Hey Stupid, your Epistemology is Showing...

People are stupid.  All people.  Myself included – I’m a people too.  It’s a fact that makes me nuts.  It’s aggravating because we’re not stupid based on an objective truth – we’re stupid based on our own working definition of knowledge.  And that definition of knowledge makes us feel smart while actually defining us as stupid.  Here’s how.

Most everyone I meet ‘knows’ stuff.  They know all kinds of stuff.  A lot of the people I meet want to tell me how much they know, and that’s fine because I like learning and hearing about stuff people like to learn and hear about.  Then I know it.  I learnt it. I’m smarter – right? 

So then I tell them the stuff I know about, which happens to be pretty Jesusy.  That’s the stuff I decided to spend my life learning about.   Some people learn about finance and accounting, some learn about insurance and business, some people learn about gardening and the environment.  I learn about faith and religion.  So I share what I know.

Which usually leads to an evasion –  ‘oh, you’re a pastor.  Well, look at the time…’ Or a polite ‘yeah, Jesus is cool.  That’s important stuff too.’  But sometimes I get a challenge – ‘I don’t believe that, it’s all just made up.  The Bible and Christianity aren’t true.  You can’t prove that it is.’

Then I say ‘your epistemology is showing’ and giggle like a school girl as they check their zipper.  It’s much more fun than pointing out the obvious incongruity of their thinking and the fundamental lack of fundamental thought towards the subject of knowing things – fundamentally.

Epistemology is partially concerned with how we know what we know.  There is internalism, externalism, blah, blah, blah.  One thing we have to come to terms with, however, is that what we know is mostly not objective, empirical truth that we have unquestionably proven – but rather what we say we know is actually believed based on faith from what others have told us.

For instance, all of us KNOW that there was an earthquake in Haiti – but were we there?  We KNOW that the earth is round, but have we been in space to see it?  ‘There is footage’ you say, but I say images and video are able to be faked pretty well these days.  For instance:

 

The earth is square.  How do I know?  Google images says so.

How do you know what you know about business?  You went to college, took courses and professors or authors of textbooks told you.  How do you know where your appendix is?  WebMD has a nice graphic – they told me.  Unless you cut yourself open and see it for yourself, you don’t really know it’s there apart from being told that it is.

Which is the other way, really, that we know what we know.  We experience.  I know that two plus one = three because we had two kids and then another ankle biter came along and there are now three butts to wipe in my house.  I have experienced that math, and it stinks.

So every year I’m annoyed at all the people who ‘know’ what they know about Jesus around Easter.  Have you ever noticed that the Discovery channel and the History channel always run some kind of story on a new twist in the Jesus story?  This year it was something about how Jesus was set up – framed for a crime he didn’t commit.  There was also a piece on the ‘real face of Jesus.’  Every year it’s something, some new thing we now know.  If you watch it, however, it’s just some guy telling you something – something someone told him.  Or in some cases, it’s something they are telling us for the first time, based on what society or culture is telling them.

So maybe you’re CONVINCED Christianity is a bunch of crap.  Maybe you’re CERTAIN that Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead.  Maybe you KNOW that this whole God, Jesus, church and Bible thing are all made up, historically contrived by generations of grumpy old republicans who want to control everyone, rule the world and be total buzzkills.  Let me ask you something…

How do you know that?

Have you ever looked into it?  Have you ever asked about how the Bible came into existence?  It’s called the cannon of scripture, btw, and is an interesting topic.  Adherents of historical criticism say they know what parts of scripture are true and what parts aren’t – how do they know?  Who told them?  They weren’t there to experience it, so somebody must have told them something about the Bible.

Do you think the story of the resurrection of Jesus is fabricated? 

How do you know?  You have two options – you were there and experienced it (as old and crotchety as some people I know are, still highly unlikely) or someone told you it is all fabricated.  Who told you?  Oprah?  Eckhart Tolle?  Tupac Shakur?  How do they know?  Who told them?  Or are they claiming they were there?

The truth is, you don’t know.  I don’t know.  If knowing is a function of objective, observable, empirical truth not subjected to interpretation or influenced by cultural or other biases but rather based on firsthand experience, then most of us don’t know anything.  With this criteria applied to knowing, we are all stupid, as I said at the beginning of this post.  Actually, we simply use the terms believe and know interchangeably. 

There is much I have not observed about Einstein’s or Newton’s theories of physics – but I believe them to be true.  I act with great certainty on the basis that they are true – though I have never experienced the experiment that would prove them true.  I believe because reputable people – teacher, professors, etc. – have told me they are true.

I believe that Jesus Christ lived, died and rose again.  I believe he was God’s only son.  I believe this to be true based on those who have told me it is so.  Not just because my pastor or professors have said so, but rather because the vast weight of history has spoken thus.  Those who did know him told others.  They wrote it down.  They spread the message.  Generations of people said the same.  Some people in the last few hundred years have started to say that those people were wrong, but they weren’t there.  They weren’t part of the early church.  They didn’t walk with Jesus – so how did we learn in the last hundred years all this new stuff about Jesus and the Bible?  Scholars today who deny the resurrection don’t do so because people who were there at the time of the authorship of the Bible told them.  People who reject that Jesus wasn’t God’s son today don’t do so because they knew him firsthand.  Those who reject and deny do so because people today tell them so.  Maybe you have a pastor who denies Jesus’ resurrection – who told him that?  Not the last 2000 of Christian scholarship.  Not the Bible.  Who told them?

Who is the authority that told you what you know?  Who is the scholar?  Or is it just a subconscious undercurrent of the culture and society?  If so, how does the culture and society know what they know?  Who or what informs them?  To keep pulling back the onion peels to see who told who – how we know what we know – is a really fun epistemological exercise.

And epistemology will take you many places.  It forces you to question all kinds of things you assumed were objective truths.  For instance, everyone I know will openly state that we should be good – but epistemology forces us to ask how we know what good is?  And if there is a different people group who defines good differently, how do we know that what we know about good is better or more correct than what they know is good?  Confused yet?  Good.  Let’s cut to it.

Easter is coming up on Sunday.  I know what I know.  You know what you know.  Maybe those things are very different.  Maybe they are diametrically opposed.  I know how I know what I know.  Do you?  What do you know about Easter?  Really, what do you believe about it?

Just please, don’t assert that the only things we do know are objective, observable, empirical truths not subjected to interpretation or influenced by cultural or other biases.  That would make us all stupid.

Oh, and by the way, your epidermis is showing.



I Will Punch you in your Clown Nose...

I mentioned to a friend once that I was going to a parade and they replied that they ‘hated those things.’  In shock I immediately assumed that my friend was a communist, socialist, Marxist – some kind of ‘ist’ – because all red-blooded Americans love parades.  You have to.  It’s in the constitution, or bill or rights, or something.  It’s what we do.  To commemorate important events in our country’s history we do two things: blow stuff up and have parades.

So I called the department of immigration and homeland security to give an anonymous tip.  Turns out I may be mistaken on the constitutional civil duty part…

All this did cause me to stop and think, however.  Parades ARE kinda strange.  It all seems normal in the moment because when you go to a parade you’re in parade mode and you have parade expectations.  The thing that’s happening in front of you seems to fit and is entirely NOT out of place.  Imagine for a minute, however, that elements of a parade randomly appeared throughout your day and week. 

What would you do if one day you’re headed to work in the morning and you find yourself stuck behind a gang of very slowly moving, engine revving motorcycles taking up both lanes of traffic.  It would be odd to say the least. 

If I were walking in the park when suddenly a tiny herd of Shriners zipped past me and started to spin in circles while their fezzes blow in the breeze I would assume they had a whiskey still hidden somewhere nearby.

If some strange man wearing crazy makeup and floppy shoes offered my kids candy while at the mall I’d Chuck Norris his Adam’s apple.

And yet we line the streets and wait for these bizarre spectacles to file past us every summer without a second thought.  Why?  Because we have a notion of something bigger going on.  There is a reason for the insanity.  There is a cause for all this that is important, or was important, or something.  Usually we don’t appreciate the true importance of the parade – we just know that we need to line the streets and get assaulted by tootsie rolls, politicians and bad high-school bands because of it.  The real reason fades away as we all hope to be in the right place at the right time when the cop’s horse lifts its tail…

You know you cheer for it.

When individually and objectively scrutinized the elements of a parade are indeed strange.  The ability of our mind to interpret the bizarre as normal based upon our expectations is amazing.  It really makes no difference what the reality is, we’ll adjust it and suspend our judgment of events in order to satisfy those expectations.

That’s the case of Palm Sunday – which we celebrate in only a few days.  That original day was one of great oddity when you think about it.  The whole city turned out for a grand entrance.  Youths were shouting and screaming in the streets as if the Jonas Brothers were coming to town (Nick and Joe, not Kevin – I mean, come on, now that he’s married it’s so like, whatever).  They were pulling down tree branches, laying coats out on the road, the authorities (Pharisees) were trying to work crowd control…

And here comes a guy riding a donkey?  That’s what everyone lined up for?

They had expectations of a king.  They believed Jesus to be the one who would change their world, the whole world.  They expected him to lead, to rule, to overthrow to be a champion, warlord and king.  It didn’t matter that he was arriving in a manner that resembled the mayor of chumptown riding in a Geo Metro during the Fourth of July parade – their expectations usurped reality and they hailed him king.  They had the wrong idea of who Jesus really was, but they weren’t about to stop this parade and find out for certain.

Hosanna, Hosanna – hundreds and thousands of Christians will sing together ‘Hosanna in the Highest’ this Sunday like they did so many years ago.  But I wonder if any will stop and think about how bizarre this all really is.  More important, I wonder if we will pause to examine our expectations of the arrival of Jesus into our city, our church and our heart. 

What are we anticipating?  That he will lead a rebellion?  That he will resolve our disputes?  That he will give us the meaning of life or a self-help seminar?  Why are we having this parade?  Our expectations might just be as off as those who first gathered.  Because this only looks like a parade.

It’s actually a funeral march.

Hosanna.  Hosanna.  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord – to be our sacrificial lamb.  To give his life. 

That’s the last odd thing about a parade – and what makes Palm Sunday anything but.  We never see a parade’s destination, it just drifts in front of us on out of sight.  Come see on Good Friday the destination of this event.  Come see what all this is really about.  Come see what it is that we welcome into our city, churches and hearts.  Come to dark Gethsemane and see…

Trouble: Luck can't last a lifetime unless you die young



From Despair.com

I’m what you call a “trouble maker.”  I always have been.  In the machine of life, I am not a fast spinning cog, smoothly firing piston or precisely timed valve – I am a monkey with a wrench.  It is not my first nature so to be – but it is a thing I enjoy doing.

Because when things run smoothly long enough we start to get complacent.  We start to get lazy.  When a person, organization, family or church settles into a pattern that suits them pretty soon that pattern enables them to cease growing or expanding.  But more importantly, we get boring.  And boring is dumb and wrong. 

So many people have found themselves busy with their work; living lives that are hectic - running kids to and fro to soccer practice and dance thingys and jazz this or club that.  Calendar’s that sync to other calendars that send us e-mail reminders to our phones that we need to go to the next thing.

Busy?  Yes.  Hectic?  Yes.  Boring?  YES.  We’ve been duped into thinking that programming our lives with fun things will make our lives full and exciting.  Instead, it’s made us predictable.  It’s made us systematic.  It’s made us rule following, deadline honoring, registration completeing, paper pushing lamewads. 

This is the situation with us and Jesus.  When it comes to God, we all have a certain pattern.  For most of us, that pattern is simply shouting his name on a regular basis when we stub our toes.  Then there are those who go to church regularly.  You have your pattern – fill up with Jesus on Sunday and that should be enough in the tank to get me through this week until I coast back into the church parking lot on spiritual fumes. 

‘Fill er up with high octane worship, please.  And while you’re at it, could you check the fluids?  I think I’m low on holy water…’

Maybe we’ve even got a far more complex pattern.  Maybe it’s Church Sunday with Bible study, small group mid-week, morning and evening prayer time and daily devotionals.  It sounds like a full and enriching Christian diet.

It also sounds boring.

Don’t get me wrong, Christian discipline is good and healthy.  I advocate systematic time with God and practice it myself.  However, this IS Lent.  So we are closely examining ourselves for sin and spiritual flaws. 

And there is a potential problem with static patterns of faith – God happens to be dynamic.  Faith is dynamic.  It lives, moves, grows and changes.  Not that which you believe – but how that which you believe impacts you and your life.  How you live, the decisions you make the relationship you foster and the risks you take.

We can’t let the routine of religion extinguish the impulsivity of faith.  Habits are good – until they nunify our faith into a Spiritless, lifeless, static existence.  The business of doing faithful things can become to us more important than the goal of those things – the bearing of spiritual fruit.

Jesus tells a parable in our text this Sunday about a tree that doesn’t bear fruit.  By any other measure, it would be a good tree.  It’s tall.  It’s big.  It provides shade.  It clearly is working – drawing water and nutrients from the soil.  The only problem is, it isn’t bearing fruit.  In the parable, the owner wants to cut it down.  The gardener buys some time, but the fact remains – if the tree doesn’t bear fruit it will be cut down. 

This was for the people of Jesus’ day the real problem – they developed a highly structured religion.  Enter the messiah – monkey wrench in hand.  He was a real trouble maker.  Disrupting trade in the temple, teaching with authority, doing things when you weren’t supposed to do them…

Jesus’ trouble making life, death and resurrection was for us.  It is life changing because it grants the forgiveness of sins.  It is life altering.  It is a thing so huge that it should reshape the way you do everything.  It should take your breath away with excitement.  It should lead you on an adventure through life.  It should make each day a new day in the Lord full of the unknown possibilities of what God might do today. 

Unless you make it boring. 

If you find faith boring, maybe you need some trouble in your life.  Maybe you’ve got plenty already and aren’t seeing it as God’s opportunity to walk with you through the trouble and deepen your faith.  Maybe this current trouble is the thing you need to go from the tree that always does and is what the tree does and is – to the tree that bears fruit.  Maybe you need to be shook up.  Maybe you need your world rocked.  This could be the time and the place to step out and trust him and take him up on the offer to be his disciple and to be used for his glorious purposes. 

Look to see Jesus in your troubles.  If you do – you might just see him with a wrench, smile and gracious invitation to join him on a faithful journey that is anything but boring.

Or he might be the guy with the ax. There's always that alternative...

Problems: No Matter how Great and Destructive your Problems Seem now, Remember, You've Probably only Seen the Tip of Them

www.despair.com

Isn’t that the way it is?  The problems in our lives most often begin as an issue small enough that we can choose to ignore it.  A little bump in the road, a glitch in the system.  Oh that?  That’s just a minor setback.  If I do nothing and pretend like it doesn’t exist, I’m certain that, given an amount of time, it will resolve itself. 

But the bump eventually becomes the pothole that swallows our SUV.  The glitch causes our system to report a fatal error.  The minor setback becomes our Arkansas.  No offense to the Razorbacks…

The most startling thing to note is the ease with which our problems escalate.  So seamless and smooth is the translation that we hardly even notice the rapid change.  It’s as if we begin by living out a deeply passionate and spiritual folk song with a healthy measure of angst and wind up in an episode of ‘Cops’ with a country music song blaring in the background.  How did we go from Gordon Lightfoot to Hank Williams Junior in one night?

This is most likely due to our propensity to positively spin our circumstances into a more palatable interpretation of a dire situation until it is simply no longer possible to ignore the obvious.  What is most important, however, is not our learning to better anticipate this dynamic.  It is not about our seeing the world differently or being honest with ourselves.  Sometimes, problems are just problems.  Whether we understand them or not, whether we see them as they are or not – our problems will be what they will be.

What is important is not that we analyze and gauge our response – but that we recognize and embrace God’s response to our problems. 

Elijah had a real problem.  It may have seemed small at first – some lady is a little annoyed at people with his profession.  No big deal.  Citizens get angry with politicians.  Nurses get angry with doctors.  Parents get angry with teachers.  Pets get angry with vets – the kind that eliminate their fertility, not the kind that fought for our freedom; let’s not be silly. 

Frankly, Elijah had seen bigger deals in his time…until that cranky lady, or ‘Queen’ as she liked to be called, decided to kill all the prophets.  Not only was she cranky, she was efficient.  Elijah’s ‘woman scorned’ issue became a ‘woman, with emotional control over the ruler of the nation’s army and all the resources required to systematically annihilate an entire people group, scorned’ issue. 

Yeah, big problem.

So Elijah does what any real man would do.  He goes running into the wilderness scared for his life, wishes he was dead like a junior high boy who just got rejected by a girl at the big dance and takes a nap like an octogenarian who missed his mid-morning Ensure.  Good response, eh?  His problems have escalated.  It started minor but now it is huge.  He never thought on angry lady would be such a big issue.  But hold on, he’s a prophet, right?  PROPHET… wait for it…wait for it…waaaiiiiit foooor iiiiiitttt….

Shouldn’t he have seen this coming?

Hey OOO!  I’ll be here all week, don’t forget to tip your wait staff!

First, that’s not how the call of the prophet works.  A prophet speaks God’s Word to the people.  Sometimes it’s about the future, sometimes not.  There is no guarantee that they can see every bit of what lies ahead.  But what’s of note in this text is God’s response to the problem of his prophet.

We tend to want him to end our troubles in an acute fashion – by calling us home or by miraculously resolving the issue.  It seems like that’s what Elijah wants.  He asks God to just end it.  His problems are too much.  This issue is too big.  He can’t handle it.  He can’t resolve it.  He’s at his end.  It might have started small, but it’s gotten way too big for him. 

But God doesn’t take it away.  God doesn’t remove or resolve the problem.  God ministers to Elijah in rest and rejuvenation.  God nourishes Elijah with his presence – and with snackies!  He sustains him in the midst of the issue. 

God doesn’t take Elijah out of the world of problems and he doesn’t take his problems out of the world – because from God’s perspective the problem didn’t escalate.  Nothing changed.  That problem on day one thousand was the same as the problem on day one.  He certainly could have just spoken the word and made everything ok without having to get all ‘personal’ with Elijah in the wilderness, but that’s not God’s style when it comes to dealing with our issues.

Let’s be honest – our biggest problem is that we are sinners.  And our biggest real world problems all stem from that fact, and the fact that others are sinners and even all creation is fallen into sin.  When we reflect in Lent on that fact we might be tempted to wonder why God didn’t just end it in an acute fashion.  Why not just annihilate sin with his spoken and powerful word?  Why not just annihilate us and all of creation? 

It’s just not his nature.  Our God, as we struggle in the face of our greatest problem, chose to come and minister with us.  He chose to be present with us.  He chose sit with us, walk with us, teach us and eat with us.  He became man in Jesus so that we might be refreshed and renewed with strength for this world of problems.  He became man in Jesus so that we be in relationship with God facing the great trials of this world. 

Come to think of it, he became man in Jesus to pay for our sin on the cross in a rather acute and dramatic fashion – it may not be in the manner we anticipated, but it is resolved nonetheless. 

So consider this Lenten season that our biggest problem in the debt we owe of sin has been resolved – what lies in front of us is nothing more than the consequential ripples of the broken fallenness of life.  They seem to escalate, they seem to become enormous – but from God’s perspective they are minor and they have been dealt with.  He will be with you in the midst of them.  He will give you rest in the face of them.

And he usually brings snacks!

Consistency: It's only a virtue if you're not a screw up.



It’s an easy, blame shifting and burden lifting phrase: ‘we all make mistakes.’  It seems for some reason to be a catchall cliché for the underachievement of everyday life, as if the acknowledgement of the imperfection of humanity in general pardons one’s personal and specific incapability.  In today’s world, a shrug of the shoulders and a blank stare – in combination with this phrase – actually disarms constructive criticism or valuable evaluation.  Normally this type of cultural de-evolution would annoy me at a level only equal to that of un-erasable Family Matters phrase ‘Did I do That?’

Now you’re going to have Steve Urkel on the brain all day.

I was forced, however, to consider the deeper implications of this phrase when I found it ingrained in my own psyche during my Lenten reflections.  Having begun a journey of self-examination on Ash Wednesday we all have the opportunity to consider our own brokenness and shortfalls.  As I was doing so, a small voice whispered seductively in the back of my mind…

“We ALL make mistakes.”

I took the bait for a second.  ‘That’s right, we do all make mistakes [insert doe-eyed shrug visual here]. ‘

Immediately I felt like punching myself in the face.  How easily I fell for the sophomoric logic that if everyone is a moron I could be a moron with them and feel ok about myself!  Now the phrase in question has taken on a much higher level of annoyance – on par with when people say Kurt Cobain was a brilliant and terminally tormented artist like Hemmingway or van Gogh. 

The man made millions of dollars singing a song with the refrain ‘A mulatto, an albino, A mosquito, my libido. Yeah, hey, yay.’ 

Not brilliant.  Probably not an artist…

We’ve all gotten comfortable – too comfortable – with the notion that we are fatally flawed.  We are so quick to give a pass to others when they underperform at a task, job or assignment because we recognize in ourselves a common denominator of fail.  If mankind were a math equation, it would be: us over screw – up times blew-it-again minus talent and ability equals tragedy - remainder you.

That, however, has always been true.  And certainly, with great effort mankind has in some regards overcome some deficiencies – though far more remain.  But it isn’t the realization of our common failure that bothers me.  It’s that fact that we’ve stopped asking why.

We all make mistakes.  Why?  Why is that?  Why isn’t anyone perfect?  Why is it that we are so diverse in heritage, tradition, nationality, race, religion and creed – and yet share one common trait of imperfection?  Why has no one figured this out?  Why do we all – ALL – make mistakes?

Because we all are born with a nature of sin.  It’s not popular to say in our world today.  Some might think it archaic or small minded – but there is no other explanation in science or the humanities as to why this characteristic would be universal among people.

Lent is our opportunity to not shrug and to not dismiss our mistakes as minor or diminished by a law of universal failure.  It is our time to consider God’s response to our mistakes.

This weekend in church we will compare and contrast two stories – one from numbers 14 and one from Luke 4 – of God’s children struggling in the wilderness.  In the first, Israel rebels against God.  It results in great punishment – but hey, everyone makes mistakes, right?

Wrong.  In the second story we’ll see Jesus remain faithful in the face of great temptation.  He will do for us what we cannot.  He will grant to us what we cannot earn.  He will bear that which would crush us.  He will remain without sin and be the sacrifice we so desperately need.

Not everyone makes mistakes.