Hipster Christian

Recently, Eileen Flynn, religion columnist for the Austin American Statesman, wrote to me to get feedback about Brett McCracken's recent book, Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide. She couldn't have used my entire response, but encouraged me to write it down somewhere. Here is that response:

By strange coincidence, I just picked up Hipster Christianity this week, though I haven't had the chance to dip into it much. However, I share McCracken's concerns, to be sure. If there's one way we've put our own spin on the boomer Christian legacy of marrying Christianity to power, it is in our marrying Christianity to "cool". While sincere Christians from my parents' generation (this does not, by the way, include my specific parents and they are not the only exceptions) can object to the loss of public prayer in schools or the legalization of gay marriage; I sense that what is often behind these objections is a desire not to be left out of the mainstream. If gay marriage is legalized, the church that objects to it is suddenly on the outskirts again. If public prayer isn't standard practice in public schools, then we start to feel like we're on the fringe. Folks from my generation scoff at their parents' stance on some of these issues and yet long to sit at "the cool kids table" as much as their parents long to sit in positions of power. We speak as if we're pursuing an edgier, weirder kind of Christianity, but it is too often a new spin on a worn out record. That isn't to say that much of what is transpiring in younger churches isn't a good thing. The call to marry the gospel to social justice is right and good. We've been too long concerned with what will happen if we die tonight, but not what happens if we live tomorrow. We're seeing a renewed vigor to effect the here and now as well as the hereafter, and I praise God for it. But we are also a generation that embraces what is ironic and "hip" to our detriment. We squirm in the face of earnestness and sincerity, when these are both qualities that faith requires. We celebrate Leslie as an iconic Austinite, but still ignore the awkward kid with the out of date clothes. 

Part of the problem is that we saw some sacred cows that needed skewering and enjoyed it so much, we skewered anything sacred. Now we take pride in the idea that nothing offends us, that we don't have the religious hang ups our parents did and, most importantly, that we aren't any different from "you". And that's the truly frightening thing behind the power play and the commitment to cool; we want to make a difference, but not at the risk of being different. We don't want to be "set apart", we don't want to be God's "peculiar people". 

My sister Bri used to joke that Austin's motto should be "Keep Austin Manageably Quirky", because we aren't ready for the truly weird. A new generation of Christians struggle with that same problem. "Manageably quirky" can be cool, but "weird", almost by definition, is not. The weirdness of Christian faith uses words like purity alongside words like passion, it speaks of fidelity alongside faith. It does not self-promote or worry about who's watching. It loves it's neighbor, even if it's neighbor is strange or smelly or simply "uncool". Especially then. It promotes hospitality as well a charity and practices spiritual discipline alongside social justice. It submits itself, humbles itself, and loses itself. It celebrates the meek as well as the merciful, the poor in spirit as well as the peacemaker. The years we spent pursuing power left us unable to embrace that sort of faith. We should be careful not to repeat past mistakes on a quest for what's cool.

I'm reminded of something one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, wrote before he died: 

The next..."rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.

And now one final thought. The apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians: "...whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely - if anything is excellent or praiseworthy - think about such things." But we don't use words like "true" and "noble" and "right" and "lovely" anymore. They're too candid, too devout, too heartfelt, too plain. They aren't cool. We need to rediscover these words and the character that comes with them. We need to remember a savior about whom scripture says, "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not." We need to model ourselves on a man who was most certainly relevant, but almost certainly not cool.

What It Means To Be "Chosen"

Christ didn’t come to create a closed up and closed off "chosen people", he came that any might be chosen who are willing to choose; choose to take up their cross, to die to themselves, and to live in trust and obedience to God. He came to adopt us all, to save us all, to make us all his brothers and sisters. Whether they be the descendants of Ishmael or Isaac or neither of the two, every person on earth is called to be a child of God. And God’s children do not exist to simply celebrate their status as children or to bask in the glow of the coming reward, but are set apart as a peculiar people to bring good news to the poor and the prisoner, to share light with the lost and the lonely, to walk in a new way and to invite others to walk in it, to hear God’s word and put it into practice, to produce fruit in keeping with repentance. We celebrate God’s grace by sharing it, we celebrate His Kingdom by living in it, we celebrate being children of God by living as children of God. As God sent His Son, He is sending His children, He is calling us, as He did Abraham, to leave our old life behind us and to walk in the way we should go. 

Blue Notebook No. 2

Was recommending Daniil Kharms to a friend today and, as I always am when I recommend a favorite, was reminded of what a brilliant author he was. He wrote children's books, poems, and absurd short (and I do mean short) stories published in underground magazines and banned by Stalin. Here is one example:

    Once there was a redheaded man without eyes and without ears. 
    He had no hair either, so that he was a redhead was just something they said.

He could not speak, for he had no mouth. He had no nose either.

He didn't even have arms or legs. He had no stomach either, and he had no back, and he had no spine, and no intestines of any kind. He didn't have anything at all. So it is hard to understand whom we are really talking about.

So it is probably best not to talk about him any more.

I'll See You In Hell

The following is a speech/sermon given by Hugh Hollowell at the Big Tent Christianity gathering:

According to Jesus, loving your neighbor is half of the greatest commandment. Pretty much everyone agrees that, if taken seriously, it’s a radical idea that could change the world. And yet it seems nearly impossible for American Christians, liberal or conservative, to agree on what it looks like.

Let me make a modest proposal.

Loving your neighbor begins by being in a relationship with your neighbor.

I love Johnny Cash. I have the entire Cash Discography – all the way back to the 1950′s. Love me some Johnny Cash.

Or do I?

Because I also love my wife, and I am here to tell you that while I feel consistently good toward Johnny Cash, how I feel toward my wife depends on what day it is, how our finances are doing, if I have indigestion, whether I had a good day at work… But I always feel ecstatic toward Johnny Cash.

Because I don’t really know Johnny Cash. I love my impression of Johnny Cash. It is fair to say I am a fan, or that I very much like his music, or that I love the idea of Johnny Cash. I submit there can be no love outside of relationship.

By that standard, most Christians don’t really love their neighbor. They love the idea of their neighbor. 


We vote for this candidate or that candidate, whoever promises to provide the sort of help we think people need. We outsource our compassion to the soup kitchens, to the clothing closets, to the homeless shelters. On Thanksgiving day, we load the youth group up in the van, to go feed the “less fortunate”, so the kids can be “exposed” to poverty, while never giving thought to wonder what they do for food the other 364 days of the year. And if that thought come up, we quickly suppress that thought and write a check. We outsource it.

Loving your neighbor presupposes a relationship. It means knowing your neighbor is going through a divorce, that the lady who cleans your office has a mother that is dying, that the man at the end of the street holding a cardboard sign has been outside for three years now, and his name is Brian. In the story we call the Good Samaritan, it meant getting in the ditch to bind the man’s wounds yourself.

When the average person in the pews can tell you the names of all the Judges on American Idol, or can name all the Glee cast members, but does not know a soul that makes 1/4th their income, I think it is fair to say we have lost our sense of mission as co-creators of the Kingdom of God.

Jesus told us the poor would always be with us – but we don’t really want the poor among us – we want someone else to handle that.

Last year in the US, some 17 million kids went to bed hungry. 17 million. In a nation where we throw away 40% of all the food we buy, where 1 in three of us is obese, and yet children are laying in bed, hungry. How can this happen?

Because none of those kids know you.

Because if you knew a kid who was hungry, you would move heaven and hell to get that kid some food.


But because those 17 million kids don’t know you, they laid in bed last night, hungry.

Here in Wake County, the official statistics say there are approximately 1200 homeless people. And many hundreds of Christian congregations. You cannot tell me that out of the many thousands of Christian homes represented by those churches, there are not 1200 empty beds somewhere. Of course there are. But we save those beds for people we actually know.

The justice of Jesus is brought about by sacrifice, love and suffering. And to the extent that we do not exercise sacrificial love, suffering and proclaim the Reign of God, we are far from the way of Jesus.

Jesus calls us to serve, not lead. The way is not about political solutions – in fact, Jesus said political power would be used against us as we sought to bring about God’s justice. The way does not involve courting those in power – the Apostle Paul told us Jesus made a spectacle of the powers of this world.

There are any number of passages in both the Hebrew scriptures as well as the New Testament that speak of God’s love for the victims of injustice and our responsibility to work to bring that justice into fruition. The one I am thinking about right now, however, is Matthew 16:18, where Jesus tells Peter that …”I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it”.

I am not the first person to note that Jesus refers to the gates as a defense measure. Those gates are there to keep us out. Just what does Jesus expect of us?

Jesus expects us to storm down those gates and invade Hell itself. Jesus is telling us to go to Hell to be with the drug addict and the alcoholic. Go to Hell to be with the victims of abuse, and with the abusers. Go to hell and liberate the adulterer, the homeless man, the pornographer. In hell is where we will find the single mother and the embezzler, the pimps and the pimped, the hungry, the broken, the forgotten.


We, you and I together, should be wading into hell itself and proclaiming that there is a new way to live and a new way to love, and that new way is bringing about the justice of God.

The justice of Jesus is a personal justice. It involves sacrificial, relational love. It involves dying to ourselves, our ambitions, our preconceived notions of how things work. The way of Jesus invites us to be the means by which God’s justice comes into being. It invites us to go to Hell, for the sake of those imprisoned there.

Today, in this Big Tent, my most fervent prayer for the church is simply this: I pray I will see you in hell. They need us there.

The Day Everything Changed

“American imperialism, often celebrated as the new globalism, is a frightening power. It is frightening not only because of the harm such power inflicts on the innocent, but because it is difficult to imagine alternatives. Pacifists are often challenged after an event like September 11 with the question, ‘Well, what alternative do you have to bombing Afghanistan?’ Such a question assumes that pacifists must have an alternative foreign policy. My response is I do not have a foreign policy. I have something much better - a church constituted by people who would rather die than kill.

“Indeed I fear that absent a countercommunity to challenge America, bin Laden has given Americans what they so desperately needed - a war without end. America is a country that lives off the moral capital of our wars. War names the time we send the youth to kill and die (maybe) in an effort to assure ourselves the lives we lead are worthy of such sacrifices. They kill and die to protect our ‘freedom.’ But what can freedom mean if the prime instance of the exercise of such freedom is to shop? The very fact that we can and do go to war is a moral necessity for a nation of consumers. War makes clear we must believe in something even if we are not sure what that something is, except that it has something to do with the ‘American way of life.’….

“Christians are not called to be heroes or shoppers. We are called to be holy. We do not think holiness is an individual achievement, but rather a set of practices to sustain a people who refuse to have their lives determined by the fear and denial of death. We believe by so living we offer our non-Christian brothers and sisters an alternative to all politics based on the denial of death. Christians are acutely aware that we are seldom faithful to the gifts God has given us, but we hope the confession of our sins is a sign of hope in a world without hope. This means pacifists do have a response to September 11, 2001. Our response is to continue living in a manner that witnesses to our belief that the world was not changed on September 11, 2001. The world was changed during the celebration of Passover in A.D. 33.”

Stanley Hauerwas, “September 11, 2001: A Pacifist Response”, in Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchis (eds.), Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11 (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 186, 188.

The Good News of the Great Flood

My preaching professor in college once said that your job is to find the gospel in any passage you preach on. This week I preach on the flood and Noah and while you can see good news in Noah's salvation, most sermons seem to pass over the mass drowning of the rest of humanity. It can be difficult to see the good news in Noah.

I think we have to come at this story from an angle that we try to avoid. We like to think of ourselves as good people and God as an easy-going god. This story tells us “how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time” and God as having “regretted that He had made human beings.” I think we conjure up images of humanity before the flood as unruly kids throwing the ultimate keg party/orgy. We see it as rowdy and out of hand, not as deserving destruction.

But I what if we think about a world in which every human being is evil. Think of the things we would do to one another. Think about the things we do to each other today and then take the worst of it and make it a constant. Think about the murder and rape and abuse. Verse 11 of Genesis 6 describes the earth as “full of violence”. Think of a world with so much violence that there was no room for anything else. Ask yourself if God’s mercy could allow that to go on.

I wrestled with this story a lot this week. Because I kept seeing this as a story of God’s justice, and it seemed like a horrible justice. But I have come to see it as a story of God’s mercy, even if it is a severe mercy. A mercy that won’t allow human beings to continue to do such violence and evil to one another. A mercy that steps in and makes it stop.

But then the mercy of God goes a step further. God makes a way to carry on. When He could just end humanity as a failed experiment, He chooses Noah and his family and animals and an ark, and He keeps things going.

Sit with that for a second. God would not only have been justified in wiping them all out, He’d have been merciful in doing so. Instead, He refuses to give up on them at their worst. His mercy cannot allow human beings to continue along the path they are on, but it can allow them to continue along a different path.

So, what does this story tell us about God and His relationship to us?

First, it states that the violence we do to one another will not be allowed to go on indefinitely. And, I don’t know about you, but I see that as a good thing. I want war to end, even if it means that the parts of me that make war inevitable have to be destroyed. And God plans to do just that. He plans to destroy me.

Which leads us to the second part, how God provides a way out. And that is in the person of Jesus and the Way of Jesus. It is in the Kingdom coming and world made new. In Christ, there is a new creation.

In Jesus, God makes a way to carry on. He could have looked at those He had called as His people and simply given up on them. Instead, He makes a way where there seems to be no way. His mercy cannot allow them to continue along the way they are going, but it can allow them to continue along a different way. And Jesus is that way.

So, the cross isn’t about God’s demanding that we kill His Son so that His wrath can be satisfied, it is a story of God who would send His Son, knowing that we would kill him…because that’s the kind of people we are, full of evil and of violence. “But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

But even that is not the end, it’s the beginning. Christ’s resurrection means that we can be made new, our story can continue if we are willing to die, to have our old selves drowned in the water of baptism in order that we might be raised to new life in the way of Jesus. For our baptism is not just of water, but of the Spirit. We can carry on only if we will allow the Spirit’s fire to refine us, to make us into someone new. It will be a painful process. Sometimes it will be difficult to see God’s mercy in it. But it is His mercy that cannot allow us to be who we were and to behave as we did, It is His mercy that destroys our old selves and refines our new selves into the image of Jesus.

We use the language of death all the time in baptism, but how seriously do we mean it? Are we willing to die in order to be made new? Are we willing to see our old selves, our old desires, our old priorities, our old sickness and sin, our old ways put to death in order that we might have new life and walk in a new way? Would we rather be dead than live in a world that Jesus isn't Lord of?

That is what Christ demands, but it is a merciful demand. He seeks to destroy us so that he can start again, making us into the people that we were always meant to be.

Thoughts On Eternal Life

So, I'm no expert on what exactly happens after we die, and none of us really knows for sure all the ins and outs, but I do believe we're given hints and clues and outright statements and I believe that what Jesus promises is a physical resurrection in order that we might live forever under his reign as King.

Assuming that's so, isn't it possible, even probable, that what eternal life is is simply that, we live eternally? What I mean is that we're not (as we often seem to believe) going to suddenly be some other heart, soul, and mind, but will continue to become the people we are as the heart, soul, mind, and body that feel and think and do the things that our hearts, souls, minds, and bodies do. What I mean is that we keep being who we are, but for eternity. And that the eternal aspect simply means that we continue to become the people that we are already on our way to becoming.

If that were so, then we get free of the disconnect of not following Jesus now and being the kind of people who somehow will later. We stop thinking we can be people who fight in wars now, but will suddenly beat swords into plough shares in an instant. We stop thinking that we can feel one way about money and power now, but will abruptly feel another way about it when Jesus returns. Eternity becomes an opportunity to become someone who is following Jesus or someone who isn't. To turn into the person we are currently becoming.

Your eternal life would then be shaped by who it is that you become and that, in turn, is shaped by who it is you choose to follow. Those who walk in the way of Jesus; a way of love of God and neighbor, of justice and mercy and humility, of worship and service, of trust and obedience, find themselves and the world around them getting better every day. Those who choose to walk in their own way, find themselves and the world around them getting worse.

And maybe that's what we mean when we talk about heaven and hell. Maybe we've seen glimpses of them already. Maybe eternity has already started. Maybe we're already on our way to wherever it is we're headed. And maybe it isn't too late to change direction and walk in a different way. And maybe that's what Jesus came to show us how to do.

Hope Makes Plans

Today we turned our calendar to October to write in an event and saw that Rachel had previously written "should be able to feel the baby move."


I know that Romans 5 says different, but sometimes hope disappoints us.


Today is going to be a rough day.