…it is increasingly clear that in contemporary culture, for many people, the search for truth has been overtaken by the search for what is pleasing… aesthetics has come to replace epistemology as the central preoccupation of educated Western people. One no longer inquires about what can be known; one is more likely to be concerned about what feels and looks good. Although there are serious problems with this move… the perception of the significance of aesthetics is widespread and ought not to be ignored.

This is a good paragraph that captures something I’ve noticed over the past several years, and that is that art and aesthetics have in so many ways replaced truth and fact. Most people today will respond to something because it feels or looks good. Experience replaces knowledge. Aesthetics replaces epistemology. Art replaces fact. In this, the Christian has an interesting place. Trained in apologetics, many of us are prepared to give a rational answer. We are prepared to respond with reason, not with beauty. We are children of the enlightenment, not children of the renaissance.

What seems to be happening in this world we call postmodern, is that the importance of the aesthetic, or even the existential, is rising. Think for a moment of what Peter is saying in the classic passage about apologetics (in fact, the word apologetics comes from the Greek word used in this passage, apologia, that is translated “answer”):

But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect,  keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.  [1 Peter 3:15-16]

What we have done in classic Christianity – at least since the enlightenment – is to give a rational apologetic for the hope that we have. I wonder, to go maybe a bit further than Dyrness, whether the new apologetic for a postmodern culture is existential and aesthetic more than it is rational. If people are looking for something that moves them, changes them, is powerful to them, and elicits something in them that they cannot explain, then certainly the gospel can provide this. The gospel stimulates lives well lived, work well done, and beautiful restoration of that which sin and the fall have tarnished, or in some cases destroyed.

Missionaries think about the cultures in which they live and attempt to contextualize the gospel in a way that is understandable to that culture. If – as Dyrness argues – we are becoming more aesthetically driven, then speaking the gospel through art and life is as important as giving a rational apologetic. What we may need today is an aesthetic apologetic.  It seems to me personally that the Christian aesthetic leaves much to be desired.  We can learn from times in Christian history like the Renaissance and the artistic work of the early Christian Celts to see what it looked like in their times. But, …we need to figure out ways to develop a Christian aesthetic that is indigenous to the language of our culture, is experientially potent, and is spiritually sound.

The LORD is my shepherd,

but I’d rather find my own way.

I lack nothing.

but just to be safe I’ll take my own lunch.

He makes me lie down in green pastures,

but I’m really not that tired.

he leads me beside quiet waters,

but I’d like to see if there are other, more exciting waters.

he refreshes my soul.

but I’m not that thirsty after-all.

He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake.

but I’ll take a map, because I’m not sure he knows where he’s going.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil,  for you are with me;

but maybe I’ll bring a flashlight. I don’t like the dark… I don’t care who I’m with, it’s scary.

your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

sort of. I’d rather be backing a gun than trusting your staff.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.

why would we eat with our enemies? That’s a bit dangerous, isn’t it? What if they poison us?

You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

but a good bank account and insurance is probably a safer route.

Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life,

but my mom told me that Murphy follows me wherever I go, too.

and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

so long as the neighborhood doesn’t change and those other people don’t move in.

[Note: This is in no way meant to be sacrilegious, but instead an explication of how we often really feel. This follows the last few posts on Failure and Risk Aversion.]

I was reading through chapter four today yesterday and came across the following passages several hours after writing Failure and Failure 2.  Here, Mark is speaking about the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. He says this:

…there’s not way to be a faithful servant of God and God’s kingdom without taking some hell-bent-for-leather risks…

The getting in or losing out [of the Kingdom] has a lot to do with the kind of risks we take, or not. We’re well schooled, from the writings of Paul and others, that certain kinds of people do not inherit the Kingdom of God: the wicked, the impure, the deceitful, the rage fiends, and such. What we’re less prepared for, though we’ve had ample warning, is the kind of person Jesus adds to that list: the cautious.

Good and faithful servants are those who shoot the moon. They run with scissors. They leap before looking. The bad servant – the wicked, lazy servant – is the cautious one.

pp. 53-54

These are hard words for many of us to hear because we want to play it safe, make sure it will work, get assurance of our protection, and stay in control. But it appears this is exactly the opposite of what faith is about. God tells Abraham to get up and go – not telling him where – and he does. God asks Elijah to trust him when he faces the prophets of Baal, and he does, calling fire down from heaven. Shadrack, Meshack and Abednigo head into a fiery furnace and are not consumed. And the list goes on and on of faithful followers – the crazy ones. It’s what Tim Hansel called “reckless abandonment” in his book Holy Sweat.

This all reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Frederick Beuchner in Wishful Thinking:

What God says… is “The life you save is the life you love.” In other words, the life you clutch, hoard, guard, and play safe with is in the end a life worth little to anybody, including yourself, and only a life given away for love’s sake is a life worth living. To bring this point home, God shows us a man who gave his life away to the extent of dying a national disgrace without a penny in the bank or a friend to his name. In terms of human wisdom, he is a Perfect Fool. And if you think you can follow him without making something like the same kind of fool of yourself, you are laboring under not a cross, but a delusion.

Oswald Chambers says it this way in My Utmost for His Highest, the Patience of Faith:

Faith – [or trust] – is the heroic effort of your life.  You fling yourself in reckless confidence on God.  God has ventured all in Jesus Christ to save us.  Now He wants us to venture our all in abandoned confidence in Him… Again and again, you will get up to what Jesus Christ wants, and every time, you will turn back when it comes to that point, until you abandon resolutely… Jesus Christ demands that you risk everything you hold by common sense – and leap into what He says… Christ demands of the [person] who trusts in Him the same reckless spirit… that is daring enough to step out of the crowd and bank his [or her] faith on the character of God. [From My Utmost for His Highest]

Brennan Manning echoes the point in his book Ruthless Trust:

Unwavering trust is a rare and precious thing because it often demands a degree of courage that borders on the heroic.

Risk aversion is only truly safe when it is embedded in the womb of faith. I am free to seek, try, fail, and leap because I have a Father in heaven who will catch me when I fall if I am truly seeking to follow him in all things. It is this true safety that gives us life and the ability to take risks. And the thing is, he expects it.

Note how Eugene Peterson gets at this same passage, Matthew 25, in the Message: (Thanks to Eric Metcalf for pointing this out to me.)

“The servant given one thousand said, ‘Master, I know you have high standards and hate careless ways, that you demand the best and make no allowances for error. I was afraid I might disappoint you, so I found a good hiding place and secured your money. Here it is, safe and sound down to the last cent.’

“The master was furious. ‘That’s a terrible way to live! It’s criminal to live cautiously like that! If you knew I was after the best, why did you do less than the least? The least you could have done would have been to invest the sum with the bankers, where at least I would have gotten a little interest.

“‘Take the thousand and give it to the one who risked the most. And get rid of this “play-it-safe” who won’t go out on a limb. Throw him out into utter darkness.’”

So, apparently, faith and risk-aversion are diametrically opposed, and God prefers the former.

“The fatal flaw of productivity is the presumption that we can plan ahead without budgeting for the unexpected.” -Scott Belsky

I wrote earlier about failure, and failing forward. I’m not promoting that we desire to failure or even seek after it, but rather that we not fear failure or let it incapacitate us from moving forward, taking risks, or seeking change. I also think there is a lot to be learned from failing – or from not succeeding.

In the article Nobody’s Perfect: why we all need a margin for error, Scott Belsky raises an important issue about how failure or imperfection affects our ability to accomplish our daily work and how our pursuit of perfection may limit our ability to truly get things done. I resonate with this post because it’s often true in my own life. The importance of making room for margin is so key in our lives because the day rarely goes like we expect it to. And if you are like me, you get frustrated when the “abnormal” happens and interrupts the “normal.” Although the truth of the matter is that the unexpected is actually normal if you look over the trajectory of your days. Belsky makes the point that we need to create margin in our lives to make room for the unexpected. Plus, God is often most poignant and present in the margins.

In fact, the idea of margin is not so different than the concept of sabbath or rest. I’m not talking about a specific religious day, but about the practice of leaving enough margin so that the unexpected can break through, and so that we can live lives that are not full of our own control. Isn’t that the truth? If we could just control every moment of every day and no mistakes happened, all would be well with the world? Well, not really. It is in our letting go of control while still living intentionally that great things seem to happen. Call it an intentional openhandedness with life and open-mindedness to possibility.

“Ambition becomes counter-productive when you pursue your goals without the humbling realization that things seldom go as planned.” – Scott Belsky

So, how do you plan for some white space, some margin, some room for the unexpected in life so that when things do go awry, you don’t get knocked off your rocker.

• I preached a sermon a few years back on the subject of margin in Scripture. You can listen to it here.
• I’ve really appreciated the following books which deal with margin in life:
  • Juggling Elephants by Jones Loflin and Todd Musig
  • Margin: restoring emotional, physical, financial, and time reserves to overloaded lives by Richard Swenson
  • Restoring Margin to Overloaded Lives by Richard Swenson
  • Boundaries: when to say YES, when to say NO to take control of your life  by Henry Cloud & John Townsend

I had a conversation with someone yesterday about this who worries a lot about failure because his parents continued to tell him over and over and over that he wasn’t supposed to fail. They treated him negatively when he “failed,” and punished him verbally, if not in other ways. This kind of child-rearing or even management in organizations creates a risk-averse culture that then leads to a lack of innovation, creativity, out-of-the-box, and break-through thinking.

In her book 9 Things Successful People Do Differently, Heidi Grant Halvorson shares some ideas that help move us toward possibility thinking rather than fear of failure thinking. I like her understanding of the difference between “Be Good” goals, and “Get Better” goals. I like this because first of all it’s practical, and second of all, it fits with my theology. Theologically, we cannot “be good” in this perfectionist mode. It is impossible to get it all right, and we are sinful, broken people seeking to follow Jesus into the better life. A friend of mine often gets frustrated with sermons he calls antithetical to the gospel – you know the ones – they have an outline like this: “You suck; do better.” When I say “get better” I don’t mean that kind of thing, but instead, the desire to seek something higher, greater, and more pure and right without the fear of failure, because honestly, failure isn’t optional. Failure happens. Get over it already.  And yet that is not an excuse for doing better, being better, and improving. I’m not advocating for a lackadaisical kind of lazy lifestyle, but a focus on getting better rather than being good; a focus on seeking excellence, not perfection; on development rather than accomplishment; and on transformation over success.

Here is how Halvorson describes the difference between be-good goals and get-better goals:

• Be-good Goals: Put the emphasis on proving you have ability and showing you know how to do something.
• Get-better Goals: Put the emphasis on developing ability and learning to master a new skill.

In a recent article on the99%.com – ideas on making things happen, called Tripping into Terra Incognita: how mistakes take us to new places,  John Caddell takes on this topic in terms of business management (cf. Six Sigma), and how the focusing on removing mistakes completely and the pursuit of perfection could keep us from accidentally falling into all kinds of great things. He uses examples such as the invention of the first artificial sweetener – saccarin, the process of vulcanizing rubber, not to mention things like the lightbulb and other great inventions. (Remember the old commercials for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? Or my favorite… those meatball hors d’oeuvres that combine chili sauce and grape jelly… that can’t have been on purpose). I love the idea John puts forth that “A mistake is a collision between your perception and reality,” and that mistakes take us to the margins, to the unknown, to the unexplored, and that it is in these places that some of the best discoveries emerge. Mistakes often lead us to the place of realizing that our assumptions and beliefs may have been invalid, which can open us to new possibility thinking if we will let it. Think Galileo and the Copernican revolution. Many – myself included – would advocate that it takes true failure of our systems, institutions, and assumptions to create a real and lasting paradigmatic shift in belief and practice. It is failure that leads to incredible success, if we are not paralyzed by it. (Think Steve Jobs.)

• “Failure” often leads us into accidental discoveries.
• “Failure” leads to margin rather than mainstream thinking.
• “Failure” gives us an opportunity to learn, and is a great teacher if we will let it.
• “Failure” teaches humility, and out of humility often emerges truth that less dependent upon our limited thinking and abilities.

So how about we figure out better ways to raise our children and to treat our employees and colleagues? How about we find ways of embracing “failure,” or figuring out how to fail forward in safe contexts that value innovation, out-of-the-box thinking, charity for risk, perfection-aversion, and seeking the opportunity to get better rather than simply getting it right.

Two weeks ago, I preached a sermon entitled “God Perfects Me,” which talked about this penchant for perfection so many of us have. If you’d like to hear the podcast, click here. (Note: there was a person during the service who had a seizure – I don’t think it was my preaching. What was interesting to me was that this “imperfection” in the service happened on this particular Sunday. In fact, I spoke with the gentleman later, and he was concerned about having been a distraction. I think the point was made for him, for me, and for others… I just wish he hadn’t had to experience that.)

So, here’s where the political cynic in me comes out. Is it really  the case that evangelicals failed to have the political will or the financial capital to fight the good fight and win the top leadership position in the world? Is Obama really the enemy here? And what, actually, are we rallying for as evangelicals? Is it a Tea Party political platform or is it to rally behind a member of the financial elite who happens to be member of what evangelical Christians have always called an aberrant form of Christianity – or a heresy, or a cult? Is Obama the personal representation of a political evil that is contrary to the teachings of Jesus?

I’m having a hard time swallowing this pill. And here’s my issue – and it has been my issue since I was a youth delegate to the 1992 Republican National Convention. (Yes, I was also a member of the college republicans, and part of a conservative coup d’etat on campus that overthrew the reigning elite at the time). In any case, since 1992, I have found that the teachings and sayings of Jesus and the Scriptures settle well with neither the left nor the right, and very rarely line up with the party platforms or policies of either party. The new neo-cons, tea-partiers, or more socialist leaning leftists give me no hope for a solid political future for evangelical Christians.

Here’s my question: If we were to do a great job of getting 17 million evangelicals out to vote… for whom would they vote? Is the assumption that the Republican nominee (Romney) lines up with my faith and followership of Jesus, because if so, I’m having a really hard time seeing it.

Here’s a second question: Why do evangelicals continue to make the same mistake that the early disciples made of thinking there is a political messiah who will lead us out of our captivity to Rome, or Babylon, or an American consumerist prosperity gospel? On this day after Palm Sunday in which Jesus the Christ who is the true Messiah rode into Jerusalem on a colt to symbolize his humility, and who spurned political involvement through a subversive campaign of death on the cross, why is it that we once again turn our eyes away from Him who leads us into true freedom and release from captivity?

I applaud the effort to involve evangelicals in thinking seriously about politics. I do think seriously about politics, economics, and social movements, and wish more evangelicals would be informed about what’s happening not only in the US, but globally. However, I am under no illusion that there is a political messiah to be voted in nor a political anti-christ to be voted out, but a true messiah who works in hearts of people rather than through ivory towers of power.

I would prefer a call to prayer, a call to love, a call to gospel action, a call to live the beatitudes, a call to reach hearts and minds. I would prefer we spend these millions of dollars on the mission of Jesus to seek and save the lost, to bind up the broken hearted, to release the captives, and to give sight to the blind and to see the cripple run.

Is that too much to ask?

Maybe. Maybe not. And there are a lot of questions. What makes a Christian film? Is it the actors? The producers? The money behind it? What happens with the proceeds? The truth and beauty portrayed? The story line? Whether or not there is an altar call or clear salvation line by a key actor or actress? This gets to a deeper question about culture that makes my mind sing. What makes Christian anything, and was Christian ever meant to be an adjective… or was it meant to describe the ones who call themselves followers of the Way?

I had a question the other day that someone asked about how our family deals with secular and sacred, or Christian music. I used to talk about that debate a lot, and now that I’m raising kids, we haven’t really talked about it much. This question caused me to pause and think about what we do with our kids. Here’s what I realized… we aren’t teaching our children about “Christian” music, as if some things are baptized and others are not, or that somehow the sacred realm is divided from the secular in clear lines and demarcations. Those of us who live in the real world no better, intuitively. I realized that my reality is that there is good music, and there is bad music. There are good lyrics, and there are bad lyrics. There are ones that are honoring to God, and those that are not. There are great riffs, chord changes, and surprising sub-melodies or sub-texts. Some of these are written by Christians and some are not. God presents himself powerfully in ways that catch us unaware if we are paying enough attention, and we need to pay attention because there is a lot of garbage that’s bad for the soul out there. But there is also much beauty, wonder, longing, and even reflexive response to the Creator by those who don’t know him, yet.

This is a problem we’ve been grappling with for a long time – what is Christian, and how do Christians relate with culture. Great questions that require much more thinking, engaging, responding, creating, critiquing, and imagining.

Here are a sampling of some interesting books I’ve enjoyed on the topic of Christianity, Culture, and Creativity:

• Christ & Culture by H. Richard Niebuhr
• Culture Making: recovering our creative culture by Andy Crouch
• Desiring the Kingdom by James KA Smith
• Eyes Wide Open by Bill Romanowski
• To Change the World by James Davison Hunter
• The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida
• All God’s Children in Blue Suede Shoes by Ken Myers

To all the fathers, mothers, children, brothers and sisters

For there to be a war between us, first we must be afraid of each other, we must hate.
I’m not afraid of you, I don’t hate you.
I don t even know you. No Iranian ever did me no harm. I never even met an Iranian…Just one in Paris in a museum. Nice dude.

I see sometime here, on the TV, an Iranian. He is talking about war.
I’m sure he does not represent all the people of Iran.
If you see someone on your TV talking about bombing you …be sure he does not represent all of us.

I’m not an official representative of my country. I’m a father and a teacher. I know the streets of my town, I talk with my neighbors, my family, my students, my friends and in the name of all these people …we love you.
We mean you no harm.
On the contrary, we want to meet, have some coffee and talk about sports.

To all those who feel the same, share this message and help it reach the Iranian people.

Ronny, tel aviv

This sparked an online Facebook forum expressing love between the people of the two countries, a true grassroots movement for peace rather than for war. This followed peaceful marches on the streets of Tel Aviv. Now, don’t mistake me here. I am totally against the development of nuclear weapons and a new kind of arms race with new players – now North Korea and Iran rather than the Soviet Union. However, I also believe that Jesus was pretty clear about how to deal with our enemies – love them and pray for them, and turn the other cheek. Now, I’m not saying anything about national security or how to deal with just war (those are for another time), but instead think this bears mentioning. What’s awesome about this campaign is that it is the public expression of people – not governments or political parties – who are expressing a love for other human beings and  a desire to avoid the kind of wars that have so divided us as a human race. I was watching a documentary on the holocaust just a few weeks ago, and was once again struck by how easily we can demonize our enemies and in our minds make them less than human. This documentary – as difficult as it was to watch – showed the human side of even the most horrendous of war criminals. One has to wonder what breaks down in us that turns us into monsters of violence and perpetrators of death on any scale? How can we feel good about making trained killers out of our youth, even as they defend our important freedoms? These are not easy questions, but the hard realities of life East of Eden that have raged since the violence of Cain against his brother. It is moments like this when the bright side of our humanity shines, and the words of Jesus in Matthew 5:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[ and hate your enemy.’  But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?”

Note that it is an Israeli citizen (probably not a Christian or follower of Jesus… I don’t know) who has written these words and begun this campaign. I wonder, where are the Christians who are speaking and spreading love throughout the world and speaking powerfully for peace through the message of Jesus?

Beyond that, though, was this phrase, “continuous partial attention.” Over the past several years, I’ve been asked if I’m ADD. Well, truth is, I’ve been tested, and I’m not. However, I think it would be true that our use of technological devices can create an effect not dissimilar to ADD in our lives that maybe we call CPA, Continuous Partial Attention. My wife and I have talked about this a lot. When I’m home or hanging out with her, I’m often checking my email or texts whenever my phone beeps or vibrates. The other night we were having an important conversation on the couch when my phone beeped, and I immediately interrupted the conversation rudely and checked my phone. I do this a lot. Sometimes when I’m meeting with someone over coffee, and the phone beeps, and I feel compelled to check it. It’s almost become a compulsion at this point. I’m not sure I like it.

Don’t get me wrong. I love technology. I love how it can help us to work faster and smarter. In fact, there’s an interesting article about multi-tasking in the New York Magazine that I read the other night called “In Defense of Distraction.” One of the ideas in this article is that we don’t really multi-task most of the time, but instead we do “rapid shifting” in thought from one thing to another. Each time we do this, we “leak” a little “mental efficiency” with each switch. This article says that the only time we truly multi-task is when we simultaneously do things that are on different channels in the brain, using different cognitive functions.

Be that what it is, I’m realizing more and more that not only am I often creating a kind of artificial ADD into my life, but that I’m also often only partially attentive to those that I’m with, including my wife and children. We’re told so often that attention matters, and that life is rich with depth, subtleties, and even the presence of God if we will only pay attention. I wonder if it’s possible that my own penchant for immediate response is creating a continuous partial attention in my own life that keeping from true presence.

I’m not saying we should walk away from technology or become ludites. Not at all. I’m just wondering if there are some better ways to use technology within limits, and use them powerfully when appropriate, but pay attention, rest, and be fully attentive at the right times as well.

Communities, like families, can be healthy or toxic, but western individualism provides no true alternative.  Ironically, the spiritual-but-not-religious embrace a consumerist mentality that in other contexts they harshly criticize.  The irony is compounded when one realizes that these spiritual individualists – inheritors of an “I” culture – most often pluck items off the shelf of “we” cultures.  Spiritual tourism offers the benefits of wisdom derived from those who submit to authority and discipline and tradition without having to do so oneself.

But spiritual tourists have no home to return to; they are always restlessly consuming new experiences.  They can’t eat, pray, and love enough…

…In worship we become participants, living members of a body, rather than observers and connoisseurs.

-Gregory Wolfe, “Religious but Not Spiritual” in Image, number 68.

Today in worship, Marlin Vis said that if you’re interested in a personal relationship with Jesus that isn’t in the context of community, then following Jesus isn’t for you.  A good but hard word.  Being a church-critic by standing strangely aloof while pretending to participate, silently observing and critiquing, is a subtle form of soul-bending.  I mean by that what Wolfe gets at in this paragraph, that we cannot merely glean the wisdom and benefits of community while remaining individualistic separate, over, and above.  True critique can only be made from within by those who are embedded in a spiritual oneness that comes through true corporate worship (and this is what I take Wolfe to mean when he uses the word “liturgy,” not merely a codified set of accepted traditions).  When we stand aloof outside community and try to critique as if we were embedded within that community, our souls bend and threaten to break under the weight of a hypocrisy that makes us two-faced.  ”Speak the truth in love.” Love requires a relationship.  So ultimately, those who merely shop for a better church, or a more palatable experience are firmly planting their spirits outside of the community of love that requires real relationships and all the good and bad those relationships have to offer.  The language of “spiritual tourist” hits the nail on the head.  A visitor to a community can critique the community all they  want, but without sharing history, struggle, victory, failure, success, context, and texture, a tourist can never truly understand the community.  It is only when one moves into the neighborhood and becomes a true neighbor that one can truly critique from within.  And that is exactly what Jesus did when he “became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14) and taught us not only how to love one another, but also confronted our lies and dysfunctions with powerful truth.  Being a spiritual tourist is easier in some sense than being a spiritual resident of a particular community, but the soul-bending required probably makes us far less human.