Are we distracted?

I wasn't at Annual Conference this year, but I understand there was a lot of talk going on about human sexuality, and that many people raised concerns that we're spending too much time on the issue. After thirty years of debate on this, could it be time to just put it to rest? Shouldn't we be turning to more important things?

I've heard this argument before from many people, including some of my favorite Brethren. And while I've never made the argument myself, I do find it enticing at times. Shouldn't we be dedicating our resources to feeding the world's hungry instead of fighting incessantly over such a controversial issue?

No.

I can't help but think of the Civil Rights Movement. It was controversial, to be sure, and it stirred up a lot of stuff that people didn't particularly want to be stirred up. They told Martin Luther King, Jr., "Just be patient," and he replied, "Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability." Fifty years later, with the gift of hindsight, few of us would support the idea that there were more important things for all those people to be doing--that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference should have been directing its energy to other, more widely supported issues. They were humans, being treated as less than humans, and they could not be expected to accept that and join their oppressors in other work.

When we find ourselves confronting injustice, there is nothing more important than working against it. Right now, thousands of beautiful men and women in the Church of the Brethren are being told that there is something wrong with them; that their lifestyle is sinful; even that they cannot minister to their brothers and sisters. We cannot ask them to silently bow their heads and pretend it doesn't hurt--and if we continue to ask it, we will find our numbers ever thinning as these individuals find it too painful to remain in the Church they love.

To ignore this oppression and go about our business in the world is a disservice to them, and it is damaging to our own spirits: we cannot heal the world while we ourselves are so wounded. We must remove the plank from our eye before we can see the speck of sawdust in our brother's.

It is the nature of those who are oppressed to fight the oppression, and the duty of their allies to join them. This is not a waste of time.

Learning to Fly

Preached 5/3/09 at the Wabash (Ind.) Church of the Brethren.

There is a show on TV called Smallville that tells the story of Clark Kent before he dons the cape of Superman, beginning with his life as a high-school-aged farm boy and running through the start of his career at the Daily Planet—with, of course, new villains to face off with every week. Young Clark comes loaded with super powers: faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. He can melt steel with his heat vision and see through concrete with his x-ray vision. One power, however, is conspicuously absent from his repertoire: he can't fly.

We all know Superman is supposed to be able to fly. It's in all the comic books and movies. It's in the little kids' cartoon videos and the 1990's show Lois and Clark, which I used to watch with my dad. But as of Season 8 of Smallville, while he is finally working as a mild-mannered reporter and has even picked up a habit of super-speed changes in a phone booth, Clark still can't fly. He just hasn't learned how yet.

Even though he's from the planet Krypton and all of us, as far as I know, are from Earth, we can actually find ourselves understanding Clark Kent pretty well—at least on this issue. The Bible is full of stories of Jesus making people see, or walk, or even rise from the dead, but he's not the only one doing it: his disciples, in his name, can perform those same miracles. Peter says to the crippled beggar, “Well, I don't have any money, but...” and BAM. The man can walk.

Now, we know where Superman's power comes from. Well, I know. Earth's yellow sun acts as a supercharger for his Kryptonian physiology, turning the ordinary alien into the Man of Steel. But how the heck was Peter able to make a crippled man walk just by telling him to? “It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth!” he proclaims to the rulers. But we're Christians, too. We're followers of that same Jesus Christ of Nazareth. I hear stories like this and I always have to ask, where's my power?

When I was little I used to pray to God to give me super powers. “I'll use them for good.... mostly!” I would plead. “Honest!” It's possible my continuing lack of magical abilities has something to do with the purity of my intentions. What I really wanted was to be able to snap my fingers and create a pet Tyrannosaur—who, yes, might eat that jerk Brandon Thomas, but only if he really refused to reform—or maybe make Lindsay Jones like me just a little bit. God probably saw right through my do-gooder charade and put a nice big DECLINED stamp on my application for omnipotence.

But it's not for lack of good intentions that we don't go around miraculously curing people. Surely we mean well. I'm over Brandon Thomas and Lindsay Jones, but I'd still like to be able to do more to help people in need, and I still can't. Now, to be fair, I've never actually tried this. I mean, I've tried to use the Force to get a disc out of the DVD player so I wouldn't have to get off the couch, and unless you count reaching your arm out with a concentrated look on your face until somebody gives in and does a task for you, it generally hasn't yielded great results. But have I ever looked at someone unable to walk and said, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk?” No. But I still don't think it would work, and I've left well enough alone for fear of looking like a grandstanding moron or, worse, of discrediting Jesus.

So there's one popular explanation: a lack of faith. We can't do anything truly miraculous because we don't truly believe that we can. After all, Jesus tells us that if we do not doubt, we can tell a mountain to throw itself into the sea, and it will comply. We haven't done a whole lot of moving of mountains, either, unless you count mountaintop removal for coal mining (and that's really, really bad). So is the problem that we doubt? Do we not really believe what we profess to believe? Is our faith so small that we're crippled? Why can't we do what the Bible says we can do?? These are the kinds of questions we don't ask because afraid of the answers, because they are just too uncomfortable, but if we're going to take our faith seriously it's time to ask!

For what it's worth, I don't think it's a lack of faith that keeps us from these miracles. I think even if I really believed and really tried, I would remain unable to do it. After all, others have believed and fallen short. Last year an eleven-year-old in Wisconsin died of perfectly treatable diabetes because her parents, rather than take her to a doctor, tried to heal her with prayer. You don't risk your child's life for something you don't believe, yet for all their faith, they weren't able to unlock a miracle.

Saint Francis of Assisi offered one more suggestion for why we can no longer do what we read the early Christians did: money. Peter tells the beggar, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you.” Francis claimed that it's an either-or scenario. You can have money for the beggar, or you can have miracles for the beggar, but you cannot have both. When we—that is to say, the Church—became an established power with wealth and status those disciples couldn't have dreamed of, we lost the power of the healing word. Perhaps those powers were born out of need, and we no longer have them because we no longer need them.

I'm going to go ahead and confess that, true to my usual form, I wrote this sermon this morning. But I was thinking about it earlier, and I caught my campus pastor after chapel on Wednesday and told him (with some panic) I was going to ask this really hard question and I needed to offer some kind of answer. “Well,” he said, “you could talk about the miracle of modern medicine...” and so I tuned him out. It sounded like a cop-out, a way of dodging the question with a wholly unsatisfactory answer. But after he told me that bit about Saint Francis, I kind of changed my mind.

We do have this miraculous modern medicine. We are able to prevent or cure many ailments that, two thousand years ago, would have left a person blind, or crippled, or dead. Maybe we don't go around performing flashy miracles, but let's look at this as utilitarians for a second: modern medicine cures more people in a day, by sheer volume and pervasiveness, than Peter and John could have in their whole lifetimes, even if they did nothing else. Medically speaking, unless swine flu wipes us all out, our civilization is in great shape!

And we have the resource that, root of all evil though it may be, can do the greatest good: money. Most of the suffering in the world is not because we—that's we as in all of us together—lack power. It's not the inevitable that's killing us. The four most common childhood illnesses are diarrhea, acute respiratory illness, malaria and measles, all of which are both preventable and treatable. Poor nutrition and calorie deficiencies cause nearly one in three people to die prematurely or to have disabilities. As I talk to you now, 963 million people across the world are hungry. And today alone, that hunger will kill 16 thousand children—some from starvation, but most as opportunistic diseases move in on their weakened bodies.

Working in Indianapolis last summer, I had the opportunity to talk with a crazy ex-drug addict who lives voluntarily in poverty, speaks truth to power, and literally does whatever is in his power to provide help to the people of his inner-city neighborhood. Exactly the sort of person Jesus would have working for him. He told me one of the most profound things I have ever heard about poverty: “People—economists--go around talking about the solution to poverty like it's this insanely complicated, elusive holy grail that's very, very difficult. It's not. The solution to poverty is easy. It's money. And the only complicated thing is figuring out how to get money from the people who have it to the people who need it.”

And I'll add here that that isn't complicated because of some complex economic structure. The economy is not an actor of its own; it's merely a reflection of the priorities of the people. Getting money from the people who have it to the people who need it is complicated because the people who have money are not particularly interested in getting it to the people who need money.

And so I must now admonish myself for insisting this question of miracle cures was so important in the first place. How dare we lament our lack of power when we refuse to use what power we have? As it turns out, we have all the power we need. Poverty, hunger, and most of the diseases that are killing us are treatable, even curable, without super powers. These woes would be relegated to the history books if we weren't so interested in living lives of luxury and fighting wars. You don't even want to know all the things we could do with the trillion dollars the Iraq War has cost us, but I'll just say that paving the entire interstate system with gold is only the most wasteful option.

My mom hates it when I preach like this. She accuses me of being depressing. “Can't you find something nicer to talk about?” she asks. And she's not wrong. It's true that we cannot afford to to spend our time saying nice things that will make us like each other, ignoring the tragedy of the world and pretending that there's nothing we can do. But neither can we afford to be constantly down on ourselves, beating ourselves into despair. We have seen solutions born out of despair—suicide bombings, for example—and they're not the sorts of answers we're looking for.

So here's the good news: we have the power. The power to heal with a word we have not, but silver and gold we have plenty. We have the power to feed and clothe everyone. We have the power to send the world's children to school. We have the power to heal. We can do all this as surely as Clark Kent can fly, even if we haven't quite figured out how.

And just like Clark is already using some of his powers, we really are doing a lot. International aid organizations like Heifer International and the Global Food Crisis Fund, though often underfunded, work hard to lessen the blows of poverty. Organizations like the New Community Project focus on learning so that we may understand the nature of the problems we face and craft healthy, sustainable solutions. And if any of those sound familiar, it's because all three were started by Brethren. I'll plug one more: Kiva, k-i-v-a, allows people like you and me to be micro-lenders, lending as little as $25 so that someone in need can start a business.

So there's a start. There's plenty to celebrate, but we can't get complacent because there is a lot of work to do. It seems daunting. It might even seem impossible, but remember this: we have the power to heal. That power is within us. It's just a matter of learning to fly.

Proving God

Some of you may be familiar with philosophers' attempts to prove God's existence.  The simplest is put forth by Descartes, who in doubting reality, realized the only thing he could be sure of was that he doubted.  Here's my paraphrase:

I doubt, therefore I think.
I think, therefore I exist.
I doubt, therefore I am imperfect.
I am imperfect, therefore imperfection exists.
Imperfection exists, therefore perfection exists.
God, by definition, is perfection, therefore God exists.
God is perfect, therefore God is good.
God is good, therefore God would not deceive us.
God would not deceive us, therefore the world and my experiences in it are real.

This proof actually shares the same fatal flaw as the other God proof I've heard:

Something can exist either in thought or in reality.
I can think of God, therefore God exists in thought.
It is more powerful to exist in reality than in thought.
God is, by definition, the most powerful, therefore God exists in reality.

The flaw, of course, is that we are asked to accept that because something is conceptualized, it must exist in accordance to its intrinsic characteristics.  Yet if I believe that God is, by definition, a delicious jelly donut sitting on my desk, there is still no jelly donut on my desk.  Those of us not well schooled in metaphysics may not be able to articulate exactly why we know these proofs are bogus, but we do know it.

(Note: I am not a philosopher, so if you're outraged at how much I screwed up my summary of these ideas, I apologize.)

However, in some of my musings this year, I have come across my own conditional proof that God exists.  Conditional in that it does not prove God, but makes God a necessary derivative of another belief.  Here it is:

If we have free will, God exists.

Maybe some of you are nodding your heads and saying "good point," or shaking your heads and saying "nope."  You have probably already jumped ahead through everything else I'm about to say.  If, however, you're going "huh?" then you can benefit from reading my explanation.

It started in Mexico.  I have no real explanation for why it started in Mexico, except perhaps that I (like Descartes, it would seem) had a lot of free time on my hands.  It was then that I began doubting free will.

It seems, scientifically, that to believe in free will, you must at some point stop your understanding of physical science.  Scientifically speaking, our brains are very complex systems of electrical signals and chemical reactions that form what we experience as thought.  Like everything in nature, these systems react to stimuli in the environment, chug through some insanely complex equations, and churn out an answer.  It's conceptually no different from the reaction you get when you mix baking soda and vinegar, or when you charge a battery, or when you plant a seed.  There are variables (how much vinegar you used, how long the battery is charging, nutrients in the soil, and so forth) that, depending on the complexity and our ability to measure them, we may or may not be aware of.  But if we were to know all of these variables, we could predict the outcome.  Chaos theory says that we cannot--that the universe is far too complex for us to predict outcomes like that.  But if we were omniscient about the present, we would be able to predict the future.

Are you buying this?  Let me ask you something: if you flip a coin, what are the chances that it will land heads?  Fifty percent?  Fifty-one percent?  Say you flip a coin and it lands on heads.  Given the exact physical circumstances of that toss--air currents in the room, your pulse, everything--what were the odds that it was going to be heads?  I claim 100%.  If you built a time machine, went back in time, and observed that coin toss again without changing anything (forget Heisenberg for a second), it would land on heads.  Every time.

Apply the same concept to a choice.  What will I eat for breakfast?  Cereal or eggs?  I think I'm choosing, but I'm actually just running an equation in my brain based on my hunger, how long it's been since I last ate eggs, how much time I have before I have to be in class, and so forth.  I may choose to make eggs.  If I go back in time and watch that play out again, I will once again choose to make eggs, because that was the outcome of that equation (note: for this reason I don't believe in alternate realities--at least not according to the "we create one with every choice" theory).

The end result is predetermination.  Given the exact same circumstances, we will make the exact same choices, just like the same math equation will always yield the same result (and don't give me any plus-or-minus crap or start talking about the number i).

There's a whole concept in philosophy that assumes all this, and goes on to explain our experiences and sense of self: epiphenominalism.  "In the Philosophy of Mind, a dualist theory of mind-body interaction which maintains all mental events are causally dependent upon physical events (i.e., brain states). According to this theory brain events cause mental events, but not vice versa" (Maricopa).  Essentially, our experience of making a choice is actually a side-effect of our body making that choice.  It's an illusion, unintended by the brain--a "ghost in the machine."

You may disagree, but I think all of this makes perfect sense.

So where does free will come in to play?  Do we have free will?  I believe I make choices all the time.  I believe I have free will.  Maybe I'm just suffering from the delusion of mental existence, but maybe I'm right, and there actually is free will.  But here's the thing:

To the best of my scientific and philosophical understanding, free will is impossible.  Therefore, free will can only exist by divine miracle.

Divine miracle means God.

Listening to God

I'm preaching on the theme of listening to God next Sunday. Does anyone have any reflections or meditations on this theme?

Sensitive matters

"Nic, I have to talk to you about a sensitive matter," Natasha said, looking at me with the eyes that are most often followed with a pleading (and misguided) "you're going to hate me forever!"

The reaction to this sort of prelude is not voluntary. My heartbeat quickens, I feel lightheaded, and my stomach twists up into that anticipatory feeling that only happens when I know something horrible is about to happen or I'm about to finally overcome some previously insurmountable challenge (usually in a video game).

"It's about your blog," she said. "I told my mom about it, and she said, 'Natasha, that's not right. It's feetwashing.'"

Jeanine had then hurried to dig up an old book as proof, but I trust this step was unnecessary. She is the archivist at Manchester College. There is no doubting that she, not I, is correct.

However, I feel that I am not alone in my ignorance. Maybe I'm just mishearing things, but isn't "footwashing" a common use? Like a less horrific "nucular?" Please comment and set me straight.

On another note, a Wikipedia entry is titled "Four Square" (two words), while Google asks "Did you mean foursquare?" (one word). "Four-Square" appears to be used solely in this blog title.

Please contact me if you are interested in being a contributor to this blog. Also, given the current sparsity of posts, I advise using an RSS reader to be informed of updates.

Who do you kill for a living?

The call for other authors on this blog is getting more urgent, since I'm taking 16 hours of class and working up to 25 hours a week and acting in a play.

Discuss: Is it wrong for a Brethren person to work in a liquor store, selling cigarettes, alcohol and (worst of all) lottery tickets?

Love your enemies: an activist's stance

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[h] and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies[i] and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” - Matthew 5:43-48

Often only a small snippet of that is quoted, which is fine, because it makes the same point as the whole passage. I’m just really partial to the whole thing.

In March of 2007, I attended a protest against the Iraq war organized by Valpo students in Indianapolis. Frankly, I found the whole thing appalling. I find that I often do not identify with the more vocal components of the anti-war movement, because sometimes it feels they’ve taken the issue of the war and turned it into a war right here at home. Those who oppose the war are our allies, and those who support it - and those who perpetrate it - are our enemies.

At this particular protest, a representative of the womens’ advocacy group Code Pink stood up and told what I can only call lies about our president. Maybe she believed them, but I didn’t - if George Bush were stumbling through the White House in drunken fits and and calling his wife “the C-word” in front of the White House Press Corps, we’d know about it. The media certainly has no bias against sensationalism.

But what really got to me was a war veteran and current professor (of communications, I think) who was sort of MC’ing the event. At one point, he started off on a rant about how he’s against the idea of impeaching President Bush and Vice-President Cheney, because it lets them off the hook. “I don’t want them impeached,” he bellowed, “I want them prosecuted! I want them to spend the rest of their natural lives in a jail cell!” The fact that impeachment does, in fact, mean prosecution (and not removal from office, as he seemed to believe) aside, I was struck by the tone of anger and vengeance that was seeping into this protest.

I did not act; I watched myself act. I saw myself turn from where I’d been standing, with my back to the protest, holding a sign with the name of an Indiana native who’d been killed so that it was visible to traffic passing through the circle. I saw myself walk to an open area in front of the angry man, drop to my knees, and pray.

Your peace, your love, your forgiveness, your mercy….

I posted this reflection on the Young Anabaptist Radicals blog some time ago about my arrest at an anti-war demonstration last year. Recently, the blog administrator e-mailed me to alert me to a comment he’d deleted, due to name-calling and profanity. It essentially lauded me for my actions and had some harsh things to say about the arresting officers, and about police in general.

First, I want to say that the police officers who collected us from the federal building and drove us to central booking were the absolute epitome of civility. The one who drove James and me even expressed some support for our position, though coupled with doubts about our chosen method of expression, and they removed our handcuffs before procedure really permitted it because they could see that we were not a threat. I have no complaint whatsoever against these officers, and would object to any harsh words spoken against them.

I cannot provide the same level of praise for the U.S. Marshals or the Sheriff’s deputy in the court house, but I will say this: All of them did their jobs. They may not have been warm and fuzzy towards us, but I feel that, had they been, it would be the exception. As a former Resident Assistant, I understand a little of the need for detached formality and established dominance when dealing with a “deviant,” and that’s what we were. Nobody can be expected to walk that line perfectly, and while that might leave us some complaint against the power differentials set up by the law enforcement system, I don’t feel that we should cast officers of the law as our enemies or slur them with personal attacks for what, most of the time, really just amounted to being professional.

But the officers’ actions here aren’t really relevant to my point. If this story is made to be about the injustice, perceived or real, of my arrest, then the true point of my action is lost. If the punchline becomes a jumble of harsh feelings towards the police, then the real crime goes uncorrected. My battle is not against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, or against Richard Lugar and the United States Marshals. My battle is against the evil of violence that can take hold in every human heart, including my own. If I cast people as my enemies, then I have allowed that evil to take hold of me, warping my cause into a point of division and hate.

“Love your enemies” wasn’t just aimed at the masterminds behind the Iraq war: it applies to those of us who oppose it, too. “End the war” isn’t the ethic, it’s the realization of it - and that ethic is love. Our actions must be rooted in love or we will lose sight of our goals and be dragged down into the same quagmire of opposition and retribution that we profess to oppose, and even a total political victory will come at the cost of a moral defeat. I do not believe that the end justifies the means: our actions must reflect the spirit of the world we wish to see, or that world will dance forever outside of our grasp.