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The Goal of Youth Ministry

The important question about youth ministry is not "Where are the kids?" or "What should we do with them when they show up?" but "What is the nature of our community?" What are the discipleship skills appropriate to those who have moved beyond childhood, and how can a community exhibit those skills in a way that attracts the young and draws them to inspiring mentors in faith? By what criteria will people know if they have developed the religious abilities appropriate to their age?

Young people are clear about what competencies they consider important for their lives. They know that those who wish to participate in sports must develop a clear set of abilities. A person can’t simply walk onto an athletic field and demand to be placed on a team. She needs to show the abilities required by the sport. And whatever one’s individual skills, one usually qualifies for team membership only if one’s skills can be blended into team play. They also know that the pursuit of athletic abilities, though exhausting and even tedious, is no dour endeavor. It takes place in a celebrative atmosphere, where levels of competence are appreciated, acknowledged and celebrated. The exhilaration of achievement compensates for the effort put into exercising one’s skills.

They also realize that one must know how to write standard English in order to qualify for higher education. And they know that securing paid employment requires having the right skills for the position. There is no argument about these things; society has taught them these truths.

Young people are often less convinced of the need to develop abilities in other crucial areas, such as in relationships and in parenting. As one 19-year-old told me, "I don’t need no marriage course to tell me the kind of person I like." I hope he eventually came to see that recognizing the kind of person one likes does not represent the full range of skills necessary for a good relationship. Similarly, when I told a new mother I was sending her two books about parenting, she told me (again using that double negative), "I don’t need no books to teach me how to love my baby." True, but by itself love may not be enough.

Most of the young people I meet believe religion, particularly Christianity, is an area of life requiring no special skills. Religion, they think, refers to an optional interior attitude. It consists of having nice, loving thoughts about God. The idea that a religion requires a discrete set of practices that forges a distinct way of being in the world -- that religious practices, like an athlete’s training, are more geared to developing abilities than a set of thoughts -- is something many have never considered. If there is a practice to religion, they think, it consists of a single activity -- an activity they reject: attending religious services. In their equation, if you love God, God knows of your love and you don’t have to be part of a religious assembly to show that love. If you do attend church but don’t love God, you are a hypocrite. So the best way to avoid hypocrisy is to avoid going to church.

Can ministry to youth reclaim its connection to the tradition of formation in discipleship as a set of practices necessary for "seeing the Lord"? Can youth ministry succeed in this if the ecclesial assembly does not itself embrace these practices and celebrate them?

One approach to youth ministry is evident in an antihunger effort by a Christian organization dedicated to alleviating hunger and poverty in economically distressed areas of the world. Attempting to involve thousands of U.S. youth in a fast to raise money for starving children, it produced an ad that read, in part:

Make your mark through the planet’s coolest event! More than 600,000 young people in the U.S. will be part of it. Twenty-one other countries will do it. It’s a gathering of global proportions! It’s World Vision’s 30 Hour Famine -- the worldwide event you and your group won’t want to miss. It’s fun. It’s free. And best of all, the 30 Hour Famine lets you make your mark on a world that’s seriously hungry. So hungry that 33,000 kids die every single day from hunger and hunger-related causes. Kids you and your group can help save. How? When your group goes without food for 30 hours to raise money for hungry kids, you will save kids’ lives! That’s what makes the 30 Hour Famine a cool event. . . . Don’t miss out on the fun. You can make a difference -- you can save kids’ lives.

The work of this organization is admirable, and it has raised young people’s awareness of hunger. Yet this particular ad seems to trivialize the energies of the young. The fast could have been successfully publicized without calling it fun or misnaming it as a famine. Young people are quite capable of being motivated by things other than "fun." They can be invited into solidarity with the hungry and the poor in a way that does not trivialize their energies and capacity for thought.

Variations of the message that efforts to be in solidarity with victims are fun and entertaining can be found throughout youth ministry. This ad just tapped into the genre. As we approach youth work, we must ask ourselves what kind of invitation, less manipulative and truer to young people’s capacities, might help them to understand the global realities that lead to starvation. To find a better way to do youth ministry, we need to begin by asking the young what they themselves see as the supreme sacramental moment of their church gatherings over the past year.

Here is an example of that better way: A gray-bearded graduate theology student, a former merchant seaman, butcher and barman-cum-bouncer, accepts a part-time position at a suburban New York church: 20 hours of youth ministry a week. He proposes to the small group that shows up for the first meeting that once a week they serve meals at a soup kitchen. They also will meet weekly to prepare a simple, nourishing dish to bring along. None of the young people has ever been to a soup kitchen and none has done much cooking, but they are willing to try. "Don’t worry. Jesus called his followers to feed the hungry, and that’s what we’ll be doing," the leader reassures them.

When they meet the next week to cook, he doesn’t need any icebreakers or group-building activities. Everyone gets right to work, since they have only so much time to complete the task; preparing a huge bowl of potato salad. They get to know each other as they peel, cut and cook. When they finish, some two hours later, they join for a moment of prayer. Two days later, as they get ready to take the food to the soup kitchen, the youth are a little anxious. Graybeard’s confident smile tells them they will be fine, and during the 45-minute van trip he describes what happens at the feeding program and what they will do. Reassured, they arrive, serve meals and tumble back into the van.

On the trip home, in response to their questions, their guide explains how it happens that such a large group of people ends up eating in a soup kitchen. They sing songs and tell jokes. Over the weeks, the size of the group doubles and triples as more and more young people join to cook and serve. Parents volunteer their vehicles and their service as drivers. When the group returns to the church, its members always spend a few minutes in prayer for those they have met and served that day.

The questions, conversations, songs and jokes go on during succeeding "food runs." The kids talk about themselves, their world, the poor who don’t have enough to eat, the rich who haul their newest purchases through the front door and then, when they are no longer satisfying, out the back. Implicit in the miles of driving and the hours of conversation are questions about who our neighbors are, about what those who gather to worship do between times of worship, about discipleship and what it means to take Jesus’ proposals seriously. Eventually, the group decides to spend a weekend learning about how certain social groups are beaten down, about the deeper problems of change and about what the gospel and the church have to say on such matters.

I do not know whether these young people ever call what they do "cool" or "fun." But I do know that their action is not a onetime event, advertised as fun, but a continual, ever more attentive set of activities.

This activity does not so much flow from the life of their church as from the imagination and wisdom of their leader. But this youth group’s effort to feed the hungry influences the congregation, especially through the involved parents. The parish became more aware of hunger in its area and of the gospel call to feed the hungry. These young people have brought a special gift to the eucharistic assembly. They have modeled the Christian practice of caring for the poor and learning to recognize and oppose oppression. They have formed a loving community with one another and a neighborly concern for those they serve. And, through their prayer times, they have engaged in regular worship.

Many Christian dispositions and activities can be developed through a skill-based approach. Take prayer, for example. When someone interested in working with young people finds a group ready for prayer -- wanting to know what personal prayer is all about and to develop some prayer skills -- that person might set up a NEXUS ("new encounter with Christ using scripture") group. He or she can show the youth how to find a space in their homes where they can slow themselves down for ten minutes each day, pick a passage from the New Testament, reflect on it for five minutes, and then talk to Jesus about "how it hits them." They can then conclude by writing a few words in their journals. The young people can be invited to meet together each week to do the same thing in a group, sharing with each other what they wish to of their journal reflections.

Or take the abilities required for maintaining interpersonal relationships. What about bringing young people together to develop the skills of conflict resolution (using a lot of role playing), and to do it so well that they can then teach these skills to younger kids? Older teens might want to learn how to resolve conflicts in romantic relationships. And there is much work to be done in helping young people develop the ability to be good friends. It takes skill to listen well to another, to avoid getting defensive, and to see situations from the other’s point of view. Harriet Lerner’s books The Dance of Intimacy and The Dance of Anger can be very useful in such programs. This work is deeply Christian if it is done in a context that makes clear God’s call to love one another.

Visiting the imprisoned is another good way to learn to care for our neighbors. A group of young people in northern Virginia agreed to participate in a five-week program of roundtable discussions and skits, all based on gospel incidents and their meaning for today. They were promised that after those weeks the group itself would decide what, if anything, they would do next. When the time came for that decision, they had become a group able to talk and disagree with one another -- and to celebrate each other. They wanted to continue.

They decided they would visit a facility in Washington where young people were being legally detained. Their leader was surprised and pleased.

The group found that they liked their "detained peers" and planned a Christmas party for them. They also planned and conducted a series of visits in which they and their new friends acted out skits, sang, grieved and rejoiced together. After about six weeks, they were ready for a different project to end their youth group season. At regular intervals throughout the year they had had parties that included a communal meal and a chance to discuss what they liked and what they wanted to change in the way they came together. They opted to end the year with five weeks of various prayer experiences: intense silent prayer and Taizé chants; the sharing of bread and the cup, combined with a spontaneous blessing of one another; Zen-type silence; and guided meditations on gospel scenes.

Involved in this effort was a group of loving adults, all volunteers. As it turned out, these adults themselves needed care and asked for counseling and attention from the group leader. Not only did the leader meet with each of them privately and call them weekly, but the adults met as a group for an informal debriefing session after the youth went home each week.

Can it be inconvenient to devote so much time to youth? Yes. But the gospel is inconvenient. In our culture inconvenience is considered worse than having the hungry standing at our gates. Is Jesus convenient? The disciples on their way to Emmaus were headed away from Jerusalem, but after meeting Jesus they returned the way they had come. Was that turn-around inconvenient? Probably.

As churches start asking what the gospel means in our own time and in our own neighborhoods, youth ministry will become what it should be: an activity shaped by the gospel, alive to the gifts of the young, that teaches practical ways of living out the faith.

Crisis on the Mexican Border

Last year over 200 people lost their lives as they tried to cross the border from Mexico into Arizona. They died from dehydration in the 120-degree heat of the Sonoran Desert. They died in storm drains as they tried to cross during the flash-flood season. They died in the trunks of vehicles that were abandoned by "coyotes" (smugglers), and in rollover accidents during high-speed chases.

That’s just in Arizona. Hundreds more died attempting to cross into California, New Mexico and Texas. The problems along the 2,300-mile border between Mexico and the U.S. have grown to crisis proportions. President Bush knows this, some congressional representatives know it, and it has become an inescapable challenge to churches in both countries.

In January President Bush acknowledged that the "system is not working." Recognizing that "our ability to assimilate newcomers" is one of the "defining strengths of America," he called for a reformed immigration policy that will 1) open borders to legal travel and trade while shutting them to drug traffic, criminals and terrorists; 2) serve the economic needs of the U.S. while providing fair income and legal protection for working visitors; and 3) offer incentives for immigrants to return to their country of origin.

To his credit, Bush realizes that immigration reform cannot be a quick fix: "The best way in the long run to reduce the pressures that create illegal immigration in the first place is to expand economic opportunity among the countries in our neighborhood. Real growth and real hope in the nations of our hemisphere will lessen the flow of new immigrants."

But that is the long run. In the short run, something must be done. To begin with, says Robin Hoover, a Disciples of Christ pastor and president of Humane Borders, "We must take death out of the migration equation." This summer waves of newcomers are crossing into the deserts of the western U.S., many of them abysmally unprepared for what lies in store for them.

For this reason, a broad alliance of religious communities and humanitarian groups along the border – named "No More Deaths" -- has mounted an effort to bolster migrant services. On Memorial Day, about 100 church-people from across the country gathered in a dry wash 60 miles southwest of Tucson to dedicate the first "Ark of the Covenant" aid station. The idea behind it is simple: if migrants can’t make it to the churches, the churches will move to the desert.

As participants gathered around a small shrine beside a motor home and a tarp in the desert, they prayed together and placed on the altar jars of water, photos and their hopes for a new border policy. The camp will be staffed continuously by church folks from all over the U.S. who are fed up with the senseless death and who are willing to go to the desert themselves to offer food, water and medical care to keep "the migrant Jesus" alive.

Two hours later, many of us gathered across the Mexican border in Sasabe, Sonora, where many migrants begin their journey. We stood before three large crosses that commemorate the lives of more than 2,500 migrants who have died in desert crossings in the past ten years. "How many more?" one cross asks. As we concluded the service, 30 hikers headed into the desert on a weeklong, 70-mile "Walk for Life" to Tucson to bring attention to the situation of the migrants.

Two days later, the marchers straggled into a camp about 20 miles north of the border. Temperatures hovered over 110 degrees. Maryknoll lay missionary West Cosgrove said, "I can’t understand how anyone makes it out of this desert alive."

In the 15 years I have lived and worked on the US. Mexican border, I have met hundreds of undocumented migrants and heard their stories. Often I take visitors to a little town called Altar, 60 miles south of Sasabe. We travel a dirt road crowded with hundreds of beat-up shuttle vans that move more than 1,500 migrants a day up to the border. In Altar, we visit a hospitality house run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese. In the central plaza in front of the Catholic church, each day from late winter through mid-summer, dozens of buses arrive from the south, carrying hundreds of people who intend to cross the border. They come from all over Mexico and parts of Central America.

Grupo Beta, Mexico’s border safety force, says that during February of this year it made contact with more than 37,000 people headed to the border from Altar, on foot or in vehicles. The number was 4,000 higher than in February 2003.

As people exit the vehicles, blinking in the hot desert sun, voices call out all around them: Come with me -- I’m the best! . . . I can get you to Chicago. . . . Only one thousand dollars to Phoenix! The last time I was there I encountered a woman in her mid-70s who had no idea where she was going. On one visit I met two teenage girls who were traveling north with their parents’ blessing to look for work in order to send money home. Wearing short-sleeved shirts, polyester slacks and open-toed sandals, they were planning to walk across the desert.

It was in Altar that a 40-year-old woman named Veronica made contact with a local coyote. The single mother of a son in his teens, she had been living with her mother on the outskirts of Mexico City. Unable to earn enough money to send her son to high school, she decided to look for better-paying work in the States. In mid-July of 2002, she left her son with her mother and headed north with her 20-year-old nephew.

In Altar they gave all the money they had to a coyote, agreeing that they would pay him hundreds of dollars more once they found jobs. Then with a dozen strangers they began their hike across the desert, heading for Phoenix.

They left at dusk, hiking all that night and all the next day. Before long they ran out of water. As Veronica became dehydrated, she began to vomit and could not keep up with the others. It takes only a few hours to die of dehydration in the desert. As one’s body loses fluid, death can seem preferable to the agony. It is easy to give up.

Eventually, the coyote left Veronica and her nephew behind, considering them not worth the risk of slowing down. Veronica’s nephew half-carried her for several hours to the nearest road. By then she had lost consciousness. Someone stopped and picked them up, and a few hours later Veronica was in a Tucson hospital. Twice in the emergency room her heart stopped beating, but the doctors were able to revive her,

I met Veronica a week later when she was released from intensive care. Her lips and tongue were still completely black, and she was unable to speak. Her cerebral cortex had stopped functioning as a result of severe dehydration. During the following week, I spent time with her each day, and watched what could only be called a miraculous recovery. By my fourth visit she began to regain her speech, and on the sixth day we used my phone card to call her son on his birthday. I held her hand as they spoke and her eyes filled with tears, tears her body could not have produced just a few days before,

Veronica’s experience is not an isolated one. It is the logical outcome of intersecting social forces. She thought that going north was her only option. Once she made that decision, she became the victim of a carefully planned border enforcement strategy carried out during the 1990s by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Beginning with "Operation Blockade" in El Paso, and continuing with "Operation Gatekeeper" in San Diego, "Operation Safeguard" in Arizona and "Operation Rio Grande" in South Texas, the strategy has been simple and deadly. The government has beefed up the Border Patrol, adding over 1,500 armed agents to the staff, along with armed vehicles and helicopters, and it has constructed new walls in each border city. This action has meant that the only places left for crossing are in the harshest, most dangerous parts of the desert. The idea was to deter migration. It hasn’t worked.

In 1995, before the walls went up, not a single migrant death in the desert had been recorded. Every single year since then the numbers have increased.

Why do people come? To answer this question, we need to return to President Bush’s assertion about the need to expand economic opportunity south of the border. Implementing that vision involves far more than a legal work program and tighter border controls.

While living in Guatemala for six months in 2003, I learned something of what happens on the ground in these "countries in our neighborhood." For example, I visited a women’s cooperative in a Mayan village just outside San Juan Ostuncalco. Fraternidad, the Presbyterian Development Agency that hosted our visit that day, had been working with a group of 20 women to help them grow potatoes for sale in the market. When the women obtained a small loan to begin a cooperative several years ago, their goal was to supplement their husbands’ income enough to keep their kids in school. When they went to market with their crop at the end of the first season, they covered their expenses and made a little money. They felt good about their efforts, and the staff of the Fraternidad was encouraged about their long-term prospects.

However, after the second season they discovered they could not match the price of other vendors in the market. Their competitors were selling Canadian potatoes that had been shipped, tariff-free, all the way to the highlands of western Guatemala. If they matched the price on the imported potatoes, they could not make even enough to pay back the micro-credit loan they had taken to get started.

The women’s experience illustrates one of the consequences of neoliberal economic policy, represented by, among other things, the North American Free Trade Agreement, established in 1994 between the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Such agreements pave the way for corporations to move out of the U.S. in order to cut costs. Thousands of workers are needed in the new factories. Countries south of the border cut their subsidies to small farmers, while at the same time undercutting local prices with heavily subsidized food from the north. Poor farmers find there is no way to support their families on the land.

As these countries have shifted their limited budgets from the agricultural to the industrial sector, little or no money is left to provide even basic social services or any kind of social safety net. So workers head for the cities to work in the factories. All over Mexico, and increasingly across Central America, rural communities have become ghost towns, populated by old folks and children who survive on monthly checks sent home by family members who have become economic migrants.

These macroeconomic policies explain why people leave the countryside. But why do they leave the factories in Mexico and head north to wash dishes, clean houses or work for a landscaper in the U.S.? Consider that the take-home pay for the average worker in Nogales, Sonora, where my organization operates a community center, is about ten pesos per hour. When that worker goes to the store to buy a gallon of milk, it costs 30 pesos, the equivalent of three hours’ work. That’s equivalent to a U.S. laborer working three hours -- at, say, $6 an hour -- to buy a gallon of milk for $18.

Factory workers in Mexico will spend 70 percent of two wage earners’ salaries to provide a basic diet for a family of five. Workers in Latin America are paid the standard wage in their country’s currency, but they are increasingly becoming consumers in the global economy. When they go to the store, they are confronted with the same choices that I have at the Safeway -- and often with higher prices. The difference, of course, is that they make only one eighth, one tenth or even one 20th of what a comparable worker in the North is making.

In the long run, the president is right. The most successful way to resolve our border and immigration crisis is to create economic opportunities that will allow people to stay in their countries of origin. But that will never be accomplished with a trade policy that regards smaller nations as nothing more than a cheap labor supply, or a place to get cheap natural resources, or as a market for U.S. subsidized agricultural commodities.

Traditionally, participants in this debate are characterized as either "protectionist" on one side or "free traders" on the other. I would suggest that there is a third way -- a trade policy that goes beyond providing economic opportunities for corporations and seeks to create sustainable communities.

That’s a large order. But it is not morally defensible to create a global economy without accepting the responsibility of building a global community. A global economy without a global community is morally bankrupt.

One thing is certain. The migrants will keep coming.

I didn’t quite finish Veronica’s story. When she was well enough to travel, the Mexican consul agreed to buy her a plane ticket home. As I pushed her wheelchair up the concourse, I told her how grateful I was for the miracle God had worked in her life. Despite years of exposure to people like Veronica, who knowingly risk their lives to reach the U.S., I still was not prepared for her answer. She said simply, "I’ll have to try again."

Move On (I Sam. 16:1-13; Ps.23; Eph. 5:8-14;John 9:1-41)

Samuel, the Billy Graham of his day, was adviser to the political leader Saul, the Pete Rose of ancient Israel. Samuel anointed Saul to be the first king of Israel. But soon (to quote James Thurber), "confusion got its foot in the door" and went through the entire "symptom." Samuel observed Saul disobeying the explicit word of God, and it became Samuel’s job to inform Saul that God had rejected him as king.

The Bible tells us that Samuel "grieved" (abal) over Saul. But Yahweh told Samuel that the time for grieving was over, and that it was time to appoint a new king.

Sometimes we just need to move on.

The Amish resist certain aspects of "moving on." I appreciate the Anabaptist resistance to the inhumane features of "progress," the Anabaptist call to simplicity and fidelity to ancient traditions. But why stop with the 19th century? Why not go to a period prior to buggies, ovens, cupboards and battery-operated adding machines? The operative word here, as Donald Kraybill so ably demonstrates, is the German word Gelassenheit , or "yieldedness" -- to God’s loving, providing and guiding will. But sometimes what is perceived as Gelassenheit is actually a stubborn resistance to the inevitability of change.

The gospel proclaims an alarming fact about historical movement -- it is what God is all about. The entire Bible hinges on one undeniable reality: reality is God’s workshop. God doesn’t give Abraham a set of beliefs but an event (a smoking fire pot) and a rite (circumcision). And God gives the Christian church a son -- a child born of a woman whose reputation was stained, and reared by a father who surrendered his status as a tsadiq or "righteous man." Yet this son does not just teach the gospel: he embodies it.

In acting this way God sanctifies history, making it something to embrace instead of resist. When Samuel resists he hears the voice of God directing him to a future that will be better. That future will include David the shepherd boy. Like all shepherds, he is often on the move. As the author of Psalm 23, David the shepherd lies down, is led beside still waters, walks through the shadow of death and sits in the presence of his enemies. David will do whatever it takes to guide his sheep even as he remembers that Yahweh is his shepherd, guiding him.

Then another shepherd will arrive. Jesus the Good Shepherd will be the Light of the World, removing darkness and trumping, for example, the darkness of the man born blind. Like Samuel, the disciples will "get stuck" because they’ll wonder whose sins have made the man blind. But Jesus, pushing them into the "Shepherd’s era," will lead them to see that simplistic correlations from the past (sin leads to curse, obedience leads to blessing) do not always work.

He will guide them with his light, and when that light is turned on, three things will happen. First, those who live in that light "try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord." Samuel was stuck for some time in wanting Saul’s era to be the kingdom era, but God gave him a horn of oil to search for the Shepherd’s era. It does no good to apply more and more oil to the old era, God said. It is gone; it is history. We please God by moving on.

We do this too by taking no part in the "unfruitful works of darkness," but instead exposing them. Like many others, I am deeply saddened by Americans’ tendency to gloat triumphally in its victories. I am also saddened by Christians who, instead of weeping over current world affairs, have picked up a new sword of Constantine, a wicked instrument of triumphalism.

We need what John Howard Yoder calls the "politics of Jesus" and what Stanley Hauerwas calls the "peaceable kingdom." Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says it well: ">From now on, all that can be said of God’s action in the past or the present must pass under the judgement of this fact [the cross]."He also says, "God is known in and by the exercise of crucifying compassion; if we are like him in that, we know him." These theologians are calling us out of the old era of warfare, the Saul era, into the Shepherd’s era of justice, peace and love.

This future kingdom is marked by "justice," a word that is fast losing its robust Christian profile. It has, as Flannery O’Connor said of another word, "a private meaning and public odor." Some use the term in the sense of "retribution"(bring them to justice), and some in the sense of "rectification"(give the victims and the marginalized an equal opportunity). Neither of these senses is adequately Christian. The Christian sense of "justice" is "what is right before God and others." And, according to Jesus’ own creed, what is "right" is to love God and to love others (Mark 12:29-31). In the Christian sense, justice means providing our world an opportunity to love God and to love others.

We need the words of the apostle Paul, who said, "Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light." We need a renewed commitment to listen to Jesus Christ, to let him be the good shepherd who can dispel the darknesses of war and bring in the Shepherd’s era. Peace and justice embrace one another because they will be empowered by love on a day when, to quote Samuel Johnson, "we shall not borrow all our happiness from hope."

Spiritual Snobs (Ps. 95; Jn. 4:5-42)

It is tempting to sit in judgment on others. Sometimes we do it in jest, as Mark Twain did when commenting on Adam. "Adam was but human -- this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent."

But sometimes the serpent eats us, and then we judge in earnest.

Just a few days into the wilderness wanderings, the children of Israel encamped at Rephidim and found no water. They blamed Moses. We may be tempted to blame them too. How can these people, we ask, after experiencing a miraculous liberation from a first-class oppressor, after watching the enemy collapse under walls of water, after waking up with manna at their feet -- how can they carp about not having water?

In a penetrating essay on the "put-down," Joseph Epstein says that judging others is "malice formulated in tranquility" and the "civilized person’s equivalent of the perfectly aimed knockout punch." More recently he puts the whole enterprise together in his study Snobbery: The American Version. We too often operate, he suggests, as the "statistician." He defines "snob" as one who arranges to make himself "feel superior at the expense of other people."

If we judge the children of Israel, whom the psalmist says had hard hearts, we also must judge the apostles. After watching Jesus feed a village of people, the disciples are challenged to think through what Jesus should do -- he’s afraid to send the crowd home lest they collapse on the way. But Mark says the apostles had hard hearts (Mark 8), so we condemn them for their faithlessness. But should we?

A parishioner once informed me that if he had been in Jerusalem when Jesus was put to death, he would have been crucified along with him because, as he trumpeted, "I would never have allowed my Lord to be even arrested without fighting for him! Nope, not me. I’m not like the rest of these faint-hearted Christians!" The claim astounded me. His self-promotion was masked as self-perception. Here was a 60-year-old who hadn’t looked in a mirror for a long time.

He is not alone.

The problem is neither logic nor faith. The problem is us. When we look within ourselves or at others, we are prone to self-promotion or blame or judgment. When we see who we really are, we see hearts struggling and minds fighting and souls doubting. And then we are like both the children of Israel and the apostles.

The Samaritan woman sees a better way. Instead of seeing Jesus as simply a Jew, she sees a revelation of God. She sees the good news that comes straight from the mouth of Jesus: water, water that gives new life in the Spirit. Jesus, especially in John, uses the earthy to evoke the eternal. Our scientific, modernist world is giving way, so the experts tell us, to a postmodern world, but both are shackled to the earthy. We need to hear the words of Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann: "The fall is not that [the human] preferred the world to God . . . but that [the human] made the world material." We are called to see the eternal through the earthy, to see living water in the water in the well.

What the woman sees is Jesus the Living Water, who summons her from her ageless racisms and divisiveness into eternal life. When she glances into the well, she sees not herself or others but the image of Jesus. Now she understands. Drinking from the living water will give her life and invite her to love rather than judge others.

I’ve struggled with students for two decades over why Jesus himself was tempted (Matt. 4:1-11). Most of them think he was tempted as an example of how to endure temptation. But the text says that Jesus, in being tempted, relived Israel’s experience in the wilderness wanderings. Unlike the children of Israel, who fail over and over, Jesus overcame temptation by trusting God.

In 1979, we lived through the Blizzard, a snowstorm that began on Friday but didn’t end until Sunday morning. Soon thereafter our three-year-old daughter, Laura, begged us to let her go outside to play in a clearing the drifting had created. We bundled her up; she stiffly descended the steps toward the clearing. Her obstacle, however, was adrift, and so she jumped onto the drift, thinking she would then walk beyond it to where she could play. She found herself not only stuck in the drift but, because she could no longer move her legs and feet, unable to move. She cried for help; as her adoring father I quickly bundled myself up, grabbed the snow shovel, and descended the steps. I pulled her out of the snow bank, set her down on the steps, and began the joyful task of carving a path for her to the clearing. Before long, she was with me in the path that was gradually getting closer to the clearing. Without lifting one shovel of snow, she was soon playing. Pure grace.

Jesus, too, paves the path of trust for us. In the Lenten season, we need to face ourselves and see where our heart is focused. When we are tempted to judge others or to promote ourselves, we can remind ourselves that we do not walk this path of love and righteousness under our own power. The Living Water is reaching out to all in love.

What is the Focus of Spiritual Life?

Discipleship and disciplines: during the past 50 years these two words have expressed for many of us the quintessence of following Christ. We have come especially to associate "discipleship" with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose prophetic voice showed us what it was like to be a Christian under Hitler’s regime. "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die," we read in Reginald Fuller’s translation -- words that challenge us to take up the cross daily, even at the cost of persecution and death.

The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer’s lectures to students at an underground seminal)’, had an enormous influence on the American church. It convinced people that following Jesus meant a life of radical commitment to his teachings, especially as crystallized in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7; Luke 6). The pursuit of social justice that dominated the 1960s found a renewed theological basis in the term "discipleship." Anabaptist writings made their way into American pulpits. Menno Simons, John Howard Yoder and Ronald Sider were no longer seen as extremists but as prophetic voices. Protestants began wearing crosses, some-times large wooden ones, and to argue that the way of the cross taught by Bonhoeffer had powerful implications for how all Christians were to participate in society and, in particular, in (or against) war. Good recent examples of this orientation can be seen in Virginia Stem Owens’s Living Next Door to the Death House and in Jim Wallis’s Faith Works.

Almost imperceptibly, however, another voice came to be heard in the ‘60s and ‘70s, first from the back pew, then from the pulpit itself. Many sensed that succeeding generations would need more spiritual sustenance than was provided by a radical commitment to social justice. A turn inward was made, a turn to find the source of strength to fire the active life.

The superficiality and materialism of culture and the noisiness and stress of the active life spurred many to seek peace and tranquillity. Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out, which begins by reaching into the deepest part of the self, best expresses this need to turn inward. Nouwen’s profound and enduring perception of spiritual formation moves from loneliness to solitude, from hostility to hospitality and from illusion to prayer.

Turning inward to the spiritual disciplines led to a rediscovery of the great traditions of the church. In practicing the disciplines, Protestants joined hands with Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. Protestants read The Rule of St. Benedict and Orthodoxy’s The Philokalia. The evangelical Quaker Richard Foster may have been most instrumental in making the disciplines accessible to a large public, but many others helped in the process. One thinks, for example, of Thomas Merton’s books, such as The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), What Is Contemplation? (1959) and The Inner Experience (2003), and spiritual writers such as Nouwen, Frederick Buechner, Kathleen Norris and Roberta Bondi. Care of the soul has become central to spiritual formation.

What do the terms "discipleship" and "disciplines" evoke about what it means to be a 21st-century Christian? Discipleship refers to a Christian who is radically committed to obeying Jesus Christ, one who studies Jesus’ teachings and puts them into practice. Of course, most go beyond these teachings to incorporate the powerful images of the Pauline letters into their practice -- images like living in the Spirit and the fruits of the Spirit. But no matter how broadly the image of discipleship is conceived, its foundation is radical commitment.

Discipline evokes the ideas of effort, commitment, will power and regimentation. One of the great impacts of a steady practice of the spiritual disciplines is that it gives a rhythm to one’s life. As the ancient Hebrews turned the mundane calendar into a sacred calendar of holy feasts, and as the early Christians turned the Roman calendar into a sacred calendar of Christian days and seasons, so the practice of the disciplines can create a sacred rhythm to our days, weeks, months and years.

One of those rhythms is the observation of the divine hours or divine offices -- morning prayer, midday prayer, vespers and compline. Enshrined in the Anglican and Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, but often a stranger to Presbyterians, Methodist and other Protestant groups, the divine hours call the Christian to regular worship, praise and prayer. Instead of interrupting our work, these daily practices remind us what work is for.

Divine hours, writes Annie Dillard, shape our days, and "how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends us from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time."

Disciplines are intended to "catch" our days so that we live mindfully. Sometimes a discipline can catch so much of what is passing that the day seems momentarily to stand still, and we get drunk on the flow of God’s gracious time.

But I doubt that either discipleship or discipline can satisfy the soul even if each can energize it. When I get up in the morning, my first thought is not, "Today is a day to be radically committed." Good though that thought might be, it is not enough to sustain me. It was not enough to sustain Jesus himself, radically committed though he obviously was.

My 20 years of studying and teaching the Gospels have made me very aware of the power of Jesus’images. of discipleship -- his admonishment to "be perfect" and to ‘take up your cross daily," and his warning that "any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple." I also am aware that these texts can be abused and misused, particularly when they are employed to present radical obedience as the entirety of’ the Christian life. Radical commitment is an important concept, but it is not what the Christian life is all about. There is something behind discipleship.

Is it the disciplines that stand behind discipleship? Jesus prayed, meditated, fasted, kept periods of solitude, lived simply, worshiped and celebrated. But he rarely spoke about the disciplines. They are there, but they are not his focus. Because they are so objective, the spiritual disciplines easily attract legalistic and pietistic barnacles that turn them into ugly monsters. Because the disciplines can be quantified, counted and assessed, they can easily lead people to compare themselves favorably or unfavorably with others. And because they are acts, they can easily lead to a sense of accomplishment and superiority. A discipline-focus for spiritual formation can lead to legalism -- as evidenced by the Christians who congratulate themselves on their daily Bible reading, church attendance, or the superior vocations of their children.

Just as the barnacle of legalism can grow onto the disciplines, so also can the barnacle of individualistic pietism. Individual piety is a noble good that produces other goods like sanity and tranquillity. But it can also lead to an egoistic spirituality that assigns God the task of serving me -- of making me a better person, of making the world clear to me, of swooping down to earth just for me. People who fall into this error can be identified by what social scientists call "attribution theory," a cognitive game in which Christians claim to understand why everything in the course of human events is occurring and what meaning specific events -- like getting a flat tire or losing one’s job -- have in their lives. That is, "God made my tire flat so I would hear a specific song on the radio so I could use those words in a personal relationship with someone else who needs to hear just those words on this particular day!"

The disciplines are important, they are well-worn paths, but they cannot become the central focus of the spiritual life. As there is something behind discipleship, so there is something beyond the disciplines. What is it that turns discipleship into a commitment that keeps us faithful? What turns the disciplines into a path of spiritual formation? I believe the answer can be found in what I call the "Jesus Creed."

A scribe comes to Jesus and asks, "What is a life of discipleship? What are the disciplines designed to accomplish?" Because that scribe is a Torah-observant Jew and because Jesus is a Jew as well, the scribe asks this great question in a first-century Jewish manner: "Of all the commandments [and you know Jesus, there are over 600 of them], which is the most important?" "The most important," Jesus answers, "is this: ‘Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no greater commandment than these" (Mark 12:28-31).

Behind discipleship and beyond the disciplines is love -- love of God and love of others. Radical commitment is fine, if it is fired by love. Spiritual formation is noble, if it produces love for God and others. Without love, to modernize Paul’s words, we become either fanatics or egoists. When Jesus says we are to love God he is quoting from the Shema, from Deuteronomy 6:4-9, words that were recited according to the "divine hours of Judaism." Most scholars think observant Jews recited this passage two or three times per day. But when Jesus goes on to say that we are to love others, he tampers with the sacred creed of his contemporaries. He adds to the Shema by quoting Leviticus 19:18, and in so doing creates a new creed for his followers, the Jesus Creed. Love of God is to be joined, at all times, with love for others. Both, always. Apart they turn humans into fanatics and egoists. Together they turn humans into the imago Dei, walking expressions of God’s love.

As we don’t add to the Apostles’ Creed and other historic creeds of the church -- though we are in the habit of trying to create new ones -- so in the time of Jesus. To add to the sacred Shema was to reform identity for a new group. The Jesus Creed was to shape the identity of the followers of Jesus. They were to be people who love God and others. By reshaping the Shema Jesus gave to his followers a creed to recite daily (and lam in the habit of reciting it many times throughout the day -- as I rise, walk, work, drive, retire). This creed is what gives discipleship a foundation and the disciplines a future. If our foundation of radical commitment is love for God and others, we live as God would have us live. And if we practice the disciplines in order to deepen our love for God and others, we live as God would have us live. Discipleship is not so much about radical commitment as it is about radical love, and the disciplines are not so much about spiritual formation as about love formation.

No one has said this better than John Ortberg, the pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church: "The true indicator of spiritual well-being is growth in the ability to love God and people. If we can do this without the practice of any particular spiritual disciplines, then we should by all means skip them."

Bound to be Free

At the end of the popular movie Braveheart, just before being beheaded, the Scottish hero William Wallace utters his last word: "Freedom." In light of this cruel ending, many might want to respond with a sigh of relief and a sense of pride: "I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free" -- a statement that can be variously applied to any other modern democracy. In modern democracies we usually need not fear that we might be beheaded when we fight for our own freedom or for that of others. And this surely is one great thing about freedom.

Yet we profoundly deceive ourselves when we stop there in thinking about freedom. Why? Because, strangely enough, there are worse things that can happen to us than being beheaded. We need to ask more rigorously: What is so great about freedom? And we must also ask about the nature of freedom. What do we mean when we talk about freedom? And who has this freedom?

In our day-to-day thinking we tend to confuse three levels of freedom. We tend to think first of political freedom: the freedom of Braveheart, the freedom that was at stake in the American Revolution – that is, Jefferson’s, Franklin’s and Washington’s freedom, and by extension the freedom sought by Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.

When we reflect a bit longer on the topic, we arrive at a second kind of freedom, the kind that is the presupposition of political freedom: moral freedom. This is the freedom on the grounds of which we are morally responsible. This aspect of freedom was most famously and lastingly developed by Immanuel Kant in his concept of autonomy. Moreover, according to the principles of Enlightenment political thinking, only truly autonomous -- that is to say, free -- persons can be entrusted with the complex project of political self-governance.

Modern thinking about freedom stops at the point of autonomy (postmodern thinking despairs long before). Yet in order to grasp what is so great about freedom we have to push beyond Kantian autonomy to a third level, where we find ourselves in the strange but exhilarating company of people like Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther, John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila, Jonathan Edwards and Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Edith Stein and Sergius Bulgakov. While they undoubtedly differ in numerous important respects, these Christian thinkers all agree that it is this third level of freedom that is most fundamental and decisive: the freedom of living with God.

It is at this level of freedom that all freedom stands or falls. This third, most fundamental level addresses the question, What constitutes the human as human? What makes us who we essentially are?

The epoch of modernity defined itself by rejecting Christianity’s answer to the question, What is so great about freedom? Goethe’s famous poem "Prometheus" captures the modern answer: what is great about freedom is moral sovereignty and self-sufficiency. By heroically defying the gods, Prometheus claims freedom for himself and the whole human race. Moreover, he shows that freedom makes him Prometheus in the first place: "Here I sit, forming men / In my own image, / A race, that is like me, / Made to suffer, to weep, / To take pleasure and to enjoy itself, / And to pay no attention to your kind, / Like me." I call this perspective, in which the Promethean "I" imagines itself as sovereign, the modern daydream.

Having been foreshadowed in various ways for about 150 years, the modern daydream of the sovereign self came to full bloom at the end of the 18th century. What had happened? A disastrous and deeply pretentious "exchange of attributes" between God and humanity had occurred: freedom for contingency. Humanity had usurped libertas, the full and ungrounded freedom of sovereignty. For Luther and previous orthodox Christian theologians, sovereignty had been solely a divine attribute. In the modern period, in exchange for sovereignty, humanity handed over to God contingency, the essential attribute of what it means to be a creature. The world was now thinkable without God. Like Prometheus, humanity was now completely its own sovereign.

It did not take long for the nihilistic implications of this usurpation of divine sovereignty to be felt. God not only became contingent but was even pronounced dead. This move is the presumptuous last consequence of modernity’s answer to what is so great about freedom: God is dead and the human is divine.

In humanity’s utmost presumption lies the seed of the fall from the modern daydream of freedom into the postmodern nightmare of freedom. It is important to remember that part of the modern daydream was a fundamental exchange of juridical positions between God and humanity, that is, between bench and dock. In C. S. Lewis’s apt description: "The ancient man approaches God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God in the Dock."

During reason’s trial of God, the god of the deists died in the dock. And with this god dead, only humankind is left to blame for the miseries that we inflict upon each other. Theodicy turns into anthropodicy. That is, in the face of evil and suffering, it is now humanity, instead of God, that needs to be acquitted. Moreover, the nature of salvation has changed. If we don’t save the world, no one else will. Progress has turned from an optimistic possibility into a sheer necessity. If we don’t decide and thus choose who we are or what we want to be and do, some other human will. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous dictum: "We are condemned to be free."

Faced with the infinite responsibility that accompanies the claim of infinite freedom, the Promethean self loses its nerve, capitulates, and flees from the posture of heroic sovereignty into the self-deceptive camouflage of petty license. License promises ultimate relief, because it allows the exhausted and overextended modern self to let its desires rule without accountability. "Freedom" now means living out whatever drives us. Such freedom, however, is eventually exposed as a life that consists in nothing other than the search for the next sensual pleasure.

Let me give a perhaps trivial but nevertheless pertinent illustration. In college most students think they are "free" to have alcohol at parties. But soon they find out that they have become unable to have fun at parties without alcohol. The same with sex. In college, many students think, they finally are "free" to have sex in a relationship, or worse, to simply try out and enjoy sex for its own sake. Yet soon they find out that they have become unable to have fun and fulfillment without having sex. They are no longer free not to have sex. This bondage to sex will begin to dominate and ultimately destroy any relationship. While promising unlimited freedom, license traps them -- and all of us -- in bondage.

The modern daydream of sovereignty has turned into the postmodern nightmare of bondage. Friedrich Nietzsche, the first and already the last genuine post-modern, attempted to fuse radical freedom and absolute determination as he celebrated the endless will to power and the eternal return of things. Nietzsche’s profound postmodernity was not the faddish contemporary postmodernism; he took a lonely, radical and ultimately deadly path. Today’s postmodernists, by contrast, tend to occupy chichi coffeehouses and the humanities departments of countless colleges and universities -- a lifestyle option secured by a TIAA-CREF pension plan.

And so in late modernity both "modernity" and "postmodernity" have become lifestyle options in a consumer society that mistakes license for freedom. It is no surprise that this kind of society finds itself caught on a manic-depressive roller-coaster ride between the dizzying heights of the modern daydream, which suggests that our freedom is endlessly expanding, and the despairing depths of the postmodern nightmare, which intimates that our freedom has been totally eclipsed.

What does all this mean? Whenever "freedom" becomes simply an issue and a catchword, limited to the political and moral levels, and especially when it is reduced simply to license, we become dangerously oblivious to the fundamental crisis of freedom that threatens humanity. Our concern for political and moral freedom in the face of the real crisis of freedom resembles a homeowner’s preoccupation with a fire in the backyard trash can while her house burns down behind her.

In the midst of the presumptuous "public sphere" daydream of cloning humans and tinkering with the human genetic code -- not to mention the unchallenged "private sphere" supremacy of license -- we may simply lose the ability to ask what is so great about freedom and still expect an answer that truly liberates and transforms our lives.

We should have a serious look again at Aldous Huxley’s prophetic novel Brave New World. We find there hauntingly displayed how license and genetic programming go together: the late modern subject understands itself to be at once completely "free" and completely "determined." And we should read right afterwards the equally prophetic encyclical The Gospel of Life, by Pope John Paul II. Living for a while between these two texts, we will start to understand that we have come to the brink of denying human freedom and dignity on its most fundamental level, a denial that ultimately encompasses moral and political freedom as well.

How can we open ourselves to a truthful answer to the question about freedom? How can we gain access to an answer that truly liberates and transforms? We must start by allowing ourselves to be awakened from both the daydream and the nightmare. And waking happens first by hearing.

It was common consensus for centuries of Christian thinking that creation’s whispering sound has always already been around us and in us, addressing us constantly in the sheer fact of creation. Our being God’s creatures, that is, our being constantly dependent on the Creator and called to acknowledge the Creator in gratitude, is thus an evident truth -- yet one from which we have fled into daydreams and nightmares. Even though creation ceaselessly addresses us, our dull ears need a stronger signal, God’s own waking call, God’s own Word become incarnate.

The Christian insight into freedom is that genuine freedom is an original gift of God. Martin Luther expresses this insight in his commentary on Genesis 2, which he sees as a portrayal of the fundamental human predicament. Luther assumes that humanity was originally created for a freedom grounded in an intense and joyful communion with God, a communion that receives its proper creaturely form by following God’s commandment. For Adam, says Luther, genuine freedom and God’s commandment stand in no contradiction to each other. Rather, God’s commandment gives concrete creaturely shape to genuine freedom. In breaking God’s original commandment, humanity abandoned the very form of genuine, received freedom and lost the original communion with God. Only then did the commandments turn into the law that both constrains and unmasks the human pretension to self-grounding. Only then did God’s law turn into the yoke that only Christ can lift.

In Christ the triune God restores the original communion as a gift received by faith alone through Christ’s self-donation on the cross, thereby fulfilling the law in an exemplary way and granting life in God’s spirit of love, The law is abrogated through Christ insofar as it constrains, unmasks and convicts the sinner. Since sin, however, is still present in the life of the Christian, the law continues to unmask sin, keeping the believer focused on the need to continuously receive the gift of Christ’s self-giving that constitutes genuine freedom. In short, an ongoing struggle continues in every Christian between flesh and Spirit (Rom. 8:13-14).

Yet this struggle must not be conceived as a static dialectic, an unending back-and-forth between sin and forgiveness, but must be seen as a dynamic -- whose subject and agent is Christ through the Spirit -- that results in an ongoing growth in faith. It is on this basis that God’s commandment, God’s law, can become a source of genuine delight -- which is the enactment of genuine freedom.

Thus the law’s content is restored to its original intent as the genuine expression of God’s will: the law of love. It provides the creaturely form of genuine freedom, the freedom of communion with God as received by faith. Now it is God’s own law of love received in Christ, a law therefore welcomed with delight: "Whenever there is this delight, it does what God commands. Then the law does not cause a guilty conscience, but causes joy, because one has become another person already" (Luther).

Genuine freedom comes only when it is received by faith. There is no other source. Genuine freedom grows out of the restored and redeemed relationship with the One who, as Luther put it so memorably in his Small Catechism, "has created me together with all that exists." The very heartbeat and life of this relationship and thus of true freedom is love, the caritas created by the Holy Spirit in the human heart.

St. Augustine remains the unsurpassed ecumenical teacher of the West, ceaselessly instructing us about the intrinsic relationship between true freedom (vera libertas) and love (caritas): Charity restores our will’s undivided desire for God. Now our will delights and trusts in God’s goodness and is set free from its bondage to fear and lust; propelled by the heartbeat of caritas, true freedom unfolds.

Eye of the Needle (I Tim. 6:6-19; Lk. 16:19-31)

Next to the window in my study, where I can’t but see it every day, there’s a framed cartoon from an old edition of the National Lampoon. It’s a spoof of a Medici rose window from the cathedral in Florence, and depicts a laughing camel leaping with ease through the eye of a needle. The superscription reads: "a recurring motif in works commissioned by the wealthier patrons of Renaissance religious art," while the Latin inscription on the window itself is "Dives Vincet," or "Wealth Wins!"

Some wit once observed that he’d never seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul. The author of the first "pastoral epistle" to Timothy expressed the same sentiment in observing that "we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it." The "love of money" seemed enough of a "root of all kinds of evil" that it presented a pressing pastoral problem for the early church. It still does for today’s church.

It’s a diagnosis of our sickness-unto death that’s older than Amos -- the confusion of religion with riches, of doing good with doing well: "In their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains." The early church, as it handed down memories, remembered how Jesus himself had seemed preoccupied with oikonomic matters. He loved to populate his stories and sayings with references to mammon and money, to offerings and treasuries and taxes, to wages and debts and investments and rewards. In an age marked by an inequitable distribution of wealth similar to our own, Jesus knew that money mattered and that money-talk could be used to speak vividly of the clashing priorities of the culture of God with those of the present age. Jesus’ "preferential option for the poor" reverberates like a basso continuo throughout St. Luke’s Gospel (take the Magnificat and the Beatitudes as two memorable examples).

The title, "The Rich Man and Lazarus," as this parable of Jesus has traditionally been known, tips us off that something out of the ordinary is going on. This is a story of an anonymous rich man and of a poor man whom Jesus bothers to name, the only named person in all of Jesus’ parables. From Jesus’ perspective, Lazarus (whose name means "God helps"), although poor and hungry, is dignified with a name even though he is paid more attention by the dogs who lick his sores than by the generic rich man. Lazarus in his evident need lay in plain sight as the rich man "dressed in purple and fine linen feasted sumptuously every day," an echo in Greek of how Jesus had taught his disciples to pray for their "daily" bread. We’re meant to think of this as a repeated, even habitual, encounter between rich man and poor man.

It’s not that Lazarus never received any scraps from the rich man’s table. The poor are smart enough to know when the scraps are available, just as they know not to expect handouts from the notoriously niggardly.

In west Los Angeles, one homeless neighbor strategically assumes his place each lunchtime alongside the drive-through lane of the nearby Jack-in-the-Box, where he is happy to relieve folks of their change. Lazarus, in an earlier time, was also part of the social landscape for this rich man, and below the notice of one who had the wherewithal to inhabit a home where the poor could be "gated" outside and kept at a distance.

Part two of Jesus’ parable presents a chilling epilogue to the initial story. Both the rich man and Lazarus die -- as we all will, rich and poor alike. But according to Jesus’ sequel, they land in different places. Lazarus finds himself transported by angels to the bosom of Abraham, while the rich man lands in Hades in torment. While in keeping with the overturning of the order of things that is dear to Luke’s theology, the rich man doesn’t see it this way. Even in Hades he tries to use Lazarus (whose name he now remembers) as his lackey to "dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames."

But father Abraham won’t have any of it. The earthly status quo has changed, and the great chasm that divides rich from poor during life on earth now has been eternally inverted. Nothing if not persistent, the rich man pleads with Abraham (see Luke 3:8) to send Lazarus to warn his five brothers of the surprise that awaits them on the other side of death. But Abraham’s reply is a show-stopper: "They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them." They already know what they need to know. It’s clear in Hebrew scripture. "But if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent," the rich man objects. But Abraham speaks over the head of the rich man, over the heads of the Pharisees, in what sounds like a direct address to us church types who claim faith in a certain Galilean raised from the dead, "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." Zing!

The advice of 1 Timothy for those "who in the present age are rich" is simple. We’re not to be haughty nor set our hopes on the uncertainty of riches hut instead rely on our richly provident God. "Do good" (not well!) and be "rich in good works," "generous" and "ready to share." We’re to spend this treasure of Christian practices now in order to fund a future rooted in "life that is really life." In Martin Luther’s last written words, "We are beggars, that is true!"

Measure of Faith (2 Timothy 1-14; Luke 17; 5-10)

An emphasis on the decision character of faith has a long and deep history in the American psyche going back to our Puritan and evangelical ancestors. From Jonathan Edwards to Charles Finney to Billy Sunday through Billy Graham and their successors, faith, as encountered in the idiom both of born-again revivalism and of religious "progressives," has served as short-hand for "I have decided to follow Jesus." But the biblical meaning of faith cannot be reduced to individualistic voluntarism.

Earlier this summer we were reminded that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews describes faith as "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen." Then followed a whole family tree of Israel forebears for whom faith in God was identified as their common DNA, the connecting thread of their family history. Sinful and sordid as much of that story turned out to be, Israel’s faith was never a "lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps" kind of willfulness. Faith was to live life by entrusting oneself to God’s promises, the storied Word of a trustworthy God.

The author of 2 Timothy sees faith similarly in its family connection as "lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice," a faith which only then can be said to "live in you." Yet this is no mere family hand-me-down but a "gift of God that is within you" and "a good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us." Faith is an incarnate reality that, while a gift from God, is one that comes embodied in our human, including family, relationships.

This reminds me of an old story which has meant a great deal to me as I try to comprehend and communicate the mystery of how one comes to faith. Scottish theologian Donald Baillie tells the parable in The Theology of the Sacraments, published posthumously nearly half a century ago. "Let us imagine," Baillie begins,

. . . the case of a small child, a little boy, entrusted to the care of a nursery governess. When she arrives, the little fellow is taken into the room where she is, and left in her care. But she is strange to him, he does not trust her, but looks distantly at this strange woman from the opposite corner of the room. She knows that she cannot do anything with him until she has won his confidence. She knows she has to win it. The little boy cannot manufacture it, cannot make himself trust the governess. His faith in her is something which he cannot create -- only she can create it.

And she knows that she cannot create it by forcing it; she has to respect the personality of the child; and to try to take the citadel by storm would be worse than useless, and would produce fear and distrust instead of confidence.... She sets about her task gently, using various means -- words, gestures, and smiles, and perhaps gifts, all of which convey something of the kindness of her heart. Until at last the little fellow’s mistrust is melted away, she has won his confidence, and of his own free will he responds to her advances and crosses the floor to sit on her knee. Now that her graciousness, using all these means, has created his faith, she can carry on the good work she has begun.

No human analogy, Baillie admits, can adequately plumb the mystery of how one comes to faith. But this "very simple and homely illustration" as he calls it, old-fashioned as it may be, illuminates how faith is always God’s gift and never our human accomplishment. Faith is ever and only a response empowered by an amazing grace originating from outside of our own efforts that enables us to entrust ourselves willingly to One we have found trustworthy. In Baillie’s understanding, it is especially through the word and sacraments that God bestows these faith-creating gifts.

Our Gospel text addresses another pastoral issue regarding faith that is still very much with us: whether the degree and depth of our faith are adequate to life’s circumstances. The concern here is voiced by Jesus’ own followers whom he sternly commands to beware of causing little ones to stumble, but also to be generous in extending forgiveness even to chronic sinners who continue to repent. For once, "the apostles," as Luke calls them, seem to have grasped the difficulty of what Jesus is teaching and plead with him: "Increase our faith!" Jesus replies rather obliquely, "If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you." Apparently faith isn’t about capacity; it is an orientation. Faith is beyond measurement. You’ve got it or you don’t, Jesus goes on to suggest. Having it is being like the slave who simply does what is commanded, who knows his or her place and does what needs doing.

I often quote a quip attributed to Archbishop William Temple: "It is a great mistake to think that God is chiefly concerned with our being religious." I think Jesus would agree, since he pricked the balloon of his followers’ own religious pretensions about faith. Faith is not a matter of pious exertion or heroic will power. But rather, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer testified in his prison poem "Who Am I?," faith is the miracle of God-given trust, that willingness beyond willfulness that crawls into the lap of a trustworthy God, encouraging one to conclude in the face of all life’s questions and circumstances: "Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am thou knowest, O God, I am thine."

Liberalism After 9/11

Dionne, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has taken a special interest in the place of religion in politics, chairing the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and editing (with John DiIulio Jr.) What’s God Got to Do with the American Experiment? (2000). His 1991 book Why Americans Hate Politics was nominated for a National Book Award.

Dionne’s latest book, Stand Up and Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps and the Politics of Revenge (Simon & Schuster), describes the partisan tone of politics in recent years and the failures of liberals to press their concerns forcefully or persuasively. We spoke with him about the political landscape and political possibilities.

You suggest in your recent book that the language of political discussion has shifted to the right in recent years. Can you give some examples?

The largest sign of this shift is the invocation of market language to justify almost everything. Market language has displaced moral language. The example I cite in the book is from Ann Lewis, who used to work at the Clinton White House. She said, "We used to call for immunizing little children against disease. Now we call for investments in human capital." She was poking fun at this language, but her point was serious: if even immunizing kids has to be defended through market language, the progressive idea is in deep trouble. Progressives begin to sound like people who are afraid of their own moral arguments.

A second example is the way in which progressives, especially Democratic politicians, have been reluctant to defend government’s legitimate role. Recall President Clinton’s declaration that the era of big government is over. Well, if you’re in favor of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, environmental protection, a strong Securities and Exchange Commission and a whole lot of other things, including national defense, you are already for a pretty big government. By pretending that you’re not, you’re being untrue to yourself and you’re not framing the right kind of argument. The proper argument is not an abstract debate over the size of government but a debate over how much government we want and need, whose side government is on and what interests government serves.

A third shift in language is evident in the constant effort by progressives to sound tough. There’s a point to this effort, because liberalism has never been the same since Humphrey Bogart was replaced by Woody Allen and Alan Alda as the symbol of what it means to be a liberal. Bogart was a symbol of a kind of tough liberalism rooted as much in solidarity as in kindness or compassion. There’s nothing wrong with kindness and compassion, but solidarity is a stronger virtue.

As soon as liberals enter an argument about toughness, they lose. If the one side says, "You’re soft," and you say, "No, I’m not," the argument’s over before it begins.

When liberals seek to talk about whose interests government should serve, they can expect to hear conservatives complain that they are fomenting "class warfare."

Whenever somebody yells "class warfare," it’s important to ask who began the war. Is it class warfare to point out that a tax program is tilted toward the very wealthy? Is the tax program itself a symbol of class warfare?

The great sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset once referred to free elections in democracies as the playing out of the democratic class struggle. There are interests at stake in elections.

Conservatives never tire of playing class warfare on culture issues. They try to argue that liberals are out of touch or are elitists. Why should one side be able to do this on cultural issues while the other side is prohibited from raising the same question on matters of economic interest?

A recent poll indicated that the more often you go to church (or synagogue or mosque) the more likely you are to vote Republican. Those who rarely or never attend services are more likely to vote Democratic. That’s pretty disturbing news for Democrats who want to appeal to religious people.

It is. But those numbers can be exaggerated. People tend to focus on the far ends of the spectrum. Sure, very secular people tend to be Democratic. People who attend religious services more than once a week tend to be Republican -- in both cases by about a two-to-one margin.

But there’s a vast number of Americans who go to church once a week or several times a month and who still think of themselves as religious people. Among this group the differences are narrower. Among the weekly attenders Republicans have roughly a five-to-four edge. Among the less than weekly attenders Democrats have about a five-to-four edge.

Another way to look at this issue is to note that there are two swing religious groups -- Catholics and mainline Protestants. We know that white evangelical Christians are, on the whole, Republican, and that African-American Christians of all stripes are strongly Democratic. Mainline Protestants have become less Republican than they used to be, and Roman Catholics have become less Democratic.

There’s another swing group that some people are talking about -- what Amy Sullivan, a former colleague at the Pew Forum, calls "freestyle evangelicals." These are evangelicals who don’t fit the Republican mold.

You’ve been very critical of President Bush for failing to build on the sense of national unity after 9/11. Why so?

For about four months after 9/1l the country was extraordinarily united. It wasn’t simply a case of people playing politics by not seeming to play politics. There actually was a broad consensus in Congress for the post-9/11 spending bills, and there was a broad consensus in the country that the war in Afghanistan was a just war. The president himself shifted his language from unilateralism to something that sounded much more like an endorsement of international cooperation. If Bush had stayed on that path, he could have kept the country united and, I believe, created a sustainable Republican majority.

Instead, he turned in 2002 to using national security issues -- particularly the bill creating a Homeland Security Department and the debate over Iraq -- to win an election and to bludgeon Democrats. This created deep resentments among Democrats. In my lifetime I’ve never seen Democrats as united as they are now. Anger, for better or worse, often does that.

Why did that shift take place? Was it a matter of Bush returning to fundamental conservative convictions or listening to political advisers on how to exploit the situation for electoral victory?

I’ve always thought that Bush was more conservative than his rhetoric in the 2000 election suggested. For example, he was quite explicit before he was elected about supporting a big tax cut and the partial privatization of Social Security.

His specific stands received less attention than his brilliant use of "compassionate conservative" language to take the hard edges off his views.

It’s worth noting that even compassionate conservatism, when examined carefully, was not about supporting anything like traditional government programs. It was much more about helping individuals to overcome their own disabilities -- drug and alcohol addiction and the like. It was much more about individual disabilities than about social justice. So you could argue that compassionate conservatism was, as it were, more "conservative" at heart than many moderates thought it was.

Liberals often complain about the conservatives’ dominance of the media. Is that legitimate?

The successes of the right with the media came from very intense organizing and a two-pronged strategy. First, beginning in the period after the 1964 Goldwater campaign, they assailed as liberal every media institution that was not conservative. That served to push the media steadily to the right, certainly from where they were 40 years ago.

At the same time, conservatives set up their own media institutions -- like Rush Limbaugh’s program and those of his imitators on AM radio and Fox News on TV. The Fox effect pushed other parts of the cable news business to the right. There is almost no one on the left side who speaks unchallenged on his or her own program the way, say, Bill O’Reilly of Fox News does on his.

An interesting twist to this development is that the very secularism that conservatives attack in the media oddly serves to identify religion with the right. If you believe that religion lives on the right, and you are booking a television program, then when you look for an authentic "religious voice" you’re probably going to find a conservative one. That automatically leaves out a very large segment of religious America. In this way, a certain style of liberalism in the media ends up unconsciously working against liberalism -- it bolsters a stereotype about religious people that in the end harms liberalism and ignores a large part of the religious community.

What issues could a center-left coalition effectively articulate?

The most effective speech anyone has given in this election year is John Edwards’s "Two Americas" speech. It was powerful because it articulated the feeling that the political battle in our nation is not between the rich and poor but between the very privileged and everyone else. Are there two governments, one for the very powerful and one for everyone else? Are there two economies, one for the very powerful and one for everyone else? The issue of basic equality is one around which center and left can agree.

For example, moderates and progressives may disagree about how to obtain universal health coverage. Progressives might want a Canadian-style single-payer system; moderate people might want to fiddle more with market incentives. But they agree that this is a problem that needs to be addressed, and that government will play a large role in addressing it. There are a series of other problems -- whether in health care or child care or the minimum wage -- where moderates and the left may disagree on means but agree on the importance of action.

At the end of the book I talk about what I call progressive patriotism as a logical response to 9/11. A progressive patriotism would take us back to that tougher, Bogart-style liberalism, rooted in solidarity. If the solidarity we felt after 9/11 was authentic -- and I think it was -- then it shouldn’t be confined to solidarity in the face of a dangerous enemy. There was much broader fellow feeling after 9/11, a feeling that it didn’t matter in those buildings whether you were an investment banker or a janitor -- everybody was at risk, we are all in this together, and we have a responsibility to each other. It’s that feeling -- and the idea behind the feeling -- that liberals need to articulate.

Off the Record (Luke 13:10-17)

In a story that is unique to Luke, Jesus heals a nameless woman by giving her the freedom to unbend and stand up straight after she has lived for years in crippling bondage. The woman has not asked to be healed. She simply finds herself in Jesus’ presence -- and that leads to healing and life for her. This beautiful story, however, is not without conflict. Jesus heals the woman in sacred space (a synagogue, mentioned twice) and within sacred time, namely on a Sabbath (noted no fewer than five times), and he is criticized for this breach of the law. Jesus insists that the synagogue and the Sabbath are not the only things that are holy -- so is this woman’s life. She is a daughter of the promise -- "And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise" (Gal. 3:29), or a "daughter of Abraham," as Jesus names her.

He turns to his critics and says, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for 18 long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?"

Women have little difficulty identifying with this daughter of the promise. As Miriam Therese Winter writes:

Surely / You meant / when You lifted / her up / Long ago / To your praise, / Compassionate One, / not one woman / only / but all women / bent / by unbending ways.

This truth is important today, when global forces are constraining women’s lives as never before, Amnesty International put it succinctly when it launched a 2004 global campaign to stop violence against women: "From the battlefield to the bedroom, women are at risk." Statistics confirm that statement. Although the world’s population continues to grow, the number of women is declining. Already there are 60 to 100 million fewer girls than boys in the world, due to selective abortions, selective infanticide or neglect, and the uneven allocation of basic resources such as food, health care and education to girls. The battering of women results in more injuries requiring medical attention than auto accidents, muggings and rapes combined.

And then there are the cultural forces that "bend" women’s bodies through cosmetic surgery, clothing or obsessive forms of dieting. Cosmetic surgery now includes interventions such as facelift, eyelid surgery, laser skin resurfacing, cheek augmentation, body contouring, and breast augmentation, reduction or lift. I have this list in my hand because every employee in my workplace received an ad for these services, as well as a special offer of a free consultation and discount. (The woman in the ad, by the way, is young, blonde, innocent-looking, and wearing very little.)

Forces that bend and cripple women’s lives -- yes, we know them today. They are all around us. Jesus’ healing of a woman’s constrained and bent-over body, in a context such as ours, surely qualifies as good news. But as it is so often when we look closer, the good news ends up being more complex and ambiguous than we might wish. The woman healed and freed for praise of the Compassionate One, after all, joins a number of women whose voices we never hear. Sadly, one of the sites of this silencing is a sanctuary. Although Jesus heals this daughter of the promise in a synagogue, and although she is said to respond with praise, her voice is lost in the recorded testimony Like the old prophet Anna in the temple (Luke 2:38), "certain women" who gathered in prayer before Pentecost (Acts 1:14), or the four daughters of Philip who have the gift of prophecy (Acts 21:9), the woman of Luke 13 is not heard.

This is not unique to Luke. Fewer than a dozen of the nearly 300 recorded prayers in the First Testament (Old Testament) purport to be women’s prayers. The asymmetry is striking. Nothing would lead us to believe that women invoked the Holy One with any less frequency or fervor than did their male counterparts, yet the scriptures record only a fraction of women’s prayers in comparison with those prayed by men. Luke’s story of the crippled woman is a part of this larger history. Of the women’s prayers that are recorded, most are related to women’s reproductive and maternal roles. In the New Testament, we find traces of such maternal concerns in the voices of the two pregnant women, Elizabeth and Mary, whose stories shape the beginning of Luke’s Gospel. Other women described as praying and praising God simply remain speechless in the recorded testimony, among them the bent-over woman healed by Jesus. The Gospel writer tells us only that she "stood up straight and began praising God."

The uneven witness of the scriptures to women is part of our tradition and heritage. We simply have to acknowledge that (even) the most foundational texts of our faith leave much of women’s practices of faith invisible. How crucial, then, for women today to stand up and speak. In a world that continues to "bend" women’s lives, we must follow Jesus in claiming that the lives of women are sacred, and that women are invited to be healed and flourish in the presence of the Holy One. Would that Jesus’ generous gift of freedom for a bent-over woman were visible in our time, and especially in our sanctuaries. And that women’s voices of praise, born from God-given freedom, be heard around the world. Surely that would be good news for today.