Articles – Page 95 – Religion Online

War on the Web

During the Vietnam war, pictures of death and destruction filled our television screens. In the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, pictures of terrorized children and suicide bombings have appeared on our computer screens. Anyone interested in following this conflict can log on to sites showing images of demonstrators on the West Bank or of stone-throwing youth facing tanks. If Vietnam was the "living room war, the crisis in the Middle East is becoming the "computer screen conflict."

Shortly after Ariel Sharon’s September visit to the Noble Sanctuary, or Temple Mount, in Jerusalem, new Web pages sprouted up from various parts of the West Bank to provide the Palestinian account of the situation. Frequently they included images -- some so graphic that they included a "beware of content" disclaimer. The most dramatic of those images showed the death of 12-year-old Mohammed Al-Dura, shot by Israeli soldiers while he was shopping with his father. That traditional media have reminded us daily of the number of children who are the victims is due in large part to the influence of the Web.

During the first intifada, in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, human rights groups often claimed that the Israeli-controlled news from the West Bank and Gaza misrepresented the ages of the Palestinian victims. In my desk drawer is the front page of the May 6, 1990, Jerusalem Post, which reported the death in Bethlehem of a "20-year-old" Palestinian in a demonstration. A number of my students and I had witnessed that shooting, and we knew that the victim was under 14.

The democratized Web world has greatly reduced the possibility of such media manipulation of events. Yes, the Palestinian Authority can still censor damaging video footage, as it did in the case of the mob lynching of two Israeli soldiers, and the Israeli government can put its spin on the news. But the truth is on the Internet for anyone who cares to find it.

With access to the Web, people can easily scan half a dozen different newspapers on their computer screens in the time it takes to drink their morning coffee. In Iowa, where I live, local newspapers often skimp on coverage of the Middle East. Yet the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are easily accessible to me online, as are stories from Europe and the Middle East. Ironically, the Israeli newspaper Ha’Aretz often provides more balanced coverage of the current conflict than does the American press.

The greater the number of sources to which one has access, the greater one’s exposure to multiple views and the less likelihood that one can be manipulated. Through the Web, one can easily find Israeli and American Jewish writers speaking out for a lasting peace based on human rights for Palestinians. Perhaps Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine, has had the most impact. His Yom Kippur reflections, first published in the Los Angeles Times and widely available on the Web, questioned Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and criticized the military force with which Israel responded to Palestinian provocations. The article led many to cancel their subscriptions to Tikkun, while others admired Lerner’s courage. Of course, the Web also gives voice to those Christians who see the conflict as evidence of a Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist, or who see the establishment of the state of Israel as a major step on the way to the Rapture.

The downside of having so much information available is that it requires quite an effort to review it. This is where informal e-mail networks have the greatest impact. It doesn’t take much effort to forward a meaningful piece to a friend -- and not much more to send it on to an e-mail list of several hundred. There are probably more readers of articles on the current conflict through e-mail than through online newspapers.

The Web also is important in giving a voice to previously overlooked communities. A general perception concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been that it is entirely a Muslim-Jewish dispute. "Yes, there is a Palestinian Christian community," went this line of thought, "but it’s really not a significant player." The Web has gone a long way to dispel that notion and to bridge communication gaps. It is allowing Americans to see the conflict through Palestinian Christian eyes.

Many of the early stories about the Al-Aqsa intifada centered on events at the Lutheran-sponsored Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem, which was occupied by Israeli military forces. In response, H. George Anderson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, wrote a public letter to President Clinton. A formal statement from the conference of ELCA bishops followed. These were distributed instantaneously to the more than 3,000 people on the ELCA’s list-serve. Then messages from Lutheran leaders like Bishop Munib Younan of Jerusalem and Pastor Mitri Rahab of Bethlehem began to appear on e-mail networks.

Palestinian Christians had found a way to reach a wide audience with news of their plight. They were able to let the world know about the shelling of the Christian villages of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala by the Israeli army, the closures of Bethlehem and other cities, resulting in an economic stranglehold, and the peaceful demonstrations taking place to protest Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territories.

It was only five years ago that the Palnet and Planet systems were established to provide the Palestinian community with secure and efficient communication links to the rest of the world. Today up-to-date information is readily available on the Web pages of the Middle East Council of Churches, the Evangelical Lutheran Church Jerusalem, Sabeel, Bir Zeit University and a host of other institutions. Media consultant Martin Bailey, who assisted Jerusalem churches with electronic media development during the mid ‘90s, now helps them distribute their messages through the Worldwide Faith News Network (www.wfn.org). According to Bailey, this network has become a standard resource for the secular press. Bailey notes that staff of the BBC and a number of stateside news organizations hit the WFN hourly to stay up to date on Middle East and other developments. A measure of WFN’s success came when a Jerusalem correspondent contacted it because she was embarrassed that U.S.-based editors had picked up stories from it before she was even aware of them.

The Web has often been criticized as being destructive of community. Yet it has brought Christians separated by great distances together in this time of crisis. American pastors Michael and Susan Thomas at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in old-city Jerusalem wrote that their church bulletin board is covered with e-mail thoughts and prayers from all over the world sent in support of Jerusalem Christians.

I remember my feeling of isolation when I was living in Bethlehem at the time of the Jerusalem bus bombings in the spring of 1996. Phone lines were cut, mail was delayed, and closures separated Bethlehem from the rest of the world. During the past six months of closures and disrupted mail delivery, however, e-mail has still been getting through. The bond between American and Palestinian Christians has not been severed.

The web’s potential as an agent of change is being tested in its attention to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Last fall an article by public radio reporter Eduard Cohen, "What Americans Need to Know -- But Probably Won’t Be Told -- to Understand Palestinian Rage," appeared on the Web. That this self-critical analysis of traditional media had to be circulated on the Web is telling in itself. When I sent it out on my usual list, I realized that among the recipients were a handful of former students now working for newspapers and small television stations.

Then I began a search for e-mail addresses of neighboring newspaper editors and television anchors so that I might share it with them -- a process taking about 45 minutes. My hope was that if I reached even just one of them, the article might have a significant effect on news production in our region. To my surprise a small-city newspaper editor sent me his reply within minutes. One of my former students -- the religion newswriter on his staff -- had already shared the piece with him. The result was a series of seven front-page articles on the subject. The religion writer was dispatched to spend Christmas in Bethlehem and to report from there.

This is but one of a number of success stories in influencing change among traditional media. Martin Bailey tells of his persistent efforts by email to convince New York Times editors to change their customary one-sided reference to "the Temple Mount" to include both "Temple Mount! Noble Sanctuary." Through the daily vigilance of Ali Abu Nimal, who sends National Public Radio three or four e-mail critiques a day, NPR knows that no reference to rubber bullets, Gilo as a Jerusalem suburb, or Palestinians sending their children into the line of fire will go unchallenged. Perhaps most significant is the increasing number of letters to editors of newspapers large and small by concerned citizens who feel better informed because of the Web.

Unfortunately, the Internet appears to be considerably less successful in influencing Congress. Advocacy groups such as Churches for Middle East Peace periodically send out "Action Alerts" asking concerned people to contact Congress. These e-mail alerts have been able to mobilize a larger number of advocates in a shorter time, as when thousands of people swamped congressional representatives with e-mails concerning House bill 426, which condemned Yasir Arafat and placed all the blame for the conflict on the Palestinians. Nevertheless, the bill passed by an overwhelming 465-30 vote. Congress has not found a way to handle this new means of communication, which swamped congresspersons with 80,000,000 email messages during the past year. But the Web may yet make a huge difference in giving citizens a more effective voice in government.

The Practice and Theology of Adoption

Father Ron meant well. He would never have intentionally excluded some children from his sermon. It was Wednesday mass, and the congregation was primarily children -- kindergartners through eighth-graders -- with a sprinkling of teachers, administrators and parents. The text was Colossians 1:15:

Christ is "the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation."

Father Ron developed his theme: Children look like their parents; Jesus as God’s Son reveals what God is like. He gave examples, picking out children: "You look just like your mother. You have her eyes, her nose, her dimple." Or: "You are an athlete just like your Uncle Sam. You have his genes." The point was profoundly simple: We know what God is like by looking at Jesus.

The comparison was not lost on the two third-grade girls seated directly in front of me. Both were dark-skinned, one from India and one from Southeast Asia. Both had Caucasian parents. The more passionately Father Ron spoke, the more pointedly one of the adopted girls shook her head in rhythm with his preaching.

Two-thirds of the way through his sermon, Father Ron realized his miscalculation. Perhaps he remembered that the school had a number of adopted children. He then acknowledged that there were those in the church who were adopted into families, and he asked them to raise their hands. Now the children were confronted with a choice: either hide their identity from the Catholic priest, or reveal an aspect of themselves that some children consider personal or private. Hands went up at half-mast.

Having witnessed this scene, I can well believe German sociologist Christine Swientek’s account of another well-intentioned pastor’s ineptness. At confirmation class, this pastor spoke about being "children of God" and looked for an example to illustrate this special relationship between father and children. He focused on a boy named Hannes, and said in front of 35 snickering and giggling adolescents: "You should try to imagine what it is like to be Hannes at home -- his parents are not his birth parents. Hannes’s parents are his adoptive parents who took him and raised him. They do not love him any less."

Hannes was dumbfounded. He did not have the slightest idea that he was adopted. He stood up, went outside, and then ran away. He was first found three months later in juvenile detention for stealing food from a supermarket.

These stories indicate how the church has failed to be sensitive to the reality of adoption and failed to recognize adoption is a paradigm for the church -- a "family of faith" made up of people who are not biologically related. (H. David Kirk in Adoptive Kinship has gone further to suggest that the adoptive family could be "the compass" for the mainstream family.)

When Father Ron thought of "family," he thought only of the biological family unwittingly relegating other kinds of families to a second-class status. The church has often followed society in idealizing and even idolizing the genetically linked family. The scriptures themselves bear evidence of a male preoccupation with his blood lineage.

There is another image of inclusion in the Bible: the image of adoption. The invitation and inclusion of gentiles into the family of God occurs by adoption through Christ, the firstborn. Yet many communities of faith exhibit an unconscious aversion and defensive reaction to the notion of adoption. Adoption is unconsciously seen as an aberration from the norm of the biological family.

Adoption is sometimes considered a joke. Kenneth Kaye remembers that he and his cousins "would tease the younger ones by pretending to let slip the fact they were adopted. In reality, no one was; it was simply a way of saying, ‘You’re different; you’ll never fit in.’ We inherited the joke from our mothers, who have been recycling it on their baby sister for nearly 60 years."

One adopted boy reported being taunted at school that he didn’t know who his father [that is, his birth father] was. Another adopted child felt treated differently by her teacher; the teacher made comments like: "You think because you’ve gone through one experience in your life [the adoption], you’ve paid all your dues."

An adoptive mother reported this incident in a grocery store: another shopper came up to her and her adopted son, who was two or three, and said, "He’s not your child. He must be adopted."

Because of such insensitivity, Christian parents often hide from their children the fact that their children are adopted. They dread the moment of telling. They know that peers of adopted children may taunt them or pity them. Adopted children can feel that their existence is a "mistake." (For example, referring to a birth mother, one parishioner remarked: "She really is a good girl. She just made a mistake.") Voices lower with the words, "She’s adopted."

In both subtle and dramatic ways, North American culture has often positioned adopted children on the margins of society. The church has followed uncritically.

Adoption in the New Testament is the central biblical image for entrance into the family of faith. The crucial passages are Galatians 4:5; Romans 8:15, 23; 9:4; and Ephesians 1:5. (At least three Old Testament texts -- Genesis 48:5-6, Exodus 2:10 and Esther 2:7,15 -- also make adoption a central activity.) From a New Testament perspective, adoption is the paradigm for all who come into the family of Christ through God’s adoption. This perspective has ramifications for the counseling ministry of the church, for sermons and Christian education and for the life of Christians in communities of faith.

Adoption is a complex phenomenon, especially when the theological dimension is added. Adoption involves the deep-seated dimensions of grief, guilt and gift.

Many social workers, therapists and writers emphasize the elements of grief and guilt common to birth parents, adoptees and adoptive parents. Most recently, Nancy Verrier in The Primal Wound and Ronald J. Nydam in Adoptees Come of Age have argued that an adopted child never fully recovers from the fact that he or she was relinquished by birth parent(s). But these writers have not given equal weight to the reality of "gift." From a theological standpoint, it is the pervasive sense of gift which permeates both grief and guilt and opens the triad of grief, guilt, gift to a glimpse of the womb-love of God.

What is parenting? What is the ultimate significance of the nuclear or biological family, the family of origin? What is the role of the family of faith? These questions are stimulating ones for Christian education classes and for sermons.

Polly and her husband, Bob, live out one answer to these questions. Polly, 28, is a Presbyterian minister; Bob, 29, is in business. While Polly was in seminary, she and her husband were watching a Wendy’s commercial in which the founder, Dave Thomas, mentioned his adoption. Bob asked Polly if she was interested in adopting. "We knew God had laid it on our hearts very early on. . . . We had that calling upon our hearts, we never felt a need to have biological children," Polly said.

First, Polly and Bob served as foster parents through the Department of Human Services in their state. Then, they chose to seek out "unadoptable children -- children with special needs, older children or sibling groups. "We felt God was leading us to more permanent commitments with children . . . You know, there are over a 100 children per day waiting in [our] state to be adopted."

At the time of the interview, Polly and Bob had three adopted daughters, ages 20, 14 and 15. They had two "pre-adopted" children, ages four and ten, already in their home, waiting for the six months to pass before legal adoption could occur. Polly concluded: "Without God’s help there’s not a day when we could be parents of the children God has blessed us with. . . . Every decision we make around children, we hold up to God."

Another story: Sam’s wife, Peggy, tried for years to become pregnant. After infertility workups which Sam called "agonizing" and "humiliating," they decided to adopt a child from another country.

Sam and Peggy stayed in Peru for ten weeks, a period they describe as emotionally chaotic. Their story involves delay after delay, complications with exit visas and birth certificates, additional expenses, closed doors. Pushing past Peruvian guards to knock on closed embassy offices, Sam recalled the story in the New Testament of a persistent woman going before a judge. He pleaded and begged. During the waiting in Peru, Sam experienced in a profound way a reality he had often preached about: reliance on the sovereignty of God.

When Sam and Peggy at last had an adopted son, the moment of the child’s baptism arrived. As part of the service, the parents were asked to affirm that the child was not theirs but God’s. After all that he had been through, Sam wanted to shout: "This kid is mine." At the same time, said Sam, "It was the most freeing experience I’ve ever had to realize there’s a God that doesn’t desire for this little kid’s hairs to be harmed, whose arms are so much sturdier than [my] shaky arms." Adoptive parents have a keen awareness that children belong to God, not to their parents.

Sam later preached a sermon titled "Is There Life After Barrenness?" He concluded: "I have come to think . . . that it is from the barren places of our lives that we hear God most clearly."

A "homecoming" through adoption of a longed-for child is parabolic of God’s welcome. It is a glimpse of God’s embrace, of God’s hospitality, of God’s trembling womb (Is. 63:15-16).

Womb-love (rahum) is synonymous in the Old Testament with the mercy and compassion of God, according to scholar Phyllis Trible. Womb-love as expressed by God is not biologically based. Womb-love, that yearning from the very center of being, describes the tenacious compassion in God’s desire and mercy. That yearning is there in Mary, the mother of Jesus, when she searches for her lost 12-year-old, and it is there when her heart is pierced at the foot of the cross. It is there with the widow of Nain pleading for her child. It is there as King David weeps for his son Absalom.

To adopt a child is to experience some of the vulnerability and woundedness of God. Bryn Kreidel, an adoptive mother in Memphis, wrote this prayer before receiving a baby. She expresses a womb-love that reflects the womb-love of God.

Then I remember that you [God] wait and wonder . . . Longing for your adopted children to be in your arms . . . Gazing into your eyes, hearing your love songs. . .

Suddenly, I know how you feel, God. . . That constriction of the heart that causes pain to the depths of the soul. And I know that my pain is more godly than anything in my life has ever been. For once, my heart is like your heart.

And this holy pain leads me to my knees. . . To thank you for the wait . . . And to pray for all the babies that need to come home. . .Yours and mine.

When Christians move adoption from the periphery to the center of theological reflection , teaching and counseling, they will lessen the degree to which adopted children are assigned a second-class status in secular society. The ministry of the church will become more inclusive as adoptive families are understood and fully incorporated and as the worshiping community realizes its own adoption. For the family of faith, adoption is the norm, not an aberration.

When adoptive parents recount their emotions, their struggles, their worries and their faith, the clear theme emerges of receiving a child as a gift from God. Whereas the biological connection identifies birth parents as the agents of creating, or those sowing the seed, the adoptive connection is dependent on external agency. There is a higher source than flesh and natural conception.

Walter Wangerin Jr. tells of the summer that his daughter Talitha asked to find her birth parents. She had just finished her freshman year at college and was beginning a search for identity. Wangerin writes of his sense of invisibility in the process, until he started to identify himself with Joseph, the adoptive father of Jesus.

Training up the child of one’s own loins has a deep spiritual and genetic appropriateness. One doesn’t question one’s right and the instinctive rightness of one’s methods. Communication is as deep as the chromosomes. [My wife] Thanne and I have raised children born to us as well as children adopted, and we’ve experienced the difference. In order to train up the adopted child, one must also learn her language, since communication begins at the surface of things. One must never assume a complete knowledge of this child except as watchfulness and love reveal her. And very early the adoptive parent realizes that the methods of training this child must obey a greater source than flesh and natural conception. (Christianity Today, December 11, 1995).

Statistics show that adopted children face special challenges. Many deal with concern over abandonment, and they face crises over identity and intimacy. Adopted children have an above-average rate of seeking therapy. Four to 5 percent of adopted children are referred to outpatient mental health facilities. Ten to 15 percent are referred to residential care facilities. Adopted children have higher rates of delinquent behavior, learning disorders, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder than their non-adopted peers. Drug abuse is prevalent. (See The Psychology of Adoption, Oxford University Press.)

Adoptive parents usually know these realities. Thus, for adopting parents, the joy of receiving a child into the home is a preamble to facing the crises of child development. These challenges, along with the stigma attached to adoptive parenting, are all occasions to look more deeply into the heart of God, the One who embraces our pain as well as our joy. God’s tenacious compassion, God’s womb-love, in the face of human waywardness and suffering, offers a theological foundation from which to draw in the crises of adoption.

In the Nativity scene, the adoptive father Joseph and the biological mother Mary represent all humankind. God is at work as creator and as adopting parent. And, of course, God is the child, who will later be abandoned on the cross. The emotions and experiences of birth mother, adoptive parent, and child are all embraced by God.

An adoptive mother named Linda discovered this embrace of God as she struggled to care for her son. He had been diagnosed with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. He was so impetuous in his actions that his mother feared for his safety. After he turned ten he became defiant toward anyone in authority. Eventually he was hospitalized. When the hospital staff said they couldn’t handle him, Linda and her husband offered to help out.

I learned how to monitor his behavior hourly. I took him his food on a tray and slid it across the threshold of his solitary-confinement room. I did the same with his schoolwork. It was on one of those occasions, when I was crawling on the rug to slide over his lunch, while crouched on the floor, that I glimpsed the heart of God. I say "glimpsed" because I do not mean to be presumptuous or imply full knowledge. I was swept up by a godly passion that enveloped me, too. In the early months of adoption when our son was an infant, I thought I knew what the love of a parent was. In the giddy joy of receiving a baby, in the flood of well-wishers bearing precious gifts, I thought I knew love. However, crawling on the floor of the child psychiatric unit toward my son in confinement, I was carried into the womb of God, into womb-love, God’s compassion, a love that will not let me go, nor my son. In God’s womb-love, I, too, am adopted.

In the West Bank

The drive from Afula in Israel south to Jalame in the West Bank takes only minutes, but these two towns are worlds apart. Afula is a relatively affluent suburb with ATMs, tree-lined streets and pleasant neighborhoods. Jalame is a town of degrading poverty, which is evident in the pot-holed roads (when they’re paved at all), storefront vegetable stands and shells of buildings -- memorials to the wars that never end.

We know this drive well because it takes us through an Israeli checkpoint on our way to Zababdeh, the Palestinian village where we live. Zababdeh is one of a handful of villages in the Holy Land where a majority of the residents are Christian, and it’s the only such village in the northern West Bank. We have been teaching English and religion classes in the village’s Roman Catholic school.

The Jalame checkpoint’s lookout towers, severe walls topped with barbed wire and sandbagged gun turrets let us know we have reached the Green Line, the international armistice line that separates Israel from the West Bank, land that Israel has held under military occupation for the past 34 years. Depending on which soldier is standing guard, we are subject either to a few minutes of questions (Where are you from? Can I see your passport?) or -- on the basis of our Israeli license plates -- to a simple wave of the hand motioning us through.

Recently, while waiting for visitors to arrive, we spent the better part of an hour talking to an Israeli soldier eager to practice his English. He spoke about his time in Hebron. "I’m not allowed to say this, but the problem there is 100 percent the settlers," he told us. "They even hate us soldiers who are there to protect them." He has spend the past couple of months at Jalame’s checkpoint -- a particularly fiery time to be assigned there. While we talked to him, two Israeli police vans pulled up and deposited their cargo of Palestinians who had been caught illegally entering Israel to work.

They blinked as the van doors opened. In their hands were papers telling them about the fine they had just incurred.

This checkpoint is also the beginning of the road settlers take to two nearby settlements, Kadim and Ganim. Housing about 80 people between them, these settlements are hardly the home of religious ideologues or rogue gunmen -- or so our soldier friend told us. Rather, the settlers came seeking a standard of living that is out of their reach in places like Haifa, Upper Nazareth or even Afula. They drive from Kadim or Ganim to jobs in northern Israel. They are suburban commuters who just happen to live in illegal housing -- housing outlawed by UN Security Council resolutions.

Once we are through the checkpoint, we put a kaffiye (Palestinian checkered head- scarf) on the dashboard -- a signal to the Palestinians that we are not settlers, despite our license plate and Western appearance. In Jalame discount shops haphazardly line the street. Their bilingual signs (Arabic and Hebrew) attest to the thriving business they once did, when Israelis used to cross the border to take advantage of low prices. Now, in the midst of the current intifada, the shops are deserted.

We reach the turnoff for the settlers’ road, which bypasses the Palestinian city of Jenin. Huge warning signs in Hebrew mark the way, as does an Israeli military jeep and a large, metal arm which blocks the road into Jenin. Without our Israeli license plates, we would be unable to take the settlers’ road.

We drive past plastic greenhouses full of tomatoes, cucumbers and other produce. From here to Zababdeh, all roads connecting to or crossing the bypass road have been closed. When the intifada resumed last September, the Israeli military blocked them with large chunks of concrete and high piles of dirt. This effectively cut surrounding villages off from Jenin, the main city in the northern West Bank. A network of side-side roads then sprang up -- cutting through fields -- to enable people to work, shop and go to school in Jenin. More than once we have taken taxis to Jenin that carefully negotiated a dirt road through what would soon be a wheat field. In December, the Israelis dug up this impromptu road and all others like it and dug trenches alongside the bypass road, preventing cars from entering it from any side roads. Occasionally, roads are "liberated" by a Palestinian bulldozer, but the Israelis are quick to block them again.

We often see lines of taxis at these road blocks. One brings people from a village to the big pile of dirt. People climb over it, cross the bypass road, and climb over another heap of concrete and soil to another taxi which will take them into Jenin. At the busiest of these crossing points is an Israeli tank. Palestinian children run to and from school under the eye -- and gunsights -- of Israeli soldiers. When the children see our yellow-plated car, they don’t bother to look at the kaffiye. Instead, they scamper away, afraid of what might happen if they linger too long. They have learned a lot about the dangers of life by living under the shadow of an M-16.

Every now and then, some brave (or perhaps desperate) souls will try to drive through even the smallest opening. Sometimes they make it, sometimes they get stuck and everyone gets out to push, sometimes they leave their stuck cars to go to fetch a tractor. During winter’s rainy season, all the roads turn to mud and the taxi business dries up.

We head up the hill that leads to the two settlements. Settlements are often on hills, for they provide the best location for military outposts. Early in the restart of the intifada, soldiers evacuated Kadim and turned it into a military base. One of the Palestinian "martyrs" was killed by a shot from there. Once you have seen one settlement, there is no mistaking another. Row after row of red-roofed houses stand on the crest of a hill like soldiers standing watch over the villages nearby. None of these houses has water tanks on the roof the way Palestinian houses do. We are told that the settlements always have water and electricity, unlike the Palestinian villages whose stolen land is home for the "lifestyle" settlers. In the past few months, construction crews have been at work on the bypass road, improving it and adding electrical lighting alongside it. The people doing the work are often Palestinians, needing to work in this brave, new world, even if their work contributes to their own oppression.

Once we pass the turn-off to Ganim, the road suddenly narrows and the pavement doesn’t look so new anymore. A sign points the way to the new Arab-American University of Jenin, which had the misfortune of opening on the day that Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount. Despite the conflict and disruption, it has remained open all year, though some of the teachers who were slated to come changed their minds after watching the news.

Eventually we reach the top of the hill above Zababdeh. The first thing you see is the new Latin Patriarchate School, inaugurated two years ago with significant help from a private agency in Spain. The other thing that attracts your attention is the muezzin -- the Muslim prayer tower.

According to tradition, which is supported by some archaeological evidence, Zababdeh was on an old Roman road that made its way from Nazareth down to Jerusalem. Supposedly Mary and Elizabeth stopped here on their journey (some have conjectured that the village’s name comes from a transformation of the name "Elizabeth"). Today the village has three churches -- Anglican, Greek Orthodox and Roman -Catholic -- among which about two-thirds of the village’s 3,000 people are divided. There are also Greek Catholics, but their church has been closed since 1985, a casualty of political and economic wranglings in the church hierarchy.

The reason the road is open from the checkpoint to Zababdeh is because Bezek, an Israeli military training camp, is stationed at the edge of the village. It was once a Jordanian camp, built on confiscated land. The Israelis claimed it after 1967, and expanded onto more confiscated land. The road winds down through the camp’s shooting range, past an old Patton tank (used by Iraqis in 1948) and other recognizable targets, such as metal figures cut in the shape of 1920s-era soldiers.

When we first arrived, the road would be closed at times for military training exercises. Now there is no need for training. Almost every other night there is a gunfire exchange. Palestinian youth go into the hills surrounding the camp and shoot down into it, and the Israelis return fire. Fortunately, casualties have been few. Early in the fighting, an Israeli tank shell went through a family’s window and passed through two walls before stopping in the bathroom. The family had hid in the back of the house when the gunfire began. Since then, homes that border the camp have been evacuated at times for safety reasons.

Once when we were shopping, red tracer bullets were fired from the camp over the village. The next night, while we were admiring the eclipse of the moon, several more tracers fired from the camp went overhead, again toward a nonexistent aggressor. We were frightened and confused, since no shooting had come from our direction.

Arriving in Zababdeh, we are greeted by the Palestinian checkpoint that denotes "Area A," which is under "full" Palestinian Authority control. Its white sandbags, hand-dug trenches and metal lean-tos make a striking contrast to the Israeli camp. When the shooting breaks out, the soldiers leave their checkpoint to patrol the streets of Zababdeh and to make sure that no one is shooting from residential areas.

While Zababdeh has averted the huge disasters that have befallen many Palestinian areas during the past seven months, it has not been immune to the occupation’s crushing blows. Many professionals (such as nurses and bankers) who once worked in Israel have had their travel permission revoked. Those who work for the Palestinian Authority have worked for months with only the promise of a salary. Families looked forward to the Lenten fast so they could have a theological reason for their meager rations.

Many times we have been subject to intensive inquiries about our government’s role in the crisis here. Why, we are asked, does the U.S. blame the Palestinians for what is happening, abstain from or veto UN resolutions, and welcome Ariel Sharon with open arms? Often the only thing we can do is simply to listen and absorb people’s anger.

Two Religions?

Book Review:

Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought

By Daphne Hampson. Cambridge University Press 323 pp.

Is there some single basic difference between Catholics and Protestants? Did the Reformation spring from a theological disagreement so fundamental that schism was inevitable, and which no amount of good will could have settled? According to Daphne Hampson, the answer to both questions is yes.

Hampson, a post-Christian feminist theologian, thinks "Lutheran" and "Catholic" represent different structures of thought and faith so radically dissimilar that they are "incomparable." Her account of Lutheran-Catholic differences closely parallels that of certain German and American Protestants who have opposed the recent Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. At first glance, her explanation owes little to her own theological views, though, as we will see, there is a significant connection.

She focuses on the differing understandings of the self and its relation to God implicit within the Lutheran and Catholic understandings of the Christian’s justification. The touchstone of her analysis is Luther’s insistence that the Christian’s righteousness is always the righteousness of Christ and never a quality that inheres in the believer. The self thus finds itself only outside itself. For Luther, the self is not an independent substance, but can be understood only relationally. Hampson contrasts this view with what she takes to be the Catholic understanding of the Christian’s righteousness as an inherent quality. The notion of such an inherent quality goes along with a view of the self as a substance which itself possesses various qualities.

Hampson sees in these differing understanding of the justified self the expression of two structures of thought and faith which are reverse images of each other. What is true for one is false for the other. In the Lutheran structure, righteousness is external, the self is understood relationally and dialectically, the justified self is radically discontinuous with the natural self, salvation reinstates creation, God loves the sinner. In the Catholic structure, righteousness is internal, the self is understood ontologically and in a linear fashion (that is, not dialectically), the justified self is essentially continuous with the natural self, salvation is the transformation of creation, God loves only those who are no longer sinners.

These differing structures are comprehensive; they form the context within which all that Lutherans and Catholics say and do are to be understood. Apparent agreements on, say, the Christian’s dependence on God’s grace are only apparent, for the differing structures of thought define "grace" in quite different ways. Hampson thus wonders whether ecumenical agreements such as the Joint Declaration "have any value, or are more deceptive than helpful."

In the end, Hampson portrays Lutheranism and Catholicism not as two ways of structuring a common Christian thought or piety, but as two faiths, or even as two religions. When each is defined so completely in terms of what it does not share with the other and these contrasts are taken to shape all that each believes, then the statement that each is in some sense Christian is emptied of any substantive content. She can thus say that what Catholicism often understands as sanctification is very close to what Luther thinks of as sin. And since the issue that defines the contrast, how the self relates to itself and to God, is so fundamental, other Christian groups either fall on one side of this divide (Anglicans on the Catholic side, for example) or represent questionable attempts to straddle it (Calvin and Barth as less dialectial versions of Luther). She considers Kierkegaard as representing a possible solution, but that chapter ends with doubt about whether such mediation succeeds. Hampson sees the issue not as a parochial Lutheran-Catholic one, but as "a real dilemma present in the Christian dispensation."

However, Hampson’s approach so distorts both Lutheranism and Catholicism that neither finally seems truly Christian. She gives the standard Protestant picture of Catholicism, exaggerated by her schematic contrasts. For Catholicism, she says, "ethics (good works) leads to the relationship to God." She states that for the Council of Trent, the Christian will come to merit justification itself, something Trent in fact never says. Most strikingly, she concludes that for Catholicism revelation is not essential. Her point seems to be that for Catholic theology the relation between the human self and God can be described in terms of a natural theology of creation. Salvation simply transforms what is already there in creation. She ignores the common Catholic teaching that this transformation is "supernatural, in the precise sense that it lifts the creature beyond its own nature to God. A divine intervention beyond creation is essential to such a transformation. She frequently hints that Catholicism is still rooted in the ancient, pagan philosophies the medieval doctors drew on. To be Catholic is to be not quite Christian. Catholic theology operates "as though the good news of the gospel has not been heard."

Her picture of Lutheranism is more sympathetic, but again deeply false. In contrast to Catholicism, she states, in Lutheranism "the human being does not make progress. . . After all, what could ‘progress’ mean if one is speaking in terms of trusting not in one’s own righteousness but in God?" True, if the Christian’s authentic righteousness is Christ, that righteousness cannot grow. But the Christian can grow and progress within that righteousness, as Luther often says. In the Large Catechism, for example, he urges frequent reception of the Lord’s Supper so that our faith might "become stronger and stronger. For the new life should be one that continually develops and progresses." After all, why can’t the Christian make progress in trusting in God? Of course, if one were to come to trust in one’s own progress rather than in God, all would be lost, but that is simply to say that true progress in the Christian life always contains an element of self-forgetfulness, a truth known to the saints of every age.

Similarly, in contrast to her stress on continuity between the old and new self in Catholicism, she finds in Lutheranism a "radical and complete break" between the old and the new self. But if the old and the new selves are not fundamentally the same person, then in what sense is the gospel good news to sinners? It isn’t good news to tell the sinner that she or he will simply be replaced by an utterly discontinuous new self.

At the heart of Hampson’s misreading is her reduction of Lutheranism to a dialectic between two ways of understanding the relation between self and God. This dialectic can be expressed in various ways -- law and gospel, reason and revelation, works and faith -- but the underlying structure is the same. The essence of Lutheranism is mastering this anthropological dialectic, which seems to be no easy task. Apparently, no one in the history of the church before Luther got it right. Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s closest co-worker and author of the most authoritative Lutheran confession, "failed to grasp" Luther’s insight and the "richness of Luther’s sense of extrinsicity" was "quickly lost" in the Lutheran tradition. It seems to have been rediscovered only by 20th-century professors.

As David Yeago has noted in a critique of Gerhard Forde, the most eloquent American proponent of such an interpretation of Luther, in this scheme Lutheranism is reduced to a kind of gnostic sect. Christian faith is a matter of grasping a certain esoteric insight into the human self, an insight most of the Christian tradition has allegedly denied. That Luther and the Lutheran Confessions contended they had the core of the Christian tradition on their side simply goes by the board.

How could Hampson have gone so wrong? Is there some way of granting the truth of what she says (there are divergent structures to the way Catholics and Lutherans think about the faith) while avoiding her distortions? A clue to where the problem lies can be found in her various summaries of Lutheranism and Catholicism. She can explain the heart of each without ever mentioning Jesus, or by mentioning Jesus, but reducing him to a cipher for the one in whom Christians either do or do not find themselves. Jesus’ concrete death and resurrection recede into theological irrelevance. This absence is of decisive importance. Hampson’s focus (here her own theological interests come to the fore) is anthropological, and for her the Lutheran doctrine of justification is above all a doctrine about what it means to be human. (It is no accident that her ideal modern Lutheran is Rudolf Bultmann.) But when Luther sought to summarize "the first and chief article" of faith in the Smalcald Articles, he talks about Jesus, who alone is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. We are justified only by faith in this Jesus, he insists. A dialectical structure can be found in how Luther speaks of Jesus, but it is Jesus who is truly essential; any dialectic only serves the right apprehension of Jesus.

The identity of this Jesus is not defined by an anthropological dialectic which Catholics and Lutherans may not share, but by the gospel narratives which they do. It is worthwhile to remember that Luther’s favorite book of the Bible was not a Pauline epistle, but the Gospel of John. For Catholics and for Protestants, the stories that identify Jesus are the focus of a much larger set of biblical texts. These texts are themselves the focus of a liturgical life that Lutherans and Catholics (and Anglicans and Orthodox and, to varying degrees, other Protestants) largely share. At the heart of the modern ecumenical movement has been the discovery that what divides us is often embedded in a biblical and spiritual context that is deeper than our divisions. When a Lutheran and a Catholic each talk of faith, does each define the word by some comprehensive abstract system, or by the complex associations the word has in a great range of shared biblical texts, such as Romans 1 with its talk of faith as that by which we live, I Corinthians 13 with its association of faith with hope and love, and Hebrews 11 with its definition of faith as assurance and conviction?

Lutheranism, Catholicism and other Christian traditions are not closed conceptual systems, but living, historical complexes of quite diverse practices: prayer, devotional reading, worship, communal life, and also reflection. When theological schemes are interpreted against the background of this wider reality, we can come to see that the concerns which have shaped specific theological positions are ones that other traditions often share, even if with a different emphasis and linked with other concerns. In this light, the genuinely different theological structures that typify Lutheran and Catholic theology can be recognized not as the closed, mutually exclusive systems Hampson has constructed, but as perspectives that overlap, clash and diverge in unpredictable but nevertheless consistent ways. Ecumenical theology’s task is to discern when the traditions are saying the same thing in different ways, when they are disagreeing on a point that need not be church-dividing, and when the disagreement truly threatens communion.

For Hampson, Lutheranism and Catholicism represent mutually exclusive alternatives, each of which is unacceptable. For those who remain Christian, her book raises a fundamental question: must we go on thinking of the faith in terms set by division, or can we transcend those terms and, as Robert Jenson proposes in the preface to his recent Systematic Theology, contradict the contradiction of a divided church by the very way we think theologically?

If the Truth Weree Told

Earlier this year the Fox network, showing either the effects of the writers' strike or the signs of social decay, offered a gem of televised exploitation--the kind that repulses you but you can't help watching. The game show The Moment of Truth features contestants who have previously answered questions while attached to a polygraph and then, in front of a TV audience, have to answer some of the same questions, with the polygraph "voice" indicating whether he or she is telling us the truth. Early on the questions are humorously embarrassing ones, such as, "Have you ever admired yourself in the mirror?" But the show moves on to penetrating personal questions like, "Have you waited to have kids because you doubted that your wife is your lifelong partner?"

The contestant who answered yes to that question shocked his wife--but he answered truthfully, according to the polygraph. It's hard to know whether to cheer or shudder when a contestant answers such questions correctly. After a while you start to feel sorry for the contestants, recognizing that they have put themselves in a situation in which the so-called truth can only expose some of their deepest secrets.

Some may see such truth telling as positive. Last Christmas I was given a book by Stephen Arterburn called The Secrets Men Keep: How Men Make Life and Love Tougher Than it Has to Be, the premise of which is that godly men should never keep any secrets and should always be willing to tell the truth. If so, then The Moment of Truth is doing God's good work, exposing lies and standing for truth.

But is it? Watching the show reminded me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's reflections on truth telling written when the German theologian was in prison for conspiring to overthrow Hitler in the final years of the Third Reich. Over several years Bonhoeffer was interrogated numerous times, and after returning to his cell he would contemplate what was truth and what was a lie. In December 1943 he worked on an essay titled "What Does 'Telling the Truth' Mean?" (The unfinished essay was eventually published in English in the volume Ethics and can now be found in Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940-1945, volume 16 in Fortress Press's Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works series.)

Bonhoeffer considers the case of a young boy who is asked by his teacher, in front of the other pupils, "Is it true that your father often comes home drunk?" In fact, the boy has a number of recollections of his father coming home drunk. But sitting in the class, under the accusation of the teacher and the stares of his classmates, he can only deny his father's drunkenness. Bonhoeffer remarks, "One could call the child's answer a lie; all the same, this lie contains more truth--i.e., it corresponds more closely to the truth--than if the child had revealed his father's weakness before the class."

Bonhoeffer goes on to state even more boldly, "It is the teacher alone who is guilty of the lie." How can this be? For Bonhoeffer, truth is not about an objective utterance that can be judged right or wrong. Rather, truth exists in a web, a context. Truth is something determined by the encounters that people have. Bonhoeffer points out that we do not assume that parents are obligated to be truthful in the same way children are. (When a preschooler asks, "Where do babies come from?" parents are not obliged to tell them the whole truth.) Children's world is different from that of parents; it would be untruthful and therefore unfair to use truth to violate the boundary between them.

It is this very boundary that the teacher crosses in Bonhoeffer's case study. The teacher has no right to interfere in the inner life of the family, no right to use the boy's pain for his own purposes--namely, to intimidate or humiliate. Truthfulness must uphold this boundary. Those who cross it, even if they have the correct answer, are liars. After all, Genesis's serpent in the garden was right in saying that if Adam and Eve ate the garden's fruit they would have knowledge like God does. The deception was not in being untruthful but in using the truth to violate a boundary (in this case, God's).

"From this we can see immediately that 'telling the truth' means different things, depending on where one finds oneself," Bonhoeffer explains. The problem with television's The Moment of Truth is that it appears to get at the truth, but it cannot do so, for its questions are asked untruthfully. The polygraph has no room for context and cannot respect a boundary. The polygraph offers technical knowledge about whether a person is telling the truth, but truth is never technical when it is related to the humanity of another.

The question "Is Minneapolis north of Chicago?" is different from "Have you ever thought your wife was an inadequate parent?" The second question is itself untruthful if asked without regard for the person's life. Indeed, the polygraph doesn't judge truth as much as it judges doubt. By physiological measurements it can determine (pretty accurately, according to experts) if a person doubts his or her own answer. But truth is not the antithesis of doubt. If I am asked, "Did you take an extra cookie when you were told to have only one?" doubt may surely confirm what the cookie crumbs in my lap suggest--that I am lying. But when the question is, "Have you ever wished you married another person?" doubt and truth are linked. The question touches my broken humanity too deeply for the questioner to assume that I can answer without doubt. The fact that I doubt may be proof of truth, not untruth, for the sliver of my doubt that I have married the right woman forces me again and again to seek for her and to seek for myself. If I maintain that I can never consider such a question, then I have ignored the profundity of her humanity and my love for her.

This brings us to Bonhoeffer's second point, which is that truth is always concrete and is never a principle: "The truthfulness of our words that we owe to God must take on concrete form in the world. Our word should be truthful not in principle but concretely. A truthfulness that is not concrete is not truthful at all before God."

The boy in the classroom is stuck: it is true that his father is a drunk, but concretely the father is more than a drunk; he is the boy's dad. The teacher has used principle as a weapon, forcing the boy to choose between upholding the principle of truthfulness and upholding the concrete humanity of his father and himself. According to Bonhoeffer, the boy answers correctly, for he chooses to honor concreteness by disobeying the principle.

It is this very perspective that led Bonhoeffer to assert in Ethics, "It is better for a truthful person to tell a lie than for a liar to tell the truth." This is so because when a truthful person tells a lie he or she does so concretely (whether in a moment of weakness or in the tension of hiding the truth to protect another). But a liar uses the principle of truth to deceive people, making truth a weapon.

The Moment of Truth TV show examines whether the contestant will violate the principle of telling the truth under the gaze of friends, family and millions of viewers. A question such as, "Have you ever been more sexually attracted to one of your wife's friends than to her?" is asked. If the contestant says no, he is revealed as violating the principle of truthfulness and therefore is judged to be untruthful. But to say yes does more damage to his wife than does violating the principle of truthfulness. Truth can be told only in concrete situations--because truth is not a principle but a lived reality involving others.

Many of the questions used in The Moment of Truth are problematic because they bear no connection to concrete situations. "If you could get away with it, would you cheat on your wife?" is a hypothetical question that has little bearing on reality. In principle one may say, "Never!"--but people who voice strong denials have been known to do such things. Or one may say, "I don't know, maybe"--yet never concretely do such a thing.

Bonhoeffer's third point is that untruth is concretely known as untruth because it destroys relationship. "A truthful word is not an entity constant in itself but is as lively as life itself. Where this word detaches itself from life and from the relationship to the concrete other person, where 'the truth is told' without regard for the person to whom it is said, there it has only the appearance of truth but not its essence."

The schoolboy must answer no to the teacher's untruthful question, for what the teacher seeks is not the truth, which promises liberation, but rather to use the truth to cage the boy and entrap the father. The question, while appearing to seek the truth, aims at humiliation and dehumanization. The boy's lie is truthful, for in telling it he stands against the dehumanization. By lying he chooses his own and his father's humanity over the abstract principle of truth.

After hearing your wife admit that she has thought a male co-worker to be more interesting than you are, how could you trust her or any of her co-workers again? Such questions are ultimately untruthful because the answers to them threaten to destroy relationship. When Jesus claims that he is the truth, he asserts that truth is a relationship and part of an encounter, and it can never be seen as a contextless principle that can be used to hurt others. Truth cannot be truth if in its wake people are left isolated, violated and scarred.

Bonhoeffer's argument has two ramifications. The first is that truthfulness is based in weakness. Whenever truth is used as power it is no longer truth and turns into a lie. When the ten-year-old sister of a seven-year-old boy dances in front of him chanting, "I know something you don't know," truth has clearly become a pawn, a currency for gaining power. The girl is concerned not for truth, but for control. To concern ourselves with a truth that is contextual, concrete and relational we must chose weakness over strength. If the teacher really wants to know the truth of the boy's situation, he must share the boy's place, must be weak enough to suffer the fullness of the boy's experience of living with the drunken father.

Only those weak enough to live concretely for others--and in ambiguity--can tell and be the truth. Only a crucified God can bear the fullness of truth. Truth cannot be quantified by a polygraph and judged by a studio audience; truth can be present only when one is willing to be weak enough to suffer with and for another. Bonhoeffer says that the one who "puts a halo on his own head for being a zealot for the truth can take no account of human weaknesses. He destroys the living truth between persons."

The second ramification of Bonhoeffer's argument is that truth has to be learned. If truth is contextual, concrete and relational, then it is not self-evident. When a neighbor of ours was kind enough--though two hours late--to bring us a home-cooked meal after the birth of our second child, our three-year-old son opened the door and announced, upon seeing the food, "We already ate. My daddy ordered pizza!" The hurt and disappointment on the neighbor's face revealed that though our son had spoken factually, he had not yet learned to tell the truth.

A final point that Bonhoeffer raises involves the significance of secrecy. The teacher in his case study is a liar because he neither upholds nor honors the boy's secret. The teacher has no right to expose it. Truth does not assault secrets but affirms them. Secrecy is not antithetical to truth. The fact that I have secrets does not mean I have violated truth. A secret is dehumanizing and deceitful only when it is used to cover up a concrete act of violation, when it is used to justify dehumanization.

Secrets of shared pain, stray thoughts and deep doubt are mine. They are part of my broken humanity, a shame we all have, a shame of nakedness. My secrets cover my nakedness that I demand be covered, and God concurs by sharing my shame and giving me cover, as God did in the garden after the Fall.

To be human is to be filled with secrets. When a secret cannot be kept it floats beyond the inner life of the person on streams of gossip. When hidden secrets are revealed they destroy relationships by destroying the trust on which relationships are built. This is why gossip is included in the Pauline list of evils. Exposing secrets destroys community by destroying people's trust in one another. Says Bonhoeffer: "The point is precisely that 'truthfulness' does not mean the disclosure of everything that exists."

Perhaps the greatest problem with TV's The Moment of Truth is that it believes that truth does mean the revealing "of everything that exists." Questions such as "Have you ever thought of hurting your child?" or "Do you believe that your mother is not very intelligent?" confront the contestant's secret thoughts. They have no correlation with his or her action in the contextual, concrete, relational world. No one, not even the child or the mother, has a right to these secrets if the secrets have done nothing to violate these relationships. If there is no action related to the question, then the question is not a fair one, but one seeking only to pry out contestants' secrets that are their own and no one else's. The great evil is that once a contestant answers yes (or once the answer is shown by the polygraph to be yes), then the secret is set loose, and what was simply a powerless, hidden thought takes on a new reality.

Many of us have had thoughts or feelings antithetical to our deepest desires or wishes, thoughts that when allowed to stay hidden have no power to move us to action. But once they are forced out they can become gremlins that change into scary, destructive monsters. The game show The Moment of Truth presents itself as a fight for the truth, but it is actually deadly to the truth, exposing hidden thoughts and urges in a way that strangles truthfulness.

Measure of Faith (2 Tim. 1-14; Lk. 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."

Farm Factories

A young man was working for a company that operated a large, total-confinement swine farm. One day he detected symptoms of a disease among some of the feeder pigs. As a teen, he had raised pigs himself and shown them in competition, so he knew how to treat the animals. But the company’s policy was to kill any diseased animals with a blow to the head -- the profit margin was considered too low to allow for treatment of individual animals. So the employee decided to come in on his own time, with his own medicine, and cured the animals.

The management’s response was to fire him on the spot for violating company policy. Soon the young man left agriculture for good: he was weary of the conflict between what he was told to do and how he believed he should be treating the animals.

Consider a sow that is being used to breed pigs for food. The overwhelming majority of today’s swine are raised in severe confinement. If the "farmer" follows the recommendations of the National Pork Producers, the sow will spend virtually all of her productive life (until she is killed) in a gestation crate 2 1/2 feet wide (and sometimes 2 feet) by 7 feet long by 3 feet high. This concrete and barred cage is often too small for the 500- to 600-pound animal, which cannot lie down or turn around. Feet that are designed for soft loam are forced to carry hundreds of pounds of weight on slotted concrete. This causes severe foot and leg problems. Unable to perform any of her natural behaviors, the sow goes mad and exhibits compulsive, neurotic "stereotypical" behaviors such as bar-biting and purposeless chewing. When she is ready to birth her piglets, she is moved into a farrowing crate that has a creep rail so that the piglets can crawl under it and avoid being crushed by the confined sow.

Under other conditions, pigs reveal that they are highly intelligent and behaviorally complex animals. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh created a "pig park" that approximates the habitat of wild swine. Domestic pigs, usually raised in confinement, were let loose in this facility and their behavior observed. In this environment, the sows covered almost a mile in foraging, and, in keeping with their reputation as clean animals, they built carefully constructed nests on a hillside so that urine and feces ran downhill. They took turns minding each other’s piglets so that each sow could forage. All of this natural behavior is inexpressible in confinement.

Factory farming, or confinement-based industrialized agriculture, has been an established feature in North America and Europe since its introduction at the end of World War II. Agricultural scientists were concerned about supplying Americans with sufficient food. After the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, many people had left farming. Cities and suburbs were beginning to encroach on agricultural lands, and scientists saw that the amount of land available for food production would soon diminish significantly. Farm people who had left the farm for foreign countries and urban centers during the war were reluctant to go back. "How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm now that they’ve seen Paree?" a song of the ‘40s asked. Having experienced the specter of starvation during the Great Depression, the American consumer was afraid that there would not be enough food.

At the same time, a variety of technologies relevant to agriculture were emerging, and American society began to accept the idea of technologically based economies of scale. Animal agriculture begin to industrialize. This was a major departure from traditional agriculture and its core values. Agriculture as a way of life, and agriculture as a practice of husbandry, were replaced by agriculture as an industry with values of efficiency and productivity. Thus the problems we see in confinement agriculture are not the result of cruelty or insensitivity, but the unanticipated by-product of changes in the nature of agriculture. Confinement-based agriculture contradicts basic biblical ethical teachings about animals. Yet despite the real problems in these farm factories, few Jewish and Christian leaders, theologians or ethicists have come forward to raise moral questions about them or the practices characteristic of this industry.

The Old Testament forbids the deliberate, willful, sadistic, deviant, purposeless, intentional and unnecessary infliction of pain and suffering on animals, or outrageous neglect of them (failing to provide food and water). Biblical edicts against cruelty helped Western societies reach a social consensus on animal treatment and develop effective laws. The Massachusetts Bay colony, for example, was the first to prohibit animal cruelty, and similar laws exist today in all Western societies.

The anticruelty ethic served two purposes: it articulated concern about animal suffering caused by deviant and purposeless human actions, and it identified sadists and psychopaths who abuse animals before sometimes "graduating" to the abuse of humans. Recent research has confirmed this correlation. Many serial killers have histories of animal abuse, as do some of the teens who have shot classmates.

Biblical sources deliver a clear mandate to avoid acts of deliberate cruelty to animals. We humans are obliged, for example, to help "raise to its feet an animal that is down even if it belongs to [our] enemy (Exod. 23:12 and Dent. 22:4). We are urged not to plow an ox and an ass together because of the hardship to the weaker animal (Deut. 22:10), and to rest the animals on the sabbath when we rest (Exod. 20:10 and Exod. 23:12). Deuteronomy 25:4 forbids the muzzling of an ox when it is being used to thresh grain, for that would cause it major suffering -- the animal could not partake of its favorite food, and allowing it to graze would cost the farmer virtually nothing (also in 1 Cor. 9:9 and 1 Tim. 5:18). We are to save "a son or an ox that has fallen into a well even if we must violate the sabbath (Luke 14:5), and to avoid killing an ox because that would be like killing a man (Isa. 66:3).

Other passages encourage humans to develop a character that finds cruelty abhorrent. We are to foster compassion as a virtue, and prevent insensitivity to animal suffering. The injunction against "boiling a kid in its mother’s milk" (Exod. 23:19; Exod. 34:26; Deut. 14:21) is supported by Leviticus 22: 26-33, which commands us not to take a very young animal from its mother, and not to slaughter an animal along with its young. The strange story of Balaam and his ass counsels against losing one’s temper and beating an animal (Num. 22) and Psalm 145 tells us that God’s mercy extends over all creatures. Surely humans are being directed to follow that model.

As one of my colleagues put it, "The worst thing that ever happened to my department is the name change from Animal Husbandry to Animal Science." The practice of husbandry is the key loss in the shift from traditional to industrialized agriculture. Farmers once put animals into the environment that the animals were biologically suited for, and then augmented their natural ability to survive and thrive by providing protection from predators, food during famine, water during drought, help in birthing, protection from weather extremes, etc. Any harm or suffering inflicted on the animal resulted in harm to the producer. An animal experiencing stress or pain, for example, is not as productive or reproductively successful as a happy animal. Thus proper care and treatment of animals becomes both an ethical and prudent requirement. The producer does well if and only if the animal does well. The result is good animal husbandry: a fair and mutually beneficial contract between humans and animals, with each better off because of the relationship. Psalm 23 describes this concept of care in a metaphor so powerful that it has become the vehicle for expressing God’s ideal relationship to humans.

In husbandry agriculture, individual animal productivity is a good indicator of animal well-being; in industrial agriculture, this link between productivity and well-being is severed. When productivity as an economic metric is applied to the whole operation, the welfare of the individual animal is ignored. Husbandry agriculture "put square pegs in square holes and round pegs in round holes," extending individualized care in order to create as little friction as possible. Industrial agriculture, on the other hand, forces each animal to accept the same "technological sanders" -- antibiotics (which keep down disease that would otherwise spread like wildfire in close surroundings), vaccines, bacterins, hormones, air handling systems and the rest of the armamentarium used to keep the animals from dying.

Furthermore, when crowding creates unnatural conditions and elicits unnatural behaviors such as tailbiting in pigs or similar acts of cannibalism in poultry, the solution is to cut off the tail (without anesthetics) or debeak the chicken, which can cause lifelong pain.

There are four sources of suffering in these conditions:

• violation of the animals’ basic needs and nature;

• lack of attention to individual animals;

• mutilation of animals to fit unnatural environments;

• an increase in diseases and other problems caused by conditions in confinement operations.

A few years ago, while visiting with some Colorado ranchers, I observed an example of animal husbandry that contrasts sharply with the experience described at the beginning of this article. That year, the ranchers had seen many of their calves afflicted with scours, a diarrheal disease. Every rancher I met had spent more money on treating the disease than was economically justified by the calves’ market value. When I asked these men why they were being "economically irrational," they were adamant in their responses: "It’s part of my bargain with the animal." "It’s part of caring for them." This same ethical outlook leads ranchers to sit up all night with sick, marginal calves, sometimes for days in a row. If they were strictly guided by economics, these people would hardly be valuing their time at 50 cents per hour -- including their sleep time.

Yet industrialized swine production thrives while western cattle ranchers, the last large group of practitioners of husbandry agriculture, are an endangered species.

Confinement agriculture violates other core biblical ethical principles. It is clear that the biblical granting of "dominion" over the earth to humans means responsible stewardship, not the looting and pillaging of nature. Given that the Bible was addressed to an agrarian people, this is only common sense, and absolutely essential to preserving what we call "sustainability."

Husbandry agriculture was by its very nature sustainable, unlike industrialized animal agriculture. To follow up on our swine example: When pigs (or cattle) are raised on pasture, manure becomes a benefit, since it fertilizes pasture, and pasture is of value in providing forage for animals. In industrial animal agriculture, there is little reason to maintain pasture. Instead, farmers till for grain production, thereby encouraging increased soil erosion. At the same time, manure becomes a problem, both in terms of disposal and because it leaches into the water table. Similarly, air quality in confinement operations is often a threat to both workers and animals, and animal odors drive down real property value for miles around these operations.

Another morally questionable aspect of confinement agriculture is the destruction of small farms and local communities. Because of industrialization and economy of scale, small husbandry-based producers cannot compete with animal factories. In the broiler industry, farmers who wish to survive become serfs to large operators because they cannot compete on their own. In large confinement swine operations, where the system rather than the labor force, is primary migratory or immigrant workers hired because they are cheap, not because they possess knowledge of or concern for the animals. And those raised in a culture of husbandry, as our earlier story revealed, find it intolerable to work in the industrialized operations.

The power of confinement agriculture to pollute the earth, degrade community and destroy small, independent farmers should convince us that this type of agriculture is incompatible with biblical ethics. Furthermore, we should fear domination of the food supply by these corporate entities.

It is not necessary to raise animals this way, as history reminds us. In 1988 Sweden banned high confinement agriculture; Britain and the EU ban sow confinement. If food is destined to cost more, so be it -- Americans spend an average of only 11 percent of their income on food now, while they spent more than 50 percent on food at the turn of the century. We are wrong to ignore the hidden costs paid by animal welfare, the environment, food safety and rural communities and independent farmers, and we must now add those costs to the price of our food.

If we take biblical ethics seriously , we must condemn any type of agriculture that violates the principles of husbandry. John Travis reported the following comments made by the Vatican last December:

Human dominion over the natural world must not be taken as an unqualified license to kill or inflict suffering on animals. . . . The cramped and cruel methods used in the modern food industry, for example, may cross the line of morally acceptable treatment of animals. . . . Marie Hendrickz, official of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said that in view of the growing popularity of animal rights movements, the church needs to ask itself to what extent Christ’s dictum, "Do to others whatever you would have them do to you," can be applied to the animal world.

It is a radical mistake to treat animals merely as products, as objects with no intrinsic value. A demand for agriculture that practices the ancient and fair contract with domestic animals is not revolutionary but conservative. As Mahatma Gandhi said, a society must ultimately be morally judged by how it treats its weakest members. No members are more vulnerable and dependent than our society’s domestic animals.

Male Clergy in Economic Crisis

Although ministers like to think of themselves as members of the professional middle class, they are hanging on to that status by their fingernails. Male clergy especially are pursuing their vocations despite a strong "fear of falling," to use Barbara Ehrenreich’s phrase. They worry that they won’t be able to sustain a middle-class lifestyle or meet middle-class expectations for their children’s education or their own retirement years.

In collecting data on clergy lives, the Duke Divinity School "Pulpit and Pew" project heard repeated accounts of the clergyman’s quiet but increasingly tense struggle to keep his family within the boundaries of the professional middle class. Although the data also substantiated the particular problems that female clergy face, the magnitude of troubles faced by male clergy came as a surprise.

Today a clergyman cannot assume that he’ll realize the gradual income growth that most Americans with graduate degrees take for granted. How, he wonders, will he pay off educational debts, finance his child’s college education, save for retirement and buy a home at the end of a ministerial career? Compounding his predicament is guilt. Why must he be preoccupied with career moves and money when he has responded not to a career, but to a call?

Until recently, people have assumed that clergy are members of the professional middle class and can accumulate the same assets as other professionals -- including some property -- and pass them on to children. From the progressive era to the 1960s, "pastor" was associated with a sense of personal calling and public service, making it an agreeable social position. Clergy lived a comfortable although not extravagant lifestyle, and could offer their children the opportunities enjoyed by children of professionals in law, medicine and education. Many institutions helped guarantee this class position. Duke University, for example, gave free tuition to any North Carolina United Methodist minister’s child who obtained admission. Local businesses offered discounts on merchandise and services.

But beginning in the late 1960s, clergy were criticized for their preoccupation with professional identity. At the same time, the public’s general trust in the professions began to decrease. The criticism did not, surprisingly, change the clergy’s assumptions about their position in the class structure. Most seminary graduates have assumed that they will be able to support a family, accumulate assets and be able to retire without a drastic drop in living standards. As a result, in the past 30 years many clergy have been living within the professional middle class while keeping their distance from the professional label.

Now, however, the clergy’s place within the professional middle class is becoming increasingly tenuous. Mean clergy income has remained relatively flat over the past 20 years, while others with graduate degrees, especially those in medicine and law, have seen their salaries rise. While the average mean salary for a married clergyman with a graduate-level degree was 11 percent higher in the 1990s than in the 1980s, salary levels rose by 25 percent for all married males with graduate-level degrees. For married male doctors and lawyers income rose 37 percent and 30 percent respectively.

Ministers’ difficulty in retaining a place in the professional middle class comes into sharp relief when they face financing college education, retirement and even elder care for their parents. In the 1990s, the average mean household income of married male clergy between 45 and 55 with a graduate degree was $54,044. Doctors were earning $188,630, and lawyers $155,801. Clergy household earnings also lagged well behind those of teachers ($90,260). In the past decade, those with graduate-level degrees earned an average mean household income of $105,539 -- almost double that of male married clergy. The ratio of the earnings of all those with graduate degrees to clergy earnings is gradually increasing; the clergy are slipping further behind.

While they do not receive the benefits of corporate employment, clergy are subject to the maladies of corporate-style work hours, high levels of job stress and low job security. Clergy families struggle with the tensions. In one survey, over 50 percent of the male pastors spent ten or fewer hours per week with their families. Although male clergy may stoically view this fact as simply part of the job, their spouses are often unhappy as a result. They worry that their families will fall out of the middle class. Yet with their husbands’ high workloads and lack of family time, spouses are reluctant to work outside the home. Their dissatisfaction is reflected in two surveys. In a survey of pastors who had recently entered the ministry, spouses ranked ninth among those who influenced a pastor to enter the ministry. In a survey of pastors who had recently decided to leave the ministry, spouses were by far the party most supportive of the pastor’s decision.

Although unhappy spouses are as much a part of the world of female clergy as they are of male clergy, married women clergy are not subject to the same level of financial stress as their male colleagues. While a number of clergy salary studies examine the male-female salary gap, a 1990s cross-denominational survey found that the total household income of female clergy is 20 percent higher than that of male clergy.

Of course, low salaries are also a problem for women. A low salary may lead a married woman pastor to turn down a promising career move because her husband’s higher salary sustains the family’s standard of living. Moreover, sociologists have shown that when family commitments need attention, it is the person with the lower salary who cuts back on work commitment -- and this is almost always the woman. Yet in their daily experience of the material world -- from the houses they live in to expectations they have for their children to their anxieties about a retirement income -- many married clergywomen live a more secure life than that of their male counterparts.

Not long ago, male clergy with a traditional family who were serving a small- to medium-sized congregation might have expected the conservative wing of their denomination to support them. But many conservatives, entranced by the dominant market culture and the megachurch, have identified small- to medium-sized congregations as "market failures," even though these are the bread and butter of the average working pastor. Lyle Schaller places congregations with 85 to 200 members on his endangered species list.

Perhaps the most influential force in the clergyman’s falling status is the critique of the professional career clergyman. Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon are critical of those seminarians who desire to become officeholders in what Willimon and Hauerwas call "a static institution." These clergymen want to "fit in, find a place and gradually climb to the top." But critics of a careerist clergy do not acknowledge that those who seek greater rewards are often driven by fear. The career ladder is the only mechanism available both to those who want to provide for their families’ future and to those who seek the same consumer durables as other members of the professional middle class. Since it is practically impossible to distinguish between the two goals, clergy are drawn into a theologically corrupted system. Serving the richer affluent churches that pay larger salaries becomes a "higher" calling as one progresses upward" on a clergy career track. The only remedy for one’s "fear of falling" is to climb higher.

Criticism of the career clergy model has not generated much formal discussion of class and the clergy. Meanwhile, the hallways of denominational conventions are filled with talk of salary and appointments. One report found that this pattern of official reticence and private worries leads pastors to bring up the salary issue repeatedly in the course of interviews, and then follow the "party line" by adding, "But salary’s not that important."

The same report stated that many clergy were resentful of the fact that after years of education and training, they earned only "what a crew chief makes at McDonald’s." But if the professional model of ministry is abandoned, then there is no benchmark for clergy salaries. If the clergy are no longer regarded as professionals, why should a minister make more money than a crew chief at McDonald’s?

And, if the professional model of ministry is gone, what will replace it? Two dominant motifs are emerging. One is the "entrepreneurial mission," in which pastors "grow" their own churches and receive a salary that reflects their entrepreneurial success. This compensation pattern matches the winner-take-all logic of the corporate world, and it’s a path open to relatively few.

The other motif, the one that I believe will come to dominate mainline denominations, might be called "meaningful vocation." In this pattern, a pastor is called to the ministry after a defining experience in midlife. But this path is open only to those are willing to step down a class level or two, or to those who come in with the support of a spouse’s income or their own preordination earnings.

These trends will leave out young ministers who long to serve the church but do not wish to compete for a few choice appointments. They will eliminate those who hope to maintain their families within the professional middle class but have only a clergyman’s earnings.

Who’s left? Those who have other means, and those who are happy to live outside the middle class. The latter group might include clergy who surrender a lifestyle they once expected, and clergy who never expected to be part of the professional middle class.

The church may be the better for this -- it has often been a more vital institution when pastors from humble origins saw its relatively modest rewards as a route to upward social mobility. Perhaps the church will be better, too, for not having ministers who aspire to higher-class status. But should such aspirations disqualify people for ministry? And will those who surrender such aspirations be a large enough group to fill the projected clergy shortages in many denominations?

Perhaps instead of asking what salary we think clergy should receive, we should concentrate on what class we think they should be in. What steps could we take to keep clergy in the middle class? Instead of raising salaries, the denominations could put aside funds for educating clergy children and for providing a home for those retiring from the ministry. The dollar amounts in these accounts might depend upon years of service rather than amount of salary. Ideally, the denomination would finance this system, although this is difficult to imagine in today’s world of de facto congregationalism.

Such a system would slow the race to the top of the salary pile and reduce the power exercised by the larger churches in attracting pastors. It would give female clergy greater bargaining power when trying to convince a spouse to relocate. And it would take away the sense that serving small, poor and struggling churches is a millstone around the neck of clergy families.

Developing any such plan requires honest and open debate about the class position of clergy. From megachurches to mainline seminaries, there is talk of renewal based on the model of the New Testament church. But the reward structure of today’s churches is creating a few well-endowed livings for ambitious pastors, and a mass of poorly paid positions for pastors with independent means. If this continues, the American church will resemble not so much the first century church of the apostles, but the 18th-century Church of England.

Living on Tiptoe (Lk. 2:22-40; Ps. 148)

In a culture that has made efficiency a moral requirement and credit-card purchasing a way of life, delays are frustrating. Instant messaging, fast food meals and express deliveries reinforce a sense that waiting for almost anything is a waste of our time and a poor use of our gifts and resources. Orienting our lives around long-term commitments seems particularly risky and unnecessarily constraining. Accounts of fidelity under challenging circumstances puzzle us nearly as often as they inspire us.

In this context, it is difficult to make sense of the stories of Simeon and Anna in Luke 2. They seem so foreign to contemporary notions of lives well lived. Two people, at this point quite elderly, have spent inordinate amounts of time waiting, faithfully looking for the fulfillment of a single promise.

Anna’s life choices seem particularly constrained. An entire adult life spent in prayer and fasting in the temple may have equipped her for high status in the ancient world, but to us such choices are nearly incomprehensible. Such a small scope for a life, so little productive activity -- how did she develop her gifts? Simeon fares a little better -- the text mentions three times that the Holy Spirit was at work -- but he too spent his life looking to the future.

Waiting and fidelity are closely connected, and many of us struggle with both. Lured by the promise of freedom and infinite choice, we are fearful of foreclosing our options and limiting our opportunities. Why make commitments to something in the future, when better opportunities might surface in the meantime? Why live in a way that anticipates a future when the present includes so many other possibilities? What promise could possibly be so life-giving that we would shape our lives around it?

Simeon and Anna were symbols of Israelite faithfulness and righteous aging. They trusted that fidelity would bear fruit, and they trusted for a very longtime. After the joyful testimony of the angels and shepherds at the birth of Jesus, it is Simeon and Anna who recognize him as the promised one. They had watched and waited for the Lord’s Messiah, and one day they met him.

Simeon cradled the consolation of Israel in his arms. Satisfied to have seen the evidence of God’s salvation in his lifetime, Simeon announced that he was now ready to die in peace. He had waited and the promise had been fulfilled. He praised God and proclaimed that the good news was for the whole world, then spoke complicated words of blessing over the baby and his parents. At the same time, Anna’s decades of daily worship, her continual prayer and fasting, led her to burst into praise and testimony when she encountered the child. The text says that this woman "of a great age" spoke about him to many other people who also "were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem."

After years of waiting, Simeon and Anna were there, in the right place at the right time, to see God’s promise fulfilled. Sensitive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, Simeon was ready to welcome God’s anointed one. Shaped by a lifetime of being present to God in worship, Anna recognized that the promise had arrived in the form of an infant being presented in the temple.

A posture of hope and fidelity structured their lives. They were righteous, devout and profoundly shaped by a story that was yet to be completed. The years of anticipation, waiting and looking were not wasted time, but time infused and transformed by intimations of the promise.

Simeon’s words to Mary anticipate some of the complexity and costliness of the promise, but it is highly unlikely that he or Anna lived to see Jesus’ adult ministry. Living on the other side of Jesus’ death and resurrection, we have a more complete understanding of the story than Simeon or Anna could have had, and the story turned out to be both harder and more wonderful than they could have imagined. But what they knew shaped their lives and prepared them for a joyful, face-to-face encounter with the Messiah.

In the end, however, this is a story not so much about Simeon and Anna as about God’s fulfillment of a promise to provide a way of salvation. The praise with which Simeon and Anna respond to the fulfillment of God’s promise is a human articulation within a choir of praise that comes from all creation. Psalm 148 describes the praise offered to the Lord from the heavens, the angels, the sun and stars. Snowflakes and frost, apple trees and house finches join the chorus. And praise comes from people, old and young, powerful and ordinary, for God has truly provided a way.

Though often overlooked, the testimony of a life lived faithfully over a long time is a gift to every congregation. A leader in the church I attend is named Anna. Well into her 80s, she spends much of each week in prayer and Bible study. She lives on tiptoe, looking for signs of renewal in the church, joyfully reporting every evidence of God’s work in the world. To me she seems like a contemporary incarnation of the biblical Anna, for whom anticipation and hope, expectation and worship are a way of life.

Simeon and the Annas invite reflection on whether what we know of the story of God’s redemption shapes our lives in ways that keep us open and attentive to God’s presence and present work. Perhaps it isn’t a foolish waste of time to order our lives according to a story that is not yet complete. Perhaps living according to the promise of God locates us where we are most likely to regularly encounter the One who is life, fulfillment and freedom.

Homeward Bound (Jn. 1-110-18; Jer. 31:7-14)

It’s all grace my dear friend replied. For some reason, I was surprised at the simplicity and firmness of her answer. I’d asked how she was able to face the last stages of cancer with such peace, generosity and good humor. The complete absence of bitterness or resentment in her demeanor and words was striking. She spoke readily of gratitude for the ways God had been faithful and for the gift of family and friends. She is not given to sentimental expressions of faith, and her words were unembellished. Acknowledging how terribly hard it was to think about leaving, she added, "I’ve had a very good life."

Reading Jeremiah 31 against the backdrop of the beauty of her life and the sense of imminent and premature loss, I realized that I had been in the company of one who was "radiant over the goodness of the Lord." Those quaint and distant words had been embodied in her being. She was very sick and yet truly radiant, "satisfied" with God’s bounty.

The exiles to whom the words of Jeremiah 31 were addressed were scattered, weary and vulnerable. The specifications of God’s faithfulness, spelled out in images of bountiful food, flourishing gardens, safety, dancing and gladness, provide a picture of overwhelming, over-the-top grace. Straight paths, deep consolation and special care for the most vulnerable suggest a road home shaped by generous welcome and tender care.

When John introduces Jesus, he describes him as "full of grace and truth." When he further describes Jesus’ impact, he says that "from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace." The language of bountiful goodness appears again -- grace piled on top of grace. Yet just as in Jeremiah, this is not grace separate from suffering or loss. John has just described how Jesus was mostly rejected by those to whom he had come. But the incarnate Word, God-in-the-flesh, was full of grace and truth. In God’s economy, there is a superabundance of grace.

Jeremiah’s description of the return from exile, John’s portrayal of Jesus, and my friend’s experience of grace make me wonder why we so often view grace as a scarce commodity. We live as if there’s not enough to go around, and ration our experience and our expressions of it. But if the grace available to us is anything, it is abundant. Its close connection to costliness and truth in the description of Jesus, however, also reminds us that this grace should not be an excuse for indulgence or presumption.

So how do we respond to the grace we have received in Christ? Can we be described as "satisfied" with God’s bounty or as "radiant" over the goodness of the Lord? If ever there were a description of a countercultural demeanor, this might be it. It is so easy to be discontent; we are trained to want more, expect more and deliver more. Contentment seems incongruous with striving for excellence -- a convenient and dangerous cover for laziness or passivity. But always wanting more makes it very likely that we will overlook the gifts we have received. And perpetual dissatisfaction makes gratitude a very awkward and unfamiliar practice.

Because our basic theological understandings of grace include assent to the claim that the most beautiful and precious things in and about our lives are unearned and undeserved, themes of gift and gratitude sometimes seem overworked. Nevertheless, encounters with an abundance of grace and goodness can still surprise us and remind us of how little we can do except respond with thanksgiving and gratitude.

My friend introduced me to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead this past summer. That amazing novel provided a way into talking about her illness and the reflections on life, death, gift and loss that it was eliciting. Gratitude was the main theme of our conversations, and gratitude shaped our capacity to see things differently. There was afresh, almost painful beauty to the New England coastline and a renewed treasuring of a summer cottage full of beloved family members. Colored sweatshirts and sailboats seemed brighter, well-worn books and grace-filled conversations more precious. The possibility of loss simultaneous with overwhelming gratitude was confusing, but it clearly changed our vision.

In Jeremiah 31:2, the people of God are described as having found "grace in the wilderness." God’s sufficient provision along the way provides a taste of the fuller bounty yet in store for them and us. Wilderness and exile are never the final word; in fact, the final word in Jesus is grace upon grace. The shepherd continues to gather the flock; the host continues to offer a banquet of restoration, love and abundance.

Like that of the Reverend John Ames in Gilead, my friend’s life has been shaped by a long faithfulness that prepared her to be open to the work of grace in one of the hardest places imaginable. As I sat on her bed a few weeks ago, and as we talked for as long as her strength held out, I saw sufficient grace, abundant grace. Strangely understated, it was surprisingly sufficient. The imminence of death has a way of making things clear -- the uncertainties of life, the importance of love, the startling discontinuities and continuities between this life and eternity. Grace had surely brought us safe thus far; I have a new sense of the sufficiency of God’s grace to also lead us home.