The Olympics as an Alternative Religion?

You probably didn't pick up on this watching beach volleyball during the Olympics, but the Olympic charter details some rather noble goals for itself.  The charter states that "Olympism is a philosophy of life," and the goal of olympism is "to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity."  In fact, "the practice of sport is a human right."

One of the things to recognize is that the Olympic philosophy is infused with religious concerns.  A couple of weeks ago, Christopher Gehz traced the history of the Olympics in more modern times, noting that the Olympics were revived in 1896 by the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, who saw the Olympics as a replacement for the old, traditional religions like Christianity:

“Deeply suspicious of conventional theistic religions . . . they promoted Olympism as a substitute for traditional faith.” Church historian Elesha Coffmann adds that when Coubertin “announced his decision to reinstate the games, he said, ‘The first essential characteristic of the Olympics, both ancient as well as modern, is to be a religion. . . . It represents, above and outside the churches, humanity’s superior religion.’”

As president of the International Olympic Committee from 1952 to 1972, [Avery] Brundage proved himself “Coubertin’s most dedicated disciple.” He proclaimed Olympism to be a 20th-century “religion with universal appeal which incorporates all the basic values of other religions—a modern, exciting, virile, dynamic religion.” And while the Jesuit-educated Coubertin had based Olympic ceremonies on Catholic rituals, Brundage used the occasion of the 1960 Rome games to imply that “Olympism was certainly superior to medieval Catholicism and perhaps preferable to modern Christianity as well.”

We might imagine ourselves to be a more secular society today, and less religious, but the reality is we will always be religious creatures, who seek to bring meaning to life.  Secular society may be marginalizing people who practice traditional Christianity, but as creatures created in the image of God, nothing can drive the religious impulse from our lives.  We will always have a need to create meaning and seek an overarching narrative to define our lives.  The Olympic philosophy sees sport as a way towards world peace and human dignity.  The Christian faith sees the advancement of the kingdom of God as key to the world's renewal.  I know which one I'm putting my faith in.

Ada Herald Pastor's Pen July 24, 2014

A Necessary Conversation
     
   Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing with readers our family’s technology agreement.  Our approach isn’t foolproof by any means, and one of the things that I have learned the hard way is that it’s best to go slow with handing out digital devices and technological privileges.  It’s harder to take away a digital freedom once granted than it is to be cautious in handing out the privilege in the first place.

   Caution is the order of the day.  Our new technologies are changing our lives in unprecedented ways and it is the better part of wisdom that we approach them with a measure of care.  The technology agreement we adopted provides guardrails in terms of our time by providing opportunities to check out (especially in the evening and on Sundays) and in terms of the content we create or allow on our devices.

    When it comes to content, the overwhelming problem today is pornography.  According to the Huffington Post more porn sites are accessed per month than Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter combined.   Blogger and youth speaker Anne Marie Miller has travelled the country speaking to “church kids” at camps and has found that more young kids are exposed—and addicted—to pornography than ever before.  She points out that Google is the new sex education classroom for today’s children, who are typing in unfamiliar phrases and getting more than they bargained for in the search results.

   Ms. Miller counsels parents not to make the mistake of thinking that your kids are the exception.  As you hand out a new iPhone or iPod touch to your children, it would be wise to discuss your expectations regarding what types of sites are appropriate to visit.  We recently took the step of installing a wireless router in our home that routinely filters questionable content on any device connected to it.  Even if you trust your kids, don’t underestimate the seductiveness—and destructiveness—of this type of content.

   Content isn’t just something our kids are viewing, but it’s also something they’re creating.  A healthy technology discussion with your kids would include reminders that anything they post online is there for the world to see—forever.  Nothing can really be taken back.  We counsel our kids to not hide behind their devices.  We should all have the courage to post only something that we would be willing to say to someone’s face.  If you’d like to see the whole tech agreement we crafted, it will be on our church’s website this week at www.adafirstpres.org.

Ada Herald "Pastor's Pen" for July 17, 2014

Look at Me

   My five year old son has taken to a new phrase:  “Look at me!”  He recently wanted to show me a new pair of skates and how well he was gliding around the driveway with his hockey stick.  And until I looked up from my phone, he was relentless in his demand.  It would have done no good, as we parents are prone to do, to insist that I did glance up when he wasn’t looking.  Kids see right through that.  They crave our undivided attention.

   To help us be present for one another, our family has adopted a technology agreement with various sections:  foundations, time, and content.  As I pointed out last week, our smartphones and devices especially challenge our ability to stay focused on the people who are physically near us.  We try to address this challenge with the following guidance:  “To be a good friend, and fully present to others, I will put my device away when having a conversation.  I will silence it in public, especially at churches, restaurants, and movies.” 

   Jesus taught us, and most people I know agree, that we should love our neighbors as ourselves.  How do we love ourselves?  We love to be noticed, to have someone listen to us and understand us.  We don’t like to be put on hold or told to “wait a minute” while someone takes a call or checks a status update.  We love by giving ourselves, fully and in the here and now, to another person.

   We used to know these things more intuitively.  In the past if we had gone out to dinner with a group of friends, we never would have thought to take out a book and begin to read.  We would’ve been thought anti-social or worse.  But as Christine Rosen observed in an article for The New Atlantis, the opposite is true today:  “the group is never expected to impinge upon the individual’s right to withdraw from social space by whatever means he or she chooses.”  The friends need to “get over it” if one of their members is thumbing through Facebook while the dinner conversation proceeds.

   An attorney friend of mine recently invited me to dinner at a private club.  During dinner, as he reached for the smartphone in his pocket, he told me he received over 100 emails a day.  Bringing the phone out on the table, he quickly retreated and put it back when he remembered the club had a rule that patrons were to keep phones away during dinner.  We will know that the human race has made progress when we don’t need rules and guidelines to tell us what we know intuitively:  we are creatures who flourish when others look at us and don’t immediately look the other way.

Ada Herald "Pastor's Pen" for July 10, 2014

Coming Unplugged

  Last week, I began to share with you my family’s technology expectations, which are guidelines we have developed and discussed with our children to help our family navigate the various iPods, laptops, and smartphones in our lives.  Our guidelines come in three parts:  foundation, time, and content.  We deliberately placed “content” last, because technology’s biggest danger isn’t so much the negative content it might deliver to our inboxes, but its power to shape our humanity in entirely new ways.

   Nicholas Carr argues in his well-received book The Shallows that the internet revolution has not only brought unprecedented information, but also greater superficiality in our interactions with that information.  We are distracted, constantly interrupted by texts or notifications on our screens.  We can’t think deeply anymore.  We try to multitask, which hinders our ability to concentrate on a single task with greater success.  And perhaps most devastating, we mistake information for wisdom.

   In our family’s technology agreement, we try to tackle this problem by encouraging our teens to examine their “all in” approach to technology.  Under the heading “time,” we state, “I will not text or email while doing school work, because my intellect best develops when focused.”  We further encourage our children to realize that life is bigger than technology with the following guideline, adapted from Janell Burley Hofmann: “I will leave my device at home from time to time and feel safe and secure in that decision.  I am bigger than technology.”

   Probably the most important guideline we have as a family is our “device Sabbath” on Sundays:  “I will observe a digital Sabbath from Saturday night through Sunday after supper.”  We ask our teens to check their devices in with us on Saturday night, and then we return them after dinner on Sunday evening.  That gives us worship and the afternoon free to be more in touch with God and each other than everything else in the world, which seems to run along just fine even when we’re not checking status updates.

   I later discovered that author William Powers also takes an internet Sabbath for the entire weekend in his helpful book Hamlet’s Blackberry.  It’s not just Christian families who are trying to get a handle on technology’s intrusion into every corner of our lives.  We all recognize that these devices aren’t merely tools that give us content; they are changing our mental and physical habits and impacting how present we are to our neighbors and families.  Deliberately unplugging at key times during the week will help us reclaim an important part of what it means to live.

Ada Herald "Pastor's Pen" for July 3, 2014

Questioning Tech's Triumph

   A few years ago, my mother proposed getting us altogether at a lodge that could house my family (no small task) along with my siblings and their families.  We enjoyed being in each other’s physical presence, but I couldn’t help noticing that something else had stolen into the center of our family—devices that took us away from each other:  cell phones, iPods, and laptops.  It seemed that we were checking out as much as we were checking in.

   Some years ago, cultural critic Neil Postman observed that “technology does not invite a close examination of its own consequences.”  And therein lies its greatest danger—we have so quickly fallen into this world of constant connectivity, that we haven’t taken the time to ask questions, set boundaries, or think about whether the changes are themselves changing who we are in some profound way.

   Thankfully some folks are starting to ask questions.  One question I heard came in a proactively titled article by Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” which ran in the Atlantic a few years ago.  Another question came when my wife showed me a book called iRules by Janell Burley Hofmann, who seeks to answer the question, how do I wisely put an iPhone in the hands of my young teen? 

   Her book got me thinking about how I wanted my own children to use and interact with their various devices, and so my wife and I developed a guide that I have shared with my own children as part of our technology expectations as a family. The foundational part, in particular, is written from our family’s Christian identity:  “Since I am an ambassador for Jesus Christ and desire to glorify God, I desire to let my Christian faith inform my use of technology.”

   It may surprise you to know that technology actually plays an important role in the Bible.  Adam and Eve were put in a garden to work it and care for it for the glory of God.   Christian discipleship, in part, seeks to honor what it means to live and work in this world under God’s lead.  We certainly have an interest then in technology, the tools that manage and make the world God has created.  We should be asking questions about technology and its impact on our lives in God’s created order.  In the next week weeks, I’ll share with you more specifics from our family’s technology agreement to continue that conversation.

Christmas: Naughty or Nice?

Christmas: Naughty or Nice?

Two Reactions

Around Christmas time, I usually encounter two different attitudes from Christians with respect to the holiday. Some look down on Christmas as a celebration growing out of pagan practice and therefore refuse to participate. The Puritans were well-known for this outlook, and it continues in certain quarters today among separatist-minded believers and independent churches. Others celebrate it with gusto, taking a great deal of comfort from it while lashing out at the crass commercialism that threatens it. Here the sentiment seems more at home among Christians in mainline or broadly evangelical churches.

I recently finished reading Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, written in 1912 by Clement A. Miles. The book is a detailed look at Christmas and its development and how the church has responded to Christmas at various times in its history. The book has offered me an opportunity to reflect on the two attitudes described above, both of which are somewhat out of balance and fail to grasp the complete historical picture of Christmas.

Is Jesus the Reason for the Season?

Among those who look to Christmas as the high point of the Christian year, you often find the popular idea that “Jesus is the Reason for the Season.” Anything then that attacks the Christian meaning in Christmas is the enemy. There seems to be an implicit belief in this view that the church, at one time in the past, established Christmas independently to celebrate Jesus’ birth, and now in recent times, Jesus has been arbitrarily removed by the secular culture. Jesus’ removal is seen in the abbreviation “Xmas,” or the bland “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” on greeting cards, or the excessive commercialism and entertainment associated with the season.

This view has a long pedigree. Around 1400 a monk Alsso of Brevnov, laments the perversion of Christmas practices. Instead of presents being given as a symbol of the gift of Jesus to humanity, they are given because if one doesn’t give, he will be unlucky in the new year. Instead of money being given freely to the poor, it is given in the hopes of securing wealth in the coming year. Alsso grieves the loss of Christian meaning in these rituals. But as Miles points out in his book, “there can be little doubt that precisely the opposite was the case—the Christian symbolism was merely a gloss upon pagan practices.” (pg. 141)

In order to understand Miles' comment, one must recognize that Christmas didn’t develop independently. Many of the customs surrounding Christmas derive from other festivals, notably the Roman celebration of the New Year called Kalends. The Greek sophist Libanilus describes the festival: “The impulse to spend seizes everyone. He who the whole year through has taken pleasure in saving and piling up his pence, becomes suddenly extravagant. He who erstwhile was accustomed and preferred to live poorly, now at this feast enjoys himself as much as his means will allow…. People are not only generous towards themselves, but also towards their fellow men. A stream of presents pours itself out on all sides.” (pg. 129) Additionally at Kalends, homes were often decked with greenery, which perhaps played into the development of the Christmas Tree, found first in Germany in the early 17th century.

Christmas itself was first celebrated on December 25th by the church in Rome in the 4th century. The date itself, of course, is not the actual day of our Lord’s birth, but may have been chosen by the church to replace the pagan festival commemorating the return of the sun at the winter solstice. Miles asks what could be more natural than the church choosing “this day to celebrate the rising of the Sun of Righteousness with healing in his wings, that she should strive thus to draw away to His worship some adorers of the god whose symbol and representative was the earthly sun.” (pg. 8)

Given that Christmas and the Kalends were celebrated near the same time, the excesses of Kalends began to make their way into Christmas. Over time a variety of superstitions from many cultures found their way into the melting pot of Christmas. There were many popular folk festivals from the November harvest all the way through the New Year that contributed in some way to Christmas as we know it today. Christmas is not a pure, isolated event. If anything, history shows that pagans have the greater claim to be upset with the church for perverting its practices than the other way around. Gift giving, for example, in pagan practice, was meant to bring favor in the New Year. Gifts of coins were good luck tokens so that the year would continue as it began—with wealth. Only later did the church associate gifts with God’s great gift of the incarnation.

A Christian with a high view of Christmas is free to bring his or her meaning to Christmas. We are free to reflect on the incarnation as the gospels do in their opening pages. But it seems misguided to allow oneself to invest too much significance in the holiday. The future of the kingdom of God does not depend on a secular culture putting Jesus back into Christmas. The world will go on being the world with all of its excess and rebellion against God. We may rightly bemoan this state of affairs, but it’s not a new or surprising development. Far more significant to the future of God’s kingdom is the everyday fruitfulness of God’s people as they focus on the Christmas virtues of love and generosity every day of the year.

Is Paganism the Reason for the Season?

Given the pagan backdrop to many Christmas practices, some have taken the opposite approach to the holiday, refusing to participate in any way. As far back as the 6th century, Caesarius of Aries spoke out against the Roman Kalends and its influence upon the church at Christmas: “On those days, the heathen, reversing the order of things, dress themselves up in indecent deformities….These miserable men, and what is worse, some who have been baptized, put on counterfeit forms and monstrous faces, at which one should rather be ashamed and sad.” (pg. 130) The writer goes on to lament gift giving, with its emphasis on securing wealth in the New Year and feasting, which often led to gluttony, immorality, and drunkenness. Responding to these abuses, the church declared a public fast during the Kalends. To participate in these activities was to share in the pagans’ sin.

Protestants also reacted against many superstitions that developed around Christmas among everyday Christian people. In Germany for example, “cradle rocking” became quite popular in the 14th century where an actual cradle with a figure of the Christ-child was rocked, allowing the worshipper to express devotion to the baby Jesus. In Upper Austria, a wooden figure of the Christ-child would be passed throughout the congregation, where each member kissed it reverently and passed it on throughout the church.

According to some observers, the problem with such traditions is that they never take us to the cross. (pg. 77) The babe never grows up. It’s easy to revere a child on a sentimental level for its cuteness. He is more like a universal little brother than the savior of the world. There are paternal instincts that come into play, exciting one’s love for the babe. But the central message of sin and redemption isn’t made explicit with such customs. The focus is wrong. In the Puritan critique of Christmas, to focus on a particular holy season was also wrong. There were no holy days; instead, the Lord’s Day worship on Sunday was itself a holy day. To set Christmas apart as a special time meant that people would mistakenly come to believe that they could honor God by observing Christmas while ignoring the significance of weekly worship.

The question to answer then is whether or not Christmas is so compromised with paganism and superstition that it should be avoided. Although it may be easier, in an effort to avoid all appearance of compromise, to cast aside Christmas, a more nuanced view is possible. In the development of Christmas, there are two streams that flow forward in time. There is the pagan stream with festivals like the Roman Kalends. As this stream moves forward in time, it picks up many other rituals from various folk religions—anything from Christmas trees to setting out food on the table for Santa Claus. Then there is the Church stream, which has established seasons like Advent and Christmas to focus on the incarnation during times of worship. Advent, leading up to Christmas Day, focuses on the coming of the Messiah, utilizing Old Testament prophetic texts that call for repentance and preparation. Christmas services themselves often focus on lessons from early in the gospels that tell of Jesus’ birth and the fulfillment of God’s promises to the world.

The tension for Christians is found in that these two streams have poured into each other, forming a river that is now modern Christmas. For some, the pagan stream has polluted the church stream and so the whole river is avoided. But why should Christians abandon the great worship resources developed by the church over the years simply because the pagan stream also influenced Christmas? Should we give up singing profound Christmas hymns simply because Santa Claus is at the mall? Should we give up Advent-themed worship with its biblical calls to repentance and waiting because there is a danger that some will be tempted to covet and overspend on Christmas gifts? For Christians to abandon their own liturgical heritage surrounding Christmas is to be defeated by the pagan stream.

Other questions feed into this tension. For example, why did the church establish a Christmas stream to begin with? The church has no mandate in scripture to observe Christmas, so why is it emphasized at all? This question moves us into larger debates about the use of a church calendar, but suffice it to say here, every pastor establishes preaching texts and themes for the year. It seems hard to argue with the practice of picking scriptures that emphasize the incarnation once a year during a focused time. The announcement of Immanuel, God with us, is the biggest news the world has ever heard. It is appropriate for churches to order worship around this theme and sing songs reflective of the hope proclaimed in the opening chapters of the gospels.

With regard to the pagan stream, some wonder how far Christians may practice activities that arise specifically from paganism. For example, the setting out of food on Christmas Eve seems to have developed from the pagan notion of feeding one’s dead ancestors, who would return at the turning of the year. Feasting, and especially the use of ham for the Christmas dinner, probably developed from the Novemeber harvest festivals, where pigs were often the sacrificial animal of choice. Can a Christian practices these traditions without being polluted by them?

Surveying these rituals in his book, Miles makes an important observation: “The denigration of [pagan] religious rites into mere play, is, indeed, as we have seen, a process illustrated by the whole history of Christmas.” (pg. 225) In other words, whatever beliefs may have at one time been associated with particular pagan rituals, they have been emptied of meaning over time as Christmas has absorbed them. In other words, the church stream has also had a sanctifying influence on the pagan stream. As the church took over certain rituals and gave them new meaning, the older pagan associations simply vanished. With the exception perhaps of some pagan revivalists, nobody believes anymore that a Christmas tree has sacramental overtones where the tree imparts some of its life-giving spirit to the household. Instead, the evergreen seems an appropriate symbol for Christmas—that in the barrenness of the world, there is still life and hope for a future fruitfulness through the Messiah.

Individual Christians would do well to strike a balanced approach to the holiday. It’s naïve and overly optimistic to hope that the world will somehow restore Jesus to the center of a season that developed along several fronts, the church being only one among many. Miles’ book is helpful for pointing out that Christmas speaks to a universal hope found in the human heart for something better; it is trans-religious in a sense. But that doesn’t mean that Christians can’t profit from Christmas either. The church knows that the world’s only hope for peace is found in the incarnation. Why not celebrate in worship what the New Testament affirms: “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

Ada Herald - Pastor's Pen Article October 29 2009

I remember with fondness my Jr. High Sunday School teacher. He put up with a lot of nonsense from me and my friends. We were the ultimate tangent-takers, attempting to derail his teaching down any number of speculative spurs. Usually we tried to steer the conversation around to the fate of people who never have an opportunity to hear the gospel preached to them. Will God condemn them?

The tables were turned on me the other night when, at the last minute, I was called to teach a class of 5th graders at the church. Improvising, I turned it into an “ask the pastor” type of event, encouraging the children to ask me anything they ever wanted to know about the Christian faith. For some reason, the questions always found their way back to dinosaurs. How do they fit in the bible?

Christians, it seems, have a perpetual desire to speculate. We enjoy taking the tangents, especially on matters where we don’t have all the answers. One of the things I have come to appreciate about John Calvin, the forerunner of Presbyterian thinking, is how cautious he was when it came to matters that were not clearly defined in the bible. He was continually criticizing the speculators.

In a passage early in the Institutes, Calvin writes that God is shown to us “not as he is in himself, but as he is toward us: so that this recognition of him consists more in living experience than in vain and high-flown speculation.” Calvin believes that God can be known. He has made the case that God is known ultimately in the bible. But he also makes the case that the bible doesn’t give us exhaustive knowledge of God. We do not know God “as he is in himself.”

To put this another way, God reserves the right to be God. We are finite. We like to speculate about questions that are on the fringes of the bible, yet if we go too far in our speculation, we take the risk of overstepping the boundaries between creator and creature. “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord.” (Isaiah 55:8)

Instead, Christians would do well to discipline their minds around the core truths of the gospel—the things that are clear and well-attested in scripture. The Apostle’s Creed gives us a good indicator of the core message that should permeate our thinking. Paul encouraged Timothy to rebuke the speculators of his day, those who devoted themselves to “myths and endless genealogies.” (1 Tim 1:4) Paul reminded us that “these promote controversies rather than God’s work.”