Tony Campolo on Christian Peace Witness for Iraq 2009

I missed a blog date yesterday. Ironically, the invitation was to read Psalm 51, with its beautiful and prayerful desire to have God "create in me a clean heart." So, I suppose this would be confession and pardon time.
On the other hand, I did not post anything yesterday because when I got off a conference call at 10:00 p.m. I forgot. Truly, I was feeling spirit-filled from the phone time spent with colleagues working on the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq's April 29-30 DC public witness. It was prayerful time.
Indeed, it opened with this prayer from a New Zealand prayer book:
Eternal spirit,
Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:
The hallowing of your name echo through the universe!
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth.
With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.
For you reign in the glory of the power that is love,
now and forever. Amen.
So, I suppose my prayerful reflection on Psalm 51 leads me to seek God's blessings on our efforts to create a clean heart in the midst of the nations that we might learn to beat swords into plowshares and study war no more.

goo goo goo joob goo goo goo joob goo googoooooooooooojoob

Today's invitation includes reading John 14:16-26. I added a verse before that and several at the end to complete a pericope.
It is one of the more beautiful and enigmatic passages in the New Testament, and it includes what I've always called the goo goo goo joob theology of John: "I am in my father, and you in me, and I in you" ... and I am the walrus. Or was it, "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together"?
Despite the silliness, I do love the extended meditation on love in which this passage falls. Just a few verses earlier (13:54) Jesus says, "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have love you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."
The setting for that commandment in John is the last supper, and from that comes the tradition of Maundy (or, mandate) Thursday.
I could not begin to follow the suggestion to set aside an hour in which to ask the guidance of the spirit on every single decision. The suggestion raises a host of questions for me that lead to theological detours and cul de sacs down which I'm not interested in traveling right now.
But, Jesus' words in John do remind me that the entire point of the Jesus movement is to give every hour to love. If we are guided by love -- if we ask ourselves in every decision "what would advance the cause of love" -- then I believe we are living at one with the spirit of love, just as Jesus did. Then, well, we are all together ... goo goo goo joob.

Free to Love

Well, obviously, I missed yesterday. I knew that I'd never make 40 straight days!
Yesterday we were invited to read from 1 John, and to ask in prayer if there is someone to whom we should be extending love. The problem was, I was in such a completely foul mood that I did not even want to risk such an open prayer.
Being in a more or less public role, I am occasionally on the receiving end of shots that are really aimed elsewhere but ricochet around till I get in the way. It happens; and I always get angry in response, and then turn inward and beat myself up for the part of the shot that struck home with any kind of accuracy, no matter how slight.
So, there I was, mad and not at all in the mood to sit with John, much less with God.
Perhaps that is the time when one ought most to seek the presence of God and unload on truly broad shoulders. Jesus, after all, offered to carry our burdens.
Perhaps, the anger is, itself, a form of prayer. The psalmist gave voice to some deep-seated anger and, when I find myself stuck in a long-term funk, dark place or unpassing anger, I turn to the psalms.
But yesterday was a passing storm, that I finally let go of this afternoon on a long run.
The invitation today was to free prayer, and the run was the perfect time for that. I turned my I-pod onto a shuffle of up-tempo songs and lost myself in sweat and song and let go of the anger. I gave it away along the way. That is prayer.
Now I am ready for a Sabbath day.

What's In a Name?

Today's invitation is to do something that preachers are always told to avoid. Well, kind of. A standard piece of homiletic advice is, "don't preach the lists." In other words, avoid using the texts that are long lists of names. Reading them out loud in worship is said to be deadly dull.

Well, reading them quietly is not much better. But here is the list, from Matthew, that we're invited to read:
An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Aram, and Aram the father of Aminadab, and Aminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, 5and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David.
And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, and Solomon the father of Rehoboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, and Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the deportation to Babylon.
And after the deportation to Babylon: Jechoniah was the father of Salathiel, and Salathiel the father of Zerubbabel, and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, and Abiud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor, and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud, 15and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah.
So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations.

We are invited to consider the real human beings with their own messy lives represented in that list, and consider the same with a contemporary list -- for example, a phone book.
But frankly, I don't find much difficulty or challenge or depth in praying the lists that way. Sure, I can hold in the light dozens of people I do not know, but I don't feel drawn into any relationship with them, any accountability toward them, any responsibility for them.
The list in Matthew, on the other hand, is intended to evoke certain memories. Check again who is in it, and who is not. Mostly it's men, but the women named or alluded to are interesting because each was extremely marginalized in her social context. There is a particularity to their circumstances that would seem to make it impossible to expect anything great to come from them. Indeed, in would be hard to imagine that anything at all would come from their lives. They would have been among the cast off and cast aside.
Why would God choose such as these?
Hm ... why should I care for such as these?
All of which brings me to my evening's activity: attending a gumbo dinner at Sojourners that raised some money for a Sojo work trip to New Orleans this Holy Week. After dinner, we watched act 1 of Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke.
The documentary includes numerous interviews with survivors of Katrina. Most of them are folks you've never heard of, just like the genealogy of Jesus. But when they were forgotten and left behind by their government, God reached out to them through the hands of thousands of volunteers. (Which does not excuse the public sector or get it off the hook in any way for the continuing disaster in many lives along the Gulf Coast.)
So, this evening, as I read the list from Matthew, I thought of the folks we helped in Mississippi in the immediate aftermath of the storm and the hundreds of thousands of others just like them. And my prayer is that I have the faithfulness to, at the very least, enable others to give hands and feet to the prayer so that lives can continue to be touched.

Take a Hike

Today's invitation begins with parts of the creation stories from Genesis, and, even as I write that I know that I am going to take a meandering detour, so be forewarned.
I read a story in the Post this morning about a "creation studies" class from Liberty University visiting the Smithsonian natural history museum.
The professor is quoted saying "There's nothing balanced here. It's completely, 100 percent evolution-based. We come every year, because I don't hold anything back from the students."
Ironic that story should appear on the day we're invited to read from the creation stories. The plurality of creation stories in scripture ought, in and of itself, tell us something about the intention of the stories, and, at the very least, ought to raise questions about the utility of employing prescientific texts in response to a fundamentally scientific question.
So, if it's not a science text, what questions does Genesis address?
Theological ones. Questions about God. About who God is and what God cares about.
God looks at creation and calls it good in the first creation story. In the second, God walks through the garden in the evening breeze and simply enjoys the creative handiwork.
This is a God of infinite creativity and joy who invites us into joy and creativity, too.
The prayer invitation today is to take a prayer walk, through your neighborhood, your yard, your workplace, or wherever. Of course, by the time I got to this it's past 9:30 and no walk is going to happen.
But I did get in a brief run this afternoon, and mostly prayed to be done!
Then I took a short bike ride with Hannah, who is just beginning to get comfortable on her bike. We rode together down to the Shirlington neighborhood -- less than a mile. I was not specifically paying attention to creation and praying for those I passed along the way, as per the instructions.
But I was open to the thrust of grace in the early spring air, and filled with joy, love and a certain yearning as I watched my daughter peddle away down the bike path in front of me.
I think that was enough prayer for the day.

Reaching ... Touching ... Healing ... Whom

Today's invitation begins with reading Mark 5:24-34.
And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’ Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, “Who touched me?”’He looked all round to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’
The prayer of the day asks us to consider the places in our own lives that are bleeding, and continues with the question, "Have you judged someone for something they did to you? Your judgment can anchor their sin into your soul with a spiritual fishhook."
I've no problem recognizing many of my own broken places, and accepting the soul-freeing wisdom of forgiveness. But I believe the metaphors are mixed up and the story's real power missed if we turn it into seeking wholeness for our own run-of-the-mill places of brokenness -- loneliness, illness, discouragement, jealousy. Certainly those can be real and soul-killing. But the issue at stake in the strange little story from Mark is, well, the issue. That is to say, the woman's ritual uncleanness due to menstrual bleeding makes her untouchable and, when she touches Jesus she makes him unclean as well.
The reaching and touching in faith obliterates the social stigma at stake in the story. So the question for my meditation this evening is not what everyday brokenness do I carry with me that I need to let go of, but rather, what socially constructed marks of exclusion am I accepting unquestioningly that unjustly condemn others and leave my soul at stake? What socially constructed systems of domination am I participating in that crush my own soul and those of so many others? What powers and principalities are ruling my own heart?
So, while I certainly pray for healing of my own brokenness on multiple layers, as I read this story from Mark, I am most mindful of my need for courage to extend a healing hand to others, and to allow myself to be touched even when I'd prefer not to be.

Love Letter from God

The invitation for today is to read Romans 8:35-39, to sit with it for a while and listen as if to a love letter.
Like many pastors, I quote from this passage often: "For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus."
I quote it, and I find comfort in it, but I certainly don't lay any claim to understanding just what it means.
But today, having just opened an e-mail from a good friend and colleague who confesses just now to feeling panic rising within her self on a project we are both deeply involved in, I am thinking that neither hopes nor fears, nor deadlines nor permits, nor liturgies nor police, nor expectations nor disappointments, nor failures nor budgets -- nothing will separate us from the love of God.
It simply will be all right in the end. We are loved. When we live out of that love, that trust, then we are powerful far beyond what we dare to imagine.

On the Seventh Day ...

I rested, and so should you. Heck, if it was good enough for God ...

In the Garden

The invitation for today, Saturday, is to free-form prayer, to be with God in whatever way feels free and joyous. It was a beautiful day today, and I spent most of it outside. We spent several hours in the garden, preparing soil, clearing the ends of last year's growth, pulling early weeds and spotting the first sprouts of mums. As Wendell Berry says, good work done kindly and well is prayer. I prayed in the dirt all day. A very fine way to step into spring.

Why Christian?

A word, from the context of the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq, from Ken Sehested, the founding director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship:
"Finally, a belated word of thanks to the CPWI group. I remember overhearing, from a distance, some of the controversy which surrounded the group's forming some years ago — basically, pretty caustic criticism for organizing a 'Christian' group. At the time I meant to write a strong endorsement for this strategy--against the cosmopolitanites and idealists who believe they can hang in mid-air, free of history and angles of vision, finding a location that transcends all social locations. This is the dark side of liberalism: the desire to reduce and distill everything to supposed 'universal' principles. This, too, is part of the domination system which must be resisted. This is not at all to deny the urgent need to do interfaith work, and to become sufficiently 'bilingual' to engage with people of no explicit faith commitment. But we must keep in mind the long history of dominant groups who want to say, 'we're all just alike.'"
I am reminded, when I hear vague references to a higher power, that it does matter greatly just what higher power we are talking about. After all, from where I sit here in Arlington, the Pentagon is a higher power, the White House is a higher power, the Congress is a higher power. Each of those higher powers does have the capacity to reduce us all to the same, to obliterate our histories and make of us creatures in their own particular images.
To follow Jesus is, first and foremost, to resist that power to reduce others to our own image, including the image of followers of Jesus. The cross is most abused when it is captive to the empire and becomes a sign of triumph rather than an invitation to compassion -- to suffering with.
Hm, so I wrote the above this morning. This afternoon I come to the Lenten exercise where today we are asked to read Luke 9:18-27, in which Jesus asks Peter, "who do you say that I am?"
The heading for today's exercise is, "What difference does it make that I'm a Christian?"
Clearly this afternoon is speaking to this morning. It does make a difference what higher power one calls upon, one sits with, one listens for. If God is made known in Jesus then what do we know of God? The passage from Luke is instructive. Just before Jesus asks the great Christological question he feeds 5,000 hungry souls and stomachs. Just after he asks it, he reminds his followers that the nature of discipleship is defined by the cross. Then, he continues his ministry of healing.
God feeds us. God desires our wholeness. God heals.
What difference does it make to put Jesus at the center of my devotion? It points me clearly toward that God. It draws me into relationship with that God.
None of which is an argument for exclusivity, but rather a recognition that I am a finite human being, situated in a particular culture and moment in history. I cannot follow every path, but I can follow the one before me with as much faithfulness as I am willing to risk.
Pictured? Oh, that's a window from my church. I call that one "peace Jesus."

Praying With ...

A two-fer today, as I try to catch up. Does unbinding my heart this rapidly pose risks?
Anyway, the invitation for today is praying for children. As father of three, this is nothing new under the sun. I feel like I spend half my life as parent following Rabbi Heschel's advice that we "pray with our feet." I'm always chasing children.
Coincidentally, this evening was parent-teacher conference night for our elementary school one. This morning was the presbytery's social justice committee meeting. The connection?
We focused this morning on the economic crisis and the host of theological questions that the church should be posing in its midst. The first question, it seems to me, for the North American church must be: what is the richest country in the history of the world called to do at this moment. While sitting in the meeting, I ambled over to Global Rich List to see where I fall on the list of the world's richest people. My present salary (which is less than ten percent higher than the minimum for a pastor in National Capital Presbytery) puts me in the richest .88 percent of the global population. Number 53,205,017 to be precise.
We live in what passes for the working class section of Arlington and our youngest child goes to the school in the county that serves the highest percentage of free lunches and has the lowest scores on standardized tests. Yet it has the richest learning environment of any school that our three children have been in (in four states and several incredibly affluent school systems).
If we are to be honest in assessing the financial crisis we must first be honest in assessing our own wealth. If we are to be honest in praying for the children of the world, we must first be honest in confessing how much more we could be doing for them if we worried less about the state of our 401Ks and recognize the ridiculous abundance that we have at our disposal.
So, I see the great Rabbi's walking prayer and raise him one. We need to be praying with our checkbooks, too.
The image? I found that when I image-searched "praying with our checkbooks." So my final prayer of the day: thank you God for the world wide web!

Thanksgiving

Yesterday's invitation was to gratitude, so I give thanks for a moment this afternoon to reflect. I am thankful for the folks who came out last night to talk about what it means to become part of a congregation and to take a step in that direction with respect to our little community.
Of course, that meeting was what got in the way of this spiritual "discipline" last night. Tonight, a parent-teacher conference will get in the way.
Real life tends to get in the way of spiritual practice, at least to the extent that we admit a distinction into our understanding.
We are talking this Lent at Clarendon about embodied faith, and we began the conversation reflecting that Jesus' Judaism did not include the mind/body, spirit/body dualism of the Greeks, and that, to the extent that Western Christianity adopted that dualism that denigrates the body in favor of the spirit it departs from its authentic roots.
So, the challenge of a spiritual practice of gratitude may lie simply in understanding how one could follow Paul's charge to "give thanks in all circumstances." In the midst of every moment -- the staff meeting you sat through today, the traffic on the way home, the hurried dinner plans, the homework, the bedtime, the sunrise wake up tomorrow -- in every moment give thanks.
I'm pretty sure I'm not up for that! On the other hand, Henri Nouwen once observed that gratitude is the fundamental attitude common to all authentic religious expression. So, if you want to get religion -- and, of course, who doesn't! -- give thanks.
Picture: gratitude in a bottle -- I'll drink to that!

Altars, Stones and Sacrifices

Today's invitation is to read from Genesis the call of Abram to journey toward a land of promise, and, once on the outskirts of that land to build an altar. Reading it I thought of the various altars that we all build to the various gods that we worship. The god of money, lately toppled from its heaven, we worship now in desperation at the debris of the altar of the market. The god of family we worship at the hearths we build. The god of knowledge is worshiped at the high temple of the university. The god of freedom we worship often in the garage altars that honor our cars. The god of power is honored at the massive five-sided altar just up the road from here.
One of the central symbolic acts of the Reformation was to do away with the altar -- the place of sacrifice -- and replace it with the table -- the place of welcome and gathering in the community, the place of revelation in the breaking of bread as opposed to in the breaking of bodies upon the stone of sacrifice. The reformers wanted to draw attention to Jesus and away from the notion of offering sacrifices to please God. Of course, there was a great deal more to their theological and political and architectural thinking than that one sentence pretends to capture.
Still, something in me resists altar-building. On the other hand, I love to collect stones from places that seem sacred to me. I carry the smallest of those around in my guitar case, and will from time to time use them in worship settings. The larger stones tend to find a place in my garden. I suppose I could think of that as an altar, but I prefer the simplicity and the symbolism of the garden. After all, that's where Jesus went to pray and if it's good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me.
So, I did the reading and offered the prayer of this day, but I'll leave the altar building to others. Me, I'll wait a bit longer for the coming of spring and then I'll go into my garden to pray amidst the stones.
Oh, the picture is a Mayan altar for sacrifices.

In the Details

Our Lenten journey this year is gathering round Martha Grace Reese's Unbinding Your Heart. The first day of the 40 days of spiritual practice and prayer invites you to read Psalm 139 -- O, Lord you have searched me and known me. The psalmists feels God's presence everywhere, from dawn to dusk, from highest heaven to the pits of Sheol.
One imagines that Mies van der Rohe understood God this way. "God is in the details," the architect famously said.
Such a God does not, it would seem to me, much care how we practice our spirituality. Being all present, it would seem to be a question of our presence to God much more so than God's presence to us.
So, the question for 40 days of intentional drawing of one's self into relation with God is, what opens you to that presence.
It was with such lofty thoughts that I stepped across the room to pick up a Bible to read Psalm 139 ... and stepped squarely into a pile of dog vomit. Seems that the chocolate birthday cake that the dog got into this afternoon did not sit well!
So I'm left to contemplate the details in which one finds God. Even in the pit of Sheol?
I have been there, and, indeed, felt the presence of the spirit of shalom. So a little mess to clean up ... or several ... is nothing. In fact, perhaps this was just another reminder from the canines that dog is in the details, too.
The spiritual life is not for the faint of heart.
Indeed, as our preaching together at Clarendon during Lent is stressing, Christianity is, or ought to be, an embodied faith. It is grounded in the earthiness of early Judaism. The gospel stories -- especially the synoptics -- are full of stories that include eating, healing, touching, listening and seeing. The texts we read together yesterday -- Luke's account of feeding the five thousand and the Numbers story of manna in the wilderness -- are all about food and the ridiculous abundance of God's economy.
While just now I am wishing that my dog's had not experienced ridiculous abundance this afternoon, even in these messy details I can detect ... well, perhaps divine laughter.

Rereading

Got a call from a young friend this week looking for a bit of guidance for responding to a church person who went on a public rant about gays in the church. I pointed him in all the usual directions (More Light Presbyterians, Covenant Network, Walter Wink, and so forth), and then I sent him this article by a preacher who has changed his mind on these issues. In the article linked above, the writer details how a rereading of scripture in an emerging context of shifting attitudes about faithful gay and lesbian persons led him the rethink and, ultimately, revise his position.
As I read his reflections, I was reminded once again that religion, to be faithful, must always look two directions at once: backward and forward. The word, itself, hints at this. The Latin roots of religion are tangled up in two distinct meanings and trajectories. Lige, from which we get our word ligament, means to tie our bind, and thus suggests a meaning of religion pointing backward -- binding us back to a tradition or story that we have inherited. Lege, from which we get legible, means to read again or reread, and thus suggests a meaning of religion point forward to new readings of tradition or text.
Jesus seemed to grasp this intuitively. In the Sermon on the Mount he tells his listeners, "you have heard it said ..., but I say ..." and thus rereads his own tradition.
For example, when he says, "you have heard it said, 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' but I say 'if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other one also.'"
While I love Walter Wink's reading of this as a profoundly subversive and tactical text, I think it is first, clearly, a rereading. We tend to miss the power of the rereading of those words because we don't think too highly of the notion of trading one eye for another. But when that ancient Israeli law was codified in scripture it represented a great advance in the cause of justice from a social setting in which an injury inflicted by a member of one tribe on a member of another -- even accidental -- could result in wholesale slaughter.
Jesus had a new mind for a new time. He understood that changed social circumstances and attitudes created space for rereading the tradition and its foundational texts in ways that would advance peace and underscore the power of nonviolence. As the picture here (taken last month in DC) suggests, the threat of violence remains quite real in the lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons.
As the church struggles to hear the Spirit's voice through its traditions and texts in a radically new social context, I keep thinking, "if rereading was good enough for Jesus, then it might be good for us, too."

In the Light

Tomorrow is a significant day in the life of the broader church as 15 Presbyteries hold votes on the General Assembly's proposed amendment to the Book of Order to change G-6.060106b to open the door to a more just and inclusive denomination. Of the Presbyteries that vote tomorrow, 10 voted "no" on a similar proposal in 2001 (the last time the Presbyteries acted on ordination). As of this afternoon, with the affirmative vote of Tres Rios Presbytery (Midland, Texas), 11 Presbyteries that voted no in 2001 have vote yes this time around. To approve the change, more than 40 Presbyteries need to change their vote from no to yes. While it is a long and steep climb, thus far Presbyteries in western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, central Alabama, and west Texas have changed. The spirit is moving in the church. Please hold the Presbyteries below in the light of love, grace, welcome and reconciliation tomorrow.
East Iowa
Eastern Oregon
Giddings-Lovejoy
Greater Atlanta
Homestead
John Knox
Lake Erie
Mid-Kentucky
New Hope
North Alabama
Ohio Valley
Sacramento
The James
Tropical Florida
Utah

Open Space with the Quakers

I've been at Stony Point Center for the past several days with a group of 50 or so folks called together to talk about beginning an intentional, dispersed, Christian community focused on nonviolence and justice interrelated with the community at Stony Point.
Lots of powerful moving of the spirit in our midst and some interesting things being born, and I'm sure to be reflecting on this for weeks and months to come.
But right now I'm still pondering the process we used: a mix of open-space technology and Quaker discernment.
It was a fascinating experience -- sometimes tortuous, never linear, occasionally ponderous. It was interesting to see the process get bogged down in the same ways and places that Presbyterian parliamentary procedures tend to: community wordsmithing, for example. But closing the discussion was done with so much more gentleness that "calling for the question" -- no less finality, just more grace.
As we Presbyterians seek more spirit-led ways to make decisions, we can learn from our Quaker friends and from the people who create open space as well.

Blowing in the Wind on Marriage Equality Day

Seventeen of us, from at least four congregations, gathered in the very blustery plaza of the Arlington County Courthouse yesterday. We shared an interfaith liturgy of prayers and readings, and then proceeded to the sixth floor offices of the county clerk, Paul Ferguson. Mr. Ferguson met us and welcomed us to the office. Meanwhile, Claire and Rebecca, who are members of the Rock Spring United Church of Christ, filled out the on-line form to apply for a license. As they filled in all of the requisite family data, Mr. Ferguson explained the state of the law in Virginia.
When the form was completed, the person staffing the window requested proper ID, and gave Claire and Rebecca a copy of the application to check for accuracy. When they confirmed the information, the staff person apologized and said, "I cannot grant you a license."
Mr. Ferguson looked straight at Claire and Rebecca and said, "I am truly sorry."
Looking at the rest of us, he said, "thank you for being here." He told us that our presence was important because it allowed him to report to the state that same-gender couples are requesting licenses.
Then each of us laid a flower on the window in honor of various couples who cannot be married here. As I laid my flower on the window I honored Ron and James. If I had a bouquet, it would be to honor each of the people in my congregation for their continued faithful witness that God's love knows no bounds and that what God blesses should receive the equal protection of the law.
There was much more that was moving and powerful, as well as simple and interesting during our hour witness, but those details will have to wait.

Too much, too soon, too bad

I found myself writing this note on camp to a friend from another Presbytery this afternoon.
The Meadowkirk situation is ugly. It's been brewing for several years, and it's all about the money. I think that there's plenty of blame to go around on all sides, and it probably doesn't do anybody much good to sort that out at this point. In a strange way, the economic downturn may save the camp because it cannot be sold right now, and too much of the Presbytery's money is tied up in it to take the losses. I do think that pieces of it will be sold as soon as there's a market for the lots. That won't destroy the integrity of the camp, but it's unfortunate.
With the 20-20 of hindsight, it's clear that we built too much too fast and did it with too much borrowed money leveraging too many Presbytery assets on use projections that were far too rosy. I remain hopeful about the viability of the ministry, but I think it will be a good day for everyone when it is more disconnected from Presbytery.
The question is: can it survive long enough to make that happen? I really don't think anyone knows. I do not think it will survive on the old model of hosting church retreats, small groups and then the various kinds of summer programs for youth.
I'd like to see it work to become a smaller scale Montreat for the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, but that would require building a capacity for programs, marketing and hospitality that simply don't exist right now. I can also imagine it hosting all kinds of gatherings that are resourced out of the DC office -- focusing on the spiritual foundations of policy work rather than simply going to the Hill as usual. But any alternative vision takes birthing and there's not much good will around here for that process.
That's my two cents -- not that it's worth even that much in today's economy.
I suppose the only "word to the wise" from all of this is don't spend money that you don't have. Of course, none of us in DC operate that way!

Faith and Values

A few random "Monday morning thoughts" delayed till Tuesday!
Sunday morning at Clarendon we talked about finding our voice. We had a brief "popcorn" conversation during worship in which folks named the values that shape and undergird what we say.
It was both easy to anticipate and, at the same time, illuminating in what was on the list: love, welcome, faith, hope, peace, acceptance, justice, compassion, forgiveness; and in what was not named. I wonder how long we would have talked before we got to values such as righteousness and truth and how we would have spoken of them.
It's not that those are unimportant, but rather that their meanings are contested and thus the subject of deeper exploration instead of being on the top of the list of easy to name and agree upon values.
I wonder, also, how the list would have read if we had be talking about practices of faith, as distinct from values that frame our understanding.