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jr.

     In Matthew 5:21-22, Jesus equates hate, insult and name-calling with murder.  For a long time, I just accepted the common explanation that Jesus is "reinterpreting" the Law, pushing for a "deeper" understanding of "what God really meant".  As I blogged several days ago, however, I am beginning to see that Jesus was reading the Law through the lens of love defined as self-sacrifice.  Thus, all commandments must be reexamined through that lens.  And so what of "Thou shalt not murder"?
     What is murder, exactly?  In his compelling analysis of the Cain and Able myth, Volf argues (quite persuasively) that Cain murders Abel because he refuses to redefine himself.  Able is the quintessential nothing - he is the second son, he is a shepherd, even his name means something like "vapor".  Cain, on the other hand is strong.  He is a farmer, the first son, strong and able (hahaha, get it?).  For no good reason we can see, God chooses Abel.  God.  Chooses.  Abel.  Cain cannot accept this; the very fact of Abel's existence now calls his own understanding of himself into question.  And, rather than reevaluate himself, Cain chooses to remove that which caused him existential dissonance.  He strikes down his brother, the Other, thereby allowing him to maintain his identity unchanged.
     If we allow this story to be paradigmatic for understanding the process of murder (and I know it's not going to be 100%, so let's agree not to get caught up in the details), I think this sheds some interesting light on Jesus' comments.  Murder arises from a challenge to the integrity of our Selfs.  So too I suggest do hate, insult and labeling.  Rarely do we hate something that does not affect us; apathy is a much commoner response to these nonentities.  Our hatred arises from that which is a challenge to our Selves.  Consider, for example, racism in the States - the races that bore the brunt of race-based hatred (Irish, Italian, African, etc) were always those races whose proximity to the dominant culture forced those in power to question and to reevaluate their assumptions about what made them human.  We have a tendency toward self-preservation and stability; it seems to be human nature to lash out in anger against that which threatens us.  Insult and labeling are public means by which we can consign the Other to safe categories that no longer threaten us.
     And so I can see why Jesus considers murder, hatred, name-calling and labeling to be related.  They are really all symptoms of the same problem: our tendency to objectify and dehumanize that which threatens our Selfs, our identities.  Jesus calls us to lay down our Selfs in favor of embracing the Other.  If we cannot allow the Other into our Selfs, to challenge and reshape us, then we will never be able to allow God, who is entirely more Other than any human, to enter into us, to shape us and to change us.  Perhaps this is what Jesus means when he teaches us a few verses later to pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," and then follows that with, "If you do not forgive sin here on Earth, neither will your Father forgive your sins in heaven."  We are not in a place to accept God's forgiveness, to repent, unless we can learn how to do the same down here.  Only the peacemakers are called children of God.
     And let's not reduce this to cause-effect.  We miss the point if we pull a magic formula, a one-to-one correlation between forgiveness on Earth and forgiveness in Heaven.  Rather, we learn to be forgiven, to live as the forgiven, in the kingdom of Heaven that is coming to Earth, even as we learn to forgive sin here on Earth.
"Dead man, is it being high that makes you alive, that makes you leave behind three boys and a wife?  ...As the track marks work their way up your arm, my mother taught my brothers and I not to call you 'Daddy', but to call you 'Father'.  And I believe there is something here to be learned of Grace, 'cause I can't help but love you."
-- "The Widow", As Cities Burn

I haven't blogged in over two weeks.  I used to think times like this were a sad rarity, but I seem to be doing less and less these days.  Thus, I promise to blog at least once weekly... I feel that I truly need the outlet, and this is the best way to stay in touch with some of you who matter greatly to me.

     As promised, I want to take some time to reflect on my observations of Guatemalan culture from the brief time I was there (one month ago) and then combine that with some of the lessons God has been (re)teaching me of late.
     Guatemala is a nation of instability.  Culturally, they are an amalgam of Mayan and Spanish cultures.  Spanish is the dominant language, but most Quiche (the native term of self-identification) also speak at least one Mayan dialect.  Surprisingly (to me at least), none of the Guatemalans complained of any racial tensions.  Rather, they to a person affirmed that the greatest tensions were socio-economic.  The gap between rural and urban, and to a greater degree, rich and poor, is enormous.  An entire subculture of women live in the city dump of Guatemala City, prostituting themselves for food and raising children in the city dump.  The government is almost entirely ineffectual in addressing the myriad social problems, in part because most of the government officials are corrupt (imagine that) and in part because the tiny country boasts over 30 distinct political parties.  Their adverts are pasted and painted everywhere, and I can't recall more than a handful that did not libel some opposing party while praising their own candidates.  No single party (or even group of parties) enjoys reelection.  The citizens feel no party loyalty, tending to vote according to the party that promises what they want.  Unfortunately, the terms short, but not nearly so short as the level of cooperation among the parties, so no elected official can manage to accomplish anything while in office.  Because no promises were fulfilled, he (always he and never she, I observed) will not be reelected and a new party will step into the vacancy to being anew.  Meanwhile, the problems only get worse.
     As for religion, I observed four groups.  While no Mayan religion exists today, several forms have been synchronized with Catholicism (including one whose crucifix bears a black Christ!) to form the largest group in the country.  The largest churches I saw belonged to the Pentecostal churches, and then of course were the Baptists (at whose conference I was speaking), who did not enter into the country until the 1980s.  In addition to these three groups are a growing atheistic demographic who find the Church to be increasingly irrelevant.  I had the greatest chance to interact with the Baptists (obviously) and I found my time with them to be very instructive.
     Many of the ministers with whom I interacted are first- or second-generation native minsters.  Their churches are barely 20 years old and they are a small denomination.  They have become a part of the national evangelical alliance, which is politically neutral, but well-respected and oft-courted by the various political groups.  Many ministers, however, are regularly frustrated by the lack of education and the lack of value of education.  I was surprised at how the churches (and the conflicts in those churches) mirror the churches in which I grew up and with which I occasionally interact still today.  Many Quiche churches are clinging to traditions that (for them) are not even a generation old as tenaciously as any tradition-laden Baptist church here in the States.  Many of them are afraid or unwilling to try anything that is not like "the way we do it."
     And this is really a deeper problem than I think we're willing to admit.  John Ortberg has commented that the source of the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees was a fundamental disagreement about how to understand the Law and Prophets [the Bible, if you will (and you should)].  The Pharisees were concerned to maintain the holiness of Israel in the face of Gentile occupation of the Holy Land.  They read the Bible as a source of social identity through social boundary-marking.  They used the Law to help them determine who was "in" and who was "out".  Jesus, however, wasn't interested in where the borders are drawn, what's around the outside.  Jesus was concerned with what's at the center - "Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven and his righteousness, and all these things [about which we worry] will be added to you."  Jesus read the Bible, he interacted with the Father (and as a result with those around him) through a lens of love, which is self sacrifice ("Greater love has no one, that that s/he would lay down his/her life for a friend").
     As Ortberg comments, "Jesus consistently focused on people's center: Are they oriented and moving toward the center of spiritual life (love of God and people), or are they moving away from it?  This is why he shocked people by saying that many religious leaders - who observed all the recognized boundary markers - were in fact outside the kingdom of God.  And this si why Jesus could say that "the tax collectors and the prostitutes' who were a million miles away from the religious subculture, but who had turned, converted and oriented themselves toward God and love, were already in the kingdom."
     I see a lot of Christians these days who still insist that being a believer is a matter of what books we read, music we hear, people with whom we associate and on and on and on.  While we've roundly rejected the holiness code God gave us in the scriptures, we've had no problem creating one of our own.
     But as a wise and beloved friend of mine said, "Jesus told us it's not what goes in that makes us unclean.  It's what comes out."

So... what comes out?  Is it clean or unclean?  Or, perhaps better phrased, does what comes out of us look more like Jesus today than it did yesterday?