“Hypocrites For Jesus Unite!”

I like to have fun and I’m gonna do so today on this blog.  Given my thoughts shared yesterday, let me imagine starting a campaign calling for “Hypocrites for Jesus” to come out, joining others…, well, ahem, ahem…for some purpose which I presently cannot imagine!  I guess I’m aware of how much “joining” and the pleasure of “belonging to other joiners” appeals to me as much as it appalls me.

But there is a serious dimension to this vein of thought which I shared yesterday. We are all actors, though “imperfect actors on this stage of life,” per Shakespeare, yet our ego wants to delude us into thinking our faith is the “real thing.”  Nevertheless, as long as we are human, we will not have or be the “real thing” in any respect; and who would want to be anything but “human”?  To answer my question, “the ego would” as the ego is a dimension of our human-ness that seeks to lead us into non-human dimensions of life, leading toward “inhumane” attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.  This ego is what the Apostle Paul called “the flesh” and led him to admit on one occasion, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me.” Without this “self” awareness that the Spirit of God wishes to give us, we will be incapable of this Pauline wisdom and find ourselves making choices that have nothing to do with God and everything to do with the ego.  Oh yes, we will likely declare loudly and boisterously that “God is leading me” but that does not mean He is .  In fact, listen to what Shakespeare had to say about the “loud and boisterous” displays of faith:

There are no tricks in plain and simple faith.

But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,

Make gallant show and promise of their mettle.

And I oughta know about this hyperbolic displaying of faith! I have spent most of my life “like horses hot at hand” in my faith because deep in my heart I yearned for a faith which I’m only now able to tippy-toe into, a faith requiring the humility to entertain doubt, insecurity, weakness, and fear. Though I’m being facetious here, my “plea” for Christians to acknowledge their hypocrisy has a degree of seriousness to it.  We never escape being human and it is okay to be an “actor” in faith; realizing this and admitting it allows us to be less so.

The Hypocrisy Temptation of Faith

A little known quip from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount was, “Thank God I’m not a Christian!”  Well, indulge my imagination anyway!!!  This notion comes from something Carl Jung said in his heyday, “Thank God I’m not a Jungian.”  Jung knew that some of his devotees were a bit over the top and turning him into a cultic figure.  He recognized that his teachings for some were becoming mere clinical dogma, missing his true emphasis was a focus on the machinations of the heart.

There is nothing wrong with “being a Christian.”  The problem arises when it becomes an identity such as, “I am a Republican, or Democrat, or feminist, or wine connoisseur.”  These ego emphases are fine, being appropriate amusements or detractions, but not so fine if they become obsessions.  When they deteriorate into the obsessive domain, they can become deadly and therefore dangerous to the individual and all those he comes into contact with.

One’s Christian faith, or any other faith tradition, can become an obsession and therefore a function of the ego designed to hide the dimensions of the heart that faith should allow to surface.  Here I speak from experience, my faith having been for nearly all of my life mere prop designed to cover up my inner emptiness.  And faith is a good cover up, if you can “do a good job of it,’ that is succeed in the performance art of faith; it can give one a persona which will play very well with others who practice the same performance art.  Jesus called the performance artists of his day hypocrites, or “actors”, and had harsh things to say about them.

There is nothing wrong with being a hypocrite.  We are all actors to some degree and seeing this allows us the freedom and humility to own our short-comings when they stare us In the face.  As the Bible notes, “There is none good, no not one.”  But it sure helps if we can find the humility to accept our duplicity, insincerity, and hollowness and therefore find a “forgiveness” which is more than some abstract ethereal legal transaction.

Hypocrisy is Not Necessarily as Bad as it Sounds!

I had the extraordinary pleasure of participating in the most meaningful church experience of my life for several years in St. Paul’s Episcopalian Church in Fayetteville, Ar.  One high light was a meditation class on Sunday morning in which we would meditate for 20 minutes and then explore meditative wisdom for Christian and Eastern mystics.  One spin-off from this experience was a Wednesday morning “coffee” with a bunch of men in the library of that church where we would have coffee, doughnuts, and just “talk” as we passed the “talking stick” around.  This was a “spiritual” meeting without the onerous demands of the “spirituality” I grew up with in a conservative, evangelical church.  We just talked…and did so honestly.  We trusted each other.

One morning a retired psychologist, who I had the pleasure of getting to know personally, shared about his “hypocrisy.”  He did this by explaining that the hypocrites that Jesus was so hard own were just “actors” and Jesus was calling them to task for the “performance art” of their spiritual practices.  This friend was not wailing and moaning in a mea culpa “performance”; he was merely sharing an insight that his spiritual life had been mostly rote performance.  I think the whole of this small group immediately understood what he was saying, just as I did.  We realized that our faith, like our professional life and personal life had been, and even was, a “rote performance” in a very real sense.

But there was no need to wring our hands in guilt and shame.  We realized this was the human predicament, to discover that we “hold this treasure in earthen vessels” and that the vessels that we are often are “extremely earthy.”  There is nothing wrong with that.  The “wrong” occurs in refusing to acknowledging this and therefore owning our human-ness.  There is forgiveness in recognizing, and “confessing” our “wrongness” on this matter but if we cannot do so the forgiveness that is always there is avoided in the interest of our ego.

Watchman Nee and Our “Spinning” of the Gospel

One of the authors from my youth in fundamentalist Christianity that has “survived” my drifting away is Watchman Nee.  Nee was the son of Methodist parents, born in 1903 in Manchu China in the province of Shantou.  After his conversion in 1920 he headed out on a path toward a ministry which would lead him to establish local Christian churches even as Communism was beginning to take roots; when the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, Christians began to be heavily persecuted and as a result Nee spent the last 20 years of his life in prison.  If you want to know more about his very interesting life, see this Wikipedia link (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchman_Nee) as I would like to get directly into why I still find his teachings valuable.

Nee’s understanding of the Christian tradition was heavily influenced by his culture; everyone’s religious experience is heavily influenced by his culture though often the ego does not like to accept this.  When I first came across Nee’s teachings at the age of 20, I immediately recognized that he offered something different in his grasp of the Christian faith.  He saw Jesus and the whole of the Christian tradition in a less doctrinaire, legalistic fashion than I was accustomed to; I was intrigued and excited.  His faith was refracted through the lens of an Eastern culture. After four decades I have come to realize from reading his works many years ago, and still remembering his emphases, the importance of understanding the confinement that our culture can impose on our faith.  It has been important to realize the “spin” of the spiritual tradition I learned in my youth needed to be refracted through my own “personal” spin.  To put this into the parlance of the Christian tradition, this facilitates a “personal” relationship with Jesus.  If we don’t find the courage to find our own “spin”, we will spend our life in confinement to the spin we were born into and more than likely merely perpetuating the values of that culture.

It is important to realize we must not be to hard on the “spin” we were born into, an error I have been given too very often.  Spiritual teachings only come to us through a “spin” and the nitty-gritty of faith is in making it more personal.  This is recognizing what the Apostle Paul described as “the flesh” in our faith, a tendency to let our ego shape our faith into something that is very self-serving.  But the “spin” of our youth was a gift to us nevertheless as it laid on the table for us a spiritual tradition which we then had to find the maturity to explore in the depths of our heart, not merely with our mind. An Episcopalian priest who married my wife and I thirty years ago once made a point that is very relevant.  In one of his sermons he noted that Christianity was originally an Eastern religion and was drawn “kicking and screaming” into the West.  I didn’t realize in back in 1970 but Nee was introducing me to a Christian faith with a more nuanced, Eastern perspective in which boundaries were less distinct.  Less judgement became possible.

Franklin Graham Asks, “Who Hath Bewitched You?” to Trump Critics.

Franklin Graham chided evangelical Christians who are pointing out the hypocrisy of Vice-President Mike Pence for his support of Trump, asking, “What are these people smoking? This reminds me of Paul’s words, ‘You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?'”

But I would turn the Apostle Paul’s quote on Graham and other evangelical Christians whose heart is “seared with a hot iron” for passionately supporting a president who has publicly expressed having the “hots” for his own daughter, uttered the word “cunt” on a national tv broadcast, been recorded saying he enjoyed the power of “grabbing women by the pussy,” has dismissed impoverished countries as “shit-hole countries,” lies about things there is no need to lie about, and publicly reassures the country about the size of his penis.  Does this not appear a bit “foolish” as if Graham has been “bewitched” and perhaps his conscience has been “seared with a hot iron”?  Trump had people like him in mind when he told us, “I could shoot someone in the streets of Manhattan and I would not lose my support.”

“Morning Joe” Castigates Conservative Christians

Joe Scarborough, a conservative ex-Republican who used to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives expressed his frustration with conservative Christians this morning.  Scarborough, now the host of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, lamented that 69 per cent of conservative Christians still support Trump even with his continued egregious anti-Christian speech, attitude, and deeds.  Joe finished his soliloquy with, “Sounds to me like an effort to gain the whole world while losing your own soul.”

I do not think Joe meant to be taken literally; his point was not to say that these people are “going to hell” but that “soul” is missing in their life, including in their spiritual life.  This “69 per center club” lacks the “discerning spirit” spoken of by the Apostle Paul and pledged their loyalty to a man who promised power at the expense of their soul; this “discernment” would not have allowed a choice like this.  And, having made this choice, they demonstrate the Trumpian quality of being unable to admit they made a mistake as doing so would be to lose face, even their “Christian” face.

But criticism to “True Believers” (see Eric Hoffer) like this are immune to criticism; they attitude is, “my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts.”  They have a ready-made defense mechanism for anything that contradicts their view point once their mind is made up, “Fake News.”  One can see why they ally so fiercely behind Trump for he articulates the fears, anxieties, and desire for certainty of their own soul.

The Origin of One Fundamentalist Baptist Preacher

Well, I’m giving up! I was born and raised to be a preacher and I’m finally gonna just do! I’m “coming out of the closet,” borrowing a metaphor that Fr. Richard Rohr uses to describe one who finds the courage to “come out” of hiding and be true to his inner most self.  So I will “preach” here though not in any formal sense as my approach to life and to the Bible is literary, the metaphor now prominent in my approach to life

This “virus” has cursed me from earliest days of my life, and technically even before as my dear mother had promised me to the Lord if He would let her have a son, having “struck out” three times already with my three sisters. And one of my earliest memories was standing on a feather bed in what we called “the splinter room”, wobbling so as to accommodate the give and take of the mattress, holding a Gideon’s New Testament in my right hand, and “preaching to momma” as she was ironing.  I must have just started fumbling with language as the only words from the Bible that stuck in my imagination were seven words from the book of John, “John the Baptist…locust and wild honey.”  Mother was preoccupied with ironing for a family of six…later to be eight…and at first did not give me the attention that I desperately needed.  I can still feel the desperate need for mother to look at me, give me an “atta boy” of sorts as I stood there reciting the same five words repeatedly, bible out-stretched in my right hand like I’d seen the pastor do in church, and hungrily looking for her attention. She finally did, and I’m sure it was much more quickly than I remember; she paused as she finished ironing one of my shirts, looked at me, made eye contact, nodded approvingly, and then resumed her ironing. I must have just beamed in my heart for the experience is still vividly intense in my heart some 64 years later.  And yes, this anecdote reveals volumes about the heart machinations that I’ve wrestled with over my relationship with my mother.

This “virus” finally came to a head when I was sixteen years when I “announced my call to the ministry” and “surrendered to preach the gospel.” I had known this was my destiny, my calling, and at last I gave into the itch and began scratching it.  I took comfort in finally having an identity, knowing that I could dutifully “walk through life in the closed cab of occupation” (W. H. Auden) and no longer wrestle with the existential question, “Just who in the hell am I?” But two years later, though the itch was still there, I began to realize that all of that “scratching” was not assuaging the hunger in my heart, a deep-seated need for an identity grounded in something other than indoctrination. After doing a year’s time in a Baptist Cemetery…oops, I mean “seminary,” an experience that deeply troubled my soul. With great shame and humiliation, I renounced my call to preach, taking decades to understand how “shame and humiliation” is often the driving force of an identity that is only “performance art.”

Baptism by a Fire Hose!!!

A friend just sent me this image, knowing my Southern roots, and I just loved it!!  But it provoked a facetious vein in my heart as I grew up in a Southern culture where baptism was a big issue—is only baptism by immersion acceptable or is baptism by sprinkling adequate.  Well, let me assure you that in my little fundamentalist Christian corner of the world it was immersion as there was no biblical mention of any “lame-ass” (my embellishment) thing like sprinkling.  If you didn’t get dunked, it didn’t count!  For, “where in the Bible was there any mention of ‘sprinkling’?”  To make matters worse, “fire hose” baptism????”  Now Jesus never heard of a hose, much less a fire hose.  Back then, the damn house just burned down…unless a lot of men could catch it early and just piss the flame out.  So the notion of a fire hose baptism just rankles me on so many levels!!!

One other facetious note.  When in my teens, my pastor told me of one older member of the church who didn’t like the idea of a baptistry in the church.  The “baptistry” is a tank of sorts in which the baptism takes place, as opposed to the local river.  This gentleman, and I remember him well and he was such a good old soul, told the pastor, “Well, if the water ain’t running, it don’t count” to which my pastor responded, “Well, I’ll just pull plug and let it be draining.”  See entire photographic essay below.

http://lenscratch.com/2019/03/southbound-photographs-of-and-about-the-new-south-day-3/

The “Father of Lies” is Subtle

The Gospel of John described Satan as, “the Father of Lies” and is incapable of telling the truth and has his origin in existentially primeval times.  Listen to what theologian Paul J. Griffiths wrote about human nature and the mortal tendency of lying:

The avoidance of the lie can only be realized when we are overwhelmed by the gift of God’s grace, because we have to recognize that we are habitual liars and can only cease to be so when we let go of the “ownership” of our speech and surrender to the language of confession, testimony to the beauty of God.

We are all “liars” in a sense as we see the world through a skewed vision which resists any revision.  Consequently, any information or feedback we receive from the world is filtered through our “skewing” apparatus and we interpret things in a way to suit our needs of maintaining existential equilibrium, even if that means holding onto ideas and notions that are inherently self-destructive and destructive of others.  This “skewing” does not mean we are bad people.  It just means we are human and echoes the observation o the Apostle Paul, that we “see through a glass darkly.”  And, to call this “lying” is a bit of an over statement I admit but it is human subterfuge than can lead to lying in most egregious sense.

But there is a tendency in my Christian tradition to accept a juicy morsel from the “Father of Lies” and assume that the Holy Spirit is guiding us so that all of our whims, our interpretations of the scripture….are absolutely true….”because God is leading me.”  This naive mind set overlooks historical events such as the Crusades when “the Lord” was leading Christians to convert others at the point of sword and even the German soldiers in World War 2 carried an inscription on their belt, “God is with us.”  It is naive to believe, “Oh, they were evil and we are not evil.  For God is leading us.”  But God can be “with us”…and I think he always is…and the presence of “the flesh” can still dictate how we utilize our faith and can lead us to believe, espouse, and do horrible things.

It takes a lot of work and spiritual toil over the year to grasp the wisdom of the Apostle Paul,  that, “I will to do good but evil is present with me” and that “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”  Our faith is always susceptible to being guided by the whims of our ego though we will always be inclined to piously announce, “God is leading me.”  It would never do any harm when we feel “God is leading me” to introduce a dollop of the Shakespearean “pauser reason” and ask ourselves, “Oh.  Is that so?  Could I be merely satisfying some ego craving to be right and pious?”

 

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THE FOLLOWING IS A RELEVANT POST FROM ANOTHER OF MY BLOGS.

Scott M. Peck in 1983 wrote a book entitled, “People of the Lie” a description of evil gleaned from decades of clinical work.  He described how that some people are so captive to their reptilian brain that “lying” in socially acceptable fashion will not suffice for their heart’s machination and they become so consumed with dishonesty that evil consumes them, bringing great harm to others, including those who they purport to love the most.

The socially necessary “dishonesty” required to function in daily life in these instances has metastasized to the point they are no longer capable of being honest with themselves and therefore cannot be honest with those around them.  This phenomenon is illustrated with the witty often used, “How do you know he is lying? Answer, “Anytime he opens his mouth.”  These people are sociopathic and in many instances will commit such grievances to the social body that the only limit available is imprisonment where their characterological malady can be restrained.

But, this metastasized dishonesty can be socially tenable…or at least permissible…in cultic phenomena where a group of people will find a leader who offers an embodiment of their own penchant for dishonesty.  They will then create an organization or group in which their “group lie” cannot be questioned, and anyone who does question them or their leader is immediately dismissed with the cry of, “Fake news!  These people have created for themselves an insular world in which their premises will never be daunted by what others are saying to them or about them.  People in such an insular world are  existentially vulnerable to the point that the “house of cards” which is the core of their identity cannot withstand scrutiny.  When the drive of this insularity gets too intense all of the complexities and ambivalences that are permitted in an “open society” will have been so repressed and denied that a melt down is likely.  (See Rene Girard, “The Sacrificial Crisis.”  This internal “melt down” is often avoided by finding an enemy out there among the “them” and all of the flaws they hide within will be blamed on “them.”  In primitive societies this crescendoing pressure is often abated with a sacrificial victim, usually some wayfaring member of a nearby tribe will be apprehend and executed because of some contrived offense.  (The actual offense in this case is being an “other”, someone different than they are; for “otherness” is terrifying to any insular group.)  This “otherness” must be eliminated, or at least have a wall built to keep it out.

To summarize, the “lie” when it metastasizes to the point of creating a “People of the Lie” or even a “person of the lie” (aka,”pathological liar”) can bring great harm to everyone.  The only hope is that when those who have succumbed to obvious anti-social speech and deeds have firm limits set with them by the world in which they live.

 

Where is the Evangelical Council to the President These Days????

Where is the Evangelical Council to the President?  We used to hear from them, or about them, quite frequently.  But they have suddenly gone strangely silent.  I’ve googled for wisdom and support of Trump from luminaries like Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, and Robert Jeffress and cannot find even a peep from them.  What’s up?

I strongly suspect they realize they have dug themselves into a deep pit, a veritable black hole, and cannot escape without humbly admitting, “We made a mistake.”  But they have bitten of the same poison pill that Trump swallowed early in his life and cannot humbly admit, “I was wrong.”  For they have a tremendous ego investment in their persona as a “Purveyor of the Truth of Jesus,” but are not able to realize they can be that and simultaneously be egregiously full of an ego that demands aggrandizement just as much as does Trump.  AND, I speak from experience, as I started out on a path of seeking a similarly specious identity but was miraculously rescued by the Grace of God which leaves me now but a mere “small clod of cholesterol in the mainstream of life.”  And, I’m humbly “proud” of this lowly station. It takes all the pressure off.

I must emphasize that these men…and women…do as I do, echo the words of the Psalmist, “My soul followeth hard after Thee, O Lord.”  And I do not doubt their sincerity, nor do I doubt the efficacy of their faith in Jesus Christ.  But I do challenge them on something I’ve had to wrestle with, this “passion” for “Thee, O Lord” can easily be an ego endeavor as it will afford one an opportunity to ensconce himself in a position of power in Christian culture.  But this immediately flies in the face of a fundamental teaching of Jesus—that power is found in powerlessness and the appeal to the power of ego-gratification is intoxicating as, ahem, “hell.”