Sarcastic Lutheran

we believe the things we want to believe

Yesterday we went to the small Texas town where my husband's mother was raised.  3 of the 4 siblings still live there along with their spouses, children and grandchildren.  They are so committed to family that even the city slickers passing through merit a meet up.  They greeted us warmly and were so sweet and welcoming to us.  The kids played with their 2nd cousins and the adults visited.

It was a foreign cultural environment for me, this small town Texas scene: aesthetically, culinarily, politically,  socially.  But we are family and they were so loving to us.

The conversation was difficult to navigate.  There were offensive racial slurs, a mention that everyone should carry side arms, an insistence that there is a reliable list of 35 people who Bill and Hilary Clinton have had murdered, and a moment where someone said that "those people" crossing the border should learn English like our ancestors did.

So what am I to do?  Do I remain silent and unspeakably uncomfortable?  Do I go blow for blow with counter arguments?  Do I alienate my children's relatives and insist we leave?  In the end I did mention that Lutheran church services in Texas were still held in German long, long after the first Germans came over.  And to the Clinton death list I said "Well, the internet is dangerous".  Matthew said "hey, come on now" to the not-printable racial slurs, but mostly we just tried to change the subject to the kids or the weather.  On the ride back to Austin Matthew and I had an interesting conversation.

Here's the deal: I was having a hard time feeling gracious about his relatives, but felt conflicted too because they obviously are nice, loving folks.  I wanted to extend some grace, but instead kept thinking they were just idiots to believe such nonsense.  But that's ultimately a dissatisfying  explanation. I kept coming back to why do they believe what they believe and why do I believe what I beleive? 

We believe who we want to believe.

I want to believe that the super-duper smart people with graduate degrees who travel the world and work for NPR (National Public Radio) for the most part are a reliable source for information.  Why do I believe this?  Because they reflect who I am,  just more so.  Matthew's relatives want to believe that local conservative talk radio personalities who are rural and not some fancy intellectuals are reliable sources for information.  Why?  Because they reflect who they are, only more so.

That's possibly one part of it, the other part of it is that we believe what we want to believe.

The want to believe that a black man with a name like Osama is a Muslim who wants to infiltrate the US government and bring us all down.  They want to believe that guns make people safer.  They want to believe that everyone gets a fair shake and that if you are in a bad situation then it's your own fault.  They want to believe that Whites are supperior to Blacks.  They want to believe that Jesus would agree with
 them.

I want to believe that a black man can be president and bring hope and renewal into the corrupt power structure of the US government.  I want to believe that political conservatives are just basically selfish and more than anything want to horde wealth and power for themselves.  I want to believe that liberals want justice for the earth and other people.  I want to believe that Jesus would agree with me.

We all just believe who and what we want to belive and then we tell ourselves it's The Truth.

Dear God,
Thanks for being more gracious than any of the rest of us.  We're a mess.
In Jesus' name,
AMEN

God's Politics Blog Posting

I seem to be spending so much of my time writing: sermons, the TBN book, articles, stuff for hire, and the God's Politics Blog.  I'm sorry to my half a dozen faithful readers....no time to blog.  I will soon.

For now check out my God's Politics posting

Pax,
Nadia

Detroit

Ryan Torma (minister of community life at Spirit Garage in Minneapolis) and I spent the last two days in Detroit. The Bishop's office there is looking at the possibility of an emerging church plant near Wayne State University and wanted our input. First of all...heaps of praise to these people (synod staff, local clergy, outreach board, Episcopal and Lutheran campus ministry) for casting a vision for something they are new to and are only in the begining stages of learning about! There's a good scene there that would lend itself well to postmodern Christian community.

Jack Eggleston from the Bishop's office drove us around downtown Detroit and I still don't quite know how to process what I saw. It was like a bombed out war zone. There were large areas with more abandoned buildings than occupied, including neighborhoods with large victorian homes which hinted at their previous beauty but are now burned up, decimated and raw. These are truly the abdandoned places of empire. Detroit never quite recovered from the race riots of the 1960's and the "White Flight" from the inner city drained the area of needed resources and infastructure. Today in Detroit, one block will be abandoned and another will hold a row of new lofts. One block will have only a run down liquor store with barred windows and the next will host a new gallery and hipster bar. I guess it felt weird to say to them that yeah, there's a happenin' arts and music scene and the creative class are moving back to the city, and then have nothing to say about the death and hopelessness surrounding the "hip scene". The whole experience was darkly and unavoidably punctuated by a reality I would rather not know about...but don't have the option of ignoring anymore.

I don't even have a prayer for this. Do any of you?

Thanksgiving

We had a REALLY "traditional" Thanksgiving!
We had some Native American friends over who shared their traditional foods with us.
After dinner, we liquored 'em up and screwed 'em in a real estate deal.
Traditional Thanksgiving indeed.

Will the real homosexuals please stand up?

Mark Driscoll, perhaps the biggest buffoon in American Christianity has blamed Ted Haggard's scandal on ... WOMEN! The lengths this guy will go to to hate and fear women is amazing. We should meet, don't you think?
He claims that:
1) only men should pastor churches so that they aren't tempted by their vixon/Jezabel co-pastors...perhaps this would have been a better argument if he claimed that male prostitute meth dealers should not co-pastor churches, so that closeted hypocritical self-hating men aren't tempted to have lurid affairs with them.
2) that if pastors wives didn't let themselves go and get old, fat and ugly then closeted, hypocritical, self-hating men wouldn't have to have lurid affairs with male prostitute meth dealers.

Clearly Mark Driscoll is one of the foremost thinkers in the church today, a true genius.

There is a conversation on emerging women on this.

Dear God,
Your church is a mess beacuse of Mark Driscoll, Ted Haggard and me...in equal measure. Help us to confess our sins as the church so that we can more clearly live the Gospel in this broken hurting world and in our own broken hurting lives.
Have Mercy on us.
In Jesus' name,
AMEN.

The whole "gay" thing

There is a discussion about homosexuality on emerging women

Here are my comments I posted:

There are those of us out here who read the passages from the Bible that pertain to homosexuality as condemning sexual violence, not gay people.

In my theological purview it is difficult to picture a God who would not support love and commitment in a world so desperately in need of both.

I don't think God cares about sex. I think God cares about hurting others and hurting ourselves (through sex, words, images, consumption, commerce, you name it)

I am deeply committed to a denomination who does not allow non-celebate homosexuals to serve in ordained positions and this is deeply difficult for me. I have (as have many others) decided I love the Lutheran church too much to leave it as it is. We will not be silent, or silenced.

The whole "love the sinner, hate the sin" in reference to gays is total bull-shit to me. We could say this about abusive partners, the promiscuous (straight or gay), white collar criminals, any other collar criminal etc. But not gay people, or short people or Republicans, or people with bad hair (no matter how much we'd like to)

Can we please stop using scripture to proof-text our own bigotry...it has also been used to keep women out of ordained ministry, to uphold the legitimacy of slave-holding, to justify genocide etc...Find something else to help you hate who you hate.

Bonhoeffer is a total Rock Star

It would be difficult for me to be less of a poetry person, but I picked up Voices in the Night: The Prison Poems of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (edited and translated by Edwin Robertson) this morning and read this:

Christians and Others ("others" can also be translated as "Pagans")

1. All go to God in their distress,
seek help and pray for bread and happiness,
deliverance from pain, guilt and death.
ALL do, Christians and others.

2. ALL go to God in His distress,
find him poor, reviled without shelter or bread,
watch him tormented by sin, weakness, and death.
Christians stand by God in His agony.

3. God goes to ALL in their distress,
satisfies body and soul with His bread,
dies, crucified for all, Christians and others
and both alike forgiving.

I may have to rethink my distaste for poetry. Holy shit this is good stuff. Bonhoeffer is such a rock star to me. If you don't know who he is, it is worth finding out - he wrote this and volumes of theology while imprisoned by the Nazis (who later executed him) for his involvement in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler. He was a powerful voice of resistance to not only the Nazi Party, but the church in which he was a pastor - a church that was silently complicit in the death of millions.

In the commentary on the next page, Robertson says that soon after writing this poem Bonhoeffer said in a letter that: "It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but the participation in the suffering of God in the world."

Robertson goes on to say:

By now Bonhoeffer had observed Christians and others, finding, as he said, that it was easier to talk about God with unbelievers than with Christians. One is reminded of the answer given by Jurgen Moltmann to the question, "are you, then, a Universalist?" to which as a good Calvinist he had to say "No!", but he added, "I sometimes suspect that God is."

I'm thinking this will be what we discuss at Theology Pub this Thursday.

My lunch with Madeline Albright

ok, so there were 400 other people there, but here are my favorite quotes from our former Secretary of State:
"The difference between Abraham Lincoln and George Bush is that Lincoln thought America should be on God's side and Bush thinks that God is on America's side."

"Women need to work hard. There is no room from mediocre women at the top, as we know, this is not true for men."

I'm looking forward to reading her new book The Mighty and the Almighty