I'm a white suburban mom, and I must speak out for justice for Freddie Gray

I've written this blog in my head hundreds of times since Sunday night, since I saw the rioting in Baltimore one week after Freddie Gray's death due to severe spinal injury, after an arrest and ill-fated wagon ride with the Baltimore police.

I wrote a few sentences when I heard a friend from church say: "Did you see that video of the mom beating her son? I loved it! Wasn't that great? This is happening because the youths have gone crazy."

I told him he was wrong, but I didn't tell him the video made me want to cry. A mom myself, I could only imagine her pain. Her desperation. That her son might not die, like so many others who shared his skin color. Why were we cheering the beating of a child, of another young black male? Did we so desire his humiliation?

I wrote a few more sentences when I heard well-meaning Christians lift up prayers for peace in Baltimore - that they couldn't understand people destroying their own community - that everyone just needed to calm down.

I was haunted by a friend's post the first evening of the riots: "An African-American is killed by the police in Baltimore under suspicious circumstances and only the black people on my (Facebook) timeline seem to care. The protests about the aforementioned death turn violent and then everyone has a hot take. Thanks."

Did property damage matter more than a young man's life?

I read and read and read and prayed and prayed and prayed and hugged my son. So much powerful journalism, from WBAL's Deborah Weiner, who interviewed gang members in Baltimore.

Another friend from church said breathlessly that the riots were brought about by gangs, who gathered together with their hoodies pulled tight and colluded to kill police.

"That's not right," the Bloods said on WBAL. They weren't there to be violent. They wanted justice for Freddie Gray. They came together so that unlike Michael Brown in Ferguson, someone might be held accountable for this young black man's death at the hands of the police.

It wasn't as simple as Ferguson: many of Baltimore's leading officials and police officers are themselves black - and yet in a part of town where thousands suffer lead poisoning and a third of the population over 25 doesn't have a high school diploma - this was also about money and class.

It was about a people forgotten, left to go to jail or die.

"They treat us like animals," a member of the Bloods told WBAL's Weiner. "And now we're acting like animals ... I don't agree with it, but I understand it."

The gang members spoke of unity, of their cause of justice lifting them out of the turf wars and causing them to shake hands with rival gangs - not to kill cops, but to protest peacefully, united together as black men who didn't want to die or go to jail.

"They've looked at us this way for so long," another said, and I kept replaying his words.

***

I was the "they." The white suburban homogeneous masses who pack organic snacks for their children and watch baseball practice and hockey games and worry about vaccinations, not lead poisoning.

The "they" who offer platitudes for peace but neglect the righteous cause of justice.

The "they" who dutifully attend church every Sunday but fail to care about the oppression of our black brothers and sisters across town and across the world.

The "they" who say, "well, we don't really have any black people in our church or in our community, so it just doesn't really affect us. We're here for Jesus, not to talk about race."

I have so many times felt that pull into suburban silence, the right perhaps to post about gay rights but not about race, to say oh that's very sad but not take it any deeper.

I've felt odd, wondering about my place at the table among my activist friends: white and black, who live in neighborhoods like the one where Freddie Gray grew up. What could I possibly have to say, typing on my MacBook, sitting on my Crate and Barrel couch wearing JCrew flats? The pressure is to keep the status quo. Perhaps to say: I'm praying for peace in Baltimore, and sip my latte.

***

On Monday night as I read about the riots and watched the unfolding news coverage, my Facebook News Feed bombarded with posts both from activists and from folks who hated the rioting but didn't care about Freddie Gray, I thought about saying a prayer for peace.

I started to pray, but God interrupted me, in the words of the prophet Jeremiah:

"They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,

saying 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace.

They acted shamefully. They committed abomination.

Yet they were not ashamed."

Was I the they?

Who were God's people?

***

There is no peace in Sandtown-Winchester, Baltimore today. Perhaps it has never known peace, since or before the April riots 47 years ago after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death.

Baltimore has the highest concentration of heroin users in the country. To be born into Sandtown-Winchester is to be born into a neighborhood where your own home might literally poison you, where 1/3 of homes are abandoned, where murder happens at twice the city's already high average.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are Freddie Gray. You were born two months early and spent the first five months of your life in the hospital, before heading to a home with dangerous levels of lead. There are few trees, parks - your mom can't afford swimming lessons or tee ball or toys - the adults you know either barely get by on assistance or low-paying jobs, or they become a part of the neighborhood's most viable industry: the drug trade.

What do you do? College - heck, high school - is out of the question. You survive. You live. You sell and use a little marijuana, maybe a little heroin - because who wouldn't want to escape? You get arrested and instead of rehab or treatment you go straight to jail, where you learn more about criminality and become more hardened. The Baltimore of the waterfront, Camden Yards, the museums, Johns Hopkins University - it may as well have been Paris. You've never left the West Side.

Now the stories are floating out. Freddie Gray already had a spinal condition. Freddie Gray injured himself. The rioters are thugs. 

It sounds like a dismissal. Who is responsible? Anyone but me. I am not a part of this. I am above it.

"They treat us like animals," said the young man on WBAL. 

Freddie Gray died, and we didn't care.

But why would they destroy that business?

***

We say that the protesters in Sandtown-Winchester need to be peaceful; we pray for peace on Baltimore's West Side - as if when the rioting stops and all goes back to "normal" it will be peaceful.

We say we don't understand why they would ruin their own neighborhood - as if their neighborhood wasn't already ruined, by disrepair and disregard by the city, by a blind eye, by failing schools and laws that punish blacks and whites differently when it comes to drugs.

We speak as though they are rioting in Central Park, and if they'd just stop rioting, the flowers would bloom and wouldn't it be lovely again in Sandtown- Winchester. 

The riots are a symptom not a cause. The cause is deeper, rooted in classism and racism and legions of young people America forgot, left to languish in houses full of lead and overcrowded, angry jails full of young black men who never got a chance. 

It's not about race in the same way Ferguson was about race and yet race colors everything we say about Freddie Gray and about Baltimore.

***

Blogger and author Jen Hatmaker became one of the first prominent white Christian voices to speak up about Freddie Gray. The title of her article in the Washington Post called her "a white mom of two black children." She took a brave stand, to pledge her support and alliance to the cause of racial justice.

Unlike Hatmaker, I will never have to have "the talk" with my pale-skinned, redheaded son. I am a Lutheran Pastor of a predominately white congregation on Chicago's North Shore. What have I to say? My son benefits from the same policies that led to Freddie Gray's death.

But as a white mom of a white son in the white suburbs - as a woman who would dare to call myself a disciple of Jesus - I am compelled to speak by the same Bible that resists calling for Peace where there is no Peace ... I am compelled to speak by the same Jesus who said He came so that the oppressed may go free, the captives may be released, and good news might come to the poor.

As long as the struggle for racial justice is only a black and brown struggle, it will be incomplete. 

My struggle is not that of the African-American mother, struggling to save her son from being unjustly accused, imprisoned, or maybe even killed.

But as a follower of Jesus, I must struggle with her. I must lift my voice and say that what is happening in Sandtown-Winchester - what happened to Freddie Gray - what happened to Eric Garner - what happened to Michael Brown - what happens to young black men across the United States each and every day is not right. It is not just. It is not constitutional. It is not what Jesus would have done.

We have been comfortable out here, isolated and at peace in the suburbs, for far too long. We must become uncomfortable, as our brothers and sisters of color have been, for far too long.

May we become bothered and begin to pray - not for peace but for justice - not when riots begin and property is damaged, but every time a young black man dies.

Soccer in Kinshasa: And Why We're So Unhappy

CAPTION: A soccer player practices before a game in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo
Photography by: Federico Scoppa / AFP / Getty Images
See original image here

I saw her pink soccer socks first, so daring they were almost more orange than pink, pulled up high to meet black and hot pink Adidas shorts in a uniform that surely designated skill and supremacy.

She was kicking the ball in the air, juggling and bouncing it on her knees as onlookers, perhaps her family, watched, the younger boys dreaming of a day when they too would have neon socks and a bright nylon uniform, crisp cleats covered in dirt and muscles honed by hours on the pitch.

She was good, that was clear. An athlete and a team member who practiced because she loved it.

Her teammate sat behind her, knees pulled up, waiting next to their soccer bags, toes shoved through thong sandals and those same distinctive socks: socks of belonging and prowess and, somehow, hope.

She looked utterly normal. Unaffected, as though the ball could soar through the air - touching Jupiter and Mars and Neptune and maybe even heaven - and sail back through the air to her and she'd juggle it without a hitch, so confident was she that the ball would return to her and the game would be on.

She smiled as it came down, as though no one had ever once suggested to her that women shouldn't show their knees or their arms, that girls should learn to pick up after their brothers and their fathers and should never smile except secretively, when no one could see their mouths.

She smiled as though she were free - unencumbered, without fear, without pain - as free to run up and down the pitch as she was to run up and down Africa, no one standing in her way but all gazing up at that bright pink uniform that matched the fiery sunset and shouting: Bravo! Bravo! Well done!

Her face seemed better suited for London, or Liverpool, or Barcelona or even Orlando, Houston, San Diego, Denver, Chicago. The audacity of hope we often limit to the affluent West, leaving Africa shadowed and forlorn.

I did a Google Image Search for Democratic Republic of Congo (People), where she lives. Five categories popped up, three of which were devastating: Poverty. Hospital. Child Soldiers.

The Congo has been mired in Civil War since 1996, nearly 20 years, after 31 years of reign by the authoritarian dictator Mobutu. Five and half million lives have been lost, mostly due to disease and malnutrition. Nearly 3 million children have died. One study suggests that 400,000 women are raped each year in the DRC.

Our soccer player lives in the capital city, Kinshasa, home to more than 9 million people and a homicide rate of 112 per 100,000 (as a comparison, Chicago's rate is 18.5). An estimated 20,000 children - many orphaned or abandoned during the war - live on the streets.

Most Americans see photos of the Congo in desperate men and women fleeing violence and despair in their villages. Young women carrying babies on their backs; children with distended bellies; young boys carrying AK-47s over their shoulders, a hardened, desperate look in their eyes.

Yet she smiled. In her hot pink uniform, practicing for her soccer game, she smiled.

I thought about that moment a few hours ago when I angrily honked at the van in front of me on a crowded intersection in downtown Chicago, as he backed himself into me with abandon and the light refused to change.

About when I grimaced to button up my sweater and pull on a stocking cap to 20 mph winds and 40-degree temperatures in the denial of spring.

I thought of my casual hatred, my callous dismissal, my impatience and frustration and #firstworldproblems.

It's funny when we say that, except we laugh that dry laugh - free of mirth - because inside we know these really are our problems, covering over the deeper problems of addiction or depression or illness or broken relationships or loss of meaning or mounting debt or divorce or fear or aging or infertility or jealousy and inside we know even our money and our mortgages and our handbags cannot free us - that we are encumbered by appearances and lies and determined disregard for life itself.

I do not even know her name but she has stayed with me this week since I first saw her photo last Monday. She reminds me of myself, in those moments when I too am unencumbered, casting away fear, and drinking in joy with confidence that glows from within like neon pink and orange soccer socks.

She reminds me of grace - that when we see those photos of devastation or fear or death in the Congo - we never are seeing the whole picture. Down that same street where the death trucks once rumbled, pick-up beds full of little boys with machine guns, today a young girl practices soccer, and she is full of joy.

Our worlds are not so different, except when we make them so.

It is not, as we often imagine it to be, that joy comes in after all the cobwebs of evil, doubt, despair and death are swept away: when the baby is born, when the loans are paid off, when you graduate, when you retire, when you get married, when you go to heaven, even.

Rather joy, as it did for Jesus at Calvary, exists alongside death and despair, at least here on earth. We are so unhappy because we make ourselves wait for joy. We refuse to embrace it, to realize it can happen just as easily at a red light in traffic in windy Chicago as on a beach in Jamaica.

Joy is not like a mountain peak but rather like a hanging apple, waiting to be picked.

Jesus says the Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

Sometimes we hide our joy, we cover up the Kingdom of Heaven, and we become so terribly unhappy, covering up our unhappiness with possessions and addictions.

Sometimes Jesus discovers the Kingdom of Heaven, and puts it in a photo series - in the midst of death and materialism and natural disaster - a young girl is playing soccer in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.

I did a Google Image Search for Democratic Republic of Congo People. Five categories popped up. Three were devastating: Poverty. Hospital. Child Soldiers.

This time I clicked on the first category. It said: Happy

9 Questions raised by Hozier's hit song "Take Me to Church" - and why Christians should care

Since last Sunday - Palm Sunday - I've been listening to Hozier's Take Me to Church all Holy Week, an odd sort of spiritual exercise I suppose.

At first it was the hauntingly catchy refrain: Take Me to Church - and after all I would be going to church all week this week, the holiest of weeks in the Christian calendar. Maundy, or Holy, Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil, Easter Sunday.

The refrain was jarring against the artist's desired impact of the song, that in fact no one would be taken to church, that no one would trust the institutional church which has proven so dogmatic, divisive, violent and decidedly un-Christlike in its practice as to become "a fresh poison each week."

Take Me to Church is about sexuality, about dogma, about prayer, about worship, about heaven, hell, life, death, sacrifice, sin, confession, and absolution. About Catholicism and Protestantism and Jesus and atheism and fear and hope and love.

We each see pieces of it. Many American viewers saw Hozier's music video and wrongly assumed he was gay; that the sum of his message was about the church's persecution of homosexuality - and yet while even though Hozier is not gay, he did mean to indict the church for its horrible treatment of the GLBTQ community - but the message of his song goes beyond sexuality.

Hozier is an Irish singer, a man who grew up with the deadly legacy of Catholic-Protestant war, a man whose national church was beset by sexual abuse scandals, and pews full of dogmatic believers who had never read the Bible; Masses in many cases dominated by ritual - women and babies sent away to church-run facilities where the bodies of nearly 800 infants were recently found in an unmarked mass grave. Where a woman died in 2013 because she could not have a life-saving abortion ...

Americans can look on the Irish church with judgment, yet our own church scandals and hypocrisy can fill even more pages ...

As a Pastor looking toward Easter Sunday 2015, I see something else in these lyrics. I see and hear a deep longing. Not only for sex. But a longing for the God who came to earth in Jesus, who died and rose again because of love. 

I asked colleagues and friends about their response to this song, as it dominates airwaves during Holy Week, and no one seemed to want to broach the topic. Too sexual, some said. Another, that "it could not be redeemed." Another, that "people would be too offended."

It's not my job to "redeem" Hozier's song. But his is a poetry that demands Christians consider the deep longings and pain of those on the sidelines of the church. It is a deeply wrought pain and yet also a pain wrenched in spiritual language, a compelling and historical language - words and pain out of which not only death, but life, can come again for disciples of Jesus in 2015.

I don't want to redeem Hozier, to explain his lyrics or attempt to say why he's wrong and church is not dog-like devotion but instead a community of faithful people attempting not to imprison but to set free. Now is not the time or place for a defense or even a confession. Rather it is the time for the beginning of the discussion, for the Church to engage - and not shut out - those pained yet longing masses who have swallowed its edicts but vomited its sin, left sitting on the edges and wondering where Jesus went.

Now is the time for questions raised by Hozier's song - and a chance for the Church to consider and respond.

1) Hozier uses the word "worship" 5x in Take Me to Church, following it 3x with "like a dog." He seems to understand "worship" to be dumb, mindless devotion - as though churchgoers are like dogs who have been taught to play tricks: pray, stand, sit, genuflect, sing, raise your arms.

Is this primarily how people understand "worship?" How is worship described in the Bible? What type of worship did Jesus desire, and was it "like a dog?"

2) The song begins with humor - and laughter - set at odds with a stern church. Whoever Hozier's lover is, her joy is the opposite of what he encountered in religion.

Are churches lacking joy, humor and laughter? Is this what Jesus intended?

3) Among Hozier's most chilling lines: "Every Sunday's getting more bleak ... a fresh poison each week." The lines are chilling because upon self-inspection, perhaps they are true to experience. 

Is there a bleakness in our churches? Are we hastening towards death or towards life? What responsibility do Pastors have in light of bleak churches?

4) One of the principles of Catholicism - and Christianity in general - that Hozier seems to have swallowed is the principle of Original Sin: "I was born sick," he says, "but I love it." 

Do we presume all people to be 'sick?' Have we so thought of our churches as 'hospitals' that we have forgotten their primary role is not healing but maintaining and spreading life, love, hope and faith? Have we emphasized individual depravity at the expense of recognizing and rooting out institutional depravity in our churches? What does it mean if the Church's primary defining characteristic of humanity is "sick?"

5) Hozier says: "Worship in the bedroom ... The only heaven I'll be sent to is when I'm alone with you." Sometimes this seems to be the only lyric Pastors hear when confronting this song!

Are we - the Church - so afraid of talking about sexuality that we neglect the rest of this song because of our prudishness about this line? What does it mean for Hozier to define worship as sex? What role does sexual pleasure play in a Christian life, and how can the Church embrace sexual pleasure and sexual relationship without endorsing promiscuity or unsafe sexual behaviors?

6) Hozier condemns the church, but he keeps vestiges of Jesus in his song: "Command me to be well," he sings, reminiscent of Jesus' healing of a man with leprosy in Matthew 8, and says: "Let me give you my life," reminiscent of Jesus' instructions to his disciples in Luke 9, to take up their cross and follow him, for whoever wants to save their life will lose it, and "those who lose their life for my sake will save it." 

In what ways might Hozier be reaching out to Jesus in this song? As Christians - are we so quick to defend the Church that we miss modern-day prophets who speak the words of Jesus? Does our religiosity get in the way of our mission for the Gospel?

7) Hozier seems to reference Holy Communion midway through the song, speaking first of "sacrifice," and then of "starving faithful." 

In what sense are Christians today spiritually starving? When we offer communion, do we offer it in such a way that it fills - or do we leave people starving for the Good News?

8) Hozier sells, "I'll tell you my sins - so you can sharpen your knife," which seems a reference both to confession and also to priest sexual abuse scandals, where in some cases priests exploited the sanctity of the confessional to abuse children. Knife in this instance could even be a phallic symbol.

Has the Church lost its high ground on confession? How can Christians uphold the importance of confession without looking like hypocrites? In what ways can the Church publicly confess of its own sins and how might this be healing?

9) Before the last chorus, Hozier ends his song with these lines: "I am clean ... Amen. Amen. Amen." Like the leper who meets Jesus, perhaps even in his anger toward the church, Hozier believes there is some advantage to being 'made clean.' 

Can the Church play any role in helping people and institutions be 'made clean'? Why would Hozier end his song with Amen, as though it were a prayer?

I am a Teenage Female Suicide Bomber

On Tuesday a teenage female suicide bomber, likely affiliated with Boko Haram, set off an explosive in a marketplace in Maiduguri, Nigeria, killing herself and 33 other people. This could be her story, as I imagine it.

I am 17 years old with unruly hair and an upturned nose and knobby knees and I am a suicide bomber.

I'm dead now, with at least 33 others, and the bomb strapped to my chest killed me as well as them: young men, old men, young women, old women, even children; shopping at a bustling market on a hot day in March in Maiduguri, Nigeria.

I was born not far from here in Chibok, northeastern Nigeria. It's dry and hot here but I had a good family and my mom used the lightest fabrics so even in summer, draped in a red dress and golden headscarf, I wasn't too hot. My girlfriends and I went to primary school, learned to read and to write and we heard that we were from the richest country in Africa, and our President's name was Goodluck.

We watched the sun rise and set over the dusty Sahel in the bush, a leopard darted in the distance, and we swung our hands as we walked and felt lucky indeed.

Lucky in spite of the pain - the first pain that hit like a burning knife between my legs when I was 11 and it was time to become a woman.

I cried for days, my tears mingling with the river of blood streaming from between my legs. In all the world young girls get their monthly periods; in my country nearly half of us bleed for a more grisly reason. The elders call it circumcision; a pamphlet I once read secretively in school called it mutilation.

The goal/result: I would never know pleasure, only pain.

***

Still for a time I was happy, until the shadow of Boko Haram cast its darkness over Nigeria and chose Chibok as its scourge. Remember when you posted on Twitter? #bringbackourgirls?

I was one of them - one of us - terrified and clinging to one another as Boko's men bound us together and forced us onto trucks into the dark Sambisa Forest, where they rule without fear.

It was me who was afraid, tortured. The pain between my legs came back again as men with machine guns took away my honor, my dignity, such that my family would never again accept me as I once was - and they did it over and over again as if to remind me that never pleasure, only pain, was my destiny in life.

They said they'd make us wives but to them a wife is only a slave, a wife or wives ... We whispered to each other and never slept soundly. Our food was old or rotten, often bloody bushmeat. We lost weight and starved and cried until we had no more tears, and our bodies felt as though they could bleed no more.

Some of the girls were Christians and others of us Muslims but the men with gruesome faces who claimed Allah but worshiped only death didn't much care what we believed, and after weeks of this hell many of us no longer believed either, reduced to robots - forced to grovel and crawl and fear only the next month and the chance we may be pregnant, to carry a baby into this hell would be worse than living there ourselves.

It got so that I no longer desired to remember my mother, her soft yet sinewy worker's arms - my younger brother and his gap-toothed smile - my father and his silent dignity and his quiet pride. I could no longer pray, or even think in sentences but only exist.

Outside people were tweeting and wearing T-shirts but no one ever brought me back. Boko gave me a new name, a new identity. Who I once was, running in the sand, clutching my mother's arm, writing on a chalkboard - was gone forever.

***

At first I wrote in the dirt where I slept a tally for each day I was here. I guarded it carefully and kept track but as the numbers got bigger a terrible rainstorm came and washed it all away. I wondered, had I been here, with Boko, forever? Was there any before or after?

One morning a tall soldier came with a gun slung over his arm. He grabbed my elbow and brought me before another man, who kept making guttural noises in his throat. A leader of sorts, a planner they said, one who'd read the Koran and knew of ISIS.

They told me to kneel at his feet; that a price had been paid and now I was his wife. Not his first; not his last.

The pain between my legs came again, but I no longer felt it.

***

Sometimes I could remember dreams: of love, of softness, of a cool breeze and a warm breakfast and of someday traveling to that magical place called Lagos and seeing the sea.

The men who came into and out of our tent spoke of dreams, too. Of thousands of virgins and paradise. Of making a difference in the jihad for Allah and how life had a purpose. Their eyes gleamed and shone in the sun.

I wanted this purpose, this gleam again so that something would not be so dull. Life had become such unremitting pain that I had ceased to see colors except only occasionally, sometimes in the red-blue- yellow moments before dusk.

I noticed, fearfully, that I was getting sicker often and my cycle had not come for many weeks. My throat seized with horror, that growing inside of me was a tiny warrior like the one who had made me so numb to life. I wanted it all to stop.

***

They called him Anulugwo, and his name was on everyone's lips around our tent for weeks. His eyes gleamed more than anyone's I'd ever seen and later I heard that on March 21 in Maiduguri he had completed his mission and was in heaven.

I said I wanted my eyes to gleam, to do what Anulugwo had done with the others and so they said they had a plan for me, too. It wasn't for Allah, or for Boko Haram, but in some sense this was the one thing - the one choice - that I got to make for me. Me, whoever that was now, the girl of pain and sorrows but the girl who would not be a slave in pain for one more day because my eyes would gleam like Anulugwo.

On Tuesday morning when they fitted me with explosives and taped them to my swollen, tender breasts, it was the first time I realized that I was really going to die and that it was death that brought the gleam to Anulugwo's eyes.

That morning in Abuja they were protesting to Bring Back Our Girls but I was never coming back.

For the first time since that day when we were taken, a hand grasped mine gently as I climbed off the back of the truck and into the crowded marketplace. Fifty-four people had died there on Saturday but people had to buy food so they came back, stepping frightfully.

I didn't see anyone I recognized; I wondered if I would recognize them anymore anyway because I had forgotten who I was. You never brought me back. Now I had been brought back by Boko so the death I'd died so slowly would finally be over and others could die, too.

When I pushed the detonator around my waist I noticed that the button was red. It was the first color I'd seen in weeks.

Netanyahu's Speech, White Privilege and Evangelical Paternalism

I have always considered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be the best-looking world leader.

I'm not sure why, really. That American air of self-confidence; the navy suits with light blue tie, his short and self-satisfied laugh, his passion for his country ... Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he shares a first name with my husband, that he doesn't shy away from a strong statement.

I probably have poor taste in world leaders, as sometimes I think there is even something to those shirtless photos of Russian President Vladimir Putin fishing or killing a bear.

It's embarrassing, really. And yet as I watched Netanyahu address a (mostly) fawning congressional audience on Tuesday, to be replayed with much ardor on cable news that evening, I found I wasn't alone.

A confident, even cocky, Netanyahu bounded up before Congress. He could barely begin speaking with all the applause, and then laughter, as he joked with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D, Nev.).

What other world leader could do this? Is it possible Congress shares my odd attraction to Netanyahu's light blue ties that match his piercing blue eyes?

Or is something else entirely at play here?

***

I remember waking up in Bethlehem at around 5:30 a.m., paralyzed with fear.

I had never ever heard this sound before: a wailing, mournful voice powered past the loudspeakers and into the dark, predawn streets of David's City, where Jesus was born.

It was the Muslim call to prayer.

And eight years after 9/11, my eyes filled with images of extremist Islamic terrorists, blowing up embassies and crashing into towers and suicide bombers in Kabul ... I associated this noise not with faithfulness, prayer or peace but rather with violence, war, and fear.

I think what made me the most (irrationally) fearful was that almost everything in the West Bank felt so unfamiliar.

Fashionable women in wool coats and headscarves bustled up and down the crowded streets; street vendors noisily sold trinkets and olive wood. We ate chicken with bones and without preservatives; had fresh yogurt and cucumber and dates for breakfast and I found myself both astounded and overwhelmed.

Even Christianity was unfamiliar. Many Palestinian Christians come from Orthodox traditions. The Church of the Nativity, built over the traditional site of Jesus' birth, is administered by the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Armenian Apostolic authorities. The smells and paraments and rites were strange; the music minor and decidedly un-Western.

Yet these are, of course, the Original Christians: the founders of our faith. And they sang hymns on Sunday morning at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church.

***

A few days later, our group left Bethlehem for the day and went up to Efrat, a Jewish settlement in the hills overlooking Bethlehem. Our Palestinian Christian guide Naim did not come.

We left the smoky smells of Bethlehem, the Call to Prayer ringing in our ears and the jostling of the streets echoing in our minds - recalling the Second Intifada and the time in 2002 when the Church of the Nativity became the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Our bus strained up the hills and suddenly we found ourselves in suburban America. We drove through the gates of Efrat, past Southwestern style homes with tile roofs and, I remember, even a Curves fitness center! The familiarity was uncanny. I saw grocery stores and orderly streets and trash cans and American made cars. We entered into a home where the residents spoke barely accented English and welcomed us heartily. Many were proud to display American and Israeli flags. Thousands of miles and oceans away from America, it felt like a base.

***

I was sad in Efrat. Perhaps it was the culture shock of being in too many different places and among people of such different religious convictions at the same time in the same small parcels of land. Maybe it was the stories we heard of Palestinian refugees, of Jewish and Muslim and Christian lives lost in conflict that seemed to have no end, maybe it was the lack of a cohesively shared vision and any sense of a future homeland the Israelis and Palestinians could share peacefully.

***

I thought of Efrat, and of Bethlehem, as I reflected on Netanyahu's speech to Congress this week, and the ways it polarized Americans. I thought too of our current president, our nation's first black President, and how his first name, Barack, was much more unfamiliar than Benjamin.

It makes me uncomfortable to realize that perhaps why I identify with Netanyahu has little to do with what he says or what he stands for and most to do with how he looks and how he talks.

Netanyahu is, of course, a wealthy, white man who spent much of his life in America. Like Efrat, the shining settlement on the hill, to other wealthy white men (who make up the majority of the Congress) Netanyahu is comfortably familiar.

Standing next to President Obama, an inch shorter but with gray hair, blue eyes, and white skin - with a Pennsylvania accent - for some portions of the American populace, perhaps it is the Israeli Prime Minister who seems to them to be more "American."

This is an ugly, racist truth of our country, and it by no means speaks to the wholeness of what America is and strives to be: a place where people of all colors, ethnicities and backgrounds are able to make lives for themselves and be viewed equally, where even a "skinny kid with a funny name," as Obama called himself in 2004, could become president.

But as made apparent by national reaction and polarization after Netanyahu's speech: there are still places in America where Netanyahu is more respected and accepted than President Obama. Race speaks.

***

American Evangelicals are some of Israel, and Netanyahu's, biggest supporters. Evangelical groups send millions to Israel and Israeli interest groups each year. Tours of the Holy Land for Evangelical Christians often skip over the Palestinian territories entirely, with perhaps the briefest glimpse of Bethlehem.

Perennial Presidential candidate and Evangelical Pastor Mike Huckabee leads tours in the Holy Land, though his groups don't stop in Bethlehem; they have met personally with Netanyahu. Huckabee tells the Washington Post that the Masada, a desert butte and sort of "Jewish Alamo," is one of his favorite places in the world.

It was here, 30 years after Jesus' resurrection, that Jewish Zealots rebelled against Roman rule and - rather than being captured - took their own lives for the hope of a future Jewish nation.

Masada is a decidedly nationalist place, having really nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus, and yet Huckabee calls it - not the Mount of Beatitudes, not the Mount of Olives, not the Garden of Gethsemane - one of his favorite places in the world.

***

I wonder, if what American Evangelical Christians like most about Israel is not its faith but its American-ness: its shiny high rises and Curves and New York and Pennsylvania accents.

We can relate to these people, it's easy to think, much easier than to relate to a Palestinian Christian raised on stories of Return and growing up in the shadow of a foreboding wall.

Evangelical Christian support of Israel is, of course, a bit paternalistic. The pastors who travel with Huckabee on his tours quote a lot of Genesis, but they don't seem to pay much attention to Paul's letter to the Galatians, where "there is no longer Jew or Greek," and Jesus' coming changes the Old Testament forever.

And I would guess that Huckabee and Netanyahu don't talk a whole lot about Jesus, his crucifixion, his disdain for the Pharisees, and that inconvenient truth that Christians believe Jesus was God.

Many Evangelicals believe that ultimately Christ will reign in Jerusalem, and the necessary number of Jews, perhaps 144,000 - will be converted to Christ. They don't say much about the rest of them.

As for the Jewish people, our shared history and Old Testament - or Torah - notwithstanding, Jesus of Nazareth was a fraud. To say Jesus was God is blasphemy!

Of course we don't say these things to one another, as Huckabee slaps Netanyahu on the back and the two white, American-educated men regale one another with tales of greatness.

***

We don't say it because it makes us uncomfortable: that the Israeli-American partnership may hold within it racism or Evangelical Paternalism, painting over deep religious divides that declare one another's most cherished convictions null and void.

There is the shadow of the Holocaust: of European Christians' pogroms and slaughter of Jews. We are deeply ashamed, but we must not atone for our mistakes at the expense of the Palestinians - or by paternalistically supporting Israel without acknowledging the depth of difference in our faith.

The truth is worth examining: as Americans and Israelis seek what kind of "special relationship" our countries will share in the years ahead, as Christians seek to follow the Way of Jesus; as Christians who don't look or sound like American Evangelicals are slaughtered in Syria and Libya, as Netanyahu and Obama stand toe to toe, and the everyday peace sought by everyday Israelis and everyday Palestinians seems ever pushed out of reach, not only by Gaza rockets and suicide bombers - but by dug-in American Evangelicals who seem to have chosen a path more consistent with our skin color and affluence than our faith.

That Ashy Cross: Why Ashes and Death mark Modern Christians

A friend of mine texted me early in the morning on Ash Wednesday. She works in downtown Chicago and wouldn't be back to the suburbs in time for our 7 p.m. service.

"Does it still count if I go to Shake Shack to get my ashes today?"

She was just one of thousands of Americans embracing a recent revival of Ash Wednesday, that historical rite of the Western Christian Church, marking the first day of Lent by a sooty, ashy cross on the foreheads of men, women and children alike.

I remember being vaguely jealous of my Catholic classmates in elementary school, who got to come to school late and were branded together by their sooty crosses. Our service was later in the evening, and even when I tried to keep my cross overnight, it was always washed off by morning.

At a time when church attendance in America is at historical lows, why this renewed interest in a low-tech rite of years gone by? Even in Chicago, where morning temperatures hovered around 0, Catholic priests, Lutheran pastors, and Presbyterian ministers hunkered down near the Metra stations, holding jars of ashes and signs that read Ashes to Go.

For centuries Christians have been branded by the sign of the cross. From inner-wrist tattoos of Egyptian Coptic Christians, to ornate crosses on the arms of Lebanese Christians, to cherubic Irish Traveller children with bedazzled crosses up and down their flashy First Communion gowns, the Cross has long been a symbol of following the Way of Jesus.

There is something off-putting, of course, about spending thousands of dollars for a diamond encrusted cross that symbolizes a God who on the cross was anything but shiny and flashy and instead humbled himself, suffering death in order to win the ultimate resurrection.

This is why, amidst the signs for Ashes to Go and Get Your Ash in Church and all sorts of other kitschy reminders of this Christian beginning of the Lenten season of reflection and spiritual growth, when I see everyday believers and even questioners coming forward to receive their ashy crosses at Shake Shack and in the train station: I see Hope for the Way of Jesus in 2015.

Of all the trappings and Christian identifying symbols: WWJD bracelets and Promise Keepers t-shirts and Hebrew tattoos - the ashy cross feels most appropriate to a Savior who chose to redeem not by killing others but by sacrificing Himself.

By marking and identifying ourselves with a Cross of Ashes, American Christians are saying today that we are defined by a God who overcame death not by killing but by joining us in our death, so that in our reconciliation and redemption death might be defeated.

In our American opulence and relative security, when we put on the ashy cross we are saying to our brothers and sisters in Libya and Nigeria and the Middle East: we stand with you in solidarity. We recognize that for you to wear this cross may mean death - our life was won by Jesus' death and the deaths of you martyrs - for Jesus did not ignore the ignominy and terror of death but rather experienced it Himself so that we all might have eternal life.

When we put on the ashy cross we are saying to our brothers and sisters in Detroit and Los Angeles and Fargo and Atlanta and New York City and Omaha and Salt Lake City and Seattle and New Orleans: I recognize my own mortality. I admit that I am not God and in this admitting I confess my sins: the times I have not loved God and the times I have not loved you.

Sometimes it seems the cardinal sin of American society is to admit our own shortcomings. We lie about our age, our credit score, our relationships - engaged in a never-ending competition to outlast others until death: physical death, emotional death, death of relationship - hits us in the face and we are lost.

The ashy cross stands as a sooty affront to the exceptionalism that says I will never die because I am better than you. The ashy cross, worn by young and old, rich and poor, black and white alike - symbolizes for some of us the need to remember our shortcomings and for others of us the redemptive power that even as we are surrounded by death - out of even this ashy cross will come new life.

I was marked by the sign of the cross and I heard Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

In a faithless, hopeless world - these words are words of death. The dust is death and life is meaningless and it will all blow away.

In a world marked by the Cross of Christ - these are words of life. Dust is God's building block for life: once we were created out of love and dust and as we embark down this journey of sin, repentance and forgiveness - of ourselves and of one another - we know we will return to that dust again of love, a creative, blowing dust in which ashes are fertilizer and poppies grow on Flanders Fields and lilies bloom in Jerusalem.

What Dance Moms gets wrong about God - and religion

More than a million Americans tuned in to watch Dance Moms Season 5 Episode 3 this week, just a few thousand more than came to church last week to hear my sermon ...

So when the Lifetime reality show starring over-the-top teacher Abby Lee Miller decided to do a group dance about religion, complete with a nun costume as well as a dancer dressed as a Saudi Muslim woman (black head scarf, full black cloak, and black face veil leaving only the eyes and nose exposed) - this Pastor took notice.

The song was Something to Believe In, an instrumental piece by Robin Loxley and Oliver Jackson. The dance version adds spoken words:

Believe. Believe because you are free and you can.
Believe in your own god. Believe in yourself. Believe in your possibilities.
Believe in others who believe. Believe in our differences. Believe in our future.
Believe. Believe in something.

It was, I believe, a 38-word synopsis of American practical atheism, or worse: self-worship.

In a world where religious extremists hate and kill in Paris, Syria, Jerusalem and even the United States - American popular religion has become so watered down that this 38-word synopsis sounds acceptable and even familiar to American ears.

We think it innocuous. Pleasant. Tolerant.

As a Christian, it is unacceptable.

Believe in your own god.

Wandering in the desert, just weeks after the Israelites received the 10 Commandments, they made their own gods. Their religious coach, Moses, had gone up the mountain to pray - and as their faith faded, they begged his assistant, Aaron, to make them gods.

He melted down their gold jewelry and produced a calf. They worshiped it.

God's heart was broken, but after Moses prayed and begged God to be merciful, God did not destroy God's people.

Thousands of years later, 2,000 years after Jesus rose from the dead, Americans make our own gods - and our pop culture heroes tell us to believe in our own gods!

We went to Steve Jobs and Apple and said: make us a god!
We went to the plastic surgeons and the Photoshop experts and the engineers and said: make us a god!
To the politicians and the teachers and architects and the personal trainers: make us gods.

They did: beautiful, intelligent, almost perfect gods.

And we worshiped them.

Under the guise of tolerance, we've made ourselves our own gods. We've made ourselves into gods.

Because you are free and you can ... Believe in your own god.

Except our freedom is an illusion, as we learn every time another family member dies, another friend falls into the swirling whirlpool of addiction, another doctor reads "cancer" off a chart ...

We believe not because we are free but we believe so that we might be free.

"Because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba! Father!' So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God," Galatians 4:6-7.

We have so domesticated God that the god of Dance Moms sounds almost like a pet. My own god. I take him out for a walk and I wear his name and put his picture on my wall so that everyone can see my own god. He was created for me. I made him.

But the God of the Bible cannot be constructed by human beings.
God constructs us.
He is not a bumper sticker or a catch phrase but a God.

We have forgotten what God is, besides ourselves. Or money or power.
It is not ironic that the Dance Moms piece immediately moves from believing in God to believing in ourselves. The line has become so fragile - so thin - that to believe in God today is almost synonymous to believing in yourself - so that we have become God.

Of course it all collapses in the alleyway, on the highway, in the hospital room, in the marriage counselor's office. We have become God and yet when we realize our own mortality the god we have constructed becomes mortal as well and our own death brings about the death of god when god lives only within ourselves.

Believe in others who believe. Believe in our differences. Believe in our future.
Believe. Believe in something.

See what has become important in American popular religion is not the object of our belief but the action of our belief. We tell our children simply to believe - and we forget to witness what we might believe in.

In the absence of other options, we choose ourselves.

The fear of God has become unpopular, for we think that fearing God must look like the radical Muslims who burst into Charlie Hebdo in Paris this month and killed 12 people.

They too believed in themselves more than they believed in God.

Their God was so small - such a pet - that He must be avenged by human blood.
Their God too was bound - by hatred, by fear, by sectarianism - rather than being unbound, free, to exercise His power in forgiveness.

We tell ourselves that we are free to believe but rather it is only our believing in a free God that sets us free.

We tell ourselves that it is the action of our belief that saves us.

It is not.

It is the object of our belief that saves us: a God who became man, died, and rose again - a free God who chose to love us.

Believe in something?

Dance Moms is wrong.

What saves us is not that we believe in God but that God believes in us.