Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such “wisdom” does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice. But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.

I have lived most of my life on an ideological battlefield. I was two years old when the fundamentalists took over the Southern Baptist Convention. I grew up in a family on the side that lost: the “moderates” (who compared to the rest of the world are still quite conservative; there are no liberal Southern Baptists). Before I knew Joe Montana’s name, I knew who Jerry Falwell and Paige Patterson were, and why they were the bad guys. For most of my life, I have thought that my purpose in life is simply to battle against fundamentalism. It seemed pretty obvious to me that they were the modern-day version of the Pharisees Jesus battled against. But about the time I hit 30, I got disillusioned with having such a reactionary identity. Now I desperately want to transcend it and one day come to a place where I am simply devoted to the glory of God’s Name, no more and no less.

The trouble is that I see Christians in the world doing and saying things in the name of God that seem to me to dishonor God. And so I get baited into wasting hours of time on useless meme wars that accomplish nothing. I come up with really clever ways of demolishing other peoples’ positions. I try to prove that my opponents’ beliefs are completely incoherent and self-contradictory. I talk smack about people who are popular (Mark Driscoll) and kiss up to other people who are popular (Tim Tebow) in order to generate the most possible hits on my blog. My “wisdom” is full of envy and selfish ambition. It is earthly, unspiritual, and demonic. It causes disorder and evil practices. When my life is defined by my arguments with others, I become a nasty, un-Christlike person.

The trouble is that I know that God has called me to write. That’s why I started this blog. I poured my heart out to one of my mentors a little over a year ago and he told me to start a blog, so I did. Some of the tactics I have engaged in which make me feel ashamed could also be described as part of the necessary stewardship of my call as a writer. You have to write about topics that are getting a buzz in the blogosphere if you want to one day have the influence to say what God has put on your heart to say. But where are the boundaries? What constitutes selling out your principles? I know this blog has been helpful to some people. You’ve been so encouraging. I just want to find a way to do this without having my consciousness so polluted by bitterness and egotism and jealousy and a host of other sinful attitudes.

I also want to learn how to pursue wisdom out of love, rather than consuming knowledge for the sake of feeling smart. To paraphrase Paul, “Knowledge puffs up your ego, but love builds the kingdom.” I’ve always had the thought that I’m smarter than most people around me. I say that to my shame; it’s a sinful thought. I have such a ferocious appetite for reading Christian theology books. But I do it with such anxiety and a sense of urgency that it’s become exhausting. It has been a pursuit of intellectual conquest rather than a journey of spiritual deepening. There has definitely been spiritual deepening along the way but it’s been accidental. Too much of my learning has served the ugly needs of my insatiable spiritual pride.

I have a sense that God will be able to use me as a vessel of His wisdom when I allow Him to kill my ego, when I come to the realization that He doesn’t need me to be waiting in vigilance on twitter to protest the latest blasphemies of Eric Metaxas or Franklin Graham, when I come to value ordinary life situations that happen in the world outside of cyberspace equally or more than my epic ideological battles, when I somehow receive God’s liberation from the need to be important. I want that real wisdom, the kind that is “first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere.” In that interest, I need to shut up for a while and listen to God, reading His word not in order to say something important, but simply in order to become a faithful disciple. If I am not a disciple first, then all else that I do is in vain. God bless you this Lent. I will be back after Easter.

Zahnd zeroes in on a critical verse about the crucifixion in Colossians 2:15: “Having disarmed the powers and authorities, [Jesus] made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” This verse is completely ironic in a way that perfectly captures the beauty of the cross. The way the cross was supposed to work is that the prisoner is disarmed by the powers and authorities to be made into a public spectacle by getting nailed and lifted up naked to suffocate slowly and sizzle in the 100+ degree desert sun.

But when the prisoner happens to be the Son of God, who is vindicated by being raised from the dead, then the powers and authorities are the ones who are disarmed and ridiculed, and the cross itself becomes a triumph: ““The resurrection of Jesus Christ is much more than just a happy ending; it’s the Judge’s surprising verdict! It was the verdict of heaven’s Supreme Court, and it overturned all the verdicts of the rulers of the world…. The verdict of the resurrection affirmed that Jesus is the Christ and he is Lord” (76).

Because of Jesus’ resurrection, it is no longer Jesus who is condemned by the trial of the Roman judicial system but the Roman judicial system that is condemned by Jesus: ““Seen through the lens of the resurrection, the cross is no longer the shameful public humiliation of Christ, but the shameful public humiliation of the principalities and powers” (87).

Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection flip the script so that the old world order of “the truth of power enforced by violence” (67) is paradoxically overthrown and replaced by a new world order that Zahnd describes as the “axis of love.” Some might object that this particular phrase isn’t found in the Bible, but I think it’s a helpful metaphor for capturing the way that the sacrificial love of Christ expressed on the cross is an “axis” around which we should revolve if we belong to the kingdom of God.

It is not solely the case that Jesus’ death “pays” for our sins, We are called to “enter into orbit” around Jesus’ cross and leave our orbit of the “axis of power” the world is built around. It might sound cheesy Star Trek, but I think the metaphor is very helpful for capturing what it means when Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be my disciples must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Luke 9:23).

Zahnd writes: “Jesus is not just saving individuals and leaving the world as it is has always been –dominated by principalities and powers under Satan’s spell. No! Upon the cross Jesus is recreating the world! The orbit of pain around the axis of power becomes transformed into the orbit of peace around the axis of love” (80).

This is a more expansive definition of salvation than many evangelicals are used to, but it’s not un-Biblical. The whole of creation is supposed to be healed as part of salvation. Consider Paul’s words in Romans 8:19-21: “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope thatthe creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.”

In any case, Zahnd’s account of how the cross saves the world is much richer and more beautiful than a lot of the more predominant explanations around today. He references a lot more scripture and says a lot of other brilliant things that you’ll have to get your own copy of the book to explore.

No Glenn, we are not all Catholics now. We are the opposite of catholic because we idolize our opinions above any concept of sacramental unity. And to try to claim the mantle of Catholicism for the sake of scoring cheap political points that perpetuate the ideological schisms of our world mocks the concept of Catholicism about as thoroughly as anyone possibly could. What Catholicism means is unity. Its etymological basis is Greek (kata holo, according to the whole). To a true Catholic, heresy is that which causes schism. Only heretics think that ideological purity is possible and so they come up with litmus tests for excluding others from their increasingly narrow “orthodoxies.”

Let me share an interesting side note about the word “orthodoxy.” in Greek, the word doxa has two meanings: opinion and glory. The way Aristotle used the word, it meant opinion, but when the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew into Greek, the Hebrew word for God’s glory, kabod, was translated as doxa. To some degree, the one “orthodoxy” precludes the other. When we are so focused on having the “right opinion” that our lives become a perpetual punditry of bitter arguments, then we can never experience the “right glory” of God. True orthodoxy means having our minds opened to a “right” perception of God’s glory, which paradoxically requires renouncing the need to be “right” about God that keeps our minds closed.

Anyhow as I was walking around this beautiful cathedral, I was tallying all the statues of Mary and scoffing in my mind about the way that Mary gets more prayers here than Jesus. But then it hit me: the reason that Protestants don’t get Mary and the saints is because we don’t really believe that they’re still alive and capable of intervening in the affairs of our world in whatever form they have. It did bother me how many Holy Mary mother of God’s there were before the mass today. But not enough to undermine my awareness of the overwhelming presence of the Holy Spirit in the room. I don’t know what to do with Mary, but somehow a whole plethora of very fervently devoted disciples of Christ throughout our apostolic lineage had spiritual encounters with Mary which shaped the way that the Roman church sees her today. Who am I to scoff at that? It’s simply something I don’t understand and that somehow has to be okay if I want to share Christ’s body with my brothers and sisters in the Roman church.

I don’t think that I’ll ever ask Mary to pray for me, though I suppose if God revealed to me the merit of doing it, I would. But one thing I am learning from coming to this basilica and listening to God is how worthless theological opinion is compared to the indescribable ecstasy of experiencing God’s presence. I have said one prayer today over and over: kurie iesou christe, huie tou theou, eleison me ton hamartolon (Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner). It’s called the Jesus prayer and people have been saying it for thousands of years.

Nothing else has been necessary. Not a list of my confessions, petitions, thanksgivings, etc, all of which are legitimate prayers at different times. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I have encountered God’s sacramental presence today precisely because I haven’t been mired in the cognitive, or ideological for that matter.

I really think we have to renounce the perpetually-colonizing/categorizing tendency of our Western minds if we want to experience God and not just theorize about Him. As long as the defense of our opinion is our raison d’etre beneath which we subordinate everything else, we will never taste God’s sacraments and we will never experience any real bond of catholicity with other people. People who allow themselves to be shaped by ideologues like Glenn Beck have decided to become the opposite of catholic. The bitter irony of Beck’s statement is that catholicity is the one thing our nation desperately needs right now.

Overwhelm us with Your mystery, O God, that our minds may be silenced and made stupid like Isaiah was before Your throne.

Part of the reason that many people today live in epistemic closure is because we no longer have a Walter Cronkite or Tom Brokaw whom everybody trusts to give us the facts without taking sides. Objectivity is no longer considered a possibility; thus the world becomes “post-truth.” There are only ideologies that must be defended or deconstructed. There is only FOX and MSNBC; every other source of information is a more or less subtle version of one or the other. Underlying today’s anti-truthful world, Christianity paradoxically provides both the source of epistemic closure as well as the means by which people can transcend it.

There are two things about the way that Christianity defines itself that can contribute to the phenomenon of epistemic closure. First, Christianity is a religion of people who expected to be persecuted: “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you” (John 15:18-19).

Second, Christianity is based upon a paradoxical wisdom that appears foolish to the wisdom of the world: “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him” (1 Corinthians 1:27-29).

These two passages happen to be two of my favorites in the Bible. They are immensely empowering and comforting to people who actually suffer persecution (which is different than people who proclaim their own persecution as part of a political strategy). Christianity is without a question supposed to be a home for outsiders — people who are foolish, weak, and hated by the world. But we should not turn around and make these words of comfort into a prescription for anti-social behavior. These verses are not saying that discipleship is measured by the degree to which we strive to provoke the world’s hatred, like the Westboro Baptist Church that pickets soldiers’ funerals with their strange, awful signs.

It is easy to turn these words of comfort which are part of the legitimate core of Christianity into the justification for epistemic closure. If the world is supposed to hate us, then any criticism or ideological conflict we encounter is redefined as “persecution,” which means that we don’t have to take it seriously. The world simply hates us; we don’t have to consider why. If Christian truth is supposed to be “foolishness” to the world, then the measure of how bold a person is in embracing Christian truth is how anti-intellectual that person is willing to be. When you think you are supposed to feel persecuted and foolish, it’s easy to embrace epistemic closure and immunize yourself against the possibility of considering other perspectives.

The sad irony about this is that Christianity properly understood actually provides the foundation to overcome epistemic closure. The fact that we are justified by the blood of Jesus and not by our own “correctness” ought to be the basis for a genuine humility in which we are less defensive of our own perspective and more willing to listen thoughtfully to other people. There are many verses I could cite for this, but the one that comes to mind is Philippians 2:3: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves.” True humility means that I value others’ perspectives enough to question my own infallibility. Otherwise it’s not really humility. If I interpret this verse to say only that I should serve other people more than they’re serving me, that might be codependency or patronage, but it’s not humility. Humility creates epistemic openness, because I don’t trust myself enough to categorically mistrust my opponents’ views; my trust for myself has been replaced by a trust for God, which means trusting that God might be talking through the people He has put in my life to disagree with and sharpen me.

Now we have to be careful, lest we turn epistemic openness into moral relativity. But they need not be the same. There is a difference between believing that there is an absolute truth and believing that I have it in my back pocket. We can only continue the lifelong, never-ending journey towards truth if we recognize that it remains perpetually beyond us. The difference between God’s truth and ideology is that God’s truth is infinite while ideology is finite. To make your ideology absolute means worshiping an idol and putting yourself in opposition to God’s truth which is only God’s if you are not able to conquer it completely.

So I pray that you would be emancipated from your ideological tribe. Almost all of us have been victimized by ideology to varying degrees. Nobody is completely right and nobody is completely wrong (which is not the same as saying that everybody is equally right and wrong). Because God’s truth has been manifested in the universe to all, even to “godless and wicked people” (Romans 1:18-20), we can and should listen for the truth in the perspectives of our opponents even if we think their applications and conclusions are wrong. The irony is that we are less likely to be led astray with an attitude of epistemic openness than epistemic closure, because we are constantly listening for what God has to teach us, even from the unlikeliest of witnesses.

Next Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, a forty-day period of penitent reflection in which we remember our sins and our need of Christ’s redemption. It’s a long-standing tradition in Catholic and more high-church Protestant denominations to have your forehead marked with a cross of ashes both as a reminder to be humble since your sins nailed the Son of God to a tree and as a public witness showing the world that you are a sinner dependent on God. (There’s no reason for Baptists and Pentecostals and non-denominationals not to do it too.) If there ever were a time in our country when Christians needed to put ashes on our foreheads, it is now. In Ezekiel 9:4, one of the scriptural sources for Ash Wednesday, the voice of God says, “Go throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it.” I know that we all have different culprits that we accuse of flushing our country down the toilet, but I’m sure we can agree that it’s appropriate to mourn the state of our country.

I strongly believe that wearing ashes on our foreheads next Wednesday is the best way to 1) assert our religious freedom as citizens and 2) remember that our call as Christians is to be witnesses first and foremost. God doesn’t build His kingdom through petitions or angry signs or blogosphere comment wars; He has always built it through the patient witness that can only occur face to face in personal relationships.

There are people with whom you work that may have negative stereotypes about Christians, but they know that you are a decent person. They need to be reminded that you are who they’re bashing if they bash Christians (as long as you’re not the reason they bash Christians). It’s a lot easier to hate people you don’t make jokes with on a daily basis. It’s not going to  hurt anybody else for you to have ashes on your forehead. Nobody can say you’re cramming your religion down their throat. If the ashes make you self-conscious, all the better. If you don’t have anything intelligent to say, your witness may actually be more powerful. Just remember the words of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:1-3:

When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling.

Maybe it’s the case that you’ve been a royal pain to your colleagues and you need those ashes to humble you and remind you of who you have been representing every day. Maybe people need to see you mourning your own sin. Of course, this only has meaning if it’s accompanied by “fruit worthy of repentance” (Matthew 3:8).

I realize some people will think this is very simple-minded, but I honestly think that if enough Christians are willing to represent Christ with ashes on their foreheads during the day next Wednesday, it could have a tremendously positive impact on the religious climate in our country. I can’t see how having ashes on your forehead could offend anyone, but if they do lash out at you, then treat them with such love and dignity that they will be ashamed and repent. 1 Peter 4:16 says, “If you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name.” Whatever else is true, people across our nation need to see Christians wearing a sign of humility and weakness to counteract the stereotypes that we are some arrogant, powerful species of people.

For this to be a public witness, you have to get your ashes in the morning. Next Wednesday, I will be standing in my church parking lot at 6200 Burke Centre Parkway in Burke, Virginia, from 5:30 to 7:30 am to provide ashes to anyone from my church or any other church who wants to represent Jesus. We will also have ashes available at the Burke VRE station from 6 to 8 am and inside our church lobby from 9:45 to 10:15 am. I pray and hope that you will join us in this simple, non-confrontational means of bearing witness.

“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” I was talking about my sermon topic with my five-year old son Matthew earlier this week. Matthew said, “I like temptation.” I tried to stay calm, and I asked him why. “Because temptation is chocolate,” he said. And I couldn’t argue with him, since that’s usually the word that they use for the most ridiculously decadent dessert on the restaurant menu. Not just chocolate, but chocolate fudge with chocolate chips and chocolate mousse and chocolate ice cream. I generally succumb to temptation quite easily in those circumstances.

It’s interesting how the word “temptation” has almost taken on a kind of comical meaning in our culture today. It’s a word for desserts and novels by Danielle Steel. People who take the concept of temptation seriously are seen as hopelessly old-fashioned. We tend to make a big distinction between indulging harmless vices like eating too many chocolate chip cookies and actually doing malicious things that hurt other people.

Of course, this all changes when we face very real and debilitating addictions in our lives and the lives of loved ones. Whether it’s things we don’t really want to put in our body or pictures on the Internet we don’t really want to look at, there are people for whom temptation is a very real and hideous presence in their lives. Anyone who has experienced addiction knows that its harm goes far beyond the direct physical consequences of the behavior; it becomes the spawning ground of all kinds of other evils. It makes us dishonest, paranoid, and violent, which can quickly destroy our relationships and careers. Someone who has been through the devastating experience of addiction is going to have less trouble believing that there’s some kind of evil force or person in the universe that is constantly trying to tear us down. The Hebrew word for this evil entity is Satan, or Say-tuhn (as we pronounce it in Texas). The word Satan means literally “the heckler” or, if you prefer, “the hater.”

Jesus went out into the desert to battle with Satan right after He got baptized. Since it was the very beginning of His ministry, many scholars think that Satan’s three temptations had to do with the different approaches Jesus could have taken to becoming the messiah of His people. Would he give away free food? Would he jump off of tall buildings to attract attention? Or would he overthrow Caesar and rule the world from Caesar’s throne? With the power that Jesus had, He faced a tremendous temptation to accomplish His mission in an easier, much more comfortable way than dying on a cross. But because of Jesus’ radical self-discipline, we have not only a role model to follow but a source of strength and hope every time we succumb to our own temptations.

“If you’re the son of God,” said Satan, “Tell these stones to become bread.” The first temptation. Jesus had just fasted for forty days and forty nights. I try to fast every Monday, but I often cave about 4:00 in the afternoon. And I don’t even fast all the way since I drink juice and milk to keep my strength up. I can’t imagine going without food for forty days; it’s one of those things only a messiah could do. What would have been wrong with Jesus turning stones into bread for him to eat? How is that sinful? What Satan said is true. As the son of God, Jesus had the power to make stones into bread. He did many miracles throughout scripture that were way more dramatic and significant. He actually made five loaves of bread and two fishes into enough food for 5000 people.

But Jesus responds to Satan, “We do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” It’s super-radical that Jesus refuses to use His supernatural powers to satisfy a very legitimate need for physical nourishment. God doesn’t expect us to go to this extreme, which is such a tremendous contrast to our world today that constantly introduces new ways of making our lives perfectly convenient and comfortable. It’s easy to be a slave to your physical comfort. That’s what it means to live by bread alone. Whatever urge you have in your body, you satisfy it immediately and automatically. I often act this way about 11:30 at night. I feel just a little bit too hungry to sleep, so I sneak down to the kitchen and start scarfing down hummus and other food. Animals live this way. They eat when they need to eat and they poop when they need to poop. But we are more than animals; we are creatures whom God made in His image to appreciate the deeper beauty that God has to share with us. If we are owned by our physical appetites, we won’t get very far in that journey.

Next Satan took Jesus up to the pinnacle of the temple: “If you’re the son of God, throw yourself down from here and let the angels catch you.” Did you notice when we read it that the devil uses scripture to support his argument? Just because something is written in the Bible doesn’t mean that the devil can’t use it. How many times in our history have we seen the Bible taken out of context to justify agendas that are completely un-Christian? Satan’s temptation for Jesus is to do something reckless with no constructive purpose whatsoever to flaunt His privilege as the Son of God.

Any of you ever done reckless things that didn’t have a purpose? I used to do that sort of thing at least several times a week when I was in high school. How many of you have ever been mudding? Might be a North Carolina redneck thing. Well, don’t try mudding in an Astro minivan, especially if there’s a pond nearby; it doesn’t turn out well. Thankfully, my parents had AAA. Jesus didn’t just have AAA; He had all the resources of the Creator of the universe to back Him up. So He could have jumped off that Temple without even a bungee cord and said, “Look at me, I can do this, because my Daddy will send His angels to catch me.” But Jesus didn’t flaunt His privilege as the Son of God. He did the opposite. He emptied Himself of privilege and spent His time with the people from the bottom rung of society. He used His supernatural power for only one thing: to heal other people.

For Satan’s final temptation, he showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and said, “I will give you all this if you bow down and worship me.” The implications of Satan’s offer are pretty sobering, because what this passage is saying is that Satan has dominion over all the kingdoms of the world, and that worshiping Satan is the way that you seize worldly power. There is a way in which the lust for power and the worship of Satan really are the same thing. Satan isn’t really in control of the world; God is; but the structures of sin and oppression that dominate the world today form Satan’s kingdom. God’s kingdom is formed out of a completely different kind of power that will ultimately overthrow Satan’s kind of power.

According to the terms of Satan’s kingdom, the one who is able to backstab and manipulate their way to the top of the social pyramid wins. The Satanic form of power consists in being feared by others and having control over them. Of course, the paradox of this kind of power is that it results in a completely isolated, paranoid existence because a leader who rules through terror and deception can never trust anyone.

The concept of power in God’s kingdom is the complete inverse of Satan’s kingdom. Jesus doesn’t just reject Satan’s final temptation. He goes on to repudiate Satan’s entire premise for offering this temptation by becoming the world’s king through dying the type of death reserved for the lowest criminals. He became what Satan offered to make Him by doing the opposite of what Satan told Him to do. It makes no sense from a worldly perspective, but the way that Jesus gains power is through submitting Himself in absolute weakness and vulnerability to the cross. Instead of seizing power by subduing the world with violence, Jesus’ power is based upon absorbing the world’s violence into His flesh. His power over people is not based on their fear that He will kill them; He has power over those who accept His death and resurrection as the source of their freedom from sin.

And this is where Jesus is more than just a role model for us. His radical discipline in the face of temptation becomes the means by which we are delivered from evil. We do not have the power in ourselves to resist evil. The forces that destroy our willpower and stir up conflict between us and other people are far too strong. It’s impossible to fight temptation alone. We will always fail, and when we fail, we will build a façade of normalcy to hide behind, which will only make us more anxious and irritable in our relationships with other people as we worry whether they can see what we are hiding.

What we need is to be embraced by a community of people who feel safe enough to confess their sins to each other and receive God’s forgiveness. This community happens among those who have put their trust in Christ’s sacrifice and taken all their failures and wounds and anxieties to the foot of the cross. Only in such an environment can we be delivered from evil. There will always be temptations. We will always need to cry out to God to lead us away from them. But this life of dependence is not something to be ashamed of. We were created to spend our lives in a relationship of trust with God. He has the power to deliver us from all evil. The question is: are we going to let Him do that?

If it should happen one day–and it could be today–that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to encompass all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God and to this country. I ask them to accept that the One Master of all life was not a stranger to this brutal departure. I ask them to pray for me: for how could I be found worthy of such an offering? I ask them to be able to associate such a death with the many other deaths that were just as violent, but forgotten through indifference and anonymity.

My life has no more value than any other. Nor any less value. In any case, it has not the innocence of childhood. I have lived long enough to know that I share in the evil which seems, alas, to prevail in the world, even in that which would strike me blindly. I should like, when the time comes, to have a clear space which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of all my fellow human beings, and at the same time to forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down…

Obviously, my death will justify the opinion of all who dismissed me as naive or idealistic: “Let him tell us what he thinks now.” But such people should know that my death will satisfy my most burning curiosity. At least I will be able–if God pleases–to see the children of Islam as He sees them, illuminated by the glory of Christ, sharing in the gift of God’s Passion and of the Spirit, whose secret joy will always be to bring forth our common humanity amidst our differences.

I give thanks to God for this life, completely mine yet completely theirs, too, to God, who wanted it for joy against, and in spite of, all odds. In this Thank You–which says everything about my life–I include you, my friends past and present, and those friends who will be here at the side of my mother and father, of my sisters and brothers–thank you a thousandfold.

And to you, too, my friend of the last moment who will not know what you are doing. Yes, for you, too, I wish this thank-you, this “Adieu,” whose image is in you also, that we may in heaven, like happy thieves, if it pleases God, our common Father. Amen!

Father Christian’s letter is an echo of Jesus’ words on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). I think often when we read those words from Jesus, we take them as some kind of expression of perfect piety, but not a serious request. We are so twisted and cynical today that we could say something like this about our perceived “persecutors,” not because we actually want God to forgive them, but in order to let them know that we are claiming the mantle of martyrdom.

In any case, Father Christian de Cherge is what a real Christian martyr sounds like. Let’s consider his attitude–his hope to reunite in heaven with the man who chopped off his head–each time we want to complain about how oppressed we are when the stores say “Happy holidays” in December or the courthouse won’t put up a copy of the Ten Commandments.

As I related in my last post, I share the sacramental worldview that is behind the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception. Though I use birth control, I don’t think churches should have to pay for it. What I’ve found as I’ve had a reasonably civil conversation with people who disagreed with my perspective is that there’s more than one legitimate paradigm for analyzing this issue. Pregnancy isn’t a disease, but it is apparently something that insurance companies try to weasel their way out of covering. I don’t understand all the ins and outs of the issue, but I’ve read enough to know that it’s a completely dishonest caricature to cast the pro-contraception side as consisting in secular zealots who are trying to attack religion. What I can’t stand about our political system is that people who engage in hysterical outrage-promotion never seem to suffer any consequences for the real violence that they inflict on our civil discourse. If there were ever a good reason to hope that God is storing up wrath, this is definitely one.

Obama has retreated on the issue, seemingly addressing the Catholic concerns, but that doesn’t seem to matter, because it’s too delicious an opportunity for people who desperately want to make him into an anti-Christ. I don’t agree with Obama’s decision. I just want for Christians to stop being sleazy spin-doctors, because it’s a stumbling block that keeps others away from the saving love of Jesus Christ. Don’t you understand that your myopic lust for political power is the reason that so many people won’t come to church? Yes, I understand that your megachurches are growing 1000% every year (with people who have a vested interest in agreeing with your ideology), but overall religious affiliation is in free fall in our society. Why are you so unconcerned with simply being above reproach in how you conduct yourselves politically for the sake of being a witness of Jesus Christ above all else? I just want for us to have integrity. That’s all.

Consider this passage from 1 Peter 2:13-17:

Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority: whether to the emperor, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people. Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as God’s slaves. Show proper respect to everyone, love the family of believers, fear God, honor the emperor.

Honor the emperor? Peter wrote this when Nero was the emperor. Nero barbecued Christians inside giant torches that he used to light up his garden banquets. And Peter was saying that for the sake of Christian witness, in order to “silence the ignorant talk of foolish people,” Christians should “honor” an emperor who was zealously trying to kill them and destroy their movement. So what about a president who considers himself a fellow Christian and is trying to weigh multiple paradigms for understanding a complicated issue? It is a complete farce to call this complex debate between legitimate women’s health concerns and a religious doctrine that I happen to support “persecution” compared to all the real persecution that Christians have suffered historically. It’s kind of like the national political equivalent of flopping melodramatically on the basketball court when you know good and well the other guy’s elbow didn’t come within a foot of touching you.

So please step back and ask whether you’ve gotten sucked into the spiritually devastating partisan meme war that may end up being the reason that our country is just as secular as Europe 30 years from now. If you’re a Christian, represent Christ not just by having so-called “Biblical” opinions but by how you conduct yourself and treat other people. I know that Romans is the favorite Biblical book of the people I’m addressing (who may or may not read this), but it seems like many of you haven’t read past Romans 11, so I’ll close with a passage from Romans 12 that captures the culminating purpose of all the systematic theology we love to argue about from the opening chapters:

Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.

First of all, I should say that on a practical level, I understand the rationale behind the Obama Administration seeing contraception as preventative medicine (even if I don’t agree with it). Since birth control costs money, people who can’t afford it don’t use it. Therefore, making it free reduces the number of unwanted pregnancies, which means less abortion and fewer kids growing up in unstable environments. I understand that logic from an isolated practical standpoint, but I’m opposed to the cultural standards that are set when employers are forced to provide free birth control for their employees as a matter of mandated national health policy. It basically means a complete surrender in the major battle that needs to be fought in our culture against the commodification of sex. I’m not sure who needs to fight this battle or how exactly, but liberals don’t see the problem and conservatives don’t recognize the source of the problem.

The problem is that sex is the most thoroughly exploited marketing tool of global capitalism. Never in human history has a society’s landscape been so thoroughly saturated with sexual images, not because hippies are living out some “free love” fantasy, but because powerful industries use eroticized bodies to sell products. Sex itself becomes a product instead of a sacrament. Our bodies become products whose value we’re supposed to increase with gym memberships, personal trainers, special diets, etc. It shouldn’t surprise us that in such an environment, pregnancy could come to be viewed as a “disease” that decreases the value of the female body. Or that producing life becomes a meticulously planned process in which you space out your babies over a certain number of years much like investment portfolios in which you have to space out your IRA contributions over a period of time.

When I use the word “capitalism,” I am talking about the powerful social phenomenon that redefines objects in its environment as quantifiable value that can be exchanged — a.ka. capital. (In other words, I am not making a comparison between having a free market or a centrally controlled market, since capitalism works just as well in totalitarian China as it does in our democracy.) Capitalism makes our bodies into capital both by using eroticized bodies to sell products (which we compare to our bodies) and by convincing us that our bodies are too fat, dry, or ugly, so that we will purchase whatever products address these issues in order to increase our bodies’ capital.

Capitalism also makes our lives into capital in a different sense: through careerism. Our value as people becomes a quantifiable algorithm that combines how many degrees we have from which schools, how many years of experience in what positions, which software applications we have mastered, etc. I was talking with a friend tonight about how ridiculous it is that despite his 8 years of military experience, tons of jobs he’s applying for won’t consider him because he doesn’t have a college degree. This is because the job market takes its shape according to the credential markers that are easiest to assess objectively and turn into a form of capital rather than unquantifiable skills and character traits that a marine acquires in a war zone.

In any case, if we allow ourselves to be shaped by the forces that value us according to our waistline and our resume, then why would we see pregnancy as anything other than a disease? What contribution to our personal capital does a baby have to make? At one point in time, when we were an agricultural society, making lots of babies meant lots of future farm-hands, but in our current situation, from the perspective of capitalism, babies are purely a liability. The way it becomes morally possible to end an unborn life that has been inconveniently started is when we value above all else the capital of our body or our career which must not be compromised at all costs.

The reason that Catholics like Archbishop Dolan oppose birth control is not just because they’re old-fashioned prudes. It’s because they believe that the value of human life doesn’t come from any market; it comes from the God in whose image we are made. Birth control makes child-bearing a consumer process rather than a divine mystery. Much of our world’s sin is the product of people deciding to be consumers first and foremost rather than images of God. I don’t agree with where Dolan and the Roman church draw the line, but I agree with why they draw the line. Does that make sense? My wife and I use birth control, but I don’t think birth control should be seen as the panacea to our culture’s problems with sexuality. I also don’t think forcing Catholic hospitals to give out free condoms does anything to address the enormous problem of what global capitalism has done to human sexuality, though admittedly I don’t know what the answer is.

The reason I’m telling you about my straw man is that I often preach sermons to him when I’m supposed to be preaching to my congregation. Or at least that’s what my wife says. This passage we read today about the unmerciful servant is one of my favorite passages to attack my straw man with, because it’s all about him, someone who is ungracious after receiving grace from God. But the problem is my straw man doesn’t go to this church. You may not realize it, but you’re unusually good-natured for church folk. I just can’t imagine anyone here acting like the servant in the parable – getting a multi-million dollar debt canceled and then immediately jacking up your buddy for owing you a couple hundred bucks. So I can’t preach the sermon I’d been planning to preach.

The standard sermon on this passage is to say that nobody owes you peanuts compared to what you owe God, and if you want God to forgive your trespasses, you’d better forgive every trespass that’s been committed against you. I could talk about how God’s infinitely high moral standards make us all filthy sinners, so we have no leg to stand on judging other people. It would be theologically correct sermon, and you might say good job, but it probably wouldn’t help you handle the truly difficult challenge of forgiveness in your everyday lives.

The problem is I’m haunted by the things I know about you. Some of you have been sinned against tremendously by people who will probably never admit that they did anything wrong. Others of you are stuck in messy situations where you’ve done some wrong to somebody else and they’ve done some wrong to you and you don’t know how much slack to cut them and how much blame to accept for yourself. Some of you have been through heart-wrenching grief that doesn’t make any sense and can’t be blamed on anyone, so you might be struggling to forgive God. Knowing this, it seems tone-deaf to tell you that forgiveness is a simple mathematical equation: God forgave you 10,000 talents worth of sin, and you’ve only got to forgive a hundred silver coins, so suck it up and be done with it.

But here’s one thing I can say no matter what you’ve been through: “Your sins are forgiven.” Jesus used to say this right before he healed people. We normally gloss over it, but if you think about it, it’s a little disturbing. Why would Jesus be talking about sin with someone who is paralyzed or blind or mortally ill? Doesn’t their suffering more than cancel out any mistakes they might have made? It seems undignified to tell victims of suffering that they have sin that needs forgiving.

But there’s a deeper truth that people in our age have a difficult time grasping. To be accepted and forgiven by God as a sinner is actually the most liberating and healing thing that can happen to you. To Jesus, forgiving sin was a far more important kind of healing than making the lame walk or the blind see. Our culture doesn’t get this. We think it’s reassuring to say to someone who has a troubled soul: “There’s nothing wrong with you.” But that’s actually one of the most dismissive and damaging things you can tell people who know something is wrong with themselves. When our society tells us things like this, we think that we’re supposed to pretend like there’s nothing wrong. We think we’re not supposed to admit it when we make mistakes, because then we’ll get thrown under the bus.

Here’s the real ugliness. When people are stuck in the trap of thinking that they have to pretend there’s nothing wrong with them, it makes them capable of doing great evil to other people. To do evil successfully requires being in a state of denial about the pain that we’re causing: our minds have to justify or repress the memory of what we’ve done in order to avoid going crazy. Unfortunately the more evil we justify, the easier it becomes to do it, turning our world into a fact-free reality in which the people we sin against deserve what we do to them. But recognizing that God has forgiven our sin changes all that. It knocks down the walls that we thought we had to hide behind. It gives us authenticity, one of the most precious endangered species of virtue in today’s world of spin and illusion.

In Jesus’ parable, the unmerciful servant may have had his debt erased but his actions toward the other servant show that he didn’t accept the master’s forgiveness of his sin. He makes it clear that he didn’t see his debt as something he did wrong for which he was shown mercy. It was simply good fortune that his master fell for his sob story, so he figured that he would add to his good fortune of getting away with the debt he owed by collecting on the debt that was owed to him. The sad thing about this story is that the true gift of forgiveness is not the waiving of our punishment, but our liberation from the prison of dishonesty that sin imposes on us.

See, everyone is a sinner, because we all fall short of the God who we were created to be like. That’s what sin literally means in Greek: falling short. It’s an archery term for missing the bulls-eye. The problem is we try to make our bulls-eye wider and wider to make our arrows fall inside until we’re not aiming for any standard of righteous living at all. Only by accepting God’s forgiveness of our sin can we keep on shooting for a target that we will never hit perfectly.

Being able to face the truth about our mistakes because of God’s forgiveness turns us into people who are capable of being refined by God. Our expectations for ourselves increase as we grow closer to God. When God eliminates our anxiety about being accepted by Him, it is replaced by a genuine desire to be like Him. We grow less tolerant of our subtle arrogance, our impatience, our envy of others. We come to value God’s forgiveness more and more, so that what seemed like a few hundred bucks worth of debt forgiveness at first comes to feel like millions of dollars to us the more we appreciate God’s transformation of our lives. And the more we’re focused on becoming holy like God, the less we’re preoccupied with nickel and diming the debt that other people have accrued with us.

When we accept God’s forgiveness, we receive the freedom not to keep score, because keeping score is exhausting. But what do we do about forgiving other people who aren’t sorry that they hurt us? It’s not healthy to deny that they did anything wrong. That’s not forgiveness; that’s enabling. We can’t force them to repent and make peace with us. Depending on what they have done, it may not be safe or healthy for us to ever see them again. But we do need to ask God to deliver our souls from the tyranny of the evil that was done to us. And we need to ask God to purge our hearts of the desire for evil to happen to those who hurt us. As long as we cling to our anger, their sin will continue to oppress us. We may not be the ones whom God sends to intervene in their lives and declare His forgiveness of their sins, but what a beautiful moment it will be if and when God finally wins their hearts.

Even if we don’t get to participate in that beauty, there are people whom God has put into our lives who need to be set free from the denial and regret about things that they did to other people. They have not yet received the amazing freedom for which Jesus Christ died to face their sins and know that they are forgiven. God’s forgiveness is the greatest gift we can ever receive, far more exhilarating than having a multi-million dollar debt erased in an instant. But there is another joy that may even be more profound: to watch another person accept God’s forgiveness for the first time. That joy is what I live for. It’s why I do what I do. And I want each of you to experience that joy in your lives. Know that you are forgiven by God; ask God to give you the strength to forgive others; share the good news of His forgiveness even with people who don’t need your forgiveness. That’s the way you become part of the chain of mercy by which God conquers the world’s evil one soul at a time.