I’ve ranted about this so many times, but nobody finds happiness by adding something new to their life recipe. Better vacations, bigger houses, et-al. have never worked.

It’s more effective, and much easier, to take things out of the way, like if your pancakes taste bad because you put too much pepper in the batter. The recipe doesn’t need more sugar or eggs or maple syrup or some cutesy obscure mysterious ingredient that nobody’s thought of before.

You simply need to get rid of the pepper.

With regards to life, the same goes for anxiety. It doesn’t matter what you add, nothing will get you further down the road than getting rid of it, or at least turning down the dial a bit.

If you’ve ever tried that, you know that your deepest fears dance on the strings of mighty powers. You could spend the rest of your life trying to get them out of the mix, but you never will, fully.

You can however head in that direction. It’s not entirely impossible to reduce the amount of anxiety in your recipe. Even if you only manage to get rid of a little, that’s a win.

The best place to start is with the anxiety that’s easiest to get rid of.

You’ll be encouraged to know that the most easy-to-eradicate anxiety is also a great source of it. Big victories can be made here.

For those of us who have enough money to make ends meet, reliable transportation, safety, functional health, and a roof over our heads, one of the greatest sources of anxitey is the prevalent fear about our standing in the pecking order, what amounts to a never-ending search for acceptance, belonging, respect, and influence.

Also known as status.

What follows is heavily borrowed from a sermon by Jonathan Merritt. While I’d love for you to first consider my thoughts on this, his are better. I sadly recommend that you take a listen, then, if you have time, read my stuff.

Everyone’s Game

British author and Journalist Will Storr, in his recent book Status Games, writes,

Life is a [status] game. There’s no way to understand the human world without first understanding this. Everyone alive is playing a game whose hidden rules are built into us and that silently directs our thoughts, beliefs and actions.

This game is inside us. It is us.

We can’t help but play.

We need people, plain and simple. We also need to belong to a tightly knit group where we feel a sense of place and belonging. But when these groups form, unintended heirarchies, games, and a complicated, stressful set of rules seem to form out of nowhere.

It just happens.

“… because the heirarchies themselves are invisible, we don’t know precisely where other players sit in relation to us. But we can sense it. We can observe the symbols that we’ve attached to particular values: a word affixed on a watch face, a logo sewn on a handbag, a school’s name printed on a diploma, a zip code on a mailing address, a job title on a LinkedIn profile, a blue checkmark on a social media account. From a very early age we learn to discern where we sit in these various pecking orders…” ~ Jonathan Merritt

You can understand why people choose instead to be “loners,” accepting the anxiety that comes from social isolation instead of the anxiety that comes from being part of a community.

It’s interesting to not that, regardless of how we might try to deal with our craving for status, it began at a very early age. Author Loretta Breuning claims that most people see the world through a lense they built in high school, developing neural pathways hard-wired for status.

I am not saying we should go through life fretting over who sits at which table. I am saying that your brain is constantly deciding whether to submit or seek dominance in relation to those around you. You can say you don’t care what others think, but your serotonin soars when you get respect. The good feeling motivates you to seek more. Each choice has its risks and rewards. Over time, you wire yourself to repeat behaviors that trigger serotonin and avoid behaviors that trigger cortisol. Most of that wiring is built in adolescence because the brain is more plastic then. Your teen self learned ways of navigating the social world that are still with you.

I agree, and have been status-seeking most of my adult life. As a kid, I knew subconsciously that there were games to be played, but they didn’t make much sense. In high school I learned that status meant girls, so I tried my best to catch up on whatever rules/skills were required, but I was behind, and somewhat ill equipped.

Much later, once I began attending church on a regular basis, I dove into these games like never before. This time, I wasn’t as interested in girls as I was in gaining respect and recognition. I worked tirelessly to do whatever things my community required to advance to the next square on the CandyLand® board.

I can attest to how much anxiety – and little corresponding payoff – comes from playing these games..

Worse, I’m not done yet. I can’t walk into a church building without thinking about how to climb the first few rungs of the system, hoping it will lead to more.

Be Like This

There’s an episode in the book of Matthew where Jesus’ disciples asked him, “who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

In response, Jesus grabbed a human, sat it on his lap and said, “this guy.”

It wasn’t a Roman Centurion, or a Pharisee, or anyone with power, influence, looks, or any of the other symbols our status games crave.

It was a person who had nothing, constantly marginalized in ancient Judea, a third class citizen at best. This particular human was apparently roaming the streets with nothing to do, no parents nearby to stop some homeless rando from seating their child on his lap. He was most likely a street urchin, the lowest of the low.

“He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.'” ~ Matthew 18:2-5

To paraphrase, “Your idea of greateness is the exact opposite of what greatness truly is. You want to be at the top? Walk away from this regime. Stop playing its games.”

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is so close you can touch it. ~ Matthew 3:2

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus spoke about “the Kingdom of Heaven” more than anything else, claiming that it is here, “at hand,” but that it is also within us, while at the same time something we can enter into, now, not just in eternity. Currently, it looks like a tiny, worthless mustard seed, but will one day blossom into something truly wonderful.

And beggars, children, prostitutes, and traitors own it.

Because of the Old Testament’s emphasis on the Kingdom of Heaven, the Jewish people of Jesus’ day expected a “Messiah” to show up, defeat the Romans, and establish this Kingdom in real time.

It would be the most amazing thing the world had ever seen.

That’s one of the reasons Jesus was rejected. It never happened, at least not the way his detractors expected it to happen.

Whatever this Kingdom is – a location, a regime, an eternal locale, a mindset, or some combination of all of the above – it wasn’t just central to Jewish thought, it was central to Jesus’ teaching. “Before you pursue anything else,” he said, “pursue this, then everything else that you’re looking for will fall into line.”

In other words, we can’t have what we’re looking for unless we somehow manage to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. But we can’t do that unless we seek the kind of status that a homeless street urchin has. And we can’t do that unless we’re willing to lay down our status games, the ones that have done little more than garnish the life that our souls are craving.

A Different Game

Jesus’ version of status, the kind that makes us “the greatest” doesn’t require skill, looks, material possessions, and all of the other things our status game requires. Our game says there can be no “winners” without “losers.” You can’t be at the top unless there are people at the bottom.

In our game, only a select few can have status.

Not so in Jesus’ game; everyone has a shot at his version of status, and “greatness” doesn’t depend on someone else’s non-greatness.

Ultimately, anyone can become “like a child,” so long as they have the courage and faith to do it.

I’ve tried, but it’s difficult. Being part of a community is much more interesting when you occupy the upper spaces.

But I’m old, and the life that I’ve chosen is taxing. I can’t spend my energy on kids, marriage, friends, AND worrying about where I sit in the pecking order. And whatever benefits that have come from climbing haven’t been worth the anxiety that comes with it.

And so, once a month, I wash coffee mugs at our church on Sunday morning and try to make friends. Sure, I dream about comandeering the pulpit now and again, or being called into an elder’s meeting for my expert advice on some difficult issue. But I’ve been in those spaces before. It’s no picnic to preach, or lead, and the attending status never left me with the feeling that I had “arrived,” or finally found Nirvana.

For the first time in my adult life, now in my 57th year, I’m ready to pursue a different kind of status, to learn the rules of Jesus’ difficult, alien game. If I can resurrect a thimbleful of the joy I knew when I was an actual child – a human who cared little about ladders – it’ll be a win.

There is currently no bigger win within my grasp.

A friend recently declared that, because “millions are flooding across our southern border without the (liberal) government lifting a finger,” anyone who votes liberal is an enemy of the state. Obviously, the argument goes, Biden’s immigration policy will destroy the US.

In part, he’s right. In 2022, roughly 2 million immigrants crossed the US border. That represents about .6% of the US population and amounts to ~5,000 people a day.

How many people can we handle?

Sure, immigration doubled from 2021, but there is no flood, and the government is most certainly not standing by as these people simply traipse into our country. In addition, emigration numbers are usually higher than those for immigration.

Re US destruction by immigration, that’s a theory at best.

If it was true, I could understand my friend’s frustration, and nobody could accuse him of hate speech.

If he were to instead read a few articles in defense of current US border policy, written by qualified, PhD-level analysts, and/or consider the current humanitarian crisis driving the surge, or spend 15 minutes studying how CBP actually processes legal border crossings, he might still disagree with current policy, but I’ll argue that he’d be less inclined to post hate speech.

It would certainly dial his fear down a bit.

In my lifetime, America has never been this divided. But it’s not a spirit of division that’s ripping us apart, it’s ignorance, which usually leads to fear, then isolation, then hatred. Hatred then leads to an even greater rebellion against the need to consider someone else’s viewpoint, or hop on the internet for 15 minutes to read a dissenting opinion.

Why would you read an immigration article penned by an enemy of the state?

Now, to add to our ignorance, and our fear, and our division, we’re banning books like never before, further isolating us from thoughts that don’t think like we do.

I’m not completely opposed to book banning. I don’t want my kids reading anything published by the KKK, or the “God Hates Fags” church, or anything else that justifies someone’s phobic fantasies. There are subjects that none of us want in our school/public libraries, or in public discourse.

Some ideas do nothing but harm and should be stifled.

At the same time I think everyone should read something like Mein Kampf; nothing warns us of the dark potential of humanity like the words of Adolf Hitler.

But should we ban 6 Dr. Seuss books? or Of Mice and Men. Huckleberry Finn? These are some of the titles that liberal folks would like to ban.

No Asian child should read a kid’s book that depicts a chopstick-wielding Asian person with yellow skin and slanted eyes, or Africans that look more like apes than humans. Those are offensive in a way that I-the-white-guy could never understand. I’m not complaining that Dr. Seuss Enterprises no longer publishes these books.

But banning them is problematic. Do I then have to ban the stop-motion vintage Christmas movie where one of the Wise Men has slanted eyes and a thick Chinese accent voiced by no person from China? Or the movie Karate Kid where Mr. Miyagi apes an equally thick Japanese accent?

And if I cancel Dr. Seuss, do I have a right to complain about any other book ban?

Regardless, none of this compares to the unprecedented level of book banning that’s happening in places like Texas and Florida.

In our current predicament, we’re banning alot more than a relative handful of  books – in far more than a handful of school districts. Most of these go after works about systemic racism, white priviledge, Critical Race Theory, and any and all Transgender and Queer issues; all anathema to the people who want to ban any further discussion.

Bad as this is, you have to chuckle a bit. As soon as teenagers find out that a book has been banned from their school library, they’ll head straight to the internet to figure out how to get a copy. Given the internet, book banning is simply going to make banned books more popular.

Either way, this level of book banning transcends our typical level of concern for what we think should be publicly available. This is simply the next step in a level of national division that, in recent years, has spun out of control. We started with the election of a leader who called for physical violence during his campaign rallies, and was caught on video celebrating the many virtues of sexual assault. Once elected, he employed political hate speech and conspiracy theories like no politician in my lifetime.

Its no wonder that, under the Trump administration, America suffered its worst case of national division in a hundred years.

Now, book banning.

The Next Chapter

There are three realities about our country that guarantee more.

First, the world’s not going to get less Gay, or Trans, much as anti-Gay Christianity hopes it will. Deviations from mainstream gender/sexual thought are going to continue. The condemnation and villification that comes from God’s army will only grease the wheels, as will its book-banning offspring.

Second, America is not going to stop talking about racial injustice until racial injustice goes away. Likewise, folks who believe that there are no significant racial justice problems will continue to dig in their heels, seeing these initiatives as a threat to America.

The objective data that support things like CRT will continue to be ignored because the people who publish them are alleged enemies of the state. Their perspective should therefore be banned.

And so, isolating ourselves from the other side of the truth, we refuse to study anything that doesn’t tell us what we want to hear, and things that are helpful will continue to look like evil in our eyes.

A few years ago, I heard the proposition that “Mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow,” and thought it was ridiculous. Up to that point, I had always been fairly conservative when it came to racial justice issues, i.e., we’ve come so far, done so much for the Black community, yet they just seem to want more. They should be happy with what they have, thankful to live in a country that cares about them.

But The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness was written by a really smart person, respected and read by many of my friends, including my wife. I read it, then went on a fact check odyssey, poring over arrest and incarcertation data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics for 6 months.

I came out with a new perspective.

There are rules to understanding what is true and what is false. Deeply considering both sides of the story is one of them.

Book banning is the opposite, a deviation from the truth that far outstrips Transgenderism’s deviation from mainstream gender thought.

Sadly, there’s more to come.

Please don’t hear me saying that it’s wrong to be conservative. It is wrong, however, to live on conservative island – or liberal island for that matter – refusing to eat anything but the junk food Cheetos that our favorite talking heads are always waving in front of our angry, frightened faces.

We’re better than this, but I fear that we might not be bigger than this.

 

Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash

Did you know that the Bible’s “Pearls before Swine,” “Do Unto Others,” “Get the Log Out of Your Eye,” and “Ask, Seek, Knock” propositions all happen in the same paragraph – the same narrative section?

In other words they’re all related to each other. They are not isolated, stand-alone ideas. They all point to one overarching proposition, one that the entire Bible revolves around, according to Jesus.

This section happens within the “Sermon on the Mount,” where Jesus sits down on top of a mountain, disciples at his feet, and lays down his law. A first-century Jewish Christian would read this and be immediately reminded of Moses, climbing a mountain to receive the Ten Commandments from God himself.

We have to be careful with this section of Jesus’ sermon as its easy to ministerpret. If we don’t respect how each element is related to the other, we will (and frequently do) miss the point. For example:

“Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” ~ Matthew 7:6

This seems to suggest that certain people are “pigs” and/or “dogs” who are too stupid to appreciate things that are “sacred.” It’s understandable how the modern church uses this passage to defend the distance it keeps from the non-Christian world. They can’t understand, the reasoning goes, and will tear us to pieces if we’re not careful.

They’re like animals.

If we, instead, consider the overarching context of this passage, we get a different understanding of Jesus’ meaning, one that, instead, indicts the person throwing the pearls. A 30,000 foot view might read like this:

• • Do not judge others.
  • You’re not qualified.
  • Do not force your beliefs on others.
  • Who does that?
  • God doesn’t do that.
  • Therefore, treat others like you want to be treated.

If I interpret “Pearls before Swine” as “protect yourself from all the dirty unreligious pigs of the world” it simply doesn’t fit the gist of the narrative section it lives in. It certainly doesn’t fit the Jesus who embraced the worst of the worst in his culture, crowning them the leaders of his movement.

Jesus is simply teaching his disciples (us included) how to interact with people they don’t agree with, people who might be going astray, even sinning egregiously, in need of a loving rebuke. If they’re not open to our “holy” advice, or “pearlescently sacred” way of doing things, his reasoning goes, it’s best not to force it, or get pushy, or stand at a distance and judge them.

It’s much easier to deal with our own sin as that’s the only sin we’re in control of, and there will always be plenty of it.

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” ~ Matthew 7:3-5

With regards to “Pearls before Swine,” Jesus’ audience would have been familiar with the care of animals, taken aback by the thought of someone trying to feed an animal something it can’t digest. Of course it would see the pearlcaster as the only edible thing in the pen.

“Pigs cannot digest pearls, cannot nourish themselves upon them. Likewise for a dog with a Bible or a crucifix. The dog cannot eat it. The reason these animals will finally “turn and rend you,” when you one day step up to them with another load of Bibles or pearls, is that you at least are edible. Anyone who has ever had serious responsibilities of caring for animals will understand immediately what Jesus is saying. And what a picture this is of our efforts to correct and control others by pouring our good things, often truly precious things, upon them—things that they nevertheless simply cannot ingest and use to nourish themselves. Often we do not even listen to them. We “know” without listening. Jesus saw it going on around him all the time, as we do today. And the outcome is usually exactly the same as with the pig and the dog. Our good intentions make little difference. The needy person will finally become angry and attack us. The point is not the waste of the “pearl” but that the person given the pearl is not helped.” ~ Dallas Willard

In all of this, Jesus is addressing the phenomenon of force, where person A passionately offers advice/instruction/correction/commandment to person B, who’s not interested in or “hungry” for what A is offering. A persists, B gets angry, A condemns, etc.

Nobody benefits.

The Christian world has long been forcing its views, values, politics, and theology – especially the part where you go to hell if you don’t convert to our religion – onto people who are hungry for something else. Now those people are mad, to put it mildly, and aren’t interested in anything we have to say.

But it’s not our fault right? They’re the “pigs,” the “unholy.”

They don’t even know the value of a pearl.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a Christian social media post, or listened to a holy soundbite that spoke of a non-Christian or group of non-Christians as if their humanity might be in question.

How can we be so surprised when they return the favor?

Stones before Children

Following “Pearls before Swine,” Jesus talks about the ins and outs of openness.

“When you ask it is given to you; when you seek, you find; when you knock the door is opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?” ~ Matthew 7:7-11

Why would you give something to someone who hasn’t asked for it? If a friend of mine wants connection, or intimacy, or understanding, or a good party, but I instead give them rote religion and/or condemnation and judgment – biblically justified as it may be – is that what God wants me to do? Just because I’m talking about “God’s stuff” doesn’t mean I’m batting for his team. Hell, folks have used Heaven’s lexicon for millenium to destroy lives.

And why do bible, religion, et-al. trump things like connection, intimacy, and compassion?

Or a good party.

One Golden, Overarching Rule

Jesus concludes this section of the Sermon on the Mount with the main point of his discourse (my paraphrase) “God himself doesn’t force things on people who haven’t asked for them. Therefore, treat others as you would have them treat you.”

Boom.

In the New Testament, you’ll find scores of episodes where Christians try to convince non-Christians to become Christians. In every case, the audience is open; Christians are asked to talk about Jesus and/or address a crowd that wants to know more. You’ll never find the early evangelists forcing their views on others, or awkwardly beginning religious conversations with non-religious people who simply aren’t hungry for whatever it is they’re peddling.

This section in the Sermon on the Mount has huge implications for Christians who seek to talk about Jesus with non-Christians, or for Christians who think our country should operate under a particular political ideology, judging the holy hell out of anyone who doesn’t agree.

Nobody wants to be treated like that.

No Christian wants to be sat down and judged, or listen to someone try to force their beliefs on them, or hear about how they’re going to hell because they haven’t accepted the Buddha as their personal lord and savior. Jesus is commanding his disciples, therefore, to not do that to anyone else.

To drive this point home to his very Jewish, bible-believing disciples, he finished his thought with the proposition that every single scrap of the Old Testament (and by proxy the New) revolves around this:

“So in everything, do unto others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” ~ Matthew 7:12

Really? The entire bible?

I don’t know many Christians, myself included, whose spiritual manifesto has “Do unto Others” at its core. If we audit God’s army, you’d think God wanted morality more than anything else, or worship, or huge buildings, or conservative politics.

I have a hard time believing that the entirety of God’s word is summed up in such a simple idea. But I have no problem believing that the world would change drastically if everyone’s life, Christian or not, revolved around it

“Do Unto Others” ain’t sexy, and it sure ain’t spiritual. Rest assured that it’s much more difficult than weekly Bible studies, church attendance, or adherence to mainstream Evangelicalism’s moral code.

I wouldn’t give myself high marks for following this particular commandment. But because Jesus seemed to place it above everything else, I’ve got some work to do.