Changing One’s Mind

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I’m not a fan of mudslinging politics and get progressively tired of the candidates attempts to dig up dirt on each other. I admit that there may be a place for it in a sense. Voters should be informed and since our (and the media’s) attention spans are so short reminders of a person’s political and legal record can he helpful. But honestly I really don’t care about when Obama first wanted to be President (was it 1st or 3rd grade!!!) or if Hillary planted questions in her audience (isn’t that what politicians do???).

But one thing I read recently did surprise me. Apparently pastor and Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee isn’t allowing the public or media access to his sermons. Granted he has faced some embarrassing moments recently as public comments he made in the 90’s have resurfaced (quarantining AIDS patients and comparing environmentalism to pornography…), but it just seems weird to me that a pastor should hide his sermons. Is he embarrassed by what he preached? Has his theology changed? Is he just afraid of controversy?

One thing I’ve noticed about politics and often the church as well is the sheer aversion to admitting that one has changed one’s mind. If a politician voted one way 20 years ago, they apparently have to stick by that decision. They never say, “well, I have grown and changed as a person and I would vote differently now.” Same with pastors. Since their words are often delivered as nearly divinely inspired to recant or speak of an evolving theology is strictly taboo. I have no clue what Huckabee’s issue with his sermons is, I just wish this fear of admitting change and growth didn’t plague our politics and churches. I’d much rather have truth and transparency than backpedaling and cover-ups.

Maybe that’s just me. I have no problem admitting that my theology has changed drastically over the last ten years. Some of it has changed over the last year for that matter. I’m sure there are papers I wrote in college that I would cringe to read these days, and not just for the poor writing style (like the one for my Theology of Culture class where I named Postmodernism as the greatest threat to Christianity today…). Similarly I am sure there are archived threads on The Ooze and elsewhere that could get me labeled an official theological schizophrenic. I’m okay with that. I like to continue to learn and to grow. I don’t want to ever arrive and cement my thoughts in one static location to never be challenged again. That scares me way more than having to admit I was wrong or that I’ve changed.

But I also would never run for President.

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Patience and Food

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I have issues with being patient. For certain aspects of my life I really can’t stand waiting. But then for other things it’s no big deal.

For example, I like waiting for Christmas. I like the anticipation, I like celebrating on Christmas. I was never one of those kids who tried to find/open my presents early (I guess the modern equivalent would be seeing what’s been bought off my Amazon Wish List…). To me waiting until Christmas Day to open presents was part of what made the day special. So waiting for the right time to enjoy or celebrate is no problem.

But for other things in life I have significantly less patience. I hate being told by a doctor “we will call you in 3-5 days with your test results” when I KNOW that said results could be obtain in less than an hour. Or waiting around for someone who is late because they couldn’t stop reading a book, or watching TV, or playing a computer game. It bugs me. My patience runs thin.

So I was intrigued by some comments about patience and self-restraint I read recently in Barbara Kingsolver’s popular new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. This is a fantastic book that chronicles a family’s year of trying to eat locally, seasonally, and sustainably. I can’t quote the exact passage since I immediately lent my copy to a friend, but she addresses the issue of patience in regards to our food choices. She writes (as a mother of two) about how parents often encourage their children to restrain from having sex until the timing is right (marriage…). But she asks how our children can respect our insistence on self-restraint if we can’t even manage to restrain ourselves to buying food in season. Instead of waiting for the right time to harvest and eat a tomato, we demand on satisfying our hunger whenever the urge strikes. Our promiscuous ways lead us to the grocery story where pale refrigerated shadows of tomato are available stripped of antioxidants and nutrients all year round thanks to the gallons of oil that were consumed to ship it hundreds (or thousands) of miles in refrigerated crates. We don’t think twice about the instant gratification of our appetites generally, so who are we to insist that our children buy into a value we have discarded?

So a tomato may be an easy example for me. I hated the things until I tasted the heirloom varieties delivered in my CSA box one year. I can wait for the real deal to appear in late summer and am not tempted by the reddish tinged impostor in the supermarket, but her point is well taken. Sure I froze and dried some veggies from my garden this past harvest, but not near enough to get us through the winter. I just assume that I can get whatever I want to eat whenever I want it at the store. Like all other consumers I am willing to give up taste, and nutritional value for easy access. I rarely stop to think that anything I am buying in the Winter months (and most everything during the rest of the year) was grown someplace far far away and shipped long distances to get to me (at taxpayers expense btw). Waiting, patience, and self-restraint are ignored as my need for convenient instant gratification gives sustainability the finger.

Honestly, sitting here in snow-blanketed Illinois in the middle of December there isn’t much I can do. I can buy organic and at least reduce the negative impact my food choices have. And I can plan ahead for the future. I’m not going to move to a farm in Appalachia and raise my own turkeys, but there are ways I can sidestep our broken food system and live more responsibly. But it is something that will take time and effort. And a lot of patience.

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Third Sunday of Advent – Love

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In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John 1:1-3, 14 

Understanding the light. This week of advent we turn to focus on love. I’m sure there are many things I could quote about love (love is a many splendored thing, love lifts us up where we belong, all you need is love…), but instead I keep returning to this thought of light shining in the darkness.

There are many ways to be light in the darkness. One can saturate the darkness with intense floodlights, kinda like one would picture in a sudden police raid. It startles those in darkness and generally pisses people off. Then there’s the interrogation usage of light. The one intense spotlight shining on the accused, making him progressively more nervous and fearful until he finally caves into the demands. Or picture cockroaches running in fear as the light switch gets turned on. These are all ways for the light to shine in the darkness, but it is rare for the darkness to understand it.

But Jesus came as a light in the darkness full of grace and truth. Jesus came with love. He cared for the hurting, he cared for the oppressed and the outcast. He encouraged his followers to love as well. He wasn’t harsh and blinding, but gentle and guiding. But he still was light in the darkness.

Sure there were some who didn’t understand his light. Others today who have turned his light into the harsh and the offensive instead of the loving and leading. But as we are called to speak of the incarnation we are called to do so in love. As it is written, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”

Let us not be clashing cymbals or harsh lights. Let us speak of truth and shine the light in the darkness with grace and with love.

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Expectation

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So I’ve been thinking a lot about expectation and babies this advent season. Less about incarnate deity and more about that we in the Clawson household are expecting baby number two due this next July. So it has very much been a season of longing and hope of the more immediate kind for us.

My official due date is July 4th (and yes I am fully aware of the irony there). I know its not considered kosher to announce stuff like this before the end of the first trimester (I’m a few weeks short), but we mentioned it in our Christmas letter so I thought I might as well tell the whole world. And I desperately wanted a public forum to complain in. Sorry.

The last seven weeks or so of this haven’t been all joy and longing, more accurately they have been constant round-the-clock severe “morning sickness” (or Hyperemesis Gravidarum to use the official name). Basically I have been constantly sick since the start of November. Even on medications I can barely eat, I can hardly drink, I’ve lost over 10% of my body weight, been hospitalized for dehydration, and am so weak and nauseated that I have to spend almost all my time reclined on the couch. Needless to say, life around here has been a tad bit stressful. But the point is to do whatever I can to control the sickness so it doesn’t develop into the same complications as it did in my first pregnancy – pre-term labor, 3.5 months on strict bedrest, and a 6 weeks premature baby. We gambled on the chance of there being no complications this time around and so far aren’t doing so well.

But we, and Emma, are nevertheless very excited. Emma insists that it will be a “girl baby,” but we shall see. Names are still very much up in the air, but we do have our list of possibilities. And following that last post on naming trends those possibilities include both the trendy and the unique – and yes there is another LOTR name in the mix as well as a couple of names of Pagan deities to round it off nicely.

So Advent 2007 has been about joy, hope, and expectation, but with hefty doses of misery, worry, and fear. There is still a long road ahead and I pray that no further complications develop (I really really don’t want to do the bedrest thing again). We would appreciate your prayers as well. But above all, it is a time of celebration that I wanted to share with friends here.

(and I so promise not to turn this into a pregnancy blog :) )

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What’s In A Name?

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I like reading socio-cultural histories and following the patterns of cultural trends. I am in no way fashionable or trendy myself. I couldn’t tell you what sort of music is popular these days or what sort of clothing is in (I wear blue jeans, t-shirts, and birks). But I love reading about how the evolution of fashion affected, say, the women’s right’s movement. Or even about how the transformation of the “book” from scroll to codex to electronic medium influences how we psychologically interact with the text. So books like A History of Reading and Freakonomics fascinated me.

Since reading Freakonomics a couple of years ago, I’ve been intrigued by the history of names. The rise and fall of naming trends, the sounds that enchant a generation, the cultural events that send a name soaring or plummeting in the charts. I look forward to the Social Security Administration’s yearly Mother’s Day gift of the 1000 most popular names from the previous year. I am addicted to sites like the Baby Name Wizard that tracks current trends and reports of historical patterns. Yes, it is nerdy, but I like these attempts to understand the cultural zeitgeist.

So I’ve been lurking at the edges of recent conversation at Andrew Jones’ blog about the names emerging and emergent. The question posed was if those terms are a help or a hindrance to those of us within this conversation. Or as some interpreted it – is the shelf life of those terms rapidly coming to an end. Are emerging and emergent the ministry equivalents of Jennifer and Jason, or to be contemporary, Madison and Jacob – useful popular names for a season but which have become so overused and trendy that those who think about such things don’t want to use them anymore?

I found the comments in the discussion interesting. Sure there were those who freaked out about using any labels at all. Others threw up their hands in despair at the idea that some people have given emerging/emergent a bad name and so therefore we must promptly abandon them. Some were more ambivalent saying that a name doesn’t define who they are as Christians, and a small few actually said they liked the names.

What I found most intriguing was how this name discussion parallelled the biggest trends in baby naming – essentially that the trend these days is to be unique (not trendy). Of course the irony is that everyone is just giving into the trend of not being trendy. But our culture places so much value on individuality and not being one of the crowd that of course anti-trendiness and uniqueness have become virtues.

But have we ever stopped to think that in the mad dash to avoid cultural trends what we are really doing is refusing to be part of a community. By snubbing our nose at a label we are rejecting those who own that label. We say “we are different and better than you so therefore we don’t want to be associated with you.” Sure in the history of naming there perhaps are appropriate occasions to do such things (did all the Adolph’s start going by their middle name after WW2?). But to eschew a name/label because it isn’t unique enough or just isn’t “me” represents the height of individuality. And I thought that one of the things that pesky emerging/emergent label conveyed was a shift away from individuality towards community. But maybe that’s not what people really want.

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What’s So Bad About Christmas?

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This month’s Synchroblog is of course apropos for the season and is themed “Redeeming the Season.” While this leaves the topics wide open to addressing everything from Christmas consumerism to debating how to appropriately remember the Solstice, it prompted me to ask “honestly, what’s so bad about Christmas?” (or Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, or whatever).

Sure I can (and have here) listed my complaints against Christmas, but what I’m referring to today is why people are so adamant on only acknowledging the holiday they happen to celebrate to the exclusion of all others. I’m talking about those who freak out of people say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Or the people who bring lawsuits against schools or workplaces for putting up “Christmas” lights. The message they send is – “I don’t care that we live in a pluralistic world, I insist that the universe revolves around me and my preferences, I don’t even want to be reminded that people different than me even exist.”

Examples. When I was in high school my December final exam one year for my dance class was to choreograph a dance to music of my choosing. I choose a purely instrumental piece that had the term “Messiah” in it. A Jewish friend saw my tape with that title and complained to the teacher that her religion was violated if she had to listen to “Christian” music during my performance. Or a few years ago when I was a substitute teacher I was in charge of a 3rd grade class on the last day before Winter break. Of course the kids did nothing constructive all day, just games and craft projects. At one point I passed out pictures of a wintery scene with a horse drawn sleigh on them for the kids to color. A Muslim girl in the class refused to participate and complained that I was forcing her to celebrate Christmas by coloring that picture. This was after I had sat with her through lunch and recess while the other kids ate and played and talked with her about Ramadan (which she was observing).

This is a season of holidays. And if we truly want to redeem it so to speak, it seems like we need to get over ourselves. Our particular pet holiday, although deeply meaningful to us personally, is just one among many. To insist that others acknowledge our holiday or to barricade ourselves from exposure to other holidays is just plain selfish. Instead of trying to fight expression of any and all holidays because ours can’t be primary, lets work to allow equal promotion for all. I always liked Austin’s Trail of Lights each December in Zilker Park. It was a holiday celebration that allowed displays from whatever group wanted to set up a display. So there were of course Christmas displays (both secular and sacred), Hanukkah displays, Solstice displays, and even one set up to acknowledge the Greek Pantheon. It was fun and festive, and worked off of mutual respect instead of faked collective ignorance as to the existence of the entire season.

So let’s redeem the season by letting it be what it is – a season of holidays. Let’s acknowledge that other people deserve respect and don’t have to be exactly like us. And maybe we could all end up having a bit more fun with more reasons to celebrate and less excuses to fight. Maybe.

For other contributions to this Synchroblog check out –
Recapturing the Spirit of Christmas at Adam Gonnerman’s Igneous Quill
Swords into Plowshares at Sonja Andrew’s Calacirian
Fanning the Flickering Flame of Advent at Paul Walker’s Out of the Cocoon
Lainie Petersen at Headspace
Sam Norton at Elizaphanian
Brian Riley at at Charis Shalom
Secularizing Christmas at JohnSmulo.com
There’s Something About Mary at Hello Said Jenelle
Geocentric Versus Anthropocentric Holydays at Phil Wyman’s Square No More
Celebrating Christmas in a Pluralistic Society at Erin Word’s Decompressing Faith
Redeeming the season — season of redemption by Steve Hayes
Remembering the Incarnation at Alan Knox’ The Assembling of the Church
The Obligation of Christmas at JonathanBrink.com
A Biblical Response to a Secular Christmas by Glenn Ansley’s Bad Theology
Happy Life Day at The Agent B Files

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Resounding Gongs and Clanging Cymbals

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So when I first read the news report about American Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s unfortunate remarks about AIDS, I was annoyed. Saying in 1992 (and standing by those words in 2007) that AIDS patients should be isolated/quarantined because we don’t know how AIDS spreads is a bit out there. Perhaps if it had been 1982, it would have been vaguely understandable. But 1992, that’s just sad.

I don’t mean to pick on Huckabee. He isn’t my top choice among the candidates, but he isn’t my absolute last choice either. His statement was stupid and unbelievable, but it was just a mere blip on the sensational news radar. What I think made it continue to bug me is the underlying attitude of rejection of the Other that it conveys.
The messages of the culture I inhabit and the belief I follow teach me to be inclusive of the Other. Values of tolerance and respect are assumed in the postmodern climate of this globalized world. My faith encourages me to love my neighbor and my enemy, treating them as I myself would desire to be treated. I read stories of Jesus hanging out with the lepers and of him promoting the actions of a good Samaritan who helped out a bleeding and dying man. In essence loving people no matter what was wrong with them. Embracing the Other out of the command to love them instead of rejecting them out of fear because they are different.

So to hear politicians and those who claim to be Christian saying that people who are different or ill need to be isolated away from normal people (and for false reasons at that) doesn’t make much sense to me. Sure I understand safety and medical issues, but I don’t understand the mindset of rejection. Huckabee’s words were foolish and misguided, but they also departed from the type of lifestyle of love Christ calls us to live. And that is what makes those words most dangerous.

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Advent – Song of Hope

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As the theme of Advent this week is hope, I wanted to share the lyrics to one of my favorite songs that celebrates that hope. I have always found David Wilcox’s songs to hold truth in their very self-awarely simple and folksy way. The album this song is from, Into the Mystery, didn’t leave my cd player for about a year after it was released as I let the songs seep in. I keep coming back to this song though because of how beautifully it captures the hope of the incarnation. Enjoy.

If it Wasn’t for the Night

If it wasn’t for the night
So cold this time of year
The stars would never shine so bright
So beautiful and clear

I have walked this road alone
My thin coat against the chill
When the light in me was gone
And my winter house was stilled

When I grieved for all I’d made
Out of all I had to give
On the eve of Christmas day
With no reason left to live

Even then somehow in the bitter wind and cold
Impossibly strong I know
Even then a bloom as tender as a rose
Was breaking through the snow
In the dark night of the soul
In the dark night of the soul

If it wasn’t for the babe
Lying helpless on the straw
There would be no Christmas day
And the night would just go on

When it seem that death has won
Buried deep beneath the snow
Where the summer leaves have gone
The seed of hope will grow

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Being Negative

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Yesterday in church as we began our celebration of Advent we focused on Idolatry. Granted that isn’t one of the common themes of the season, but the advent of this different type of Messiah calls one to examine idolatry of empire versus allegiance to the Kingdom of God. As one stands against the false messages of empire, it become important to not only live differently but to have a prophetic voice where one is at. One needs to have the ability, the right, and the courage to stand up at times and say “this isn’t right.” Unfortunately that prophetic voice is generally suspect or corrupted in the church and in American society. As we discussed this, I was reminded of a recent quote of Tony Campolo to Tony Jones that I have seen posted on a couple of blogs (HT – Brother Maynard and Steve Knight)

“Don’t emerge. The Church needs you to not emerge. Keep being emergent. Keep saying what you’re not. Keep saying what you’re against. Be a prophetic voice in the Church, ’cause as soon as you say, ‘OK we’re done being against, we’re done kind of calling out the failings of the modern church, the weaknesses of the modern church,’ then you will become something, and you’ll no longer be Emergent. Then you’ll start ‘workin’ for The Man.’ You’ll become part of the big institution.”

While I am sure that more was meant in this statement than just what I am perceiving here, I think this holds some good advice for the church. One of the most common complaints I hear against us emergent types is that we are too negative – we just complain about the system and don’t actually ever say what we are for. While I often wonder if those making such accusations are just too miffed that our complaints hit too close to home to bother looking at what we do believe, these sorts of accusations generally end up shutting down constructive conversation. Conflict avoidance is next to godliness in most church settings I’ve been a part of, and so to accuse someone of being negative and inciting conflict is a sure way to silence opposition. In effect prophetic voices get muzzled or tainted with the label rabble-rouser. We can’t have people being negative now can we? Or as someone asked in church yesterday, did people tell Martin Luther to stop being so negative as he nailed his complaints to the door?
Granted, some attempts at having a prophetic voice are anything but helpful. Thoughtful engagement and criticism appear instead as hatred and judgementalism. Those voices are not looking for dialogue or change, but to merely tell others why they obviously are wrong. They kinda forget the whole “speak the truth in love” mandate or Peter’s advice to give a reason for the hope we have with gentleness and respect.
There needs to be a balance here. Judgementalism must be avoided in favor of respect and love, but prophetic voices shouldn’t be shamed into silence either. There is nothing wrong with calling for reform of the church or of the country – even though such a call is by its very nature negative. In exploring flaws and providing constructive criticism one is not necessarily rejecting those structures, just hoping to make them better. So while positive outlooks have their place, so do negative criticisms. We need to cling to the ability to be self-reflective of the cultures we inhabit (including the church) and continue to have a prophetic voice within those realms – no matter how uncomfortable it may be for others to hear.

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