I’ve been playing with Posterous for the past day and am really liking it, both for the simplicity of posting (I can’t wait till I have some audio to upload so I can test out that feature) and the way it auto-posts to the various sites that I use for social media. You can check out my page here: http://joeburnham.posterous.com.

Now, no matter what, I’m going to keep the Posterous site and have everything posted there, however, I’m not sure if I should drop this site (which runs on WordPress) and just use Posterous (which would become joeburnham.com).

I’d like to get your thoughts via the poll on the right. Should I:

• Keep this site as is, meaning this is the place you go for weekly articles, and the only thing that shows up in the RSS or email feed from joeburnham.com are the articles from this site.
• Put everything in Posterous because, well, if it’s something I recommend, find funny, or think it worth a gander (and there’s quite a bit of that stuff), then it’s worth getting in your RSS feed or inbox.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

This is the fourth in a series of four reflections on my time in Africa:

• Pineapples
• Vuvuzelas
• Laundry
• Trash Cans

When we first landed in Nairobi, I didn’t see it, but only because it was dark. However, the next morning, when we began our journey into the city to see some of the sites, I couldn’t help but notice the trash that was everywhere. At first, I thought maybe it was a just a consequence of having been in one of Nairobi’s poorer estates, but as we moved in towards the city, the trash didn’t go away.

A few hours later, as we were wrapping up our day of tourism, our driver, who’d picked up a coke, chucked his empty bottle into the bushes as we walked towards the attraction’s visitor’s center. My natural impulse was to pick it up and put it in a trash can, but, wanting to avoid offense, I decided to be discreet and seek out a trash can first. I quickly realized that there wasn’t one, so the bottle remained on the ground. But a short time later, I found myself looking for a trash can again while holding a small scrap of paper. More determined than before, I held onto the scrap and went looking for something that would allow me to throw it away without littering. A trash can, a dumpster, a fire pit … anything! Problem is, there was nothing.

The following day we left Nairobi and made our way to Accra, Ghana, where we were set to meet my friend Kwaku who would take us to Lome, Togo. In Accra, like Nairobi, trash was everywhere, a reality the driver of our cab contributed to on multiple occasions while taking us 60 miles to the boarder. As you can guess by now, Togo too was trashed (as are many parts of South Africa).

About three weeks into our trip we left Togo for a weekend in Ethiopia. Once again, we arrived in the evening so we didn’t get to see much, however, the next day, as we set out from our hosts’ home to explore Addis Ababa, we found ourselves amazed at the cleanliness of the city … and yes, trash cans were available in abundance. But there was something else that stood out in Ethiopia, the pride of its people. Where as my friend Kwaku had talked about African’s generally being people without hope who felt they lacked the ability to face challenges, Ethiopians, even though they live in one of Africa’s poorest countries, are confident in themselves and are determined to better their future. In an odd way, for Anita and I, trash cans became a symbol of Ethiopian pride.

As we talked with numerous Ethiopians that weekend, and then again as we spent time with our Ethiopian students at the Seminary in South Africa, I noticed two common points of pride. First, Ethiopians like to talk about their long-standing Christian tradition which links back to biblical events like the Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon (1 Kings 10) and the Ethiopian eunuch whom Philip baptized on the side of the road (Acts 8), and second, Ethiopia is one of two African countries that were not colonized, the other being Liberia, which was largely founded on former American slaves who returned to Africa.

At first, it was the second of these points that stood out, after all, it makes sense that there would be no hope after years of colonial occupation followed the Europeans moving out and leaving massive power vacuums to be filled by warring tribal leaders. It made even more sense as I came to understand how Western charity has worked to create a culture of dependence that has stripped Africans of their dignity. No wonder so many Africans feel hopeless, and no wonder that, because of it’s different historical path, Ethiopia is somewhat immune.

The more I thought about this the more I wondered how the Church, as people who have had their lives reoriented by the gospel (see the “laundry post“), could approach charity differently so that our works of service, rather than robbing Africans of their dignity and leaving them waiting for the next check or group of workers to arrive, would empower and enable Africans to address the challenges they face. The obvious example, and the first one I thought of, was what I found myself doing in South Africa as I focused, not on doing the actual ministry, but raising up Africans to be pastors in their communities. This then stemmed into thoughts on all kinds of mentoring and training, be it in construction, healthcare, digging wells, governance, or whatever else. But for the most part, this isn’t anything specific to the Church, and it’s becoming a widely adopted approach and a way to provide Africans with the “trash cans” that they need.

But what about something distinctly Christian? It wasn’t until last week when I saw this article by Matthew Parris, a self-proclaimed atheist, that I fully linked Ethiopia’s Christian history to how it understands itself today. As Parris points out, the gospel changes the way people understand themselves, and it’s a change he can see in their faces as he travels Africa. In a previous post, I described this change as happening in multiple tenses … the gospel frees you from your past, offers confidence as you face challenges today, and gives hope for the future. Freedom, confidence, and hope … “trash cans” for Africans and all the broken in our world.

Yesterday, I set foot on US soil for the first time in 2010. For the first five months of the year, my family and I have been traveling and living on the African continent. While it’s good to be home, now that I’m back, I find myself needing to fully rejoin the struggle of how I can be both an American and a Christian.

Think of all the “American” things that I’ve missed over the past five months. Pat Robertson’s response to the Haiti earthquake, the consumer event of the year with the release of the iPad, the conclusion of the healthcare debate, the final seasons of both LOST & 24, Glenn Beck telling people to run away from churches that talk about social justice, and the Arizona illegal immigrant law. For each of these things, the bulk of my contact with them is what I picked up off of my Facebook wall and a bit here and there during my 30-minutes a day with the BBC global news. While some of my blog content reveals a certain level of wrestling with these things from afar, being back in the States pushes the question of how to live as a Christian who also happens to be an American to the forefront of my everyday living.

Now, before I say more, let me offer a few thoughts so you know where I’m coming from. First, I’m an Eagle Scout. Now, that might not seem relevant to some people, but for those of you who know Scouting, you realize that there’s a huge emphasis on patriotism within the Boy Scouts of America, or at least there was when I was growing up. The formative impact of my Scouting experience still effects me today. For example, I get irritated whenever I see someone flying the American flag the wrong way (the stars belong on the top left), I can’t sing the Star Spangled Banner without choking up (or maybe, since I can’t sing, I should say I can’t attempt to do something that resembles singing the Star Spangled Banner without getting choked up), and I fully recognize the immense blessings and benefits that I’ve received simply because I was born where I was born (America’s impoverished have far more opportunity than the bulk of the world’s population). So, without a doubt, there is a deep seeded love and pride that I have in my country.

At the same time, I don’t buy into the theory that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. Yes, some of our Founding Fathers were Christians. John Adams is well-known as being a Calvanist. However, Thomas Jefferson is just as well-known (at least outside of Christian circles) for harassing Adams about his TULIP faith. Jefferson was a product of the Enlightenment who denied human depravity and the miraculous, to the point that in the version of the Gospels that he put together, he chopped out the virgin birth, Jesus’ miracles, and even the resurrection. Yes he held to a Judeo-Christian ethic, after all, he loved the moral teachings of Jesus, but holding a certain moral code doesn’t make one a Christian. In the end, I can’t help but agree that philosopher John Locke has more influence than Jesus in the founding of the United States.

Moreover, I don’t have any issue with that. After all, Jesus made it abundantly clear that his kingdom is not of this world, and Peter refers to Christians as sojourners and exiles on this side of eternity. Beyond that, while Paul repeatedly presents the Church as a place of proclaiming grace, he also affirms God’s hand in civil government which wields the law. In other words, with the founding of the Church, geography no longer plays a role in the people of God, therefore, even if we wanted to form for ourselves a Christian nation, good theology doesn’t allow for it.

Obviously, this stance alone creates a certain tension with the dominant form of Christian thought in the States today, one that I struggle with not only in my interactions with other Christians, but my engagement with those outside the church who, at least initially, want to lump me in with the masses. However, there’s more to it than that.

You see, while I said that I don’t have issue with the United States not being a Christian nation, I meant it more theologically than practically. Practically, there’s a tremendous amount of tension created by the reality that I live, hold citizenship in, and take pride in a country that is founded on the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment, principles that, when we take time to flesh them out undermine the Christian faith (click here for more on this). As a result, I have no choice but to wrestle with how I live out my vocation of earthly national citizenship while remaining faithful to my Christian faith. Let me offer two examples of this philosophical difference and how it plays out in actuality.

Individualism:
The Enlightenment is the age of the autonomous individual and it makes broad assumptions about the goodness of people, our rational abilities, and the importance of our own desires. While originally, much of this theory was a means to attack oppression and its abuse was to be refrained by the theory that pursuing your own purposes is valid as long as you don’t infringe on someone else in his or her pursuit, this theory has resulted in the American obsession with happiness.

Whether it’s the parent telling the child, “I just want you to be happy.” or the Christian trying to justify themselves with the question, “Doesn’t God want me to be happy?” Americans are fixated on themselves. It’s this fixation that leads to our culture of consumerism and the thrill that comes with the purchase, as well as the materialism that insists you’d be happy if you just had more.

Contrast this with the Bible which places far more importance on community than it does the individual, a group’s holiness over their happiness, and finding our collective joy in the salvation Christ won for us upon the cross.

As a result, while the society I belong to pushes me to pursue what I want, my faith calls me to deny myself, take up my cross, and follow Jesus in serving the greater good.

Liberalism:
Now, when I say anything with the word liberal in it, most people in the US automatically think of the Democratic Party. But that’s not the liberalism I’m talking about. Rather, philosophical liberalism is about liberty and equality, or, in John Locke’s words, the fundamental right to life, liberty, and property. As Jefferson wrote, this is because, according to liberalism, all of us are created equal. I for one, disagree with this presupposition.

Now, this isn’t to say I’m a fan of tyranny on inequality, rather, I believe that human beings don’t have a fundamental right to anything, rather, all that we have is a gift from God. As Luther’s explanation to the First Article of the Apostles’ Creed concludes, “All this [a list which includes things like life, liberty, and property] He does only out of fatherly, divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me.”

In the US today, this idea of rights is central to so much of what we do. Part of the issue behind the housing crisis was seeing home ownership as a right and trying to get people who couldn’t afford a home into one. The Democrats argued it was the right of people to have healthcare while Republicans argued it was the right of the wealthy to spend their money as they choose rather than have it taxed so the poor could be cared for. Some demand their reproductive rights, which, oddly enough, typically means they don’t want to reproduce. I’ve even heard people argue that it’s their right to drive the biggest, most luxurious, and most environmentally unfriendly vehicles they can afford. The list goes on and on. To be fair, while I strongly doubt our Founding Fathers would ever approve of where we’ve taken their ideology, when combined with a more realistic view of human nature, is the natural consequence of the ideas themselves.

So, while the world around me wants to debate which rights we’re going to uphold, I find the premise of the entire conversation faulty.

So, where does this leave me on my return to the States? Here are some of my practices as I engage in this struggle:

• I tie a string around my finger. Ok, so I don’t literally do that, but in theory, it’s a good way to remember something important. In this case, I think it’s important that we, as American Christians, don’t forget that none of us are “self made men” who have earned what we have. Every blessing, every opportunity, every break, and every breath hasn’t been of our own doing, but it’s been a gift from God. As we remember how we’ve been blessed, we’re reminded to be a blessing to others.
• Over the past 5 months, we’ve been around a TV for 21 days. You know what, I haven’t missed it (well, to be honest, I did miss 24). We’ve also been living off the generosity of others and therefore, have worked hard not to spend money on frivolities like going out to eat. You know what, I haven’t missed it. Moreover, I’ve come to believe that when we live minimally the everyday patterns of our life break us, as Christians, away from the society around us that aims for opulence.
• While I’m a firm believer in human depravity, I don’t think most of us are out to step on others while engaging in our own pursuits, rather, I think it just happens. Therefore, it’s important that we take time to listen. Have you ever stopped to think how others perceive your actions? Have you ever made a point of finding out the broader impact of your choices? Make a point of hearing beyond your typical sphere.
• Make time for individual confession and absolution. There’s no better way to beat down your enlightened self than to honestly look in the mirror and tell somebody else what you see … and then hear of God’s grace in Christ.

What else? How do you seek to remain Christian while living in America?