niebuhr and justice...

In a 1950 essay entitled, “The Spirit of Justice,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the following:

“Love in the form of philanthropy is, in fact, a lower level than a high form of justice. For philanthropy is given to those who make no claims against us, who do not challenge our goodness or disinterestedness. An act of philanthropy may thus be an expression of both power and moral complacency. An act of justice on the other hand requires the humble recognition that the claim that another makes against us may be legitimate.”

Earlier in the essay, he rightly notes that Christians are called to abide by the law of love as in doing so we fulfill all the laws of God (cf. Romans 13:8). Niebuhr is comparing the merits of love displayed through philanthropy (or charity) and justice. He asserts that between the two, charity is a less loving than justice. It is justice that is the highest form of love.

Niebuhr claims that philanthropy is given to those who, one, ‘make no claims against us’ and two, cannot ‘challenge our goodness or disinterestedness.’ He suggests that charity  can be an expression of power. What he means is that when I give resources to someone in need, be it a homeless man on the street or an orphan in a poverty stricken country, I must recognize that doing so gives me the upper hand. Saying nothing of how I use the advantage, my charity positions me as the wealthy, or, for the moment, wealthier, benefactor in the relationship. In that way, the one receiving my charitable gift (having been given a gift) is not in a position to ask us for anything (making no claim against me) and they are also not in a position to challenge my motivation for giving charitably. (Imagine a homeless man taking some money and then accusing you of some bad motive. Wouldn’t you want to take the money back? Wouldn’t we most likely consider that our right, to retrieve what was ungratefully received?)

Niebuhr also suggests that charity does not necessarily indicate care or love for the recipient of the gift. The giver of charity is never challenged as to the level of concern they show for the receiver of their charity, the gift is the end. In fact, Niebuhr claims, charity is potentially evidence of a complete lack of moral concern. It could be nothing more than a self-congratulatory gesture.

Justice, on the other hand, is not possible from a position of self-interest. Justice, necessarily requires ‘the humble recognition that the claim that another makes against us may be legitimate.’ In other words, justice deals with larger issues of what is right, good, fair etc. The labels ‘benefactor’ and ‘beneficiary’ do not carry the same weight. Instead, the benefactor must recognize that personal and social changes must take place in order to ensure the spread of justice.

An act of justice is a way of pursuing what is actually good, and not just good for me. It seeks to promote the interests of all parties, or all of society, and not just self-interest. It takes a genuine interest in the other, and seeks to live accordingly, rather than coolly dismissing all claims others make on one’s life.

Interesting thoughts.

Certainly, charity is a good thing. It is a way of shaping our lives towards generosity. It is not something to be avoided. But charity is not an end. Niebuhr rightly challenges us to see that love without justice is not love. Love that is disinterested in the other is just selfishness. Love that exerts power is still more about me than you. He challenges us to see that love is not just a disembodied feeling, but takes on the tangible form of justice in the lives of people and in society. He challenges us the same way God challenged Israel through the prophet Isaiah. External displays of religiosity and devotion are detestable to God. Righteousness and faithfulness come through the promotion of justice.

What do you think?

realizing limitations

Today, Josiah was playing in his room and he was attempting to pick up large handfuls of big lego blocks to transfer them to the other side of the room. Unfortunately, his little arms were no match for the slick plastic blocks. After time and time of failed attempts, his little faced curled up and he began to cry. As I sat there with him, all I could think was, join the club buddy, join the club.

As I grew up, people always said, You can do anything you set your mind to. I loved it when they said that, the world was open and available to me, anything I wanted I could achieve. But now, officially in my late 20's, I have not achieved the things I set my mind to when I was younger. What's more, no matter how hard I would have tried, I never would have become a professional ballplayer or platinum selling rock star. (There were significant parts of my life where these were the desires of my heart)

Of course, as my life has gone on, there have been moments where I have realized that I had reached some limitation of my natural capacities. Very much like Josiah's attempts at picking up blocks, these have been hard moments to deal with. Coming to grips with my own limitations can be heartbreaking. It's more than just the frustration of not being able to accomplish a task or achieve a dream. A person's soul can take a pretty solid blow when you realize that the horizon of 'what is possible' is somehow less expansive than it used to be. (If you've seen Napoleon Dynamite, think Uncle Rico chucking steaks at Napoleon to prove he can still throw a football.)

As I get older, I find new goals and new dreams, fresh designs on what is possible in my life. And yet, even in reshaping what I set my mind to, I still find myself dealing with my own limitations. I will never be the best thinker, writer, speaker, teacher. The life I "have set my mind to" will inevitably be tempered as time goes on.

It could be that my only option is to dispair of what I fail to achieve. There are moments when I feel that is the best option. More likely, though, I should learn to think in new ways. Instead of believing I can do anything I set my mind to, I'm trying to embrace the idea that I have limitations, and that limitations are not a sign of weakness. Because it could be that my limitations are a sign that I have been designed, specifically, for particular purposes. The living of life then is more about discovering God's intentions for me, than achieving whatever fancy strikes me on that particular day.

I wanted to just hug Josiah. I knew the kind of pain he was feeling when he bumped up against his physical limitation. In a way, dealing with these limitations is part of life. I just don't want it to be all of life.

Can you relate?

Fish Shirts and other Creature Comforts

Our days are pretty hectic. We are learning to parent kids, not just kid. Amazing what a difference that little ‘s’ makes. At the end of the day, we are pretty tired. So, once these yahoos are in bed and we have had our dinner and the dishes are done, which hopefully, I’ve helped with, she comes into the family room and says with a sigh, “It’s time for the fish shirt.” 

Ann has this sweatshirt that she stole from her dad when she was little. It is incredibly old. And, if we are being honest, not exactly the pinnacle of fashion. It has a cartoon fisherman standing in a boat casting his line down one of the sleeves. Midway down the right sleeve of this sweatshirt, you discover that the fisherman has hooked this enormous cartoon fish with big googly eyes.

In our house, the fish shirt has taken on almost mythological status. It is so much more than a shirt. It is a symbol that the work for the day is done and now it is time to get comfortable and relax. This shirt symbolizes the rest that both of us crave after a day of work and chasing our little ones around the house. Relaxation and rest is much harder if you aren’t in your comfy clothes. The fish shirt provides the comfort necessary for re-creation.

As diversified as fashion has become these days, most Americans are really just walking around in fish shirts. Our houses are filled with devices aimed at decreasing stress and anxiety while maximizing our comfort level (I’m sitting in one example of that as I’m writing this).

Products develop around new technologies and features aimed at increasing the level of comfort that each one can deliver the consumer. Take, for example, the car. (Disclaimer: This is not a historical account.) When it was created, the only climate control was based on what the weather was outside since you were literally in the outdoors when you were in one. So, to shield us from bad weather, we developed stronger roofs and windows.

We still had to deal with the problem of temperature, though. So, heaters were installed to keep us warm. The summer months were another problem all together. Climate control in the summer time used to mean rolling down the windows and you prayed you could air the car out before sitting down on those molten lava hot vinyl seats. But with the advent of the air conditioner, cars now had the ability to deliver the proper comfort to the whole car regardless of season, without having to roll down the windows (who has time for that anyway).

Once the mini-van came around, and I’m assuming once parents got tired of their kids moaning about how hot/cold they were, the rear climate control feature was added, allowing those in the back seat to control the force and temperature of the air flow. That however, was not enough because the driver and the passenger (for too long!) had to barter over the temperature coming from the front vents. No more though! The dual climate control feature was added now allowing everyone in the car to determine for themselves just the right temperature for them to be comfortable. (This is, of course, to say nothing of the new options made available to us by heated and cooled seats!)

We have become a highly comfortable society and thus we are driven by the pursuit of these comforts. But the question I’ve been wondering about is; how has an obsession with comfort crept into the ways we practice our faith?

In many ways, the answer is simply that we have taken something that should make us mainly uncomfortable and turned into something that helps increase our comfort. We have become very adept at turning the gospel life into the secret path to personal happiness, or a way to attain the life we have always wanted. More than the many who make a very good life telling people that God wants them to have a good life, regular, everyday Christians have trouble thinking about the gospel as something other than a way to be comfortable. I know that my actions all too often make it seem like its something I think as well.

This certainly makes it hard to see how Jesus could define the good life as giving up your life for him or for your neighbor. It makes it hard to see how taking up your cross and following him in the way of death could be anything other than a metaphor about personal humility. It makes it hard to see how Jesus could have goals outside of fixing my life and making me comfortable. It just makes it hard to see clearly.

Curiosity v. Couch: The Epic Battle

My son is insatiably curious. He’s approaching 2 years old and it seems that his curiosity is fundamentally unquenchable. He is at the age where playing would really more accurately be described as exploring. When we play in his room, he roams from his toybox, to his bookshelf, to his pile of blocks, to his dresser drawers. Every stop along the way elicits the same kind of response from him. “Ohh!” and “Wow!” are his most frequently uttered words. He is constantly pulling his toys out of his toybox, almost like he’s hoping to discover something hidden in the bottom that he had forgotten about. From the moment his day starts, my son is driven by this curiosity.

Of course, this curiosity that cannot be slicked is sometimes a burden on those of us around him. Josiah quickly gets into things he shouldn’t be playing with and wants to explore drawers and cabinets full of things that 20 month old hands would more likely ruin than anything else. But even the energy we expend redirecting his pursuits is a  symptom of the kind of life he lives every day. Josiah’s curiosity drives him to explore. It motivates him to find something new.

When he comes up against a boundary, either one that is due to his limited abilities or parental restraint, he comes apart at the seams. He cannot conceive of a reason why anyone would not want to experience life the way he wants to experience it. Why wouldn’t you want to go outside right now? Why would you not want to play in the dirt and eat this bug? Why wouldn’t you want to climb up on the back of the couch and teeter perilously close to the edge like this?

These are questions he cannot answer, because they are no brainers to him. Our home and the outside world are wide open spaces for him to take in all that life has to offer him. Every experience he has, every discovery he makes is proof that this is the way life is supposed to be and it drives him to find new experiences and make new discoveries until he simply cannot keep his eyes open and he falls asleep only to wake up ready to discover new worlds and hidden treasure boxes.

Now, contrast that with his dad. When I wake up in the morning, my first thought is usually something like, “How long until I get to go back to sleep?” It takes a good jog, shower and grooming session before I feel like engaging anything in a meaningful way. The mental task list that begins to compile in my brain as I am taking a shower is discouragingly long by the time I head out the door and by the time I sit down in my chair in the office, I’m already tired. At the end of a day of work, my son is running circles around me, which only serves to highlight the vast difference between his limitless curiosity and my penchant for tuning out.

Tuning out is easy when there is very little mystery left in life. At this point, I pretty much know what is in all the drawers and cabinets in my house, I don’t need to go exploring. I’ve been outside and I’ve had a few years of experience with grass, trees, dirt and bugs and I’d rather just stay inside where I can stay clean and I don’t run the risk of getting bugs on me.

    I really think I’ve lost something. There was a time in my life where I would play outside exploring the world around me until it was too dark to see. I wouldn’t come inside, even if I had to go to the bathroom. I would scarf down my dinner so that I wouldn’t waste one minute of precious daylight. There was life to be lived! But now, it seems like, most days, I just sit and think about what I’m missing while I fill my time with TV shows and Facebook. Instead of being insatiably curious, more often than not, I just feel sleepy.

Remembering Whidbey: Part 1

A few years ago, I flew to Washington state with some friends to attend a conference. We spent a week at an old army base called Camp Casey that was located on Whidbey Island off the coast of Seattle. We all worked together at a Christian college outside of Chicago and we were at this conference to think about things like mentoring and spiritual formation on a college campus.

To be honest, I have never experienced anything close to the happenings on the islands off the coast of Washington. Somehow, the week on Whidbey etched itself into my life and created a more meaningful experience than I think I’ve ever had.
   
I have to admit, I am not very good at meeting new people. I much prefer the comfort of spending time with people I know to the nervousness of connecting with people I’ve never met. So initially, this conference was a bit off-putting. It was a highly relational gathering of people who seemed to, unlike me, draw energy by connecting with new people.
   
Right away, I was feeling stretched. Not only were these people new, but they were professionals in the same field I was in and so I knew that I would battle my innate tendencies to compare myself with all these people for the next 5 days. They were far more experienced, thoughtful and put together than I was.
   
Situations like this make me feel a little bit like the kid who, no matter how hard he tries, always seems to spill his lunch on his shirt and come back from the bathroom with toilet paper on his shoe. I think I spend far too much time checking my shoes for trailing toilet paper and looking for stains on my shirt. Its hard to feel comfortable with those kinds of preoccupations.
   
But, alas, here I was, and I was excited, even if it manifested itself as anxiety and intimidation. What is more, the guest speaker for the first two days seemed interesting. He was a big man with long curly hair. He was dressed like he had just gotten off a sailboat but his hands were so big it looked like he made a living hacking out canoes from tree trunks. And he was the president of a graduate school to boot. He seemed like a bit of a wild card so I was excited to see what he was all about.
   
After dinner together, he got up and began telling stories. Better stories than I had ever heard. He told us a story about how he would pick up loose change that people drop and keep it, but then offer it back in exchange for some conversation. Who does that? I liked it a lot. Then he told us about what we were going to be doing the next day. He said we would be walking through our lives and digging up all the pain and hurt and joys and delights of our past and putting it all together to see if we could make sense out of what God was doing with our lives.
   
So the anxiety was back. I had been had. He lured me in with his funny and compelling tales of bribing old ladies to talk to him on the bus and then he drops the bomb, we were going to have to be honest with each other and with ourselves about our lives. I wish I could remember looking around the room at the others there at that moment. Looking back, I sort of imagine myself begin to curl up in a ball, trying to protect myself from the inevitable process we were going to walk through together.
   
For now, though, the night was over, and I could go back to telling jokes with David and Greg, watching the waves hit the pebble covered beach, getting transfixed by the campfire, and thinking deeper thoughts than I normally do. This was a better day than most.

on feeding tubes and incubators

When my second son was born, just a few weeks ago, he had a few complications and so the doctors sent him to the NCU for a few days of close observation. During that time, he wasn’t eating enough from a bottle so the doctors inserted a feeding tube down his little throat to make sure he was getting enough nutrients. They kept him in one of those little plexiglass incubator boxes that regulates the temperature and had him attached to various machines in order to monitor his vitals.

This was all emotionally taxing to see, but the hardest thing was watching him using the feeding tube. It felt very unnatural. He wasn’t supposed to be able to exist on his own in this little box, he was supposed to come home with us and need us to care for him and need my wife to feed him. This other thing just wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. This felt like artificial independence to me.

I think about that when I hear people talking about being independent Christians. Churches have started using the phrase ‘self-feeders’ when they talk about the goals of their discipleship program. The idea is that Christians should be totally independent people, completely capable of existing on their own...spiritually speaking.

(Now I will admit that far too many people feel like they cannot survive unless they have a pastor teaching them. They simply don’t believe they can understand Scripture unless someone who has a fancy degree tells them what it means. I understand why pastors and church leaders would want to wean people away from cognitive dump spiritual growth and toward a dynamic personal life with God. There are many benefits to training people to think, study and pray for themselves.)

But I have begun to wonder if we have missed something significant along the way to becoming self-feeding Christians. I’m wondering if we have come to think that Christian maturity is synonymous with Christian independence. The most mature Christians will be the ones who do not need anyone else to maintain spiritual vitality. To put it another way, to depend on someone else is to demonstrate a lack of maturity in faith.

I’ve come to see this as artificial independence. It’s kind of like we champion the idea that the strongest in our communities are the ones who are solidly encased in a plexiglass incubator with feeding tubes down their throats. So we all strive for that. We want to be satiated and comfortable within the confines of our meticulously controlled spiritual eco-system. We do not need anyone to feed us, we are capable of feeding ourselves. No wonder people think they don’t need to be a part of the family of God... they really don’t.

This is where we have missed something. We have missed the fact that we aren’t supposed to be able to exist on our own. We are supposed to genuinely need each other. What if we extracted the feeding tubes from our throats and stepped out of our climate controlled incubators? What if my spiritual journey was less about ensuring that I am fed and focused more on feeding my sisters and brothers? What if I stopped asking, ‘What’s in it for me?’ and began to ask, ‘What’s in me for you?’

Two things would happen I think.

1. We would learn what it means to be generous.

Asking a different question might lead us down new roads and help us explore what a real generosity of life looks like. It means that we would learn to orient our lives around giving grace, showing mercy, extending forgiveness, pursuing shalom, and helping others flourish. This would be a way to practice giving up my life for the sake of the ones in my community. Imagine what kind of communities we would have if we came into them practicing that kind of generosity.

2. We would learn what it means to trust.

As you may have been thinking all along, if I take out the feeding tube and start feeding others, won’t I starve? Well, not necessarily. However, instead of being artificially independent, you will have to trust the sisters and brothers who gather around you in community. You will have to entrust your spiritual vitality to them and God’s Spirit working through them. That may be hard to do, but real community will never be easy.

(I’m not saying that we don’t practice spiritual disciplines or pursue personal spiritual formation. What I’m saying is that we miss something if we view personal spiritual transformation as the only end of our spiritual journey, and that we might be surprised how much God shapes us as we give our lives to our communities.)

Learning to entrust ourselves to the community of God is one way we learn that real faith is about cultivating dependence, just like my son is living a more human existence because he is dependent on us for everything. As my son grows he will need different kinds of support from us, he will always need us, just in different ways. As much as society may tell us the goal of life is independence, it seems to me that the goal of the life of faith is to realize what real dependence looks like. Human independence doesn’t seem to be all that human to me. We flourish when we are connected to one another, because its not good for us to be alone...

where would I fit on the pyramid?

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a local diner, having a breakfast meeting with Ben. We were discussing all forms of ministry and life related issues when next to us a conversation got so loud it was impossible not to hear. Two young adults were discussing what immediately became clear as a high school cheerleading team. Presumably, these two were coaches, advisors, or maybe camp directors. That I will never know. What I do know is that the conversation made me as sad as I have been in a while. As plain as day, one coach said to the other, "What do you do with the ugly girl? You put her in the back where she belongs."

No joke, direct quote. Ben and I sat there stunned. Walking around today has left me wondering...where would I have gotten placed in the pyramid? Where would any of us have gotten placed? I'm pretty sure our hearts couldn't handle hearing the answer to that question... What does it say about the world when the ones given charge over our young people use that kind of matrix to make decisions? What hope do any of us have if that's the message being sent to all of us? Is there any wonder people make some of the decisions they do when that kind of garbage shapes the way we see the world? Most days the world is harsh and ugly, and people who think like that only make it harsher and uglier.

Today is a sad day. Perhaps no more sad than other days, but the cold, vicious nature of the "real" world was simply booked on the main stage this morning. Personally, I'm tired of the main stage being filled by this kind of act. Acts that disregard real, honest humanity in favor of culturally embedded and captive ways of thinking that are as shallow as Josiah's kiddie pool out back. Acts that fail to see that we have allowed movie stars to determine the value of a human being and that we have in large part just accepted their determinations because we like the flavor of their Kool-Aid.

There is only one thing that keeps my head above the water on days like today. That (to quote Jason Gray), everything sad is coming untrue. Everything sad is coming untrue. That buoys my spirit, because I remember that Jesus asked people who weren't the best and the most beautiful to follow him, he asked regular gals and guys, people who likely would have been "in the back, where they belonged" by anyone else's estimation, these folks had a place in Jesus' movement. The scene in the diner this morning is no surprise, right?

I think Ben was right, perhaps there is no better reason for us to invest ourselves in the world (our schools, our neighbors and our neighborhoods) than simply to be a different voice, a voice that says, "There is another way. You don't have to be defined by these silly and shallow notions of what beauty is and what gives you self-worth... ...there are other ways of seeing the world. There are other definitions of what true beauty is, different ways of measuring how much value you truly have..." Come to think of it, I think I'll move to the back of the pyramid anyway, I'm not sure I want to be chosen to be the lead in this play...the scary part is, most days I feel like I play the part all too well.