Fit? Tellign my family's disruptive story of faith

Micah Bales Letter to Post-Evangelicals struck a chord with me, though I don't quite feel the need to address post-Evangelicals.  What I connect with is having a family and personal faith story that doesn't quite fit neatly into the categories of American Christianity.

The source of this difference as I read Bales blog post is around decisions his parents made around class, race and homosexuality.  These decisions set themselves off from both Modernist and Fundamentlist understanding of Christian faith.  My parents also made similar choices and decisions around these questions (this post will mostly deal with class and race, how my parents navigated homosexuality and human sexuality will be addressed in a separate post), though in a less dramatic fashion and with less decisive conflict, yet the choices and decisions my parents made and where they allowed themselves to go and be taken in the course of my childhood and youth, meant the faith I received had a radical tinge.

The first decision my parents made that set this other path for myself, was their decision to get married.  My mother and father met only shortly after he and his first wife had been divorced.  In the late 60's in the Christian circles my parents existed in divorce and remarriage was viewed as sin. The plain meaning of Jesus's own statements on this are quite clear. My mother tells the story of having returned home for Christmas and discussing possibly marrying my father with her mother. My grandmother was opposed to the possibility, as I recall my grandfather wasn't excited but was willing to leave it to his daughter to decide what was right.  The night before my mom was to return to Chicago my grandmother told her that if she went ahead with the relationship and married my father she would be in sin and that my grandmother could not condone the marriage to a divorced man, it was adultery (after all Jesus says so.)  My mom prepared to return to Chicago to tell my dad she would not marry him and call of their relationship.  The next morning my grandmother told my mom she had been praying the night before and God spoke to her and said that she should not oppose the marriage.  As I understand it that didn't settle it for my parents but through wrestling with Scripture their hearts and consulting Evangelical Covenant pastors whom they respected, they decided it was good for them to be married (Their struggles and the mixed ramifications of divorce and remarriage are another story and not all for me to tell.)  So began the adventure of my childhood.

As I came around and for the first two years of my life, ours was a suburban and solidly middle class life.  We went to church and were involved in a Covenant Church, my father owned his own Tool and Die business that was relatively successful, and my mother quit teaching when I was born.  My parents felt a call to something more and specifically my father felt called to return to school, and to go to seminary (feeling called to work in churches as a director of Christian Education).  My father sold his business, and they sold our house and went to a Mennonite Brethren college and seminary (Fresno Pacific College and Seminary) in California near where my grandparents had a farm, and we went and lived with my mother parents while Dad went to school full time and helped out on the farm.

As he completed his degree and began to apply for positions of Director of Christian education, few churches would consider him as a divorce, and even those who would offer an interview, the divorce stood in the way except for churches where he wasn't interested in serving.  So he returned to tool and die and manufacturing. Which lead us to France.

In France we chose to attend a international (many who were international students at the university) and multicultural congregation that was a missionary congregation lead by a Baptist missionary couple, in Bordeaux.  Our worship was in French but we worshiped not only with French but expats like ourselves from other countries, mainly African is my recollection. This, like so many of my parents choices weren't presented to us as choices. Even as I write this I have difficulty crediting anything special about this. However, because of this congregation we joined, France for me wasn't simply being acculturated in French culture (my sister and I went to French schools, and it wasn't long before my mother would sometimes overhear passer's by wonder what that American woman was doing with those French children), but in a different culture I encountered as equals those who weren't European or White.  I met and they were friends of my parents people from India Africa and the Middle East who back in the states were people to whom we sent missionaries.  In this congregation they were leaders and even from families who had been Christian for several generations, like my own family.

Returning from France my family chose to live in a house that was near the wrong part of the country, an unincorporated town called new London where many poor, White,and Latino (mostly Mexicans) lived.   Again my parents made little of this decision, and even down played it, the house was what we could afford and we new the landlord and his extended family.  I was never told to avoid certain people, and made friends with the children whom I went to school and  wholived in new London, I had them over to our place, and even brought some of my friends who didn't go to church to our Covenant church. Unfortunately , a significant minority of that congregation made it clear that those people (poor Whites) weren't welcome and were even possibly a bad influence upon me (so I learned from my parents later) but it was clear to me that my friends weren't entirely welcome and they felt it too.

When I was Twelve in the middle of the year, we moved to Los Angeles (Carson, a city neighboring on Compton, in Los Angeles county).  Again my parents gave rational for their choice as being largely economic and pragmatic, a house in a Whiter and more middle class part of L.A. county wouldn't have been as nice or as large.  I went to a large school (from a country school made up of White and Hispanic) to a school with variety of ethnicities.  I was befriended by Samoans. As White, I was in the minority.  We went the closest Covenant church that was in a Wealthy part of the South Bay, but because after we visited the church my sister and I wanted to be part of that church.  So, our church experience was majority white still, though, significantly my parents were friends with the few people of color that did attend the church.

Just before my sophomore year of high school we needed to move and we were in a better financial place, and could have moved into predominantly White parts of the South Bay, but we ended up renting a house in one of the first deliberately integrated housing developments to be built in L.A. county (by the 1980's that had been many years ago), so by my parents choice, we continued to live in racially and ethnically diverse context. When my parents were able to buy a place during my Jr year of high school they bought a house in that same neighborhood.  Our next door neighbors were African American and we got to know them fairly well, but on Sunday we'd drive to our predominantly White church and they'd drive to their African American church.  One of my best friends in in High School was Black, we didn't live near each other he rode a bus to school, I walked. We never went to each other's churches, but distance wasn't the only reason. Because of the choices my parents made, I experienced the divisions within American Christianity through being socially and economically close to people of color, but experiencing the divide on Sunday morning. My parents never questioned this, after all it was how they knew American Christianity to be. My Grandfather pastored a German congregation in Chicago, other Europeans weren't even members.  In the 1970's and 1980's the Covenant was becoming more ethically diverse, but my mother's experience wasn't of worshiping with other white people but other Swedes in the Covenant Church, but due to my parents choices this way things were was dissonant, and remains so.

Because of my parent's choices and sense of calling and following Christ, Church and Christian faith had little if anything with enclave of sameness and safety.  Thanks to their decisions and lack of fear, thanks to their faith and willingness to follow God in even the mundane and practical, I have long been with and known personally those others fear, or have kept at arms length.  I have also seen how Christians can reject and exclude, and my parents allowed me to experience the pain and helplessness surrounding that exclusion.  Thanks to their decisions and choices while White, my formative experiences weren't only of a White and privileged world.  My faith was able to form in a much more diverse and complex and multicultural environment than many a White evangelical, where the experience of the other is on mission trips. But it was all so very normal, that even to this day I have difficulty seeing just how those choices make a difference, except when I seem not to fit into the categories of White American Christianity.

Advent Reflection: Had we fallen asleep on our watch?

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.

Election Day Reflections

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.

Returning to Church: what does it mean to Join?

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.

Praying the Psalms

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.

Evangelism, Church or to dechurch

(Editorial note: published before rereading and I was quite muddled at points, edited for clarity 8/13/2009 8:15 pm. LEK)
Last night, I went to a presentation at an Episcopal Church on Evangelism by the Episcopal priest who (along with Tripp) thought up the idea of an ecumenical congregation that became Reconciler, David Gortner. Essentially he said that evangelism is not a programmatic thing but a Spirit empowered and lead relational activity of Christians consisting in listening and conversation born out of joy and gratitude. As a spiritual director this sounded somewhat similar to spiritual direction, another spiritual director,who is also the priest of parish that held the seminary, made this observation during the discussion as well.

As a basis for his discussion of Evangelism we read the passage from Acts about Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch and the passage of Jesus with the Woman at the Well (St Photini). This is fairly standard in my experience in talking about Evangelism and I have seen these texts used to back up most approaches and methods of evangelism. It was pointed out that these stories of evangelism happen while traveling,(going out where people are) and that they are conversations in which much listening happens as well as naming the holy in the persons life or story. Lastly ordinary things, things that are at hand are used to convey meaning due to that ordinary things are already filled with meaning.

What has stuck with me the most was his he directing us to think about joy wonder and gratitude as the place out of which evangelism should take place. Commencted with this that David sees evangelism as a spiritual practice. The Spiritual practice of evangelism involves three steps:
1)Remembering joy wonder and gratitude, as those who have encountered God in Jesus Christ.
2) Speaking of this joy, wonder and Gratitude, with fellow Christians and those outside the church.
3)As we meet others and converse with them listening for the holy in their lives.

About the other half of the time dealt fear and dread that come with the idea of evangelism, the ways to address this and the state of the church and the Episcopal church in the US. I am now a bit fuzzy on this portion, in part because it was directed at an Episcopal audience and partly because it was not clear where exactly this all was going (admittedly we did not get to some role playing exrecises that might have clarified things). though, I also wonder if by addressing anxieties around evangelism and institutional barriers to evangelism lead to comparisons between the Episcopal church and other more conservative bodies that either seem better at evangelism and/or are seen as growing. This line of conversation was reinforced by David giving statistics about the decline of the number of Christians and religious.
In all this the seminar lost a bit of focus for me and seemed to be dominated by concerns of retention of members and why denominations are shrinking, and specifically what needed to be done. This was not entirely David's fault it was where people were at. I certainly understand this anxiety though where I am at with Reconciler it is more simply facing the fact that at least for the context the two passages shared since they end with the Ethiopian eunuch being Baptized and St Phontini spreading the news about Jesus in her town all in one sitting for both stories don't quite fit my context. I am involved in the sort of activity David sees as evangelism, and the case of St Photini is the most similar to my context but the conversation is something that is extended over much more than an hour conversation or even a day, more like months and maybe years.

The other thought I came away with that connects up with something David said as an aside about evangelism bringing about conversion in us as Christians as well as the one evangelized; the sense of evangelism as spiritual practice that David is advocating actually calls for the evangelism and conversion of most Christians. Part of that conversion seems to let go of denominational identity and stop trying to make Episcopalians, Methodists, Covenanters, Baptists etc, and focus on sharing Gospel as it has been handed on for 2 millennia. This means learning to become intimately familiar with the Tradition, and not just our own denominations, and certainly going deeper than the Reformation. And now I am sounding like the various essaysists in Remembering our Future: Explorations in Deep church.

Even if the ending of the seminar with David last night lost me a little over all it has got me thinking and got the Anglobaptis ruminating as well. But I also wonder at the insistence that evangelism is not institutional, and that institutions got us to where we fear evangelism or fit it into a narrow program. Now let me say that I agree with David that evangelism can't be a program, this has been a long held belief of mine. However, even as a relational organism the church is an institution, the basis of its worship was instituted: we speak of the institution of the Eucharist by Christ (though as with most things many dispute this assertion, but I don't hold with those). Baptism was instituted as the means of entrance to the church, most denominations and the Ecumenical convergence documents still hold to this. These things are not the reasons we have difficulty with evangelism. I think we need to be more nuanced in this ubiquitous tendency to blame institution for all our problems, and think that "organic community", whatever the hell that is, would solve all our problems. Now admittedly I obviously don't think the institution of denominationalism is a good expression of the institution of the church, though churchly things may happen in denominations, they are not the church. I'd say, this is the problem not the institutional per se. When Tripp speaks of "institutional loyalty", I think he actually means denominational loyalty, though he also as a Baptist may mean congregational loyalty. But The problem isn't necessarily loyalty but a loyalty in the place of Christ and the Body of Christ. For instance demanding Loyalty to the Evangelical Covenant Church even though one knows that the Covenant church isn't the Body of Christ in its fullness. I am not sure right off hand what all is actaully wrong in denominationalism beyond the problem of loyalty, but I am quite certain it isn't the institutions of the sacraments, nor is it anything that helps us hand on the Gospel, ie Tradition. But in the end I think David Tripp and I are in agreement, this way of thinking, seeing evangelism as spiritual practice, and a Spirit lead and filled activity of listening sharing and naming first requires we evangelize ourselves and our own conversion. This itself may be a long process, especially as we Christians seem hang on to our anxiety about our loss of significance in the cultural and societal landscape, and in someway trying to find our way back to that influence. Granted it is an unfortunate reality that some (possibly looking like many) of our parishes and congregations will find themselves unsustainable. This is painful for those Christians and their pastors, and it is a threat to the continuation of some denominations. It may not be so dire but that fact that we all seem to know something is wrong and yet don't really want to ask some very fundamental questions like "is denominationalism really a good thing?", don't leave me too sanguine for the larger picture. Except in the cases where Christians are actually looking beyond survival and asking what it means to be Christian. I may disagree with many peoples answers at the moment, and tend to look to those aspects of Christian faith that can show some continuity that goes deeper than 500 years ago. What I found helpful and clear in Davids seminar was where it asked us to reflect on what it meant to be a Christian in action and relationship in the world. The rest was fascinating statistics and distractions.

Ps. I'll post more on this but on the way to my "office hours" for Reconciler having been reflection on evangelism all day and remembering my joy gratitude and wonder, and looking for holiness in the world, had three people talk to me on the way to the coffee shop. Granted I was wearing a colar as I usualy do. All three were in some form of need and a bit off, and a challenge to in relating and conversing. It leads me to an other reason why many people avoid this sort of attitude towards Christian faith it lead you into some strange places and to find oneself out of one's depth.

A quote on Church evangelism and worship.

So, I have been attempting all week to post something but what I have attempted to write was still not ready to post. Couldn't find that place between posting something that could give some idea about my thoughts on some things I ahve been reading and short essays that really need more work and may or may not work for this blog.
So instead here is a quote from the last essay in Remembering our Future: Explorations in Deep Church.

"Church is not another organization primarily committed to individual or community development. It is a community of worship who express their love and gratitude to God. Worship is not the method of evangelism it is the sacrificial offering of the community in love with their redeemer and their creator; it is the spirit-filled response to a gracious invitation." Mark Wakelin "Education, Discipleship and community formation" (pg. 224, Remembering our Future)

I think I mostly agree with this, though I may nuance things a little differently.

PS. this is an interesting collection of essays of evangelicals and charismatics, mostly British who are attempting to get at Emergent questions and critique evangelicalism and charismatic renewal from the perspective of Tradition, or what they are calling Deep Church.

Ships, Airplanes and Denominations

(Edited for clarity 5/19/2009, LEK)
As I was following links in various blogs the other day I ran across this interesting post on conveyance metaphors over at Father T's blog. He is commenting on this article over at Episcopal Life On Line. Father T is commenting on the author's questioning of the ship metaphor and his suggestion that we may need to change our conveyance metaphors to airplane metaphors since few people use ships as a means of travel while most do use airplanes. The questioning of metaphor is a questioning of denominational identity loyalty and the fierceness with which Christians including mainline and liberal Christians hold their opinions.

Given my conversation with the Diocese of Chicago the following observation caught my attention; "The [Pew Forum's]survey points up an interesting countertrend worth pondering. The one bright light of significant growth in the mainline group of churches is – are you sitting down? –"nondenominational.
We might summarize the trends the report identifies in a simple statement: The denominational structures that we inherited, those traditions once central to shaping our identity and sense of community, are answers to a question fewer and fewer people are asking." While I am not found of the label "non-denominational" and we have avoided such terms as non-denominational, inter-denominational, or post-denominational in our self-definition at Reconciler in preference for the label "ecumenical". However, I have to admit that most of those who come through our doors either just for one visit or who end up staying around do really fit the label "non-denominational", and this has influenced how Reconciler has developed as a congregation. Though I was arguing something similar to the above article though it seems that the author like the Canon to the Ordinaary can't quite envision a strong Christian identity that is that is strong but not denominational and also welcoming. We the pastoral team of Reconciler have always sought in working with those who can be called post-denominational or "non-denominational" to offer a strong identity grounded in a broad ecumenical orthodoxy.

I ultimately though find the article heading in a direction I think is mistaken: seeking to find a firm distinction between form and content, through setting in opposition "church" and Gospel. The Gospel should in my opinion produce a particular form, that form may have a certain malleability, but it also can't take on any form. For the Christian faith I insist that message and medium are closely linked. The division of Christianity up into distinct groups we have come to call denominations is it self our failure to truly embody the Gospel, and is to have legitimatized what Paul criticizes the Corinthian church for doing: thinking that they were being faithful by claiming to be primarily identified with one or other of the apostles or itinerant preachers of the Church, which ends up essentially displacing our proper identity with Christ and the universal body of Christ. (1 Cor. 1:10-17) So, I do not believe that denominations need to change and hold more lightly their identities simply because the surrounding culture fails to find value in those identities. Rather, I believe change needs to happen because I see in the surrounding cultures reluctance to embrace denominational identities a true insight into the nature of the church and the Gospel, and thus a recognition that denominational-ism compromises that nature.

priestly Goth Preaching chronicles, XIV

Last night I met with someone who has come to Reconciler a couple of times in the past few weeks. We had a good conversation. We talked about where we each have lived, how we came to our current vocation, film, churches he has attended, and the community and Reconciler of course. Two things struck me as we each returned home from Kopi Cafe: We did not talk directly about God and I did not talk about Reconciler except in terms of how it has effected my life. He talked about the leaders and people who had been in churches he attended - talked about how they impacted his life or their quirks from which he learned personally. He didn't ask me about our vision, or ecumenism, and I didn't try to get him to tell me what he thought of the church or what attracted him etc. In other words we had simple conversation that one has when you have recently met someone and you have the chance to sit down with them to get to know them better. It just so happened that the reason we were having this conversation was because he had come to the church and I was the pastor of the church he has started attending.

This does authentically reflect my sense of faith and God and life, they are simply intertwined and it isn't always needful to make it all explicit and overt. Church is part of life and is about relationship. Yet, even I can forget this sometimes. There are pressures, for church to be part of life there are structures to maintain, and if no one comes or shows up, then there isn't really and church. These pressures at times can on one hand cause me to do too much, to push when I should just let things be, but on the other hand it can keep me from taking the initiative or offering something. I do this because I am thinking about church in terms of finding ways to get people to come or to get people to stay once they come. One way I am wondering if I do too little is in the area of contacting people after they visit and leave us contact information. It has been our practice to e-mail or mail a letter of welcome to our visitors and then wait to call them until they have come back again. I don't want to seem pushy, yet if I truly believe that church is part of life and is about relationship, then someone who has visited us has shared a significant moment with us, and to simply let that pass with a short note may not acknowledge all that might be there. There are a number of reasons someone may have come on that Sunday, taking the extra effort to call and offer to meet with a person after visiting communicates perhaps a caring for the person who came and for that moment whatever it may have meant to the person to the congregation. I don't know if such a policy will mean that more people who visit us will end up returning and staying, but it may make entering the congregation a little less daunting and a little more like beginning a relationship than entering an organization disconnected from life.

Tangential Sermon thoughts: Hermeneutics, Faith and Politics

An acquaintance and colleague of mine sent out a reflection on the lectionary texts for this coming Sunday, specifically Genesis 17 and Romans 4:13-25. These passages are about Abraham and the promise of God, and faith. My colleague in this e-mail says that given the entire story of Abraham he must disagree with Paul, claiming that Paul's account of Abraham's faith as hoping against hope and not wavering in faith contradicts the story of Abraham found in Genesis. I assume in interpreting Paul that he knew the Scriptures, and I agree that in this knowing well the Scriptures he also takes what some may consider questionable hermeneutical moves. However, I do not think that Paul is ignoring all the failings of Abraham nor ignoring the way the story seems to indicate he doubted or attempted to make good on God's promise on his own terms. I think Paul challenges our notion of faith, and the righteousness that comes from faith. Clearly faith did not make Abraham perfect in all he did. In fact I think Abraham's failings are part of what lead Paul to make the grandiose statements about Abraham here. The perfection of the Law isn't in these story's. It seems tome that if we see Paul's statements as contradicting the story of Genesis is to have faith become a work that perfects us and makes us righteous. However, if we take Paul's account of Abraham and the Genesis stories with all Abraham's foibles and false starts, what we see is someone who is consistently open to God, and to submitting to the will of God. Abraham in the midst of all the mistakes is still the object of God's faithfulness. God is faithful through Abraham in these stories. Faith is not something without doubts or failings but something one has in the midst of human messiness, which is another way of saying that faith is not a work. The faith of Abraham that is accounted righteousness then is not perfection but an attitude of the person, a disposition towards God that is open to God's faithfulness, regardless of the mistakes one makes or the doubts one has. If Paul's account of Abraham means that Abraham was perfect or never doubted then it seems to me that faith is a work and would then be under the Law. This contradicts Paul's very point that faith is not under the law, this is freedom and the good news of faith in Jesus Christ. Rather what is being lifted up by Paul is the persistent and enduring faith of Abraham which bears out in the whole of his life even if at any one point we may judge Abraham lacking in faith and/or righteousness or perfection, but that's the point isn't it?

We also seem unable to see the persistence and the continuity of enduring faith of the Church when confronted with the failings of Christians and the hierarchy of the the church or of historical Christian societies and cultures. I am currently reading a collection of essays by archbishop Anastasios (Yannoulatos), Facing the World: Orthodox Christian Essay on Global Concerns. The first two essays deal with issues of justice one from the perspective of the Global Community and the other in terms of human rights. Anastasios in these essays is defending the resources in Orthodox Christian theology and faith for helping bring about a just Global human community and for the defense of human rights. In mounting this defense he admits the ways in which Christians, the hierarchy of the church, and Christian states and politicians have failed to fully live up to the ideals he presents as being the faith of the catholic and orthodox church. This is a very different attitude than I hear from many Christians who also see the the Gospel as a source for working for justice and human rights. Many Christians whether emergent, or mainline or liberal, or progressive I hear speak this way usually look at the failures as a means to show that we need to be suspicious of how the faith has been handed down to us. There are reasons for this certainly in the US, given that Fundamentalists have long claimed to be those who represent the true Christian faith and in recent memory (this was not always the case) conservative evangelicals and Fundamentalists have either allied themselves with forces that perpetuate injustice and work against human rights or even themselves, in certain cases, actively seek to undermine certain goals of human rights. It seems to me that we have simply accepted that these voices represent true Christianity and the faith as it is passed down. Rather than being suspicious of the Faith passed down to us we should be suspicious of the sectarian claims of representing the true whole. For Anastasios, while it is regrettable that Christians do not always live up to the goal, the witness of the Saints and other faithful Christians should be the place of our emphasis not on the place of the failures to live out the Gospel. On the other Hand, Anastasios also is pessimistic of the ability of humanity to achieve a just global community and a consistent defense of human rights on our own efforts of law and international declarations. He has a (I believe healthy and true) skepticism about human ability in terms of resolving the worlds issues politically and of the State being able to live out these things consistently. In this sense he has the reverse attitude of many people I know who are deeply skeptical about the church and Christians (with good reason I will admit) but who are much less skeptical about human ability through politics and the State. Anastasios witnesses to a faith in God who, through Jesus Christ and his followers who remain faithful to Christ, can transform the world (but whose hope ultimately lies not in the achievement of Christians but the work of God in Christ). While many Christians I know seem to have more faith in human beings and politics to make things right. And so we have to go out and do, do, do, and become righteous by working for Justice and human rights in part because the Church has failed. I don't find this latter position to be one of much faith, but of a certain desperation and a result of a failure of faith. Anastasios in faith says yes there were Christian emperors and they did not follow the ideals of the Gospel, but at the same time there were faithful Christians who like St. Chrysostom (and there were many others throughout history, known and unknown) who criticized and continually lifted up the truth of the Gospel and its respect of the dignity and freedom of all persons and its call for justice, but also in the evaluation that humanity is sinful and incapable on its own of doing justice and living out its life within the true an holy divine community. I find Anastasios' position one full of faith and lacking entirely in self-righteousness.

Midwinter Closing Breakfast

My experience of of Midwinter began and ended with the issue of contemporary slavery. As I noted in an earlier post my first Workshop was Dr. Boaz Johnson's seminary on Global Slavery. Today at the closing breakfast, Gary Haugen president and founder of International Justice Mission (IJM) spoke to us. The organization works to protect victims of injustice and oppression around the world and to restrain and bring the laws to bear on oppressors. His take and message overlaped and also contrasted with Boaz Johnson's. His message was to us pastors and for us to take home to our churches was that we the church were to be involved in what he called the adventure of working for justice and against injustice. He has seen that so many Christians in the states are like he was at 10 when his father and brothers climbed up Mt. Ranier but he fearful claimed that such a hike seemed boring and that he'd rather stay in the visitor's center while. Many Christians are like he at ten in the visitors center of the Christian life, while Jesus is going out into the world. On the other hand after he told some stories of slavery he admitted that it was easy to get overwhelmed and full of despair as the job seems to big. He then brought to bare on this the story of the feeding the five thousand. First, Jesus tels them that they should feed the enormous crowd, and then tells them to bring what they have to him. God doesn't expect us to perform the miracle but to be willing to bring to God what we have so that through us and what we have God can perform the miracle and transform the world and bring an end to injustice.

He gave us intensely personal message and largely telling of Gary Haugen's own story and journey in a sense and was impactfing. He did have to do what the head of any activist organization has to do is speak of action of the hearers and encourage participation in the politics portion of the activist organization and support the cause. Nothing wrong with this but it did strike me as a contrast to most of his message. It did the opposite of what Boaz Johnson's presentation did which was to connect our stories to the stories of the oppressed and to see how we were connected and to look for oppression and slavery in our midst as opposed to that which was out there and over there. On some level this was an invitation to the powerful not to step away from their power but to use their power and influence the more powerful to alleviate the wrong. And certainly not something to be dismissed, or rejected and yet it retains some of the power structure and form of the oppression and injustice being resisted, and it doesn't ask us to see how we are part of the problem that even our systems of economy, law, and organization of political power is bound up in the issue. Our story stays seperate in a sense from these other stories.

Clearly what Gary Haugen had to bring to Jesus Christ in facing the evil of slavery was his training and practice in Law and the Justice department and international law. And bringing that along with other also brining this an organization has been crated that is doing the work of alleviating the oppression of slavery and rescuing slaves. Yet, his presentation ignores that part of the disciples problem in being asked to feed the five thousand is that as people who had answered the call to follow Jesus closely as that group that simply followed Jesus around in his itinerant ministry, had given up their abilities to even pool together enough cash or resources to feed five thousand people. They no longer had jobs or careers that they could use to address the situation before them they had accepted a chosen poverty in accepting the call to Jesus. They brought the resources of a boy because they themselves as people who once had supported themselves with "jobs" no longer did. So the message here to a wealthy and powerful people may not just be bring what you have but are you asked to give up the power and resources that would allow you to help in the first place. Not to say that all are called to this, there are instances and hints that not all of Jesus disciples were called to this chosen poverty, the one who provided Jesus' tomb and some of the women around Jesus are such examples, and yet we have just read the stories in the common lectionary of Jesus calling people away from what could provide resources to alleviate pain. Jesus does not tell the Rich young ruler put your power and money at my disposal and dole it out over time, but to give up that position of power and influence and come follow me. I don't think this is an either or, but a both/and. And I think Gary Haugen could not have preached both messages today, and his story is of bringing his power and influence to Jesus and to bear upon this overwhelming reality of contemporary slavery. But I was aware that without the witness of chosen poverty and relinquishing completely of ones power Gary Haugen's witness and story distances us from those it creates a division, the helper and the helpless. Where as if Gary's story is just one option, one way and there is this other very radical and counterintuitive way of relinquishing the resources of the world to alleviate the pains of the world then there is no critique of the existing power structures that both work for and against justice, and alleviate and perpetuate these things simultaneously often.

My mind is full

Let's see where shall I begin. In September I have co-officiated at a wedding, been working as a temporary church administrator at the church the AngloBaptist pastors, lead a weekend retreat for that same church (I had agreed to lead the retreat late spring long before the Anglobaptist asked if I needed some temp work), lead the retreat for the Community of the Holy Trinity, all the while keeping up with my pastoral responsibilities with Reconciler.

In the midst of all this there is much going on around us, the Presidential race of course is in full swing and we are finding ourselves in an economic crisis that brings up comparisons to the period that began the Great Depression.
My mind is full because I am still trying to process my experiences leading the two retreats the past two weekends and trying to figure out what I think about this Presidential race and the economic crisis we are in.

Until, this week I thought I was balancing all this pretty well. This week I have found myself a bit of a muddle, finding it difficult to remember where I am or what I am doing. At one point I answered the phones at the church with "the Community of the Holy Trinity... Larry speaking how may I help you." As I said the last bit I realized that I had not said the right name of the church, and was about to correct myself when it turned out it was a member of the church who was also at the church retreat so we ended up having a good laugh about my not knowing where I was. I am finding that keeping the life, schedule and patterns of three different religious communities in my experience and head is to much for one person. It has been fun to work with the AngloBaptist again even as his support personnel, but I will be glad when they will not need me anymore.

Holy Trinity's retreat at St Gregory's Abbey in Three Rivers Michigan was an amazing time. We prayed with the monks and reviewed our Rule and life together. In that we discovered somethings about ourselves that we want to continue to do and do so with greater intention and recommitted ourselves to aspects of the Rule that we had not been attending to recently. I think the highlight for me was when Abbot Andrew came and talked with us, and gave us an excellent brief history of Benedictine monasticism and western monasticism, and also was able to learn about our group enough to give us some suggestions on how we might adapt aspects of Benedictine sprirituality and practice to our context.

Leading a retreat

This Past Weekend I lead the church retreat for the Community Church of Wilmette. Being church leader meant in this case leading a three hour session Saturday morning and the Taking part in the leadership of the Sunday worship service and preaching at that service. I enjoyed getting to know the 20 or so people who came up for the retreat at Green Lake Conference center in Wisconsin. Green Lake is a beautiful place. The story of the conference center is pretty interesting as well, and kind of amazing that the American Baptist Conference eventually got a hold of the property.
Well this seems to be happening lately I sit down to write a post thinking I had more to write than I do at the moment. I have many thoughts on the retreat and leading a retreat, but it seems they are still a little unformed to put in a blog post.
So this is more just letting you all know that one of the reasons I have not blogged in the last week to week and a half is that I was preparing for this retreat. i also caught a cold last week, so I was attempting to finish preparations for the retreat while being sick. Thankfully it was in its final stages by the weekend and I did not get worse over the retreat. But I was able to have a long nap Saturday afternoon which was a good thing.

Retreat at Abbey redux

Well it turns out that I had written a little piece about my time at St Gregory's Abbey before I left. I carry with me a notebook in which I from time to time will jot down some ideas for a blog post or write a sizable portion of a blog post when I am not near my computer. When I began to write some notes for my post on Take this Bread, I found what I had intend to post when I returned. So here it is a reflecting on my time at the Abbey written about an hour before I left the Abbey after Sexte on the 24th of June.

At the Abbey June 24th-
I will have spent exactly 24 hours at the Abbey. I traveled to Kalamazoo by train and was picked up and dropped off by the monks Brother Abraham and then Brother Martin. I felt less impacted by the environment of St Gregories because the ride from the train station to the Abbey with Brother Abraham was like entering a pocket of the monastery before arriving there.

I had several conversation that were all about the stat of Christianity in the U.S., with some of the monks and with a priest who was also on retreat there. From these conversations I am concluding that there is a neare universal response to the continued transformation of the American religious context: get congregations and parishes to grow numerically. In essence to attempt to create some semblance of the peak of church attendance and membership in the period after WWII. This means that our focus remains as all of our denominations face decline (recently it has been reported that even the Souther Baptist Convention is not immune to declining numbers just not yet as serious as with "mainline" denominations) is to attempt to get our congregations to attract people to come to worship and take part in programs.

I wonder about this attitude because it seems to be partially based on the assumption or belief that church is merely a human institution that we have to convince people to join. We do not seem to believe that the gathered faithful are places of encounter with Jesus Christ and the Trinity Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We do not seem to really believe that our faith and health as church has to do with being filled with the Spirit. It seems to me that if that was our belief than "attracting" people would not be our concern but truly worshiping god and being formed into the holy temple the body of Christ and royal priesthood, that then goes out and proclaims the Gospel in word and dead. Now I can't guarantee that that focus will in all places and all times bring in the numbers. It seems to be true that at times people don't want or don't think they want the Gospel, and an encounter with the God who became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. Acts Certainly indicates that one can have both amazing numerical growth and complete rejection of the Gospel and everything in between.

In our current context I think we should be asking oursleves if our worship is true worship- meaning not only a question of form but about whether we are living our lives out of that worship. We should also ask if our people are living out and thus proclaiming the Gospel. This should lead us to ask if our seminaries, priest/pastors, Bishops/Superintendents and other denominations leaders are in fact teaching the Gospel and the faith once delivered to the saints. However we will not find the answer to this question if we allow ourselves to be stuck in the categories of "conservative" or "liberal", or other narrowly conceived notions of Christian truth.

Well that seems to be what I was thinking about at least over my 24 hours, as well as writing on the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Reading Rowan Williams book Resurrection. I am not sure I know exactly where I was going with the above thought. And not even sure I would defend all that I wrote above but it was interesting to find this and also to discover that I had this thought and had moved on in a sense. Though I think it might link up in interesting ways to my thoughts on Take this Bread: A Radical Conversion. Thoughts anyone?

Prophetic Preaching and Obama and American Politics and Culture

Last Sunday we had a guest preacher from a congregation that has been supportive of Reconciler since its beginning and was the ordaining Congregation of our first Baptist Pastor Tripp. Her sermon was entitled "In Defense of Prophetic Preaching". On one hand she took the words of Jeremiah and of Jesus in the Gospels that are hard hitting and provocative, to give context to the type of preaching that has been excerpted and posted on You tube in small sound bites and broadcast across the TV News and blogs etc. She made the assertion that it is this prophetic tradition out of which Revs. Wright and Pfleager preach (she however did not defend the mocking). The sermon though mostly focused on that at times the preacher is called of God to say what is not popular what is provocative and will ruffle feathers especially when there is a world and a system that is not consistent with What god intends for the world. None of that to me was extraordinary or necessarily surprising or even unusual. But she said one thing that set my mind ruminating: she said that she felt that the controversy over Revs. Wright and Pfleager was due to our having forgotten the tradition of prophetic preaching. I am not sure that is true. Israel certainly had a tradition that was quite alive of prophetic proclamation and Jeremiah, Ezekiel Amos etc. were never really well received and their messages were seen as offensive and outrageous by a significant number of Israelites. No the problem with prophetic proclamation is that it tells us who think we are good that we have failed that our self-righteousness our self congratulatory stance on what a good job and what a great people and nation we are is false. Mainly because God has a higher standard than ours. So no, I think what is offensive about Wright and Pfleager is that they do in fact speak truth and do so in a way that makes us uncomfortable as did the prophets of the Hebrews. And as Jesus did. Even if you remember the tradition of this type of proclamation it doesn't make one want to receive that proclamation with open arms.

But I also think that Revs. Wright and Pfleager have in their association with Obama and thus sudden wide public visibility (both have been preaching here in Chicago in this manner for years without anyone really taking notice both occasionally are in the local news here in Chicago, but never about what they have said in their pulpits so far as I am aware). There is a sense in which from both the right and the left that when their preaching touches on politics and the American way of life that in an election year when they have connections to a Presidential candidate that they should tone it down a bit. That is they should be hypocrites, and stop saying what they believe because people will notice and not like or understand what they are saying, even though they believe what they are saying and have been preaching this way all along, and preaching in a political way. From the left they should do this so that Obama will not be tarnished by their words and thus Rev. Wrights words and beliefs are a detriment to Obama and thus he should hide them during an election season. While I understand that this is how politics works, to expect a minister with any sort of integrity to play that game is a little naive I feel and asking that minsiter to be a hypocrite. Of course from the right it is agahst that anyone can claim that America is anything but the "city set on the hill". First that is a nearly blasphemous claim and always has been second, if America is in fact pure as the driven snow a preachers words are hardly going to effect the truth. Of course the truth is that there is plenty wrong about the United States and it is responsible for both good and evil in the world and international politics Rev Wrights prophetic critiques should be allowable public discourse even if one disagrees with him and even if he is at points wrong or mislead or misinformed. In the end if our politics and public life are indeed robust and healthy than Revs. Wrights and Pfleager's preaching should be allowable public discourse even if on the edge of civility. The practical universal horor over their words shows that our public life and politics is entirely obsesed with image and facade creation and not with substantial debate and critique required for true democratic policy making and decisions. To get at truth takes both deep and soul searching criticism and debate as well as bridge making and compromise. If all we want is the image of the US or of a politician than we have no means of making a true choice about what his/her beliefs and policies truly are.
In the end I am disheartened that Obama has consistently tried to distance himself from Rev. Wright and Trinity UCC, surely as his conservative critiques claim he attend the church for so long because what he found at Trinity resonated with him and is something like what he believes, surely he hasn't been simply tolerating Rev. Wrights sermons all these years. No in the end in our political process and public discourse Rev. Wright and Trinity UCC were simply a liability to the Image Obama needs to project to win the election even though his true self may be closer to Trinity UCC than the image he needs to project to win the election and that division and the succumbing to the dominance of a projected image is a sad and unfortunate thing to see. It also shows that truth has no place in our electoral process.

The Sacred and Anxiety

A friend of mine and I have recently discovered that we have very different experience of a particular musician and composer. I believe Hhe composes and plays mostly music for worship and liturgical settings. We did agree on one thing though that some of the music reminds us of the band Dead Can Dance. Though we concluded different things from this comparison. I felt that the pieces that were like Dead Can Dance were doing similar things musically but did so less well, namely in conveying a sense of mystery and the Sacred. My Friend said that this music was like Dead Can Dance without the anxiety. This struck me because I have never heard anxiety in the music of Dead Can Dance.

As I thought about our differing experiences of both Dead Can Dance and the musician it occurred to me that perhaps I had not heard anxiety in Dead Can Dance's music because there is a little anxiety in my own understanding of approaching the Sacred or Holy. That this absence of anxiety may be why I experience less of a sense of mystery and the sacred in this music that is like that of Dead Can Dance. This fits with two thoughts I have long run with for some time that of Rudolf Otto's the Idea of the Holy and C. S. Lewis' comment that it is possible that God's goodness is in fact terrible to us. Key for me in my sense of worship and art that is worshipful is how open it is to the mysterium tremendum, the wholly other of the divine. I might assert that worship should not be free of some type of anxiety. I suppose I don't really have trouble with phrases like the "fear of the Lord."

What is further interesting is that if one would be able to go back in time and see the worship of my childhood one wouldn't see much sense of mystery or emphasis on the wholly other and awe etc. Lutheran Pietists very much insist on emphasizing the intimate relationship with God, which I also value when balanced with this other aspect of the divine. For me Christian faith is the balance of the intimacy of relationship with that which is wholly other than ourselves. Thus even that intimate relationship should unsettle us at least a little bit. I say all this because while I know my taste is part of my response to this particular musician, I experience something else. This isn't just that it is different from how I was raised (in some sense it might actually be very close to how I was raised), but I have always found something missing in the Covenant's sense of Worship or at least its practice (its theology of worship often does attempt to express what I am trying to get at.) God always and my relationship to God always has had for me something more than intimacy and familiarity. Otto and Lewis (and others) expressed things missing in my native experience of church and worship. Thus I have been drawn to the old European Cathedrals and the worship of the Orthodox Church. So, ya I guess a little anxiety in worship would be a good thing, and thus Dead Can Dance actually comes closer to the expression of the sacred that I seek in worship than this musician that at times sounds like Dead Can Dance.

Oh and I am not mentioning who this is because I have only listened to the music once, and so my impressions are only first impressions and before really critiquing and evaluating I want to listen more carefully. But at some point I may post on that here.

Maundy Thursday

Today is the beginning of the Tridium or the Three Great Days: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday (Easter vigil). Holy Week is full of interesting tensions. We walk and pray through the last days of Jesus before his death, we follow Jesus to the Cross watch the disciples fall away and flee, and yet we know that Easter is just around the corner. We are not surprised by this story. Yet, I never experience Holy Week and the prayers and liturgies the same. Each year these prayers and liturgies the events they recall and re-enact touch on my world and life ever so slightly differently.

I approach tonight's Maundy Thursday service and enter the Three Great days, with much on my mind and with carrying certain struggles and pain that members of our congregation are bearing. I am wondering about Obama and hope and all those who are hopping in his candidacy, wonder if our hope really is in us Americans as a united decent people. I wonder if "progressive" Christianity and Christians is really any better than the Religious right. I wonder about my identity and identities. With all of this I come to that Thursday of the command the new command, to love as Christ and God has loved humanity. Oh, we like to talk about love, but this Love we are called to, the new commandment, is a terrible thing. It lead Jesus to the cross, it was a love that his followers at the time could not and did not comprehend. This is not a command to join together in unity because we all are really decent people deep down. No this love loved even in the face of torture and rejection and hatred. This love the love we are called to gave up everything so that everything could be returned to its rightful and just and righteous place.

So tonight we wash feet as Jesus on that night of the new commandment washed his disciples feet as a symbol and reminder of that love and the command. I am called to lay aside my pride, my identities and follow Jesus to the Cross once again to be reminded there is only one place of true hope and it is not in politics or politicians or the American people or the goodness of Humanity, but it is in God and Christ and that Jesus died and rose again, victor over death. Victor over all injustice war, greed etc., all that sets itself on the path of destruction and inhumanity, which lurks in each one of us in our secret pettiness, our inner resentments and seeking to protect our precious identities.

Here are some interesting links that for some reason lead me to write the above reflection:
Pastor Gavin is is asking about Jesus and Heaven and Hell
The Young Fogey has some interesting posts and links on Obama and Rev. Wright
And then as many have noted We have just passed the 5th aniversary of the war in Iraq.
the Winged Man reminds us that a prayer for peace is a prayer for conversion
the Young Fogey gives an interesting list of lessons from Rob Dreher and other links on the war.
And Sister Julie posts a piece by John Dear SJ on how to live a peaceful life
edited 3/21/2008 And I had meant to link to two of Steve Hayes recent posts: One on the Iraq war and the other Frank Schaeffers response to the controversy over Rev. Wrights recent remarks.
Blessed Maundy Thursday. Lord Have Mercy.

Sermon Preached Sunday January 20, 2008

Bellow is the sermon I was a little nervous preaching yesterday at Reconciler. It went well. The manuscript bellow is not what I preached, I turned the manuscript into an outline and I think I may have ended up changing some of the emphases in the actual preaching of the sermon. This is the first time since I started simply preaching from notes that I have been able to also write out a full manuscript. I'd be interested to hear from any of my parishioners who heard the sermon if they see any radical difference between the manuscript and the sermon they heard.

This sermon is also an articulation of where I am at in regards to the ecumenical movement and its meaning. I welcome anyone thoughts on that. It turns out it is a kind of long sermon.

Where are you Staying?
The Lectionary Readings for the Second Sunday After Epiphany
Sometimes a bit of Scripture transforms things you have lived with for a long time. Sometimes Scripture upsets the way you look at what you and who you are. This is what happened as I meditated on today’s Gospel. As I contemplated what the Scriptures might be saying to us I began to see our vision as a church and my own understanding of it broadened and changed. The bit of Scripture that began transform my sense of our ecumenical vision was the following portion of Johns Gospel;
1:35 The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples,
1:36 and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, "Look, here is the Lamb of God!"
1:37 The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus.
1:38 When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, "What are you looking for?" They said to him, "Rabbi" (which translated means Teacher), "where are you staying?"
1:39 He said to them, "Come and see." They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon.
1:40 One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother.
Two disciples of John follow after Jesus no longer simply content with understanding and encountering Jesus along the Jordan witnessing to Christ with John. But only after John’s reiteration of his witness do these two disciples suddenly head off after to ask of him a question, but why this question in response to “What are you looking for?” “Rabbi, Where are you staying?” Of all they could possibly ask in that moment why that one? They want to be where the Christ is, not just encounter him, and find him in the world but to be and to stay where Jesus stays. Do we know where Jesus stays today? How do we seek out Christ and come and see where he lives? How do we move beyond witnessing at the Jordan, knowing Jesus but not abiding with Jesus? Have we come beyond the encounter of Christ as “Lamb of God” at the Jordan? I wonder if it is somehow easier to stay at the Jordan. Certainly not all disciples of John the Baptist sought out Jesus, though they heard Johns witness (Acts testifies that follower’s of John the Baptist continued to exist after Jesus’ ministry death Resurrection and ascension). Are we seeking to know where Jesus abides, stays, lives? Perhaps you are thinking but don’t we know. He is among the poor and oppressed, or the Sunday school answer “Jesus is in my heart I invited him in”. Or simply I know Jesus what more is there? What I want to suggest is that these answers are like choosing to live on the Jordan to recognize who Jesus is but to hope, and to plan, encountering Jesus where we are rather than to find and encounter Jesus where Jesus is. The current context of Protestantism and denominationalism perhaps does not encourage us to seek out Jesus and to find where he stays. There are a variety of ways we might do this, and there are personal practices and disciplines, but I want to focus on what is probably the foundational aspect, which is finding and knowing where the Church is. The seeking out of a firmer sense of what the Body of Christ is. Thus , seeking to move beyond the witnesses of our divided denominations to the unity of that place where Christ truly abides, not where Christ shows up now and again, not where you or I first encountered Christ, not the Jordan but that other place, to which Jesus invites us to “Come and see.” This search to abide where Christ lives is, I believe, ecumenism at its best by following after Andrew and that other first disciple of Jesus. In the end this is I believe Reconciler’s vision as an ecumenical congregation. Which means that to embrace Reconciler’s ecumenical vision is to be on a journey, and to admit an ignorance, to move into a position of humility of saying I don’t know, but I am seeking out Jesus and I will ask of him this simple question. “Where are you staying.”

The above assertion is in part personal testimony of my own engagement with ecumenism and my experience of being in the particular denomination The Evangelical Covenant Church. This also admits that my own personal search has lead me to come to some conclusions about what the Church the universal body of Christ is. It is that place where Christ is because it is Christ in the world. It is also a reflection of what I think was a motivating factor behind starting Reconciler, or at least articulates a longing that lead me here, to this sermon, to this pulpit, to pastoring an ecumenical congregation I helped start. I am also asking something of you all here tonight, to test these words. I am asking that as we begin a third year as a church start that we question our vision: have we moved beyond these longings and desires? Is God in bringing us together around this vision leading us to articulate our being brought together in a different way? That is not what I feel God is saying to us. I believe that God is saying to us follow the example of Andrew seek to find where Jesus the messiah stays in the world. But these are the sorts of questions I hope my words today will stir up in us, and I hope will lead us closer to what God has called us together to be and do.

But what could this mean to seek out and find where Jesus Christ is staying? I want to begin to answer this question by directing our attention to parts of our vision. Reconciler’s vision:
We say “It is in worship - word and table- where we are invited to lay aside what divides and are joined together as the one body of Christ. We affirm and seek the unity we are called to by Christ.”…. “United as one body with many members serving not only our particular identities but the identity of Christ our head.” … “We then see this ecumenical congregation as a proclamation of the universal body of Christ—the one holy catholic and apostolic church as a concrete spiritual reality… As such we hope to draw those who find Christ hidden by the disunity of Christians and our various claims to be church, that all may find reconciliation offered them in Christ Jesus.” To what does all this language of unity, of one body, the Body of Christ, of identity with Christ our head, the universal body of Christ point? What is the scandal of disunity that keeps Christ obscured to us and to those beyond the boundaries of Christianity? I am stating this in a starker way but still what the vision statement at least begins to say. If we are followers of Christ we are called to unity. We are called to this unity because by virtue of faith, baptism and Eucharist we are supposed to be the Body of Christ in the world, that is, we are to be Christ in the world. The Church is supposed to be that place where Christ stays abides and is to live. This is what it means for the Church to be the body of Christ. Where the Church is there is where Christ is to be found! Not that he can’t be found elsewhere as well, but the place where Christ stays from where Christ moves out into the world is the Church. Our vision also indicates that this reality is somehow obscured rendered ineffective or ruined somehow by our divisions. Our divisions while they allow our denominations to continue to witness to Christ they also keep people from finding Jesus Christ and coming to live where he lives.

All of our denominations will speak of the church or their congregations as the Body of Christ. They give witness to this reality. They like John speak the truth about Christ. Yet, there is something amiss. When we began Reconciler we were identifying divisions and denominationalism as that which is amiss, and that Reconciler was to be a journey to something else, something offered to us by 50 years of the World Council of Churches and ecumenical dialog between various denominations, and agreements that those involved in these dialogs have come to about the faith and the nature of the church, its ministries its sacraments and its mission. Yet, Christ remains obscured. The vision with which Reconciler began took this and said we need to find Christ in our coming together, in seeking that faith that was once delivered to the Saints, to seek out the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. In a sense we were saying (though we didn’t know it at the time) that our denominations as denominations as separated Christian groups fail to be the Church. They function as witnesses to Christ, but they fail to show Jesus Christ fully and intimately. We in our Protestant context of denominationalism (and its offspring non-denominational and independent churches) are more like John the Baptist on the Jordan, witnessing to something we do not fully comprehend, something to which we can only point but not fully experience. Our denominations and we who cling tightly to denominational identity are better John the Baptists giving witness than we are Andrews. We are content to stay on the Jordan.

In saying the above I risk being heard as preaching some form of pure church, or as saying that what makes Christ abide is through members of the church/Christians living out the Gospel perfectly or at least very consistently. But this puts the emphasis on us and not on Christ’s abiding presence. Our actions our divisions do not prevent us from being the Church they prevent us from asking the right question, they prevent us from seeing clearly where Christ abides. So this is not “Oh if only Christians were more Christ like! Oh if only there were no ethical and moral scandals then we would know where Christ abides, and we must seek out the morally ethically and doctrinally pure individual Christians and all band together and then we would be the church.” That has already been tried and every time it has been attempted it has been found wanting and is the reason we are in the place that we are in now. The opening of Saint Paul’s letter to the Corinthians in relation to the rest of the letter (One can do this with most of Paul letters) is revealing in this regard. Paul speaks in glorious and exalted terms about the church of God in Corinth (and he does this in every epistle) yet in much of the letter he is correcting the actions of those in that church for not agreeing with the exalted reality they supposedly live in. In fact Immediately following the exalted words we read today about the church of God in Corinth Paul begins by castigating them for falling into identifying with the person and practices of this or that prominent and leader of the church, when their focus should be on Christ as the one with whom we are to identify and be identified by. No the high view of the church does not mean that Christians always live up to it even those who are in the place where Christ lives. Unfortunately the performance of individual Christians either saintly or sinful will not really tell us about where Christ is staying. So what obscures our vision aren’t the conduct of those in our denominations, but the fact of our divisions and our conflicting identities and loyalties that are not of Christ and of the Church. We are talking something more mystical and less moralistic.

By the time Tripp approached me about planting Reconciler and I began to help Tripp David Gortner and Jane Schmoetzer flesh out the founding pastoral vision, I had tired of simply witnessing to Christ, and yet feeling distant disconnected from those in the Body of Christ who had gone before, all those saints commemorated by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. I was struggling with what it meant for someone to convert to Christianity, to come to Christ, by becoming a Covenanter. I had already come to feel that there was something partial and incomplete in this picture of living out my life as simply a Covenant minister. Yet, I loved and still love the Covenant, I know it, it is my home it raised me in the faith. In fact the emphasis that Ecumenism at its best is to be a search to find where Christ abides and to stay where he stays in relationship with Jesus Christ and those who have also found that place, in part is informed by the faith of Swedish Lutheran Pietists who formed the Covenant. I believe they were seeking to find where Christ stays, feeling the incompleteness of Lutheranism that claimed for itself the complete articulation of the faith and attempted to claim that Christ abides in its institution. We saw that while it gave witness to Christ in so many ways it showed that Christ did not stay there, and so we went out from the Lutheran Church in search of Christ that we may invite people into a fuller relationship. Some 130 years later I a great-great grandson of those Swedish Lutheran Pietists was looking at the denomination they founded and asking some of the very same questions they had asked of the Lutheran Church but added to those questions was the answers and questions given and asked by the ecumenical movement and the World Council of Churches. Thanks to these, the questions were also asked with a greater understanding of the best of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and a deeper understanding of the history of catholic and orthodox Christianity. I was in a quandary one I still am in as I stand before you today: I do not doubt that in the Covenant Church I have encountered Christ, that Jesus Christ is witnessed to, and yet I cannot say that the Covenant church is where Jesus Christ stays. In fact until preparing this sermon my own commitment to my denomination had hid this very question from me even though it articulates the very longing that lead me to help form a vision for an ecumenical congregation and help start it. All the longings the questions that lead me to embrace Tripp’s thoughts of an ecumenical congregation are summed up in this “Rabbi, Where are you staying.” I want to be in that place where Christ is, where Christ stays where Christ abides. As I probe and test my own denomination and other Protestant denominations I know that Christ does not stay in any of them. Our divisions obscure Christ’s habitation, and I find I am incapable of evaluating Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox claims that Christ abides among them, that they are not just witnesses to Christ but are in fact the Body of Christ.

So where does that leave me? Where might that leave us? My hope is that our ecumenical vision, our coming together, are having been brought here by God and the spirit indicates that we are on that journey from the side of John the Baptist on the Jordan witnessing to the coming of Christ and the presence of Jesus Christ in the world and in our lives, following Andrew on our way to finding where Christ truly abides that we may know where Jesus Christ stays in this world that we can show people where Christ is staying. So that we may truly bring them to Jesus Christ, not to John the Baptist and the Jordan, not to my idea of Christ, but to the one who truly is my head my identity, that I may fully together with all the disciples, in continuity throughout history, be Christ in the world, Christ’s Body, and be able to say come and see, we know where the messiah lives and we live in him and he in us, because I can tell you for sure where the Church is and thus where Christ abides.

For now all I can say is let us journey together from the Jordan affirming the witness of John the Baptist, and seek out Christ and say together “Rabbi where are you staying.” We have met you we know you but we do not live where you live, and that is what we want, that is what every spiritual longing in us wants. We want to bring people to where you live, where they will know they can find you, not to the Jordan where they may get a glimpse of you and hear witnesses and rumors of your presence in the world. Perhaps I am alone in hearing in this the articulation of my deepest longings but I hope not, for to me that is ecumenism, it is all about being with Christ, about truly being his Body, about being able to say to people not journey with me to the Christ, but come and see, this is the fulfillment of all your longings here is the Messiah, Jesus Christ, he is in us we are in him because we abide where he abides. I am not there yet; I do not believe we are there yet. And it may be a long road to follow Andrew. Following Christ to where he stays may be longer road for us, but I believe this is the path we must go if we are going to be able to know where Christ stays and bring people to Jesus Christ and not just witness to others about Christ presence in the World. This is how I have come to see our vision, this is the adventure and journey I invite you all and any who may come to us as we live out our ecumenical call and vision together.

Confidentiality

The AngloBaptist directed me to this post, over at Confessions of a Small church pastor. I am not interested in talking about here the specific cases he presents (You can read my own thoughts on that in my comment on the post) but it touches on something that has been an interesting conundrum in being a pastor who also has a blog, and wants to share his life with friends and family who live far away.

Unlike one of the people who commented on the above post, both the seminaries I attended were big on teaching about confidentiality and pastoral responsibility. So, both as pastor and spiritual director when people come to me for spiritual conversation I do not even consider speaking of what is said in our sessions not even to my wife. This means that my own life and sizable portion of experiences are other peoples stories and lives that I cannot speak about.

I first experienced the degree of this situation this past September when we met up with a friend who we had not seen since we left LA. He was part of the poetry scene we were part of in LA. He regaled us with stories of things he was involved with and people he was doing things with. It was exciting and cool to hear all he was doing. I also had various things from the community, to spiritual direction to pastoring Reconciler, but so much of the detail of all that I am involved with and doing are not my stories. I carry with me the stories of so many people, while some of it is public and things I could share even those public things touch on stuff I can't tell. It was a strange feeling as I briefly told him what I was doing. The telling of it was gray and flat because I am not my own: what I do is hold peoples lives up to God that they may journey ever more closely to God.

There are many thoughts insights things I have learned about human being, about theology and pastoring that I'd like to share here on this blog, but they come from the trust and willingness of those who I pastor and direct to open themselves up to me in the presence of God, confident I will not speak of what they bring. They come tome confident I will respect their stories and journeys as their own and not mine even as I take those things into myself and bring them before God. At some point I hope to disentangle the insights and thoughts I have in relation to my interactions with those I pastor, and be able to work through some of the theology that emerges out of these encounters. Of late that explains my intermittent posting here as much anything else. What I really want to post here, the things I'd love to reflect on here and see what if any conversation might come from it, is entangled with confidences. My life and thoughts are not simply my own, what I say here does and can effect those with whom and for whom I minister. Oddly enough confidentiality means I can't even speak about myself as freely as I would have done before becoming a pastor, spiritual director and prior.

I think many pastors experience this as loneliness. Or at least I have always been puzzled by the speech about how lonely it is to be a pastor. I don't see it as lonely because I am so present to so many people in ways I would not be if I were not a pastor. There is though a weight of the responsibility I have been given, and much of that is in what I speak or write, even, perhaps especially about myself, as myself takes in the lives and stories of others such that I do not belong to myself alone.