Just for fun I checked out a site that claims to tell you how many people in the U.S. share your name. Apparently there are 28 of me around. So I googled myself and discovered that whoever these other Steven Woolley people are, they are far more well known, well published and worthy of googling than am I. It’s one way to stay humble.
To continue the thought started below, the church has been urging us to do what we can for peace in Gaza. Now what on earth might be helpful? Well, if Mr. Olmert decides to ask my opinion on the matter I might suggest the following.
I’m a little confused. The news reports that a number former Guantanamo residents have returned to their terrorist ways by rejoining their old outfits or ones like them. Why does this surprise anyone? I could be really sleazy and suggest the parallels to all the old Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stalone movies. That would be un-American. What about comparing it to just plain recidivism, the kind we experience with a lot of ex-cons? The real question is, what sort of attitude would you have toward your captors under similar circumstances? Would you have gone back home and said to the recruiters, “I learned my lesson. What I did was wrong. Actually those are really nice people and they treated me well all those years.”? They and we can continue to sow and reap violence until the end of time, or we can do what we can to break the cycle of violence and work toward peace. At the very least, if we claim the name of Christ, we could start trying to follow his counsel. My conservative friends will call me naive. What do we have to lose? We cannot screw it up anymore than it is. Let’s try a different path for a change.
This is a quote from someone offering her opinion to the Obama transition team:
I do not believe in family immigration. Just because one person comes to America does not mean that the whole family belongs here. Immigrants should be educated and speak english (sic) to be in this country. We have enough people in this country who are not educated and can not (sic) afford higher education, so we must take care of the citizens of this country before we can take on more. We do not need to (sic) world’s poor in this country.
While I can understand the angst about losing our American character to a foreign invasion of poor, illiterate strangers who do not share it, it also betrays a deep ignorance of how America developed in the first place. It is also consistent with the ethnic paranoia expressed by every generation of Americans about new arrivals. I guess it’s human nature, but it’s terribly sad and worse, it’s the feedstock that fuels bigotry, violence and the corruption of our highest civic ideals. I’ve done some traveling about the globe, and I know what it’s like to be the one who is illiterate and uneducated, and who, like dear old Blanche Dubois, had to rely on the kindness of strangers to get by. Of course, I was “rich.” What if I had been poor? But even more important, what kind of connection might you make between this brief article and the several that precede it on the subject of radical welcome?
Regular readers, if there are any, will note an occasional reference to a friend who is writing a commentary on a portion of Luke. I’m a little vague about what I say about that since his daily drafts are intended to end up as an edited whole ready for publication one of these days. But I’m going to borrow one of his sentences from this morning’s draft because it speaks directly to a couple of previous posts about radical welcome.
“At the root of anticipatory welcome is confidence in God’s gratuitous generosity.”
Anticipatory welcome is the feeling, or at least hope, that I will be warmly welcomed by the people I am about to meet, perhaps for the first time, in the place I am about to enter, perhaps for the first time. Anticipatory welcome is hard to come by. The more likely expectation is of anticipatory rejection. “I don’t really know this place; I don’t really know these people; I know I was invited but I don’t know the local rules of the place, it’s culture, it’s practices; What if they don’t like me?
Anticipatory welcome, as least in terms of the radical welcome I believe is the primary tool of evangelism, is all about confidence in God’s gratuitous love. But that confidence has to come from somewhere. Congregations and individual Christians need to be bold in talking about that gratuitous love when the opportunity arises, and develop habits of being that reflect it in some way, so that when that hopeful, but skeptical, person finally decides to find out if it might be available to him or her, she or he will find an abundance of it during worship and fellowship. But let’s be clear about it, an abundance of God’s gratuitous love as expressed by you, me, or our congregations is not the same thing as fawning, smothering, and obviously phony welcome that many of us have experieinced. It is the genuine willingness to touched by the stranger who is a sinner as by our brother or sister. There’s more, but I’d like to hear your take on it.
Let’s set theology aside for a moment to ponder a truly important question. What do dogs think? My Andy is a close observer of clothing. He watches me take it off and put it on, every item, some with close inspection. Does he wonder why humans put their fur on and take it off so often? Does he wonder why they keep changing colors, textures and smells? Does he find the human behavior in our household acceptable if extremely odd in every way? I know he thinks we are not too bright. For instance, we cannot be allowed to go to the bathroom by ourselves, and we are totally ignorant of the obvious fact that there is more chicken on the kitchen counter just barely out of his reach. These are weighty matters, are they not?
Does the Church have anything useful to say about the economy? The eighth century prophets certainly had a lot to say about it in their day, and now and then we’ve seen a contemporary stab at it as in the Social Gospel movement. But what about today? I’ve got my own guesses. You might wonder what they have to do with theology or the Church, but they all come from my meditation and prayer about God’s words as expressed by those old prophets, the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus.
My first guess is that there is no such thing as a free market or free market system. All markets exist within an environment established by governmental policies, and those policies, no matter how arrived at, create boundaries, rules, exceptions, and biases. So the American myth that we should get government out of the way and let business do its business isn’t even a decent myth. It’s just blatant silliness.
My second guess is that the most important question American’s can ask right now is; what policies are best for a democratic nation that values private enterprise and private initiative, and that must live and compete within a global economy?
My third guess is that speculative greed and corruption will always be a disruptive element in any economy. To what extent can it be contained without depriving the freedom to experiment and take risks?
Based on these guesses, I would like to consider some possibilities. What about economic policies based not on consumer credit but consumer savings? That would not mean the elimination of credit, but the emphasis and rewards would be tilted toward savings. What about policies that encourage manufacturing for a world market according to international standards of measurement and quality? What about policies that eliminate subsidies for most crops but keep crop insurance and environmental sustainability incentives? What about a tax system that does not deliberately exacerbate the widening gulf between rich and not rich? What if our highest national priorities were health care, education/skills training and infrastructure? That would require a politically risky change that would dramatically reduce our investment in traditional preparations for war. Finally, what if the investment markets could be cured of their addiction to quarterly results, which, in the long run and the short run, leads only to playing craps with loaded dice?
I’m not sure what the results would be, but my guess is that they would include a larger number of somewhat smaller corporations, more small business start-ups, a greater number of jobs requiring certain skills and offering decent pay, a lessening of the gap between rich and poor, opportunity for the creation of wealth for the lucky, and a pattern of international economic integration that would greatly reduce the likelihood of major war. It would not eliminate the presence of greedy speculation, but it would frustrate its practitioners enough to make them work extra hard for ill-gotten gains.
I wanted to start with very simple, ordinary things about radical welcome in the post below because we have a tendency to over-complicate matters right off the bat mostly, I think, as a way of avoiding doing anything but talk. For a number of years I taught a course in an MBA program called Management and Society that introduced budding executives to some principles of ethics. I’ve written elsewhere on some of my experiences with them, and one consistent experience was their desire to leap into questions of the morality of atomic warfare or how to achieve peace in the Middle East. What we really needed to to was begin with examining the moral habits of our ordinary daily lives and the relatively simple choices we make in them. It turns out that that is a very hard thing to do because it forces us to deal with the reality of our own lives as we confront our own responsibility for choices and their consequences.
Epiphany is a season of signs and symbols, and I want to reflect on that in some pretty down to earth ways.
“Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the Glory of God.” (Rom. 15.7) Jesus gave us a new commandment to love one another as he loved us, and, while I believe that remains our highest goal, it also seems to me to be out of reach even for the best of us. But what we can do is to welcome one another, just as Christ has welcomed us. The record of Jesus welcoming is somewhat alarming in that he didn’t seem to have very high standards. Just about anyone who came into his presence was welcomed: lepers, tax collectors, notorious sinners, elite scholars, lawyers, good friends, total strangers, even the crowd that came to arrest him in the garden. Not everyone accepted or responded warmly to his welcome, but all were offered it nonetheless. Maybe we are unable to love as Christ loved, but we can welcome as he welcomed. So now the questions becomes, what signs and symbols do we erect that say You are Not Welcome!?
I wonder if we could work on those first, and I don’t think we need to get overly theological about it. These are ordinary, practical things. For instance, some years ago on our annual sojourn to our favorite winter retreat we decided to look for the Episcopal Church in a nearby community. We had the address and new the town, we could even see the building sitting back in a small grove of trees, but there was not the slightest hint about how to actually get to it. Obviously only those in the know were welcome there. A nearby SDA church, on the other hand, had a large inviting driveway framed by a large, but tasteful, sign of welcome. I have no idea what went on in either one of those places. The point is that signs and symbols of welcome are a first step and we can all take it. I know there is a lot more to it than that, but why not start with the simple basics and go from there.
My friend is hammering his way through Luke 7:36-50 attempting to resolve issues of love, repentance, forgiveness, and prevenient and cooperative grace. He seems to be especially interested in getting us out of the logic of the exchange/debt rut in which things are exchanged between God and humans to even out the score. Exchange is required in order to settle accounts in our world. It’s a very powerful force. Quid pro quo, isn’t that a phrase we all know even if we can’t translate it? I give you something, you owe me. I say it’s a gift, but I expect at least some sign of gratitude in exchange. The best sales persons know how powerful the exchange principle is and use it with skill to deprive us of our cash. The exchange principle is at the heart of our criminal justice system, and at the heart of all the little “you owe me’s” that we collect and treasure.
I’m fascinated with his work, which is far beyond my abilities. But as I’ve been reading each day’s piece I keep coming back to the observation that we humans (or at least this human) have severe limitations to our thinking that is bound to our dimensional world, and especially to the linear nature of time. I know there are lots of very sophisticated arguments about the non-linear nature of time, but let’s face it; our daily lives are lived out in very linear way with one moment following another like “clock work.” We are accustomed to a world of cause and effect or event and consequence, and that’s not bad. It keeps us sane and allows us at least some ability to make moral decisions and plan ahead.
That means that questions like the following make perfect sense to us. Does repentance come before forgiveness? Is repentance a precondition of forgiveness? Does God’s steadfast and abounding love for us offer forgiveness for things not fully repented, or even known? Does God require full payment for sins through the death of Jesus before full forgiveness is given? Is there anything we can give God in recompense for our sins? Can my free will ever make a holy contribution to my relationship with God? And so on.
To be sure, Jesus came to live in our world as one of us, and it is through him that we can apprehend, but not comprehend, an accurate but very limited picture of God’s intention, love and grace. Thanks be to God for that, but what if God exists in another kind of world altogether? What if God’s environment is omnidimensional with no outer limit? That would mean that all things could be going on at the same time in any direction and in any relationship. Theologians have sometimes talked about perichorisis as a way of describing the internal relationship of the Trinity as something of a holy dance – I always seem to picture it as a traditional Jewish wedding dance. What if this perichorisis is the dance of Grace that God has with all of creation so that there can never be an answer to the proper sequence of things in order for God’s grace to be encountered, received or have effect?
That sort of environment would not make any sense to us. It would be totally incomprehensible, yet passages in Scripture such as Luke 7:36-50 push us in that direction. In that case, most of the traditional arguments from Luther, Calvin and most of the rest of us, about what is required for eternal life and what it means to say that Jesus died for our sins are nothing but wild shots in the dark. The best they can do for us is satisfy our need for God’s actions to make some sense to us as being at least a little bit the way that we ourselves would act if we were truly good, loving and pure in heart. When someone comes to me asking about how they can be saved, they want an answer that makes sense in human terms, and that is almost always based on the exchange principle somewhere along the line.
I love this stuff, and I can’t wait to see where my friend comes out on all of it. But I also think it’s tangential to what it means to be a follower of Christ. I think the core to what it means to be a Christian has a lot more to do with discipleship. Anyone want to take a shot at that?