We Are Not Alone

There’s a large Presbyterian church in Pittsburgh that is known, in some circles, as Mellon’s fire escape. It was built on the donations of Andrew Mellon, and the clear implication of the nickname was that building a cathedral was Mellon’s best chance of escaping the fires of hell to which he would be consigned by a life marked by rapacious greed.
It was the ultimate money laundering scheme, and I thought about it last evening when I heard Wendell Berry describe the intimate connection between philanthropy and pillaging.
Berry was in DC to give the 41st annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. Established in 1972, the Jefferson Lecture is the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities. It is awarded each year by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the federal agency charged with serving and strengthening “our republic by promoting excellence in the humanities and conveying the lessons of history to all Americans.”
Berry framed his remarks with the story of his grandfather, a Henry County Kentucky tobacco farmer whose 1907 crop was rendered worthless through the monopoly machinations of the American Tobacco Company and its founder, James B. Duke.
Duke is the namesake of Duke University. I don’t know whether or not the Duke foundation contributes to the National Endowment for the Humanities, but that’s about the only funding source that could be more ironic than E*Trade Financial, which, along with the History Channel and the Owsley Brown Charitable Foundation, provided major funding for the Jefferson Lecture.
Duke, as Berry said last night, disregarded “any other consideration, followed the capitalist logic to absolute control of his industry and, incidentally, the economic fate of thousands of families such as my own.”
Berry has written often on the theme of proximity and the importance of small places. Last night he spoke of “stickers” – a term Berry’s teacher Wallace Stegner used it to signify those “who love the life they have made and the place they have made it in,” and to distinguish a stream in American life that runs apart from the mainstream of “boomers,” Stegner’s term for “those who pillage and run, who want to make a killing and end up on Easy Street.”
“James B. Duke was a boomer,” Berry said, motivated by greed and the desire for power. Stickers, Berry insisted, are motivated by affection for the small places which they steward. The logic of corporate capitalism is that of the boomer, of Wall Street, of E*Trade and other financial institutions that exist to serve the dream of Easy Street.
I almost wrote “who exist …” in the previous sentence, and thus barely sidestepped the trap laid for us by the United States Supreme Court when it assigned “personhood” to corporations. Berry noted last night the great irony that institutions that have no self are, nonetheless, defined most purely by selfishness.
The deeper irony, as Berry alluded to, lies in the complex web of culpability in which each of us is caught in relationship to the logic of capitalism that determines the shape and structure of the economy that encompasses us. That web has been spun over the past century by men such as James Duke and Andrew Mellon and Bill Gates and Mitt Romney and the other five thousand or so who have comprised the “one percent” since Duke’s company consigned Berry’s family to poverty.
Every one of us is caught in it, participates in it, serves it, gains and loses in it. My livelihood depends upon it, laundered by the church though my pay may be. As much as I might like to think otherwise, I am holding the ladder steady as Mr. Mellon continues his climb. (That is a description only of the smaller economy of our society not of the larger economy of the Kingdom of God, and thus it is a statement of political ethics and not of eschatological theology – although the two are not unrelated.)
This would be true enough if I served the Presbyterian church in Henry County, Kentucky. It seems all the more so true for those of us who serve the vast American suburban population. When Wendell Berry’s grandfather’s livelihood and farm were threatened by the corporate economic powers of the early 20th century the Berry family was among the majority of Americans who lived on farms or in rural communities and small towns.
Now the majority of a much larger nation lives in the suburban sprawl of major metropolitan areas or in the cities at the heart of the sprawl. Not only are we caught in the web of corporate capitalism, but we are also far removed from the small places to which one can relate with affection over the course of a lifetime. If, as the title of Berry’s lecture holds, “it all depends on affection,” then what is the proper, effective, realistic way to live out such affection in places that are defined as much as anything by the kind of bland sameness that removes affection from the equation altogether?
Most of us live as if we live in no place in particular at all. The Target up the way from my house in Arlington is virtually indistinguishable from the Target that was up the way from where we lived in the suburbs of Cleveland, or of Pittsburgh, or in the city of Lexington, Ky. Target is the major funder for the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, and thus a particular example here. I imagine the E*trade branch locations are the same, as well, though out of my experience.
 Affection demands particularity. I have no real affection for Target, though it carries the basics and it is convenient. It saves time.
Affection also demands time. It demands that we spend time. However, the prime directive of the present economy and of suburban life in general is to save time. The gadgets that I can and do buy at Target promise to save time, to make me more efficient. Target, in that way, promises to liberate us from the demands of the very places where we live.
I only know of Andrew Mellon through the bank the bears his family name and through the church built with his money. Perhaps he felt as trapped within the logic of the larger economy as the countless families who were dispossessed at the other end of his business dealings. Maybe the staff at the church he built feels trapped, too, as surely do lots of folks who attend that church, which serves an economically marginal urban neighborhood these days. I know with certainty that lots of folks in the various suburban congregations I have served feel trapped in the logic of an economy that can put a price on almost any thing but that cannot account for that which is of real and lasting value.
As Berry noted last night, millions of Americans since the economic crisis of 1907 lost their farms, homes and land, and the economic crisis of our time has similarly displaced millions more. Despite the obvious fact that this experience is far from unique, perhaps the singular nature of modern economic crisis is how alone we feel within its logic.
Berry has insisted for decades now, against the tides of his time, that none of this is inevitable. He insisted so again list night in the face of visible ironies: beginning with corporate sponsorship of a national endowment for whatever it is that “humanities” might mean within this economy, and including an entirely expectable yet still odd display of so-called patriotism in the presentation of colors by the U.S. Joint Armed Forces Color Guard and the music of the U.S. Air Force Band Ceremonial Brass Quintet playing beneath a huge screen on which was projected a quote from Berry’s essay, “The Failure of War.” In that essay, published a decade ago, Berry wrote”

“We experience no shortages, we suffer no rationing, we endure no limitations. We earn, borrow, spend, and consume in wartime as in peacetime. And of course no sacrifice is required of those large economic interests that now principally constitute our economy. No corporation will be required to submit to any limitation or to sacrifice a dollar. On the contrary, war is the great cure-all and opportunity of our corporate economy, which subsists and thrives upon war. War ended the Great Depression of the 1930s, and we have maintained a war economy—an economy, one might justly say, of general violence—ever since, sacrificing to it an enormous economic and ecological wealth, including, as designated victims, the farmers and the industrial working class.”

Despite that long history of state and corporate military and economic violence, despite the displacement of millions and the deaths of countless others, despite the economic logic that seems every day to extend its reach and circumscribe our lives, our futures, our imaginations, Berry continues to insist that, ”this has not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone.”

Skittles, Violence and Justice

Like many folks, the more I read about the incredibly sad and tragic death of Trayvon Martin the angrier I get. Perhaps I should just stop reading the stories. As I understand it, ostriches are seldom troubled by anger.
There’s plenty of legitimate targets for anger in this case: the 28-year-old white man who shot and killed the 17-year-old African-American kid armed with Skittles and iced-tea; the Florida police department that refuses to arrest Zimmerman; Florida lawmakers who passed an inanely named “stand-your-ground” law that allows people such as Zimmerman too easily to claim self-defense; Florida voters who filled their legislature with the yahoos who passed the nation’s first such law in 2005.
Take your pick. But my wrath is aimed at the National Rifle Association.
This front organization for weapons manufacturers promulgates legislation such as “stand-your-ground,” and then pushes bills through state legislatures across the country. More than 20 states followed Florida’s lead in adopting such laws, which could more accurately be called, “shoot first, ask questions later” laws.
Since Florida adopted its version there have been hundreds of shootings in which the shooter claimed self-defense. While the right of self-defense is a long-standing one, under the “stand-your-ground” laws asserting self-defense is often enough to end a police investigation short of trial. The laws effectively create a presumption of immunity from prosecution upon merely the claim of self-defense.
As the facts thus far reported in the case of Trayvon Martin make clear, the claim of self-defense can be remarkably flimsy. Martin was walking through a gated community from a 7-11 toward the home of his father’s girlfriend when Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, spotted him. Zimmerman called 911, reported a “suspicious person,” confirmed that he was following Martin, was told explicitly by the 911 operator not to follow the person and that police were on the way, nonetheless confronted the unarmed teenager, and shot him dead.
Because police cannot establish precisely what happened between the moment Zimmerman stepped out of his truck and the moment he pulled the trigger, claiming to feel threatened – perhaps by lethal Skittles – they have pressed no charges simply because of Zimmerman’s claim.
While we may never know exactly what happened in those critical moments, there’s one thing that I am utterly certain of: if you change the racial context of this event the shooter would be in jail under arrest for murder no matter what he claimed about self-defense. It is completely inconceivable to me that if, for example, my own teenaged son were walking through the nearby historically African-American neighborhood and got shot by a 28-year-old black man that the shooter would be walking the streets of Arlington a free man a month after killing a white teenager.
I won’t blame the NRA for America’s entrenched racism, but I will blame them for taking advantage of it during their decade’s long attempt to make of us a nation armed to the teeth with laws that protect gun users from prosecution even when they shoot and kill unarmed kids. Urban violence – a racially coded trope in American culture – has long been a staple of NRA communication and lobbying efforts.
Meanwhile, a bill before the Arizona legislature seeks to establish “as a class one misdemeanor, the crime of resisting arrest by passive resistance.”
On the face of things, the two pieces of legislation have nothing to do with one another. One establishes a presumptive immunity from civil or criminal prosecution with a claim of self-defense, while the other makes passive resistance to a lawful arrest itself a crime.
But the Arizona bill is, in fact, the other side of the coin from the stand-your-ground laws, and both of them embrace violence as the appropriate response to threats. In stand-your-ground states, individual citizen violence is upheld as the appropriate response to perceived threats against one’s person. The Arizona bill upholds the state violence of forcible arrest against perceived threats against state institutional prerogative, and, significantly, against the power of nonviolence.
It’s almost as if Arizona lawmakers have seen that nonviolence can be a force more powerful than violence and, in their fealty to the so-called law-and-order agenda of the purveyors of violence, they are doing their best to undermine nonviolence.
At the confluence of these two laws stands a nation’s love affair with violence, romanticized by the well-funded image masters of the NRA, who either fell lock, stock and barrel for the myth of redemptive violence or, perhaps, actually invented it from whole cloth in order to make a buck selling their death-dealing toys.
While they continue to sell us a wild, wild West vision of vigilante “justice,” the soul of Trayvon Martin cries out for authentic justice.

Call Me a Snob

Call me a snob, but, really, I'm just a chicken.
Let me explain. Apparently a serious candidate for a major party's nomination to the presidency of the United States seems bent on discouraging Americans from going to college ... or something like that. It's sometimes hard to figure out exactly what Rick Santorum really means, unless he's talking about gay people. He's crystal clear on that: he doesn't like them.
Maybe he doesn't want Americans going to college because they'll change their minds about gay people. The conservative wiki site, Conservapedia, citing a study of exit-poling from several years ago, sternly warns:

"The fact that the strongest predictor of support for same-sex "marriage" is level of education shows that brainwashing into professor values has a corrosive effect on morality."

It really says that. Maybe that's where Rick goes to get his info, or maybe they go to Rick to get theirs. As I say, I find him confusing.
On the other hand, maybe kids who choose to go to college are just more open-minded even before President Obama gets the chance to remake them in his image. Polling seems actually to bear that out: college freshmen are almost twice as likely as the general public to support same-sex marriage, according to a Higher Education Research Institute survey a while back. Maybe the brainwashing is just that good.
Or, maybe, Santorum really is just that crazy. As I said, sometimes it's difficult to tell.
Still, crazy as he may be, Santorum's thoughts on education did get me thinking. More accurately, the reaction of his audience got me thinking. Speaking in Troy, Michigan, over the weekend in the run up to today's Michigan primary, Santorum said:
"President Obama has said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob."
The crowd shots at that point showed folks applauding, laughing, smiling and generally nodding their heads in approval. Then came the big applause line:
"There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day, and put their skills to test, who aren't taught by some liberal college professor (who) tries to indoctrinate them. I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his."
Sure, it's easy to dismiss this as typical campaign fear mongering. Santorum raises the "liberal" boogie man and panders to latent American anti-intellectualism. Moreover, I certainly wouldn't expect a Republican candidate to point out or praise President Obama's personal journey of using higher education opportunities to lift himself to the highest rung of American power.
Even so, I wonder why the speech resonated with the crowd. After all, according to various surveys, 94 percent of parents believe their kids will go to college, 75 percent of Americans think college is very important, and 60 percent believe it is essential to success.
Maybe Santorum found the six percent of parents who don't think their kids will go to college.
From where I sit, ridiculously over-educated, white, middle-class, living inside-the-beltway, enjoying incredible privilege, it's easy to dismiss Santorum's supporters as ignorant and bigoted (and there are, no doubt, ignorant bigots out there who support him). But as I watched video of Santorum's speech, I couldn't help wondering what the people are afraid of.
I'm convinced that what they're afraid of is the future.
While Troy is a relatively affluent suburb of Detroit, it's still, well, a suburb of Detroit. That is to say, it sits in one of the country's most hard-hit areas economically, and in a place whose people had, at the depth of the recession, just about the most negative economic outlook in the nation.
Going to college is an inherently optimistic decision because it is almost always about hope for the future. Maybe Santorum's supporters consider that snobbish because they are so busy longing for a past -- not "the" past that actually happened, but "a" past that they imagine.
I feel for them in their fear, but I do not wish to join them in that imagined past. Talk about scary.

The Fast I Choose

So my friend Nichola (see comments from yesterday) posted this morning on Facebook:

So, at last night's Occupied Ash Wednesday gathering, the one person present who had no substantial connection to Christianity was blown away by Isaiah 58, and at the end, said something like, "Oh my god, this is so beautiful! If your book says this about 'raising your voice like a trumpet,' and 'shouting out loud about the rebellion of the people,' and 'feeding the hungry,' why isn't this plaza packed with church people?" Those of us who are Christian just looked at each other sheepishly.

Why isn't the public square packed with church people? Is that part of a more basic question: why isn't the church packed with church people? Or is it the other way around?
The list of reasons is long and complicated, to be sure, but it gets down to some basic questions of faithfulness. Do we really believe the prophet's vision:

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am. If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.

It is beautiful. But do we believe it, and not just in the manner of giving intellectual assent to the proposition that God is with us and thus we shall be the repairers of the breach, the restorers of the streets? Do we believe it such that we are willing to give our lives to it?
The evidence -- in the public square and in the church house -- is not promising.
On the other hand, many of us continue to show up in those places and more, and we continue to lift up words of hope, of love, of justice.
Oh, and here's a hymn inspired by Isaiah's vision for singing in the public square or the church:

This is the Fast

Is this the fast I choose for thee
Of ashes, tears and empty misery?
Or rather this: To share abundant bread
That all my children will be loved and fed

Why do you fast yet still not see
Your sisters suffering in poverty?
Their children cry and still you do not hear;
their fathers bowed and broken by their fear.

This is the fast I choose for thee
Of justice, peace and human liberty
Not forty days, but all your yearning years
My love will wipe away all human tears

Break, bless and eat; then drink this wine
The fast I choose makes ev’ry midnight shine
You shall be called restorers of the street.
Arise, now shine! And make your fast complete.

Tune: Truro (Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates; Christ is Alive!; Live Into Hope!)
Feel free to use it. Copyright, D. Ensign, Lent, 2005

Lent and the Impossible

It has been a very long time since the days when I was doing doctoral work on 20th-century French philosophy. Indeed, it was actually in the 20th century! But for some reason as Lent begins this year I've been pondering the impossible.
The impossible was a recurring theme in Jacques Derrida's writing, and while none of that work is ready-to-hand at the moment (search engines notwithstanding), I'll reduce it violently to one observation: the answer to any question worth posing is (the) impossible.
You can trace the impossible, the impassible, the entirely and unutterably other through much of Derrida's work, and, in particular in his lengthy dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas. Their conversation was central to my ancient dissertation.
What's any of this got to do with Lent?
Levinas was fond of interesting equations. I recall, for example, his observation that "paternity is a relationship with a future that is not my own." I'm pretty sure I remember that after all these years because I was playing with it in a paper I wrote while we were anticipating the birth of our firstborn -- who turns 21 this week.
Other of Levinas' equations were pithier: ethics is liturgy. That one I recall because I teased it out in work that I was doing even as I was beginning my own turn, or re-turn, toward what we too easily reduce to "the religious."
I don't recall if Levinas actually wrote "ethics is the impossible," or if I'm making that up. But, hey, this is a blog post not an academic article -- thanks be to God, or the impossible I Am, or that which, in this very moment, calls me by my name. In any case, his various observations about "ethics" drew me deeply into the long conversation that he and Derrida conducted through various texts over many years. In those writings they regularly addressed, indeed their conversation turned on, "the impossible."
I got to thinking about that in terms of practices one "takes on" or "gives up" for Lent. Most of the time we go for the low-hanging fruit of the the imaginable, the possible. There's nothing wrong with that. Picking up something that one can actually accomplish is always worthwhile, in this or any season. Letting go of something that one needs to let go of, and that one can, in fact, let go of is also always worthwhile.
But what if we aimed deeper or higher toward "the impossible"? What would it look like to practice "the impossible"?
In their own distinctive ways, both Derrida and Levinas focused considerably on encounters with the other. Levinas wrote extensively about face-to-face encounters and confrontations with the face of the other. Derrida wrote a good deal, especially late in his life, about hospitality and the politics of friendship. All of that work was about the impossibility inherent in the claims that others make on us.
I can't recall at this point -- again, blog post not academic paper -- whether either Levinas or Derrida riffed on Paul's eschatological observation that "now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."
Such knowledge is at once the impossible and the fundamental demand that others place on us. We all want to be known. The essence of hospitality, the root of ethics, perhaps even the ground of politics and certainly of justice is found in that basic desire to be known fully.
To the extent that any of our Lenten disciplines aim, ultimately, at deepening our relationships -- with God or with others -- they aim at the impossible.
What if we took on "the impossible" for Lent?

I Am a Witness

I am a witness, standing on the side of love.
Sometimes that is the most important calling to which we respond. We show up. We stand together. We witness. We speak of what we have seen and done.
I was asked this morning to say a few words of blessing at the Valentine’s Day public witness for marriage equality at the Arlington County Courthouse as two of the elders in my congregation sought a license to make true in law what has been true in fact for more than two decades: they are married. Anyone who has ever spent any time at all with Ron and James knows that they are married. Indeed, any definition of marriage that excludes them misses the mark completely when it comes to describing a loving, committed, life-time, compassionate, faithful, joyous, creative relationship.
As I noted this morning, at Clarendon we stopped signing legal documents for straight couples until that day comes when we can sign them for all couples who come to us seeking to celebrate their promises to create and sustain the beloved community of two within the larger context of the beloved community of all.
Since that time, we typically begin services of celebration for all couples with Jesus’ words, “render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar, and render unto God that which belongs to God.”
Our love and our promises belong to the God who, in sovereign love created us all equally in God’s image, called us good, and promised to stay in relationship with creation through all time – through, as it were, richer and poorer, sickness and health, and, because God is God, even in the time beyond time itself. Thus to God belongs our love, our commitments, our compassion, our faithfulness, our joy, our creativity – all those foundational values upon which good marriages are built.
What then belongs to Caesar? The truth. That is to say, what we owe to the commonwealth is the truth as we have been given to see it, the truth spoken in love to the power of the state. The truth is that we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness. For many of us, straight and gay, those foundational rights can only be authentically claimed when our lives are joined together with the one we love. The truth is, there is no compelling reason for the state to deny to same-gender couples what it so freely grants to straight couples.
We owe Caesar the truth, for the truth will set the commonwealth free from the weight of oppression, the blinders of bigotry and the shackles of its own history.
This morning, several dozen of us joined Ron and James as witnesses to the truth. Though sometimes the moral arc of the universe seems mighty long, when we do the work of love, when we speak the truth in love, when we stand as witnesses on the side of love, the arc bends the whole world round.

Pissed-off Presbyterian Pastor Passes on President to Pitch Pots

I’m a beginning potter, or more accurately I am taking a beginning pottery class, so perhaps I can be forgiven for pitching pots instead of throwing them, but I am a lifelong Presbyterian so I know process, and I know when process is being used to obfuscate rather than to clarify.
This evening National Capital Presbytery voted down an overture to General Assembly from the session of the congregation that I serve seeking concurrence with an overture already passed by the Presbytery of East Iowa seeking an authoritative interpretation from the Assembly affirming that pastors in civil jurisdictions that have legalized same-gender marriages can solemnize such vows without fear of being brought up on disciplinary charges in church courts.

That’s Presby-speak for saying we wanted assurances that pastors can conduct legal same-sex weddings, including signing marriage licenses, without worrying about be defrocked by the church and we wanted National Capital Presbytery to go on record supporting that position.

I’m not pissed that the overture was defeated. Disappointed, yes, but not angry at the result. If I have any anger at the result it is entirely self-directed because I failed to do the organizational legwork to get out the vote tonight, wrongly assuming that the long pattern of NCP voting about 2-1 in favor of GLBT-related issues would hold.
The first (or maybe second) speaker against the motion introduced a motion to defer arguing that the Presbytery needs time to talk about marriage. I suppose since it took the church 30 years of “talking” to get to the point of ordaining gay and lesbian clergy and lay officers there may be a point to that perspective. After all, we’ve only been “talking” about marriage for about a decade. The first overtures on same-sex unions came to and through the General Assembly in the late 90s.
But the truth of the matter is, and always has been, we only actually talk about any of these “uncomfortable” issues when someone proposes an overture and we vote on it. Up or down. The denomination empaneled a study group that issued a lengthy report on marriage at the 2010 assembly and invited the entire church to engage the question. As far as I know, nobody in NCP took them up on it.

The bottom line is now and always has been this: a motion to defer is a motion to do nothing at all until the next time somebody forces a vote.

To suggest otherwise is simply disingenuous, and I’ll stick by that charge until the maker of the motion invites the long-time married same-sex couples in my congregation to dinner for some conversation on the meaning of marriage.
I use the word “disingenuous” perhaps disingenuously here, for that word was what really pissed me off tonight. The makers of the motion – that would be my session, and, let’s be perfectly “out” here, that would be me – were called “naïve and disingenuous” during the debate on the overture tonight, and our capacity for compassion was called into question.
When colleagues who have performed same-sex weddings in jurisdictions where they are legal have been brought up on charges in church courts (and they have) it is not disingenuous to ask for clarity from the General Assembly.
When pastors in this Presbytery (including yours truly) are being asked to perform legal same-sex weddings in the District of Columbia, it is not disingenuous to seek some assurance that the church courts will not be used to block us from following the dictates of conscience and pastoral responsibility.
And when a same-gender couple who has been together for more than 20 years asks a pastor about the possibility of being married in the church, is it disingenuous to suggest that the call to compassion might have something to do with that couple’s suffering?
Supporters of the motion tonight were asked to consider the suffering of our conservative sisters and brothers, and, in particular, the ones who met in Florida last week to talk about forming a new denomination. As I noted at the beginning, I am a life-long Presbyterian. I am sorry, truly, that some folks feel like they no longer have a home in the PC(U.S.A.). But if the call to compassion has any meaning whatsoever in this debate, it must begin with consideration of persecutions, pogroms and pink triangles. Conservatives are not being bashed, beaten, or killed. Queer folk still are right here in this Presbytery. Conservatives are not being harassed to the point of suicide. Queer teens still are. If you want to talk about the passion, let’s begin there.
So, yes, the evening pissed me off – enough that I skipped the State of the Union Address entirely in favor of session two of my pottery class. I threw my first pot tonight. I’m far from an artist, and this piece of clay will never shout out for gallery space. But as I sunk my fingers into it and worked it at the wheel, I realized that the clay wanted to be a cup – not really a chalice because even if that’s what the clay wanted the potter’s hands were not up to the task. I also realized that the cup wanted, eventually, to find its place in the home of the married, gay, Presbyterian elder who introduced the motion tonight. Clear a spot Travis!

Happy Christmas. War Is Over!

December 24
How many clichés about time could be gathered around Christmas trees or hung from their branches like ornamental clock faces? The halls are decked with memory and expectations as cards stretch out as if hung on a string stretched between the hopes and the fears of all years, and the dream that they might be met tonight.
So a very merry Christmas from our household to yours. May your hopes be realized and your fears be, well, as minimal as possible in such times as these.
The annual year-end stock-taking finds the Lederle-Ensign family well, albeit one dog short of this time last year. Our 14 and a half year old Jack Russell, Norm, is killing mice in the great beyond, an image that raises all kinds of eschatological questions. I mean, if your great joy in life is “killing things” then what would happen to the things you kill in an afterlife? Do mice have as many lives as cats? And do they ever live into an existence in which they are no longer hunted by cats or Norm? On another note, how many Christmas letters do you receive containing speculations about rodent eschatology?
Moving along to the surviving members of the family then …


Hannah continues to stake her claim as the studious member of the family, following in her high-achieving mother’s footsteps even as the slacker men in the family try to keep her grounded. She’s pretty much loving life as a seventh grade girl. While the great changes that come with her age keep us on our toes, she’s living into them with grace. As a friend visiting this week said, “What happened to that little girl who used to live here?” Indeed. While she is becoming a young woman, 2011 was the year that she laid claim to a youthful love that could last a lifetime: baseball. We made it to a half dozen Nats games, and Hannah celebrated the 4th of July lying on her back in the outfield grass of a minor league stadium in Chattanooga watching fireworks and clutching a foul ball that came our way during the game. “This was a good day,” she told me as we watched the peaceful bombs bursting in the warm summer air.


Always precocious, Martin has had senioritis since 8th grade. Finally, at long last, he can have it for real! With graduation looming in spring, he’s been busy with college apps and visits this fall. He seems likely to follow his older brother to Mary Washington, and we’re all quite pleased with that prospect if it turns out that way. In the meanwhile, Martin continues his musical explorations, adding the banjo to his mandolin and violin playing – he could be a one-man bluegrass band if he’d grow a few extra arms. He’s planning to deepen his understanding of the southern folk heritage this winter as he hits the Crooked Road as part of his senior project exploring part of the history of the banjo in America. His Bach-on-the-banjo rendition of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring was a highlight of the Christmas Eve service at Clarendon. Who knew that piece could sound so nice on the banjo? I’m not saying that there’s a connection, but the curly haired musician kid always has a cute girl beside him, and the current love interest (a friend from camp) is a brave enough soul to have accompanied the nattily attired (floral print skirt) Martin to the gender-neutral dance that his school’s Gay-Straight Alliance sponsored (and that Clarendon hosted). The father-son picture from the dance was called “the greatest thing on the internet” by one discerning friend on Facebook. Personally I think it was dad’s tie-dyed clerical shirt, but some disagree.


Down the road in Fredericksburg, Bud continues to have a generally fantastic college experience at Mary Wash. He’s moved off campus for his junior year and is sharing a house with two good friends from Arlington. We gathered with the three young men, all the parents and most of the siblings the Saturday evening after Thanksgiving, and it was immensely gratifying to see what nice, smart young men they’ve become, and to realize that there’s every good chance that they will hold onto this core friendship throughout their lives. They are living the all-American college life, and loving almost all of it. Perhaps the most enjoyable part of it for Bud is his continuing relationship with Monica, a delightful young woman who is a first-generation Chinese-American immigrant. Cue My Big Fat Greek Wedding, as we get set to meet her parents at New Year’s. I want to bake a bunt. In addition to the swirl of academic and social circles, Bud has devoted a huge amount of time and energy to the club level ultimate Frisbee team. We got a chance to watch them in a tournament in Fairfax this fall, and came away impressed by the skill and intensity with which these young men play a game that many of us played at a far lower level years ago. In the classroom, Bud has decided to complete a double major in English and computer science, and it seems possible that he may actually be employable upon graduating in the spring of 2013, though graduate school is also a distinct possibility. His summer internship at the Library of Congress will certainly look good on applications to potential employers or schools.

As you’d guess, he got that internship through his good connections at the Library, where Cheryl continues to love her job of eight years. Happily, albeit sappily (and dully) she reports that the highlight of her year was staying married to me. At the risk of too much happy-sappy, I’d say the same is true for me, as I come toward the midway point of my ninth year at Clarendon. We’re looking forward to celebrating 30 years of mostly blissful married life next spring, and are happily soliciting suggestions for ways to mark the occasion. The year has been filled with small but joyous moments and events: a family ski trip to Pennsylvania last March, time at Camp Hanover in the summer, trips to Chattanooga to visit David’s family in July and to Ohio to Cheryl’s mom’s in August, work trips for Cheryl to Chicago and New Orleans (and lots of pizza and Mel Brooks for the left behind), an early-December 15k run to celebrate my 52nd birthday – hey, you celebrate your way and I’ll celebrate mine!

There were, of course, world events of great import during the year, and we played our very small role in them -- delivering cake to the Occupy Wall St. group in McPherson Square, continuing to advocate for the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in the church and culture, and trying speak out for, and live into a world more welcoming, just and peaceful. Christmastide '11 we celebrate the long-overdue end of the war in Iraq, with hope that Christmastide '12 may see the end of the decade of war in Afghanistan.
I suppose there is something quietly wonderful to be said for living into comfortable middle age where the passing of a year brings mostly simply gratitude for work and family. As Wendell Berry wrote years ago, “Work done in gratitude,/Kindly, and well, is prayer.”
If that be true, then we’ve passed a year of prayers, and as it comes to a gentle close, we lift up a common prayer for our friends and loved ones, that 2012 find you in good health, in good cheer, keeping faith with the work you have been given to do, and planning a visit to our nation’s capital, where there is always room in our inn for you.
Grace and peace,
Hannah, Martin, Dylan, Cheryl and David
A post-script from the next generation: Martin says, ”our pater familias has way too much time on his hands. Please, help us find him something useful to do with that PhD. “ Hannah says, “our father is a ridiculous man.” Bud says, “I love my father very much.” (OK, Bud was not available for a post-script so I had to guess what he might say.)

Occupied Images

Love On the Blog

I broke one of my cardinal rules today, again, and was reminded, again, of how incredibly difficult the law of love really is.
Here's what happened: Following a now forgotten link I found myself on Red Letter Christian, Tony Campolo's blog, reading a thoughtful piece posted by Methodist pastor Morgan Guyton. Guyton wrote about Herman Cain's recent statement aimed at Occupy Wall Street that “If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself."
Guyton compared Cain's remarks with John Wesley's insistence that "If I leave behind me ten pounds [when I die]… you and all mankind bear witness against me, that I have lived and died a thief and a robber." In other words, as Guyton puts it, "if I die rich, blame me.
It comes as little surprise that, in a blog post of a Methodist pastor, the founder of Methodism is going to come out looking better than the founder of Godfather's Pizza. Thus Guyton's post, thoughtful and well stated, brought no real surprises.
Perhaps I was lulled into false hope by the thoughtful prose, or perhaps I had just wanted to put off my own writing for a little while longer. But whether it was the prose or the procrastination, I broke own of my cardinal rules: I read the comments.
Like an alcoholic who can't pass up a drink even though he knows he will regret it later, I regularly read the comments section on religion and politics blogs and then feel like I need to take a shower.
In the comments, the scribes and the Pharisees collide with the Sadducees and the hypocrites, and it turns out that we are they and they are we and, pretty soon, we're all covered with the same slime.
I didn't stick with the comments long enough to confirm, again, Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies, but I'd be surprised if Hitler didn't turn up soon enough. This time I quit soon after reading that:

Leftists, regardless of whether they put a religious spin on their arguments or not all want the same thing. They don't want the advancement of mankind but the opposite. They want to punish success through redistribution so they don't have to work. They want to constantly agitate for "social change" because by calling everyone racists they can further their own political goals. Leftists like to ignore human nature and advocate completely insane policies that grow the size of gohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifvernment and limit human freedom. The list can go on...

And so can the vitriol of the comments.
I wound up on Red Letter Christian today in priming the sermon pump for Sunday, when the gospel lectionary passage is Matthew 22:34-46, which begins like this:

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

It seems to me that loving neighbors, even virtual ones, requires us to use more of our minds than the overly quick and easy vilification of those with whom we disagree. Accusing the people occupying Wall Street and those who support them of opposing the advancement of humankind doesn't get us anywhere at all. Neither does accusing those who support Herman Cain of not caring a whit for the poor.
When Jesus spoke of love he spoke of acting toward others in ways that always sought out the best for the other. He spoke of acting with the best interest of the other place before self interest. In placing love of neighbor in the same breath as love of God, Jesus clearly insists that you cannot have one without the other.
At a bare minimum, on sites that bring together people who are trying, from various points of view, to follow the way of Jesus, the law of love ought to trump Godwin's Law.

Dear Chelsea

I got one of those e-blasts from the Democratic Party. You know the ones; they usually go straight into the recycle bin. But the sender ID caught my eye: Chelsea Clinton. That was new and different. So I opened it and was surprised to be asked only for ideas for the Clinton Global Initiative. No money ask; no voter support solicitation. Just ideas.
Naturally, I was suspicious.
But I did write back. Here's what I said.
Hi,
Wow! A note from the Democrats that didn't ask me for my money or my vote. Maybe y'all are learning something.
I spent several hours this week with the young adults -- Chelsea's cohort -- who are occupying K St. in DC these days. I'm closer to Bill's age than to most of them, and I hope that the grey heads who still wield some much power will wonder around the various occupations across the country these days and simply listen. Listen to a generation that feels left out, powerless, and betrayed by those of us who came before them and left them with broken systems. They went to schools that didn't work well. They've graduated in massive debt into a jobless economy. The see the global climate changing and they witness an American democracy that is completely dysfunctional in the face of all the rest of it.
As a pastor in a Mainline Protestant church, I also know that the systems of faith -- Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and the rest -- have also failed them.
So first: listen. Then listen some more. And when you've finished with that, then listen some more. After all that listening, check your ideological and party lenses, and then listen even more.
I'd go on about listening if I believed for an instant that anybody on the other end of this e-blast was actually listening. Then I'd go on about some actual ideas, but I don't believe you're listening. That's the biggest challenge we face: learning to listen to each other.

PS: feel free to call, if you're up for an actual conversation. But don't ask for my money or my vote because I'm among the tens of thousands of pissed off liberals who don't believe that anyone in the Democratic Party is listening to anyone who doesn't control millions of dollars.

Shifting Practice

I was reading an article the other day about the local footballers, the ones with the incredibly racist team name and, let’s face it, a long history of racist practices as well. The article concerned the team’s practice habits – not the practices of racism, mind you, but the football practices.
I was struck by the routine the author noted, the deeply ingrained habits of off days and on days, of full workout days and study days. I wondered if, given the teams glaring lack of success over the past decade, those routines ever change. If we are what we practice it stands to reason that if a team constantly loses in games then perhaps there is something suspect in its practice habits.
Oh, to be sure, there’s a lot that goes in to making a team – any team in any game, including work teams and worship teams – successful or not. If you have the wrong players on the team then no amount of practice, no matter how perfect, will perfect the team. Moreover, in every game – from football to politics, from work to worship, from the basketball court to the courtroom – random chance and dumb luck loom large.
Practice, then, amounts to a consistent effort to control the things you can control.
What happens when you change practices?
Years ago I was in the regular practice of beginning my day with a reading that was e-mailed to me courtesy of the Bruderhof community. I can’t recall what they named the daily message, but it consisted of a paragraph or so from some text that arose along the fault lines between spiritual practice and political engagement. I came to enjoy the readings and found their provocations an excellent way to begin my day. They became my morning prayer time.
Then the Bruderhof stopped publishing the service. I cast about for another morning prayer practice. I tried the daily lectionary for a while. Having followed it for a long while years ago I anticipated that it would be a good opening for morning prayer, but found that it simply was not speaking a word to me. I discovered the daily e-blast from Sojourners about then, but their afternoon schedule just didn’t work for my morning practice.
(Even as I write that I realize also that some frustrations in the working relationship between Christian Peace Witness and Sojourners no doubt left me a bit closed to what Sojo was sending out, too. Acknowledging that much also prompts the recognition that some folks cannot stand the Bruderhof community and consider it a cult. My own, extremely limited, contact with them in Pennsylvania years ago, on the other hand, was friendly and positive, so I received their daily e-mails with no internal strings attached.)
I tried on various other practices and none of them fit, so I stopped looking.
Somewhere along the way, without thinking about it as a spiritual practice, I discovered that Garrison Keillor would send me a poem every morning. OK, it’s not really Mr. Keillor I’m sure, but whatever. Back about the same time that the Bruderhof was sending me e-mails Mr. Keillor woke me up most mornings with a poem on the radio. Then the station switched formats and when another local public radio station picked up the Writers Almanac they broadcast it at some ungodly early hour when no one should be listening to poetry – or, at least not this someone.
So I was familiar with the almanac and was delighted to discover that I could get it e-mailed to me. Over the course of the past year it has become my practice to begin almost every day with a poem. Some of the poems are complex and provocative. Others are incredibly sad. Some are silly and playful. Some are political and some overtly religious.
But whether playful or profound, all of them are spiritual. That is to say, each of them touches something in my spirit if I am open to being touched on the given morning.
The poem this morning, Changing Genres by Dean Young, prompted all of this with its simple opening line: I was satisfied with haiku until I met you.
Practice shapes us. Changing practices changes the shape of us. I do not know how the new form of practice is reforming me. I do know that I was satisfied with praying in prose until I started receiving a daily dose of poetry.

Before the Deluge

Perhaps I'm coming up from the depths, or the fog of summer is clearing. Don't know, and perhaps will eventually reflect on the long silence of this summer. For now, in the aftermath of an earthquake and before the deluge of Irene, here's a hymn that I wrote when doing storm cleanup after Katrina.

Amidst the Storm

When raging storms push forth a rising tide,
When rain and wind leave nowhere left to hide,
We cling to branches of the tree of life.
Alleluia.

Foundations crumble on the shifting sand.
We search for hope across a broken land.
Amidst the raging storm we seek God’s hand.
Alleluia.

The homeless wonder through the city’s street.
They seek small shelter from the scorching heat.
Amazing grace would be so cool and sweet.
Alleluia.

When on our own we cannot seem to start,
But neighbors are God’s feet and hands and heart
It is as if You’ve made the waters part.
Alleluia.

The captives will taste liberty again.
The suffering find a balm for deepest pain.
The blind will see, the voiceless lift the strain:
Alleluia. Amen.

Tune: Engelberg, copyright, D. Ensign, 2006

WWJD or Everyday Ethics on Vacation

According to Google Maps, it's 592 miles from Arlington, VA to Chattanooga, TN. According to my backside it's a damn long drive.
The average American family drives 793 miles on its longest vacation drive, or so says a survey by the American Automobile Association. The note on that survey wasn't clear about whether or not that's a round-trip or one-way total. Either way, it's plenty of time sitting in a car to ponder questions such as WWJD: what would Jesus drive?
I'd like to feel all self-righteous about driving a hybrid, but I know I still contribute more than my fair share to the carbon impact on the world. Driving my hybrid puts 3.4 tons of CO2 in the air each year, according to a handy Yahoo calculator. I can't vouch for the calculator's accuracy on tonnage, but it does provide a stark reminder that my everyday choices have consequences.
What would Jesus drive? If you plopped Jesus down in the 21st century in an urban area I think that most days he'd probably leave the driving to others and use public transportation. The man did love a crowd and a teachable moment. I could have ridden the bus this morning, and if I take my incarnational theology with any seriousness I know that I'm a whole lot more likely to encounter Christ on the bus than in my car by myself.
Or on the train. If the Chattanooga Choo Choo still ran perhaps we'd take the train next time down. Of course, like most Americans, I'm going to drive more often than not for more trips than are necessary.
Vacation time raises a host of other everyday ethical considerations: where do all those souvenir t-shirts get made and by whom and under what working conditions? how about all of that fast food? who picks those crops? what do they get paid for their labor? in what conditions were the animals raised whose lives are given over to our bodies in the sacrament of eating?
Most of us are complicit in all kinds of systems or injustice and inequality, and sometimes the most we can do is acknowledge that fact and hope for grace.
But there are a few moral choices we can make everyday that make small differences in the world, and my own vacation experience reminded me of one: we can all hang up and drive! I don't know what Jesus would drive, and I do know that he loved to communicate, but I'm pretty damned sure he would not talk on his divine cell phone while holy rolling behind the wheel of a motor vehicle.
Is "moral choice" too strong?
Using a cell phone while driving, whether it’s hand-held or hands-free, delays a driver's reactions as much as having a blood alcohol concentration at the legal limit of .08 percent.
It's just like drunk driving. It's life and death. It's a moral choice.
Why did vacation remind me of this? It wasn't actually being cut off in traffic in Knoxville by a guy with his god-forsaken noggin on the phone. It wasn't passing a crash scene and wondering if distracted driving was involved, as it is in hundreds of thousands of accidents each year.
Actually, it was forgetting my cell phone charger and being out-of-touch for an entire week. It was a great reminder that I am simply not all that important in the great scheme of things, and that the world will get on just fine without me being in constant contact. I can hang up and drive and the world will actually be a better place for it. So can you.

Still Waist Deep in the Mig Muddy ...

U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, envoy to Afghanistan, lobbed a parting shot at the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai over the weekend. According to an NPR report today, Eikenberry told university students in Herat that when Afghan leaders call the United States an occupying force it becomes difficult for him to look the family members of slain U.S. soldiers in the eye and explain to them what their loved one died for.
I'm sure that job is always difficult no matter the circumstances, and I do not envy those who must do it.
On the other hand, what does the ambassador expect from the leaders of a country we've been occupying for almost a decade? Moreover, we're occupying a country with a long and storied history of resisting outsiders.
On top of all that, Karzai is more warlord than president. When you lie down with dirty dogs you're going to get fleas. Reading Eikenberry's comments in the Post this morning -- "I must tell you that I find occasional comments from some of your leaders hurtful and inappropriate" -- I couldn't help thinking that Eikenberry harbors a secret wish to be like Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam in the early days of that war. When Lodge got tired of South Vietnamese President Diem he simply green-lighted a coup and had him removed. Ah, the good old days.
Coincidentally, the Post carried a front page story today about the ways that American politicians profit from their incendiary sound bites. Say something outrageous and donors line up to contribute.
It's a lesson that President Karzai obviously understands. His remarks are clearly for the benefit of a domestic audience that has grown weary of Americans bombing their countryside.
Really, what do we expect from Karzai?
Really, what do we expect from the Afghan people?
We can claim the moral high ground all we want. Eikenberry told his audience yesterday that "America has never sought to occupy any nation in the world. We are a good people."
After ten years of war and occupation those words must ring pretty hollow to families whose lives have been destroyed.
Really, what should one tell the survivors -- American or Afghan -- at this point about why their loved ones are still dying a decade on when al Queda is long-gone from Afghanistan, when bin Laden is dead, when the Afghan politicians are making political hay at our expense, when no good purpose is being served by our continued presence?

Bound By More than Loose Connections

I had a lovely dinner last night with a couple whose one-year-old daughter I get to baptize on Pentecost. The family has been worshiping with us at the wee kirk since last fall. Mom joined the church mid-winter. Dad may at some point down the road. He likely would have joined last winter, too, but for a month of out-of-state Air Force training back in January.
None of that is particularly interesting outside of the personal connections, to be sure, but within that simple description lies a tangle of broader connections wound tightly around the challenge of being the church near to the heart of the empire these days.
To untangle this just a bit: a young couple choosing to join a church -- any church -- these days in America is a bit unusual. The cover story of the current issue of Christian Century, "Loose Connections," is all about the rise of American religious participation and the simultaneous decline in Americans claiming a particular religious identity.
We are, as the article points out, no longer the "nation of joiners" that Tocqueville found when he went off to look for America.
I might have explored why this particular couple was choosing to buck the trend, but the conversation followed a slightly different thread into the tangle: the tension between Christian faith and participating in the military-industrial complex of the empire.
We touched on Augustine and Niebuhr, just war and Christian realism, Vietnam and the war on terror. There's plenty of grist for any mill in that list of names and topics, and it struck me somewhere in the midst of the naan that rich conversation over the breaking of bread is the only way we'll ever find common ground. After all, I do a great deal of work with the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship and Christian Peace Witness, and, from a certain point of view a faithful conversation between airman and peace activist might seem impossible.
From a certain point of view one might anticipate nothing more than the scene from an old Phil Ochs song:

Soldiers, disillusioned, come home from the war
Sarcastic students tell them not to fight no more
And they argue through the night
Black is black and white and white
Walk away both knowing they are right.

But if that is all there is we will never move beyond the loosest of connections. Something more must bind us together, or we wind up loose threads blowing in random winds.
At some point in the conversation on-line discussion came up, and I allowed as how I generally try to avoid any threaded online conversation that deals with anything more controversial than the fate of the Nationals. Godwin's Law is almost as certain as death and taxes, and most on-line discussion forums -- whether conservative or liberal -- leave me feeling like I need to take a shower. I get sucked in occasionally, but mostly I stay away.
Sometimes, though, it follows me. Indeed, some anonymous reader this week left a rude comment (that I deleted) on this blog. Obviously, following Godwin, I'm not surprised by much of what I encounter in comments but this one surprised me because it commented on a comment on something I posted one year ago! It takes more crankiness than I can muster most days to get worked up to rudeness about something from 12 months ago.
If you're still hanging in there with this loose thread you may be wondering just what it has to do with the beginning. Hang in there, this is a big tangled mess!
In another week or so we are going to baptize the baby girl who slept through the last evening. We'll welcome her into the communion of the saints, and to the gathered community at the wee kirk. We'll promise to teach her the good news, help her to follow the way of Jesus, and strengthen her ties to the household of God.
In all of that, we will also welcome her to an institution whose connections seem to be growing looser precisely at the moment when the remarkable communications technologies at our fingertips have given us unprecedented capacities to connect with each other. But, instead of connecting, we call each other Hitler and then retreat ... to what?
Too often, we retreat behind walls and gates and, particularly in this part of the world, the hyper-security of pax Americana.
The church, at its best, offers no such security and builds no such walls. Instead, at our best, we offer a table to which all are welcome, a table at which to break bread and to risk authentic conversation about the most complicated and tangled strands of our broken lives. Something beautiful can be woven out of all of that, if we are willing to risk being honestly vulnerable. With respect, at least, to our own complicity in the violence of the empire it means also holding out our own dirty hands. Fortunately, in addition to the table, we also have a font at which to wash our hands before we break the bread.

What Is Church For?

What is the church for?
I've had a series of rich conversations over the past little while that all come round to some variation on that question. What is the point and purpose of this enterprise that we call the church?
These conversations -- with friends and colleagues both locally and spread a bit further afield, some Presbyterians, some not, some ordained, some not -- have not typically begun with the existential question of "why church"?
Typically the conversations have begun around an aspect or program of the church that needs attention. For example, my Presbytery's camp and conference center is about to be put up for sale and that has occasioned considerable conversation about that type of ministry and program. On a completely other note, the recent change in my denomination's stance on ordaining gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people to church office has prompted conversation among progressive friends about what's next for congregations or networks that have worked long and hard to see this change. Elsewhere in the mix, I've had a couple of rich conversations about worship and spirituality.
Somewhere along the line in each of these conversations, in a manner appropriate to the particular focus, someone will ask some variation on this question: what are people looking for?
Perhaps that is the common lament for leaders in shrinking institutions.
We seem to believe that if we just knew exactly, precisely, programmatically what people are looking for then we could supply it, kind of like Ben & Jerry's knows that people are looking for ice cream so they supply it.
It makes sense, in a consumer culture, to assume that if you can identify the point of demand then you can create a supply to meet it. And that does give an answer to the existential question: the church is for supplying whatever it takes to meet the demands of the people under the broad heading of "spiritual products and services."
One could organize a more or less efficient supply side of this equation by drilling down a bit into "spiritual demands" to clarify the nature of those demands. From this perspective, the great challenge to the church lies in perfecting market research and product development in the spiritual marketplace to meet the growing market of the "spiritual but not religious."
That is no doubt true to some extent, and we should get much better at asking such questions. Still, I can't help feeling that there is more there, and that the ways we frame and word the questions are both profoundly important and poorly understood.
Perhaps it is the difference between doing market research and telling parables. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed ... the church is like kudzu.
So, what is church for? Anybody ... Bueller ...?

Finally Comes the Poet

I seem to spend a great deal of my preaching life wrestling with Walter Brueggemann. He's getting on up there in years, so I ought to be able to take him now, but most of the time I still wind up bearing the scars of our encounters. And I've never actually met the man.
At the moment I'm being bounced about by his argument that "obedience follows imagination." More than 20 years ago, in Finally Comes the Poet, Brueggemann wrote:

Our obedience will not venture far beyond or run risks beyond our imagined world. If we wish to have transformed obedience (ie. more faithful, responsive listening), then we must be summoned to an alternative imagination, in order that we may imagine the world and ourselves differently. The link of obedience to imagination suggests that the toughness of ethics depends on poetic, artistic speech as the only speech that can evoke transformed listening. Even concerning ethics, “finally comes the poet”. It is poetic invitation that holds the only chance of changed behavior, a point understood and practiced by Jesus in his parables, which had such ethical bite, but such artistic delicacy.

I think I'd buy it if he'd written it in rhyme!
But seriously, I came across this quote while looking for something else on the web and it got me to thinking about something I ran across a while back in a used book store. The internet and used books stores work much the same alchemy for me, and they often seem to have been "organized" by the same folks.

In any case, I just finished William Prochnau's Once Upon a Distant War. Not quite as old (copyright 1995) as the Brueggemann text, Prochnau tells the tale of the young correspondents who covered the early days of America's involvement in Vietnam. Malcolm Browne, David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnet, Horst Faas, Charley Mohr and a handful of other young reporters who found themselves drawn deeply into the turmoil of a failing South Vietnamese government and the inept American efforts to respond.
Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest) and Sheehan (A Bright Shining Lie) went on to write two of the most important reflections on the war. Arnet became one of the great television war correspondents and stayed in Hanoi until the bitter end of the American war in 1975. Faas photographs brought the war into American homes, and his efforts as AP photo editor ensured that we saw the most famous images from Vietnam, including the "napalm girl" in 1972.
Prochnau follows the story from the days when there were only a couple of hundred American advisers in Vietnam in 1961 through the fall of the Diem regime a few weeks before Kennedy's assassination in November, 1963.
The reporting of these young men -- especially Halberstam in the New York Times and Sheehan for UPI -- convinced key leaders in the Kennedy Administration that Diem was not capable of leading the South, and helped create that atmosphere which led to the coup that ended Diem's reign and his life.
Prochnau wrote of the coup:

For the correspondents it was a moment of great triumph. Rarely had such a small group of relatively young reporters attained such influence. Perhaps never had so few redefined the rules for the many who followed. They had exposed the government's lies and cast light on its ineptitude, two of the most fundamental functions of their craft.

By odd happenstance, I read both Halberstam's and Sheehan's Vietnam histories about 10 years ago -- during the months after the invasion of Afghanistan when the Bush Administration was turning its eyes toward Iraq. There was, at the time, a great deal of debate about whether or not we were getting ourselves into "another Vietnam."
I was struck at the time not by similarities of circumstance but by similarities of thought. Desert war was not going to be the same as jungle war. The War on Terror was not going to be a replay of the Cold War. Al'queda was not the Viet Cong. Ben Laden was not Ho Chi Minh. And so on and so forth, but the American media was still marching in lockstep with the government's perspective.
The vast majority of the mainstream media reporting of 2001-3 either supported the war and its justifications outright, or failed to ask particularly probing questions about the Bush Administration's aims and strategies, much less the deeper questions that a march to war ought always to raise.
Almost a half century on from the early days of Vietnam it is easy to forget that the young correspondents whose reporting changed the way America viewed that war themselves entered the work entirely supportive of American aims. They were the children of the World War II generation, and they believed the cause in Vietnam was just. In Hanoi they asked a lot of questions about tactics and competence, and their questioning unleashed a torrent of questions in America that came on the heels of the reporters' triumph in November '63.
"But," as Prochnau wrote (in the rest of the paragraph blockquoted above):

it was a triumph to be tempered. It would take others to see and ask the most important questions of all. Could the United States win with any South Vietnamese government? Should the United States win? Did all those well-meaning, can-do, we've-got-the-answer Americans have any business at all in a far-off and alien land among a people in search of their own unique destiny?

Those are not questions that America's war leaders could ask in 1963. Those were not McNamara's questions. Those are not questions that America's war leaders could ask in 2002. Those were not Rumsfeld's questions. We're still not asking those questions well.
We simply lack the imagination.
Finally, comes the poet.

About Last Night ...

Yesterday the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) took a leap of faith into a future that looks more like the rich garden of God’s good creation. The Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area became the 87th presbytery to affirm a change to the denomination’s constitution that will allow for the ordination of faithful, called and qualified gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender candidates for clergy and other ordained church offices. With the vote last evening, more than one half of the denomination’s 173 presbyteries have voted to affirm a change adopted by last summer’s 219th General Assembly (which, by coincidence or providence, also met in Minneapolis).
My wife and I celebrated the change over dinner with the first openly gay, partnered elder in Virginia, his partner of more than 20 years, and another friend. This dinner by coincidence, or providence, had been arranged by the friend well before we knew that yesterday, May 10-A, would be the day that would see passage of amendment 10-A, as the measure has come to be called.
The dinner had nothing to do with the church’s politics, and everything to do with my congregation’s long-standing, deep commitment to radical hospitality. The soup for dinner, as well as the idea for this gathering, came from a young woman who has been worshipping with us for a few months. She is the victim of what I would call theological abuse or church malpractice. The details of her story belong to her, but I will simply say that when she suffered a debilitating illness as a teenager her fundamentalist pastor told her adoptive parents that the disease was a result of her sinfulness, and her parents threw her out of the house. To say that she is leery of church is a profound understatement.
But she has found a new experience of faith community at Clarendon, and a huge part of that has come in the incredible hospitality and generosity shown by the couple we shared dinner with last night.
Their lives – their whole lives – testify to their deep faithfulness, and they are not alone. Our little church has dozens of deeply faithful people who welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, care for the lost and the least, and also happen to be gay or lesbian or bisexual. A healthy handful of those men and women have been ordained to the office of elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in defiance of the long-standing ban on such ordinations. They have served (and some continue to serve) their terms of office in good faith, “submit[ting] joyfully to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all aspects of life,” as the newly adopted language puts it.
Like many (some straight, some not) these faithful men and women did not live in “fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness,” as the Book of Order has read from the mid-1990s until today’s change (which becomes effective after the final presbytery votes on July 10.) They lived, instead, in fidelity in same-gender relationships – marriages as true as my own to my beloved of 29 years.
As a new day dawns for the Presbyterian Church, my prayer is that the entire church will get to experience the full range of gifts from the full range of our membership. Together we can bring more light to the vast parts of the nation and the world that still dwell in such deep darkness when it comes to the lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Together we can witness more fully and faithfully to the love and justice of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

A Letter to Jim Wallis

May 10, 2011
Dear Jim,
As a long-time Sojo reader, subscriber, and fan, and as a friend who has worked with your interns and worshipped with your community, I write with deep respect and great fondness, but also with deep disappointment in calling you on Sojourners’ rejection of the “Believe Out Loud” ad. More than calling you on this decision, I feel that I am calling you back to your own organizational commitment to “confront and dismantle discriminatory behavior wherever it may be manifest.”
It is a grace-filled coincidence that I write you on this May 10, the date when my own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) will finally affirm its own welcome to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community by lifting our long-standing ban on ordaining otherwise qualified, called queer folk.
I know you have a deep, long-standing commitment to justice. I have heard you speak eloquently about your own crystallization of consciousness concerning racial justice in America and, in particular, in the evangelic branch of the church. I know also of your evangelical commitment to scriptural authority.
I have heard you speak powerfully about economic justice, and know that your convictions there are rooted and grounded in scripture. I have heard you tell the story of the Bible from which your seminary classmate cut out all references to the poor to underscore God’s abiding concern for economic justice. You called it, “a Bible full of holes.”
It occurs to me that if you took from the Bible every reference to the word “homosexual” you would still have an intact Bible. Indeed, the word “homosexual” did not exist when scripture was written. Even if you removed all of the verses that conservatives use to condemn same-gender relationships you would have to search pretty carefully to find the handful of holes.
But if you tried the same experiment with reference to welcome to the outcast, love for the stranger, compassion for the least of these you would have another Bible full of holes.
In a week that may also see final passage in Uganda of a bill that could impose the death penalty on those found “guilty” of being gay or lesbian, who is the outcast, the stranger, the least of these in whose lives we are called to see Christ?
As Christians we share an incarnational theology. We understand that in Jesus the truth was made flesh in the world, and thus we understand truth through a relationship with Christ. If we take Matthew 25 seriously, we also understand that part of our relationship with Christ is bound up in our relationships with one another, and, in particular, in our relationships with those who are hungry, who are imprisoned, who are marginalized by systems and cultures and institutions, even and especially the church.
Toward that end, all I can do is offer testimony. I am a witness here, and my understanding of what it means to try to be a faithful follower of Jesus has been shaped in part by my relationships with people of faith who happen to have a different sexual orientation than I have – people in whom I have seen Christ.
Thus I invite you, for the sake of your own faith journey, to come and worship with us at Clarendon. The trip over on a Sunday morning won’t take you more than 25 minutes. Don’t let the Potomac stand in your way; at Clarendon we are dedicated to bridging every divide. You’ll find a gracious welcome from this community where we truly believe that each and every one of us is a creature made in the image and likeness of a loving Creator.
Yours in Christ,