thoughts
High enough anxiety
Earlier today a post came across Bluesky that stopped me short. Canadian author Ryan North put it this way:
All pleasures are guilty pleasures if you have high enough anxiety
Now, as far as I know, North is just trying (with some reasonable success) to be funny. But as a former evangelical this single line sums up the angst of modern neo-Calvinism as well as anything I’ve ever seen.
The core conflict of the neo-Reformed theology I spent most of my adult life with was that for all the assertions that God controls and predestines everything, serious believers should have an ongoing concern, verging on fear, that they are not doing enough. Not living piously enough. Not evangelizing enough. Not spending enough time in prayer and Scripture. Not having theological arguments honed well enough. In one breath the pastor would say “you can’t do anything about whether you’re one of the elect or not, it’s all God’s decision if you are saved” and in the next would say “if you’re not doing X or Y or Z you should probably be worried about whether or not you’re actually one of God’s elect”.
Neo-Reformed guiding light John Piper is a sterling example of this sort of divinely-inspired angst. Listen to any sermon of his, read any book, watch any interview, and you will get the sense of a man who is driven with a wretched, endless anxiety about his relationship to God. He’s always on edge, always afraid that he (and by extension, you, his listener) might be knowingly or unknowingly Wasting Your Life or Wasting Your Cancer or wasting your Retirement or missing What Jesus Demands or not Delighting In God or not Desiring God enough. Joy comes with the companion fear that the joy might be misplaced or appreciated a little too much. There is very little chill or rest or peace or pleasure that comes across there.
And let’s face it, friends: if you take the evangelical teaching on eternal conscious torment seriously, it’s hard to see how you could not live that anxiously all the time. Is there even a minute chance that you, or someone you love, is going to experience ultimate torture for all eternity? How could that not make you anxious? How could you ever enjoy life?
My therapist likes to say that there are two basic types of religion: one that has a goal to control, and one who has a goal of life enhancement. It’s a sign of how steeped I was in anxious evangelicalism that I had a visceral reaction to “life enhancement” as a religious goal. Isn’t that self-centered? Wouldn’t that make God mad? Shouldn’t we be God-centered instead?
It took several years of detox under other Christian teachers to find that I could actually be a Christian with a level of peace and chill that seems more in line with what Jesus seemed to be hoping for his followers. It doesn’t include the fear that God is going to eternally torture anyone. It does allow me to think about sin, healing, forgiveness, and godliness in terms of how our behavior encourages or hampers human flourishing. Suddenly the Gospel feels like real “good news” - not in the “hey if you’re desperately lucky and get stuff right you might avoid eternal damnation but you’re not gonna be sure about that until you die” sense but in the “wow that makes me smile and breathe easier” sense.
Friends, if you find yourself in a church that stokes your anxiety about whether or not God loves and will accept you: it doesn’t have to be that way. Jesus came that we might have abundant life (which sounds an awful lot like “life enhancement”, now that I think about it), and gave us peace. Let’s not let anxious teaching rob that from us.
Image credit: Anxiety by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images
A couple recommended newsletter reads
Quick recommendations for a couple things I’ve read lately that are worth a few minutes of your time:
Diana Butler Bass’s most recent newsletter essay On Statues, History, Politics, and Division. In discussing the removal of Confederate statues across the South, she hits on a resonant phrase.
Not long after the Richmond bronzes and marbles had been removed, I was in the city speaking at a church. The pastor, a religious leader who agreed with their removal, asked me: “Have you driven down Monument Avenue yet?”
“No,” I replied, “I’ve haven’t been there recently.”
“It is stark, emotionally powerful in a different way,” he said. “You look down the road and the statues are all gone. There are empty altars everywhere.”
Empty altars everywhere. That captures the spirit of the age, doesn’t it?
Second: Andrew Osenga’s latest, American Christianity is a CyberTruck. He looks at the sad scandal of Robert Morris and some online discussion of a modern worship song that says “praise is the water my enemies drown in” and pulls the threads together this way:
The commercialization of Christian culture has led us to sacrifice wisdom for influence, and thus we are losing both.
These songs and leaders (and books and conferences, etc etc) might get us where we want to go - a big church, a #1 single, a senate seat - but to anybody outside our little circle, it just looks ridiculous.
They don’t take our faith seriously, because we have not taken our faith seriously.
The CyberTruck might get you to Target, but people are going to roll their eyes when you get there.
I don’t know what kind of car Jesus would drive, but I do know that He has asked me to love my enemies, to pray for those who persecute me, to give what I can to the poor, and to pick up my cross and follow Him.
What if the world saw a young pastor turn himself in for his sexual abuse, offer his guilty plea, do his jail time and then live the rest of his life quietly doing good and serving others? What fruit might grow from that true repentance?
What if, rather than weapons or drowning, our big sing-along songs were about loving those who persecute us? How might that change the nature of our cultural conversations?
In many ways it feels like the sun is setting on a particular era of American Christian empire. Its leaders are crumbling like pillars of sand and the institutions feel like empty shopping malls.
In the grief and pain of so much damage, may our tears water new fruits of kindness and humility, thoughtfulness and wisdom. The world doesn’t need Jesus-brand products, it needs to see Jesus in our eyes, hear Him in our language, and feel Him in our actions.
Yes and amen.
In Praise of Humble, Gentle Men
This morning a headline came across my social media feed, with a link to a remarkable interview with actor Sir Patrick Stewart, best known for playing Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation for seven seasons. In this interview with NPR reporter Rachel Martin, Stewart describes his time playing Picard with strong religious tones. When Martin noted that many Star Trek fans treat the show with almost a religious reverence, Stewart said this:
Yes. I see it very, very clearly and very strongly. It was about truth and fairness and honesty and respect for others, no matter who they were or what strange alien creature they looked like. That was immaterial. They were alive. And if they needed help, Jean Luc Picard and his crew, his team, were there to give it.
In a sense, we were ministers. And I have heard now so many times from individuals who have been honest enough and brave enough to tell me aspects of their life, of their health, of their mental health. And how it was all saved and improved by watching every week.
I came to ST:TNG right about the time it finished airing, and eventually caught up via VHS recordings. And while I may not be a full-blown Trekkie, TNG is my comfort watch. At its best, the Star Trek series—and especially TNG—portrayed an optimistic future where technology and diplomacy had taken care of systemic social issues; where the leading adults were grown-ups who behaved responsibly, admitted their faults, and worked for the greater good.
None was better in this regard than Stewart’s Captain Picard. He was the best of what you as a man might want to be - an accomplished leader, an artist, a man who put his crew’s needs before his own and held to his principles even when it cost him dearly. In a world of entertainment where so many actors turn out to be real scuzzballs in their personal lives, seeing Stewart reach old age and maintain, by all accounts, his reputation as a man of integrity, it’s hard not to feel his real-life person and his onscreen role merge just a little bit. It warms my heart to see this acclaimed example of a good man.
Whether Stewart attracted good people or just rubbed off on them I don’t know, but the men who acted around Stewart have also continued to display honorable attributes long after the show was done. Wil Wheaton, who played the teenager Wesley Crusher on the show, recounts in his memoir how Stewart and Jonathan Frakes (Commander Will Riker) were men who showed him what a real father should be like after Wheaton’s own parents abused him. And then there’s Levar Burton, who for the seven years of ST:TNG, and for 16 more years around it, hosted Reading Rainbow, encouraging a love of books and reading to children via public television.
None of these men went on to build great empires; none needed to play (or try to be, in real life) overly macho men. And yet here, decades later, they are beloved by so many simply because they have maintained integrity in their lives as men of gentleness and humility.
These led me to think about another humble, gentle man who I’ve written about before who fits the same mold, and who spent decades on television in a similar way. I’m talking, of course, about Fred Rogers. Again we have a man who in most ways wouldn’t live up to the expectations of American masculinity, but who portrayed love, care, generosity, and humility in a way that was as fully genuine in person as it was on the screen.
I can almost hear the response pieces being written at Christian outlets like The Gospel Coalition already. Clearly, they’d say, that as nice as Stewart seems, his “ministry” is some sort of false gospel since, well, he doesn’t believe in God. They’d say all his righteousness is false. They’d say he supports liberal social causes and calls himself a feminist, so clearly he’s problematic.
I have been out of evangelicalism long enough to not care what TGC says any more, but having steeped in it for so long, and having had so many people dear to me who embrace that kind of thinking, I want to offer an alternate take. It goes like this:
We don’t need to put scare quotes around “good” when we talk about men like Stewart, Frakes, or Burton. We recognize admirable characteristics in them because they are there. I might even crib a list that includes things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self control…
Now here’s where I’m gonna get all heretical. If these men (or other people like them) are demonstrating the characteristics that Christians know as “fruit of the Spirit”, I’m gonna say that this is evidence of God’s spirit working in them and through them. They may not acknowledge it as such, or even that such a thing exists. But if God is “over all and in all and through all” (Ephesians 4), then does it have to be a big stretch to acknowledge people who model the virtues and priorities that Jesus taught, even if they ascribe them to somewhere else?
The freedom of seeing that God is truly reconciling the whole world has led to a glorious freedom to recognize, admire, and love the good in others without feeling the need to nit pick their theological beliefs. Those who practice the fruit of the Spirit, who do justly and love mercy, who cry out for the poor and oppressed—they will find entering the fulness of the kingdom of God to only be a gentle step from (to borrow Paul’s words) worshiping in ignorance to worshiping in knowledge. Those who carefully articulate a theological line while modeling arrogance, hostility, and gracelessness, though, may find the kingdom to be a bit more of an adjustment.
A justice not to be feared but to be longed for
Here is my servant, whom I uphold
my chosen, in whom my soul delights
I have put my spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his teaching.
Isaiah 42:1-4, NRSV
Often when I have read this passage or ones like it my first inclination is to think of this “justice” being established as a punishing sort of justice. God sends his servant, the Messiah, to justly deal with sin by punishing the bad guys. That’s largely how we’ve been taught, at least within my faith tradition, to think about God’s justice - as something punitive and to be feared.
But then we get to Matthew 12.
The Pharisees confront Jesus about his disciples picking grain on the sabbath. Jesus rebukes the Pharisees. “If you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.” Jesus then goes into the synagogue and provokes them further by healing a man on the sabbath. Which drives the Pharisees to start conspiring how to destroy Jesus.
When Jesus became aware of this [that the Pharisees were conspiring to destroy him], he departed. Many crowds followed him, and he cured all of them, and he ordered them not to make him known. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah:
“Here is my servant, whom I have chosen,
my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased.
I will put my Spirit upon him,
and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.
He will not wrangle or cry aloud,
nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.
He will not break a bruised reed
or quench a smoldering wick
until he brings justice to victory.
And in his name the Gentiles will hope.”
Matthew 12:15-21, NRSV
This brought me up short when I read it this morning. This is what it looked like for Jesus to bring forth and establish justice. He rebuked the abusive religious traditions and hypocritical religious teachers. He healed. He didn’t just heal a few of them - read the words! “He cured all of them”!
What if, when we think about God’s justice, this is what comes to mind? Not a fearsome, punishing justice against sinners, but a loving restoration? A rebuke of abusive tradition? Jesus taking broken lives and bodies and making them whole? A justice that says ‘this is not how things were intended to be, and so I am making things right again’?
This is a justice not to be feared but to be longed for.
Zierman: Making Room for Others
Well, now, this from Addie Zierman is lovely:
Our hearts are made like pendulums, and when we swing away from one thing, we tend to end up on the far opposite site. Passionate devotion to a certain viewpoint turns to total disdain, even embarrassment. I can’t believe that used to make sense to me. I can’t believe I used to say “epic” so much. I can’t believe I wore a t-shirt with a giant bloody picture of Jesus on the cross on the front. To school. (“He did this for you,” the t-shirt said.) It’s easy to be hard on the person you were; it’s easier still to be hard on the people who are still there, who still see it this way, who still find comfort in the phrases that make you chafe. It’s easy to believe that they’re wrong and you’re right; that they’re stuck, and you’re enlightened. It’s easy to look back at them with a mix of pity and pride, as though they are somehow behind you on the journey. I don’t think that’s true.
A good reminder for all of us on our faith journeys. Worth reading the whole thing.
'Perfect' is just my pathetic attempt to hide
Comedian Marc Maron has a fantastic recent podcast episode where he interviews jazz pianist Ben Sidran.
In the midst of a long, fascinating discussion about jazz and rock music and the music scene of the 60’s and 70’s, Maron and Sidran has this interchange that’s really about more than just music [starting at about 36:20 on the podcast]:
Sidran: In jazz you can spend 8 hours a day blowing through a copper tube, right, and I promise you that after 10 years that tube will not change, but you will be totally transformed.
We’re transforming ourselves here, and you can’t do it if you’re not in public. If you can’t make your mistakes in front of people, it doesn’t matter, so what? You can’t make a mistake alone and you’re sitting there with friends - you gotta go out and hang it out.
Maron: That’s getting lost in the culture we live in now, across the board - there’s an expectation of quality content to be provided at all times, and if you do let it hang out and it doesn’t go well, you’ve got an entire culture of people who are gonna be ‘Aaah, he didn’t, you know, he let it hang out and he’s an a**hole, and it didn’t work’, and now that’s out there being misinterpreted.
Here we are as human beings looking for personal truths, willing to make mistakes in public and fight the good fight, and you’ve got a bunch of a**holes who are gonna be, like, ‘well, you didn’t quite do it, did you?’. Well that’s part of the thing! We’re at risk of losing what is organically human in the creative process.
Sidran: Well that’s the same thing in the music business, especially as you get further and further into digital technology, it’s possible to fix it. You know, just because it’s possible to make something perfect doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
Maron: What is “perfect”, right?
Sidran: What is “perfect”. Perfect is just your pathetic attempt to hide in the technology, right? “Ooh, I made a mistake.” But the stuff that we love is, for me, and I’ll bet it’s the same in comedy - it’s not so much avoiding the mistakes but how you recover from mistakes.
Like if you’re in public and you do something and you didn’t intend to do it and the first thought in your mind is “shit, what did I just do?”, if you can train yourself to say “I’m gonna make something out of that”, in that recovery there is transcendence, and people have a sense that something magical just happened. It’s in the recovery. It’s not in being perfect, it’s in letting it all come through and using it.
Maron: Right, I love it. I never thought about it like that. Like every moment of misstep is an opportunity to transcend that moment.
There’s so much truth there, and the spiritual application isn’t far off, whether Maron and Sidran know it or not. Each of us as Christians have our own experiences of pain and failure to work through - some greater than others. (My mind immediately went to recent pieces from blog friends Aaron Smith and Zach Hoag, just two of many.)
And while our ultimate hope is for the day when Jesus will restore us from brokenness and transform us into something beautiful, new, and eternal, we see temporal glimpses of that transformation as God works in us now, in the responses that Maron and Sidner talk about here.
In the recovery, we see transcendence. Something holy working to heal and transform.
If you can’t make your mistakes in public, what does it matter? How much do I really believe in grace if I want to go into the studio and edit all the mistakes out of my life before I show it in public?
“Perfect” is just my pathetic attempt to hide. It’s not in being “perfect”, because perfect is impossible. Often due to my own failings - sometimes due to the failings of others who have hurt me. Where we see the transcendent, though, is when we let all of that through, and then see God working and shining through the brokenness.
Jesus as the great "I Got You"
Far down in the comments on an excellent post on cross-gender friendships (which is worth reading in its' own right) is this paragraph by commenter Andrew:
…I love the stories of Jesus. As you probably know, he is always telling people to leave their work, their money, their families–all the things tied to very worldly desires, ones often thought to be fixed into the very nature of what it means to be human. Jesus steps between those narratives that seek to tell us what our nature is, and he tells us to leave it all to follow him. “Not that,” he says, “Me.” “Don’t worry about that,” he says, “I’ll take care of it.”
He is the great “I Got You.”
What a great expression of Jesus' promise of provision as he calls us to unreservedly follow him.