What’s the difference between reacting and responding?

 

Another excerpt from Hearty Masculinity:

You aren’t a blank slate, you don’t come to your decisions without a history, much of which you had no control over. For that matter, you don’t “come at” or attack time hoping to subdue it, but instead you are in time, part of it. As such, we will always, in an ultimate sense, be reacting to time. Yet, as David Allen, efficiency guru extraordinaire, says, “Reacting is automatic, but thinking is not.”[1] Or, to frame it all another way, its good to respond instead of react.

Reacting is shooting from the hip (which is a good way to blow off your feet), doubling down on your hot take and first impulse. Responding is slowing down, taking a pause and a beat. Do you know where the word respond comes from, it’s etymology? To pledge again! Just as we pledge allegiance to a flag, when we respond instead of reacting, we are acting out of our faithful prior commitments, out of our allegiances and loyalties, our better and more thoughtful selves.

Responding is taking the time with those glasses of yours, to see more clearly, to pay attention. Have you heard of theSelective Attention Test? It is sometimes called the “gorilla experiment.” A psychologist named Daniel Simons would show a video of people throwing a basketball and ask the viewer to count how many times the ball was thrown. What he didn’t tell them was that a person in a gorilla suit was going to dance through the frame, and because people were too busy keeping their eyes on the ball, they didn’t even notice the gorilla in the room.[3] To quote Burkeman again, “What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is… At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.”[4]

You hear the lump of paradoxes and tensions there, right? I am asking you to pay thoughtful attention to your deepest most meaningful allegiances and self—while also acknowledging that what you pay attention to is a sort of pledge, it will determine your future loyalties and become your future self. Additionally, you’re somewhat violently tossed into all of this, yet I’m asking you to keep calm and carry on. No wonder we’re simultaneously fallen angels and anxious apes!

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[1] Allen, Getting Things Done: the art of stress-free productivity, page 16.

[3] Beck, Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age, page 4.

[4] Burkeman: 4,000, page 91.

Encountering God 1: Encountering Temptation

 

                Today is the start of an (overly… perhaps) ambitious 15-week sermon series titled: Encountering God. It will link Lent and Easter and culminate on Pentecost. 15 stories of God meeting 15 different individuals, from Adam to Ezekiel to Thomas to the 12 and eventually to all of us on Pentecost.

                What I didn’t anticipate was that, from the start, these stories resist an overly flat telling or categorization—and that’s okay, the preacher has to let the Word do what the Word Does—I gotta let God be God.

                For example, today’s lesson complicates an easy, “Look, this is how God interacts with Adam” sort of reading—instead there is a dynamic when encountering the God of Scripture that we Lutherans call—Law and Gospel. The Word must work on us some as a Mirror (showing us our faults) and Window (interpreting injustices), before it can exude grace as a Love Letter from God.

So, despite my best efforts to wrestle scripture into a simple formula—we’ll enter into this series, “Encountering God” by beginning with Encountering Temptation.

Prayer

 

God and Humanity’s story begins well enough—Work this land, care for the Garden; it is so precious. Avoid this one thing—here is a boundary I give to you, so that you will live, not die.

And The Crafty One, destroys God’s boundary and uses it for spare parts, constructing a new boundary, one with an unnatural thickness that makes it into a THING—an idol out of a rule. No longer is this some sort of good advice or gracious protection from danger, it is a violent wall keeping Adam down. Serpent asks questions predicated on rules instead of promises. “Is God stingy?” “Is God a liar?” by the end there is even an implied: “Does God think he’s better than me?”

And then Humanity’s eyes are opened to our own capacity to collapse our connections to God and neighbor—we believe falsely that it is our duty to rebuild the break—each attempt just another folly, another fig leaf, another whirl of blood and nonsense, all of it exposed. Instead of abiding with God, we rely on our weak animal heat to fix what only God can.

 

And the Apostle Paul reads all this, and sees it as the rough intersection between Death and Sin—Death’s uncontrollable descent strips away decency! We replace limits with lies, shrug off finitude and make it murder… That we are Dust, that we are Ash—it becomes an excuse and entry point for alienation, manipulation, exile, revenge, boasting of violence… and all of that just in chapters 3-4 of Genesis! Have mercy!

 

But he doesn’t stop there. He insists that God the same God who offered a lifegiving boundary, a garden to keep, good labor—that same God keeps after us—gives us gift and gift—abundance, blessing, justification—the rightwising of the world that I yammer on about so often! In Christ Jesus God deals with Sin singular with a capital S and presses back through all those vile responses to finitude until death itself is destroyed! Christ is the better way—the way from the beginning—Humanity in the Garden, embraced by promise instead of rules, instead of idols, abiding.

A New Adam—one who is Fully—completely—human. “Look! That one is a true human being!”

 

                The Human One, the Son of Man, the Son of God—when he encounters Temptation, it comes seeking the Old Adam, but finds the New One instead.

                “Is God stingy?” “Is God a liar?” “Is God better than me?” The Spirit chased you out here into the desert—thin with scarcity and want. Embrace an If/Then world—if God is truthful, if God is more worthy to worship than the powers of this world—then show me so!

                But that’s the Old Adam’s playbook—the New Adam responds, “Because God is good, therefore get out of here Satan!

                But the Tempter kept at it, still assuming he was like the Old Adam, curved in on himself, a naval gazing narcissists… and Jesus responds to continually trusting in God, naming his dependance on God, God is at the core of his being.

                “Feed yourself with this bread” “No, I will feed the 5,000.”

“Never be dependent on anyone ever again!” “Lord, give us today our daily bread.”

                “Save yourself.” “No, this path is the salvation of the whole world!”

“Look here is a lifeboat for one.” “Deliver us from Evil.”

                “Don’t you want a Kingdom for yourself?” “No, my Kingdom is not of this world!”

                “The powers and riches of this world can offer you everything—there won’t be a single boundary for you!” “Lord, Thy Kingdom Come!”

 

                In encountering temptation, we are able to see its opposite—we Encounter God.
-A God who is not stingy, but abounds in gift and grace.
-A God in whom there are no lies, but instead is dependable and trustworthy.
-A God who would never even consider the question, “Do I think I’m better than you?” because God blesses and makes right the twisted world we’re addicted to and continually construct—redeems our idols and puts them in their proper place. Do not die, but live!

Amen.

Why should men go to the doctor?

 (An excerpt from Hearty Masculinity)

              A few years back, I went to that national Adult Congenital Heart Association convention down in Florida. It was amazing, I got to meet tons of people who had similar health backgrounds to me; people born with a congenital heart condition. I couldn’t help but notice the ratio of women to men was incredibly skewed. I eventually got around to asking someone what was up with that, and her ominous response was, “they drop out.”

              She didn’t mean they join the group and then decide it isn’t for them. She meant men with congenital heart conditions drop out of care, they stop seeing their doctors about their hearts, and eventually they die. I gotta say, this seems unimaginable to me, irresponsible, embarrassing. I initially thought maybe it was some sort of stigma for men with heart conditions like mine, but having talked to friends and done some googling, it seems we men are choosing not to take care of ourselves! As Rev. Angela Denker, who wrote the book Disciples of White Jesus points out, “In an April 2023 study, the Washington Post showed that men in the United States were likely to live nearly six years fewer than women, the largest gender-based gap in life expectancy in twenty-five years.”[1]

I know it is a pain, but going to routine yearly medical examinations is a must. It establishes a relationship between you and a doctor, and gives them a working baseline of what is “normal” for your body. On top of that, they can also catch things early, so what might otherwise have been a tragedy is instead a minor inconvenience.

              For example, I went to a routine eye exam. My optometrist thought she saw something funny, and sent me on to a retinologist colleague of hers. Before I knew it, I was diagnosed with lattice degeneration and that very day they scooped my eye against the side of my head and lasered it. While that might sound traumatic—and it did feel a little like that one scene in “Clockwork Orange”— it sure beat going blind for no good reason!

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[1] Denker, Disciples of While Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood, page 98.

Hearty Masculinity: How do I figure out what my values are?

 

 (An excerpt from Hearty Masculinity)

Values can be understood as both a boundary and as a standard. As a boundary they echo the singer Meatloaf, “but I won’t do that.” As a standard they point us to our ideals and what we consider to be worthwhile. They determine both ends and means—I desire this value, but my values stop me from pursuing it in this way. I value peace over war, but that same value precludes me from resisting war through violent means.

So, one way to answer the question, “What do I value?” is to look around and notice your boundaries. Think back on your life and notice those times when you’ve clearly said no to something, or put boundaries up; think through why you did that, what was at stake, what did you value about yourself enough that doing that thing would have violated your integrity?

An exercise to help you figure out the other side of values—what you consider to be of great worth—is to pretend today is both the beginning and end of Daylight Savings Time. Today is a day where you either gain or lose an hour in your day. What would you do with an extra hour? Alternatively, what’s the one thing you’d preserve in your day if you lost an hour; what would you miss in your day if you lost an hour? Those things are probably pretty important to you!

Alternatively, if you aren’t as whimsical as me, inventing days that don’t actually exist and such, there is a more concrete way to get at this same question. Pay attention to your use of time, “keep track of your time for at least two weeks,”[1] and see to what you devote the majority of your time. As you look around at your world, keep those in mind, they hold great meaning to you.

What we value, our boundaries and our ideals, help us to know ourselves, set goals, and find our place in the larger world.

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[1] Willard, Time Management for the Christian Leader: Or How to Squeeze Blood from a Turnip, page 25.