Tag Archives: Christianity

The missing Pentecost post

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When my friend, David Henson wondered on Facebook where all the Pentecost posts were, it exposed me. Not that the world rotates around me. It’s just… I haven’t been here. My mind has been elsewhere.

I wonder if they all are.

All the minds, that is.

All the minds are elsewhere when it comes time for us to remember Pentecost.

Drifting. Eyes glazed with window stares at the green leaves and sun-danced radiance shimmering off flower petals and windshields. The sudden birth of the world, woken from the winter slumber, and our brains become like overcooked stew, still stirred and served.

We miss Pentecost for the fury and fever of Holy Week, met by the exultant alleluia! of Easter. Then suddenly, it is over, as theologians call the game.

And Pentecost, the granddaddy of church holidays, the most important, most revolutionary, most inherently true to the name gospel which means “good news,” that one day is lost to sun worship.

In mourning, the eulogy is written for this movement, birthed from nonviolent revolution and drawn by GOD to the fitting conclusion that it is us that have the divine spark! Us that are given the keys to the future, not Peter. And it is us who are ordained to love and transform the world.

But instead, we have gone back to the old gods.

5 Years Ordained

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Today is the fifth anniversary of my ordination as a presbyter. Of course, I’m celebrating appropriately–writing sermons for a funeral on Saturday and for Pentecost on Sunday.

Rather than reflect on all that I have been a part of over the last five years, I am instead struck by this picture. It dawned on me that many of these friends and colleagues in ministry are now spread out all over the country, serving in new calls and in retirement. That ours is a ministry, not of stasis and static service only to one community, but as fellow travelers and followers of Christ who is always journeying, always seeking out those most in need.

And to all my friends who I have had the pleasure of serving as both Christian brother and as presbyter, I hope that I have, and continue to be, a source of guidance, support, and most especially love. And to those friends I have yet to meet, may the love of Christ be within you and may that love show through you.

Jesus’s Prayer for Unity

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a Sermon for Easter 7C

Text: John 17:20-26

Listen to the Audio here: Jesus’s Prayer for Unity

A hopeless prayer

If you are ever self-conscious about praying in public, don’t be. Just remember how the writers of the gospel we call John portray Jesus:

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

And that’s like the second time he said that. John isn’t doing Jesus any favors with this gobbledy gook. Can you at least string together a coherent sentence? Then you’re good.

In spite of this rambling style, Jesus is praying for three things: understanding, intimacy, and unity.

Understanding: that they might know GOD and what GOD is doing.

Intimacy: that GOD, Jesus, and the people may be “in” one another—that they may be so close that they are joined.

Unity: that all of us may be brought together as one.

This begs the question: if even Jesus’s prayer for unity is not answered, then what hope do we have?

We are not one

Clearly we aren’t one. And despite what many would have us believe, we never were.

From the earliest moments after Jesus’s ascension, His followers had different things to say about Him and His ministry. They spread around the region with their own takes on the Jesus Event. We inherit four different gospels from four different communities, with four different sets of priorities.

Even the great councils of the first millennium, which produced our creeds, among other things, were not moments of great unity, but sources of division. They didn’t gather to determine what we do believe, but rather, eliminate what we don’t.

As a church and as a culture, we don’t seem united at all. In fact, we seem all the more divided. Divided by interpretation of scripture, theology, and ethics; how we treat each other, the outsiders, and the enemies; how we minister to the sick, the suffering, and the disadvantaged. Our churches, our communities, our politics, our neighborhoods, our schools, our civic organizations are all divided. We are not one.

Going back to the skipped steps

Of course, we are looking for that unity by skipping steps.

Jesus prays not only for unity, but for three things:

understanding, intimacy, and unity

Jesus says

Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent me.

Jesus knows GOD. He understands what GOD is about. He doesn’t say that the disciples understand. He seems to say that they get Jesus and they get that He has intimacy with GOD. But that He, Jesus, will build a bridge to that intimacy.

I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

So Jesus helps reveal who GOD is to those that follow Him. He makes GOD more vulnerable by stripping away the layers of mystery and distance—the things that create power and separation. Jesus does this because there is no other way to have intimacy with GOD, or anyone, without vulnerability.

And through intimacy, we become one. Not uniform. Not identical. Not subservient to a single, dominant bureaucracy. Not ordered—with first and last. One.

In blessed community

Our problem isn’t unity, its intimacy. And to be fair, we should probably do some work at understanding, while we’re at it. We’re a culture of proud know-it-alls. Our men don’t stop for directions and our women don’t want an honest response to “does this make me look fat.”

Even our churches are places which shun intimacy. We want to look good, we attack mistakes, and punish the vulnerable. But Jesus gives us a way out. A way of His being vulnerable to us, that we might be vulnerable to one another. Two examples from earlier in the night were washing feet and anointing for burial.

As followers of Christ, we learn about GOD’s ways that they may become our own. Ways of love and vulnerability. Ways of generosity and sacrifice. That we might find an intimacy that is not of this world, but one that might be sanctified by GOD.

That we, gathering in blessed community, learning the name of GOD, becoming close to one another, may become one.

Not Free to Think

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A short reflection on race, geopolitics, theology, and the role of the church in faith.

Growing up in the church, I have long felt both at home in the church and like a resident alien. What some classify as evoking transcendent timelessness, I have often seen as dated and inaccessible.

When exploring other ways of being church, I have often found the presence of this same sense, that as time goes by, the church isn’t aging well. It’s clothes poorly fit. It’s tendencies to be a “straight-shooter” now sound like the cranky ramblings of an addled old man. Or perhaps the kindly woman, hunched over; delicate and well-groomed.

Just not vibrant. Lively. Vivacious.

Sort of like looking at my music collection, which used to expand weekly, then monthly, and now annually. My favorite album, loveless by My Bloody Valentine was released in 1991. It’s sound is quite timeless—as it was truly sonic perfection—but my listening to it, even at home, cooking dinner, dates me. It holds me back to a time in my past in which such discovery was so pertinent and essential to my understanding of life itself. Now, I am a musical dinosaur.

In this way, the church has so often been tempted into diving headlong into the hasty decision of being the place for the dinosaurs or the place for the youth. And sometimes they make the slightly wiser decision to be the place of transcendence—and yet still fall into the trap of trying to escape the quicksand by adding more dirt or water to the mix, rather than allow themselves to be freed.

Growing dishonesty

Several years ago, I read a book called The Dishonest Church by Jack Good. It is a charmingly prophetic book, in the honest sense of the meaning. It is written by a pastor, raised in the modern world and he has a modernist mindset. He argues that the main problem in the mainline is that we learn one thing in seminary and teach something different to the parish. That, for at least a generation or more, we have failed to teach our congregations effectively and honestly.

He then breaks it down along liberal and conservative lines and discusses the issue in a binary way, which I essentially reject. But his charge is profound: that in not sharing what we have learned, the pastors of the church have been dishonest.

Many of us in church know this to be true and yet have trouble figuring out what to do about it. When we get 80 people worshiping on a Sunday and then 6 to join a Wednesday study group, parish leaders can easily feel defeated. I do.

This is our work, however. Doing ministry in this context, means that we are dealing with a church that is shrinking across the board, a society that is post-Christian, and a religious landscape that has become calcified by a partisan divide. That is our current condition, but it need not be our reality.

A new focus

Reading an article by Christian Piatt yesterday, which was a reflective piece about the place of race, radical theology, geopolitics, and religious influence in our current milieu and I was struck by how much I agreed with it on so many levels and yet took great issue with its conclusion. Piatt seems to be arguing for a greater place for “practical” stuff in the academic. Or, at least, that this is the source of our divergence. But I’ve long thought the opposite. We need more space for the academic in the practical sphere. This is all based on our comfort with responding to one simple question:

Why?

Why do we do this? Why should I care? Why are we here? Why does GOD care if I eat bacon or drink alcohol or dance or have sex or                       ?

Why?

And the church has so long ignored these questions; more like avoided them; in two ways.

  1. We prescribe what to believe. Rather than give a response that allows people to better understand what we are doing, we give a formulation to memorize and regurgitate. We don’t deal with the task of answering the hard, yet simple question “why?”
  2. We focus on “practical” stuff. We plan for our ceremonies and we get our people to do the “right” things and stand in the “right” places. We run around sitting with people as they are dying. We give food away at the food pantry. We go out and we do all of this stuff. But do we do this because of what Jesus commands or because we have figured out why?

Instead of dumbing down the faith to be easily practiced, we should be building it up. Instead of prescribing what we ought to believe, we should be making belief.

With Us

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a Sermon for the Great Vigil of Easter C
Text: Luke 24:1-12

Our Bible study group that started last fall has slowly been working its way through Genesis. For many of us, it has been a pretty eye-opening experience. We are currently wrestling with Jacob and his return home. I admitted to

the group that I personally have a hard time with Jacob because he isn’t all that good. (In a different setting, I might use a more colorful descriptor.) Jacob steals, cheats, and takes advantage of other people. He matures through the story arc, but some of these traits are still there.

And still, GOD is with him.

It is one of the most amazing things about these stories. What GOD is willing to do.

GOD created the world and everything in it and declared that it was good.

GOD promised death to the first humans and their son, but shows mercy, instead.

GOD finds a friend in Abram and promises him a son and a mighty nation. And delivers.

When that nation strays, GOD stays with them.

When they are imprisoned, GOD stays with them.

When it is time, GOD liberates them.

And even as they wander in Egypt, complaining that GOD has abandoned them, GOD is with them.

GOD keeps the promise to a man that long ago died.

Then GOD came to not only be with us, but to live and love and work and hurt and die as one of us. That GOD might know the feel, the fear, the anger, the sadness, the hope, the love of being human.

GOD in Jesus pushed us. Revealed Himself to us. Helped us to see what GOD most desired, what GOD dreamed for humanity. Taught us to share and to love one another. Opened our eyes to the mockery of creation we had made. Demanded we do something about it. Then gave us a tool to transform our lives and best embody that dream.

GOD gave us baptism. Even GOD in Jesus was baptized, by a human hand, in a river; water washing over his body, dripping from his skin, streaming back to the source as Jesus stood up from the river: a new creation.

In baptism we declare our old selves dead. We reject our past and turn ourselves to a new life. A better life. Eternal Life: that vibrant, abundant, truly alive life.

But to get there, we have to die.

GOD is still with us

In some ways, Christianity is a death cult. One of the reasons ancient Romans condemned the proto-Christians was because they thought they were cannibals. They ran around talking about eating flesh and drinking blood. How much Jesus tells us to die to ourselves, to give up this life for a better one, to face death in this life for a true one. It is what we are about. Accepting the need to die so that we might become something else, we are like human caterpillars weaving cocoons.

For the first few centuries, we made sense of this with conviction. We faced persecution. We were hunted and killed. Not because we believed we were one religion and the state sponsored another. But because our faith taught us to reject the dominant values of Roman culture. To be different. To live different. To love different. To kiss each other. To hold each other in suffering. But also to reject violence. To refuse to hurt another. To swear allegiance to Jesus and not Rome.

When our patron Paul wrote that we claim for ourselves that “Jesus is Lord,” he was doing so with political intention. For Rome demanded that the conquered people declare that “Caesar is Lord.” Paul took the phrase to poke Rome in the proverbial eye and say No, there is no earthly Lord. We pledge our allegiance only to Jesus.

And in Jesus, we face the very death of GOD.

That our great and powerful GOD was killed by humans. And we face the incredible humbling experience that we, as followers of Christ, are not conquerors and rulers and warriors, but are vulnerable, meek, and killable. That the way of the world is powerful and most likely will defeat us. But we are supposed to be different anyway.

We face that we have been the ones to oppress and hurt and despise.
That we have shamed and spat on and sent death daggers with our eyes and lips.
That we have cursed one another and condemned them with our words and gossip.
With our eyes and minds and hearts and fingers.

That we haven’t done enough, not nearly enough, to make GOD’s dream a reality. A dream of radical equality and peace. A dream that every child born into this world will die old and gray and happy. A dream in which our weapons would be destroyed and turned into tools. That we, even through our baptisms and confirmations and ordinations still are also sinners.

In spite of all of this, GOD is with us.

Even when we are like Peter, who doesn’t listen to Mary Magdelene and has to see for himself. When we ignore the women, the poor, the weak, the disabled, the different simply because they aren’t us; when we think we know better than the rest; when we have to experience Easter for ourselves and we place our heads in our hands and weep, GOD is with us.

Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow. GOD is with us.

In our love, our anxiety, and in our rebirths. GOD is with us.

GOD is always with us.

Overcoming Death

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We all love Easter. Particularly after a tough Lent. This year’s felt heavy.

Each year, I struggle with the scope of the great story arc that we deal with in Holy Week–with the rise and fall of Jesus of Nazareth. Then the fall and rise of the Christ. I have always taken this as the epic story that it is. But this year was different.

What if taking up our cross and following Jesus is as serious as it sounds?

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You don’t get a new beginning if the cross isn’t really the end.

Each year we are invited to say goodbye to our BS and become closer to what GOD wants. I have to believe that none of this can work without each part. Living, dying, rising.

Skip a step and it doesn’t work. And each year, we get the chance to do it right. Is this your year?

Link

Whether you have a deep attachment to the stations of the cross or don’t even know what they are, check these out. Frank Logue, Canon to the Ordinary of the Diocese of Georgia has put together a visual stations of the cross. Click the link and head over!

Rejecting the Cross that isn’t Christ’s

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a Sermon for Good Friday C
Text: John 18:1-19:42

Good Friday Cross

[recording will be added later]

The Cross

Jesus was forced to carry it. He died on it. What more do we know about it?

Jesus was being led to the outskirts of the city, right outside the front gate. This is where traitors were hanged and let to rot in the sun. Visitors would know what Rome does to those who undermine Rome’s authority. They couldn’t miss it.

Rome crucified traitors, not petty criminals. It is not a universal punishment, but a specific one. It is reserved for those who defy Rome: revolutionaries, rebels. Not so much thieves, beggars, or even murderers.

The cross was tall, but not like in the movies. Just tall enough to get your feet off the ground by a couple of feet. Low enough that stray dogs would tear the flesh off the bodies of the crucified.

The cross is a torture device, causing extreme pain. It would normally take days to die, but death was certain. This is the shock of Jesus’s relatively quick death on the cross.

Like the lynching tree, the cross is an act of terrorism. It’s intention is to humiliate and frighten the locals, demonstrating what happens to those who rock the boat.

The cross is the work of Rome, not “The Jews”. The gospels portray Pilate as an unwilling judge, but the cross is a Roman weapon, not a Jewish one. Regardless of the church’s anti-Semitic past, it is undoubtedly Rome that kills Jesus.

The changing nature

The proto- and early Christians used a sign to identify themselves to one another: ichthysthe ichthys, or Jesus fish. This symbol matched their understanding of themselves as fishers of people. In spite of this, the cross became the symbol for Christ and Christianity. There’s only one explanation: it is a rejection of Rome. It is common in oppressed communities to adopt the symbol used to humiliate them.

So the cross you wear is supposed to be the cross you bear.

It is not your jersey, your advertizement, your billboard, your evangelism tool. It is a declaration that you reject Rome and its cult of subordination and violence and a sign of your allegiance to GOD’s kingdom.

And yet, when Constantine absorbed the early church into Rome, the cross, the symbol of Roman oppression was redefined a third time. It was wrestled back by its first users and stripped of its revolutionary power. Once again, Rome the mighty, enemy of the Kingdom of GOD, was using the cross as a symbol of its power, its domination, its adoration of violence and control.

In the nearly 17 centuries after Constantine’s death, the cross has more often been used as a sign of state power and oppression and hatred than the peace and love those first followers. Those people that adopted the cross as an orphan, saying This is your new family. We treat each other differently in this house.

Wearing the cross

When I wear my cross, I do so to reject Rome, to show my allegiance goes to no country but to one kingdom.

Most of the time, I don’t wear a cross. I have a few reasons. Take with you this one: for many, the cross is always a sign of oppression and cannot be redeemed. It is a sign of human greed and violence and arrogance. It reminds them of how full of sin the church continues to be. And it terrifies them that we are powerful and irrational. A terrible combination. Many cannot see Christ in the cross.

In spite of all that the cross has become and what it has yet to become, it is deeply symbolic of our struggles and of our ongoing learning. It is what we bear with Jesus today. Just as many of His first followers met that same fate, executed by Rome.

But we do so with a certain knowledge that Jesus came to us at a specific moment in our history and yet is always here; always with us. That the Christ, the Word, is here: in flesh and wine and water and wood. That Jesus died, yet never leaves us.

May we, Christ’s humble servants reject the cross of power and authority and certainty and murder and fear and greed and hate and sin and all things we know deep in our hearts to be wrong. May we instead take up that other cross of humility and sacrifice and faith and generosity and goodness and love. And may we know that in everything Jesus loves us and dreams for us and pushes us to make this place more fully GOD’s Kingdom.

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For My Son: Changing the Lord’s Prayer

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Right off the bat. I have to confess that I am predisposed to the modern Lord’s Prayer. Even better are some of the rewrites I’ve heard in the last year or so. Some really good praying is happening. Tonight, I’m now all in. Here’s why.

Praying with my son.

I used to argue that we can change anything else, just not the Lord’s Prayer. I was convinced, since its the only thing people know by heart, we couldn’t do it to them.

Until I discovered how many actually don’t know it.

And what keeping it is doing to others.

Then I tried it, and found that I preferred it. But the churches I’ve served don’t use it, so I don’t lead it.

How easily those words slip out of my mouth:

Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name they kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our tresspasses as we forgive those who tresspass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever amen.

Words, so foreign, so strange, so opaque. Yet familiar and comforting. Words of childhood. Old, distant words. Words that aren’t mine. It was the only prayer in the whole book my parents required me to memorize.

Something is different tonight. Something in the air. Something in my heart.

I have been praying the other version from the Book of Common Prayer with my kids for the last few weeks. And tonight, it really struck me. I had forgotten to slip it in between the two songs. I started slowly and deliberately.

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name.

Your Kingdom come

your will be done

on earth as in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread

and forgive us our sins

as we forgive those who sin against us.

Save us from the time of trial

and deliver us from evil.

For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours,

now and forever.

Amen.

It doesn’t rattle off the tongue, it sings off it. It pleads off it. It yearns off it. These are not the convictions of the powerful or the expectations of a people that enact blue laws. It isn’t a prayer for memorizing, but for living. These are the hopes and dreams of a people so beat up, so small. The prayer I want my son to know.

Not a prayer of yesterday, or a prayer that is one Jesus taught some people long dead. A prayer that speaks to GOD’s dream for all of humanity in every age and in every moment. And more to the point, a prayer that speaks to my son. A prayer that tells him that Christ is yearning for more than what we have in this world and compels him to see it, to strive for it, to make that dream a reality. A prayer that isn’t my prayer forced upon him, but a prayer known and accepted

because it is his.

Tonight, this prayer is ours.

Man, Have You Got the Wrong Idea

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a Sermon for Lent 3C
Text: Luke 13:1-9

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Jesus raises a question about providence this morning. A question about GOD. About good and evil. About the way of the world. He tackles what is perhaps the most enduring question in human history: why do bad things happen?

And yet, before tackling the big question, He asks the gathered people a question:

“Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?”

He asks if they believe this thing: that all tragedy is a result of sin. That people get what they deserve.

No, he says, it doesn’t work that way.

But He knows they don’t believe Him. He knows they already have it wired up here:
There is good and there is bad. Good things, good people, bad things, and bad people. Then good results come from good actions and bad results from bad actions. So good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. And we think GOD plays an active role in how this plays out.

Michael Danner, a Mennonite pastor, approaches this idea in his commentary for this morning.

People believe this in spite of the facts. No matter how many good people suffer, people still believe this. No matter how many bad people prosper, people still believe this. Why? Because people really, really, really want the world to work like that. In a world where that is true people have a say in the matter of suffering. In that world, if people are good, they can avoid suffering.

In other words, control. Now hear this again: “people really, really, really want the world to work like that.” We have imposed this order to the world. It isn’t scriptural. It’s more like Greek philosophy. It doesn’t speak to GOD’s sense of justice. It speaks to our devotion to balance and fairness. And it confines GOD, transforming that which cannot be understood into a dispenser of carrots and sticks.

Reject and replace

Jesus rejects this view of the world, and of GOD. But He doesn’t explain why. This should be a familiar characteristic of Jesus to us by now. Jesus isn’t a wisdom dispenser. He is a teacher, a rabbi, and his disciples, then and now, are to not just learn, but follow.

What Jesus does say, however, is that we will meet their fate unless we repent. This sounds bad, doesn’t it? But we must take these two things together.

First, Jesus rejects out of hand any perceived causal link between having bad things happen to somebody and the suggestion that they must be bad people. Doing bad things doesn’t mean you’ll eventually get your comeuppance. Lacking strong morals does not mean GOD will manipulate your environment so that you don’t get into the program you applied for or that an anvil will land on your Wile E. head. Jesus flat out rejects this. Do you believe this? He asks them, then before they can answer, He says “No, I tell you.”

Second, Jesus seams to suggest that all are fated to death, unless they repent. You remember that repentance involves three things:

  1. acknowledging one’s sin
  2. confessing it
  3. accepting a new way

So repentance involves rejecting one’s old life and embracing a new one: rejecting the way of our world and embracing the way of GOD’s Kingdom.

Jesus is inviting his disciples in every age to reject this human understanding of providence and embrace a way of becoming a different people. We are called to reject this specific construction, this way of understanding the order of things, this Platonic dualism of good and evil. That GOD doesn’t engage with us that way. GOD isn’t responsible for our labeling of good and evil. It isn’t how the world is ordered. We made it up!

And we are called to replace that, not with another construction for explaining away providence, but with a way of walking in this world. It is a way because it isn’t enough to believe certain ideas and it isn’t enough to do certain things and it isn’t enough to be a certain way. We are to become something new. Always becoming new.

Replace beliefs with a journey

The challenge for us, then is that Jesus is asking us to tear apart this frame of understanding the world that provides comfort to us and then doesn’t give us an identical replacement. I know that many of us have a hard time rejecting something without a replacement. Don’t throw it away without getting a new one! But Jesus is telling us to do just that. Our idea is wrong. GOD’s mercy and judgment doesn’t work that way.

So that’s pretty uncomfortable.

Jesus seems to be saying that, as usual, our attention is focused on the wrong things. Reject the empire’s ways—the ordering, the certainty, the purity, the authority—and embrace GOD’s way—the way of discipleship, of following, of becoming what GOD dreams for us. Don’t worry about the natural law—where is Jesus leading us? How might we best feed His sheep? These are our questions.

Like Abram, we are called to a life of exploration and fascination. A life that is not just a set of conditions or an orderly belief structure, but a Sabbath journey of hope and courage. It is a way of living in our world as an immigrant, a wanderer, a sojourner on a pilgrimage.

Like the Woman at the Well, we are called to a new life, a changed life, a life of rejecting the old and embracing the new. Of witnessing the power of Christ in our midst, proclaiming it to our family, friends, and neighbors. And to be transformed by the power of the Spirit.

For us, may this journey continue.