Singapore Roast

I was in Singapore a few weeks ago. My first morning there, we went to a Starbucks. It was walking distance from the hotel I was staying in. I was pretty amazed. The coffee tasted exactly the same as it does in the states. That’s really pretty remarkable, because in the hotel, and everywhere else--the coffee in Singapore does not taste like the coffee that I know and love. I’m not sure why it tastes different, and I’m not sure that it’s bad that it tastes different, but it does.

I felt so happy that I had the Starbucks, and I thought “well, that at least is right.” And suddenly I realized that I was playing the part of the ‘ugly American’, who thinks that the right way is the American way, that the only way is the American way.

I’m honestly surprised that my mind ran along that path, that I had that train of thought. You see, my family and I have lived in lots of places overseas. Tokyo, Bangkok, Jakarta, Las Vegas. Not visited, but lived. And when you live somewhere else for a reasonable length of time, you learn that different is normal. So I was surprised that I had the ‘ugly American’ thought.

It quickly passed, and I remembered what I already know. That my normal isn’t ‘THE normal.’ That in some sense, there is no ‘THE normal.’

My Mom owned her own business when I was a teenager. She was a partner in a fabric store. Something happened to her that bears on all this. She was ordering fabric from a supplier in Texas, and talking to someone there with a lovely soft drawl. They concluded their business, and the woman on the other end said to my Mom “I just love talkin’ to y’all out there in California; y’all have such a lovely accent!” My mom thought “wait a minute; you have the accent, not me!” Almost immediately, she realized that accent is a matter of perception.

So, when it comes to coffee, or breakfast foods, or accents, or even matters of spirituality, there isn’t normal.

People who have been in the church know that you get that feeling of ‘normal’ when you go to a particular church for a while. You get that feeling especially when you grow up in a particular church. But hopefully at some point you go out, and you meet other people of the faith, and you attend say a black church, or a high church, or a low church, or a rock church, or a church of artists, or a church of therapists, or a church of egg-headed theologians, or a church of Japanese speakers, and you begin to think how few people in the world are normal. From there you progress through the “I’m not the normal one,everyone else is” and on to “everyone is normal”, and finally to you might arrive at “no one is normal.”

The problem with the concept of normal connected to church is the problem of God. You see, God, in the Christian mind, is beyond what we see and understand. To us, He is not completely knowable. And, if we are to have a relationship with Him, which is honestly the whole point of the Christian Faith, then it stands to reason that this relationship will be pretty unstable. We’ll be constantly bumping into this infinite God who is ultimately unknowable, and that will be an unsettling and not a ‘normal’ relationship. One reason we do church is so we can get together with other people and encounter this unknowable God in whatever limited ways we can, and get to know him a little better. So probably church done right is always a little unsettling, and there certainly isn’t anything normal about it.

The other reasons we do church is because we can get to know this unknowable God better by getting to know other believers. It’s weird, but we are called His Body. We believers are his physical presence. When you meet other believers and get to know them, this is when you really begin to understand that there isn’t anything normal about this Body.

But we are drawn to the normal. We yearn for it. We love it. We want the comfortable. We want the coffee we know, served in the cup we know, by someone with an accent we know, whose prayer ends “in Jesus Name, Amen,” just like normal prayers end.

In my better moments, I’m not satisfied with all that. In my better moments, I want to know God more, and to know more of this unknowable God, I’m going to have to be willing to set aside the normal, the comfortable, the known, and find in other believers, the uncomfortable, the weird, the accented; and learn to love that. By this I hope that I will gather in more that was previously unknown by me of this ultimately unknowable God.

Of course, that sounds good, I want to be courageous, I want to stretch myself. I’m completely willing to do the hard work, with one caveat. There must be a Starbucks in walking distance.

I meant it to be funny

Yesterday I was in a Starbucks in Pennsylvania. I was ordering a Grande Drip Coffee (my usual at Starbucks) and the barista asked about how I like my coffee. Usually they say "room for cream?" but this one asked me "do you want it black?" I immediately said "yeah, black...like my heart" The barista started, and her eyes widened for just a moment.

I realized that the humor of this was lost on her. She wasn't quite sure what to make of this strange phrase. Of course, like everything I say and do, it’s not original with me. In the Simpsons, Season 5 or something, Mr. Burns has a meeting with his Attorneys, and offers them coffee. One of them accepts it and Mr. Burns says "you want it black, like your heart?" It’s always stuck with me.

I do like black coffee. I love Starbucks black coffee. And parenthetically, my heart is black. That barista's eyes went wide like saucers because it’s weird to admit. No one likes to be reminded of it, but all of us have a black heart. We aren't really to be trusted. We all prefer the bitter over the sweet, the tragic over the brightly comic. Sin and Death over life. It’s why more people know the kid in the hockey mask with the chain saw than know Pollyanna.

It’s that black heart that connects us to reality. It’s what reminds of us of who we are, that we come from the earth. Life isn't idealistic like Star Trek, where everyone knows what they're doing and are all insanely competent and controlled. In real life Lt Ohura comes to work depressed and irritable because her husband has left her, and at lunch she sits in the corner of the bar telling her worries to Sulu while having four grey goose martinis and then she comes back and tells Capt. Kirk that he sucks as an actor--and for once--for once in his damn life would he please think of someone besides himself?

Actually, that is an episode of Star Trek I'd like to see.

The Christian church is too much like Star Trek. Everyone is controlled, everyone is competent. No one ever comes to church depressed and irritible. If someone does, the rest of us avert our gaze and wish they'd go away. Or, if we are really controlling, we will grab the irritable one and drag them into a corner and pray for them, to try and exorcize the demon of honesty out of them. We can't have that happen at church.

Fifteen years ago, a guy showed up at my church dressed as a woman. The pastor came up to him and said "Hey, what's up?" The guy had been coming for quite a while. We all knew him, he sang and played guitar beautifully. But this day he was having a crisis, and apparently this was one of his ways of coping. I admit, dressing as a woman isn't probably the best way to cope. The pastor was really trying to be loving. But the guy left that day in shame, and has never been back to church. I've always been sad about that. He showed up, really needing something, and even though no one said boo to him, his shame was so great that he never came back. Because he knew. His idea of church is a place where Ohura always is calm and Sulu always steers perfectly, and everyone wears the proper uniform. He knew that he had broken that, so he's never come back.

I've wondered on and off if I should call him, but I never know what I would say. And now, its been 15 years, and it feels too hard to bring it up. And so, I've done nothing.

Jesus was a guy that understood our black hearts. He told the woman caught in adultery "I don't condemn you." Wow. Then he said "go and sin no more." Double wow. He had enough love and credibility that he could say both. Really, if you think about it, it’s the only way to really love someone. If you say “I don’t condemn you” but leave out the other part, you are also saying “what you do doesn’t matter to me.” If you say “go and sin no more” but don’t tell the person you’re not condemning them, then you are really saying “you embarrass me, get out of here.” The message of condemnation is clear.

Church should be a place where we can talk about our black hearts...where no one's eyes widen when we say that we are made of dirt. Where they nod and say "mine too" and we laugh and move forward. The Church should be willing to serve Coffee dark and black and bitter, and not blush too much about who we really are. It should be a place where as Lincoln said we are called to "our better angels." Where we can redeem the moments when our black hearts show through, which they seem to do pretty often.