Contentment vs fact

For lunch on Sunday, I made "Israeli Salad" (and the accompanying cocktail) from Zahav.  This was a deliberate choice on a number of levels: 1) it's summer, and tomatoes and cucumbers are in season, and delicious and 2) Saturday was mostly spent running around and all I could really manage to eat was potato chips, rice snacks, and a bowl of cereal, so I was feeling kind of carb-heavy.

Now, #2 is entirely silly.  Eating vegetables for lunch was kind of an act of "cleansing" which doesn't work.  The idea that some foods rid your body of other foods is entirely unscientific, except for the possible exception of insoluble fiber.  I know this is a nonsense idea.  But psychologically, it feels satisfying to eat vegetables to make up for eating lots of carbs.

And I am wondering if this psychological sense of contentment, of something that feels satisfying in the face of facts, is partly what is going on in this election season.  I mean, when majorities of Trump's supporters don't even believe half of what he is saying, facts are obviously not what is carrying the day.  It feels good (for them) to hear someone saying what he is saying.  It feels scary to know that black people, brown people, non-English-speaking people, and women are gaining power in society, power that had previously been reserved for white, English-native men.  Even if they have never actually seen these effects, they know they're out there.  It's not the actual disenfranchisement as much as the fear of it.

I'm not really sure what can be done about it, though.  In pastoral care and counseling classes, we are taught that feelings are neither right nor wrong, and that one of the first steps to dialogue is validating the other person's feelings, regardless of whether the other party thinks they are "valid" or "fair."  But when those feelings and emotions lead to real harm, to hatred and violence, validating them may not be the way to begin.  Where do you go when you've validated vitriolic hatred?  Not even that the hatred is valid, but that the person feeling it has good reason to.  That is what people are doing when they point to the hollowing of the middle class, wage stagnation, and the disappearance of jobs that don't demand a college education.  But for all the analysis of the validation, no solution is offered to get the people who are hating to stop hating.  Value systems aren't easily changed after generations.

And even educated, informed people can act contrary to fact and their own knowledge.

You don't have to believe.

One of the things that has bugged me for a long time and has been a driving force personally in my very vague career direction is people tacking things on to Christianity and forcing people to accept a whole bunch of stuff that is not, in fact, universal to Christianity. 

As far as I'm concerned, the Nicene Creed pretty much sums it up.* 

There are a whole bunch of things that people of all stripes add on that drive people away from Jesus.  So I'm going to list some of the things here that piss me off.

You do not have to believe:

1.  The earth is 6,000, or 10,000 or whatever years old.

2.  Evolution doesn't happen.

3.  God meticulously controls everything.

4.  God created evil.  Also under this heading: God planned the Holocaust, God plans for children to die, God plans serial killers, God endorses war.

5.  God likes or endorses patriarchy.

6.  Only certain special people control access to God.

7.  The Bible is an instruction book.

8.  God is obsessed with what you do with your genitals.

9.  The best Christian is an unthinking, blindly believing Christian.

10.  One slip-up in activity dooms you for life and/or eternity.

11.  Christianity is just a series of guidelines invented over the years to help people live better.

All of these things are things you can believe if you want.  I would argues that all of them are wrong, actually, but I don't condemn anyone for believing them.  But absolutely none of them are essential to being a Christian.

*Normally, I would have linked here to Wikipedia or whatever, but I'm actually working on my own translation of the Nicene Creed.  I'll probably unveil it some day.  In the meantime, GIYF.

Including tradition.

So many things I could have blogged about this week. 

But I'm going to take on something that I should have written last week that is still bugging me.

I haven't been to church in over a year.  Part of that is that I've been very, very hurt by a church in the past, part of that is that I've moved 3 times and I'm not in a place with weak public transportation, and part of it is that I don't really know how to go to church anymore if I'm not staff.  And yet one more factor is that I am, as my blog says, quite eclectic in my theology, and it's hard to find a place where I'm comfortable. 

One of those eclecticisms is that I'm both traditionalist and progressive.  I love a lot of the classic hymns of Christianity, but I don't love a lot of the masculine language they contain.  Last week, I woke up from a dream with the hymn "Be Thou My Vision" stuck in my head.  This is a lovely hymn with 2 quite problematic lines.  The first appears in the second verse:

Thou my true Father and I thy true son

And the second is the first line of the third verse:

Riches I heed not nor man's empty praise

 The last church I attended was a moderately conservative Episcopal church, and I remembered that in the hymnal, that second line had been changed to

Riches I heed not nor vain, empty praise

which I think is nice, and works.  But I couldn't remember what the other line had been.

And that line has bothered me for a long time.  I know "man" has been used for "human" for a long time, and while I don't like it, I can kind of at least slide myself into it when I sing a traditional hymn.  But I can't be a son.  "Sons" maybe I can sort of include myself in because I know it's a clumsy translation in the Bible from בני b'nei or παιδός paidos (both of which, yes, can mean "sons" but they also stand in those languages generally for "children" especially in Hebrew which doesn't have another word for "children").  But "I thy true son" just doesn't work in my head.  And it was driven home strongly several years ago when the hymn was sung as a solo by one of the women on our music team.  She had a gorgeous voice, mezzo-soprano-ish, and that line just sounded utterly ludicrous when she sang it.  And it's funny because that community usually changed the pointless masculine language to inclusive language when it could.

I think the problem is the next line.  You see, the usual arrangement of this hymn is in rhyming couplets.  So it goes:

Thou my true Father and I thy true son
Thou with me dwelling and I with thee one

This also makes sense in the context of the original hymn, which was composed and sung by Irish monks.  They were all male, and they had dedicated their lives to a kind of life that centers around God and worship.  But as much as I might long for unity with God, I'm not a monk and I cannot really be a "true son."  I'm not so great with rhyme and rhythm language, and I couldn't think of a way to alter those two lines to keep the meter and rhyme.  "Child" really doesn't work - what in the world could it rhyme with?

So, as we do, I turned to the internet.  Googling "be thou my vision inclusive" doesn't, helpfully, bring up an inclusive version of the hymn, but instead a lot of people bitching about changing hymn lyrics.  Which, just, ugh. 

I don't mind traditional masculine language for God, as long as it's properly balanced by acknowledging that there is plenty of traditional feminine language for God and I do prefer if people avoid pronouns generally.  And I don't mind the "king" language, because that is rather part of God's character and what makes God God.  If God isn't ruler, no one is, and we are God's creation, so God has authority over us and the rest of creation.  I'm as pacifist as anyone, and I'm all for the church avoiding taking power and authority, but I don't mind if God has it.

But there are people out there who bitch about any change to any masculine language.  Including that referring to people.  Sometimes they claim it's about translation and respecting the original grammar, but somehow they're ok with never referring to the Spirit of God as feminine the way it is in Hebrew grammar.  So basically that argument is intellectually bankrupt.  Appeals to "original language" are just appeals to keep women from being fully included, and are no better than the Victorians leaving obscene bits untranslated "in the modesty of the original language" (which was, of course, perfectly understood by women in ancient Greece or Rome). 

One of the things that drove me away from the fringes of evangelicalism where I was and to the Episcopal Church was that I am just sick of fighting about gender.  I'm a woman (more or less), God called me to teach.  I'm not going to fight about it.  I'm just tired.  Other women are called to, and I'm glad for them.  But I'd rather be part of a community that lets me get on with doing what I'm called to do and not interested in deciding if it's ok first or not.  It reminds me of one of my professors at JTS.  He is orthodox, and JTS is conservative (which is to say, less observant and slightly more liberal).  I once asked him why he was at JTS and not YU and he said at YU, he would say something, and the class had to spend 20 minutes discussing whether what he said was heretical or not.  At JTS, they just engage in what he actually said.  I'm not interested in people debating whether I can talk or not.

It took me a while of slogging and fine-tuning the Google search, but I finally found a lovely inclusive re-phrasing:

Thou my true Father, thine own may I beThou with me dwelling and I one with thee

 Keeps the same theme and sentiment, just re-works the word order for a nice couplet.  So now I can sing this hymn again.  Thank God for community.

Rhetoric has consequences.

I hope I don't need to provide links.  There have been so many violent events recently that it would be depressing to go trawling through websites looking for examples of all of them.  Other people have done the reporting, and some have even attempted to look at the context.

What is, and I hate to use the word, but, interesting is that it seems to be a transnational western/northwestern global thing right now.  The rise of nativism and populism in the United States is trailing a similar rise in western Europe.  While the U.S. has a somewhat unique racial context and history to some that rhetoric, western Europe is itself grappling with the legacy of colonialism which radically and violently othered those with darker skin, and the philosophical underpinnings of those histories is quite explicitly shared.

At the same time, a new rhetorical power (from those of darker skin) is also rising right now and explicitly designed to cause its own violence. 

As long as those in power somehow believe that their history and wealth and light skin absolve them of the actual, real, violent effects of their rhetoric, as long as they lie to themselves and say, "they're not like us, we are rational and would never commit those acts," they will continue to cause them.  A friend of mine was lamenting to me today about the predictability of that violence.  This rhetorical and ideological world that is being created inevitably, logically leads to violence.

Yes, yes, everyone has to make an individual decision to be violent eventually.  Shut up.  The nativist,  populist, othering, even apocalyptic rhetoric that is coming from all corners is, in fact, creating an environment where making that decision to be violent seems logical, reasonable, and even praiseworthy.

As long as dehumanizing rhetoric is being used, humans will continue treating other humans as things, not human beings. 

As Jews and Christians (I don't actually know about Islam), we affirm that all human beings are created in the very image of God, that there is something divine and therefore worthy of respect and love in every single human being.  Colour of skin or religion or wealth are not enough to deprive anyone of that divine image.  The destruction of it in other human beings is an act of violence not only against them, but against the image of God in the one committing the violence as well.

A bit much.

This is getting a bit ridiculous.

Because of a misspent youth, I ended up having to learn a whole bunch of languages.  French, because you needed a language in high school.  Latin and Greek because I was a Classics major.  Italian because, uh, actually, just because.  I got to live in Florence for a month which was a lot of fun.  Biblical/classical Hebrew, because in seminary I already had Greek, so why not?  Syriac because... uh, well, because by that time I was kind of collecting languages, and it was really interesting to not only learn a new language but also a new Christian tradition.  Modern Hebrew because JTS requires all their students to learn it because Jewish (and most Israelis I've ever spoken to insist that Modern Hebrew and Classical Hebrew should really be categorized as different languages.  Just like I wouldn't say I can speak Modern Greek).

So I'm up to ... 8 languages.  4 modern (yes, English counts even if it is my native language), and 4 ancient.  And that's still not enough to satisfy PhD requirements.

I'm taking German this summer.  And my department wants me to take either Aramaic or another ancient language.  If I could learn Palestinian Jewish Aramaic instead biblical Aramaic, I'd rather that.  Palestinian Jewish Aramaic is the language of the later Amoraic rabbis, after the Mishnah, and after the Roman empire went Christian.  It's the language the later Midrashim are written in, as well as the Yerushalmi Talmud, not the Babylonian Talmud, which is the famous one.  I'm trying to keep my research focus on the eastern Roman empire, and I'm interested in Jewish belief and practise before the hegemony of the rabbis and the Babylonian Talmud.

And I'm kind of thinking of learning Arabic because it seems like it might be useful, and also because of world events, etc.

So that would make it... 11?

Uh, yeah.  This is getting a bit much.  But it is also interesting and fun.  The more languages I learn, the more literature opens up to me, and also more people and cultures to learn about and understand.  And I feel like in our current socio-political environment, understanding other people and cultures and being able to speak their language is a good and important thing.

Graduation approaches

Hebrew started this week, so I think blog posts (assuming I remember to write them) are moving to Thursday.

As the title says, graduation doth approach, which means I am starting to feel kind of stressed out about my thesis.  Since I am, I'll write about that today.  It turns out that I did indeed decide to build my thesis on top of my good paper from last semester.  I'm just adjusting it slightly so that it's not a paper about 4QMMT anymore, but about a sociological analysis of Second Temple Jewish groups.

It's generally accepted now that during the Second Temple period, Judaism was moderately diverse and divided into different groups or sects and even to speak of "Judaisms."  Most analysis of these follows standard sociological constructs, in the vein of Max Weber or and Ernst Troeltsch. These scholars both built generally applicable sociological models to explain groups or sects in any human society.

One aspect of the Second Temple sects that I think has been overlooked is the importance that halakhah played in these groups' various self-definitions and also as a cause for sect formation in the first place.  I am using "halakhah" (הלכה) to refer not to the Torah itself, but to its interpretation and specifically practical interpretation.  The discovery of the documents known as 4QMMT at Qumran and the apparent attestation to a halakhic debate that also appears in the Mishnah invigorated study of the Qumran sect and their possible provenance, but I still think even Jewish scholars overlooked the importance of halakhah itself.

I am arguing that halakhah was in some cases the cause of group/sect formation (as in the case of 4QMMT) and definitely one of the primary characteristics of self-definition.  Josephus tries to explain the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes to his Gentile audience by making them look like Greek philosophical schools, but he cannot hide that many of the disagreements between the groups were halakhic in nature.  Even, I am arguing, the Jesus movement cared about halakhah, recorded their group's halakhic decisions, and cast Jesus as their group's halakhic authority.

Same sex marriage and category errors.

I've been on here before stating that many of the arguments against same sex marriage fail because they attribute characteristics to different sex marriage that don't exist or are historically implausible.  Today I'm going to attack another: the idea that if we legitimize any "alternative" to 1-male-1-female marriage, we open the door to all of them.

This stance is not only very common, but is unfortunately helped by the "love is love" argument, which I have made here myself.  I'm going to call that a category error because marriage is not 100% about whom you are attracted to.  The similarities between two people of the same sex getting married are far greater to two people of different sexes than they are to any of the ridiculously suggested "slippery slopes" like human-animal, child, or incestuous marriages.

Validating same sex marriage is not validating any and all variants of human sexual attraction.  This is the argument, and it is false.  Two men or women who wish to commit their lives to each other and form a household as consenting adults are pretty much equivalent to a man and a woman who wish to do the same thing.  They are adults.  They are both capable of fully informed consent.  Both couples are capable of raising and providing for children which will not, from the conception, be genetically disadvantaged.  All of these things are impossible for the "alternative" marriages described above.

The other question that comes up, especially in regards to child marriage, is one of cultural norms.  If, as was common throughout human history, children or young adolescents entering marriage is a cultural norm, shouldn't we tolerate it?  In this case, I think the answer is still no, because we have decided that, generally, children and young adolescents are not capable of making those kinds of decisions.  The frontal cortex is not fully formed until the late teens or twenties, and this development has significant impacts on a person's decision-making capabilities.  The other factor is that child marriage is much more often the girl or young woman being married to a much older man. which initiates not only an impressive power imbalance, but also pairs someone who may or may not be capable of consent with someone who is able to force a decision.  In this case, the woman is undervalued from the start, and this is simply not what we should be striving for.

I've avoided the word "biblical" several times here because there are examples in the Bible of all kinds of marriages, including ones today we would find abhorrent (e.g. children, rape, slaves).  However, what is described in the biblical text and what God has established as ideal for God's people are not the same thing.  I think the biblical text is pretty clear that the ideal marriage in God's kingdom is monogamous and equal and based on love.  These characteristics are easily matched by both same and different sex marriages.  They are not by any other "scary" alternative.

Overt Sexism vs. Structural Sexism

Gender roles are a big source of arguments in the church today.  What women can do and how to deal with them (us) has caused deep hurt, acrimonious debates, and split churches.  As you might guess from this blog, I come down strictly on the side of full mutuality/egalitarianism.  As a woman, I have preached, taught, led a community, baptized people, served communion, and "celebrated" it, or done the initial explanation and prayer.  I have performed all these things in equal partnership with men, although I have been fairly isolated as a woman in this role because there weren't any, or only very few others.  Sometimes I feel like emailing the men I worked with in the more conservative and evangelical community and asking if anyone ever objected to me as a woman but I haven't yet and quite frankly, I don't know if they would even tell me.

It's that latter point that I'm going to explore here.  White males not telling females or non-white people that someone has objected to their role because of the lack of male-ness or white-ness is structural sexism or racism, not overt.  They think they are protecting the person.  They themselves never receive criticism because they do not fit into these socially constructed categories that have been determined to be appropriate for leadership, authority, and power.  These "protectors" are not overtly racist or sexist.  But in hiding criticism from those people who are, they are leaving their partners in work in ignorance, which increases their power over them.  They are structurally sexist or racist.  And they would never think of themselves in those terms.

A good example of structural sexism is going on in the tech world right now.  This story, if largely true as told (do note that GitHub has so far refused to comment), is not an example of much overt sexism.  But it is full of structural sexism.  What it more is, however, is the story of immature people in circumstances they can't deal with, and boundless egos.  Both of these things, by the way, are very common in "the startup culture."

My husband said I should blog about it because he didn't see any sexism at all in the story until I pointed it out to him.  So I am. And I'm putting it on this blog because a lot of the same structural sexism in the GitHub story is replicated in the church.

First let's point out the only overtly sexist action in the story: the rockstar programmer refusing to be romantically rejected and the company not calling him out on it.  His sexual ego has been hurt and he punishes the woman who hurt him, and the other men don't really see a problem with this.

This, by the way, is one of the key assumptions of "rape culture."  If you are attracted to someone, there is this expectation that this objectified person has some kind of obligation to attempt to reciprocate the attraction or allow you to gratify it.  They do not.  If attraction is not mutual, then it just isn't.  Rejection hurts, go have a beer with a good friend and cry on their shoulder (this advice is for both you men and women), talk it over with your therapist, and deal.  There is no obligation put on the object of your attraction, except maybe to be polite in rejection and acknowledge the pain they are causing.

Anyway.  First point of structural sexism:  wife of founder has a role in the company, but it is undefined and she is not formally employed by the company.  This ought to sound familiar to anyone who has ever run into "the pastor's wife."  This is sexism, pure and simple.  Because of her relationship and gender, she is excluded from a formal role in her husband's company, but is still expected to "support" him.  It's also the decision of a bad manager:  never, ever allow someone to have an undefined and unofficial role in your company.

Second point:  the unofficial wife (ok, that's not quite what I meant :) is sent to deal with the unhappy female employee over drinks.  Would the founder have sent his wife to deal with a male employee over drinks?  I'm going to guess there's a 95% chance that he wouldn't, not even if the male employee was gay (although he might have.  There's a reason discussion about women often overlaps with discussions about queer people).  But he sends a woman to deal with a woman.  This is structural sexism because it treats women differently from men based on assumptions about gender stereotypes. 

This is a big point in the story.  The female programmer is treated the way she is partly because the people involved obviously have no idea how to handle any kind of internal dispute, and partly because of her gender.  Assumptions about how to manager her are being dictated by gender, not by her or anyone else's role in the company.  When I pointed this out to my husband, he said now he could see the sexism.  He had not seen anything but bad management and a clash of egos until I pointed these aspects out to him.

But he's right, it's also a tale of egos.  This programmer thought she could "fix GitHub."  That has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with ego.  Her ego is identical to the men's egos in this story and they are clashing.  In a culture that rewards the biggest ego, the best self-seller, the loudest voice, situations like this are inevitable.  The sexism is in how this programmer specifically was dealt with.

It's wrong to say this is a story about sexism only.  But it's equally wrong to say she was not treated in a sexist manner simply because there is barely any overt sexism.  Structural discrimination is just as damaging as overt discrimination, and it's made even worse because it's invisible to the people it benefits even when they disagree and would never condone overt discrimination.

staying connected.

i graduated in may, ended my internship at a church, and i haven't been back to a church, any church building or local community, since.

This is not really a good thing.  i do realize this.

Not precisely as defense, but as explanation, the church i was a member, employee, and leader of before i left to go to seminary full-time and work at my internship was somewhat abusive.  Because of the senior pastor's insecurities and ambition, the community i had been a part of was dissolved by the leadership.  This happened 2 weeks after i had gone to a new church to intern.

Part of the problem is also that i went from being a leader in a community to being a seminarian-intern, another leadership position.  i've been teaching in churches for the last 4 years, and i've been a resource for church leaders for even longer than that.

The prospect of finding a new community to worship with is exhausting.

Also the problem is that i have some strong theological and ecclesiological commitments these days, and part of what i would be looking for in a church is either closely shared ideological stances, or openness to them.  i'm really not willing to compromise on women being in ministry, the church adopting missional ecclesiology, following and supporting social justice, or a belief in the inspiration of the Scriptures and the supernatural.  This puts me in a very awkward position, half liberal, half evangelical.  both sides have things that irritate me.

i want a church that believes in the resurrection, that believes that Jesus' followers are empowered by the Spirit sent by the Father, that believes that "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world" (James 1:27 NRSV).

And i've been hurt.  A few weeks ago, we were staying with my parents, and i couldn't go to church with them.  the prospect of stepping inside that building stressed me out and upset me so much.

But see, this is where things like the lectionary come in.  For the last couple years, i've been buying these devotionals that follow the lectionary with ancient christian commentary.  Paleo-orthodoxy has its own problems, but i'm a historian, and reading what my brothers and sisters left behind as relics from their spiritual journeys makes me feel connected to them.  Also, reading with the lectionary allows me to follow the church year and the same scripture readings along with the huge numbers of other christians who do the same.  So i just bought myself the volume for the "A" year, as well as the Episcopal Church's book "Holy Men, Holy Women," which is something like a calendar of saints, but a little more contemporary, yes, liberal, and Protestantized.

It's not real community, but it's the best i can do for now.  Sort of my Advent longing.

intervention

i have been thinking about this whole Syria thing, and wondering what a good Christian, Christ-like,  response is.  i do believe that God calls God's people to intervene and offer relief to the suffering innocent, and that relief is real, physical, this-world relief, not just a promise of some kind of vague spiritual paradise.  but i also believe that Jesus taught a non-violent way.  and quite honestly, we've seen the results of violent intervention all over the middle east, and there's no reason to believe that Syria would be any different.

so this is the conundrum.  how do you intervene in the suffering of the innocent but without violence?

and it kind of hit me, well, isn't that what the cross is?  in becoming a victim of violence, Jesus conquered violence.  in receiving the ultimate judicial punishment that humans can devise, the cross stands as a rebuke against violence and death.  but even more so, by God becoming human and dying, God conquers death.  the way of Jesus, the way of the cross, is to offer oneself to suffer with the innocent and to gain power precisely in the abdication of violent, judicial power.

so i think the Christian response to what's going on in Syria ought to be to line up like the Freedom Riders and the lunch counter protesters of the civil rights movement and take the violence on us.  take the bombs and the gas and bullets and stand there in defiance of that violence.

it won't happen, of course.  for one, i can already think of hundreds of logistical objections, and Christians really aren't used to working in partnership globally.  we're more used to fighting each other.  and it's incredibly rare to hear Christian preaching that says, hey, give up your life.  no, really.  give it up like Jesus did.  we hear more about how to steward our finances and improve our relationships and do good, practical things to work for social justice (and these sermons, btw, have nothing to do with liberal or conservative).

Christianity has become so wedded to political, judicial power that we don't really take the "give up everything" call of Jesus seriously.  this is true both in western state and culture as well as in the middle east.  we can't answer that call anymore because we don't know how.  we are too used to having that kind of power that we've forgotten to look for solutions that don't use it.  but we've seen the results of intervening in a society nonviolently too, with the civil rights movement here, and India's independence movement, and the path that took Christianity from an illegal, persecuted sect to precisely that political power that it is today.

and as strongly as i feel this conviction, i know i won't go myself because this kind of widespread, systemic violence is precisely why we have the body of Christ.  i could go over there, and die, and maybe my husband or parents would publicize the story, but it wouldn't cause mass change in the Church Universal.  so i'm blogging instead, and learning a lesson and looking for somewhere here in my local life to intervene nonviolently.

but also, i believe that the local, Syrian Christians have a responsibility to their neighbours, and i'm not saying they're not hearing God or whatever and they're terrible Christians.  they show us in the west everything that is wrong about Christian power wedded to state power.  they are our mirror, not our scapegoat.  it's our fault too.  but Christians are in a place and a location and a culture, and the success stories are largely the stories of Christians acting from within their own culture, not from outsiders.

but imagine if Christians globally flooded Syria and stood between the innocent Muslim children and the violence of soldiers on both sides.  imagine what could be the result of that.  that, i propose, would be a picture of God's throne in heaven.

identity and terms.

Last Sunday, CNN.com published this post by Rachel Held Evans.

While I sympathize with her sentiments, there are some problems with the post.  I don't know how much of it was due to her and how much of it was due to the CNN editors, so don't take everything I say as criticism of Ms. Evans.

The first problem with the post is the title.  "The Church" it says.  Except in her post, she remarks that millennials are leaving the "evangelical" church and joining the more liturgical and high-church traditions like "Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Episcopal Church, etc."  So millennials aren't leaving "the church," at least not the Church as the body of Christ.  They are simply leaving one expression of that church and moving to others.

However, the main problem is that Evans apparently doesn't recognize that the reason evangelical pastors don't "get it" when she talks to them is because she is fundamentally asking them to stop being evangelical, or at least to radically re-define what "evangelical" means.  She ends her post with a list of things that "we want" (full disclosure, I'm about 2 years older than Evans, consider myself more Gen X than millennial, and have left the "evangelical" tradition for the Episcopal Church) without realizing that the things she wants are the very things that evangelicalism has (as she points out unconsciously) spent its time defining itself against.  Evangelical Christianity has the same problem as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: both are movements of religious conservatives that cannot back down from their current, historically held positions without at a minimum a severe identity crisis, and essentially a paradigmatic shift as to how they deal with society, culture, and theology.

On one hand, Evans is right.  It's not about music, coffee, lighting... style, basically.  It's about the substance of the Christianity being taught and lived out in churches.  But to ask an evangelical pastor to moderate his (and it is almost always a he) stance on the LGBT community, science and evolution, and gender roles, to say nothing of completely redeveloping his ecclesiology so the church is something you don't "go to on Sunday" is to ask him to read the Bible differently, with different eyes and different philosophical assumptions.  It is, essentially to ask him to stop being an evangelical and become something else, something different.  Something, unfortunately for those of us trying to effect this change, that we don't have a name for yet.

In the early 2000s, there was a brief uprush of books being published about "the younger evangelicals" or the "post-evangelicals" or "the emergent church."  They were mostly written by older men, confused about the demands of Gen X at the time, demands which, 10 years ago, were basically identical to Evans' in her post.  The fact that 10 years later, people are asking for the same things ought to at least point out that the evangelical church failed to figure this out.  But the approach is almost the same. In these books (and I read a lot of them as part of a research project for my pastor at the time) generally Gen X and the leading edge of the millennials were treated as anomalies, as strange species to be studied, but not people to be taken seriously.  There was a sense that changing language about community and whatnot, but not changing the core of evangelical belief, would mollify these people and bring them back into the fold.  In a couple years, these men promised anxious pastors, these steps would no longer be needed.

The "evangelical" church is not dying, but for those of us who are tired of asking, we need to sit up and recognize that for some reason, we are asking to wear the "evangelical" label with only being tangentially related to what has been defined as "evangelicalism" culturally.  I am aware the definition is contested, but that is precisely the point.  People older than Gen X who want to expand it, make it a "big tent" are fighting not only their own colleagues, but popular culture in general.

I can't call myself "evangelical" anymore.  According to a friend and former colleague of mine, I never really could :)  This might explain why I am comfortable giving up on that tradition and label and looking for something new.  But I suggest to Evans and her cohort that they should take a critical look at what they are asking and ask themselves if they really want the label "evangelical" or if it isn't, in fact, time to find something new. 

Maybe no label at all, so we can stop this in-grouping and out-grouping and indeed live as the body of Christ.

doubting thomas.

so i just moved and don't have internet regularly except when i'm at school.  and i preached the second sunday after easter again this year.  as with me, this sermon goes all over the place, but people said afterwards they really appreciated it.  so here it is.

every year for the past few years, i have either taught or co-taught a class for "skeptics," people who are honestly interested in christianity, but have questions. very often, one of those questions is, "is it ok if i have questions?" this class always works my own faith pretty hard, but i really value the experience and would not give any of the past few years up. this sermon came out of some of that reflection.

Doubting Thomas

Have you ever had anyone ask you if you have “accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior”? If you haven’t, let me say that you are lucky. It seems to happen to me with uncomfortable regularity. I guess I just don’t look like someone who has. Once, I just had someone mutter, “There’s hope in Jesus” as they walked past me.

Every time this happens, I think to myself, is that what Christianity is? Accepting Jesus as personal Lord and Savior? Getting some kind of nebulous hope? Going to heaven when we die? This sounds so different from our gospel reading today, doesn’t it? “But these [signs] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing, you may have life in his name.”

Man! Someone call the Bible translation committees! John got it so wrong! We’re not supposed to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. We’re supposed to believe that he is our personal Savior, right? And “life in his name”? Where’s heaven? Where’s what happens after I die? That’s what Christianity is all about. Heaven or hell. Right? ...Right?

My point here is not to belittle street evangelists. They are obviously sincere enough about their faith in Jesus to go up to complete strangers and try to share that faith. They believe what they’re doing is the right thing, and I won’t say that street evangelism has never had any effect. God uses us all in different ways, and God can use anything to build the kingdom of heaven.

But what I am saying is that the “don’t you want to go to heaven when you die” gospel that the street evangelists share with people is only part of the gospel. It’s a compressed, simplified, and to some extent, a reduced gospel.

What does John’s gospel say today? Notice that there is no mention of heaven in the statement where the writer says why he’s written this book. John says only, “that through believing, you may have life in his name.” Heaven isn’t mentioned anywhere. And this statement comes right after the story of “doubting Thomas.” And before that story is the story of Jesus’ first post-resurrection appearance in John to the disciples where he says to them, “receive the Holy Spirit.” And then he gives them some instructions that seem strangely this-worldly, doesn’t he? Again, nothing about heaven or what’s going to happen after you die.

We are now in this period between Easter and Ascension Day, between Jesus’ resurrection and his ascension into heaven. In studying this text, I kind of noticed something for the first time: Jesus didn’t go to heaven after he died! He came back to the world for a while. He taught his disciples more, he ate with them, he had a body they could touch. And after he did go to heaven, he left them with a promise that he would come back to this world. So there’s something more to this than going to heaven when you die.

On the other hand, it’s easy to go the other way from the street evangelist and make the gospel all about this world. Jesus’ teaching certainly concentrates on how we should live for God in this world, in the here and now. But again, the gospel of John does not quite fit that either. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” Jesus says. There is a spiritual reality that also cannot be lost from believing in Jesus. And that spiritual reality contains a word we don’t like very much: sin. Now the church has disagreed over Jesus’ saying here for centuries, and to be honest it baffles me as well, because Jesus also says that only God can judge sin. But at least it must mean that there is a spiritual reality that we engage as Christians as well as a physical one rooted in this world. To lose either side is to shrink Jesus. It may be easier to get people to sign on to a shrunken Jesus, but then, who are they believing in?

And what does it mean to believe? I recently read an article that talked about Protestant problems with doubt. As you might know, one of the key pushes during the Protestant Reformation was to ground salvation in “faith alone.” “Sola fide” as it’s often quoted in Latin. There are a few of these grounding elements of the Reformation; some people call them the “solas.” But since the reformers put such an emphasis on faith, on belief, doubt became an enemy. We all know what a “doubting Thomas” is, right? And we all know that it’s not a compliment.

After the Reformation, the Enlightenment made certainty its holy grail. If you could just be certain about something, you had a place to stand. If you could just be certain about your faith, you are saved. It’s simple. It’s easy.

And it’s totally unrealistic.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” That sure makes it seem like doubt can’t be part of your life if you follow Jesus, doesn’t it? And yet what often gets missed in this story is Thomas’ shocking answer: “My Lord and my God!” Thomas may have doubted, but he came to such an amazing declaration of faith.

Many scholars see an echo of the Shema in Thomas’ answer. The Shema is the basic prayer of Judaism. It is one of the first things an observant Jew will say in the morning after waking up, and one of the last things said at night before going to bed. It is called the “Shema” because that is the first word of the prayer in Hebrew. We know it in English as “Hear O Israel: The LORD your God, the LORD is one.” In Hebrew, LORD stands in for the proper name of God, and the Greek Jewish writings carry that tradition over. When Thomas exclaims, “My Lord and my God!” he is making an extreme declaration of faith for any Jew.

And tradition tells us that Thomas went to India to spread belief in Jesus there. There are still churches in India today that trace their heritage back to Thomas. And of course, Thomas’ tradition was strong enough in the first two centuries of Christianity that we have a collection of Jesus’ sayings named after him: the gospel of Thomas. Regardless of its later reception by the church, you do not get a gospel named after you if you are considered the paramount example of someone who failed in your Christian journey.

If doubt is the enemy of faith, we would have to not only disqualify Thomas, but a huge number of the Psalms as well. Many, many Psalms express doubt about God and God’s purposes. They cry from the darkness of despair and depression. Just last week on Good Friday, we heard Jesus cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” If that is not doubt, I don’t know what is. If even Jesus doubt, and not only Jesus, but the psalm-writer before him, how can we say doubt is the enemy of faith?

Notice Jesus’ response to Thomas: “Stop doubting and believe.” Doubt is normal. A faith that never doubts, that never wrestles with questions like the possibility or impossibility of resurrection is not much of a belief. But a faith that never stops doubting is not much of a belief either. Chronic, constant doubt kills our belief. On one side, we have to lose our affection for certainty and realize that we will never have it. Faith, belief, trust - these are not certainty. They are instead the voice that says, “My LORD and my God!” even in the dark times. But on the other hand, if we can never say that either because we are too concerned with getting something right, with missing something, with something being impossible, we do not have faith either.

Remember where Jesus appears: in the middle of the disciples. They are all in a group, relying on each other to get them through this dark time. And it is the group that bears witness to Thomas. One of the promises of Jesus is that he formed a community to carry on his work and his teaching. Everyone receives the Holy Spirit. In the dark, in the doubting times, we never have to go it alone. Thomas might doubt, but he sticks with his fellow disciples anyway. When our own faith is falling to pieces, the church picks us up and carries us until we can see Jesus again in our lives.

Jesus isn’t my personal savior. He is all our savior! And he is not just “my Lord” but all our Lord. And sometimes we might get something wrong, but there is always someone else to offer another viewpoint. Jesus is not just spiritual and not just of this world. We question and we doubt, but we gather with Christians every week or month or year to fall on our knees and say, “my LORD and my God!”

Amen.

before they're gone...

very sadly, my former church was forced this year by the load of an unpayable mortgage to merge with another one.  and the new church doesn't have much use for women in a teaching ministry.

from 2005 to 2011, my husband and i were part of the emergent community that existed there.  they were our friends, our family, our congregation.  and eventually, as i learned and matured in seminary, i was given the wonderful priviledge of being one of their preachers.

i discovered a few days ago that some of the last sermons i preached there are still available on the website. this website will go away sometime this month, probably, in favour of the one from the new church, so this will only be relevant for a few more weeks.

the church i am currently attending does not have recording capabilities, and of course this blog is mostly my sermon manuscripts, but if any readers here would like to actually hear me preach, go ahead and click the link.

the sermons are much longer than the ones i have posted here; that community was used to 30-45 minute sermons.  i find i much prefer writing and preaching shorter sermons, but most of these hit the 30 minute mark. 

i'm not actually very proud of these.  they have significant flaws, and they represent a growing stage for me as a preacher and, really, pastor.  i disagree with some of the theology i preached in these, but they reflect the dominant theology of the community and the founding pastor (who always reviewed my sermons with me after i preached them).  in my humble opinion, the earliest one available there, from April 14, is the best, although today if i preached it, it would be less supersessionist.  the latest one, from September 4, is the same as this post.

with the change to a new year, sometimes it's good to look back and see where we've been.  this is where i've been.  it's an unalterable part of my story.

we are all individuals.

i preached this morning at the request of my ordination committee.  unfortunately, this sermon suffers from a lack of tight organization; some of the transitions are rough, and in one case, nonexistent.  i tried to fix it on the fly when i was actually speaking, but now i can't remember what i said, so you just get the manuscript version.

i do preach from a full manuscript because i'm nervous enough that if i didn't, i'd be even more disorganized and would forget things.  it usually does change in the moment, but not a whole lot.

the text is Mark 6:1-13, with an allusion to the collect for the day.

Born into community

The image of the completely independent human individual has been a powerful one in western civilization since the eighteenth century. The person who stands alone, dependent on no one, completely determining their own fate - this image has guided art, literature, philosophy...most areas of human endeavor for the last three hundred years or so.

Unfortunately, that image, like so many others, is just that: an image. It does not reflect an accessible reality. We as people are dependent on our parents, first, for life, food, the beginnings of education. Even someone who moves “off the grid” as we say, was still at one point dependent on and shaped by their parents, or the people who kept them alive through the extraordinarily helpless early years as a human infant and toddler. Where a horse, for example, can walk shortly after birth, think of how little a human infant can do, and for how long. From our birth, not only do we need to depend on other people, but we learn to depend on them.

And when one reflects on this, the question might arise, is the image of the independent person a desirable one? Should we try to throw off as much dependence on each other as we can? Is dependence some kind of infantilism?

The answer from the Christian tradition has generally been... no. No, utter independence is not desirable. And it is not a symptom of an arrested childhood.

In today’s gospel passage, Jesus commands a radical dependence on his disciples. Do not make even the most basic preparations for your own comfort or survival, but rely on strangers who welcome you generously. This is how to be a disciple of Jesus.

That’s pretty... unrealistic, isn’t it? Does it really mean that we should never take thought to providing for ourselves? Well, we can say what it doesn’t mean. We know it doesn’t mean that Christians should be lazy and rely on everyone else for day to day needs. Paul has to remind the Thessalonian church of this: that someone who just leeches off the community is not living the way Jesus commands.

And in the second century, we have a document called “The Teachings of the Apostles” or it’s Greek name, the Didache. In there, it tells a church that they should be welcoming and generous to a visiting prophet, but a prophet who stays more than 3 days, and by implication, eats your food, drinks your wine, and borrows your clothing and spare room for more than three days, is a false prophet. True followers of Jesus don’t abuse the community’s interdependence or generosity.

And, logically, if everyone just relied on everyone else, nothing would ever get done and we’d all starve to death, wouldn’t we? This isn’t a command to sit around waiting for food and clothes to drop from heaven. The disciples cast out many demons and cured many who were sick in exchange for being taken care of physically. We even find out from this passage that Jesus was a carpenter, that he worked “for a living” so to speak, before he transitioned to being a rabbi, a teacher.

And by the way, just because I found this interesting, being a carpenter did not disqualify you from being a rabbi. One of the most famous rabbis in all of Judaism, a man named Shammai, started his life as a carpenter. The comment here by the crowd is an attempt to identify him as someone known and controlled, not necessarily to disqualify him from being someone who can teach. That’s just a freebie there.

But still, this kind of radical generosity and dependence is built into the Christian message. It’s not just about us as individuals going about the work of Jesus in the world, it’s about us forming a community, a radically generous and interdependent community that as more than the sum of its parts carries Jesus’ message and his presence into the world to change it.

You know, one of the things that really strikes me about this passage is Jesus’ own dependence on people. “And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief.” This statement is all the more striking because this passage comes right after about three chapters of miracle stories. Jesus has been healing people, casting out demons, even raising the dead, and suddenly he can do no deed of power in this town. Somehow, even Jesus is dependent on the faith of the people of that town to do his miracles. The saddest part of this story is that they crippled their own ability to experience the amazing things that Jesus offered.

And a realistic take on dependence and independence cannot ignore the fact that we are all separate people. Humans are not joined at the hip to each other, and dependence can be very unhealthy when a person loses their sense of self and identity. Dependence among the community of Jesus-followers should be life-giving, not taking selfishly or giving until the self is lost. Jesus knew who he was, and he stood by it. Loving your neighbor does not mean losing yourself to them.

Independence and dependence are alike that way. Some of each is needed, and too much of one or the other is unhealthy. Where Jesus’ instructions here in Mark prick us is that what Jesus defines as a healthy amount of dependence has been defined by our culture as unhealthy. This is the radical, world-changing side of Christianity that often gets pushed away the same way the crowd tried to domesticate Jesus, we as Christians often try to domesticate and control his message.

We can still cripple the power Jesus gives, both as the church, the community of people who follow Jesus, and individually in our own lives. We are given the power of the Holy Spirit, who gives life and who unites the church, but just as Jesus could do no deeds of power in his hometown, as individual Christians, we can cripple the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in our own lives.

And I think we all do this, at least a little. Jesus’ message hurts. It changes us. Change is always scary. How can we possibly live like this? The gospel of Mark is a great place to go for examples of this, because it seems every time you turn the page, the disciples are back-to-back getting it right and wrong. Here, in our passage today, they’re getting it right, healing people, casting out demons, calling for repentance. In a few chapters, they’re arguing selfishly about who gets the most honor in Jesus’ coming kingdom. Jesus’ call is a hard way to live.

And as the disciples’ bickering and miracle-working show, when we stop the change, when we domesticate and tame Jesus and his message, we don’t just hurt ourselves. We hurt the whole community we’ve been joined to through Jesus, and we hurt the rest of the world, because they don’t get to see us bring Jesus to them.

Jesus teaches a message of radical dependence and generosity, and not just in terms of spiritual gifts, but in intensely practical and physical ways as well. This is easier to do as a group; it’s easy to point at the ministries and community service and social justice acts of a local church than it is to either give or receive this in our own lives. But the radical, rugged independent individualist that we have come to see as a powerful guiding image is not the image that Jesus holds out for us. Jesus holds out the image of someone who knows who they are, but who also knows they are part of a community, that they are in a dramatic way dependent on that community. Jesus calls us to be a radically generous and interdependent community carries Jesus’ message and his presence into the world to change it. And instead of insisting we determine our own fate, we pray, Thy will be done. Even unto the cross.

Amen.

not a mother's day sermon.

this sermon was for two weeks ago, which i only realized was mother's day after i wrote it.

so one line got shoved in there real fast to acknowledge that fact.

one of the lectionary texts for the day was 1 John 5:1-6. i already happened to have a sermon written on 1 John 5:4-12, so that formed the jumping off point, and the "application" bit was taken pretty much straight from that one. but this was a different sermon. it was the one i would have liked to have written the first time (march 2011). but i wasn't a good enough preacher/sermon writer back then to have been able to pull it off, and i had only just fallen in love with Desiderius Erasmus then. the combination of trying to write (and giving up on) a paper on Erasmus and just getting better at more tightly organizing sermons, and having a very different audience let me pull it off this time around. this version of it actually should be longer, and could definitely have been a lot longer, but at an 8am service, they like the sermons short and sweet *grin*

Love and Faith Conquer All

Today’s reading from 1 John happened to intersect with two of my favorite topics, so I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to preach on it.

Despite possibly being the most bizarre book in the Bible after Revelation, 1 John is one of my favorites. I really love 1 John for its emphasis on how to live in Christian community. Even in the passage today, which is about the power of faith in Jesus Christ, 1 John can’t resist throwing in the comment that “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child.” If you love God, you will love the children of God, each other!

It manages to pack in a ton of theology, encouragement about how to follow Jesus, and confusing language all in such a short space. It’s also regularly given to New Testament Greek students, partly because the Greek is so strange, so you’re never sure if what you’re translating is correct or not because sometimes it just doesn’t make sense.

And speaking of the Greek, one of my favorite people in church history was Desiderius Erasmus. He was a monk who hated being a monk and ran away from his monastery to become a scholar and writer in the fifteenth century. One of my favorite quotes of his is also one of his most famous: “when I get a little money, I buy books. And if there is any left over, I buy food and clothing.” He was dedicated to his work as a scholar and dreamed that everyone would have a Bible of their own to read. Erasmus shocked the church by publishing a new translation of the Bible in Greek that disagreed with the Latin Vulgate, the official, approved Bible of the medieval church. His boldness in publishing and his vision of a Bible for the masses was a huge influence on Martin Luther and many of the other people who became the reformers.

Erasmus never joined the reformers, though. He knew the church needed reforming, but he was horrified when it became clear that Luther’s reforms would lead to a schism in the church. Although Luther wrote Erasmus asking for support, Erasmus refused and told Luther to back down in the face of Rome and work for less radical reform. In the words of my church history professor, “Erasmus died a Catholic, but a depressed Catholic.”

And this particular passage in 1 John became something of a real problem for him. The writers of the Vulgate saw three things: The water and the blood and the Spirit, and they couldn’t resist putting in an extra verse that supported Trinitarian theology. Erasmus looked at the Greek manuscripts available to him and realized it had been added. So he took it out.

The uproar was fierce. How dared he change the words of the sacred scripture? When Erasmus pointed out that they had been changed to add the verse in the first place, no one was appeased. How dared he question the wisdom of the church? Erasmus’ reply to that was that he wasn’t questioning the wisdom of the church, he was simply being faithful to the manuscripts. If, he said, someone could prove to him that the verse was original, he would add it back in. And the leadership of the church was so desperate to put it back in the Bible that they had someone forge a manuscript and present it to Erasmus so that he was forced to add it back in. If you look up 1 John 5 in a King James Version of the Bible, you will find it there.

But today, Erasmus has won. And in one way, his story is a wonderful example of exactly what is being spoken about in this passage. Erasmus not only loved the parent, but he loved the children. Out of love for the church, he wanted the church to have the most accurate Bible it could have because that is where our faith comes from. When we read the Bible, we hear God’s Spirit speaking to us, telling us about God, and giving us the strength to have faith.

But out of love for his fellow Christians, Erasmus also wanted as many people as possible to have a Bible that they could read so that the Spirit could speak to everyone, not just the rich and powerful and educated. Before the reformation, the church leadership controlled who was allowed to read the Bible and who was not. Erasmus intended his Greek Bible to be the basis for translations into every language, and indeed, the King James Version is based in a large part on Erasmus’ Greek text.

And Erasmus had faith. He believed that God was guiding the church, especially in this newly discovered wave of manuscripts and the recovery of knowledge of Greek in Western Europe. He truly believed that our faith would conquer the world.

Of course, when a late medieval ex-monk thought of faith conquering the world, he thought of something quite different than what we think of today, or what the original readers of 1 John would have thought of at the end of the first century. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have the promise for today. In fact, today, we probably read it much more closely to the original audience, partly because of what we have learned from Erasmus and other scholars of his era: go back to the text. “Ad fontes” was their slogan: Back to the sources! Not only the biblical text, but as many other ancient sources as we can find.

The community that 1 John was written to, and probably the gospel of John as well, had undergone some kind of trauma. Just as Erasmus feared would happen to the medieval church, this ancient community of Christians had split, and they felt betrayed. So the writer reminds them of Jesus’ commandment: “love one another as I have loved you.” And when we obey this commandment, which is not burdensome, we love God, and our faith in Jesus Christ and our love for God and each other is what conquers the world.

This is not a victory through military might, or through rhetoric and manipulation, or even through a voting majority. This is a victory through love. It’s an amazing, upside-down, backwards idea. But this is the lesson of Jesus. And the Spirit of God who speaks to us and in us and through us testifies to this love and to Jesus because the Spirit is truth.

What does it look like to live like this, to live following the commandment to love each other as Jesus loved us?

How you act when you’re waiting in line at the grocery store or at the coffeeshop?

Or when someone else’s kid throws a tempter tantrum in the middle of the mall?

Or when a call goes out to volunteer here at All Saints’ or in one of the many ministries here that serves the community?

Or when the global NGO Save the Children comes out with its annual list of the worst places in the world to be a mother?

It shows in how we act towards people, yes, but it’s not just about people. In his book “Surprised by Hope,” N. T. Wright, a bishop in the Church of England and another of my favorite authors, says, “Every act of love, gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation…”

All of these things can be part of our faith which conquers the world. The activities themselves don’t conquer the world; it’s why we do it. We are inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation.

Living this way won’t automatically come naturally to us. It would be nice if they did, but we have to consciously listen for the Spirit in our lives. These are habits we have to build. For some of you, maybe writing things down is your way to go. Jotting notes during the day, or if you do daily devotions could help. I go through journaling phases in my own life; sometimes I write every day and then I stop for months. Something constant is what helps us build habits.

Put a sticky note on the dashboard of your car. “Love each other as I have loved you.” Make it your iPhone’s wallpaper :) Put a note on your cubicle wall at work. Make art or music or find an activity that speaks both to your heart and from your heart as it’s inspired by the love of God and the delight in the beauty of his creation. Maybe learn about a person in the history of the church who exemplifies this for you and then learn from them. There are some amazing people tucked away in our family over the course of two thousand years, and many of them are inspiring as well.

Maybe you’re already serving in a ministry and trying to love each other and listen for the Spirit. The problem is, if you’re still alive, God is still working on you. Keep listening, for the Spirit in your own heart and in the voices of those around you, and you can be sure eventually God will push you on to your next step.

But the promise is there for us. As we abide in the love of Jesus, we are children of God, and whatever is born of God conquers the world. Victory through love. Love God and love his children.

Amen.

fleeing to canterbury.

so. i am joining the episcopal church on sunday.

there are a number of reasons for doing this, but the primary one is ordination. the episcopal church ordains women, no questions asked. i don't have to justify myself. i don't have to defend my "call" (well, any more than anyone else seeking ordination). put simply, i don't have to fight. they will ordain me and let me teach and preach and not bat an eyelash.

i know there are many women who go back to the american evangelical church and fight. they push their way into meetings and committees and church leadership teams. they serve quietly, asking ever so often if the men up there have decided to take a look at the issue again. i could do that. but i'm not a very good politician, and i'd rather be in a place where i can actually use my talents rather than have to spend half my time convincing people to let me do so.

another key reason is that i'm currently plugged into an episcopal church for my internship, and they have been very supportive of sending me on for ordination. if i didn't do this, i would have to wait until next summer and find a new church and start all over again. am i rushing in too fast? probably. but that doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong.

and, in the end, i love the anglican tradition and liturgy. except the whole state church thing, but it's a disestablished church here, so that's ok. i like Thomas Cranmer and Elizabeth I and John Donne and C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers. and i even like Anselm. plus the anglican church can draw on celtic spirituality almost natively. and they're not a reformed tradition. there's a place for art and music and beauty and poetry. the episcopal church, and even the anglican church is centered on worship, not doctrine. they are the via media; they encompass a range of beliefs and are not fixated on doctrinal or idealogical purity. they even have a peace movement and support conscientious objection.

i guess i'll have to baptize babies if i even enter parish ministry, which i think is silly, but there's a good chance i'll only ever be an associate and hopefully spend more time getting a ph.d. and being a professor. but this is the thing: i've discovered that, generally in the church, in order to teach, you have to be ordained. i don't want to be anything but an associate pastor/priest and a professor; i don't think i would be a good primary pastor for any church. but if i want to teach, being able to say i am "an ordained episcopal priest" can only help.

low sunday sermon.

in doing research for this sermon, i discovered that liturgically, the sunday after easter is called "low sunday." but no one said why. the sermon is on Acts 4:32-35 and Psalm 133.

God's diverse yachad

Do you know, this short little passage from Acts has actually become fairly controversial? Maybe it’s not so surprising to see why... it seems as though the early church followed quite a communal economic model, doesn’t it? “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.”

There is a lot of argument over whether this description of the earliest church is to be “normative” for the whole church. That is, we ask is this really to be the way the church should live? Isn’t it impossible when there are billions of Christians? Isn’t it impossible when we live in a world of credit and capital, an industrialized economy where money is more often numbers in a computer somewhere? The model of an ancient, agricultural society can hardly apply to us today, right? And really, do we have to talk about money in church again? Many scholars question whether the picture of the early community depicted here is even accurate; maybe it’s being remembered with “rose-tinted spectacles.” Or maybe the people who never really believed but came for free handouts is being carefully edited out.

I once had a professor who quoted a paraphrased version of this passage, and then she asked, “who said that?” And I answered, without raising my hand, “Karl Marx.” Most of the class laughed, but the professor said she would pray for me :)

But we like our stuff, don’t we?

Luke, who wrote the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, has some hard things to say about money. The most famous is probably the story he tells is the one we call “the rich young ruler,” where Jesus tells a young man to sell everything he has and give the money to the poor, and then come follow Jesus. One scholar notes, “Wealth is not, for Luke a sign of divine approval. It is a danger.”

I don’t really know if there are economic lessons we can draw from this passage. I don’t think Luke recorded it to give us a model for organizing the financial situations of our churches. Because of where it is situated in the narrative of Acts, though, I think Luke put it there to explain to his audience how we should live as followers of the resurrected Jesus. If there is anything perfectly clear from Luke’s stories and parables about wealth it is that the follower of Jesus should not be caught up in gathering wealth for their own sake. Wealth is good, but only if it’s used to build up the kingdom of God.

Luke follows this general sketch of the new community of Jesus-followers with two stories: one is of a man who sells a field and gives all the money to the apostles. The other is of a couple who also sell a field, but who keep back some of the money and then lie and say they are giving all of their profits to the community. Peter confronts both of them about the lie and they die suddenly, which Luke attributes to supernatural causes.

The point in their story isn’t that they kept some of the money back. It was their property, they could do such a thing. No, what they are accused of is lying to God. They wanted to make themselves look good by saying they were giving everything to the people of God. Their lie proved they cared more about themselves than and how they appeared than God or the poor. So we need to be really careful about insisting we can draw economic or financial models from this passage.

What is absolutely certain is that God wants his people to look beyond themselves and especially to the poor. You can barely open the Bible without being confronted on every page, Old and New Testaments, with the injunction to care for the community, to be generous and free with your money for the good of God’s people. And this isn’t just unique to Christians. Tacitus, a Roman historian who wrote in the second century complained that Jews are wealthy because “among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to show compassion.”

I also think the psalm selected for this morning picks up on another theme Luke is hitting on here. “How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters live together in unity!” Psalm 133 is a very famous psalm in the Hebrew Bible; when I was growing up, we sang a song of that verse in Hebrew. Unity is also desperately desired by God’s people. The word in Hebrew is “yachad;” it’s one of the words the community which created the Dead Sea Scrolls used to describe themselves. They were not just an assembly, or a community, they were a unity.

But we have to be careful with that too. The yachad, the Dead Sea Scrolls community are known for their very strict discipline practices. It took at least three years to be admitted into their community, and it was very, very easy to be cast back out again for some infraction of the rules. As far as we know, women were not allowed at all. They clung to their charismatic leader, whom they called “the teacher of righteousness” and seem to have had a tightly controlled and administrated community purse, which is unlike Luke’s depiction of the early Jerusalem church in this passage.

It seems to me that the unity that God’s people are called to is not uniformity. God created a wonderfully diverse world full of all different kinds of people. I can’t imagine that all that diversity was a mistake. I don’t think God wants people to be identical, cookie-cutter clones. For one thing, people are given different spiritual gifts! Why in the world would God make people different if he wanted everyone to be the same? In a few more chapters, the apostles are going to create the first deacons to head up what we might call the social justice side of the community, because they see their primary role in the community as teachers and witnesses to the risen Christ, not as administrators.

And thank God for administrators and people who are good with money! The church needs them as much as it needs people to teach. I mean, I love reading and researching and teaching (you may have noticed :) but I’m just as happy to hand off details and logistics and finances to those who love it as much as I love my books.

This, I think, is the final lesson of Luke’s little snapshot here. Although it is the apostles who “gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus...great grace was upon them all.” The line about giving testimony to the resurrection is sandwiched in the middle there among Luke’s description of the community’s practical day-to-day living. What that tells me is that God is as concerned, if not more concerned, with how we live as a community than our public witness to the gospel. The resurrection is absolutely of central importance to the Christian witness, don’t get me wrong. But being a missionary or a pastor or someone in what they call “full-time ministry” is not the only way to worship God and it’s certainly not the best way to be a Christian. Being concerned with social justice and the poor, being concerned with how the church handles money is just as “full-time ministry” as the clergy roles.

By the way, I hate that phrase “full-time ministry.” For one, it uses “ministry,” which is a silly word only Christians use to begin with, but it implies that somehow living your life with those other gifts from God isn’t as full-time as anything else. As people of God, we’re all doing it full time!

So you know what? Live with the gifts God has given you. If you are rich, if God has given you wealth, remember why you’re given it and remember the radical generosity in the scriptures. If you love social justice, pursue it! If you serve behind the scenes, serve! If you’re artistic, make art! If God has given you something, you make us all poorer by not using it. As we brothers and sisters live in unity, supporting each other in our diversity, then we are living as God’s people.

So isn’t it funny that this short little passage is so divisive? It divides us into those who think Christians should live in communes and those who think capitalism is God’s chosen economic model. It divides those in “full-time ministry” from those who merely give money. It divides rich and poor. And instead Luke wanted to show us that “those who believed we of one heart and soul.” Luke doesn’t erase the differences between rich and poor or between the apostles and the rest of the community. But he insists that they don’t matter. The people who sell their property and give their money just as much serving God as the apostles are when they witness the resurrection. Rich and poor alike are part of the community. The priest is as much a member of his church as the accountant, the business owner, and the person who comes to the food pantry. We are called to a beautiful yachad, a unity with all the diversity of God’s creation.

Amen.

lenten sermons, part 2.

here is the sermon i delivered this past sunday. it is not as good as the one below. if i had been thinking more clearly, i would have added the challenge to think about who doesn't seem to fit, who doesn't seem to have done things "right" and the possibility that they may be the new way God is working in and through his church. but i was stressed and a little depressed. and i'm not very good at "application."


Children of God

You know, sometimes Jesus doesn’t make any sense to me. On the other hand, he’s hardly alone in that. The passage today from the gospel of John actually happens after Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, but of course, we won’t celebrate that until next week. So the people who arranged the lectionary are at least as confusing (or maybe confused? :) as anyone else.

But I think Jesus is especially confusing. Here he is in Jerusalem. He is getting ready to celebrate the Passover with his disciples. And he seems to be getting ready for his death, having been predicting it for a while. He has just been welcomed rather flamboyantly into Jerusalem by people waving palm branches as one would cheer a king returning victorious from battle. And in all this excitement - about Jesus, about the festival coming up - some Greeks want to meet him.

It’s not entirely clear who these people were. They may have been Hellenistic diaspora Jews who had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover. That is to say, Jews who spoke Greek as their first language and read the Bible in Greek. Or they may have been gentile worshipers of the God of Israel, but one who had not officially and formally converted by the rite of circumcision. My guess is that they’re non-Jews who worship the Jewish God. Either way, it’s clear they lived neither in Jerusalem or Palestine at all and had traveled at some length and some expense to come to the festival.

It’s similar today to how Christians travel to Jerusalem to celebrate Holy Week there. You may know that every year, thousands of Christians from around the world descend on Jerusalem around Easter to follow Jesus’ own path through the city and celebrate with parades, ceremonies and church services precisely the things we are reading in the gospels. Of course, today, we can fly there, whereas in the first century, the journey had to be made much more slowly and painfully by foot, horseback, and/or ship. And whether it was the first century or the twenty-first, it’s not a cheap trip either way.

So these Greeks seek out Philip, one of Jesus’ disciples who probably spoke Greek - he has a Greek name - and told him they wanted to meet Jesus. Philip goes and tells his friend Andrew, and together, they go to tell Jesus, possibly offering to act as translators between the Aramaic-speaking Jesus and the Greeks.

And what does Jesus do? Does he say, “Great! Bring them over!”? No. Does he say, “No, at this really important festival, I need to concentrate on my fellow Jews”? No. He goes off on this bizarre monologue about the Son of Man being glorified, grains of wheat, and his Father in heaven.

What the heck is going on here?

Well, part of what I think is going on here - and this is just me - but I think the author of the gospel narrative has gotten a little distracted. Ok, distracted isn’t quite the right word. I don’t mean to imply that the author here has ADD or something. But what I do mean is that he is trying to make a point, and he’s using the Greeks to make it. We’re the ones who get distracted by this narrative of the Greeks who have come to Jerusalem for the festival and get a little off track from the gospel’s larger point. So the Greeks and Philip and Andrew are really just a setup to be able to give Jesus a chance to speak.

This is all standard in the ancient art of writing biography, which is another reason I feel like saying the author got distracted is a bad way to put it. In the ancient world, people expected the story of someone’s life to be given a point, that the narrative would be constructed to communicate a morally edifying lesson by the author. If the author didn’t do this, he would be held to have not done his duty. It was part of the convention of the genre. It would be like today, picking up a newspaper and reading an article about a court case, say, where the journalist had written up the article so that it was embellished and sounded like an excerpt from a novel. It would, in fact, still depict what happened in the courtroom, but it wouldn’t fit our expectations about how the journalist should write her story. She would have defied the conventions of her genre.

So when I say that the author of the gospel is using the request of the Greeks as a setup for Jesus, I don’t mean he invented it. It probably did happen, because we also know from other writers that inventing things was frowned on. But then in proper ancient style, he uses the episode to allow Jesus to deliver an important speech which reinforces the message being given to this account of his life.

But what is the point?

One way we can get to that question is to ask what is it about the fact that people described as Greeks wish to see Jesus. We’ve already seen that Jesus doesn’t seem to answer their request. But what if his strange monologue here is, in fact, an answer?

People have found that among others, some of the major themes in the gospel of John are Jesus’ identity with respect to the Father, and the identity of God’s people. And when you look through that lense, this episode starts to make a little more sense. First, Jesus’ monologue about the glorification of the Son of Man and of the Father’s name fit very nicely within the theme of the relationship between Jesus and the Father.

Throughout the gospel of John, Jesus is put into a very close relationship with his Father. And in this little passage, Jesus’ own glorification is linked to the glorification of the Father’s name. So this very carefully reinforces again that close link between Jesus and his Father. As we’ll discover on Easter, Jesus’ death glorifies both him and the Father’s name.

The other theme that gets pushed here is this gospel’s new definition of the people of God. Jesus spends his time in this gospel talking to just about everyone: his friends and family, Pharisees, fellow Jews, and at least one Samaritan woman. In all of these exchanges, John’s gospel has Jesus pushing on the definition of God’s people, arguing and disagreeing with his fellow Jews about that definition. And here, Greeks come to see him and this prompts him to begin talking about the glory of the Father, which even prompts a response from heaven.

Jesus is pushing a new definition of the people of God. Here it’s being made clear: the new people of God are Jews and Gentiles together, united not by circumcision, but by Jesus’ death. There was always a way for Gentiles to join the people of God: circumcision for men, and eventually baptism for both. The Hebrew Bible is filled with stories of Gentiles coming to believe in and worship the God of Israel.

Jesus' radically new way of including Gentiles in God’s family is one of the things that we celebrate on Easter, and indeed every time we take communion. We always pray and thank God that we are made one body when we eat the bread and drink the wine, the bread and wine that were first part of a Passover meal where Jesus made another radical announcement that they were to be the body and blood of Jesus himself. In his death and resurrection, all people are made the children of God.

Amen.