We fear they will be slaughtered sheep and we fear they will become wolves, and we feel helpless.

Some of us celebrated the capture of a Boston bomber because now we get to kill him. We celebrate because our yearning for vengeance runs deep, and our desire to know that we are not ourselves monsters runs deeper. That boy is a monster and so is the one who murdered all those children in Connecticut and so is the one who gunned down people in a Colorado movie theater. Something in them is broken and they are not human.

We need to believe this. We need to kiss our children as they sleep, and know they are normal, that it’s the severely broken who do unspeakable things, and our own can’t be broken like that because even now we would know, we would peer into their eyes and see the deadness there and we would know.

Instead we see their eyes filled up with love and so they can’t be monsters, not now or ever, because monsters could never have loved anyone, not even their own mothers and fathers.

Their mothers and fathers. What hell must it be, to gaze at a picture of your child, and know it would have been better had you strangled him in his crib? What hell to wonder what you did wrong, to wonder if he was always broken or if it was you who broke him, to wonder if this blood is on your hands, if the fires of hell burn hot for the child you wrongly raised?

What hell, what hell, and if all this doesn’t keep you on your knees for your children then you haven’t considered what world awaits them, how it hungers to make them wolves and slaughtered sheep in equal measure.

This world hungers, and we parents weep, and we pray that our pleading is heard, that if there is something in us that can be altered so they can be spared, God will alter it; that if our flesh might be torn in place of theirs, God might rend it; that if sheep must be slain, God will pass over our own, because the cost is more than we can bear.

For years, his demons made the boy tear his own clothes, hurl himself into the fire, leap into the sea’s deep waters. For years, his father kept him close, no doubt despite those who hissed in his ear: “This is because of your sin.” Religious experts couldn’t help the boy, priests couldn’t save the boy. That boy was helpless and without hope and still his father persevered, even where others would have let him perish, or would have bound him in a graveyard like the Gadarenes.

Then comes this roving, raving miracle-worker, and the father says to him: “But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” The father is weary and wary. He has seen miracle-workers before.

“If you can believe,” Christ replies, “all things are possible to him who believes.”

If. Who hasn’t lain awake at night, tormented by this if? We want to believe there is a good God who can spare our children the horrors of these recent days. Yet this same God allowed horrors for those parents, for their children. The gulf of if is wider than faith, sometimes.

“Lord,” cries the father, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

This is every parent, each of us believing our children will be safe, each of us struggling against the fear they will be anything but safe. We believe and we disbelieve and we pray the kingdom of heaven comes soon, for it belongs to such as these, and we who are no longer children have made such a wreck of it. We pray he will remember our children, that he will save them in spite of us. We pray in belief and we pray against disbelief, and we pray that he is listening.

Sheep and wolves is a post from: Sand in the Gears

Imagine that. Millions of people, many of them knowing not the first words of orthodox praise, harboring scant knowledge of theology, yet all of them whispering back to the whisper within their spirits, imitating the God they may only know, many of them, as the urge to arrange words in verse, the craving to strum a power chord with the amp cranked up high, the yearning to dance because sunlight has come pouring through the windows in a slant that overwhelms our adult insistence on having a reason for joy.

What ought to make us weep are not scores of sentimental poetry blogs, but the crowds of teenagers who neither read nor write, who consume one another in gossip and scarcely articulate conversation, who create nothing and feel no yearning to create.

You can read the rest here.

Everybody dance now is a post from: Sand in the Gears

Mitt Romney referred to “binders of women” considered for government positions, and it was proof of his latent paternalism, his sexist treatment of women as objects to be stored away until useful in the schemes of men. Now we know what Romney really believes.

We love this game. Maybe it’s an enduring fascination with detective stories, or the persistent influence of Freudianism. Maybe it’s the notion among journalists that real reporting is unearthing some reeking black secret, rather than learning enough about their subject to explain it well. Maybe it’s just that ugly little things buried in the souls of others make our own souls feel less sullied.

Whatever the impetus, we all know the game, which is to dissect a person’s words in order to reveal hidden truths. Journalists do it. Politicians do it. Preachers do it. Lawyers excel at it. If we can’t find an outright slip of the tongue, we’ll just yank some words out of their context, or extract them from a moment of weakness or anger.

When the opportunity arises, I show my sons how a lie can be told with the truth. “Your brother just called you ‘the worst brother in the world,’” I’ll note, “but he was smiling when he said it. Would you be lying if you told someone tomorrow that your brother called you that?”

“No. But also yes.”

“That’s right. We can report exactly what someone said, and be liars in the process.”

They nod. I tell them about Satan, using that favored method of modern theologians, prooftexting, to tempt Christ to hurl himself from the heights. Christ’s reply illustrates that when we offer a truth absent its counterpart, we are simply telling a clever lie.

In which case we’re all liars, every child of God and the devil, because we’ve all uttered, more often than we care to admit, truths without their counterparts.

My friend lied about me (and stood up for me when other people said I was a jerk).

My father ignored me (and kept food on the table and a roof over my head).

My daughter never calls (and she’s taking care of two toddlers day and night).

My pastor’s sermons are so judgmental (and he is the first one there when someone is gravely sick or dying).

There is ugliness in everyone, and there is the light of God, and maybe the part we choose to see says more about us than it does our target. We see the worst in people we don’t like because it’s not enough that they be wrong, we need them to be evil, because if they are evil then we are good, and each of us desperately wants to be on the side of the angels, if only because, deep down, each of us knows how often he’s aided demons.

Grace is in order. Would it make a man less wrong, or me more right, if I point out his error without making him the devil, too? No, but giving that up means I’m no longer coasting on the false sainthood called Not Being Them. It means I’m back to working out my own salvation with fear and trembling.

Which is probably where each of us needs to be, working out his own salvation, rather than searching for signs that his enemies have forsaken theirs.

The lies in truth is a post from: Sand in the Gears

Deadened by a toxic mix of drinking, self-pity, and stressful work, I felt too stupid and unworthy to speak. Maybe I still am. Someone like me doesn’t have any authority to hold forth on what Christ really meant, or how a life should be lived, or what it is to love rightly.

If you want to hear about failure, though, I am your man. I can tell you about days without shaving because I didn’t want to look myself in the mirror. About the gallons of whiskey. About a trail of women. About a gun in my hand and being too cowardly to pull the trigger, not restrained by love of my own children, even, just fear of what comes after the recoil and flash.

Even now, in this sober and prayerful place, I have been reticent to write of these stirrings in my heart, because my heart is such a faithless instrument.

A falsity I embraced is that only righteous men can say good and true things. This misconception was one vein of a deep-rooted arrogance within me. I believed I was righteous and enlightened and God-ordained to speak truth. I believed I was more worthy than others to speak of noble things.

Of course that’s nonsense, insofar as whatever is pure and lovely and praiseworthy doesn’t originate with man. The worth of benedictions doesn’t reside in the purity of the speaker, but in the holiness of truth’s author. We make ourselves gods at every turn, don’t we?

There is beauty within this shattered creation. There are true and good things, and our struggle, every day, is not the truth of them, but the truth of ourselves. The words aren’t made worthy by us, but maybe, by God’s grace, we can be made more worthy of the words, and even by them, because good words are a blessing, which is why the priest or preacher or rabbi sends us out into the world with them humming in our inner hearts.

Logos is a name for Christ because creation was spoken into being. Some of that power conveys to us as well, because with our every word we build up or tear down, we soothe our brother or we flay him, we call into this earth either a heavenly aroma or pungent brimstone. God knows, we need more good words.

Which means they warrant utterance, it seems, even when they come from bad men. This world needs words freighted with gravity and grace, and I suppose it would be a sin not to speak them, even if we’ve never once in our lives measured up to their fullness.

Benediction from a bad man is a post from: Sand in the Gears

“It is a great mystery to me, how God can know what it means to be forsaken, and because he is three-in-one, know also how it is to look on your dying child, hear the breath rattle in his deflating lungs, smell the shit running down his legs, see him strain to find your face, the only sight that will comfort him, your face, which is denied him in this moment of greatest need, because his eyes and this darkening world itself have failed him.

After my daughter died, people tried to comfort me by pointing to the fruits of her suffering. My own mother came to faith, she said, in the funeral home. My pastor took my mother into a side room and when she came out she wept and told me she’d accepted Christ as her savior. So much good, people said. Your daughter accomplished so much through her suffering.

I suppose that fruit is good but this is not a deal I would have made. I am weak and I miss her and you’d think a hole running through you would be light as air but it’s such a heavy load sometimes.”

You can read the rest here.

On feeling Godforsaken is a post from: Sand in the Gears

It’s understandable if you haven’t heard of Gosnell. He’s a Philadelphia abortionist on trial for, among other things, murdering newborns by snipping their spines with scissors. He did this after failing to murder them while some portion of their bodies remained in the birth canal—that practice, of course, being considered humane by organizations like Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Rights Action League, and the National Organization for Women.

Gosnell ran a slaughterhouse, and sometimes he kept the severed feet of his tiny victims in jars. At least one woman died under his ministrations. His defense alleges that his prosecution is motivated by race.

Not the sight of severed baby feet floating in jars, mind you, but race. How wonderful it would be, were Dr. King still alive, to give him five minutes alone in a room with this man.

There are four times more mentions of Jimmy Fallon not simply because Americans prefer entertainment to real-life horror. Had Gosnell been, say, a self-professed evangelical who murdered seven abortion doctors, instead of a profiteering abortionist who murdered seven babies, then I promise you, there is no way you would avoid hearing about it. There is no question about the morality of abortion for most journalists, only questions about the morality of people who oppose it.

It’s easy to blame journalists, and in this case they deserve blame. But I remember that in his heyday George Tiller, a late-term abortionist operating in Wichita, Kansas, secured from the city council a permit to expand his operations and add an incinerator to his facility. Tiller’s abortuary was located next to a car dealership, and if you talked to the guys working there, they would explain to you how every week they had to get out the hoses and wash white ash off the cars.

One day, a man walked into Tiller’s church and shot him in the head. That made the news, and it should have. But those white ashes? Reporting them would have been gauche. A journalist might get mistaken for some kind of religious nut, talking about those ashes.

History scorns the people who lived outside Auschwitz and Treblinka, with their weak protests of ignorance. How will history treat us, I wonder?

White ashes is a post from: Sand in the Gears

If you’ve been to New York, if you’ve been to America, then you might be tempted to question this praise. Most Americans watch many hours of television a day, most of our children rarely read, most of us are overweight. We are not a people who have distinguished ourselves, in the past two generations, by the smartness of our choices.

The right-thinking person doesn’t oppose a ban on gigantic sodas because he trusts the average American to make good decisions. He opposes it because he believes that if you give Mayor Bloomberg the right to regulate your Dr. Pepper intake, you invite him to determine what foods you may eat, and which vaccinations you can skip, and what is an acceptable height for women’s heels. Then, because this is government, you invite a host of well-connected companies to infiltrate the process with money, so that what is good for you miraculously begins to align with what is good for them.

This opposition to government power doesn’t assume that Americans will always make good decisions, but it does assume we won’t destroy ourselves. Freedom is predicated, in other words, on a capacity to live rightly. “Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people…” wrote John Adams, “are necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.”

Imagine someone came looking for wisdom, knowledge, and virtue in America today. Where might he find it? On our late night television shows? In the comments sections of newspapers? In the average high school classroom, where students read at a 5th-grade level, and admit to lying, stealing, and cheating on exams? In Congress, which might best be described as high school for demagogues?

But that’s a silly thought experiment, isn’t it, because who in his right mind goes looking for wisdom, knowledge, and virtue any more? We’re too busy searching for our God-given portion of self-esteem and happiness.

But if wisdom, knowledge, and virtue are scarce, what happens to freedom? Failing to instill in children lovingkindness, perseverance, and self-restraint eventually necessitates a mighty and merciless police state. Whether our feral offspring consume our substance and freedom, or we relinquish both in order to obtain protection from them, the equation remains undisputed—governance of the self is essential for political self-governance.

We have gotten ourselves to a place where we don’t even know how to sufficiently restrain evil and insanity from arming itself and slaughtering schoolchildren. Some people talk about restricting guns and others about distributing more of them, but the truth of things is that we grow sicker by the year, and so we face two unappealing options:  an armed populace increasingly unmoored from reason and virtue, or a populace disarmed by politicians unsavory enough to be elected by people who can’t be trusted with firearms.

The the thing is this: people talk about banning sodas and banning guns because we are destroying ourselves. There are good reasons to oppose both bans, but this opposition makes little sense unless we resolve to do our part to build up wisdom, knowledge, and virtue.

The difficulty is that these essentials are maintained in the institutions of community—families, churches, friendships, workplaces, schools—that we have allowed to become denuded. There are any number of causes for this erosion, and it can be quite pleasurable to sort through them, but I suppose when it comes to repairing these institutions it really just comes down to each of us picking up his allotted share of the burden.

Which is to say: loving one another less selfishly, serving one another more fully, training up our children more faithfully, praying more fervently. I know I stink at all those. Maybe some of you do, too. The good news is that there isn’t a whole lot of competition out there making us look bad. The bad news is that this means it’s up to us.

It’s hard work and it’s generational work and the people who call themselves conservatives used to understand that, though now they busy themselves with agonizing over how to “get their message out,” as if the problem might be solved by marketers and election consultants. The problem can only be solved, however, by each and every one of us, and that is because each and every one of us is the problem.

Sodas and guns and minimum virtue is a post from: Sand in the Gears

“And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.” (Matt. 10:7-8)

Churches struggle to conjoin them. People struggle, don’t we? You want to love this self-destructive person you happen to care about, which is a miracle in itself because it can be so hard to love, and yet you love him all the same, in his brokenness, in his need, and surely this love must come from God, for you are just a sinner, after all, selfish and fallen. But how is it love to tell him the pain-filled truth, which is that in his lust or sloth or despair he is deeply, unrepentantly rebelling against God? How can a loving person even believe such a thing?

Preach to him? No, I’ll just love him. He’s already heard plenty of preaching from those whose hearts are shrouded by doctrines, by self-righteousness. I’ll love him, and my love will be my witness.

But this, even though it is borne of an earnest desire to show compassion, is arrogance. Christ, who is God, who is love, labored himself to preach, even to the point of driving away the bulk of his amassed followers. If Christ, who was first described as “the Word” by John, who later declared himself a sword dividing families—if the Savior who is God did more than witness himself through loving acts, then who are we to imagine we can shirk that duty?

But we are tempted to do so, especially when the one we love has been hurt—we know this because he recounts it to us in tears and fury—by others who have preached at him. We’re even tempted to tell ourselves that his troubles stem less from his rebellion, his refusal to submit on this one small point that should hardly matter to a God who is so big and loving and mysterious, than from the people who judge it sin. Love must rule the day. Love.

Some broken people you want to love, and other judgmental people (even though we know in our hearts that this, too, is a form of brokenness) you want to give a double-barrel of exegesis. They’re too literal or too narrow or too expansive, they are too . . . something, the chief characteristic of which is that they disagree fundamentally with you about what the Bible means, you with your great love for God and your many years of study and your membership in a church that really pursues Jesus.

Some we want to shield from preaching, and others we want to scorch with it.

In our omissions born either of selfish affection or angry righteousness we neglect the fullness of the commission itself, which is to preach and to heal. Worse, sometimes we confuse one for the other. We imagine healing comes solely from preaching the Bible’s truths at someone, or we imagine that a testimony of the truth can come solely from our compassionate care and acceptance. We make ourselves Christ when we do this, and more even than Christ, who himself submitted to the need to do both.

A question all we who seek to be doers of the word and not hearers only, then, is how we might both preach and heal. Sometimes this means we will cause someone to feel wounded and angry, which hurts us in turn, because it appears to be living proof that we have been unloving. Other times it means that we will let dirty, sinful, awkward people into our lives and homes and churches, which means we’ll confront our own ugly feelings towards them, which means confronting the ugliness that dwells within our own darkened hearts.

All of which is why, I suppose, Christ said to take up a cross rather than a party hat.

On the separateness of preaching and healing is a post from: Sand in the Gears

This magnanimity carries a subtle condescension, as in the first sentence of Dave Barnhart’s recent essay, “How Being a Pastor Changed My Thinking on Homosexuality:”

“I managed to make it through college, seminary, and grad school with most of my prejudices intact. I won’t overstate my bigotry: ‘I had gay friends,’ but I was the kind of person who would use that phrase when defending my prejudices.”

The implication is that if you disagree with Barnhart about the pliability of gender, the acceptability of homosexual sex, and gay marriage (something he only tacitly admits supporting in the midst of ingratiating himself to one of his commenters), then you are a bigot. It’s a forgivable error, given that hostility toward gays is the trait most commonly associated with Christians.

It’s highly problematic all the same, at least insofar as we might expect a pastor to understand Christian dogma to the point that he does not bless what God condemns. But perhaps that is too high an expectation these days. Now you are deep if you quote a few lines of Scripture to support your heartfelt point. Barnhart, for example, quotes the 23rd chapter of Matthew to argue that Christians have, like the Pharisees, bound their brethren with the overly heavy burden of refraining from homosexual sex and marriage. The implication is that these burdens are unbiblical, though in the very same passage Barnhart cites, Christ says: “Whatever they tell you to observe, that observe and do…” Christ’s point, in other words, is not that the Law is invalid, but that the Pharisees obeyed it only as show, and did nothing to help their flock live righteously.

No matter, because Barnhart is making a point here, the totality of Scripture be damned, and his point is that, if Jesus said “My burden is easy and my yoke is light,” that must mean, when we put it next to those isolated verses from Matthew 23, that he aims to decrease the rules. And if Jesus himself diminishes the law, well, we fussy Christians who want to hold to all that stuff about homosexual behavior in Leviticus and Romans and elsewhere are being like the Pharisees.

It all makes sense if you want it to make sense, regardless of the reality that Christ also said that He came not to change an iota of the Law, regardless of the traditional understanding that when He speaks of the light yoke He doesn’t mean that the Law is obliterated, but rather that He bears it, and He therefore bears us, and strengthens us to live rightly.

All this is problematic because both Scripture and Christian tradition are remarkably clear about homosexual sex, and only heroic semantic acrobatics can cast doubt on this reality. Homosexual sex is condemned in Old and New Testaments (every Christian should humbly pause and remember, at this point, that gossip is likewise condemned), and at no point before modern times has any church within shouting distance of orthodox shores ordained homosexual marriages.

Christians who would alter (or bow out of the dispute about altering) this tradition have taken two routes. One is to cast doubt on the Scriptures themselves. Science progressively reveals, they say, the falsities of the Bible. Tossing out Scripture, we are free, in the words of Bishop John Spong, to achieve “a new humanity.”

The other method is to evoke the serpent’s question: “Did God say?” We see this in the response of popular Christian writer Shane Clairborne to a question about homosexuality:

“I think we have to begin by acknowledging that part of the reason this is a difficult topic, and part of the reason we have disagreement on it, is because Jesus never really talks about it directly.”

This is a refinement of the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, in which the red words are preeminent. Sola scriptura rubra. Its proponents seem to imagine themselves closer to the original Jesus than all we fussy dogmatics, though in imagining as much they commit the further dogmatic error of forgetting that Christ is a member of the divine Trinity, of one will with the Father, who breathed out to us the Scriptures, according to St. Paul and the councils at Constantinople and Nicea.

But these are small matters, these days. American Christianity is, like the market economy in which it is rooted, a matter of personal choice. And to be fair, it is Christians—I number myself among them—who have enabled the popularity of ear ticklers like Dave Barnhart and Shane Clairborne. Too many of us, too often, have acted in hatred toward homosexuals, or treated them with cold indifference, or failed to denounce widely followed church leaders who acted with hatred and indifference. We failed to distinguish actions from persons, and to remove the planks from our own eyes first, and in demonizing homosexuals we not only sinned grievously, we strengthened the standing of men who are so swelled with self-serving compassion that they happily alter “tired theology,” as Barnhart calls it.

It’s a false compassion. It’s not a “suffering alongside,” but a denial of the faith. It offers its intended beneficiaries neither the fullness of the Church nor of Christ, and it misleads a generation of young people who have enough love and good sense to reject the hatred they’ve detected in too many of their elders, but who have been no better trained in doctrine. Its corrosive effect will not be limited to this one small corner of Christian dogma.

On false compassion is a post from: Sand in the Gears

“Sometimes this broken world hacks away at our flesh. Other times it hands us the blades, and we sunder ourselves. Drink down whatever forgetting medicine invites you and the stump will stop hurting, but as God is my witness, you will not move from that place of loss. You’ll lie on the floor, raging at the sky for taking your legs, raging at God, raging at anyone who offers to help. You’ll rage and you’ll drink the numbing draught and then, one day, you will be alone.”

You can read the rest here.

Phantom limbs and other lost things is a post from: Sand in the Gears