Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?

It’s humbling. Jeff Foxworthy, of “You Might Be a Redneck If…” puts a series of questions to adults who are paired with fifth graders who serve as coaches to the game show participants. If the participants are smart, they go with the fifth grader’s answers rather than their own. But if they think they’re smarter than a fifth grader and go with their own answers and lose, they have to look into the camera and say: “My name is _________, and I’m not smarter than a fifth grader.”

The show works because there’s an assumption that learning is progressive and cumulative, that the farther we move in life the smarter we become. A fifth grader, we reason, should have a fifth grader’s grasp on information, life, and reality, and a forty year old, a forty year old’s grasp on information, life, and reality. It’s funny to discover that that assumption may not always hold true. Well, sometimes it’s not so funny.

Take the Christian life, for example. It’s cute for a three year old to think that Jesus is the Easter Bunny’s friend who hides Easter eggs and fills Easter baskets with chocolates. But when a forty-three year old’s understanding of Jesus isn’t much different from that, we’ve got a problem.

There’s a lot of hand wringing these days about the “graying of the church.” Denominational types, desperate to find ways to capture the Holy Grail of church growth, the 18 to 38 demographic, will do anything, and I mean anything, to put young adults in the pews, and knowing that many (not all!) young adults are motivated more by feeling than thinking have banished serious, historical, contextual Bible study to the margins of church life. But I’m not nearly as worried about the “graying of the church” as I am the “dumbing of the church.” Biblical illiteracy among Christians is epidemic. Preachers used to be able merely to allude to biblical stories and then move on to make their theological points assured that the listeners had already filled in the necessary details from their own repositories of biblical knowledge cellared from years of serious, historical, contextual Bible study. Nowadays, the preacher can assume nothing, not even the most basic of biblical stories.

Part of the problem is marketing – a minimalist approach to Christian education that strips the Story down to the bare minimum predicated on the assumption that a generation that grew up with sound bytes and “attention deficit disorder” can tolerate little else. Part of the problem is theological – the assumption that “when I got saved” I got all I’ll ever need. A fifth grader should have a fifth grade understanding of the Christian faith, but when a fifty year old does, it’s not funny or cute anymore; it’s ugly.

In describing the Christian’s responsibility to grow up and mature in Christ, I often say: “Give as much of yourself as you can to as much of God as you can understand,” recognizing that both of these are “moving targets.” Christian formation, faith development, growing up in Christ is a life-long journey with Jesus that moves us from “faith to faith” until we “grow up to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”

Maybe we could break this vicious cycle if we were to have adult Christians stand up on Sundays and admit: “My name is _____________, and I have a fifth grade faith.” Just a thought.

Salvation's Ashes

Today is Ash Wednesday, the official start of the Lenten Season. It is a period of 40 days of preparation, examination, confession, and repentance in advance of Easter. It reminds us that there can be no resurrection until somebody dies. In recognition of that fact, classmates and co-workers will come to school and work today wearing cruciform ashes on their foreheads, unless, of course, they’re Baptists. While most Baptists have smuggled the Advent wreath into church, the Lenten cross has largely been banished to the narthex or the front lawn, the actual practice and disciplines of Lent being left to the Catholics and “high churchers.” I actually asked a Baptist minister once why his church placed a cross with a purple-hued cloth draped on it on their front lawn when I knew his church didn't practice Lent. And with level gaze he said: "Because all the other churches in town have one; we couldn't be the only church without one!" I wish I could tell you he was kidding; he wasn't.

It’s a shame, really; a lot can be learned in Lent. The tradition is quite old, dating to the fourth century. The biblical texts usually associated with the start of Lent are all wilderness texts – the wilderness wanderings of ancient Israel, and the wilderness temptation of Christ. Part of the reason, no doubt, is the symbolic significance of the number 40. Lent has 40 days; Israel wandered 40 years; and Christ was 40 days in the wilderness being tempted by the devil. Interestingly, psychologists and behaviorists say that it usually takes about six weeks (40 days) to make something a habit. Do the math. But those "wilderness times" were also a learning time, a discovery time, a testing time, a truth time. Israel learned some lessons in the wilderness they could not have learned anywhere else. Jesus learned who he really was and what he was really about in the wilderness so that, battle tested, he emerged ready to engage the demonic wherever he encountered it.

But as much as anti-Catholic bias (not to mention ignorance of church history) is to blame for the loss of Lent in the Baptist tradition, I rather suspect theology more than ecclesiology is the real culprit here. Baptists don’t do confession and repentance very well. Somewhere Baptists have gotten the erroneous and quite unbiblical idea that confession and repentance are done once, and after that they are never again revisited. Been there; done that; got the baptismal certificate. This despite the fact that the New Testament clearly states: “If we keep on confessing (Greek continuous action) our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

Somewhere Baptists have gotten the idea that repentance is “saying you’re sorry,” and that once you’ve done that, you’re done. But sin is not so easily dispatched, and that is not what the New Testament means by repentance. New Testament repentance is a life-long process of bending your life back to God. C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, put it this way: “Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like.” Get it? Repentance is not a “prerequisite” to salvation, it is salvation!

And that’s why Lent. It reminds me that diagnosis is a necessary part of cure; that there can be no resurrection until somebody dies; that the cross is not just Jesus’, it’s mine too; and that I must pick mine up and carry it daily if I am to follow him. Maybe if I can carry it for these next 40 days, it just might become a habit. You think?

Pagan Power

The media can’t decide what to call today: Super Tuesday or Fat Tuesday. By some strange twist, Mardi Gras (French for “Fat Tuesday,” the day before the start of Lent), and “Super Tuesday” (the name given by the media to the day in which 24 states and American Samoa will choose their presidential candidates), just happened to fall on the same day. Fat Tuesday, or Carnival as it is known in most places, is a sort of last big “blowout” before the forty days of fasting and self-denial associated with Lent. Its origins probably lie in the pagan festivals associated with the worship of Bacchus (Dionysus was his Greek name) in which all restraint on conduct was suspended in favor of orgiastic and frenetic feasting and partying. And so the media can’t decide what today is all about: power or paganism.

It occurs to me that it’s about both. In Mark’s gospel there is a story about James and John’s request of Jesus to sit in the “seats of power” when he should come into his “glory.” Of course, the “glory” Jesus will come into is his crucifixion, not exactly the power places James and John had in mind. Jesus senses here a “teachable moment” and turns to his disciples and lays a little lesson on them about power: “You know that those who seem (Greek dokeo) to rule over the pagans lord it over them…but it shall not be so among you. Whoever would be great among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:42-43). It was Frank Stagg, my late teacher and mentor, who first made the connection for me in this text. Commenting on this passage in a PhD seminar, Stagg said: “Did you hear that? Did you hear what Jesus just said? The will to power is pagan and cannot be redeemed, no matter who is wielding it; it can only be aborted.”

And on this day when paganism is prominent and people are vying for the “seats of power,” Stagg’s words haunt me. I know, I know, we think that the reason power goes awry is that the wrong people have it. Give it to the right people and things work out. But as Stagg reminded us that day, there are no “right people.” Like Gollum in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings consumed by lust for his “Precious,” I’ve seen people betray their best friends merely to grip a paltry piece of pagan power that every hand seized by death’s rigor must relinquish anyway. Seen it? I’ve done it!

There are no “right people.” Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely, Machiavelli said. The will to power is pagan and cannot be redeemed; it can only be aborted, Jesus said. Give it up; throw it back, destroy the Ring, Tolkien said. You’re not that smart. You’re not that good. It’s not that simple.

I’m not saying that Christians shouldn’t care about politics or vote or take part in the political process. Though we’re not “of” the world, we’re certainly “in” it. Nor am I saying that the people currently vying for the “big chair” are bad people. I don’t know them, and it’s not my call anyway. I’m saying the only power we can be trusted with is the power of powerlessness: of cross, of servanthood, and of suffering love.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Digital Image: Mangueira samba schoo parading during 1998 carnival in Rio, by Felipe Ferreira.