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Beware of the Scribes

A review of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. The book reviewed gives a thorough introduction to New Testament textual analysis. It challenges the reviewer to do research in biblical criticism.

Book Review:

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, by Bart D. Ehrman. HarperSanFrancisco, 256 pp.

Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus has caused something of a sensation. This is no small achievement for an introduction to New Testament textual criticism, a field known for writing that is dry and inaccessible to non-specialists. Ehrman’s book has been so successful in reaching a broad audience that the author has appeared on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.

Ehrman is able to make textual criticism come alive because the study of the text has shaped his life. In the introductory chapter he tells his story. After his conversion as a teenager, he studied at Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College and Princeton Theological Seminary. As he studied the New Testament text, he changed from a fundamentalist to an evangelical and then to a liberal-critical Christian. Today Ehrman is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina -- Chapel Hill and calls himself an agnostic. These changes were provoked by his study of the differences in the New Testament manuscripts. He wondered: With so many variant readings in copies of copies of the original, how can we possibly know what the New Testament writers originally wrote? He moved from believing that the Bible is the inerrant word of God to seeing it as "a very human book." Hence his subtitle: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.

Ehrman begins with a delightful and informative introduction to New Testament textual criticism. He tells in nontechnical language how the New Testament came to be written and copied and how errors inevitably crept into the text. He then relates the story of the modern editions of the Greek New Testament, enlivening his narrative with fascinating anecdotes -- like one about how Constantine Tischendorf rescued the Codex Sinaiticus from the fires of St. Catherine’s Monastery.

After laying out some of the principles that textual critics use to determine which of various readings is the original text, Ehrman gets to the heart of his argument: that orthodox scribes of the second and third centuries "occasionally changed their texts to make them say what they were known to mean. (This is also the thesis of Ehrman’s landmark 1993 work The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.) They did this, Ehrman claims, to bolster their case for orthodoxy in the face of challenges from heretical groups such as the Adoptionists, the Separationists and the Docetics.

When I read Ehrman’s The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture ten years ago, I felt my own confidence in New Testament documents and in the early Christian scribes and leaders challenged. If these early orthodox Christians changed the New Testament text to suit their needs in controversy, how can we trust them or the scriptures that they claimed for their authority? In the late second century, Irenaeus claimed that the heretic Marcion had "dismembered the epistles of Paul." But if Ehrman’s assertion is correct, Irenaeus and the other early orthodox teachers -- and the scribes connected with their churches -- were equally guilty of corrupting scripture.

As I studied the text of Irenaeus in response to Ehrman’s charge, my sentiments were the same as his – "I was intent on pursuing my quest for the truth wherever it might take me," he writes -- but my quest took me to a different place. I discovered that time and again, in cases in which Ehrman alleged that there was orthodox corruption of the text, Irenaeus had chosen the reading that was less useful from the orthodox standpoint and more likely to strengthen the heretics’ case. In multiple instances I concluded that Irenaeus was resisting the temptation to make changes, exercising a scrupulous fidelity to the text as he had received it. Such faithfulness in copying the text can also be found in the work of other early orthodox Christian writers, including Tertulian and Origen.

Reading Misquoting Jesus has led me to a second discovery. A number of textual variations that Ehrman alleges to be orthodox corruptions may be explained in other ways. Sometimes the changes were unintentional, caused by a scribe reading or hearing one word and writing a similar word. Alterations in Hebrews 2:9. on which Ehrman has a long discussion, may well be explained in this way, as he admits. But there is another explanation for some variant readings that Ehrman overlooks entirely: the New Testament writers’ rich theological reflection on the Old Testament. Study of this theological dimension of the New Testament yields unexpected and exciting fruit.

For example, we read in Mark 15:34 that Jesus says, quoting Psalm 22:1, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" These words are very useful for the separationist argument that Christ came upon Jesus at his baptism and left him at his crucifixion. So, Ehrman argues, early orthodox scribes changed this verse to read (as it does in a few manuscripts) ‘why have you mocked me?" However, several scholars have suggested that mocked is not a later alteration, but what Mark originally wrote, I believe that Mark took mocked from Psalm 69:9; in his narrative of Jesus’ death, Mark weaves together Psalms 22 and 69, as he does other Old Testament passages elsewhere in his Gospel. The reading in most New Testament manuscripts can easily be explained by the influence of the more familiar Psalm 22:1 or Matthew 27:46.

So the explanation of this variation is to be found not in the efforts of some imagined unscrupulous second-century orthodox scribe but in the writing of Mark himself, and in his rich and creative theological reflection on the story of Jesus. When we read these two psalms over and over, the one about godforsakenness and the other about shame and reproach, we can hear the stories they tell and sense the theological and literary power of Mark’s fusing them together to interpret the meaning of Jesus’ death.

Misquoting Jesus has led me back to a fresh study of the New Testament and early Christian writers, a study that has revealed early orthodox Christians’ scrupulous fidelity in copying the New Testament text. It also has brought into clearer focus the New Testament writers’ disciplined freedom in using the Old Testament. Whereas Ehrman’s journey in textual criticism has led him to increasing skepticism, my own has brought me to increased confidence in the New Testament documents and in the central figure to whom they bear witness.

Faithful Citizens

Book Review:

The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, by David L. Holmes. Oxford University Press, 240 pp.

The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church, by Gregory A. Boyd. Zondervan, 208 pp.

American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, by Jon Meacham. Random House, 416 pp.

I am a Christian, and I am an American. It has always been -- and probably will always be -- a confusing identity. In no other country does this dual identity -- religious and national -- pose so many problems and offer so much promise. It seems that we are still building that "city on a hill" to which John Winthrop referred nearly 400 years ago; we are still functioning as "God’s almost-chosen people," as Abraham Lincoln put it; we are still asking God for blessing and guidance during moments of national transition (like presidential inaugurals) and times of crisis (9-11). America does seem to be a "nation with the soul of a church." It is a peculiar identity.

How can we make sense of this identity? Three recently published books provide some illumination. The most scholarly is by David L. Holmes, a professor of religious studies at the College of William and Mary, who in The Faiths of the Founding Fathers sketches the religious landscape during the constitutional period. Informative but never fastidious, he provides just the right amount of detail, including a useful bibliography at the end, arranged according to topic. He writes with clarity, conciseness and objectivity.

Holmes assesses the Founders according to their ecclesiastical involvement (such as attendance at worship services), participation in the sacraments (especially the Eucharist) and use of religious language. He acknowledges that radical deists like Thomas Paine played a pivotal role but points out that their religious beliefs did not necessarily carry the day.

Clearly the Founders had minds of their own, as is evidenced by the subtle religious differences among Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, who, contrary to popular opinion, were neither radical deists nor evangelical Christians. Holmes shows that the religious convictions of the wives and daughters of the Founders, which leaned in a more orthodox direction, played a decisive role as well.

Holmes outlines a typology by which to categorize the beliefs of the Founders and their families. Some, like Ethan Allen, were "non-Christian Deists"; others, like George Washington, were "Christian Deists"; still others -- John Jay, for example -- were "orthodox Christians." In short, their religious views were hardly monolithic, though some form of Unitarianism represented the majority opinion. Holmes concludes the book by describing the beliefs of modern presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush, proving that since World War II the presidents have moved in a more orthodox and even evangelical direction, which seems ironic considering the assumed rise of secularity in America. Holmes’s book is a model of accessible scholarship, and though it addresses a controversial topic, it actually generates more light than heat.

Gregory Boyd targets an evangelical audience with a book based on a series of sermons he preached in 2004 on "The Cross and the Sword" in response to America’s invasion of Iraq. The founding pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, Boyd was surprised by the severity of the reaction: though some members of his congregation expressed gratitude, about 1,000 left the church.

He sets out to show that America is not, never has been and never will be a "Christian nation." God is not on America’s side; Christians who think so are seriously mistaken, for they confuse civil religion with true Christianity. That many evangelicals believe that America was once a Christian nation and should be turned in that direction again, Boyd argues, has damaged the ministry of the church, both in this country and around the world. "A significant segment of American evangelicalism is guilty of nationalistic and political idolatry. To a frightful degree, I think, evangelicals fuse the kingdom of God with a preferred version of the kingdom of the world."

Though Boyd concedes that America has accomplished some good, "we must never confuse the positive things that America does with the kingdom of God, for the kingdom of God is not centered on being morally, politically, or socially positive relative to other versions of the kingdom of the world. Rather, the kingdom of God is centered on being beautiful, as defined by Jesus Christ dying on a cross for those who crucified him." It is one thing to be good, just or right, as it is culturally defined in America; it is another thing to be Christlike.

Boyd contrasts two kingdoms. "While all the versions of the kingdom of the world acquire and exercise power over others, the kingdom of God, incarnated and modeled in the person of Jesus Christ, advances only by exercising power under others. It expands by manifesting the power of self-sacrificial, Calvary-like love." Dualisms appear throughout the book. Boyd forces us to choose sword or cross, kingdom or country, compromise or holiness, warlord or alien. "To the extent that we pick up the sword, we put down the cross." Boyd summons readers to become disciples of Jesus Christ. "The distinct kingdom question is not, How do you vote? The distinct kingdom question is, How do you bleed?"

Boyd bears courageous witness to a truth that many American Christians utterly dismiss. What he argues so forcefully cannot be said often enough. Yet the book has weaknesses, too. One is that Boyd misses the fact that the people sitting in the pews live in two overlapping worlds. As much as Christ mandates that they exercise power under, they are forced by circumstances to exercise power over, too. They hire and fire employees, pass or fail students, defend the rich and prosecute the poor, and do a thousand other things that Jesus never had to do because of the unique nature of his mission.

Of course Christians should try to follow Jesus’ example. But it is not easy; sometimes it might not even be possible. Then what? Perhaps Jesus’ mission was unique for that very reason. To be sure, Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross sets an example to follow. But it does something else, too. It provides the means of salvation for people who try but fail to live as he did. If there is an absolute in the Christian faith, it is not what is demanded of Christians but what is offered to them, which is the gift of God’s grace in and through Jesus Christ. It strikes me as strange that Boyd did not emphasize this point more often.

The second problem is that though it’s right to say that America is not God’s chosen nation, that doesn’t mean America is the opposite. There is a religious -- even Christian -- dimension to our national identity, like it or not, and though it has gotten us into trouble from time to time, it has also inspired great achievement. A civil religion permeates our history and national ethos. It might not be true Christianity, but it does have Christian elements in it. Can the two -- true Christianity and national faith -- forge a cooperative relationship for the sake of the common good?

John Meacham, the managing editor of Newsweek, thinks so. American Gospel explores public religion in America, which Meacham believes Americans of all persuasions must protect and nurture. Americans are more likely to succeed in this endeavor if they avoid the "extremes" -- something Meacham abhors (as did the Founders). He prefers grace and civility over all forms of fanaticism, whether secular or religious.

The genius of the American system is that no one is forced to be, but everyone is free to be, religious. Though fragile, it has proven to be a durable system. Americans should never take it for granted, "for each generation faces the danger of extremism that Madison spoke of -- and each generation must defeat it anew." Meacham prefers the "broad middle," which is founded upon a "collective cultural consensus," "common sense" and, of course, religious principles.

As Meacham argues, to impose religion on the American people violates the Constitution; but to oppose religion denies history itself, for religion has played an active role in shaping the nation’s ethos. Meacham assumes that religious belief runs deep in human nature. "Humankind could not leave off being religious even if it tried." He believes that it is imperative, however, to distinguish between the private dictates of orthodox faith and the role of public religion. For example, Christian pastors can and should preach from the entire Bible; but presidents can quote only those passages that address the nation as a whole. Sectarian faith has its place, but it must also leave room for public religion.

Using key episodes in American history as case studies, Meacham shows that Americans have not always gotten public religion right. The partisanship of northern and southern Christians before the Civil War illustrates his point. So does the hesitation that Americans displayed about declaring war on Germany before Pearl Harbor. Reinhold Niebuhr lamented that hesitation, contending that sometimes justice takes precedence over love, It is not always right to turn the other cheek.

Meacham also shows that many of America’s presidents understood the importance of public religion. Madison attributed the success of the Constitution to the providence of God. Teddy Roosevelt observed that "from Micah to James" the religion of the republic "has been defined as service to one’s fellowmen rendered by following the great rule of justice and mercy, of wisdom and righteousness." On D-Day FDR read a prayer for Allied soldiers, asking that God protect them and, failing that, receive them into his heavenly kingdom. Billy Graham, pastor to presidents, promulgated a form of public religion that differs from that of Jerry FaIwell and Tim LaHaye, whose narrow vision of a Christian America, suggests Meacham, has engendered much ideological conflict.

Meacham makes a cogent case. Still, I wonder if he truly grasps the complex relationship between Christian faith (still dominant in America) and public religion. Alexis de Tocqueville argued in the l830s that Christianity in its Protestant form functioned as the "first political institution" in the new nation because, though officially disestablished, it enabled the American people to use their freedoms responsibly, freedoms that the Constitution provided and protected. The system seemed to work remarkably well. "Thus, while the law allows the American people to do everything, there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to dare."

De Tocqueville observed that Americans enjoyed more freedom than any other people on earth. Yet freedom, however important, was not their ultimate concern; the Christian faith was. "America is still the place where the Christian religion has kept the greatest real power over men’s souls; and nothing better demonstrates how useful and natural it is to man, since the country where it now has widest sway is both the most enlightened and the freest."

Meacham believes that America has a bright future, but only if the center holds. Both rabid secularity and fanatical religion (especially conservative evangelicalism) pose the greatest threats. Is he right? Ironically, how America. fares in the future might depend on the very faith that often engenders such extremism. Militant evangelicals like Falwell and LaHaye plan to win America back to God, a goal that Boyd vehemently opposes because he believes that they are fighting the wrong battle. If they would take the Christian faith as seriously as they claim, they would forsake the quest for power over and instead commit themselves to exercising power under. Perhaps it is not the future of American public religion that is at stake after all; what is at stake could be the future of American Christianity.

Capital T (Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29)

The other day I was sitting in a coffee shop and couldn’t help overhearing an interesting and intense debate on the other side of the room. An older gentleman was trying his best to aid an inquisitive college student who had some hard-hitting questions. She asked about scripture, about authority and about the church. One question kept popping up: What is the difference between truth for you, truth for me and truth with a capital T?"

I have encountered the question in my own ministry and I find it to be distracting and unhelpful, in part because it assumes that individual judgment trumps a community of people committed to truth-telling. We too often become enamored with trying to identify abstract propositions of faith and forget that truth is first and foremost about not lying.

Why are we not more preoccupied with questions that explore this reality, such as: What would happen if I quit lying to my spouse? Why do I avoid the truth about myself, my weaknesses and my hidden faults? Is it possible to succeed in the workplace without lies or half-truths? When I do lie, what do I gain and what do I lose?

Such questions are troubling because they explode theoretical categories of subjective and objective truth, thrusting us into the distressing incandescence of honesty -- leaving us vulnerable, needy and exposed. I would much prefer to haggle over scriptural authority or the divinity of Jesus than be confronted with my own ugliness, sin and self-constructed falsehoods. Given a choice between accountability to a community of truth-tellers and my own version of truth, I am regularly tempted to opt for the latter. Until, that is, I remember that as a baptized member of the body of Christ I have sisters and brothers who will drag me toward the light even when I resist -- sisters and brothers who will remind me that I have died to the old lies and have put on Christ.

No one knows more about truth-telling as a mark of the baptized than John the Baptizer, who devoted his ministry to speaking truth to sinners and calling them to repentance. Seekers from all over the "Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem" went out to meet him in the desert, not because of his great theological acumen and insight, but because of his uncompromising veracity (Mark 1:5). They traveled to this locust-eating, camel-hair-wearing prophet not because he knew the difference between lowercase and uppercase truth, but because they recognized the truth in his words. John had the rare ability and willingness to "cut to the chase" and give people the "straight dope." He was willing to say things others are afraid to say -- to proclaim that things are not right with the world or with us. His candor may sound harsh and politically incorrect to us in our contemporary setting, but like a skilled surgeon’s hands, it still excises cancerous fictions, lies that sicken us unto death.

But what are the consequences of speaking the truth? That may be the more relevant question for seekers of truth and would-be disciples. A conversation over coffee with the Baptizer might reveal a disturbing reality: truth-telling often leads to suffering and sometimes to death. This holy habit of speaking and receiving truth is one of cross-bearing and costly discipleship. It’s a narrow path, one that few dare to trod, for speaking truth is not always popular, especially when it is spoken to power. The prophet Nathan learned this. Although he came to the adulterous and murderous King David through the proverbial back door (via a parable), he risked his life with four short words of truth: "You are the man!" (2 Sam. 12:7). Nathan knew that when truth is spoken to power, someone pays.

John’s word to Herod Antipas echoes the courage and tenacity of Nathan and a host of other truth-proclaiming prophets before and after him. "John had been telling Herod, ‘It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife"’ (Mark 6:18). The news was no secret. Everyone who was anyone knew that under Israelite law, Herod was guilty of both adultery and incest because of his affair with his brother’s wife. Everyone who was anyone knew the word that was circulating on the street and the talk that was consuming the town. Everyone knew, but only one person spoke, and that person paid for his fidelity to truth with prison and eventually with his life. Those who describe Stephen as the first martyr for the cause of Jesus and the in-breaking kingdom of God should not forget this forerunner from the desert whose actions echo those of Nathan and the prophets of Israel, and whose death foreshadows the death of truth incarnate and love crucified.

In this season after Pentecost, as the church continues to reflect on the gift of the Spirit and the challenge of our Easter calling, it is time to once again take up the mantle of speaking truth in love and exposing the big and small lies that entangle us and threaten our undoing. We have been baptized into Christ’s life, death and resurrection. Like the Christians in Ephesus, we are a people who have "heard the word of truth, the gospel of our salvation" and have been "marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit which is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory." That pledge, among other things, demands that we live in truth, speak truth and hear truth when it is spoken to us in love.

Wrecking Crew (Ephesians 2:11-22)

The world is full of walls. Everywhere we go, there are fences, gates, partitions and other ingeniously constructed barriers -- all aimed at keeping something or someone in and keeping something or someone else out. We need walls: walls in our homes to protect us against wind and rain; walls to keep livestock safely in and predators out; walls to help us separate spaces and improve organization and efficiency. But one does not have to be a sage to comprehend how walls, both literal and spiritual, can lead to grief, division and even violence. All walls serve a purpose, but not all walls serve the purposes of God.

In Ephesians we read that Christ has "broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us." It’s difficult to understand how this can happen, especially today, when hostility appears to be the bread and butter of human relating and living. But we know that we have helped to build walls of hostility. We’ve built many of them not out of bricks and mortar, but out of the raw material of sin and division. Then we’ve cemented them with the mortar of name-calling, labeling and prejudice.

An ill-conceived application of the Torah helped ensure that a wall of hostility was solidly in place among those in the growing Christian community. In this case, it was the circumcision insiders pitted against the uncircumcision outsiders. Perspective and power shift depending on what side of the wall a person is standing on. Just ask those called "U.S. citizens by birth" about "noncitizens" in their midst; ask the "legally naturalized immigrant" about the "illegal alien," the Jewish Israeli "settler" about the gentile Palestinian "squatter" or the white-suburban commuter about the people who live around his downtown church. Again, all walls serve a purpose, but not all walls serve the purposes of God.

What about the walls between Christian communions? What about the voluntary segregation of typical Lord’s Day worship services? What about the scandal of divisions, splits and infighting that flies in the face of Jesus’ high priestly prayer for unity and oneness? (John 17). Such troubles in the body of Christ are a sign not of diversity but of division. They are a sin that compromises the church’s witness and grieves the Holy Spirit.

How then can one receive this word from Ephesians 2? The unity referred to here is not manufactured by human hands busy trying to pursue multiculturalism and tolerance in the world’s image. The peace described here is not just a ceasing of conflict or the absence of violence. The hope alluded to is not merely a hankering after international experiences and cross-cultural encounters. Here unity, peace and hope are not things at all; they are a person. Christ is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall. In Christ’s death on the cross, peace has been achieved and hostility has been crucified. Jesus is the singular, God-human wrecking crew that demolishes division and gifts us with unity, peace and reconciliation.

It is this gift and its givenness that creates a scandal. It is hard to receive a gift when your hands are not open. It is even harder when your hands are clutching bricks for personal building projects that have nothing to do with the in-breaking kingdom of God. My own experience in a multiracial and multicultural congregation serves to constantly remind me that unity and peace come from God alone. Any human attempt to build unity, no matter how valiant and well intended, will fall far short of the spiritual structure that has Jesus Christ as the chief cornerstone. Such human construction often poses as "kingdom building," but when the hard hats leave the site, all that one can see is a wall.

It is important to note that recognizing unity as a gift does not make receiving it a passive affair. Anyone with any experience in gift giving and receiving knows that receiving gifts can be hard, costly work. If it is an extravagant gift, one must put away pride and clothe oneself in humility; if it is an undeserved gift, one must put away closed-fisted objections rooted in dogged self-sufficiency. If it is a gift that says more about the nature of the giver than the fleeting desires of the receiver, one must be willing to let go of self-centeredness.

When God gives us a gift, it still must be received and appropriated as the Giver intended. Baptism is such a gift, especially when it is given to children who are unable to answer for themselves. In this act, God is busy demolishing sin, washing away debris and carefully placing a new, living stone into the holy temple of the Lord, a stone that no longer resembles the sin-riddled, dilapidated vessel that was presented. It is a gift that every baptized believer is given in this sacrament in which each stone is patiently shaped, fashioned, named and incorporated into the body of Christ. It is a gift that is freely given. It is also a gift that, although it can’t be taken back, can be shunned, resisted, squandered and profaned.

Why are there so many walls remaining in the church? Perhaps we are so caught up in the busy work of building that we fail to step back and examine our resulting handiwork. Has all that blood and sweat, have all those tears, been poured into a failed construction project that has left us with one long wall rather than a "dwelling place for God"? Maybe it is time to put down our tools, agendas and misguided aspirations so that the original Site Manager can gift us with a building not made with human hands.

Pressed into Service (2 Corinthians 8:7-15)

In the mid-1980s I attended a church that still honored "Money Sunday," a practice begun in the 1950s. Once a year members of the congregation gathered to make financial pledges to support missions efforts. As the pledges were collected, the minister would read the amounts aloud from the pulpit: "Here’s one for $50.... Here’s another for $100 and one for $1,000!" Occasionally a pledge came in for, say, $10,000, eliciting all sorts of approving oohs and aahs from the congregation, and for the rare pledge of $50,000 the organist would leap from his pew and play a rousing fanfare of "Great Is Thy Faithfulness." If the financial goal had not been reached by the end of the service, the minister would send the offering plate back around, shaming the members into emptying their pockets of everything except the subway token they needed to get home.

I was appalled by the process -- I felt as if I were in some money-grabbing religious TV show. Granted, none of the missions money was ever kept by the church. Generous amounts of money went to support causes outside the church: campus ministry, urban ministry, medical and relief work, and church planting and Bible translation around the globe. Still, I was relieved when Money Sundays ended. At that point in my life, I agreed with Paul that "God loves a cheerful giver" and does not ask for a giver to be coerced by shame or pride (2 Cor. 9:7).

So why does Paul himself resort to both shame and pride to raise money for the financially troubled Jerusalem church in these passages? First he flaunts the superior generosity of the Macedonian church so as to embarrass the Corinthians into giving, and then he flatters them for their excellent Christian virtue in an effort to spur them to give even more.

Perhaps Paul is pressing them not only to give, but to understand why giving is so important. The God whom we worship is, after all, a God who gives. To be a Christian is to receive grace. To receive grace entails becoming a conduit of grace through forgiveness, words of kindness and acts of generosity toward others. Like manna from heaven, grace cannot be boarded. Like gossip, we can’t keep grace to ourselves. If the grace of Jesus truly resides in us, it won’t be able to stay there. The God who cheerfully gives loves a cheerful giver. Eagerness and giving together are signs of the presence of Christ inside. And inasmuch as Jesus is the eager giving standard, how can anybody hold back anything?

Of course, Paul knew that nobody can give totally like Christ. We are not the Christ. We don’t have divinity to divest ourselves of. We can give our lives, but that won’t save the world. "Match actions to your eagerness," Paul writes in 8:11, "but do it according to your means. Give what you can." Because if you’re eager, you’ll give all you can. Paul’s not offering us an out; he’s creating a boundary for us. We give all we can, just not so much that we become financially needy ourselves.

The goal of giving is not a vow of poverty but a vow of generosity for the sake of equality, sufficiency and justice.

It’s not right that nearly 3 billion people live on less than two dollars a day. It’s not right that a few hundred millionaires own as much wealth as the world’s poorest 2.5 billion people. It’s not right that 30,000 children die every day due to poverty or that in Boston, where I live, there are over 6,000 homeless men, women and children. Even in our own congregations, some are struggling to make ends meet. It’s no secret that if all Christians on earth tithed 10 percent of their after-tax/after-debt income, world poverty could be obliterated.

Yet for Christians, equality and justice are measured not only monetarily, but also relationally. Christ died for all in order to reconcile the world to himself. Giving and forgiving go hand in hand. Although the Jerusalem church was in dire need of financial assistance, Paul’s appeal for help was directed at gentile churches. Justice is both economic and relational -- even racial. Being reconciled to God, giving to your neighbors and forgiving your enemies, living at peace because everyone’s needs are met -- is there anything that feels closer to heaven? No wonder Paul lays it on so thick, using every lever at his disposal: Shame. Flattery. Fear. He did whatever it took to get the Corinthians to eagerly give because that’s what people reconciled to God do.

But how could the Corinthians become eager givers if Paul was twisting their arms? If motivation matters, forcing me to give only makes my motivation fake. You may be able to scare me or guilt me into giving, but you can’t guilt me into being cheerful or eager to do it.

We started a group in our church devoted to serving the homeless who live on Boston Common. I had a hard time getting this group together. Despite the number of people who expressed frustration with our church’s being all talk and no action when it came to the homeless, actually moving from talk to action proved scary. I was frustrated, and despite my reluctance to coerce anyone, I decided to see if I couldn’t press a few people to sign up. The good news is that this worked: we now have a group that regularly serves food, provides clothes and leads a worship service outside each week. Being pressed to serve did not tarnish our motivation, but instead resulted in more of us knowing the joy of service. We were pushed to be true to the people we already are in Christ.

Power Source (2 Corinthians 12:2-10)

The closest I get to the kind of religious experience the apostle Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 12 is the occasional Sunday when the music and the congregation merge in worship that is unrestrained praise. I especially enjoy communion, since the Eucharist itself is designed to anticipate heaven. With our sins confessed and forgiven, peace made and prayers prayed, we experience an unusual unity with God and with each other. It’s a taste of paradise. Priorities reorder themselves and anxieties ease. There is a momentary sense that the worries of this world just aren’t that important and that this earth is not our true home.

Unfortunately, I have an inbred cynicism that makes religious experience particularly tricky for me. I reflexively wonder whether it’s really God I’m feeling or something I’m just imagining or inventing. Maybe what I need is a religious experience as potent as Paul’s. God granted Paul a tour of what ancient Jewish cosmology labeled the third heaven; the place where God Almighty dwells. In the lectionary passage, Paul refers to another man making this heavenly journey, but most scholars believe that Paul is describing himself. He just doesn’t want to brag about it.

Throughout 2 Corinthians, Paul has been up against a group of religious pretenders, sheep-stealers who’ve discredited Paul by slinging mud. They point to his ongoing hardships and persistent troubles as signs of deficient faith. In contrast, these pretenders flash their own self-serving piety and worldly success as evidence of proper faith. They resort to boasting about their ecstatic religious experiences to boost their image further. Paul makes it clear that boasting about such experience does no good. Religious experience is by definition personal, alternately powerful and ambiguous and sometimes even bogus. Any true encounter with God is always an act of God initiated by God. It does not indicate anyone’s superior level of faith or spirituality -- which is why you can’t brag about it.

Nevertheless, Paul was sometimes tempted to boast. After all, his extraordinary experience provided an enticement to one-up his annoying rivals’ hype. For this reason, God gave Paul his famous "thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment [him]." As with the Old Testament story of Job, God released Satan to keep Paul humble and weak Why? So that no one could attribute Paul’s success to his own talents. God also released Satan to keep Paul faithful. We may experience great religious heights, but it’s the valleys and deserts that tend to draw us nearest to God. God’s unleashing Satan on Jesus in the desert firmly grounded Christ for the unfathomable mission that lay before him.

Satan showed up throughout Jesus’ sojourn; in the alluring words of Peter and in that tempting moment at Gethsemane where Jesus prayed three times for some other way to account for the sins of the world. Like Jesus, Paul prayed three times for reprieve. But Jesus answered Paul just as God answered Jesus: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Even after the resurrection, the way of the cross remains the way of following Christ. It’s tempting to bypass the cross and rely instead on the religious pathways of pious behavior, ecstatic experience and doctrinal allegiance. We like to pretend that good deeds, a good attitude and attendance on Sunday suffice for the Christian life. But this is not what Jesus implied when he said to take up a cross.

To be serious about following Christ means suffering for Christ. The more serious we become about being salt and light in the world, the more devoted we will become to mission and justice, the more concerned for the least and the lost, the more stubborn about forgiving those who don’t want our forgiveness, the more determined about exposing the works of darkness -- and the more we will suffer. And yet, ironically, if ever we’ve suffered in this way for the sake of Christ, then we know the power of weakness, that spiritual force and joy of obedience that energizes us to endure the suffering with grace. It is what enabled Paul to declare, "I delight in weaknesses, I am content in insults, I am glad with hardships, in persecutions and in distress that I suffer for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong."

I wonder if we’ll ever really get this. I attended a recent gathering of large-church pastors in our area and enjoyed meeting colleagues whose church situations are similar to my own. It was helpful to hear how they struggle with the same problems -- how to create community amid crowds, how to provide sufficient leadership training, recruit volunteers and run programs effectively. However, I confess that at times, instead of sounding like ministers, we sounded like managers of religious shopping malls who generate goods and services for the betterment of the customers who walk through our doors. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it isn’t necessarily Christian either.

By contrast, when I attended a gathering of pastors from much smaller churches, nickel-and-dime operations with meager attendance on Sundays, barely able to support their pastors, I did not hear the pastors talk about improving their facilities or putting together a smoother operation for Jesus. All these pastors could talk about was how they were going to bring revival to Boston and turn the city upside down. They were going to halt violence, redress economic injustice, and preach peace and forgiveness to every neighborhood. I can also be cynical about planned revival, but this sounded like Christ-directed ministry to me. When God does show up in the ways these small churches expect, we’ll know it is definitely God, for they cannot accomplish these things by their own power.

A Voice for Grunchy Conservatives

Book Review:

Grunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (or at Least the Republican Party).

By Rod Dreher. Crown, 272 pp.

I think I might qualify as a Crunchy Conservative. I wear Birkenstocks whenever weather permits. My wife and I worry about our children becoming too much the target market. We buy organic an awful lot. When my friends and I grapple with issues, we ask the age-old question: What would Wendell Berry do? I’ve voted, at various times, for Democrats, Republicans and Ralph Nader. I want to affirm the sacramental integrity of creation without fitting into any facet of Karl Rove’s high-tech totem pole. I want to be a student of wisdom, ever ancient, ever new and ever cosmic.

To my mind, there’s an encouraging sensibility on offer in Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons. The subtitle is a bit misleading. Dreher, a writer and editor at the Dallas Morning News, doesn’t appear to put much stock in the right-wing brand or much hope in the Republican Party. He can’t name a career politician (Democrat or Republican) whom he finds encouraging.

He notes throughout the book that it’s generally the so-called liberals who are "the most conservation-minded" as homeowners and stewards of local economies. "I fail to see just what American conservatism has conserved." And he repeatedly calls into question the "family values" hype that seems to sustain the GOP: ‘Conservatives are divorcing at the same rate as liberals."

Amid the static and the noise, Dreher seeks to discern and describe the Crunchy Con character as it emerges beneath the radar of the news networks and the pollsters. The Crunchy Con has begun to suspect that there’s something essential in William Blake’s vision of "dark Satanic mills," that Jimmy Carter was largely right in his talk of "moral malaise," and that we often commit murder in our attempts at profitably dissecting whatever corner of hallowed creation we refer to as a resource.

Neotraditionalism is an umbrella term that Dreher employs to cover this ecologically minded, self-consciously community-oriented demographic whose ties to religious tradition bear countercultural fruit.

Dreher persists in using the liberal-conservative jargon even as his findings belie the usefulness of’ the labels, I wonder if this has more to do with his publisher (who also gives us Ann Coulter) than his own inclination. The inexactness of the Us vs. Them paradigm of popular conservative talk is apparent in Dreher’s "Crunchy Con Manifesto," which doesn’t appear to resonate with either major political party. Among the tenets: "The economy must be made to serve humanity’s best interests, not the other way around. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government. And: "A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship -- especially of the natural world -- is not fundamentally conservative."

With statements like these, it often appears that Dreher wants to recover the stolen conservative brand. He thinks the fact that asthma and respiratory diseases are caused by industrial pollutants is a family-values issue. He believes that the popularly "conservative" refusal to relate global warming to human activity is like tobacco company executives’ denial of a link between smoking and lung cancer. And he deeply resents the suggestion that Americans might best respond to the attacks of September 11 by spending more money: "The American way of life is now synonymous with the idea of endless material abundance, at low cost. It is an intoxicating vision, but that’s not how the world works."

In regard to the million-dollar industry of’ "conservative" talk, Dreher wants to edge out the predominance of "market-mad consumers who vote Republican ... whose commitment to conservative ideals ends the moment it costs us something." He proposes a sacramental vision, something akin to Vaclav Havel’s antipolitical politics, whereby individual ethical choices, discerned and hashed out within communities (families, neighborhoods and churches), might somehow serve to transform the collective.

The revolution might be nothing more than a determined witness in which people choose lifestyles of mindfulness and communal consideration, an art of being in the world. Dreher notes that joining the volunteer fire department or a local farmers’ food co-op might be more authentically conservative than joining the Republican Party.

Compared to the conditioned reflexes of today’s politics (our values versus their values, or our Swift Boat Veterans against their Swift Boat Veterans), there’s something noteworthy and redemptive in the character type that Dreher sketches. It reminds me of many Protestants my age (I’m 36) whose dabblings in Dostoevsky and other Russian writers eventually took them toward Eastern Orthodoxy and homeschooling or whose discovery of Flannery O’Connor or Walker Percy as they emerged from Baptist youth groups took them all the way to C. K. Chesterton and Roman Catholic catechism.

As I read the book, I kept a list of potential honorary members of the Crunchy Cons. It was headed by Dorothy Day, followed by Daniel Berrigan, William Stringfellow, Martin Luther King Jr. and Will Campbell (with folks like Cornel West, Bill McKibben and Brian McLaren as more contemporary candidates). And I kept wondering what Dreher would say about such people.

With my more obviously Crunchy Con peers, names like these sometimes lead to a strain in the conversation, a parting of the ways.

Like Dreher, these figures conspire toward or hope for a socialization of conscience even when they’re skeptical as to how much their moral vision will be popularly realized. They are also remarkably vigilant against the Manichean impasse whereby we assume that our kind of people with our values (homeschoolers, soup kitchen workers, draft-file burners) are the only ones who are really trying to do something to change the world. They don’t bother much with liberal or conservative labels.

"We don’t want our kids to be in a school where they’ll pay a price for being a nonconformist. We want them to learn in an atmosphere informed by our religious, moral, and philosophical values," writes Dreher. While I’m very sympathetic to Dreher’s hope (I teach at a school that advertises itself as Christian), I see something problematic in a kind of greenhouse theory of conservative education in which students are reared and taught within an engineered, not-in-the-world atmosphere. This isn’t to say that any old public school will do. But there is tension between the biblical imperative of receptivity toward the ostensible outsider and the ethic of the enclave -- between love and safety. I don’t pretend to have resolved this tension,

Dreher reports the following conversation:

"What will happen to the public schools if good people give up on them?" a liberal friend asked me one night. She was near to tears trying to convince me of the moral offensiveness of choosing to homeschool. She said it was un-Christian, and implied that there was something racist about our decision. All I could say was that our first responsibility as parents was to our children’s welfare, and we would not put them at risk for the sake of living up to a political or social ideal that we believed, rightly or wrongly, conflicts with what’s best for our kids.

I’m not sure where I’d land as a partaker in this particular conversation or what label might be added unto me at its conclusion, but I’d want to throw in, as an attempted testimony, that the coming kingdom of God is an appropriate hope within which to place our hope for our children’s welfare. What it will mean to try to bear witness to it in various contexts (to homeschool or not to homeschool?) will always be the work of communal discernment.

More than any explicit reference to the kingdom come, Dreher refers throughout the book to Russell Kirk’s "permanent things" -- "those eternal moral norms necessary to civilized life and which are taught by all the world’s great wisdom traditions." I can imagine a great deal of common ground in conversations relating Jesus’ gospel to the "eternal moral norms" of Dreher’s Crunchy Cons, but I sense some tensions too. Are the norms whatever should be obvious to all sensible people of good will? Might the gospel occasionally be foolishness to the Greeks and the world’s great wisdom traditions? Might Day and the Berrigans and Will Campbell prove scandalous in their attempted multipartisan, enemy-loving witness? Aren’t we all only now (and still and later) coming to the faith?

I want to affirm the supposedly shared values or eternal moral norms of my conversation partners while reminding all present that none of us possess a God’s-eye view of what life is all about. To my recollection, nobody ever disputes my point (we’re all learners, unknowing heretics, ignorant initiates in the ways of the Lord), but it’s easy to forget in the fevered pitch. We love our labels like ourselves, and we long for firm positionings to adopt and repeat knowingly. Self-confidence at high volume is often mistaken for strength and virtue, and the adversarial posture appears to be something of a best seller.

In a moving passage that took me completely off guard, Dreher recounts a conversation with some strangers in a bar about the unlikelihood of terrorist attacks in Dallas. The strangers began by noting the possibility of Baptist fundamentalists provoking Muslim fundamentalists and ended, amid laughter, by describing a scenario in which a well-known Baptist megachurch is targeted and destroyed. Dreher excused himself politely, drove home, and cried sitting in his driveway.

By his own account, Dreher attempted to regain his composure by returning to a habitual thought pattern ("Stupid goddamned liberals"). But he notes how fear and hatred preempted his ability to think clearly. Specifically he notes how he refused to entertain the arguments against military action in the run-up to the Iraq war, even when articulated by card-carrying conservatives, because his hatred of terrorists and liberals outran his reason.

In reference to this episode, Dreher wrote online of "how both parties and their partisan machines keep us all stuck on stupid. . . . They gin up such fear and hatred of the Other that they get us to be loyal to them no matter how badly they’re failing, or [how] lousy their agendas." In a sense, Dreher is offering a personal testimony concerning the selective fundamentalism whereby we filter out voices that might in any way call into question our feverishly defended worldviews.

In the final chapter, "Waiting for Benedict," Dreher cites the end of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which imagines the possible coming of another St. Benedict. According to Dreher, "The key thing to notice here is that the original Benedictines understood that the process of civilizational decay was, in the short run, irreversible, and that therefore the only reasonable thing to do was to make a strategic retreat behind defensible borders." I largely agree with Maclntyre and Dreher concerning the mess we’re in, and I agree that subversive communities are the way to go (it takes a village, after all).

But without losing anything (hopefully) in the way of Crunchy Con solidarity, I’d like to throw in the notion that Jesus’ gospel will always call into question whatever it is we have in mind as "defensible borders." The people of Nineveh, as a certain ancient tradition affirms, are often already repenting in ways that we, the self-consciously religious, have yet to see. And the values we espouse, as Dreher understands, are frequently most faithfully practiced by the people who have yet to fall into any mad circle of "values" talk. An ongoing admission of mutual screwed-upness, even within our ethical enclaves, might clear the air for the possibility of candor and sane thinking and, perhaps, listening.

Arguing with Paul (2 Corinthians 5:6-10, 14-17)

When I read the lectionary texts for this week, I was disappointed. Give me texts of David sinning, Amos raging against the "cows" of Bashan or Jesus again in trouble for loving outcasts. These I can run with. But don’t give me Paul always confident, walking by faith and not sight, apparently really feeling he’d rather be at home with the Lord than in his body, regarding no one from a human point of view, celebrating that "in Christ there is a new creation. everything old has passed away -- see, everything has become new!"

Don’t give me texts like that because my life so often clashes with them. I remember my boyhood in my missionary family amid the ceaseless quest of Christians around me to live in the new creation. I haven’t forgotten how guilty that boy felt, stuck in his trash-filled old humanity -- unsure how to reconcile what seemed to him the ethereality of Christian living with a body that seemed always to run hot when it was supposed to run cold or cool when it was supposed to run warm.

Nor will I forget the day I casually asked my mother how a relative had died, back when I was too young to remember. I expected to hear about cancer or heart trouble. No. He had gone out to the fields with his hunting gun and had shot himself. Some who loved him found out how he died only when they came to view his body In those days and among those Christians committed to their new beings in Christ, no one knew how to make human space for suicide. They knew only to grow scar tissue around the wound and continue on in new creation.

But as I grew up, I heard my very bones groaning that what would kill me was being other than human. I struggled to believe that anything could be made new. How could any of us trust that "everything has become new" when it was precisely such faith that helped kill my relative? Depression and faith had fed each other. Awareness of how far short of the new creation he fell had fueled his guilt and misery, even as he interpreted the depressive attacks as failure to live in Christ.

Because Paul is part of God-breathed scripture, I will wrestle with what I can learn from his wish to be away from his body, at home with Christ, made new. But boy does he cut against my grain! How do we give up the human point of view without giving up the truth about ourselves as human beings?

My truth is that I don’t want to leave my body or its loves. I wouldn’t rather be at home with the Lord; I want to be right here! I love this world. The older I get the more I love elemental things: leaves shimmering in the breeze at sunset; morning coffee with my wife; a daughter’s impish smile; cruising in the 1990 Subaru I bought from my dad, with the sunroof open, my dad’s spirit still in the car. Why would I want a point of view that didn’t cling to such things?

So am I a bad Christian? I have often thought so. Good Christians are like the ones I saw this morning leaving a Bible study at Vernfield Restaurant, walking out with Bibles in hand. I bear them no ill will, but I don’t want to spend hours with men helping each other be new creations. I want to be in my Subaru, smiling up through the roof not at Christ but at blue trimmed with clouds.

Then I thought of Angie, a waitress at the restaurant, who greeted me when I arrived: "Well, hello, dear," she said. "Welcome to your office." We both laughed as I went to the table that has indeed become my office -- there where I visit with congregants in a down-home setting well suited to probing human truths and new creations.

I thought of Ike, whom I’ve often met there, and of the time we debated whether he was ready to become a Mennonite. If he had to be perfect like it seemed to him Mennonites are, then no way! "Perfect" wasn’t in him. But he’d be glad to start traveling toward Christ and see where it got him. So to the shock of many, particularly himself, he became a Mennonite.

I thought of the next morning, when I planned to meet Ike. Ike would report on his latest struggle to be a Mennonite Christian. Amid laughter, because you can’t be with wild Ike without laughing, we’d consider his options. Like the time he reported that his ex had stolen wood from his woodpile. And we pondered what might happen if instead of demanding his wood back he added more to her pile.

Ike is not Paul, and neither am I. Maybe new creation language would sing to us too if we had raged against Christ before our human point of view burned up on the Damascus Road. But both Ike and I have experienced the new creation as a club that can be used, often with the best of intentions, to assault our human truths and cause lies, pain and sometimes even death.

So we don’t talk much about being new creations. We look for Christ within our human lives rather than try to leave our human lives to be with Christ. Still, how often do we ask, "What does Jesus teach about this? How is his Spirit nudging there? What would Paul say if writing to us? If we tried that instead of this same-old same-old, what would happen then?"

So maybe in our way we’re trying to get where Paul wants to go. And as much as I don’t want to leave this body, I do hope that when I’m dragged out -- kicking and screaming all the way -- at home with the Lord is where I’ll be.

Holy Hate (Jeremiah 23:1-6; Luke 23:33-43)

They were no angels. Whatever else they did or didn't do, or hoped to do, they hired strippers. Then prosecutor Mike Nifong charged them with rape, Duke University turned on the boys involved and the media feasted on what these white jocks gone wild had done.

Along with many others, I hated them. In the 1960s, jocks gone wild like these had taunted the nerd I was in high school. I was sure that these spoiled rich boys deserved the punishment my boyhood accusers should have faced.

Jesus, who came to bring good news to the poor and let the oppressed go free, who embodied the Jeremiah 23 dream of one who would "reign as king and deal wisely, and … execute justice and righteousness in the land," would have hated those rich boys too, we think. He would have chastised the offenders.

Except things got complicated. The villains turned out likely to be victims of false accusations. One victim apparently shredded young lives with lies. We could hate her, then, but even better to hate one who exploited lies for his own gain.

Nifong became the new villain, a prosecutor who cared nothing about evidence but only about ensuring his own re-election. Thank God Nifong had no redeeming qualities to complicate our righteous judgment. He deserved to pay for his sins. "Mr Nifong was clearly one of the worst," as the Economist said (September 15), so it was good to see him sit there, abjectly apologizing, even spending a night in jail, the mighty one fallen so those he oppressed might go free.

We could also hate those who had abetted Nifong, like "Mr Nifong's enablers in the Duke faculty" who, as the Economist asserted, "have learned nothing from it all.… Even after it was clear that the athletes were innocent, 87 faculty members published a letter categorically rejecting calls to recant their condemnation."

I even found myself tempted to hate the Economist, as it was so eager to turn the story into one more example of political correctness run amok. One could wonder if Nifong was the latest victim of mob justice. Was this finally the truth, or just the latest turn of a tale shot through with enough sin, ambiguity and hate to lure us all into its cesspool?

Thank God I at least was smart enough to wonder this. Thank God I was able to evaluate the sins in everyone else and even in myself, to see not only their own hate but also to acknowledge my own, and in so doing to be one step holier than the rest of the rabble.

Despair tempts. How do we climb out of the sewer of holier-than-thou-ness? Iraq: an Evil One once empowered by the U.S. hangs from a noose the U.S. helped weave. As blood and chaos flood the dictator's former killing fields, war supporters hate peace lovers' inability to hang tough in the name of freedom. Peace-and-justice lovers hate warmakers' blind inability to see that war is not the answer.

Israel: Six million of us were gassed, but now God gives us this homeland. Palestine: You took our homes; God will help us wipe you off the map.

Democrat versus Republican: Whatever you believe is wrong; I'm right. You will destroy this country. We all seem to be joining in that chorus, hating when the world so needs wisdom instead.

How strange then to hear of one so hated that they crucify him. We wait for his holier-than-they victory. Some have said he is the Son of God. Surely his editorial commentary on what has been done to him will be riveting. At last here we'll find a hero with whom we can in legitimate holiness hate all the rest.

He offers his thoughts: "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing."

What happens next sounds like 2007, perhaps even straight from the blogosphere. First leaders mock him: "He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!" Then come soldiers, "offering him sour wine and saying, 'If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!'" Even a criminal hanging on a cross beside him is eager to join the hating game. He keeps "deriding him and saying, 'Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!'"

Just one alternate voice is heard. Another criminal on his own cross rebukes the mocking criminal: "'Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.'"

This man has done nothing wrong. Maybe this means that he is the only one who has been able fully to resist our ceaseless craving to take one more step behind the other's sin to claim, "You're wrong, but I'm right." If so, how this only one who has never done wrong behaves when the whole world mockingly assures him "we're right; you're wrong" may be worth copying. "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing." Except that we and I, who have done so much wrong, must add one more variation: "Father, also forgive me; for I do not know what I am doing."

Maybe that would be our way of yielding to this King--not only those mocking him but all of us drowning today in our mutual holy hate. Maybe that would stop our mad determination to be the last righteous one standing.

Storm System (Mark 4:35-41; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13)

I struggle to make peace with Jesus ordering the sea into peace. If we were to stumble across a time traveler’s videotape and find that it all happened just as Mark reports, I’d still be troubled. Because this isn’t the way the world works. People don’t go around saying, "Peace! Be still!" to the wind and the waves, and find that the wind and the waves obey. And I don’t like the "Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?" business. Of course Jesus’ disciples are afraid! When the tsunami hit Asia, weren’t those caught in that wall of water right to be afraid? Should they have expected Jesus to rebuke the tsunami?

That just isn’t how things work, and surely that wasn’t how things worked back then either. So I wince, when Jesus rebukes the disciples fear. If I’d been one of the disciples, I’d not have been sure Jesus would save me any more than I’m sure he’ll save me if the flooded Perkiomen Creek sweeps my car away. I flinch at stories of people killed when tornadoes are tearing off the church roof or hurricanes are flooding their houses -- even as they pray for Jesus to rebuke once more the wind and the waves. He doesn’t. They die. Why shouldn’t they have been afraid?

So is this passage a story that didn’t quite happen? Was an overeager writer showing how powerful Jesus is by cobbling various little events into one dramatic miracle? Or did a sudden calm come after the boat had nearly capsized, and as the disciples began to tell the story, they decided that it was Jesus who stilled the waters? Or would a video camera, had it been available back then, have recorded the miracle that Mark -- apparently determined to highlight Jesus’ lordship over nature -- tells about?

If I knew the answer, I’d share it. But then one more train of thought: Just as I was swamped in the raging Galilee and the issues it raises, I ran across Scott Stossel’s review of Stumbling on Happiness, a book by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard professor of psychology who studies happiness (New York Times, May 7). According to Stossel, Gilbert contends that "because of logic-processing errors our brains tend to make, we don’t want the things that would make us happy and the things that we want (more money, say, or a bigger house or a fancier car) won’t make us happy." Stossel writes:

Gilbert argues that what he calls the "psychological immune system" kicks into gear in response to big negative events (the death of a spouse, the loss of a job) but not in response to small negative events (your car breaking down). Which means that our day-to-day happiness may be predicated more strongly on little events than on big ones. On its face, this sounds preposterous, but Gilbert cites study after study suggesting that it’s true.

My seminary education didn’t include doing exegesis through the lens of happiness research. Still, for me Jesus and the storm connect with Gilbert. His observations remind me of what I’ve witnessed so often when offering pastoral support to people facing minor, drip-drip troubles versus the great crises that bring larger energies into play.

What happens, I hear Gilbert suggesting, is that the daily dribbles of woe wear you down. Wearily you slog on. Then when you think things can’t get worse -- you’re grappling with insurance hassles caused by your daughter’s car crash just as an article you’re writing is behind schedule -- you see that the water tank pressure gauge is leaking. No inspiration there. Just teeth to grit.

But energy surges when the real storms rage! I remember a dear faithful widow telling me, just after her husband died following years of stroke-weakened living, that everyone had long asked her how she could keep going. She said that before living through his stroke, the years of caring for him and those final months of never knowing whether tomorrow he would be alive or dead, she too would have said that she could not endure such an experience. But once the time came, there also came resources -- from "beyond," as she experienced it through her Christian faith -- and she had strength enough to sail in peace even across that sea of troubles. I witnessed this miracle.

Cognitive science proves nothing about what happened or didn’t in that threatened boat. But Gilbert at least gives my tortured Western mind a doorway through which to glimpse renewed power in the story. Could it be that the peace-be-still of Jesus is like the power from beyond that we experience when life’s ultimate storms befall us? Could it be that what Jesus wished for his disciples to understand -- both then and now -- was that he was and is the channel to such power?

In 2 Corinthians 6, Paul seems to teach something like this. Amid an almost endless list of hardships, calamities, beatings and persecutions, he celebrates the power of God. There turns out to be a kind of spiritual immune system for someone enduring storms for Christ, a system that turns "having nothing" into "possessing everything."

None of this tells us precisely what level of power was released in Galilee and whether, amid God’s mysteries, Jesus actually could command a spiritual immune system powerful enough to still actual wind and waves. But Gilbert helps me suspect anew that the power of the psychological immune system we spy through the lens of cognitive science may be only the first level of what we may glimpse if we open ourselves to the resources that Mark and Paul tell us come from beyond.