Category: Blog

Jimmy Kimmel recently aired interviews of people who were asked which they preferred and why—Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act.  Person after person interviewed and taped preferred Affordable Care Act. As you probably know, the interviews were coordinated to expose people’s ignorance: Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are one and the same.

One person interviewed whose ignorance is exposed responds in the affirmative to the question about whether or not a well-informed public is essential to our democracy’s vitality. Indeed, it is. Key to being well-informed about healthcare complexities related to any attempt at a comprehensive proposal is dealing with complex questions. Let’s take for example business owners.

Small business owners might face quandaries about providing health insurance like, “If I provide health insurance for my employees, will I have to reduce their compensation or raise the cost of my product or service? If an employee takes insurance through their spouse, will that employee ask that the benefits I have for their insurance be put toward their compensation? Should I cover an employee’s spouse and dependants? Will I lose a good employee to a competitor, if I don’t provide health insurance? How might the lack of healthcare coverage affect employee morale and productivity? Will the government provide incentives to my business that will support me in providing healthcare coverage?”

Those who are business owners may or may not believe the Affordable Care Act addresses adequately their various concerns and assists them with answering such questions. Any healthcare system put in place must account as much as possible for their concerns, as well as those of others, if we are to provide a comprehensive, workable, and sustainable model.  The upcoming New Wine, New Wineskins conference on healthcare (conference link) is not intended to champion one model, but to address the subject of healthcare from a variety of angles, including questions pertaining to whether or not a comprehensive healthcare system in the United States is critical to our nation’s public health.

While it is funny when a comedian like Jimmy Kimmel exposes people’s ignorance on the subject of healthcare, it is no laughing matter when our democracy is not shaped by a well-informed public. It is our responsibility as neighbors and citizens to care for the common good by asking questions and seeking to address the complexities surrounding such matters as comprehensive healthcare. A well-informed public is a healthy public.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

Have you read Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, “The Emperor Has No Clothes”? It’s the story of an emperor who loves strutting about in glorious apparel. One day two swindlers come to town and deceive the emperor and his advisors into believing that the two of them can make the most splendid clothes for the Emperor from the finest material. However, the thread and cloth is so fine and refined that only those who are sophisticated and wise and those befitting significant positions in society can see it. Not wanting to appear foolish or unworthy of their high calling, the emperor’s advisors say nothing when he tries on the clothing, which is really imaginary. The emperor parades through town before the people’s eyes. While everyone sees the emperor’s nakedness, they are unwilling to say anything out of fear of being dismissed as foolish for not being able to see the garments. Finally, a little innocent boy who has nothing to lose cries out that the emperor is stark naked. Murmurs spread throughout the crowd until everyone finally exclaims that the emperor is wearing no clothes. While the emperor hears their shouts, he carries on as if everything is as it should be and he is wearing kingly garments until he finishes the procession.

In 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, Paul makes a big deal of talking about God’s son hanging from the cross. While Paul doesn’t say anything here about the details of the Lord’s crucifixion, we know from the canonical gospels that Jesus’ clothes were divided among the soldiers who crucified him (See for example John 19:23-24), as he hung on the cross naked, or at the very least, wearing exceedingly little. The subjects of the Roman emperor—Gentiles and Jews alike—mocked him (we were all in on it). We could see how foolish and pitifully weak Jesus of Nazareth appeared. Who knows if Paul was there as Saul? All we know from Acts is that he was in Jerusalem not long after when Stephen—the first Christian martyr—was stoned to death for his witness to the crucified and risen Jesus. In fact, those who stoned Stephen put their coats at the feet of Saul, who approved of Stephen’s stoning and death (Acts 7:58; 8:1). Saul hated Christianity because of its claim that the Messiah was this crucified corpse: for as he knew from the Hebrew Scriptures, anyone hung on a cross is cursed (Galatians 3:13; Deut. 21:23).

Saul wanted to stomp out Christianity completely. But as the story goes, Saul was later blinded on the road to Damascus and came to see how foolish he had been. He then became like a little child and saw that Jesus’ death reflected poorly on all of the Roman Emperor’s subjects (Acts 9:1-31; Acts 26:1-32).

At the time of writing his first epistle to the Corinthian church, the Corinthian Christians were reflecting poorly on their Christian faith. How so? They were trying to appear strong and wise in their own eyes, and in the eyes of those around them. They were boasting in their flesh—which was not all that noble, according to Paul: “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth” (1 Corinthians 1:26). God had chosen them as a lot so as to shame those who were truly noble in fleshly power and wisdom:

But 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. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:27-31).

Why does God operate in this way? Paul answers this question: so that no one could boast before God and that people would come to boast in the Lord (1 Corinthians 1:29, 31).

One person who did not come to boast in the Lord as a result of the Lord or 1 Corinthians 1 is Friedrich Nietzsche. Here’s what Nietzsche writes in his book, The Antichrist, about the Christian teaching of the crucified God set forth in 1 Corinthians 1:

The Christian movement, as a European movement, has been from the start a collective movement of the dross and refuse elements of every kind (these want to get power through Christianity). It does not express the decline of a race, it is an aggregate of forms of decadence of locking together and seeking each other out from everywhere. It is not, as is supposed, the corruption of antiquity itself, of noble antiquity, that made Christianity possible. The scholarly idiocy which upholds such ideas even today cannot be contradicted harshly enough. At the very time when the sick, corrupt chandala strata in the whole imperium adopted Christianity, the opposite type, nobility, was present in its most beautiful and most mature form. The great number became master; the democratism of the Christian instinct triumphed. Christianity was not “national,” not a function of a race—it turned to every kind of man who was disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. At the bottom of Christianity is the rancor of the sick, instinct directed against the healthy, against health itself. Everything that has turned out well, everything that is proud and prankish, beauty above all, hurts its ears and eyes. Once more I recall the inestimable words of Paul: “The weak things of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base and despised things of the world hath God chosen.” This was the formula: in hoc signo decadence triumphed.

God on the cross—are the horrible secret thoughts behind this symbol not understood yet? All that suffers, all that is nailed to the cross, is divine. All of us are nailed to the cross, consequently we are divine. We alone are divine. Christianity was a victory, a nobler outlook perished of it—Christianity has been the greatest misfortune of mankind so far.[1]

It’s hard to match Nietzsche’s rhetorical flurry, so I won’t even try. Two things stand out to me at this moment. First, sometimes our worst enemies are our best friends: Nietzsche understood key aspects of what Christianity was about and rejected it; we Christians often accept the faith without really understanding its negative implications for boasting in our flesh (we cannot boast in the Lord that way and the Lord won’t boast in such fleshly escapades). Enemies like Nietzsche remind us of how costly Christian faith is—appearing all too foolish and pitiful to fleshly ways of thinking and living.

Second, Nietzsche goes too far when he says that everything that is nailed to the cross is divine; only God who is nailed to the cross is divine. We cannot be strong and wise if we do not see how weak and foolish we are apart from God who makes weak and foolish all human boasts that are made apart from him.

We need to become like the little boy in Andersen’s story of the emperor with no clothes, not like Nietzsche. We need to become like the Apostle Paul who became like a little child, once Jesus revealed to him that his fleshly power and wisdom were all too fleshly—they weren’t covering his nakedness before the Lord. Like the little boy in Andersen’s story, Paul called out people to be fools for Christ so that they could be truly wise. Maybe then all the others standing around gloating over the emperor’s imaginary clothing will finally come to their senses and realize that none of us are wearing clothes and that we need to be clothed in the wisdom of God’s Son.

Have you ever met someone like the boy in Andersen’s story? Would you like to be like him? More importantly, would you like to be clothed in the wisdom that Jesus exhibited while hanging on the cross? What was symbolized by his hanging there is that all our boasts according to our vain and autonomous forms of reasoning are in vain. Don’t get me wrong—reason done rightly has its place. Certainly, careful argumentation and rigorous reason are important—Paul models them here in 1 Corinthians 1. But what is he reasoning about in his letter? What does he value? What do you and I value? Do we value looking good to those around us? Have we forgotten that not many of us were all that much by the world’s standards, and certainly not much according to God’s standards, when God called us? So why should we put on/clothe ourselves in airs now?

Something that Nietzsche did not understand and that most Christians (including myself) so rarely understand is that the cross makes a mockery of all our forms of sophisticated rhetoric that elevates only our mental prowess. Such rhetoric often parades about, trying to cover up the fact that we’re wearing nothing.

It’s not only in our dream states that we show up at work or at a party wearing nothing. We do it all the time—every time we go about our business as if we’ve got it all together and merit positions of high standing. When God had his chance to parade about in his garments of power and wisdom he chose to elevate himself on a cross to show us how foolish we are and how great our need is to boast only and believe only in him:

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe (1 Corinthians 1:18-21).

My dad, now deceased, used to say jokingly that my Ph.D. stands for “Pile it high and deep.” I fear that at times it just might mean what he said. For I have engaged with others in debates about divine mysteries and doctrinal formulas, including attention to the person and work of Christ. No question, these truths have significant positions in the Christian faith. But I fear that we cared far more about how smart we sounded and what status and positions our smartness would gain for us than about how deep the faith really is.

All of us need to stop strutting about in a dream state of appearing wise in everyone else’s eyes, when deep down inside in the subconscious realm we sense something’s wrong and that just perhaps we’re nude before God’s penetrating gaze. What happens when the dream turns into a nightmare and God wakes us up and we realize ever so clearly that we were naked all along? Will we even then play the fool or will we at last try Jesus on for size?

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

Much has been made this week of the Supreme Court’s decision to return Baby Veronica to her adopted parents, removing her from her birth father. The decision is a cause of concern for many in Native communities, not simply Veronica’s Cherokee birth family, in terms of what it may signify for the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA).

What is the Indian Child Welfare Act? North American Institute for Indigenous Studies (NAIITS) scholar Andrea Smith explains, “This act was passed in 1978 which allows a tribe to intervene if a tribal member is going to be adopted outside the tribe. This doesn’t mean the child can’t be adopted out, because the tribe might approve that, but it does allow the tribe the right to intervene.”

So, what is the concern? While the Supreme Court did not overturn ICWA, ICWA and Indian Tribes lost a major battle in “the court of public opinion,” claims Jacqueline Keeler. Keeler adds that Indian people should take this matter very seriously.

One of the chief issues that Native peoples have to contend with today, as always, is the belief in many circles that they are savages who will destroy their children’s lives. The prescribed solution historically was forced removal and enculturation in Western “Christian” values. Smith argues:

Prior to ICWA, the US had a long history through the boarding school system of forcibly removing children from their homes, sending them to boarding schools at the age of 5, returning them when they were 18 and forcing them to be  Christian and give up their traditional ways. The point of this policy was to ‘Save the man by killing the Indian.’ There was massive sexual and physical abuse as well as starvation and neglect.  This is where socially dysfunctional behavior really began in Native communities. During the summers, rather than be returned home to their families, Native children were leased to white families essentially as slave labor.

While many Americans will no doubt argue that Smith’s claim involving the boarding school system and western Christianity is a sweeping generalization, the irony is that many people, including Christians, have viewed Native communities across the land in starkly negative, generalized terms for centuries. What about now? Keeler points out that in the case of Baby Veronica, the birth father’s family does not appear to have any of the problems that the broader public associates with Native peoples. She wonders why the case involving Baby Veronica was chosen as the focus of the challenge  to ICWA and the sovereignty of tribes. Keeler says that “it begs the question, are all American Indian families being painted with the same brush?”

The battle for the future of Native communities must be fought in the court of public opinion as well as in the court of law. Given the involvement of Christian groups, including Evangelicals, over the centuries in supposedly saving the man by killing the Indian, we need to introduce these groups to truly indigenous Christian organizations that will provide another perspective. Smith believes that the way forward is to bring together Evangelical organizations that have little exposure to Native American populations with Native American Evangelical organizations. In a Huffington Post piece, Smith is quoted as saying,

Probably the best way to develop alliances would be to mirror the organizing that Latino evangelicals did with Christian right groups around immigration reform. They just began with partnering with white evangelical churches to expose them to what immigrant families were going through and were gradually able to get most Christian right groups to reverse their positions.

If Evangelicalism at large is really concerned for seeing Native communities respond to the good news of Jesus Christ in a soul and life-transforming way, we need to be transformed as a movement. The best way we can do that is by being shaped by Jesus in relationships with fellow Evangelicals who are indigenous witnesses to the biblical Jesus rather than captives of the American western dream of manifest destiny. The more we know these indigenous Christians in particular the more we may come to know Jesus and also Native communities in particular ways. Otherwise, why should Native peoples not use a broad brush stroke and argue that Christianity is anti-Native and Jesus is the white man’s God? We must change public opinion in Native circles so that Vine Deloria, Jr.’s claim is no longer true for Native peoples at large: “Where the cross goes, there is never life more abundantly—only death, destruction, and ultimately betrayal” (Vine Deloria, Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion {Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1994}, p. 261).

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

The movie Patch Adams addresses the subject of health care in a holistic manner. The movie is about the story of Hunter D. “Patch” Adams, whose Gesundheit! Institute “is a project in holistic medical care based on the belief that one cannot separate the health of the individual from the health of the family, the community, the world, and the health care system itself.”

This statement on the complex connection betwen the health care system and various other forms of health comes through loud and clear in the movie.  Adams, played by Robin Williams, claims that if you treat a disease, you may win or lose. However, if you treat a person, you are guaranteed to win regardless of the outcome. According to the movie, Adams gets the nickname “Patch” because he patched up a hole in someone’s cup. Patch wasn’t satsified with fixing only cups. He was concerned for fixing holes in people’s hearts and lives, including their physical health.

One instance of Adams treating the whole person occurs when he follows a group of medical students and their professor on a tour of the university hospital. They stop to analyze the chart/condition of a patient lying on a cart in a hospital hallway without engaging the patient. Adams interrupts the analysis to ask for the patient’s name. The woman lying there is not a lab experiment. She doesn’t simply have a condition. She has a name. His regard for her person changes the atmosphere in the hallway, as he humanizes and personalizes the situation.

What goes on in any health care system reflects and also shapes the state of health of the society at large in various ways. How personal are we in our engagement of people at the checkout counter at a store? Do I look into the eye of the clerk ringing up my purchase, as he or she hands me my receipt? Does the clerk talk to you or ignore you, conversing with a fellow employee? How do we drive down the road? Do we allow a fellow driver to change lanes, or do you and I speed up when we see their turn signal? How do we interact with one another over social media—socially or anti-socially? How healthy are we?

A few weeks ago, a group of my students, their families and I were talking about the upcoming conference we are hosting on health care at Multnomah University’s Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins. One of the student’s wives shared about their major challenge with making payments for recent hospital expenditures concerning one of their children. They have good insurance, but their insurance only covers so much. Even so, I was struck by the wife’s comment: they will be able to figure out a way to handle the various bills, as long as they have friends by their side to walk with them through the ordeal. For example, just having someone close at hand as they sort through the various bills from this and that hospital department is healing. So simple—a personal touch.

As a society, we cannot ignore the plight of people as they try to bear up under the weighty cost of health care in America. We cannot brush the question of affordability aside with a wave of the hand. Still, the sense of touch goes a long way in helping people cope under the burden of the financial strain. As important as medical experts are, we don’t need to be medical doctors like Patch Adams to provide a healing touch. How relationally healthy are we?

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On October 19, The Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins will host a conference on healthcare that will address the subject of healthcare from a variety of angles. We invite you to join us for open conversation, learning about the healthcare needs of our community, and efforts to address them. Register for the conference before October 1 to take advantage of early bird rates (just $20 for general public and only $5 for students!). Hope to see you there!

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.

The most dangerous force in the world is not Al Qaida, nor some Special Ops force, but the church that truly knows it is loved by God. The gates of hell will not prevail against such a church.

The movie To End All Wars is a moving tale of how Christian love conquers hate inside a prisoner of war camp during WWII. It is one of the most powerful movies I have ever seen. More powerful than such a movie, though, is living out the ideals such a movie conveys: can such Christian love conquer hate inside and outside church walls in our own day?

How do you and I respond to people’s indifference and hostility toward us? Do we seek to return the favor, or do we pray in view of our Lord who cried out from the cross concerning his enemies, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing?” (Luke 23:34) What will get us there? We can take comfort from the fact and live in light of the reality that Jesus does not get even with us; rather, he makes whole: “It is finished” (John 19:30). How then shall we live?The way the system often works is that we expect and even demand retaliation and retribution. We may even feel good when we watch it in a movie like Unforgiven, starring Clint Eastwood. But that good feeling may evaporate when we consider Eastwood’s character’s haunting remark, “We all have it coming, kid.” We all have judgment coming, but many if not all of us welcome forgiveness when it is offered to us.

We often think of forgiveness as weak. But actually, true forgiveness of one’s enemies, as in To End All Wars, is the scariest force in the world. There is no way of computing it. It makes no sense. It destabilizes and undermines all strategies of confrontation, even if one seemingly loses in the end.

But those who live in and out of Christ’s love will not lose in the ultimate end, for as Paul proclaims in Romans 8:31-39, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ:

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Divine love pouring through us is the most dangerous force in the world because it does not belong to this world’s order, but confronts and contradicts and overwhelms it in view of the end. Such love from above as revealed in Christ extinguishes the cycle of hate, whereby it loses its grasp on people. To end all wars, we must continue to try on the scariest though scarcest and most special force of all–love.

This piece is cross-posted at Patheos and The Christian Post. Comments made here are not monitored. To join the conversation, please comment on this post at Patheos.