Something's Coming

When it comes to pondering the pace of technological advancement, I like to look at an example from my own family. My grandfather was the first person in my family to ever fly in an airplane. When he did that, he was training to be the pilot. When he was born, his family owned a Model-T pick-up. His death came just months before the sales of the first iPhone. The house he was born in had a party-line telephone. By the time he was in the nursing home, the first fibre optic lines were being laid for commercial use. 

My grandfather was one of the people in my life who I believe was the living example of what has been called, “the Protestant Work Ethic.” That idea that when you work, you are working for God, and that God is pleased with your hard work. I remember the way it was taught to me in church, and its influence has often caused me to identify myself with what I do for a living. “I am a pastor/preacher,” as opposed to anything else. We hear it in the sermons of pastors from all over the theological spectrum. Even Joel Osteen’s prosperity Gospel has obligatory homages to the idea of a strong, Christian work ethic.

Unfortunately, something is coming, and it’s not good.

Back at the end of March, I came across an article that talked about the coming AI (Artificial Intelligence) revolution. The article focused on the response of certain members of the government to the coming breakthroughs and their plans for how to respond. According to the article, the response was not great. What struck me while reading the article, however, is how “not ready” the Church is to the same change in the fortunes of its members. While the Church in America never had a really good answer to the changing fortunes of regular people as they lost their jobs, we at least found someone to blame them on. They were shipped overseas. Of course that is what happened, because there was even a short-lived sitcom about it called, “Outsourced.”

Unfortunately, that’s not where the majority of the jobs went. It turns out that most of the jobs that people lost in manufacturing weren’t sent abroad for cheap labor. Instead, the company had a robot built who could do the job faster and for less money than a person could. In the end, technology took away the jobs of working-class people, not low-wage labor in foreign countries. The Church has not really handled this well, and has not offered those without jobs a new way too see their world. Instead, we talk about “bringing back” jobs that never left. I remember speaking with my family about how so-and-so was going “bring back our jobs.” What’s funny… no one in my family ever worked those jobs, and they never left. 

When the AI revolution hits, it’s going to get worse, and what will we say then? 

Will we just push the same Protestant Work Ethic?

Maybe the church should find a new way to talk about how we find our worth as human beings. For too long, we have said that the value of an individual is found in what they produce. Sure it is rewarding to create something and work with your own hands, but our value as beings created in the image of God is not predicated on what clock we punch, or the salary we take home. The day is coming when more jobs will be lost to technology, and those jobs aren’t going to come back, no matter who you vote for. Simply, they will cease to exist, just as previous manufacturing jobs cease to exist. When that happens, the Church needs to have an answer. 

For much of my time in ministry, there have been different discussions focusing on the idea of relevance. In fact, there is an entire Christian magazine devoted to that discussion. How can the Church be relevant when the thing people believe gives their lives meaning is simply gone? While we have made nods toward meaning found in our lives with God, we move in a milieu where true meaning is found in economic terms. 

But I don’t remember Jesus saying, “Blessed are the industrialists.

Or, “Blessed are the pipe-fitters.”

Or, “Blessed are the employed.”

What Leader Are We Following?

                         Photo courtesy of Ancient Faith Blog

This last week has been emotionally painful, if you have been following the news. As a quick recap, the Syrian President, Bashar Al-Assad, allegedly launched a sarin gas attack against a rebel-held city in his own country. The province where the attack occurred, Idlib province, is where many of the people who evacuated from Raqqa went after that city was bombed mercilessly by the Russian-backed president. In response to the gassing of innocent civilians, images of which were shown on international news, US President Donald Trump launched Tomahawk cruise missiles which were targeted to destroy the airfield that supposedly served as the launch base for the gassing in Idlib province. Then, Christians around the world observed Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. Some Coptic Christians in Egypt were attacked by the Islamic State while worshiping in their sanctuaries. 

In terms of conflict, politics, and faith, this is a lot of try and digest. As Christians, we are beginning what I like to call our High Holy Days. I, for one, will be participating in many services throughout the week in the lead-up to Easter, and I know I’m not alone in terms of having a busy schedule of worship experiences in the coming week. With Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday on this week’s calendar, there is a real need to connect the work of our faith with the events of our world. 

So, what kind of leader are we following?

Almost ten years ago I had the privilege of living and studying in London for a semester. It quickly became one of favorite international cities, if not outright favorite. Public transport makes the city easy to navigate, and there is so much to see and do that you can’t experience it all in one single trip. I loved everything about it; the food, music, theatre, and culture were dazzling to this small-town guy.

Before I left home, people were telling me of all the tourist stuff I needed to do. I had to go to Buckingham Palace, see a play in the West End, make sure to shop on Portobello Road, take a Jack the Ripper tour, and so many other things that I could write an entire travel post of the things you should do in London. But my mother was insistent that I go and see the changing of the Horse Guard. She said the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace was nice, but seeing the changing of the Horse Guard was spectacular. I found my way to the Whitehall area and found the place where they do the guard change after some failed attempts. That experience is one of the few that lived up to the hype. 

It’s difficult to describe what I felt, but just the horses were so beautiful that you should go if for no other reason. Those enormous thoroughbreds will leave you breathless. With their dark, shiny coats groomed to immaculate precision, you can tell that these animals are bred for power. Their muscles flexing as they walk causes them to shimmer in the light, and in that moment you realize that they are just as deadly of a weapon as the ones carried by their riders. It brings to mind the romanticized stories of cavalry riders on the open plains and deserts of the American West during the 19th century. Or it can conjure the images of Alexander the Great leading a cavalry charge during one of his campaigns of conquest. Regardless, those animals, and their riders, epitomize strength and power. 

As you walk to Whitehall, you see bronze statues of British military generals atop their steeds, captured in perpetual action. It’s similar to the statues you might see in the US of military leaders. There’s one of George Washington in DC that comes to mind, or maybe you think of the murals and statues surrounding Grant’s Tomb in New York City. Humanity has pictured its great leaders on the backs of powerful horses for millennia. That image of them controlling power and bending the will of the horse to their own direction is meant to be the perfect display of true control for a leader. Even Scripture uses the image of powerful horses and who controls them as motifs for powerful leaders. In the prophets, Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar are said to have horses that run like leopards. In the Revelation of John, there are four horseman that herald the coming apocalypse. It’s a mystique and image that is almost a part of the way humanity just sees leadership.

That is exact image, however, is what makes Palm Sunday so powerful. After a week where world leaders try to display their power in how much they can destroy, Christians walked into churches around the world to worship a savior that comes, not on some powerful charger like the Duke of Wellington or Alexander the Great, but not he back of a donkey. A lowly pack animal. Sitting atop, not a gilded saddle, but the robes of His disciples. He wasn’t leading an army in a grand parade, came into the Jerusalem to the shouts of the poor. They didn’t shout, “U-S-A!,” or sing a song of victory over vanquished foes. Instead, they said, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

In a week where leaders around the world used sarin gas and Tomahawk missiles to show each other how powerful they were, we were called to celebrate our leader. The one who rode on the back of a donkey.

And it’s the same leader who will be executed, without resistance, for being an enemy of the powerful.

So, while political leaders in the US debate whether or not it was good for us to launch missiles at Syria, or whether there should have been more political deliberation, and bipartisan cooperation before it happened, we see our leader on a donkey.

The Gospels vs. THE GOSPEL

                                         Image from https://exitchurchianity.com/

A few months back, Michael Gungor, a musician, got into a little bit of an argument on Twitter with some of his followers after he disparaged Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA). It’s the theological conviction that says Jesus was sacrificed on the cross in order to atone for the sins of humanity as an act of God’s justice. A few days after this social media meltdown, a couple of bloggers took it upon themselves to take Gungor to task for his, “heretical theological opinion.” (You can find their posts here and here.) Needless to say, I’m sure that once this was all over, everyone went on their separate ways and thought little about what they said. Most assuredly, no one changed anyone’s mind.

       The reason I’m writing this, however, is because of something Brandon Hines, of Pulpit and Pen, said. While posting screen grabs of Gungor’s tweets, he called PSA, “the Gospel.” His words imply that this theological position is the whole and entire Gospel, or Good News, to be communicated to humanity by God. The other writer, Owen Strachan (who has written some other stuff that gets under my skin, but that’s not for today) talks of “Blood Atonement” as if it is a dogma of good Christian faith; one that has been part of the life of Christianity for two thousand years. While there is a dissertation level amount of discussion to be had on this topic, I want to focus on the implications of what these two writers are saying. For both of them, a theological proposition, constructed in the sixteenth century, is the totality of the Gospel. That should be rather shocking. Of course,…it’s not shocking at all. Instead, it is a product of decades of theological malpractice.

As a brief rundown… Penal Substitutionary Atonement is first found in the writings of John Calvin, specifically his Institutes of the Christian Religion, published in the sixteenth century. In itself, this is a theological repackaging of the Satisfaction Theory of Atonement proposed by Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century. Since then, theologians have continually tinkered with the mechanics of PSA in reaction to the changes in human society. The Enlightenment, which sparked a period of political revolution in Europe and America that resulted in secular democracies brought about the most extensive refinements. The reason this should be noted is that PSA, like any theological writing, is a product of a time and a place. While the theological argument is derived from Scripture, like any good theology, it was still a product of a time and a place. And as time passed, and the place changed, it was refined and updated for new times in new places. PSA is not the only atonement theory that the Church endorsed over the centuries, and all of them were drawn from Scripture. So, to say that it is THE GOSPEL, handed down from the beginning of the Church is disingenuous, to say the least. (For a full discussion on atonement theory, there are a couple of great books to start from. Scot McKnight’s, “A Community Called Atonement,” and Tony Jones’, “Did God Kill Jesus.")

Another thing you might notice when you read their articles, which I would advise since that is the basis of this discussion, you will notice a glut of Biblical quotations, but one glaring hole stuck out to me. There is only one quotation from any of the Gospels. One thing that has been handed down throughout Christian history, at least in all the major ecumenical councils that produced creeds, is the Incarnation of Jesus. The idea that Jesus is the incarnated God that we worship. What I’m getting at is, Christianity has always said that the only way we know what God looks like is by looking at Jesus; that Jesus is God embodied on Earth. Therefore, it makes sense to me that we lean heavily on the books of the Bible where Jesus speaks about what he came to do. I mean, wouldn’t you want to get information straight from God? Well, it’s right there in the Gospels, if you believe what all those righteous Christians have been saying through the centuries.

When we look at the Gospel texts, the picture gets a little muddier. In John 17, Jesus implies that he has done everything he was sent to do. And this happens before the crucifixion. In Luke 4, Jesus quotes from the prophet Isaiah in saying what he has come to do. In Matthew 25, Jesus describes what true followers look like, and how to know if someone has fully grasped the Good News of Jesus. In Matthew 22 and Luke 14, Jesus uses the parable of a banquet where the invited guests snub the invitation and so the people from the streets are invited as an image of what the Kindom of God will look like. In The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5, 6, & 7) Jesus lays out his most in-depth teaching of what it means to be a follower of God. One thing that runs through all of those descriptions is a lack of sacrifice. The rich man throwing the banquet doesn’t have to sacrifice anyone to let those off the streets come to his banquet. The Sermon on the Mount carries no imagery of Old Testament sacrifice for people to be accepted by God. It’s curious that when the Incarnate God, the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus the Christ describes what he was sent to do on Earth, there is no indication of a necessary, cosmic sacrifice in order to redeem people from their sins. 

       

        I’m not trying to upset the apple cart. When I tell the story of my faith, it was a revival preacher using the framework of PSA that brought me to faith in Christ. I know many who I would call faithful followers of Jesus that still hold this view of the atonement. The reason I am writing, though, is that we are approaching Easter. This is our holiest day. And because of that, I just want to make sure that we recognize that it is our Scriptures that tell us what the Good News is, and not a theological writing made by a Frenchmen, four hundred years later. That should worry all of us.

What Happens When the Sun Comes Up?

I, like many, feel as if we are living in a dark night where the wind blows cold and the stars seem dim. I feel the anxiety that many witness to when they say they have heightened anxiety in this new world we seem to find ourselves inhabiting. My feelings have been a mix of righteous indignation and rage at how the discourse concerning our identities as Americans, Christians, and even human beings seems to be descending into a pit of negative projection towards difference. Like millions of others, I have taken to the streets, waving my sign and chanting the chorus of resistance. I’ve written before of my particular feelings toward those who would call themselves Christians while refusing to apply Scripture to their social comments. These are my feelings, and I know that they are not unique to me, nor are they indicative of some obscure social movement.

However, as time has continued to progress, and that thing I will call “night” deepens around us, I have a question. What will we do when the sun comes up?

My faith obligates me to orient myself towards hope. I shine my light in the darkness because I truly believe, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” I have an intuitive sense that the sun will rise and this “night” will end. The world has moved, though at times slowly and hesitantly, towards a more peaceful and just existence. Though strife is ever-present, human beings have overcome our own inhumanity so many times before that I believe we will again. But what happens on that morning?

After we have carried our signs, chanted our hopes for the future, and resisted those things that we feel are threatening us, will we be able to build the world we truly hope for? 

If polarization is the thing that has led us to this place, are we truly doing anything to create a future of reconciliation?

Reconciliation is a powerful word for Christians. We believe that the work of Jesus reconciled the world to God, and Paul’s words would send us out into the world to participate in the ministry of reconciliation. Currently, the voices around me have spoken often of the need to speak out against that which seems to counter to the Gospel we hold so dear. I have done my share of saying, “I’m not that kind of Christian.” But when the sun begins to warm me, what kind of Christian will I be? 

Over the past few months, I, like many, have felt horror and resentment towards what I see as bigotry run amuck in our social discourse. There have been people that I grew up with that have said incendiary things and felt no compunction to reflect on the consequences of their choice of words. I may have responded at times with uncharitable words of my own to those who are so inflexible. I wonder, however, will there be any chance at recovery after this time has passed, or will we just retreat into separate corners to celebrate/mourn the change in situation?

Now, it should be clear that I am hoping to spur a conversation on how we can affect change in our world without alienating those on the other side of the debate. We have our own personal opinions on what we think of those who differ from us, and I’m sure we could say equally hateful things about each other. But when the time comes that things change it will not be different if we don’t start now in altering how we try to affect that change. If all we do is shove one side off the molehill so we can take our place, there is still a hill and still those who are on the bottom. Nothing really changes in such a situation, though we would like to think it will be better. 

The feelings attached to all of this are difficult to navigate. Some have been deeply wounded by the changing social context, and others imagine that they have. Finding grace can seem as if we are dismissing our differences without actually changing anything. Those who spend long hours and unrecoverable amounts of energy in trying to make things better can see reconciliation as negation of their hard work. I don’t know how to address all of this. It’s more than I can respond to on my own, and I need to recognize that if I am ever going to be able to have a real conversation about it. 

As members of the body of Christ, we are supposed to be at the forefront of reconciling the world to God. It will mean that we need to reconcile ourselves to one another, and that is a tall order. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to march, or speak up for what I think is important and true. However, it does mean that as we try to push a march for progress, we can’t burn down every bridge we cross, or no one will be able to follow. 

If the day dawns on us, does it mean the night settles on someone else?

Should it?

The Real Threat to Our Faith

                                                                    photo courtesy of Amazon.com

Just this morning, at the National Prayer Breakfast, the new President vowed to “destroy” the Johnson Amendment. For those unfamiliar with the Johnson Amendment, it was put in place by then-senator, later president, Lyndon Johnson in 1954, prohibiting non-profit institutions (501(c)3 variety) from endorsing or opposing political candidates. At the time, it was seen as an extremely uncontroversial bill and was never questioned in public debate until the 80s. At that time the work of groups such as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition began to move directly into the political sphere and so began to speak of the Johnson Amendment as something that constrained their ability to speak freely.

All throughout the campaign, candidate Trump said repeatedly that the power of Christians in the public sphere was being destroyed and his pledge to the leaders of evangelical churches and denominations was that he would restore that power. Today, his view is that the way to retire that authority is to allow churches, and other non-profits, to become actively engaged in the political process. This promise is a gift to a group that over the last five years has purposefully thumb its collective noses at the Johnson Amendment by starting a pulpit freedom movement where they would directly and open speak of political candidates who they supported or opposed, and many would dare the IRS to write citations of their churches in those sermons. People such as Rev. Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church of Dallas, TX, Jerry Falwell Jr. of Liberty University, and Pat Robertson of the 700 Club see the removal of the Johnson Amendment as the means by the Church will be restored to its correct place as the moral arbiters of American society. For years they have been saying that the Christian faith is under attack by those who support and defend the separation of Church and state. They claimed God was removed from our government by “secularists” who hate God and want to destroy Christians.

I do agree with them that Christianity is under attack, however I believe it is their fear-based motivations which are destroying it. 

Moves such as this to close the gap between political power and religious faith dilute the power and uniqueness of Gospel we are charged to share. This motivation is what allows someone like Franklin Graham to say that the President’s executive order halting the admittance of all refugees into our country, and barring entry for anyone from seven majority Muslim nations is, “not a Biblical issue.” However, both the Jewish and Christian Testaments have much more to say about the care of immigrants and refugees than they do about marriage equality which was a defining reason for supporting their preferred candidate.

In 2006, Brian McLaren and Tony Campelo authored the book, Adventures in Missing the Point: How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel.” Their main argument was that in the rush to create novel ways for the evangelical Church to reach the culture of the last part of the 20th century, they failed to confront and address the biggest sin, consumerism. By creating a Christian shadow culture, with all the trappings of everyday life just with crosses stamped onto it, the Church failed to create a Christ-centered counterculture reflective of the radical hospitality of the one we say is the image of the invisible God. 

The work of those who would push for the abolition of the Johnson Amendment are just the next evolution of that Christian shadow culture. They speak of the Bible as authoritative when it suits them, but only as long as you adhere to their interpretation of the Scripture. Their main benefit to society is a faith that doesn’t require you to change anything about the way you interact with the world while getting “fire insurance” for an afterlife you rarely think of. Now, if the Johnson Amendment is removed as they so desperately hope it will be, they can add their favorite candidates to the sermons that hope to build comforting walls around the life they already live as they wait for the Apocalypse they yearn for. 

If anything is a threat to the faith of Jesus Christ found in Holy Scripture it is a Gospel so bereft of Grace and Love that it cannot even address the ways we fail to see human beings as beloved creations of God. The true threat to Christianity is not some teacher in a school trying to educate students on safe ways to have sex, or a Planned Parenthood physician. It’s a faith that sits still while the Spirit of Hope is busy moving forward.

Our Reductionism Is Going To Kill Us All

So, I live in the suburbs of Washington, DC. My wife and I moved here about a year and a half ago because she was called to a church in the area. It was exciting and terrifying in equal measure, though I think more for me than for her. I remember driving along the Potomac on the Virginia side, all of the monuments visible through the trees, and I asked her, “Did you think you would ever live in a place like this?” Her response, “I was accepted to Georgetown for college…so yeah. I did.” Granted, she didn’t go there, or we wouldn’t have met. However, she did a good job of bursting my small-town bubble. 

This last weekend, I crowded onto the Metro with thousands of others and trekked into the nation’s capital to take part in the Women’s March on Washington. I was packed into the crowd, shoulder-to-shoulder, with all those who had traveled from across the country to hold signs and chant out in the hopes of having their voices heard. I think I will always remember the signs and voices that were raised. They spoke support for LGBTQAI+ rights, affordable college or childcare, access to healthcare for children and women, safety and inclusion of immigrants and refugees, recognition of ecological responses, and positive reforms to address racial tensions. Those were just a sample of the diverse crowd that jammed into downtown DC that day, to recount them all would take my entire post. 

What has hurt, however, is the response I saw when I got home. I had spent the entire day hearing stories and meeting people from all over who wanted to be here in solidarity and support of those who are not heard, and my social media was flooded with those who thought it was frivolous, at best, and destructive, at worst. In the days since, I have contemplated deleting my social media accounts and never going back because I hurt so much for those who criticize to interpret my actions, and the thousands of others who took to the streets across the country, as nothing more than hurt feelings or whining. 

Equally frustrating, were the marchers and allies who attacked critics with equally reductionistic ascriptions. It’s not new that people would let fly more ad hominem attacks at one another, nor is it unique that the response is more of us wanting to shut down instead of get involved and reach out. It hurts to be reduced to the most esoteric of motivations and then dismissed because those are the things no one understands. As we try to navigate such incredibly tumultuous a time as this, we should try and recognize that there are things that are not helping in these situations. 

The constant thread of the last year is that people feel as if they are not being heard. Either we are ignored by the political elites who continually count on us for votes while only responding to the will of their donors. Or the political system itself has ignored us through structural means manipulated by one particular ideology. Some feel as if the economic structures of the global economy are maintained in such a way to alienate those who produce in order to benefit those who invest. Others that the social structures that have created divisions based on such trifling criteria as the color of ones skin or the amount of money in their bank account are now doing everything in their power to ignore the tension that still exists between these socially constructed categories.

These are all serious problems, and problems the Church, since that is what I write about here, should be focusing its energy towards in order to bring the light of the Gospel’s call to justice to bear. That justice will never materialize, however, if we continually reduce people down to the parts of their argument that are the most reprehensible in order that we might dismiss them. In a world that is so filled with color, to say that solutions are only found in black and white is to miss the target in so wide a fashion as to be playing on a different field. Issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, social stratification, political disenfranchisement, employment opportunity, educational access, and healthcare reform, to name a few, are not simple hurdles that can be cleared with simple responses such as, “Well, maybe you should just get out there and make sure the other person gets elected next time.” 

I used to think it was that simple. I had hoped it would be that simple, but it is obviously not. However, we now hold to such a high degree of ideological purity that everything is seen through lenses that remove all the color from the world. We have created for ourselves a world devoid of nuance. Our boundaries are such that everything is “pass/fail” and now we can’t even hear the crowd. We have lost the ability to appreciate diversity, though arguably we never had such an ability in the first place. 

If we continue to reduce our world down to such a pure essence that it has no meaning, and therefore can be easily dismissed, then we will forever be stuck in our present. This kind of reductionism will definitely kill us all.

The Gospel and Politics

                                                                   photo courtesy of Debate.org

Last month, a pastor from Texas wrote a great article in Baptist News Global about the difficulties pastors could be facing in the coming years due to the changing cultural landscape. Without going into too much detail, because I think you should go read the article for yourself, his main point is that many topics confronted within the Gospel narrative have been politicized over the last year. And because of this, there will be those in our congregations who are upset that there is too much politics coming from the pulpit. It seems you can’t through a rock these days without hearing about something to do with our political climate being mentioned in religious settings across the ideological spectrum. Let’s just admit up front that the sermons that will probably anger us are the ones we disagree with and leave it at that.

I remember talking about this during staff meeting at my church this last week. It was during one of those moments where we had not started to address the agenda for the week yet and were just making general comments about the status of our congregation. The senior pastor, one of the calmest ministers I have ever met, said, “That should have always been the case.” His words struck me because I was ready to get on my progressive soapbox and start advocating for our church to be a place that does not flinch in confronting our context with the Gospel, but he was right. It should always have been this way.

I’ve been rereading Jurgen Moltmann’s, “The Crucified God,” thinking specifically about the political images the German theologian highlights as conflicts between Jesus and the religious/political power structures of his time. In reading the Gospels from this perspective of the God who suffers with us, it is impossible to avoid seeing how Jesus’ teachings collide so spectacularly with the norms of his day. In a world where “separation of Church and State” would not exist for another 1700 plus years, these collisions are not even subtle.

In the midst of this thinking and meditating, a thought has resurfaced for me from my early days in seminary. The Gospel is not merely supposed to transcend our political boundaries, but to break through them. In the coming days, when we take to our pulpits, the Lectionary texts may lead us in to some troubling waters where we are discussing things that carry intense political baggage, but I must remember that my Savior is not a politician. I may have voted a certain way, I may be rejoicing or grieving the outcome of the Presidential election, and I may even have some politicians who I like what they are saying. But even a cursory reading of American history shows that political climates change. A party who may have started a movement at one time may find that movement becoming the cornerstone of the opposition’s message a generation later. 

What’s important for the church is to remember that we are preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We are preaching a Gospel that we believe comes from God. If politics and culture finds itself butting up against what comes out of my sermon…that’s politics and cultures problem, not mine. 

Have faith in God.

Preach the Good News.

Follow The Most Excellent Way.