Rambling Thoughts on Health, Salvation and Oprah Winfrey

I've noticed that most people have a real love-hate relationship with Oprah Winfrey -- they either think she's Wonder Woman, or else they can't stand her. And boy -- start talking about Oprah to a theologically literate Lutheran, and you will very often see that scary high eyebrow of disapproval; you know, the Oprah who appears to embody the sort of pretension to spiritual self-reliance and self-improvement that stands in contrast to the insight that, as Luther put it, we are all beggars before God.

But I've been thinking about Oprah as the year's lectionary readings have been leading us into Mark's Gospel, filled with all those short vignettes of Jesus' BANG! POW! BAM! healings, coupled with his message that the Reign of God was "at hand."

I used to watch Oprah, before her show got so self-absorbed, celebrity-driven and bling-dispensing. And I've subscribed to O magazine, before the ratio of advertising to editorial content and the cognitive dissonance therein -- you know, "You are capable and talented and beautiful and empowered, and that's why you need to look a certain way and buy all this stuff" -- finally got to me. I enjoyed and was inspired by the stories of everyday people who overcame desperate situations in extraordinary ways, I appreciated the practical, accessible cognitive psychology that underpinned many of the articles and I also liked the affirmations and uplifting quotes that were there in between all the cosmetic ads and photos of Oprah's Favorite Things.

So while I find Oprah's self-aggrandizing brand of celebrity spirituality, what I can understand of it, goofy in a Shirley MacClaine/Tom Cruisey way, and while I get tired of her seeming constant celebration of herself as personification of her "brand" -- I also see someone who, having struggled to free herself from a very damaging family experience and destructive personal choices to become successful, has a genuine interest in giving other people hope that they can do the same. And that is not a bad thing.

The problem is, I run into a lot of my coreligionists who, in their ongoing battle against "works righteousness," wrongly conflate the notion of spiritual self-betterment, the climbing-Jacob's-ladder model of salvation that's the opposite of the Gospel message, with what I think is a healthy realization that we can be enslaved by faulty thinking, by learned responses to stress that don't work anymore or that never worked at all, by the messages imprinted on us by parents and our culture, by a paralyzing helplessness...and that there are practical, proactive ways people can overcome those patterns of thinking and doing.

Living in struggling rural America, I see every day the result of "stinking thinking" in the lives of people stranded here -- people who live in communities like mine not by choice but because it's their perceived dead end. The local backwoods culture sends the message to children not only that education isn't important but that seeking anything beyond a kind of minimal literacy and local folk smarts is a dangerous, antisocial thing; the greater pop culture encourages a self-indulgent nihilism that tends to get a lot of young people here in trouble at an early age via pregnancy, paternity, drugs and/or criminal behavior. So by the time people are in their 20's, a great many of them are stuck -- stuck with kids they don't have the tools to adequately parent, stuck in the social-services system or in strings of part-time minimum-wage jobs, stuck in relationships of convenience, stuck in a cycle of whatever chemical or other pleasure-seeking gets them from one day to the next.

I would like to respectfully suggest to folks who do ministry in communities like these that it is possible in this sort of milieu to be so heavenly minded in terms of affirming the Lutheran idea of justifcation by faith that, when it comes to community outreach and care of the whole person, we do no earthly good. If someone's m.o. from day-to-day is enculturated learned helplessness, high-minded discussions about our inability to earn brownie points for good behavior with God don't make a lot of sense; because that person has somehow internalized the idea that brownie points from anyone for anything -- getting out of pajamas in the morning, staying in school, learning something more than Ma and Pa and Uncle Earl know, aspiring to a challenging career or even to a self-supporting job, delaying gratification in service to a greater good -- are either totally beyond their grasp or else are just not worth the effort. "Don't try to impress God with good works, because God isn't impressed by them," can sound very much like "Don't try," period.

Take that, steeple-fingered, middle-class Lutheran theologians and pastors and lay leaders. I'm just sayin', me, a little semi-trained church elf here in the depressed hinterlands. What is the good news for these folks? How do you get from the Gospel message that God is our friend, not our enemy, to the message that this life is a good gift of God that's worth living in a mindful way, and that there are ways of escaping the hopelessness of bad thinking and bad choices? Or is that the point where you pull out the business card of the local CMH office and make a referral, because that's not the church's job? I'm not being snarky here; I'm interested in how other people in ministry of whatever kind navigate the territory between "care of souls" and care of the rest of us.

All of which, as I'm sitting here thinking about stuff and procratinating housecleaning on this cold February day, leads me to pondering the Lutheran tendency, at least as I've experienced it, to maintain a very Western, penal model of sin and grace and to reduce the idea of salvation to God's free key to a heavenly condo. I mean, that was certainly the definition of salvation that I grew up with; my unearned fire-insurance policy won for me by Jesus. Many decades later, after having lived a lot of life and being exposed to both the Eastern Church's ideas about salvation -- salus indeed -- being about spiritual and other health in this life as well as the next, and to the very real benefits of cognitive psychology and counseling, I wonder why so many of us are still stuck in a rather simple-minded and to me unhelpful salvation paradigm starring Jesus as our defense attorney, Satan as prosecutor and Judge Sky Daddy gravely perusing our multi-paged record of criminal charges. That's how it seems to me, sometimes, in our collective Godtalk.. How does that mesh with Mark's image of Jesus as One whose healings are a powerful sign of God's intention that we be freed of whatever it is that alienates us from God and from one another and from living "the life that is life"?

(As you can see, I really do not want to vacuum the living room right now.)

Our local fundamentalist churches, of course, offer their own version of the eternal get-out-of-jail-free card (some conditions may apply); and they are also fond of promoting the tempting idea that struggling rural people's personal chaos and community malaise are largely blameable on certain predictable Evil Others, so that if American society just purified itself of the Evil Others life would return to a  comforting scene from The Andy Griffith Show with Jesus, the Duggars and a really big, flappy American flag thrown in. You can laugh at that, or get angry at that -- but do those of us in the Christian mainstream have any kind of compelling alternative vision of a life healed by God that makes sense to a teenager with little competent adult guidance or role models whose only idea of an "abundant life" is a boyfriend, or some aimless young man who drifts between Mom's basement, under-the-table odd jobs and baby mamas, or a proudly self-sufficient entrepreneurial couple who suddenly find their tenuous grasp on a bit of security and dignity yanked away when a major local employer moves its operations elsewhere and all the money bleeds out of the community?

How does the Gospel we encounter in Mark become real for people like this? Discussion is welcome and encouraged.

S*it Lutherans Say

A quick update on what's going on in my life right now: Our Annus Horribilis (look it up -- it's not naughty) continued through the holidays, with Fellow Traveler having problems maintaining a healthy potassium level and me getting food poisoning from -- and I'm ashamed to say this -- mall food-court sushi that, in a random moment of insanity, looked like something I wanted to have for lunch while we got in some last-minute Christmas gift shopping.

Despite this, were able to celebrate a scaled-back Christmas, battered but unbroken...and then at the cusp of the new year we received devastating news from both sets of kids: Our son-in-law is in ICU as I write, after worrisome month or so of feeling increasingly weak and unwell, and eventually winding up on an ambulance ride to the ER and then in an induced coma while staff worked to keep him alive while trying to understand what was happening to him. Thanks to his wonderful team of healthcare professionals he's making some small but very encouraging increments of progress in overcoming this medical crisis, but he's still in critical condition, and Son #1 and our in-laws are pretty much living at the hospital for the time being while Son-in-Law grows stronger.

Meanwhile, across the continent Son #2, up in the California mountains on an extended-family vacation, was in a sledding accident -- the plastic sled he and his small nephew were on hit a rut and began careening out of control, and while trying to shield the boy and stop the sled #2's leg got caught underneath somehow -- and he wound up getting airlifted off the slope with three compound fractures needing complicated and expensive surgery to fix. For a young family with a small child, trying to establish themselves in a new place, this is a very hard burden to bear.

Both sets of children had, in the past couple of years, been enjoying the kind of thirtysomething personal and professional milestones that we all hope for in the next generation, and as elders we'd been kind of relaxing into the idea that The Kids Are Alright...and then all this happened; one frightening phone call after the other.

At first it felt as if the Universe were engaging in a kind of cosmic mob hit directed at our family...but then I kept getting Facebook updates from friends all experiencing grief and loss and anxiety and frustration, all seemingly concentrated in this past month. I thought back to that famous first line of Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled: "Life is difficult." Tell me about it.

All of which is really less of a kvetch  (although not entirely kvetch-free) than a necessary prelude to what is really bugging me at this moment:

I was reading a Lutheran website the other day. Now, as someone who's been active online for a pretty long time I understand that the Internet has created, for all intents and purposes, a kind of transcontinental, 24/7 bar where anyone with an online connection can swagger in, grab a barstool and, inhibitions loosened by anonymity, proceed to share multitudinous Deep Thoughts with the rest of humanity. I also know from experience that most of these Deep Thoughts, including my own, are crap. And yet I am regularly lured into pulling on my mental Sorels and wading into this crap...especially into the Religion corner of the virtual bar, where the crap tends to be particularly deep and odiferous. I don't know why I do this to myself; probably for the same reasons that I spend precious hours of my life on earth toggling the TV remote between "Celebrity Rehab" and "Swamp People."

But anyway, I'm browsing through the various conversations on this website, and I start reading a conversation about the wrath of God. Hmmm, I think; there's a topic that doesn't have a lot of traction in mainline Christianity these days. So I start digging deeper into the verbal back-and-forth between the participants.

Now, most of what is being said is pretty reasonable: That we human beings do a lot of stuff to one another that makes God angry; that these days it's unfashionable to think about how angry we make God; that we need to start taking God's anger more seriously as a faith community so that people can in turn take God's grace more seriously. See, I grew up in an LCMS congregation where the Law was drilled into the congregation like a jackhammer hitting concrete every single week -- where one pastor, in fact, once noted in a sermon that he disliked seeing worshippers smiling in church because it was an indication to him that they weren't sufficiently sorry for their sins. So I have been inured to a fair amount of Wrath O' God rhetoric. And, frankly, I agree with it to a point; not to the point of "Don't smile in church, you miserable sinners"; but when I read the daily news' nonstop litany of human violence and inanity and apathy and injustice...and when I get real about my own lamentable failures in loving God and the people around me...I have no doubt at all that God is angered by all of it. I also realize that actions have consequences; I get the concept behind "temporal punishment," even if I wouldn't normally use that phrase.  And I understand that, in the Lutheran way of thinking about the saving grace and mercy of God, there needs to be a Law/Gospel dialectic; first you have to understand you have a problem, as the 12-Step folks say.

So I'm reading along, thinking, "Yeah...yeah...I get this." But all of a sudden this one Lutheran guy starts talking about God killing sinners; I think the actual words were, "God kills sinners every day." He also notes that we should all be on our knees every day that we escape being killed by God.

That is when my brain explodes. This is when I start thinking of Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List, portraying the infamous SS officer Amon Goeth, casually picking off concentration camp prisoners as morning target practice. Seriously, dude? That's God to you? "Hmmm...which pathetic bastards do I take out today?"

I wonder what Lutheran Barstool Guy would think of my family situation, and that of our friends dealing with their own suffering and sorrow. My God...maybe this guy is a pastor, Maybe this is what he says to people who come to him for help. Maybe this is the speech he'd give me, sitting there in his study with my guts in a grocery bag, blubbering out my tales of woe.

I hestitate. Maybe I'm not giving Lutheran Barstool Guy the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he has a much more nuanced theology, one that would actually be be much like my own, that he simply has trouble articulating without resorting to a kind of obsolete religious shorthand. Maybe he just needs to learn to talk like a person -- talk like a bright 21st century person to other bright 21st century people.

Then I conclude: Yeah, right. What a lousy jerk. Go jump in a lake. [I've decided to substitute random 40's-era movie euphemisms for my actual thoughts.Use your 21st century imaginations.]

Especially when I am in the midst of real-life drama, I have a tendency to take virtual drama like this and just gnaw on it like a bone. And then it's 2 am and I can't turn off the problem-solving switch in my brain, and in between trying to mentally fix all the various hurts of my loved ones I'm also trying to take some swings at Lutheran Barstool Guy.

First of all: It's about grace, stupid. Yes, you need the Law; but Law without Gospel is like an ER doctor looking down at some mangled human being on a gurney, smugly noting, "Yeah, you're pretty messed up -- what'd you do to yourself?" and then walking away. Even in my dour Pietist childhood church, the pastors (including the Rev. Smiley, cited above) always eventually got around to grace.

Secondly -- I know I'm preaching to the choir for the most part here, but I also know I may get some frowny-faced combox responses to this from more conservative readers, and I don't care -- I'm calling bullshit on the idea that physical death is "punishment for sin," just because it's illogical. Life on earth is predicated upon cycles of life and death. The idea that, once upon a time everything alive in this finite world remained alive forever -- while being commanded to "Be fruitful and multiply," no less -- is just not possible. (Buy a fishtank and a bag of guppies, if you need some empircal evidence for what I'm saying.) And that's the sort of thinking that leads to making stuff up in order to make the Bible, or one's pet theological theories, come out right -- arguing that, pre-Fall, carnivores were grass-chomping vegetarians is just one ludicrous idea I've heard floated in an effort to defend the honor of a literal curse of God upon creation, and Paul's "The wages of sin is death." And once you decide to go down this path, you'll find yourself being backed into a variety of theological culs-de-sac: For instance, if the wages of sin is death, are people who die in especially painful or prolonged ways worse sinners than someone who passes away quietly in her sleep? How does that theory square with Jesus' own refusal to make moral pronouncements upon the victims of misfortune? What did the rest of sentient creation ever do to God to bring this "curse of death" down on them as well, or are they just collateral damage? There are certainly ways to understand truth in Paul's statement without understanding it in the alarmingly wooden way of Lutheran Barstool Guy. Augustine once cautioned his colleagues about making ignorant, illogical statements about Christianity that would lead the pagan intelligentsia to assume Christians were all, roughly paraphrasing, yahoos who just fell off the turnip truck. Depending on your attitude toward Augustine, you may be thinking, "Physician, heal thyself" -- but the guy had a point.

Theodicy -- trying to figure out why God does or doesn't do what God does or doesn't do -- is always dangerous territory. Personally, my preferred approach to such stuff is a three-word sentence that I first heard from a clergyperson as a college student in a campus parish one Sunday morning: I don't know, said the pastor, as he described his struggle to understand some enigmatic comment of Jesus' in the Gospel lesson. I don't know what he meant. I had never heard this statement uttered from a pulpit before; I was so stunned, and impressed, that I think I even noted it in my journal that evening. What a liberating idea; that one didn't have to know what every utterance in the Bible was intended by its authors to convey; that one didn't have to know the why of why God seems to be "large and in charge" in some situations and AWOL in others. I am fine with I don't know as a way to process my family's recent concentration of misfortune and other calamity in the world. To me it beats turning God into a pathologically capricious judge and executioner whose message to the world, in the words of a friend of mine describing the cognitive dissonance in fundamentalist thinking, is I just love you so much that I have to kill you for being so bad.

And -- one more thing, Lutheran Barstool Guy. One thing I do know is that God has a strange way of showing up -- as a healer, not a hater -- in the very circumstances that you seem to interpret as God's righteous wrath directed toward the sinful. This past week, for instance, I have experienced God showing up in a rather remarkable way in the midst of our son's and son-in-law's friends and colleagues, and FT and my friends, and people none of us even know who've heard about our son-in-law and want to help. Every night at 9 pm they stop and pray for our son-in-law and family. They've set up an online store to help raise funds for medical expenses. They've kept Son #1 and our in-laws fed and cheered through this thing. Every evening I read their messages on a special Facebook page they've created for our son-in-law, and I am moved to tears by the grace and generosity I find. (Anyone out there interested in joining this team of supporters, let me know and we'll talk elsewhere.)

Maybe, Lutheran Barstool Guy, if you actually got off your online barstool and out of your theology books long enough to engage with the real world in a compassionate way you'd start to realize that God looks less like a cosmic Amon Goeth working on his divine Final Solution and more like...well...Jesus. What a concept.