Aliens In My Saddlebags

I just rode my Triumph Thunderbird SE from Phoenix to Pittsburgh. Adventures fly like sparks from the wheels under 1600cc and 800 lbs of British steel, enough for at least two blog entries worth. I start with the strangest adventure first.

Between Tucson, Arizona and San Antonio, Texas, 900 miles of godforsaken wilderness runs unleashed across a third of America, momentarily interrupted by El Paso The Rude. On I-10, there really is nothing out there. OK, almost nothing. I saw a cow.

I also saw something rather remarkable. At the point where the waterless sun-scorched wasteland collides with the waterless sun-scorched wasteland, there sat a... something. It kind of looked like a toll booth looming up out of the desert, partly because it spanned Interstate 10 and partly because all traffic was stopping for it.

As I closed on it, I began to notice some things were different about this toll booth:

• There weren't any signs saying "Pay Toll $.75" or special lanes for my E-Z Pass. 
• Strange devices bristled over and beside the road, looking like they'd been borrowed from NASA or the SETI program, pointing at the cars and trucks and motorcycles on the road.
• Lots of men (they all looked like men anyway) in uniforms with handcuffs and weapons were hanging out outside in the 98 degree heat.
• Some of the men were carrying mirrors on the end of poles and using them to look under the cars and trucks.
• A lot of nice doggies. The men must like having BIG doggies for pets out there in the middle of the sun-scorched wasteland. I hope they give them plenty of water.

As I slowed to a stop beneath the overhang spanning the road, I noticed the men were talking to every driver and some passengers. The roar of my engine and my earplugs kept me from hearing what it was they were talking about. A man with a pole mirror was looking under every car, and doggies were sniffing all the cars. Every now and then the men told a truck or car to go to a parking lot where there were lots more men in uniforms.

It got to be my turn. One of the nice men in uniform with his weapons and handcuffs asked me "You an American Citizen?" I said "Yep!" Evidently "Yep!" is the right thing to say if you want to be mistaken for an American citizen in Texas. Finally I got it: They were looking for aliens! He started to wave me on, then stopped me. One of the doggies wanted to sniff my right saddlebag. I knew I didn't have any aliens in the saddlebag, but the doggy wanted to make sure. The nice BIG doggy took one sniff and agreed with me. He also didn't show any interest in the beef jerky lurking in my saddlebag or any interest in my right leg, for which I was grateful. I rode on, pondering this checkpoint for a while.

Moral of the story: if you are going to ride a major interstate highway across America, be prepared to get checked because you could be hiding aliens on your motorcycle. Make sure you bring your passport. And just to be safe, hide all the aliens in your left saddlebag.

Osama Happy Dance

When the news broke, I was surprised to see people thronging the streets around the White House.

At first it didn't register why all those people were there. All I could see was a crowd, viewed from a hovering helicopter. Before President Obama said one word the crowd's size was snowballing courtesy of viral texts & tweets.

When CNN cut to street level, I heard the singing, the Olympic chants of "U-S-A!  U-S-A!" Dancing, fist-pumping, high-fiveing, hugging leaping jubilation boiled on the midnight asphalt there and at Ground Zero.

I felt relief at the news. I felt sadness. But I didn't feel what they were feeling, not even remotely.

Suddenly I realized that these young revelers had shivered in grade school or Jr. High school desks as the planes hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon. They'd grown up in a world where the Iron Curtain had been hauled away for scrap metal. But after 9/11, their childhoods and adolescence proceeded with caution under the shadow of a nameless fear. Boogeymen with scimitars and Sharia and tactical nukes lurked in hiding, waiting for the chance to destroy their world, their dreams, their lives. They came of age sharing a secret fear that tomorrow might never come and they'd never know doom was coming. It would creep up on them and strike without warning.

Tears rose in my eyes as I watched them dance into the night. Boogeyman Prime had been shot dead, and their tribe had tracked him down and killed him. They had to dance and chant and sing! Even the Grinch couldn't have stolen this from them.

But I couldn't share their jubilation. A man was dead. A heartless, smiling, murderous monster of a man. A man who Jesus had loved so much He died for him on the cross. A man who refused that Love and has now refused it forever.

I sympathize with the dancing young throngs, but I just can't join in their triumphal joy. I relish their moment of liberation from fear; yet I feel it in my spirit -- God doesn't rejoice in the death of the wicked: not now, not ever.

Kingdomball

I’ve been playing Senior Softball this winter here in Fountain Hills. This experience has revealed two things. 1) It’s improved my opinion of how good I used to be. 2) Jimmy showed me how important it is to live the Kingdom simply.

I don’t think Jimmy did this on purpose. He’s a personal fitness trainer who is about 55 years old and still throws people out at home plate from 270 feet away. I remember making throws like that… 25 years ago. I’ve caught some of his rifle throws this month. I’m playing catcher because I can’t throw the ball more than 100 feet now. Counting the roll.

Jimmy is his own best ad. I mean, if a 50something guy can still fire the ball like that (did I mention his speed and agility?), then he knows something about how to condition an aging body to play softball. He’s living proof. He performs as if he’s 35, not 55.

Most of the other guys on the field are more like me. You can tell some of them used to be good. They try to do things you wouldn’t attempt if you didn’t remember doing it. But like me, their bodies don’t cooperate. Someone will charge (trot) to catch a fly ball but it bounces off the tip of his glove. I even saw one fly ball bounce off the top of a guy’s head. We swing the bat, make solid contact, but the ball only flutters out of the infield like a renegade kite.

I went to Jimmy’s storefront today. Jimmy tells me that my problem is that as I’ve gotten older I’ve tightened up. He poked around my armpit, then demonstrated a couple of easy movements he asked me to repeat. I started into the motions, but couldn’t complete them. Too tight.

I wonder if we Jesus-followers have gotten too tight. Has 2,000 years tightened us in places where we once played more fluidly and powerfully? I keep identifying places in my head where I’ve believed things are really important yet Scripture simply ignores them. I keep finding spots where I act as if some religious practice is vital that the Bible says absolutely nothing about. What would happen if we only required what Scripture requires and let the rest go? What would happen if we took the Bible’s commandments and disciplines seriously but just forgot about the rest of the religious add-ons and “improvements”?

I talked to my friend Jen about this. She said she’s giving up religion for Lent.

Maybe Jesus’ followers can be living proof when it comes to living the Kingdom. But we’ll never get there if we stay all wound up about things that didn’t matter enough to God for Him to inspire them to be written into the Bible.

As for me, I’ve made a personal training appointment with Jimmy. Maybe next year I’ll throw him out at the plate.

DOH!

When a disaster strikes, why do people keep giving money to the Red Cross? Just Google "Haiti Red Cross scandal" -- then substitute Katrina, 9/11, or Tsunami for Haiti. Lots of bad stuff about misappropriated funds, right? Then try the same search using "Salvation Army" or "World Vision" instead of "Red Cross." Almost nothing shows up. Live & don't learn, that's us.

McLuhan in Egypt

McLuhan in Egypt

© 2011 by Whis Hays

In recent weeks we’ve been awash in commentary about the revolution in Egypt. Will it lead to true democracy? Will Egypt become an Islamic state? Will it remain friendly to American interests in the region? Will it become a permanent military dictatorship? Along with such questions many commentators have noted the pivotal role that cell-phone technology played in the revolution, wielded by predominantly young demonstrators both in Egypt and in Tunisia and more recently in Libya. Similar comments were made two years ago when there was a near-revolution in Iran.

Amid all these commentaries, I have yet to hear anyone speculate on how the communications media that fueled the Arab revolutions will reshape and define the societies and states that emerge from these uprisings. For much of the 20th century such thinking was the realm of Roman Catholic layman and media critic Marshall McLuhan (1911-80). Any student of McLuhan’s (mostly proven) theories would know this: sooner or later the structures that emerge will be rooted in the technological extension of senses implicit in these communications technologies.

McLuhan’s landmark 1964 book Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man presented his primary thesis: the dominant communications medium in any society unconsciously shapes our psychic and social lives irrespective of the content presented through that medium. His still-famous dictum was “The medium is the message.” His insights provoke a number of questions about current events in North Africa. How does mobile phone texting extend our natural capacities? How does it fit into the mélange of graphic and typographic communications technologies used in these cultures? What values are embedded implicitly in these technologies and the process of interacting with them? How does this reshape their consciousness and societies?

Often McLuhan’s ideas are stated most succinctly in the provocative subtitles of his chapters. For instance, his chapter “The Photograph” is subtitled “The Brothel Without Walls.” (Note that he got there 30 years before porn introduced e-commerce on a mass scale.) His subtitle for the chapter on “The Printed Word” is “Architect of Nationalism.” What kind of nationalism arises from typographic messages on masses of hand-held screens instead of printed books?

McLuhan’s theory would predict that in parts of the world where typographic messages become the primary means of communication (as in the Arab world), there will be a corresponding drive for nations to be governed by law, not by the whims of dictators, monarchs or religious oligarchies. Furthermore, the inherent nature of texting will also drive things in the direction of national democracies. The medium itself democratizes information. Everyone who has a mobile phone is a publisher/reader. Conspiracies of silence about public events become impossible. The medium is the message, and the political message is participatory government.

These developments are not confined to the political realm: they also carry great implications for the missionary enterprise of the Church. Just as the printing press rendered the Latin mass intolerably distant and ignited public demand for individual access to Scripture and uniformity of common prayer in the language of the people, this technology creates a demand for spontaneous and personalized engagement in spiritual life. Sixteenth century solutions stand no chance of mass replication in such an environment.

While cell phones have saturated the Middle East, it doesn’t stop there. The saturation of this medium extends to most of the world. The BBC reported in mid-2010 that mobile connections have surpassed 5 billion. Even many poor people throughout the world have mobile phones. These devices — mostly simpler than smartphones — are reshaping the global village. If McLuhan was right, this movement will not confine itself to the Arab world, nor to the Muslim world. It will soon shake sub-Saharan Africa and Asian dictatorships Burma and North Korea. Time has reported that Orascom Telecom “has branched out from Egypt into six other countries (including Algeria, Zimbabwe and North Korea), servicing close to 100 million subscribers.” The Egyptian phone company is inadvertently exporting Egypt’s revolution to North Korea!

Amid all this I’m hoping the United States will have enough sense to stay true to its own democratic ideals. It will be impossible to coax or coerce all the arising new governments to form American-style (or America-friendly) democracies. For instance, Sharia will certainly constitute the legal backbone of the new Arab social orders. Other deep cultural values will dominate in places like Cuba as these grassroots revolutions roll on. But as long as texting dominates, we need not worry that these revolutions won’t really end up as democracies. Just as the movable type printing press drove the rise of the Renaissance and Reformation and the eventual rise of Western democracies, ubiquitous texting on mobile phones will have a similar effect, but with a new individual and immediate twist. Like the orders of Donovan’s “Universal Soldier,” these orders will “come from here and there, and you and me.” But unlike print, viral movements driven by mobile phone texting will boil up with breathtaking speed.

If McLuhan was right — and if I am right about McLuhan — get ready. The geopolitical world is about to be shaken.

A Wedding Smackdown

I recently went to a wedding and got blown away.

I’ve been to lots of weddings. I’ve done lots of weddings. I’ve been in student ministry for decades so I’ve done a lot of these, maybe 200 or more. Maybe because this time I was watching instead of leading it that something hit me for the first time. Hit me hard.

I noticed that the Anglican/Episcopal wedding service I’d led so many times asks the bride and groom to answer this question:

“Will you have this man (woman) to be your husband (wife); to live together in the covenant of marriage? Will you love him (her), comfort him (her), honor and keep him (her), in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, be faithful to him (her) as long as you both shall live?”

The answer is “I will.”

What hit me hard was how incredibly presumptuous this answer is. I mean, compare it to the service of baptism. When the person being baptized is asked questions that include “Will you,” the answer shows a lot more humility: “I will, with God’s help.”

With God’s help. How come we don’t clearly acknowledge our need for God’s help while entering into marriage? Is it because marriage is sooo easy – tying the knot is like tying our shoes? We don’t really need God’s help for that, do we?

Marriage can be an incredible wellspring of blessing if you’re given the Grace to enter the dance of Ephesians 5 -- which you can only do with God's help. Or it can suck your soul if you’re stuck in a marriage where that Grace is absent or refused by one or both. Or it can simply be mundane: doing life like doing the laundry. Or it can mutate into a dark idol that holds God hostage to its supreme demands. (Some of that idol's minions even have popular radio shows.)

As I reflected on this I was overwhelmed by the sensation that I’ve helped hundreds of people to launch into this deep, life-altering commitment with an attitude of presumption. While I only know of a couple of those marriages that have ended, I still wonder about the toxic effect of presuming too much. Could this be one reason so many marriages turn out to be so difficult? Is it that God opposes the proud and pride is woven into the very wedding service itself?

God also gives grace to the humble. There’s one insight I won't neglect again.