A ruffled-tuxedo, big-fro, cho-mo, super-bangs reminder of what Ash Wednesday is all about.
I actually did this song with Michael Collins, an old friend of mine, at a high school talent show, but there’s NO WAY we were this awesome.
And by awesome, I mean reminiscent of a troupe of mutant circus freaks.
I write about Mattias a lot. There’s plenty of material there. It’s become particularly interesting since we’ve discovered in the past year that he has Asperger Syndrome. We’ve also realized, though non-medically, that I most likely have many or all of the same traits.
And really, if you look back through the guys in my family, it’s pretty easy to begin seeing the threads.
My dad had entire rooms (not just closets) filled with clothes he had bought. Some of them, he’d never even worn. He keeps stack of magazines and shelves full of books all over his house, some of which he will never open.
My grandfather wrestled with insomnia, and spent about a year living by himself in the basement of the family house. To pass the time, he read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, cover to cover.
For Mattias, he has been diagnosed with what’s called an “obsessive personality type.” This basically means that he fixates on all kinds of things, but that it doesn’t creep over into the formal category of “disorder.” So although it’s fascinating to watch (sometimes verging on maddening), it doesn’t entirely take over his life.
But it can be pretty damn close.
Last week, his obsession was on the hit points of various characters on Pokemon cards. Before he even had any cards of his own, he could rattle of a hierarchy of hit points for dozens of cartoon figures I’d neither heard of nor cared to. But you have to realize that, for an obsessive type like Mattias, whatever his fixation is, that’s the most important thing in the world to him in that moment. So because it’s important to him, it’s important to me, if grudgingly so.
This week’s topic: bug eyes.
Apparently he came across a close-up picture of a tic at school, because he came home with an exhaustive description memorized about the qualities of a tic’s eyes. “They’re red and big and spongy,” he said. “I wonder if that’s because they store the blood they suck from people’s bodies in their eyes?”
“I don’t know bud,” I said, “but I need you to stay focused on getting ready for school.”
All he heard: Tic eyes, tic eyes, tic eyes. He decided he had to find a photo online to show us so he would know for sure that we knew what they looked like. When he couldn’t find exactly what he was looking for, his voiced reached a shrill pitch, betraying his distress.
“It doesn’t show their eyes, dad. It only shows their bodies.”
“Dude, you are going to be late for school.”
“Dang it! Why don’t they have pictures of their eyes?”
“We have to leave in three minutes, and you still have to comb your hair, brush your teeth…”
“Oh, no, none of these show their eyes!”
The good thing about sharing his tendency to obsess is that I can share a few coping strategies with him. I always have a fixation of my own. Usually, it has something to do with writing. for me, I came to accept that I was going to have obsessions as long as I was living, so I might as well find ways to use it in productive ways. For me, writing touches on all the key needs I have in an obsession. There’s no end to it, so you never run out of things to obsess about. There are millions of readers in the world, so if you’re good at it, obsessive writing can actually connect with people rather than alienate you. It’s a great means of personal expression, so for folks like me who have trouble expressing ourselves face to face, this helps us “be known.”
And regardless of how good or bad we may be at it, we all long to be known.
“Little man,” I said, squaring his shoulders and waiting for him to look me in the eye, “I need you to take this part of your brain, put it in a box and put it up on a high shelf so you can move on with your day.”
“Tics are parasites,” he said, “but skin mites can actually be helpful.”
“In a box…”
“And bees have five eyes.”
“On the shelf.”
He let out a sigh of resignation. “Okay dad,” he said, looking at the floor. “But it’s really, really hard.”
“Dude, I know. Really, I do.”
This really has nothing directly to do with theology or family, though its message of resource awareness and conservation certainly aligns with my feelings on environmental stewardship.
Anyway, this is a project I worked on recently for an organization in Colorado called Water 2012. Their goal is to engage average citizens in the important movement of conserving our water resources and planning for future growth. The video itself was really fun to work on, especially given that we had a company called Aerial Imaging shoot original aerial footage for it.
As for my part in it, I got to do a little bit of the filming, then I got to script and edit it. Check it out:
One of the cornerstones in the belief of many Christians is that “Jesus died for our sins.” However, I often struggled with this idea on many levels. Why would a God of peace, love and mercy require blood atonement? Didn’t Jesus forgive sin before his death? And doesn’t this, in some ways, put the power in the hands of Jesus’ executioners?
What I also learned as I met other Christians was that I’m not alone in wrestling with these questions. While some argue you can’t be a Christian without claiming this belief, others quietly wonder if this might actually be a misunderstanding, or at the very least, a limited understanding of salvation.
So when putting together Banned Questions About Jesus, I wanted to make sure to include this question among the fifty I posed to my crew of respondents. Below are three reflections on this challenging but important question.
Jesus forgave people of their sins before he died. How could he do this if he actually had to die in order to save us from sin?
Phil Snider: For many years I sat in church quietly wondering why God’s forgiveness was based on the idea that awful violence had to be inflicted upon Jesus in order for God to save us from sin. I was never comfortable with this idea, but I feared voicing my questions would make my Christian friends think I was a hell-bound heretic.
It was only when I went to seminary that I learned this wasn’t the only way to view Jesus’ death, and I’m glad to say I no longer believe Jesus had to die in order to save us from sin.
As it turns out, the idea that Jesus had to die on the cross in order for God to forgive our sins took nearly a thousand years to develop, and numerous theologians have pointed to its problematic implications. Chief among these concerns are questions related to God’s power and God’s character. In terms of God’s power, why is it necessary for God to sacrifice God’s Son in order to grant forgiveness? Is there “some higher authority or necessity above God with whom God has to comply in doing this?”
In terms of God’s character, can’t such a belief make God out to be “a perverse subject who plays obscene games with humanity and His own Son,” like the narcissistic governess from Patricia Highsmith’s “Heroine” who sets the family house on fire in order to be able to prove her devotion to the family by bravely saving the children from the raging flames?
Instead, my Christian faith is grounded in the affirmation that God’s love is unconditional, which leads me to believe that God’s forgiveness is unconditional as well. All of which means that Jesus’ unconditional forgiveness – offered before he died – is one of the things that makes him most God-like!
Amy Reeder Worley: I’m a lawyer. My first reaction upon reading this particular banned question was to leap from my desk and shout, “Objection! This question assumes facts not in evidence.” Yes, I know that is weird. But it’s also true. The question as posed assumes that Jesus had to die to “save” people from sin. I don’t find much biblical or historical evidence to support this “substitutionary atonement” theory of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.
Rather, I agree with Marcus Borg and other post-modern theologians who argue that Jesus died because of human sin, not in the place of humans who sin. As it relates to the question at hand, my view of the crucifixion means necessarily that forgiveness of sin emanates directly from God, and it existed before, during, and after Jesus’ life and resurrection. Like many religious ideas, God’s forgiveness operates outside of our limited view of space-time.
So how is it, exactly, that Jesus had the authority to forgive people? Sacred texts throughout the world speak of forgiving our enemies as a sacred and holy act. When Jesus forgave the unclean, criminal, and gentile he embodied God’s preexisting forgiveness of us all, teaching his followers that forgiveness was not limited to the religiously “in” crowd of the day.
In Matthew 9:1-8, Jesus forgives and then heals a paralyzed man. The rabbis accuse Jesus of blasphemy for claiming the authority to forgive sins, an authority they believed was reserved for YAWEH. Jesus responds, “Why do you entertain evil thoughts in your hearts? Which is easier: to say ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk?’ But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins….” Jesus turned to the paralytic and healed him. The crowd was “filled with awe; and they praised God who gave such authority to men.” Here, as throughout the gospels, Jesus reaffirms the message that God’s love and forgiveness are available to all of us, all of the time.
Tripp Fuller: One could answer the question by saying that Jesus knew he was going to die and rise so he could forgive with the future known and certain, or possibly that Jesus’ divine identity gave him the ability to forgive sin at will, or one could even suggest that if forgiveness could be given before the cross, then the cross may not have been necessary.
It is important to recognize that in forgiving sins Jesus is acting on behalf of God and was one of the reasons Jesus was opposed by the religious leaders, thus forcing one to explain how Jesus’ identity is tied to that of God. To understand this I have found it helpful to see how Paul re-imagined the sacrificial system in light of Christ’s work.
Traditionally an act of sacrifice began with the sinner transferring their identity to the animal through an act of consecration. Afterward the animal was killed so that the person was reincorporated into the people of God. Paul reverses the process so that the process begins with Christ identifying with us and ends with the consecration, us identifying with that which is sacrificed.
In a sense Paul sees, in Christ, God coming to put an end to sacrifice by turning it upside down and beginning with God’s coming to sinner with Good News. From this perspective it would make sense that Jesus could forgive sin without having died because God had come in Christ to consecrate the world as God’s beloved.
There are plenty of websites that generate fake church signs, but thankfully there are still more than enough real examples of church messages that can evoke emotions across the spectrum. I’ve collected a few of my favorites here and thought I’d share.
I’ve passed on all of the cliche ones like “God answers knee-mail’ and “CH _ _ CH –what’s missing? U – R!” and gone for ones that have really grabbed my attention, though not necessarily in the way they intended to.
Enjoy!
There’s an especially hot spot in hell for lawnmower stealers…
A compelling case for changing the church sign at least once every three months or so.
The lesser-known sequel to the Katy Perry hit single.
God is Love…and AIDS…and Tsunamis.
So does this mean that it’s impossible to be gay and have rickets?
Send me your favorites and I’ll post them in the future.
For starters, I’ll apologize for not including my usual images and links. I poured an entire glass of red wine on my laptop last night, and so I am blogging from my iPad. Yes, I know, a true yuppie problem. So you’ll get text-only today AND LIKE IT!!!
Now that I got that out of my system…
It’s kind of like catching dead fish in a kiddie pool to go on the offensive any more against Westboro Baptist Church, brainchild of Fred Phelps. The small but headline-grabbing group is infamous for picketing everything from military funnerals to Whitney Houston’s memorial service, generally because they make some connection between the subject of protest and the affirmation (or even indirect tolerance) of homosexuality.
In a lot of ways, they are a caricature of themselves. They’re no longer worth the ink to dissect. However, they do have more insidious agenda, whereby they verbally provoke people they’re protesting until, hopefully, someone physically assaults them. Then they turn around and sue the people, thus helping to fund their ministry.
Peace of Christ be with you, right?
The Phelps mob showed up a few years ago at our denomination’s general assembly in Kansas City, apparently because some of our churches are led by LGBT ministers. One of the protesters even called me a name, and thankfully my wife, Amy, encouraged me to walk away rather than engage.
Talk about a Better Half.
Anyway, the Disciples youth in attendance at our gathering decided to offer their own peaceful counter-protest. They stood across the street from the Westboro folks and sang songs. That was it. But it made quite an impact on me.
That, in a nutshell, is notviolent resistance at its best, demonstrated to the rest of us by our kids.
Did it change thhe hearts or minds of any of Phelps’ followers? Who knows. But it clearly affected me, or I wouldn’t be writing about it eight years later.
I’ve written before about how we’re called to nonviolent but active engagement as Christians, and how much I appreciate Walter Wink’s explication of why and how this is done, at least in some instances. But it seems that we often suffer from a deficit of the imagination when it comes to responding to injustice, oppression or violence, resorting either to responding in kind, or doing nothing at all.
Enter the GLITTER BOMB.
There’s a movement afoot in recent months to confront those who speak publicly about intolerance, particularly in the case of our LGBT brothers and sisters. The idea is simple but brilliant. The protesters appear at a public event where they will know press will be there to document the stunt, and they shower the object of their protest with glitter. It’s completely harmless and actually pretty funny, but it’s also hard to get off.
It’s harder to be taken seriously when you’re Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty or Rick Santorum, speaking about preserving traditional marriage and moral virtues while covered in glitter.
Now, I should note hhere that glitter bombing technically can be categorized as assault. However, few if any charges have ever been filed, partly because it would be a little embarrassing to explain in court, and they would also have the onus of proving there was specific intent to harm on the part of the glitter bombers.
Glitter bombing has not been limited to social conservatives either. Gay activist blogger Dan Savage has been glitter bombed more than once for what some consider to be unfair biases against the transgender cdommunity. Though I have to think a little bit of the effect is lost, as Savage admittedly does look fabulous covered in the shiny stuff.
Personally, I would love to hear Walter Wink’s own thoughts on glitter bombing asw an effective tool of nonviolent protest. It seems to meet all of his criteria based on his understanding of Jesus’ call to action:
No one is hurt.
It grabs attention without doing damage to property or person.
It helps point out the absurdity of the issue from the perspective of the protesters. In a sense, it serves to disarm the negative power of those seeking to withhold rights from others based on their orientation.
Maybe churches should consider glitter bomb squads to confront larger issues of injustice in their communities. I mean, why limit it to issues of sexual orientation? Just ask yourself the quuestion:
Who would Jesus glitter bomb?
BREAKING NEWS
February 16, 2012
Jeff Spagniola of Durham, North Carolina, was stunned when his girlfriend announced to him last week that she was, indeed, pregnant.
“It’s a miracle!” says Spagniola, “I mean, it must be, right? We used birth control and everything.”
Asked what method of birth control they employed, he explained that the couple faithfully practiced the “Santorum Method.” Coined by supporters of GOP Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, the process is simple, using a single over-the-counter aspirin.
“Everything I hear about it said that you just have to hold one little aspirin between your knees during, um, relations,” says Spagniola, “and 
there’s supposed to be no way she can get pregnant. I just don’t understand what happened.”
“It’s fairly simple,” writes Dr. Debbie Halverson of Harvard Medical School. “There is no medical basis to the old myth about aspirin serving as birth control. The idea is that, if a woman holds the aspirin between her knees, there is no way she can engage in coitus.”
“But that’s just it,” says Spagniola, after reading Dr. Halverson’s response. “I thought I was being liberated by taking responsibility for birth control myself. If it works for her, why wouldn’t it do the same thing for me?”
Following being shown a diagram of the male and female anatomy, along with a detailed explanation of the prophylactic properties of an aspirin placed between the woman’s knees, Spagniola’s response was ironic but brief.
“Holy crap,” he sighed, “I am so screwed.”
No, he doesn’t go down on one knee every time he nails a dunk or a perimeter shot. And as far as I know, he’s not building any hospitals in far-off countries. But the 23-year-old point guard for the New York Knicks suddenly finds himself in a spotlight familiar enough to Tebow that the pair should consider a face-to-face lunch to compare notes.
Like Tim Tebow, Jeremy Lin “rode the pine” as a bench-warmer for years. Unlike the star quarterback, Lin was cut by two other NBA teams before landing a supporting role on the Knicks bench.
So why do we know about him all of a sudden? Although Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni would love to claim credit, he admits the only reason the American-born player of Taiwanese parents got his shot was because so many players ahead of him were injured.
Then, as if storing up his energy for months in anticipation of his big break, Lin lit up scoreboards, followed by sports talk shows and endorsement deals. Eleven days ago, he was a relative nobody. But it seems all it takes is leading your team to a six-game winning streak, posting 38 points against Kobe Bryant and snagging a buzzer-beater three-pointer against the Raptors to get the public’s attention.
So long Tebowmania; enter “Linsanity.”
There’s plenty to fascinate in the young point guard’s story, only part of which relates to his shockingly strong court performance. Lin has 
become an overnight icon in China, which claims him as their own, given their territorial claim over Taiwan. Folks in Taiwan beg to differ. And despite all the back-and-forth, it seems to matter very little that he’s a lifelong resident of the United States.
There’s plenty of buzz here at home too. TV ratings for Knicks games are up 70% since his emergence. Ticket sales at Madison Square Garden are soaring, and even the publicly traded stock for the Garden is at its highest point in a year. His Jersey – previously unavailable – now is the number one selling name on the NBA’s pro shop site. Nike already has an ad campaign in the works featuring Lin, and dozens of other companies are waiting breathlessly for a chance to hitch on to the Lin star.
Never mind that his good fortune may fade next week. For today, he’s the Golden Child of global sports.
So why do so many people care about this guy, including people who could not otherwise care less about professional basketball? Because everyone is dying to know how this kind of thing could happen. How does a nobody turn into a superstar in less than two weeks? And of course the subtext beneath all of this is:
Could this even happen to me?
As an ABC news segment points out, more than a dozen publishers passed to J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series before she finally landed a deal. Patriots QB Tom Brady was passed over in five rounds of the NFL draft before getting picked up. Music and film star Jennifer Hudson didn’t even make the top five in the season of American Idol in which she was discovered.
The point is that we’ve all been there: unnoticed, under-appreciated, the last kid on the bench. We’ve felt deep down in our bones that we had more to offer the world than was being recognized. We believed that, given the chance, we could break out and become that bright, shining star that we imagined being in our minds.
So every time we hear a story about it actually happening, it reinforces the fantasy for the rest of us. So really, it doesn’t matter in that respect how long Lin’s stardom lasts. the very fact that it happened at all is enough to fuel our fantastic imaginations.
The question all this raises for me is: What’s behind our tendency to make messiahs out of people?
There’s is actually a bit of a formula to it, stretching all the way back to the days of Jesus.
Modest Beginnings: The messiah-to-be has to come from common stock, or at least experience the common struggle in some way. Jesus was born to humble beginnings. Siddhartha Gautama, who would become the Buddha, was born to royalty, but walked away from it all to live in austere poverty. it’s there that he found enlightenment. This is also a struggle we see the likes of Mitt Romney contend with. While he preaches empathy with the common man, he’ll then turn around and stick his foot in his mouth about $300,000 in speaker fees not being much money. So a messiah has to be someone we can relate to. We have to be able to see some part of ourselves in their struggle.
Overcoming Odds: Who could have seen the likes of Jesus coming? Who would have guessed the late draft pick of Tom Brady would turn into a hall of fame legacy? What were the chances that an adult writing 700-page fantasy novels for kids would become a billionaire? You get the idea. A messiah has to not just preach that the impossible can be made real; they have to embody it.
Humility: I watched the Grammys last weekend with my wife, Amy, and rolled my eyes when Taylor Swift offered yet another “Who, me?’ look of disbelief when she received a standing ovation. Though I questioned the authenticity of her humility, Amy believes that, despite her many awards, worldwide tours and millions in album sales, she still remains grounded in who she really is. And that’s a large part of her appeal. Once a messiah becomes too self-aware of their stardom, they simply become the latest unreachable figure. We no longer relate to them, though we may still want to watch them voyeuristically, just to see what happens next.
Meteoric Rise: I’m sure for the folks listed in this article, their ascent seemed anything but overnight, given the work they put into getting there. But as for the public attention, it’s more like a light switch than a rheostat. In the case of Jesus, it could be argued that his three years in active ministry was not exactly a breakneck pace to the limelight. But comparing the news cycles of today to those of the Middle East two millennia ago, I’d say he came more or less out of nowhere. And I expect if you asked the powers that be in Rome at the time, they’d feel similarly.
And actually, sometimes the humility is not enough to avoid the voyeurism that tends to lead to objectification of our messiahs. Consider Jesus, on trial against a common criminal for something he hadn’t done. Why were people so willing to see him handed up, sacrificed in exchange for one more deserving of such punishment? Because he didn’t end up being the kind of messiah they expected. Sure, we claim we want someone real, someone truly grounded in who they are. But if that true identity, once discovered, creates too much of a chasm between reality and expectations, we’ll soon lose interest and move on in search of another.
How long will Jeremy Lin retain the mantle of global Cinderella Story? How long until the chariot turns back into a pumpkin? We’re a fickle lot,
and the game of basketball is such a complex combination of chance, team dynamics and physical ability that it’s hard to say for sure. He’s fortunate at least in that he has the opportunity to enjoy his ascent while still alive. For others, from Picasso to Jesus, it’s only in history’s retelling of the story that we seem to find the insight that leads us to anoint certain figures as chosen.
Sure, Jesus had his moments during his short ministry when people seemed to “get it.” But let’s be honest; if his ministry was measured in the end the same way ours are today (the proverbial butts in the pews and bucks in the bank), he was a bitter failure during his lifetime. So why is it we believe Jesus was who he claimed to be? That question has under-girded the Christian faith for two thousand years. And it’s an answer still being revealed, one believer at a time.
