David Brooks and Original Sin

Since when did David Brooks, the conservative voice on the New York Times Editorial Page and one of the smartest columnists in the country, start talking about Original Sin?

Brooks wrote a fascinating column this past week in which he talks about his concern over the stimulus plan and the massive changes that are afoot in the country as a result of the economic crisis. His major concern is not so much in the programs that will be funded by the stimulus and the details of changes to come, but the philosophy behind them.

The debate, Brooks argues, hinges on just how much we can know and just how capable we can be at rapid institutional change. The debate is whether it is even possible to know enough or be competent enough to engineer transformational social change from the West Wing of the White House and the halls of Congress.

While these are debates that so-called conservatives and so-called progressives have been debating for centuries, what is fascinating for me is that this debate goes all the way back to Augustine and to the Garden. If we believe that our minds were warped by the Fall like our bodies and our souls, then our thoughts, our ideas, our motivations are all curved, distorted, and broken as well.

This means that we can never be sure of much, other than that we are flawed and that God is in the process of transformation. This, Brooks would argue and I would agree, requires a serious amount of modesty in estimating just how much we can do and just how effective we can be in government as well as in the church.

Humility and modesty, in both the the government, the church and the world, seems to be the order of the day.

It must be Lent.

You're Fine

Two words, it turns out, can make quite a difference.

On Monday I sat for an hour and a half in front of three people, defending my theology, receiving constructive criticism and trying to remain calm during one of the most important interviews of my life. On Tuesday afternoon I got the word - you're fine. You're fine translated didn't mean that the person across the room was impressed with my attire that would have made a Republican Congressman proud - white dress shirt, red white and blue striped tie, navy blue suit. Instead, it meant that I had passed my interview with the Board of Ordained Ministry.

It hasn't even been a week, but already something feels different. Being commissioned - which is the technical term that means you passed your interviews and will be commissioned as a probationary elder at Annual Conference in June - is a weird thing. I could still do ministry as a licensed local pastor without being commissioned, including serving communion, performing baptisms, marrying folks and burying folks. But there is something a little different, I'm not quite sure what it is.

Maybe it is the church setting me apart for leadership (part of my riveting answer to what is the meaning of ordination in the context of general ministry to the church), maybe its knowing that this is what three years of seminary and a lot of Christian life prepared me for, or maybe its something about the Spirit. I've been thinking a lot about words lately. Preaching every week means you have to come up with a lot of them. I read other authors' words, I hear musicians' words, I put out a lot of words for people myself.

Commissioning is more than words, but the words have power. I have always been one who thought that words were useless without being joined to actions that match them. I still like that idea, but I'm not so sure.

Words still have the power to make a difference. Words still have the power to resonate with something inside of us, to join us to something greater, and to take us somewhere we wouldn't have gone on our own. This, in a sense, is why we perform liturgy together and why we reserve space every Sunday for one person to come out of our congregation and talk to us about God's word.

I don't know all the places I am headed, although its likely somewhere in East Tennessee. I just know that two words have made me think a lot this week. They've made me thing about where I want to go, and more importantly how I want to get there. They've helped me see that I want to learn again how to pray, to help me see that I need to be shaped more by some words than others, to know that lots of people are watching, and that lots of people are invested in me.

You're fine. We're all counting on it.