Author Archives: Drew Downs

About Drew Downs

An Episcopal priest and blogger living northeast of Detroit intent on building up a vibrant and authentic church.

Superman and Violence

Posted on by
Reply

Big title, short post.

All this Superman talk reminds me of the Doomsday storyline from way back in which Superman is killed. As a strange attempt at selling books (which it certainly did), it revealed the problem of violence in comics, particularly for Superman.

In Doomsday, Superman met an evil he could not prevent and an enemy he couldn’t defeat. He was not stronger or faster than Doomsday. He couldn’t outwit Doomsday because the situation wouldn’t allow for it.

It also revealed the essential character of Superman as protector, rather than responder or advocate, to violence. Doomsday came marching in and Superman put himself in the way. The deadly confrontation was sacrificial. It wasn’t even “last resort” or an attempt at making violence tolerable. He put himself in mortal danger. And was killed.

That was a decade and a half ago. I didn’t keep up with the books more than a couple years afterward. The ensuing plot included the rise of several different heroes claiming the mantle of Superman. Eventually, the real Superman emerged (with long hair, btw) and the stories could continue.

I think the Jesus motifs are far too easy and far too inappropriately applied to Superman generally, Here are good responses by Mark Sandlin and Zack Hunt for why that is. Particularly as Superman is operating in a zeitgeist that is alien to the Jesus story, particularly with the World War origins of the Man of Steel.

I do believe that essential to the character of Superman is his relationship to his power; that unlike Spider-Man’s great line about responsibility, Superman’s true greatness is based in the power he doesn’t use. He is never portrayed as the smartest hero, but his struggle is to always protect people while doing no harm. In this way, Superman turns out to address the most human need of all.

A need that only comes through peace.

May He See Us

Posted on by
Reply

a homily for Proper 5C

Text: Luke 7:36-8:3

The Awkward Dinner

If I were to ask you to name a person, living or dead you’d like to have over for dinner, after hearing this story, I’m guessing you wouldn’t say “Jesus”. Jesus makes a lousy dinner guest for the faithful. The people that need help or are ostracized: those people get love from Jesus. Guys like Simon, the Pharisee get a different companion.

The text doesn’t give us Simon’s motives for inviting Jesus over for dinner. We know who he wouldn’t invite over. He wouldn’t eat with someone below his station. Purity laws and customs forbade it. So Simon sees Jesus as something of an equal.

Which means he seems to be completely ignoring the woman that is on the ground, sobbing, and wiping Jesus’s feet with her hair. I’m not sure how he does this. We’d be distracted. If we didn’t want her there, we’d have her kicked out. If we wanted her there, she’d be sitting somewhere. If we wanted her near the table, she’d be serving or eating at it. She wouldn’t be on the floor, like a dog.

We can also sense a certain hostility in this conversation. Simon impugns Jesus for this woman’s presence. Jesus, meanwhile, responds to the man’s spiritual immaturity. It is all quite the odd dinner. Put in the right hands, this scene could make quite an excellent short film.

There’s something more to this, something in the composition that is revealing.

Eating and the Law

If you remember from last week, we’ve been exploring this section of the gospel we call Luke as growing out of this sequence of calling and naming the apostles and preparing them for ministry. It is a quite bold storyline.

In the middle is the curious argument about the Sabbath. I believe that this is a central moment in the text and directly informs what we’re talking about here with this man sitting at the dinner table and this woman beneath it, washing Jesus’s feet.

At the beginning of chapter 6, Jesus is criticized by the Pharisees for allowing his people to pick heads of grain to eat on the Sabbath. He responds with a story that may as well say “man, you have the wrong idea about the Sabbath.” This is followed by Jesus going to a synagogue. Inside, and in front of a whole bunch of people, a man with a withered hand approaches Jesus to be healed. Jesus is warned that it is improper to heal him. Jesus does it anyway. [For more about this story, click here.]

In both of these pieces, Jesus flaunts his breaking of Sabbath law, but more over, He breaks it with witnesses. Witnesses who would be cheesed to see such a thing. It is purposeful, willful, and antagonistic. And if you think Jesus is a meek lover-not-a-fighter, then you need to reconcile that Jesus willfully broke what amounts to canon law in front of people knowing they would catch Him.

The Blindness of Winning

Today’s part of the story is shortly after that moment and seems written for precisely that confrontation. Except that we aren’t talking Sabbath any longer, but ritual purity and the patriarchy. Jesus gives a teaching about love and commitment, but the elements of the narrative tell a bigger story. This powerful man and this powerless woman. He is getting a little respect and she is getting His love.

He isn’t giving anything to Jesus, obsessed with the physical and the situational. If Jesus really were a prophet, He would know better. It’s logical that the debtor who owes more would be more grateful. And those at the table with them, who were probably men, make the same conclusions: “Who is this who even forgives sins?” These are details that distract them and keep them from seeing the humanity of the woman in their midst. They, like we, obsess with the metaphysics and the rules and the systems and the how-does-it-works while Jesus is too busy actually seeing this woman to care about those puny details!

He gives this woman honor in the midst of these fools who cannot see her, which is where we would end the story, confident in that redemption, but Luke continues by saying that Jesus moves on, followed by his apostles and a whole bunch of women. And not just any women, but women who have been redeemed. Which, in this culture, meant redeemed for, to put it bluntly, being women. And women who are his benefactors. Jesus isn’t just going to the outcasts and healing them or hanging out with them in His downtime. He is traveling, ministering with them. And they make it possible. Jesus doesn’t need the rich and powerful like Simon to fund His ministry. He has the women.

A Loser Rebellion

What a fitting text for Father’s Day, isn’t it? Guys, Jesus doesn’t need you because He’s got the ladies! it seems to say. The story, however, is about who is in on this mission with Jesus. The rich and powerful are used to being in charge of things, but Jesus doesn’t let them be in charge over GOD. This is crowd-sourced and crowd-funded. It is of and by the people.

How often are we like Simon, who cannot see the woman, or regard her? As Michael Danner writes this week,

What is more clear, however, is that Simon needed this woman to be and to remain a sinner. Why? In order for Simon to be “Simon the Pharisee”, he needed this woman to be “this woman the sinner.”

We want to judge and make faith into a competitive sport with winners and losers. We want losers so that we feel like winners.

But Jesus loves the losers and regards the winners as already “having their reward.” Isn’t it also clear, however, that Jesus regards Simon as a loser as well? That our own ignorance and mean spirits make us losers and in need of Jesus’s love?

This radical movement that Jesus is creating is not for the successful, but the broken. Those broken by a cruel world and an unjust society. And those broken by their place in maintaining the world’s cruelty and the injustice of society. That any and all of us, may approach in humbleness that we aren’t doing things right and we need help.

When we do this, we might be ignored by society or each other, but Jesus will see us.

Related articles

Of what I was afraid

Posted on by
Reply

To tell you the absolute truth, I was not afraid I would die; I was afraid I would be damaged.

Prepping for a colonoscopy, going into the hospital, being put under, being told of what was found: each of these caused concern for me.

And if you’ve been reading along, you know my anxiety with the process. You heard of my fear of growing old and my anxiousness over fasting. But the root of that anxiety isn’t really about growing old or even dying. It is something more difficult.

salad

No, I am not afraid of salads.

Since I was in the 5th grade, I have been hypoglycemic. I try to stay away from sugar, eat regularly, and get enough protein in my diet. I’ve tried to fast before and found myself so uncomfortable that I feared for my health. To go a whole day, then try to sleep on an empty stomach, seemed daunting and a little dangerous.

The fear is diabetes. I have been told many times by doctors that I must monitor myself and my intake. How my health is dependent on my behavior. The onus is on me. To then be put into a situation in which I would never put myself, to risk an entire day of not eating, made me incredibly anxious.

The second fear, the fear of what would be found, is the more tantalizing fear, psychologically. The more obvious, deeper fear. The fear of the unknown. The fear of my own mortality. That I would be afraid to hear the word cancer come from the doctor’s lips. So 20th Century.

For me, though, it is different.

These two–diabetes and cancer–don’t form for me a link toward death. Or at least, it isn’t the fear of dying that caused my anxiety. It is that neither would kill me tomorrow. Or the next day. Either would kill me out there in the future somewhere, after wrecking my body and causing fundamental life changes. No, I was afraid to be broken.

Or worse, find out I already was.

To be broken, or to be seen as one who is broken, is as hard for us as any Pharisee.

To be broken is not successful, Western, 20th-Century-style.

To be broken is to be imperfect, not ideal, not the one. And we so want to be the one.

For us, then, and for me, my compulsion is this:

To judge.

is hurting, abusing.

To be judged.

is being hurt, abused.

Our (my) way–the subtext of our lives. To name what’s broken. To despise it. To seek to fix it. To punish it.

Which leads me to the inevitable question:

Was I most afraid then that I would judge myself? To not only be revealed to be broken, as if the harshest critics are out there somewhere, but be revealed to myself?

Or worse, that my brokenness has nothing to do with disease? That I, as I am, am broken.

And in facing that fear, will I discover the true beauty that brokenness offers?

“God” is not God’s name | The Theological Wanderings of a Street Pastor

Posted on by
Reply

Check out this short excerpt:

“God” is not God’s name | The Theological Wanderings of a Street Pastor.

God language can tie people into knots, of course.  In part, that is because “God” is not God’s name.  Referring to the highest power we can imagine, “God” is our name for that which is greater than all yet present in each…

It reminds me of my own post about the divine name, but is much more succinct.

Do I have to fast the whole day?

Posted on by
1

As Christian disciplines go, I am better at some than others. There is one, however, with which I am an abysmal failure. I don’t fast well.

I can deny myself things.
I can deny myself foods and drinks and favorites.

I just can’t not eat.

I need something. My blood sugar gets low, I get headaches, I get irritable, and I don’t play we’ll with others.

I am trying.

I fed my kids yogurt moments ago and my stomach growled angrily, ravenously; my brain beginning to cloud over; my willpower shrinking and I think about stealing the yogurt from my own kids.

Yogurt. Not steak. Not a hot dog. Mmmmm…hot dog…
Yogurt. Vanilla. And it isn’t even noon.

20130611-115323.jpg

This is my lunch. I’m on my second cup. This and chicken broth. For desert, I’ll have Jello.

Like any fast, there is a purpose that is supposed to be my strength. That this time tomorrow, I’ll be done. And hopefully the tests will come back as clear as my bowels are supposed to be.

But fasting is never really about the results. It is the struggle, the life experience that causes us to open our brains to personal reflection and discernment.

I hope to learn about myself and about my relationship with GOD today in a way I can’t on any other day. In this unique experience.

Because today is today and tomorrow is tomorrow: it comes with a different experience and focus and expectation.

Today, I learn. And drink a lot of coffee.

The scandalous character of ministry

Posted on by
1

Scandalous WheatThe Lectionary did us no favors by jumping into Luke at chapter 7, skipping what I think are the two most important chapters in the whole gospel in 5 and 6. Smack in between the calling of disciples and the Sermon on the Plain is one of my favorite moments of Jesus’s. It is striking and captivating. And it paints everything that comes after it.

At the beginning of chapter 6, Jesus and his new rag-tag bunch of followers have started out on their mission. They are healing the sick and proclaiming a new era. They go through this wheat field and the followers pick the wheat on the way through and eat it. Not a big deal. Except that it happened to be Saturday: the Sabbath. Now they’re in trouble.

The Pharisees get on Jesus for this. They ask how he can allow the disciples to break the law. This is Jesus’s response:

“Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and gave some to his companions?”

The text then says:

Then he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.”

The story, and its companion that comes right after (Luke 6:6-11) demonstrate a big picture view of Jesus that rejects the Law to fulfill the Law. I’ve written about this a few times.

There’s something telling, however about Jesus’s reference to David beyond the easy connections we make about Jesus. I’m compelled less by that follow-up message about being “lord of the sabbath” as I am in the tale of David and his companions breaking the Law to share in the presence. For to make this about Divinity and power of Jesus is to miss the pure humanity of David, and his much greater transgression than Jesus’s. Jesus allowed a couple of dudes to break Sabbath—David himself and his buddies entered the holiest of holies.

This comparison is important because it sets the stage for what it means to do the ministry of GOD. As much as the Sermon on the Plain (6:17-49) explains a ministry of listening and service, Jesus demonstrates also a ministry of rebellion. Or perhaps more accurately, one of reconciliation. This is, in fact, what happens in the raising of the Widow’s Son at Nain, which we explored yesterday, and demonstrated in Jesus’s healing of the man with the withered hand.

These things are important because when confronted by the authorities for breaking the rules, Jesus doesn’t say

I’m bigger than the rules.

He is saying

We break the rules to follow the rules.

Perhaps more specifically, we break the rules we made to support GOD’s rules when those human rules aren’t actually supportive.

Which brings me to what is most striking about the David story: Jesus defends his followers with a story that we would read scandalously if we were paying it any attention. Imagine if people broke into our churches and ate the consecrated elements—how scandalized we would be.

How scandalized we are when we talk about communion without baptism.

How scandalized we are when the wrong people are doing things.

This is the story Jesus picked to defend his followers.

And it is a story so easy to connect with our own practices, our own laws, our own traditions and canons that we are left sitting with an uncomfortable question about our own behavior and our own practices. It is so tailor-made for conversation about Eucharist and access to it, Jesus seems to be arguing against us.

All of this is wrapped in the context of this sequence of events:

  1. Finding his followers
  2. Doing ministry with them
  3. Breaking Sabbath Law
  4. Naming the 12 apostles
  5. Preaching the Sermon on the Plain
  6. Heading out to do the ministry together

This must not be seen as a single scandalous event, but embedded in the essential character of our ministry.

Question: Does your ministry contain this element of scandal?

Being Shown What To Do

Posted on by
1

a homily for Proper 5C

Text: Luke 7:11-17

Listen to “Being Shown What To Do” here and read along

Getting Focused

On Wednesday night (at Basics), we talked about ministry. What it is, who does it, and why it matters. The Book of Common Prayer describes it as the work of the laity, bishops, priests, and deacons. Notice that the laity go first. This is intentional. For ministry is our work as Christians. Our work in baptism. Our work together. We are all the ministers of this church. We all know this. I’m just reminding us.

We’re currently in Year C: Luke’s year: and we’re in the season after Pentecost: also known as Ordinary Time. In the coming months we’ll be able to dig deeper into the Gospel we call Luke more intentionally—without the direction of the tent-post holidays to focus our attention in obvious ways.

This is the season we like because we get teachings and parables, healings and events. It isn’t the narrative of the Passion or cherry-picked passages chosen to give the season a certain feeling. In this way, we are more likely to hear the scripture anew—with fresh ears.

We can also get lazy and unfocused. We can see each week without context—even when we cover the narrative in order—from week to week. We get snippets. Sayings. Just sounds, really. Bits of ideas and suggestions that tend to disappear from our minds long before Friday.

What’s going on

Our gospel story today is early in the book, but right after, perhaps the most essential sequence of events in the entire Gospel of Luke.

Each of the gospels presents a unique vision of ministry. This one has Jesus call his disciples in chapter 5 and begin healing. Jesus goes, gathers His followers, and then does.

Chapter 6 begins with conflict over the Sabbath—which deals with Sabbath observance codes and ministry—and then Jesus names from his disciples 12 apostles. This doesn’t occur after Jesus’s death, but long before it. He names who will succeed Him early on, before they’ve done much of anything.

Then they have the big moment. It is called the Sermon on the Plain, which is like Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. Each is the central teaching moment of these two gospels. In both, Jesus spells out what it means to minister: to do the very work of GOD.

It’ll take humility, compassion, and listening. You know, the stuff we don’t actually want to do. And woe to those that don’t act this way.

They then go into town and run into the Centurion’s people, who we met last week. They move on and come to the town of Nain, in which Jesus brings the widow’s son back from the dead.

Witnessing

I’ve given us the back story to this reading because today’s reading is useless without it. We would get the wrong message from it and the wrong impression of Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t come to raise sons from the dead simply because their mothers grieve. There are far too many grieving mothers in our own world for that to be the case. Besides, it isn’t even about the son.

It’s the mother. Without her husband or any of his brothers to protect her legal status, the responsibility falls to her son. In his death, this widow lacks protection.

It is fitting that this occurs along the funeral procession, outside the city, because she no longer is protected—no arms, no walls—she is open. And Jesus feels her pain. All of it. Not just the grief, but also the fear. In giving her back her son, he restores her. He brings her back from certain death.

He does this in front of his newly named apostles. Not merely disciples following Jesus, but apostles, called to learn how to do this; who have been given ministry. Here is the ministry we do. We restore life.

What we do

At the end of chapter 6, Jesus says:

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I tell you? I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them.

Jesus could easily be talking about the Centurion, I suppose. Perhaps also the dead son, told to rise and he does and then speaks. Or any number of outsiders that come, hear, then go and do who appear throughout the gospel.

Or it could be us.

That we have been shown “what someone is like who comes to [Jesus], hears [His] words, and acts on them.” That we, today’s apostles, named by Jesus to do ministry in the world, are witnesses to those who do ministry in our midst. And in those examples, we see the very case of GOD’s great transformative grace.

When we listen and we feel and we act.

Unwilling to watch a woman disappear into the gutter, disappear from our sight, our minds, our hearts, or our community.

Or we step forward, bringing to Jesus the needs of the hurt and grieving and fearful and in one voice ask audaciously for them.

This is what Jesus tells us to do and why He shows us how.

Conan’s Inspiring Sendoff

Posted on by
Reply

I like Conan O’Brien. Certainly much more than Leno. And to be truly honest, Jimmy Fallon’s is the only “late show” I watch now. But these words, this send off to Conan’s last Tonight Show are prophetic. You should watch this. And if you have, then watch it again, because you need to hear them again.

I Can Label Myself, Thanks.

Posted on by
4

Some people don’t like labels. It’s common among members of my generation to reject them. However, it seem that when people say this, they are really trying to say that they don’t like being labeled by others.

Or perhaps the problem isn’t the label, but the box in which we put those people we label.

I like labels. When I read A Generous Orthodoxy several years ago, I gained a new appreciation for the complexity and power of labels. One of the book’s core ideas is one of accepting many labels, rather than one or two, which was a revelation to me. Accepting, for instance, the labels of both evangelical and anglo-catholic in my tradition is profoundly liberating.

The problem with labels is that we use them like a toddler treats a marker. We grab them, and start drawing on all of the things around us indiscriminately.

We also see the world through a prism of polarities or dualisms. So we label accordingly. If the person or object doesn’t fit one category, they must be in “the other”.

In this way, we seek to define the identities of those around us. This is a power game and is both politically and intellectually dishonest. Even if it is common.

The real power of labels, and it is a subversive power, comes in the form self-defining. When we see labels, not as something to be placed on someone or something else, but the means by which we self-identify, we become our most powerful selves.

Reread the older creation story (Genesis 2-3) and notice that in creating the first human, GOD gives the human a job of naming things. But then the job is changed and the first human, Adam (of the soil) is given a job to work the soil. The first human is transformed, given a new job, and given a name to reflect that job.

In labeling others, or refusing to explore the labels GOD has given us for ourselves, we are ignoring the foundational moment in the creation story, and living, not lives of transformation, but of ignorance.

It seems to me that GOD gives us way more labels than a name, and way more work than to fulfill that one name. We are given many. And the self-discovery of many of those labels is profoundly empowering.

Labels I’m currently adopting, in no particular order but off the top of my head:

Strong, Christian, Priest/Presbyter/Pastor/Reverend/Father, Rector, Daddy, Son, Brother, Emergent, Passionate, Talkative, Excited, Thankful, Radical, Evangelist, Hopeful, Liturgist, Theologian, Thinker, Writer…

So go and live out the labels GOD has given you. I’d love to hear what your labels are!