Tag Archives: Religion

Of what I was afraid

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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

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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.

Build Systems or Leaders?

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Which is more important: the system or the leader?

Since arriving at St. Paul’s, which is a pastoral-sized congregation*, I’ve figured out that much of the structure of the church is based on specific leaders doing specific tasks, rather than systems. I’m not sure how to feel about this.

*[a pastoral-sized congregation is what many would call a "typical" church: 75-125 people on a Sunday morning and most of the ministries of the church are pushed through the Pastor's office.]

With the passing of one of our dear leaders last year, this conversation became more important. John was our Memorial Day flag guy. He would put flags around our columbarium to mark the resting places of our deceased veterans. He took this on himself and did it himself. He kept the flags in his garage and every year he would bring them out.

I suspect that he did this as a personal ministry. It is now seen as an institutional ministry.

Without John to curate his own personal system, we are left with three options.

  1. Find a person to take it on by herself.
  2. Systematize the process.
  3. Let the ministry end.

Which way do we go?

It would be simple enough to find a committed leader to take on this ministry by herself, making sure that she knows how to do her ministry. This solves the labor problem, but not the continuity one. It represents the incarnational aspect of ministry, but neglects the need for clarity in the congregation–since only one person will know what is going on.

Seth Godin writes that we should “build the system that can scale” which means that we do from the beginning, what we would do at any size. In this way, it is a clear vote for building a simple system for the future. However, this means the congregational leadership has to make a perpetual emotional investment into maintaining this practice.

The third option is to recognize the ministry for what it was: the devout act of one faithful man. Is our attachment to the ministry really about the ministry itself, or the person? If we are committed to the ministry, we will be eager to make it happen, otherwise, our true vote is cast.

In questioning what our attachment is really about, the true question is revealed. It isn’t so much a matter of individuals and systems, but a manifestation of our enthusiasm for ministry and commitment. The truth might reveal that we aren’t actually committed to the beloved practice after all.

I often argue that if we can’t find people to serve on altar guild, then we get rid of the altar guild. “What about the linens?” you may ask. We’ll have to get rid of those, too. Nobody to wash and iron them, let alone set the table. All we really need is a cup and a plate, anyway.

Will Jesus be present if it isn't this fancy?

Will Jesus be present if it isn’t this fancy?

We do have to answer this leadership question at St. Paul’s about this specific situation with the flags. It is a situation that translates, however. How, in your context, do you deal with the question of raising leaders or building systems?

 

 

Glazed Eyes

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Why do they hate to think?

That’s the take away I get from looking out from the pulpit and seeing glazed eyes.

I can say with complete honesty that I’m not that used to it. But launching into the Trinity, by talking about orthodoxy and heresy–something that I believed would pique interest–seemed to have the opposite effect. Check out what I had to say: it wasn’t bad, I swear!

The eyes weren’t glazed, however, when I invited all of us to turn to our neighbors and speak to a way GOD has been involved in our lives.

No, I received very different looks for that. Not boredom. More akin to horror.

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.

The Messy History of the Sacraments in 6 Questions

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[This is the second of three posts about the sacraments. The first was yesterday's: “What is a Sacrament?”.]

As we explored yesterday, our Sacraments, primarily Holy Eucharist and Holy Baptism, are a physical and spiritual means of receiving grace. Today, we’ll have a small taste of the messiness around the living out of the Sacraments. There is no way I could sum up two thousand years of conflict in 500 words or fewer without scrubbing out big parts of the story. So, rather than go chronologically, I’ll name several significant issues for what they reveal to us.

1) How many sacraments?

Depending on who you talk to, there are either seven or two. Or perhaps 2+5. We have inherited from our ancestors two sacraments that are scriptural and attributed to Jesus: Eucharist and Baptism. We have also inherited five more that grew out of the tradition: confirmation, ordination, matrimony, reconciliation of a penitent, and unction.

2) Are some more important?

If we believe that all sacraments are of equal value, we have to treat them as equals. If we recognize that only Eucharist and Baptism are “authorized” by Jesus, does this mean that the others are “lesser”? And by extension, unnecessary?

3) What happens in…

The Eucharist—Perhaps the most famous conflict in the church is the one over what we think happens in the Eucharist. As I discussed yesterday, we are torn between the ideas that the host actually becomes Jesus or that Jesus is merely symbolically remembered. Many Christians have sought a different interpretation that rejects that binary question, arguing that something changes that allows the bread to be bread and something new.

Baptism—Are we dunked in the water as adults to reject a sinful past or are we sprinkled with water as infants to protect us from evil? The character of baptism is about transformation and the rejection of evil. It has also historically been an entrance rite to the church, proving one’s commitment and participation in the community. Since the Patristic age, these purposes have not run in unison and caused great conflict as we have chosen one purpose over the other.

 4) Who is in charge of the sacraments?

This question gets into what we call ecclesiology, or the study of the church, and is often a conversation about authority. The historical matrix we have for these discussions is about distribution of power in the church, either to a priestly class or to the laity. This has meant that our understanding of who gets a say in the sacraments is based on how hierarchical one’s church is. For Catholics, this means the line goes all the way up to the pope. For many Protestants, the line goes straight into the individual participant that may be given authority by the worship community. For many of us, we live in a both/and structure with ordained authority figures as gatekeepers who attempt to inhabit a grass-roots theology of collaboration.

5) What if the gatekeeper sucks at it?

As persistent as these other questions have been for the church, perhaps none is as damaging as this one. In the early days, there was a group called the Donatists. Their focus was on purity and they began to reject the sacraments from those who were not doctrinally pure enough. In other words, they refused taking communion from people who didn’t believe “right” (as in their way). Even though this is one of the named heresies condemned by the worldwide church, you don’t have to look very hard to find Donatists in our midst.

6) Must we keep the gates?

This is most timely of these questions, as we rediscover the roots of our sacraments and question how best to embody them in our world. Questions about restrictions to the sacraments are causing great conversation (and conflict) in many parts of the church. In many ways, this is the outgrowth of the church’s historic response to question 5, which is to say that the sacrament is a sacrament by grace—not the magic powers of the individual. This shifts the power from the gatekeeper to the Holy Spirit (where it perhaps always was) and changes some of our expectations. In the Book of Common Prayer, it gives instruction for the priest to deny the sacraments to anyone we suspect is an unrepentant sinner, meaning it is actually my obligation to keep the gate. But is that itself theologically consistent?

How we wrestle with these questions does a great deal to inform our theology. Perhaps more important is that we recognize the need to wrestle with them.

Tomorrow, we’ll explore how we choose our theology about the sacraments, and what this does to our practice.

What are your favorite theological fights? Are they over sacraments? How do you deal with some of the messiness in the sacraments?

What is a Sacrament?

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Over the next three days, I’ll briefly explore the nature of our sacraments. Starting with what we actually mean by the word.

According to the Book of Common Prayer (pp. 857-8):

The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.

Many of us can recite the first half of that definition: the part about their being an “outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace”. But when we call something a sacrament, what are we really saying? Primarily that this (to whatever we are referring) is the observable part of something bigger. Like the water in baptism or the thin wafer many of us use for Communion. That these are something physical and observable, that direct us to something more than that.

Perhaps more difficult is the second half: that these are “sure and certain means” of receiving grace. Most challenging, I think, based on the way we think and behave, is that we are able to receive grace through physical means or that our “sacramental” habits possess in them the very grace “given by Christ”. Like Calvin, we might see that thin wafer, as just a wafer. We also need not adopt an understanding that is hard for our post-Enlightenment brains to comprehend: namely that the thin wafer that tastes like Styrofoam is somehow magically turned into a person’s flesh who has been dead for 2000 years. But we are being invited into a mystery in which that wafer becomes more than a wafer.

We may have to get what is meant by grace:

Grace is God’s favor towards us, unearned and undeserved; by grace God forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills.

For us, then, the sacrament is a hint at the world beyond this one and are something we do together. They also exist as a means by which we can know and sense that GOD-given grace. It is no wonder, then, that the sacraments involve a physical nature: water on the skin, food and drink in the mouth, oil on the forehead, hands on the head and shoulders. Sacraments are intended to be experienced in our bodies, not merely our minds.

This, then, is the story of sense and understanding, of feeling and thinking. The sacraments can’t be confined to one way of comprehension.

Tomorrow we’ll explore some of the messy history of sacraments.

In the meantime, what is your experience with the sacraments? How do they feel? What do you think? And how have they worked?

Jesus Verbs

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a homily for Ascension Day

Text: Luke 24:44-53

The Ascension is pretty much the hardest part of the Jesus Event for the post-Enlightenment world to get. It seems as if we can suspend our disbelief only so far. And the Ascension is just too much.

And yet, we might be asking the wrong question.

Listen to the whole thing here: Jesus Verbs

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.