Priestly Goth Blog

Preaching on Christmas Day

2011-12-25T14:49:00.000-06:00

It has become the practice that for the shared Christmas Services with Immanuel Lutheran Church and St. Elias Christian Church I preach on Christmas day. The sermon I preached this morning can be found here.

I'd be interested in anyone's thoughts, as I take seriously God become human, but do it from the side of God who is beyond our universe and source of all that is. This sort of understanding of God, moves god beyond, or so it seems to me, in such a way that I'm not sure I'm taking things "literally" at least not the way many American Christians understand taking the Bible literally. I don't know, maybe you have some thoughts after reading the sermon.

Images from B1 E Gallery Dia De Los Muertos

2011-11-04T18:15:00.001-05:00

I have an album up of the Gallery B1 E turned into a chapel for a Dia de Los Muertos exhibit. It will run for the next few weeks, gallery is open in the evenings. I lead Vespers services in the gallery on the Feast of All Saints and the Feast of All Souls (day of the dead). The work is by various artists though the shrines are mostly Andy De La Rosa's(the owner of the Gallery). The mural behind the Altar is an icon I wrote a year and a half ago, and some of my icons are in the show.
Praying the psalms among artists and those variously involved with Occupy Chicago has a sightly different tenor and was quite raw. I may do one or two more services there during the run. At least that was the original plan when Andy De La Rosa had thought up this exhibition. But that original plan had an opening before Nov 1 which did not happen. So we'll see. Also, I might be at the gallery in the evenings in the next two weeks writing icons in the gallery while the gallery is open.

Intentional Community and Occupy Wall Street (Chicago...)

2011-10-11T21:18:00.003-05:00

I'm the prior of an intentional Christian community, The community of the Holy Trinity, we have a blog. I wrote a post on where our Rule of life might meet up with the Occupy movement, you can find the post here.

Questions for Occupy Wall street/ America

2011-10-05T13:26:00.000-05:00

I want to begin to say that I defend the right of those who are assembling and expressing their desire for change and outrage. Nothing of what follows should either be interpreted as siding with those who would wish to curtail this activity or deny the right of this form of expression. Also, in general I am in agreement with the implicit criticism of the financial system and that much of its practices are unethical. I too am outraged at the disparity of wealth that exists.
That said I have some questions for those in this movement of protest. I understand that there is reluctance or inability to speak for the movement so I ask this of those who are participating. I gather that part of what is desired is conversation that leads to change, so I ask questions.

1) What else are you doing - have you been doing? Its an honest question. Are you even in small ways disentangling yourselves from the system against which you are protesting?
2) Some seem to be asking for a voice in the system: Do you really want a voice in a system this broken?
3) Are you aware that there are people who have set up alternatives to the system against which you are protesting, giving up privileges and even a middle class lifestyle? If you aren't aware of such people and communities I encourage you when you are done seek them out. Learn from them seek to create alternatives.
4) Do you believe democratizing and reforming the financial system will eradicate the problems with the system? What if the problems are endemic to the system no matter how much we attempt to control the system?
5) Doesn't this crisis and the havoc it has wrecked upon the middle class and poor, show that greater access to the system is not in the best interests of the poor and middle class? We need to examine that in part this crisis was created as loans were given in the name of expanding the "American Dream" to those who hand not had access to it before. A noble goal if Americanism is true and good. Are you willing to question some of the fundamental stories, mythologies and fables Americans tell themselves about the world and our place in it?
6) Do you really want to have greater participation in a system of power and wealth based upon "making money"?
7) Are you aware of the degree to which you and all of us in the USA are beneficiaries (as well as victims) of this system? I mean this seriously, some of us are more victims then beneficiaries others of us more entwined in the system and its benefits. So you who are on the streets have you examined yourselves and your place in the system and your own culpability?
8) What if the creation and expansion of the American Middle classes even the raising up of the poor in the US was based upon injustice and oppression outside the US?
9) Do you believe you are paying prices for your food, your clothing, you technology, your luxuries that truly provides for a living and fair for those who produce it and deliver it to you?
10) to put it another way are you always looking for the least expensive product or service? If so it is at least plausible that someone in the line of production and delivery has been exploited for your savings. Do you know for sure that those who provide you with your products and services (your internet connection and devices upon which you tweet this movement) are paid equitably?
11) Would you pay more and do with less to ensure that people could have a living by providing you with your goods and services.
12) are you willing to provide for yourself and your community? Or How are you outsourcing your life in ways that are exploitative? Are you willing to change and have less for a more equitable world?

It would be fair to ask me if I could answer these questions. I will admit my own questions are challenges to me as well. What I can say is that I have made choices that in part at least lessen my dependence and involvement upon the system. But I ask these questions because I am acutely aware of the degree to which I at best can live only in resistance to what is. I ask these questions painfully aware of my own complicity. For instance I haven't bought a new computer in over ten years. But this means living off donated technology. I benefit from someone elses participation in the system, I'm still in it. There are people I know who are doing much more. I'm no paragon of virtue here. But I have found I can do with less, and I am seeking to create pockets of an alternate way of being in the midst of what is. I struggle with the system in myself. I have benefited from the system and its practices, I have depended upon the financiers of the world. I have bought the lie that making a living and making money are synonymous. I also have turned aside from this but it lurks , and like Trent Resnor at the end of the Head Like a Hole video, I (and I think we all are) entangled. And our entanglement is in at least a small part our own doing. We all have worshiped at the altar of god money.

I will admit thought that these questions have a theological and spiritual basis. I do not believe that our hope comes from greater access to the halls the control the Moneyed wealth and Power of the world. In fact I believe the hope for the transformation of the world has its origins in a Jewish peasant carpenter executed by the Roman Empire 2000 years ago. While the movement that obscure peasant spawned caleld the Church and his Body in the world did confront and was embraced by the powerful and wealthy eventually, the hope doesn't reside there. The hope doesn't even reside in obscurity and smallness, rather it resided in the reality that God entered the world as that obscure peasant, and conquered by being conquered by the powerful and moneyed of the world. In living suffering and dieing as a human and an outcast God showed us that the halls of power and moneyed wealth are not aligned with the ultimate reality of the world. Rather, it always will lie elsewhere. The halls of power and money will always attempt to coopt transformation and change for their benefit or create classes that benefit from a revolution more than others that is the logic of power and moneyed wealth. For more on the theology behind this go here

9/11 Civil Religion, difference, and Fear

2011-09-16T14:29:00.000-05:00

(I in part have waited to post these thoughts because I did not want to step upon peoples genuine grief, even so what i have to say here probably remains incomprehensible and unpalatable to at least some. LEK)
It turns out this was the first of a trilogy of posts. The second in this series can be found here, in Things Gothic and priestlygoth.org, when the third post is finished it will be linked to here in Ecclesial Longings.

I live in a diverse neighborhood in Chicago, and am part the the interfaith religious association (Edgewater Community Religious Association, ECRA, though its regular participants are mostly mainline Christian congregations with a Synagogue, and an Ismaili Center who are regular participants, there are other members but I have never seen them at meetings.) in the neighborhood. Our new alderman asked us to take part in 9/11 neighborhood commemoration he and the alderman from the neighboring ward that also covers part of Edgewater were planning. The alderman and ECRA were in agreement that the emphasis should be as we commemorate on moving forward in coming together as a diverse community. I was hesitant about participating in such a commemoration but with the emphasis ECRA was encouraging it seemed to be positive. Also, we wisely chose not to give even our inter-religious imprimatur upon the proceedings by turning down the offer to give an interfaith invocation at the commemoration. We limited our involvement to saying this pledge:

"We of __________ pledge to help make Edgewater

(may want to broaden this for Pat O'Connor's Ward)

a place of justice and security for all."

"We pledge to make Edgewater a place of opportunity

and safety for everyone."

"We pledge to help make Edgewater a place where all

can worship, work and re-create in peace."

It didn't occur to me that even using this form wasn't so much about diversity as such, but a diversity conformed to a unity. In a context that opened with the pledge of allegiance to the U.S. flag (which I stood at attention for but refused to recite), our pledge of embrace (of diversity?) conformed to a pledge of unity that obscured our particularity and difference. In the end for all the talk of diversity even at the commemoration itself, what I was left with was the uni-vocal stamp of the Nation State that we in a civil religious ceremony bowed our selves before in hopes that our particularity would be respected. However it was at the price, we gave up our ability to be truly other even to the Nation State and its Religious aspirations of the American character to which we in our diversity were to pay tribute.

In the moment I wished I had suggested we not say a pledge but make a commitment creating a space fo opportunity and safety where all can worship work and re-create in peace. Rather, what happened is that we had to first conform to a unity and the logic of the Nation State, to truly form a unity out of our diversity that remains diverse and other. I wished for in that moment was a unity that is not sameness, or conformity to the ideology of a Nation State even one that has the ideal in its ideology of liberty and justice for all.

I am a citizen of the United States of America, I will live at peace and obey its laws, but I do not give it my allegiance, for I bow my head and give my heart to only one sovereign, and that aint any Nation state, government or unity of Nation States.

Neither do I value difference for difference sake, but our attempts at unity in diversity, demand something I see as only being able to be given to God.

The logic of the Nation-State attempts to create sameness out of a diversity, by telling everyone within a particular arbitrary border that they all share the same ideology and character, no matter what they feel or their diverse origins. It is a fiction created to enforce order, which admitedly can be

beneficial. However, it is at the price of our ability to remain other and different. In some sense the Nation State is built upon the fear of otherness and actual diversity. For some reason David Bowie's I'm Affraid of Americans seems relevant here:

Do we in fact fear otherness that refuses our view and structuring of the world. Is this perhaps not the essential logic of the Nation State and any character of a nation to fear what is not of its character and ideology and to thus produce fear of itself in others.

Corporation or Governement, or....?

2011-09-06T23:25:00.000-05:00

My friend Jeremy over atGlassdimly tweeted this article about Tea Party rhetoric last week. The author makes the interesting observation that one could replace in most instances "Government" with "Corporations" and the rhetoric makes sense and according to the author would actually get it right and be a movement one could get behind. The assumption here though is that we need government even big government to keep corporations at bay and in check. What is assumed is that our lives simply need to be and will be dominated by large impersonal entities: Government (the State, Nation/State) or corporations. It is true that we are so dominated. In my last post here, I conclude with wondering if we could spend our energy on alternative ways of existing, living and making a living. This post wants to channel our anger, our reforms into supporting the State and pushing the State to curtail corporations. But can we turn our imaginations to both? Can we say no to both forms of impersonal distant entities that seek to tell us how to live and wish us to exist as good workers and/or good citizens.Is it true that the only possible means to curtail corporations is another Goliath? Is Leviathan the only counter to the Corporate Goliath? Follow these metaphors and perhaps we have an answer. I have little faith in either giants of our age to truly care. Sate and Corporation should have limits and they should be human ones, humans not other impersonal institutions, not merely rules and regulations and laws.This article about a small artisonal creamery that ran afoul a state regulator applying regulations intended for larger mass operations where bacteria on fresh strawberries is a real issue, should cause us pause. This is perhaps is a cautionary tale of a reliance on Government and a world dominated by Corporations: A regulator seeks to apply the law, which currently makes no distinction between size of opperation. What protects in one instance keeps something good from being produced in another. I'm also here not against all regulation, or advocating no role of Government, but questioning how we think of this, and in ways that make a necessity of the State that as our caretaker.What is the relationship between the rise of the larger corporation and large government? Why have we accepted that we need corporations to provide us with say ice cream. It seems we have come to believe that we can't survive and live without large Government and the large corporation. I think this should be challenged. Whether or not the Tea Party is so challenging certainly is questionable. However, I do find it interesting that the corporation that is behind this doesn't present itself as a larger impersonal corporation. Rather the Koch brothers are the image of this corporation. To such an extent that it is hard to believe that Koch industries is this massive operation. Cynically (most likely) the Koch corp understands something important, that people respond to the personal touch, even if it is simulated. Thus as I see it its not that the Tea Party could switch its target and get it right. but that our dependence on corporations and the State is what should be our target. A State as caretaker and defender of the poor is perhaps not in fact the sort of power we want to give to any large bureaucratic institution. By the same token depending on large corporations to bring us our food and other necessities of life and depending on them to provide our income and living is also not the wisest nor most satisfying way to live.Granted in our time and place Corporations will employ a large number of us and we will consume the products they provide, and to that extent we may need the State to step in, but simultaneously some of us should perhaps seek to live an alternative existence and as much energy as we spend pitting the State against Corporations and into regulations etc. should be put into creating these alternative local spaces of personhood and true humanity.

Wealth Poverty and the Role of Government

2011-08-22T17:32:00.000-05:00

Over at Homebrewed Theolgoy last week there was a post on this report by the Heritage Foundation, which questions the Federal definition of poverty, because poverty should be limited to those who can't provide at all for the necessities of life for themselves and their families. Warren Buffett also wrote a piece last week calling for more taxes for himself and the wealthiest Americans. Today on NPR there was this discussion on Welfare 15 years after Clinton signed into law a major overhaul of the welfare system. And also today Harvey Golub has a rebutal to Warren Buffett's piece saying he pays plenty in taxes thank you very much.

There are a flurry of claims and counter claims here. There are statistics, some very disturbing like the amount of wealth held be smaller and smaller percentage of Americans, and yet Harvey Golub claims he still pays 80% to 90% of his income to some form of taxation.

There are I competing assumptions and presuppositions hidden in all of this. On the one hand there are those that simply assume that it is the role of Government to provide for and take care of the poor, ie the Nation as a whole through the operations of the State. There is the assumption that money I earn is mine and most if not all of it should be at my disposal to do with it as I see fit or desire. Taxation itself flies in the face of this, but one can of course argue that an entity like a nation and a government creates the stability necessary to be able to live and work without being robbed and ensuring agreed upon standards of business and law etc. So one pays through taxation into this stability that allows one to earn money. A government could care about the poor and provide for them to further ensure said stability. By this view though there may be reason to limit aid to poor, if it is seen that this aid keeps people who should be in the workforce from entering it. This was one reason given for the Clinton Welfare Reform. But what about when there isn't a robust economy and there are fewer jobs than there are people who want to work? But should everyone be in the workforce? and might the Government have an interest in supporting people who are doing work that doesn't earn them the money they need to live on? But why should those who are working and/or in positions to earn vasts amounts of wealth through taxes and the State support those whose life work does not earn them a living? Or more to the point should this form of support come from other segments of society than the State?

Unfortunately our discussion on these issues tends to either be Statist (or State collectivist in some fashion) or individualist and opportunist. Also, these discussion divide the world up between Employers (the wealthy) and the employed (everybody else). We seem to be unable to conceive making a living that doesn't involve either making money off other people or receiving a paycheck from those who are making money through being employed. Granted that is what we are dealing with largely, but few in my experience find this situation ultimately fulfilling.

This is rambling, because I'm attempting to get at something that is obscured. There is a tendency among Christians both liberal and conservative when talking to the Middle Classes in comparison to the rest of the world that they are incredibly wealthy (granted liberals and conservatives say this to elicit differing responses, for liberals it is to drum up support for the State taking care of the poor, and for conservatives it is to drum up donations to help alleviate poverty). But (and this was my own reaction to the Heritage Foundation report) when someone suggests that maybe most poor in this country are in comparison to those who can't provide for the necessities of life quite well off, it is offensive. Eugene Cho today is talking about downward mobility and simplicity. He has a point, but if he can ask and continually ask what is needed to live in our context as a pastor and someone of the Middle Class (?), why is it wrong to ask about at what point should the government step in and provide aid to people?

And yet I can't help but think that when you ask "Well if their poor, why to they or their children have X." this is asked from a place of privilege and out of a resentment based upon an assumption that the poor are poor because its their own fault. People are wealthy not on the backs of others but because of their hard work. But what if this isn't either or. What if both are actually true? And what if hard work isn't always rewarded and what if welfare does at times reward irresponsibility?

I also wonder if as much effort and energy went into attempting to reform the current system and funnel peoples greed into altruistic paths through the bureaucracy of the State went into people seeking to create alternative ways of being and living if we'd find that we don't need solutions to poverty just alternative ways of living.

Or to put it another way: I'm not convinced any longer that biblical and eccelsial teaching on care for the poor is about getting any particular state to so care for the poor. Rather it is the people of God, those gathered out of the nations who are to be a light to the nations, showing forth an alternative to the ways of the world and the realms humans continually create in their own image. Just a thought as we rightly wrestle with wealth, poverty and the role of government.

Bonhoeffer a Man for Our Times?

2011-08-11T10:08:00.001-05:00

Here I want to pick up an undeveloped thought in my previous post. Bethge's subtitle of his Bonhoeffer biography has been rolling around in my head "Theologian Christian Man for his time". It is the last phrase "man for his time" which is in contrast as it seems we wish Bonhoeffer to be a man for our time. Yet what if Bonhoeffer in some sense can only be at play in our midst if he is never ours, never easily and simply for us and our time. What if we are perhas people of his time? We perhaps belong more to Bonhoeffer than Bonhoeffer will ever belong to us. I doubt he will ever serve our purposes: mainline, academic, evangelical, fundamentalist, post-Christian, post-modern, post-Christendom. If we allow Bethge's presentation of Bonhoeffer as someone given up to his time it may free us to an encounter with Bonhoeffer that allows him to be at play in our midst, and will never possessed by any of us. Can we allow Bonhoeffer to be other and still speak to us, who ever we ar? Can we be lead to Christ through Bonhoeffer's witness as a man for his time. Will we allow Bonhoeffer the place of the continually unsettling saint, who shows us an undomesticated God.

Bethge's subtitle summarizes his own sense of a progression and thread in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life. First he was a theologian, who as he developed as a theologian also became a Christian. The theologian and Christian then become a man for his time, which lead to his (early) death at the hands of the Nazis. While Bethge sees a progression, it isn't that the early Bonhoeffer the theologian wasn't a Christian or a man for his time, but as things progressed in his life he was lead upon a certain intensifying trajectory, that lead (rightly) to a flouring of things that were only in bud at an earlier period of his life. In some sense one may say that Bonhoeffer's life was one of continual conversion, where he continually sought to take up the cross of Christ anew. In a sense it is this Christocentric and cruciform understanding of the theologian Bonhoeffer that made him a Christian, and this way of being a Christian, one who answered the call to come and die, lead him to be a man for his times and his death.

Another way of saying all this is to say that Bonhoeffer was a man for his time, because he was taken up into Christ, because Bonhoeffer surrendered himself wholly up to Christ. He was a man for his time because Dietrich Bonhoeffer the theologian and Christian took up his cross and followed Christ where Christ lead. Where Christ lead was into conspiracy, prison, and execution.

This is the challenge of Bonhoeffer for us: he followed Christ and simply(not unthinkingly) and radically calls us to that same discipleship. This means though that Bonhoeffer stands apart from us and our time. Bonhoeffer's witness is then to open us up to the cruciform nature of our existence before God so that we may be people of our times, in this same radical way of taking up of the Cross and following Jesus Christ.

We who might lament the fragments of his letters and papers from prison, the unformed thoughts and theologies - "religionless Christianity"- are then called to see his life as offering which give us a whole and complete Bonhoeffer, meaning that on their own his last words are meaningless. There is only Bonhoeffer who did not survive the Nazis. There is no Theologian after for us. In that sense Bonhoeffer can not speak to us who are wishing and seeking to be freed of our agony by some solution that will save our petty Christianities, our precious fragmented identities we unthinkingly call Christians and label "church". Bonhoeffer will always be other than what we feel we need. Bonhoeffer will never speak life into our tightly held human identities we wrap in spiritual language of self-justification. He wont even breath life into our lifeless theologies and piety. He can only stand outside all our fragments and agony's that as often as not have little if anything to do with the suffering of Christ, and call us to the only identity that matters for the world. Bonhoeffer stands as one who allowed Christ to be all in all, that he could give his all to his time, and proclaim, as one who wholly belonged to Christ, Christ to the world.

Bonhoeffer can't offer us any answers to our troubled times, except in the offering of his life to Christ for the World. This is the silent proclamation of the one who is for others, Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer is for us only to the extent that we in the same way we will take up the Cross and follow Christ, and struggle and suffer as Christ Suffered. Bonhoeffer is for us only to the extent that we are for our times by being taken up into Christ. For in the end Bonhoeffer was a man for his times because he gave himself over to Christ and the Cross as being for others.

Bonhoeffer: Two Biographies of the orthodox saint of "Religionless Christian"

2011-08-06T14:44:00.001-05:00

I finnished, at long last, this week Eberhard Bethge's biography of Bonhoeffer, Deitrich Bonhoeffer a Biography: Theologian Christian Man for his Times. As I have said elsewhere I had read portions of Bethge's biography of Bonhoeffer, but not all the way through. Bethge of course came up when I posted on having read Metaxis' biography of Bonhoeffer. Some suggested I just should have read Bethge and been done with it. Yet. critics I read seemed to indicate that Metaxis was too close to Bethge's presentation of Bonhoeffer while also saying Metaxis brought Bonhoeffer too close to American Evangelicalism and the Religious Right. It is true to say that Metaxis' audience was the American Evangelical. Metaxis presents a Bonhoeffer who can be received (again) by Evangelicals. Yet, Bethge is also writing his biography so that Bonhoeffer maybe received into a certain fold(or folds): that of the theological academy and the German Evangelical Church. Bethge's and Metaxis' presentation are close to each other because each are apologists for Bonhoeffer for their times and groups, and they diverge from each other because of the differences between their times and groups into which they wish Bonhoeffer to be received.

Bethge on several occasions mentions how Bonhoeffer has been ignored by the theologians and theological academy of his time. Much of the volume (and this contributes to its voluminousness) is taken up in presenting and defending Bonhoeffer as an academic, a theologian and critical thinker on par with the giants of his time. Bethge defends Bonhoeffer's thought and theological work. First and foremost then we are to see Bonhoeffer as a a Theologian who could have had he chosen and had he not lived in Nazi Germany followed an illustrious academic career. The problem is that one of the reasons Bethge must mount this defense is that Bonhoeffer himself seems to have been unconcerned with his theological reputation. He was pursuing something else, and in part we may not know exactly what that was since that pursuit led him into a particular confrontation with the Nazis, and thus ultimately his death at their hands.

However, Bethge is not solely concerned with Bonhoeffer's reputation as a theologian among the academic theologians, but also Bonhoeffer's reputation among Christians particularly those in the German Evangelical Church. Here there are several sticking points: His role in the Church Struggle, his role in the assassination plot(s) against Hitler, and his fragmented thoughts on "Religionless Christianity" presented in some of his letters from prison. Here Bethge presents Bonhoeffer in terms of great integrity and willingness to sacrifice and undergo suffering for the truth and in order to preserve the church's authentic witness to Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer's harsh criticism's of those in the German Evangelical Church who did not side with the Confessing Church or who left the Confessing Church at certain points in the struggle, are softened by this presentation of Bonhoeffer's intense commitment to Jesus Christ, and the demands of following Christ truly. This is done in part by showing the consistency between Bonhoeffer's stance in the Church struggle and his already widely received Discipleship (Cost of Discipleship).

More challenging is Bonhoeffer's participation in the political conspiracy to remove Hitler by assassination, and "Religionless Christianity". Bethge though points to the continuities between Bonhoeffer's fragments in Prison and his previous writings and actions. The main thread of this continuity is for Bethge Bonhoeffer's Christology and ecclesiology. "Religionless Christianity" is the means by which the church witnesses to Christ in a world come of age. Also, Bethge limits the definition of "religion" for Bonhoeffer in such away that "religion" is not synonymous with theism, but is a sort of distorted theism.

Metaxis had similar concerns, but he is also attempting to rescue Bonhoeffer from certain uses among certain segments of the academy and theologies, like "death of God". He also, wants to present Bonhoeffer as someone with whom Evangelicals can relate. Metaxis suggests the strong possibility of some form of conversion for Bonhoeffer during his first time in New York as a student when he spent "nearly every Sunday" at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem church (Bethge pg 150). Even Bethge marks this as a point of transition though Bethge has a more extend period of Bonhoeffer's becoming a Christian. Metaxis veiw and bias is partly supported by Bonhoeffers own actual disapointment with the preaching he found and Riverside Church, and his having chosen to spend most of his Sundays while in New York at the Abysinian church.

Some Critics have said that this above interpretation and that Metaxis follows Bethge so closely is a weakness in that we encounter nothing new in Metaxis' work. Which is perhaps true to a degree but Metaxis style and desire to present a consistent person of faith who was killed for his faith, means that we actually have an account that follows the lead of Bishop Bell's own sermon at the memorial service for Bonhoeffer, namely giving us a Bonhoeffer who is a martyr and a saint. For me the value in Metaxis' biography is that it is an hagigrphy, or a martyrion. Metaxis, more consistently than Bethge, presents us with Bonhoeffer as a man of faith whose faith lead him to die for Christ and that faith is expressed in part in the act of political resistance. Thus it also rescues martyrdom and sainthood from needing to be purely apolitcal. Metaxis biography shows how martyrdom and the life of faith must be grounded in the world and even politics while also transcending them, and thus transfiguring said actions into witness to Christ. In that sense showing us how "religionless Christianity" is a filling out of the sufferings of Christ.

MAAF 2011-Sea of Sculptures

2011-07-23T22:38:00.000-05:00

I'm showing my work again at the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Fest. This year I will have an icon mural and three of four wayside shrines around the sculpture Garden, entitled this year Sea of Sculptures
You can see my progress over at priestly goth. Images of the wayside shrines in progress can be found here

priestlygoth.org

2011-07-09T18:57:00.001-05:00

I have a new website. It is an extension and focusing of this blog. I will continue to post here. The website will have my iconography portfolio, and blogging on three specific topics: Ecclesiology, spiritual direction, and goth subculture. This blog will continue to be the space for my more general and rambling thoughts about culture, politics and life.
I am calling my reflections on the church Ecclesial Longings, you can find the first post of this blog here

You'll be able to find your way to priestly goth via the menu bar above.

Brendan Perry and Robin Guthrie in Concert at the Metro

2011-06-06T16:19:00.001-05:00

As noted here and tweeted last night, Kate and I were at the Robin Guthrie/Brendan Perry concert last night at the Metro, with Scary Lady Sarah DJing.

We arrived right at 8 pm and Guthrie was just beginning his set. As we entered. We found our friends, as Guthrie stood a corner of the stage (as promised) and video projected on a screen behind a drum set. After the first song the drummer and bassist came on stage. If you aren't familiar with Guthrie's solo work it is all instrumental haunting guitar paining an aural landscape of sound. Guthrie's performance is an immersion experience. Without the attending movie I am not sure I could have sat through the whole set. Yet, it seems to me that the visual projection is in a sense the words to his songs.

As I settled in and let my self take in the performance taking seriously Guthrie's own cue about his live performances, I found the music and video coming together to elicit emotions and thoughts in myself. Thoughts and emotions would be called up and then taking the cue from music and video, move on. It was all very meditative, even at moments transcendent. Guthrie finished his set with a smile and gestures acknowledging us the audience and left the stage. The set and Guthrie's presence elicited the experience of being invited into his musical living room and to just settle down, or wander about, come in and out. We didn't need to give him our entire attention through out, yet we were invited to settle in and listen. But if we took the full invitation then we were transfixed. I can understand some critics of Robin Guthrie who say he is in a sort of musical rut, I could sense that if there wasn't the video projection I'd have gotten tired of the haunting guitar after a few songs, but I have a suspicion we are both supposed to see and hear, Guthrie's music.

Brendan Perry was a parallel but radically different experience. Perry is very present on stage, and he had a full band two keyboards, drums, bass and he on guitar. Perry was giving us a Rock show, and we were to pay attention, and he and the band were riveting and powerful. He began his set with Dream Letter, (I am not sure though he played it early in the set.), and the first song of the encore set was Severance. I heard in this a certain acknowledgement of the significance and transitory short lived nature of the concert. So bounded we were to enter in and be spell bound by our gracious host. The show and Perry's music weave together longing, sorrow, grief, loss and scraps of joy into a great ecstasy. This is what has made and makes Perry in my eyes someone I point to when I wish to describe what is goth and why I find the aesthetic appealing and something with which I wish to identify.

Guthrie and Perry together created a meditative exuberant evening that lead me to contemplate the joy in a life that has happiness, and sorrow, struggle and ease. It was an exquisite evening, one I think I will long remember.

Robin Guthrie and Brendan Perry

2011-06-05T13:41:00.000-05:00

I first was introduced to Dead Can Dance in 1990 or 1991 they band had been in existence for three or four years. A friend of mine was playing their latest album at the time while a group of our friends gathered at his place to go out. We were struck by the distinctiveness of the sound and spirit of the band. I went out soon after and found one of their albums. I had recently turned 21 and was beginning to attend Goth clubs on occasion with my friend, hadn't yet self-identified as goth. I have followed Dead Can Dance and Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard ever since. I have been anxiously awaiting Perry's next Album just now being Released, Ark.

I love this track from it, Utopia. Something about it makes me think of the Song of Songs, in that one can read and hear it as a love song and yet it also has an incredible multi-valence, opening up onto a quite large spiritual vista.

Just heard today this track from the album, Babylon:

I don't have a simlar experience with the Cocteau Twins. Though I have loved this band for a very long time. I haven't followed Robin Guthrie's or Elizabeth Frasier's solo careers as closely as Perry's or Gerrard's. I think I owend one album of thiers maybe two (my CD collection was stolen in 1999 shortly after moving to Chicago, I replaced much of the dead Can Dance, did not with the Cocteau Twins) Like much music in the realm of the goth subculture, Cocteau Twins were a band I heard at clubs, listened to at friends houses. Both Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins for me create a part of the ambiance and texture of what is goth, the ambiant, etherial and meditative aspects. Though I suppose on a certain level neither band is goth as such.

Here is something from Robin Guthrie:

I am thinking about all this because tonight my wife is taking me for an early birthday gift to the Brendan Perry Robin Guthrie concert at the Merto. I am very much looking foward to it. Dj. Scary Lady Sarah is spin for the concert

Lastly here is Perry talking about his new Album Ark:

Brendan Perry - Ark

Brendan Perry | Myspace Music Videos

The King and I - Love Gender Imperialism and Universal Values

2011-06-04T14:54:00.000-05:00

Last night Kate and I went to see Porchlight Theater's production of The King and I. Kate assisted Bill Morey in the costume design for the show. At some point while growing up I saw the movie with Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr, probably on TV when I was fairly young. Young enough that I wasn't aware or thinking about gender, or the history of Western colonialism, and Globalization of culture. What follows is more a reflection on those theme's in the King and I, than on Porchlight's production, though it was an enjoyable and beautiful production that gave me room to ponder the way in which the King and I deconstructs itself and leaves one wondering about what exactly it is that we know or don't know, or simply act as though we know. Though, nor remembering much of the movie and not knowing the original this deconstruction may be due to Porchlight's own decisions in the production

It is from the start a fairly complex tale. The King of Siam, brings an English woman teacher and governess to teach his children for the purpose of bringing his kingdom in line with a changing world dominated the the British Empire and European colonization, and intertwined in this are two love stories. The first between Anna and King Mungcut (bound to fail as he has many wives, and thus more sublimated), and the second the love affair between the new concubine recently given to the king as a gift from vassal king and an agent of that vassal. And of course there is the play within a play as the concubine puts on a theatrical adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, used as a cultural bridge to critique the practice of concubinage.

The conflict in part revolves around these love stories and the clashing cultural expectations concerning gender and love, and the person of a king. But there is in the background the conflict between British and Western colonial and Imperial ambitions, and King Mungcut wishing to navigate independently this changing world dominated by a new(to him and his small nation) Western Imperial power. Britain seeing Siam as inferior is contemplating colonization, the king obviously wishes to remain an independent power in the region, and thus is seeking away to keep Britain at bay.

The audience is then given conflicting desires: rooting for the King to "modernize" or Westernize his Kingdom and thus remain independent, but also rooting for Anna's seeking to impose her moral and ethical system, specifically in terms of the story line the Western view of romance and gender relations, monogamy, etc., etc., etc. thus colonizing Siam culturally, if not politically. This creates a double bind in the story, as we both wish for the king to hold our western views of romance, love, gender(though still assuming static reality of the male and female but as somewhat equals, or at least women are more equal in Anna's conception than in the Kings conception), while rooting for the King to protect himself and his kingdom from the encroachment of British Imperialism (and thus our western colonizing), by aping and appealing to Western colonial and imperial values. These values includes an abhorrence of Slavery, though a recent value, and of a certain value of marriage and romance as an equally freely chosen estate to be entered into equally by both parties. This western value is cast as a universal value through the love affair of the concubine and her lover. The play leaves these conflicting desires unresolved: Kingdom of Siam for now remains free of British colonization, but at the same time has been westernized, as the king's son at his death bed instructs his subjects to show respect for the king in terms of western gendered practice abandoning the tradition that had been in place up to that time. Neither romance's work out, the cultural divide and the political and cultural realities are too strong, but we are too judge this failure, and we hope for change, and that Siam will look more like England and the West in the end, (like us).

Anna I think can stand in for well meaning American and European activist at work in other countries and cultures, as progressives desire to spread what we consider humanizing values. The King and I raises, the question: can one reform other cultures and societies without universalizing certain cultural relative values. Anna's values of gender equality of Romance, are forerunners of current radical conceptions of gender equality and even the questioning of male and female as categories themselves. If we allow it the King and I can lead us even to question our current sense of the universal idea of democracy and freedom. Is our sense of democracy and freedom actually universal or aren't' they actually Western ideas we have universalized and some in other cultures are willing to convert to them?.How do we know the line between "opening up" cultures to "universal" ideas and tendencies, and subtle almost imperceptible colonization via an imperialism of value that assumes an underlying or overlay of human longing? In the King and I what is assumed as universal is heterosexual romantic love that assumes a parity between static genders. We who don't share this value are caught in an interesting double bind as we can recognize the cultural relativity of that value and at the same time since we share its value of romantic love we also see it as a universal value that the King of Siam should accept.

Along this analysis and my experience of this production of the King and I, the number where the son of the King and the son of Anna ask the question of how they know or how adults know they know what they know is the fulcrum of the musical. We the audience and Western progressives are, perhaps. in the end in this unresolved position and state of unknowing acting as if we know. Whose values are universally moral and applicable to all? Whose conception of gender and romance and marriage is univerraly moral and applicable to all. How do we know are understanding of human rights is universally true, can we even know that? The King and I does not resolve these questions but gives an answers by reaffirming our Western colonial values over those whom we colonized. It seems to me that even among the various activists I know this remains to be true; we say our values are correct, and we do not question what we think we know, and we see our ideas of gender politics and romance as normative and expressing a truly universal longing that can be found across the globe where ever we may go. But can we actually know that or are we simply comforted in this assumption, and smug in our ability to condmen those who are backwards and regresive both in our own cutlure and society and those in any culture or society? In fact any form of activism requires this sort of certainty concerning universal morality and justice. But do we, or even can we, know we aren't imposing a relative and culturally specific value and view of the world?

Maybe There isn't Religion?

2011-05-30T12:47:00.000-05:00

Ya, that is a controversial title. This goes back to my days as a Religious Studies major, and the perennial problem of how to difine "religion" in general. This comes up now as Reconciler and Mitziut had a Theology on Tap together and are coming together to celebrate Shavuot/Pentecost.

As we sat around a bonfire and talked about God,I had the distinct experience that there was no thing called religion that we could say we held together. We were all perhaps religious (or in our current terms spiritual) but there wasn't either spirituality or religion in general, only the particular or positive instances of religion or spirituality.

This experience is potentially (as experience tends to be) mediated by my training in Religious Studies: At least in the early 1990's the discipline of Religious Studies questioned not the phenomenon of religious acts or religious, but found an overarching definition, or singular origin of these phenomena to be problematic and under question. It was an open question, but put from a phenomenological bias. That is if there was an underlying unity of the religious it needed to be shown through the phenomena, that is the particular manifestations of our subject of Study. Most of my professors and most of the text books we were assigned were concluding there was no such phenomenological unity of religious phenomena. The positive instances of religion could not be united except in abstract definition that failed to account for all positive instances of the phenomena. Accounting for Religion either was so broad as to simply include all forms of human activity or too narrow so as to exclude a positive instance.

A particular instance of this problem of definition of religion resides in one meaning of the latin religio: devotion to the gods. If one posits as a general definition and unity of all religion a belief in a deity or deities, one runs into problems, in at least two instances. The first particular instance is certain forms of Buddhism particular Chan or Zen Buddhism for whom the ultimate reality isn't a deity per se. One can perhaps stretch the definition of deity in such a way so as to include the Chan Buddhist understanding of ultimate reality, but that can strain the definition of god or deity. At the other end are certain forms of animism which treat all things as inspirited but don't even have an overarching ultimate unified reality or over-spirit. This is just one part of possible definition and understanding of a general unity of religion.

Yet, religio also had to do with a binding, of binding oneself or being bound to something. What I experienced around the campfire and talking about God was more along this line. For those of us there our understanding of God was bounded by our commitments, and we were committed to God in particular and differing ways.

This is then possibly also a meditation oriented around a Christian perspective. Christianity was first called the Way. A particular path to which one was bound, and from which one would not deviate.

My thought here is that even in coming together even in attempting to speak together about God, what was most evident to me was the difference in our paths, and the ways in which we were bound. There are and were differences that simply cannot be ignored, the differences aren't what is in the way of our unity, we obliterate the difference and we have nothing around which to unify, in our differences we can come together and together talk about God, but in that activity our differing ways of being "religious" or "spiritual" are heightened, and there is no common thing we share beyond the particular instantiations of our spirituality and religious beliefs and practices.

I am coming to think the the problem of the definition of religion, is that there is no religion as such that exist universally apart from its particular instances. There is then no basis for a unity of religions and/or spirituality. We are stuck with our differences.

A quite day for the Rapture

2011-05-21T16:39:00.001-05:00

Here in Chicago this 21st of May 2011, has been overcast with rain showers. Not enough rain to keep people indoors but enough to need an umbrella on hand and serve as a blanket of quiet and calm. Well this may be my perception. Overcast gloomy days generally leave me with a feeling of melancholic contentment. So this day has been a mellow day: made breakfast for the community and we had our meeting, then worked on the base drawings for some icons and then ran some errands. Now sitting here at the computer writing this post. As I check the news on the internet it seems like a fairly quiet and uneventful news day. World events don't seem to be providing Harold Camping, with an alternative explanation. Yet, Jesus said the day would come like a thief in the night unexpectedly, perhaps even unnoticed, until some future moment of wakefulness.

It doesn't seem to me that Harold Camping's last prediction in 1994 made quite the same stir it did this time around. But then a great dealt has changed in the intervening 17 years. In 1994 evangelicals weren't yet taken seriously as a political power house. We have come to fear minorities and the fringe elements of religious belief and practice. I have been dismayed at the mockery, and in that mockery the seeming ignorance that even among those Christians who believe in the "Rapture" that Camping and his followers were alone in believing the prediction. Or even aware that Christians who believe in the "Rapture" are themselves only a portion of the Christian landscape, and while in the US they may consider themselves the representatives of True Christianity, if you look at the historic Christian faith, their opinions would be largely seen as heretical. My point is that to some degree the attention paid, and the energy that has been spent on this prediction is disproportionate to the role this prediction and the underlying belief system plays in the 2000 or so years of Christian theology teaching and practice.

I find it fitting that this is a quiet day. For those who aren't Christian who think this is a time to mock faith, realize Camping may share a belief system held by a significant proportion of American Christianity, but even his co-religionists did not accept his prediction. You can mock if you will, and I have made a joke or two myself, but recognize that the vast majority of Christians were not expecting anything to happen today. This in fact says very little about faith or religion, though it may say something about our human nature. And as a Christian it is our fallible sinful escapist human nature that is the reason Christianity exists. We humans need to be saved from ourselves and when we are convinced that we have it, and saved ourselves is the very moment we confront our need for salvation. So, I caution anyone of us if we are feeling superior for our not believing.

On this quiet day remembering that Jesus says the ultimate things, the last things, the End, will come quietly like a thief, unknown and noticed until it is all over. I lift up Camping and his follower's to God, and in humility quietly pass on. I recommend we all do the same.

Beginning a New blog and other possible changes

2011-05-02T13:28:00.000-05:00

I have been feeling that some changes need to take place here at Priestly Goth Blog. The current shape of this blog is the third iteration of the Priestly Goth Blog. I will continue posting here on various subjects of art culture, faith and things goth. However, the new blog I am thinking will deal mainly with my thoughts on what it means to be church, and my searches and researches in ecclesiology. I may move/repost some old blog posts that were first published here over at this new blog. I am working on a name, that will reflect the subject of the blog and its connection to this blog and reflect that the reflections there are from the Priestly Goth.

I am thinking of using Word Press for this blog, this could also mean moving this blog to a Word Press website. If anyone has any thoughts on these plans and changes for this blog and a new one, and having a website, I welcome your thoughts.

Holy Saturday Reflection: Love Wins and Christ's Descent into Hell(Hades)

2011-04-23T16:03:00.002-05:00

The one weak point of my confirmation classes was this little bit of the Apostles Creed: "He [Jesus Christ] descended into hell. On the third day he rose from the dead." We sort of passed over descent into hell on to raising from the dead. Whatever the descent into hell meant, what was important was raising from the dead. I think my confirmation teacher mostly treated it as a synonym for death. A way to say that Jesus really died. But mostly my recollection is that this phrase from the creed, and that it was supported by Scripture, the First Epistle of Peter and the Gospel of Matthew's account of Jesus Death and Resurrection, was simply a point of discomfort and puzzlement.

As Covenanter's both the Scripture and the Creed seemed to cause us a bit of discomfort. These accounts seemed a bit too Roman Catholic, too close to the doctrine of purgatory. A contradiction of the scripture that says " It is appointed once to die and then the Judgement" (Hebrews 9:27) The "second chance" idea of purgotory that has also gotten people so worked up over Love Wins, suggested by Christ's descent into hell, caused us to squirm even as we said it each communion Sunday.

Today Christ is in the Grave. Today Christ harrows Hades. Christ comes to Adam and Eve, and rescues them from deaths grip, saves them from the devil's grasp. Love wins for them eternal life. Here we find I think both the affirmation of our separation from God, that we can't repair by our own effort or even work up in ourselves in our own desires, and the hope of our universal salvation. Adam and Eve are both particular persons and representative persons of our humanity. If Christ does not go into hades and defeat death and bring them from up from the grave then we have no hope. If our parents, if our humanity that first turned from God to our own selfish desires are loved by God so that God in Jesus Christ comes to them in that place of separation then who is beyond the reach of God's love?

Evangelicalism lacks this contemplation of Christ's descent into hell. Thus to a large extent Evangelicalism must either affirm the existence of hell, or affirm universal salvation which denies hell. On Holy Saturday when we affirm "He descended into Hell" we both affirm our separation from God even in death, and we can hope for Salvation of all. We can do both of these because, Love descended into the place of absence of love, in the place of the shades, and brings life and love. Christ comes for Adam and Eve into the depths of Sheol, and thus affirms with the Psalmist that even in the depths of Sheol one can't escape God's love.

Presumably Adam and Even and many other's in Hades longed for and awaited the coming of Christ. But if we are honest with ourselves we know that we shrink from God, and such a all consuming love. We know the power of death, of our own destructive patterns, of the ways we hide like Adam and Eve from God, when God simply wishes to walk with us in the cool of the evening.

There is Hades, our separation from God, our willingly saying yes to death and destruction where we are ruled only by our passions. And there is Christ come with blinding light crushing the gates of our imprisonment, dragging up our humanity, Adam and Eve, out of the depths, and thus the hope that we will like Adam and Eve reach out and grab hold of Christ's hands.

Reflecting on the Passion Masses

2011-04-20T22:57:00.000-05:00

The past three evenings Reconciler has had Passion Masses, led also by the The Community of St Francis. The one of the three synoptic passion naratives were read each night. (For my thoughts on why do this and have services every day of Holy Week see this post.)

On one level nothing extraordinary happened. I didn't find them particularly moving services. We kept things fairly simple, one hymn, and only one reading (besides the Gospel) and the Psalm. We did not preach. Yet focused in this way and in simplicity I heard the passion narratives differently. Knowing I was hearing all three at once I was hearing the points of connection, the divergences , and the idiosyncrasies of each Evangelist. Hearing all three passion narratives in succession of three days in the context of the Eucharist without a sermon, connected up the Eucharist to the Passion in a subtly profound way.

As I here attempt to give some account of my experience of these three services I am finding it difficult to put into words what happened within me. I feel closer to the passion of Christ. Closer to the apostles as they were puzzled, then bewildered and then frightened. Jesus appeared to me both as more human and more divine than I had heard before in my reading of the Gospels. Jesus when put the question directly about his being the Messiah, neither deny's it, nor will he himself say that he is the Messiah. All three Evangelist have Jesus say something like "You say so." in answer to that question. This seems so human and yet a resolve and calm that has different quality to it.

The other significant part of the services was that two of the priests of the community of St Francis and I con-celebrated at the altar. I had never done something like this, at first I felt a little out of my element. But it was cool leading a service with those who don't share and having differing liturgical actions from what I am use to.

Rob Bell and Love Wins: I get on the band wagon, though I'm resentful of it.

2011-04-20T15:40:00.001-05:00

(Edited 4/21/2011, LEK)
No, I haven't read Bell's book Love Wins. I have seen the promotional video that flitted about the interwebs. I have kept tabs with the controversy. I have read this review. At some point I'll pick it up, understand its a quick read and kind of like poetry. I can dig that.

I remember when I first encountered Rob Bell; I had finished up seminary at NPTS. One day a friend still in seminary asked me if I knew about Rob Bell and Mars Hill (Mars hill had been going about 3 years or so). I hadn't. My friend showed me a video of Bell teaching on the Song of Songs. The video was artsy, had high production value, and Rob Bell was compelling articulate and his speech had the cadence of spoken word poetry. I liked the video. The message itself, perhaps would stretch a particular type of Christianity one may call evangelical, but on the other hand I found the message itself unremarkable, and more or less typically evangelical. It was in the presentation, the artistic approach to preaching and theology that was remarkable, and not what he was teaching.

I've had a sense that this pastor and church outside Grand Rapids had grown, and was a significant force, but Mars Hill and Rob Bell are in a segment of Christianity with which I am associated but largely uninterested in, if I am to be honest. Primarily because as I experience it, founding an intentional Christian community drawing deeply from the well of the monastic tradition and starting a congregation that attempted to be ecumenical by simultaneously affiliating with three denomination just wasn't really in the orbit of the Christianity of Mars Hill and Rob Bell, which is American evangelical. And for this reason Mars Hill and Rob Bell were simply to me unremarkable, or at least something you'd expect of a Graduate of both Wheaton College and Fuller Theological Seminary. My wife has her MATS from Fuller and I did studies there before coming to NPTS. Artsy, edgy evangelical theologians and pastors, were for a time the student body at Fuller Theological seminary, and Rob Bell was a lot less edgy than quite a few of the theology students I rubbed shoulders with at Fuller between 1996 and 1999, all claiming to be equally evangelical.

Love Wins then doesn't come out of nowhere and out of the blue. I am a little surprised Rob Bell didn't write the book years ago, from what I can glean the ideas he puts out in this book where on the minds and lips of a great number of my fellow students at Fuller in the Late 90's, and they were in the air before that. Granted this irked a certain type of evangelical then, as it clearly does now. And one must keep in mind that when I told an elder at the Covenant church (that had been taken over by Fundamentalists) in 1995 that I had applied to Fuller Theological Seminary , he respond with "Isn't that a Liberal school?" I had to suppress my laughter, and a snide comment, about what he then thought of Claremont. Of course even in the middle to late '90s Fuller was still reeling from its split from a segment of evangelicalism in the "Battle for the Bible" that occurred in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

This is a ramble but one in which I'm attempting to point out that this controversy is perhaps a battle that has been waging among evangelicals for much of my life, and certainly all my adult life. If this seems like a tempest in a teapot it is because it is. Rob Bell maybe saying some important things as my friend Tripp says, but if it seems shocking to you, either it means you have listened to much to the strident voices of one segment of not only American Christianity but of evangelicalism itself.

I also wonder if this controversy is also, over control of a dwindling population of people that are adherents of this particular form of American religiosity. One of the strengths of American evangelicalism and what makes it "American" is its lack of centralization, it is also what makes for the volatility of these sort of controversies. There are no institutions or mechanisms for handing on theology and doctrine among evangelicals. Certain institutions may so proclaim themselves and attempt to make themselves the arbiters of all things Fundamentalist and Evangelical, whether it be an association of groups or denomination or groups of theologians signing declarations. As Fuller showed in the "Battle for the Bible" one can continue as an evangelical even after such declarations and denominations put you beyond the pale.

So, in the end as I discovered when I was at Fuller: I don't care. I really don't care if anyone thinks I'm an evangelical or not, and I really don't care if this or that theology is or isn't "evangelical". What I care about is something else entirely and because of that at times I tire of American Christianity and its tea pot tempests that in the end misrepresent what I am seeking for as a Christian.

I have been in or on the edge of American Evangelicalism for much of my life. The way American Evangelicalism raises these question, and navigates these disputes, and asserts theological claims, is irritating and flabbergasting to me because I don't think they actually get us closer to the truth! (sorry Rob Bell as much as I sympathise with your position, and as close as we may come). I think if one looks at my own theology one would find more affinity with Bell than with his detractors. But Rob Bell knew this would create controversy and he knew from what quarter of evangelicalism. His promotional video for the book, was aimed it seemes to me towards two audiences: those who would object (he was sticking it in their theological craw) and those including the media who think evangelicalism and Fundamentalism are monolithic entities, and he has played upon that misunderstanding of the fractured reality of Evangelicalism. I understand why, but I'd rather American Evangelicalism not be the reference point, whether it's Rob Bell's version or that of his opponents, for what is Christian. For me this is a distraction from what should be our actual pursuit and questions. Yet here I am writing on this, and yes I resent it! I resent it because it makes me tired and consumes us and I don't think it should.

The place of ritual liturgy and worship services in the Spiritual life

2011-04-17T14:35:00.001-05:00

The congregation I pastor meets in the chapel of Immanuel Lutheran Church and the community I lead lives in the Apartment in their tower and their old parsonage. Yet the relationship is deeper than that. Also, there are to other worshiping communities (besides Immanuel) that also worship in their building. About 8 times a year we all worship together, Holy Week and Easter is the main time for doing this.
One of the priests of the Community of St Francis suggested some months ago that in addition to the Liturgy of the Three days that we also do Passion Masses Monday through Wednesday of Holy week. I agreed, and so Reconciler and St Francis are leading these services.

As Holy Week has approached I have wondered why I said yes to such a thing, so that essentially Holy Week is full of worship services. Sure there are perhaps aesthetic reasons, and that I have been associated with only one other church that had worship every day of Holy Week, and so it is for me a tad novel. However, I am a person of my time, so I ask the question, what difference does it make? What relationship to life does this week full of worship service contemplating the death and resurrection of Christ have? Initially, I have to admit, I had difficulty answering this for myself.

Somehow it seems to me we, even I who love liturgy and ritual, we find ritual and liturgy to be divorced from life. We have difficulty connecting a rhythm and cycle that repeats itself with life. Oddly enough it was reading a book on a Feminist interpretation of the Apocalypse of St John, and reflecting on Apocalyptic that recalled for me why this is all so important and why I intuitively affirmed Father Greg's suggestion. Partly this is an issue of time, and about a rhythm to time that isn't strictly speaking linear, however it also isn't about a merely cyclical time either.

Holy Week and Easter are the ordering rhythms of time for Christian faith, and thus for the church of the underlying reality of the World. We return to it each and every Sunday, each Sunday being a little easter, each Sunday we remember the first Eucharist and the Last Supper (one in the same event) Jesus betrayal and death and Jesus' Resurection - its all there in the words spoken over bread and wine, that become for us Jesus Christ the bread come down from heaven.

Even so, time a linear time, time in which I age, time in which I will someday cease to be, time of clock and schedules wears me down. In this time I can forget. In this time I forget to live in the rhythms and time of God Holy Trinity and of the Christ. Yet, in this time I am also striving to live out this other time, these other rhythms, this return to that time, this sabbath, that came before the 8th day of the Resurrection, also the first day of the week. The Apocalypse shows us this other time, this time that overlays or underlays other time, in which I am to live. This time of the 8th day, is to be manifest in my life, and thus break into the everyday life and time of the world as we know it.

A Pauline way of saying this is to say that I am to have the mind of Christ, that Christ is to be formed in me. The point of these rituals, of the rhythms and patterns of the Church year and its rites and ceremonies, isn't the ceremonies themselves nor the aesthetics of them, but that they are to reveal and form ourselves, in light of this other time.

I agreed to this intensive schedule of worship services and liturgies this coming week, because in them I enter a time that is to infect my day to day life. In these liturgies Christ is to be formed in me. I meditate on the Passion of Christ, for in that I find the mind of Christ and the Character of the God of the universe and time. Especially in this week that begins with the contradictions of acclamation of Christ as Messiah and then the cries for his death from our mouths, forms us in the way of Christ, the Way of the Cross. This is a dark way that leads to our enlightenment, that forms us for another time and world, that is what this world and time was to be.

Lenten Apocalyptic: Rending Our Hearts

2011-03-12T18:42:00.005-06:00

Apocalypse is an unveiling, thus why the book of Revelation is called Revelation, and in some Bibles the Apocalypse of St. John. In a sense the book is to show what is underneath the events and happenings in this age that is passing away. This revealing of apocalypse removes an outer layer and opens up to view what has been covered over.

The second chapter of Joel calls for a tearing off of clothes and a tearing of the heart. This is in response to this terrible and unsettling geopolitical event of Joel's day, that Joel also identifies as the day of the Lord. The uncovering of this looming event as the Day of the Lord is to also bring about an opening of the hearts of the people of God.

This rending open of the heart as a response to apocalyptic is perhaps counterintuitive to how apocalyptic thinking is presented to us. Many "End Times" focused and/or obsessed Christians can seem to cover over their hearts within apocalyptic expectation and prediction. Their is an appearance of heartlessness in expecting, looking for, and basing political decisions and actions upon expectations of the end of the world being near.

But as I think about what I have studied and read in the Hebrew Prophets, and in my reading of the Apocalypse of John, this covering over and hardening of the heart to what happens in the world is not the only direction their words can be taken. Rather, I am coming to think that apocalyptic is supposed to lead us to repentance. This repentance based on hearts opened to the levels of meaning and the suffering in the world, uncovers the suffering and upheaval as itself a sign that something other needs to come, if not also the revelation of its coming.

At least a Lenten apocalyptic should be this. Fasting (of various kinds), alms giving, greater perseverance in prayer and meditation during Lent should lead us to large and small Apocalypse, and thus lead us to ever greater and deeper repentance. An apocalypse of our hearts, where our hearts are rent open to the world and its suffering and thus opened up to the nearness and approaching age to come, The Day of the Lord. Apocalypse (properly understood) then should make us a compassionate people without judgment, who identify with a failing world, and wish to bring what Good is here into the world to come, confident this is what God, the Good, is doing.

Uncover your hearts and see the coming of the Day of the Lord.

Lenten Apocalyptic

2011-03-11T14:39:00.004-06:00

One of the Readings for this past Ash Wednesday was From Joel. Something about the urgency and upheaval Joel saw coming in the world and which Joel names as the Day of the Lord, struck a chord with the upheaval in the middle east the continuing strife and wrangling in our civic and political processes. I have been lead into a bit of Lenten apocalyptic. I was wrestling to articulate this Lenten unveiling in my Ash Wednesday Sermon Apocalyptic as seeing in the upheavals in our lives and the worlds as revelations, as those things that expose truth, and proclaiming the coming of the Day of the Lord. Thus leading to repentance and preparation to receive God's judgment and transformation, that is salvation.

I hesitate to say much more. There is a mystery here, there is something profoundly sacred and thus something that can be profaned. Apocalyptic, God's unveiling has been seen as God doing the destruction that reveals, and that brings the world to its big destructive end, like the lair of a villain whose finally been exposed. Like bond or the super hero those in the know somehow make it out of the imploding lair unscathed, but not so lucky are others. Though there is probably something to this image: the destruction of the villains lair is due to some flaw in the villain, or the plan or the operation of some device that brings everything crashing down. There is in our current state of affairs, what we might call this present age, or "The World" and in humanity a fatal flaw. We and the world aren't as we should be. This is the Christian story. this is why there is Ash Wednesday, Lent, Good Friday, and Easter.

The earth quake in Japan, in conjunction with so much else that is going on in these past several months in the world, held my attention as I thought of Joel's and the prophet's (like Amos) Day of the Lord and their poetic and prophetic utterances. In these confluence of astounding and devastating, and even hopeful but staggering events of recent months is there something to be uncovered, is something being opened up to us and are we to repent and open ourselves up to what is coming?

Honesty, Authenticity and Pastoral Office

2011-02-23T22:55:00.005-06:00

Rachel Evans, recently blogged about pastoral honesty, exhorting pastors to tell the truth. It ilicited a long comment thread with numerous pastors saying they'd like to be but don't think they can, or more telling saying they had tried and found that congregations didn't want what the post she wrote and signed was encouraging. Adam S. McHugh at the Introverted Church had his own repsonse. In that he outlines the characteristics of a congregation that could receive the honesty Rachel Evans in her post was encouraging pastors to have.

I am of an age and of a subculture in which authenticity, being honest about who you are, being true etc. are all high ideals. Rachel's post, fits with my cultural assumptions and thus rings true, and Adam's Characteristics of a congregation also sounds to me like the ideal congregation, but....

My extensive "but" has to do with the pastoral office, and the truth that actually will set us free, which isn't our individual truths.

Honesty and authenticity must serve something else. A pastor isn't simply an individual person who gives a sermon on Sunday morning (or in my case evening). A pastor also cares for (shepherds, that is the etymology) the spiritual well being of particular gathered people of God and disciples of Jesus Christ. These gathered people come even in the most homogeneous of groups with differing level's of maturity, differing circumstances of life (much of it stressful or grief ridden.), differing levels of spiritual understanding and experience. A congregation that fits all the characteristics outlined by the introverted Pastor would be a congregation where all the individual members remarkably had such maturity, spiritual and personal, and/or such even keel personal histories as to never have a reactive thought or emotion, or the life experience and wisdom to immediately recognize such reactive thoughts and emotions within moments of experiencing them! On this side of Kingdom come (as some use to say) one will never find such a congregation.

My point is while I am sure many a pastor hides for the sake of the job, and as a disturbingly large number of comments in the comment thread show, congregations can be very petty in their response to any sign of weakness or doubt in their pastor, but honesty and authenticity can be wielded like a weapon, honesty and authenticity can become more important than the Pastoral Office. Honesty and authenticity need to serve the Gospel and the care of souls, and very rarely should be about the pastor.

As a someone who helped start the church I now pastor, and given the make up of my congregation I will admit there is little I feel I need to hide from my congregation. Even so, I am not honest in the ways Rachel Evans enjoins me to be honest. Not because I am hiding but because my opinions aren't supposed to be the point of my pastoral role. They inform what I do, but as Pastor I am to seek to submit my will (and opnions) to the will of God, and to the service of those God has given into my care. I am to lead the people of God entrusted to my spiritual leadership into the fullness of our relationship to God in Jesus Christ,by the power of the Holy Spirit. Sure there are opinions here. But rarely do my doubts serve that purpose. Mainly because my doubts are my own personal struggles with the call of God on my life through the pastoral office. I need a place to take these doubts and struggles, but that isn't the particular congregation, thus one reason why there is the wider body of Christ. The local congregation isn't the be all and end all of Christian community.

Lastly I learned a valuable lesson about the pastor and honesty in my stint as a hospital chaplain in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE). Sitting with people in crisis in the hospital room recovering or before going into surgery, or when a loved one is in ICU or having just died, honesty about my doubts about the after life, or my theological struggles, or even my struggles with death and frailty only on the rarest of occasions ware comfort or of spiritual help to the patients or their families. Rather, what I was called to was to listen, and based on what I heard in the other to bring my relationship to God, my knowledge of theology and spirituality, my experience in life to bear upon their situation, by reflecting back to them their struggles their doubts, and to affirm that these things are okay, but not by telling them about me, but by being a presence with them in crisis. Most people have friends who can be "honest" with them, what people needed wasn't my personal honesty, but comfort with ambiguity, pain, doubt, death, and life. This I think is a type of honesty, but it is internal and silent, a speaking the truth with out speaking.

The reality is that pastors aren't just Christians who stand up front of the assembly, we are pastors, shepherds of God's people, or we should be. This requires being honest with ourselves, it may mean saying things that may make people uncomfortable, but it also may mean that we never speak to the congregation our deepest darkest doubts and struggles. In my view a congregation should rebel against some form of total honesty. Pastors must tell the truth but the truth their to tell is Christ, not their own individualized truths. According to my tradition I am a minister of the Gospel of Word and Sacrament. The truth I am responsible to proclaim has little to do with my opinions or struggles, but with what God has done and is doing in myself, in the congregation and in the world through Jesus Christ. In that truth telling, I am to follow the example of the one who did not break the bruised read, nor douse the smoldering wick. compassion for ones congregation needs to always be uppermost in a pastors mind. Being honest and telling the truth for a pastor means being acquainted with grief and the pastors own weaknesses not so that she may tell it all, but so she may out of this self acquaintance in love convey Christ to God's people and so that healed and being healed the people of God may being acquainted with Christ know their own weaknesses and in compassion proclaim the Truth Jesus Christ to the world. Due to a variety of realities getting oneself let alone a whole congregation to live fully into these things is a life long task.

Alone in silence we write otherness

2011-02-10T08:55:00.000-06:00

The end of the Midwinter conference was significant. Since Thursday night I have attempted to write about it. This is a post from my silence, from this moment of being alone. This is an articulate silence.

There is a limit, that I have placed on my self, a limit that I have long practiced: That which is inchoate in myself, things yet still in formation I do not speak except in the safest and most private of spaces. And even at times even then I keep silent.

Last Thursday I met with a spiritual director at Midwinter. It was a good session, a needed session. The spiritual director told me I was not being in the moment. Not necessarily the general moment of the now, but a particular moment in my own self, a moment I usually try to avoid at great cost. In this moment I have few words. It is a moment of isolation, of being alone (even if in a large group of people) of being myself before others and the Other. I avoid this moment for in it I am consumed by my own awareness of my otherness, of difference, of distance. I read Derrida in part because in his philosophy I find a companion in this distance.

This moment is being alone with others, at this moment being in this moment is to allow myself to be other, even to myself.

This was my experience of the end of the conference. An experience of being alone, standing out, being other. In this moment thoughts swirl and then are silenced. A sense of movement forward, and yet standing still. In this moment I wait. I Wait alone, in silence, and the rush of thoughts, and possibilities. I wait here alone for the other, wait to speak, wait to write, waiting for the other to speak that we may write between each other, and speak our difference together in the space between us and the Other. I Wait to take in what will rewrite our very thoughts, showing us that it is in the other that we are, and in our otherness that we speak truth.

Racial Reconciliation -Midwinter 2011 reflections - part 3

2011-02-03T07:57:00.004-06:00

Yesterday I had one of the more potentially transformative and moving workshops I have had at Midwinter. Velda Love and Peter Sjoblom lead the workshop designed for us to take seriously that the Christian Tradition and the Bible all are resources for confronting Racism and a Racialized society through the act of seeking racial reconciliation. They also created a space where we could as those committed to Christ and the Gospel come together and speak our stories of race and racism, out of the intention of hearing one another and not merely asserting our perspective. In all it was a humble, humbling and rejuvenating time, because Truth and truths were spoken that often don't get or aren't allowed to be spoken.

We were in Three groups around three tables, and in our groups we were to speak to each other from where we were and who we were around the issues of race and racism. The first discussion was to tell our stories through what influence our theology, who wee the people, the scholars the circumstances that inform who we think theologically and live theologically. The first person to speak a confession and the pain of the struggles of his own congregation. He spoke of the pain of coming to this realization and the pain that he did not know what to do for his congregation, yet knowing this was a barrier to so much good that could happen there. And that was simply the beginning, so many stories of pain but also hope. Hope mixed with pain, and the complexity of living and resisting in large and small ways this system of racial division and categorization, allowing the different groups to have opinions of the other that are in the least inaccurate if not completely false and for the sake of keeping those categorized as White with the wealth power and privilege. I found it interesting that the stories on all sides often included a theme of prejudice concerning the other, and either being taught that prejudice was wrong through the actions of others (Friends, parents, grandparents, or the experience of grand parents and parents). There was also the understandable theme of, for those of races other than white, struggling with seeing all people of European descent as one monolithic group of people who have done one wrong (not entirely false but not entirely true either).

For me a great breakthrough moment in the workshop was when a Hispanic pastor who pastors among First Nations, challenged the framing of workshop along lines of White and Black (though to the credit of the facilitators they sought this framing as exemplary but not exclusive). This felt like an exclusion despite the attempt at inclusion. this lead us as a whole to struggle with the paradigms of race that we continue to use to dismantle Racism and a Racialized system. I feel that rose up in that moment was a cry against continuing to use the classification and linguistic system of an oppressive system. while struggling with the reality that we also have to fact the system and its language and confront it on its terms for we are also part of that system. It was an amazing moment as we were confronted with the reality that our own story's don't necesarily fit so easily into the mythology and construct and classification of the system, even as the system itself attempts to address the racial realities.

Velds Love said two things that have remained with me: one was in part in responce to the above protest and renunciation, that she when she is asked to describe herself says she is a woman by birth of African descent who chose Christianity. She explained that this is deliberate way of describing herself that she believes opens up for encounter, for it frees the other to similarly self-identify. The other thing she said was that we need people willing to deliberately and carefully cross boundaries and barriers to encounter and build relationship with others. It occurred to me that this was largely what my German missionary grandparents did. They left Germany as missionaries not to bring Germany to China, but to meet and have relationship with the Chinese for the sake of the Gospel. I am told that until his death my grandfather, (Vati we called him) burped after every meal as was the custom and polite in Chinese culture of his time. Vati went to China and took on Chinese custom and social norms to reach out and relate to the Chinese, and he perhaps (unconsciously) told everyone he ate with that they would have to cross a boundary, that he was not easily categorized, in that there is great redemption I feel.

Midwinter 2011-Reflections- Worship and a Blizzard

2011-02-01T21:50:00.005-06:00

I had thought I might make it out to the Hyatt O'Hare for the morning sessions of the conference this year, they made the latter in the morning 9 a.m. this year instead of 8 a.m. but that is still early when you are traveling out to O'hare from the north side of Chicago. So it feels a little weird since I also missed the evening session since the storm picked up greatly while in the afternoon session of the workshop I attended today.

Today the conference was more or less the workshop on worship. Turns out I had met Geoff Twigg the presenter at another conference in the fall last year on the history and present relationship between the Covenant Church and the Augustana Synod/ELCA. Currently I am feeling a bit bewildered by the workshop. I enjoyed it and think I got something from it, but now sitting down and reflecting on it I don't really know why I enjoyed it and even put off meeting a friend of mine because as I told him "I need to be at the second session of the workshop." I remember feeling this way, I also found the second session engaging, but now I can't quite put my finger on any thing about it.

I think one reason this may be is that the way he wrapped up the workshop, doesn't relate to me. though I realize now that if I had paid attention I should have realized this is where he was going. He wrapped up the workshop talking about the role of the Covenant Affirmations for "our" worship and what meaning and possible implications they may have for worship in Covenant churches. I had been of course thinking about all this in terms of Reconciler which is not a Covenant Church, and relating to a great deal of what Twigg was saying and even from some good challenges of what Twigg presented form other participants to Reconciler and how we chose and continue to choose to approach our worship life. However, while thinking about worship in terms of the covenant Affirmations made sense to me as a Covenant pastor there wasn't really a way to relate that easily to Reconciler.

Midwinter 2011- Reflections- Part 1 John M. Perkins

2011-02-01T08:29:00.004-06:00

This week is the Midwinter ministers conference of the Evangelical Covenant Church, I am there all this week, and will be blogging my thoughts and experiences there this week.

The speaker at the opening worship service was John M. Perkins who encouraged us to not see justice as something tact on to the Gospel, but as the very Gospel itself. In saying this he was calling for a reorientation of our thinking: God's justice is found in God's action to redeem a sinful humanity, thus God's justice (and love) is revealed in the cross. For Perkins love and justice go hand in hand.

He also talked about the silence of the prophetic voice against the system of greed that pervades our Nation, and hear things got a little sticky. He called on the church to lay claim and live out the full Gospel, to live it out, to bring God's love to the world as the church should. But as he was speaking about the church sometimes he would slip into speaking about America as a Nation. He did so in such away that it was unclear if he made a clear distinction between the two. In this he spoke truth the history of slavery and racism and segregation in this country contradict "We hold these truths self-evident that all men [people] are created equal..." He also pointed out the contradictions between our nations democracy and its support of tyrants and dictators like Mubarak and our willingness to prop him up when the people of Egypt have risen up against Mubarak. On one hand he wanted the encourage us as part of the Church to speak prophetically to the nation on the other hand he called us to identify with the mythology of this great nation of ours that proclaims itself as the "City Set on a Hill" bringing light to the world.

This lead me to a clarified idea that has been tossing around in my head since the State of the Union Address last week and the uprising in Egypt and Tunisia. It seems to me that Nation States and Nations simply will act in their self interest, that the point of our current form of Nationalism is to create a sense of a particular people with a particular mythology and self-interest as a group that is not only different but stands over and against other nations. The point of the United Nations is to ostensibly be the place where these competing interests may be worked out peacefully and diplomatically, and thus prevent wars which is the other way nations with competing interests solve these conflicts of interests.

In my mind the problem for Perkins in not clearly distinguishing between church and the nation of America, is that his preaching against self-interest and greed, which is Gospel, runs counter to the very logic of the Nation, which is to represent and defend the interests of a particular "people" with a particular character (we wont get into now that these "people" are inventions and themselves deny a plurality and diversity that actually deconstructs the mythology of the "people" of the nation, including the people of Egypt). What I feel Perkins proclamation should have Gone but didn't, is that the Gospel actually calls for the church in the U.S. to declare its independence from the American Nation. For us to work for the church to work for the"good of the City" it must recognize that it is an alien people. For us to work for immigration reform is to recognize that we are from another nation and authority that we are immigrants always already. We don't belong to any nation, or state or people, for God is forming a new people out of all nations and peoples. In so doing God creates resident aliens in all nations and among alll people. The prophetic voice that Perkins said is silence I believe is partially silenced because we Christians in the U.S. want to be citizens of the U.S. and Citizens of the City of God. History points it seems to me that while such dual citizenship may be able to work for a time, it has a corrupting influence on Christians, and it leads us to attempt to shore up the state and Nation by attempting to make it fit the Gospel, and live out the Gospel, in the place of the Church. The church can only carry God's just love to the world, when it recognizes that it is an other people, alien to the kingdoms and nations and peoples of the world, and a foretaste of God's transformation of all things including kingdoms and nations and peoples.

Sartorial terminology for facial hair

2011-01-27T22:04:00.010-06:00

I have been walking around with the above beard for sometime. It is a styled full beard that, depending on various factors, is more or less pointy. In the past few weeks people have been complementing me on my goatee. A barista at Metropolis coffee one of my favorite haunts in Edgewater, last week began to so complement me on my goatee and then stumbled over himself saying "Well Iguess its not a goatee is it, but I... uh... the pointy bit ..."

I have come to conclude that the cause of this sartorial confusion is due to the preponderance of the untamed "I could be an Orthodox monk if I didn't like sex so much" beard that I am told is all the rage among hipsters who can grow facial hair. And I have observed that the untamed monk beard has become more common among those sporting facial hair.

As a goth, who does not feel the need to have my beard eat my face, and as clergy, who is married and Protestant and thus the monk avenue isn't realy available to me, I am perhaps in a unique position to help clarify satorial terminology of facial hair.

Most assume that the circle of hair around the mouth uper lip and sides of mouth and chin is a goatee, I in fact assumed this until very recently. Such a style of facial hair is a Genial (or as I like to say a moutee, because its fun to say). Technically a goatee is simply the tuft of hair on the chin that makes one look like a goat. Also not a goatee is a mustache and a hair on the chin (often pointed like my current styling of my beard), but rather a Van Dyke. There is also the soul patch but I know only one person who pulls that off successfully so we will simply pass over it in silence.

I did have a moutee for about six years (about 11 years ago), and then decided to shave it off and my wife discovered I had no chin and hid in the bathroom for a couple of days, and I began growing a beard immediately. The point of my beard evolved over time but it's been pointy since about 2003 or so, I think.

In fairness as another friend of mine said the satorial terminology of facial hair is obscure and arcane, and even highly disputed. This handy guide slightly contradicts what I said above and backed up by the Wikipedia articla on Goatee. I offer it as a potential handy guide and if you must have a term for my styled beard it appearantly is a "ducktail", it would seem. But even according to this slightly different taxonomy of facial hair I do not, I repeat, I do not have a goatee!

Bonhoeffer Church and American Christianity

2011-01-12T09:01:00.007-06:00

I am unsettled, by Bonhoeffer. I am uneasy with the appropriation of Bonhoeffer by American Christians: what we hope to find in him. I have been reading Eric Metaxas' biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer published last year. This is not a review though I do plan to write one. However, I have been puzzeling through somethings about our use of Bonhoeffer and the parallels and the divergences of Dietrich's time and place and ours in the US in 2011.

Metaxas has said he sees Bonhoeffer as particularly relevant for our time, in part because he sees parallels between contemporary America and Germany between the wars. One reviewer I read of the book claims that Metaxas wishes to present a Bonhoeffer that can be or is on the side of the Religious Right culture warriors. I think both Metaxas and Metaxas' critic are missing something.

One of the things that the reviewer pointed out was that Metaxas deemphasizes aspects of Bonhoeffer's times at Union and emphasizes his experience with the Abysinian Church in Harlem in such away as to paint Bonhoeffer as being on the Evangelical side of the curent culture wars. I think this critism could have some weight except that Metaxas is insistant that Bonhoeffer comes from and is other than American Christianity (liberal or conservative). This has long been my sense of Bonhoeffer. I first read his Discipleship (under the English Title of Cost of Discipleship) in a moderate evangelical context, the spin that was attempted didn't fit my reading of the text. Then I encountered liberal scholars who sought to build whole positions out of his musings about "religionless Christianity" and claim Bonhoeffer's authority for what they spun out of that musing. As I am reading Metaxas it seems to me that Bonhoeffer's convictions don't make alot of sense unless we step back and recognize that we can't use Bonhoeffer for our theological and ideological ends.

My thoughts in part are at the moment around the Church Struggle after the Nazis gained ascendency, and Hitler ruled Germany. In seminary I read various books and accounts of it, and I found it difficult to grasp, and even Metaxas in attempting to give an account through Dietirch Bonhoeffer's life leaves a great puzzle. Its not the facts that aren't clear, but the responces to it from all players. Even the actions of Christians outside Germany is puzzling. Metaxas gives greater prominence to Bonhoefer's role in the Church Struggle than any other account I have read before. Bonhoeffer had a sense of the church that caused him to be frustrated both with the Confessing church and the ecumenical movement of his time. In some sense Bonhoeffer also stands out against his own time and theologies.

So far one of the more puzzling things about Metaxas' account that it doesn't explain but simply recounts Bonhoeffer's politicking to get the ecumenical movement to condemn the Reich German Evangelical Church and recognize as the only true representative of the church in Germany the Confessing Church Movement. Bonhoeffer does this while the leaders of the Confessing movement wanted the ecumenical recognition they were reluctant to become an "alternative" church to the church headed by the Reich Bishop. Why wasn't it enought for Bonhoefer for the Confessing Church movement to be a movement, or even why was it a travesty for the confessing church movement to be simply recognized as a church in Germany by Christians outside Germany and the ecumenical movement? From an American perspective you don't like what is going on in your church and you've tried to change it well its perfectly legitimate to start your own, and then you show up at ecumenical groups (if you are so inclined) as a new Christian church. One is left wondering why the agonizing over leaving an institution that was so clearly corupting the Gospel?

I think the above is difficult to unpack, there are unexamined assumptions underlying this for both Bonhoeffer and those of the Confessing Church. There is also the unexamined assumption for many American Christians I know that continuity has no role in the character of being the Body of Christ, and while from a Roman Catholic perspective those who went with Luther in the Reformation had not retained continuity with the church, it seems to me that in the Church Struggle both Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church were struggling with a belief that contrary to Rome it was in fact the Evangelical (ie. Lutheran) church that had retained continuity. Also, there is indication that Bonhoeffer's sense of ecclesiology was other than that of the Confessing Church.

Lastly it is perhaps significant that Bonhoeffer's thought was formed in conflict and struggle. As such I think it is perhaps best to approach him as one whose theology can never be appropriated. Rather he stands as a challenge as he did to his contemporaries. Metaxas may be correct in having written and hagiography rather than a critical biography. Bonhoeffer stands and as a martyr challenges us with the impossibility of the Gospel and the church, and theirs simultaneous absolute claim upon us who name ourselves as Christians, followers of Christ. This disturbs me and wont let me alone, and I am disturbed by the ways we all want to tame and make this martyr of Christ become a martyr of our pet ideas and American philosophies and theologies.

Civility Violence and Evil

2011-01-11T22:38:00.004-06:00

Today I signed Sojourner's Peace and Civility pledge" I could agree to all the points of the pledge and so feel it is the least I could do in response to shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the six others.

Yet, what are we to do? What does such a pledge mean? For me I signed it because I know hatred and evil lurks in each and everyone of us and because to the best of my knowledge and awareness I am already living according to the pledge. It would be false of me to say that I signed it out of some sense that I had failed in recent memory to do what I have now pledged to do. Maybe I am in a minority and suddenly liberals and conservatives are realizing the small or large ways they contribute to vitriolic in our public discourse, but I doubt it.

I suppose I am not sure Jim Wallis is correct to suggest as he did in his editoiral yesterday in the Huffpost that this violent event is a moment of transformation. I am not sure that if I believed vitriolic was perfectly okay 7 days ago that this event in and of itself (as sad and tragic as it is) should cause me to change my ways. Partially I am unsure about that because I am not sure we can truly say we know the causes of this event. Second, because as much as the pledge and Jim Wallis are seeking to call for introspection, it falls short of real and deep and truly transformational self-examination.

You see I can read the pledge and feel satisfied. I agree with it wholeheartedly, I even can honestly say that I have for most of my life sought to live according to the principles that the pledge seeks to encourage. But as I read the Christian tradition it teaches us that sin and evil are far more subtle, and thus tell us that something far more disturbing than vitiolic is at the root of the violence that occurred in Arizona this past weekend.

Jim Wallis actually gives us the easy way out. He wants us to take responsibility, and thus wants us to correct the wrong and the environment that caused this to happen. This is an easy way out because I am not asked to identify both with victim and perpetrator, rather I am to see how I who would never succumb to the evil of this violence have inadvertently through violent language caused something I personally would never do. This sort of distancing from another human being is what I see the Christian Tradition and Scripture and Jesus calling self-righteousness. From the Christian perspective pledges and even gentle rhetoric will not uproot the evil that lurks in us and is the true source of this tragic event. The transformation we seek comes from a God who in human form suffered this very violence not from the hands of "madmen" but from legitimate peace loving authorities.

In the end I took the pledge not only because I could agree and have striven to live according to the principles of the pledge, but because I know that this evil lurks in me as it does in us all, and I follow the one who suffered this evil to rescue us all from it.

My friends this is much worse and the good news is someone has already begun to transform us and our world and liberate us from it. But we need to name it as evil, we need to name it as that which is in all of us, whether we use vitriolic or not. In the end we can't take responsibility but must surrender ourselves to the one who suffered this evil to free us from it. Only in allowing ourselves to be close to victim and perpetrator as both fully human and sharing our humanity may we find the place of finding a truly transformative word and action, whether or not we have or have not used vitriolic.

Reconciliation and Witness

2010-12-28T14:09:00.000-06:00

I am thinking about reconciliation and martyrdom. The sense that Paul and the martyrs of the church saw themselves as filling out and completing the work of Christ on the Cross, which, Colossians tell's us is the work of reconciliation, Colossians 1:15-20. This passage of Scripture is the inscription on the Icon of Jesus Christ, Pantocrator that has been by the altar at Reconciler since we began.
My current public thoughts on this can be found here

Christmas Day Sermon

2010-12-25T13:39:00.003-06:00

I was the preacher at the joint Christmas Day service today. My sermon a Dissonant Joy, can be found here

Englewood Review of Books: Print edition

2010-12-17T07:09:00.000-06:00

This December Englewood Review of Books, began their quarterly print edition. I have known of Englwood Review of Books e-mail and on line editions for awhile now as well as the publisher Englwood Christian Church, so I was interested in their publishing a print edition. Though, I probably have only read a handful of the reviews published online.

The editorial introducing this inaugural quarterly print issue, stated that ..."[t}he ERB was started not only to encourage the practices of reading in our churches, but also to nurture practices of conversation..." I must admit that I had experienced neither aspect of ERB in its online edition. I have not read any of the books of the few reviews I have read in ERB, and I never had the sense of being in a conversation. So as I began reading through the ERB print edition I was a bit skeptical and yet my curiosity was peaked by such an ambitious mission for a review of books.

Pleasantly the print edition did live up to the ambition. A number of things contributed to this: the layout was inviting, interviews with authors (reviewed in the online editions), drawings that conversed with content, and poetry.

I think too the physicality of paper and print on the page brought to me a focus that I simply don't have when on line. This may be my age- I have lived longer with books than I have with computers and the interwebs. Yet, I think there is also a lesson in this about differing technologies and media having an effect on our engagement with material and ideas. Online I am constantly aware that with a click I will have immediate access to another conversation, another bit of information, in the time I spent writing this sentence countless number of tweets have passed through the Twitter stream, articles, blog posts and tweets all have links to other posts, articles and information. This can facilitate conversation, (and it has for me on more than one occasion), but it can also mean simply gliding along the surface of numerous ideas and conversations. By contrast when I sat down with a printed book and relevant to this review the ERB quarterly print edition, the ERB had my full attention. I sat alone in the library of my community and took in only one article at a time, and a deep conversation was elicited from me. I found myself being changed and effected by the reviews I was reading (I will say more about that in a moment). In the end I think ERB's print edition may well be extremely important in furthering its sense of mission, for the print edition forces one to slow down, to and to truly listen, things essential to good conversation.

Somehow reading the few reviews online I had missed the quality and character of ERB reviews(at least in this issue): each review was scholarly but not detached, each author was explicit about their own engagement with the book being reviewed. I found this refreshing, as I wasn't simply being told about the contents of the book and the effectiveness of its presentation and argument, but the place the book and the ideas given might have in our world and in my own thinking.

If you are unfamiliar with or already know ERB online, pick up the print edition. If you have experienced already something of what I found in the print edition online my sense is that that experience will only be expanded and enhanced through reading the print edition. The only negative of ERB quarterly print edition is a tiny thing about the layout that I found irritating:the continuing of a number articles at the end of journal. Having edited and published a student publication in seminary I know that at times this is simply necessary, but the frequency of it felt like it was a tactic to get me deeper into the review. If so that was unnecessary as the design and quality of the review does so with out any need of such a tactic. The moment I read the first interview, I wanted to read the whole thing.

Salvation Belief Relationship and Cosmic Renewal

2010-12-15T16:58:00.008-06:00

Recently tweetted with Khad Young around this podcast of his on "Grace and Atheism." He asked "Does God's grace cover Athiesm". The issue though was the place of will and belief in being saved. Though the source of the line of questioning was a book that seems to argue for a universalistic determinism. The view affirms that our will or belief can bring nothing to our salvation God accomplishes it all. Yet, it rejects a Calvinist view that says only some select few the elct are saved and the Lutheran side stepping the question, and states that since salvation is all in the hands of God, based on the work of Christ on the Cross, all are (probably) saved. In the very least, having faith or believing, or accepting Jesus doesn't save one and so not believing or not accepting Jesus doesn't mean your not saved(this is at least how I understood Khad's summary).

I got hung up I think in this line of argumentation around the meaning of salvation. For Khad in the podcast at least and the author he was sighting, salvation is a transaction between God and individuals, a transaction connected to the Cross. This of course has deep roots in Protestantism, for if salvation is simply our being declared righteous by God, Justification, than we are focused on how that transaction is applied and activated. The American Evangelical position is that it takes the action of the will to have faith in Jesus or accept Jesus as one's Lord and Savior. It is at that moment that one is saved, i.e. that the transaction of salvation is activated and one is at that moment saved.

I agree that this particular view of how we are saved is a limited view. Yet, in the podcast at least, I got the sense that Khad accepted the basic underlying premise of this idea, and was arguing for a universalism based on this premise of Salvation as transaction. The point of disagreement between Khad's line of argumentation and the American Evangelical position was the point in time of activation. Thus salvation was like having a million dollars deposited in ones bank account. It's already happened on the cross 2000 years ago. God's not waiting on our acceptance of the gift of a million dollars, but has without our knowing already accomplished it.

However, Khad puts forward an idea that actually to my mind contradicts the whole transactional metaphors, that of salvation as relationship. Though I would push further and say that salvation is cosmic, restorative and about new creation. Justification then is only one small aspect of our salvation. Sanctification, and/or theosis and the renewal of the entire cosmos, the defeat of death, and triumph over Sin and the Devil, are equally all part of what salvation means. Granted, I agree that all of this is due to God's action. However, not restricted to a singular moment but God's action in Christ through Jesus's life death resurection, ascension and parousia. through all of that God, brought the "Kingdom" to us, through Jesus Christ a new age and world and cosmos, a renewed reality, came into existence and is coming into existence. This is Salvation.

Yet the question remains what do we do with this new reality? Do we see it, do we live in it and reject it? Are we oblivious to it? What God has done makes little difference to me if either I can't see it, or don't enter into this new reality. In an abstract technical sense since salvation is cosmic all are saved, but in a concrete particular way that abstract and technicality makes little difference if I continue to live as though the old world and reality, of sin death violence are the final word. In a very real sense if I live in that world, either by ignorance or outright rejection, or some combination of the two, I am hardly saved.

I affirm with the Reformers that Salvation is that which God accomplishes in and Through Jesus Christ, but with my Pietist forbearers I must also assert that said Salvation, whether limited to God's declaring us justified, or in the cosmic sense I have outlined above, is of little use to us unless we are cognizant of the reality that this salvation creates and live according to the world and reality created through God's act of salvation. In that sense I do in a very small way share in my and others salvation. For the point of salvation is the transformation of the world and all in it bring all back into proper and whole relationship with God

The Death Notes: In the Spider's Web

2010-12-10T11:43:00.004-06:00

The Death Notes are described on their web site and in the promotional material I received for their new single as being comparable to Sonic Youth. Yet the latest single from this new band out of Nottingham UK, "In the Spiders Web" has the haunting growling whining guitar and driving beat of the early post-punk bands around which emerged the goth scene. This particulare song seems to be more kin to Sister's of Mercy Bauhaus and Christian Death than Sonic Youth. Their new single brings to this styling an energy and freshness that both makes the sound their own, and creates something other than just another goth song.

I was both impressed by this single a bit puzzled by the comparison until listening to songs released in The Death Notes self titled 2009 EP. At first I felt that this single was quite a departure from the EP especially songs like "Seismic" or "Decide" which do have an affinity with Sonic Youth. However as I listened both to the songs from the EP again and "In the Spiders Web", songs like "Sleepers" and "Cold Dawn" push against these various comparisons. The Death Notes certainly has echoes of various post-punk/goth/experimental rock, but from this small sampling is pursuing a fresh and living interpretation of the genres.

All in all I wish I was in Nottingham or at least the UK and could catch The Death Notes live. I'd say this is a band to listen to and to watch, we'll probably be pleasantly surprised with future releases. I look forward to a full album. "In the Spiders Web" is due to be released December 13th..

Boojum and War Plays

2010-12-06T14:33:00.000-06:00

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I had two rare experiences, one was going to a play in which neither Kate nor one of our Theater friends was in and second seeing to plays in one weekend.
As a gift from a friend we saw War Plays on Friday night, and our friend Kevin Grubb is in Boojum at the DCA Theater, and runs through Dec 19th.

War Plays, was an engrossing experience and very moving. Through a number of devices, including a pre-show where the actors all were with the audience in character and all that seamlessly wove into the show proper in the theater. We were immersed in 1940's war torn London. Mortality, love and fear were strong themes, as we watched characters put on a show for us in the midst of a bombing raid. The spell was briefly broken shortly after we settled into our seats and the show proper began as a show being done in London, even the request to turn off cell phones was said in terms of 1940's (turn off all radio receiving devices), it was for a time unclear what actions on stage were being done as the characters putting on the plays or the beginning of the plays themselves. This became clear later but it did break for me the immersive experience as I had to orient myself and experience a confusion that was as a participant in the show and not as the 1940's London Audience. Also, upon reflection I feel some of what could have been explored in such a play wasn't as the stories were all somewhat traditional romantic love stories set in war time. However, the play was deeply affecting and impacting, and I do feel I had a glimpse into some of the feelings, and experienced them myself in a limited way, what it might have been like to live in London at such a time. I came away from the show with a mix somberness and overwhelming awe at the persistence of life, love and beauty even int he midst of death horror and ugliness.

Boojum was a very different experience, and in all ways different, yet with overlaping themes of mortality and persistence of beauty and life in the midst of difficulty. Lewis Carol, or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, is a difficult person to get ahold of. His works are nonsense and yet deeply connected to logic and explorations of meaning and language. Boojum weaves into this the place of music into these, not only exploring a particular work of Lewis Carol's (The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight fits) but his enterprise and the life the the Anglican deacon and Oxford don who wrote under the name of Lewis carol.

The musical begins light hearted reveling in the nonsense and play of the language as the hunt for the snark is playfully and delightfully presented along with the introduction of the hunters. While this remains all playful and one is tempted to take lightly this silly hunt for that which is mysterious in its probably non0-existence, something entirely made up, a nonsense word. Yet, even here there is an undertone of danger, of utmost seriousness, of something that is about a struggle, one that is at the core of existence. The mood of the show flips entirely as the musical continues in the second act as the silliness and playfulness turns deadly serious, while remaining playful and delightful. The playfulness is subdued by a growing sense that there is a very real danger and facing torments, questions of faith and sexuality, and fears of annihilation.

The score and book seem to me to be very nearly flawless, the performance was amazing, and impressive in its physical demaondingness for all performers. The use of costume was impressive especially in the robing and disrobing of the charicters, event o the point of the characters towards the end putting on items of clothing having belonged to other characters. The set design was restrained but extreemly effective and elegant and beautiful in its simplicity.

Advent Reflection: Had we fallen asleep on our watch?

2010-11-27T10:08:00.009-06:00

If you are like me the prophetic passages "predicting" Jesus' coming have long caused me frustration, puzzlement and troubled my faith. When read from a certain perspective one can certainly see how Jesus of Nazareth, as the 4 Gospels presents him as the Christ, fulfills these prophesies. Yet if one sits with these passages for too long one realizes that there are things prophesied that have not happened in history or at least haven't happened literally. Following that path, one then wonders if Jesus himself fulfilled these passages literally. Growing up I was taught that by keeping Advent we were remembering God's coming in Jesus Christ, and so preparing for Christmas, and we were waiting for Christ return at the second coming. There are two advents and we are between these two. Many wait for the second advent in a "left behind" sort of way, as dispensationalism has found its popular expression. One almost can't talk about the second coming of Christ without most people even fairly non-religious types seeing or thinking in terms of Dispensationalism: that is seeking to discern the signs, and a belief in a rapture and an anti-Christ and final great tribulation in which the world is destroyed in wars and plagues. The Gospel for tomorrow this First Sunday in Advent in year A of the lectionary is part of a string of texts used to justify these speculations, we are to be ready after all! But there is that is little thing about jesus saying we cannot know the time, which is often ignored.

Dispensationalism wasn't ever really the focus of Advent in my years growing up, but waiting was, and expectation. I think I have long puzzled over the exhortations to wakeful watchfulness: What are we watching for, and how do we know if we are awake?! The "Left Behind" mentality certainly seems watchful, and these sorts of dispensationalists certainly know what they are watching for. But this makes the incarnation something that is simply in the past. The church itself in this time between the advents is in a time of suspension. We are in the airport terminal, between flights and the next one has been delayed.

There is then the solution to this: focus on the realized eschatology, that God has come and the purpose of the church is to witness and or realize the Kingdom of God and the results of the incarnation now. This has its own issues. Wakefulness and waiting is turned into activism. And our hope begins to be lodged in our ability to realize God's Kingdom, Jesus becomes a moral example we are to copy, and God disappears, the incarnation becomes either a principle or becomes entirely irrelevant a back drop to our activism, an idea we no longer need once we realize that what is really important is the here and now and not the here after.

Yet what if this wakefulness and watchfulness is neither simply waiting for something to happen, and watching for the signs that it is happening, nor a frenetic activism that tries to realize and manifest the promised coming in primarily human terms and based upon human effort? What if these prophetic words are in fact true, and Jesus Christ has fulfilled them,and they are being fulfilled and will be fulfilled? What if our wakefulness is not some solution to the problem of these prophetic words and God come in human form, but a living out of all these things in expectation that God is at work? What if being on guard, keeping watch is remaining awake to God's coming pure and simple, no limbo, no self-sufficient activism. What if God's coming happened and continues to happen in the incarnation of the Word in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, and will find its resolution and consummation in God?

I posit this is precisely what these calls to wakefulness and watchfulness in Romans and Matthew are about. I also posit that somehow in the last 600 years or so the followers of Jesus Christ, perhaps much if not all of the church was lulled to sleep by having seen the call to watchfulness as a call to resolve the puzzle of the prophessies and the moment between the incarnation and second coming of Christ. We perhaps can read our history of this period in terms of God's coming to us, and we being found wanting, of God coming seeking to rouse us from our stupor. We have become drunk on our certainty that we know what God's coming is: even though we all had differing solutions to the puzzle. I then posit that our disorientation now, our various attempts to gain our bearings, is due to our being awakened from our deep slumber and drunken stupor, and so we are unsure of exactly where we are and what has happened, and we have lost sight of God. Western culture and American Culture were created in our period of these drunken certainties, and the irreligious corners of our culture perhaps first awakened to the truth that we were in fact sleep waking and had no idea what we were doing or saying anymore. We now have awakened but we are like the guard caught off guard who is fearful to admit he had fallen asleep, and was derelict in his duty, and so we are trying to blame everything and everyone else but ourselves.

The hope it seems to me from this perspective this advent as we hear Paul and Jesus' words to us is that the Emergent, or our emergence (from our sleep and drunken stupor) is that we can see that God coming to us as a human, God's presence to us in sacraments, sacramentals and our everyday life, and God's continually coming that will be consummated at the end of the ages, are all of a piece. The possibility of our time is to come to see that the mystery, the contradictions, the uncertainty of all the referents of the prophesies, is not a puzzle to be solved but the reality we are to live into in wakefulness. God's coming past, present or future isn't about knowing: no one but the Father knows the day or the hour. Advent is about a being awake to the reality of the living God, come, present and coming. We fell asleep, we became drunk, we have been roused but are unwilling to admit we fell asleep. Our time of emergence should be a time not only of being awake but admitting we were asleep and drunk. We are lost because we failed to stay awake, and we missed God's coming, thinking we knew what waiting, and coming meant, forgetting that Jesus told us it wasn't about knowing but about living and being awake, attentive. God has roused us from our stupor, but the question is will we simply return again to our drink.

Stay awake accept God come in the flesh, accpet God continually coming accept that God in Jesus Christ will come again, and remain awake to God's continual coming, God's continualy coming and going. We do not know, but we are to remain awake, and alive to the possibilities of God in Jesus Christ.

Mystical Theology, Reading the Bible, and Critical Theory

2010-11-17T18:41:00.000-06:00

This reflection has its origin in a conversation and argument Brian Merritt and I had a couple of weeks ago on Twitter. At one point in that he asked: How does a mystical experience override a rational interpretation, or something like that. However Brian actually said it, his quesiton contrasts what he correctly saw as my making a mystical theological point in answer to his critical, perhaps historical critical analysis of the text. In some sense this points to the question of how does one read Scripture as the Word of God after taking up critical methods?

I accept and have been trained in higher and lower criticism of Scripture. I have never been taught to distrust or disbelieve higher and historical criticism of Scripture, though for a time I did attend a church that found my use of higher criticism in my Religious Studies classes at university to be suspect. I mention this because what I say could be misunderstood as a critique of higher criticism of Scriptures, rather it simply is meant to allow that criticism of Scripture is itself a limited enterprise that may not be necessary for interpreting Scripture as the Word of God.

Critical methods and tools for interpreting and reading scripture, tend to dissect, seek to confirm authorial claims, and give the location of a text in an historical context. All of this is useful, but also has its limits. Critical methods as often as not need to in some way reconstruct what lies behind the text: the author, community, and/or historical milieu. The limit here is that the author, community, and historical milieu are not given by the text but must be reconstructed by analysis and synthesis that is then also the invention of the scholar who undertakes the analysis. There are various forms of criticism seeking to admit or address this, but they all point to the limits of criticism and an analysed text. To some degree one can argue that following along these lines of thinking and criticism we are left with that all texts tend to unravel and fail to maintain cohesion under extensive critique and analysis. Some even argue that for there to be meaning there is no and can be no stable unity of unchanging meaning within texts, or even any form of human communication.

In the end we can't get beyond the texts of Scripture. We have the texts, in their uncertainty, ambiguity, and at times even offensive plurality. From the perspective of a mystical reading of the Scriptures there is no need to get behind the text to encounter the word of God in the Scriptures . The word of God is not in the intention or theology of Paul or Moses, or Isaiah, but in the texts of Scripture we have that are theirs or is attributed to them. The word of God in the gospels and the Christ we are to follow and worship is not in historical reconstructions and inventions of scholars but in the four Gospels themselves as we have them. The word of God is not found in tracing out the various theological communities that may or may not have existed in the 1st century Church. Granted I may have a broader or greater understanding of the possible meanings of the human words of these texts that may give me more clues as to what God has said, but these things don't bring me into encounter with the Word of God in the Scriptures.

The reason for this is that Word of God is not the texts, the words on the page, but ultimately God, the Second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. A mystical reading of Scripture seeks to hear and see Christ in the Scriptures. This means that in contrast to the critical reading of Scripture mystical reading seeks to read towards encounter before comprehension or understanding. The purpose of the scriptures is not to tell us about the theology of the prophets or of ancient Israel, nor is it to tell us about the theology of the first followers of Christ in the first century. The purpose of the Scriptures is for hearing and encountering the living God.

I don't intend by saying this to mean that critical methods of interpretation and reading have no place in the mystical reading of Scripture, only to say that critical readings of scripture can't and wont give us the encounter with God in the and through the text. There is in fact no technique or method that can ensure this, except waiting upon God and seeking to hear the text in the presence of the people of God. This mystical approach is not an individualistic approach and requires faith in those who have gone before and handed onto us these texts. I have no way of proving that the word of God is to be found in these texts and these texts alone, what I do have is the witness of those who have passed these on and of these texts themselves to be the Word of God.

One may find these texts wanting, and chose to look elsewhere and not take the witness as true, but the critical methods will not tell you whether or not the witness about these texts is true. The critical methods often enrich my reading open me up to various plays of meaning that can if approached correctly be part of the encounter of the Word of God in Scripture. In the end what I found helpful in the critical methods of interpretation was that through reading Derrida I discovered an otherness in meaning, and textuality, and language that could not be tamed and held, that escaped analysis. Through this experience of the limits of the critical methods I returned to what I had always known about the Scriptures, that in them is life, for they are God breathed and they live by the power of the Spirit, and I learned again after engaging in higher criticism to be open to an encounter with Christ in the text even when difference between meanings and intentions seemed irreconcilable in human terms. The mystical overrides the rational by accepting the limits of reason and human meaning creation.

(PS. this post by J. R. Daniel Kirk says something simlilar or at least parralel, I think)

Some random thoughts on the State, democracy and the Church

2010-11-05T13:03:00.003-05:00

I believe especially as Christians we need to take the long view of the origin of the nation and the state. From my study the long view shows that the Nation-State has its origins in a separation of Church and State that was intended to make the State superior to the church, the Nation-State is then possibly in competition with the church. This competition though perhaps has even deeper roots as the idea of the Church as the Body of Christ was itself a borrowing from political philosophy, a statement then that the Church was itself its own polis, headed by Christ. The competition between the members of this body of Christ and any other polis, Empire, nation, state, Nation-state, is then probably hard wired into the very notion of Church, and Christian faith.

When the state actively persecutes the followers of Jesus Christ, it is easy for those followers to experience this conflict and even find comfort in it. And yet, the conflict from the perspective of the church taking the long view and not focusing on any one theorist within the history of the church or Christianity is that the conflict is due to factors that aren't due to God's intentions for the world. The church call's the polis, the State, the Nation-State to its truest and most just reality. The conflict remains thought because the polis, the state, the Nation-State, the Empire retains its fallen inclination towards self-preservation and self-justification, which it shares with all humanity. The conflict arises because the Church is to be the polis in which the citizens shed this egocentric self, and put on Christ, become a new creation, and new creature. It is the polis that announces that this world, all current human systems are of an old order that must and will and has already begun to pass away.

Christians as believers in redemption, salvation and God's grace and transforming love, believe and hope in the transformation of all reality, including the polis, thus there is in this hope always the temptation to see more transformation in a polis or in the systems of the world than there is in actuality. Very rarely does the church see this in their own time thought it can become glaringly apparent to those who live some distance in time and space from other systems. Many contemporary Christians are aghast that any Christians actually thought Constantine's conversion was real or even beneficial the the church. Yet those same Christians see nothing contradictory to tying themselves and their faith, to democracy, or communism, or America, or even more astoundingly a political party or a particular president (at least two in recent memory of opposite parties).

However, whether in Byzantium, or Medieval Europe, or America there have been voices that call us to allegiance to Christ only even when we the church believe we have the power and influence to affect change and reform in the systems of this world. Taking the long view and whole witness of revelation and the history of the Church it seems that we can neither wholly demonize the State, Empire, Polis, nor ever hope prior to the consummation of all things in Christ. that we can rest in a particular vision and actuality of any particular human polis. In fact we by virtue of our baptism are prohibited from so resting. We are always to be ambassadors of the world to come, of Christ, who was crucified by the systems of this world, and it alway already includes what ever system humans have created for themselves, including our current system of democratic Nation-States. We pray for leaders, authorities, nations and governments, not because the church wishes to endorse them but because they need and we need our prayers for them, for without them human systems descend into self-interest and self justification, and justice is defined by what those in power deem to be justice. This is true today as much for progressives and conservatives, or whatever definitions and labels one puts on human attempts to organize and control each other.

Back to an earlier point: Nation-States emerge out of a conflict with the church (one that perhaps the church did not fight well, and in so doing may have compromised its witness even as it tried to witness to its proclamation of the coming of God's reign in the world), in such a way that the state came to see itself in terms of the church. It in various forms and with various apologies and philosophies and economic theories, has attempted to claim that it can change and transform the human soul. That it should be allowed to legislate a better and Utopian world. that it should coerce people whether by force of arms or simply executive orders, laws, and regulations into being selfless. Yet, it denies its own selfish ambition, and the power that then brings to those who either through election or force of arms hold the reigns of government. Oddly enough the church has as often as not sought to tie its fortunes to these divine imperial claims of the state, and encouraged the notion that the state can be a trans-formative force in the world. If or one am naming that claim as blasphemous and idolatrous even if it may accomplish some good in the world.

Also those above claims reduce our own personal human responsibility, it throws upon the state our call to care for our fellow human beings, in the name of efficiency of a central authority that can direct and control outcomes. Well we know how well that works don't we, and yet we keep trying it.

Why I don't Vote- and no it is not because I am a Quietest

2010-11-04T18:50:00.007-05:00

You can find a post here on not voting that says things differently than I do here but with which I pretty much agree. Also, there is a repost here, of Alasdair MacIntyre's argument for not voting written around the 2004 presidential election. If you want you can see them as exhibit A and B in my case for not voting.

There are a number of issues. To some degree what I wrote about here on Election day has much to do with it. There were a few things around which my decision to not vote originally hung: 1)an objection to the two party system 2) a sense that Christians myself included were putting our hope in the political process and who controlled the Government 3) A growing unease with the mythologies and civil religion of the United States that I came to conclude is idolatrous and thus felt that abstention from this "meat sacrificed to idols" was my best witness as a Christian and pastor. 4) To proclaim and call people from this idolatry through this abstention, though not necessarily through doing as I do. I do not believe that not voting is something a Christian must do.

Since the 2008 election I have struggled with my decision. I have asked myself, and reflected on this question put to me by others: if we can influence the state to protect the poor the oppressed should we not do so? I do think there is a place for this and my position has never been that it is a Christian thing to not vote. My voting is influenced by my being a Christian and disciple of Jesus, but it itself is not a necessary expression of so being. As I struggled with this I have also taken part in local conversations with city, state and Federal elected officials. I have a better appreciation for what being a politician is in our system and context, the pressure they feel to fix everything, but also the pragmatics of government which seems to be deal making, controlling various competing interests and making happy those who make up their base and their support (not the same thing). Such interaction has not made me more confident in our system nor made me more inclined to jump back in and participate in it.

What I have seen in the past two years is our two party system encourage self-righteousness in my fellow believers in Christ. Many Christians I hear talk about their convictions about this or that politician or this or that party are completely convinced that their support for the party or politician isn't in conflict with their disicpleship to jesus Chrsit. In fact they are quite convinced that their voting as they do is directly connected to what God wants for the world, that they are defending truth and justice and righteousness by voting for a candidate or party and opposing said candidate or party. Most disappointingly I have seen it in Jim Wallis. When he came out with his God's Politics and God is neither a Democrat or a Republican campaign, I felt it was mostly a jab at the Religious right and a hidden support for the Democratic Party. Jim's comments I have read tend to identify the Gospel with the current administrations policies. There is also, in Jim's rhetoric an increasing talk in terms of American civil Religion and speaking of the American citizenry as a people of God. These tendencies I find unpalatable in relation to the Gospel.

Lastly I continue to not vote because someone needs to witness to the fact that Christians are citizens of a realm, of a "nation" that is other than the nations of this world. We do not primarily express this citizenship by conforming to the desires, the duties of the nations, the states and the governments of the world. Democracy is not a characteristic of God's realm any more than any other human political or economic system. I might be amendable to an argument that democracy might be the most likely to approach the limit of God's Kingdom. Yet, even if that is true it is I believe important perhaps especially in our current situation and as antidote to American Civil Religion that has sought to conflate attributes of the church with attributes of the the Nation of the United States. As those baptized into Jesus Christ and Christ's body on the earth our only real citizenship is in the realm of God, and the world that is to come and has come in Jesus Christ. All systems and nations including democracy and the nation of the United States is part of those things that are passing away and are part of that system which had set itself against God, and part of those powers and principalities and systems that put Christ to death.

As I see it America itself pulls us as Christians to see it or to want it to be coincident with the Kingdom of God. There is a nuance here in that what i am seeing now is that this loyalty to America has become loyalty to one of two competing visions of America one Republican ("conservative") one Democratic ("progressive", "liberal"). As Christians we may have convictions that lead us to vote one way or another, but our loyalty isn't to parties, or governments. Our trust cannot be in politicians or the State, or system, like democracy. Liberation and justice and righteousness do not come from any of these. If we are to make a true difference in this world we need to admit that we have a citizenship that is from another world. It is only in God that we find the truth justice, and righteousness that is beyond reproach and can truly transform the world into what it should be.

This would be a Sermon Reflection if I was Preaching

2010-11-04T15:00:00.005-05:00

This Sunday Reconciler is joining our host church and the other two churches that worship in the space for a All Saints worship service. I am not preaching, in fact all I have to do is show up. Which is kind of nice. The reflectin to follow then would be in prep for a sermon if I was preaching.

The Gospel for the feast of All Saints is Luke's Sermon on the plain. At the moment I am thinking about the blessings and the woes. Each week there is a Lectio Devina on Wednesday night around the Gospel text for the coming Sunday, During Lectio strangely I was sensing great hope in Jesus' pronouncement of the woes. I sat with this and have been sitting with this today as well. I have generally understood and generally heard the Beatitudes (and woes) spoken of in static terms. There are those who are being blessed by these words and those who are being cursed by the woes. These are classes of people and you want to be in the class of the blessed of course. What I began to hear in the woes was a call to not attempt to escape poverty or morning if one is rich and happy, etc.

More particularly woe to you who laugh for you will mourn, resounded in me as a call to mourn to accept the "curse" in a sense, and then it dawned on me that if I accept the mourning as one who laughs, I then become the one who mourns, and am blessed with comfort, which then may cause me to laugh, which should then send me back into mourning. This is a spiral of shalom and not violence. There is Judgement here only if I try to stop the movement attempt to stand unchangingly as the one upon whom blessing or woe is pronounced. And woe to me if in any way I may be found as the one who laughs, rich, or all speak well of- The static frozenness of such an attempt to be simply have the good things without regard of others is the place of judgement. Jesus calls us in the sermon on the mount to an openness and a dynamism that is life and pronounces death upon those who have no life in them and have become stone.

Post on not-voting to come

2010-11-04T14:38:00.003-05:00

I owe a post on not voting. When I chose that my engagement with our political process was a conscious, deliberate and active decision not to vote in elections I also committed to being open and clear that this was the case and giving an account. I have posted on this subject on this blog before here. I will post on this but first I feel the need to post on the Sermon on the plain/mount.

Election Day Reflections

2010-11-02T16:02:00.005-05:00

Today Scot Mcknight on Eschatology and Politcs asked us to consider where is our hope (he limited his reflection to evangelicals, but I think it applies to all and any Christians, to the whole Body of Christ)? McKnight asserts that our hope is in God in the gospel and God's mission in the world. "God’s gospel-powered mission creates a new people, the church, where we are to see God’s mission at work. Therein lies our hope." I am mulling over this in light of assertions that America is a light set on a hill, and in light of the ways in which for American Christians the fate of our understanding of the gospel and the fate of America and the political process is often linked. On some level we as American Christians want our citizenships as people of the United States and as people of the church to coincide and exist without conflict. We want the church and the state to mutually support each other. In our present context, and that which McKnight is addressing, this desire is not only about our citizenship but our partisanship and thus a particular vission of America that must coincide with our being the church. For many being Christian and supporting or being Democrat or Republican are nearly inextricable, and the political other is beyond the pale of Christian faith. Both sides of this debate use Nazi Germany as the prime example of why Christians must stand up and oppose the other party and its policies. The other party is seen as the fascist (and/or communist) party. Each group of Christians of course focuses on differing aspects of the Nazi regime and thus is able to see in the other a lurking Nazism. For Democrats it is the Nazi treatment of all minorities not simply the Jews and the regimes persecution of homosexuals and other sexualities it deemed deviant. Also for Democrats it is the populism of the early Nazi movement and its concern for a proper German identity. For Republicans it is the way in which Nazism and fascism through the power of the State sought to infuse itself into every level of society insisting the church and family serve and promote the Nazi State and its Aryan agenda. Christians of either party insist that we must resist these tendencies by supporting one party and opposing the other. But it seems to me that this means that Christians are actively promoting what the Nazi regime attempted to do and that is create a Christianity and church that was indistinguishable from party and nation. However, we are not seeing a repeat of the rise of Hitler. More likely we are simply seeing a division in the American Christian identity that has always collapsed being a citizen of this nation and a citizen of the people of God. We are after all that city set on a hill. Well no, no we aren't that is the church!

Oddly enough to me I see this collapsing even among liberals who in their anti-Constantinian settlement and anti-Christendom stances claim to have abandoned such civil religion. And yet we have such suggestions as that put forward by Candace Chellew-Hodge on Polling place as sacrosanct. As one who has a degree in Religious Studies I can appreciate the analogy of polling place as sacred space. But as one aware that we do have and have always had a civil religion in this country and that it has tended to have a Christian veneer, the collapsing of civility and politeness of a poling place with the exhortation to Love from Saint Paul the Apostle seems to be a watering down the Gospel and the notion of Love in Paul (which by the way is for Paul always already self-sacrificial and exemplified in the Cross and leads Paul to his own death) by equating it with politeness and civility in a public setting. I'm sorry but Jesus and God are many things but politeness is not the same as God's self-sacrificial love. And However much I may like John Stewart (and I think he is hilarious, damn funny, and has bitting insightful commentary on our times) and however nice, good and useful his analogy of cars merging "you go, then I go..." , such an image is hardly a comparable image to the cross and Christian Martyrdom which should be the meaning of Love for the Christian. Two things seem to make Chellew-Hodge's conflation possible: 1) that politeness in the line at a voting booth seems worthy of commentary in our day (who knew, I didn't but I haven't voted since 2002 so haven't been to a poling place in awhile) and 2) a desire to make our civic duty as citizens of the United States coincide with our civic duty as the people of God.

As I wind down I return to our current fear that the other political party will bring us to the brink of fascism (and/or communism): For the church there is in the United States the analogous co-option of the church and Christianity by the nation and state, but it's nothing new and has little or anything to do with fascism or communism. We are currently aware of this danger on the one hand because ostensibly it is the consensus that empire and colonialism are at odds with Christian faith, and that Christendom was a huge mistake. On the other hand we aware of this because there are now two competing visions of how being both a citizen of the United States and a citizen of the people of God can coincide without conflict or betrayal of either citizenship and without needing to give priority to that of the people of God. American Christians for most if not all of our history have assumed that our allegiance to God and Christ and the Kingdom of God could be entirely coincident with being citizens of this great democracy. Few have questioned the claim that America is a "City set on a Hill". Even now, while liberal Christians may point out how America failed at that miserably, liberals haven't given up on this idea but seek to make a progressive agenda into that which will fulfill this manifest destiny of the United States. It is long overdue for Christians in America to return to Augustine's City of God, and contemplate our only true citizenship, and revive a two kingdoms theology not in its form that allows Christians to betray Gospel principles if in civil office (and may have lead to German Lutherans slow response to Hitler and Nazism) but one that heightens the tensions between these two citizenships, and makes the bold claim that we are better citizens of the nations of the world if we are only loyal to our citizenship in the people of God. Or to say it another way; We are most truly good citizens of this world when we seek to have no other identity than that of Christ, and thus see ourselves as only truly citizens of the City of God.

the Melancholy of being neither and still seeking

2010-10-20T16:33:00.019-05:00

Tuesday evening I met up with some people I knew only from Twitter and who have various connections to the Emergent Church movement. The Anglobaptist who was there as well is the exception. It was a good and enjoyable and thought provoking evening. I also have a melancholy about the evening. I have been struggling to articulate what it was. And found myself distancing myself from the melancholy in analysis of our general situation of "emergence" but that just didn't do the encounter between us justice.

I will not, nor could I necessarily, recount our conversation and our stories that we told in brief. However, there were tensions, in each of us, and between us. We were okay with that, perhaps even reveled in them a little. The stories that were told were ones of moving away from one thing to something else, as well as discovery of faith in a more meaningful way: In these stories there were things rejected, and here is one possible source of melancholy. In these stories what had been rejected seemed to loom large behind what is now held. I know this tendency in myself and it rarely if ever serves me nor the search for God and Truth well. Mostly the melancholy comes from memories of sitting with a group of friends in L.A. from various backgrounds and churches: Roman Catholic, variously Evangelical and Charismatic and Mainline spending time in evangelical churches. I don't think the melancholy was missing those people and those conversations though I do miss them, but more that twenty two years ago when I first met this group (first calling themselves "Minds for Christ", eventually calling ourselves "The Society") we were dealing with pretty much exactly the same issues that came up in our conversation and telling of stories on Tuesday evening. Though with a difference: somehow those of the Society were more aware both of the previous history of evangelicalism which we were admittedly critiquing and we were more aware of a forms of Christianity that were not defined by either Progressive or Conservative, Modernist or Fundamentalist. Or in other words for us Christianity wasn't defined solely and primarily by the American context. The Society couldn't help but respond to the evangelical churches we were in who were threatened by young members of theirs reading Augustine, Calvin and Luther etc. for themselves, yet we were also aware of how the mainline churches even in their progressive stances that some of us were attracted to, did not by themselves serve us in our search for authentic Christian faith. We were seeking something beyond the American dualism. It was just a tad depressing to see how much that dualism continues to be something that remains a defining reality, perhaps even more so than it did 22 years ago.

So a melancholy hangs over my experience of Tuesday evening, because 22 years ago we in The Society were quite hopeful of our ability to extricate ourselves from American dualism and the Modernist/Fundamentalist controversy and split: to find oneself still there to find the vortex of that controversy to be so powerful that one can't even escape it by being part of a denomination that has tried to bridge that split for most if not all of its history and starting an Ecumenical congregation, and founding an intentional Christian community. I search for the Church, not really other disciples of Jesus wandering about, though when I find said wandering disciples it is a joy, but I'd rather those disciples be also seeking to know not in the fuzy sentimental way of the free church and believers church, but in a catholic and truly incarnational way the church. And yes I know that a rejection is looming large in my search for the Church. This is part of the Melancholy I find myself in. For 22 years I have sought to live in the tensions, resisted fleeing to Orthodoxy or Catholicism at certain points I could have thrown myself into those contexts with evangelical enthusiasm, finding "liberal' and "conservative" or now "progressive" and "conservative" as poorly fitting clothing, and frankly in my opinion neither actually about being clothed in Christ in the final analysis.

Tuesday night reminded me that I have felt stuck for quite sometime, truly seeking to bridge and mend the divide isn't really what most American Christians are really interested in. We are interested in our journeys, which makes sense. but I have to ask to what are we all journeying? Not that The Society is some grand thing to copy, the results of our conversations is perhaps under scrutiny ambiguous at best. Several of us became and have remained atheist or agnostic. I don't think any of us returned either to the Mainline churches or evangelicalism. Some of us remained where we were, other's returned to the ethnic and orthodox churches of their families. Christianity in some general sense failed us, yet that it seems is what we are still seeking a generalized Christianity that can wear one of the coats of American dualism in a way we are comfortable with. I think I have given up on Christianity, what I am looking for is the Church, the mystical and real and tangible body of Christ. My fellow disciples of Jesus wandering about in this barren landscape we call America I invite you on that search, and have to admit that if that is not what you are looking for we probably wont walk long together.

My Melancholy is perhaps my sense that what I long for few others truly long for, what I seek few others seek. Also, from the outside it seems to be something few members of the two claimants to be the Church care much about, as they seem just as caught up in American dualism as everyone else. It seems an odd thing for an American Christian (of any stripe) to seek,yet here I am.

Haven't found my way to a post in awhile.

2010-10-19T11:27:00.002-05:00

Early August had a fairly significant loss, some of you who read this Blog and know Kate and I in person know what that is. Since then I have started a couple of posts but just haven't been able to edit them to something I am comfortable with. I am always quite aware of the public nature of the internet, and certainly this blog. When I am feeling particularly vulnerable it makes it difficult to post my reflections and thoughts.

I have meant to post on a number of things, the Pastor who Threatened to burn Korans, the who "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy, to thoughts on Glen Beck and Social Justice, and most recently the publicized bullying and suicides. What I wrote may find its way into something I actually post in the next few months. To speak is to be vulnerable. To speak especially in this forum is to say things that will effect people, that will be hard to retract. When I am feeling particularly vulnerable that vulnerability is itself overwhelming.

Well just a brief note about why I haven't been blogging, though perhaps sometime this week there will be a post, on self-righteousness and the Coen brothers's films.

"..you have ample goods laid up for many years..."

2010-08-03T07:24:00.001-05:00

The above quote is from the Gospel for this past Sunday August 1: Luke 12:12-21. These are the words of a person Jesus calls a fool, a rich fool. I was struck that if we (most classes in the U.S) allow ourselves to be identified with the rich man of this parable we can see that the rich mans attitude is the expectation and/or desire of most if not all classes of people. Our sense of the good life and a just society is one that would provide for all a job that allows everyone to store up ample goods for many years in the form of retirement plans of various kinds, homes, cloths, cars etc. This is of course complex for the inability of many to store up for themselves something is an issue of injustice and exclusion from the centers of economic power. So the expansion of this ability to lay up goods for many years and allow one to stop working at a certain age was and still is a matter of justice. And yet Jesus' words here challenge such a sense of economy, prudence, and justice. I would say Jesus' words even critique state run versions of the rich mans individual safety net.

Since, our economy tanked and we uncovered numerous problems with our economic and financial system based upon accumulation of wealth through investments dependent upon the actions of financiers and gaining the largest possible return on ones investment, I have personally been puzzled and struggled with the general attitude to locate greed only in the bankers financiers and professional investors while excluding from greed the middle and lower classes who have been hit so hard by the failure of the financial system. I struggle with this because part of what allowed greater access to mortgages, high yeild investments for retirement was in part the invention of new ways to make and accumulate wealth. I have wondered at our continued faith in this system shown by our demand that it be controlled by more government regulation. Few if any have asked if there is perhaps something simply ethically flawed about the whole system tightly regulated or not. It seems that what we want as an American people to one degree or another is the expansion of who gets to live as though they are wealthy. We are seeking to expand this storing up that allows one to have a disposable income to spend on investments that if it pays off (and we want the guarantee that it will) will ensure that we will after a certain point in life have no worries about our financial well being.

This seems like a good, and yet here is Jesus saying that that attitude is that of the wealthy and foolish person, who has no understanding of what the Kingdom of God is and will find that when God comes calling that said person will not even know it, and will have lost their soul.

We'd like to say that those other peoples forms of wealth accumulation and creation are greedy. Thus the average American who has been hit deeply and fallen on hard times was not greedy, only those financiers and investors who took risks and invented new and ever more risky ways of making money and increasing their own but also that of the average American's portfolios, it is those people labled "Wall Street" who are the only greedy and unethical ones. Even I would like to say that I am exempt from this parable, that I who have no investments or pension fund, who left aside 7 years ago now seeking to only accumulate things and space for my wife and I and our family alone am free of this. And yet, if I am honest I too when and if a financial windfall comes want to store that money and goods up. I have many things that I have for some future that may never come, for a future I may not be called into. I seek to acquire things that may have nothing to do with God, or what God requires of me. My own denomination requires that its clergy store up for themselves with the denominations pension plan.

The good news here I think is that Jesus is talking about true liberation and true security, which we should know now can't come from our government nor the financial and economic institutions that set themselves up as necessary for our ability to survive and live and thrive. Also, what allows me to be prepared for the future or for that moment which is now to render to God's what God requires of me which is my whole being my soul, is God's own invitation in Jesus Christ. Also it is that the moment is always now, God continually comes and asks us to follow and as Bonhoeffer says bids us come and die. Our soul is always required of us and the grace I know is that God accepts the amount of ourselves we understand to give. The challenge of this parable is to seek to be one who seeks to have no possessions as the one who seeks to have them. However, it seems to me that our entire culture is bound up in the attitude of the foolish rich man, and so to answer Jesus' call we must begin by letting go of the values of a culture that says security and prudence are found in storing up so that one may at some point when old have more than enough to survive without needing to work.

Tripp has preached something similar .

In this passage Jesus refuses to be the one to decide how and who gets what they are due, rather he calls all to abandon the search for the accumulations of things and wealth. We are to have our attention elsewhere, we are to trust that there will be enough,that there is enough. When God provided manna in the desert for the people of Israel, it could not be stored up even for a day except before the Sabbath. The year of Jubilee undid all accumulation of wealth and in fact the whole cycle of sabbath years and Jubilee does seem to indicate that wealth creation and accumulation takes place at the expense of others: if one has surplus of something it means another has less off it, such disparities are reversed in the year of jubilee. We on the other hand seem to believe quite the opposite: we believe that everyone can have a surplus without someone else having less or less than they need. But the issue isn't simply justice, or rather justice isn't simply about liberation and freedom from oppression but living according to the call of God, the claim of God on us each one. justice is then ultimately to place us in that moment where we can receive God's call and claim on our souls, our whole beings. Justice is not an end in itself, but a means to true communion with God. So, if we work for economic justice in our system of wealth creation and accumulation, of the need for economies to grow without end, or slip or stall, we must understand that the system itself could be just by our standards (perhaps) but fail to open us up to the call of the Totally Other, who has an absolute claim on our lives. In the End Jesus says gaining entrance into wealth and the supposed security of having enough to sustain one without worry, will hide us from the truth of life.

Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival, Big Sculpture Garden

2010-07-28T09:04:00.003-05:00

Overall the festival and the Big Sculpture Garden went over well. We at the sculpture garden had a rough beginning as we all were a little behind and were still attempting to finish things Friday evening when the storm rolled through. The last bit of paint I applied to the large icon hadn't dried by the time the rain came, which meant that the very last parts I painted washed partially away in the rain. The large icon then had a weathered look to it. It meant that I was up in the morning installing the rest of the installation (see bellow), and that other artists were also finishing up their pieces on Saturday. By Saturday night the garden had completed feel to it, with a couple of artist working on their pieces as "live art." "Live art" i.e. artists working on a work of art as people visited the gallery spaces, was something that was happening all over the festival, though in the sculpture garden while Andy had assumed some of the artists would be working on their art during the festival, it had not been planned who would do so. John Bambino who neighbored my piece actually finished his painting as the festival was winding up on Sunday.

My installation was well received. I talked with many people about it, and I heard back from one of the organizers of the south end of the festival that many people were talking about the installation. We had a good crowd at times, though most people walked through and did not stay and listen to the bands and acts who were performing, so that bit of the garden may have felt less than successful for the bands and organizers of the performance part. The space was great when all the pieces were in place and the feel of it all especially on Sunday was inviting and interesting space.

Here are some photos of my piece and the Garden most I think taken on Sunday.

Big Sculpture Garden: so much to do so little time and then Rain

2010-07-24T08:20:00.000-05:00

This has been and continues to be a wild week. And it got even more exciting as I finished the large Icon just as the storm was upon us. though due to the rain I still have not put up the full installation. Which is a little disappointing I at this point want to be done. Also, I am not completely satisfied with the large icon, though this is largely because this is the first architectural sized work I have ever done, and painting on canvas in the wind is just plain difficult, and it was windy most of this week when I was out painting. But it is good.

Here are a few images of some of the progress on my icons and iconostasis and at the site this week.

Blurry but I kind of like the photo.

A few Days ago, blank canvases on site
The Big iron rebar sculpture by Andy Delarosa, Other artist began hanging stuff on it, stained glass ceramic etc. Thunderstorm kind of put a damper on working on putting up stuff, as you probably can imagine. Iron spires and lightning.

Just about to begin painting, see jar of paint on the ladder.

From across the parking lot that is the site of the Big Sculpture Garden.

Art Festival, Conferences and Hermits

2010-07-19T09:17:00.003-05:00

The Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival is 4 days away (well 4 1/2 as the festival begins at 4 pm Friday). I am somehow not freaked out about that this morning. I have a great deal to do still on my installation art piece not the least of which is to write the largest Icon I have written on site. I think, I hope the mural space has been constructed will find that out in a little bit. Writing the two icons last week went well and Kate says it went fast, it did not feel fast but I will need to probably work both quickly and long to finish the mural.

Given the time this takes and all I have wondered about whether I should have taken this on. Are there other things I should have been focusing on, or doing. There certainly are other things. I missed the Ekklesia Project Gathering, which I and one or two people from Reconciler were thinking of attending this year. I always think of going, and never have. I don't go to conferences generally. About every other year I attend North Park's Symposium on the Theological Interpretation of Scripture and once made it to *CINO's Practicing Resurrection (the first one actually). I am actually a little puzzled and overwhelmed by the number of conferences there are in the various circles I am in. I don't know how people make it to conferences nor why it is such a priority. This isn't a criticism, though somewhere there may be a critique of conference mentality. Of course if I were in the Academy I would be attending the conference(s) of my respective discipline. AAR and SBL for Religious Studies and Biblical and Theological studies, yet as a Religious Studies major and the seminary student never attended.

What I do instead is something like the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival, or try my hand and making a movie one summer (as Kate and I did the summer of 2005, and having spent the previous year writing the thing with some friends). I am prior of an intentional Christian community and pastor a small church, maintain some semblance of relationship with pastors in the Edgewater neighborhood, and currently trying to establish a relationship with service providers for the mentally ill and homeless. In all of this the place of art in faith and my life as a pastor and prior, the role of the local church coming along side service providers etc. is enough to keep me occupied and with enough to theologically cogitate and mediate on without going to a conference to hear about other peoples thoughts on other possibly related subjects and experiences. Don't get me wrong a very large part of me wants to do just that. I want to engage others talk about what is going on hear what others, and yet I just can't be bothered, it all seems like so much noise and distraction.

A friend of mine pointed out when I expressed some of this that conferences are the way a privileged affluent culture communicated with itself. Conferences are ways we communicate and network, we let each other know what is going on. It has it pluses and its downsides. This lead me to think more seriously about a thought that came into my head as the Ekklesia Gathering was going on and that same friend was tweeting the conference and I was wishing just a little that I was there: I am a hermit, a new hermit perhaps (something along the new monasticism). I say this partially tongue in cheek, but there is something here. This thought was elicited by reading on the blog Mystagogy that a certain hermit on some Island in the Mediteranian one the Greek Isles I think, is spending his time restoring a building (that either was a monastery or the hermit is restoring for the purpose of it becoming a monastery), the hermit works on the building and apparently also hangs with the local villagers, who love the hermit. Something about this seemed analogous to my experience as the Priestly Goth, who is pastor and prior, does crazy things like agrees to be part of the Big Sculpture Garden at the Milwaukee Avenue arts fest and wanders about Chicago. I am building something, preparing a space for others. Often it feels like that, others who are yet to realize they need or want the space perhaps. The difference though is actually some are already there, and then there are the villagers, the fellow goths and artists who I run off and do things with from time to time. I need to focus on these local tasks, this singular and lonely tasks, like being in the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival. Reconciler isn't there, I alone. I have invited members to connect with this but this is a solitary task, I don't understand it entirely, not sure what or why, except that when I was asked, there was no question that I was supposed to do this.

So maybe I am a very odd hermit, a hermit in a city who is also prior and pastor. but there is something solitary about this, something that I also invite others into, something I am called to build for others. But saying that seems a little nuts, but are hermits ever sane? I don't know.

Progress on Icons for MAAF: Iconostasis and Highlights

2010-07-14T08:03:00.002-05:00

as part of my installation I am creating a sort of iconostasis, or just the most basic kind for the two icons I have been writing. Bellow are the frames, on site or before I will finish them. There are also images of the icons in the frames. The icons are getting close to done but still have a ways to go.

Progress on Icons for MAAF: first layer of paint

2010-07-07T21:31:00.003-05:00

Fuerza Bruta

2010-07-07T07:41:00.005-05:00

Saw Fuerza Bruta: Look Up last night. It is an amazing and incredible show. The audience and performers are all on the stage. In many ways it much more like a really good and incredible night at a dance club than my sense of theater. It was odd to be lead up to the stage and see the Auditorium theater empty, and for a moment to look out from the stage up into the seats of the theater. The Auditorium theater was not built for this sort of thing. If you were to design something for this type of theater I guess you'd design some combination of a warehouse club space and the stage of a theater.

The show opens with light and wind coming from either side of the stage alternately and then appears a man walking on a conveyor belt set on a raised piece of staging. A series of events unrelated but related in a dream like sort of way transpire as the man runs and walks, gets shot, passes through crowds, sits at a restaurant, sleeps, carries his own bed. The rest of the show had women on harness walking and somersaulting on a shiny curtains, and a point where the actors interacted with the audience hitting some people over the head with "boards" of Styrofoam and confetti, that lead into a dance party overseen by a DJ in powdered wig and military coat whose appearance conjured up images of George Washington. So a George Washington DJ. The Show concluded with four women cavorting in a shallow pool of water made of some form of clear plastic suspended overhead. We watched them from below.

The show meandered through dream scape, interactive happening, dance party and circus spectacle. Nothing that I saw I had seen done before, and the special effects the technical aspects, the endurance and performance were all flawless and amazing. All seemed oriented toward evoking emotion and having an immersion experience without referent. On the other hand I also felt that it was simply an extension not so much of a performance art piece or Theater, but of the night club. Over all take way the technical aspects of the special effects and the overall experience emotively was that of a very good and special night at a Goth club. But then in this I am looking for more than the creators intend as the playbill essentially discourages looking for a meaning, though it also seeks to interpret itself as simple reality.

As amazing as the show was I am in the end disappointed. Disappointed not in what it was which was amazing but in that it failed to be the more it could have been. The style of theater lends itself to comparison with the Blue Man Group, which I think is a fair comparison in term of genre, if one can apply a genre to either performance theater group. When I saw the Blue Man Group I left the theater seeing the world differently, the buildings and streets I had walked just 2 hours before were the same but i saw them differently. I saw Kate differently, and I looked at my life and seminary differently(I was at North Park Theological Seminary at the time). With Fuerza Bruta I was to experience my self in relation to what was going on. There was nothing outside, nothing other than a sequences of experiences in imitation of a dream (which don't get me wrong is pretty cool in and of itself, but that is all it is) that means nothing and thus changes nothing and asks me only to see the world and myself as I have always seen the world and myself. Or worse it asks me to escape myself and the world and how i see the world for the moment we were enclosed on the stage.

Fuerza Bruta is meaningless. It showed us bodies without meaning, a desert of life in stark beauty, momentary emotions and fleeting experiences. It was decadence devoid of any and all transcendence and it was an amazing experience. I am no different for the experience and it is fading rapidly in my memory as this day has passed. It is an empty experience a desert of artifice. And despite the insistence of the playbill that there can be reality with out referent and interpretation, it was not real, but an exercise in futility, a dream without symbol. That might be the very point, a celebration of the decay of symbol and meaning as what is "real". Such a view of the world and art and theater is for me in the end then without life.

Icons For the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Fest

2010-07-06T15:30:00.003-05:00

Last week I began work on the two smaller Icons for my installation art piece for the Big Sculpture Garden at the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Fest in Logan Square.

(initially forgot to put in the link, it is there now LEK)

Today I begin the first layers of paint on the icons. Here they are in their initial stages. I had wanted to use actual gold leaf, but it turns out Dick Blick store near me doesn't care real gold leaf in the store, you can only order it on line from Dick Blick. I couldn't afford overnight and couldn't wait for shipping time, so composite gold leaf it had to be. I am though pretty happy with this composite gold leaf it is still harsher than gold, but it is pretty good imitation of real gold. Also, since for a variety of reasons mostly logistical I am painting these in acrylic paint, and not using egg tempera, which I usually use when writing icons.

Mother of God Galaktotrophousa

Christ Pantocrator

Both Icons together in my studio

Reflection on Galatians: Sermon Prep

2010-06-18T13:05:00.006-05:00

I am finding that this week as I prepare my sermon that I am taking issue with the NRSV translation of the Galatians 3:23-29, and even taking issue with many commentators. In part it is around the use of gender neutral/inclusive language. Though it is also translating paidagogos as disciplinarian. The problem I have with this translation is primarily that the translation hides the extended metaphor Paul is making in this passage (many commentators also seem to miss this extended metaphor of fail to see its implications). Not seeing Paul's use of an extended metaphor here keeps us from seeing the correct emphasis of the oft quoted (and I am coming to believe) little understood Pauline phrase "neither Jew nor Grek, slave nor free, male or female, in Christ Jesus". The failure to allow Paul's metaphor and thus rhetorical force of his argument is in part Paul's fault and part our theological cultural presuppositions. Paul says that the law guarded us had custody over us. The translators and commentators view these words that can be used and usually are used for imprisonment gives the impression that Paul is making use of two metaphors here rather than one. This translation and interpretation also leads us to readily conclude that this might be a continuing harangue on the Law. However, the longer I read Paul in light of the post-apostolic age and the trajectory of orthodoxy and its affirmation of the Old Testament as a living interpretive guide, as the Word of God, the more I see that Paul has no harangue against the Law. When he says the Law is good we are to take him seriously. Paul is not speaking against the Law but about a certain usage and interpretation of the Law that is used as a means for our own self justification. Human self-justification in the sight of God is an impossibility by the law or any means, whether through Torah or some other measuring rod.

So then why use these seeming terms of imprisonment and guarding, which seem to contradict the next thing Paul says about Law: that it is a Paidagos? The NRSV translates this word as disciplinarian, which fits with the negative understanding of the guarding words, the NRSV translates in terms of imprisonment. However, there is a clear cultural referent in paidagogos as the servant who attended and guarded privileged children to the gymnasium (school). According to Liddel and Scott "tutor" would be the English for paidagogos. A paidagogos was a slave or servant who attended and guarded a child, a son in the cultural context, on his way to and from the gymnasium and was in charge generally of watching over the son's education. This son would also be an heir and the training of the son as a child would be training him to inherit the fathers estate and business etc. Only male children need these "tutors", and once they were adults and fully heirs the sons are simply sons of the father free from the discipline of a paidagogos.

I believe we and the NRSV translators get tripped up here by the fact that Paul uses an illustration from a privileged and thus to us oppressive system,(Classist and Patriarchal) to illustrate our relationship to God in and through Jesus Christ. Here is how I read Paul's metaphor: The Law guarded us and protected us like privileged Greek male children are guarded and attended by a tutor, who is a slave of the son's father. The paidagos serves the father, the Law serves God. But once Christ came we all have become adults, we are son's of the father. We are all heirs. Paul makes this explicit in the end of the passage where he says we are all heirs of Abraham, of the promise.

In my estimation for us to interpret correctly and by interpret I mean not say only what Paul meant but what it can mean for us, we actually have to hear this as a metaphor drawn from privilege. We need to hear the gendered, sons of God. In neutralize the gendered language by saying we are "children of God" we hide that Paul is talking about an adult child who has received full privilege of his adult status as heir of the father's estate. Paul in essence queers things: woman, slaves, those others(we don't like) are as much heirs as we whom we like, the privileged, and men. Paul uses an extend metaphor based in the oppressive system of the world to show us how in Christ all of that is turned around and to show us that the proper function of the Law was to prepare us for Christ and our role in Christ as sons, that is heirs.

Humanity was closely guarded by the Law as our custodian/tutor, and like a son once an adult no longer needs a paidagagos, but who has been guarded and attended so as to be able to become the adult son who will inherit. So, it would be rediculous for a son to as an adult continue to submit to a paidagagos, so it is a denial of Christ to submit to the law after Christ, for we are all heirs and sons in Christ Jesus, through our identification with Jesus Christ.

The upset the upheaval all happens in Jesus Christ and because of Jesus Christ. Paul's statement about "no longer Jew or Greek... slave or free,... male or female" isn't based in some generic inclusive humanity, but that Christ is the true human, is humanity. We find our place again as human beings not in our origin, Adam or Abraham, but in Christ Jesus. Our identity must become one with Christ. The reality happens in unification with Christ not some cultural evolution, for Jesus Christ is humanity come of age. Sorry Bonhoeffer the coming of age of humanity, if I am reading Paul correctly here, happened in Jesus Christ, not European enlightenment and World War. Humanity isn't' evolving towards greater consciousness, it has achieved this adulthood and consciousness in Jesus Christ, and it is only in unity with Christ that we come of age and become heirs, that is sons of God, no matter who we are what our gender, what our class, what our race or ethnicity. This is a radical message of Christ who is all in all, not about human achievement or cultural evolution. If it could be human achievement and cultural evolution then we are simply back in some kind of "Law" it may not be the Torah (and that is probably worse than dependence on Torah which actually came from God, after the promise) but it would still be a law, that human beings can advance because of their inherent humanity. This Paul preaches against because such views of improvable humanity make a mockery of the life death Resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.

Sneak Preview Art Benefit

2010-06-17T06:12:00.001-05:00

It turns out I am part of a group of artists that will be creating the Sculpture Garden for the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival. There is a fundraiser for the festival this coming Monday, June 21. You can find all the information here

If you are in Chicago and are free on Monday evening I encourage you to attend it looks like it should be a fun time. Also, suggested donations are on a sliding scale from $10-$100.

Making Changes to my blog

2010-06-15T23:53:00.002-05:00

Making changes to the blog look and feel and adding some pages.
Let me know what you think. This is still a work in progress so we'll see where this goes.
And I will soon have more posts. Things are brewing. Sometimes I need to simply take a break and let my thoughts steep and brew and settle. So that has been happening. Also the past fortnight has been quite full and for 4 or 5 days of it I was quite under the weather.

Peter Rollins and Orthodoxy

2010-05-30T07:27:00.000-05:00

At the same time as I picked up and began reading How (not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church, I also picked up two recent anthologies of essays by Orthodox theologians: Thinking through Faith: New perspectives from Orthodox Christian scholars and Orthodoxy and Western Culture:A Collection of Essays Honoring Jaroslav Pelikan on His Eightieth Birthday. I am finding that Peter Rollins and some of these Orthodox scholars are saying very similar things but with a difference. Rollins seeks to affirm the tradition. However from my reading Rollins can't quite see that Revelation isn't merely human language about God but God reaching us in human language. So, Rollins tends towards the not speaking of (not) speaking, tends towards doubt that puts holes in affirmation, tends towards the experience of the cross without Resurrection. In this he mirrors much of Derrida who at moments will seek to not prioritize absence over presence recognizing that his philosophy would itself deconstruct such a priortizing but can not find a way to encounter presence/absence. What these Orthodox theologians are doing for me as I read them in parallel to Rollins is showing how to hold presence and absence together: how in absence we have presence and in presence we have absence and this is the holding always together Crucifixion and Resurrection, Jesus' divinity and humanity, God's hiddeness and God's unveiling in revelation. I believe this is what Rollins seeks to do but at lest in How (not) to Speak of God, at best he vacillates between the two but the weight is always on the "not to speak of God" that sometimes allows affirmation. But affirmation is always held in suspicion as the easy way out, that which undermines faith. Rollins is so afraid of false claims of absolute presence that at best he seems to touch it only to withdraw, as if Thomas the Twin touched Jesus' wombs without exclaiming "My Lord and my God" and withdrew again into the shadow of Holy Saturday. As if Thomas only whispered that affirmation and only ever after could whisper "My Lord and my God." As if such an affirmation erased the crucifixion and uncertainty, rather than compounding it. This is what the Orthodox scholars are saying is that in affirming the incredible that God is revealed in the Passion (Jesus Christ Crucifixion and Resurrection, is to be left in the unutterable reality of God.

Warm Leatherette - Trent Reznor, Jeordie White, Peter Murphy

2010-05-19T21:00:00.005-05:00

And here's another video for your enjoyment. Keeping the "goth" in Priestly Goth Blog: Trent Reznor, Jeordie White and Peter Murphy performing a cover of Warm Leatherette originally by the Normal

"William Howard Taft": Two Man Gentlemen Band

2010-05-19T12:03:00.005-05:00

For your Wednesday afternoon or evening enjoyment. This is delightful and cool. Found this thanks to Benjamin and Ectoplasmosis

Preaching at Reconciler

2010-05-16T15:28:00.002-05:00

I have posted my sermon for this evenings Ascension of Christ, observed worship service at 5 p.m. It isn't a children's sermon but a sermon seeking to be mindful that children are among those who make up the congregation. You can find it here at Reconciler's blog.

This sermon it is part of the result of my reflections I posted here on children in worship.

Children in Worship and the nature of the Liturgy

2010-05-13T09:07:00.003-05:00

Reconciler has decided that it wants to have on some schedule some services that are intentionally inclusive of children, but not having a children's service as such. The materials I have found on this are quite varied. Quite a few are centered on services created for children next are services that are oriented towards creating a "family" oriented service as an additional service provided in the parish, and few materials oriented towards how to simply attend to the fact that the worshiping community includes children. All these approaches say that philosophically they are committed to the inclusion of Children in the worshiping life of hte church, not simply accommodating children in a worship service. All say that worship is something to be taught through doing. All are claim that the approach to children and worship is the means to obey Christ in his command "Do not hinder the littel ones from coming to me."

What all these approaches don't contemplate or simply reject outright is that children aren't simply children: while children aren't just little adults they are on a process of quite rapid development to being adult persons. It seems to me that the corporate worship of the church is one place where the telos of a child should be emphasized and the passing temporary world of the child is attended to but not emphasized. That is if in worship we are addressing the whole person of the child then in some sense we need to be addressing who this person as child is becoming and is to become. In fact I would say the liturgy so addresses the child we simply need to guide the child in attending this address. In fact this is what we all find in the liturgy: what is addressed is someone who we currently are not but to whom we are called. The liturgy of the church isn't an adult world as such but the world of the coming kingdom of God. In the liturgy we are brought into contact with what is not us. If we are truly including children we will teach them that their world is passing away, that they are not who they are to be, that in fact none of us are who we are to be, all things are passing away we are all together moving into and being formed into something other than we currently are.

The most helpful in this regard as it turns out are those resources that believe in more or less major transformations of the liturgy (I didn't find free church resources helpful here as they all assume that each instance of worship is constructed more or less from scratch from various elements, and was about how to construct these elements each week with children in mind). I found this helpful because of what these resources felt they needed to retain, that remained outside the "world of the child". In reviewing what these resources retained it occurred to me that they weren't simply retaining things that adults could relate to but that in fact the Gospel, Christian faith is something beyond the full grasp of a child. The child needs to learn to be comfortable with being asked to attend to that which they don't understand. But then again it occurred to me this is what the liturgy should do in the first place for all. In the liturgy, in worship, we encounter the one whom is beyond our grasp. We encounter the Gospel that is something other than we are, we are invited into the Kingdom of God, which is beyond our comprehension.

What I have concluded we need to be doing is what we should always be doing and which should be a reminder to ourselves about what we do as we submit to the liturgy of the church. What I am guiding Reconciler in doing in its services inclusive of children is inviting them to attend and participate in something that is not of their world as children, that is beyond their ability to understand,but in so doing I am also reminding myself and their parents and the whole congregation that this invitation to attend and wait upon that which is beyond oneself is what we all are doing. This is why the liturgy doesn't change radically from week to week or necessarily even age to age, we are being brought into contact with that which overflows the acts we do, and yet it is through these acts that we encounter what we do not know. It is in fact the way we do so. Invention and creation of variations in fact distracts us from that what we do in worship is not ours.

Granted we can become so familiar with the forms that we assume that the liturgy is our possession, but that is simply a sinful response to the liturgy, not its true meaning. The hope of the true inclusion of children in the liturgy is that we are all reminded that in the liturgy we are called beyond ourselves and encounter what we do not know and cannot fully comprehend. In the liturgy we encounter who we are to be.

On the apophatic and the kataphatic, in Peter Rollins

2010-05-11T06:00:00.001-05:00

Recently, I Picked up from the library Peter Rollins book How (not) to Speak of God. The introduction pretty much sums up why I like the guy and why I find in the end am dissatisfied with his thought.

He begins quoting Ludwig Wittgenstien from the final sentence of the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." This for Rollins is contrasted with an other assertion he found in the evangelical charismatic movement "God is the one subject of whom we must never stop speaking." Rollins sees these two attitudes as two extremes that he found himself swinging between these two extremes that he says manifested in himself either as mystical humanism or religious fundamentalism. However, he came to the conclusion which the book is about that " these positions need not be enemies. The more I reflected upon the dept of these perspectives, the more I began to suspect that far from being utterly foreign to each other, there was away for them to inform and enrich each other."

In this discussion Rollins avoids the terms apophatic (away from the voice, ie not speaking of God) and the kataphatic (with voice/towards voice, speaking of God) and I think that is fair since I knew of these two ways before I was introduced to these Greek terms. But here is where I find Rollins both congenial and irritating at the same time: My faith has never been absent of these two positions (though they have been more approaches to God) and yet I have never really swung between these two positions. For me when he sums union of these two approaches as "That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking." this is my faith and it seems tom e that the best of the Evangelical Covenant Church, or its version of Lutheran Pietism, raised me within this place of holding both approaches to (not)speaking of God. The revelation for me wasn't that these two approaches are supposed to be together; rather the revelation for me was that pretty much this has been the orthodox way, and opinion. Granted people within orthodoxy may want to emphasize or may have a tendency towards one or the other, but the overall trajectory is towards the union of the approaches.

Rollins admits that this discover is something like Chesterton’s outline of the story yachtsman who gets lost and attempts to claim Britain for Britain. I appreciate this being said in the introduction since it seems that many in the Emergent movement don’t always take the time to admit that much of what they are talking about is a discovery for themselves and their communities but not the church as a whole through time. I feel towards the emergent church like the people who would watch the Chesterton yachtsman claiming Britain for Britain. Even so Rollins posture is towards explaining this discovery somehow revitalizes rather than a space that one has to inhabit abandoning previous habitations. Even I who was raised upon a Christian faith that more or less worked with some union of these approaches, has had to inhabit another space where that union is built in without skepticism of either silence or words in the face of God. Still it was skeptical of too much silence in the face of the divine. In the end I have had to embrace a concept of tradition as part of revelation as I have embraced ever more the union of these two approaches, and live in orthodoxy, for it is after all the saints fo the church who have lived this theology that Rollins has discovered that the Evangelical covenant Church taught me poorly.

But I hear Rollins: for those who thought they had to choose, for those who were never taught otherwise, this is a discovery. And perhaps a quite radical one, that seems heretical. Even so it is perhaps key to remember that the defenders of Nicene orthodoxy against the Arian heresy were also the ones who spoke of the union of the kataphatic and apophatic approaches to speech of God. So this is not only a very old understanding of theology but one that was not afraid to speak of those who in their speaking spoke not of the true God at all. This also needs to be recovered if this approach is to have Rollins hope for revitalization of Christianity in the West.

The Next Exhbition at Artropolis

2010-05-05T13:10:00.000-05:00

Artropolis was this past weekend, and a friend of ours got us complimentary tickets. So, Kate and I arranged our Saturday Schedules and headed down to the Merchandise Mart for a couple of hours.

We only had time and energy to wander around the Next Exhibition of Emerging Art. A great deal of what was there was of passing interest, which might be expected. a good bit of what we saw in various ways had a whimsical feel or playing with expectation of the viewer based on a shared understanding of art history. Also, there was the stuff that was based in the perfection or use of a particular technique, that while I find interesting always leaves me disappointed because technique itself rarely says anything.

There was one Chicago based artist who used a great deal of color and a complex technique of painting that included layers of resin and paint. the milling about of people and that this was a trade show after all, kept me from quite being able to enter into his work. I think I would have liked to spend time simply standing and sitting in front of his paintings, to be able to encounter the painting in a museum setting. His work was fairly dominated by his technique but his work was also saying something, and it was really beautiful.

There were also several artists who either are Japanese and Chinese or Japanese American and Chinese American who had some striking and beautiful work that worked in what I could recognize as traditional styles, not simply references but also had them in conversation with other traditions, techniques and styles.

Sermon Musings on a Saturday

2010-05-01T12:27:00.003-05:00

This Sunday once again we find ourselves in familiar territory if one has spent any amount of time in church and youth camp, at least in the 1970's and 1980's. The Gospel text for this Sunday is paraphrased in that song with the refrain "... and they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our Love. Yes they'll know we are Christians by our love." It is also familiar territory to grumble and remonstrate how unfortunate it is that this is not the case in actuality. Whenever I encounter such a very familiar text, one that is almost over used and seemingly at the same time also misunderstood in that familiarity, I at first want to charge ahead and beat down all the misconceptions and misuse of the text. And it is not only the Gospel text of John 13 in our lectionary this week that has this problem but also the story of Peter and Cornelius and the Spirit's first descent upon Gentiles. This is perhaps less familiar but is popularly used in both by proponents of multi-ethnic/racial congregations and acceptance of homosexuality and other sexual identities within the church. Love and God's acceptance of the Gentiles. This really should be easy, and yet...

Peter concludes his defense of his actions with going to Cornelius and baptizing gentiles who had not been circumcised saying "If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?" (Acts 11:17) and the church in Jerusalem responded "When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, "Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life." (Acts 11:18)

Suddenly this looks less like acceptance of difference as that no matter who you are God gives you the gift of repentance. How did Jesus love us? Jesus walked around Judea and Galilee preaching repentance and through repentance entrance to the Kingdom of God to all, and ultimately died so that said gift and repentance could be settled and guaranteed.

What the first Christians thought initially that only the people of Israel were offered this repentance. The good news and the love God offers is this opportunity to repent. This means that whoever we are whatever our identity, we need to repent, and the ability and the chance to do so is God's gift to the entire cosmos, and all humanity. Love one another as I have loved you remind one another about the gift of repentance and the world will know you are my disciples, and offer that repentance to everyone no matter what they do or how they identify. But this means all still need to repent.

Hmm... I think that's my sermon, more or less.

Returning to Church: what does it mean to Join?

2010-04-27T16:12:00.009-05:00

Over at Salon Jane Roper writes about returning to church, because of her kids. I find the article of interest in part because it is a point of contention whether or not people continue to return to church as they have children. Roper's article shows that at least some still do. Yet I am interested in the details. Roper was raised Congregationalist and returns to church among Unitarian Universalists, which itself historically comes out of the Congregationalists. Roper returns to a church community that has historical roots in a church of her own personal history and one that shares the conclusions she arrived at as a young adult. However more interesting is the description of a journey from being a joiner, participation in various groups, clubs and committees, to being against joining such institutions, and then deciding that there might be something to being a joiner (well sort of she still is a little uncomfortable with the idea) after all. This journey has some parallels to some of the journeys and struggles of certain members of Reconciler. We have wrestled with questions of what joining a group means. Does joining and having a community and working together necessarily, involve committees, fundraisers, service projects, study groups, retreats etc? Also, are you joining if you join for your kids? I suppose on some level it is admirable to do something for your children you wouldn't do if you did not have children because you on your own can't provide something you believe your children need. So, I am not saying there is nothing of value here but is what is valued community or the experience of community? I get the sense from the essay that the conclusion Roper has come to is that children need the experience of community, but the value of community itself is still questionable beyond providing an experience Roper want's her children to have.

Those who are at Reconciler and have come through Reconciler aren't so interested in the experience of community (or so it seems to me) but struggling with a particular sort of community grounded in a particular understanding of reality. In this struggle some of the programmatic aspect of American church and institutional life that Roper is re-embracing for the sake of her children, is actively questioned and discarded, and community and institution is opened up to reinterpretation and redefinition. Of course this is done also with a certain attempt to recall a very particular articulation of community centered upon a particular religious vision, quite different from what is being sought at a Unitarian Universalist congregation.

Even so there is perhaps also a form of caution to some of the call's to more or less uncritically have churches embrace various types of social media. Roper should remind us Christians that there are elements of our embodied existence that can only be communicated as we gather together, as we Baptize, as we eat bread and drink wine, as we embrace at the peace. None of which can take place in the facebook, twitter etc. I say this as someone who does pray the daily office at times on Twitter thanks to the Virtual abbey. Yet it is different, from praying the office with the monks at St Gregories Abbey. My thought is not so much to critique the embracing of social media by churches but are we questioning the forms of community and through such questioning making sure that we as Christians are not allowing technology to move us from the incarnational and sacramental center of our faith. Which is something Roper seems to want to affirm or at least to have her children experience even though she doesn't believe in the incarnation itself.

The Self and Stories of the Self

2010-04-14T06:56:00.001-05:00

One of the things I did not touch on here is the story Peter Rollins told about a Homes and Country article that ran around 1930 featuring the home of a rising European leader, vegetarian, and painter. He loved to entertain guests and gave cupcakes to children. The house was beautiful and well appointed, the painter talked in a cultured way about his paintings and about art. From the article one gets the sense that this man is a decent person. This person was Adolf Hitler.

He also tells this story here in this video:

Peter Rollins takes this to show that the story one tells about oneself is not one's true self. If I understand him correctly Rollins wants to say that such a narrative is a pseudo self, it is false. The stories we tell ourselves aren't true. At the Insurrection tour he unpacked this more than he does in the above video. We tell stories about ourselves that stand in place of our true self. We can be overcome these false stories through action: we can work at making sure the story we tell ourselves about our self matches our material conditions. We all know who Hitler ultimately was and he wasn't a nice guy, he was evil and the mastermind of genocide. Hitler was not the story told in the Homes and Garden article. Rollins says we are our material conditions and actions, not the stories we tell ourselves. But I don't know that the above example does the work Rollins wants it to do. Or rather it does as long as one simply accepts the story most of the world now tells about Hitler: that he was the the mastermind of a great genocide, an evil and unstable man, possibly the very incarnation of evil itself. This narrative we believe cannot be squared with a cultured gentle vegetarian painter, therefore that narrative must not be Hitler's true self. Yet this view of the self posits the self as simple and singular over which we can overlay complexity but that always views said complexity as always false. However, if as Rollins also posits we find the self in the material conditions and actions of our lives, then Hitler's house vegetarianism and paintings reveal the self of Hitler as much as what he did as Fuehrer of Nazi Germany. Now we may choose to judge that self claiming that one set of material conditions is more significant than the other, but based on Rollin's claims about the self we cannot dismiss his vegetarianism and painting and appointment of his house as false, since these are also material conditions and actions.

We may want to believe that the two things are incompatible, incommensurate and contradictory, but I posit we want to believe that because we don't want to believe that our own cultured narratives could overlap with this one we have judged as the incarnation of evil itself. The belief in a singular true narrative of the self means we have the hope of achieving our pure selves that will not overlap with certain others, whom we can then keep at a distance. This I don't think is what Rollins' is about but I think it is why this theory of the self has certain resonance, and why the example of Hitler lends itself so well to Rollins' thought. He is concerned that Christians have and accept narratives incommensurate with Christ, especially the moment of Christ on the cross feeling abandoned by God, and wants to encourage the sloughing off those incommensurate narratives but through appealing not merely to their incompatibility with the Christ narrative but by encouraging a search for the true and singular self.

What I'd like to posit as another view of this story about Hitler the vegetarian cultured painter who understood the good things of life and someone whom we think we could like, is that the self is multiple and not singular. I posit the possibility that we could have more than one narrative of the self (or more than one self,for it is difficult to disentangle a self from a narrative) and that we are unable to make them agree, this is the case Hitler presents us with: Two sets of material conditions and actions that lend themselves to two different narratives of Hitler and they don't seem to coincide in one self, but they are equally true. Such a multiple self is always already in danger of self-contradiction and thus dissolution. If there is a lie we tell ourselves it isn't our stories, which don't match up to our material reality, (most stories we tell ourselves do match up with at least some aspect of our material reality) rather the lie we tell ourselves is that the self is singular and indivisible. The self is multiple always in danger of disolution, but the solution to this is not Rollins singular true self.

In positing this I am interpreting Derrida on what we are encountering or can know about an author, and Derrida's own musing and playing with "Derrida" as interpreted by a friendly critic and Derrida as written in conversation with St Augustine's Confessions. From this I have concluded that the self is not reducible to a singularity, and from St Augustine I learn that we as those made in the image of God do reflect in our being who God is, and thus there is something of the Trinitarian life in our own life. God also is not reducible to an absolute singularity, but is a perfect unity of three persons. The Trinity tells us that multiplicity does not necessarily contradict a unity and oneness.

Admittedly this is itself an attempt to describe my own experience and to justify my own choices. The name of this blog brings together to disparate narratives of myself. What I do is to admit both that the narratives of myself are disparate and seek to make choices in those narratives that lead towards the coincidences of those narratives rather than the dispersion of myself in multiple and incommensurate narratives. Hitler is perhaps the example of one whose disparate narratives never found coincidence and so becomes a site destruction emptiness and death, the site of evil. This is perhaps the disturbing things about ourselves they tend toward this dissolution, being the site of evil. What will ultimately hold our narratives together isn't ourselves, isn't our effort towards singularity but openness to the Other, who is perfectly three and perfectly one, in whom we move and live and have our being.

In a conversation years ago, a Romanian artist and iconographer, Ion Ardelean once said in response to someone saying "I am among many things a guitarist". He said don't say that "rather say of the many things I am one of them is a guitarist." This has long stuck with me as a truly wise saying.

Insurrection Tour Comes to Chicago

2010-04-09T08:07:00.007-05:00

The Insurrection Tour facebook page indicated it would be a full house at Trace bar, but one never quite knows what to expect from facebook rsvp's in my experience. But we aimed to arrive as soon as the doors would open for the event. When we entered the upstairs of Trace there was already a good crowd and immediately met two people I knew who had seen my announcement about the Insurrection tour on Facebook. They wanted to know more about this, I didn't have any clue what to expect and still not having read any of Peter Rollins' books, couldn't say much more than this is somewhere in the Emergent Church conversation. By the time the presentation/show was to begin the place was packed.

What then took place is difficult to convey, because the components, Peter Rollins speaking and telling stories, punctuated with interludes of video montage and ambient music (by Jonny McEwen), and music and poetry (by Padraig O Tuama) were all in a strange sort of dialog, that didn't always appear to fit, but did create at times a sense of counter point, to what Peter Rollins said and the stories he told. The friend who came with us described it as mesmerizing. And there was something very much captivating about the form of the event (not exactly sure what to call it). At moments striking beauty flashed out, at times it was humorous, and at times labored.

Before I continue I want to say one thing: I came away feeling renewed. Something about the event continued for me the celebrations of the Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday. Meaning that whatever critique may follow something of the intention of this Insurrection tour did reach me as true. Also, I think any criticisms here, and expression of disappointment comes out of a longing for more, a sense that what was done paled in comparison to what was seeking to be expressed, and I admit perhaps that's the point.

Peter's portion of the presentation was a form of intellectual story telling that at moments approached preaching, and was supplemented by exhortation and explanation of the meaning of his parables and jokes. One aspect of this story telling fell flat because it was obviously a prop a tool in fact a deus ex machina (The first chapter of his presentation): The claim to have found a book that had his presentation in it, and all that would happen and had happened. He made constant reference to this non-existent book. It also meant that the event/presentation had a literary feel to it, that I found distracting; like labeling the sections of his presentation "chapters." As counter point to this was Padraig's poetry and song most of which were quite beautiful, though I found the poetry more compelling than the music (though that had more to do with my preferences in music than his musical talent). Padraig's pieces slowly introduced a location for the experiences that has prompted these various artistic and intellectual reflections and exhortations, Belfast, Northern Ireland. However, Rollin's was seeking to dislodge from his audience a attitude towards faith that I recognized as a certain form of Evangelicalism, and so I wondered why this continual reference to this religious other? I still do not have an answer. Of course an obvious answer is that this is Peter's native faith, though I have a difficult time believing that.

Disappointingly the whole event did nothing more for me than walk me down the early years of my spiritual journey, punctuated by the lament and recollections in poem and song from Belfast. Peter Rollins used slightly different language than I have used, though he quoted from two thinkers who are also part of my companions on the way Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Soren Keirkegaard. He referenced Bonhoeffer for his assertion and demonstration that our faith can be a faith in a Deus ex machina. Admittedly it was some point in childhood that I first realized this, it was part of my resistance to saying the prayer to accept Jesus into my heart that was offered semi regularly by a certain Sunday School teacher. Though it took a long time for this realization to mature and profoundly affect my own faith life, and only began to mature at some point in high school.

The second and third chapters took me through to my 20th or 21st year, as I embraced doubt as not only part of faith but connected up with Christ's Crucifixion. The origin of my adult faith is a vision of Christ crucified as the center of and holding together the disparate aspects of myself, yet that vision gave me no certainty and didn't resolve the doubt. I also remember coming to the realization that this faith that cries out with Christ "My God, My God why have you forsaken me!" moves on to the Resurrection and that the truth of the Resurrection is to be actualized in life. Rollins used the language of materialize or something like that- his exact wording I am forgetting at the moment.

So, I agree or have agreed with Peter Rollins. Yet as I left somethings weren't sitting well with me. Last night I described it to Kate and our friend as feeling that the whole presentation even as it exhorted to doubt and to embrace uncertainty was itself certain and indubitable. It was all enclosed in a smooth glass box and I couldn't reach in and grab a hold and wrestle with the experiences and ideas. As I have discussed and reflected and written this post I think I have been able to remove the glass box a little and get at some of what doesn't fit for me.

One thing that I recall was Rollins rejection of the function of church as that which can hold faith for us when we doubt. This he viewed as a lessening of the horror that Christ experienced of abandonment by God on the Cross. Yet, the actuality of Christ on the Cross is more complex, For it is the divine human who experiences separation from the divine and yet that separation is never actually complete. Of course this is a mystery and I hesitate to say more, except that this mystery itself posits the lack of truth of Jesus Christs experience of abandonment as actual and total abandonment. So, while I think I agree with Rollins' criticism of how people often use this actuality of the church to have faith for them so as to avoid the pain of doubt, there is a proper way for the church to so function, or so I would say, and it seems to me that what is needed is an articulation of the complexity of this mystery rather than a continual critique of what isn't working.

In the end I don't buy the bleakness of the resentations depiction of Crucifixion and Resurrection, because I wouldn't put so great an emphasis on a Christian's achievement of what we are given in Cross and Resurrection and Ascension of Christ. Rollins is still seeking that perfect and pure body of Christ without blemish or stain, and it is good to so seek this. However, not if one is to seek it in our current historicity. This church has never historically existed, read the New Testament carefully and hypocrisy is no less rampant among the early and persecuted Christians than it is in our day. Rollins presentation is caught up in our contemproary allergy to hypocrisy, which prevents an enter into the complexity of our faith. There was a denial (paradoxically) of the tensions that Christian faith creates for us, and the longings it awakens as it tried to assert that we in our time bound limited ways can on our own fulfill these longings if we doubt and make material the Resurection in our own lives. This is itself a type of remaining certainty in the midst of the faithful doubt the doubting faith Rollins exhorted us towards. Yet the Insurrection Tour was also to awaken those longings it was also about the achievement of them, this faith in our ability to achieve these divine longings that I feel is a major flaw of the presentation and, possibly in Rollins own philosophy and theology (I don't know I'd need to talk with him or read his books, which I plan to do). Rollins actions are movement while standing in place, he is arrested by his own deconstruction that fails to deconstruct itself. People have built houses when they should have built tents and so he refuses to even construct a most simply habitation. There is only desert and it isn't clear whether any Oasis is actual or our imagination and so it is best to remain in the desert hoping by some impossibility that we may embody the Resurrection through resisting all visions of an oasis. This is the impression I am left with, and yet even so hope of a habitation breaks through, and as does the reality of the Resurrection that is even if we don't embody it.

There is more, but I think I will leave it here for now. If you were there last night I'd welcome your own experience to the evening and what you took away from it. I may write more for there was a great deal to ponder and reflect on, even if I also feel it is stuff I am very familiar with.

Is Brian McLaren arguing against a Caricature?

2010-04-07T21:52:00.009-05:00

One of Scott McKnights criticisms of Brian McLaren's latest book is that his "Soul-sort Narrative" is a caricature and doesn't exist in any reputable form, or even more strongly only exists in the mind of Brian McLaren. Over at the Christiannonduality blog (side note I find it humorous that the tag line of the blog itself sets up a duality between Thinking/proposing and imagining/participating, a duality I find at best inaccurate and at worst false) JB posts a brief response to Mcknight's post. Oddly enough JB begins his response saying that McLaren is not in A New Kind of Christianity (ANKoC) "describing mainline Christianity". This is an interesting point to make as a response to Mcknight because McKnight himself is not speaking about "Mainline Christianity", at least not in the common use of that word, but "Evangelicalism". In the midst of this banter over the use of labels I continue to wonder what exactly is McLaren addressing. For McKnight McLaren's target is Evangelicalism and thus his complaint that essentially what McLaren critiques is a caricature. This thought I think connects up with what JB points out as Mclaren's rhetorical strategies of hyperbole and sweeping generalizations to map things out. In my view it is these rhetorical strategies that make difficult identify with any precision what sort of existing or formerly existing form of Christianity Mclaren is actually talking about as he describes the belief about its god "Theos" (BTW surely Brian knows that "theos" is the Greek word used for God in the NT right?!). Jb limits McLaren's target to Fundamentalism, which is what I have said elsewhere, but McKnight takes him to have a broader target,which is Evangelicalism beyond and inclusive of Fundamentalism.

Though based on various reviews I have read it does seem that in his broad mapping McLaren is including "Mainline Christianity" at least in its being "Western Christianity". Perhaps JB wants to say that "Mainline Christianity" has come out of and away from what McLaren critiques. But I wonder then is JB wishing to appropriate McLaren but saying the critique applies to others but not JB's Christianity? JB feels McLaren is on target but critiquing those other Christians. McKnight feels he has caricatured what he critiques and asserts that McLaren's target is Evangelicalism in particular but that McLaren's "soul-sort narrative" doesn't describe actual Evangelicalism. though he also interprets that McLaren's target includes "mainline" or at least the historic theological tradition of the mainstream of Christian faith.

My suspicion is that the difficulty here is that McLaren has a particular form of Christianity in mind (perhaps what he initially taught as he started Cedar Ridge Community Church, I don't know) but that he then blames on and identifies with broader historical antecedents. Its this later move that I think JB is talking about when he talks about McLaren as mapping a a very rough trajectory. Thus while JB praises McLaren's rhetoric I find this rhetoric the very thing that unravels his argument as he knits it together. In a sense if JB is correct here, McLaren as cartographer has whole contents in view and he is pretty good at giving the general outline of the continents with the necessary distortions to the actuality for the sake of presenting something which is three dimensional in two dimensions. However, McLaren doesn't seem to actually think of himself as a cartographer of contents giving us a "satellite view" of the continent. McLaren wants to be writing guide books to how to get around France and Paris: telling us the best places to stay, what to avoid etc. But really to get around France and Paris I don't need the satellite view. I don't need to see from above (google maps satellite is interesting but I never found it helpful as a means to know what to expect on the ground when finding my way to a new place), nor sweeping generalizations about terrain and the character of the French people. If your offering me a guide book you better know the place backwards and forwards not simply a combination of one corner of Paris and the map of all of France and the continent of Europe. My suspicion of McLaren is that he knows a particular corner of Paris really well and certain provinces of France very near Paris, and then from that wants to extrapolate from that narrow experience to the entire city of Paris and the whole of France. Perhaps as JB says this is simply what is done when trying to do what Mclaren is doing, after all we can't know experientially the whole of Christian reality, and our interpretation of the history of Christianity will be colored by how you have experienced it. However, McLaren's rhetoric crosses out the inscription of his particular experience and overwrites it with an "objective" account of the history of the "soul-sort narative.", as having an actual history through time that has been taught as official doctrine, not just something some form of contemporary Christians may believe. I know there are Christians that believe something like his "soul-sort narative." but I am with Mcknight in questioning its actual extent even while finding McKnight's assertion that it doesn't actually exist at all. So, i think I'd agree that his "soul sort-narrative" is a caricature, a caricature that some currently may be acting out.

Paul VerHoeven on Jesus

2010-04-07T20:33:00.003-05:00

I ran across this today, and quoting from this interview with Paul Verhoeven interview I met him when I was in college. One of my Religious Studies professors was a fellow of the Jesus Seminar as was Paul Verhoeven. Interesting that he has written a book as he was speaking then of using the research from the Jesus Seminar as the basis for a film about Jesus. Not sure what else I have to say about this except that I was taken back to the days of the Jesus Seminar as they were still working on the saying of Jesus, and Verhoeven came to Long Beach State on a couple of occasions while I was there.

This is Beautiful

2010-04-07T11:02:00.002-05:00

"What Wondrous Love is this": Thoughts after Good Friday Service

2010-04-02T21:18:00.006-05:00

The Good Friday service is always so powerful, with the chanting of passion from the Gospel of John, the adoration of the Cross, and the chanting of the great reproaches. Each time I find myself hearings and encountering the passion in a different way than before. Not necesarily new but it simply hits me differently.

Today it was that I was presiding (for the first time) at the service and I came to the service with two articles from the Huffington Post about Good Friday and the crucifixion

The first article I read late last night, by Rita Nakashima Broch. The article seems to be saying that to attach anything salvific to the Cross and Jesus Crucifixion, torture in some general way becomes a good. I get rejecting Anselm's theory of the Atonement (though whether what the author critiques is Anselm's theory in its fullness, and he didn't invent it whole cloth as the author gives that impression.) even that the Cross and the Crucifixion of Christ is an uncomfortable, but even if we reject Anselm's theory it seems that other ways of comprehending keep us from simply seeing torture as salvation in itself. In fact that seems to me to be part of the point of all this Through something horrific and evil, By God in human flesh willingly undergoing this evil, transforms human evil and offers us a way through and out: true liberation. An Implement of death becomes in this instance only (not in some generalized way) that which gives life, the tree of life.

And then an article by Paul Raushenbush. Which attempts to more or less well contextualize the crucifixion with God's sacrificial love as the context of the crucifixion as salvific. The author quotes his Great Grand Father Walter Raushenbush in making his case.

Both articles for some reason left me feeling like something was missing,something was being missed, and then the Anglobaptist posted this:

So very beautiful and haunting. Such great beauty in that song and that rendition of it.

So this all was there tonight as I heard the Gopsel chanted. On one hand I heard in ways I had not before the politics of the passion story: the Religious leaders playing off Pilate"s ambitions and anxieties of his position. Pilate playing the magnanimous leader in a situation where he could only win: If He could get the religious leaders to agree to Jesus' and he was the revolutionary he was presented as, then he'd have the excuse to crush. If Jesus wasn't such a figure then his reputation among certain populations of Judea could grow more positive. For the Religious Leaders, they have the chance with Jesus to appear to the Roman authorities as good loyal subjects of the Roman Empire who would even protest when the imperial governor would release a mostly harmless trouble maker. In the end even as Pilate gives in Pilate mocks the Religious leaders, and does so in away that they can only half heartedly protest. Their king is someone in the full control of imperial power, the King of the Jews ends up on a cross. But Jesus is not subject to all the political grandstanding. Jesus endures, and points out the various attempts to grab at power and influence, and shows how he is following another way, that leads through his death on the Cross. Here is some amazing love that can stand and withstand all this to seek to pass through death, to bring all out of the death trap of such ways of politics and the world.

"What Wondrous Love is this" Theories don't capture it, only point to the more that is there, the astounding enormity of what this day means, should leave us speechless and in awe, and tears both of joy and sorrow.

Maundy Thursday

2010-04-01T22:13:00.005-05:00

I did get focus on the sermon. The text I brought into the pulpit is posted on Reconciler's blog. However this text is not as focused as I got in preaching (I believe). The service itself helped me gain focus. The joint service with Immanuel and St Elias, begins with confession and laying of hands and speaking of forgiveness, followed by a procession around the nave of Immanuel Lutheran Church, sing a Kyrie in Pakistani.

This is one of those situations where I try to recall what I said in the pulpit. What I do remember is that I made a stronger connection between Jesus new command to love, and the example of this love being Jesus washing of the disciples feet. Then I wove themes from the whole Triduum, since my sermon tonight will be the only sermon for the Three Days.

Maundy Thursday and I need a Sermon

2010-04-01T11:20:00.006-05:00

So much is swirling in my head right now. The culmination of Lent is crashing in and questions of my vocation, the Mind of Christ and this day of the command to love and eat and drink in remembrance. The conversation and story telling around getting or not getting the emergent church and discomfort with Brian McLaren are in this mix as well. This is not a good situation for settling on a focus for tonight's sermon.

I am still quite struck at the generosity of Robyn's response to my attempt to account for my discomfort and distance from the emergent church. Robyn told her own story in response. In that story she comes to say the place she ends up is with Jesus. I say Jesus executed by the Roman Empire as a criminal and terrorist, Christ on the cross and seeking the Mind of this Christ is where I end up. hmm..., Wonder if the Christian Militia recently in the news, is two thousand years later taking seriously the propaganda that sent Jesus to the cross. I guess they didn't read the Gospels too carefully (if at all, seem more interested in Revelations etc.) that the charge of insurrection (sorry Peter Rollins couldn't resist linking to the tour here) and usurpation were trumped up charges. Well, you see my problem my mind is all over the place. Interwebs, and Twitter don't help in this regard.

Oh right where I was going with all this is that it seems to me that one place where Robyn's and my story intersect is in the story of Jesus of Nazareth. That Story that we only know in and through the four Gospels. I perhaps at the moment am more willing to assert an orthodox spin on all of this then perhaps Robyn is, and yet there is Jesus in the midst of our stories.

There is Jesus in the midst of a disparate crew of disciples with all sorts of ideas about who Jesus is and what it means for a restored Israel, and the fate of the Roman Empire. Each with very different stories, most of which we know little or nothing about before they meet Jesus. In the midst of their stories Jesus commands love, and demonstrates what he means by this word and command, by washing feet.

What analogue to our times for this act? There are no basins at our doors to wash the dust off our feet. When we enter a restaurant there is no lowly worker hired to rinse our feet off before sitting down for our meal. Yet it is still a powerful unsettling symbol to the extent that the thing we consistently talk about as we plan these services of the Three Days is how do we encourage and get people to participate in this rite of washing feet. It is strangely intimate (which is from our context I think probably not so much so in 1st century Palestine) and still dirty activity. We are very much like Peter, don't touch my feet as our initial response to this act of washing feet. Yet, the service and love portion is perhaps lost on us a bit, given that there is not some lowly position in our labor force in which people are given the task to wash feet. And yet that is the point, God in human flesh before the supper in which we are to eat and drink in remembrance, takes on the role of the lowliest position one could have as a servant or a slave. insurrection in deed, but not in the way the trumped up charges wanted the Romans to believe.

There is so much here that is simply astounding, and beyond comprehension, or at least tidy systematization. As the crucifixion looms and at our Good Friday service we adore the cross; debating substitutionary atonement seems to miss something. I get the rejection of it: More or less it was this exclusive theory and the early Covenanter's assertion that Jesus died out of Love that God had for Humanity not as the recipient of God's wrath in our place that the Covenang was born. Even so rejection of this isn't the answer. We can't get away from that Jesus' death isn't an accident, and it isn't simply about identifying with suffering. Ivan in the Bothers K shows us the weakness of that position as well. No, it was the plan, the Lamb of God was slain from the foundation of the world. We may not like it our attempts to systematically and theoretically comprehend it may land us in horrific ideological places, but without the cross there is no Resurrection. There is no life as Christians understand it without passing through this death, through Death itself. As the Orthodox Liturgy proclaims "Christ beat down death by death..." It seems we often in the US feel that we must chose between a theory of the atonement where God is the wrathful furious God who is only able to calm his rage enough to forgive by killing his Son (I use the male pronoun here deliberately), or something that equally reduces God and the cross to some equally ( in my mind) distasteful place of platitudes about God being with us in suffering. I'd say that these three days are neither simply about wrath nor about suffering, and yet about both and so much more.

We don't have to choose, rather we are called to contemplate divine love that is greater than what we can grasp, and at the same time face ourselves, our inability not only to comprehend but fully and completely live out this love that calls to us. No reductions here, only the massiveness, the awesomeness of something we are always already only beginning to understand and live out. And so we come and we wash and we worship and kneel. We weep with tears of sorrow and joy, and we wonder that through death somehow God has ended all oppression and injustice. God beat down Sin and death and freed us from their "necessary" dominion over us, and yet we still must choose and we so often choose death and our reductions over life and its infinity.

Reviewing this Lent on Holy Wednesday

2010-03-31T19:57:00.013-05:00

I did not, as is perhaps obvious, post every day, though of the last 42 days I have posted 20 times. I am not sure I am closer to the answers I was looking for when I chose to use posting to this blog as a Lenten discipline. Also, I failed in my goal. Also, I haven't written much explicitly on my vocation. I began there, but then I seems that most of what I have ended up posting has been a practice of being a public intellectual in the sense that i recounted here, and which J.K.A Smith talks about in the introduction to his The Devil Reads Derrida.

In this sense I suppose I have become aware of a good bit: there are a number of people who I know outside the interwebs who read this blog and appreciate my POV on things, actually appreciate is not quite right, if I am interpreting their feedback correctly over this period of more frequent blogging. Well it seems that when I write I give a perspective either that helps them give articulation to things they have been mulling over but not been able to give full expression or a differing perspective they find of interest.

I think I have learned a great deal from the post on McLaren and the Emergent church, both about the potential of speaking but also concerning my own hesitancy to speak out on such things in this public forum. But, I also am learning the need to reflect openly about what may lie behind a position I take, that is I suppose to practice an "archeology of knowledge" on my self. Which I'd argue is what we do when we stop and tell the story of our beliefs, intellectual positions, and philosophies and theologies. Perhaps not surprising to some Derrida continues to be a helpful companion in this. Though, not really because of his conclusions he himself seemed to have come. And he may think that I am not as ruthless as one could towards Christian orthodox doctrines. Yet, I find him helpful even there where I know he came to other conclusions.

This all still feels a little over exposed especially after posting this on Sunday. I feel a bit of resistance to what this all might mean. I am not really comfortable with what seems to be this public role as part of my vocation.

Is it that I'm not Listening or Have I Never Been Heard?

2010-03-28T10:56:00.019-05:00

I am trying to grapple with the Anglobaptist's response to and the conversation on Facebook around my recent post on Brian McLaren and the emergent church. I am realizing that this is not merely about ideas or rhetoric or history (is it ever).

I have drafts of two responses (and will post them soon). The first addresses the issue of rhetoric, and Mike Clawson encouraged me to look beyond the rhetoric of "new" and equivocal use of "Christian". I can't do so since the rhetoric means something, it is not merely ornamental, it forms perceptions it is part of the meaning, it is not merely a conveyor of a meaning that I can have apart from the rhetoric, even if the rhetoric isn't all McLaren is saying. The second is attempting to get at what might give the personal and emotive force behind my discomfort with this rhetoric.

The Anglobaptist in his brief socio-historical account of his own personal experience of the American Modernist/Fundamentalist split and controversy, is a beginning. I found it helpful, because I personally do not resonate with that story of needing to choose sides and now needing to somehow hear each other again. Being told I should listen to other's peoples saints and hear how they are possibly "orthodox" in their own way, makes sense and is painful to hear.

The reason for the pain is layered, bound up in the alienation of being an immigrant (Not literally myself). All of my childhood a much of my adult life I lived in immigrant churches, in a denomination that was and in many places still is Swedish. Now most of those churches were in various stages of assimilation, and mostly very late stages of that assimilation process, so one would look at them and simply say they were white churches. However, my father is a naturalized citizen, his family were displaced persons and refuges after WWII, as his parents were German missionaries to China, who for some sense of protection destroyed their German citizenship papers and documents and were made Chinese citizens, and then due to the devastation in Germany could not prove they were German citizens. They came to the states. My father was not treated well in his first years in school in the States, even though my father has a great deal of love for the US, he also told us those stories of rejection and alienation. My Grandparents also had stories as children and grandchildren of Swedish parents of discrimination and assimilation. Of course, as Northern Europeans, once the language (German or Swedish) was given up and cultural difference were relegated to family food traditions of Christmas, the privilege of being white was given without question. While I seem to be the few of my generation in my family to struggle with this, I have found it difficult to assimilate the pain of the immigrant experience, the cultural and religious identity passed on, and the fact of assimilation.

What all this has to do with the conversation around McLaren and the Emergent Church is that the tensions of this experience of immigration and resistance to assimilation, for me was lodged in a faith tradition and identity, one that itself may be disappearing. When the Anglobaptist talks about sharing our saints I wonder who are my saints. Other than Luther I don't know who my paternal grandfather's "saints" would have been. And for the Swedish and Evangelical Covenant side of my story I did not grow up with stories of "saints", we were good Protestants of a sort where the gathered people of God were the saints, the stories were communal stories. Though the Covenant does have it's "saints" though I first began to hear their stories late High School, early College in the midst of conflict in the covenant church we were members which was attempting to resolve the tensions of the Covenant immigrant identity and assimilate into the conservative fundamentalist end side of the American Protestant experience. However, I didn't actually discover our "saints", Waldenstrom, Nyvall, Lund, etc. until I came to North Park Theological Seminary and realized that all I had been taught by my parents and my Grandparents and church of childhood, was not accidental and merely communal but the intention of these saints, and intention that once in the American context was a refusal of the Modernist/fundamentalist dualism and controversy. So, Mclaren's attempted mediation, and even his questioning of a certain theory of the atonement prevalent in American conservative Evangelicalism isn't new. And I wonder, shouldn't those who are seeking mediation listen to these "saints" these Swedish immigrants who refused American definitions of Christian faith as a witness to another way? Is my criticism really a lack of hearing, or is it an attempt to finally be heard?

I have difficulty putting into words to what degree saying all this is frightening, and at the same time feels like I should just let go and simply accept, and that in comparison to others I have it well and other voices really should be heard rather than mine. So, many voices aren't being and haven't been heard. Then I wonder do I help those other voices by simply being quiet and pretending that the dominant American stories are mine, and simply assimilate and appropriate that dominant story as my own. So, I wonder if Mike and Robyn spoke past each other when Robyn asked where are the queer's and people of color in the emergent church conversation and Mike responded saying there were such people prominently part of the conversation at a recent emergent conference. Because I too could simply be part of the conversation, as long as I would simply accept the rhetoric and dominant religious story of the American context, and ignore that my particular story has not been told and no one actually knows my "saints". Can we who do not share this white Protestant story, really speak, is Brian Mclaren and the emergent church really making space for truly different stories. When I read Brian Mclaren, when I have attended local emergent gatherings, I truthfully have never felt I had space to truly speak in my native tongue or even give the time to translate my tongue into a common tongue. This is how I feel, perhaps I have misinterpreted, but I continually experience an unacknowledged difference. A difference that it seems I am to sublimate and pretend doesn't exist. So, I am speaking attempting to admit the tensions, the contradictions, and relative privilege.

Here's my Problem with Brian McLaren and the Emerging Church

2010-03-23T09:43:00.006-05:00

(I have made some edits to this post that will hopefully help clarify some of what I am saying here. LEK 3/26/2010)

I agree with a great deal of what Brian says about the Gospel in this video. Brian McLaren: Q5 – The Gospel Question | :: TheOoze.TV :: Emerging Church Video Podcast But I have so many problems with the beginning point and that Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism are his actual point of reference, but rarely overtly stated as such. This starting point then requires newness and rethinking. Brian McLaren's "New Christianity" ends up being either a fairly placid form of orthodoxy or a rehashed form of social Gospel and classic Christian liberalism (in its early stages perhaps). Much of the edginess and sense of excitement of the Emergent Church and Brian McLaren is due the keeping of the backdrop of the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy and specifically the Fundamentalist answer to that controversy as the only form of Christianity. The Tradition is still read through the lenses of American Evangelicalism. Granted for McLaren especially and many in the Emergent Church that is their biographical and existential starting point. Even so, frankly through this constant unstated referent, and the use of "Christianity" in away that really means Evangelical or Fundamentalist, the Emergent church excludes me, who comes to all these questions without ever having seen American Evangelicalism as definitive "Christianity".

In terms of this video, I wasn't taught mainly that the Gospel was about going to heaven. (And BTW while I appreciate the spatial metaphors of up and down, to continue to emphasize them and seem to use them exclusively just reinforces my sense of how McLaren is still stuck on a very small stage, and attempting to rewrite script and call it an original and new work.) Granted I was familiar with this opinion and many in the churches I grew up in believed the Gospel was about going to heaven, but it wasn't the teaching of the church or Christianity it was simply the opinion of some. Also, it is true that I have come to believe that the form of Christianity I was raised with had spotty resistance to Fundamentalist and American Evangelical Christianity, so that by now perhaps many Covenanters would think that this itself is the teaching of the Evangelical Covenant church or at least has been part of its tradition, even though it was imported as we assimilated into the American landscape.

So,Brian McLaren wants to redefine Christianity give us something new. But when he talks about what he is redefining what he is redefining isn't "Christianity" (whatever that may be) but Fundamentalism or simply American Evangelicalism, which has never really been my faith tradition. "Pietist Lutheran" Christianity was what I was raised on though no one used that label. This form of Christianity had a great deal of emphasis on how the Gospel had "this worldly" consequences and effect on the life lived. Now it wasn't a very political sense of the effect the Gospel should have in fact it was probably quite apolitical. But it wasn't escapist, and Romans was always seen as a robust and complex theological work, not well suited tot theological reductions of the Romans road, or any other quick summary. So when McLaren attempts to re-frame Romans as about the problem of Reconciliation, I respond with this is simply another form of reduction that mimics the reduction of Romans that McLaren is critiquing.

I can affirm the criticism of the reduction of the Gospel to "upward mobility", even against using Romans exclusively or primarily as the definition of the Gospel, but in my reading of the Gospel I find something exceedingly more complex than McLaren's interpretation of Romans and the Gospel, something not so easily molded into Reconciliation and inclusiveness. Something beyond exclusion and inclusion: something far more challenging. It's easy to talk about a new kind of Christianity when your old kind was itself a new kind of Christianity, that denied its newnes, and as such had a very narrow focus. The Gospel is expansive refuses reduction, can't be made into either a social Gospel- a Gospel of this world alone- nor an escapist Gospel of heading to heaven. In part because the Gospel is the story of God redeeming and transforming humanity and all creation because we failed, and continue to fail. (And I think McLaren would want to agree with this.) To accept the Gospel is to accept that we can't make the world better and to enter into the realm where God is transforming the world. That world is heaven, its not a location, the metaphor of up should read as transcendentally immanent (Up means God has perfect view/knowledge of the world, and a separateness from its corruption), especially when we recognize as Mclaren does in the video that Heaven and earth are being joined, Heaven is coming down to earth- Heaven is being fused with earth. But we can refuse this event this transformation. We can choose our solutions. We can still try to make our selves right and just outside of this realm of God's transforming work. To the extent that we do that we exclude ourselves from God's transforming and redeeming work accomplished by Christ on the Cross. This has been what Paul preached what the Church has taught, there is no need for a new kind of Christianity simply an acceptance of what God has done and is doing, a work that is always already new and ancient at the same time. The Fundamentalist and American Evangelical reduction of the Gospel simply has been a refusal to enter into that work in its full reality, it is not nor has it ever been Christianity in its fullness.

Thirsting for Beauty

2010-03-21T20:22:00.003-05:00

This past week has been kind of rough. Within three days of returning from my retreat at St Gregory's Abbey, I got sick, and was not all that functional for the next three days. In the illness and as I tried to make some sense of the Lectionary texts for the Fifth Sunday in Lent I found myself in a deep longing for things saturated with beauty and feeling that so little even that which purports to be beautiful is truly saturated in it. Mary's extravagant action of anointing Jesus' feet with very expensive perfume had me transfixed and the result of her action as described by John The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume." (John 12:3) In all my preparation for this sermon I tried to focus on Isaiah 43, or the Philippians passage, or both Isaiah and Philippians, but to no avail. This one verse describing Mary's astounding and seemingly incomprehensible act of extravagance wouldn't let me be. Mary just kept saying contemplate what I did there, take in the fragrance of Christs burial, take in the olfactory beauty.

Today as I was preparing for service and attempting to get some order to my thoughts for the sermon, I was astounded at how deeply I was longing for beauty and how despairing I was feeling that one could actually find things truly saturated with it. I was truly feeling a sense of a world devoid of beauty even as I reflected on things that I would usually think beautiful, or recent movies. It was quite troubling.

After service and weaving John 12:3 and Mary's action throughout a sermon in which I also touched on Isaiah 43 and Philipians 3:4-14, it occurred to me that this longing and desire for beauty to fill the world and feeling its absence, was a desert experience. Something to be expected to some degree in Lent, and in the midst of various forms of fasting and discipline. I am thirsty and hungry, as we are in the last stretch of Lent things are feeling a bit barren, I am finding this expressed in myself in this experience of a world devoid of beauty. So, we'll see what Holy Week and Easter bring. But until then I think I'll remain thirsting for beauty and finding a world devoid of it.

A day of contrasts

2010-03-16T21:24:00.003-05:00

This morning met with someone Kate has been saying he and I should meet. We hit it off quite well. Spent much more time over coffee than either of us expected. It was one of those mostly effortless conversations in which telling ones story lead also to mutual reflections on life God and self. This sort of immediate and deep connection with someone happens rarely for me, perhaps for most people I don't know. I am usually more cautious in getting to know people. Then at times I meet someone and for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I feel free and the other person feels free to say those things we don't always feel free to say to most people, or to express doubts, or questions that we don't generally get to express. In our midst there is an opening and a connection that is quite profound. It is perhaps relevant to note that one of the few times this has happened is when my wife and I went on our fist date, now 12 or 13 years ago.

I Came home from that meeting and ran some errands and did some other things related to the community and was going to work on my sermon and presentation for tomorrow evening on the Exsultet, and suddenly felt exhausted and a fever with a developing sore throat. So, it has been a last the pleasant rest of the day, and probably will go to bed soon, and am missing the One of the Girls gig I had planned to go to. Hope it was a good gig - I am sure it was.

A time of Surprises at St. Gregory's Abbey

2010-03-15T15:37:00.005-05:00

My retreat at St Gregory's Abbey I think yielded what I had hoped but not what I expected. I went with the intention to being open to God's leading in my role of pastor of Reconciler and prior of Holy Trinity. And I had a very gentle lesson in being open to what God might be doing in the moment when things did not go as I planned or necessarily wanted for my time at the Abbey.

Things did not go as I would have had them on my way and first couple of hours at the monastery. First I left about 15 minutes later than I intended, but I had planned to leave so as to arrive at Union station early. I did not leave early but with still ten minutes to spare, so more or less just on time since I needed to collect my tickets. It was a little nerve wracking but it turned out I had enough time. Then the train arrived on time and the monk who was picking me up was late and had been hoping he could count on that this line of the Amtrak tends to be late. But we had a quite tasty meal at an Indian restaurant in Kalamazoo. I think just about some of the best Indian food I have had, and that is saying something. This was my first surprise. I had not expected to find Indian food in Kalamozoo that rivaled what I have had in Chicago and L.A.

Once at the Abbey I ended up being locked out of my room because house keeping didn't unlock the room until I had been at the Abbey for an hour and a half. This disrupted what has become my pattern: unpack, make bed setup the desk for study, then go to the church to pray and ask the prayers of St Benedict, St Gregory and Virgin Mary for my time at the abbey and then to the library and check some books out. Too my surprise, once I established that I was not going to get right into my room, I was able to settle in anyway, went to the church and prayed and came back and read a book I had brought along until the bell rang for None. After None I was able to get into my room and settle in the rest of the way.

The most surprising thing was that I was more social than I usually am on such retreats and it enriched my times of silence meditation and reading/study. The first night after supper I ended up talking for about a half an hour with one of the other guests, who seemed like he needed someone to talk to. Then the evening Kate arrived one of he monks, Br. Cuthbert took us into town to meet up with mutual friends of ours who live in Three Rivers, Rob and Kirsten VGR. Friday was the Feast of St Gregory, so there was not only a celebratory feel of the day but there is conversation at meals (usually we eat in silence as one of the monks reads from a book that has been selected) and at supper guest and monks sat at the same table and at both dinner and supper there was beer and wine to drink. All very festive and I played darts with another guest and some of the monks in the refectory. In the midst of this celebration I also did a good bit of studying and of course there is still the Divine office though some of the Hours are combined but the day is still punctuated withe the Hours of prayer. So even in the midst of finding myself interacting more with other guests and the Monks it did not detract from the other reasons I came for there was the time and opportunity for them as well.

On the whole the Feast of St Gregory that was the most surprising. It was a day that felt so full of a pure joy I have rarely if ever experienced. At diner at midday on Friday as we the guests sat at our table and I watched and heard the Monks at theirs, I caught a glimpse of a larger feast going on around and in the midst of us, one that ours was a sort of shadow. Or I could just make out the saints there celebrating with us, St Gregory and St Benedict and the Virgin laughing with the monks, Jesus Christ carrying a glass walking about in our midst. Even felt this in the evening meal though for some reason not as deeply. However, I partied with the monks (yes monks do party especially on the feast of their patron Saint.) and it was among the most purely joyful times I have ever had in my life. Makes most parties I have been to seem dreary places to tell the truth.

I had no great insights to my situation from this time but I feel more open to what God has in what lies ahead for the congregation and the community. Also, feel a little more attuned to the roles and various involvements and connections I have here in Chicago.

Oh, a side note to conclude. In playing darts, I won the game we were playing and for a time it was Prior Aelred and I neck and neck so to speak, but I got the final bull's eye that won the game. So I beat out the Prior of the abbey in a game of darts. I mostly think that is all kind of funny and silly and that was part of the joy and surprise of this retreat.

Resurrection Insurection?

2010-03-12T08:32:00.000-06:00

This latest Emergent Church Tour is interesting but I am skeptical. No I am hesitant and a bit puzzled by what exactly this all needs to be said. not sure who is being addressed by such a tour. Certainly not me, though I am probably going to the Chicago stop, because I just need to see one of these Emergent events up close and personal.

The tour website says this about itself:
"The task today does not lie in some naive attempt to return to the early church.

The church before Constantine.
The church before Platonic philosophy.
The church before Paul.
The church before...

For these moves fail to bring us back far enough.

Rather we must call a new army of agitators into being. Dissidents courageous enough to return to the event that gave birth to the early church. A new breed of individuals brave enough to turn back so as to advance."

A part of me really resonates with this except for the suspicion this is the simple sign of a Protestantism that has exhausted itself pretending it still has energy to continue on as a separate thing without consuming itself.

Does this really get beyond the logic of return to that pure origin? Must we not renounce the idea of going back far enough. And in the end insurrection against what or whom?

Is the Resurrection a thing, and event, or is it in itself that turn, that hinge of history, that place that transfigures all places and times, and in that transfiguration will in the end consume all that is not of the Resurrection?

I feel that this leads to preposterous theological gymnastics, to achieve what Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism have without such agonizing rhetoric attempting to be hip and faithful at the same time.

I say all this as one who respects many in the Emergent Church movement, who at times suspects that he really is Emergent when it gets down to it, and who is also trying to find a way for Protestant faith to be truly orthodox. That might just be a preposterous idea.

The Gaze of the Lense and the Visual Politics of the Prayer Vigil

2010-03-10T22:54:00.000-06:00

The Organization of the North East (ONE) and The Edgewater Community Religious Association (ECRA) held a 30 minute prayer vigil Monday March 8th, outside the Somerset in response to the 30 day notice given to residents as it is being closed down. The Somerset is a home that has been the residence for nearly 300 people living with mental illness. Here is a Chicago Tribune Article on the closing On March 9th we met with Alderman Smith and were able to get a greater sense of what was going on and assured that the needs and desires of the residents where being addressed and that mental health workers were involved in the transition. While the moving of the residents was happening rapidly it was not indiscriminately and without regard to the needs and desires of the residents.

Though my thoughts are more on the prayer vigil itself, and the role of the camera in meaning and reality creation. Not to down play the importance of the issue of the closing of the Somerset, I was at the vigil because I believe the importance of this. I arrived at the Somerset almost 10 minutes before the 5 pm stated start time of the vigil and the news trucks and camera's were there. I hadn't really thought about it but I realized that I hadn't thought about news crews being present, but that made sense. I approached my colleagues who had arrived before I and I was handed a song sheet and one had a tambourine. A few more clergy showed up from ECRA. 5 o'cklock had now rolled around and the pastors who were going to speak and pray were consulting to be sure all knew what they were going to do.

As the final preparations were made, and as the rest of the camera's were set up, I had the strange feeling that I was on a movie set, and I was an extra, with my colleagues who were going to speak and pray the actors with the lines. I was even handed by a "PA" the prop for the scene, a candle. We were even directed to move as a group to have the right placement in front of the Somerset so the cameras could get us along with the name of the Somerset in the shot. There was also a script, that those who spoke followed. Once we were done it was a wrap, and it was all over. It dawned on me that this prayer vigil was done for the camera.

There is some dissonance here for me, between the staged liturgy orchestrated for the camera, and the notion that a prayer vigil is a waiting and appealing to God, a watching (vigil) in prayer before God. While what we did seemed to be for and before not the gaze of God, but the Gaze of the camera, with the props the camera would recognize, with the scripted language that will appease an ear for sound bites.

Not to accuse my colleagues perhaps they were able to not be captured by the gaze of the camera and the ear of the sound bite. But I don't think I prayed to God there, I was too aware of that all this was scripted for the camera, that this was not a liturgy of worship of God, but a liturgy to appease the god of the dissemination of information and the god of being "on message". I understand the pragmatic reality of this, the need to mold an image (which was possibly not done very well, though we really probably needed more information to actually do have done that well, we were in part acting on partial and misinformation it seems.)

I left wondering why couldn't we have actually had a vigil planned spend hours in actual prayer not staged prayer for the camera, not banish the camera, maybe give a nod to the needs of image and the gaze of the lens and have some portion of the vigil ahve the orchestrated quality of the movie set rather than of the orchestrated quality of the work of the people in worship before their God. Perhaps if we had spent more time in prayer we'd have had a more reflective have allowed ourselves to see that we were acting on very little information, and really just reacting.

In the end I suppose I may be uncomfortable and oppose the use of prayer for such a specific act of visual power politics. It felt to me that the power of our prayer was sucked out that it had no life but the life the gaze of the lens would give it, and that seems to me to be walking a little too close to the line of idolatry. Or at least I could not escape at this prayer vigil the idolotary of the image of appearing to be in prayer in protest.

Lenten Retreat

2010-03-09T21:29:00.004-06:00

Since I have been a pastor Lent has always felt to me like a time to take a personal spiritual retreat. Yet, Lent always seemed ill suited as well, as one is also preparing for Holy Week and Easter services and as a pastor I wanted to also provide places for Lenten reflection and studies. It was difficult to let myself get away. Last year I finally simply went ahead and did it. And I discovered that Lent was a very good time for me to go on retreat. It got a little hectic after I got back because I took it the week before Palm Sunday. So I have scheduled the retreat earlier in Lent and this is feeling good.

This will be the longest retreat I have taken, 4 days. There are many things I feel I need to wrestle with God about. Also, Kate is coming along as she did last time, but by taking a longer retreat I am able to go for about a day and a half a head of her, and so will have about a day to pray and think before she arrives which I feel will be good. We'll see.

I will be praying with the monks of St Gregory's Abbey, I find it is very restorative to immerse myself in the full cycle of prayer and their life, well as much as I can as a guest. I actually like to get up at 4 am when I am there, and those who know me, know that I am a night owl, so mornings usually not my favorite time of the day.

So I am going to be away from the interwebs for the next four days. I have a couple of posts that I have been working on the past two days, and I will schedule them to post while away so you will have something from me to think about while I am away.

Preaching Repentance: is this Repentance?

2010-03-08T22:25:00.004-06:00

Sunday I preached on Repentance. Unfortunately it was not a very good sermon. Not my worst, I hope, but it was a bit disjointed and I did not communicate what I had hoped, actually dropped a whole portion of the sermon on Jesus parable of the fig tree and the gardener. If I am honest, it wasn't a good sermon because I was on the edge of my own understanding. I was preaching to myself as much to the congregation. There's something about repentance and the scriptures appointed for Sunday take me to the edge of my own understanding.

This reminded me that in may or June of 2008 I wrote about being on the edge of my understanding theologically. I think I am still there. Repentance challenges me, because I do not know how to turn wholly towards God. The longer I live and pastor and lead an intentional Christian community the more I know to the depth of my being that God calls me to turn myself towards God and orient my whole self and life around God. Yet, That is so far from the truth. And I resist this turning, I resist the call to repent, and in that resistance I can feel the presence of death. Such resistance dilutes me in someway, I am less vibrant, somehow less alive in those areas where I resist. Yet, I resist all the same. Parts of me disbelieve that to be wholly oriented and ordered around God and God's love is to have true life. Even though I experience this life in those areas of my life where I have turned from self and worldly expectations towards God.

So it turns out I was probably a bit conflicted about what I was seeking to preach. This conflict or perhaps more accurately my inability to recognize the conflict in the midst of sermon preparation to realize that I didn't believe some of what I was trying to preach. So I think I was preaching more to myself than to the congregation. I suppose that is bound to happen maybe even needs to happen from time to time. But at least in this instance it was a lack luster sermon

Weekend distractedness: Repentance and Enlightenment and a Birthday

2010-03-06T22:45:00.002-06:00

Well a sermon is rattling around and will eventually come out. Its on repentance. Leonard Cohen's song The Future has been playing in my head largely because of the part of the refrain "...When they said Repent, Repent, I wonder what they meant..." For a time I thought of using the song in my sermon but most of the lyrics would simply distract from the point I feel lead to make and that is that repentance is something other than avoiding the wrath of an angry god- something quite other.

Also, I can't get Jodorowsky's film the Holy Mount out of my head. I will need to see it again soon. The ending of the film and my sense that there isn't a take on enlightenment given in that film has me a bit distracted. I want to probe the film more. So, I am wondering what is the connection between enlightenment and repentance. Is there one, and if so what would it be. Certainly I don't think there really is a depiction of repentance in the film. But is repentance a particularly Christian concept.

And then there was simply a lot going on at the 'Nidge today. A great deal of activity and today was the birthday of one of our members and there was a party at an establishment near by and some were going to the Neo-Futurists afterward. I Joined the party for a while and had a couple of pints of excellent Belgian beer, but all of this is just spinning in my head. Well I was kind of hoping this might lead to some profound insight into what I am preaching tomorrow it has not so back to sermon work proper.

The Holy Mountain

2010-03-05T21:18:00.004-06:00

As I mentioned last night a group of us got together to view Jodorowsky's film The Holy Mountain, along with some excellent soup made by Benjamin, and Liz's bread was delectable.

One of the original trailers of the film says that nothing in your experience can prepare you for this film. But apparently a decent course of study in Religious Studies and mythology is pretty good preparation. Admittedly it is a well textured film and I don't think I got all the nuances and various symbolism.

The film begins with a man (who we soon realize is the protagonist of the film) lying spread eagle on the ground in a desolate landscape empty bottles of liquor strewn about him, his face covered with flies. Another man most of whose limbs have been amputated but who also has a certain shamanistic air chases away the flies from the protagonists face and begins to nurse him. Then naked children rush out from the landscape and they and the "shaman" carry the man off and while he is still unconscious hang him on a sort of cross and begin to throw stones at him. He comes to and chases of the children and then takes the shaman with him. This opening sequence is unsettling and as the beginning of a movie about the path of enlightenment makes a good deal of sense. Well in that one can get stuck and over think, attempt to figure out what the children mean, when the scene itself is one of the unenlightened soul, awakening to an unpleasant reality of the self mired in the world.

We then follow the protagonist through a puzzling and grotesque world that is similar to and very different from our own. But it in outlandish and disorienting ways presents a world of the passions and suffering and violence. In this world we find Christ crucified as a trinket to be bought and sold, by a nun/St Mary (a man in drag) and portly roman soldiers. Our protagonist is made drunk by these and then make a plaster cast of him in cruciform and they make hundreds of life size Christs and the protagonist awakes to hundreds of himself as Christ. He smashes them, all but one. then takes that one and carry's it. If one is not keeping up we have the awakening to the self through self denial and dying to the self, all while passing through and in some sense emerging from the world of the passions, violence and suffering.

Actually there is a great deal going on beyond this in terms of Jodorowsky's depiction of the world, including a reenactment of the conquest of Mexico with toads. and also a depictions of what Irigary called the homosexuate structure of patriarchy. But to get into all that would be to write a book on this film, and I am for now focusing on its main theme - enlightenment.

After passing through the world he finds a tower in which an alchemist lives who will be his guide up the Holy Mountain, bringing him to enlightenment. In the tower he goes through various initiations and purification, and then is joined with a number of the powerful in the world he has just left all of which are on a journey to enlightenment and to gain immortality. Each of these powerful are associated with a planet. It should be noted that Jorodowsky plays with the astrological as he has played with and will play with all the religious and mystical symbolism in ways that aren't necessarily consistent with the symbolism as they would function in their originating systems. Once this group seeking enlightenment and immortality has been formed by the alchemist we are taken upon various ordeals and our protagonist must give up anything that he has taken from earlier, his Christ consciousness, his shaman who firs awakened him. But a prostitute with an ape whom he met while carrying his plaster Christ follows him and those on the path up the holy mountain.

Just as all are going to make the final ascent, the alchemist says that they no longer need a guide, and leaves. The protagonist follows him and the alchemist tells him that he must cut his head off and he ends up cutting in two a lamb and not cutting off the alchemist's head. Then the protagonist is sent back to the world, to love and make a better world. meanwhile the powerful people make it to the summit to take on the 9 immortals, who turn out to be manikins and the alchemist, and then we are told that this all is an illusion and are shown that this is just a film and the shot pulls back to reveal the film crew and equipment.

The ending puzzles me in terms of what the film might tell us about enlightenment. Perhaps it presents a plethora of understandings of enlightenment and Jodorowsky simply makes the viewer choose. And that might be most telling. Where I went immediately was that Jodorowsky was saying that enlightenment is not enlightenment in the sense of Nirvana or the complete dissolution of self but an awakened engagement with the world based in love. But this as we talked after the film this was an unsatisfactory answer and there were elements of the film that certainly could make one discomforted by this conclusion. Another take is that enlightenment is just another way to seek power over others and the world, and as such, is as much an illusion as the the world of passion, violence and suffering. These two sort of make the film's theme as being about the impossibility or the unreality of enlightenment. A third meaning is that the path to enlightenment is still part of the illusion of self, that the path itself must be abandoned, to achieve enlightenment but in so doing one is perhaps left without away of knowing if enlightenment has been achieved. And lastly in my own reflection in the past 24 hours is that while the film has outlined a path of enlightenment, the film will not bring one to enlightenment, nor is it a proscribed path, in the end we the viewers must decide what to do with the film, its vision of the world, reality and illusion. At the end of the film we are at best only at the beginning of awakening.
(edited for clarity 3/6/2010, LEK)

Metablogging and Seeing Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain

2010-03-04T23:45:00.004-06:00

I have been posting more but not quite every day. Weekends seem to go by without my being able to bring my self to write a blog post. Last weekend that in part was due to helping some friends of ours in their move. The weekend before 4 of the seven members were changing rooms so that was a big move although all within the parsonage that we inhabit.

So there have been mitigating circumstances. but simply blogging more has surprised me a few people I see on a regular basis have said they appreciate my more consistent posting. I hadn't really expected that, in part because I don't feel I have said anything particularly profound or even revealing. Also, I am not all that satisfied with my style when I am simply shooting off a post.

Also, surprising is the response to the brief comment I made last week about enlightenment both here and on Twitter. Since my Twitter account talks to my facebook account that comment elicited an extended conversation on facebook. I have also had several conversations in person about enlightenment with people who read one or both posts. This brings me back to one of the inspirations for seeking to post daily in Lent: James K. A. Smith's description of his philosophical writing as diaconal, in the introduction of his collection of "occasional" essays The Devil Reads Derrida. The essays collected in this work he describes variously as Public Philosophy, Public Theology, or "philosophical reflection in the service of faithful discipleship." In so describing he sees the church as a "public", and thus seeing in part his calling to be a "public intellectual" for the church. On some level it seems to me that this role also falls to a pastor especially if that pastor like me is a student and a scholar by bent as well as by training. I have taken up daily blogging in part because I was convicted that I was tempted to shrink from this sort of role. I shrank from it in part because blogging at times feels a bit self-centered and vain. And I suppose it can be, though that isn't my temptation I think.

So, I will reflect in the next few days on Jodorowsky's film I saw tonight with some of you who are reading this. I'll reflect some more about enlightenment. As a foretaste: The Holy Mountain on one level could be seen as having an anti-enlightenment message, that is enlightenment at least if it is seen as that which would lead you to see living a "normal" life as an illusion. What was named as an illusion in the end was the very seeking after enlightenment. Or enlightenment is for the film, recognizing the value of life lived and not seeking some other reality or consciousness, but rather to be fully conscious to life lived with all its joys and sorrows and full sense of self. But I suspect that is not all there is. More to come

Praying the Psalms

2010-03-02T20:43:00.003-06:00

Since I began praying the Daily Office as part of the daily rhythms of the Community of the Holy Trinity I have been taking a journey of learning what it means to pray the psalms. Initially it was the struggle of feeling like I often was praying things that were not my feelings, or that did not match my life. Praying the Psalms was at first uncomfortable and ill fitting. I chafed at some of the violent language and the language of desiring God to save from and triumph over enemies. Aren't we called to love our enemies. Then I began to appreciate in a general sense how the Psalms expressed deep and a wide variety of human emotion and was even able to allow myself in praying the Divine Office to feel those emotions even if I didn't feel that way.

At some point I was able to admit that the violence and the emotions I wished to avoid when praying the Psalms were in me and were things from which I tried to hide and ignore. Once I accepted that these weren't just human emotions in general, but my own unwanted and troubling emotions I was able to offer more and more of myself to God in my prayers.

Overtime I began to find certain Psalms deeply intimate conversation with God, that somehow addressed and gave me words to address to God about my circumstances or a worry or concern. The Psalms were becoming deeply personal: others words that had been prayed by the saints who have gone before that gave me a language to offer my life up to God in ways that my own words could never communicate or express.

I have been living here for awhile, and it is hard to believe I at one time saw the Psalms as foreign strange and at times even repulsive they became my words of prayer to God.

Something happened this Ash Wednesday I stopped praying the Psalms for myself, and as I have been praying the Psalms since then I have been praying them for others. As I begin to pray the Psalm I have found a person or persons coming to mind and a sense that this Psalm is not only my prayer for them but their deepest prayer, that they may never think to pray for themselves. I now think it have some inkling of how one can pray the Psalter ones entire life, even praying the whole of the psalter each month or even over a week. I have stumbled upon a great mystery, something that makes me tremble a bit if I attempt to contemplate it to long. I haven't prayed for myself since Ash Wednesday. I trust that others are praying for me in ways that I could never do on my own. And this is the reality of the Church the Body of Christ, I have come to experience how Divine Office is the prayer of the church.

A Couple not so Radom Thoughts

2010-02-25T23:06:00.007-06:00

I don't think I have much to say at the moment. So just going to see what comes as I type. I am thinking and mulling over many things. There is the vision of Reconciler and my role as both pastor of Reconciler and prior of the Community of the Holy Trinity. Some of what I am puzzling through is that for me my being both pastor and prior effects my experience and interaction with both groups, yet does not seem to be that much in the consciousness of the members of Reconciler or Holy Trinity. So to some extent it seems at the moment that there is the vision and ministry of these two groups that in someways overlap, but for the groups are distinct and are in my being pastor and prior are united. There is then a sense that my ministry and call isn't defined by Reconciler or Holy Trinity, but that there is something else that encompass (at least) both. One thing I think I am having difficulty getting my mind around is how to honor the distinct vision and mission of the two groups and at the same time keep in mind my distinct ministry that is also bounded and defined by the vision and mission of these two institutions. And this isn't figuring it out how to make it happen but to give articulation of what simply is the case.

Also, I have enlightenment on the brain. There has been a conversation about enlightenment and the art and films of Jordorowsky. One party of this conversation was very much extolling enlightenment as nondual. Which seems to me to name enlightenment in primarily Buddhist or Hindu terms, in which ultimate reality or the source of all things is a non-personal absolute oneness. Which is not Jewish or Christian cosmology. Also, it does not seem to me that the enlightenment experience that surrealism seeks or seeks to produce or induce is nondual. In fact I would argue that it is very much a dualistic enlightenment experience. Which then makes me wonder to what degree surrealism is or is not still very dependent on Christian mysticism. Certainly it played a large(ish) role for Dali, though he is not the surrealist movement in its entirety.

Well that is it for now.

Thoughts After ECRA Meeting Today.

2010-02-24T22:38:00.003-06:00

Today was the monthly meeting of the Edgewater Community Religious Association (ECRA), an association of religious leaders of various faiths though mostly clergy of Christian denominations. We had a very large gathering today. Possibly the largest I have attended.
At this meeting one of the things that was discussed was the possible closing down of the Summerset Nursing Home in the neighborhood. Which actually brought up many concerns that we all had about the nursing care facilities in our neighborhood. the question I have is why I and the rest of us are only talking about this now that one of the larger facilities is in the news for violations and the threat of shutting down the facility? It does kind of seem that without the media attention our own observations and concerns weren't entirely observable and noticeable to ourselves. this seems a tad strange and there is something wrong about that.

I ask this because I had concerns due to people I have met and had coffee with who are in one or more of some of the nursing care facilities, and had discussed it with people but nothing more. I personally wasn't sure how to move forward. But something did seem to change in my sense of the issue as we discussed the news reports and talked about steps we could take to bring attention to the larger issues than just what has been in the news over Summerset.