Tag Archives: Church

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.

Why I’m preaching Easter 7 (and nothing else)

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This week there are no doubt many preachers trying to figure out how to deal with Sunday. It is the Seventh Sunday of Easter. It also happens to be two other things: the Sunday after the Ascension and Mother’s Day.

To the church, it is Easter 7.

This isn’t to say that people in church shouldn’t be thinking of Mother’s Day. But that isn’t a church holiday. I’m all for dealing with cultural holidays in the context of church. This is just one (like our patriotic days, btw) that gets out of hand. White carnations for Mom’s are OK. I just don’t see how it relates to the gospel.

And perhaps more challenging is that the Ascension is kind of a big deal. It is one of the 7 principal feasts in the church. And like the Epiphany and Holy Week, we tend to ignore what can’t be celebrated on a Sunday. So many will be compelled to observe the Ascension on Sunday.

We won’t be. We observed it on the day (a link to the sermon audio will be posted shortly).

I’m not a snob about this, really. There is a place for all of this. Our problem is that we are inclined to put things in the wrong place. This Sunday’s gospel takes center stage this Sunday. Everything else can take its place accordingly.

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.

Holy City (Eating Scripture)

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Last week, we had the temptation in the desert, the quintessential Lenten text. This time, we get Angry Jesus. I have a soft spot for Angry Jesus. What Jesus is angry about is the stuff we already know, but rarely give attention to. It falls into two parts: the hypocrisy of leaders and their support of empire.

In this passage, it isn’t the usual whipping boys, the Pharisees  that receive the tongue-lashing–but Jerusalem–the city itself. I think this mostly has to do with the Temple leadership and the King (Herod) being in bed with empire (Rome) and meeting the needs of self-preservation rather than supporting the mission of GOD and bringing the Kingdom closer.

Mixed in this is Jesus’s own walk to Jerusalem, His own conviction and crucifixion as a terrorist, His own mixed relationship with the city of David. The city that would embrace Him as Messiah and reject Him as heretic in a matter of days. The city that knows better and does worse.

But it need not be so.

Eating Scripture is a short video series in which we explore the juicy and the crunchy in this week’s gospel in four minutes or fewer.

Bible app doesn’t get the season

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A real push notification on my phone right now:

As the Easter season begins, start a Reading Plan today

Two gut responses:

  1. The “Bible” app, YouVersion doesn’t actually know that Lent begins today, not Easter? Who doesn’t get that Lent isn’t Easter?
  2. The Advent/Christmas problem is invading Lent! The world mischaracterizes Advent as the Christmas Season–does that mean we are going to do the same to Lent?

In a few years, will people be giving up chocolate and going to Fish Fries for the Easter Season to prepare for Easter?

I think this is the real problem of our post-Chrstendom context.

An Every Day Season

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a Homily for Proper 28B
Text: Mark 13:1-8

The origin of the Temple.

Let’s go back more than three thousand years. Long before Jesus takes His disciples to Jerusalem. Back when tribes fought with one another, a young shepherd boy became king. His brothers were bigger and stronger. This boy was a musician and sort of a mama’s boy. And yet, as king, David did what nobody ever had before. He united the 12 tribes and combined Israel and Judah into one kingdom. And in a remarkable demonstration of equality, moved the capital to the middle of the united territory, to a city called Jerusalem.

Maquete→Ideal reconstruction of the Temple of ...

Maquete→Ideal reconstruction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem according to the description from the Bible. (This is not a reconstruction based on archaeological grounds). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

His son, the lone survivor of a bloody war for succession, built a great testament to this unity, giving not only a home to the divine presence, but a monument to the land given to this mighty people by their god. Solomon built the first Temple and the Hebrew people became a people that made a regular pilgrimage to the Temple to sacrifice animals on its altars to the glory of their god, named YHWH.

In building the Temple, Solomon transformed the religious character of the Hebrew people by changing the nature of their worship. The city became a holy city and the site became a holy site. The Temple came to define the worship of the Hebrew people.

Centuries pass and the people still worship at the Temple, but the kingdom has long since split. Shrinking unity, shrinking power. In their weakness, they are easily conquered, and the Babylonians sweep in in two waves and take half of the Hebrew people from their land (the land given to them by GOD) and their Temple (their very means of worship). Because of the importance of their land and their Temple as part of their religious and geopolitical identity, they are essentially divorced from GOD and kidnapped. It gets worse; in the conflict, the Babylonians destroy the Temple, essentially destroying their entire religious identity.

As the people were in exile for a generation, the religious scholars were all brought in one place and were determined to reshape the religious identity of their people. They gather the many stories told by the people and put them into writing, for the first time organizing them into not only discernible narratives, but into the books that would become the Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. They began to see their faith as not dependent on the land or to a site of worship in the Temple, but through Scripture and practice. They began to formalize their faith into a religion.

Long after returning home, they rebuild the Temple, but it is imbued with a new spirit and a new religious tradition. It is no longer the only means of worship, but it is again the monument to worship. And when Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, it becomes the symbol of the Jewish leadership’s misplaced loyalty.

Why will the Temple be destroyed?

In proclaiming the inevitable doom of the Temple (it was destroyed forty years later), Jesus is trying to make a statement about the tradition.

Let’s go back a couple of days. It is Sunday of Holy Week, the day we celebrate as Palm Sunday, and Jesus rides a donkey or perhaps a small horse into Jerusalem, mocking the Roman expression of power. He peaks into the Temple and then leaves. They leave the city to go stay in the suburban town of Bethany.

They get up Monday morning and head back to Jerusalem. As they walk, they pass a fig tree. Jesus declares that He is hungry and commands the tree to give him figs, but it doesn’t. It isn’t the season for figs. And in what seems like a completely irrational display, Jesus condemns the tree and moves on to the city. They head to the Temple and it is there that Jesus drives the bankers and the merchants out. On their way back to Bethany, they pass by the fig tree and it is shriveled and dead.

Tuesday morning they go back to the city to visit the Temple one last time. There, Jesus teaches a giant crowd of people during the Temple’s busiest week. Like going to the mall on the Saturday before Christmas. The place must be packed. And he proceeds to humiliate and condemn the Temple leadership in those familiar lessons, including the one about the coin (give to Caesar what is Caesar’s) and the Great Commandment (love God and your neighbor). Then on the way out, they talk about the Temple.

Looking at this whole arc and what the Temple means to the Jewish people, we can see where Jesus seems to be going. On Sunday, he condemns Roman power and arrogance. On Monday, he condemns the Temple’s economic systems. On Tuesday, he condemns the Temple’s leadership for its hypocrisy. And on Tuesday evening, he condemns the Temple itself for what it has become. The real clue to this is how Jesus interacts with the fig tree.

The Fig Tree.

What seems irrational to us in Jesus getting angry at the fig tree is that it is, well…a tree. It didn’t make a bad choice. It didn’t choose to not give Jesus any figs. It wasn’t the season for figs! Besides, if Jesus has superpowers, why didn’t he make the tree produce figs?

That isn’t how it works.

The problem with the tree is that it gives figs only when it wants to, not when it needs to. It isn’t prepared to feed the hungry when the hungry are hungry. Jesus then goes and condemns the structures and the people and then the Temple itself because they take advantage of the weak and only help them when it is convenient. The Temple only produces figs when it is “time” to do so. But Jesus is showing them that GOD wants the Temple to produce based on need, not on “season”. Think of it this way: Jesus only cares about demand, not the Temple’s supply.

Out of season.

This stuff about the Temple can seem a bit distant. So does the way Jesus condemns the Jewish leadership. It is easy to rope this story off and turn it into a history exhibit. To tell ourselves that this isn’t about us. About our church. About our faith or traditions. Many Christians have used this text to condemn Judaism and call Christianity its successor. But we are no more innocent of this problem than they. Of giving only “in season” when we are able and willing, rather than when it is asked for or needed.

St. Paul’s is a very generous congregation and our successful stewardship campaign proves that. But Jesus is compelling us to be generous in a different way: not our giving when it is convenient for us, but to give when invited—and out of the other’s need.

In the end, what Jesus offered the world in his ministry, his death, and his rising again isn’t a new religion, but a new way of understanding our relationship with GOD. A god that wants us operating out of generosity and not selfishness; out of hunger, not satisfaction; out of love, not pity.

And to be free of temples and monuments and our human shackles of ego and power and certainty; to dance in a new garden of delight, below a new tree, full of hope, joy, and fascination at the wonders of the new world GOD is creating.

Failing a Father

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This guest post by Registered Runaway on Rachel Held Evans’ blog is too powerful to ignore.

“Church Stories: Forgive them, Father”

I want a church in which we can all celebrate and live up to the type of fatherhood described in the story. And their children inspire us to be better fathers as this one does for me. Where the church causes pain is precisely where the church should cause celebration.

Let the good stuff out

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a Homily for Proper 17B

Text: Mark 7:1-23

Those Dirty Hands

You may have noticed that I read the whole gospel pericope, not the shortened version in the lectionary. The primary reason is because the full story makes more sense than the edited version. The second reason is because what was removed is the part in which Jesus explains why He condemns the Pharisees. And as much as we look to be Jesus’s disciples, we must not be afraid to recognize ourselves in those Pharisees.

The big issue in the text is that the disciples gathered around Jesus and started to eat food without washing up. The Pharisees see this and take their outrage to Jesus. This is total triangulation. The Pharisees’ beef is with the disciples, but instead of going to them, they go to Jesus. They hope to get Jesus to change the disciples’ behavior. Hence, the triangle. They are angry, so they direct their anger at Jesus. Apparently for “allowing” it to happen. It is so much like that familiar tail of the neighbor complaining to Mom and Dad about their boy who hits his ball into said neighbor’s backyard. “What’s wrong with your parenting/teaching?” the neighbor projects. They move issue from the ball to the parent.

Jesus turns the tables on them by pointing out how much more important tradition is to them than pleasing GOD and fulfilling the Law. And worse, he argues that they break the Law to preserve tradition. His example is the commandment to Honor your father and mother. The Pharisees, he argues, make it all about GOD, therefore rejecting the honor they are to give to fathers and mothers; other flesh-and-blood people. Honor that is supposed to go to people, they give only to GOD. So Jesus is arguing that they are breaking a commandment. Therefore, when it comes to purity laws, it isn’t the stuff that gets on a person that makes him or her impure, it is what comes out of them, specifically from their hearts. He’s saying what you believe and how you act on that belief: that’s where the evil is.

Just in case we don’t catch how scripturally appropriate, but radical Jesus is being here, note in verse 19 it says parenthetically “(Thus he declared all foods clean.)” Is he suggesting we no longer follow Levitical laws condemning shellfish and pork, too?

The Evil in Our Hearts

The hardship for us is that we may be tempted to overlook our own Pharisaical nature: the ways we’re just like those Pharisees. How our tradition means more to us than following Jesus. One of the common jokes about Episcopalians is that you ask virtually any Christian what is meant by “the Good Book” and they’ll say The Bible. You ask a group of Episcopalians and they’ll say “The Book of Common Prayer!” And actually mean it!

We wade into some pretty dangerous waters when we place the trappings of church: our clothing, our pulpits, our stained glass, our pews, and yes, our Prayer Book, over GOD’s presence with us, what we are being taught now, not just yesterday, and what the Spirit is calling us to do.

I can’t help but see my church in this gospel today. I love my church. I love this church, which remember is not the building, but the people gathered in community to worship GOD. I love St. Paul’s. But man, we like tradition.

Kester Brewin suggests that if Amtrak were in the transportation business, they’d have built airplanes. I’d extend that metaphor to say if Delta were in the transportation business today, they’d be building high-speed rail. Brewin makes this point to turn the spotlight on our churches: we have a specific business and we are called to fulfill it; but is that business reconciling the world, or simply gathering weekly for worship? Churches and traditions get stuck. We’re called to be the blessed community, actively reconciling the world and bringing the Kingdom closer. That’s our business. And yet we argue about types of candles on the altar, whether or not we were notified about some event in the community, and how long our meetings run. We need to continuously learn how to be that community GOD has called us to be.

This is why Jesus argues to them that the evil is within us, not something that ruins us from without. Think of all of those television preachers that rail against the evils of the world and we must defend ourselves against their corrupting influence: in other words, the evil cooties. Instead Jesus has us examine our hearts to find the problem.

What do you think we’ll find there?

Letting the Good Stuff Out

Hope…I hope. Love. Compassion. Goodness. We weren’t created to be a vessel for evil. We were created for good. On the 6th day GOD declared that creation was very good. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have our moments. It doesn’t mean that we won’t be challenged by what’s going on around us. And it isn’t another opportunity to beat ourselves and one another up for not being perfect. But, it is a vision of the world that isn’t superstitious or abusive or a world in which human understandings of purity, order, and justice are elevated above GOD’s. And that includes those human understandings we attribute to GOD. Those laws in Leviticus that we have no trouble cherry-picking already, for example. Or blue laws in which we think GOD cares one second whether or not we shop at Target on Sunday (and for the record, the Sabbath is Saturday). That stuff isn’t GOD’s. It’s ours.

In some ways, it is really useful for us that this all comes up over something so mundane and unspiritual to us as washing hands. Because we might be tempted to avoid Jesus’s argument. To be peacemakers trying to get Jesus to just get His people to wash their hands, so as not to upset anybody. That’s how we do things normally, isn’t it? But Jesus all but says “the only evil here is you.” The keepers of the faith. The scholars. The devoted ones. The committed. These are the people Jesus calls out, and it sounds a lot like us.

Because we are being called out for our missing of GOD’s point, Jesus sends us in the right direction: to embrace what GOD has instructed: Love GOD and one another. Be the blessed community. Proclaim the gospel to all nations. Feed the hungry, cure the sick, clothe the naked. Change unjust structures in our world. That is our work. Jesus has given us permission to break those Laws we’ve created for GOD that aren’t really GOD’s so that we might actually walk the way Jesus has taught us—to live the true Laws GOD has given us. Laws about love, support for the weak, and building the community. Let’s get to work.