Sermon

Sorry for yet another break in the action. In my defense, we have a brand new baby to thank for the time off.

Here's a sermon I preached on September 6th. (PDF).

http://www.firstplymouthchurch.org/Sermon_September_6.pdf

Alpha Male And The Canine Mystery Blood

This is the best song about aging and being a parent that I have ever heard. God go with him, amen, indeed.

Cuban Health Care

Sorry again for the hiatus. This summer turns out to have been a really bad time to start a blog, since I was away for long periods of time, and now that I'm back, I'm buried in the debris of fall kickoff stuff.

I'll try to soldier on, though.

I've been enjoying NPR's series on health care in other nations. Today's segment was on Spain's system, and it jogged my memory on the health care system of one of our neighbors: Cuba.

About ten years ago I traveled to Cuba with a group from my college (back before Bush made it more difficult to do). We were basically an educational and humanitarian trip, connected to some Baptist communities there, which are surprisingly numerous. We took a LOT of medical supplies with us, since the embargo makes getting even simple things like Tylenol very problematic.

The entire trip was eye-opening, for sure. Cuba is a beautiful nation full of beautiful and engaging people, and not at all like the enclave of evil our national rhetoric leads to believe it is. We began our trip in Havana, one of the coolest cities I've ever been to, and then traveled down the northern coast to Matanzas, Yaguahay, and eventually to a village called Piedrecitas. We stayed there for a few days, before making our way back to Havana for the flight back home.

Along the way, one of our major focal points was health care. We toured several medical facilities, and spoke to several doctors and patients about it. You might think that decades of the embargo would have crippled the Cuban health care system, but that's really not true. It's true that there is a perpetual shortage of equipment and medicine, but the care itself is really quite excellent. Cuban doctors are in demand all over the world, and many Europeans (who are not bound by the embargo) travel to Cuba for medical procedures.

As a communist nation, of course, Cuba provides health care to all of its citizens. I don't want to romanticize this, as Cuba clearly has a sketchy human rights record, and money can certainly buy you access to great care there. But the philosophy, and usually the practice, is that everybody gets care. Did you know that the Cuban infant mortality rate is better than that in the United States? Or that the life expectancy is roughly identical to that in the US? This without access to the cutting-edge technology that we employ so routinely in the US.

I'm not sure I would advocate for a system like Cuba's in the US (although my excellent experiences with Kaiser Permanente's HMO dispose me to admire managed-care systems), I think we could learn a lot about how frugality and excellent care can go together from our southern neighbors.

And while we're on the subject, I want to know where I can sign my name to this.

Hiatus

Sorry for the long stretch between posts. I was on vacation for a while, and in the week I've been back, we've moved and I've been planning the Senior High Mission Trip (which departs in a few days).

I promise to update more soon, possibly even from New Orleans! Stay tuned!

Atlas Asked For A Bailout

Lately, I've been hearing lots of people talking about Ayn Rand's book Atlas Shrugged. I should say right up front that I think this book is wrong about everything, and I've thought so since I read the book while on my honeymoon 9 years ago. (I know. I know).


It seems that sales of the book have spiked since January, and there is a renewed interest in discussing the book and seeing whether its ideas might apply to our current context. Some are even suggesting that we are on the verge of a generation of "John Galts" taking a cue from the book and dropping right out of our society.


In case you haven't read the book and aren't sure why it should have become so much more popular lately, here's a synopsis: in the world of the book society has become something of a socialist welfare state, where a few motivated individuals carry the rest of us on their backs of their genius. These titans of industry and commerce, one day, realize that they don't have to. Their intelligence and wealth have given them the ability simply withdraw from society, and that's just what they do. One by one, they withdraw to a valley that they've somehow hidden from everybody else (in Colorado, if my memory serves). There, they build their capitalist utopia while the rest of the world, robbed of its erstwhile sugar daddies, descends into chaos.


This is the scenario some think is playing out right now. In America. Especially given the presidency of Barack Obama and his obviously socialist ways.


This is, of course, ridiculously stupid. Monumentally dumb.


Let's review the current situation, shall we? Here's a quick synopsis: those titans of industry and commerce, the great capitalist leaders of our time? THEY'RE THE ONES WHO SCREWED EVERYTHING UP! The rest of us are bailing them out! The guys who run GM and Countrywide and AIG and Wells Fargo aren't carrying us on their backs. We're carrying them. Pure unbridled capitalism isn't the only thing holding our nation together. At this point, there's a good chance that only the "socialist" bailout is saving us from disaster.


Yes, the world right now is just like the world of Atlas Shrugged. Except it's totally opposite.


Attention right-wingers organizing book clubs around this book: stop for a second, use that "liberal" critical thinking skill for a moment, and take your copy back to Barnes and Noble for a refund. And send the $12.95 to a CEO in need.

In Plain Sight: The Orant as a Hidden Transcript of the Subordinate

I spent most of the weekend working on a paper on the orant, a motif in ancient Christian art. That's the orant over there on the left, taken from a 3rd century catacomb just outside of Rome. She's the one with her hands outstretched. To her left is the Good Shepherd, another early Christian motif.

The orant is important because it's the most common image in early Christian art. It's everywhere. (The Good Shepherd is the second most common). The orant (from the latin for "praying") has befuddled scholars and art historians for a long time. It's one of only two images in early Christian art (along with the Good Shepherd) that uses a human figure. It's almost always female, even when it depicts a male character like Noah. Its hands are always outstretched in a praying fashion.

There are lots of theories. Some people think it just means what it meant to the Romans--piety, or the personification of the deity Pietas. Some think it's evidence of a long-lost female priesthood, or goddess-worship in early Christianity. Some think it's just a woman praying, and some think it's an early example of the veneration of Mary.

My thesis is that the first option--personification of Pietas--is correct. The orant figure was common on coins in the imperial era, usually with a female figure from a royal family posing as the goddess Pietas. (The coin on the top is real; the bottom one is a replica). I think Christians used the figure of the orant in an effort to both blend in with broader Roman culture (and thus stay unnoticed) and to assert certain beliefs. This is the tricky part.

There's a guy named James Scott, who wrote about the "hidden transcript of the subordinate." Basically, he says, whenever one group is in charge and subjugates other groups, the group in charge demands that certain things be said about them--that they're benevolent and wise, etc. The subjugated group says those things because they don't want to die. But when they're in private, they say other things about the ruling group. I suggest that the orant is adapted from the Pietas symbol to blend in with the rest of Roman culture, but that in reality it stands in for the cross as a symbol of suffering and death. (There weren't crosses in this period of Christianity...they didn't come along until later). The outstretched arms of the orant mimic those of Jesus on the cross.

Two other little bits of info bolster this case. First, the orants show up mainly in two ways: as characters in biblical stories of conflict or danger (like the 3 men in the fiery furnace) or on funeral art like sarcophagi. I think that's because Christians wanted to connect the orant (i.e., Jesus) to suffering and death. The second bit of evidence: in two cases the orant actually has stigmata on its hands. That seems like a pretty clear indication that it recalled the crucifixion.

There's lots more to it, obviously. (The paper was 18 pages). But that's the gist of it. I'm looking forward to presenting it Tuesday and getting some feedback.

An Afternoon of Unfortunateness

This afternoon, I had my first appointment with my new doctor. My employer just switched health insurance a few months ago, so this was my first time going for an appointment.

The striking thing about visiting the doctor is how many statistics they gather about you. And they are not fun. They measure how tall you are (not as tall as you'd like to be), how much you weigh (wow), your body mass index (substantial), the amount of time since your last physical (umm......), and they catalog your many ailments. It's a very revealing process. There's nowhere to hide, and no excuses to make. And even if you have an excuse, they've heard them all before.

One of my ailments today was a mole in a very unfortunate place. No, not that place. The other one. I'm not telling which one. But it was unfortunate. And my doctor? About my age, female, and hot. If I passed her on the street, I'd probably unconsciously suck in my gut. Five minutes after meeting this person, I found myself in a very compromising position, with her clinically peering at my mole. I don't know if there's anything that will make you self-conscious faster than an attractive member of the opposite sex examining your nether regions. If there is, I don't want to know about it.

As I was lying there (she called in the nurse to help, obviously, thanks doctor, appreciate that), I was thinking that it was probably way worse for me than it was for her. (Debatable, but we'll go with that). She does this for a living, after all, and while the situation was unfortunate for all concerned, I'm sure she's seen worse. (Marginally worse).

And I started thinking about what it must be like for someone to approach a minister with a problem. Even if you do somehow work up the nerve to go to a "professional," you still face a daunting gauntlet of foreign terminology and concepts, administrative assistants with knowing grins, and the nagging feeling that everyone is judging you. We ministers often see people who are in the midst of situations far more compromising than anything I went through this afternoon, who are both desperate to get help and desperate to keep their problems hidden. It's a harsh dichotomy.

In the end, my problems at the doctor were easily fixed. Ten minutes later, I was fully clothed and sheepishly shaking my doctor's hand. I can rest easily in the knowledge that by the time I visit again, she will probably have forgotten about me (one can dream). But how different is it for someone who still shows up at the church week after week, knowing what you know about them? In some ways, I'm sure that's comforting. But in some ways it must also be very intimidating.

I'm not sure what to take away from this, except to remind myself and others that we carry a pretty big responsibility to our parishioners. They entrust us with tremendous parts of themselves, and become vulnerable in ways we can rarely imagine. "Bedside manner" is a big deal in medicine; shouldn't it be in ministry too?

The LOST Finale

Here's my take on the LOST finale, which I've seen twice now. I'm pretty sure I don't know what's going on, but this is my best shot at it. This is adapted from an email I sent to some friends.

Juliet is the variable. Or, at least in this iteration, she's the important variable. (Or maybe Sawyer. I'll explain).

In the past, things played out just like that. Shootout, nuclear core, standoff, core gets dropped down, it lands in mud, fails to detonate, things gets magnetic, etc.

In the past, the magnetic pocket pulled the metal nuke core down into the mud, and permanently attached it to the magnetic stuff. The Dharma folks, realizing that they couldn't drill anymore, left it there, poured concrete over it to keep the radiation in, and built the Swan there to study the anomaly. Radzinski lives there and works there, Kelvin comes, Radzinski kills himself, Desmond comes, Desmond kills Kelvin, blah blah, blah blah.

This time, though, Juliet succeeds in detonating the bomb. Why this time and not other times? Maybe it's because the Oceanic Six left the island, allowing Sawyer to have a relationship with Juliet without Kate around, allowing them to form a bond, so that when the time came for Juliet to get sucked down the hole, he was there to somehow alter her course down by holding on to her, causing her to land differently. Or something. Anyway, their relationship made things different. The bomb goes off, and somehow (who knows) that changes everything. Maybe it just resets things. Maybe it ends things. Maybe they flash to 2007. Maybe they all wake up washed up on the Hydra island. I don't really know. But something is now different from the way it happened so many times before.

That's the science side of things.

As far as I can tell, both Jacob and his dark nemesis dude are humans or divinities from the past. There are strands of information from Greek, Latin, and Egyptian contexts. The Others speak Latin (Richard's name is apparently Ricardus, and he answered Ilana's question in Latin last night: "the one who saves us all"). Jacob's tapestry is in Greek (it's a quotation from Odysseus in the Odyssey; I recognized the script, but it's a different form of Greek than what I know). And Egyptian heiroglyphs are everywhere.

(Yes, I like knowing two of the three dead languages they are using).

I think Jacob and the other dude have been trapped on that island for a very, very long time...since, say, a couple hundred years BCE.

OR...and here's my mythological explanation...they're a form of these dudes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugolino (Skip down to the Literary Afterlife section.)I've always thought the purgatory theories would play out in the end, and the whole episode I couldn't stop thinking about Dante's Inferno. Maybe these two are consigned to this island as their hell, to gnaw each others' skulls for eternity, until someone finds a way out? And maybe one of them just did.

The Ten Commandments of Youth Ministry

I'm thinking about my column for the youth news section of the church newsletter. I've been brainstorming it for a few weeks now. My working title has been "The Ten Commandments of Youth Ministry," but now that I'm trying to write it, that doesn't seem to work.

I want to use the column to dispel some myths about youth and challenge some bad behavior on the part of our adults. But I also don't want to come across as too much of a jerk; after all, many of the behaviors are well-meaning. Here are some of the ideas I have so far. Tell me what works, what doesn't, and what I should add.

1) Thou shalt acknowledge that youth are a part of the church. The church is not an adult institution that allows youth to participate under certain rules and conditions. The kingdom of God "belongs," says Jesus, to children. So much more the church! We adults just borrow space.

2) Thou shalt not bemoan "kids these days." "Kids these days" are very much like the kids in other days. Think about what you were like as a teenager. Remember? Teenagers today are just like that, but with different fashions, music, and lingo.

3) Thou shalt not blame everything on the internet, cell phones, and texting. Yes, youth spend a lot of time with those technologies. But they are just that--technologies. They allow youth to communicate with one another, much like telephones with cords and drive-in movies allowed youth to communicate in the past.

4) Thou shalt respect the ability of a youth to teach you something.

5) The church building shall be a place for youth as well as adults. This sometimes means that messes will be made, things will be misplaced, and decor might be awry. This is as it should be. A church building is a house for God's people, and like a house, it is meant to be lived in. Youth live here too.

6) Thou shalt not utter the words "maybe we could get the youth to help." The youth are not a labor force, a cheerleading squad, or a built-in audience. Let your programs and ideas stand on their own terms, and if a youth wants to participate, then you know you're doing something right.

7) Thou shalt not ask a youth's opinion without being prepared to hear it. Youth sometimes say or believe things you might not say or believe.

8) Thou shalt support the youth with your resources. Our youth have lots of energy, ideas, and passion for helping to heal the world. They do not, however, have a lot of money. If a 15-year-old wants to help rebuild a church destroyed in a hurricane in Louisiana, they can't do it without your help.

9) Thou shalt be a presence in the lives of our youth. We need adults to work as mentors to our youth, and to be a presence in their lives. Yes, you can do it. Our youth are not scary, and will not laugh at you. Unless you make a joke.

10) Thou shalt revel in our youth. We have dozens of young people active in this church, many of whom show up week after week, more frequently than many of our adults. They are a creative and passionate bunch, who try to live out the values of the church and of Jesus Christ. Be thankful for their presence, listen to what they have to say, and support them any way you can. The old cliche is true: they are the future.

Some Things I Learned Today

Tuesdays are my long day at school. From the time I walk out the door for my first class to the time I get home at night, I'm gone almost 16 hours. Almost 10 of that is spent in class. I love it, though. My classes this quarter are really interesting. Today, I spent time learning about:

• The function of priests, ritual, and sacred space in traditional Roman religion. I actually had to lead a discussion on this for about an hour and a half. I'm not totally happy with how it went (I'm not great at talking even when I don't have anything to say), but there were several really interesting moments. The thesis I kept trying to advance (that was tepidly received by everyone else) is that ritual develops congruently with priestly classes. That is, the more a tradition develops a class of people who act as the guardians of the tradition, the more highly ritualized it becomes. Perhaps this is not so revolutionary, but it's interesting to think about in the context of something like the development of the Eucharist in early Christianity. In the beginning, it was a meal. After a few hundred years and the development of a priesthood, it was a sacrament that could only be administered by certain people at certain times and places to certain qualified recipients, using certain approved materials.


• The Mishnah, which I had actually not ever read very much of at all until now. I don't know what it is about the Mishnah, but it makes me laugh. Like, out loud. Like, I was getting looks. It's not an overtly humorous text, but there seems to be a swell of humor just under the surface of it. The best way I can think to put it is that it's beguiling. The Mishnah has an almost imperceptible smirk on its face. We talked a lot about two particular tractates, the Sotah and the Abodah Zarah. The moral of the story: adultery (or even the suspicion thereof) can be very bad for your uterus.


• Jesus of Montreal. I am taking a class called Jesus on the Silver Screen, which is a lot of fun. It's basically a Historical Jesus course, taught through films. It's far less intense than most of my classes, and the high proportion of undergrads means I don't have to work too hard to sound smart. Tonight we watched Jesus of Montreal, which has been on my list to watch for about ten years now. It's a very strange film, but also a very provocative one. I particularly liked all of the nods to Dostoevsky and the clever ways the film recapitulated scenes from the gospels that were unrecognizable until the very end.

Tomorrow, one of my academic heroes is coming to school for a lunch with doctoral students. Then, Thursday night, he's giving a lecture on exactly the subject I'm most interested in at the moment: the functions of different architectures in early Christianity, and the effects of those differences on the development of rituals. I'm giddy with excitement. I'm debating whether I should take the 1000-page commentary on Romans that he wrote to get it autographed. I'm pretty sure that sort of thing is frowned upon, but it's tempting anyway.

Live Long And Prosper

I didn't watch much TV when I was a child. It wasn't some sort of moral statement on my parents' part (although my mom liked to limit TV time). Rather, it was a function of the fact that we didn't have a lot of money, and so we never had more than the one or two channels we could pick up on our old black and white set. For most of my childhood, those were PBS and NBC, although later on FOX was invented, and our TV world increased by 50%.

It was FOX that gave me the glory that was syndicated Star Trek. In addition to our regular black and white TV, we also had this tiny (like 9 inch) black and white set. I would take it to bed with me (I don't think my parents knew) and watch a couple of hours of Star Trek reruns before going to sleep. This was the original...none of that Next Generation junk. We're talking Spock, Kirk, Bones, and the whole crew. I never quite developed into a Trekkie, but I did gain a deep appreciation for science fiction.

My wife and I went to see the new Star Trek film last night. I have seen a few of the other films in the franchise, and I haven't been all that impressed. This one is magnificent. I am already a huge fan of JJ Abrams (via LOST), but the Star Trek film just solidified my intention to see everything the man ever does. It's one of those rare films that I'll probably see again, voluntarily.

While watching the film and munching my $7 medium popcorn, I was thinking about the vision of the future and humanity's future portrayed in the film. It's not a Utopian vision; there are still conflicts, on earth and throughout the galaxies. But there is a certain presumption that a few hundred years hence, humanity will have worked out many of our troubles with each other. While our world isn't perfect in the Star Trek world, it is pretty far down that road.

That world-view strikes me as a pretty good stand-in for what the Kingdom of God might mean in the gospels. The Kingdom of God, that thing that Jesus won't stop talking about, is really just the idea that Jesus has inaugurated a change in humanity, and that one day we will be able to complete that change. Jesus doesn't want to obliterate or pave over human nature, but he does want humans to realize the potential we hold--the potential for peace, justice, righteousness, and a spirit of goodwill.

That's not exactly what Roddenberry and his creative heirs have in mind. But it's not so far off, either. A world where our differences blend to make us stronger, where there's little enough strife that we can build great things together, and a world where a Vulcan and a human can make out in an elevator...I think that's a world Jesus could get behind.

Hello There

I once had a pretty regular blog. For about four years, I posted on another (now defunct) site, writing about my family, my friends, my politics, and my job. When that site went kaput, I stopped blogging about those things, but I often find myself wanting an outlet to say something. Hence this blog.

I have few expectations. There are probably very few people who are interested in the stuff I am interested in, so my readership may never materialize, but at least there will be a place for my thoughts to reside.

So for now, I introduce A Lover's Quarrel, a blog about my life in the church and the academy, specifically, and my life in life, generally. I hope you enjoy.