1. Favorite thing I read this week would have to be theologian Richard Beck’s newsletter on being a missionary in the modern world, which he titled “Stop Sneering and Get to Work.” It was sent to me by an MCast listener who I guess appreciated my tentative defense of — gasp! — the prosperity gospel on a recent episode. It’s true, my friends. As the years go on, the takedowns of prosperity theology one encounters so often among educated (i.e. prosperous) Christians have started to grate. Yes, there is the dangerous conditionality of it all, to say nothing of the overt materialism. For neurotic, privileged performancists like myself it is hard, maybe impossible, to hear the content of such preaching as anything but a theology of glory that sets people up for disappointment and disillusionment. And yet, I wonder if there is another way to hear the contentions of someone like Joel Osteen — a way not immediately available to ears like my own. Beck conjectures just such an alternative after taking a class of seminarians for a tour of Gregory Boyle’s Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles:

The tours at Homeboy are given by the homeboys. In years past, our tour guides have been younger men, in their twenties. But our tour in October was led by a man in his 50s who had multiple felony convictions and had been in and out of prison for most of his adult life. He started the tour asking where we were from and about our interest in Homeboy. We told him we were in a seminary class at Fuller and that most everyone in the group was a pastor for a church. Hearing that, our guide said, “I’m not very religious. But you know who my guy is? Joel Osteen. He’s my guy.” And then he went on to tell us how impactful Joel Osteen has been in rehabilitating his life after prison. You can imagine our surprise–teacher and students in a seminary DMin class, a group who had been sneering at Osteen for years, a sneer literally trained into us by our seminaries–standing there, for quite some time, getting a heartfelt testimonial about the impact Joel Osteen has had on this ex-felon’s life.

When we returned to our classroom back on campus, I asked the class: “So what did you learn about Joel Osteen?” To a person, we all wished we had churches that could speak to our tour guide. But we also had to confess that our guide would never come to our churches, never listen to our sermons. And yet, he was listening to Joel Osteen.

…anyone who has paid two seconds of attention to the modern world knows exactly why Osteen has such wide appeal. I think Rob Bell, when he once shared some thoughts about Osteen, got it exactly right. Bell observed that Osteen was “parenting” people who never had any parenting, or at least not any good parenting. Many people have never experienced a stable family where they heard constant and unconditional messages of positivity, praise, and encouragement. Most people never grew up hearing “You can do this! You got this! I believe in you!” But you know who says that, over and over? Do you know who believes in you? Joel Osteen.

Our tour guide was carrying a burden of shame and facing very long odds on his road to rehabilitation. Facing this, he needed positivity and encouragement. He needed a cheerleader. And Osteen was cheering him on.

In other words, where some of us hear Law (“believe harder, stronger, faster, and God will bless you with affluence”) this man and many like him had heard the Gospel (“God actually cares about you — here and now — and wants good things for you, and has the power to bring those things about”). At the risk of being over-generous(?), the ex-felon had been invited by a welcoming-and-not-condemning parent figure to bring his non-theoretical cares and concerns to God. And oftentimes those cares and concerns are circumstantial, financial, and material. God cares about that too was the message he received. That’s my conjecture at least. Whatever the case, what we hear often says as much about us as whoever is speaking.

Of course, as Beck makes clear, this doesn’t wipe away every criticism of the prosperity movement. Private planes and limited-run designer sneakers are what they are, and Lord knows I wouldn’t want to baptize the desire for more more more in spiritual languge. But I’m still hoping the homeboy’s experience will give me a little pause before launching into my next diatribe on the subject. Fortunately, Beck keeps going and applies that same pastoral imagination to the oh-so-easy target of contemporary worship music.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard seminary-educated pastors and seminary professors sneer at Christian praise music. The music is castigated for being overly individualistic, therapeutic, and sentimental. We sneer and call it “Jesus is my boyfriend” music. You’ll see the point if you listen to the lyrics of a song like Hillsong’s “Oceans” (over 129 million YouTube views) or Lauren Daigle’s “You Say” (over 242 million YouTube views), lyrics like “You are mine and I am yours” and “In You I find my worth, in You I find my identity.”

Instead of sneering at the therapeutic individualism of these songs, their focus upon me and my feelings, take a second to listen to the songs as a missionary, as a cultural anthropologist. Instead of lol lol lol how about we think for a second? To what deep ache in the modern world are these songs appealing to?

This isn’t rocket science. The reason praise songs centering therapeutic themes of God’s intimate care and love are so popular is simple. As I recount in Hunting Magic Eels, anxiety, depression, suicide, loneliness, and addiction are all sky-rocketing. So the appeal of songs like “Oceans” or “You Say” are no mystery. These songs are hitting us right where we are hurting. Their appeal is blindingly obvious to any decent missionary.

Amen x 1000. And speaking of hurting (and the difference between what we should care about vs actually care about), the story behind the fabulous Tears for Fears reunion record had me in, well, tears. The lead single is genius:

2. Next, “Ash Wednesday Forces Us to Confront Death, but It Also Offers Hope” may be my favorite NY Times column yet from Tish Harrison Warren (who’ll be speaking for us in Tyler this October). There’s a lot in it, but her point about wealth dovetailed with the Homeboy experience Beck describes. And a hearty “hear-hear” to her rejoinder to Marx’s tired refrain:

Oftentimes, by avoiding the truth of death, we end up stifling questions about the meaning of life, about God, about eternity and about who we are, what we are for, where we are headed and why anything matters at all.

Karl Marx famously called religion the opiate of the masses. He meant that faith can have a numbing affect, quelling hard questions and hampering the work of justice in the here and now. He has a point. Religion has at times been used as an excuse by some to not work for change and to embrace a pie-in-the-sky quietism. Still, in my own life, any numbing effects of religion don’t hold a candle to binge-watching Netflix with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a bourbon on the rocks. Like morphine, the pleasures of consumerism and creature comforts dull my notice of life, death, longing and the pressing struggles of this world.

There are myriad reasons that wealth might dampen faith. But one is that those of us who are privileged and comparatively comfortable can insulate ourselves from death, suffering and our own mortality in ways others cannot. Whether one is a churchgoer or not, when our bodies are strong, our stomachs are full, and we have high-speed internet and craft beer, questions of eternity seem less pressing.

These Covid years, though, asked us to face the inescapable fragility of all of our lives. Each year, Ash Wednesday asks the same.

3. “Does My Son Know You?” asks Jonathan Tjarks in a stunning personal essay on the Ringer about his terminal diagnosis and the crucial role his church friends have played in the midst of it. Tjarks, whose own father died when he was young, thinks of his son and the life ahead of him without a dad. The whole thing is worth a read, not only for its brilliance on a poignant subject, but also for its story of the everyday grace to be found in the kind of churches that don’t find their way into the headlines.

Being diagnosed with terminal cancer doesn’t happen like it does in the movies. The doctors don’t actually tell you how long you have to live. They can’t predict the future. What they say is: What you have will kill you at some point. We just don’t know when. It could be months. It could be years. It could be longer.

The only real hope they can offer is that someone might find a cure before it’s too late. All they can do for now is keep me alive as long as they can … it leaves you with a lot of time to think. I usually end up thinking about my son…

Some of those strangers from the house [church life group] that first night are now some of my closest friends. It didn’t happen overnight. It took me a long time to feel comfortable. I usually came after the life group had already started and left as soon as it was over.

But I was seeing the same people every week and I was telling them about my problems and they were telling me about theirs. Do that for long enough and you become friends. You get to know enough people that way and life group goes from being an obligation to something you look forward to.

Making the commitment to come every week is still hard. There are always other things to do. Sometimes you are tired or you had a long day or you just don’t feel like it. It gets even harder once you get married and have kids.

Nor are the people always easy to deal with. You may not have a lot in common. You have to search for things to talk about. You can be vulnerable with people and they don’t always respond how you would expect. And you certainly won’t always agree with them on how they see the world.

Life group is a different kind of insurance. People talk a lot about medical insurance and life insurance when you get sick. But relational insurance is far more important. I didn’t need my dad’s money, but I could have used some of his friends.

4. Next, I loved Jay Kim’s “When We Survey the Wondrous Cross” in CT, which utilizes the text of Isaac Watts immortal hymn as a basis for Lenten devotion:

The Cross is the great revealer, exposing the temporary stuff of earth and directing our hearts and minds toward the everlasting substance of eternity. Human value systems are upended. Worldly riches, pride in our self-sufficiency, vain pursuits — all of these and more lose their splendor and shine in the shadow of Calvary.

As our gaze begins to shift away from the deceptive gloss of earthly pleasures and toward the wondrous cross of Christ, and we see “sorrow and love flow mingled down,” we are faced with the question, “Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?” And eventually, we’re compelled toward the reality that a “love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”…

The poet George Herbert described how time (and mortality) was once “an executioner” but in light of Christ’s coming, “Thou art a gard’ner now.” We look upon the cross because it declares that death has been disarmed; it is no longer an executioner, ending our stories, but rather a gardener, tilling the fertile soil from which resurrection life rises.

5. One increasingly popular way we find our moral bearings these days would be via pop-typologies. Hardly a week goes by where I don’t run into a new personality test and categorization matrix that pushes my #seculosity buttons. To wit, over at Vox, Terry Nguyen explored “How Kibbe body types became an internet obsession,” in the process touching on the mastery such systems promise. In the case of Kibbe, there’s also a secret book and reluctant guru to contend with! Of particular interest to us, however, is the way a system that begins as a means of acceptance (or at least no longer hating one’s body), soon morphs into a means of judgment of others.

For those who do manage to decode the system, your image identity can become a sort of signifier in Kibbe-adjacent online spaces — much like how your astrology sign, Hogwarts house, or Myers-Briggs personality type can be a means to identify and relate to others. No one body type is better than another, of course. But this line of thinking can still be a slippery slope, wherein people are placed into self-selecting groups predicated entirely on appearance. This, as you might imagine, can be a huge problem for those who struggle with their body image. Still, these downsides don’t seem to affect the system’s growing popularity.

Kibbe fandom often treats determining the correct image type as the end-all, be-all — for themselves and certain celebrities. This is, in some ways, revealing about our desires. We want to fit in but only in categories we consider desirable or aspirational.

On YouTube and TikTok, it’s common for people to borrow from Kibbe’s theory to explain a celebrity’s type based on red carpet or paparazzi shots. This tendency to type others, according to David Kibbe, runs counter to his own style philosophy. His system was created for personal use, he said, not as a basis for judgment.

6. In humor, McSweeneys made me chuckle with “Ted Lasso Is a Shining Example of Kindness and Decency, and Critics Who Disagree Should Burn in Hell Forever,” but they gave us one for the ages this week with “Selected Negative Teaching Evaluations of Jesus Christ.” A few favorites being:

“Inconsistent attendance policy. Said we had to be in class by 9:00 a.m. every day. Over half the class showed up late or didn’t attend until the last meeting, but we all got the same participation grade.”

“Feels like a class for farmers. Hope you like talking about seeds. Wheat seeds. Mustard seeds. Seeds, seeds, seeds.”

“DON’T take his class if you care about your GPA!!! Treats everything like pass/fail. Only cares about you if you’re failing the class, so good luck getting that A- up to an A.”

7. Finally, writing in New York Magazine, Lisa Miller penned a heartening profile of Humans Of New York founder Brandon Stanton. The piece drips with grace and wonder; I especially appreciated Stanton’s awestruck response to the traction his work has found. I don’t think it’d be a stretch to call the account a form of “ministry,” certainly a redemptive expression of what the Internet can do. My favorite post is probably this one. Long may Stanton snap, caption, and share:

I wasn’t at Stanton’s house for 20 minutes before he started to cry. When he interviews people, he always starts with “What is your biggest struggle right now?” And when I posed that question to him, he began by describing how difficult it was to attain his success and how single-minded he had been in the pursuit of it. When he was 19, he went through a phase of being very religious. He was Christian, not in the churchgoing way but in a “God is love” kind of way, and he insisted to people he would write a great novel that would contain the wisdom of the ages and share it with the world. The intensity of his faith eventually dimmed, but today, as he sat in his living room contemplating the unlikely string of events that had made his achievement possible, he could only regard it as a miracle […]

The idea, originally, was to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and plot them on a map. Stanton had moved to the city in the fall of 2010 and was just walking around taking pictures of strangers. He began posting four images a day to Facebook, and he called his project Humans of New York. He was not, he admits, a good photographer, but in a way, that was his edge: He was every dude, awestruck at the exhibition of humanity on display in the city […]

Stanton still struggles with his professional identity. He had tried calling himself a journalist, but it never felt right. “ ‘This guy’s being celebrated as a photographer, but he’s not a good photographer.’ What do I tell my mom I am? Every time I try on those clothes, they don’t fit right.”

In our conversations, he referred to himself as an “artist,” but recently he’s also been inspired by the idea of becoming a “channel for blessings.” After his brush with mortality, he is reconnecting with the idea that inspired him as a young man: that God is everywhere and God is love and that he can be part of it. (“I’ve got that mission feeling,” he texted me a few days after our trip to the Ginjan Café.)… “I have felt God the most when He’s sent people into my life at the times I’ve needed Him most. Why not try to be that for other people?”

Strays:

• RIP Mark Lanegan. His music saw me through a dark period of adolescence. Having penned grunge’s greatest Ash Wednesday anthem, I like to think it’s no coincidence that he died a week before the big day.
• Not one, but two articles this week from the Wall Street Journal on Stephen Colbert’s life (and faith).
• “The Strange Love of a Strange God“

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