youth group and hitler

I don't have the energy or discipline required for 6-9th grade boys and girls.  It is exhausting.  But I love them, so every Wednesday night, we gather.
Tonight, with Valentine's Day coming up I found this cheesy game in an email about collecting hearts and whoever gets the most wins and then some even more cheesier questions and love.  But the follow-up scripture was a very familiar one that is dear to my heart: 

You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your strength and with all of your mind.  And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

So we played it.  And it was kind of fun.But then it came the time to talk about it.

We got to talking about who our neighbors were.  Were they just the old couple who lives next door?  Or the cranky mom who won't let us play basketball?  Just people in our town?  In our county?  In our state?  in the world?

In the way things do happen with this extremely talkative group (which was only boys by this point), we got to talking about "illegal immigrants" (I'm trying very hard to encourage folks to use the term undocumented... many of them actually did come here legally but circumstances have prevented them from going home, renewing visas, etc.) and "terrorists." 

We started asking whether it was fair to characterize a whole group of people.

We asked if people who do bad things deserve our hatred or our love if we are Christians.

We started wondering about how folks get to the point where they allow terrible things to happen in their own country, like people in Nazi Germany.  We wondered if we would have stood up for our neighbors and faced prison and death on behalf of another person. Would we have gone along, or would we have sacrificed ourselves and our families? 

Would we have tried to leave?  Where would we have gone?  Would we have entered a country illegally if we thought it was our only place of escape and refuge?  Would people have welcomed us or turned us away?  Where are the folks who come here coming from?  Would they have come legally if they had the option?

We found ourselves ending with Deuteronomy 10

Look around you: Everything you see is God's—the heavens above and beyond, the Earth, and everything on it. But it was your ancestors who God fell in love with; he picked their children—that's you!—out of all the other peoples. That's where we are right now. So cut away the thick calluses from your heart and stop being so willfully hardheaded. God, your God, is the God of all gods, he's the Master of all masters, a God immense and powerful and awesome. He doesn't play favorites, takes no bribes, makes sure orphans and widows are treated fairly, takes loving care of foreigners by seeing that they get food and clothing.

You must treat foreigners with the same loving care—
remember, you were once foreigners in Egypt.
Reverently respect God, your God, serve him, hold tight to him,
back up your promises with the authority of his name.
He's your praise! He's your God!
He did all these tremendous, these staggering things
that you saw with your own eyes.  (The Message, verses 14-21)

It was not at all where we thought the evening would end up... but these kids are smart. And when you can get them to talk one at a time, they have some fascinating things to say. My prayer is that they will go home and never look at their neighbors... the grumpy guy next door, or the strangers who live all around us, or the brothers and sisters we see on the television half way across the world... the same way again.

Lost - The Oldest Game Ever Played

In the second part of the pilot, we find John Locke sitting on the beach setting up a backgammon board. Young Walt walks up and wants to know what the game is and how to play.

In his usual enigmatic way, Locke replies, holding up the black and white counters, "two players, two sides, one is light, one is dark."

That theme of light and dark, good and evil, white and black flows throughout the series of lost. Constantly you are trying to figure out who is good, who is bad, and which side the characters are playing on.

Having known very little about the actual game of backgammon, I did some research. In the game, the goal is to get all of your counters/checkers/stones off of the board. The checkers are initially set up at various set locations across the board and the light and dark pieces are moved in opposite directions, each player trying to get their pieces "home." It is the roll of the dice that determines how many moves each person can make.

Opposing forces, two sides, each trying to make it "home."

Later, I want to discuss what it might mean for each side to make their stragetic moves in their attempts to get home, but right now, I'm struck by the contrast between black and white.

In Christian theology, there is a battle between good and evil, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. This is talked about both cosmically in the sense of Christ's victory over the forces of Satan and individually as our hearts and minds are up for grabs. Christians are called to live in the light, to clothe themselves with rightousness, to put all darkness and evil out of their lives. There is no inbetween. Those who are "lukewarm" might as well be on the darkside. The choice is clear.

Yet even in the midst of this black and white, either/or language, there exists within theology another current that talks about the grey area... the both/and. Lutheran theology claims that we are simultaneously sinners and saints, darkness and light living together. In Methodist theology, we talk about sanctification - that God's grace flows within us from the moment of justification and over time, we are gradually perfected in God's eyes - that someday we reach that moment of perfection, but that in the meantime we are people of the light who struggle with the darkness within us.

The question is one of if and when redemption can come. If we are filled with darkness and evil, can we ever change our ways? If we are filled with light and goodness, can we ever fall from grace?

The characters on Lost constantly struggle with these questions. As we are introduced to Kate, Sawyer, Charlie, Eko, Sun, and others, we see the destruction that their past lives have caused. We see the hurt and pain they have caused not only others, but also themselves. And while at the same time running from their past, they are also running towards a new future. In small ways throughout their lives they have done redeemable acts - like Sawyer leaving his "commission" to the daughter he has never met, or Eko trying to help the villagers get their vaccine - although he chose a path of killing to get there. Their lives are a mixed back of light and darkness, each vying with the other to take control of these individuals.

The island in many ways gives them a clean slate - a tabula rasa, as one of the first episodes puts it. It is a fresh start and a chance for them to make themselves over as new people, without their past haunting them.

The ability to say that they are sorry, to confess the wrongs of their lives and to make amends is difficult. Kate finds that she cannot apologize for killing her step-father, nor Eko for the destruction that followed as he tried to save his brother from a similiar fate. But Charlie does find ways to say that he is sorry and successfully gives up heroin use. Sawyer makes amends with the survivors by throwing a boar feast. Juliet tries to prove she is on the side of the survivors through telling the truth about being a "mole."

And yet, as fear and anger take over, darkness again creeps in. On the first night in their camp, Eko takes the lives of two men that have tried to haul him off. Sayid returns to torture as a means of getting information. Sawyer just cannot leave the con alone when he feels that power has slipped away from him.

In the game of backgammon, light and darkness cannot exist on the same point at the same time. Either there are too many counters of the one color and the other cannot move in, or there is a one on one confrontation. As the light or dark counter moves onto a point occupied by another - the "blot" - the blot must leave the board and is placed on the bar between the sides of the board. That counter must now start from the beginning and make its way all the way back around the board.

That constant interplay, the struggle between light and dark is present in our lives. Faced with temptation, encountered with fear, we must make a choice to move and to confront those opposing forces or to sit back and wait for the darkness to win. As we see all too clearly in Lost, mistrust and secrecy become avenues for darkness to work. Yet, we know through scriptures that through prayer, through community, through open hearts, we are strengthened by others and by God to face those opposing forces. Jack's famous, "live together, die alone," is not only a statement about survival - but a recipe for how they can strengthen themselves for the battle of hearts and minds. If only they could figure out a way to follow it.

t.v. is taking over my life!

So, I will be the first to admit that I love television. I'm a sucker for an hour long episode (well, 42 minutes). I like to just relax in front of our t.v. and slip away to another world for a while.

The beauty of a television show - especially those "hour long" epi's is that you slowly, chunk by chunk make your way through a story. Yet they are short enough that when my ADD (self-diagnosed) gets the better of my I can hop away and mow the lawn or wash dishes.

This summer, my husband and I have made our way through seasons 1 & 2 of Dexter - a showtime series about a serial killer who only kills murderers and works forensics for the police department. In some ways, it's just an escape, but as a theologian and as a philospher, I also see so many themes that we need to deal with in our everyday lives: redemption, good and evil, morality and sin, what it means to be human.

Our instant play for Dexter isn't available for season 3 so we are waiting for it to be released. And instead, we began to watch Lost.

Now, in the whole time that Lost was on the air, I maybe watched one episode. I didn't want to get into the hype. But now that I have been watching it for a solid week (we just started season 3) I'm hooked. There is so much symbolism and many of the same themes that came through in Dexter - good and evil, redemption, and others - our purpose/destiny/fate, what it means to be family/community, questions of whether there is a God.

For the past few days now I've been thinking about blogging through the series and taking some notes - kind of a gospel according to lost type of thing. As far as I can tell, no one has really done it yet - aside from an article published by the Christian Research Institute. We'll see if I have time to go back through some episdoes and really do it or not.

s "I" n

Another Wednesday morning conversation with local pastors on the lectionary. I really enjoy this time to meet with my colleagues and talk about how to translate the gospel into plain language and a word that our congregation can make a part of their lives. The scriptures are tricky. They are written in ancient languages, in ancient contexts, and they use ideas and concepts that really just don't translate to our world today.

This morning in particular, we talked about the first healing in the gospel of Mark. I hadn't thought about this before, but there isn't a whole lot of demonic activity in the Old Testament. And there isn't a whole lot of demonic activity after Jesus either. At least not in the same sense that we see in these scriptures. As I talked with a friend about it today, we talked about how the "powers" might work in our world today.

In all honesty he said, if evil works through manipulation - then in people who are superstitious and believe in spirits - then working through evil spirits and demons makes sense. But in our modern scientific culture, we don't buy the whole "spirits" thing. What if the devil is simply working through other means - through means by which we can be manipulated - reason, science, false theology, etc.

I hadn't ever thought of that before - and it really made sense. I think that throughout history God reaches out to us in different ways - so why not the evil powers of the world as well?

After that, i headed to the church for our weekly bible study. This group basically reads through a book or section of the bible and we try to understand it, but mostly, it is to get a feel for the whole story. Right now we are in Numbers, and I found myself stopping the group after every paragraph to explain a few important pieces. We were reading in particular the section where it talks about what a man should do if he is jealous and suspects his wife of cheating. There is all of this talk of bitter water and the priest and fallen thighs and it made no sense. So I translated. "If a guy is jealous, he takes his wife to the priest, who then administers this bitter water solution... if she is pregnant (presumably by another man) it will cause a miscarriage. If she is not pregnant, either she has not been cheating and is cleared, or doesn't get caught... but it's likely that she won't do it again. All guys are in the clear and won't get in trouble for their actions."

Comments ranged from "that's not fair" to "why would they do that?" I explained that one reason is that women were viewed much differently - as property, as the belonging of the husband in this time. But also, that the law actually provided a way for a woman to prove her innocence - so in that sense, it was protective.

We also talked about the vow of the Nazarite. And I noticed in particular a different understanding of what sin might be within these passages. The Nazarite is not allowed to touch a corpse, but if someone dies right next to that person, and so they are unwillfully put in contact with the corpse, they have still sinned. There is a process for cleansing and setting things right in relationship to God and their vows.

We think about sin and law as an act that 'I' have done that breaks a law. It carries a sense of guilt and punishment. But when we think about law as order, as a process, as a way of being - then sin is simply when that order gets out of balance. What is required is not punishment, but restoration.

I have found that my congregation really tends to think of the law as this harsh thing that condemns and convicts - the law needs to be laid down - God is always telling us how we are supposed to act and we are faithful if we follow all those laws to a "T". I'm really trying to get them to have a more graceful understanding of the law. God's Word should rule our lives, and God's grace is what saves us and the law is still a good thing that helps us to live more in line with God's will. But it is also in many places used to describe a way of being that is not in line with our culture, and we have to use God's grace to interpret the laws we read in Numbers.