Hail to the Chief

Take me out to the ballgame,

take me out to the crowd.

Buy me some peanuts and a racist mascot hat,

I don’t care about Standing Rock’s pipeline spat.

For its root, root, root for manifest destiny;

If they aren’t treated fair, who cares?

For its one, two, ten thousand treaties we’ve broken

At the old political game.

Outside of family, baseball is my oldest love.  Growing up, I loved hustling out the bunt or tasting dirt after a headfirst slide. I loved Omar Vizquel enough to name a cat after him. I loved The Natural, Field of Dreams, Major League, and later on loved 42 and Moneyball. I loved mowing grass because it reminded me of outfield landscape designs at major league ballparks. 

I loved baseball so much that I went against my cardiologist’s orders and played as a senior in high school, strapping a protective plate over my defibrillator for one more summer in the sun. I loved my team, the Cleveland Indians, more than any amateur or professional sports assembly. 

This past week, Chief Wahoo has been featured for hours and hours of live television and post-game interviews. The red-faced mascot of the Cleveland Indians is everywhere, paraded through Ohio cities on t-shirts and flags and carved pumpkins. 

At the same time as this World Series, a tiny community of Standing Rock Sioux fight to retain confidence that they will be able to drink clean water and therefore live. 

23.6 million people watched game five between the Indians and Cubs on Sunday night. 

8,250 residents live on the Standing Rock Reservation. 

What image of Native Americans do you think prevailed this past weekend? A blatantly racist Chief Wahoo patched onto hats and arm sleeves, or a courageous group fighting for the environment and for their own human dignity against a country that treats them as if they were expendable? 

I grew up ninety miles south of Cleveland, in an area rich with Native American history. A local musical, Trumpet in the Land, annually tells the story of a brutal massacre of 96 peaceful members of the Lenape (Delaware) tribe. But this isn’t the history that filled my life. Instead, I often saw the mascots of other local teams we played in sports—mascots like the red-faced Indian Valley Braves, or the similar mascot of the Coshocton Redskins. 

“We are what we eat,” I was so often told as a child those days. I consumed endless images of racist depictions of Native Americans, from local and professional sports media markets. Such great consumption of these images allowed me to very easily label Native Americans in dehumanizing ways. 

A college summer spent building relationships with the Ojibwe people in Red Lake, MN helped me to vomit up all those consumed images. Yet it is so hard to reject Wahoo when the mascot is everywhere. 

Regardless of whether or not Cleveland wins this series, the world will win if Paul Dolan chooses this winter to rid the team of the chief and to consider an alternative team name. More than that, wouldn’t it be amazing if the front office was able to imagine not just a reactive response to criticism, but instead took steps to stand with Native American communities after years of affirming a racist profile picture for millions to see. 

Cleveland, you have the world’s attention right now after back-to-back seasons of major sports success. The microphone is there, right in front of you, with tens of millions listening. 

You can be a prophet of equality; you can lead the way. 

Seize the moment. 

Speak. Act.

Do it for the next generation of kids who otherwise will experience racism as normal behavior.

We are the Young / Our Lives are a Mystery

My youthfulness is ever apparent to me. This is particularly amplified because the ELCA is getting older, with the average member age now over 60. The math of my specific church setting is eye-popping: there is a 43 year gap between my age and average age of a churchgoing member of this metropolitan church located just a state away from the Lutheran Meccas of Chicago and the Twin Cities.

I will never believe that the Gospel has gone stale or had an expiration date of 2000 years. We have failed in reaching my age group with an authentic evangelistic message.

This September, I was delighted to be asked to proclaim a message at a wedding of my hometown best friends. Yet mixed into that delight was a degree of discomfort. It was not challenging because Babylon was on my people’s doorstep with plans for annihilation. It was challenging because I needed to overcome all these things in the room: church is boring, or church is hypocritical, or church is an exclusive bunch, or church is pro-Trump, or church is a crutch of hope in a sleeping/absent/non-existent God, or church is just part of the wedding day to please grandma and grandpa, or church is home to a white male God.  

Against these images of the irrelevant or harmful church, I see Jesus as radical, wild, unpredictable, and ever-inviting the marginalized – he is poet and outlaw and community organizer and healer all at once. I see the bold promises of a genderless God who longs to be in relationship with us. I see the expressive stories of our canon, rich tales that have been shared for millennia to build the narratives of communities around the world. Faith feels dangerously alive and inviting enough to ignite ongoing revolution in human lives, both my own and certainly others of my generation.  The religion I claim is not in hospice care but is still growing and speaking and feeding the body of Christ.

So when I took the floor at the wedding, this was the message in my head: “God has something to say to these people of all ages right now, and this is real life.”

Yet at the same moment, I felt too (as I often do) that this major gap exists between my identity as Christian and the identity I am assigned as a Christian. How I long for people of faith to be liberated from the restrictions of assumptions about who we are. Following Jesus and going to church isn’t about earning merit marks or punching a ticket to heaven; it is about tasting the rich hope of “the life that really is life” right now in a community of humans that hold each other up. The church wasn’t built to lag behind cultural social change in areas of human rights and inclusion; we are meant to be the prophets at the forefront of the cry and initiation of justice and wholeness around the globe.  

I stepped up to speak. I wondered about friends in my age group who spent time before the ceremony making jokes about church.  I prayed for words that would offer a vision of how God’s love gently pulls the human heart toward justice and peace, toward wholeness and inclusion, toward generosity for neighbor, toward peace and moments of divine communion…I prayed for words that would combat the images of church listed above.

There are many biblical figures lacking self-confidence, but the examples of Moses and Jeremiah help me understand that inspiration does not come for perfect rhetorical speeches. It comes from settling into your single identity—not the one you are assigned, but the one you are. In Parker Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness, he laments how most humans have “a well-rehearsed habit of holding their own knowledge and beliefs at a great remove from the living of their lives.” When the wedding began, I was living as a divided self; I was the groom’s friend and I was a candidate for pastor. One side of me had unlimited baseball knowledge and swore alongside my friends, and the other side of me had deep curiosity about God and human stories and felt the urge to speak of the love that flows from God to us, and then overflows to serve the world. When I filled the leadership void in the room, my two selves united. I never want to live divided again, because it was only as my authentic whole self that I could speak to humans and see transformation.

I have no idea what evangelism means most days for my generation. Usually it feels limited to the cross and equality stickers side-by-side on the back of my car. But that day, evangelism felt like being a leader as my undivided self, both faithful and flawed, both sinner and saint. It was this realism that actually caught the attention of my peers.

This was my takeaway: authentic truth cuts through centuries of assumptions about what Church is. All people of faith are given moments to witness and express this truth. If we have the courage to speak, we may just shock the world with a relevant message after all.

When I Grow Up

In the movie Matilda, the character Bruce is only known for his Augustus Gloop-esque gift of devouring chocolate cake.

But in the musical Matilda (which I must say moved me so deeply that I am still pondering it over a month after seeing it in London), Bruce Bogtrotter does much more than pound back pastry.

The first half closes with him escorted to “chokey,” which is not so much a funny closet of bent nails but rather a place where children are abused psychologically to be governed by fear.  

When the second half opens, it is Bruce who takes the stage alone. Exhibiting PTSD symptoms, he sings in a faint voice of the dreams he has about growing up. Lyrics that would sound silly anywhere else instead hit with intense pain. “When I grow up,” Bruce sings, he will be tall enough to climb trees, and smart enough to answer life’s questions, and strong enough to carry all the things “grown-ups” carry.

More children join him. Boldly they promise together, “when I grow up, I will be brave enough to fight the creatures that you have to fight beneath the bed each night to be a grown-up.”

The song grows in strength, swelling into this cry for courage among youth.

Then the sound quiets; the stage lights dim.

Miss Honey walks on, fully grown-up, and fully lacking the courage the children have named as their goal for adulthood. She meekly repeats the same line as the children, convincing herself that she can be brave…she can be brave enough to fight the monsters of life—an abusive Trunchbull and the selfish parents of a neglected child.

What becomes clear in Matilda is that a gap exists between the dreams of children and the reality of the grown-up life. It is the children who are the heroes of this story, and it is the adults who look like young humans needing development. The children dream of strength and brave; the adults act as immature bullies or timid cowards.

“Mind the gap,” the British say everywhere, concerning themselves with spaces between trains and platforms. Two years ago, I watched my wife write “mind the gap” when she was asked to describe her vocation. I never asked but always wondered what she meant by playing with that word choice—mind the gap between economic classes? Mind the gap between God’s dreams for the world and our own intentions?

Since seeing Matilda in July, I’ve been thinking about a new gap to mind: the gap between what we dream for our futures as children and the actual life we lead as adults.

I write this at age 24. To the outside world I have cleared some of the normative hurdles that signify I am now in the class of “adulthood”—I am married…I have a full-time job…I have a home with a yard to care for and trash to roll to the street.

But I watched Bruce dream boldly of always becoming, and I find my own youth roaring to life within me. I want to hold on to my childish ability to imagine the impossible. I want to be in constant evolution, to continue to molt even when my body stops growing taller.

I want to recognize that the bravery it takes to fight the monsters of life—fear, or bullies, or loneliness, or selfishness—this bravery never just happens but is a daily decision to do something that scares you, to take the leap of faith, and then watch the magic unfold.

This is true magic of Matilda—not her ability to make newts move or chalk write, but her ability to convince her community to yearn toward bravery.

In seminary and especially now as an intern pastor, I am often standing in places where I feel too young and not grown-up enough. I am 43 years younger than the median age of the members of the congregation where I serve. I am the called person standing in hospital rooms, or helping to lead marriage ceremonies, or proclaiming God’s unconditional grace and love for the world….and I feel so young sometimes.

But I look to Bruce and Matilda and the other brave children who are everywhere, and the anxiety about my age turns into a joy. As I navigate the gap between the fictional, created worlds of child and adulthood, I am no longer seeing the world as split between young and old.

Instead, I am thinking about the Mary Oliver question: what is it I want to do with this one wild and precious life, and how can I always be becoming toward that? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0tRDhEmdO4 

The Great Toaster Race

Gloria Dei Vivens Homo. The glory of God is the human being fully alive. So spoke my college English professor; so spoke St. Irenaeus, long ago (4^th century!) bishop in southern France.  

Last week in my “Care of Souls” class, we were asked what it meant to be a human fully alive. The responses unfortunately did what often happens in seminary classrooms. Voices slipped into attempting to respond to the question with more philosophical questions; others looked to negate or avoid the question through some language loophole. But my heart yearned for someone to speak truth to a question that felt so real and vital to me. What does it mean to be fully alive?

I didn’t speak in class that day. But if I would have, this was my answer:

When I worked for YouthWorks! in Red Lake, MN, every Tuesday morning was my turn at breakfast duty. This meant that at 6am, a random assortment of high schoolers would shuffle into the kitchen to prepare breakfast (at my instruction) for eighty people. Tuesday, however, was not your typical “just throw out those giant store brand cereal bags and some milk” mornings. Tuesday was magic. Tuesday was messy. Tuesday was marvelous. Tuesday was…..waffle day. 

On a time and money budget, however, we could not afford a fleet of Belgium waffle irons. Instead, our Tuesday morning mission was to take knockoff Eggo frozen discs and toast hundreds of them. At my first Tuesday, I was ready with every toaster of that pre-school kitchen ready to go. One hour and many blown circuits later, we served generic cereal, milk, and frowns to our diners. 

Yet out of the circuit ashes that morning rose an idea: the great toaster race.

One week later, to prep for my fresh recruits of sleepy-eyed adolescents, I leaped off the half-filled air mattress. Dashing through the pre-school halls, I placed toasters throughout the whole building. Youth were split into teams; some monitored the toasters, while others were carrier pigeons equipped with tin foil to keep freshly toasted waffles insulated for their journey to the warm kitchen ovens. 

The great toaster race, a wild human invention, is the best image I can offer for a human community that lived into joy and spontaneity and shared meals and service and wildly fun worship and storytelling. That is my picture of a summer where my humanity was fully alive.

At school, I am enrolled in five classes. So often I voice or hear about the feeling of tiredness from these days of occasional lecture and evening reading. How strange that I claim “tiredness” here, while at Red Lake we worked crazy long days and I loved every second of it. Every morning started with a leap off the deflated mattress, as I was hungry for that day’s toaster race creative adventures. I am convinced that the human being fully alive only happens in communities of love, in places where purpose and mission are clear, in homes where playfulness and care for the self and other come first. 

The great toaster race was psychotic. Imagine telling a high school sophomore at 6am after the night was just spent sleeping on a tile classroom floor that she or he is going to run the halls with toasted waffles wrapped in tin foil. Madness. Maybe this is the idea behind the statement that the only people to change the world are the ones crazy enough to think they can. We need a little loco in our normal. We needed the great toaster race.  

Places like camp or YouthWorks trips are not an escape from the “real world”—they are perhaps the most real world, the most fully alive world, where humans can be their best selves and live courageously together. They are places where even frozen waffles become banquet feasts.