Tag: family systems theory

Refugees, Reactivity, and Jesus

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Hello, Friends. I’m back, after a long hiatus from blogging. I’ve been working on a few life goals away from the computer this year, but now I’m settled back in to our home in Sherman, Texas and serving a church part-time in nearby Whitesboro. Beginning today, I’ll be blogging about once a week with a post each Wednesday evening. With the recent attacks in Paris and Beirut, and with the refugee crisis intensifying, I have been thinking a lot about emotional reactivity and its relationship to the practice of faith.

Nature provides us with a part of our brain that reacts instantly to a perceived threat with an instinct to fight, flee, or freeze. That part of our brain has been provided to save us when there is no time for reasonable thought or moral judgment. A striking snake, for instance, will trigger a reaction in us that will be faster than our higher brain could possibly handle. We do not observe the snake and say to ourselves, “Hmm, that snake is in a striking posture. It has the triangular head typical of many poisonous snakes. Let me look closer and see if it also has the elliptical pupils of a venomous snake or the round pupils of a non-poisonous snake. Ahh, it does have all the marks of a venomous snake. I think I will move out of its way.”

By that time, of course, we would have a viper hanging from our nose.

Refugees, however, are not snakes. The reactivity that serves us so well when we do not have time to think or make moral judgment can derail our attempt to be faithful followers of Jesus. My own denomination, the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., along with most major Christian denominations, has been active in refugee resettlement since our nation began, but especially in the aftermath of the World Wars and the devastating wars and genocide in Vietnam and Cambodia. The biblical mandate to care for the refugee carries with it challenges that the reactive part of our brain cannot handle. It requires reason and love to be the one out of step with a fearful and reactive society; to be the Samaritan who stops to help the Jew, the Egyptian who welcomes the fleeing Joseph, Mary, and Jesus, the rebellious daughter of the pharaoh who pulls Moses out of the river and raises him as her own.

In times such as these, the verse from Hebrews 13:2 printed on the banner that hangs in the front of our sanctuary calls us to a deeper love and faithfulness, a love and faith that conquers all fear: Remember to welcome strangers, for by doing so some people have entertained angels without knowing it.Version 2

The Offense of Liturgy and President Obama’s Prayer Breakfast Speech

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A young woman who grew up Christian but had never attended a Reformed or Presbyterian service came with her friends to a church I served. She told me later how upsetting she found the unison prayer of confession:

“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is nothing good in us.”

While the rest of us took the words for granted, they took her aback. She looked up from the worship bulletin and scanned the congregation, all of whom were praying aloud. “I couldn’t believe all these people were admitting this in front of God and everybody!”

To many of us in a liturgical Christian tradition, the attack from the Christian right on President Obama after his prayer breakfast speech last week left us baffled. Former governor of Virginia Jim Gilmore has written that President Obama’s speech was “the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime.”

Further, he said that the president “offended every believing Christian in the United States.”

Here are the offending words of the president:

“Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history,” he told the group, speaking of the tension between the compassionate and murderous acts religion can inspire. “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.” [Quoted from the Washington Post online]

Response from the Christian right ranged from “that was a long time ago,” to “the Crusades were justified,” to SBC president Russell Moore’s “The evil actions that [Obama] mentioned were clearly outside the moral parameters of Christianity itself and were met with overwhelming moral opposition from Christians.” Well, no.

Most of the offense seemed to come from the fiction that President Obama had intimated that Christianity and ISIS are morally equivalent.

While much of the hysteria can be written off as political crazy talk that naturally emerges when reactionaries hear the speech of a Muslim Atheist Kenyan Communist Black Panther Terrorist-sympathizing leader of the free world, some of it comes from a genuine difference between liturgical and non-liturgical Christianity.

Those of us in the Reformed tradition, especially those of us who are faith-descendants of John Calvin (who did not burn Michael Servetus at the stake, that’s a nasty rumor–he just approved of it after the fact) confess our sin each week in response to the words of Scripture,

“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make God a liar, and his word is not in us.”

The universality of sin, especially idolatry, stands at the center of our worldview.

The fact that Christianity has been distorted throughout history (and continues to be distorted to justify murder, kidnapping child soldiers, and discrimination) comes as no surprise to Calvinists. Humans being what we are, we will use every force for good, whether religion or science or psychology as a tool to serve our own ends.

In the Christian tradition that does not include a regular confession of sin, such an examination of our own religion’s history could sound weak and even treasonous. Eric Erickson’s language reveals this profound difference when he writes “When we possess Christ, we possess truth.” In the non-liturgical and fundamentalist Christian tradition, Christ is a tool or even a weapon to be possessed to give us an advantage over others. Rather than a guiding light, Jesus becomes a heavy flashlight to be wielded against opponents.

When one’s own desires stand at the center of faith rather than God’s, whether one’s desire is a ticket to heaven, winning an argument, winning an election, or making more money, that religion becomes self-serving and idolatrous. The words of Jesus and the prophets (“love your neighbor as yourself,” for instance) can get hammered into the oddly-shaped space in the heart of the self-centered pilgrim, but they will not find room to take root and grow.

Self-satisfied Christianity insulates its adherents from those who believe differently. “You seem like a nice person, too bad you’re going to hell unless you believe the same thing I do” tends to put up a wall against authentic and mutual friendship with anyone devoted to a different religious tradition.

For those of us who have Muslim friends, the fact that ISIS and Al-Qaeda are misusing Islam for their own ends is self-evident. Only someone who has no close Muslim friends could believe that Islam is, at its root, more violent than Christianity and that all Muslims are potentially dangerous.

For those emotionally cut off from actual Muslim people, violence in the Koran defines the religion of Islam in a way that violence in the books of Judges and Revelation, for instance, do not define Christianity.

The president’s point, almost lost in the kickboxing match of political competition for the victim badge, seems so obvious. It is, however, no less offensive to us righteous sinners now than when Jesus first said it: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?”

Is American Idealism Obsolete?

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I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.–Matthew 25:25

From a family systems theory perspective, we can hear two different conversations occurring over the recently released torture report. One conversation is self-differentiating and the other is reactive. The self-differentiating conversation can help us think through our nation’s moral and national security priorities. The reactive conversation dooms us to name-calling, reinforcement of social and political divisions, circular arguments, and a spiral of ever-increasing anxiety that helps nobody except those who sell advertising on fear-mongering news shows. [No link necessary. You know who I mean.]

In both conversations, we hear voices in favor and voices opposed to the interrogation methods used on detainees outlined in the report.

In a reactive conversation, people speak and act out of their automatic reflexes, especially fear.

In a self-differentiating conversation, people speak and act out of a clearly-articulated moral framework.

In the reactive conversation, even when the participants appeal to reason, they construct reasonable-sounding arguments to support their emotional reaction to the report. Whether one responds with revulsion to the reports of forced rectal feeding and freezing to death a man whose affiliation with terrorism was never established, or with anger that the report was released because it fans the flames of our enemies’ hatred, the argument that follows will be constructed from the foundation of that reflexive feeling. Cherry-picking facts always reveals an emotional reaction rather than a thoughtful self-differentiated argument. Evidence that supports that feeling will be included and evidence that supports the opposite will be dismissed or ignored.

The self-differentiated argument begins with identifying a moral framework and ethical foundation and builds a position and a proposal for action on the basis of that foundation.

john-stuart-mill
John Stuart Mill argued in favor of human liberty based on a cost-benefit analysis. His mentor in utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, advocated abolishing physical punishment, but called the theory of natural rights “nonsense upon stilts.”

For example, arguing in favor of the use of any means necessary to extract information from detainees, a self-differentiated argument begins with John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian moral framework. It builds its argument on the postulate that the ultimate goal of government is the protection of its citizens. Since that goal stands supreme over all else, the argument over the use of torture emerges as an argument over whether or not torture is effective in extracting actionable intelligence from detainees that will give the CIA the ability to catch enemies or prevent plots against the U.S. from succeeding. Killing or torturing some innocent people is the necessary price of attaining a greater value.

John-Locke-7
While Locke agreed that a government’s role was to protect its people, he argued in favor of natural human rights rather than Mills’ and Bentham’s utilitarian cost-benefit approach.

Within this same utilitarian moral framework, the argument against the use of torture argues that the cost is greater than the benefit—that the use of torture yields very little if any actionable intelligence and that it yields a great amount of misinformation from detainees that just want the torture to stop so they say whatever they believe their interrogators want to hear. Further, the utilitarian argument against torture claims that the use of torture fans the flames of hatred against us and puts our own citizens who are prisoners of war at a higher risk of being subjected to similar treatment at the hands of our enemies.

The argument that I made in a previous post stands on a different moral foundation, a moral framework elucidated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, based on traditional Jewish and Christian religious values and shaped by the humanists of the Enlightenment, both Christian and secular, especially John Locke. On this moral foundation, I argue (along with John McCain) that the ultimate goal of our government and its agents is to act out of the moral foundation of our country: that all people are created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights, and entitled to due process in the quest for justice.

In the self-differentiating approach to argument, the position we ultimately take requires two steps: first, articulating the ultimate value on which we stand, the utilitarian commitment of government to protect its citizens at all costs, the commitment of government to act out of its foundational values of human rights, or something else.

Second, the self-differentiating realm of argument weighs the evidence of whether torture serves each framework—whether it makes us safer, if one stands on the utilitarian argument, or whether the interrogation techniques used by the CIA violate our nation’s moral foundation, if we stand on the human rights argument as the ultimate value.

Here are the questions I invite you to consider:

  1. Are we too far gone toward reactivity and societal regression as a nation to have a self-differentiating conversation?
  2. Is the idealism of the American revolution (equal rights for all people) obsolete in a day when terrorism rather than tyranny threatens us more?
  3. From what ethical foundation other than utilitarianism and universal human rights might we find common ground in our national conversation on torture?
  4. How do you know when a conversation has become more reactive than self-differentiating?

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The Church Is Like A Family. Your Family.

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“When I became an adult, I put away childish ways . . .” 1 Corinthians 13:11

Presbyterian Disaster Relief volunteers get playful.

If the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. breaks out of the doldrums and thrives for generations to come, she will do so because our generation answered God’s call to lead her members to a higher level of self-differentiation.

What is self-differentiation? It is the ability to think and act calmly and clearly according to one’s deepest values and principles even in the midst of a highly anxious emotional system. People who are highly differentiated can disagree with others over significant issues and still maintain a good relationship with them.

Years ago, I helped two different couples prepare for their marriages. One couple (The Stones) agreed with each other about all the major issues they could identify from religion and politics to child-rearing philosophy and money management. The other couple (The Golds) did not. She was raised Catholic, he was raised Jewish. She was Republican, he was a Democrat. She came of age in rural California, he came of age in urban Atlanta, the deep South.

Conventional pre-marriage counseling would have predicted that the Stones, having everything in common, had a far greater chance of staying married than the Golds. However, the Stones have divorced and the Golds continue to enjoy a very happy marriage. The missing question in conventional pre-marriage counseling is the level of self-differentiation of the couple. The predictive factor I did not include in the brief description of the couples above was how playful the Golds were around their disagreements and differences and how serious the Stones were about everything. The Golds continue to live comfortably with their disagreements and enjoy engaging and teasing one another about canceling out each others’ votes on election day. The Stones divorced because they could not accept each other’s differing views over the very small issues that inevitably showed up. Mr. Stone’s absent-minded habit of leaving the toilet lid up escalated into accusations of disrespect, a spiral of passive-aggressive behavior from both of them, followed by a yelling match that sent Mrs. Stone to the divorce lawyer.

In a counter-intuitive paradox, the playful people are the grown-ups.

What does this have to do with the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., or any other denomination?

I predict that after our disagreements over gay ordination, gay marriage and the Middle East calm down, we will find different divisive issues in the future (which is as risky a prediction as foretelling market volatility at some point in the future). The pendulum may swing back and forth between conservative and liberal, but we will never go to a General Assembly in which all the votes are unanimous. (How boring would that be?)

Our future health as a denomination does not depend so much on whether we can assume God-like power over the minds of others so that they agree with us and start acting and thinking right. It depends on our ability to love one another in the midst of our disagreements. It depends on our ability to win graciously and lose without resentment. It depends on our ability to speak, not in the tongues of mortals or of angels, but in the language of grown-ups who love each other.

When have you seen church leaders or members of your family acting in a highly self-differentiated way? How has that affected you and your family and/or church?

For All the Saints, Martyrs, and Liars

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If you are preaching or listening to a sermon this Sunday from the All Saints Day lectionary, you may encounter 1 John 3:1-7. It’s a strange paragraph, pulling us back and forth between the assurance that we are children of God to the warning not to be deceived about lawlessness. My article today addresses the context of 1 John as a whole rather than a verse-by-verse analysis, but I thought you all might find it helpful.

My thinking about the whole New Testament has been greatly influenced by Amy Jill Levine’s The Misunderstood Jew and, of course, Rabbi Edwin Friedman’s Generation to Generation. Though neither of them address this particular passage, they address the larger issues. Levine reminds us of the Jewish origin of the New Testament and Friedman writes of emotional reactivity and family cut-off as if he were addressing the situation of first century members of the Christian community as their relationship to the synagogue disintegrated.

When we remember that the dividing line between Christian and Jew did not exist in the first century the way it does now as a religious and ethnic designation, it influences the way we read all of the New Testament. In the first century, Christians were a subset of Jews. Even those Gentiles who joined the first century church saw themselves as becoming Jews. The whole circumcision controversy would not have arisen if the church did not think of itself as a Jewish institution. It wasn’t until the second century (decades after the writing of 1 John) that Christians embraced an identity separate from Judaism.

The community of John (I’m convinced that the Johannine pastoral letters and the Gospel grew out of the same community) thought of themselves as Jews who believed Jesus was the Jewish messiah. The expression John uses in the gospels that is translated “the Jews” refers to some group of Jewish leaders, not the whole ethnic group or all the members of the synagogue. It’s probably more complicated than that, but the main thing to remember is that Jesus and all his disciples and almost everyone mentioned in the Gospel according to John were Jews except for the Samaritan woman at the well and her friends in chapter 4. So, whoever it is John refers to when he uses that Greek expression “hoi judaioi,” (translated “the Jews” in the NRSV) it’s clear that he uses it in a very different context than our own. We use it to distinguish between Jew and Gentile. He uses it to distinguish between one group of Jewish people and another.

The next thing to remember is how emotionally devastating it was for them to be cut off by their synagogue and many family members. (Emotional cut-off is the essence of the word translated “hate.”) It was so devastating that many members of the Christian community left to return to their families and the synagogue, renouncing their claim that Jesus was raised from the dead because they were unable to withstand the emotional pressure of the cut-off. (Here’s a bit of polemic John uses against them in 1 John 2:18, “many antichrists have come. From this we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us.”)

The claim that Jesus is the Messiah, and that his resurrection is the evidence, is the central claim of the Christian community and the claim that the leaders of the synagogue would not allow people to teach in the synagogue. It was, they said, a lie, and those who proclaimed it were liars. John joins in the name-calling. He turns this claim around with his polemic against “liars” who say they have not sinned and “liars” who say they love God but hate (cut off) a member of their own family or community. While we ordinarily read his proclamation that “God is love” (4:8) as a gentle description of our Creator, it is, in context, part of a screed against those whom John feels have betrayed him and his community by cutting them off or leaving to return to the synagogue.

Another issue the letter addresses is the accusation from some synagogue leaders that Christians were libertines. The fine line John walks between those who say they have not sinned, whom he calls “liars,” and those who abide in Jesus and therefore do not sin (3:6) makes sense only as part of that larger controversy between Christian Jews and synagogue leaders over the definition of sin. To the synagogue leaders, sin was breaking the commandments, but to John it was breaking this one commandment with two parts, “that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another just as he has commanded us.” (3:23)

The letter of 1 John, then, sends encouragement to a community of disciples of Jesus who had been cut off from (hated by) their families and their synagogue. John tells them that they are the truly faithful ones, that those who hate them (cut them off) are the liars and the sinners, and that the only way to stem the hemorrhaging of members is by loving one another as brothers and sisters.

Here’s my own reflection on this. The Johannine correspondence records for us John’s struggle to make theological sense out of the rejection of Jesus and his resurrection by the leaders of the synagogue and the tearing apart of family and community relationships. His polemical tone, using labels such as “liars” and “antichrists” indicates that the emotional reactivity had reached such intensity that those Jews on opposite sides of the resurrection claim could no longer hear each other. This emotionally charged letter records a sad failure of the church and synagogue to maintain their relationship in the face of disagreement. Certainly, the synagogue had withstood disagreements before, but this one led to the tearing apart of families and communities, and that’s hard to make sense of in the context of a loving God who calls us to love one another. Often, John presents his explanation in terms that fan the flames of division: God loves us because we love Jesus, but those who don’t love Jesus are liars who only say they love God, but they really hate God because they hate us, their brothers and sisters. While John’s rhetoric soars in places, he is at his worst when he claims the victim badge for himself and his community.

The question for us I think is this: To what extent has this emotional process of cut-off, victim-thinking, and name-calling of our adversaries repeated itself within the church? To what extent was it replicated in the Reformation? What would happen if we refused to engage in the cut-off, victim-thinking, and name-calling? What if we could embrace John’s soaring rhetoric on love without using it as a weapon against our adversaries? What if we never tired of reaching across theological, denominational, and ethnic boundaries in love? What would it look like to reach across to our Jewish brothers and sisters? Our Muslim brothers and sisters? Our Roman Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant fellow Christians? What if we simply rejected the divisions that evolved from the emotional process of the first century Christians’ failure to negotiate a peaceful coexistence with, or amicable divorce from, the synagogue?

On a more positive note, the Johannine community clearly survived because they took up John’s challenge to love one another as brothers and sisters. They provided one another with the love and strength it takes to withstand the rejection of their own families. What would it look like for us to provide one another with such love to withstand every rejection of the world outside (or other churches) while still reaching beyond our boundaries to those outside our own community?

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Sabotaging Stewardship

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This time of year, church leaders sharpen their pencils and write budgets, and preachers turn to the most inspirational sermon material we can find to motivate people to pledge and give enough to support those budgets. We do our best to talk about stewardship more inclusively than making a budget, and some of my friends do that very well. We preacher-types have become very skilled at laying out the benefits and joys of stepping up to a higher level of stewardship of our gifts, whether that means giving away more money or time, becoming a better friend, spouse, or parent, or taking better care of this earthly tent in which we live. What we almost always fail to tell anyone about is the dark side of stepping up:

If you become a better steward of your gifts, you will be sabotaged.

If you step up your leadership of an organization to the next level, and maintain a new sense of vision and clarity for more than a week, you will be sabotaged.

If you raise your fitness regimen, or your practice of spiritual discipline and ethics to a higher plane, you will be sabotaged.

Sabotage may come from others, especially Continue reading →