Live Generously

Rob Bell’s newest NOOMA video, Shells, is being streamed on the NOOMA facebook page until Wednesday at 12 p.m. EST. I watched it last night, and it’s great.

In this one, Rob tackles the idea of “busyness”, calling it a drug that many in our culture are hooked on. I think he’s right. Think about it, what’s the first thing we all say when people ask about ‘how things are going’? They’re busy. Things are crazy. Oh man, I’ve got so much going on. I’ve thought about this quite a bit, and have become frustrated with our cultural obsession with the appearance of busyness (one that, despite my disdain for it, I share). Hearing people talk about how busy they are is a lot like hearing people talk about when they had their wisdom teeth pulled. Everyone’s got a story, and everyone’s story is more gruesome than the previous one. And none of us really care about anyone’s story but our own.

What Rob suggests is that we are too ‘busy’ not because we don’t know how to say ‘no’ to things in our lives, but rather we don’t know how to say ‘yes’. He’s right. Really, he is. The problem isn’t that we’ve all got too much on our plate. Our problem is that we all too often lack the singular vision and focus necessary to pursue things of great meaning. For that reason we end up distracting ourselves with things that will ultimately leave us hallow. He tells a great story to illustrate that point. So then the solution to our busyness isn’t disengagement, but is rather a vision and a focus that compels us to focus on things that matter. Good stuff.

So it turns out Rob is coming out with a new book.

Jesus Wants To Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile, by Rob Bell and Don Golden

Here is the synopsis of the book found on the Zondervan website:

“There is a church not too far from us that recently added a $25 million addition to their building.

Our local newspaper ran a front-page story not too long ago about a study revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty.

This is a book about those two numbers.

It’s a book about faith and fear,

wealth and war,

poverty, power, safety, terror,

Bibles, bombs, and homeland insecurity,

It’s about empty empires and the truth that everybody’s a priest, it’s about oppression, occupation, and what happens when Christians support, animate and participate in the very things Jesus came to set people free from.

It’s about what it means to be a part of the church of Jesus in a world where some people fly planes into buildings while others pick up groceries in Hummers.”

Yikes.

If there is one thing I appreciate about guys like Rob Bell and Shane Claiborne it’s that they tell it like it is.  As I read that synopsis for the first time a few days ago I remember thinking that I can’t wait to read the book.  But then I thought something else, and I didn’t particularly like it.  I thought about how they are the problem.  You know, them. The ones who build $25 million church buildings, the ones who pick up their groceries in hummers, the ones who justify war, and use fear to get people to behave in a certain way.  You know, them.

Reading that synopsis made me want to blame someone else, anybody else.  Because there is a problem and it’s someone else’s fault.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t fault Rob for saying what he said…from what I can tell he practices what he preaches and his voice is often nothing short of prophetic. The points he raises are points that desperately need to be addressed.  The problem is with me and my need to find someone else to blame.  As long as there is a them then I don’t have to worry about we, and I certainly don’t have to worry about I, and how i might need to change, how I might need to look inside myself, and how I might be a part of the very problems I so despise in church, society, and the world.

This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, our need to project problems outwards.  Consider the following: We all know people that we consider to be difficult to deal with, yet few of us consider ourselves to be “difficult”.  We can all point out problems in our churches, but few of us consider ourselves to be actively contributing to said problems.  Many of us agree that we live in a culture of excess, and yet few of us are really willing to admit that we live in excess, and even fewer of us are willing to sacrifice our excess.  Many of us complain about the lack of community that exists in our culture (me being one of them), and yet few of us are willing to do the work to establish real community (I know the names of exactly zero of our neighbors). Many of us complain that large church gatherings of college students and young adults turn into nothing more than “scenes”, yet few of us are willing to do the work necessary to change that culture.

This drives me crazy. And I’m as much a part of the problem than anyone.

The bottom line is as long as we seek to project problems outward without taking responsibility for ourselves, nothing will ever get better.  That’s why I appreciate guys like Rob Bell, who are willing to name problems in society, while at the same time doing the work to be the sort of change that they believe Jesus came to make in the world. I suppose the real issue becomes, how can I live less excessively?  How can I better promote real community? How can I help the church become a real ‘community in exile’, rather than simply a ’scene’?  Progress is found in the I statements and questions rather than the they statements, because it’s really easy to throw rocks, but it’s a lot more difficult to turn the mirror inwards.

There were two particularly interesting articles in this week’s issue of The Economist. The first was an op-ed piece commenting on Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ suggestion that “the symbiosis that existed in practice between the law of the land and Muslim institutions, especially those that regulate marriage, property, and inheritance, should be recognised and formalised.” (British spelling) The op-ed piece then said that Williams’ remarks revived the age old debate about where to draw the line between church and state, and that he got it wrong. The full text of the article can be read here, and the article that reported on his original remarks can be read here. While I’m not really in much of a position to comment on the specific Muslim laws themselves, the article did get me thinking about church/state issues. Being an American, it’s difficult to imagine having a national church like the one that exists in England. Similarly, it’s difficult to imagine having Congress approve church prayer books or having church bishops serve as members of the Senate (although maybe part of why that’s tough to imagine is the fact that my denomination has neither prayer books nor bishops ;-)). The article goes on to say:

“The archbishop proposes to expand the privileges of all religions. It would be better instead to curtail the entitlements of his one. It makes no sense in a pluralistic society to give one church special status. Nor does it make sense, in a largely secular country, to give special status to all faiths. The point of democracies is that the public arena is open to all groups—religious, humanist or football fans. The quality of the argument, not the quality of the access to power, is what matters. And citizens, not theocrats, choose.”

I agree that in a pluralistic society it doesn’t seem right to give one church or religious group formal power. The public arena ought to be open to all ideas, and people of faith should be required to formulate good ideas and effective public policy if they want to be heard in the public square, just like everyone else. Furthermore, as a Christian who is horrified by the way that Christians in power have too often abused that power, I am very uncomfortable with Christian leaders having a presumed “access to power”. I also firmly believe that the Christian faith is practiced most authentically when it is practiced from the margins. Rob Bell at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, MI, gave a brilliant sermon a few weeks ago where he spoke from the perspective of the Apostle Paul and declared that the idea of a Christian state deeply concerns him. It concerns ‘Paul’ because if that happens Christians will become lazy in their faith and they will be vulnerable to getting sucked in to the lust for power that too often accompanies solidarity with the state. History has proved that fear to be valid. In the final paragraph of the article the author writes:

Let religion compete in the marketplace for ideas, not seek shelter behind special privileges.

And my point in all of this is simply that the separation of church and state is a good thing because it requires the church to be more like the church and less like the state. It requires those of us who call ourselves Christians to take seriously texts like the one I’ll be talking about this Sunday where Jesus says, “Whoever would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me,” rather than focusing on power and authority. Similarly, it requires those of us who call ourselves Christians to get creative politically, and think deeply about what the issues are that Christians ought to care about in the public square, and how our approach to these issues can lead to the good of all people regardless of their faith. This is a needed alternative to blind alignment with moral disasters like the Religious Right. A clear separation between church and state will help the church spend less time trying to be heard and more time making sure we actually have something positive and constructive to say.

The other story that caught my attention, that I’ll discuss much more briefly, was the cover story on Barack Obama. The cover simply read, “But could he deliver?” The sub headline goes on to say that America needs to start evaluating Obama the potential president rather than Obama the political phenomenon. I sometimes suspect that I, as much anyone, have been captivated by Obama the phenomenon. I loved his book The Audacity of Hope, his skills as an orator are first class, and the way that he speaks of changing the political game in Washington is inspiring, but the article does point out that in some cases his position on key issues isn’t quite as nuanced as one might like. I agree with the author of the article that perhaps now that Obama is the Democratic front runner it’s time to raise the bar and hold him to a higher standard. Rhetoric is nice, but a plan is better. I remain confident that in the coming weeks and months Obama will be able to rise to the challenge and prove that he can be a competent president, but he certainly needs to start doing that quickly.