dancing is still unchristian

I do not dance. Most people who know me at least know that. Unfortunately, the little girls at Love in Action did not know this about me when I suggested that we celebrate one of our last evenings together. They innocently insisted that I join them on the roof-top where they intended to teach me some traditional Indian dancing. I explained that my body is not capable of such things... that someone might get hurt... that dancing is not Christian... that no human should ever be so undignified.

Thankfully, it was late enough at night that there was very little light shed on my complete loss of dignity. I could not turn down twenty orphan girls. It was humiliating, it was ugly, and it was dangerous for those who got too close. The girls were overtaken by laughter as they watched me hop and stumble and bow and twirl and kick and... hell... I don't know what I was doing. We all stopped to catch our breath after each song--the girls were laughing too hard, I was simply out of shape.

But ultimately, I believe this experience was one of the more beautiful of my many lovely experiences in India. The beauty was in forgetting myself; it was a rare moment when I was totally free from my pride.

That night we celebrated God: the One who saves us from evil, hunger, poverty, and ourselves.

the sights

a tea leaf

lots of tea leaves

breakfast on a banana leaf

villains at rest

wild elephant

divine elephant

chennai beach cart

gandhi in chennai

healthcare

after school snack

lost appetite

working from home

capitalism

simplicity

fashion

two-wheelers

a modern indian

an old indian

a long ride

a family ride


Meet the children from Love in Action:

making faces

creating a distraction

preparing for dinner

the smile

the story-teller

the baby

shyness

bubbles

the sass

the sweetest

Indian faces with dignity:

selling guavas

emotional pose one

emotional pose two

emotional pose three

emotional pose four

from india

Hello friends…

I hope the summer has been treating you well. The weather is so beautiful here in India. It is monsoon season, which means it is a lovely seventy degrees, sometimes a little cooler… definitely not what I expected. Besides enjoying the weather and the food, I have been helping out at an orphanage in Bangalore and will spend the last week in July visiting another very famous orphanage near the southern tip of India. Somewhere in between, on my way to the south, I think I am going to go on a safari. I am pretty excited about the detour. I have also had plenty of time to think here… and after a mere three weeks in India I have come to three unrelated conclusions. If you have the time to read a lengthy post, I would like to share them with you.

One of the few conclusions that I have made is about my friends at home, the few great people I have had the privilege of living my life with these last few years—they are of the rarest kind. I have often boasted of the quality of people that God has placed in my life, though I secretly wondered whether this was exaggerated because of my lack of experience. I am happy to say, after traveling to the opposite side of the planet, I have a new confidence on this matter and intend to boast even more in God’s provision. My brothers and sisters in Christ are truly something special and I am humbled that God would allow me to have such a fellowship. I miss them very much.

Perhaps my second conclusion is a bit bold for only a few weeks, but it seems safe to say it: I will not be the same after this visit to India. I have been staying at an orphanage in Bangalore that is filled to capacity with about twenty children. It is a very humble space, about the size of a typical two-story house in America… but lacking many of the luxuries. However, I can say with confidence, that the children here have a wealth unmatched in the prosperous homes of America. They possess true freedom through discipline, daily prayer, regular labor, and most importantly, loving fellowship. The name of the orphanage—Love in Action—describes this place as precisely as words are able. The family that started this ministry, and who has welcomed me into their home (which is the orphanage itself), is truly the most loving group of people I have met. Please allow me to take a moment to introduce them:

Enoch, the patriarch I suppose, is an elderly but vibrant man who is full of wisdom and humility, someone I already deeply respect. His wife, who I call Auntie, is a frail old woman in her frame, but her strength as a mother and wife over the years is astonishing. And finally, their daughter, Nancy, displays such tenderness to both her extensive collection of animals as well as to all twenty children—she is the essence of motherhood.

There are many ways God is using this orphanage in my life, but I will share just one of the experiences here that will likely change me forever. Shortly after I arrived, I had the privilege of seeing the children celebrate Father’s Day. I felt a little awkward honestly… Father’s Day in an orphanage… I did not know what to expect. After breakfast, the children announced that they would be hosting an event that evening and would like for us to attend… upstairs. Of course we went, arriving upstairs at the specified time. The children put together an elaborate performance of song and traditional dance, praising their Heavenly Father. At the end, the children also honored Enoch for providing for them and protecting them. I cried the entire time. I kept remembering all the verses I have read about justice—many of which are related to orphans—and felt as though all my recent clumsy efforts to grasp a Biblical vision for social justice were radically challenged by the simplicity and humility of love in action.

Another less personal conclusion I have made is that Americans have a lot to learn from India, particularly about democracy and social justice. In a sense, there are more social injustices—at least more obvious ones—in India than there are in America. However, there is a strong voice for the poor and the oppressed which is a great victory for both democracy and justice. In the words of an Indian economist, Amartya Sen, “Silence is a powerful enemy of social justice.” Democracy is tangible here, whereas, in America, it is like a faint memory that we now look on with skepticism. Just one example: I have seen street-side demonstrations from the Communist Party, the Hindu Fundamentalists, and the dozen political parties in between. People join together to make their variety of concerns heard and are not limited by the narrowness of our two-party system.

Indian politics have also raised many questions I am eager to explore. For instance, secularism here has a totally different connotation. It is, in fact, promoted by all the Christians that I have met. This is partly due to a different understanding of the concept. For the Indian, secularism more or less means religious freedom, as opposed to the Western sense of the absence of religion in the public sphere. In other words, Indian secularism emphasizes religious ‘neutrality’ while Western secularism emphasizes religious ‘prohibition’. Could this kind of secularism be better for America? More importantly, is this secularism, with great irony, advancing the Kingdom of God in India? I am still asking these questions.

I look forward to returning and sharing our summer experiences with one another. I miss everyone so much.

Sincerely…

taste and see

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described the challenge of celebration as reconciling God's view of creation with our experience of it. That is, God created the world and called it good... celebration is the task of engaging in the world as it ought to be... as God sees it. Of course, this is difficult given our regular encounters with evil, ugliness, and brokenness. And we find this is even more difficult when we recognize our own broken desire for ugliness rather than goodness and beauty. Indeed, celebration is a challenge.

The good life, as the Bible reveals it, is not so far from what has been intuitive to most cultures. Many worldviews will suggest that happiness, enjoyment, or mere pleasure are necessary elements of a good life. Humanism, for instance, tries to measure the quality of life using precisely these characteristics. I do not think they have misunderstood what makes a life good, but rather how one might attain these things. From this naturalistic viewpoint, it is a matter of equations, of experimentation and medication. By fully investing in the science of pleasure, the good life could eventually be patented and sold at your local pharmacy.

In Psalm 34 King David sings, "Taste and see that the Lord is good..." suggesting that we must experience the good Lord with our senses; goodness is something our taste buds and eyes and hands and ears can discover. This kind of experience, when we are attentive to the uniqueness of the moment, sensing the divine gift of goodness, recognizing the personal Creator through his masterpiece... when we engage in the world as it was created to be... this is celebration, this is worship. We are required to live a life of celebration, a life of goodness. The life that is attentive to the good Lord, while it may require sacrifice, can only be described as good. David says that, "Those who look to the Lord are radiant." The good life is certainly one filled with joy and beauty, for, "Those who seek the Lord lack no good thing."

But the Biblical approach to the good life is different than that of the Humanist. David continues in his song, "Whoever of you loves life and desires to see many good days... turn from evil and do good..." Goodness is found in obedience. We must do good if we want to experience it. For King David, to "taste and see" meant to live by God's statutes, by His law, by His revealed word: Psalm 119 says, "How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!" A good life is a life of good action. It is a moral life. But this is not in opposition to the other intuitive qualities of a good life. Rather, to live a morally good life is to simultaneously live a life of pleasure. What is sweeter than a good deed? What meal does not taste better when it is shared? And because worship is a moral action, all aesthetic qualities are enhanced when we engage them with God. That is, a daisy is brighter and more fragrant when we see it with God. It is a matter of obedience to engage in creation as God created it to be... to reconcile God's view of the world with our experience of it.

Only the Creator, the One who defines goodness by his being, can reveal to us what is good. If we are to experience a good life by doing goodness, we must learn what it is to do good. The good life is revealed in the Word made flesh. Jesus lives life as it is meant to be lived, experiencing the world with God, perfectly obedient. Jesus' obedience to God was radical, unprecedented; no one in in human history had lived a life of such obedience. The essence of this obedience is love. To say that Jesus was perfectly obedient is to also say that Jesus loved perfectly. Thus, doing goodness, as revealed through Jesus, is to engage all of creation with love. To smell a flower,to chew a meal, to heal a wound... all of these things must be done with love if we want to experience goodness. Everything Jesus did was with love, and when we follow Jesus, we are choosing goodness... the honey-sweet life of love.

But this is curious... his perfect obedience, or love, led to suffering, not pleasure. It is because as the Suffering Servant, Jesus not only models the good life, he redeems it and all the ugliness around him. It is our ugliness and brokenness that killed Jesus, yet somehow God overcomes it and writes the most beautiful story in the universe through the love of Jesus. That is redemption. Making ugly things good and beautiful again. Our lives, no matter how ugly we have made them, can be beautiful again, for "love covers a multitude of sins." God is rewriting and redeeming and restoring through the powerful turning-point in humanity's story when the love of Jesus makes beauty possible again. The long, lonely life of a man who has been destroyed by alcoholism is made into a beautiful story of love and redemption because he chooses to follow the way of Jesus. This is the joy that was set before Jesus as he endured Calvary, and it gave his suffering a profound sense of true goodness. The good life has been redeemed and opened to us. Our choosing to follow Jesus, to do goodness, will transform any life from ugly to beautiful and good.

To say it as concisely as I can, the good life is life as it was intended to be, and therefore it is a life guided by an obligation to its Creator. Yet, this is obligation does not rob us of beauty and pleasure, but the very opposite. By doing goodness as God has revealed it through Jesus, by engaging the the world with Love himself, we can "taste and see that the Lord is good."

jesus and history.

Jesus may be one of the most misconceived historical figures of all time. For too long in America the study of the gospels was done with a total lack of historical context. Now, however, there is an abundance of scholarship on the historical Jesus, so that even if a careful student of the gospels does their homework, he (or she) finds the conflicting information overwhelming. I found myself in the midst of this crisis about two or three years ago. It brought me to the office of the famous (at least, famous in my little world) professor of history, Dr. Linder, with a desperate plea for some guidance. Since then, I have found that the study of the gospels, in their historical context, is not only absolutely essential to being a disciple, but refreshingly possible.

... ... ...

Jesus was a Jew. Jesus lived within the culture of first-century Judaism. Jesus spoke the language of his culture, used imagery from his culture, and made historical and geographical references that were specific to his culture. Jesus never rode a carnivorous dinosaur that was preserved by Noah on his ark. I don't expect any of this is a surprise.

Though, just a little over sixty or seventy years ago, much of this could have been seen as a scandal. Due to the liberal, naturalistic work of several late nineteenth-century German scholars, American fundamentalists became extremely skeptical of any talk of a historical perspective of Jesus. These German scholars stripped Jesus of all of his supernatural qualities--healing, prophecy, Godhood. It was definitely cause for alarm. Yet it should not have led to the kind of skepticism that would reject any historical supplement to the reading of the gospels. It should not have swung the pendulum to the extreme conclusion that Jesus transcended time and culture completely--that Jesus should only be understood through a simple reading of the biblical text.

This pendulum swing forced us to cram our western, enlightenment culture into a first-century Jewish text. This left Jesus with incomprehensible comments and uncomfortably strange behavior. This pendulum swing forced us to gloss over all of Jesus' ministry and emphasize the stuff we could make sense of... Jesus was born in a manger, died for our sins, and was raised from the dead. Never mind all the stuff in between... the words about the Jewish law handed down for centuries, the prophets and their hope for a messiah, the rabbinical debates of the day, the oppressive Roman empire, the misguided violent revolutions, the disgraceful temple built by Herod, the economic injustices that haunted the land, and most confusing of all, the reoccuring theme of the Kingdom of God.

But perhaps we have moved past this strict fundamentalism and are prepared for a serious study of the gospels within their historical context. Unfortunately, we move forward only to find a new block in the road. Which books do we read? Which scholars do we trust? Where do we start in this massive sea of conflicting information?

This is precisely where I found myself a few years ago. I had read any and every thing I could find on the historical Jesus (my first mistake) and entered into a minor crisis of faith. On one hand, I found what I had considered heroes of the Christian faith offering flimsy, uninformed defenses of Jesus as the son of God (the Bible says it, I believe it--cause if you don't you will have hell to pay). And on the other hand, I found very academic presentations of a historical Jesus that looked nothing like the one I found in the Bible.

This latter group, the seemingly academic presentations of a historical Jesus, turned out to be scholars with heavy agendas. Of course, any study of Jesus is motivated by an agenda from the start, but this group claims to be the untainted, honest look at the whole subject. I am talking about the Jesus Seminar--a closed group of authors and scholars who get together and vote on what is true about Jesus (John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg are just couple of names you might find at Borders). They vote on which documents suit their perspective of Jesus and which documents are contaminated with the power-hungry, mind-controlling church hierarchy. These men have set out to liberate humanity from the evils of the oppressive 'Christian Jesus' by revealing the true, historical Jesus. This is, of course, a Jesus who is anything but biblical. If it is contrary to scripture, it seems to have an automatic credibility.

I do not mean to say that everything they publish is wrong, it simply means they do not have the right to claim an objective study of the historical Jesus that overrules any biblical conclusions one makes about Jesus. Much can be learned from the Jesus Seminar if one accurately understands their approach to history from the start--they begin with the naturalistic assumption that Jesus cannot possibly be God. They continue the tradition of those nineteenth-century German scholars with new energy.

The lack of scholarship in my life, followed by the abundance of it, finally shook me enough to seek some help on this essential part of my faith. I went to my professor in desperation, "How can I make sense of this historical perspective of Jesus?" He handed me a book by N.T. Wright called, "Jesus and the Victory of God." It was massive, intimidating, and promising... so I read it. It explained all of the approaches to the historical Jesus, made sense of the books I read, and lead me to books I should read. It laid out a historical approach to Jesus that also respected scripture... in fact, it gave tremendous credibility to the bible as a historical document, not just a book of religion. It began to make some sense out of all the stuff in between the birth and the death of Jesus. It gave a profound explanation to the core of Jesus' teaching, the Kingdom of God (a subject I had already become curious about). It opened up a door for me to begin a relationship with Jesus that I had not been able to grasp with the stripped-down, fundamentalist approach that I had grown up with. It gave me courage in my studies--I finally felt like there is more to my faith than flimsy apologetics, tight-fisted dogmatism, and a hearty fear of Hell.

So the point of all of this babbling is to say this: my personal experience as a disciple of Jesus has led me to the conclusion that I must maintain the posture of a student--a student of Judaism, a student of the gospel, a student of theology, a student of history, a student of science, and a humble student of Jesus himself--if I want to understand the message that has already been transforming the world.

enemies.

"Can you love your enemies and still kill them?"

I asked my students this question today and their brains melted. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of them said yes. They had one reason: we have to win wars.

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I know this a tired subject, but when I look at these students, who I thoroughly love by now, and see this wretched kind of confusion, my heart hurts. All of their heros are murderers, not martyrs. You can see why following a Messiah that peacefully died at the hands of his enemies is a brain-melter. If you do not murder, than you are a coward, a hippie... you are unamerican.

... ... ...

Recently, I have been trying to work out the connection between hope and imagination. I still have a ways to go, but for now, I will simply state that war is hopeless because it totally lacks imagination. This is not only to say that war shows a lack of creative energy to find alternatives to violence, though that is true, but I mean to say more than that. I think war is hopeless because it shows that we do not have the will or ability to imagine life after resurrection.

... ... ...

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even 'sinners' love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even 'sinners' do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even 'sinners' lend to 'sinners,' expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. ~ Luke 6:32-36

... ... ...

It is tough to imagine nonviolence as a practical way of life. There are numerous situations that we can dream up where we would intuitively use violence to solve the problem: to save our own lives... to rescue the ones we love... to defend the helpless child... and so on. The latest Rambo movie was all about that intuition. I certainly have those same intuitions. But what if we really believed death was not the end of the story? What if Christians really believed that all the pain and suffering they currently endure would be erased in a flash. Perhaps loving enemies makes more sense when we consider the end of the story.

... ... ...

This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother's were righteous. Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him. This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. ~ 1 John 3:11-18

merely three of many.

This semester I am teaching my students about the Life and Ministry of Jesus. We just recently discussed the various ways Jesus is perceived and the problems that they present. These pictures represent just three of the things that have confused our understanding of Jesus: Historical Ignorance (this picture is from a "beginner's bible coloring book" and distorts history on so many levels), Nationalism (it is impossible for patriots, both then and now, to reconcile their view of victory with Jesus' true victory by dying peacefully at the hands of his "enemies"), and Gnosticism (I may post something later to explore this more... but for now, I simply want to point out that Jesus is a ghost, which reveals the total lack of care we have taken to fully understand the resurrection).