the opposite of faith

"The opposite of faith is not doubt:" Anne Lamott wrote in Salon.com this week -- "It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do. The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God's identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it's the truth."

a ringing in the ears

So I have this odd connection to people whose organizations are dedicated to the notion of Christian evangelism. I say "the notion of Christian evangelism" because I've somehow become a source to a few people who see that the assumptions they've been working under seem to be crumbling and their missions failing -- or at least not succeeding much beyond the appearance of Christian evangelism. In practical terms I suppose that may mean they are able show enough activity to continue raising money from people who have yet to question the assumptions of modern(ist) American evangelical evangelism. But these people who find me from time to time seem to believe that's not good enough to be sustainable and I believe they're right about that.

Yesterday I took a call from a videomaker working on a project for one of these folks. It was obviously an obligatory call because the videomaker made it clear he was trying to finish shooting the project in the next couple of days and his client said he should call me for direction on some things he should steer around in the "Gospel presentation" that is to be included on the DVD. The videomaker let me know he had a guy coming in to "present the Gospel" and the client wanted him to avoid language that would turn people off -- words like 'sin,' you know, because people don't like to be told they're sinners.

My ears were ringing the least bit as I listened to the nice videomaker do his duty and make the call he was asked to make -- reminding me several times that he needed to get this finished up in the next couple of days. I may have made his ears ring when I said none of my friends like being called sinners because they don't particularly believe they are sinners, but they're convinced right to the soles of their feet that they are fucked up.

"Excuse me?" he said from the other end, "did you say messed up?"

"I said, fucked up," I replied.

"Oh, f'd up," he said with a nervous chuckle. "Well, we probably won't go that low."

The ringing in my ears got louder and I said, "No, we wouldn't want to go as low as Jesus would go."

I don't know what was going on at his end of the line. He asked if he could give my number to the guy who was coming in to "give the Gospel."

"Look," I said, "yes; you can give him my number, but I don't have enough context to even know what i'm voting on. In general I think it's a bad idea to try to 'close the deal' on a DVD."

At this point he cut me off: "Yeh, everybody has their opinion about that," and reminded me he was trying to get this project wrapped up in the next couple of days.

I ended the conversation and promised to get back to him. Then I left a terse message on the voice mail of the guy who made the poor videomaker call me.

Turns out they've already had two other guys "give the Gospel," including a reputedly postmodern guy from northern California who turned out to be no less offensive than whoever it was who struck out the first time. Now they've lined up an ethnic guy to deliver the goods and really feel the need to get it right this time because who can afford to just keep shooting and shooting?

The ringing in my ears is driving me out of my mind.

"Which gospel is he going to deliver?" I asked. "The gospel of the kingdom of heaven Jesus came preaching? I doubt it."

"I know," my friend said. "I respect your thinking on that." And he does. But he has a job to do and he doesn't work for me.

I cherry-picked this from an interview with Os Guinness this morning:

"Suffering is uniquely individual, so there are no recipe answers. The first part of reaching out in love is to listen and try to discern where and why the person is hurting, and only then to bring the reassurance that the gospel brings to that particular hurt. We must never forget that listening is love, that comforting someone with an embrace without words is love, and that if we do not know why someone is suffering, to pretend that we do and say what God is doing in his or her life can be insensitive, cruel, and dead wrong—as Job's comforters were. That said, evil can torture the mind just as it can torture the body, and it is wonderful to be able to bring specific, comforting truths of the gospel to bear on specific points of anguish and see them make a difference. For example, I have seen more people helped by coming to appreciate the outrage of Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus—and its significance for the notion that "the world should have been otherwise"—than by a hundred worthy expositions of the Fall."

Even if we reduce the Gospel to individualized cognitive event -- there's that ringing again -- it's still individualized.

I have another friend from another American evangelistic collective with whom I've been hashing this dilemma for a whole decade. He was training the staff of his organization to put the Gospel in terms he could relate to. I pushed him hard on the biblical context of all that and after a series of heated exchanges he went off to do some field research. Everywhere he went for several weeks, he asked self-described Christians what it was that persuaded them to consider the possibility that Jesus was the answer to their most pressing questions.

He came home with a pattern of nine categories including the one that proved persuasive to him. All of a sudden he moves from one reason to believe to nine possible reasons. So how does he teach his organization to choose the appropriate contextualization for the person seated across from them in a given moment? He teaches them to listen. To ask really good questions. To pay attention as if it really mattered because, of course, it really does.

The reason I think it's a bad idea trying to close the deal on a DVD is because I think it's a bad idea trying to close the deal period. There is no deal. That's an unworthy metaphor for an exchange between two human being talking about the unlikely possibility that the good news about God might be even better than the bad news that they are both fucked to hell and back.

The problem is, that particular telling of the Gospel is completely unacceptable to everyone but those who are convinced that what they're doing isn't working. Would Jesus stoop so low? Are you kidding? Go read the stories again and get back to me on that.

the hunger + the thirst

The Los Angeles Times' Janet Kinosian asked legendary cartoonist Stan Lee the big question: If you could have a superpower yourself, what would it be?

Lee was behind the best years of Marvel Comics as the creator of the Incredible Hulk, Spider Man and the X-Men. "If you could have a superpower yourself," Kinosian asked, "what would it be?"

"Immortality;" Lee replied, "I'd hate to think this will end."

Yep.

legacy

Sao Paulo Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns reports that every time he visited John Paul II, the pope had three questions for him:

Are you taking care of the poor?
Are you taking care of the workers?
Are you taking care of the youth?

These are not bad questions for people who wonder how we're doing…

enough already

Enough of this ungodly preoccupation with the Ten Commandments.

Anybody as fixated on the Ten Commandments as your run of the mill American Evangelical can't possibly have read the whole book…or Kurt Vonnegut.

" For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

“'Blessed are the merciful' in a courtroom? 'Blessed are the peacemakers' in the Pentagon? Give me a break!"+

OK, that hurt a little.

And then some clown says to find out what the Bible says about the Ten Commandments -- as distinct from just reading the list -- I'd have to read the whole thing. Seriously? Are you kidding? I haven't even read the Left Behind books! Enough already!

+ Kurt Vonnegut, "Cold Turkey," May 10, 2004, In These Times.

a resurrection dream...or so it seems to me

We had a quiet dinner with friends and neighbors in various states of hopeful disrepair this Easter.

The poet Wendell Berry slipped this word in edgewise...

A MEETING
In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: "How you been?"
He grins and looks at me.
"I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees."


Wendell Berry, Collected Poems, North Point Press, 12th printing, 2000, page 206

jimhenderson

the U.S. Budget is a moral document

A note I sent my U.S. Representative and Senators as the new budget leaves committee and begins its course through the Congress:

Senator Boxer, Representative Cunningham, Senator Feinstein:

I believe the proposals on the table from the House and Senate Budget Committees include penalties against the most vulnerable Americans and welfare payouts to the most privileged Americans. As a person of faith I find this unconscionable.

"It is," Jesus said, "the sick who need a physician." I call on you to be doctors for those who need help, not those who can help themselves.

The U.S. Budget is a moral document. Please lead your colleagues in doing the right thing.

sincerely,

Jim Hancock

dustball

for grins...

speaking of Jon Stewart (or was it Jim Wallis?)

Did you see Jim Wallis on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart? No?

Well, here you go, then: Jim Wallis on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

you'll forgive me, i hope

You'll forgive me, I hope, for posting words I didn't write and to which I don't think I have anything to add.

“The Left mocks the Right. The Right knows it’s right, Two ugly traits," Bono writes on the back of Jim Wallis' new book, 'God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. "How far should we go to try to understand each other’s point of view? Maybe the distance grace covered on the cross is a clue.”

I could sure use a clue.

numb...

Jenni, whom I don't know, commented on the Blood:Water posting, referring me to a book called 'Good News About Injustice' which, I do know.

I went with author Gary Haugen (who's the founder and president of International Justice Mission) to India to see if there could possibly be any good news about injustice. There is. The result of that trip is something called The Justice Mission.

Jen Howver at Youth Specialties asked what it was like to work on the Justice Mission. Which took me back to the beginning…

+ + + + +

Numb is what I was. Overwhelmed by 24-hour news about precision bombing + corporate corruption + genocide + suicide killers, evil empires, broken promises, dead children, stolen dreams + working Americans slipping into poverty. Just numb.

So, being numb and all, I wasn’t sure how I was going to engage youth groups in the fight against global oppression. Because that’s the assignment I was asked to take on in The Justice Mission.

I think I know something about constructing appeals that get a knee jerk emotional response. I just don’t think that translates to sustainable engagement. Besides which, manipulating 15 year-olds feels a little sleazy to me.

That said, if the mere facts of the matter were enough to generate committed action we would live in a very different world wouldn’t we.

What to do…what to do?

The solution was finding a way to see the world through the eyes of someone who wasn’t so numb to pain and hope. That turned out to be four American kids who were alert and articulate (and possessed a significant emotional vocabulary). We took them to South Asia for ten days—to look over their shoulders and into their eyes as they became eyewitnesses to oppression.

Ben was few weeks out of Christian high school and on his way to a state university. Charissa was a high school junior. Lindsay had just completed her sophomore year in college. Trever was entering his senior year in high school (some people recognize Trever from his work in television and the movies but that wasn’t why he was on the trip). Trever and Lindsay and Ben and Charissa all went to Asia because they love Jesus and they love people and they are not afraid to see what they’re seeing—however shocking—and describe it clearly and directly.

Our hosts were the International Justice Mission who are heroes as far as I’m concerned. They are law enforcement professionals and government relations experts and attorneys (the sort who become protagonists in John Grisham novels) who have figured out how to extract children from forced labor, how to release girls and women from involuntary prostitution, how to bring corrupt cops and soldiers to justice and how to restore stolen land to poor farmers—all in the name of Jesus and by lawful means. This is very impressive to me, and a heckuva good story.

IJM introduced the American kids to dozens of people their age and younger who were trapped in hideous circumstances—little kids rolling beedi cigarettes instead of going to school; a girl forced into prostitution when she should have been in seventh grade; a boy whose 10th grade year was interrupted when he had to go to work for a loan shark; a woman who had been breaking rocks by hand in a stone quarry for 40 years (40YEARS!) while getting further in debt every year.

The Americans took case histories from more than two-dozen children in bonded slavery—they were working to pay the interest on family debts structured so they could never, in two or three lifetimes pay them off (which explains the woman at the rock quarry). Typical story: My brother was sick. My father borrowed $25 from a man in the village to pay the hospital. I’ve been working ten hours a day for the last six years to pay off the $25. I don’t know how much longer I will have to work. I feel a little sick from remembering. Maybe I’m not as numb as I thought.

Those case histories, including x-marks on little human-shaped outlines to show where some children were beaten by the “businessmen” who held them captive, became part of the evidence against the moneylenders. This was not busy work. In the months following our visit, IJM mounted legal proceedings against those men, leading to jail time and hefty fines for the bad guys and emancipation for the children.

This is what IJM does. They leverage the simple, painstaking work of law enforcement for the benefit of people who have no one else to defend them. The Americans watched as dozens of children waved their papers in the air—the documentation declaring their release from bonded slavery and threatening prosecution against anyone who dares to steal their freedom.

Every night the Americans reflected on what they saw and heard that day and how they felt and what they thought it meant and what they wanted to do about it. All this was dutifully recorded tape after tape by the very tall and talented Jay Delp and me.

The five sessions in The Justice Mission are as good as I know how to write. But what youth workers talk about when they describe The Justice Mission experience in their groups is the moral authority of those four American kids facing up to their responsibility through tears and determination—conspiring to make the world safe for children.

Who has what it takes to look at global oppression without flinching? Not many. Not me. It’s too big; I feel too small. Joseph Stalin, who ordered the murder of hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens, is supposed to have said that the death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of thousands is only a statistic. That’s why The Justice Mission couldn’t be about numbers. It had to be the story of four American kids who saw and heard and felt certain things when they looked oppression right in the kisser and decided what to do about it.

From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger. Psalm 8:2

From the lips of children…

I’ve spent a good chunk of my life trying to represent the voices to people who are mainly overlooked (or ignored, or misrepresented) by people in power. The Justice Mission takes that effort two layers deep: It’s a vehicle for the passion of four young storytellers who would be easy to ignore except that they are eyewitnesses to things most adults have only read about (if that). And these four speak on behalf of millions of children victimized by adults who certainly know better (but do it anyway).

The Justice Mission may be as good as I can hope to produce—I’m still learning so we’ll see. In the meantime, if it engages people like you in groups like yours to make a tiny dent in the universe of pain, it will be enough.

+ + + +

Good people doing a difficult job: International Justice Mission. Gary Haugen has a newer book called 'Terrify No More.'