I am preparing my discussion for our Sunday morning meeting for worship and am thinking a lot about what Kester Brewin calls “wombs of the divine,” and creating the necessary space for something new to be born over time (See his book Signs of Emergence) It’s kind of a preference for evolution rather than revolution, or rather it sees evolution as the slow revolutionary process of change. Then I came across this quote (which mirrors Mark 2:27): “Our structures must serve us, not us serve them.”
This is an appropriate quote for all of us in the church, but especially, I think, for Quakers to observe. With so much discussion recently on whether or not some of our more longstanding institutions, meetings, and publishing outlets up for grabs these days because of smaller numbers, smaller budgets, and less interest or energy. With so many looking at the bottom line, I can’t help but think that we need to step back, stop, and contemplate the point above. What does this really mean for us?
Brewin writes:
“Only if I am still. Only if I have stopped what I was doing to listen and hold my breath and enter some spiritual apnea and wait. The perception of the new step will come only to those brave enough to stop dancing the old. The realization that we must descend this low peak will come only to those prepared to stop and take stock of their position. We fear that if we stopped for a week, a month, a service, a moment, we might be forgotten, or lose our momentum, weaken our profile, appear ill-thought-out and failing. So we feed the ecclesiastic furnaces our burned-out wrecks: tired leaders, disillusioned ministers, fatigued congregations – marshaling them to dance longer, march faster, pray harder, cry loud in earnest for God to come, come, COME and batter our hearts into change.”
What Brewin is essentially calling for is that we return to our own practicing of silent waiting, but with a fresh perspective as to why we are doing it, what we are waiting and hoping for. Or conversely, maybe our stopping and waiting is the opposite of silent waiting, maybe we need to stop with the quiet and really say what is on our hearts and minds. In either case, something needs to give. Who has the courage to stop dancing the old?
In my reading of the Disciple’s Prayer (the anabaptist/Quaker name for the Lord’s Prayer), we have to make sure that we don’t limit what forgiveness includes1. Our (Western) tendency is to think of forgiveness in terms of personal wrongdoings, forgiveness is an individual action. But in the prayer Jesus clearly draws on a Jewish understand of Jubilee with his selection of the word translated “debts.”2. The Greek word there, ophilema, literally means a debt that someone owes both financially as well as morally. Remember in Jesus’ time society wasn’t as split as it is today, a ’sin’ to the Ancient Jew could be familial, social as well as individual. So when Jesus says, forgive people’s debts, as God has forgiven yours, I think he’s thinking back to the forgiveness of debts during the year of jubilee.
There are other examples in the Gospels where Jesus draws on this Debt language. Besides the obvious the prayer for today’s bread, or enough bread for today, reminding us of the sharing of Manna, a narrative linked to Jubilee as well, there is Jesus’ announcement in Luke 4 that the year of Jubilee had come, there’s the fact that the Gospel writers tell the story of Jesus sharing bread and fish six times in four Gospels. There are the religio-social debts canceled by Jesus’ forgiveness. And we should be quick to remember the story of Zaccheus who, through his encounter with Jesus, returned the money he had extorted from his fellow Jews. Zaccheus quite was radically practicing “forgive us our debts, as we have also forgiven the debts of others.”
The prayer of forgiveness and the confession “Do not bring us into a time of trial” presupposes sin and sin as a rupture between human beings, and the risk of the earthly journey (Doctrine, McClendon 156). It admits that we who are in need of divine care have created all kinds of debts with our fellow humans, not least of which are financial. It prays for rescue and deliverance, not just in case it ever happens, but because we need deliverance regularly. How can we live as a faithful community who helps to forgive the spiritual, relational and the financial ruptures of our world?
As we approach Black Friday, and Christmas, which has been swallowed up by over-consumption and credit-card debt, maybe this is the good news we all need to hear this year. God wishes for us to be freed from this debt, and to free others, to live a life of enough, to live in a place where sharing and jubilee mark our interactions with the world far more than what we currently see on TV and in strip-mall America.
Things have been going well at my new job as pastor. I’m enjoying the work and I’m enjoying the steep learning curve that comes along with it. Things have been by-and-large steady, no major crises or anything like that which has been a really good way to start off. Throughout this summer, I’ve been relying on knowledge as well as a variety of skills I picked up in seminary but there have been other things that have happened that there’s just now way you can really be prepared for. They’re the kinds of things you have to learn in the moment (or not learn in the moment as the case may sometimes be) and with the help of those in your faith community.
This past week things have been really kicked up a notch, we’ve had a couple unexpected visitors that have really forced me into a different space of “preparation.”
Last week a young man, 28, walked into our office and asked if we did funerals at the church. I had arrived on my bike only minutes before him and was still standing with my right pant-leg rolled up, my helmet on, and breathing heavey from being out of breathe. This first question was not something I anticipated on my bike ride to work that morning and it wasn’t something I was ready for. But I was even less ready for his second question, “will you perform the funeral for my mother?”
I’ve never officiated a funeral and I guess I expected that the first one I would do would happen in some far off distant future when I was “ready” and it would be someone I knew. Well, I took my helmet off, settled in a little, and after suggesting that if they had a minster that knew the family that would be better, I realized this was a family I was to for and that it was no mistake they were there. So last week I spent a lot of time thinking about death, working with this family, and finally, spending time with them on Sunday during and after the funeral. Being with this family I’d only known a week on their day of intense grieving was very powerful for me and an experience I felt honored to participate in.I learned more last week in a crash course in preparing for a funeral and helping others grieve than I could have done in a quarter at Fuller (though a couple of books from seminary proved very helpful).
Our second unexpected visitor was a homeless lady (who said she went by no name) showed up at our meetinghouse yesterday. We talked for a little while, she sang me a Quaker song (tis a gift to be simple), and began to weep. She said she doesn’t fit in anywhere, and feels a deep sense of loneliness. She also said she felt selfish for thinking about how lonely she is. Then she said she needed to sleep and wondered if she could sleep on the floor of the foyer, I brought her into the santuary and offered her to sleep on a pew.
After she went to sleep, I began calling around to find a shelter for her. I called 5 or 6 shelters in Vancouver, the emergency shelter hotline (repeatedly), and a couple other organizations and a church. No one could help, everyone was book, or they just didn’t answer the phone. It was extremely frustrating. I spent more than an hour on the phone, along with the help of a Friend in our meeting, and between the two of us we could not find her any shelter. This whole time I’m thinking, “I have no training for how to help homeless people! What am I am supposed to do to really help this woman?”
So we decided to at least feed her something good, so Emily cooked up a wonderful batch of polenta and ratatouille, along with some desert. Emily, L and I along with our visitor ate together in the fellowship hall of our church building. It was fun, albeit a little intense; the lady certainly is dealing with some form of paranoia. When we could get her off her cycle of conspiracies she was very pleasant, tender and had a great sense of humor.
A couple in our meeting who saw my facebook message, “We are eating dinner at the church building with the homeless lady. Come join us.” Did in fact drop by and since we had no place to send her they outfitted her with wool socks, a fleece, and a rain jacket. We also packed her up with some basic food items.
I felt terrible knowing she would be sleeping out on the streets but wasn’t sure what else to do.
I realized at least a couple things yesterday through this situation. Every situation is completely different and there is no way to really be prepared for each circumstance. I can only be present in that moment and listening for the Light of Christ there and then. I learned that I need to be open and compassionate and willing to “do to the least of these,” and that bureaucracies can certainly be helpful at times but are often just a distraction from us doing the work ourselves.
I am also struck by the simple fact that in Camas and Washougal there is nothing for homeless people and I find this a deep need. There is a charity but it only helps people with addresses. There’s nothing, as far as I know, available if you’re on the streets. And from one conversation I had with a women at a shelter, the shelters are even more full this year and some have up to a 3 month waiting list. This woman dropping by made me aware of something I’ve been asking since I moved to Camas, what does this town need? I think the surface has now been scratched. I look forward to working through this question with our meeting.
I was unable to post my talk from last Sunday here this week because I’ve been busy at YM but I did post it on the church’s blog and on twitter. If you’ve already seen it, I apologize for the duplication, but I wanted to have it here before I post the new one. I’m not sure if I’ll continue to post sermons in this way or not but since I don’t know what I’m doing here’s the link to audio version of the discussion. You can download the audio to your iPod or listen on the webpage.
And here’s the (very) rough written text.
This summer we’re talking about interventions in the Gospel of Luke. These are moments in the Gospels where something unexpected happens, where there is an encounter, a reversal, where everything-as-it-seems is turned upside down. “Interventions” signals the God’s work in the world turning the losers into the winners, and the work of the Kingdom lies outside our ability to control, predict or domesticate it. It is often that God’s plan for salvation even troubles those sure of their own place in God’s will.
This morning I will use the language of a short-circuit to help describe what took place in this early scene of Jesus’ ministry. It is Jesus’ first sermon, his inaugural address, his very first of many interventions, and he does it by way of a public performance in his hometown during worship.
How many of you remember Johnny 5 from the 1986 movie “Short Circuit.” Johnny 5 was a military robot, that after a great power surge was “short circuited” and became “alive.” [SHOW CLIP]
“A short circuit is an abnormal low-resistance connection between two nodes of an electrical circuit that are meant to be at different voltages. This results in an excessive electric current or overcurrent.”
Sometimes the short-circuit results in a malfunction, and from the perspective of at least those who created Johnny 5, his short circuit, is a malfunction. But what I like about this movie, the image it conjurers is that sometimes, a short-circuit provides a new thing, a new perspective. From the perspective of the animal-lover Stephanie Speck Johnny 5 is alive.
I liken Jesus’ first sermon to a “short-circuit,” his oral performance was meant to unhinge, create an overcurrent, the redirected the way these first century Galileans understood God’s salvific work in the world.
[SLIDE] Jesus short-circuits a standard reading of the Hebrew Bible in a way that offers a new perspective, a new reading, that ultimately leads to a new way of being the people of God. Some, as you can see from their response, saw his reading as a malfunction, but we see things differently. We see his reading, his short-circuit points out the movement of God in a way that creates quite the intervention.
But before we get to that here’s a little background.
Jesus’ First Sermon
By the time of Jesus ministry, it was normal for Jews to gather in the synagogues on Sabbath for reading and exposition of the Hebrew bible. As they became more settled under the power of the empire, more synagogues were built and became the central place of worship.
And from what we know here Jesus’ presence at Sabbath worship was something he regularly did! Interestingly, some have pointed out that because all the other times in the Gospel of Luke we find Jesus in a synagogue teaching but aren’t give the content to his teaching we’re supposed to assume that this was his general message he gave as he traveled from meeting place to meeting place.
And these services were generally be far more like Quaker worship services of old than today’s event-oriented mega churches. The way the synagogues were built encouraged discussion and free exchange among those present, the normal practice was to allow anyone with something significant to say speak up.
If you’ll remember last week, we discussed John’s method of preaching, how it was open to dialogue, allowing others to respond and have a voice, as I put it, we see the same happening here and throughout Jesus’ ministry.
Interventions and Response
Interventions, led by the Holy Spirit, always provoke deep thought and challenge the very framework from which people live their lives. Because of these challenges, the people are given space to process, and respond. Sometimes we see, as was the case with John, they asked the probing question, “What then Shall We Produce? And Sometimes there is a contrast, and the people respond the way they do in our passage this morning, with hostility and rage.
[SLIDE] But in either case, every intervention demands a response. It demands a yes, or a no. There is no in-between with interventions.
And if Response is so important why did these folks want to throw Jesus from a cliff?
This isn’t what you would generally expect from your hometown family and friends on your first public sermon. [ILL: My First Sermon was Really Long!]
Isaiah and Now
Like any inaugural address Jesus stood up and carefully selected the source of what he felt would characterize his administration. He had no plans to clean Washington up, appeal to fears, stress a particular cozy language about who they were as a people, and he certainly didn’t draw on nationalistic tendencies. Instead, his idea was to replace Washington. That is, replace the power structures, both religious and political, with a new vision of God’s people that operated in a distinctly different way from the world.
So, he stands up and reads from Isaiah 61:1-2 (someone already very present in the Gospel of Luke):
“The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD’S favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn.”
What did you notice different about this? vengeance? Apparently Jesus edited out the part of about vengeance from the bible he was reading from. Why is this?
When this passage was initially written, it was written from the perspective of Israel, it favored their side and suggested that God would judge all those who oppresses Israel, all those who held it captive. God would judge Israel’s enemies.
But with Jesus two things happen here in Luke 4.
a) He gets up and reads this, and edits the passage removing this clause so that it stresses release and favor, rather than damnation.
b) And then, after he sits down, he says, today this is made true in your midst. (There is no more waiting around for the Messianic Age – it is here now).
As one translator puts it, “You’ve just head Scripture make history. It just came true now in this place.” The stress is on the word NOW!
Today, in your presence, God’s year of Jubilee is upon all of us. Today, right now, we are to begin living not in expectation, or in waiting but in the reality, in the now-ness of the rule of God.
This Passage Classically Describes God’s Mission
This is Jesus’ “mission.” I know the word mission may excite some of you, and make others a little queasy. I’ve come to expect both responses as someone studying “missiology.”
But here for Jesus “mission” means this: living out of the reality of God’s Kingdom and proclaiming that this reality is for everyone, especially the people who have been marked as outsiders by the religious community.
We can domesticate the Gospel and make it safe by keeping it focused on Jesus’ death and resurrection, but from this passage we see that there is far more involved in the Good News, the religious, economic and political all get wrapped up in Jesus’ work.
There is no sphere of life that God is not interested in, all areas of life can and should be given over to God in worship. God demand our total allegiance, and a willingness to respond totally.
Mission for Jesus is now, it is not something that happens out there, it is not something we send special people out to do on our behalf, Mission is saying yes to God. It is carefully tending to the needs of those marked as outsiders. It is handing over every aspect of our lives to be a witness to the kingdom of God.
It is doing whatever we can to extend the reality of God’s kingdom with our own bodies where ever we are at.
Who are the Poor?
What I love so much about this is that Jesus stands up and says this is my mission that is the activity of God’s Spirit is “to bring good news to the poor.” And here he doesn’t just mean those down and out, those who are unemployed, and homeless, he also means those of low honorable status.
[Here's where the Good News moves beyond the religious and into the political and economic]
When we think of poverty we often think of economics, but in antiquity status was measured differently. It came through sex, family heritage, inherited or genetic traits or defects, it came through performance based actions such as education and conformity to particular religious behaviors.
People could be kept out of the religious community for genetic faults, injury, being deaf, having mental retardation, etc. This is all to say that people had less religious and political rights depending on their status.
God’s understanding of poverty is far bigger, far more inclusive than our own, Jesus’ call to the poor is far more impossible than our own versions of this.
What I find truly liberating about Jesus’ ministry is that in Luke’s Gospel we see this all reversed. All these people who make the dishonorable statue Jesus invites to be a part of his movement.
The point we are drawing to, the climax of the intervention, the very tipping point that leads to our short-circuit is that Jesus shows that there are unexpected recipients of God’s grace and those who are typically excluded are now on the inside (Joel Green).
And as we can see Jesus doesn’t just stop with the poor (that would be far to simple!):
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”” (Luke 4:18-19 NRSV).
Jesus stresses release, as you will see in the chapters that lie ahead, release will include the forgiveness of sins, release from sickness, disease and other physical malformations, people will be released from social barriers that keep them out of the community of God, and they will be released spiritually from diabolic powers.
People will literally be given sight, blind people will be healed, but metaphorical sight will also be given. People will receive God’s revelation and experience salvation and be included into God’s family in ways unimagined, never envisioned before (Green Theology 78).
This is all wrapped up in Jubilee, the year of God’s favor.
[SLIDE] Jesus announces the final Jubilee, not in the sense that it is to never happen again, but that it is to become the reality through which the people of God operate. It is final, because it is now the reality, Jubilee is now the starting point for the people of God not something off in the distance.
As Shane Claiborne says, part of Jesus mission was to call to restore the “economic system of sharing, debt cancellation, and land redistribution” (90). God’s economy is a divine economy, a gift economy, where sharing and the canceling of debts are at the heart of everything and expected reciprocity and equal exchange are absent.
Jubilee is about giving to those who are in need, those who do not deserve it, those who wouldn’t even necessarily ask for it for themselves. We do it not because it will make us better people, or so that we can now expect their allegiance, but because it is how God gives.
But it is much bigger than that as well, it encompasses everyone, all people and all of creation.
God through Jesus personally inaugurates jubilee, and creates a community that will take it upon themselves to live out jubilee.
This is Jesus’ mission, all of it. What he says in his inaugural address, he means to actually do.
And he goes on to do all this stuff in very literal, as well as metaphorical ways.
[Take that presidents, dictators, religious leaders, and big-time CEOs!]
This is all well and good, and why would anyone in their right minds be upset about something like this?
A Short-Circuit in the Mission
It is in the response, the anger and rage, that we see where the short-circuit happens.
The problem arises not by what Jesus said, but by who he says the recipients of God’s favor will be.
a) First, they misunderstand this message is for. That’s why he says, the line about the proverb “Doctor, cure yourself” which was a saying that meant, “you are expected to do in your hometown whatever you do elsewhere.” Jesus’ hearers would have thought this good news was for them.
The problem was Jesus was telling them just the opposite.
b) Then he elaborates by turning to two very famous Hebrew prophets – Elijah and Elisha. In both these stories only people outside Isreal receive God’s favor, and in the story of Elisha, the man who is healed of his leprosy, Naaman the Syrian, is the commanding officer of the Israel’s enemy army!
Jesus is saying, this good news is not for you. You thought God was going to bring vengeance on your enemies, God is declaring favor on them in stead. God declares release. You thought jubilee was just for you, well know it’s for outsiders too.
The short-circuit happens this way.
Jesus gets up, reads a popular old Hebrew text, one that people loved to identify with, saw themselves in it, heard their dreams, and prayers resonated within that passage, so much so that it became a crutch to them, so much that it became the thing itself that kept them from actually helping those in need because they read it only for themselves.
Then he sits down he says this is for the nations.
In the same way that Johnny 5 is both a malfunction, and a new thing that exceeds its created purposes, even contradicts its created purpose, Jesus short-circuits the common reading of this text, creating a malfunction, even a (mis)reading of the text, as you can see from the perspective of those present, but for others, it creates an entirely new reality.
[SLIDE} Jesus’ short-circuit opens up a new reality where the the kingdom of God is understood to be working.
Jesus’ short-circuit was speaking into existence a new reality, a new way of viewing the world, a new way of relating to and understanding God.
He takes the OT wire, and touches it with the reality of God’s presence located within Jesus himself, the incarnation of God, and creates an explosive overcurrent, that radically displays a new way of being the people of God.
Let me try to make the problem as plan as day:
Israel’s God was rescuing the wrong people. They were praying for their own resuce, and he goes on to rescue others.
Jesus turns their expectations around like a mirror, he redirects their hopes, and their prayers for God’s final blessing on them. It was like Jesus said,
“your prayers for God’s help, his judgment on the nations, on your enemies have acted as an excuse for you to abuse and misuse those in your midst. Your religion has become your obstacle to living religiously. Because things aren’t going the way you hoped, you’re taking it out on those who are most vulnerable among you. So now I’m going to show you how to live Good News to those people God deeply loves.”
Let’s put it another way:
“You think this good news is just for you but it isn’t, God’s favor has turned towards everyone you wish to judge, everyone you think are excluded from the grace of God because they don’t follow your religious rules and fit your religious standards are in fact included, and those you think are included don’t get it. God’s goodness is for all the nations, it is for everyone, it’s no longer just for you.”
Closing
We are invited to think this morning about both practice and interpretation, what I called ecclesiology and hermeneutics our first week.
We are invited to investigate the questions:
If Jesus embodied his mission fully, what ways might the church continue in this mission? If these are the practices of Christ, should they be the practices of the church?
If Jesus found it fitting to short-circuit the expectations of his hearers, his religious community, to challenge their understanding in very radical ways, how might we as the church be short-circuited by this reading, and what are we to short-circuit in the world? How do we follow the message and method of Jesus put into practice here?
Activity: Write a short-circuit of your own for Luke 4 during open worship.
The May Marches are just about to take place and I just received an email with an image seeking to raise awareness around the complex social issues and injustices surrounding immigration in this country. There are a number of pictures by Shepard Fairey dealing with this issue of “Immigration Reform Now” here.
Certainly there are a lot of feelings around this subject, and it’s only going to increase in both in intensity and in frequency. I recognize there are no easy answers to this subject but that doesn’t give us a right to drag our feet while families are being torn apart. My hope is that this year the church will continue (or begin) to reclaim it’s stance as a community of people who practice radical hospitality, caring for all strangers and aliens and find ways to make space for everyone at our bountiful table. I also hope and pray that this year the Quaker yearly meeting I am now apart of, Northwest Yearly Meeting, will put out a minute on this issue calling for the injustices to stop – the way they did on the subject of torture last year.
“To stand within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge, but makes it possible.”
Hans Georg Gadamer
Today I spent a few hours working on my Mid-Program defense for my PhD program, I will be presenting it to my committee on May 14th. This entails laying out the key questions and motivations behind my research. It also includes what I’ve studied so far, where I am headed and how I will finish up (God help me!). It’s a good exercise but it’s rather grueling and kind of works against the way I am wired. When I was editing today I came across the word “denominations” which I had written awhile back and I instantly replaced it with the phrase “faith traditions.” Shocked by my initial response, I realized that I still have an allergy to the word.
I grew up Catholic, went to mass regularly, was baptized Catholic (as far as I know) and was confirmed as an adolescent. I did my time, literally, in parochial schools up through 8th grade and was devastated when my parents decided to stop going to mass and start taking us to some small store-front Charismatic church. I was by then pretty committed to my Catholic faith. Then I was indoctrinated in the non-denominational framework, where all denominations are evil! Boo!! And will steal your soul, because everyone in them is mindless and not really passionate about their faith, they just go because that’s where their parents went, or whatever.
I stopped believing this anti-denominational doctrine once I realized the importance of being a part of something bigger than one local congregation, and the amount of support, accountability, and richness of history involved with, well, denominations. But still, I don’t like the word. I prefer instead to talk about (faith) traditions for a couple reasons.
For one, the word denomination just has a bad rap for a lot of Americans. It sounds overly paternalistic, top-down and dated. Whereas tradition, at least to me, rings of something more alive, something that is potentially more organic and flat. Anyone can participate in a tradition. For instance, think of all those interested in aspects of the monastic tradition, who adopt this or that practice, but are not themselves wholly monastic.
A friend made a great point to me on twitter saying that denominations help to name something that would otherwise remain unnamed and unnamed things are ultimately untenable as movements. I think he was right to suggest the importance of naming something, this is a process we see happening again and again in the Bible. But still, the problem lies not in the fact of naming something, but rather that often everything can be lost but the name. Consequently, the denominational name simply becomes a placeholder for something that has become largely obsolete. Rather, tradition in the way I understand it stresses the (dis)continuity between our stories, the practices we engage in as Christians, our beliefs, and points to what texts, biblical and otherwise, are important in the formation of our communities.
Finally, denomination still signals, at least to me, a preference to structure and hierarchical authority. Here “denomination” is the opposite of “movement” or “organic.” A denomination was once a movement that has become top-heavy, bogged down by its irreplaceable and non-translatable history and text. Instead, a tradition is more like a way of perceiving our contemporary world and relating to our shared history, a way of interaction with and communication about God. It can remain fluid and translatable even when people within that tradition get caught up in denominational-isms.
This is what I like so much about the Quaker Everett Cattell who worked within the denominational structures of the Friends church, he was both a college president and a superintendent, but suggested that the heart of the tradition was not found in those structures but in the community’s organic relationship to God’s mission and fellowship with one another in the Spirit, both of which he felt would actually undercut our structures and challenge them to be re-thought according to our contemporary needs. My reading of Cattell is that he believed the only way to truly be a Quaker was to betray the structures in favor of obedience to God’s call to be for the world, and in doing so, we might in fact be truly Friends.
Following Cattell, I have very little interest in Quakerism, in as much as it is an ism. These things that are the “way we’ve always done them” can actually becomes obstacles to our believing in the power of God’s Spirit. The denominational nitty gritty, when it is left to its own devices and not rooted within the life of the tradition, only sustains structures often reinforcing the church’s role as a placeholder for our belief rather than a bottom-up community of people following God’s mission in the world. I want to be a part of a community that not only tells but also lives into the stories of those we call Quaker.
Scott McClellan emailed me a couple weeks back and asked me to imagine what The church might be like in 25 years and write it in 150-300 words: It’s for an upcoming article for Collide Magazine (a magazine largely dealing with church and new media, an emphasis you will hear in my thoughts). So in a (very) playful, imaginative way I sat down and initially hand-wrote my response out. What I have below is actually more like 600 words, the second part “In 25 Years?” is actually the portion for the magazine, but I included the first part because it’s some background.
Unless a Grain of Wheat Falls
A recent article by the Michael Spencer, also known as the Internet Monk, made its way around the Internet recently titled ominously as “The coming evangelical collapse.” I received a link to it on the pastor’s list-serve for our denomination, and you can imagine the (justifiable) responses that followed. In the article Spencer basically suggested for Christianity in American everything was going hell and a hand basket: “Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.”
That things are in decline in America shouldn’t be shocking to us, or even cause for fear, Jesus said, “For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.” The church are the people of the light, those of us who stand for the peace, love and justice of God’s kingdom will continually be reviled. But what we often forget is that the world will hate us because of this revolutionary Jesus-centered imagination and that this is the more normative state of the church than the cozy role of chaplain its had in Christendom.
This seed falling to the ground and dying need not be cause for us to lock the doors, pull the shades and close up shop. We are reminded that this seed, after its death, will give birth to new life: “…I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” In John 12:24-25 we are shown that the church is born with a sort of auto-deconstruct mode, as John Caputo puts it. The Church is only the signifier of the kingdom, always subject to the movements and call of God’s Holy Spirit. There are times it will, even needs to, fall to the ground in order for rebirth.
This is very much the insight Quaker Everett Cattell had in 1966:
Perhaps the call is now before us for a new seeking: a seeking to find where God’s Spirit is actually at work in today’s world and then a giving of ourselves to work with Him – whether within or without the framework of Friends. The future of Friends may be like the grain of wheat, which must fall to the ground and die. Perhaps this would be the way to a new harvest (1966.).
Thoughts on The Church In 25 Years?
My sense about the future is that the church, whatever is left of it in 25 years, will be built around a kind of nebulous, decentralized participation in God’s mission. I imagine there will be a lot less full-time CEO pastors and more people who see themselves as co-cultivators of kingdom imaginations. People who band together in a world where there is little money, time or space for full-time ministry to embody this call.
At the heart of what we might call “mission communities” won’t be buildings, and budgets but high amounts of inter-connectivity, utilizing and disseminating the church’s wisdom and critique through whatever devices and networks are available. Being tied-down to physical space will be seen less as an asset and more as a disadvantage. I think these people will use whatever space is available to them, and while being committed to particular (local) areas, they won’t be fixed to one location.
Building on this sense of participating within these mobile ecclesial groups will be a strong emphasis on communal creativity, rather than the individualistic focus of the do-it-YOURSELF, they will be focused on a do-it-OURSELVES mentality. In 25 years the church will not count on social services, setup within Christendom, to do its work for it any longer. The church will have to embody God’s mission, creativity, justice, non-violence and hospitality as a community of people committed to being disciples of Jesus.
Because these Christians will be less separated from the world it will be important to build communities and practices of resistance: people who read Scripture together to be reminded and shaped as people of “The Way” while learning how to survive in empire, who share their food, their belongings, and who reject the speed and consumption of hyper-capitalism. They will be non-conformist while living within and seeking to transform the world.
Finally, while this gathered diasporic people will focus on their particular local concerns they will also join with other “mission communities” for collective fronts on important and timely issues of their days. They will disband and regroup as needs arise. Thus even denominations will work more like social networks, cultivating disciples, artists, theologians, leaders and imaginations for survival in a world in need of the Gospel.
I’ve written about Henry Jenkins in the past, he’s Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and writes constantly about fan culture or “fandom,” remix, and other contemporary cultural happenings. I didn’t know much about him until last year when my doctoral advisor recommended I read Jenkins book, “Convergence Culture” for a methods class I was taking. The book was astounding and has really impacted my recent research. In the book he argues that technology and mass media has moved to a more participatory “convergence” culture, where the traditional flow from producer to consumer has been disrupted. Now the consumer becomes the producer and creates the media he or she wants. Convergence culture allows small communities all around the world to gather around given topics and interests and produce information, media, etc., on those things. Fan culture is an example of the possibility for meaningful communities that are not limited to geographical space.
In his book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture 1992 Jenkins was the first to celebrate fan culture as not something weird or cultish, but as something that has subversive tendencies that challenges status quo consumerism.1Fans make their “primary” texts (or objects), examples are anything from Star Trek episodes to the Lord of the Rings trilogies to bicycles (critical mass,2 midnight ridazz, etc), resources to build on and have fun around. They don’t simply consume these texts but they reread them and produce new cultures out of those texts. Another example of this is fan fiction: in fan fiction people extend the original narratives and lives of the characters turning them into something that is their own creation.
In Convergence Culture Jenkins writes that fandom, as displayed within convergence culture, is characterized by these five things:
Appropriation – A person appropriates in their own life a particular text, work, and practice relating to their fan object. Often these objects are reinterpreted in their own life.
Participation – There is an openness for people to participate at all levels within the community. They are so inspired by it they write music, create events, etc.
Emotional Investment – People become really invested in this this object, topics, etc. It is something they are really into and something they want to talk about.
Collective Intelligence (rather than the expert paradigm) – There is room for everyone to have something to say and contribute to the collective understanding of the group. Collective intelligence doesn’t need credentials, degrees, etc., experiences and insights are beneficial to the community and conversation.
“Virtual” Community – These are communities that are not necessarily built around face to face meetings. Some of these people know each other and some are unknown, but more often than not these groups will have times to meet face to face.
In his class on this subject Ryan Bolger argues that this is how we should evaluate communities, not just fan communities, but communities in general. That is to say that community within convergence culture is no longer relegated to dinner tables, not that it shouldn’t happen there as well, but that “community” is now extended in both space and time through the global flows of mobile technology. To reduce community down to a physical interaction betrays what we know of how people actually interact in our world today. We all have those things we get really excited about and build communities around, whether they are religious interests and concerns, academic interests, pop cultural texts, or a consumer product, our communities are now being shaped, reshaped and constructed in very different ways.
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If you are interested in more thoughts on virtual community and convergence culture check out my two articles here:
Ryan Bell, the pastor of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Hollywood, invited philosopher/theologian Peter Rollins to do a two day conference called “Beyond Evandelism” at their church building (You can read Bell’s recent post on Rollins talk last night).
In his talk Peter Rollins discussed a number of things important to the church: the ironic gesture and fetishism. According to Rollins, the trouble with “mission” and the church is that we try to bring people into our buildings, lock them in and scare them into believing. He pointed out that human desire is best experienced in a triangle. We need a third (someone or something) to tell our fantasty/desire/experience too. He told the story about the two strangers who were the only survivors on a shipwreck and were stranded on a deserted island. After many months there they started to become friends: initially they really begrudged each other for being the only two people on the island. And finally one night they have a real nice evening together. The next morning the guy seemed a little down and the girl asked what was wrong, the guy couldn’t explain his troubles. Then he had an idea. He asked the girl to put on a mustache and a wig and meet him over by the tree. She thought it was really weird but decided to go along with it. When she, looking like a man, met up with the guy later the guy said, “Hey Buddy, you’ll never guess who I had sex with last night!” This story illustrates that often pleasure can only be enjoyed when it is shared with others (It seems to me that twitter and facebook status would be a good examples of this kind of triangulation. We turn the all aspects of life, mundane or otherwise, into a pleasure that can be shared with others).
Often God fills this triangulation for Christians. God fills the space so that “we can sleep at night.” God becomes a crutch to lean on so we don’t have to face the harsh reality of life, which often looks meaningless. Rollins said, “We want God to be this third, so we can place our projections, and keep us from facing up to our issues.”
This was essentially Bonhoeffer’s point as well. Ryan Bell in his reflections on the talk wrote:
In his time, Bonhoeffer make the observation that God was always on the retreat, with less and less power, reduced to an idea – simply an explanation for what we cannot explain. We need God to help us face the likelihood that life is meaningless, everyone we love is going to die, that we have come from nothing and will return to nothing. So, God is pushed to the margins, not only of our lives, but also of society, to the point where God has now power at all anymore.
In modernity, God becomes intellectualized. We go to church believing while we are there, that is we believe intellectually, but when we leave we are “practical atheists.” We don’t live the rest of the week like we really believe. Our faith is intellectualized to the point that we can critique social practice while engaging in that social practices. Think of those influenced by the green movement who are critical of big cars, but who drive just as much or more in their smaller efficient vehicles than those with the gas guzzlers. Instead of asking, why own a car at all? Or why do I drive so much? They intellectualize their passion for sustainability so that they don’t have to really believe in a way that would change their practice.
This is what Rollins called the ironic gesture. This sentiment goes against pascal who didn’t care what people believed so much as that they lived according to a world where God exists.
What has happened in our form of mission is that by bringing people into the church and making sure they believe in certainty and out of fear the church ends up having to believe for people. The rituals, the pastor, the sacraments all believe for us, these things becomes the third in the triangle. They believe on Sunday so we don’t have to believe the rest of the week.
This happens when the church becomes a fetish. An example of a fetish is money. We know money isn’t magical but we go on living as though we believe that it is. A fetish “prevents us from experiencing the true reality of our social situation.” Church as a fetish allows us to continue in our horrific jobs, abusive relationships, unethical corruptions, etc. So in order to really find God and free these people we need to remove the church.
The first response to this, and the most provocative, is to say we need to remove the church so that people can be free to face reality and believe themselves. But this would only be the antithesis of the problem. What is needed instead are robust, “powerful practices” as James McClendon called them, that are rooted in both believing and practicing. We need communities that interrupt the flow of the third, and push us to confront the reality of God and encounter Christ. What does it look like for the church to disrupt this ironic gesture? And what has it looked like for God to do it to our churches?
This past weekend at our convergent Quaker retreat we had both programmed (planned) and unprogrammed (silent) worship. For the programmed worship on Saturday morning I planned an interactive worship time based around the Lord’s Prayer (a topic I am deeply interested in). In this post I’ve included a video and pictures of the various stations, here and at the bottom you can download all the instructions and list of needed materials. I have not included the descriptions and instructions for each station, you’ll have to read the documentation for that. In each station one person read the petition from that portion of the Lord’s Prayer, there are queries to help reflect reflect on the prayer, an activity and then time for silence.
Here is where I explained the basic idea:
Be sure to give yourself some time and get some help if you can because It took a little time to set things up. There is a list of materials in the downloadable packet below.
Station One: Santify
Our Father in the heavens, may your name be sanctified (Matthew 6:9).
Query: Consider the ways we can pray this prayer in three forms: inward, upward and outward.
Activity: Light candles and say opening prayer
Station Two: Witness
Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10).
Query: ”How can we be a part of the kingdom’s coming on Earth?”
Activity: A Body Prayer “To Become Useful In God’s Plan” Face the four directions
Station Three: Eat
Give us today the bread we need (Matthew 6:11).
Query: ”Do we seek to share our resources, belonging and food with those who need it? Am I available to share daily bread with others? Does my table reflect how the kingdom of God looks?”
Activity: Slice a piece of bread and give it to another person
Station Four: Forgive
Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors (Matthew 6:12).
Query:”What do I owe you God? What debts have I incurred against you and others?”
Activity: Write out a debt you owe God or one that another person owes you on a piece of paper and tear them up together at the end.
Station Five: Cleanse
Do not bring us into temptation, but rescue us from the evil one (Matthew 6:13).
Query:When do I let temptation overcome me? How can I live a cleansed life?
Activity: Read a confession and wash another person’s hands.
Take five minutes per station and we had five small groups that rotated after the five minutes were up (we rang a bell). At the end, after everyone had gone through all the stations, we returned together for a time of silent worship. The feedback was the most people enjoyed the experience of going through these and appreciated the interactivity in the stations.
