The Other Jesus

Mister President, Madame Speaker, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, kids of all ages:

The State of Our Union is rotten.

Can I say that? Can I criticize, in love, an institution that is floundering like a whale on a beach? MLK and RFK would say yes, but look where that got them.

Jesus would say yes, but he had also had a pretty bad day as a result.

Here’s the thing: I love this nation, I voted for this president, but we have lost our way, and I don’t know what it will take to get it back again unless we turn around.

And I’m not speaking of returning to some mythical Golden Age in the 1950s, when white men had it really good, and women and not-so-white-men not so much.

And I’m not speaking of rediscovering some mythical Founding Age, where some of us have turned the Founding Daddies into the First Great American Christians when many of them didn’t even think Jesus was the Son of God.

But as a Christian who is an American, here is how I see the state of the union: We are such creatures of self that the very idea of union is almost laughable.

We are so afraid of the world outside that some of us want to hermetically seal our borders to prevent others from gaining the comforts our own ancestors came here seeking. We are so afraid of the world outside that we spend more on defense than every other nation on the planet combined (and then complain about how social programs have led us into deficit spending). We are so afraid of the world outside that we (or at least a majority of American church-goers) say we accept torture, the demeaning and maiming of another human being made in the image of God, in the spurious hope that it will make us safer from attack. Where is our thought of union with others?

We cling to our use of resources and our way of life when we have been told by the mass of scientific opinion that it is making the planet unlivable for our children and grandchildren. We buy SUVs and advocate drilling more oil wells when the mass of scientific opinion tells us that the poor around the world are already suffering from the environmental results of the petroleum age, and will suffer more. We rest secure in the thought that oil will probably last for years, and why should we sacrifice so much as a trip to the mall in a big, air conditioned vehicle? Where is our thought of union with others?

We lament the use of our tax dollars to help provide medical care for those who lack it, or housing for those who lack it, or education for any other children besides our own—and that’s here in America (God help the poor who are in other lands—because we don’t want to). We insist that the homeless stay off our block and out of our part of town, herd them into places where we don’t have to look at or interact with them. We feel great sympathy for victims of disaster here and elsewhere, and sometimes respond with great generosity to their plight—but never enough sympathy or generosity to alleviate the conditions people like the people of New Orleans or Haiti lived in before their disaster—or will live in after the relief workers have gone. Where is our thought of union with others?

Even when we try to do the right thing, our self-interest screws things up. I am disgusted that the fight to make health care available to every American has been twisted into partisan battle, and political and business-as-usual deal making. I am disgusted that our need to safeguard our economic system has rewarded banks and economic institutions whose own greed and lack of foresight and moral vision caused the disaster in the first place. I am disgusted both by people who say that President Obama has to do things the way they’ve always been done because it’s the only way to get things done and by people whose memory is so short they believe President Obama leads the most corrupt, or dangerous, or dishonest administration in history.

I am disgusted that we cannot call ourselves to something higher, better, nobler.

A dangerous unselfishness is what Martin Luther King advocated, and I know, you’re saying, that can get you killed. But you can also get killed walking across the street, or by a bolt of lightning from out of the sky, or by a man carrying explosives in his underwear, for crying out loud.

Safety is an illusion we cling to, but that we cannot guarantee ourselves, no matter how we cling to our money and things, no matter how many guns we own, no matter how we clamor for law enforcement and the military to defang the dangers of the world. I mean, honestly—once we agree to do body scans and the occasional orifice search of all airplane passengers, Al Queda will start implanting bombs in people’s pacemakers or something. There is no safety in this imperfect world.

What is there? Love, faith, trust.

We are here to be good to each other, to give and to sacrifice, to do what is right even when we know it will be difficult, to learn and act on the belief that we and those we love are not at the center of the universe, to treat every human being as though she or he is beloved by God, made in the image of God.

What did Jesus do? He broke down barriers. He reached out to the poor, disenfranchised, despised. He healed. He fed. He blessed. He taught. He was dangerously unselfish.

I don’t know what that looks like as American domestic and foreign policy.

But Mister President, Madame Speaker, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, kids of all ages:

I can tell you that, for the most part, this is not it.

May God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America–and remind us, as Stanley Hauerwas says, that with God’s blessing comes accountability.

 Saturday evening Jan. 23: U2charist at St. David’s, Austin

Some final peaceful thoughts on inter-faith relations from my manuscript for The Other Jesus in honor of MartinLuther King, Jr., of blessed memory:These most recent paragraphs (see previous posts) veer precariously close to a theological belief called universalism, and I am not suggesting universal salvation, exactly, although I have here quoted others who find God moving in each faithful heart. The hidden truths of salvation are, like other things, way above my pay grade; I do not know who God will choose to redeem any more than I know how the ultimate shape of our eternal life with God will look. All I can honestly say is that I believe I have found the path of God’s love for my own life in a faithful belief in Jesus Christ and practice of his teachings, and that I cannot imagine myself walking any other path.

But that is a long way from saying that I don’t believe anyone else should walk an other path, and, strangely enough, my life and faith would be diminished if everyone else were Christian. I have learned how to walk my own path in a more faithful and just way from many on those other paths. I have learned from Jews about holiness and setting things apart, about justice, about speaking truth to power, about faith in the One God. I have learned from Muslims about submission to the will of God, about charity and compassion as central elements of true faith, about mystical union with the Divine. I have learned from Buddhists about inner attention, about mindfulness in the present moment, about gentleness, about right speaking. When we truly see and hear others, we can paradoxically, as Robert McAfee Brown suggested, see ourselves more clearly. Rodger Kamenetz wrote of his own journey to Tibet that once he had seen Judaism contrasted with Tibetan Buddhism, he understood his own faith tradition as “not just an ethnicity or an identity, but a way of life, and a spiritual path, as profound as any other.” [1] Encountering another faith tradition illuminated his own path, and actually opened up a new life of faith for him within his own tradition.

I am writing this chapter in Northern New Mexico at the Casa del Sol retreat center at Ghost Ranch. Nearby are holy places of Catholic pilgrimage, pueblos where Native American rites and dances are still practiced on Christian holy days, a community of Sikhs, a bunch of Buddhists, a mosque and Muslim study center. In this landscape marked by different faiths and practices, the community that has formed around Casa del Sol has demonstrated how interfaith relations might work. A rabbi, a Muslim teacher, and  a Christian minister often join to lead educational programs, spiritual teachings, and worship here, each pulling from their own traditions, each learning from each other, and through their willingness to interact and dialogue, each demonstrating love and respect for other traditions. When I lead my Wisdom of the Desert retreat at Casa each June, I speak out of my Christian tradition, relating the wisdom of Jesus, recalling the Desert Mothers and Fathers. But I also read Sufi Muslim stories, Jewish wisdom tales, even the occasional Buddhist saying (aren’t those steppes deserts, after all?). I am a Christian who understands myself, my God, and my life through the window of my faith, but I often get strength for the journey from our brothers and sisters who have found meaning elsewhere.

Our answer about how to live in a world filled with faiths and denominations, is that we are not called to be, as the New Atheists would argue, less faithful, but to be more faithful. In response to other traditions and cultures, we are called to be more fully Christian, believing, practicing love and compassion, treating each person we meet as though she were Christ. We are called to work with other Christians and with all those of good will to feed the poor, heal the sick, restore the damage we have done to our planet, fight for peace, love each other. We are called to live in hope and trust. We are called to continue to believe that God is working in the world, and that this may be happening in ways that are not obvious or even recognizable to me.

And finally, we are called to continue journeying faithfully as followers of Christ even though others may not understand what we do or why. If we journey faithfully and thoughtfully, eventually they may understand, and eventually the negative associations that people have had with followers of Christ may drop away. Some might join us in our ecclesias; some might form new ones; others may pursue other paths. But if we live with love and compassion, then people will see the connection between Jesus, the founder of our faith, and his followers that now sometimes eludes them, and we will be doing the important work that God gives to every Christian: living so that others can see the God of Love reflected in what we say and do.

[1]   Rodger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 280.

A great documentary on Christian/Muslim relations airs today. Check here for stations:http://www.ethicsdaily.com/photos/airdates.pdf

 Here’s a second piece of the new book that I’ve been working on for Westminster John Knox, offered up in this season of peace and goodwill:

Americans don’t have a history of people within the Christian faith killing each other, as Europe saw for centuries and Northern Ireland has seen until recently, but we do have plenty of experience with Christians denigrating the faith, culture, and beliefs of other Christians. With so much conflict, misunderstanding, and genuine bad feeling between Christians, it should not be surprising that when we consider Christian responses to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and adherents of other faiths, we often find those same emotions heightened to a greater degree. Admittedly, sometimes they are returned. Not everyone from another tradition is going to be willing to sit down and talk, and I don’t imagine that we can have meaningful dialogue with those who hate us, demean our beliefs, or do not see us as worthy of God’s love.

But other people’s responses to us are always going to be largely out of our control. What we can control is our approach, and what I want to suggest is an approach that takes our own faith seriously without insisting we hold all the answers, looks for common ground where it exists, does not deny our differences, but considers them through the filter of love and compassion, and acknowledges that we are all seeking the sacred in the best way we know how and that perhaps it is not simply ignorance, wrong-headedness, or the deceptions of Satan that keep you from believing as I do.

Robert McAfee Brown has offered nine general suggestions for ecumenical exchange in this spirit of faithful but compassionate interaction, and they also begin with the rejection of absolute certainty. These suggestions also include surrendering the belief that my tradition is better than your tradition, rejecting the agenda that we only dialogue so that you can ultimately see the wisdom of my position, and recognizing the cultural baggage that encompasses all our faith convictions. Further, Brown advocates the sharing of stories to recognize our common humanity, and learning about other faiths through those stories and not through outside interpreters from our own tradition. Finally, Brown says, we do all these things to discover who we really are, and these are matters of real urgency, since the failure to live peacefully with those unlike us, is, as the New Atheists do have right, the most immediate human threat to our race. [1]

To understand what these things might look like, we can use a meeting between people of non-Christian faiths as a sort of laboratory that doesn’t necessarily put our own issues on the line, although it certainly illuminates them. In The Jew in the Lotus, his account of how a delegation of Jewish rabbis from various traditions were invited to meet with the Dalai Lama, my friend Rodger Kamenetz observed some of these qualities of interfaith dialogue for which I want to argue. This meeting was, first, a dialogue between groups who were assumed to have something of value to each other; many Jews have been attracted to Buddhism as a practice, which rabbis wanted to understand, while the continuity of Jewish culture and belief during the many years before they again had a homeland made the Dalai Lama think their tradition had something to teach the people of Tibet. In their time together, they listened to as well as spoke to each other, and what emerged from this dialogue was understanding and mutual compassion—and something spiritually powerful, as well. Rodger discovered that this dialogue and journey actually transformed him from someone only marginally Jewish into someone devoted to his faith. In other words, he did not understand who he truly was until he had engaged in this conversation with believers of a different tradition.

The group sought to understand commonalities between their faiths—the Dalai Lama had expressed an interest in Jewish contemplative practices, both cultures had experience with the difficulties of exile, and both traditions placed compassion and justice at their hearts. But this meeting did not assume that there were not fundamental differences between them, which was illustrated by how much maneuvering it took between the rabbis of different traditions to negotiate the prayer of thanksgiving the Jewish delegation wanted to pray upon greeting the Dalai Lama, and even by the issue of how to address the Dalai Lama himself. “His Holiness” is the typical form of address, as you may know, and some of the Jews (as might also be true with some Christians and Muslims) had difficulties with this title.

Both questions revolved around wanting to recognize this man, one of the world’s great spiritual and ethical leaders, without going so far as to call him holy, since only God is holy. (And while we might argue that we seek holiness in our spiritual journey, as we, made in the image of the holy God, seek to become ever more like God, I we can also see where this might be a sticking point; we reverence God alone.)

The Jewish delegation also rejected honorifics for the Dalai Lama that might be translated as “savior,” since such a figure would seem to be involved in the act of salvation which only God can provide. One of the Jews explained the liturgical and linguistic contortions in this way: “We would like to say a word in honor—it’s not that we don’t want to honor—it’s like saying we understand, we honor you as a source of teaching and blessing for your adherents.” But not, he implied, as a savior or holy one we Jews recognize or reverence; it was their faithful attempt to honor a great man and a great wisdom tradition while remaining true to their own beliefs. [2]

The exchanges between Jews and Buddhists on this trip were challenging, but also fruitful and necessary. One of the Orthodox Jewish rabbis, Irving Greenberg explained why, in a pluralistic world, there is great value in interfaith dialogue: “The big question on the religious agenda is how people rooted in their own religion are able to respond to others. We must learn to affirm our truth while doing true justice to the other.” Honest encounters with different modes of belief prevent a religious person from thinking he or she possesses the whole, or sole, truth, Rabbi Greenberg said. “God’s will is for us to learn how to affirm our full truth doing full justice to the other, not partial justice or twisted justice, or a secondhand treatment.” [3]

Another rabbi, Abraham Heschel, was one of America’s great heroes of interfaith dialogue; he often worked with people of other faiths on issues of common interest. He marched with Martin Luther King in the deep South when white Southern religious leaders could not be seen in his company. But as William Sloane Coffin points out, while it may be true that “God dwells with every committed Jew, Moslem, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu who believes religious pluralism to be God’s will,” Rabbi Heschel pointed out that “’the first and most important prerequisite for interfaith is faith.’” [4]

What Coffin meant was that I do not honor my Muslim brother or Jewish sister by pretending not to be deeply and happily Christian, nor am I taking their faith seriously if I pretend to more commonality than we possess and diminish our differences. These distinctive paths to God should be seen as distinctive; at the same time, I believe that they are worthy of honor. The Hindu sage Ramakrishna once wrote that there are many ways to climb to the roof, all of them valid; the Christian sage C. S. Lewis once wrote that those of us who have already found our room in God’s house should behave with great gentleness to all of those still looking for theirs. Although our first honor is to our own path, there is much we can learn from each other, not the least being that perhaps God does not call us to force others off their paths.

[1] Robert McAfee Brown, Speaking of Christianity: Practical Compassion, Social Justice, and Other Wonders (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 117-120.

[2] Rodger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 46-48.

[3] Ibid, 49.

[4] William Sloane Coffin, Credo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 85. 

A piece of what I’m writing at Ghost Ranch this week for a book called The Other Jesus, which will be out in 2011. In the midst of the Christmas season (and I remind everyone, Christmas is a season, not a day), I thought these might be words of peace. More later:

            On my son Chandler’s last visit to Austin, he spent part of one day visiting old friends, and when I went to pick him up, I had a long conversation with his friend’s father, who is, in typically Austin fashion, not a Christian. He does, in fact have images of Hindu gods and goddesses placed around the house, so I’m assuming he leans in that direction. As Chandler was putting his shoes on, the father was asking me what I was writing, and so I told him about this book.

“I’m trying to write a book about what it might mean to be a faithful and thoughtful follower of Christ in the 21^st Century,” I told him. “Someone with a thirst for justice.” He nodded, once, twice, three times. I asked about his work as a healer, we were talking about the stock trading he has been trying as a day job, and then Chandler’s shows were tied and jacket on, and so we parted with a handshake.

In the car, Chandler’s first question was, “Were you uncomfortable?”

“Why?” I asked. I have been uncomfortable over the years around some of the more granola/patchouli/free love denizens of Austin, but I have always liked this family, and the father, who is a gentle soul.

“Well,” he said, “I just thought you might be uncomfortable because you’re a really big Christian, and they don’t believe like we do.” I nodded thoughtfully, because I know that a lot of people who are Christian might be uncomfortable around blue-skinned gods. People of any strong belief, actually, have at least a tendency to want to be around others who confirm those beliefs. But I think, slowly, I’m getting to the point where I don’t require everyone to share my beliefs. I have been to a couple of Jewish seders, own a hundred-year-old Buddha statue from Thailand, and have a translated Koran on my bookshelf. They are not the way to God for me, but they may be for others.

“No,” I replied. “We had a really good talk.” And I smiled. “And he’s a good person. Who am I to tell him what to believe?”

This last comment would be received as heresy by many Christians. What? You’re going to allow someone to persist in error? You’re going to behave with acceptance toward someone who doesn’t believe as we do about the Creator of the Universe? You know what’s true, and you’re going to damn someone to hell by not correcting him?

It’s exactly these ideas, whether voiced, acted on, or held in seething silence, that account for many of the attacks on religion from those outside it. The New Atheists argue that religion is dangerous in its truth claims because we live in a world where the results of the worst of religion can now be so damaging. “I honestly believe that religion is detrimental to the progress of humanity,” Bill Maher says in his 2008 documentary film Religulous, echoing a strain of rational criticism found in many of the attacks on faith that have cropped up since 9-11, since those attacks seemingly pitted Muslims against Christians. Religion that cannot tolerate any difference, that insists that everyone needs to believe as it does, is leading the world toward that Armageddon that we discussed in our last chapter. Because so many religious zealots anticipate the end of the world with joy, Maher argues, it may actually cause the end of the world. (“If there’s one thing I hate more than prophecy,” he says at the outset of the film, “it’s self-fulfilling prophecy.”)

At their heart, these critics of religion are saying that because religious people seem unable to turn loose of our truth claims, unsubstantiated by rational evidence as they may be, but still tend to want others to acknowledge the truth as we see it, religion can only be a force for ignorance, uncritical belief, and violent attempts at conversion. As Sam Harris writes in The End of Faith, “It is no accident that religious doctrine and honest inquiry are so rarely juxtaposed in this world.” [1]

This book has attempted to pose an alternative both to uncritical belief and to critical arguments against belief by suggesting that a thoughtful Christianity can amend many of the problems we discover in our faith and be a joyous and meaningful path to God. Certainly we are called to thought, not simply uncritical belief, as William Sloane Coffin said: “There is nothing anti-intellectual in the leap of faith, for faith is not believing without proof, but trusting without reservation. Faith is no substitute for thinking. On the contrary, it is what makes good thinking possible.” [2] The medieval theologian and thinker Anselm, whose motto was fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding, believed that his faith actually allowed him to get closer to the core of life’s important questions.

            But, as hard as it might be for the champions of rationality both within the Church and outside the walls to acknowledge, human imperfection means that our knowledge will always be imperfect. My understanding of God’s revelation is the best I have now, but it does not mean it is perfect, nor that is it the only understanding possible. So it is that Coffin, the champion of Christian intellect, also recognizes its limitations, and places love and compassion above it:

It is bad religion to deify doctrines and creeds. While indispensable to religious life, doctrines and creeds are only so as signposts. Love alone is the hitching post. Doctrines, let’s not forget, supported slavery and apartheid; some still support keeping women in their places and gays and lesbians in limbo. Moreover, doctrines can divide while compassion can only unite.” [3]

            Absolute certainty leads to thinking that if I am right, you must be wrong. Absolute certainty leads people to marginalize, hate, or attack those who believe differently. Absolute certainty leads people to fly planes into buildings, to blow themselves up on buses, and to launch wars—literal or figurative—against other faiths because they believe God wills it. This absolute certainty is the first of the marks Charles Kimball has recognized as when religion becomes evil; when you and your fellow believers—and you only—have the absolute truth, he says, other things will necessarily follow in succession—blind obedience without asking the hard questions, the end justifying the means, and ultimately, “holy war.” [4]

            During Chandler’s recent visit, we also saw a not-very-good animated kid’s film, and desperate afterward to try and get some value for my fifteen dollars, I asked him if the film taught us any lessons. Chandler thought for a second, and shrugged, since it is not a lesson he necessarily needs: “We shouldn’t be afraid of people who are different from us.”

            “That’s a pretty good lesson,” I told him. “Sometimes people end up killing each other because they haven’t learned it.” Certainly the contemporary world contains plenty of examples of how difference leads to difficulty; Robert McAfee Brown wrote that “New ideas often frighten us and make us more rigid than we need or ought to be.” [5] So learning not to be afraid is important, and one of the ways we learn this is by being in dialogue with those we think of somehow as other. Think about your own developing understanding of the world—actually coming face to face with people you have only heard about (people from another race, another belief system, a different sexual orientation, maybe) can force us to recognize our common humanity. One of the most positive things about interfaith dialogues springing up after the attack on the Twin Towers is it allowed Christians and Muslims to look across the room at each other instead of across a chasm of faith and cultural differences. It allowed them to listen to each other instead of talking at each other. And in some cases, it convinced those on both sides that one could faithfully worship God in a different way—which has always been a hard thing to acknowledge.

[1] Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton, 2005), 105.

[2] William Sloane Coffin, Credo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 8.

[3] Ibid, 9.

[4] Charles Kimball,  When Religion Becomes Evil: Five Warning Signs (New York: Harper SanFrancisco, 2002) passim.

[5] Robert McAfee Brown, Speaking of Christianity: Practical Compassion, Social Justice, and Other Wonders (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 120.

Okay, nothing controversial here, right? A long post, with apologies. Brevity just didn’t seem possible. Deep breath, and:

My dad lied to my grandma a couple of days ago. He and I had been walking around his land and having the conversation I’d been longing to have with him all Thanksgiving, and when we went back into the house, she asked us if we’d been on a run—my dad is still an avid runner, although I am not.

 “Twelve miles,” he told her. “Good brisk pace.”

“You’re lying to your own mother,” I said to my dad. “Shame.” And then I turned to her. It’s fun to stir up trouble between them. “He’s lying,” I said to her.

“You don’t want to lie,” she said to him. “Liars will have their portion in the Lake of Fire.”

Which is, I guess, where my father and I are both going to end up if my grandma is right about God, the Bible, and everything, since I have been lying to her for most of the past 35 years.

I love my dad’s mother, who is, honestly, one of the most faithful Christians I know, and who has prayed for me every day of my life, and who loves me, as I love her, devotedly and doggedly. She lives in western Oklahoma, where the wind does come sweeping down the plain, and she has been a member of Clinton First Assembly of God Church since 1948. For most of those years she played piano or organ, but since she’s hit 90, I suppose she’s entitled to step back from a thing or two.

I have encountered many of the more difficult and most repressive tenets of Christianity that have been part of my life in the Assembly of God tradition; my parents actually compromised on the Southern Baptist Church as a way of averaging the Pentecostalism and Methodism of their parents, and growing up in the Southern Baptist tradition nearly killed me, so I can hardly imagine life in the Assemblies of God, except as I see Grandma live it out. It revolves around prayer, and gifts of the Spirit, like speaking in tongues, healing, and prophecy, and around an unshakeable certainty that God has set up through his infallible Scriptures (the King James Version, naturally) an absolute set of standards that one must adhere to in order to escape eternal hellfire.

This is not how I understand faith and practice and the Bible, which I suppose I could explain to her. We could have a debate. She could cite chapter and verse; I could talk about the larger Biblical narratives of grace, forgiveness, and commitment.

But she is 90 years old, and she is never going to change her mind about anything she believes.

And so I lie to her.

I lied to her during the years when I was in the wilderness, although I felt less guilty about it then. If she asked if I was in church, I told her yes, every Sunday; if she asked if I was reading my Bible, I told her yes, every day. This has become the unofficial policy of my family; to avoid hours of preaching, a two second lie to Grandma is not a bad thing.

I suppose I thought—naively, it now seems to me—that I could stop lying to her about religion after going to seminary, becoming a preacher, living a faithful life. She is, she says, proud of me, and I do believe it.

 But my way of belief is not her way, and she has never quite understood how someone she loves could fail to find the Assembly of God a natural home. When I told her I felt called to go to seminary (something Assembly of God preachers do not generally do; there is only one accredited Assembly of God seminary in the US, and most of their preachers I’ve encountered are proudly unlettered), she sat me down and asked a question that had been troubling her. “Do Episcopals believe in Jesus?”

Now, as an Episcopalian who feels that his life as well as his soul have been saved by belief in a loving Son of God, my options were wounded outrage or sly humor.

As always, I chose humor.

“No,” I told her, without a hint of a smile, and watched the horror spread across her face. “We worship Satan.”

It was just a split-second of belief before she realized I was pulling her leg, but it was enough.

And this is how we’ve gotten along my whole adult life. I have told her what she wanted to hear, even if I didn’t believe it, or I have made a joke and tried to get her to talk about something besides Jesus.

Good luck with that, by the way.

But I knew it was going to be a difficult holiday when ten seconds after I had entered my father’s house, said my hellos, and parked myself at the table, where everyone was already eating, my grandma started asking me to enthuse about Sarah Palin. Now whatever you think about the woman, it doesn’t take much awareness to know she’s one of the most polarizing figures in American life today; some people love her, and others loathe her, and why on earth would you start a conversation at Thanksgiving around her?

“She’s a devout member of the Assemblies of God,” Grandma told me, and although I think I know that the Palins are members of a Bible church, I do remember that she had been prayed over in the Wasilla Assembly of God on several occasions. A Kenyan pastor prayed for protection from witchcraft for her, something like that.

“She’s something,” I said. Grandma was satisfied. I was secretly ironic. Everyone was happy.

And then we went on to have a series of exchanges about where the Episcopal Church stands on abortion and homosexuality. I tried to avoid these questions in a way that was truthful—I told her that Episcopalians hold a lot of opinions about spiritual issues, that what we agree on is prayer and worship together. But that in itself was damning in her eyes, since any church that can’t agree to uniformly condemn these things is probably headed for the Lake of Fire in a mass movement.

So, since she wasn’t getting satisfaction here, she asked another question: “And where do you stand on homosexuality?”

And, despite a lifetime of lying to her, I discovered that there comes a moment when you are soul-weary of pretending to believe something you do not, of trying to keep the peace by avoiding your differences.

“That’s a really personal question, Grandma,” I said, and I’d guess that my offense and exasperation showed.

“You know what God says about it,” she said.

“I know what it says in Leviticus,” I said, and then joined her in saying, in Garrett stereo, “It is an abomination.”

And then I told her I thought her pastor might be a homosexual because he pays a lot of attention to his personal grooming.

“He is not,” she said, outraged. “Why, he’s preached against it. And he loves his wife. He talks about her all the time, I’ve never seen a man so devoted—”

I touched her arm gently to distract her. “Kidding,” I said, and I forced myself to smile.

I wish her pastor were gay, but he probably isn’t. Still, what a grace-filled experience it might be for her to wrestle with the existence of a gay person she loves, as she was forced to wrestle with the morality of divorce after her son and her favorite grandson experienced it.

But I’m still angry at her, which hurts, because I love her and always will, and I’m still angry at myself, which hurts, because again I betrayed my core values of love, tolerance, and forgiveness to avoid some uncomfortable moments.

I wish there were some way I could tell my 90 year old grandmother that if homosexuality is a sin, it no more sinful than gluttony or cruelty or prejudice, and certainly should not be some kind of litmus test for authentic faith. I wish I could tell my grandmother that I think that the God of Love might surprise her by being a little more tolerant that she is. I wish I could tell my grandmother that if she insists we should read passages from the Bible literally in every case that she needs to stop taking shrimp off the buffet, and we had better start gathering rocks to stone people.

I wish I could tell my grandmother that some days her Jesus and my Jesus seem to be, at best, only distantly related.

But I don’t think I can, not in any way that she would hear.

So we march on, two Christian soldiers, both of us loving God, both of us loving each other, and, I’d guess, although I’m still working on it, both of us forgiving each other. When I got in the car to drive back to Texas, she took my head in her hands, prayed for God’s protection for my trip, prayed God’s blessings on my work.

“I pray for you every day,” she told me, her eyes shining with tears as she patted my face.

“I know,” I said.

“I always have.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

Advent 1C

St. David’s, Austin

Nov. 29, 2009

Gospel Reading: Luke 21:25-36

²⁵“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. ²⁶People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. ²⁷Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. ²⁸Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

²⁹Then he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; ³⁰as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. ³¹So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. ³²Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. ³³Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. ³⁴“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, ³⁵like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. ³⁶Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”

            Good morning. And Happy New Year! This morning we mark the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new year in the liturgical calendar, and a new beginning for Christians everywhere as we anticipate the advent of Christ. We often mark our secular New Year’s Day by taking stock of where we’ve been, and by resolving to do better in the coming year. We resolve to eat less and to exercise more, to spend more time with those we love. Those are all good things. But I think it’s even more appropriate to reflect and to resolve when it’s our spiritual New Year’s Day, and so I begin with a story that throws much of this past year into resolution for me.

On a Wednesday night a while back, I was at the Continental Club on South Congress to hear Jon Dee Graham and James McMurtry, and at the end of his set, Jon Dee looked out into the darkened room, and he paused for just a moment, clearly trying to put together what he wanted to say in closing.

            What he said was this: “Don’t be so afraid.

“You don’t have to be so afraid.”

            I received these words then, and now, as a message from God, although Jon Dee would be the first to tell you he is someone who wants to believe, not a believer.

But he would also tell you that when the only thing to read in the hotel room is the Gideon Bible, he reads the Gideon Bible.

            I begin with Jon Dee’s invocation against fear this morning, when we should enter a new liturgical year in hope and begin to anticipate the coming of Christ, because I have been living with a lot of anxiety lately, and I know that I am not the only one. As Anne Lamott said about a dark year of her own, of late, many things seem to have broken, lives and hearts among them, and although Episcopalians are statistically the wealthiest Christian denomination—which is to say, on average, that we are better off than some folks—we are most certainly not immune to painful loss, both human and financial. In the past year, people I know and love have lost their jobs at our seminaries around the country, including the Seminary of the Southwest here in Austin, as well as at our National Cathedral and the Cathedral College of Preachers, and I know that there are Episcopalians here this morning who wonder what tomorrow will bring because yesterday has been fraught with difficulty.

            So as we reflect on a year filled with tough economic times, with environmental crises, with wars and rumors of wars, we hope for some clarity from our sacred texts.

And we wake up this morning to this horrifying Gospel text.

Now, as you may know, we tend to have troublesome apocalyptic Gospel texts on the first Sunday of Advent talking about distress, fear, foreboding, and, some might suggest, the end of the world—which may be why I always seem to get invited to preach on the first Sunday of Advent.

And by troublesome, I mean cryptic. Difficult. Scary.

            So, as my dear friend Charlie Cook would ask, Where is the gospel in this Gospel? Where is the good news that tells us how we should keep going, find our way, be a light to others?

How can these words of Jesus teach us something about where God is in dark times?

            And in asking all these questions, I’m also asking this: How can these frightening words help us to be less afraid?

Now it just so happens, that I am the trustee of a useful story about fear. When I was serving at Calvary Episcopal in Bastrop, John Henry Faulk’s daughter gave me a tale and asked me to use it whenever I found occasion. Molly Ivins used to relate this story once a year in her columns before she passed, but now it’s all on me, so I’m thankful that this happens to be a story that fits neatly with a gospel reading about people fainting from fear and foreboding.

When John Henry Faulk was a small boy in South Austin, not too far from where we sit this morning, in fact, he and one of his friends, Boots Cooper, were playing Texas Rangers. At the request of John Henry’s mom, these valiant lawmen were commissioned with the task of rooting out a chicken snake that was causing some trouble in the hen house. Now just going into a dark and dank hen house to get some eggs is a fear-inducing thing when you are a small person; I stepped into the old hen house on our farm this week to remind myself of that. Chickens are scary—they’ve got beaks that peck, and those reptilian grasping feet with claws, and soulless beady eyes. Chickens look like hired assassins.

So John Henry and his friend Boots were already more than a little apprehensive as they went out to the hen house, where there were strange smells and lots of shadow, and they moved slowly and cautiously toward the nesting hens, where the eggs would be, and where they’d most likely find a chicken snake if one was to be found.

            And lo and behold, as they drew near to one of the roosts, hearts pounding, already full of fear, they did see a snake coiled there, big as a python to their young minds, and they just about jumped out of their skins.

They ran. Oh, yes, they ran. In their panicked flight, they ran into the side of the hen house, Bang!, and then they tumbled out through the door and into the chicken yard, Oof!, and then finally, banged up and covered with dust, these valiant Texas Rangers fled to the Faulk house.

So John Henry and Boots went running into the house, the screen door banging behind them, and John Henry’s mother looked at them. Just looked at them—winded, panicked, bruised and battered from collisions and falls—and she shook her head.

“Boys,” she said, “that there was just a little ol’ chicken snake. It can’t hurt you.”

“Yes’m,” Boots Cooper said. “Maybe so. But there’s some things’ll scare you so bad, you hurt yourself.”

And that’s just exactly what happens when we’re afraid—we hurt ourselves. Emotionally. Spiritually. We make bad decisions, we react to things out of a bad place, and we forget what we are called to do, how we’re suppose to act, what is ultimately supposed to matter. We look around, and the world seems so dark and dangerous that we don’t know what we’re supposed to do next, and we forget that the battle that truly matters has already been fought—and won—on our behalf.

That’s why I say that fear is un-Christian. I try not to make blanket statements like this, to dare to speak for the whole tradition. But throughout the gospels, our normative texts, Jesus and his miraculous works and ethical teaching are set against and in opposition to the backdrop of fear. The Greek root used today and elsewhere in the Gospels is phobos, which we know from our words “phobia” and “phobic.” And it is used over and over again in this controlling context: Jesus is constantly telling his listeners—and us—not to be afraid, whatever happens, because God is in control.

            Texts like our gospel reading today, which scholars call The Apocalyptic Discourse of Jesus, have been badly read and misused for centuries within the Church to stir up fear among the faithful, to encourage a focus on the future and a withdrawal from the world so as to be safe and sound for some imagined end. Now it’s not that we haven’t had church leaders tell us that this passage and others like it should be read as history, not prophecy. Augustine wrote that, unlike the parallel passages in Matthew and Mark, it’s clear in this reading from Luke that the prophecies of destruction that Jesus is making have to do with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, not with some end of the world scenario. The Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright, and other modern historical scholars likewise hold that, read literally, the apocalypse Jesus is warning of has happened already; it is not some future doomsday to be deciphered with the aid of clues from Revelation and Daniel or close study of the statements of world leaders.

            When apocalyptic passages are read literally, they are often excuses to inject even more fear into a world that on its own naturally has plenty of chaos and uncertainty. But this Apocalyptic Discourse, like its partners in Mark and Matthew, like the Apocalypse of St. John, which we know better as Revelation, is spiritually powerful for us in this respect: as Fred Craddock points out, the Jewish tradition of apocalyptic writing represents “history being set in the larger context of God’s purpose.” These and similar passages have always been strangely comforting for troubled people in dark times, because they remind us that God has a plan where clearly we have none, that God is in control even when we feel most out of control. “When you see these things,” as Jesus tells us today, “you will know that the Kingdom of God is near.”

            And indeed, the Kingdom of God is near. The birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ, God’s master plan put into human form, represents, as the contemporary theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar has written, God’s loving and beautiful ending to a story that without His intervention would end in disaster. And so, this morning, we are again anticipating the coming of Christ, our annual reminder that God loves us, suffers alongside us, and would do anything to draw us into abundant life with Him.

            I come back to Annie Lamott, as I often do, who has written that the most profound spiritual truth she knows is this: in the darkest times, just when it seems as though there is no way for Love to conquer all, it does.

Don’t be so afraid.

You don’t have to be so afraid.

Jesus is coming.

Amen.

This is the final post where I’ll be offering some theological reflections on community trimmed from the theology section of my recently-finished book on Harry Potter, due out in Summer ‘10. These reflections may seem a little choppy, since they’re no longer part of a larger context, but the larger context is J. K. Rowling’s emphasis on the value of community. And they’re released in the wake of massive layoffs at the seminary where I received my MDiv, perhaps the most important community of my life. I hope they’ll be of use.

We band together for formation and for mission—the battle against injustice and evil—and the fact that we choose these groups is significant. We can’t choose your family, it has often been said; but we can choose—and our chosen by—our friends. And in his friendships, both within the Order of the Phoenix and at Hogwarts School, Harry is particularly blessed. He is loved—and he is held accountable and urged to be his best self. In this simultaneous love and urging people to higher standards, we can see how friendship functions within the ecclesia. In the Gospel of John, Jesus himself modeled the concept of friendship to shape them into a community who could both love and act:

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.

I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

(John 15: 12-17, NRSV)

Among those who love each other and are part of the healing of the earth, as those in an ecclesia—or the Order of the Phoenix—are, then true friendship can thrive, and lives can be changed. Within these relationships, people can be free to be themselves, and are called to be their best selves. People can share anything with each other—like Harry’s embarrassing revelation in Order of the Phoenix that Cho Chang was weeping as he kissed her, or Ron’s confession in Deathly Hallows that he had been a prat for deserting Harry and Hermione. As Mary Earle and Sylvia Maddox write, such a friend “honors the secrets of the heart and gently nudges one’s dreams into being.” [1]

Dumbledore, Ron, Hermione, and Sirius are true friends to Harry, and often the book depicts Harry reaching out to them for counsel, comfort, and encouragement. But Mary Earle and Sylvia Maddox note that we can also experience soul friendship in those beyond the reach of our present moment and current surroundings, that a soul friend may also reveal her- or himself to us “in our reading or in our prayer.” [2] The Potter books are full, of course, of those who reach out from beyond the here and now to aid and instruct, including portraits, Hogwarts ghosts, and other such figures.

In the Book of Hebrews, we read of a communion of saints from whom we learn and by whom we are inspired: “So since we stand surrounded by all those who have gone before, an enormous cloud of witnesses, let us drop every weight, every sin that clings to us and slackens our pace, and let us run with endurance the long race set before us.” (Hebrews 12:1, The Voice) In the Christian tradition, these saints are figures from whom we learn and by whom we are comforted and encouraged; the medieval genre of the saint’s life was intended as an exemplary story for others to emulate, while the examples of modern saints—Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, and Mother Jones, for example—may also help to mold us into those we are meant to be.

In the persons of Harry’s parents (and later, sadly, Sirius and Lupin), we find this abstract concept of the communion of the saints brought to life, since over and over again in the books one or more of them appears to Harry. They peer out at him from the Mirror of Erised and from Wizarding photos. Harry’s parents appear out of Voldemort’s wand in the graveyard in Little Hangleton thanks to the miracle of Priori Incantatem, encourage him to hold on, and direct him in what will happen. And they come to him in the moments just before his death, when he opens the Snitch Voldemort left him and takes out the Resurrection Stone. His mother tells him he has been so brave, and his father, “You are nearly there . . . Very close. We are . . . so proud of you.” [3] Then Sirius and Lupin encourage him not to be frightened of his approaching death, and then all promise to stay with him, to be with him as it happens, to give him strength.

In all of this—as in Harry’s post-mortem conversation with Dumbledore in King’s Cross Station—those who have gone before are not separated from us by a gulf, but are with us (part of us, Lily Potter would say), in all we do, walking with us, encouraging us, still teaching us, so that together we can do what needs to be done, can be the ecclesia of the faithful.

[1] Mary C. Earle and Sylvia Maddox, Holy Companions: Spiritual Practices from the Celtic Saints (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2004), 22.

[2] Mary C. Earle and Sylvia Maddox, Holy Companions, 22.

[3] J.K. Rowling, Deathly Hallows, 699.

The news of the shootings at Fort Hood has come as I’m speaking in Washington, far away from what I would normally be very close to. I only want to say this: people who love guns have always told us that we need for guns to be widely available so that wrongdoers with guns can be countered effectively. I just want to ask this: if people on an army base aren’t safe from gun violence, then how can we say weapons can ever make us safer?

And that does nothing to help, I know. It’s just me screaming “I told you so, I keep telling you so, why doesn’t anyone listen?” And I’m just adding to the noise. Forgive me.

My friend Beth Wyndham wrote a poem that sheds some light in this darkness, and I share it with you with her permission. I am trying hard to listen to it. May God be with all those suffering–and with all of us.

In solidarity, silence, and prayer with those who are hurting tonight…

There are a thousand other things I should be doing…
Well okay, not a thousand exactly – it just feels like it.
But none of them seem very important right now.

What is important
is to stop
and
pray…

Not wordy prayers for my sense of peace and justice.
Not wordy prayers for my strength and guidance.
No.
Words will fail and there will be far too many used anyway.

I will hear about the shootings
in a thousand different ways
with a thousand different voices
with a thousand different opinions
for thousands of hours on end.

I will be tempted to add my voice.
I have an opinion.
I care!
Hear me.
Oh Lord.
Hear my prayer!

But if I am busy talking,
I’m not listening.

And listening is prayer too.

It is at times like this when the world needs to be listened to.
Because clearly, someone was not heard.

What am I listening to?
The World and God’s people?
Their voices, opinions, fears, pain, rage, loss, and grief?

Yes… I hear all of that.
I don’t need to say what is already being said.

What could I say that would be completely different?

By my silence…by my prayer…
Is it possible for my actions to scream louder than anything I could possibly say?

Will my sighs entreat the Holy Spirit?
Sighs that come when I cannot catch my breath
Let alone form a word
Sighs so soft, so still
They are like breath – in and out - too deep for anyone to hear
But the Spirit knows and comes…
Come, Holy Spirit, Come

Will my tears be the tears of silent solidarity?
Tears that flow freely down to the dust
Covering the dead and the dying
With the life giving waters of Christ
For my tears are not shed as one
But as the tears of a collective Body.
Come, Lord Jesus, Come

Will my gaze upon this world,
be that of a loving Father, overflowing with compassion?
Allowing my eyes to take in the pain of the day
Not fearful
Not turning away
But steady, steely,
Firm in the confidence that what I hear in what I see
Will Move me
Move me to open my arms and embrace God’s children.
Come, Father God, Come

Yes… there is much to say to the world
But first I must go and listen.

This is the third post where I’ll be offering some theological reflections on community trimmed from the theology section of my recently-finished book on Harry Potter, due out in Summer ‘10.

These reflections may seem a little choppy, since they’re no longer part of a larger context, but the larger context is J. K. Rowling’s emphasis on the value of community.In the Harry Potter novels, the omnispresence of “those we love but see no longer” (a liturgical formulation from the Book of Common Prayer) illustrates beautifully the idea that we are all members of an ongoing Christian community that cannot be stopped even by death. [1] It is true that Harry’s parents are no longer with him—and yet they are ever with him. That’s how important family can be, and why Christian understanding speaks of those who follow Christ as fellow sisters and brothers.

In his Apologeticum (a defense of Christianity),  the third-century Christian theologian Tertullian employed familial terms to describe the ideal communal relationship, one of many suggestions from the first few centuries of Christian life that our faith journey together is also built around the model of family, albeit a large and diverse family with one Father.  [2] This is certainly how Jesus spoke of the community that had grown up around him; Barbara Brown Taylor observes that in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus reminds his followers that “they need each other like brothers and sisters need each other . . . they belong to one family.” [3]

The Apostle Paul formalized many notions about Christianity, including this idea of family membership; Paul addressed the communities with which he was in contact as “brothers,” a term that appears more than 50 times in the letters most reliably attributed to him. In contemporary translations of the Bible, the Greek adelphoi is typically rendered as the more inclusive “brothers and sisters”; Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan argue that for Paul “to address people as brothers (and sisters)” was not simply about social convention or bonds of affection. It was, instead, the use of a new language of family that states that although the members of this family are not biologically related, they nonetheless “have the same obligations to each other as biological brothers and sisters do.” Paul was arguing that communion in Christ created new families that were to be “communities of caring and sharing,” particularly in the absence of the care of biological families, and this is wisdom we can easily understand dramatically in the story of Harry Potter. [4]

In its diversity, Hogwarts represents some essential Christian ideas about living within a varied community as opposed to the sanctity of the individual. Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, described that necessity in this way:

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.

We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.

(Romans 12: 3-10, NRSV)

Borg and Crossan suggest that Paul’s vision for the ecclesia is simply this: “In Christ people are equal—everybody matters.” [5] For Paul, this diversity in the body of Christ was part of his larger understanding—that in the faith community, though people might differ in abilities, resources, and gifts, they were equal, and that together, they were part of something much larger. As Paul suggested in the Letter to the Galatians, “in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 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: 26-28, NRSV)

Jesus himself understood how difficult it was for his followers to get along, even while they had him to referrer their disputes; he could only have imagined that their rivalries and prejudices would grow larger and more unmanageable after his departure, and so he spoke directly to this problem in a section of the Gospel of Matthew some scholars call the “Discourse on Life in the Faithful Community.” In Chapter 18, Jesus enjoins us not to be stumbling blocks to others, and tells Peter that if his brother hurts him, he should forgive him not seven times but seventy-seven—forever, for all intents and purposes. Jesus also speaks of how to deal with the problem of evil within the community:

If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.

But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.

If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

(Matthew 18: 15-20, NRSV).

To read the end of this plea for reconciliation as a final statement of ostracism—for such it is often considered by Bible scholars—hardly represents Jesus’ true attitudes. The enemies of Jesus took him to task for associating with people outside the acceptable limits of Jewish community, including tax collectors, and the Gospel of Matthew is traditionally attributed to a tax-collector. Taken together with his earlier comments on forgiveness and community, Jesus seems to be calling for people to forge bonds that can only be broken under the most serious of conditions.

As Taylor has preached, in this passage, Jesus seems to care less about who is right and who is wrong, and more about keeping the community together, less about mere tolerance, and more about harmony. [6]

The point of community and moral formation, as J. K. Rowling suggested in her own discussion of the creation of Hogwarts, is a world in which one’s differences do not separate people in and of themselves, but are seen, instead, as a vital part of creation. Tertullian wrote that while Christians called themselves brother and sister, they also claimed kinship with all human beings. [7] This movement toward harmony, as we will see, is ultimately where we end up in the Potter stories, with even the offensive Slytherin gathered into kinship—or at least, all of those who, as Tertullian put it, “from the same womb of a common ignorance have agonized into the same light of truth.” [8]

[1] Book of Common Prayer, 504.

[2] Tertullian, Apologeticum 39.

[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, The Seeds of Heaven, 84.

[4] Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 187.

[5] Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Paul, 202.

[6] Barbara Brown Taylor, The Seeds of Heaven, 85.

[7] Tertullian, Apologeticum 39.

[8] Ibid.