Sacrificial Lamb Jesus

Last week I took a look at Hippy, Left-Wing Jesus so I thought I should work towards the other extreme this week.  You know, to keep things balanced.  So may I present to you Sacrificial Lamb Jesus (a.k.a. “Scapegoat Jesus”, “Passion of the Christ” Jesus:

Fun fact: SL Jesus prefers colder climates, because all that wool gets VERY itchy in the heat. And a sweaty Jesus is a stinky Jesus. Sacrificial Lamb Jesus came to die for your sins.

And that’s all.

His whole purpose in becoming human was to come here and die in your place so that you can go to Heaven and be with God.  He didn’t die until he was in his early 30s, and he came as a baby, but no one is really sure what he was doing the rest of the time.  I heard he taught some stuff and did some miracles (which are NOT devil magic like Harry Potter), but that was all sort of like A1.  Some people think it makes the steak taste better and some don’t, but either way, it’s not the main course.

No, the main course was his horrible, terrible death on the cross.

See, every time you talk about how SL Jesus died, you have to use as much gruesome detail as you possibly can.  Your listeners need to know every painful, awful detail of crucifixion so that they understand exactly how awful, wicked and sinful they are.  Because, after all, when you talk about SL Jesus, you have to make sure everyone knows that he died in their place.  This was his only purpose.  If they don’t understand this, then they miss Jesus entirely.

The problem with this view of Jesus is that it’s too narrow; it ignores too much of his story.*

Evangelicals are (in)famous for focusing on the Cross nearly to the exclusivity of anything else, and here we’ve made a misstep.  At the Cross, Jesus defeated Death and Sin, but these were not ends to themselves.  Jesus’ story starts before the beginning of time, according to John.  And his mission was not to defeat Sin and Death, but rather to reconcile all things to himself – everything that had been lost in the Fall.  Sin and Death were standing between Jesus and his goal, but they were not the end of his journey.

Jesus’ ultimate goal was to restore the world to its original purpose – to be the place where God lives with all creation (including us).  Something in humanity is broken – that’s evident if you look at what we do to ourselves, each other and our world.  When Jesus came, he came not only to heal us, but to show us what a fully human person looks like.  That person is concerned with neighbors and creation.  Not because it’s hip or trendy, but because Jesus is all about shalom, the whole world existing as it was created to be.

That’s why we have to pay as much attention to Hippy Jesus as we do to SL Jesus.  We need them both.  We need his life and his death.

What do you think would happen if we stopped looking at the wounds of the crucifixion only as our source of healing but also as Jesus’ means of identifying with the brokenness in our world?  How might that change what we think it means to follow Jesus?

*If you just thought to yourself, “I like to be narrow.  Jesus said the road to Heaven is narrow,” then please follow these instructions: Place your hand on the desk in front of you.  Take a pencil in your other hand, and jam it as hard as you can into the desk-hand.  Have you done that?  Good.  The pain you are now feeling is nothing in comparison to the pain SL Jesus felt on the cross for the sin you just committed of taking Scripture so grossly out of context.  Lesson learned!

CEO Jesus

Since last week I took on a Jesus I’m not too big on, I figured I’d balance everything out by exploring a Jesus who is nearer and dearer to my heart than I really enjoy admitting.  So without any further ado, may I present to you

CEO Jesus (a.k.a. Corporate Jesus, Business Model Jesus)

CEO Jesus loves to ADMINSTER sacraments. Or ordinances. Whichever you prefer. He'll take a poll and get back to you on what we're going to call them.

This is a Jesus who’s been growing in popularity in the Church since the 1970s, and we can probably attribute both the seeker movement and the megachurch to his activity.  It was around that time leaders in the church really began to look to corporate America for guidance and inspiration.  So we began to see churches with Mission Statements (and later Vision and Process and a host of other flavors of statements) and Core Values.  We began to hire according to skill sets, even creating positions like Administrative Pastor.  Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin have joined Max Lucado and Rick Warren as must-reads for any church leader (and when the heck is Mitch Joel going to get on that list?  Come on, people!).

This hasn’t been all bad; indeed, it may have been inevitable.  Given that our culture is so shaped by the culture of Corporate America, we should have expected some degree of syncretism.  And leaders like Bill Hybles and Andy Stanley are shining examples of faithful incarnation of the Gospel in corporate culture.

But Corporate Jesus is really all about making you a better person.  He has worship services and encourages us to church shop until we find a place that meets our needs.  He wants us to worry about whether or not we like the music or how well the sermon feeds us.  This body of CEO Christ creates rockstar senior pastors and pop-perfect worship bands.

A good friend of mine recently interviewed at such a church, and during their Sunday gathering, his wife commented that he probably wasn’t cool enough to be a part of their leadership.  She was only partially joking.

The CEO Jesus is slowly working his way down the corporate church ladder: more and more churches are embracing strengths-based ministry, in which a person is profiled and then invited to serve where their unique combination of gifts and talents will best benefit both them and the larger church corporation ::ahem:: excuse me, larger church body.

Here’s my problem with CEO Jesus: I love him.

I love this model of church.  The reason we borrow so heavily from business is because their models work. Really well.  I have become a much better minister thanks to Marcus Buckingham and Tim Sanders’ mentoring.  Made to Stick and Communicating for a Change pretty much revolutionized my preaching.

And I really do believe that we love God best when we are good stewards of all the gifts we’ve been given, including our strengths and talents.

But what about the fact that the Gospel is not primarily about me?  What about the fact that I’m called to die with Jesus, not promote myself or my company (dang it, I mean church!)?  What about the fact that his strength is enough for me, that his strength is made perfect in my weakness, not my top 5? (that’s a Strengthsfinder reference for the uninitiated)

This is a tension the Body of Christ must take seriously.

Right. There's a limit. I get it.
Right. There’s a limit. I get it.

We walk a tight rope and falling to either side is deadly.  On one hand, we have the consumer church culture and rockstar, too-cool-for-school church leaders.  We run the danger of becoming a cheap, plastic generic Church made not in China (maybe we’d be better off taking a lead from Chinese churches?) but in focus groups and opinion polls.  On the other side, however, we run the risk of becoming ineffective.  I know that word is unpopular; we’re not supposed to measure God’s work because it’s somehow unfaithful.

In response to this problem Andy Stanley once said,

One time Jesus fed 5,000 men plus women and children.  How did they know how many people there were?  They counted them!

We should always be asking ourselves if we’re doing the most we can with the resources and energies we have.  If our vision is really God’s vision.  If it’s a BHAG (pronounced bee-hag, from Jim Collins – Big Hairy Audacious Goal).  If it’s something we can do on our own – the way CEO Jesus would want us to, or if we’re actually going to have to step out in faith and trust the real Jesus, who promised that we’d do even greater things than he, who promised never to leave us or forsake us and in whose name we will not rest until the whole world has been reconciled.

How much have you interacted with the CEO Jesus?  Do you see corporate culture in your church?  Do you like it or not?

American Jesus!

Jesus 1

A couple of good friends of mine picked up this magnetic dress-up Jesus. I can’t tell you how fortunate I feel that when my friends see this, they think of me and buy this for me.  I am going to use dress-up Jesus over the next several weeks to explore the various types of Jesus we settle for rather than the real Jesus we meet in the Scriptures.

A disclaimer: these images of Jesus are supposed to be funny, so before you get up in arms about them, sit back, count to ten and think about what I’m saying.  Just for a minute or two.  Then go ahead and get mad and burn me in the comments section 🙂

Without any further ado, may I present today’s subject of interest, especially appropriate given that yesterday was July 4.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold American Jesus.

Jesus - American JesusDoesn’t He look ready for some BBQ and Apple Pie?  Maybe a baseball game a little later and then some fireworks?  His shirt, in case you can’t read it, says “God, Guns and Guts Made America Free.”  This is all too often the way we think about Jesus’ relationship to those of us who follow Him here in America.  Jesus died for our sins – was sacrificed for them.  The word ‘sacrifice’ is a religious term – it means to make something sacred or special by giving it to a deity.  Sacrifice is a powerful word, with powerful connections.

So it’s not especially surprising that we try to co-opt the word, to apply it to so many other scenarios, including when a soldier gives up his or her life.  In fact, many within the Church commemorate the service and death of soldiers by proclaiming them to be ‘sacrifices’ (consider this book from a Christian publishing house).

But is this a sacrifice?  The soldier is giving up his or her life for the defense of American interests.  Are these interests always Jesus’ interests?  Uncritically, we immediately answer, Yes, of course!  God is always on our side, after all.

But if we stop to think for a moment, we can recognize that America has not always been on God’s side – we recognize that the genocide of Native American peoples was a great evil, as was the institution of slavery.  And yet both of those movements were resolutely defended by persons who claimed to follow Jesus.

So how can we be so sure today that Jesus is on our side?

Such a question should at minimum cause us to pause and consider.  Here’s what Rob Bell had to say about the matter:

On the news are sound bites form a speech by the president of the United States.  He’s on the deck of an aircraft carrier, proclaiming victory in a recent military effort.  Not only was the mission accomplished, according to the leader of the world’s only superpower, but American forces are now occupying this Middle Eastern country until peace can be fully realized within its borders.  This puts a Christian in an awkward place.  Because Jesus was a Middle Eastern man who lived in an occupied country and was killed by the superpower of his day. – from Jesus Wants to Save Christians, p 17.

Is Jesus on our side?  That’s probably the wrong question to ask.

It certainly was for Joshua when he encountered the Angel of the Lord in Joshua 5:13-14.  Even though Israel was God’s chosen nation, God did not side with Israel.  Joshua should’ve been asking how he could be sure he was on God’s side, not vice versa.

And there, I think, is the fallacy of the American Jesus.  We assume that Jesus is just like us, and so Jesus can’t challenge us.  And we end up sacrificing to America, our jobs, our families, or any number of other false gods we fashion for ourselves.

And we forget the words the author of Hebrews spoke to us:

Every priest stands day after day at his service, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins.  But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, “he sat down at the right hand of God,” and since then has been waiting “until his enemies would be made a footstool for his feet.” – Hebrews 10:11-13

The only sacrifice we have left to make is of ourselves to God.

Not to America or anything or anyone else.  Jesus did that for us.  He won the victory, and the day is coming soon when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord. (This doesn’t mean we can’t talk about soldiers as brave, courageous or honorable; I have several friends who are stationed in the Middle East right now and they are certainly these and more.  I only want to caution us against the misuse of religious language both in the military and in our own lives.)

So the question is: Are you on God’s side?

BONUS: Here’s a preview of what’s to come

Jesus 2

Jesus on Fire and Holy Prayer Grenades

Once I preached at a church on worship.  After my talk, we entered into a period of reflection and prayer, and a couple approached the altar.  The husband moved behind the pulpit, reached under it and pulled out a rock.  He placed it on the altar, then he and his wife knelt near it and prayed; they were quickly joined by other members of the congregation.

Needless to say, I was confused – what was the purpose of the stone?  I thought it was perhaps a sign that a person wanted prayer – put the stone out and it means ‘Come pray with me’; leave it hidden and it means ‘I want to pray alone’.

A good guess, perhaps, but incorrect.  After the gathering was finished, the man came up to me to explain that he was about to attend a prayer gathering at a nearby farm – the same farm from which he’d removed the rock.  He told me that he was going to return the rock “once it was good and prayed up.”  Apparently, the man envisioned the rock as some sort of Christian fetish – a religious term for a physical object believed to have spiritual power.

He believed that in some way the prayers with which he and his congregation had filled the rock would enhance the prayer gathering.

I was reminded of the prayer rock last Monday when we found out that the (in)famous “Touchdown Jesus” in Monroe, OH had been struck by lightning and burned to the ground (check out the YouTube footage of the conflagration in progress).

 

The statue was built in 2004 in front of the Solid Rock Church; it stands 62-feet tall and was made of plaster and styrofoam around a metal frame.

Reaction to the flames was mixed – in my circles we mostly laughed about it, but a lot of people apparently found the statue inspiring.  One guy even said, “I think it’s a sign of the end of the world.  If lightning is going to strike God, then there’s no hope.”  Probably the most common sentiment I heard is represented best by the guy who asked how God could strike down the Jesus statue while leaving the billboard advertising an adult bookstore that stood across the street standing.

Everyone wanted to know what God is saying by striking down Touchdown Jesus.  This thinking is still essentially fetish-ism.  Solid Rock Church built a 60-foot tall statue with a metal core.  Said metal core was struck by lightning, and since the material surrounding the  metal were flammable, it caught fire.  This is simple laws of physics.

What it is not is God taking a special interest in a five-year old giant Jesus.

My favorite reaction? A person said, "Thor: 1. Jesus: 0".

The Scriptures present God as transcendent – above creation and separate from it.  The second commandment (you know, in the big 10) is a prohibition against building idols.  But idols in the ancient world were not things people worship instead of God (the way we usually explain idolatry today) – that prohibition is covered in the first commandment, “I am YHWH your god… You shall have no other gods before me.”

Rather, idols were used to bind gods to physical spaces.  Thus, when the Israelites built the golden calf (Exodus 32), they were not worshiping the calf instead of God.  Rather, they were binding God to the calf – bulls were used as mounts for gods in many Ancient Near Eastern temples.  Thus, telling someone not to value his car more than God, or her romantic relationship more than God is not idolatry; it’s worship of the god of Consumerism or Romance (Mammon or Aphrodite, perhaps?)

God’s prohibition against idols is a command not to bind God to any created form, not to limit God by any physical space.

And in this way, I wonder if the prayer rock and Touchdown Jesus have become idols to some.  They are not essentially idols – we can use physical objects to help us focus or to draw us towards God in our worship.  But the prayer rock was not being charged with prayers to enhance our worship.  He wanted to ensure that God did more, that God was more present at the gathering because of the prayer rock.  The person who questions what message God is sending with a statue-destroying, porn-affirming bolt seems to think God has some sort of obligation to protect images of Godself (ironic, that) while destroying what the person in question considers obscene.

And that is idolatry.  God is not bound to prayer rocks or giant statues of the incarnation.  And God does not make a habit (at least in my knowledge) of breaking the laws of physics in order to protect our ill-advised mistakes.  I wonder, though, if this yearning to have a physical connection with our faith reflects the extent to which our faith has become interior and spiritual to the exclusion of any affirmation of our real world and real bodies.

What do you think?  Is the burning of Touchdown Jesus a sign?  Can you charge rocks up with prayer?  And what do these ideas say about contemporary Evangelical Christianity?  Most importantly, how should Christians engage in this discussion?

25 Reasons I Love My Wife

Manda Head Shot So if you didn’t know, today is my wife, Amanda’s 25th birthday.  It’s her ‘Golden Birthday’, which is when you turn the age that is the same number as the day of your birthday (so, 25 on the 25th).  In honor of this special occasion, I present to you 25 reasons I love my wife (in no particular order).

1. She’s a reader.  I love that both of us read a lot.  She is always reading something – usually that I haven’t read.  It makes for some great discussions, and we can kill hours in a bookstore together.

2. She has great style.  One of our first conversations revolved around our mutual love for Chuck Taylors.  She has a unique fashion sense that means she always looks great and probably different from anyone else in the room.  In the best way.

3. She is a people person.  We’re both super-extroverted, so she loves having a housefull of guests as much as I do.  She’s wonderful with people and has never met a person she couldn’t make into a friend.

4. She’s smoking hot.  But I don’t have to tell you that.  Clearly she is the hottest woman on the planet.  Sorry, fellas!

Triceratops 5. She listens to great music.  We have the same taste in music, more or less, and she’s always up for heading to a show with me, or picking up a new CD from one of our favorite bands.  She only sings along when I do too, because I sing way louder.  But it’s still fun.

6. She loves coffee.  This is good because we work at a coffee shop, but also because we can drink it together in the mornings.

7. People like her better than me.  No exaggeration, and no lie.  I have a tendency to be too blunt and not very compassionate.  She balances me very well in that regard.  And I think it’s pretty awesome how much everyone loves her.

8. She is a great leader.  She quickly earns the right to speak truth into other people’s lives, and she does so with grace and gentleness.  It’s quite a thing to watch, and she inspires fierce loyalty in those she calls friends.

Creation Museum 2 9. She thinks about stuff from a theological perspective.  Even though she’s not formally trained in theology like me and a lot of my friends are, she doesn’t hold back from jumping into a conversation and offering her thoughtful opinion.  She does a great job of considering all aspects of an issue, and she offers really practical advice.  Speaking of which…

10. She is always very practically minded.  At the end of the day, I’ve typically been content to contemplate abstract and detached theological ideas.  Amanda is always concerned with how this changes our lives in the here and now, how we can put something into practice.  She has taught me a lot about how to make the Scriptures and my faith more real.

11. She listens to my sermons at least 4 times.  By the time I preach a sermon, I’ve usually talked it through at least 4 times.  And usually Amanda has heard most of those practices, offering me critiques and feedback to make my talk more focused and practical.

12. She gives great feedback.  Yup… like I just said, her feedback is really good.  It’s thoughtful and helpful.  My talks are always better after I’ve given them for her, and she does a great job of helping me come up with solid, concrete content that relates better.

13. She’s fluent in Spanish.  Like for real fluent.  Remember how I said people love her?  You should see her in a Spanish-speaking country.  At least 3 different people told her her Spanish was better than theirs.  She’s truly a marvel to watch in action.

El Sal Group 1 14. She loves to travel.  You know how she got fluent in Spanish?  By living in Spain.  Oh yeah, and Mexico.  And El Salvador.  And she’s going to Honduras twice this year.  I love that she loves to travel so much.

15. She plays Guitar Hero.  She doesn’t play a lot of video games, but she does play Guitar Hero like a fiend.  And she’s just bumped up to Hard for a couple of songs, so watch out world.  The only thing better than rocking out at a concert together is rocking out in our TV room together.

16. She enjoys Sci-Fi.  She has a soft spot for Star Trek and we watched (and loved) Battlestar Galactica together, and discussed it much.  That is way hot.

17. She’s adventurous.  If you haven’t picked up on this by now, she’s the first one out the door when it’s time to explore Dayton or drive across the country to visit a friend.  We’re rarely ever home.

Brandon and Manda 18. She loves her family.  She has a huge extended family, and most of them live in the immediate vicinity of St. Louis, so they’re all very close.  It’s a lot of fun to hang out with all of them, and – no shocker here – they all love her quite a lot.

19. She has tattoos.  Not just a couple, but lots.  And she’s working on her 3/4 sleeve right now, which is blowing my mind.

20. She loves going to concerts.  And she loves getting in the Pit.  This is important.

21. She does hair for fun.  If you’ve never had Manda work on your hair, you don’t know what you’re missing.  For real.  This is one of her many forms of artistic expression.

22. She disciples really well.  If you haven’t figured it out by now, people are drawn to Manda, and she is always on the lookout for younger persons to mentor.  She does a great job of helping them to discover how to live in the story of the Gospel.

23. She serves better than anyone I know.  She is up and serving before most other people have even figured out there’s a need.  I love doing things like Target: Dayton with her, but she has an eye for the little, everyday needs that escape me.  She’s incredible!

24. She uses technology without being addicted to it (blogs, TomTom, etc.).  While I have a gadget addiction, Amanda is a lot more balanced.  She can use pieces of tech for what they do well without becoming obsessed with them (read: unlike me).  She is a great check for me in my gadget obsessions.

25. She has the Sermon on the Mount memorized.  Before she started on her 3/4 sleeve (which is Sermon on the Mount-themed), she decided to memorize the whole thing (Matthew 5-7) and spent a couple of months diligently doing so.  I’m blown away.  Impressed and in awe.  She’s so awesome!

There you have it… 25 of the 100s of reasons I love my wife.  And what about you?  What do you love about Amanda?

Engagement Session 6

A Sabbath Still Remains…

John and Amanda at our wedding rehersal. He is no doubt being sassy. You can tell because...

Third in my reflections on the life of my Grandfather, John Barnes.

In my last post, I recounted John’s work ethic – that as a young husband and father he frequently worked up to 20 hours per day.  Even as a young boy, I remember going with Grandpa to the rock quarry where he worked.  My siblings, cousins and I would spend hours climbing the giant piles of lime and gravel while John filled trucks and ran the quarry.  When we returned to the farmhouse (and, later, the house by the lake), John would spend hours outside, tending to his garden or fishing.

Old Maid is super fun. And will give small children an ulcer. Proven fact.Rook was created because some Christians refused to use face cards due to their derrivation from Tarot cards. True story!Even after he finally retired, he spent countless hours out in the Mound City community,   And while John certainly played well – he was almost always up for a game of Rook or Old Maid – I remember most that he worked.  And in the last few years, when he got more and more sick, and just couldn’t get out and work anymore, it stole away his soul.  It wasn’t a dramatic sort of thing.  He just gradually became more and more miserable.

  John was a worker, and when he couldn’t work anymore, a real and important part of him died.

Such were my thoughts as I stood under a tent at the Wesley Chapel Cemetery, surrounded by my family, all of us facing the casket that held John’s body.  I thought about John the farmer.  I thought about Adam the farmer.  And the words of Genesis 3 rang in my mind even as the minister declared, “Ashes to ashes; dust to dust”:

“Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.  By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

...of the snarky grin on his face. This mischevious grin, as well as Amanda's reaction, were common occurences.

John worked hard.  And in this, he participated in the story of Adam, the story that is our story.  By his own toil and sweat he brought forth life for his family and – through his generosity – to his community.  And in this way, John also participated in the story of the second Adam.  John’s love for those around him was evident despite his gruff exterior, and he worked hard, he sacrificed for his loved ones – his friends and his family.

So as I stood, watching his casket, tears flowing down my cheeks even as rain kissed the canvas over our heads, I recalled for myself what the writer of Hebrews said concerning that second Adam, whose own labors on behalf of us, his beloved, are finished:

“Under the old covenant, the priest stands and ministers before the altar day after day, offering the same sacrifices again and again, which can never take away sins.  But our High Priest offered himself to God as a single sacrifice for sins, good for all time. Then he sat down in the place of honor at God’s right hand.”
— Hebrews 10:11-12

I wept for my loss, for my mother and grandmother and family.  But I understood what it means to mourn as those have hope.  John was adamant that his death be marked with celebration and I left the graveside overcome by joy rather than sorrow.  Because after a long life full of work, John Barnes was finally at rest.

“So then, a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labors as God did from his.  Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest.”
— Hebrews 4:9-11

Generosity and Community, but Blunt.

The Mound City Post Office displayed this sign for a few days before the funeral. The POST OFFICE. This doesn't happen in cities. Or even big towns, for that matter.This series of posts comprise my reflections on the life of my grandfather John Barnes. The first entry is here.

A few years after John and Helen married, Eastern Kansas was struck by a pretty severe drought that left their small family in dire straights (since John was a farmer).  They were unable to pay their gas bill, but the owner of the station knew John and extended him credit for over a year until they could harvest a good crop and begin to recover from the drought.

When I first heard this story, I was overcome by the generosity of the store owner.  Such an act of kindness is far from commonplace in my culture.  Credit is offered by VISA and MasterCard, not by a local business owner, and we don’t do business with the same persons often enough that they know our names, much less vouch for our honesty and work ethic in so tangible a way.

That singular act of generosity is a window for me into John’s world; he and my grandmother were unfailingly generous as well.  I remember snippets of conversations overheard by my young ears – discussions between my mother and her brothers about some loans Grandma and Grandpa had made.  I never really knew the persons in question nor did I fully grasp what had actually transpired (I was far to busy exploring the barns or swimming in the lake to be troubled by such grownup concerns), but I do remember that they always seemed to give more than most everyone else thought they should.

I also remember when a good friend of theirs was finally dying.  Her husband had long since died, and she had no children to care for her (whether she had never had children or they were not there for some other reason I never knew), so my grandparents cared for her for a long time, visiting her several times every week and helping her to put all her affairs in order.  Small town gossip being what it is, several persons in town began to speculate that they were trying to weasel into her will.  I’ll never forget that my Grandma looked  at me and said, “I don’t know how anyone could think such a thing.  She’s our friend.”  John simply nodded his agreement.

That was John Barnes to me.  He didn’t say much.  And when he did speak, it was straight to the point (for instance, when I got my first tattoo – Hebrew on my left forearm – I knew instantly that he was not thrilled.  He asked me what it said, and when I started to tell him, he cut me off by exclaiming, “It says bulls*** to me.”  That was the first time I ever heard him cuss.)  For most of my life, I’d always taken his gruffness to be a sort of sullen anger – as my mother pointed out in her funeral reflections, he always could throw a good fit.  But in retrospect, I realize that John was just a simple man.  Not intellectually; as my uncle Jim said, “He didn’t say much, but he didn’t miss much either.”

No, I wonder if John’s simplicity was a sort of embodied honesty.  He worked hard.  He loved well.  He lived in a community that respected hard work but that caught you when you fell.  And he didn’t see much point in trying to be anything other than what he knew.

There’s an authenticity there that many of us are missing.  The communities in which we live have become so detached, so disembodied that we now have to seek out those experiences that were part-and-parcel of John’s every-day-life.  And we’re having to learn to be real in a way that he never did.

John wasn’t perfect; far from it.  And that’s the point.  If you knew John, you knew him flaws and all.  He never had a conversation about ‘taking off masks’ or ‘tearing down walls’ in his community.  I’m not sure those conversations would have even made sense to him, so far are they removed from his lived experiences.

It makes me wonder what we have to learn from actual communities actually living in community.  Where your loss is my loss and your win is my win.  I wonder what we can do to begin to reclaim that level of honesty in our lives.  I wonder how we can move back towards an embodied sense of community.

Any thoughts?

A Man of the Land

John on our wedding day... in his signature overalls and wearing yellow to match my grandma, Helen. John Barnes died on Sunday, March 20 at 2:30 am, Central Time.  He died on a hospice bed in the living room of the house he’d occupied for nearly 20 years, surrounded by his wife and two of his four children.  He was 82 years old (b. December 19, 1927) and had lived in Mound City, Kansas his whole life.

He was, among many other things, my grandfather.

And he was, among many other things, a farmer.  A man of the Land.  I learned a lot about my grandpa in the process of his death, and in the next few posts, I want to reflect on what I learned about and from him in the last few weeks of his life.

John grew up farming with his father and brother, and after he married Helen in 1950, they struck out on their own.  Soon, John bought a lime truck and began hauling lime.  His days soon looked like this:

Wake up before dawn, take lime truck to quarry and start hauling at dawn.

Home around 7:00 pm.  Eat dinner.

Farm until early morning.

Sleep a few hours.

From the stories I heard, Grandpa started out with pretty much nothing.  He worked sometimes 20 hours per day and was at the mercy of the Earth.  Some years there were drought; some years they had less.

For a man like John Barnes, the amount of work he did was directly proportional to how much he had.

This is not the world in which we live today.  The world of Office Space in which we do just enough not to get fired.  We live in a world of salaries and benefits, a world in which we are told we ‘deserve’ a certain amount based on how much education we have or the persons we know but – very rarely – the quality of work we do.

For the vast majority of us, job reviews or performance evaluations are a joke.  For John, a poor evaluation was his children’s growling stomachs.

One thing I’ve always remembered about my grandfather was that he didn’t take what he didn’t earn.  No, that’s not right.  He was a very generous man, and he had received generosity often in his life (more on this in the next post).

He accepted gifts and generosity without expecting them.

He worked as hard as he could and never felt entitled to anything.

And that’s something I took away from my grandfather’s death.  Somehow we in my generation have developed a strong sense of entitlement.  We feel the Earth owes us something, that the mere fact of our existence entitles us to health and wealth.

Our culture has become increasingly disembodied, ever further detached from the Earth that was created to sustain us.  In the hours I spent with my grandpa just before and after his death, I was able to peek into a different world, a different culture.

“And to the man he said, “Since you listened to your wife and ate from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat, the ground is cursed because of you. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it.  It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains.  By the sweat of your brow will you have food to eat until you return to the ground from which you were made. For you were made from dust, and to dust you will return.”
–Genesis 3:17-19

Bringing Sexy Back?

I want to wrap up this series by reflecting on the conversation PETA has started with these ads, and what we might learn from them.

PETA’s work is important, and worth our attention.

While I don’t agree with all of PETA’s values or methods, I believe their message and voice are important.  Our culture has made the exploitation of creation for our own convenience and pleasure the rule of the day.  We seldom give second thought to what we eat, wear or drive and how it affects the world around us.

Christians do have a responsibility to Creation, and we would get a lot further by partnering with organizations like PETA.  We don’t have to agree with everything they do, but instead of condemning them, we can offer a helpful voice of critique.  And if we listened a little bit more closely to what they’re saying we can learn something as well.

PETA’s ads raise several important questions we must take seriously.

1. When did you last give thought to where the products you use originated?

If you’re like me, the answer is: a long time ago.  I use animal products – I eat meat, I wear leather, etc.  And I’m not against killing animals as a rule.

But take a look at this horrifying video of a fur farm (if you have the stomach for it).  I don’t wear fur, but this video gave me pause because in watching it, I realized that I need to be more conscious of what I consume.  The way we treat creation says a lot about our picture of the creator, and I believe we can treat animals more humanely than they’re usually treated in our mass-production mills.  (Another great resource to get you thinking is the film Food, Inc.  You can get it on Netflix OnDemand if you’re a subscriber!)

2. What are we doing to live out our convictions?

A lot of the power of PETAs ads comes from the status of the persons they feature.  Each of these persons (allegedly) has some sort of influence over a number of other persons and they choose to leverage that influence to support a cause in which they believe.

PETA works very hard to change your mind.  They work so hard because they’re passionate about their message.  They’ll stop at nothing to save animals from unethical treatment.

I have an important message to communicate.  I’m passionate about it as well.  I bet you are too.  I want to go to the next-next level.  I want you to walk away from an encounter with my message unable to get it out of your head.  I want you to find it compelling.  I want you to mull it over for the next week (or more!).  PETA has encouraged me to step up my game.

3. Why are PETA’s ads so effective?

These ads are brilliant.  They’re smart and sexy (and for the record, I don’t think sexy has to be bad).  They communicate the same message on multiple levels and they have generated an enormous amount of attention.  I haven’t seen anyone in the Church do this effectively in a long time.

Which brings me to…

We would do well to learn from PETA’s communication techniques.

PETA is not the devil; they’re doing some good, and they’re working harder and more creatively than most faith-based organizations I’ve encountered.  They’re using the resources they have at their disposal and they’re using them well.  For me, they call to mind Jesus’ parable of the shrewd manager (Luke 16:1-12).

Listen to what PETA had to say in defense of their ad campaigns: “As for the sexy women in our ads, the silly costumes, the street tableaux and the tofu sandwich give-aways, in a world where people want to smile, can’t resist looking at an attractive image and are up for a free meal, if such harmless antics will allow one individual to reconsider their own role in exploiting animals, how can it be faulted? Yes, Peta could restrict its activities to scientific work, but how often do you read of that in the papers? It could just hand out lengthy tracts about ethics, but how many people would stop and take one, let alone read it? Any peaceful action that opens eyes, hearts and minds should be commended, not condemned.”

I would debate whether the ads truly are peaceful – there’s a violence in pornography and in misappropriation – but that (important) debate aside, notice what PETA is doing: they recognize that just talking at people doesn’t effect change, that facts and figures (and, I would add, casually quoted Bible verses) don’t move us to alter our lifestyles.  So they appeal beyond our reason, to our emotions and to our identities.

HERO-JESUS-T-Shirt-Front-Design-M I wish that within the Church our communication was more creative and intention in the ways we communicate.  I don’t think that everything PETA did in these campaigns was right, but they are effective, original and creative – three words we can seldom apply to anything coming out of the Church.

PETA’s ads make me ask, “Am I using all my creativity to generate compelling and original incarnations of the Gospel?  Am I working at what I’m communicating, or am I stuck in a rut, talking at instead of talking with?”

What we need is a better picture of healthy sexuality.

The short takeaway from this for me is: Until we as Christians develop a healthy picture of sexuality that is indebted more to thoughtful exegesis of Scripture than it is to traditional (read: Western, post-industrial revolution) gender roles and unreasonable, culturally-formed sexual expectations, we’ll never be able to do anything more than stomp our feet and throw a temper-tantrum when we discover cultural texts such as the PETA ads.  To borrow a line from Andy Crouch, our posture will always be one of condemnation, never one of critique and certainly not one of creativity.

And we desperately need creative and clever pictures of healthy sexuality in our culture right now.  If this study has taught me nothing else, it’s how broken we all are, how fully our culture screws up our picture of what it means to be sexually healthy.  I don’t have much of an idea of what this looks like yet, but it’s something I’m exploring pretty heavily for an upcoming series of posts.

For now, though, I’d really like to hear your thoughts about what constitutes a healthy sexuality.  Pretty please?

Coda: Better Late than Never?

One last note – one of PETA’s more recent campaigns is “Ink not Mink”, which features various tattoo-bearing celeb in an anti-fur message.  And best of all, most of them are male – from R&B artist Mario and rocker Tommy Lee to “Miami Ink”’s Ami James and “Jackass” star Steve-O.  And, of course, Dennis Rodman.  The ads are no less pornographic (with the possible exception of Steve-O, who is just absurd), but at least including men in the ads is more… balanced?

And in case any of you are unsure, these pictures are great examples are what NOT to do.

In A Godda Da Vida

In this series, I’m exploring a recent series of ad campaigns by PETA.  The ads are striking for their use of nude (or nearly so) minor-celebrities to creatively and cleverly promote various aspects of animal rights.  The first post explored PETA’s use of sexually suggestive imagery and text such that the models are dehumanized and thereby relegated to the moral level of animal.  The second post dealt more specifically with the “Angels to Animals” campaign in which (I argue) PETA misappropriates Christian religious imagery and language (the cross, rosary, concept of ‘savior’ and others).

In one regard, I believe I have not clearly communicated my intentions in this series of posts.  I do not believe that PETA is engaging in this advertising campaign maliciously.  I want to argue that these ads are indicative of larger cultural trends: we are dehumanizing ourselves through our (mis)use of sexuality and we are losing the unique and significant meanings of our Christian symbols.  PETA is not a Christian organization and so has no reason NOT to undertake this campaign. From a non-Christian perspective, the ads are, frankly, brilliant.  But more on THAT in the last post (coming next week).

The Eve of a New Day

Today, I want to focus on one last ad-campaign with which I’d like to dialogue: the “Turn Over a New Leaf” campaign.  The text of the ads is fairly innocuous by itself – ‘turning over a new leaf’ is a common idiom in our culture for trying something new, and the ads suggest that we try Vegetarianism.  So far, so good.  But I find fascinating how they’ve chosen to use their models.  Here are model/actress Pamela Anderson and actress actress Maggie Q.  Both women’s essential parts are covered in lettuce leaves, and they bear an uncanny resemblance to Eve, our first mother who gets a bad rap for – well, most of the rest of Western History.

Why use Eve?  She’s a complicated figure even within the Biblical text, and 6,000+ years of human history has only made her more complex.  Today she is both an object of scorn and a paragon of feminist virtue, an uber-woman who long ago escaped the texts in which we meet her to roam across our culture leaving a powerful impression.  For some Feminists, she’s become the ultimate example of choosing to embrace advancement against the threat of patriarchy.  As Lilian Barger argues in Eve’s Revenge:

Rubens_-_Adam_et_Eve[1]This act of eating forbidden fruit has in recent years been seen as a ritual of empowerment within feminist theology.  In this reinterpretation, the first woman is said to have been exercising power over her own life and challenging the existing order.  Through ritual eating of an apple we follow the first woman in an act of subversion, encouraged to overthrow the oppressive patriarchal power that has dominated us (136).

Is it a stretch to see in these ads this Eve, this empowering symbol?  I don’t think so; in fact, to use Eve in this way is clever and subversive in its own right.  Cruelty of any kind is often viewed as a male trait, albeit a lesser, undesirable one (see, for instance, the writings of Grace Janzten).  Vegetarianism, on the other hand, is often touted for its many health, ethical and social justice benefits.  It’s a short step from there to imagine that vegetarianism is, well, a little bit more evolved than omnivorism (quick shout out to my Veggi-minded friends who have never once made me feel this way for enjoying my steak!).

lisa_vegetarian[1] So Ladies, are you unhappy with your life?  Or perhaps more pointedly, given the ad’s choice of models, are you unhappy with your Self?  Then it’s time to go, girl!  Time to recreate yourself, to unleash the kind, clever, strong and beautiful woman trapped inside!  Turn over a new leaf and stop eating meat!  You’ll look and feel better than ever before.

This model of Eve is not the most healthy or helpful model available to us.

This rebel-against-patriarchy is not the most helpful picture of Eve.  In fact, I think the Genesis 2 narrative offers both men and women a more helpful answer to patriarchy.  I don’t have space for a full exegesis here, but briefly:

Genesis 1:27 reveals that the image of God is both male and female – that neither is complete without the other, and that both are necessary to embody the fullness of God’s image.  Genesis 2 affirms this by stating that “It’s not good that the man is alone.”  Woman is introduced as the man’s ezer, a Hebrew word that means ‘ally’, ‘partner’ or even ‘savior’ in other biblical texts.  It’s not until Genesis 3 we see hierarchy (read: patriarchy) introduced into the text.  As a result of the Fall, God tells the woman that her “desire will be for the man and he will rule over you.”  In this reading, patriarchy is the consequence of our choice – both Adam and Eve’s.  And more importantly, it’s a choice that is reversed at the Cross.  The church is meant to be a place in which gender is no longer linked to power (as Paul points out in Galatians 3:28).

So what’s wrong with the PETA ads?

Is PETA buying into the image of Eve-as-rebel?  I think so.  The message I see in these ads is a call to reinvent yourself in your Mother’s image, as a Vegetarian (is this a subtle appeal to Ken Hamm’s pals?).  Our path to overcoming patriarchy and (re)creating ourselves as stronger, moral persons runs through the Cross.  We don’t recreate ourselves, reverse the curse we brought down on ourselves.  We are renewed, regenerated, recreated through Jesus, who is even now making all things new.

image Of course, I don’t fault PETA for not creating advertisements consistent with a Christian worldview.  They’re not a Christian organization.

I wonder what might happen if we try to recover Eve as a model not of rebellious or anti-religious womanhood, but as a model of good and pure humanity, an example for both men and women to follow?  A model of a person who chose unwisely, but who through self-sacrifice and faith can be rescued from death.

Truthfully, I’m not sure a PETA ad inspired by that Eve would look a whole lot different.  So maybe I’m reading too much into these ads.  But they’ve at least given me pause to reflect on my own idea of gender roles.

To what sort of Eve are you drawn?  Does she figure prominently (or at all) in your theology or spirituality?

Next time: I want to take a step back and reflect on the issues this series has raised.  I’ll talk about what I really like in PETA’s ads and a bit more generally about what I think a healthy Christian response should be.