Visions of Hope, Top of the Tenth

"The good news is, there's nothing behind it."

So said the crew chief in Cleveland as the rain came, delaying the top of the tenth in a storybook finish of American drama as two teams hungry---no, desperate---to end their droughts waited, millions of hearts pounding in the world's gallery, to finish what they came here to do.

He was referring to the rain cell, but he might as well have been referring to the game itself: after this, there is no more.  The end will come, the end will come---and somewhere between 68 years and over a century of thirst will be quenched.  Somewhere in America, a city on a Great Lake will erupt in cheers as finally, finally, their turn comes.

So it is with us, as we await the coming of our Lord.  We do not know when.  We do not know where.  But we do know that he will be here, he will bring justice to the oppressed, he will set the captive free, he will wipe away every tear from our eyes.  There is a storybook ending and a new world, if only we will watch, pray, and be ready.

Tonight, whichever lakeshore bears the sound of bride and groom, whether it be the Windy City or the North Coast, let us rejoice that someone's desert years are over, just as ours will be at the end of days when Christ comes again, restoring all things.

--Vancouver, WA
9:10 p.m. PT, start of the 10th inning

Cafeteria Culture

Adults Do It Too

Dispatches from Youth Culture, No. 6

Visiting a high school with some 2015 graduates recently, I learned that the cafeteria had a social geography: some kids were more likely to eat in certain areas of the room than others.  Mean Girls, the high school satire from 2004, has achieved cult-classic status with young people partly because it points to themes of social segregation at its fictional high school:

“You got everybody there,” a friend tells “Cady,” Lindsay Lohan’s new-girl character, giving her a doodled map of cafeteria tables, each labeled with a different stereotype. “You got your freshmen . . . preps, JV jocks . . . desperate wannabes, burnouts. . .”  Above all, she says, “beware of the Plastics”—the most popular girls in school.

Thirty years ago, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, another teen satire, pointed to a similar idea when Miss Grace, the school secretary, explained about all the cliques who admired the school-skipping hero, Ferris: “They all adore him!” she says after listing eight stereotypes.  “They think he’s a righteous dude.”

In the genre of what youth-culture theologian Jeff Keuss calls “transformation films,” main characters “rely on a rigid and stereotypical social structure where there are strict categories of people including nerds, jocks, beauty queens, smart people.  The emergence of a new identity,” he writes, “usually relies on this social structure in order to define itself.”

While that’s less true in Ferris Bueller—which isn’t so much a “transformation” film as a quirky comedy—it’s quite the case with Mean Girls.  Cady “transforms” from a newcomer-stranger to one who accepts herself and her newly unsegregated peers at the end—while still using the language of the cliquery she has transcended as a reference point.  “I had gone from homeschool jungle freak, to shiny ‘Plastic,’ to most hated person in the world, to actual human being,” she says.  “All the drama from last year just wasn’t important anymore.”

Why do movies featuring silly groupings tend to resonate so much with young people?  Could it be because we adults have a tendency to do this, too?

Consider an airliner’s coach seat, which, at roughly 87 millionths of an acre, is big enough for the gameshow of grasping at the tiniest social advantages.

At the airport last month, I was reminded of the number of social strata available for what Louis C.K. calls “sitting in a chair in the sky.”  To pre-board people with disabilities and families with children only seems right as a matter of justice and courtesy.  What got me was the array of arbitrary cake-layers that followed, with designations such as: the gold-status frequent flyers, the silver-status folks, then bronze, copper, helium, and Styrofoam, then the Plus members, the Plus Minus crowd, and the Plus-Plus-Minus Plus! people in that order.

Then came layers even more obscure, with names like Partner-Carrier Ultra Platinum PassengerPerks PointsExtra Deluxe status, or Beatified Elevated MileageExtreme Left-Handed PlanCardholding Oft-Flyers; and so on down the list of about 89 ever-smaller boarding calls.  Finally, we—the hoi polloi, non-frequent, budget-traveling also-flews—were called aboard, and to everyone’s surprise, we all landed at the same instant.

We classify ourselves by our cars, our phones, our vacations—even, on Route 167 and I-405 outside Seattle, by whether we can afford a fee to use certain lanes on the freeway.  Is it any wonder our kids learn to self-stratify?  How can they do otherwise if the grownups are doing it too?

“High school,” the band Superchic[k] sang a generation ago, “could be a Mini-Me of the rest of society. . . . Sadly, some will be eternally keeping score of popularity”—like who makes more money than whom, or who has a higher GPA, who gets on the plane a few minutes before everyone else, who makes it into which name-brand college or wears which corporation’s clothing.

Maybe we can model God’s intention for our lives instead: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

In God’s economy, our artificial one-ups are all meaningless: we all “get on the plane” at the same time, we all sit at the same “cafeteria table,” and wearing Abercrombie doesn’t score any more grace-points with God than shopping at Target or Goodwill does.  “We have a God who enters the world through smallness,” wrote Shane Claiborne in The Irresistible Revolution, “a baby refugee, a homeless rabbi, the lilies and the sparrows”—or, we might imagine, the ones whom no one invites to the table, or who can’t afford the extra twelve bucks not to stand in line.

Our kids are watching us.  Can we give them an example of a God who loves us equally, regardless of where we sit?

Sources include:

Jeff Keuss, Blur: A New Paradigm For Understanding Youth Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014), 160-61.

Louis C.K. via Comedy Central at www.cc.com, accessed October 15, 2015.

Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006), 321, via Google Books, accessed October 15, 2015.

This article appeared in the November, 2015 edition of The Circuit Rider, the magazine of Salmon Creek Church in Vancouver, Wash.  Visit Salmon Creek Church, which is a United Methodist ministry, at www.salmoncreekchurch.org.

Are You Ready Right Now?

God Could Call You Into Service At Any Minute

TACOMA

When Jesus told his disciples that they would be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8), he could have added Tacoma.

This morning I was on Amtrak train 501 when it struck a man walking the tracks just east of the station.  EMS had to use a forklift at the United Rentals beside the railway to lift the fence and minister to him on the gravel.

He was alive when the ambulance took him away.  For some of the passengers, particularly those a few cars behind mine and on the left side, it will be a long road home after what they had to see when their compartment came to rest right beside him.

In train accidents, as with other forms of tragedy, there is nothing to stop us from having to watch someone’s suffering: our mortality, or at least, in this case, the tremendous fragility of life, comes peering into the passenger carriage uncensored.  You cannot not see the man lying on the ballast, the dutiful conductor administering first aid, the woman in a Seahawks sweater kneeling beside him, the lady speaking Spanish and calling the man’s name over and over to help him stay alert.

EMS personnel know that an emergency can happen anywhere, anytime.  Pastors know this too.  But it’s not always clear that our job as Christians—all of us—is to be ready to show up on a moment’s notice, offer a helping hand, and be the non-anxious presence of Jesus with zero notice: for the man on the railway, for the nervous passengers in the carriage, for the snack bar attendant with the somber, heavy expression.

“We hit a transient,” a rider told someone over the phone.  No, that’s the wrong noun.  We hit a man, a person—an individual for whom Jesus died, rose again, and is coming back, a person with a story, with flesh and blood, made of skin and spirit, whose family lineage stretches back in time as far as the human race itself.

There’s no sanitizing that.  And it only takes a little stroll through the aisles of the train to realize the sobering effect it can have on people to be confronted with the reality of life, death, and what often feels like the “meaninglessness” (see Ecclesiastes) of the scandal it is that humans suffer.

That’s why it’s so essential that we claim the hope that we have as Christians—the hope that even in this sometimes ridiculous world, we know that the story does end well: that death and suffering do not have the final word.

But in the meantime, you, brother or sister, will have times this week when your devotion to Christ, and the commitment you made to live for him all the time, will come to cash that check—and you may not see it coming.  How will you be a voice of calm in the midst of suffering, a helpful hand, a soothing voice, when the situations of life demand it of you?  Are you ready, should the Lord call you, to act in this moment—and to remember with absolute confidence that he is with us always, to the very end of the age?  Are you sufficiently rooted in his love of you, sufficiently practiced in the daily discipline of intimacy with him, that you will be able to overflow his love into the lives of others around you?

We think the man’s name was Ramon, though his speech was slurred.  I pray for his life, and for the peace of everyone on train 501 who had to see things this morning.  As we pass underneath the Tacoma Narrows Bridge on this beautiful morning with the Puget Sound so placid out my window, I pray that you, wherever this day takes you, may be ready when the waters of life suddenly aren’t so peaceful.  May you be ready to serve as the hands and feet of Jesus, give the healing breath of the Holy Spirit, and overflow with the fathomless love of the Father, when your moment comes.

We Can't Stay on the Train

It's Easy to Ignore the Real Pain of Real People

Dispatches from Youth Culture, No. 5

“A riot is the language of the unheard.”

—Martin Luther King

My cellphone chimed at the baggage claim at Baltimore’s BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport a few weeks ago.  Having heard that I was traveling through Maryland’s largest city on the way to a conference in New Jersey, friends and loved ones were texting me, urging me to be careful and stay safe in light of what they were hearing on the news.

This was April 27th, the night of the worst unrest in the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.  As it happened, my flight landed just as events in Baltimore neighborhoods were unfolding on the T.V. screens of America.

But BWI sits several miles south of town, and I was lodging closer to D.C. that night anyway, so my itinerary didn’t call for me to go into Baltimore and I didn’t see anything firsthand.  I was able to stay “safe” without even trying.

In fact, my only occasions for being inside the city limits were on trains to and from the conference.  Since most of Amtrak’s passage through downtown is underground, I couldn’t see any evidence of unrest, other than some helicopters in the late-morning sky on Tuesday.

That second night, though, I heard from someone who had been an eyewitness.  Attending our seminar was a pastor who had grown up in Baltimore and had felt God tugging at his heart that he needed to go into the city to be a pastoral presence amid the unrest Monday night.  By the time he addressed our gathering of youth workers the day after, he had been awake for about 48 hours, having spent all of Monday night in the city, hearing people out, coming alongside them as a servant of the God who cares for his sheep (John 21:17).  He must have been exhausted when he spoke to us, but he led an incredible time of reflection on what had happened and the root justice issues involved.

If I’m honest with myself, my reaction to passing through Baltimore on the train included a nervous watchfulness, wondering how long the station-stop would last.  This was my “safety” impulse—possibly an outgrowth of a desire to live life and do ministry without having to take risks, not really encountering injustice firsthand or wrestling with real issues.  It’s the same impulse I felt in the Egyptian countryside several years ago, confronted with abject, majority-world poverty for the first time in my adult life: get me out of here, back where it’s safe.

In the church of suburban America, it’s easy to retreat inside the walls of a building, never dealing with the realities that God’s people face on the street and in the schools every day—racism, oppression, poverty, and other forms of injustice.  To paraphrase Steve Fitzhugh, a youth speaker and former NFL player I heard as a teen, we can live our Christian lives and chill with our Christian friends and our Christian family members, listen to our Christian radio, drive our Christian car, roll up our Christian windows . . . and drive directly past the Kingdom of God.

That’s the easy route.  And some days as a Christ-follower, I’m tempted to play it as safe as possible: put a smile on, say something about God’s love, send everybody home with surface-level happiness—without really inquiring about the things that really matter in kids’ lives, the burdens they carry, the hurt and frustration that often comes with being a teen in 21^st-century America.  It’s an un-risky approach, perhaps even vaguely “religious”—but almost completely irrelevant for real kids with real struggles, and not at all reflective of a God who stepped into our world as one of us to prove how well he understands our condition.

Teens, as Kenda Creasy Dean might remind us, are looking for something transcendent, some sign of hope in a world that often feels and looks hopeless.  As Christ-followers, we’re invited to get off the train—to understand the realities of our broken world, whether it’s on the streets of Baltimore or in the hallways of Clark County’s schools—just like Jesus got off the train for us, risk and all (Phil. 2:6–7).

In my life, I want more of that Baltimore pastor’s boldness—to follow where the Holy Spirit leads, even into places and spaces that aren’t smiley or churchy at all but where real people live—where kids are crying out to know that they’re heard and that they belong, that someone cares about what they have to say.  That’s the other impulse I felt at Penn Station, Baltimore, and what I feel on the days when God breaks through my need for security: what would God do with me if I had the guts to get off the train and just listen?

Exploiting Teens for a Buck

Dispatches from Youth Culture, No. 4


Here’s a game you can play if you’re at the mall this week: try to figure out what companies are saying to teenagers to sell them stuff.  Check and see if identity—the question of “Who am I?”—is a theme.

On one such research-walk through a clothing store targeting young people, I once noticed a bait-and-switch as intriguing for its creativity as it was disquieting for the messages it sent to kids defenseless to guard against them.

Over the sales floor stood pictures of young people of indeterminate age, probably early-twenties at most (and therefore within “be-like-Mike” reach of kids and teens) and largely devoid of clothing.

This wasn’t the typical, family-department-store-model showing of skin, the kind that might make young kids ask questions but wouldn’t make the average adult more than a little self-conscious.  This was different.  In these photos, it was impossible to tell whether the models had reached 18.  They could have been any college student, but they also could have been high-schoolers.  Might that have been the point?

Not that they were just bodies: there was, for example, the occasional showing of jeans at the lower end of the frame, maybe a couple inches of actual denim visible below the torso that filled the rest of the shot.  But the skin was the focus.  The males had chiseled abs, of course.  Some of the women (girls?) weren’t wearing anything at all above the waist, though the editors had used camera angles to keep the photos just this side of “PG-13” and out of “R” territory (and probably the courts).  But it was close.

The message wasn’t hard to decipher.  What could be the point of bombarding teenagers—a demographic thirsty for nurture, attention, and acceptance—with near-nude photos of people who could have been their peers, just at the moment of deciding whether to try on a shirt?  Could it have something to do with the insecurity that comes with a changing body, surrounded by changing friends, changing tastes, changing relationships, changing everything?  Could it be an example of preying upon teenagers’ normal, healthy desire to be noticed, loved, and appreciated?

That was the “bait.”  The “switch” happened outside the fitting rooms.  Here, the pictures changed.  Gone were the scanty photos of the young, replaced instead with kids doing . . . well, nothing unusual at all: hanging out with friends, laughing, having a good old time.  Nary a square inch of scandalous skin in sight, and all smiles and laughs.

See the game here?  On the sales floor, the message was, “You want to be noticed for your body, and our clothing can get you there.”  But at the moment of entering the fitting room, the message shifted.  Now it was, “You don’t really subscribe to all that showy nonsense out there on the sales floor.  All you really want is friendship, to be loved, and to have a good time, right?  That garment you’re holding may help.  Why not try it on?”

You almost have to admire the subtlety.  After all, somebody makes a buck by making teenagers feel insecure: buy this clothing, get this body-type, use this body-wash, and you’ll finally have what you want.  In this case, the store used one insecurity (physical fantasy, on the sales floor) immediately trumped by another, more accessible one (relational, by the fitting rooms)—a one-two punch in a kid’s desire to be known.

We’re not new to this, of course.  Companies create an itch, sell a product to scratch it, and then create a new itch.  But adolescence is a time for establishing an identity—answering the “who-am-I?” question on the road to adulthood—so the stakes are higher.  That’s why understanding teen-target commerce is so important for churches who want to work with youth.  If kids are hit constantly with the message that “You’re not quite good enough,” there’s a good chance they’re entering the church just waiting for the other shoe to drop, for us to join the chorus and prey on them like everybody else.

Let’s have none of that.  Yes, we’re all sinners in need of God’s forgiveness.  That’s real.  But he has already declared us Good Enough To Love.  “God,” the Bible says, “proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).  Turns out, God thinks pretty highly of us already, including teens.

In a consumer culture, the idea that God has already declared us lovable can be a powerful message, especially for the young, many of whom are new to putting up defenses against corporate greed.  Let’s set a Jesus-worthy example for them: getting to know them, learning to love them, showing by word and deed that yeah, they’re actually pretty cool just the way they are, even if they don’t buy the jeans.

This article appeared in the April, 2015 edition of The Circuit Rider, the magazine of Salmon Creek Church in Vancouver, Wash.  Visit Salmon Creek Church, which is a United Methodist ministry, at www.salmoncreekchurch.org.

Taylor Can Do Better

Dispatches from Youth Culture, No. 3


It’s hard to get songs to Billboard’s number-one slot without young people listening to you, so when a person with such potential for good comes awfully close to normalizing domestic violence, it’s time to ask what counter-narratives we need to offer the kids around us.

Case in point: the video for Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space”, which charted at number one.  At this writing, its video has over 485 million views on YouTube—about 62 times every second since it came out in November on average.

In the video, Taylor disagrees with a boyfriend by vandalizing a mansion, throwing a vase at him, smashing his car, cutting holes in his clothing, poisoning him, and kissing his unconscious body on the pavement.  “Got a long list of ex-lovers,” she sings.  “They’ll tell you I’m insane. / But I’ve got a blank space, baby, / and I’ll write your name.”

There’s a defeatism at work here, suggesting it’s normal to enter a relationship assuming it can have only two possible fates: either to “be forever” on the one hand or “go down in flames” on the other, with no options for friendship or civility between the extremes.

But isn’t learning to navigate relational ambiguity part of the task of adolescence, along with how to treat former dating partners with respect and grace?  If every relationship will probably fizzle out, then why pursue relationships in the first place?

That’s probably not the best example to show kids who are learning how to handle their emotions.  Many relationships do fail, of course, as Taylor’s does in the video.  Fair enough: that’s real life, too.  Discovering that we’re not compatible with everyone is part of how we discover who we are.  But kids may watch this and believe that it’s pointless even to try.  How is that hopeful?

The saddest part of the performance is that amid all her influence as a public figure—when she has a platform to suggest justice and hope amid our culture’s constant objectification of persons—Taylor blows it.  Rather than calling her audience to an alternative to the cultural norm of treating partners as commodities, she offers more of the usual: her partner becomes “that face” (not a name, though “Sean” is carved in a tree in the video), “new money”, and “my next mistake”.

People who work with kids already have a hard enough task trying to teach boys to view women as bearers of God’s image instead of the objects the media says they are.  We’re fighting uphill as it is against male influences who are rewarded in pop culture for their exploitation and de-personification of women.  How nice had Taylor said instead, “Here a video about how we really ought to treat people.”

Not that there aren’t moments of clear thinking from male performers amid the noise of man-to-woman objectification in the media.  John Legend’s self-sacrifice and love-of-the-other’s-imperfection is beautiful in “All of Me”.  There’s the bold, life-committing, marriage-minded devotion in “Rude” by the band MAGIC!  And the pure exaltation for love in “Happy” by Pharrell Williams comes with a touch of poetry: “Sunshine, she’s here, you can take a break.”

All three of those songs made it to number one in 2014, which says that not every chart-ruler has to stoop to the cultural norm.  Taylor herself has a history of positive messaging.   She was a voice of inspiration for a youth I once served who was going through a rough time.  The video posted to her Facebook page was of her 2008 song “Change”: “I believe in whatever you do,” she sang, “and I’ll do anything to see it through, because these things will change.”

I saw that student grow in some really cool ways.  Rightly so.  Taylor’s message at that moment was one of hope, and kids do listen.  I’ve seen kids perform Taylor music at a talent show, and she won an award at Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice in 2012.

Her young fans are “discovering the music that tells them how they are going to live their lives and how they should feel and how it’s acceptable to feel,” she told Time’s cover-story reporter last fall.  Yes.  And what a chance she has to help them think big thoughts about how the world can be.

For the moment, let’s own to our kids that there’s a pretty powerful example of what not to do in relationships making the media rounds right now.  Hopefully, it’ll pass; we’ve seen before what Taylor is made of, and it can be a tremendous force for good.  While we youth-ministry people wait, let’s model treating each other with dignity—as Persons, not as Things—and look for the day when Swift’s number-one hits stop bespeaking vengeance, in favor of justice and mercy and hope.  Taylor, I know you can.

This article appeared in the March, 2015 edition of The Circuit Rider, the magazine of Salmon Creek Church in Vancouver, Wash.  Visit Salmon Creek Church, which is a United Methodist ministry, at www.salmoncreekchurch.org.

Vancouver, But Not Just Vancouver

Dispatches from Youth Culture, No. 2

It’s fair to wonder why Christians spend so much time and effort each year on youth missions when there’s so much work to do back home.

Take Salmon Creek Church, for example.  Here in Vancouver, 16 ½ percent of us live below the poverty line, which equals a population about 120 times the size of our average Sunday-morning attendance (services combined).  Just here in Vancouver School District, if we were to take just the students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and stand them side-by-side in a line, they would span almost 3 ½ to 4 miles—of kids.  “Many of our students come to school to eat and rest,” said Theresa David-Turner, principal of Truman Elementary School, at a breakfast for faith leaders last fall.  “Some sleep at their desks and eat the two meals they will have for the day.”

Those of us in the faith community need to be awake to statistics like these, especially when there’s such disparity in income between the richest and poorest in our city and across the culture.  The notion that there is work to do here at home is quite correct: there are people hurting and hungry in the zip codes that begin with 986—to say nothing of the other forms of oppression and injustice that show up every day around town.

Jesus’ heart beats sorrow for such a status-quo.  “I was hungry and you gave me food,” he says in the famous sheep-and-goats narrative of Matthew 25; “I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink” (Matt. 25:35).  In identifying as the poor and needy around us, Our Lord tells us that when we serve someone in need, we are, quite actually, serving Jesus himself.  Why leave town when there’s such abundant missional need around us?

An answer can be found in the first chapter of Acts—here again, in the Lord’s very words: “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).  See the geography that Jesus is playing with there?  The apostles will be witnesses “in Jerusalem”—which is where this dialogue is taking place (1:4).  And then they will also be witnesses “in all Judea”—across the country, removed from the locale of Jerusalem—“and Samaria”, a foreign land and culture.

In local terms, Jesus might have said: “You will be my witnesses in Vancouver, and across America and around the world.”  Nothing is out-of-bounds: the world is our mission-field, which includes everything from Highway 99 to as far away as any and all of the other 190 or so countries that populate the world today.  To obey our Lord of Love is to keep a global missional scope at all times.

But there’s another reason why we go outside Clark County to serve the world with love: another type of poverty—our culture’s low supply of the virtue of self-sacrifice.  I myself wrestle with it every day, and it doesn’t take more than a quick channel-surf to see how powerful our temptation is to love self at the expense of others.  Short-term missions, as Jeff Keuss used to say in my seminary days, are valuable because they provide an opportunity for kids to spend a week in service and never once think about themselves.

That also goes, by the way, for adult disciples like me, and for all of us who live in a culture that places personal fulfillment ahead of self-giving love of others—something I’m tempted to do every hour of every day.  This summer, as we bless our students’ decision to be servants in another locale, it’s not that we’re abandoning our duty here in Vancouver or teaching them to do so as well.  Quite the opposite.  It’s a form of obeying the Lord’s command to go to “Judea”—whatever country lies just outside of our comfort zone—and be the hands and feet of Christ so that others may experience the love of a God who moves beyond just one place.

And it’s a chance to forget, for the moment, the culture’s obsession with the hoops of self-fulfillment—AP scores, career advancement, social standing, entertainment, and all the rest—and focus, even if just for a few days, on someone else, someone whom God loves every bit as much as he loves you and me, and who needs that love just as urgently as you and I do.

Vancouver will be waiting when they get back.  For now, let’s pray for these young missionaries as they step forward into how God would call them to serve.  And as the faith community that has adopted them, may we at Salmon Creek Church give these teens tons and tons of affirmation for their willingness to “empty themselves” (see Philippians 2:7) and spend a week serving people they’ve never met and may never see again.


This article appeared in the February, 2015 edition of The Circuit Rider, the magazine of Salmon Creek Church in Vancouver, Wash.  Visit Salmon Creek Church, which is a United Methodist ministry, at www.salmoncreekchurch.org.

Sources include:
U.S. Census Bureau
Vancouver School District data at www.vansd.org; most recent data posted is for 2013–14 school year.
Scripture is nrsv unless noted.