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Simple Concepts, part 1

I feel like my voice has been silenced at  some point in the last few weeks. Thoughts are attacking my mind like a swarm of bees around a hive and I can seem to calm them down  enough to put them into words in any organized fashion. Lately I catch myself talking and talking and talking. My thoughts keep forcing themselves out of my mouth in such an unorganized way that I simultaneously feel extremely misunderstood in conversation. The truth is, everything feels like it’s becoming so simple to me, but simple concepts seem impossible to communicate.

A year or so ago, my friend Brad taught me what we call “The Game”. It’s a simple game that will ruin your life (at least if you don’t forget the game the minute you learn it). It goes something like this:

The Game

Rule 1: Anyone who starts playing the game plays for life.

Rule 2: Any time you think of the game, you lose the game

Rule 3: Any time you lose the game, you must tell everyone you’re with.

Three rules. Simple, huh? But every time I explain the game to someone, the first question I get is, “OK, so what’s the game, how does it work?”

Have our lives become so complicated that we can’t understand how to put three rules together? Have we lost the creativity to take three rules and begin playing the game? Instead, we always seem to need to be told how. This idea has been hitting me on a few levels lately; War, peace, economics and love. Today I am writing mostly about the latter.

One of the misunderstood concepts spreading throughout the nation is the notion that our country needs to return to morals. I disagree. A moral is not any sort of an assumption of fundamental truth, and morals themselves are often subjective. A moral is a lesson derived from a situation, story or piece of information, and morality is a way to live these lessons through the goodness and badness of human character. I believe that this is where morals miss the mark. What can be accomplished by defining a rule, or lifestyle around the badness of human character? When God created man, didn’t he say it was good? If sin truly entered the world, sure sin would be bad, and sure evil may be in existence, but did it change the goodness of human character, or just the goodness around the human? Are we sin, or are we sinful?

I have often been disappointed in the way that recovery programs ask their participants to say, “I am an addict.” Why don’t they say, “I am a great person who is addicted?” or “I am an addicted person that hopes to grow stronger?” Addiction should be treated as an adjective and not a noun.  I myself admit to addictions – Mainly consumerism and unhealthy food choices. I am not an addict though. If consumerism is the nature of my being, then I have no chance at recovery. Likewise, if we define humans as bad or evil people, rather than people who have done bad or evil things, what chance do they have? Have we given up on hope for our neighbors? If God created us as good, I do not believe a person can be bad at the core.

With that being said, let’s return to the idea of morals, starting with this – Morals are derived from principles. Though morals are similar to principles, they are a way of taking a principle and feeding it through a grinder with historical perspective, culture, and the assumption of good and evil as being a part of human character. Hmm… sounds to me like a moral turns out to be a byproduct of a little truth, a little experience, a little opinion, and maybe some chili powder. How much is our culture run on byproducts? Nothing is pure anymore. Chicken isn’t chicken; it’s  chicken byproduct. Butter isn’t butter, it’s mixed with too many things. This is one of the largest contributors to health problems today. Likewise, spiritual byproducts are killing our belief systems. I want to get back to the core, the raw truth. This is why I prefer the word principle. Principle is defined as “a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a belief, a behavior, or a chain of reasoning.” Can we get back to principles instead of morals?

What does this mean? If a principle is a fundamental truth as defined above, then where does it come from? That’s hard to answer since we all have different religious beliefs, but lets examine something that I believe everyone holds as a fundamental truth - love. I think for certain we have in our nature a sense of Love. Love is defined in so many ways from friends to family to spouses, etc. Jesus said that all laws, all commandments are fulfilled when we love God and our neighbor. What more do we need than love?

I know what 99% of people will say from this; “yeah, but you can’t just love everyone everyday in every way if they’re not all willing to do the same. They’ll steal from you or take advantage.” This is what my mom calls an ANT or an Automatic Negative Thought. Remember, if you are doing your role of loving, what can go wrong? Ok, so someone steals from you. Remember, if you hold on to that treasure in the first place, you are not living out the principle of loving God. I couldn’t believe how many people I shocked when my car was broken into last year and I said, “well, they must have needed my wallet and phone power chords more than I.” I don’t say that to tout myself, but to teach myself that my love is flawed if I can’t always answer that way. Things are not ours, land is not ours, stuff is not ours. Still, Love is too simple a concept for some to really get. Even when Jesus tried to tell his disciples to simply love God and your neighbor, the teachers right away tried to complicate it with “who is my neighbor.”

I’ve heard people say that love is complicated – the types of love, the ways to love, who you love, failure of love, etc. But again, these are byproducts of love. Love at its core is simple, and should require no explanation. Yesterday, in church we read a verse where Jesus said, “love recklessly” (John 12:25). So I wonder why we constantly try to cut our losses before letting ourselves love someone. Why do we love just half way to protect ourselves and our things? I’ve been told that it’s easier said than done, but I say it’s too simple for that to be true. In fact, its far easier done than said! I have heard of enough problems that can come from doing the right thing, but we protect ourselves too much at the cost of others.

Now, let me wrap this up by returning to the beginning of this conversation. I had questioned why we need to be told the “how” instead of creating the “how”. In the many stories of Jesus, he constantly told us to love. He gave us the "what" (love), the "who(m)" (God and neighbors), the "why" (because it makes a better world), the "when" (indefinitely), and the where (everywhere). He gave many examples in his life that answered the “how”, but even the Good Samaritan story did not define every future scenario. We constantly have to define the how by returning to the core -the fundamental belief and the principle - of love.

I leave you with this question:

When will it be enough just to do something because it’s the right thing to do?

 

 

Flaws (again)

So, I wrote a blog a while back about The Liberty Bell, but I revised the same core for a new concept. I hope this one makes more sense and is more concise, and more relevant:

 “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the land unto all the Inhabitants thereof. Lev XXV X”

I stand behind the roped off area, staring at the word “Liberty” and wondering what it means. Why is this word inscribed here, and not “Freedom?” Why not “Democracy?” Why not “Independence?” The light is shining through the huge glass walls, casting shadows on this broken American Icon. From my memory though, the word “liberty” is supposed to be much larger and alone in the center, like the title of a story. I was wrong. Here I stand and I learn for the first time what this story is about. I wait for the crowd to clear a little before I walk a circle around the subject to read the entire quote. I read it slowly. “…all the inhabitants thereof.” I take a few steps back and read again,  “Proclaim Liberty…” then read again, “…all the inhabitants thereof.” I finish my walk back to the part that everyone wants to see – the crack. I am in Philadelphia, the Epicenter of the United States of America. I want to reach out and touch the crack - really feel it and experience it. I want it to speak to me, to ring for me.

The Liberty Bell was commissioned to be created far before the Revolution, before the First Continental Congress, and far before the US even conceived the idea to separate from Great Britain. When the bell was first hung, in 1753, a hairline crack was discovered, so John Pass and John Stowe re-cast the bell. However, the crack reappeared. One more time, they re-cast the bell but it failed. History says that the bell’s final ring was at the celebration for George Washington’s birthday, in 1846.

It wasn’t until the abolition movement that the bell began to represent something greater. The quote on the bell began to speak to the nation in a new way. The word Liberty means, “The state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.”. It began with the abolition, but the Liberty bell represented the same idea for the Civil Rights era and the Suffrage movement. It was not only a US icon, but a world-recognized icon from Nelson Mandela to Ghandi. Was it just the inscription that had such an effect, such a loud ring? No, the image of the Liberty Bell is the crack. The bell was re-cast three times before it was settled that it would always be imperfect, and it sat for years before that imperfection turned out to be one of the most powerful images in the world.

 

What is it about imperfection that we are drawn to in icons and why are we so afraid of that same imperfection in our lives? One of the most recognizable icons in Egypt is the Sphinx, with its broken nose. We love the Coliseum in Rome, because it is tattered and torn from wars. We embrace the Tower of Pisa because it’s so flawed that it’s flippin’ awesome. Yet, the slightest imperfection in our clothes, and we get rid of them. We make a mistake and beat ourselves up for it for years. Even if we burn a meal we are serving to friends, we feel embarrassed even though it’s still perfectly edible.

 

Isn’t it crazy to think that the people who hung the Liberty bell never would have conceived that a simple bell (they didn’t know it as the Liberty Bell) would mean what it does today. Why? Because it cracked. Today I am struggling with church because the idea of church has been re-written so many times. From the original church of Jesus (not Paul) to the Roman Catholic church, to the evangelical church, to the post-modern church, to the house church, to the now called “Missional” church. Why do we keep re-defining church? Probably because we think we can fix it. We think we can fix the problems of what church is. I am guilty myself of thinking I can fix the church. But maybe it’s not meant to be fixed. The bell was cast three times before it was accepted as something bigger than a bell – before people were allowed to have it mean what they wanted it to mean on an individual basis - abolition, civil rights, suffrage, and equality in today’s struggles. In order for this to happen though, the bell was taken out of the bell tower and put on display; given to the people. The leaders stopped trying to ring it and just allowed it to ring in a new way.

That day is coming for the church. I am seeing it everywhere. Leaders are starting to let go of the grip on the rope that rings the bell, and are accepting the cracks. I noticed this last Sunday that when the sound system began to crackle at church, many people became distracted. Our worship was disturbed by a small technical difficulty. Then, the worship was further disrupted when the issues were pointed out to the congregation as if it was such a problem to have sound issues. Why do we feel we can’t have distractions in our worship? Our concern for perfection, not only in church but in every type of worship, is taking away from the true sacrament of worship – the idea that we can take an intangible God and somehow make Him tangible in our lives through music, discussion, reading, etc.

I take this idea from the Society of Friends (Quakers) who commonly practice silent worship in their weekly meeting (church). Silent worship comes from the belief that God came down as the spirit so that each of us can hear from God in our own lives, and that there is no authority but God, and therefore we don’t need a preacher. In silence however, you can hear every bicycle on the sidewalk, every siren on the street, every baby crying in the building. Listening to these sounds and distractions is a part of worship. They enhance the worship because they remind us that God is big enough to be present through the distraction. Let’s not evict distractions from worship, lets embrace them.

As a parallel, I hope we can think about our lives that way – that God is big enough to be present and is in fact enhanced in our lives through our flaws.