I enjoy “The Simpsons.” Besides irreverent humor, it offers abundant life lessons. Homer almost always ends up doing the right thing, even if it doesn’t look as though he’s headed that way at the beginning of the show. Some critics have argued “The Simpsons” is one of the most moral shows on television. According to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, “It’s one of the most subtle pieces of propaganda around in the cause of sense, humility and virtue.” Back in 2001, The Christian Century suggested the Simpsons might be TV’s most religious family.

But as much as I love the Simpsons, I’m afraid they may have taught a generation or perhaps even several generations that Christians look like Ned Flanders. Ned Flanders, a devoutly evangelical Christian, is the Simpsons’ next door neighbor. Although he’s good-natured, cheerful, honest, and among the most compassionate of Springfield’s residents, Homer Simpson can’t stand him. 

Ned Flanders doesn’t swear. Instead, he says, “Ding dong diddly!” or “Hey diddly ho!” He avoids alcohol. In one episode, he complains, “I’m not thinking straight; why did I have that wine cooler last month?” As for sexual pleasure, Flanders advises, “Just tell them that God wants them to ignore everything in their bodies that God is making happen.” In other words, Ned Flanders is no fun. His faith keeps him from enjoying life’s ordinary pleasures. He says he grounds his behavior in Scripture: “I’ve done everything the Bible says – even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!” 

Okay, that line actually is funny, because the Bible is full of contradictions. But if Ned Flanders is the only Christian you encounter on a regular basis, you might think all Christians are like him. A painful Ned Flanders moment that sticks in my memory is when Ned and his family return from a trip, and Homer asks where they’ve been. Flanders replies, “We went away to Christian Camp. We were learning how to become more judgmental.” 

Ouch. Double ouch.

And perhaps worse, Ned Flanders isn’t cool. 

I’m not saying “The Simpsons” should get rid of Ned Flanders, or that conservative Christianity and maybe even Christianity in general don’t deserve a ribbing. Comedy is an effective form of social commentary, and as someone put it recently, the church isn’t being persecuted; it’s being challenged to act like Jesus. But “The Simpsons” is one of the most popular shows in television history and has aired for over 30 years. 30 plus years of Ned Flanders, the corny, goody-two-shoes caricature of an American Christian. I fear that for many, especially folks under 40, Ned Flanders is the face of Christianity. If you think being a Christian means being like Ned Flanders, why would you choose that?   

I wish there were a way to balance the Ned Flanders effect by reminding people of the many people who really deserve to be the face of Christianity, who have acted like Jesus. Of course folks have heard of Martin Luther King, Jr., but they might forget that he was a Christian pastor acting on the most basic principle of his faith: love your neighbor as yourself. 

They might not remember that William Wilburforce, the British politician and leader of the movement to abolish slavery, was an evangelical Christian.

They may never have heard of Oscar Romero, the El Salvadoran archbishop who spoke out against social injustice and violence amid the conflict that led to the Salvadoran Civil War. Romero said, “The ones who have a voice must speak for the voiceless,” so he spoke up. He was assassinated for doing so.

They also probably never heard of Dorothy Day, the Catholic journalist and activist who insisted on the preferential option for the poor and helped establish the Catholic Worker Movement. She practiced civil disobedience, which led to her repeated arrest, including in 1973 at the age of seventy-five.

They may never have heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian who resisted Hitler and Naziism and was executed for it. 

They likely never heard of Dom Helder Camara, the Brazilian priest and liberation theologian who said, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

Closer to home, they may not know about Glenda Hope, the Presbyterian pastor who led San Francisco Network Ministries in the City’s Tenderloin neighborhood for decades, a ministry that serves the unhoused, the drug-addicted, and the outcast. She established San Francisco SafeHouse to help women escape prostitution and continues to work closely with that organization.

And they probably haven’t heard of Janie Spahr, who describes herself as “a lesbian, feminist, Presbyterian minister committed to justice issues for the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender community, pursuing connections for wholeness with other oppressed communities claiming their freedom.” I’ve known Janie and worked beside her at various junctures since the early 1990’s before I went to seminary. She has met hostility and rejection with a colossal heart and genuine love. Her bold leadership has transformed lives and communities.

Janie Spahr turns 80 this month. I thank God for her long, courageous ministry. Janie Spahr, Glenda Hope, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others, ordinary folks who walk the walk, who march in Pride Parades, help with disaster recovery after hurricanes, stand up for Black Lives Matter, fight for fair housing, welcome the stranger, heal the afflicted, offer water to the thirsty and food to the hungry: these should be the faces we associate with the Christian faith; these are followers of Jesus. 

Ned Flanders isn’t a bad guy, but he doesn’t work as Christianity’s poster child, and he’s held that position for a long, long time.

 Luke 12:13-21

   Someone asks Jesus to help settle an inheritance problem with a brother. Jesus declines. He warns about the dangers of greed, and then tells a parable about a rich farmer with so much wealth he decides to build bigger barns to hold it all. But that very night, he dies. He learns, as we all must, that you can’t take it with you. 

   Jesus doesn’t say this man is wicked or evil. He doesn’t say he cheated anyone or exploited his workers. He says this man is a fool. Exactly why isn’t obvious, especially in our culture. He’s a success, right? But listen to the man’s monologue. In the first place, you have to wonder why he’s alone. Where’s his family? Where are his friends and workers? Then, notice how many times he says me, mine, my. In three verses, he uses first person singular pronouns eleven times. My crops, my barns, my grain, my, my, my. He sees himself as completely self-sufficient, and he sees all his wealth as his alone. There’s no hint of gratitude, no acknowledgement that “The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it; the world, and those who live in it.” (Psalm 24:1)

   At my father’s memorial service a few years ago, my brother told a story that took place during my family’s sojourn in Des Moines, Iowa. When my brother was 10, he was big enough and a good enough athlete that he made it onto the Little League team for 11- and 12-year-olds. His team ended the season at the bottom of the league. Maybe that’s why their coach decided he’d had enough and quit. The following spring, my dad stepped in as the coach. He started the team with fundamentals and moved them on to practicing more complicated plays like squeeze bunts and pickles. That year, they won the league championship. But, said my brother, that’s not what this story is about.

   My brother’s league sold popcorn to raise money for ball fields and umpires and such, the way Girl Scouts sell cookies. It was premium popcorn, and remember, this is the Tall Corn State, so standards were high. This was not your Jiffy Pop or even your Orville Redenbacher. This popcorn popped into cloud-like kernels the size of gardenias. It was 2 pounds for a dollar. My dad required the boys to wear their uniforms, including their caps, when went out to sell popcorn. My brother said they looked like a Norman Rockwell illustration. Under my dad’s encouragement, my brother’s team sold more popcorn than the other seven teams in the league combined. My dad drove my brother and three of his friends to several neighborhoods around town, and those four boys alone sold ten times as much popcorn as the rest of their team. But, said my brother, that’s not what this story is about.

   On the way home from their last popcorn sales trip, sitting in the back seat of my dad’s blue Oldsmobile, my brother and his three friends started imagining the prizes they’d win for selling this much popcorn. That was part of the incentive: If you sold a certain number of pounds of popcorn, you’d earn points worth prizes, and even more points meant even more and bigger prizes. My brother said it was like visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. And then my dad looked in the rearview mirror and said, “You know, boys, if you share your points with the rest of the team, then everybody on the team will get prizes.” My brother said their first response was, “Share!?! What are you talking about!” But the boys thought it over for about five minutes and decided my dad’s idea was a good one. They shared their points with the rest of the team, the whole team won a trip to Minneapolis to watch the Minnesota Twins play, and every boy won prizes. My brother learned that by sharing what they had, they lifted up the whole team. And that, my brother said, was our dad – and that’s what this story was about. 

   By sharing, we lift up the whole team. It’s so obvious, isn’t it? Which is exactly why the rich man was a fool. 

   Now, this might be where a preacher could throw in some statistics about how the three wealthiest Americans own as much as the entire bottom half of the population; how big corporations, CEOs, and a handful of extremely rich people have vastly more influence on public policy than the average American; how wealth and power have become one and the same, even to the extent of undermining democracy. You might even speculate about what our society would look like if the ultra-rich and corporations paid more taxes, or if the minimum wage were increased. I recommend taking a look at books or articles by Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, current UC Berkeley professor and author, but there’s plenty of literature out there explaining the economic, social and cultural reality that by sharing, we lift up the whole team.

   It’s so obvious. May God grant us all wisdom. 

Luke 11:1-13

072022.Blog

   You’re in my prayers. Please pray for me. Let us pray. These words trip easily off our tongues in the church. Praying is what we do. Prayer and Scripture are the pillars of our worship and much of our life together. And yet, I’ve probably heard more questions about prayer than any other spiritual issue. Behind these questions lie our beliefs about what prayer is. Most people think of prayer as asking God for something. The Luke passage supports this. “Ask and you shall receive.” That doesn’t sound complicated.

   But when we think about prayer as asking for something, it raises loads of questions. Doesn’t God already know what we need? Doesn’t it turn God into something like the Wizard of Oz, or some kind of divine jukebox: plug in your prayer instead of a quarter, and get your wish? What about all those people praying their hearts out who don’t get the job, don’t get cured of cancer, don’t avoid foreclosure, don’t manage to keep their kids off drugs? What about all the people whose lives are scarred by terrorism, wildfire, earthquake, warfare? Did they just not pray hard enough? As a philosophy professor once put it, “If God can influence the course of events, then a God who is willing to cure colds and provide parking spaces but is not willing to prevent Auschwitz and Hiroshima is morally repugnant.”

   Prayer isn’t simplistic. Prayer plumbs the very depths and mysteries of the nature of God. But Scripture provides us with some clues. For starters, it’s important to me that Jesus himself prayed. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus prays a lot, and it was after he’d finished praying that the disciples approach him with their request, “Teach us to pray.” He responds with Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, then he follows with a parable. An annoyingly persistent neighbor pounds on the door in the middle of the night, looking for food to give an unexpected guest. The neighbor is so desperate that his sleepy friend next door relents. Jesus implies that God has at least that much generosity and compassion in hearing our anguish.     

   Jesus tells the disciples to keep asking, seeking, knocking with the same shameless desperation. But what can he mean? Most of us have prayed for many things, good things, and not just for ourselves. We’ve prayed desperately, in fact, and still not received what we were seeking: a child’s safety, a parent’s health, justice for terrorized people, peace in a land under siege.  

   There’s a book that was on the best seller list a few years back about the prayer of Jabez, a prayer found at First Chronicles. It’s embedded in a several-chapters-long genealogy, so it’s amazing anyone noticed this prayer, but someone found it and published this little book. Now, the good thing is it apparently inspired millions of people to pray. But what makes me nervous about this book is that some people understand the prayer as sort of a magical incantation. They believe that if you pray the prayer exactly the way it’s written, which makes me want to ask, “In what translation? King James? NRSV? In Hebrew?” But in any event, if you pray it just the way it was written, wonderful doors will open to you. You’ll get rich, get a new job, and get everything you ever wanted.

   The thing is, Jesus never promised that. Jesus never said, “Ask, and exactly what you prayed for will be given to you.” Jesus is saying that what you will be given is a good gift. What’s the good gift? Well, one gift we can count on is the presence of the Spirit of God. That’s what we get when we pray. We get God. And in bringing all the desires of our hearts to God, we get God as our companion, accompanying us, in all that we care about.

   Prayer is a theological puzzle, and we shouldn’t pretend we’ve solved it. John Buchanan, former editor of The Christian Century, wrote some years ago about his hip replacement surgery.  People told him they were praying for him. He wrote, “I still can’t believe that my new hip is mending more quickly because hundreds of people prayed for me, while my buddy across the hall is proceeding with more difficulty because just two people are praying for him. But I do know this, in a new and profound way: strength and courage and hope and wholeness are imparted in the knowledge that others are holding you up to God in prayer. And I do know that God’s healing love somehow uses the love and concern and prayers of others in the work of restoring, comforting, and creating wholeness. And I am ready, once again,” said Buchanan “simply to be silent in the face of the mysterious goodness of God, and to resume my own pastoral ministry of praying for those whose needs are real and urgent.” 

   So I plan to keep on praying.

The other day a clergy woman friend confessed to a group of us that she finds that she’s shy, even embarrassed these days about fessing up to being a Christian in groups of non-Christians. We all understood. If all you know about Christianity is what you’ve seen in the media in recent years, then of course you paint all Christians with the same brush: politically and socially conservative, more interested in saving souls than saving real people’s lives, more interested in trying to convert people than listening to them and learning from them. But one among us challenged us: If we don’t speak up, actual Christian clergy for crying out loud, then who will?

On my walk the next day, that challenge blossomed into this blog. “Solvitur ambulando” means “it is solved by walking,” a quotation attributed to the 5th century bishop, St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine apparently found that walking gave him time away from distractions and the rushed pace of life, and this inspired ideas and alternatives he hadn’t previously considered. The phrase has a double meaning for me in terms of this blog. Like Augustine, I do my best thinking on my walks; in fact, I just learned in a blog how-to-video that for most people, creative output increases 60% just by walking.

But in addition, my approach to my Christian faith is that what Jesus had in mind was not so much that we are to believe the right beliefs, but that by living his teachings day by day we participate with God in bringing about the world God intends for all of us. That’s why the early Christians described themselves as being on the Way. So, for me, Christianity is a path. It isn’t the only path. Many central features of Christianity aren’t unique to Christianity, and I have tremendous respect for those who choose other paths, other faiths. And if you got stuck on the word “God,” I’m okay if you substitute Higher Power, Holy Mystery, Creative Source, whatever works for you. But Christianity is my path, the path I have chosen, or, perhaps, the path which has chosen me.

As many have said in one way or another, we make the path by walking. Christians make the path by walking together, bringing along our doubts and our questions as well as our best hopes. My intention with this blog is to raise questions, confess doubts, explore faithful responses to some of the world’s challenges, and encourage conversation, all toward the end of making the path by walking.

I’ll make this blog by walking, as well. I’m new to blogging and will learn as I go. Among other things, I plan to post stories that put flesh on some Bible passages. If people can’t imagine how those old Bible stories might speak to their lives here and now, they can’t be blamed for wondering why they should bother with them. Each week I’ll look at one of the passages in the Revised Common Lectionary, a list from which many preachers choose the passage for Sunday’s sermon. But I want to be very clear that I do not claim to be a Biblical scholar, I’m a preacher, so don’t expect me to tell you what the Greek or Hebrew really means or to dive deep into the history of the passage. I’m just interested in showing how a timeless story can be true for our lives regardless of what you believe about whether it’s fact or inerrant or any of the other words people plaster on the Bible mostly to prove they are right and someone else is wrong.

So here goes. Solvitur ambulando. Welcome to the journey.