a thousand words and more than that many laughs

Because laughter is better than tears and more healthy than rage, here's a great list of comments about hunting with the vice president. Enjoy.

Grace, Love, Limits

If grace is real, it must be real for everyone no matter how malevolent they may be. Limit cases interest me because they force me to reconsider the depth of the love that Jesus commands his followers to exercise always and everywhere. That's why the "does God love Osama?" question is interesting. The answers we offer to such question shape and form how we live our lives everyday in the face of the suffering inflicted upon us by others. This is true in the outsized cases such as a terror attack, but it is also true in the intimate personal cases like when a partner says something hurtful or when a colleague spitefully undercuts us or a friend speaks ill of us. The question, in a blog-size nutshell: If God is love, how are we to respond to hate?
Here's what Dr. King wrote, in Strength to Love:
"We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory."

Saved from What?

Marty asks the logical question: saved from what? What is this "salvation" all about? From what are we saved and to what point and purpose, if any?
I grew up in the Bible belt in the midst of the "I found It" bumper sticker craze of the 1970s. "It" meant a personal relationship with Jesus, and "it" was clearly crucial to one's personal salvation. "It" was what saved one from a life of alienation from God and an eternity of hellish alienation. More to the point, "it" was what saved you from the wrath of God. Indeed, there's a book out called Saved From What by a conservative evangelical that argues precisely that humankind needs to be saved from God.
The image of a wrathful God is ancient, and certainly has Biblical roots. The word "wrath" shows up hundreds of times in scripture, and is certainly the subject of much artwork as Cain Fleeing the Wrath of God illustrates. Among my favorites is Exodus 32, where Moses talks God back from the brink of a wrathful destruction of the golden-calf worshipping people. Perhaps the most famous English-language example of wrath-of-God theology is in Jonathan Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. That one will send shivers down your spine.
It should come as no surprise that I don't see it this way, but it's important to acknowledge how common such theology is, even when it comes in a "kinder and gentler" version of a wrathful God who calls his (and this God is always masculine) followers to hate the sin but not the sinner. I actually prefer the old one, whose hate was right out there!
Well, no. But anyway, as is often the case, I find John Hall's work helpful here. In Why Christian?, he asks, "Do you know (most people don't, I find) that the word at the center of this whole discussion, 'salvation,' comes directly from the Latin word for 'health' -- salus? It means to be whole, to be integrated. You may think, for instance, of the way that Jesus in the Gospels, in healing someone of some debilitating illness, tells them, 'Be whole.' ... All that kind of thing lies behind the word that we too often turn into something so 'spiritual,' religious, and 'otherwordly' that it betrays the most fundamental meaning of the word itself, which is a very earthy thing: the healing of persons, the reintegrating of divided selves, the reuniting of people with those from whom they are estranged, the equipping us for the kind of life our Creator intended us to have. 'I came that they might have life and have it more abundantly.'"
Saved from what? From ourselves, I think.

Grace and Salvation

If you google "grace" you get about 95 million hits. If you google "salvation" you get about 20 million. I have no idea what the roughly 5 to 1 ratio of grace to salvation means.
But I was pondering these words yesterday after a couple of women came to our door peddling, I presume, salvation. I'm not certain of their pitch because I wasn't at home and my partner* was on the phone and didn't answer the door.
In any case, I'm sure most of you have, at one time or another, answered a similar knock and been asked, in one form or another, "have you been saved?"
I've seen variations on that theme become the center of debate at Presbytery meetings where the concern is not so much for the salvation of folks at the meeting -- after all, we Presbyterians are God's frozen-chosen. The question at such meetings usually arises during questions to candidates for ordination who will be asked something along the lines of "do you believe God saves all people?"
It's a trap, for universal salvation has been considered heresy according to orthodox Christian theology for roughly 1600 years. The orthodox position, crudely stated, is that Christ's death on the cross was the necessary atonement for the sins of humankind and trust/faith in that saving death is necassry to receive salvation.
Of course, as with most theological arguments, there is an orthodox tenet that undermines the orthodox position. In this case, the essential Reformed tenet of God's sovereignty. When one considers the Biblical witness that God desires communion with all of humankind on the one hand and the belief that God is sovereign -- God gets what God wants -- on the other, some form of universalism seems the logical conclusion. Don't try that on the floor of Presbytery, though, because pretty soon you'll get the Hitler question -- e.g., Do you believe Hitler was saved? Actually, Hitler is a great example, because he presumably had "accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior."
Ah, salvation theology ... a sticky wicket. What do you think?


*I'm using that term just to drive a little closer to the edge all those folks out there who have had a field day speculating about my sexuality in the months since my church's stand regarding weddings was in the news.

Happy Birthday Bonhoeffer

On the 100th anniversary of the great prophet, here are some links to Bonhoeffer including a link to a birthday reflection for seekers of peace and justice, info on a new documentary airing on PBS tomorrow, a link to the Bonhoeffer society, and the Barmen Declaration -- the statement of theological principles that guided the confessing church movement in Germany under Hitler. While Karl Barth wrote the declaration, Bonhoeffer was a central leader in the confessing church and the anniversary of his birth -- especially when it falls in a time of increasing confusion about ultimate authority and allegiance -- is a good time to reread Barmen. Happy Birthday Bonhoeffer.

What Manner of Man ... or God?

A small provocation for Friday afternoon, courtesy of Hall's Why Christian?:
What God? What is this God like? If Jesus "reveals" God, puts us in touch with God, makes God specific and particular, no longer a vague abstraction, then what sort of God do we have here? Is this a God chiefly of power and might, who is primarily concerned for "himself" and "his" own glory? Or is this a God who is out to condemn every sinner -- who, as Dorothy Sayers once wrote with characteristic irony, really hated everybody, but let his wrath fall on his beloved son instead? Or is this a legalistic, tit-for-tat sort of God, who has once and for all laid down the rules for being a "good" human being -- a moralisitic divinity who backs up the moral codes of exemplary citizens (my village!)? Or is this an internalized, gently forgiving, no-hard-feelings sort of God whose "business" as an ironic thinker of the nineteenth century said, "is to forgive"? If Jesus is for Christians the finite one through whom the Infinite is primarily glimpsed, what does that tell us, concretely, about the Infinite -- about "God"? (Hall, 25)

Why Jesus?

Theologians call it the "scandal of particularity." Why incarnation? What does it mean to call Jesus the Word made flesh? Well, before diving into the many why's, how about just a few "who's" to begin with.

Who is this One called savior and lord,

Who was from the beginning, eternal Word?

Who is this One whose birth angels would foretell?

Who is this One in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell?

Who is this One?

Who is this One who touched and healed?

Who is this One in whom God is revealed?

Who is this One who calls us here,

Who gathers us in from far and near?

Who is this One?

Who is this One riding in on a colt?

Who is this One, the king of kings?

Who is this One called prince of peace, the hosannas sing?

Who is this One hung on a tree,

Whose life and death and life again somehow set us free?

Who is this One?

Who is this one with a table spread,

Who offers us this daily bread,

Who pours this cup and shares this wine, and calls us out to spread the vine?

Who is this One?

Who is Jesus -- for you?

And another thing ...

This may be slightly off-topic, but what the heck! I just bugged out of a Presbytery meeting in which an overture from the session of the church I serve was swallowed up in parliamentary manuevering. The overture concerned removing the section (G-6.106b) in the constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) that stands in the way of ordaining gays and lesbians to church office.
The case for removing G-6.0106b from the Book of Order is the same today as it has been each time National Capital Presbytery has voted to seek its removal. All that is different is the final report of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church.
Nevertheless, no matter how many good faith efforts at relationship building we pursue, no matter how many practices of discernment we engage, no matter how many alternative means of decision making we use, there comes a time to confront this issue. G-6.0106b is a failed piece of legislation that for a decade has undermined the peace, unity and purity of the church.
The whole church was watching today as this Presbytery, which has for a long time made plain its desire to see a church whose hospitality, grace, love and justice are as wide and as deep as God's. Alas, the clarity of that desire was blurred by a vote that endorsed the Task Force's report and only provisionally endorsed removing G-6.0106b.
I believe that, as Dr. King said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. I trust God's grace, and pray that it will work its way with us to further the peace, unity and purity of the church we serve.
What has this to do with scripture? Well, nothing and everything, as it is, of course, the narrow interpretation of a handful of verses that holds together the house of cards that is homophobia. If that suggest of rank bigotry is too strong, perhaps it would be better to call it a house of cards of heterosexual privilege. I live in that house -- and I use the resources of scripture to tear it down.

Why Scripture?

One of the watch words of Luther's Reformation was sola scriptura, or "by scripture alone." For Luther and for those inheritors of the Reformed tradition, scripture was to be understood as the "sole sufficient rule of conduct and belief for the Christian," as Peter Gomes puts it in The Good Book.
But what are we to make of the collection of texts we know as the Bible? After all, writing centuries before the advent of historical criticism, John Calvin himself wrote, "We know that the Evangelists were not very exact as to the order of dates or even in detailing minutely everything Christ said or did."
It is incumbent upon those of us who stand in the tradition of the Reformers to take the Bible seriously, but how do we do so in a cultural context that continuously uses scripture as a weapon in culture wars? Even more critically, how do we read a hopeful word when scripture itself has been a stumbling block to the hope of faith for so many modern readers? One of my favorite Old Testament scholars, Walter Brueggemann, offers a compelling point of departure in Hopeful Imagination. Commenting on the literature of the exile, he says, "we study the themes, metaphors, and dynamics which give new life to the tradition, which summon to faith in a fresh way, and which create hope for a community so deeply in crisis that it might have abandoned the entire enterprise of faith."
On the other hand, we might prefer to abandon the enterprise ourselves rather than accept the radical challenges the scripture poses. As Hall remarks in Why Christian? "It has been the happy fate of Protestantism, which insisted on the 'sole authority' of Scripture, to have to live with these writings, like it or not. Nothing has been more subversive of human 'religious' tendencies than this book, because the truth is ... that 'the Bible hates religion.'"
At which point, he quotes Amos: "I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings I will not accept them. ... Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."
So, as you consider your own faith and the future of the church, what role does scripture play? How has it been a help? A hindrance? A comfort? A challenge? What is its authority for you?

But Why This Church ...

Brian's comment below is neither "simplistic" nor "naive." Rather, in noting that "the church is necessary because God's actions in Christ and in the Holy Spirit have made it so" he states a foundational truth. Foundational truths are essential, but they have the nasty habit of raising as many questions as they answer. This one begs the question of which church is necessary? In other words, what manifestation or expression of church necessarily arises out of God's actions in Christ and the Spirit? On the other hand, what manifestation or expression of church arises, instead, out of needs for human security, out of human fear, out of cultural expectation, and out of theologies or Christologies shaped and informed by such fear, insecurity and cultural expectation? How can we tell the difference?

What Church?

The first comment from yesterday's post raises the next question: what is the church? Our Reformed confessional heritage can be both gift and burden for all such questions, but on this one it does offer much to consider. I believe it is the Scots Confession that says the marks of the true church are that the word of God is rightly proclaimed and the sacraments are rightly administered. I can't help a day-after-King-Day provocation: perhaps the fire hoses of Birmingham were baptism, the lunch counter sit-ins were the Lord's Supper, and "I have a dream" was the word proclaimed.
In addition to the marks of the church, he constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) names certain purposes or ends of the church. Among them is "exhibiting the kingdom of God to the world." The Beloved Community is one compelling image of that kingdom.
Of course there are many ways to be the church and few will ever be called to look much like the Civil Rights Movement, but, as Martin Luther suggested, a church that "gives nothing, costs nothing and suffers nothing is worth nothing." Radical generosity, costly grace and redemptive suffering may just be additional "marks of the church."
Nevertheless, no matter what vision pertains -- whether conservative or progressive, Reformed or Roman, movement or institution -- the present moment demands that we think seriously about the question: is the church necessary? Why? Why not? What do you think? How does your own experience with church shape your response?

Why Church?

When I began this blog in November of 2004 I posted an e-mail from a friend who was asking, essentially, "why bother with church at all?" Martin Luther King Day is a perfect opportunity to grapple again with that essential question.
Why consider the necessity of the church on King Day? After all, King was often extremely critical of the church. In his Letter from the Brimingham Jail King wrote that "the judgement of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an errelevent social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. I am meeting young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust."
On the other hand, I have always suspected that the Civil Rights Movement, at its best moments, was, precisely, the church at its best. King suggested as much in ending his famous letter when he prophesied that "One day the South will recognize its real heroes. ... They will be the young high school and college students, young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders courageously and nonviolently sitting-in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience's sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage" -- in other words, they were being the church.
Indeed, as Douglas John Hall notes in Why Christian?, "The first Christians were not thinking in institutional terms at all, they were thinking in terms of a movement" (page 127). Of course, as both the early church and the Civil Rights movment learned, if any movement is to be sustained over time various institutional forms become necessary. The movement gave birth to, among other institutions, the NAACP, the Congress on Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The first Christians, and all of the rest of us for 2,000 years, have built, reformed, reshaped and rebuilt the church in thousands of institutional incarnations.
This King Day comparison is not without incongruencies, of course. The Civil Rights movement was not an entirely faith-based enterprise. It did not requiring creedal statements or confessions, (although it issued manifestos, including many of King's speeches, that are confessional statements). Nevertheless, I think it is a useful comparison because it can help us ask central questions about the church: in what way is it a movement? to the extent that it is a movement, toward what is it moving? what institutional forms, liturgies and traditions serve the direction of the movement? which ones distract from that direction?
Ultimately, these questions help refine our approach to the central question my friend's e-mail raised: is the church necessary and, putting my own, self-interested cards on the table, why does it remain necessary?

New Year

The new year might be time for some good reading. Especially since, as a form of self-punishment masquerading as "professional responsibility," I am trying to make it through the first book of the Left Behind series. Sack cloth and ashes would be easier. Forty days of fasting would be more pleasureable. But if I could break the fast with something from David James Duncan it might make the whole thing go down a bit easier. Duncan wrote one of my favorite novels, The Brothers K. It sits on my bedside table and I pick it up now and then just to enjoy the way he uses words. He tells stories of faith better than just about anyone I know, and obviously it gets him in a bit of trouble now and then, as this passage suggests:

AFTER THREE DECADES OF INTIMACY with some of the world's greatest
wisdom texts and some of the West's most beautiful rivers, I assumed I'd
escaped the orbit of organized religion. Then came a night in
Medford, Oregon. After giving a literary reading to a warm,
not-at-all-church-like crowd, I was walking to the car when one of the
most astute men I know -- my good friend, Sam Alvord -- clapped me on
the back and amiably remarked: "I enjoy your evangelism."
I was flabbergasted. Evangelism? I was a story-teller, not one of
those dang proselytizers! The evangelists I'd known since childhood
thought the supposed "inerrancy of the Bible" magically neutralized
their own flaming errancy and gave them an apostolic right to judge
humanity and bilk it at the same time. The evangelists I'd known
proclaimed themselves saved, the rest of us damned, and swore
that only by shouting "John 3:16! John 3:16!" at others, as if
selling Redemption Peanuts at a ball game, could we avoid an Eternal
State of Ouch.
Then honest Sam tells me: "I enjoy your evangelism"?
Shit O. Deer.

That's pretty much the way I felt the first time somebody suggested to me that I might be
well-suited for ministry.

Christmas Peace

Never forget that we are called first to be makers of peace. As senseless, endless war rages in Iraq, the Christmas Truce of World War I should give us pause to remember that soldiers do not make wars, generals do. This is a story worth remembering. John McCutcheon wrote a beautiful folk song that tells the story. You can listen to the story and a bit of the song through the Public Radio Exchange. Search "Christmas in the Trenches." Perhaps some troops in Iraq may experience such a moment of peace this year, although the only peace for some is the eternal quiet of the grave.

A Hoax, and a Ho, Ho, Ho

The story about the Dartmouth student turns out to be a hoax. It was, in many ways, a classic "urban legend." It reflects the fears of our times, that mount with each new revelation about domestic spying. That fear, felt with a particular closeness here in the DC area, certainly made me more than willing to believe the story.
But that's a subject for another day. For now, enjoy this little silliness -- a gift from the world wide web. Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year.

Merry Christmas, Big Brother

The story from Dartmouth , of a student being questioned by government agents after he requested a copy of Mao's "Little Red Book" from the library, leaves me wondering just how little one has to do these days to get the national security state's mockers in a twist. Could one simply blog on such words as Marx, communism, terrorism, assassination, 9-11, Bush, peace, redistribution, protest, poverty, war, or Israel? Is that enough to draw down the attention of those who are apparently watching our words? I'm reasonably certain I've used every one of those words in sermons before. Perhaps I'd better stop posting sermons on the church's web site.
Heaven forbid we should organize a congregational witness for peace. We might wind up like those poor Quakers in Florida. I'll think twice this Christmas Eve before making any mention of the Prince of Peace. And that e-mail I sent to Virginia's U.S. Senators about investigating this domestic spying ... on second thought maybe I should try to call that one back.
My high school son is reading Marx's Revolution and Counter Revolution -- just for fun! OK, he's an interesting child. Thank goodness he got that book from the pastor's study and not from the public library.

All I Want for Christmas ...

All I want for Christmas is a version of Spybot that can tell me when I am under surveillance by the national security state. How about you?

Sleepwalking Through Advent

Advent is the season of watching and waiting. It is a season of hopeful expectation. It is a season of preparation. As the paper fills with news of torture and domestic spying it is tempting to roll over and go back to sleep.

But, above all, this is a season of and for wakefulness.

Of course we know that wakefulness is not always easy. We want to turn away from what is difficult. We want the solace of sleep. This is nothing new under the sun.

Jesus’ disciples turned away from the terror in the Garden of Gethsemane and they fell asleep. Their sleep did not stop the crucifixion. Nor did it stop the resurrection. Their sleep did not stop the radical reorientation of life that is the gospel, and, of course, neither will ours. As the psalmist says, “In peace I will both lay myself down and sleep, for you, Yahweh alone, make me live in safety.” When the terror is too much, when the valley of the shadow is too deep, God promises to be with us, and keep watch over us as flocks in the night.

Nevertheless, we are called to wakefulness. Even now, in the midst of a season of great darkness; especially now when such a season cries out desperately for light and more light. For advent means coming, and we are called to be awake to what is being born in our very midst.

And what is that, or, more to the point, who is that begin born here and now among us?

It is the one who calls us to awake; the one whose coming radically reorients all of life, even our definitions of what is lowly, what is weak, what is broken.

As Bonhoeffer put it, “Where the understanding is outraged, where human nature rebels, where our piety keeps a nervous distance: there, precisely there, God loves to be; there [God] baffles the wisdom of the wise; there [God] vexes our nature, our religious instincts. There [God] wants to be. … God in lowliness – that is the revolutionary, the passionate word of Advent.”[1]

---

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Mystery of Holy Night (New York: Crossroad, 1997) 8.

Imagine

Thinking about John Lennon on the 25th anniversary of his death ...
Imagine there's no empire; no hungry war machine.
Imagine there's no vote fraud; no neoconservative movement no, well ... you can fill in whatever names come to mind.
Imagine justice mattered, and human frailty, too.
Imagine there's no corporate music machine reducing everything to tripe.
Imagine there's no Disney, no Newscorp, and no Fox.
No New York Times to lie or libel; no People full of hype.
Imagine music mattered, and artistic vision, too.
Imagine a middle school ochestra playing Vivaldi and tearing your heart out.
Imagine real religion binding us together not tearing us apart.
Imagine a child ringing a chime, and an old woman singing hymns.
Imagine no wins and losses, but mercy and compassion instead.
Imagine letting go of Truth with a capital T, in favor of love.
Imagine not getting angry when not everyone agrees with you.
Imagine not being right, but still being part of a community.
Imagine not being afraid, and trusting abundance.
Imagine grace.

Happy Holidays!

An informative, and somehow quite amusing, post about the ACLU in this holiday season. Enjoy, and a blessed Advent to you.