Irreverence

Of all the helping professions, police work seems the most suited to a dark, sardonic disposition often referred to as gallows humor. It’s the byproduct of being subject to crime, degradation, and violence on a day-to-day basis. Still, the case of Seattle police officer Daniel Auderer should help officers reflect on the consequences of their words, especially when they’re caught on camera.

Auderer’s bodycam footage recorded him joking with another officer while discussing the death of a pedestrian. SPD officer Kevin Dave had been driving over 70 miles per hour in his police vehicle while responding to an overdose call when his car struck and killed 26-year-old Jaahnavi Kandula in a crosswalk. Auderer had been summoned to evaluate whether Dave had been impaired at the time of the accident. Auderer was recorded saying that the city should “just write a check,” and implied that eleven thousand dollars would suffice, because, “she was 26, anyway … she had limited value.”

Auderer later wrote in a statement to the city’s Office of Police Accountability, "I intended the comment as a mockery of lawyers. I laughed at the ridiculousness of how these incidents are litigated and the ridiculousness of how I watched these incidents play out as two parties bargain over a tragedy."

Auderer admitted that anyone listening to his side of the conversation alone "would rightfully believe I was being insensitive to the loss of human life." The comment was "not made with malice or a hard heart," he said, but "quite the opposite." Still, police watchdog groups were not satisfied with the explanation, and several demanded Auderer be suspended without pay.

At the time of her death, Kandula was a student enrolled in the information systems program at Northeastern University’s Seattle campus. After her death, her uncle Ashok Mandula arranged to send her body to her mother in India. Mandula said, "The family has nothing to say. Except I wonder if these men's daughters or granddaughters have value. A life is a life."

Researcher Christian Smith's book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, concludes that many young American adults have a faith characterized by "moralistic, therapeutic deism." According to this view of God, if we live good lives and if we're kind to others, then God will provide "therapeutic benefits" to us like self-esteem and happiness. Other than that, God is not involved much in our world.

This view of God has a profound effect on prayer. Smith found that American teens personally prayed frequently; 40 percent prayed daily or more, and only 15 percent said they never prayed. However, their motivation for prayer largely focused on meeting their own needs. Some of the teens interviewed said: "If I ever have a problem, I go pray." "It helps me deal with problems. … it calms me down for the most part." "Praying just makes me feel more secure, like there's something there helping me out." "I would say prayer is an essential part of my success."

But Smith also found that many young Americans' prayers lacked any sense of repentance or adoration. Smith writes, "This is not a religion of repentance from sin." Again, Smith concludes that this "distant God" is "not demanding … because his job is to solve problems and make people feel good. There is nothing here to evoke wonder and admiration."

Julia Sweeney is an actress and writer best known for her four-year run on Saturday Night Live and her solo shows. Her piece, Letting Go of God, she raises a common problem for contemporary atheists—why does God want (or even seem to need) our praise? Here's how Sweeney puts this objection to belief in God:

I'm living my life as a person who accepts the natural world. The whole idea that there's a God who cares whether people believe in him or not, like why would God care if people believed in him or not? That was one of the many things that I found so shocking reading the Bible. First of all, how insecure God is. I mean, God is so insecure he needs everyone to say, "You're the number one, you're the number one over all the other god's, you're the top god." And like, it's the most insecure character.

Editor's Note: Contrast Ms. Sweeney's view with this quote from C.S. Lewis: "I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment … It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with … . Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him."

The word geek is a slang term for (a) A person regarded as foolish, inept, or clumsy; (b) A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially incompetent.

The word usually isn't intended as a compliment. But if you have a problem with your computer, cell phone, gaming device, or television, that's when you really want a geek around. There's even a company called "The Geek Squad" which proudly advertizes, "We're geeky, yes, but we also know what you're going through, because nobody is more into technology than we are." When you need The Geek Squad, you give them a call, they fix your problem, and then they leave you alone.

Is it possible to treat God in the same way that people treat the Geek Squad? In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis described approaching God in a similar way. At a young age, when C. S. Lewis learned that his mother was dying, he remembered that he had been taught that prayers offered in faith would be granted. When his mother eventually died, Lewis prayed for a miracle. Later, he wrote:

I had approached God, or my idea of God, without love, without awe, even without fear. He was, in my mental picture of this miracle, to appear neither as Savior nor as Judge, but merely as a magician; and when he had done what was required of him I supposed he would simply—well, go away. It never crossed my mind that the tremendous contract which I solicited should have any consequence beyond restoring the status quo.

Anytime we expect God to fix our problems, restore the status quo, and then go away so we can live without him, we've treated God like the Geek Squad.

Manhattan, New York, pastor Tim Keller once said that in 1970 a Sunday school teacher changed his life with a simple illustration.

The teacher said, "Let's assume the distance between the earth and the sun (92 million miles) was reduced to the thickness of this sheet of paper. If that is the case, then the distance between the earth and the nearest star would be a stack of papers 70 feet high. And the diameter of the galaxy would be a stack of papers 310 miles high."

Then Keller's teacher added, "The galaxy is just a speck of dust in the universe, yet Jesus holds the universe together by the word of his power."

Finally, the teacher asked her students, "Now, is this the kind of person you ask into your life to be your assistant?"

In his sermon “Big God, Little God” John Ortberg said:

Many years ago I was walking in Newport Beach, a beach in Southern California, with two friends. Two of us were on staff together at a church, and one was an elder at the same church. We walked past a bar where a fight had been going on inside. The fight had spilled out into the street, just like in an old western. Several guys were beating up on another guy, and he was bleeding from the forehead. We knew we had to do something, so we went over to break up the fight. … I don't think we were very intimidating. [All we did was walk over and say,] "Hey, you guys, cut that out!" It didn't do much good.

Then all of a sudden they looked at us with fear in their eyes. The guys who had been beating up on the one guy stopped and started to slink away. I didn't know why until we turned and looked behind us. Out of the bar had come the biggest man I think I've ever seen. He was something like six feet, seven inches, maybe 300 pounds, maybe 2 percent body fat. Just huge. We called him "Bubba" (not to his face, but afterwards, when we talked about him).

Bubba didn't say a word. He just stood there and flexed. You could tell he was hoping they would try and have a go at him. All of a sudden my attitude was transformed, and I said to those guys, "You better not let us catch you coming around here again!" I was a different person because I had great, big Bubba. I was ready to confront with resolve and firmness. I was released from anxiety and fear. I was filled with boldness and confidence. I was ready to help somebody that needed helping. I was ready to serve where serving was required. Why? Because I had a great, big Bubba. I was convinced that I was not alone. I was safe.

If I were convinced that Bubba were with me 24 hours a day, I would have a fundamentally different approach to my life. If I knew Bubba was behind me all day long, you wouldn't want to mess with me. But he's not. I can't count on Bubba.

Again and again, the writers of Scripture pose this question for us: How big is your God? Again and again we are reminded that One who is greater than Bubba has come, and you don't have to wonder whether or not he'll show up. He's always there. You don't have to be afraid. You don't have to live your life in hiding. You have a great, big God, and he's called you to do something, so get on with it!

The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, Scotland, is hosting a series of exhibitions called "Made in God's Image." Organized by a company called Culture and Sport Glasgow, the exhibition includes Untitled 2009—a simple, opened Bible. Next to the Bible is a container of pens and a notice which reads, "If you feel you have been excluded from the Bible, please write your way back into it."

There are a number of things disconcerting about such an invitation—chiefly, it makes us the subject and the Bible an object that can bend to every whim and agenda. But what is worth noting is the venomous response of people who have visited the exhibit. Visitors have responded to the invitation by daubing the Bible's pages with a litany of angry and lewd comments. One person wrote: "This is all sexist pish [a word used to express deep disdain], so disregard it all." Another wrote on the first page of Genesis, "I am Bi, Female, and Proud. I want no God who is disappointed in this." Others have even taken the opportunity to alter verses, including Genesis 1:1, to prove that everything about the Bible and God himself is man-made.

The producers of the exhibition have indicated that the most offensive pages will be removed, but Christians in the U.K. are angry that the show had been staged at all. "This is symbolic of the state of our broken and lawless society," said Andrea Minichiello Williams, director of the Christian Legal Centre. "We have got to a point where we call the desecration of the Bible modern art. The Bible stands for everything this art does not: for creation, beauty, hope, and regeneration."

Sometimes I think that all religious sites should be posted with signs reading, "Beware the God." The places and occasions that people gather to attend to God are dangerous. They're glorious places and occasions, true, but they're also dangerous. Danger signs should be conspicuously placed, as they are at nuclear power stations. Religion is the death of some people.

—Eugene Peterson, U.S. pastor, scholar, author, and poet (1932-2018)

Marva J. Dawn writes in “Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down”:

I remember an animated discussion with my high school freshman English teacher over the word awful. I insisted on using awe-full to describe something so exalted as to arouse reverence. She preferred that I stick with the word's common spelling and its usage to designate something dreadful.

We should have looked in the dictionary. My old Webster's lists as its first definition "inspiring awe; highly impressive." Not until its fourth entry does it supply the definition usually assumed in idiomatic English: "very bad, ugly, unpleasant."

But the teacher had the final word that day in class. Even at age 14 I felt that a vital perception was being lost—the sense that something, someone, was higher than we. I longed to verbalize awe-full-ness; my teacher made class awful.

Today teenagers apply the related word awesome to clothes, food, music, and cinematic effects. The word is so overused that when people sing Rich Mullins's "Awesome God," they seem to trivialize the Awe-full One and put the Trinity on the same level as toothpaste and togs.

As our culture has worked hard to establish equality among persons, we've somehow put God into that parity and gradually reduced our sense that this is a breathtakingly transcendent GOD we're talking about.

We live in a fast-paced culture, but some things just ought to happen slowly.

The book Final Salute tells the story of Major Steve Beck, a U.S. Marine whose heart-wrenching task is to inform the nearest of kin when a Marine is killed in Iraq. Beck doesn't just break the sad news and then leave; for several days he may help the family through the process of the funeral. That includes supervising the Marine honor guard that stands near the fallen soldier's body.

The honor guard learns from Beck how to salute their fallen fellow-Marine as they leave or resume guard with a slow salute that isn't taught in basic training. The slow salute requires a three second raising of the hand to the head, a three second hold, and then a three second lowering of the hand—a gesture of respect that takes about nine times longer than normal. Beck explains: "A salute to your fallen comrade should take time."

Indeed, those who die serving their country are worthy of great honor, worthy of a slow salute, worthy of extra time. To do some things fast, just to get them done so we can move on to the next thing in our lives, sends a subtle message of disrespect.

So it is with our worship of God. God deserves a slow salute. The Savior who gave his life for us is worthy of our time.

To live in fear of God means that we live before God and the rest of reality in such a way that there is never contempt within us. We take nothing for granted, everything as a gift. We have respect. We are always poised for surprise before the mystery of God, others, and ourselves.

All boredom and contempt is an infallible sign that we have fallen out of a healthy fear of God.

—Ronald Rolheiser, president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas

Actor Sir Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf in the winter blockbuster Lord of the Rings, confesses,"Whenever I stay at a hotel, I always check to see if they have a Gideon Bible, and if they do I tear out a page," says the openly gay actor. "I turn to Leviticus 18:22 and rip out that page, which is directed against homosexuals…. I think by now I must have ripped out a few hundred."

His motives, McKellen adds, are purely altruistic.

"Who knows? There might be someone who has insomnia… who reads the Bible because they have nothing else to do and who might be especially vulnerable to what I really think is Leviticus's pornography."

In 1717, King Louis XIV of France died. Preferring to be called "Louis the Great," he was the monarch who declared, "I am the State!" His court was the most magnificent in Europe, and his funeral was the most spectacular.

In the church where the ceremony was performed, his body lay in a golden coffin. To dramatize his greatness, orders had been given that the cathedral would be very dimly lit with only one special candle that was to be set above the coffin.

The thousands of people in attendance waited in silence. Then Bishop Massillon began to speak. Slowly reaching down, he snuffed out the candle and said, "Only God is great."

Western culture has made a fundamental change in its religious base. We have exchanged that One who said, "I am the Truth" (John 14:6) for the incredibly expensive doctrine of Freud and the words of all his varied disciples. Our new religion says with Pontius Pilate, "What is truth?" and teaches that our status is one of "original victim" rather than "original Sin."

Flippancy is the best [kind of joke] of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. ...

If prolonged, the habit of flippancy builds up around a man the finest armourplating against the Enemy [God] that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.

-- Your affectionate uncle SCREWTAPE