Month: December 2010

2010 Books

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So once again I’m posting the lists of books I read this past year. This is more of a personal post to reflect back on where I’ve been, but maybe others can get a good recommendation or two out of it.

There were books I had to read and those I read for research that are on the list only because I read them. Some, like those by Dobson and Grudem, were painful reads, but served as needed reminders of how much hatred towards women still exists in the church. But the point of the list is the good recommendations. Hands down, the best fiction books I read this year (and in a long time) were Suzanne Collin’s The Hunger Games Trilogy. Intricately written, they explored the personal and social ramifications of bread and circuses entertainment. Violence and extravagant living always have a price and the books explore (through a fantastic story) the tale of those forced to pay that price. I highly recommend picking up the series and reading it immediately (it’s written for young adults so they are quick reads).

As for non-fiction, I covered a decent amount of territory this past year. I appreciated the postcolonial works I read (especially Chung Hyun Kyung’s Struggle to be the Sun Again) and want to continue to read such books in the upcoming year. My favorites from the year though would have to be Walter Brueggemann’s Out of Babylon and Wes Howard-Brook’s “Come Out My People!”: God’s Call Out of Empire and Beyond. Obviously both dealt with similar subjects – exploring the biblical texts as springboard for commentary for how the people of God should relate to living in empire today. Brueggemann’s text is short and inspiring. Howard-Brook’s text tackles the whole of scripture – becoming the biblical survey book I have always wanted to read. He pulls in not just biblical criticism, but theology, and history, and anthropology, and linguistics. It’s a book that doesn’t limit the Bible to one small lens (which always misses the forest for the trees), but attempts to read it as a holistic text that speaks truth to us today. I bought it for research purposes and ended up being unable to put it down (all 500+ pages of it). It is a great resource and an engaging read.

Non-fiction

Textbooks

Fiction

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My “criminal mindset”

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A friend at church asked me to help with her son’s project for a college psychology class.
He was studying the criminal mindset of women inmates and needed a control
group to compare them with. So his mom handed out the survey to adult women at
our church.

I answered the questions as honestly as I could. Yes, I believe there are systemic issues
that keep people in poverty. Yes, I believe people of color are sometimes
treated unfairly by our judicial system.

A few weeks later my friend mentioned that her son was surprised by the results from our
control group: we scored extremely high on having a criminal mindset. Now, I
don’t know much about the methodology. The test is apparently a standard survey
developed and approved by boards to judge “criminal thinking.” But I was
offended by the results.

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Mary’s Grammar

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as posted at The Christian Century blog –

The final exam in my theology class surprised me. Instead of complex essay questions, there was one simple question: defend the grammar of the Magnificat.

How can Mary sing that the Lord has done great things for her? It’s a little crazy: how can this young, lower-class girl who finds herself knocked up sing that God has already–in the past tense–ended injustice and oppression? All she has to do is look around her to find evidence to the contrary.

I answered the question, working in the requisite readings. But days later the question is still haunting me.

What intrigues me is the gap between what the song proclaims and how the song is commonly used. As the exam question implied, we tend to get confused about the song’s verb tense. It isn’t simply past tense, announcing the fulfillment of the eschatological vision in which rulers are brought down and the lowly are lifted up. Nor is it simply a future hope for a time when all will be made right.

Instead it’s both; it’s the already and not yet. This can be hard to understand, in part because English lacks the aorist tense. The Magnificat testifies to God’s work to reconcile all creation, work that has already begun and will continue forever. Like Mary, we are invited to be intimately involved in this work.

Mary wasn’t crazy. She was carrying the hope of the world inside her; she knew that God had entered the world in a dramatic way. This changed everything–but to accomplish the change, the hope had to be proclaimed with assurance. We don’t just place our hope in a past event or a future reward; we live into it.

When God sent Jesus to the world to reconcile all things, his incarnation and work on the cross did the job. Salvation dealt with the world’s injustices and oppressions. But as humans we could not be transformed all at once–that desire is what got Adam and Eve kicked out of Eden. God works gradually in our lives and world, helping us grow up into the hope that is already there.

Like Mary, we magnify the Lord for already overcoming injustice and oppression–and we also work to end such evils. Mary trusted so profoundly in the reality of the baby she carried that she asserted God’s fulfillment of hope in the past, present and future. Her faith challenges me to join her in magnifying God by making this hope a reality.

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Fourth Sunday of Advent 2010

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I was listening to Christmas carols the other day and one of them was asking Jesus for forgiveness for letting him be born in a manger and for being crucified. The song’s excuse was, “we didn’t know who you were.” The implication there is if we had known it was God we were doing those things to we wouldn’t have done them. I had to laugh out loud at how utterly the message of that song ignores not just the revolutionary message of Jesus, but also the unexpected subversive nature of his birth.

Jesus was not born to the elite or the powerful. He was born to an oppressed people suffering under the taxation of empire. His family was lower class. He was born in the muck and mire of a stable and laid to sleep in a feeding trough. A hero might have humble origins, but not this humble. God showed up unexpectedly (for some at least) amongst the poor. While the words Mary uttered rejoicing in the social reversal that the birth of her son inaugurates, there are still those who struggle with God showing preference to the poor.

And so they write songs saying that if they would have know it was God being born in that manger then they wouldn’t have let it happen. That sort of thing is okay for some backwater girl with a suspicious pregnancy, but apparently not for God.

Maybe we need to get past the sweet baby Jesus and listen to the words of the adult Jesus telling us that whatever we do to the least of these we do to him. It is true – a manger isn’t good enough for God. But therefore then it isn’t good enough for any of God’s children. The poor shouldn’t be left to suffer or merely survive on the leftovers and stable corners the world generally allows them to have. If we are angry about Jesus having to be born in the dingy conditions of a stable – unwanted and rejected by society, then we have better be just as upset by the fact that babies all over the world are born in similar (or worse) conditions every day. Some 20,000 women get sick from childbirth everyday – mostly from unsanitary birthing conditions and lack of access to clean water and medicine. They too are Jesus. How we treat them is how we treat Jesus.

It was unexpected when God showed up amongst the poor in that stable in Bethlehem. But what is really unexpected for most Christians today is that God continually shows up amongst the poorest of the poor all over the world today. Responding to the advent of our Lord shouldn’t end with playing with plastic nativity sets as if the unsettling reality of the event has been thoroughly domesticated. Hearing about the unexpected breaking in of God into humble conditions should not numb our souls but instead open our eyes to seeing all the places God shows up – even the unsettling and the horrifying – for God is already there.

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The wrong kind of pluralism

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The American Family Association has published this year’s
“Naughty or Nice?” list. It measures which businesses
support, marginalize or censor Christmas by how often they use the word
“Christmas” in their advertising. Concerned Christians then know which
businesses to support and which to avoid.

The so-called Christmas wars have been keeping the love
of Christ out of Christmas for years now, with people on both sides neglecting to consider others’ feelings. This hit home when my daughter came
home from kindergarten and asked for permission to attend her public school’s
holiday party. It’s a highly generic winter/Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa mash-up,
yet students must have parents’ permission to attend.

My daughter was seriously worried that I might not let
her go and relieved when I told her she could. But seeing her anxiety made me
feel bad for the many Muslim mothers in the class who may have had to explain to
disappointed children that they couldn’t attend the party because of their
faith. What does it do to a five-year-old’s perception of his faith to be
forced to avoid a class party because of it?

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Despising Advent

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Continuing my exploration of the unexpected this Advent, this is a post I contributed to Christine Sine’s Advent series this year.

It can be easy to despise Advent. I don’t mean the period of waiting in hopeful expectation itself, but the actual trappings of the season. It is easy to despise the commercialism – to condemn the frenzy and the greed and see it as an obstacle to entering into a meaningful discipline if waiting. It can be easy to despise those that jump straight into Christmas – those that deck the halls in red and green and blast Christmas carols during what should be a time of building expectation. It is easy to despise those that leave Christ out of Christmas (or to despise those that get offended when Christ gets left out of Christmas). From tacky decorations, to pushy sales clerks, to religious wars – the hustle and bustle and the secular trappings of the season often stand in the way of our hopeful anticipation of the Christ child. And so we despise it all, letting Advent become a time of spite and condemnation.

I’m one of the first to question the all consuming ways of empire and consumerism, but I’ve had to humbly realize that all too often I let my animosity towards such things turn my experience of Advent into a twisted period of judgment instead of hope. And in standing in that judgment I prevented myself from encountering Jesus in the very things I despised. I found myself hoping to draw near to a Jesus of my own creation – a Jesus that liked the things I like and ran in the same circles as I did. This was the Jesus I lit the candles for in hopeful expectation during Advent.

But of course, my image of Jesus was a poor reflection of the real Jesus. Jesus was the one who was out there in the world, hanging out with the uncouth and common members of society. He was accused of being a drunkard and glutton because he enjoyed being with and feasting with people. Sure, he delivered challenges to his culture and found moments for retreat, but he didn’t shun it because he despised it for getting in the way of his contemplative spiritual journey.

The Messiah showed up where no one expected him to. Born to a poor family in the unexpected dinginess of a stable, he subverted all cultural expectations. I’ve had to learn that my narrow expectations about Jesus do not give me the right to define the modern American secular Christmas as God-forsaken. Even there – subverting expectations – Jesus is at work. If I desire to draw near to Christ this Advent, I need to let go of my judgment and condemnation of such places and be willing to see how Jesus appears unexpectedly even there. My narrow conception of Advent should not lead me to a place of bitterness and hate, but instead allow me to find hope in the redemption of all things wherever it may be occurring.

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Back to Narnia

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Aside from the Bible, The Chronicles
of Narnia have been the most formative books in my life. My parents hung a
Narnia map in my nursery, and my dad started reading the books to me at age
three. Soon I was reading the books a couple of times a year.

Wheaton College houses C.S. Lewis’s papers (and has the wardrobe),
and we students lovingly referred to him as St. Jack. My husband and I got to
know each other at the Wheaton Children’s Literary Interpretation Society,
where we’d read children’s books out loud during study breaks. The first
semester we read The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe. My husband was Aslan; I was the White Witch.

So regardless of the reviews, I am excited to go see the movie
version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The story
is an integral part of my faith journey and I love it. But it’s strange to
encounter Lewis apart from the evangelical lens I’ve always seen him
interpreted through in the past.

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My Daughter the Santa Believer

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as posted at The Christian Century blog –

We tried to be those parents. We tried to tell our daughter that Santa Claus isn’t real.

We knew that this could get her in trouble at some point, that chaos would ensue if she destroyed the innocent faith of her kindergarten classmates with a declaration of Santa-atheism. Yet we did it anyway, perhaps to always tell her the truth about the world, perhaps to preserve the religious focus of the holiday. Whatever our reasons, the project didn’t work.

Early on she went along with our attempts. She even laughed at the silliness of Grandpa suggesting we put out milk and cookies on Christmas Eve. But as she matured to the more social age of four, everything changed. Her assertions to her Sunday school class and preschool that Santa isn’t real were met with uniform disagreement; she was outnumbered. Every single other child she knew believed in Santa, so the logical conclusion must be that her parents were wrong. She informed us without hesitation.

But around the same time, my daughter decided that the Christmas story–as in the whole Mary, Joseph, angels and baby Jesus tale–is just too far-fetched to be real. So I was stuck with a preschooler who believed in Santa but not in the Bible.

Strangely enough, I was okay with that. I didn’t care that the preschool constituency was against me; my daughter’s conversion woke me up to what it means to convey truth to her. I realized that our understandings of truth are communally created–the truths I want my daughter to understand have to make sense within the communal narrative of her world. The truth of the Christmas story is about more than historical veracity. And the Santa story provides space for meaning as well.

There will be time to explore the complexities of the historical Christmas story, but for now I am content to work within my daughter’s understanding of the world to kindle faith and encourage a love of meaningful truths.

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Third Sunday of Advent 2010

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As I explore the unexpected places God showed up in our story of Christmas, I think the most unsettling to our modern sensibilities how God was revealed to the Magi. It is one of those stories that we often try to explain away. We ignore the text that names these visitors to the Christ child as Magi and translate them as the more acceptable “wise men.” It makes for cute evangelistic cards that proclaim “wise men still seek him,” but it ignores the unexpected way God showed up.

Scholars aren’t certain, but tradition holds that the Magi were the actual historical Magi from Persia. Followers of the teachings of Zoroaster, they looked to the stars for wisdom. If they were official Persian Magi, then their tradition would have had access to the religious writing of the Israelites. For after the exile when the Persian emperor Cyrus permitted the rich and elite Jews who had been exiled by the Babylonians to return to rebuild Jerusalem, many of them chose not to go. They were the elites of the land – the royal families and the scholars; the comforts of an established society that valued their wisdom was far more enticing that roughing it in a backwater province that had been left in ruin. So it is a near certainty that these scholars of Judaism interacted with and shared their knowledge with the educated elite among the Persians. Even if the Matthew gospel included the story only to convey the idea that all nations will worship Jesus, it still suggests the same meaning – God shows up in other cultures and religious groups.

That is the part that freaks people out a bit and why the revelation is so unexpected. In our modern attempts to domesticate the story, we either ignore who the Magi were or we explain them away as converts to Judaism. We have allowed our expectations of how we assume God to work to remove the power from this story. God showed up unexpectedly not just to those who were told that an anointed one was coming, but also to those truth-seekers following a different path. Truth was revealed through their culture and their religious practices – and this is part of our Christmas story.

To even talk about this is unexpected. The exclusivity of Christianity has become a totalizing thing for most Christians. Insisting that Jesus is the reason for the season often has less to do with a commitment to Jesus as it does a rejection of other cultural practices. Hearing how God shows up in other cultures is unexpected because it is the last thing people often want to hear. But God does not play by our rules (thankfully). God shows up where God desires to show up. We have the testimony of the Nativity story to affirm that truth, perhaps we should stop letting it unsettle us so.

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God Even in Christmas

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as posted at The Christian Century blog –

I’m a sucker for Christmas songs. I’m not so far gone that I’m okay with department stores playing some pop princess’s version of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” on an 85-degree early November day here in central Texas. But let me join in on a round of “O Holy Night” or “White Christmas” and I’ll get choked up every time.

They might be overdone and cheesy, but there is something visceral about the collective emotion that Christmas songs tap into. Something is stirring even in all the schmaltz and sentimentality, something that goes beyond the consumeristic trappings. God shows up in the midst of all that cheese.

This week I finally allowed myself to click on the “Christmas Songs” playlist on my iPod (yes, I waited until Thanksgiving week). The songs shuffled between Willie Nelson and Enya and Harry Connick Jr. and The Wiggles. Then the player landed on U2’s version of “I Believe in Father Christmas.” Released two years ago to raise awareness for World AIDS Day, this quickly became my favorite Christmas song–mostly because of a one-word change Bono makes to the lyrics.

The original lyrics question any deeper meaning of Christmas and encourage people to simply enjoy the chance to be with family. The song writes off the reasons for the season as a mere bill of goods:

They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a silent night
They told me a fairy story
Till I believed in the Israelite.
And I believed in Father Christmas
And I looked at the sky with excited eyes
Till I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise

We were apparently sold to and told until we believed. But Bono changes the fourth line to “But I believe in the Israelite.” This present-tense affirmation changes everything:

—

We still have the trappings of Christmas and the competing narratives. But God shows up–there is room for belief. Yes, our eyes are full of cheap tinsel; yes, we can see through Father Christmas’s disguise. We may not get the snow at Christmas or peace on earth–but that isn’t all there is. We can say, “But I believe in the Israelite,” and this affirmation provides a meaning that the season otherwise lacks–and even infuses the season’s trappings with meaning. The sparkly lights, the trees, the tinsel and the songs (even the cheesy ones) can connect us with a surprisingly weighty soul language.

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