Lead Time
Lead Time
How the Light Shines Through with Rev. Dr. Chad Lakies | Part 2
The episode focuses on the interconnected themes of identity and story, emphasizing that understanding one's identity as a gift can alleviate the burdens of self-creation. Rev. Dr. Chad Lakies leads the discussion on navigating authenticity in a complex society, the role of suffering, and the impact of essentialism in relationships.
• Exploring the relationship between identity and personal narratives
• Understanding societal pressures of authenticity in modern life
• The role of suffering in shaping a deeper sense of identity
• The dangers of reducing individuals to singular labels
• Highlighting the importance of historical and religious wisdom
• Embracing identities as gifts from a divine perspective
• Community and faith as core components of resilient identity
Breaking down faith, culture & big questions - a mix of humor with real spiritual growth.
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Speaker 2:Welcome to Lead Time, tim Allman. Here it is part two with Reverend Dr Chad LaKeys, and Jack Kauberg is also in for this conversation. How are you doing, jack? I'm doing fantastic. How are you doing, sir? Yeah, I know, loving every day, man, it's a true privilege to get to hang out with leaders. I just got done recording with Dr Dale Meyer. He's such a hilarious, hilarious man and he knows you, dr the Keys, and speaks very highly of you. So we're going to last episode.
Speaker 2:We kind of gave an overview of the kind of light and dark, the culture this one's going to be a lot more. I guess pointed on the second half of the book, how the Light Shines Through Resilient Witness in Dark Times. So I'm going to start off just a question based on chapter five how to find yourself in an age, how to find yourself in an age of authenticity. So what is the role, dr LaKeys, of identity and story in an age of authenticity and story in an age of authenticity? Those are two huge topics identity and story in an age where people are trying to find themselves.
Speaker 3:Air quotes. Well, I think they relate directly in a really simple sort of way. I think, in our time, identity is the story I tell myself about myself and then, therefore, that's the story I want to tell other people about myself, and so that's really how they come closely into alignment. The challenge, I think, is, in the time in which we live, identity has become something of a task. Right, I've got to figure it out, I've got to discover it, I've got to. In some sense, it feels like a burden that I've got to carry, right, and, and there are pitfalls. Right, if I don't kind of find my way in the right sort of way, right, am I going to live a life full of regrets? What am I going to be missing out on if I don't sort of land in exactly the right place? That, you know, is really the true, authentic me, and that's the challenge of our time is in an age of authenticity. I think it's been put out there that we've got to search for this, we've got to chase down this task, and there's really no guidance for how to come to any conclusions that we can be confident in, because it's constantly a look inside here, listen to what you hear and feel, and and if anybody challenges that, that's a no, no, because our feelings in our time are completely sacrosanct, right, and we live in a time when it's forbidden to forbid. So to look in here and follow your heart Right, march to the beat of your own drummer, you do you All of these things.
Speaker 3:A number of cultural mantras, some of them are encouraged in popular media. I think I use the Burger King example, right, have it your way. And the even longer little description that they've got on some of their old posters, and I just think that's going to be a really exhausting sort of journey, and so I'm trying to help people find a way out of that. I want them to know that there are other stories that exist outside of themselves that have come down through the ages and have provided wisdom and guidance to people for many, many years. I love GK Chesterton's line of don't rip up the fences if you don't know why they were put there in the first place, and he's talking about fences in terms of something like moral boundaries, guidance of that sort.
Speaker 3:And you know, we've kind of come through this age of enlightenment in the last 250 years where we've sloughed off a lot of the wisdom of religion, and that's Christianity, but it includes a number of other religious ideas. Right, we've thought that as we proceed in a technological age, we'll have more and more control over our time. We won't need religion and it's mythological, meaning false stories in that sense to fill in the gaps that we can't answer. We're going to be able to figure it out. Right. It's a very man is the measure of all things kind of story. So we've gotten rid of all of these ancient pieces of wisdom and we're out here sort of floating around, scrambling, living fairly aimlessly, not knowing what to do.
Speaker 3:Right, what I want to do often is a competition with what you want to do and think is best for your life. There's no arbiter, then, for those situations. How do we fix this? Let's lean back on some old wisdom, and that's all I've tried to do is open the space to reconsider the Christian story again and see that it's got some wisdom right, see that your life is a gift, your roles are a gift. What you are called to do is a gift. What you are called to do is a gift and it's freeing from this burden of identity as task to become identity as gift. That was a long answer. I hope that's what you're searching for.
Speaker 4:That is awesome. I love that. This is something that needs to be talked about a lot. I think you really hit the. You know, you really hit the right nail here. That identity is the main narrative that people are walking through right now, and is it something that we have to create for ourselves or is it something that's put on us? And if it's something that we have to create, boy, that is a huge burden. That is a huge burden for us to actually say like we are the authors of our own lives, and it has to be something meaningful and impressive, you know, and yet there's eight billion people in the world that you're trying to compete with from for meaning and purpose, right, uh, rather than an identity that's put on you by god, that is like incredibly special and incredibly powerful and is shaping you Right, and it's something that you can find peace and joy and contentment in.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if I can add to that, I think another thing that we're searching for is a kind of affirmation of our very being Right. And so, as we try to craft these identities that work out in some way, as you're saying, to get attention amidst the many, many other human beings that we're competing with and we do it via various kind of performances and displays of ourself, often on social media. In our time, that becomes in and of itself very challenging. But I think that underneath the spiritual side of it that I want to bring up is this search for affirmation is very normal. It's a part of what it means to be human. Right, when a child is born and they make that connection with their mother and we develop attachment with our parents, right, those are the beginnings of affirmation, the beginnings of its fulfillment. Right, god has given us those relationships, in part to help us experience just a glimpse of what his unconditional love is like. Right, because none of us can actually do real unconditional love, but we can see pieces and parts of it. But I think, spiritually, what I'm trying to do when I'm looking for affirmation from everybody else is I'm searching for affirmation in the horizontal realm and I want to use that as a proxy for God's affirmation in this way. See God, I've got all of these likes and all of these followers and all of these people affirm me how could you not? I don't know if there's any other way to kind of really explain it, that kind of breaks it down that simply. But I think this is what we're after and this opens a spiritual space then for us as pastors, ministers, gospel proclaimers, to speak into this search in the lives of people that we're ministering to. You know, there's all kinds of data that says there's spiritual openness. That's really characteristic of our time. This might be one of those moments, but it's a really end around angle to try to get there to really say you know, let me tell you about the ultimate kind of affirmation that's possible for you as a human being, the greatest kind, the most fulfilling kind, the seemingly impossible kind. It's God's affirmation for you in Jesus. Look what he did and you got to sit back and order. Why would he ever do that for me? And that's just the question that we get to sit with every stinking day of our life. Why would he do that for me? But it's sort of reveling in this gift and it's helping people find a way to fulfill that search for affirmation and then be able to set aside some of these, these bad habits.
Speaker 3:Right, because there's a great article in the New Yorker from a handful of years ago by, uh uh, an influencer named Tavi Gevinson and, um, I think most recently she has been, um, an actress in an HBO television series. I am not, I am very uncultured when it comes to television, so listeners would have to look her up. But anyway, this article. She asks who would I be without Instagram? Because she was one of the earliest influencers on the platform and she just came to realize how deeply it was leading and guiding her life, this search for affirmation from other people on the horizontal level.
Speaker 3:And I think in a sense she's escaped from that. She still remains a celebrity and many opportunities are thrown her way as a result of that. But just the fact that she was honest enough to ask this question, as I've used that I think I've got a sermon where I've used that example. It's one of those ways of opening the space, her story, her personal kind of confession, and then where she's gone from there to sort of get out of those bad habits of constantly looking for and measuring her sense of self on the basis of what all of these other people on social media think of her. It's just a huge shift and it means that it's possible. What all of these other people on social media think of her. It's just a huge shift and it means that it's possible for all of us.
Speaker 4:So I'm having a thought here, as I'm thinking about these models of identity right, and how they interweave with how we think about the notion of freedom, and it seems to me that the popular model is freedom is a tool that I use to create my identity. But the Christian view is actually God gives me an identity and that identity given to me is what makes me free. Do you agree with that statement?
Speaker 3:I totally would agree with that. Hang on just one second and I'll throw another book recommendation at you. And I'll throw another book recommendation at you. If you all don't know this scholar, james KA Smith. He's one of my favorites, but this book On the Road with St Augustine is incredibly helpful, super preachable for anybody listening to this who is a preacher. But he's got a chapter in there, I think, where he references an author named. I think her last name is jameson um.
Speaker 3:I could be wrong, but she wrote a book about addiction and she really talks about this connection of freedom and addiction and freedom in the sense that we mean it like liberation, the freedom from sense, right, the negative kind of freedom, right released from, release from captivity, bondage, chains, ball and chain, whatever Right Is is supposed to be a good thing in our very enlightenment, informed age. Right I talked already about throwing off the from her is that freedom in that sense becomes a negative, not just in the freedom from sense, but in the sense that it becomes exhaustion. I'm too free, right, I can do anything I want. The choices are so many that making a choice becomes a burden. Yeah, it's like going becomes a burden.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like going to a buffet, right. None of us can eat everything that's there. We've all had this experience. I hope my wife thinks buffets are gross because too many people are able to touch the food. I feel that. But if you've ever been to a buffet, there are too many things to eat, right. It's almost a waste of time for people our age to go to a buffet because we just can't sample everything like a teenager could, right, there was a time when my metabolism allowed for such a visit, but not today.
Speaker 3:That kind of freedom, with all of these choices, becomes a burden, and I think what he argues for, and this addiction scholar argues for, is boundaries, guardrails, guidance, that sort of funnels us in a way to be free. Bonhoeffer, famously, would say something that's very counterintuitive Our bondage in service, our call to love and serve our neighbor, our bondage to our neighbor right, is not a kind of slavery. It is the definition of freedom, but in the positive sense it's freedom, for he writes about that, I think, in his couple of chapters on creation and fall.
Speaker 4:One of the best quotes I heard was from Dr Corbin, one of his books that said Christian freedom is the freedom to relax in God's presence. Hebin, one of his books that said Christian freedom is the freedom to relax in God's presence. He was like, wow, that is so powerful. And apart from that identity that's put on you by God, you cannot have that. That is not something you can have. It just doesn't exist right. It's that gifted identity that allows that.
Speaker 3:Heck. Yeah, it's kind of like how we like to say at times in our church sanctification is getting used to justification. Right, both of those things that you said. Right, learning to rest in God's will. I can't remember exactly how you said it, just now God's presence. Yeah, god's presence. Both of those are something that we are constantly learning, right, constantly learning. It is definitive, I think, of the life of the Christian in a certain way.
Speaker 2:Isn't it kind of funny? Let's get existential here just a bit. Humans live as if we're never going to die Like. And how frivolous even this quest for affirmation. You say celebrity we want. I think the root of that word is we want to be celebrated, right? So there are these people that, like collectively, we celebrate and yet we spend all this time to, like, keep death from coming. When inevitable suffering, loss, trial, trauma come, we wonder one, where's God? And you know you can go to the nihilistic or the hedonistic kind of pursuit eat, drink, be merry, kind of tomorrow we die, but God uses. You spent some time in the book, in this chapter, talking about suffering.
Speaker 4:What is?
Speaker 2:the role of suffering connected to our identity. You refer to Viktor Frankl and Man's Search for Meaning. Those who had kind of this higher meaning, this higher sense of calling, you could say vocation, were the ones who were able to kind of make it through, make it through concentration camps and, for those of us today, can make it through inevitable suffering and trial. Speak to the role of suffering and our identity, dr LaPiece.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think his story is really great. I learned it from David Brooks in his book the Road to Character is where I first came across that story and the way that he framed it really hit me and has stuck with me for a long time. That Frankl discovered in the midst of the concentration camps the difference between those who would often commit suicide in order to escape what they knew was coming right the gas chambers or some other gruesome death at the hands of the Nazis, versus those who hung on, not knowing whether or not they would be able to live to see freedom again from the captivity that they were experiencing. They continued to live on because he recognized in them, they believed they had something to live for, something bigger than above, beyond, greater than just their own life, and that began his research. It wasn't the sort of direction that he wanted to go with his life as a psychologist, and I think that's what he was but he became a scholar of suffering, and so Man's Search for Meaning, that really classic book that you can read, documents a lot of what he found as he moved into that scholarship. But that isn't the life that he planned for, right, being a Jew, being captive and taken away from his family, losing all that he lost. He would say this isn't the life that I planned for. And that's, I think, a great characteristic of how we could describe suffering in a way that's safe, validates the pain, acknowledges it this isn't the life that we planned for, acknowledges it this isn't the life that we planned for. But out of it, you know his story. He says, becoming a scholar, of suffering, despite not being the life that I planned for, was a life upon which I could not turn my back. And, and I think, whatever it is that, that life in our various roles and callings, right, from which we derive a real, true sense of identity, whatever life drags us through as we participate in that, it's going to include a lot of suffering.
Speaker 3:Right, tentatio is a critical part of how we talk about our tradition and it's a cyclical thing. Right, it takes you back to God and prayer and then it takes you further into reflection and and you know, luther characterized this, this, as the life of a disciple. Um, and I think from there, um, we realized that, however hard this thing is, that God has called me to do, it's a gifted calling, whether that's the burden of being a parent and changing diapers, or the burden of being a parent and having a child who has just recently run away, as we've been seeing across all of our social media platforms the last couple of days, a fellow pastor in our church body, his daughter, had run away. Thankfully, just this morning we found out that she's been found.
Speaker 3:Right, but being a parent in so many ways is burdensome, right. It's taking on the stewardship of another life. It means you have to say no to yourself so often, right, and that's the dying to self part that goes with being a follower of Jesus in the kingdom. It determines what kinds of ways we're going to pursue livelihood in the world. Livelihood in the world Are we going to take on jobs that produce exploitation of people for us to be able to win, or should we choose something else?
Speaker 3:Or, when we find out that the way that we're living is off the backs of exploitation of people, what do we do? Yeah, these are all challenging burdens, right, and our suffering is marked by varying degrees. None of us quite share it the same way. But knowing that the roles and responsibilities that God has called us to in terms of our identity, right, our callings, our vocations, they are places where we're going to feel pain, but they're also places upon which if God has gifted this to me we cannot turn our backs on it. We cannot turn our backs on it just because it's painful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, amen, and I mean a lot of your book is talking about how Christians may actively maybe it's subconsciously cause respective pain trauma. We're just walking through a trauma series right now. Unintentionally cause trauma by could be by labeling, by judging people based on and you use a word that I hadn't seen before a little bit later on in the book essentializing like saying people are this one identity. If you associate with this one different group, or if you're of this one race or ethnicity, whatever, then that's the entirety of who you are. That causes an existential crisis and I think I mean personally, just for me. I kind of live with, I feel like some in our church that I don't know in our church because we're a larger church body, a few million or whatnot, because I've said things in a certain way on the podcast.
Speaker 2:I'm maybe more edgy than others and maybe I should have been kinder, reframed, whatever the statement was that I'm the sum total of, like that viewpoint and that if you disagree with me on one topic, maybe around pastoral formation, like then you disagree with the entirety of who I am and we human beings. Maybe this is where I can get landed and let you kind of run off. We love to work from places of difference rather than places of commonality, even in our church body. This is we become more tribal around. You can have this perspective on a how. If I differ on the how, then I differ on the gospel of Jesus Christ and for me that makes no sense.
Speaker 2:Logically, like we, we have way more that we agree on, especially in our tribe, than than we disagree on as we're working toward. What does the future look like in our church body? So we essentialize one another down into these small little identity markers Anything more, because the big identity marker is I'm a baptized child of God, son of the king, just like both of you and just like everyone baptized here. That should be the driving unifying factor in uniting us together, united to Christ, united to one another. We commune around the same together, united to Christ, united to one another. We commune around the same table, united to Christ, forgiven of our sins, and then united to one another as the church, as messy as it is, to walk together. So go off on essentializing a little bit more there, dr LaKeys.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's just a. It's reductionistic is the problem, but it's. It's convenient and helpful as as a tool for thinking and kind of organizing it that it works that way or is used that way, especially to the people who have to live underneath labels that they cannot remove from themselves. But that's why we do it right. We try to find ways in just how we organize our thinking and perspective on the world to keep it simple, and we do that with these sorts of labels. But the outcome is essentializing is reductionistic, right, and and some of what has come out of, I would say helpfully, out of critical theory I know a scary thing to announce on a podcast of this sort, but I think most people who criticize it probably don't really know what it is very well, nor where it comes from, and I wouldn't put myself in that camp. I'm not going to use it in an unmeasured or inaccurate sort of way, but I think one of the things that comes out of there right is a term called intersectionality and this is going back from the 70s and it comes out of legal argumentation going back from the 70s and it comes out of legal argumentation. But it's a way of recognizing that there's so much more to a singular individual than just a single identity. Right, none of us are just heterosexual white men. We are dads right, we are servants of the church, we are husbands. We've got a number of other roles and maybe a variety of ethnicities, via blood that come into the background, that are often not visible these days anymore, because of the ways that you know racially and ethnically we've we've intermixed our families. You know, racially and ethnically, we've we've intermixed our families and you can't figure it out on the basis of someone's last name. I learned that the hard way when I was a professor at a university. Right, I've got somebody with a Hispanic last name and they have literally no Hispanic background in their blood. It's just come down over a series of generations to be that way, and it's an easy way to make a category mistake. I think then, when we have been essentialized in one way or another, the outcome is it really prevents getting some good work done in the future. Right, it doesn't actually solve any of the problems that we might have one to another by throwing those sorts of labels out.
Speaker 3:They're also a weakness in the labels themselves, some of them that are used right, liberal and conservative, for example, right. They're relative in the sense of liberal compared to what conservative compared to what Conservative compared to what Right. So it allows us to get away with being very inaccurate and assume then when I use that label I mean the same thing that everybody else means by that label. But it functions much more like a master signifier. So the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek talks about master signifiers and I think our church body has a couple of them and I'm not going to say what they are.
Speaker 3:But liberal and conservative are good enough, right.
Speaker 3:They're master signifiers in the sense that they function as kind of a big banner under which all of us who use the label can gather with the assumption that all of us mean the same thing by the label, with the assumption that all of us mean the same thing by the label, until we come to find out by working with one another that we don't actually mean the same thing by the label and we've got all of these external, extraneous, contingent connections outside of this group that uses the label.
Speaker 3:That starts to reveal that I don't share necessarily what this person means by the label or what that person means by the label, and similarly with them, and it becomes really messy and just reveals the sloppiness of those labels and those gatherings underneath which we come together, is also simultaneously a critique of kind of that essentializing effort. It's reductionistic and it just misses. It misses the much wider picture of the reality of things. So, yeah, that was totally why I would advise against it. Right, it's just better to dig into the more complex, the more concrete um parts of of individual human lives, really listen to where they're coming from the way I've experienced.
Speaker 4:That is, it seems like there's a lot of um segmenting into things that I would consider to be false dichotomies. Um, that, okay, you believe this, that means you're now making all these assumptions and that you're also not this, and it's like, no, I'm this and this at the same time, right, and, but there's this tendency to want to pull these things into these dichotomies that aren't necessarily true dichotomies, or doesn't?
Speaker 3:or let's say it doesn't have to be, but we insist on making it that way right yes, yes, I think one of the fears that you can detect behind this tendency to label, or be to be too quick at times to label, is a fear, um, that to accept someone over here that I don't fully agree with on this thing, right, if I were to do that, it's we. We run with a slippery slope argument. To give an inch is to give a mile, right, and so it's just better to disassociate and cut off my relationship and connection with this person, as opposed to sort of whatever the outcome I'm worried about might be right. Asking what people are afraid of, um, is a huge way of kind of getting at an understanding of how they operate, because all of us are operating from the basis of protecting ourselves against what it is that we're worried about. And I'm trying to remember the philosopher's name.
Speaker 3:Iris Murdoch talked this way about philosophers, right, you want to understand why a philosopher argues the way they are or the way they do, ask what they're afraid of, and my Dr Father, joe Locomoto, applied that and he's like well, I think we should ask that of theologians too, and I think he's right. But then, to go just a step further, in a much broader and wider, I think you can ask that of just about anybody.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:What are you afraid of? That's going to help you understand another person's behavior, able to kind of figure out how to work with them in a way to move forward beyond preventing all the time or protecting ourselves from what we're afraid of, to finding a way through. Um, I also think the differences between us are good things, right, they often can function as corrective measures. When you think about how the American government was put together, with three branches of government, the so-called version of Republican and Democrat that existed at that time, the views of those people and the way that they were meant to carry forth the business of governing, was meant to function as a corrective, right. Yes, in a sense they were at loggerheads, but it just meant that none of them was ever able to get into the extremes because they always had the other one kind of pulling and jostling them in the other direction, and it might be a little far over here for a while, or a little far over here, but it swings back and forth in a more limited direction, and so I think that's one of the ways that we can anticipate our difference is actually having a positive function for us, right?
Speaker 3:I don't know everything, neither do you, right, so I'm going to have my ideas, you're going to have your ideas, because we disagree doesn't make us bad people and we should stop our relationships, hate each other and consider one another nefarious and talk terribly about each other to others. In fact, we can maybe see that these differences play a functionally helpful role in keeping us a little more balanced, a little more tightly bound together. As a member of the groups that we walk with, hey, so good, so good.
Speaker 2:Let's let's talk about some of our last podcast spent a fair amount of time. If you didn't listen, go back and listen of time. If you didn't listen, go back and listen how we engage our neighbors, who are spiritually attuned but they're at different places on their journey. On page 185, you draw out three different and then you extrapolate on it, you go deeper into this three different kinds of human experiences, and I think this is James K Smith, some of his work, but the one, the pole, of being haunted with our own mortality. The second one is the religious impulse and the third one is waiting for the cracks in the secular for holy moments this is CS Lewis for holy moments to kind of break through. So how do we use that as kind of a framework for starting evangelical conversations with our neighbors, dr?
Speaker 3:LaKeith. I mean, that's a, that's a turn in this conversation towards something totally different than what we've been talking about. Is that okay? No, that's great, that's great cool.
Speaker 3:Um, I think one of the challenges is, as we try to think about evangelism and outreach in our time, um, what we want to be able to control, how it happens. But none of us can control how God shows up or when. Right, we can't, we're not in charge of how the Holy Spirit operates. Right, the wind of the Spirit blows where and when he pleases, and so what I try to do in this section is really just open up a space to talk about three different kinds of opportunities. So, when I talk about someone who's haunted, yes, I'm borrowing from Jamie Smith. He talks about that a little bit in his book how Not to Be Secular, which is an accessible version of Charles Taylor's argument in a secular age, charles Taylor's argument in a secular age, and I I highlight, you know, some of the the, the work, not the work.
Speaker 3:I highlight some of the experiences of what happens when we have to encounter and wrestle through the big questions. What happens when I die? Why am I here, right? So the purpose question um, how is anything that actually exists, where did it come from? Question? How is anything that actually exists, where did it come from? Why is it here in the first place? Those sorts of things when they hit us and they don't always hit us and we find really good ways of being distracted and avoiding them, right, you know, scrolling through reels helps when those questions hit us. They are an opportunity for us to be, you know, uh, what my friend Peter Meyer would call alongsideers. Right, we can walk along with them in those moments and, as the Holy Spirit leads, be able to speak into those moments from a Christian and biblical perspective, offering answers to those questions. You still got to wrestle with them, right? Another one why is there suffering? You know, that's a really challenging question for us to answer as theologians of the cross. Right, what we have to offer is really unsatisfying. We're just kind of stuck perpetually wrestling with it. So we're haunted by those things. I think we're haunted by those things. I think we're haunted by other things.
Speaker 3:If you've not noticed just how popular in the last 20 years it's been that fantasy movies, lord of the Rings, cs Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, star Wars, game of Thrones, harry Potter we could probably name many others, how popular they've become and just how wildly devoured they've become and how many spinoff universes and so on they've created, and even dystopian novels and fiction and video games, television series. It's incredible and I wonder if they're so popular. It's incredible and I wonder if they're so popular. I'm borrowing this from the UK theologian, graham Ward. I wonder if they're so popular because they depict a variety of versions of an enchanted world, and the world in which we live in a secular age, is shaped very much by a scientific imagination where we can explain away the rainbow.
Speaker 3:Richard Dawkins has a book titled something similar. Unweaving the Rainbow is what it's called, and essentially we've done that. The rainbow for us as Christians, followers of Jesus, bible readers, is symbolic of God's promise from the Old Testament. See, I put my bow in the sky. I will never condemn humanity to that kind of gruesome end again. Right, it's a promise. It's enchanted. Right, there's a magicalness to it, if you will, and I know Christians are sometimes afraid of the word magic. I don't mean it in that way. I mean it much more in the enchanted sense that there's more than meets the eye to this reality that we live in. But in our scientific age we've unweaved the rainbow, right, dawkins is right. It's nothing more than the refraction of light waves through water droplets suspended in the sky. Well, you know how's that for a buzzkill right and crushing your spirits? It's kind of life-sucking.
Speaker 3:So these movies, these films, these stories, these books, tv series, video games, that show an enchanted world, I think, and our love for them, reveal maybe we're haunted by the fact that we were made for that kind of reality and we miss it. We love those depictions because we were made for that kind of reality and we miss it. Now, what kind of an end and an entry point would that be for us in our churches to talk about those movies, talk about those stories, talk about those TV shows? Now, I know there's all kinds of depictions in those shows that we don't necessarily like. There's nudity, graphic violence, bad language, right. So how would we carry this out?
Speaker 3:I don't know, y'all have got to figure that out in your particular context and maybe it's going to be a risk, but maybe it's going to open a space to talking about. Well, let me tell you this story, right, for example I mean, the safest ones are Narnia, lord of the Rings. Let me tell you the story that these two guys is writing and thinking about how to communicate the gospel. We're trying to recreate an imaginary enchanted world on the basis and on the back of the real one. Our reality is really enchanted. Let me tell you how right and how. Could we have discussions about that and get at that? I think that's an entry point, right.
Speaker 3:That's one of the cracks in the secular, these hauntings, the religious impulse idea. I wasn't sure if readers would really like that or get that. It sounds Catholic to me, right, like we're always trying to kind of reach up to God, and I think there is a sense of that when I talk about the seeking of affirmation in the section on confession. But in another sense, you know, there's the God coming down to us with miraculous experiences. You know, I felt like I was saved when I shouldn't have been. I'm alive today, but what I just experienced I shouldn't be here anymore or the birth of a child, or, you know, the healing, miraculously and surprisingly, from a disease that would have put me terminal, otherwise right, the world around us doesn't have a lot of explanations for this sort of thing.
Speaker 3:We've got a language, a parlance that very easily equips us to speak into those moments when someone's just overcome with the sense of either tragedy or miracle, where God is opening a space for his voice to be heard right In our pains. God shouts, cs Lewis says, and I think, are you listening? And as we get to walk along with these people, right, and here's where it comes to the again, this is absolutely out of our control. I don't know when someone's going to fall into a tragic situation. I know roughly when someone's planning to deliver a child, right, roughly right, we play, you know, meteorologists in the hospital looking at all the measurements and the weight of the child and blah, blah, blah, and roughly how long gestation occurs. But my first daughter, right on time, my second daughter, three and a half weeks early, who knew? And everything was okay. And my wife and I were able to give a name to that right, fearfully and wonderfully made, knit together in secret in your mother's womb. How many people don't have that language? And it's an opportunity for us to speak into that. So that's just some examples.
Speaker 3:I'm actually working on some more that I want to eventually be talking about out in public just to give a few more avenues to help just trigger this kind of thinking in people. It's a bit of a paradigm shift. As I argued when I said we've got to think about our secular age as an age of implausibility, where it's difficult to believe. What I'm trying to do in chapter seven with how to reach out in a secular age and talking about the cracks in the secular, is how do you find these opportunities where belief and faith actually become plausible, when we can maybe best be set up to deliver the goods in a way that are going to be sticky?
Speaker 4:that's good, Jack, and around in the skull is like I don't see how I find meaning and purpose in that at all. Right, that's a. That's a very nihilistic way of viewing my own existence. And then I think about Luther, how he talks about the first commandment like a God is anything that you're putting your hope in. And what he's kind of saying is, like human beings have this God shaped void that only God can fill, and if God's not filling it, then we're filling it with something that's functioning as God for us.
Speaker 4:And you know, in some cases that is a scientific theories that becomes my God. Or social justice becomes my God, or some other type of thing. You know, some sort of quest to manufacture my identity becomes my God. But the whole point is that becomes my religion, and you will see people suspend disbelief because they're so committed to that God. Right, you know, I mean, this is why we have people creating so many genders right now, because I'm on a quest to manufacture myself. Right, let's set aside science. Or, you know, I'm going to create my own view, I'm going to put my hope in this thing, right, Yep. So it seems to me like this is baked into the nature of the human being and to me, like one of the most fascinating questions to ask people is like well, what are you putting your? You talked about earlier, what are you afraid of? To me, it's like what are you putting your? You talked about earlier, what are you afraid of? To me, it's like what are you?
Speaker 3:putting your hope in Right.
Speaker 4:Yeah, what are you putting your hope in? And when people answer that question, they are revealing what their God is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, jamie Smith argues that way in Desiring the Kingdom, which is a really helpful book, or a more accessible version of that, is you are what you love. So you're kind of making a parallel argument you are what you hope for, or your God is what you hope for, or something like that. Yeah, and we can see the through line of that argument and thinking, because Luther was an Augustinian monk and so he simply derived the way that he talked from Augustine in that way, and so is Jamie Smith an Augustinian scholar. I was trying to remember what I was going to add to your point. Oh, oh, oh, nope, I've forgotten it again. It almost came to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got a good follow up.
Speaker 2:I've talked a lot. No, Well, this is why we have you on. This has been fantastic. No, well, this is why we have you on. This has been fantastic.
Speaker 2:You're kind of, as you talk about story and the hero's journey, you know what's kind of hard this like meta story. I believe there's a lot there to that. And then the mystery of there, because there's a part on the hero's journey where you're like I don't know exactly how this is going to turn out and I'm open. The crack in the secular me is I'm open for divine, providential, mysterious encounters, for God to do something when all appears lost, all the hero's journey, when all appears lost and they're at the very, very end, something extraordinary happens, For instance, a guy rising from the dead, Right. So there's this, there's this other dimension. I so I wanted I don't know we got a lot of time on this, but we have one of our leaders in our community whose way he's a, he's a mathematician and kind of dabbles in physics and Jesus in the third and the fourth dimension and I think a lot of people today are wrestling with what are these AEPs or what are the UFO type encounters Like?
Speaker 2:There are things that are popping in from outside of us there's another realm that's very evident. Right, we're actually heading into a spiritual warfare book, Like how does the spiritual world demons, angels, that God is over all of it how does that intersect with the physical realities of time and space for us in the here and now, and I'm kind of, I think, the third to the fourth dimension Jesus kind of define those boundaries, those physical limitations, especially in his resurrected reality. He just pops into a room, right?
Speaker 2:I think there's a fair amount of the mind can be open. The crack in the secular is there's way more that I. There's a lot that I don't know, and there are things that are above me, beyond me, that I've yet to discover and probably will never fully discover all of it. But I'm on this grand quest. Anything more to say about any of that, dr With the Keys.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think part of what you're signaling is the spiritual openness that I talked about before. Right, there's a willingness, a greater willingness to think there's more than meets the eye, right, that there's something transcendent, something beyond, something unseen. There's more than meets the eye, right, that there's something transcendent, something beyond something unseen, a greater willingness to sense that we live in an enchanted world and we don't have to be so antagonistic to all of these encounters of various sorts of religious practice that we come across. Right, go out to California and you experience a lot of crystals, people wanting to engage in that. The Pacific Northwest, where I used to live, wicca and a kind of neo-paganism is still there and I'd much rather look at that as an opportunity than a threat. And for a long time at large, the Christian church has considered that a threat. But in our time it's just part of what Charles Taylor calls the Nova effect. But in our time it's just part of what Cheryl Stahler calls the Nova effect. Right, the explosion of new ways of believing, or what Tara Isabella Burton will talk about in her book Strange Rites. Right, intuitive religion and how we encounter people kind of remixing things from a little over here in Christianity a little over here in Kabbalah, judaism and a little over here and Neo-Paganism and then the rest of it, with some crystals or soul cycle, right and exercise and just sort of the things that we commit our lives to and certain other ways. There's an openness to this that gives us a space to connect, to reach in in ways that simply have to be friendly, antagonistic, non-antagonistic and curious, rather than, you know, always trying to come at these people and be like, well, you're wrong, you're wrong, I can't talk to you until you fix your views, or or simply to be afraid of talking with them at all because you're worried that they're going to infect you. I, I love the idea of the power going out from Jesus in the encounter with the hemorrhaging woman. She touched his cloak and he felt it.
Speaker 3:I wonder if us Christians might not be better off taking a different tact, that, as the Holy Spirit leads us, power might go out from us to influence and affect these lives. We confess the word never returns to God, void. Let's just try it out, you know. Let's preach the word, let's share the word, let's introduce people to Jesus in subtle, winsome, gentle ways, right, not shove it down your throat sorts of ways Be attuned to when they're ready right. Use your God-given gifts of discernment and empathy, but use those opportunities right. Paul advises us to do that. Don't miss an opportunity. Be wise in the way that you walk toward outsiders. And so I wonder about the spiritual openness of our age, and and what a more ancient, more truthful, more stable story might do for people who experienced this sort of openness. I don't know if that's entirely an answer to the question that you set me up with, tim, but a hundred percent.
Speaker 2:No, it's great. Well, we're just about at time. Um, you need to get the book listener. He goes into as I listened to you. How many books has this guy?
Speaker 4:read.
Speaker 2:You are so well read Chad, it's so amazing. Anyway, how to avoid mistakes that prevent engagement. I'd love for you to just talk just briefly on one of these. So one of the mistakes we need to keep in mind is that love does not always equal affirmation. Keep in mind is that love does not always equal affirmation. Another one is disagreement does not equal hate I'm flipping through here. The other one is people. We talked about this in the other podcast. People do not equal their ideas, opinions or beliefs. That's the third. You got a couple more. Association does not equal advocacy for that person and engagement does not equal endorsement. Any of those that you're like, I don't think we've talked at any depth on one or more of them. Can you talk about one of them? Just cliff note version that we haven't touched on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean real quick.
Speaker 3:What was the fourth one? Association does not equal advocacy. Advocacy, yep, yeah. I think there are a lot of Christians who are afraid and very confused about what to do when it comes to relating to somebody in their life that's LGBTQIA, etc. Right, especially when it's a family member or a close friend. Do I go to that wedding? Do I have them over for dinner? Do we stay friends? Like what do we do? I think we've not been great in the church at large of giving guidance to that and to me.
Speaker 3:The primary thing that I see from Jesus is he never let an issue prevent a relationship. Right, I don't have to agree, but I don't have to stop associating with them, and my association with them doesn't mean that I am all rah-rah for the thing that they want me to be for when, if they take me for who I am and my authenticity and I'm taking them for who they are and their authenticity. Here's where we are at the moment at a point of disagreement, but they know, ultimately, that I haven't cut off my relationship with them, because I deeply love them and care for them, and maybe my relationship with them over the long haul is one of the only authentic gospel witnesses that they're going to have in their life. Who am I to cut them off from access to the Father in that way? And so I just want to, you know, help people feel free not to cut those sorts of relationships off, and do it for the sake of keeping a relationship, because it might be a gateway for God to share his love with them.
Speaker 3:Association doesn't equal advocacy. It's a category mistake, but it's based, I think, on the fear of that slippery slope that I talked about earlier. Give an inch, you give a mile Right. And the labeling, the quick categorization that tends to happen. The labeling, the quick categorization that tends to happen. And so people are afraid to maintain relationships because they don't want other people to get the wrong idea about who they are and what they think or believe. Golly, how many of us are like that right? How many of us are self-censoring in our time, not sharing all that we think or believe because we don't want to be misread, misinterpreted and mislabeled? It's tough, these are dark times, in a sense like that, and so I'm trying to shine some light.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no. And I think if you just hang out with people that like see the world the exact same way, that agree on everything and you're like in lockstep, that sounds remarkably boring to me thing. And you're like in lockstep, that sounds remarkably boring to me Like I think it's boring to Jesus. Like Jesus chose this group of a variety of different characters, you know, from the over the top Peter to the money strategist. And like Jesus chose these guys. Peter's a zealot, for goodness sake. You know he's way far from the kingdom and yet Jesus drew him near. The Holy Spirit changed them. Was the early church messy? Is our church still messy today? Do we live and do ministry?
Speaker 2:I remember getting out Chad and having a number of pastors, professors, say hey, man, you learned a lot of great stuff, it's good, but watch out right, the devil's in the details of how that word, those, those truths get lived out. Will it be a heavy handed, dictatorial, control ridden perspective, like that doesn't work in a local church. Or will it be a kind, hospitable, like I can say the right thing in the wrong way? And Grandma Schmitke, every church has a Grandma Schmitke. And Grandma Schmitke like slaps me up. She doesn't really slap, but like verbally, slaps me. Like you need to be kind, tim, you need to be, and you close with these three kind of goals for the resilient church. I think it's so helpful. You need to be tolerant of different perspectives, you need to be humble. You may know a little about a little. You don't know a lot about a lot. So you've got a lot more to learn, son, and then patient with one another. Anything more to add to those three kind of goals for closing?
Speaker 3:this conversation. Yeah, the one that I was most worried about and as I wrote that you know that would be misinterpreted is the language of tolerance, is another one of those dangerous things to talk about. It's kind of a swear word within, you know, conservative Christendom, and it has been for a while, but I come from it from this angle. We live in a pluralistic world. It's just an empirical reality that we cannot do away with. So we've got to find a way through it, and so I think if we want to be able to have the right to share the gospel and preach the good news and tell the truth in the way that we do, to live as authentic Christians, faithfully before Jesus and before the eyes of the watching world, then the only way that we can rightfully ask for that is to make space for other people to live in completely contrary ways.
Speaker 3:Right, and I think we get the model of this from God himself. He is not insecure, he's just not right. He lets us ask him questions, he lets us yell at him, he lets us be angry with his ways, and still he challenges us to follow and believe anyway. And then you get Jesus who comes along and, just like you said he called a bunch of frail, fickle, feeble, weak human beings to be the ones who started his movement and spread the good news in that part of the world. And you know what? He's shockingly called us frail, feeble, fickle, weak, fallible human beings to do the same darn thing. It's not going to look pretty, but somehow God's going to use our mess to get his work done.
Speaker 2:Amen, amen. This has been so much fun, chad. Thank you for the last two hours we've got to spend together. Time has flown by, jack. Any final comments on our conversation today? It's been fun flown by Jack.
Speaker 4:Any final comments on our conversation today? It's been fun. No, I mean just on these last comments here. You know, sinners belong in church and because I belong in church, I'm a sinner. I belong there, right? So we need to show that same love and kind of recognize, in humility, whatever type of sin a person's carrying along in their life, including, you know, different belief backgrounds and people just trying to learn what it means to believe in God. Like we should be the most inviting place. And, like you said, invitation is not affirmation, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, hospitality does not mean that we are approving, that we endorse any type of sin, including our own sins, right, it just means we are inviting sinners into church, where every single one belongs, and that's our goal. You know a vision to see every sinner in church.
Speaker 3:I absolutely agree.
Speaker 2:Yeah, hey, this has been great. If you haven't picked up the book, please do so. How the Light Shines Through Resilient Witness in Dark Times, and it's been a joy. This is lead time. Please, like, subscribe, please, please do hit the subscribe button wherever it is that you're taking this in.
Speaker 2:Youtube continues to work on the algorithm and for the book, if you would go and leave a Google review, an Amazon review, all those types of things, that really, really helps get the message of this needed work of literature out into the wider, wider church and I'm praying, beyond. Again, I applaud CPH Great. I know they were awesome to work with Great people over there. That influences not just the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod but even beyond the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, just our work in the world, especially here in the West, as we're walking through dark, hard times. The light of Jesus he is the light of the world and then we have been called to be a light set on a hill to shine the light of Christ out into the darkness, and we do so with love and respect and I'm praying that, based on this conversation, humility just wins the day as we enter into conversation with people who are on their way to Jesus pre-Christians. They're on the way to Jesus. They're not the pagan, outlier, secular person. They're a person for whom Jesus loves, for whom his image has been placed upon, for whom the God of the universe wants a relationship with. And somehow he wants to use us feeble, weak. I love that.
Speaker 2:As you're closing, yeah, small people to do his great, great work. It's a humbling thing. It's a good day. Go make it a great day. Wonderful work, jack. Thanks, chad.
Speaker 3:God bless you. Thanks for having me, tim and Jack. It was such a great conversation. I really enjoyed it, privileged to be here, likewise.
Speaker 1:You've been listening listening to Lead Time, a podcast of the Unite Leadership Collective. The ULC's mission is to collaborate with the local church to discover, develop and deploy leaders through biblical Lutheran doctrine and innovative methods To partner with us in this gospel message. Subscribe to our channel, then go to theuniteleadershiporg to create your free login for exclusive material and resources and then to explore ways in which you can sponsor an episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for next week's episode.