Eating, Praying, Loving (Part VI): On Being What You Eat

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I don’t really think about myself as a “fad dieter.” Certainly when I was young, at that stage of life where many of our eating habits get ingrained in us, I ate pretty much what I wanted, when I wanted; and, having inherited my dad’s metabolism, I’ve never really had to worry much about the outcome. That said, as I was planning out this series on the biblical spirituality of food, it occurred to me that I have actually experimented with a wide range of unusual diets over the years. It surprised me, somewhat, to realize this.

When I was a poor University student I discovered 101 ways to prepare Ichiban noodles, and there’s a period in the middle of my second year where all I had in the cupboard was 2 weeks worth of this miracle food. But that of course, was by necessity, not by choice.

The first real “diet” I went on was in my mid-twenties, when my wife and I ate strictly vegan for approximately 2 years. Later this shifted to a vegetarian diet (so I could have cheese and milk). Some time later still, I read Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food and tried the Michael Pollan Diet for a while, which to this day I still think of as one of the healthiest diets going: eat food, not to much, mostly plants (especially greens). It’s simple and catchy, though it didn’t last. I went back to eating vegetarian for a while (it’s actually my preferred way of eating, though it’s hard to maintain), and then described myself as a ”flexitarian” and ate some meat on a periodic basis. I’ve told the story of how a visit to the naturopath last year had me eating a variation of the keto diet (high protein, low carbs) for about 6 months, and though I felt amazing on this diet, I found it really hard to do consistently.

So from vegan to vegetarian to keto to Ichiban, I’ve been all over the map when it comes to diets.

I should state it clearly, though, that these diets were never really fads for me, and certainly never to lose weight or salve a poor body image. Truth be told, every time I’ve ever experimented with a specialized diet I was motivated almost entirely by a concern for my physical health. I'd heard that veganism would improve energy levels and maintain good health; I was told that a little animal protein in the diet was good for you; my naturopath told me that carbing up in the morning was causing me to crash in the afternoon, and so on. Each of these diets have had a positive impact, I think, on my overall sense of well-being, though whether that’s because of their real nutritional value or mere placebo effect, I can’t say.

What I can say is that I've learned from experience that our health really is connected intricately to our diets, and a change in the one really can effect a change in the other. This point may seem so obvious that it goes without saying; hasn’t your mother been telling you all your life to eat your vegetables cause you are what you eat?

But from a biblical perspective, I think it needs saying, however obvious it may sound. One of the reasons to pay attention to our food, besides all the reasons I’ve offered already, is that simply put: eating well makes us emotionally and physically healthy; and the healthier we are the more good for the Kingdom of God we will be. This is why, I think, that in the midst of all kinds of lofty theological claims about the trustworthiness of the Gospel, and all kinds of detailed instructions on how to order the worship life of the community, Paul gives his young protégé Timothy this all-too practical advice in 1 Timothy 5:23. “Oh yeah,” he says: “Stop drinking only water and use a little wine because of your stomach and frequent illnesses.” There’s probably some back story behind this dietary directive that we’re missing, but whatever else it means, it suggests that a good servant of the Lord will take care to take care of himself, when it comes to his food choices.

In theological terms, the concept we are touching on here is called “stewardship.” “Stewardship” refers to the truth that everything that is—the whole of creation in fact—belongs solely and exclusively to God. Our time, our treasure, our talent, our possessions, our property, it’s all really his, and if we can lay any claim to it at all, it’s only as a steward, holding it in trust for the real owner, to whom we will give our account in the end. The theological basis for a Christian view of stewardship comes primarily from the creation account of Genesis 1, where God makes the world and then entrusts it into our care, though it is a concept often present in the teaching of Jesus and the church’s understanding of the Second Coming.

We don’t usually think about our physical bodies as belonging to the Lord, one more thing he has entrusted to us to steward well, but biblically it is very clear that the New Testament writers saw it this way. “You are not your own,” Paul said, “therefore honor God with your body.” If this idea is taken to its logical end, we would have to conclude that even our physical health is a gift from God and we are stewards of it, just as much as we are stewards of God’s money, God’s resources, and God’s property.

From a biblical perspective, then, we could say that healthy eating is simply a matter of good stewardship. We eat properly to steward our health so that we are better able to serve the Lord well throughout our lives.

In saying this, I want to offer a disclaimer or two, though. I’m not saying here that you have to be healthy in order to serve God well. I have seen some amazing prayer warriors and faithful servants of the Lord serve him devoutly while going through very serious and very real health crises—but even there, I would suggest, that one of the ways they have done so is by stewarding their health as well as they could as they went through it.

The other disclaimer is just to acknowledge that it is possible to become so focused on the food we eat that we cease to be servants of God at all, because we’re giving our diets all the attention that should go to him. For this concern, see my previous post on the dangers of making a god out of our stomach.

But even given those two disclaimers, I think the point still stands, and probably deserves more consideration in the North American Christian Church than it gets.  I don't know if healthy eating needs to rate up there with reading your Bible, praying everyday, but certainly if we want to "grow, grow, grow" for the Kingdom's sake and for God's glory, we would do well to give some thought to how we're feeding the body, while the soul is busy doing all that growing.

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Of Games and God (Part VI): Gaming in the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts

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There’s a poignant teaching from the Buddhist tradition about something called “The Hungry Ghost.” It’s a way of talking about a certain spiritual condition that people can sometimes find themselves in. A hungry ghost is a spirit with a very narrow throat and a huge distended belly, so that it’s always trying to stuff itself full, but can never get enough in. It’s an image of human emptiness and spiritual despair at it’s worst.

I’m a Christian pastor, of course, not a Buddhist monk, but still I’ve thought about the image of the hungry ghost a lot over the years, ever since I heard about it from a doctor named Gabor Maté. He worked for years among the heroin addicts and homeless people of Vancouver’s downtown east side, serving one of the most severely addicted populations in the country, and he uses the image of the "hungry ghost" to describe what it is like to be an addict—always eating, never full.

Maté’s book about his experiences working with drug addicts is called In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts, and it’s the kind of read that will linger with you for years after you close the final page. Because Gabor describes in pretty stark terms what it is like to live among the “hungry ghosts” of Vancouver’s downtown east side; but then he goes on to argue that in a sense, we are all of us hungry ghosts, in one way or another. Addiction, he argues, is a way of trying to compensate for the lack of love, belonging, and nurture that we did not receive in the most formative years of our lives, which our parents, or our peer group, or our communities were unable to give (because who, really, has been loved the way they most needed to be?).

In Maté’s view, an addiction is simply a strategy that the brain has latched on to, to salve the psychological pain of the deepest wounds it has experienced. The problem with heroin, as a strategy for self-medication, is that its physiological effect is so powerful, flooding the system with opioids, short-circuiting the brain’s natural ability to produce endorphins, and making the user physically dependent on the chemical just to feel normal, let alone “good.” Some addictions are more destructive than others, in other words; but Maté argues that everyone, really, has some “ghostly hunger” or other in their lives—obsessive work habits, compulsive viewing of pornography, impulsive spending, over-indulgent eating—that we use to avoid or cope with inner pain. He talks sincerely about his own addiction to classical music—which might crack a smile or two—until he explains how his compulsive buying and listening to classical music did for him on a psychological level, the very same thing heroin did for his patients. (Here's a Ted Talk he gave a while ago on this subject; very much worth a listen.)

Turns out we are all hungry ghosts.

I’m thinking about Gabor Maté and the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts this morning because for the last few months we’ve been exploring video games from a theological perspective, trying to develop a “theology of video games,” as I’ve been calling it. And we’ve looked at time and worship, freedom and providence, original sin and problem solving, each in turn. I stand by my work, of course, and do indeed think that each of these themes are ways to think theologically about what’s going on whenever we sit down to game.

There is, however, a shadow side to gaming, one that is quite serious, I think, and one that any serious theology of gaming would be remiss if it didn’t address at some point: simply that gaming can be, and certainly for many people it is, a “ghostly hunger,” something that does for the gamer on a psychological level what heroin does for the drug addict.

To be clear, I am not trying to say anything beyond my particular expertise, about the existence “video game addiction” as a genuine and diagnosable mental disorder, on par with alcoholism, say, or other kinds of substance abuse. There is some controversy around the idea that “video game addiction” should be recognized in this way. The World Health Organization did include “gaming disorder” in the 11th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, but the American Psychiatric Association did not include it in the 2013 edition of the DSM-5. The APA held that there was insufficient evidence for its inclusion, though they considered it “worthy of further study.” From a strictly clinical perspective, then, there are none of the standardized definitions or diagnostics that we would need if we were to talk about compulsive gaming as a mental disorder.

That said, it should also be noted that “problematic gaming” is on the rise in our society. A 2016 study of Ontario teens, conducted by Dr. Robert Mann found that 13 percent of participating teens “reported symptoms of a video gaming problem.” This was up by 9 percent from 2007, and included such problematic symptoms as preoccupation with gaming, loss of control, withdrawal, and disregard for consequences. On an anecdotal level this rings true as I consider my last eleven years as a pastor, and I think about the number of times I’ve seen compulsive gaming steal the happiness from young married couples, or spoken to parents who had concerns about their teenager’s obsession with video games.

So: whether or not video game addiction qualifies technically as a clinical condition—and I’m speaking as a gamer myself when I say this—it certainly qualifies as an addiction in the spiritual sense, as an activity people use to avoid, self-medicate, or numb the spiritual fears and pains all of us carry in the deepest part of our selves. Certainly when I am most honest about my own experience of gaming, I would have to say this is true, that often I turn to gaming as a superficial way to salve my emotional distress or soothe my emotional turmoil. An hour or five roaming the mythic land of Skyrim, for instance, where all my problems have straight-forward solutions and every success is rewarded, as I move forward in a compelling story where I am always the hero, can help me to forget, by transcending it, whatever emotional unrest I may have brought with me when I first sat down to play.

This does not mean that gaming is intrinsically bad—anymore than classical music is, even though Gabor Maté used it to feed his ghostly hunger. It simply means that we must handle video games with real care and self-awareness, recognizing that we are all of us hungrier ghosts than we think, and unless we’ve found a real way to fill our spiritual emptiness, we’re just as likely to try feeding it with video games, as we are with booze or drugs or classical music.

For the Christian especially, this understanding of gaming as "ghostly hunger" is especially helpful, I think, because a Christian would say that in Christ we have found the one thing that can truly feed the ghost within. Didn’t the Lord himself say it, that anyone who was thirsty could come to him and he would feed them with the only wine that really satisfies (Isaiah 55:1-3)? And didn’t Jesus say that he himself was the bread of life that would fill our spiritual hunger so full we would never be hungry again (John 6:35)?

The answer to these questions, of course, is yes. And if we have truly satisfied our spiritual hunger in him, Christ then sets us free to approach gaming from any of the theological perspectives we’ve explored so far, appreciating it for what it can do, without depending on it to do that one thing that only He can do: to feed the hungry ghost.

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A Christian Conversation about Steven Universe (Part II): All the Fuss about Fusion

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One of the most intense debates I ever had my kids when I first started watching Steven Universe with them, was whether or not fusion was a metaphor for sexual intercourse.

I suppose a statement like that needs some careful unpacking, so let me open the suitcase. As I mentioned in my last post in this series, Steven Universe is a cartoon that aired from 2013 – 2019 on the Cartoon Network, and one of my kids’ favorite shows. It follows the adventures of a half-gem/half-human teenager named Steven Universe, as he defends planet Earth from invasion by the Gems of Homeworld. The Gems are an alien species of sentient gemstones, hellbent on colonizing the galaxy. These aliens themselves have no human form, but are able to project physical, anthropomorphic bodies from their gems (their gemstones then become “fixtures” on their projected bodies, allowing the gem itself to move about with the body it is projecting). Steven is aided in his mission by a band of rebel Crystal Gems, who themselves have revolted against the Gems of Homeworld to become the self-appointed guardians of planet Earth.

So far this simply seems like the stuff of a good, old-fashioned Sci-Fi adventure. Original, to be sure, but nothing especially controversial.

Enter the concept of fusion.

Because at some point in Season 1 of Steven Universe, the show revealed that most gems have the ability to “fuse” with another gem, so as to create a more powerful new gem, one that is a combination of the character, qualities, and powers of them both. In order to initiate fusion, two consenting gems (that is to say, the “physical forms” of two consenting gems), engage in an elaborate and, truth be told, somewhat sensuous dance, at the end of which their two bodies come together and merge, forming a new body in a blinding flash of light.

The first time I saw a scene in Steven Universe depicting the fusion of two gems, it seemed so obviously a cipher for intercourse that I almost blushed. I was, admittedly, watching it with my two middle-school-aged daughters at the time, and, well, I’ll let you be the judge:



I have not delved very far into the Steven Universe universe online, but my understanding is that there is a bit of disagreement in the fandom over whether or not fusion really is meant to be a metaphor for sex. Certainly my family had our own debate after the show. To be honest, my kids were somewhat chagrined and more than a little offended to hear my wife and I suggest that fusion could be anything other than the innocent merger of two superheroes’ super powers for the sake of creating an even greater super hero.

Here are the arguments they advanced against our reading that fusion was an intentional, if subtle metaphor for intercourse. A) The gems are asexual aliens. Yes, their physical forms are always female, but that’s part of the aesthetic; these bodies are merely projections of each gem’s gemstone, and the gems themselves are gender neutral. B) The gems are able to fuse with each other in all sorts of combinations (even three gems at a time), on and off pretty much at will. If fusion were really a metaphor for sex, the gems would be grossly promiscuous. C) Dad, this is a kids show!

Over the course of five seasons, however, the evidence seems to mount, that the show is using fusion as a narrative device for exploring and discussing sexual relationships. A) Steven fuses with his best friend Connie (creating a hybrid human named “Stevonnie”), proving that under certain conditions, humans are able to fuse, too. B) It’s revealed that Garnet, one of the main characters in the story, is really a fusion of two gems, Ruby and Sapphire, who fell in love with each other back on Homeworld and were sent into exile for engaging in fusion with gems of a different variety (normally, rubies can only fuse with other rubies, and so on). C) Later on in the series, Ruby and Sapphire get married, fusing into Garnet at the end of the ceremony. D) When Pearl is threatened by Greg (Steven’s human father), because Rose Quartz is falling in love with him, she fuses with Rose to form “Rainbow Quartz,” as a way of making him jealous. E) And then, of course, there’s the sensual nature of the fusion scenes themselves.



In the eyes of a heterosexual middle-aged male, it’s hard to see how fusion couldn’t be about sex, whatever else it is about.

But this brings me, at last, to the real point of this post. As I mentioned previously, one of the reasons I’m spending time exploring an obscure kid’s show like this—besides the fact that my own kids were such fans—is that I think it allows us to look at LGBTQ issues with a fresh set of eyes, from a perspective that is one step removed from the issues themselves, and so, hopefully, more objective.

When I look at fusion from this perspective, one of the things it helps me to understand—and this is so crucial for understanding same-sex relationships in the church—is that sex isn’t just about sex.

What I mean is that our sexuality is this integrated part of ourselves that touches on, and is touched by, all other aspects of our lives. Our emotional well-being, our financial stability, our status in community, our prospects for the future, our physical health, our spiritual maturation, and more, all impact, and are impacted by our sexuality. If I am married, for instance, I have more financial stability and career options than I do if I am not. If I have a consistent, faithful, sexual partner in my life, I am more likely to be physically and emotionally healthy. Shoot: even my life expectancy increases if I’m in a committed, monogamous sexual relationship. The benefits are more pronounced if I am married and part of a church, where I have all kinds of ministries devoted to me—from marriage enrichment seminars and well-run nurseries—and all kinds of preaching series tailored to me—from how to have a happy marriage to how to enjoy God’s plan for sex.

If fusion really is about sex, then the truth is that it’s not only, or even especially about sex; because sex itself is not only about sex. Sex is a thread woven into the big woolen sweater of human life, and you can’t start pulling on it without all the others bunching up and coming with.

To be clear, I’m not saying that sexual activity is itself necessary for a person to be healthy, happy, well-adjusted, and so on. Far from it (you can read my series on celibacy, if you want, to get a sense just how far I am from saying that). Chastity and celibacy, properly understood, can both be vibrant expressions of human sexuality, in their own right.

So I’m not saying “you have to have sex to be happy.”

What I am saying is that often discussions of LGBTQ issues in traditional Christian circles focus almost exclusively on the physical “sex acts” in question, as though a gay relationship is only about sex; only a means to a strictly sexual end. Statements like “It’s okay to be gay, just don’t act on it,” tend to communicate this. So do statements like “love the sinner hate the sin.”

To do better, we must recognize that people are integrated wholes, and as such our sexual experience is connected to all the other things that make us who we are. We can’t talk about the one without touching on the others, and if we want to talk about the one well, we will have to address the others also. To have the theological conversation about same-sex sexuality honestly, we will have to acknowledge first that same-sex relationships are about far more than just sex, just like gay people are far more than just a “sexual orientation.” More than merely acknowledge it, we will have to compassionately and humbly admit the ways in which our posture towards same-sex sexuality, whatever that posture may be, may be impacting, influencing, or causing harm to these other areas of the LGBTQ person’s life.

Strange as it may sound, as someone who has been working at a doctoral level on this stuff for more than five years, it was the concept of fusion, in the kid’s show Steven Universe, that made me wrestle with this fact most profoundly. Seeing Garnet and Amethyst fuse on Steven Universe actually helped me notice the prejudices, the presuppositions, and the assumptions that I had when it came to same-sex sexuality. In an ironic twist of logic, I looked at fusion, and because it was clearly about relationships, togetherness, mutual love, care, support, friendship, and even sensuality, it must therefore be about sex; and then I turned around and assumed that, if it’s about sex, than it can’t be about any of those other things. It’s only because it was a kid’s show that I realized how unfair I was being.

But thank God I came to see.

It may not be a kid’s show that does it for you, but what ever it is, I hope you, too, have opportunities to come to understand how much more same-sex relationships are about, than simply some particular sexual acts. And may you find the conversations you are having with the LGBTQ people in your life becoming deeper, richer, and more compassionate, as a consequence.

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Eating, praying, Loving (Part V): The Sixth Deadly Sin

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When my daughters were children we enrolled them in an art course run by a retired art teacher in our community. He taught from his home, and it was a bit of a drive to get there, so usually I would take them both for the class and then wait in the make-shift waiting room he had set up in the rec room, adjacent to his studio, and read.

Well: sometimes I’d read. Other times I’d just sit and mindlessly watch the television set he had there. This was always on, and it was always tuned to the same channel: The Food Network.

Our family has never really had TV in the house, so I never knew till then, that there was such a thing as a television network devoted entirely, non-stop, 24/7, to food. It was always Diners, Drive-ins and Dives playing when I got there, and I’d get part way through Chopped before it was time to go. This was pretty much the only time I watched TV all week back in those days, so I got to say, far more Food Networking than reading got done while I was waiting for art class to end.

I’m thinking about The Food Network today, however, because we’ve been working our way through a “Biblical spirituality of food,” for the last month or so at terra incognita, and last week I posted some effusive thoughts about the pleasure of food, and what it tells us about God, the fact that he made the world so chock full of good things to eat. The shadow side of that coin, however, is that too much of a good thing—especially when it comes to food—can be sin. At least, the Christian Church has always thought so, and has traditionally listed the sin of gluttony, that is, an over-indulgence in food, as one of the seven deadlies. In the modern world, a world where you could, if you wanted to, spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week, watching television programs devoted (and I mean that in the theological sense) devoted exclusively to eating, the concept of gluttony seems somewhat antiquated. Even the term—gluttony—sounds quaint; the idea that giving full reign to one’s appetite might actually immoral sounds outright puritanical.

In fairness, though, I should make it clear that the Bible itself says very little about gluttony, per se. The closest Hebrew approximation we have for the English word gluttony is zâlal which has the sense of  eating that is “wasteful” and “rowdy.” The word shows up especially in the Book of Proverbs, where it warns that the glutton will come to poverty in the end (Prov 23:20, 21, 28:7). In the New Testament there’s even less to go on. The Greek word phagos (an over-eater) is about the same as the English word “glutton,” but the only time it appears is when the Pharisees use it to insult Jesus, calling him a “drunkard” and a “glutton.” So that’s hardly firm data against gluttony. Certainly there’s no direct commandment that says, “thou shalt not be a glutton,” like we have in the case of murder, theft, and adultery.

I haven’t studied this out, mind you, but my hunch is that the Christian teaching that gluttony is a sin comes less from concrete biblical interpretation, and more from Aristotelian ethics. Aristotle was the Greek Philosopher (ca. 300 BC) who taught that any action, character trait, or personal quality could be called a virtue only if it occupied the golden mean between the two extremes of having too much of it, or too little. Courage, for example, was a virtue because it expressed the golden mean between foolhardiness (too much courage), and cowardice (not enough courage). Generosity was the golden mean between stinginess and profligacy. In Aristotelian ethics, then, we might say that gluttony expresses an extreme at the opposite end of neurotic abstinence, for which the golden mean is temperance.

Certainly Aristotle has had a strong influence on the development of Christian ethics over the years (Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1274 AD) was a Catholic Theologian whose whole theological programme was an attempt to integrate Christian Theology and Aristotelian Philosophy), but there is probably a better place to turn to find a basis for our understanding of gluttony as sin.

In Philippians 3:19, Paul refers to some false teachers in the early church who were “living as enemies of the cross,” and he makes an interesting claim about them. “Their god,” he says, “is their stomach; their glory is in their shame. Their minds are set on earthly things.” Earlier in the chapter Paul was discussing a group of Jewish Christians who were insisting that the Gentile believers needed to be circumcised to be saved. Given this, it’s quite possible that here, when Paul mentions some people who have made “their stomachs” into “their god,” he’s referring to the same group of Judaizers, who would also have insisted that the Gentiles needed to follow the kosher food laws of the Jewish Torah. As such, they were making their “stomachs” their “god” by insisting that what you ate could save you.

This verse is probably not about gluttony specifically, then, or at least, it’s not only about gluttony. But in its application for Christians today, Philippians 3:19 forces us to wrestle with the possibility that we may have let food take the place that God rightly ought to occupy in our lives, turning to it for the sense of identity, the sense of belonging, the assurance that things are going to work out okay, and/or the spiritual comfort that really only God can give.

Does anyone really do this? (you may be tempted to ask). Well: what is a “foodie” except someone who has allowed their appreciation for “gastronomical esoteria” to define themselves? What are we doing when we binge-eat after a break-up? What is happening when we stress-eat to get through a hard season at work? What’s really behind that latest health-food fad that’s guaranteed to give you the looks, the libido, or the longevity you always dreamed of? What is the food network really celebrating, when it broadcasts food-focused programming for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?

It turns out it’s far easier than we might have guessed to make a god of our bellies, counting on food to do for us what God alone can do. As such, it’s also far easier to fall into the sin of gluttony than we might have thought, too. Because the sin of gluttony has less to do with what you’re eating, or how much; it has everything to do with why you’re eating it. To be sure, usually one of the signs that food has replaced God for you, is if you are uncontrollably overindulgent when it comes to eating. But I’m trying to flesh out this definition of gluttony more broadly, because it’s also true that you can have your eating obsessively controlled and also be sinning the sin of gluttony. The health-food guru who tracks every calorie with hawk-like precision, so that they can remain in complete control of their well-being, may be just as gluttonous (on this definition) as the one who eats himself into a food-coma at every meal.

The alternative to gluttony, then, is not obsessively under-eating. This is just making a god of our stomachs in the other direction. The alternative is simply (more simply said than done sometimes) to let God be God in your life. If we will give him his rightful place, he will put our stomachs, our appetites, and our eating into its proper place, too. This will not mean a wholesale rejection of the delight the food can give us (see my previous posts on that), nor a denial of the importance of careful, healthy eating (see upcoming posts on this). But it will mean tasting and seeing how good the Lord himself is, and in that knowledge discovering that food is nothing more and nothing less than what it was always supposed to be: a healthy, wholesome, pleasant gift from him.

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Of Games and God (Part V): Gaming with the End in Mind

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Back in the year 2000, my brother loaned me his unused Nintendo 64 game console, and a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I was twenty-six at the time, and this was the first video game I had played since the old days of the original Super Mario Bros. He assured me, when he passed it on, that video games had come a long way since I had seen them last, and that I would absolutely love the Ocarina of Time.

My brother knew me well, and his prediction proved prescient. To this day Ocarina of Time still stands in my mind as one of the greatest fantasy adventures of all time (though, admittedly, I have not yet played Breath of the Wild, which, by all reports, blows even Ocarina out of the water for sheer epic awesomeness).

I logged untold hours exploring the richly detailed, beautifully 3-D world of Hyrule, enjoying every nook and cranny. Enjoying it all, that is, until I found the nook and/or cranny that housed the infamous Water Temple of Hyrule. If you’ve never heard of the Water Temple before, you can bone up on the details at the “Water Temple (Ocarina of Time)” Wikipedia page. The fact that this one level in the game has it's own dedicated Wikipedia page perhaps says it all. The Water Temple is considered, by various gaming critics, to be the all-time best, or the all-time hardest (or sometimes both at once) level in the greatest video game ever.

I’ll let the aficionados duke it out over that grandiose claim. In the meantime, I want to focus down just on the factor that has made completing the Water Temple such a fabled rite of passage in gaming lore. I’m talking here about its difficulty level. Anyone who has attempted the Water Temple unaided would agree, I hope, that even if you can’t rate it the best level of all, you'd concede that it is one of the hardest puzzles ever to grace the screen of a Nintendo adventure.

Certainly when I came at it for the first time, it had me stumped for the better part of a month. Granted I had recently become a young father and a new high school teacher at the same time in those days, so I wasn’t playing Zelda non-stop over the course of that month; but even so, I repeatedly flung down the control in despair of ever figuring it out. Keep in mind that this was in the days before the solution to every video game known to man could be found online, with a nice, neat tutorial video on Youtube to walk you through it. Back in my day you slogged your way through, trail-and-error, mis-step by mis-step, with nothing but your wits and a bit of luck to guide you. Kids these days have no clue how easy they have it.

But I digress. The point of all of this is that, however tough the going got with the Water Temple, I never “got going.” That is to say, I stuck it out. I kept coming back at it. Even when my frustration with the puzzle was visceral and my reaction to yet one more failed attempt was physical, still I kept on, hoping against hope to crack the nut at last. As one of the best levels in one of the best video games ever, the Water Temple awoke in me what all the best video games awake in their players, a deep down desire to solve an intractable problem.

In his book Homo Problematis Solvendis – Problem-Solving Man: A History of Human Creativity, David Cropley traces the history of modern human innovation through a close examination of the solutions to basic human problems that our species have developed over time. He argues that a defining characteristic of modern human beings is our fundamental ability to solve problems. Besides opposable thumbs, what sets us apart from the rest of the creatures on God’s green earth is this innate desire we seem to have to solve a problem. Other creatures problem-solve too, I’m sure. I’ve seen our family dog do it trying to get a pound of cooked bacon left lying out to cool on the counter. But unlike any other animal, the human creature seems to go looking for the problem, and seems to delight in solving it for its own sake.

Video games tap in to this desire, I think. It’s part of their appeal. But they also reveal something underlying that desire. Because back in my Ocarina of Time days, you could have laid a big exercise book full of random math problems in front of me, and I would not have tackled them with anywhere near the same verve and dedication as I did the Water Temple. There was something unique about that puzzle in particular that drove me relentlessly to tackle it.

I want to suggest that the “something unique” that makes video games so irresistible is the teleological nature of the problem solving they present us with. Unlike the math exercises in the illustration above, which are all random, self-contained puzzles that don’t seem to have any real purpose, the puzzles we encounter in the best video games are problems with an end in mind. That is to say, the puzzles themselves serve the purpose of advancing the story, solving the quest, defeating the villain, saving the world.

In fancy theological terms, we would say that when something is moving towards a very clear, and especially a very meaningful “end”—when things happen for a purpose and that purpose moves things towards an ultimate resolution—we would say that it’s “teleological.” In Greek, telos means end or purpose; and something is teleological when it begins with an end in mind.

In Christian creation theology, for instance, the real question is not “did the world evolve or was it created in 144 hours.” The real question is: is the universe teleological, or not? Was it created for a purpose, or was it a meaningless accident?

In Christian theodicy (the theological explanation for suffering), the problem of evil is not resolved by mere logical arguments, but by teleological arguments. Roughly speaking, a Christian theodicy would say that there is a higher purpose in our suffering that allows us to transcend it as we go through it.

And in Christian Video Game Theology (a new field I’m developing), the importance of video games is that they reveal—not just that we like solving problems—but that we want the problems we solve to be teleological. That is to say: we have this deep-down desire to tackle problems especially that move us towards an ultimate end as we solve them.

I’m drawing this connection because all Water Temples aside, the world is brimming these days with problems to be solved. Thirty seconds on my Facebook feed would probably be enough to convince you of that: the planet’s getting warmer, time-honored political structures are devolving into junior high shenanigans, gross injustices against people of color are being brought to light, pandemics are raging, locusts are swarming, and people are hurting. It’s easy, and perhaps tempting, to approach all these problems like so many math sums in an exercise book, a bunch of disconnected and especially non-telelogical difficulties that don’t have any meaning beyond simply the discomfort and consternation they cause us.

Of course, if I’m on to anything in my analysis of Zelda’s Ocarina of Time, approaching the really big problems of this world atelelogically won’t give us the resolve or the resources we need really to solve them well, not when the going gets really tough we won’t.

A Christian, by contrast, should tackle the big problems of our world something like how a dedicated gamer would tackle the Water Temple: by trusting that each problem we face feeds into a bigger, single challenge—the problem of sin in the world—and that there is an underlying purpose for us in tackling this this problem faithfully, a real reason to do it well.

I say this because, from a Christian point of view, we are all moving to an ultimate end. According to the Apostle Paul’s Gospel, we will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ on the last day, to receive our due “for the things done in the body, whether good or bad” (2 Corinthians 5:10). And on that day, he says elsewhere, we will all give our account (Romans 14:12). Surely what we did or didn’t do to be a healing presence in the creation, how we did or didn’t offer a cold drink of water to the parched and starving, how we strove to be peacemakers in a warring world, how we lived as ambassadors of Christ's reconciliation—surely these “good or bad things” will be included in that reckoning on that day.

What if I tackled the problem of evil in the world with the same tenacity and determination I poured into trying to figure out how to get the water levels in the Water Temple raised and lowered just so, so that I could advance to the Room of Illusion and defeat Dark Link, my alter ego in the game? There would probably be a lot less hurt in the world if I did, and more likely than not, when the ultimate quest of life was finally complete, I would have the reward of hearing the Divine Designer of the Game say to me, as he will say to all of us who tackle sin with the end in mind: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

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The 81 Percent, a song

I wrote this song back in 2017, upon learning that 81% of white, male evangelical voters in America voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. I'm Canadian, and the Canadian church has all kinds of its own problems, to be sure, but inasmuch as this statistic is the truth about a tribe that I still identify with in some way (i.e. the global evangelical church), it broke my heart to hear it. Think of this song as a cry of anguish over the current state of evangelicalism in North America. 

I'm thinking about it in new light these days, as I find myself reeling to see the chaos that has unfolded in America during the last four yeas of the Trump administration, and especially after the spectacle he staged at  Washington DC's St John's Episcopal Church during the Black Lives Matter rallies. I offer it here knowing that, as an outsider looking in, my voice is one of the least important in the conversation right now, but such as it is, it's still mine to offer.



The dealer played the trump card
When the stakes were getting high
And the Joker upped the ante
With a twinkle in his eye
And all the players folded
Cause they knew just what it meant
That the chance of drawing aces was 81%
The chance of drawing aces
The chance of drawing aces (yeah)
The chance of drawing aces was 81%

And I don’t wanna talk
About politics and faith
And I don’t wanna walk the line
Between the church and the state
Cause I can’t really say
Who’s hell bent or heaven sent
But I don’t wanna be a part of the 81%

The temperature was rising
And the cistern was bone dry
And the clouds were piling up
In an apocalyptic sky
With lightning on the wind
With a cold metallic scent
Cause the chance of thunderstorms was 81%
The chance of thunder storms
The chance of thunder storms (yeah)
The chance of thunder storms was 81%

And I don’t wanna talk
About politics and faith
And I don’t wanna walk the line
Between the church and the state
Cause I can’t really say
Who’s hell bent or heaven sent
But I don’t wanna be a part of the 81%

And if we sold our souls
At least it was on the level
That’s the art of a deal
With the 81%

And all the merchants gathered
Together for the feast
And someone raised a glass
To the dragon and the beast
And Lazarus was calling
But no one would repent
Cause the profits all were up by 81%
The profits all were up
The profits all were up (yeah)
The profits all were up by 81%

And I don’t wanna talk
About politics and faith
And I don’t wanna walk the line
Between the church and the state
Cause I can’t really say
Who’s hell bent or heaven sent
But I don’t wanna be a part of the 81%

A Christian Conversation about Steven Universe (Part I): Becoming a Community of Hospitality

This spring I completed a Doctor of Ministry program through Northeastern Seminary in Rochester, NY, one that I began in 2016 and have been working at, on and off, over the last four years. The topic of my dissertation was LGBTQ ministry, and in particular my research focused on how churches can become communities of hospitality for LGBTQ people.

One of the reasons this topic is so important to me is because I currently serve in a denomination that is not affirming of same-sex sexuality, and I have been trying for many years to get my denomination to grapple with the implications of its theology. In keeping with my denomination’s non-affirming position, I wrote my dissertation from this theological starting point. Essentially, I was asking: if this is where we are starting from as a denomination, then what does ministry for gay people really look like? And as a corollary question: what are best practices for churches in our denomination to do effective ministry for LGBTQ people, if we are unwilling or unable to reconsider our theology?

I hope it won’t take much work to convince you that this was an extremely challenging topic to work on, in a non-affirming context, and an extremely challenging approach to take. On the one hand, I personally have a vested interest in seeing the denomination I belong to do better when it comes to its response to LGBTQ people. On the other hand, many of the biases, assumptions, and prejudices that I encountered among otherwise well-meaning Christians made it difficult to engage in the kind of open-hearted, open-handed conversations that are so crucial if a denomination like mine is going to do better. At the same time, throughout my research the Lord was stretching me, challenging me, and pushing me continually to examine my own biases, assumptions, and prejudices. At the end of the day (and the end of my degree), the best I could say was simply the word “hospitality.” Churches that are unwilling or unable to reconsider their theology regarding same-sex sexuality can and should, in the meantime, strive to be communities of hospitality for LGBTQ people.

Hospitality is far easier said than done, however. In the modern world we have lost sight of the biblical vision for hospitality—xenophilia—which had more to do with welcoming in the stranger than it had to do with inviting over your family and friends. We have lost sight of how deeply moral and spiritual the practice of hospitality was in the ancient world, replacing it instead with Martha-Stewardesque images of well-set tables and tastefully decorated guestrooms, used especially for entertaining people who are "like us."

Biblically, however, hospitality is about making space for the person whom we have been taught to think of as “the other.” It’s about opening our communities to the person who is least like us, and in doing so, opening our hearts, our minds, our ears and our hands to them as well.

In concrete terms, I argued that a church can be hospitable to LGBTQ people only if it is willing to do things like: end the silence, nurture safe pathways for coming out, address the power imbalance, and listen to the stories of the gay experience. At the very least, as I tried to do those things in my own life, I came to understand the need for including and affirming gay people in the community of the church far more clearly and profoundly than I ever had before. I came to understand the unique challenges that gay people face, the unique questions that have to grapple with, and the unique gifts that they contribute to the community in ways I never would have otherwise.

I would like to share some of the things I’ve learned about how a church can do better when it comes to the gay people in its midst, here on my blog over the next few weeks. If nothing else, this will keep the conversation I started with my dissertation going, now that my actual degree is finished. But there is something else: because there are gay people in church, and gay people who want to be in church, and gay people who are not in church but the church should be reaching out to them; and unless the church can really learn to open its ears to understand their experience as gay people, it will, I think, do harm to them and dishonor Jesus, both at the same time.

Of course, one of the things I learned, studying this topic for four years in a non-affirming context, is that these issues themselves are fraught with tensions (see my preceding paragraphs where I mention the biases, prejudices, and assumptions). Tension makes us anxious and anxiety makes it difficult to hear well. As a way of trying to alleviate these tensions, then, what I would like to do for this series, instead of presenting one more stuffy theological treatise—you can read my dissertation for that—is to present it as a sort of theological conversation about one of the most fascinating children’s programs I’ve come across in recent years. I’m talking about the show: Steven Universe.

Steven Universe is an animated cartoon created by Rebecca Sugar that aired on the Cartoon Network for five seasons, from November 2013 to January 2019. I got into the show on the recommendation of one of my children, who identifies as queer and non-binary and is a major Steven Universe fan.

Steven Universe revolves around the adventures of a half-gem/half-human boy named Steven Universe.

Yes, I said “half-gem.” In the show, the gems are a species of alien life forms which are literally gems, but they can take on various anthropomorphic shapes, projecting these forms from their gem-like “bodies.”

But wait: it gets weirder…. and awesomer… because Steven Universe is the child of one of these aliens, a gem named Rose Quartz, who fell in love with a human named Greg Universe. Rose has since died, but her spirit lives on in Steven, her half-gem offspring. Steven himself is being raised by Rose’s band of rebel gems—Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl—who are the sworn protectors of earth and together make up a team of adventurers known as “the Crystal Gems.”

Yes, I said “rebel gems.” It turns out that long ago, planet earth was invaded by an army of evil gems from a planet called “Home World,” who wanted to convert it into a Home-World colony. Rose Quartz and her companions fell in love with the our little blue-and-green chunk of rock hurling through space, and rebelled against Home World, driving them off and saving the day. Rose herself is long since gone, but still the Crystal Gems continue the fight she started, defending earth from the on-going attacks of Home World.

If you’re wondering what all this has to do with a dissertation about hospitality for LGBTQ people, stay tuned. Because one of the things that Rebecca Sugar was attempting to do in creating the show was to imagine a cartoon that was not (in her words) “heteronormative.” That is to say, she was trying to create a show that worked as a children’s show in its own right, regardless one’s sexual orientation, but at the same time, it presented issues, characters and themes that young people who did not identify with the heterosexual mainstream could resonate with.

As a result, watching Steven Universe as a Christian Pastor helps me to see the world through a unique set of eyes; and because it's in the genre of a children’s cartoon—and a good one at that, with real adventure and compelling characters and imaginative story lines—it allows me to really see with those eyes. The usual things that make seeing so hard (see again my paragraph about biases and prejudices) are bracketed out so that the story can get told. In this way, the show allows the viewer to “enter into” queer issues, themes, and questions, without all the usual anxieties and tensions.

As unlikely as it sounds for me to say it, having worked on this topic at a doctoral level for 4 years, watching Steven Universe has taught me some of the greatest lessons I’ve yet learned, about what hospitality for gay people really looks like, by asking me to bracket out my biases and assumptions so that the story can simply be told.

All that being said, I hope I’ve piqued your curiosity enough that you'll join me for the next few months as I start a theological conversation about some of the themes in Steven Universe, and more importantly, I hope that learning to appreciate these themes will help us all do better—becoming more inclusive and more affirming—when it comes to the gay people in our lives.

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Eating, Praying, Loving (Part IV): The Joy of Food

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There is an almost throw-away scene in C. S. Lewis’s science fiction novel Voyage to Venus that I’ve been thinking about a fair bit lately. The hero of the story, an interplanetary traveler named Dr. Ransom, journeys to Venus where he discovers a pristine, unfallen paradise, completely untouched by any sin. The story itself is fascinating, chock full of metaphysical speculations about what might have been had humans never fallen from grace, and what the life was like that we lost when we lost paradise.

The scene I’m thinking about is especially interesting, though, because early on in his sojourn on Venus, Ransom grows hungry (naturally) and seeks to sate his appetite with one of the many alien fruits that grow on the planet. The fruit he selects for his first extra-terrestrial meal is a round, yellow fruit that looked, from the description, something like a cross between a melon and an orange. Here is how Lewis describes that first taste of this new fruit.

The rind was smooth and firm and seemed impossible to tear open. Then by accident one of his fingers punctured it and went through into coldness. After a moment’s hesitation he put the little aperture to his lips. He had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight. It was, of course, a taste, just as his thirst and hunger had been thirst and hunger. But then it was so different from every other taste that it seemed mere pedantry to call it a taste at all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant. For one draught of this on earth wars would be fought and nations betrayed. It could not be classified. He could never tell us, when he came back to the world of men, whether it was sharp or sweet, savoury or voluptuous, creamy or piercing. “Not like that” was all he could ever say to such inquiries.

Lewis will go on to describe the other fruits of Venus with just as much eloquence. Everything Ransom puts into his mouth, it seems, was designed especially and specifically to delight the eater, and every meal on the planet seems to result in the discovery of a “totally new genus of pleasures.”

Lewis is almost embarrassingly effusive in his desire to dwell on the good things to eat that Ransom finds in paradise, but there is something going on here that any serious spirituality of food must address: the simple fact that food brings delight.

In paradise, of course, the delights of food are paradisaical, but even on this side of the fall, food still has this ability to give great pleasure in the eating of it. Few Christian discussions of food that I have read squarely acknowledge this. Christians tend to dwell on the sin of gluttony, the wisdom of moderation, the importance of feeding those who don’t have, and so on. These things are of crucial importance, and I hope to address them in turn through this series, but they are not the best place to start in our biblical exploration of the spirituality of food. The best place to start, I think, is in the beginning; and in the beginning we see that food was created especially to give human beings pleasure.

This is implied in places like Psalm 104:14, which describes the Lord “bringing forth food from the earth, wine that gladdens human hearts, oil to make their faces shine and bread that strengthens their hearts.” It’s implied more subtly in the way Song of Solomon uses the pleasures of food as a metaphor for sexual pleasure. It’s stated explicitly in Genesis 2:9, when it says that in Eden, God caused to grow from the ground “every tree that is pleasing to the eye and good for food.”

As far as the biblical witness is concerned, God intended for us to take great pleasure from the simple act of eating good things.

The word “simple” and “good” perhaps needs underlining in our modern era. In his book Salt Sugar Fat, Michael Moss argues that in North America, all our prepackaged foods have been carefully concocted by the modern food industry, with a finely engineered ratio of sugar, fat, and salt, designed especially to stimulate a specific response in the pleasure centers of our brains and so make us want more. In other words, most of the foods in the supermarket are made, not to give us pleasure, but to get us hooked. Michael Moss calls salt, sugar, and fat the “holy trinity” of the industrial food complex.

In a similar vein, Michael Pollan argues that in order to feed the needs of the modern food industry, modern agriculture relies almost predominantly on the “big three” crops: corn, wheat and soy. The mass production of these three, he suggests, has led to the loss of all kinds of biodiversity in our agriculture, as whole species of foods are cast aside because they are simply not profitable.

You can explore these arguments and weigh them for yourself. My point here is just that, instead of experiencing the wide array of gastronomical pleasures that the Creator invented for his children to enjoy, most modern North Americans eat a diet consisting predominantly of foods synthesized from, raised on, or laced with salt, sugar, fat, corn, wheat, and soy.

It’s a pretty paste-pudding diet when you hold it up to the veritable cornucopia of good things to eat—the rainbow of colours, the myriad of smells, the tangs, the savors, the textures, the tastes—that God dreamed up for us to enjoy. From avocados to zucchinis, from bananas to broccoli, passion fruit, dragon fruit, grapefruit and kumquats, we see the wonderful imagination, and the infinite joy of the Creator on display. And from a biblical perspective, we would say that God actually made the earth so variegated in its bounty like this because he wanted his creatures to have no end of causes for delight, and no end of reasons to thank him.

There is a place in the book of Romans where Paul says that from a theological perspective, “God’s invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” In other words, Christians can learn things about the character of God—what God is really like—by looking at the things he has made. Paul would say, and I would agree with him, that until the Spirit of God opens our eyes to it we are unable accurately to read the witness that God has left in the creation. True enough. But for the Christian, the man or woman whose eyes have been opened by the Spirit to the truth that there really is a Creator behind it all, the creation speaks volumes about what that Creator is like.

And when it comes to all the thousands of good things to eat that the Creator has made, the creation tells us that whatever else is true about him, God takes great delight in taking delight. That is to say: he loves to see his creatures experience the joy of sensory pleasure. He is, as C. S. Lewis said it in another place (though somewhat tongue in cheek), he is a hedonist at heart. And he made lemons so sour so that we could have the fun of crinkling our noses when we ate them; he made maple syrup so sweet for the sheer pleasure it gives us to savor it.

There is, of course, a flip-side to this coin, and it’s not for nothing that gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. But that post can wait for another day. For today, just remember what the Apostle Paul said, when he told Timothy that “everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:4); and with that reminder, take the time at dinner tonight to take delight in the sweet, the salty, the sour, the bitter, the tang, the texture, the sting, the soothe and the savor of whatever good thing the Lord puts on your table for you to enjoy.

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Sitting at the Bottom of Nickajack Cave, a song

Sitting at the bottom of Nickajack Cave
I’m waiting for someone to come along and save me
Sitting at the bottom of Nickajack Cave
I don’t want to leave but I know I can’t stay
And the flickering light is playing tricks on my sight
While I’m sitting at the bottom of the cave

There’s a darkness that shines
Brighter than the daylight
There’s a dying place
That breathes there deeper than the soul
There’s a cleansing buried in the mire
There’s a healing burning in the fire
There’s a needing that’s sharper than desire
And a thirst in the ache when the aching makes you whole

Sitting at the bottom of Nickajack Cave
I’m waiting for someone to come along and save me
Sitting at the bottom of Nickajack Cave
I don’t want to leave but I know I can’t stay
And the flickering light is playing tricks on my sight
While I’m sitting at the bottom of the cave

And I’m stuck here again
How I go there I don’t know
Just a slip of the hands
And suddenly I find myself groping through the shadows
In the darkness where the light is deceiving
On a journey where the path is misleading
For vision where the blindness is believing
As the past rattles round like a never-ending echo

Sitting at the bottom of Nickajack Cave
I’m waiting for someone to come along and save me
Sitting at the bottom of Nickajack Cave
I don’t want to leave but I know I can’t stay
And the flickering light is playing tricks on my sight
While I’m sitting at the bottom of the cave

Of Games and God (Part IV): Finding the Freedom to Game

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A number of years ago my son showed me this strange video game that was both mesmerizing and bizarre. It was called The Stanley Parable, and in it you play an office worker named Stanley whose computer screen mysteriously goes blank one day at work, and when he sets out to investigate, he discovers his whole building has been suddenly, inexplicably vacated. From this point on, Stanley explores the empty office building, led on from room to room by an omniscient narrator who suggests a course of action for every scenario Stanley encounters. The player may chose to act contrary to the narration of course, and this sets the story in an ostensibly new direction, forcing the narrator to find some way account for your choice and get the story back on to its original track.

The whole thing is tongue-in-cheek fun, with all sorts of references to popular video games from its era, like Portal and Minecraft, but there is no real action, combat, or puzzles to solve. At best it plays like an elaborate Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story, with the narrator consistently expressing exasperation at the decisions you make, if and as you deviate from the story’s main path.



Calling it a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure though, is something of a misnomer, because on repeated play-throughs of The Stanley Parable, an astute player will begin to notice that the game is pushing you towards its desired outcome, regardless your choices. If you choose the left door when the narrator wants you to choose right, well, no matter, the game will find a way for the “right door outcome” to happen even so. This becomes part of the joke, but also, more importantly, the point of the parable.

Because The Stanley Parable is actually exploring a profound philosophical question, I think, one that all sorts of video games wrestle with in subtler, less self-conscious ways: what is the nature and extent of our free will when we are gaming?

The Stanely Parable presents the gamer with a façade of freedom, and works hard to convince them that every decision they make matters, because each one will help to determine an otherwise open-ended outcome. In the game, it seems really to matter if I choose the left or the right door; certainly it matters to the narrator, who grows increasingly annoyed if you ignore his directions. In truth, however, the endings of The Stanley Parable are of course limited, and ultimately the game’s programming will move you towards the same conclusion regardless what choice you make.

I encountered this same problem—that in video games we only seem to have free will—in a more sophisticated way while playing the game Skyrim. In the mythical kingdom of Skyrim an epic civil war is raging between the Tamrielic Empire and a faction of rebels known as the Stormcloaks. At one point early on in the story, the player is forced to decide which side he'll throw his hat in with. Will he join the Empire or become a Stormcloak?

I remember the first time I played through Skyrim, I agonized over this choice for weeks. I kept taking on pointless side-quests, trying to delay the fateful decision. In the end I sided with the Empire (because when I visited the capital city of the Stormcloaks I discovered the place was rampant with anti-Elven sentiment that I could not, in good conscience support—more on the morality of gaming in later posts). It sounds silly to say this decision gave me such grief, but it was, in fact, a painfully hard lot to cast.

I’ve played through Skyrim a number of times since, though, and what I’ve learned is that, ultimately, the game still unfolds in more or less the same way, regardless the choice you make. Stormcloak Rebel or Imperial Officer, you still get to become the Dragonborn, you still broker an uneasy peace between the two sides, you still defeat the evil dragon Alduin, and so on. Sure, you get to see different cut scenes if you're a Stormcloak, and perhaps you close off some side quests if you're an Imperial, but as far as the over-arching saga is concerned, fate runs ever as fate must (to quote Beowulf).

Some would argue that this is poor game design, if your choices don’t really affect the outcome of the game, but I think that’s one of the points of The Stanley Parable. Even games with a number of different endings still only have a specific number of different endings.  Every video game is still, in the end, running a predetermined algorithm, and however many permutations and combinations there might be, still, they can't be infinite.

On a philosophical level, to begin playing a video game is to agree to limit your freedom in service to the game.

If I am on to something here, then I wonder if video-gaming might be a more verdant analogy for the Christian life than we might suspect. Indeed, an imaginative Christian could argue that the whole of reality, from God’s perspective, is not unlike the algorithm of a stunningly holy and beautifully divine game, where God will not micro-manage the individual decisions of individual players, but even so we can rest fully assured that the outcome he intended when he set the game in motion will be realized.

Some Christians, especially the Calvinists among us, would disagree. How could God truly be sovereign (they might ask) if human beings truly had free will? Others, the Open Theists among us, would disagree in the other direction. How could humans really have freedom unless God has left the future truly open ended?

In answer to both, the Christian Gamer might point to any number of video games where the player’s free will and the predetermined outcome of the game function together, not just harmoniously, but joyfully contributing one to another. Might this, in some way, be analogous to God’s Sovereignty? Could the video game offer us a way of imagining how we are free to make our choices in life, but however real those choices are, still they will not derail the Creator’s intention for the game?

If I am on to something here, there’s a flip-side to this argument that we will have to wrestle with eventually. Most gamers sense it intuitively, I think, that in order to enjoy the game, you have to submit in some way to its limitations. If Mario never fell when he stepped off the platform, and every Kuppa Troopa just brushed harmlessly by, what would be the point of playing? The joy of the game comes, in fact, from functioning within and exploring around the edges of the limitations it places on you.

In this, too, games may offer us a fascinating analogy for the Christian life. Becoming a disciple of Jesus is, after all, the ultimate submission of our wills to the most beautiful, joyful, and holy limitation of all. It’s to subject our very real, individual choices to the boundaries that the Way of Jesus imposes on us. And if video games are any indication, to do so does not suck the joy out of life, rather infuses it with greater delight, higher purpose, and more profound meaning than it could ever have if we were left to our own, perfectly free, devices.

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Waiting for Godot, a song

This is a song about waiting for something that just never seems to arrive. The title comes from Samuel Beckett's famous existential play with the same name.  It sounded far more poignant and rainy-day-jazz in my head than it does in the final mix, but that's what it's like, I guess, when you're waiting for Godot-- the stuff in your heart never really seems to come along the way you think it should.



O Godot, Godot, where did you go?
And when you coming back?
Cause a pocketful of promises
Can’t make up for what I lack
I keep waiting on the corner
But you just don’t show
And it gets so lonely sometimes
Waiting for Godot

O Godot, Godot, I just wanna know
How long’s it gonna take
I’ve been hanging around for a while now
And my fingers are starting to ache
I don’t know if I can keep holding on
But I’m afraid to let go
It just gets lonely sometimes when you’re
Waiting for Godot

O Godot, I know, it’s not apropos
But it never hurts to ask
If you could find the lost boy
Behind the looking glass
He went out one day to look for you
But that was long ago
And he’s still out there somewhere still
Waiting for Godot

Conspiracies Exposed (Part IV): We have Seen the Enemy

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One of my favorite B-Grade horror flicks staring former WWF wrestlers is that 1988 cult classic They Live. In They Live, Rowdy Roddy Piper stars as a butt-kicking Everyman who stumbles across a secret cabal of mysterious aliens, who have infiltrated society disguised as normal citizens, and are controlling the population through mind control, subliminal messages, and mass media. This movie was doing The Matrix before The Matrix was cool.

Truth be told, however, I’ve never even seen the whole film; there is just one scene etched indelibly on my imagination. Because early on in the story, our hero Mr. Piper discovers a resistance group holed up in a church (no coincidence, that), and there he acquires a set of mysterious sunglasses that, when he dons them, allows him to decode the messages that the aliens have plastered across the billboards, magazine covers and television screens of his world.

So, for instance, he might look at a billboard advertising the latest computer software, and it seems normal enough, but when he looks at it through his sunglasses, it turns into a black-and-white sign reading, simply, OBEY. He might look at the photograph of a pretty fashion model on the cover of a magazine in the convenience store, but when he sees it through his sunglasses, it’s a black and white page simply printed with the word REPRODUCE.

You really have to see it to believe it…

I have no idea if the makers of They Live consulted any biblical scholars when producing this film (I kind of think they didn’t) but the reason I find this obscure sci-fi fantasy flick so fascinating is because it’s actually a pretty good analogy for one of the hardest, but also most intriguing books of the Bible. I’m talking here about the Book of Revelation.

We’ve been spending a fair bit of time over the last month at terra incognita unpacking conspiracy theories (as an epistemological phenomenon, not particular conspiracy theories), and up until now we have avoided getting too deep into the Book of Revelation. But I would be remiss, as a Christian pastor talking about conspiracy theories, if I didn’t at least give Revelation a nod in this discussion. This is because, on the one hand, conspiracy theories of the Christian variety tend to be intricately, almost inextricably tied up with the Bible’s apocalyptic writings. I have seen any number of Christian conspiracy theorists, for instance, offering to explain how such-and-such a political leader is really the Beast of Revelation, or how UPC Codes, G5 towers, debit cards, or vaccinations are really a fulfillment of the prophecy about the number of the Beast, or how this or that development in geo-politics is really the machinations of some secret society pushing us towards Armageddon.

The problem with using the Book of Revelation to shore up your conspiracy theory like this, is that the conspiracy theorist who does so is kind of right, but not quite, and not at all in the way they think.

This brings us to the other hand. Because the Bible’s apocalyptic writings actually do help us to discern, and understand, and respond to the “stuff of conspiracy theories”—the machinations of political powers, the manipulations of corrupt economic systems, the dehumanization of omnipotent technology—all of it. The problem is that most conspiracy theories that draw on the Book of Revelation to speculate about the existence of an Illuminati (let’s say) or whether [fill in name of political leader here] is really the Beast, are working with a fundamental misunderstanding of how biblical apocalyptic actually works. Consequently they tend to misread the news, and do violence to the biblical text, both at the same time.

So as a primer in how biblical apocalyptic works, might I refer you to Rowdy Roddy Piper’s “decoder glasses” in They Live. Because what we see here is that the conspiracy, such as it is, is hiding in plain sight. All it takes is something (a set of sunglasses…. a highly symbolic biblical text…) to decode it for us. The adverts and the social media feeds and the economic systems that you take for granted—and this is the key, you accept them as normal because they are normal in your society—that’s where the real conspiracy lies. If only you could see them through the right lens.

A full exegesis of the Book of Revelation is impossible to do in a 1000-word blog post, but suffice it here to say that all of the dark imagery—the idolatrous beasts and the multi-headed dragons, the scarlet Jezebeels and the 666s written on people’s foreheads—all these trace back to specific aspects of everyday life in the Roman Empire: Caesar, and the worship of Caesar, the Imperial Genius and the exploitative economic systems that gave it life, the military conquest and dominance, the pagan idolatry. All of these things were the kind of stuff that your average citizen in ancient Rome would have simply assumed was the way the world turned, systems of government and politics and economics as normal to them as 1st of July celebrations and regular garbage pickup is to us. What the Book of Revelation is doing is peeling back the façade of these things to show—not another human conspiracy—but instead the spiritual reality that lies within these everyday things.

That “Caesar” whom you worship so willingly on your way to temple (Revelation seems to be saying) has a spiritual dynamic to his office, a spiritual entity indwelling his office, even, and whatever else it is, that spiritual entity is best imagined as a demonic beast hell-bent on devouring the world. It’s like putting on a pair of sunglasses and realizing the billboard really says OBEY. Suddenly you see for the very first time that thing that was always there.

I’m wording this very carefully. Because Revelation is not saying (I don’t think) that Caesar himself was the Beast. If it were saying that then you’d have every license in the world to use Revelation to concoct no end of modern-day conspiracy theories. But Revelation is saying something more subtle and more important than that.

There is a bestial power at work within all our acts of “Caesar making”—every human effort at empire building—and this "spiritual power” is the real problem. This is why the early Christians could denounce Emperor worship, in one breath, something they did every time they confessed that Jesus is Lord, but in the very next breath they could enjoin their followers to honor the Emperor (1 Peter 2:17). Because they understood that the mere human being named “Nero” wasn’t the real enemy; the real enemy was the bestial “power” that indwelt Nero’s authority and office as Caesar, the “powers and principalities” which every Christian knows are the real adversaries (Eph 6:12).

That last reference to Ephesians 6 is especially helpful here. In this verse Paul makes it crystal clear that for a Christian, no human being, be they Caesar or otherwise, is our enemy, and it is a failure of Christian courage to make it out as though they were. “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood,” he says, “but against the (spiritual) rulers, the (spiritual) authorities, the spiritual powers of this dark world.” Paul is doing here in shorthand, I think, what the Book of Revelation is doing at length; or rather, Revelation is an extended, poetical exposition of this basic principle. Human beings are not the enemy. The enemy is the fallen spiritual entities that indwell all human power structures, be they political, economic, technological or otherwise.

This is why I say that plugging your pet conspiracy theory into the Book of Revelation to give it juice does violence to the text. Because most every conspiracy theory I’ve ever heard starts with the premise that there are some mysterious unknown human beings in power, secretly trying to manipulate us, and because they are in league with the devil, these human beings must be the enemy. Even if there were real conspirators behind this or that modern day problem, which for all I know there may be, Revelation would ask us not to see them as the enemy themselves, but as victims of the enemy, tragic casualties of the real war. When we fail to realize this, and use the Book of Revelation instead as a way of gaining power over other people (even if they are the unseen people behind my theoretical conspiracy), we may actually fall into the Beast’s trap, playing by his rules and grabbing for his power, even as we are trying to expose him.

As an alternative, we can let the Book of Revelation be a set of They Live sunglasses that allow us to see the spiritual dynamic at work behind, beneath, and within every human power structure, and especially within those power structures we take for granted as normal.  In saying this, I realize that the analogy breaks down almost immediately, because in They Live, the aliens were disguised as human beings, making people the enemy again-- but hey, that's what you get when you turn to former WWF wrestlers for your theological analogies.

So maybe we should just stick with the Book of Revelation itself. If we did, it would remind us that even the conspirators (such as they may be) aren’t the enemy. The real enemy is a spiritual one, hiding out in plain sight, and because this enemy truly is spiritual, it can only be “fought” in those ways that Jesus himself taught us to fight: with prayer, with truth, with cruciform humility, and with self-giving love.

On Racial Equality and the Human Family

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There’s a spot in the Book of Acts where the Apostle Paul is speaking before the philosophers of ancient Athens, sharing the Gospel on the slopes of the Acropolis, and he says this almost throw away line about the origin of the species. “The Lord God,” he says, “gives life and breath and everything else to every human on the face of the earth” (paraphrase). Because (direct quote), “From one man he made all the nations (pan ethnos anthropōn—lit. “every ‘ethnicity’ of men”), that they should inhabit the whole earth.”

In Paul’s mind, all human beings, regardless their racial distinctions, share the same common ancestor, and the whole human race is the single creation of the same one God, descended together from one mother and father. Bear in mind, too, that Paul is speaking as a Jew before Gentiles when he says this, and as such he has all kinds of reasons to make all kinds of claims to racial distinctiveness. Instead of doing that, however, he appeals to his common humanity with his Greek audience.

No doubt he is thinking primarily of the Book of Genesis here, which traces everyone back to the same single set of parents. Notably, though, he does not quote the Hebrew Bible to convince his Greek interlocutors of this truth, rather he quotes their own pagan poets. “Didn’t the Stoic Philosopher Aratus say it, back in 300 BC, that we are all God's offspring?” he asks, with a bit of rhetorical flare.

Yes Aratus did say that; but this is more than just rhetoric for Paul. This touches on a truth that is absolutely essential to his understanding of the Gospel, a truth that, he believes, God has written on the hearts of every ethnic group on the planet, whether they have the sacred scriptures to remind them of it or not: that we are all members of the same human family.

In pointing all this out, Paul is simply expressing the natural corollary of the Hebrew creation story itself. One of the main points that Genesis 1 and 2 is making when it says that God created Adam and Eve in the beginning, is that every people group on the planet must therefore be descended from the same mom and dad. This is one of the reasons the Book of Genesis is so obsessed with genealogies, incidentally. We tend to gloss over them, but echoing in every mention of who begat whom in the genealogies of Genesis is the conviction that each of us are therefore blood brothers and sisters with everyone else. In this light, the convoluted table of nations in Genesis 10 could very well be one of the most beautiful anti-racist texts ever penned, because whatever else it does it underscores this truth: that no one’s not related.

When I was in Seminary I did a project where I traced out a complete map of the family tree of Adam and Eve, including every character, every marriage, every birth that gets mentioned in the book of Genesis. The results were pretty fascinating, reminding me not only that human beings really did make good on Genesis 1:28’s directive to multiply and fill the earth, but that in doing so we formed a beautifully inter-connected web of humanity, one that ties us all together with each other.

While I believe this with all my heart, we have to be very careful how we handle this truth, because it can actually point us two different directions, one of them very helpful, the other decidedly not so.

On the one hand—the not-so-helpful-hand—we can look at the family tree in Genesis and say, essentially, well there you go: there’s no point making a big deal about race, racial distinctions, racial injustices, because after all, we’re all part of the same single humanity. People are saying this very thing, I think, when they say stuff like “All lives matter,” or “There’s only one race: the human race.” Even if these statements are fundamentally true, they are, I would argue, misadventures in missing the point. The fact that we are all part of the same human race and therefore all equal in God’s eyes doesn’t mean that we can’t speak specifically about particular ethnic groups that make up the human family, if by doing so we can redress past wrongs or current injustices.

Because there’s this other hand—the more helpful other hand—where we allow the family tree in Genesis to teach us how to feel the pain of another human being who is suffering racial injustice, as though it were our own pain. Because it is; or it should be. If it’s true, for instance, that the Native American child who was torn from his family and forced to attend a racist residential school was literally my brother, then I should feel as outraged and traumatized by what happened to him as I would be if it had happened to my biological father or my very own son.

I’m saying this in part because  this morning for the first time I saw a photograph of Derek Chauvin, kneeling on the neck of George Floyd during the arrest that resulted in his murder. Words fail me. It was disgusting, brutal, heart-wrenching, infuriating, but none of those words actually capture what I felt. Because as I looked at it, that strange family tree from the book of Genesis, the one I’d drawn back in seminary, came up in my mind’s eye, and it was as if God was saying: if that was your son, or grandson, or father, or brother lying there in that photo, how would you respond in this moment?

Because in theological terms, it was.

My grief, of course, will never match the grief of those who were George Floyd’s immediate family and closest friends, and it would trivialize their pain, I think, to somehow suggest it even comes close. But anyone who can look at that photograph and not feel the grief, the anger, the heartbreak, and the ache for justice that they would feel, if it was their own flesh and blood under that knee, has not learned the first lesson of the Book of Genesis, or, indeed, of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.