Filtering by Category: Christianity
Taking Cues on Immigration from Jesus
By Derek Penwell
I received a call a while back from someone I’ve known since we were kids. Caesar, lived in the children’s home my grandparents established in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, in 1964. I spent my summers there. I’ve also known his wife, Sophie, from the time she was a baby. She grew up in the home, too.
Some years back, Caesar came into the States illegally to work as a painter in Atlanta, leaving Sophie and their son, Caesar, Jr., in Mexico. Hard life, living in one country illegally, while your family lives in another.
Lonely. Anxious. Scared all the time you’ll be discovered, and sent back.
Out of the blue, Caesar called me and asked if I could send him a little money via Western Union, so that he could help bring his family to Atlanta. He explained to me how difficult it is living without the people you love the most next to you; how uncomfortable it is living in a country that takes every opportunity to tell you how much they wish you’d leave … “after you finish that last job for me”; how painful it is to contemplate having to return home to a country where you’re afraid the violence will swallow your family, leaving nothing behind but shattered lives and spent shell casings.
What’s a man to do? He’s got a wife, a son. All he cares about is keeping them safe, and making enough money to create a future he’s sure is unavailable to them back in his homeland.
Where does one start when speaking of illegal immigration?
Read MorePope Francis Says Atheists Who Do Good Are Redeemed, Not Just Catholics
"The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can... "The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!".. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”
~Pope Francis
The Prophetic Call for a Little Brash Stupidit
In this blog post, Will Willimon reminds us that age and experience are important, but that they can become idols when we forget that God is dynamic, moving--and so is the world (and the church) that God oversees. We need to move forward, take chances, embrace failure not as a moral deficiency but as a tool for learning.
"We choke to death on the geriatric virtues of maturity, balance, and careful procedure when what our moribund system needs are more clergy who are young, brash, reckless, and stupid. That is new pastoral leaders who will give God enough room to get in this staid old church and do the sort of resurrection that this God does so well."
A Letter to LGBT Student Groups (and Allies) at Christian Colleges
From A Letter from Rachel Held Evans
I don’t know much about what it’s like to be you. But I value those times we’ve spent talking over coffee and exchanging emails. We always seem to find one another when I’m on a college campus, and I’m beginning to think it’s because we’re the same kind of people—broken, wrestling, hopeful, brave…ragamuffins and misfits just taking it one day at a time.
I love you, and I am honored to be your sister in Christ.
Hang in there.
I’ve got your back.
— Rachel
Sermon Podcast: They Will See His Face
"No, you start telling people that they live in a place where they can see the face of God, and pretty soon they’re going to start living like it’s true.
"And it’s not even like we’re responsible for pulling it off, for planning this new world that looks like John’s picture of God’s new city. But one day, after spending all this time with a different vision, we wake up to see that we inhabit an entirely different world from the one we used to inhabit, or the one that used to inhabit us."
A sermon on Revelation and the New Jerusalem.
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DBCC Hosts Screening of the Film "Gen Silent" on Aging and LGBT Elder Issues
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
CONTACT:
Chris Hartman, Fairness Campaign Director
(502) 640-1095; @FairnessCamp
Dr. Noell Rowan, BSW Program Director, UofL Kent School of Social Work
(502) 852-1964; NLRowa01@louisville.edu
"Aging Fairly" Series Includes FIlm & Lecture on LGBT Elder Issues
April 28, 4 p.m., UofL Chao Auditorium; June 9, 5 p.m., Douglass Blvd. Christian Church
(Louisville, KY) As part of its "Aging Fairly" series, the Fairness Campaign is partnering with KIPDA Mental Health and Aging Coalition, the University of Louisville Kent School of Social Work, The LGBT Center at University of Louisville, Mad Stu Media, Faith Leaders for Fairness, and True Colors Ministry to present showings of Stu Maddux's award-winning documentary film on LGBT aging, Gen Silent.
Each film showing is coupled with a brief lecture by Dr. Noell Rowan, BSW Program Director of UofL's Kent School of Social Work, who will reveal findings from a groundbreaking Hartford Faculty Scholars research project, Resiliency and Quality of Life for Older Lesbian Adults with Alcoholism. The series is free to the public with refreshments and will be shown Sunday, April 28, 4:00 p.m. at UofL's Chao Auditorium in the basement of Ekstrom Library and Sunday, June 9, 5:00 p.m. at Douglass Boulevard Christian Church, 2005 Douglass Boulevard.
The film showing and lecture series is part of the Fairness Campaign's ongoing efforts to promote awareness in the community of LGBT aging issues and disparities among older LGBT adults. As chronicled in Gen Silent, many older LGBT people struggle with going back into the closet as they fear prejudice and unfair treatment in assisted living facilities and nursing homes. According to Improving the Lives of LGBT Older Adults, a joint study by the MAP Project, Center for American Progress, and SAGE, 8.3% of LGBT elders reported abuse or neglect by a caretaker due to their sexual orientation or gender identity, senior lesbian couples have almost twice the poverty rate of senior heterosexual couples, LGB older adults have 11% higher alcohol abuse rates than their heterosexual peers, and 72% of LGBT seniors are hesitant to engage in mainstream aging programs for fear of being unwelcome, among other staggering statistics.
"With more than 1.5 million LGBT seniors living in America today, and with that number ever increasing as more Baby Boomers join those ranks, caring for and better accommodating the needs of our LGBT elders has become an increasingly urgent issue on the Fairness Campaign's radar," shared director Chris Hartman. "In the coming years, we will be deepening our partnerships with these and other organizations--like Elderserve, Inc.--to best serve Louisville and Kentucky's LGBT seniors."
WHAT: "Aging Fairly" film and lecture series
WHEN & WHERE:
Sunday, April 28, 4:00 p.m.
UofL's Chao Auditorium in the basement of Ekstrom Library
Sunday, June 9, 5:00 p.m.
Douglass Boulevard Christian Church, 2005 Douglass Boulevard
WHO: Dr. Noell Rowan
KIPDA Mental Health and Aging Coalition
University of Louisville Kent School of Social Work
The LGBT Center at University of Louisville
Fairness Campaign
Mad Stu Media
Faith Leaders for Fairness
True Colors Ministry
Where Do I Want to Be When Justice Rolls Down?
By Derek Penwell
I had a parishioner write something the other day that I can’t quite get out of my head. Darla is an advocate in the state capitol on behalf of the rights of the disabled and the elderly, and had a bill go on life support -- the Adult Abuse Prevention Bill. (How do you not support that?)
In her disappointment, she wrote: “I sit here again thinking about exactly where do I want to be when justice does roll down!”
I’ll be honest: That question haunts me. Darla was referring to the famous passage from the prophet Amos, who , in a time where grave disparities existed between those in power and those on the margins, between those dining on bone china and those forced to eat leftovers out back from the dumpster, wrote:
“But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream” (5:24).
Apparently, God has become upset with Israel because of the way those in power have treated the folks at the bottom of the food chain. God’s anger stems from the fact that “they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals -- they … trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way” (2:6b-7a).
The irony in Amos, however, is that the people who oversee this oppression labor under the assumption that they’re on God’s side. The oppressors are God’s people, people who long for the “day of the Lord.” They believe that when God sets things right, they’ll be -- as they’ve always been -- on the winning side of things.
But God says something like, “Don’t be so quick to hunger for the day of the Lord. The justice you seek may not be nearly as pleasant for you as you imagine” (5:18).
In other words, the people God is most annoyed with are the people who’ve always considered themselves the heroes of the story, the ones whom God should be grateful to have on the team -- the ones who throw holy festivals, who gather in solemn assemblies, who offer up all the right sacrifices, who sing beautiful songs -- all to God. These are the people who’ve taken care to make sure they believe all the right things, who hold all the correct theological positions and whose liturgical prowess is unmatched.
What is God’s response to these pillars of the assembly?
“I don’t care about your spiritual virtuosity! Fine, you know your way around the scriptures. You know what fraction of an ephah of flour should be used to bake bread for the tabernacle. Congratulations! You have an exhaustive metric concerned with determining who’s fit to bother with, and who doesn’t measure up. Here’s the problem, though: none of that means anything, since you forgot that all that stuff is a tool to make you into the kind of people who seek justice by loving the people I love.”
When my daughter was about 4 years old, she’d just received (at our prompting, of course) the latest in what must have felt like an endless string of apologies from her older brother for hitting her.
“Tell your sister you’re sorry,” we said.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
And she said something that still calls out to me: “I don’t want your ‘sorries.’ I just want you to stop hitting me.”
You see, the thing is: It’s easy to do that which seems big and true and righteous, but costs me little. Doing something that costs me, really costs me, is difficult. And I’m not talking about money, except inasmuch as money stands as another way to control the world I live in.
Making myself vulnerable. Voluntarily surrendering power. Placing myself in someone else’s hands. Not getting to be the boss of who’s in and who’s out, who’s worth helping and who “should have known better in the first place.” These things cost me.
Being right isn’t a bad thing. I try to do it regularly myself. But when being right costs you nothing and someone else everything, Amos says you’re bound to get crossways with God -- since God seeks first to love us, and through us to love one another. Even God is less interested in being right than in being loving -- for Christians, that’s what that whole Jesus thing was about.
God says to the keepers of the keys: “For my part, give me justice. Justice. Let it roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.”
And for God, justice doesn’t mean simple fairness, flattening everything out so it’s the same. Justice means seeking for everyone what they need to flourish.
So, where do I want to be when justice rolls down? My first inclination is to say: “I want to be on the right side of it.”
If I read Amos anything like correctly, my heart says: “When justice rolls down, I want to be right in the middle of it.”
Sermon Podcast: Seeing with Different Eyes
"The story of Peter and Cornelius is a tough passage just to the extent that it asks us to do the difficult work of continuously discerning the movement of the Holy Spirit. Where is God going? What kind of new thing is God up to? Who is it that makes us uncomfortable, whom God is busy trying to welcome into the fold?
"It’s a lot easier to sit back, point out the rules, and say, 'This is the way God’s always done it before.' But God is bigger than our attempts to box God in. God cares about establishing a a reign of justice and mercy, not about making us feel comfortable."
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The Future of Faith
With the rise of both the "nones" and immigrant faith groups, the way future of faith seems squeezed between two opposing forces. What is the way forward? How about this?
"What if the path toward awakening is simple? Embracing faith as if we really mean it, not worrying about institutional power or rich congregations, living out the teachings of Moses and Jesus, sharing with others, seeking to be at peace with all, loving our neighbors as ourselves?"
A thought provoking article by Diana Butler Bass. Take some time to read it.
Evangelical Leader, Jim Wallis, Now Favors Marriage Equality
Do you hear that? It's the winds of change
It's All About Getting There
By Derek Penwell
Shipping
Shipping. In the end it’s all about shipping.
It’s not about starting. Anyone can start.
It’s about producing. It’s about seeing a project through to completion. It’s about shipping.
Used to be, I was a good starter. I liked the process. I’d get excited about something, and I’d go out and buy a notebook to start taking notes, start planning, start getting ready to start.
And pens. I bought a lot of pens.
And calendars. Notebooks, and pens, and calendars.
How could I not be serious with all these office supplies?
Or, after I got into the computer age, it was software. If I only had the right software, I’d already be finished.
The problem was I mistook starting for shipping. I thought that if I could just get started, I would have done the really important work. If I could just line up the perfect office supplies, the right software, I would have solved the hardest part.
I mistook preparing to work for work.
And it’s not that preparing for work is unimportant. You need the right tools to do the job. Unfortunately, I spent so much time getting the right tools, then organizing them, and making sure the desk or the paints or the tool bench was just so, that I could walk away from the work thinking I’d accomplished work without ever actually working.
Perhaps, even more importantly, I usually had tools enough to start anyway. I convinced myself that the work couldn’t get done, however, without “better” tools.
Here’s what it took me so long to figure out—and occasionally still need help figuring out—good work is the application of resources in the service of realizing a goal—that is, good work is about completing a project and shipping it. Good work doesn’t require a perfect beginning. Perfect beginnings are a white whale that lead you to the middle of nowhere.
Good rule of thumb: If the work you’re doing isn’t bringing you closer to achieving your objective, it’s wasting your time. Not only is it not helping you do good work, it’s preventing you from doing good work—since all the fiddling around deceives you into thinking you’re actually doing something, when in fact, you’re actively, not doing the very thing that would help you achieve your goal.
Sometimes you just have to use the notebook you have.
Maybe you have to make peace with the fact that the old Bic you find at the bottom of the drawer will work just fine.
Perhaps what you need isn’t new software, but a bare-bones text editor and the determination to start driving the cursor across the page—before you have all the details worked out.
The Church and Getting Sidetracked
One of the problems with following Jesus is that you never know quite where he’s going to go. According to the Gospels, the disciples regularly found this little idiosyncrasy of Jesus vexing.
First, he’s going here. Then, he’s going there. The disciples found it next to impossible to keep up with him.
Then, after Jesus left, they stood around, waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.
After the ascension, they stood around looking into the heavens, wondering, “Now what?” Suddenly, two men in white robes sidle up and say, “Why are you just standing there? Quit mouth-breathing and get back to work.”
At Pentecost, they were all gathered together in the Azalea Room at the local Holiday Inn Express, wringing their hands, unable to work out just where to go next. The Holy Spirit showed up, kicked them out into the street with no discernible plan, “For crying out loud! Will you just get out there and start working?”
“We don’t know what to do.”
“Of course you don’t. And you’re never going to know sitting here, rearranging office supplies. You’re going to have to get out there and start.”
“We don’t know where to go.”
“If you wait to start walking until it’s all lined up for you, you’ll never find out where you need to go.”
“But what if we go in the wrong direction? What if we do the wrong thing?”
“You will. Inevitably. You’re going to make so many mistakes, even Lindsay Lohan’s going to look thoughtful next to you. But so what? Most likely, you won’t know exactly what to do and where to go until you’re already out there in the middle of it. So, go ahead and make some mistakes; because making mistakes in the service of a goal is preferable to sitting about endlessly rehearsing the reasons to continue sitting about.”
Congregations too often gets sidetracked. Worried about making mistakes, congregations freeze up.
Well, that’s not true entirely. It’s not like congregations that are afraid of making mistakes don’t do anything. They start things; they just don’t ship much that’s interesting. Unfortunately, the things they start are things with which they feel comfortable.
They spend a great deal of time lining up budgets, making flow charts, buying fancy stationary, dreaming up new programs. And these things feel like good work, like ministry.
But so often these scared congregations stop just short of doing good work because they fear making a mistake. Not wanting to do something that might raise the ire of the faithful, they stick to things they know—which would be one thing, if what they know actually took them toward anywhere interesting. As it is, much of the normal flurry of activity fails to help them arrive at a destination, amounting to energy expended in the service of wheel-spinning.
Here’s What I Think
- Use the tools you’ve got … until you have enough experience to know they’re not sufficient. Then, go get what you need. (Consistently reversing the order here, will almost certainly guarantee you won’t ship.)
- Start working. Start heading toward a destination.
- If you don’t have all the details figured out about your goal, start working anyway. You’re more likely to understand exactly what you’re trying to do only after you’ve begun.
- If you don’t have the exact GPS coordinates in hand, start heading in the general direction. (This isn’t the same as traveling at random. Start heading north, if north is where you think you need to be.)
- Make some mistakes. Embrace your mistakes. They provide you valuable information.
- If you’re on a journey to a destination, backtracking is not defeat; it’s re-calibration. (If you have an idea where you’re going, backtracking is almost always better than sidetracking.)
- If you’re vaguely afraid of going someplace, it might be that you need to pay more attention to that place. It could truly be dangerous. Or it could be that it’s the very place you should be headed, since all truly interesting places involve a certain amount of risk.
- Start. Produce. Finish. Ship. Repeat.
Honesty Isn't Our Policy
Honesty, as the saying goes, is always the best policy. If we believe that, the question is: Do we practice it? Do we live our lives truthfully? Now, someone might object that telling the truth and living the truth are two different animals. That is to say, the question of telling the truth without living that truth begs the question about whether it is possible to be Charles Manson (i.e., a complete schmuck) and still speak something approximating the truth, inasmuch as it is argued that the truth is not contingent on anything outside itself to be true. In other words, one account of the truth maintains that there is something that exists independently, objectively “out there” that is called the “Truth.” What one needs to do when there exists competing truth claims, goes the thinking, is to appeal to the “objective standard” of “Truth.”This formula works serviceably well when the question has to do with whether or not 2 + 2 = 4 or whether the population of Louisville is larger than that of Lexington. If, however, the question raised is whether or not University of Louisville fans are less dedicated fans than University of Kentucky fans or whether or not Christianity is true, to what uncontestable “objective standard” does one appeal?
Absolutism, or the belief, not merely that there is an “absolute truth” but that that “absolute truth” can be apprehended by human beings—if they only “try hard enough”—is a difficult argument to sustain, just to the extent that it is possible to have two reasonably intelligent, reasonably passionate, reasonably sincere individuals disagree on where to go to find the absolute truth that will settle their argument. Should they look in the Bible? The Koran? The Bhagavad-Gita? The DaVinci Code? Dr. Phil? The periodic table of elements? Who gets to decide what’s true? Or where do we expect to find the true account of truth to which everyone will defer? Absolutism runs the risk in the end of only being able to communicate by monologue.
“Does that mean,” as many will quickly ask, “that everything is relative? That there are no standards of truth to which we may appeal? Do we throw our hands up in the air because there is finally no way to adjudicate between competing truth claims?” No. Relativism, as a set of truth claims, collapses under its own weight. As James McClendon has pointed out: “As a general theory [relativism] seems to ask us to believe (a) that it is (in general) true, and (b) that nothing is (in general) true—and both can’t be the case” (Ethics: Systematic Theology, Abingdon, 1986, 350). Relativism as a theory of knowledge is logically absurd—or should we say, it’s only relatively true—whatever that means.
Therefore, to assert that honesty is the best policy is only to have begun the discussion, not to have settled it. If absolutism is problematic and relativism is logically indefensible, how are we supposed to talk about truth? Or as Pilate put the question to Jesus, “What is truth?” (John 18:38)
When asked “What is truth?” how did Jesus respond? We are left to assume that Jesus said nothing, because Pilate immediately left Jesus and went outside to address the Jews. Why didn’t Jesus say, “The truth is x, y, and z, and you would know that if you only studied your _______?” Or why didn’t Jesus say, “Truth is such a slippery subject, I’m not sure we ought to waste time trying to nail it down to a single definition. After all, all definitions are ultimately equal?” In fact Jesus let the silence hang in the air, as if to say, “If you want to know what truth is, look at me. I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
In a world in which we seem incapable of sustaining a conversation about truth between faith systems, perhaps the only way we have of judging their truthfulness is by observing the kinds of people they produce. It seems to me that the only way we have of judging the truthfulness of a particular set of truth claims is by examining whether, and to what extent, there exists a people capable of embodying those claims. That is to say, are the people named by a particular truth claim living the truth to which they appeal, or more to the point, are they living truthfully? Do people who claim to follow Jesus, for example, live in ways that honor Jesus’ commitments? Or, as Samuel Wells remarks: “Pragmatic tests of Christianity focus on Christian tradition and the ‘richness of moral character’ it produces in much the same way that science judges its theories by the fruitfulness of the activities they generate, and significant works of art become so in the light of the interpretation and criticism that surround them” (Transforming Fate into Destiny, Cascade Books, 1998, 86).
If I am right that the only real way to decide between two truth-claims from competing systems of belief is to look to the sorts of communities of character they produce, and if the only way to judge communities of character is by whether they produce people capable of living the claims they espouse, then living truthfully is the only way to establish the truth of those claims. Put another way, brick-layers lay brick, cooks cook, and Christians live like Jesus. Clearly, not everyone who wears the name has mastered all the practices necessary to be named a master craftsman in these crafts, but the shape of one’s life is determined by one’s commitment to living faithfully with the name—brick-layer, cook, Christian. It is, after all, possible to take any of those names in vain by failing to practice, or practicing poorly, the disciplines of each craft.
However, when practiced well the very product of the craft (i.e., the wall, the cake, the life) stands as legitimating evidence of the value and veracity of the craft. Consequently, for Christians, living truthfully isn’t only a matter of practicing the craft of Christianity well; it is the very means by which the truthfulness of Christianity is judged in a world where truth claims abound and compete. In other words, speaking the truth is the product of a truthful life.
The Hands of a Living God
“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31).
“We die and we die and we die, not only physically—within seven years every cell in our body is renewed—but emotionally and spiritually as change seizes us by the scruff of the neck and drags us forward into another life. We are not here simply to exist. We are here in order to become” (Susan Howatch, Absolute Truths).
The writer of Hebrews writes a letter to a community that was apparently on the verge of reconsidering its commitment to Christ. The author uses an extended argument to demonstrate to the reader that living as a Christian, as painful as it might be because of institutionalized persecution, is superior to their former lives. Commitment to Jesus surpasses all other attempts at worshiping God. Apparently, however, the readers of the letter to the Hebrews were having second thoughts, and were beginning to abandon their faith in Christ in favor of their former attachments.
The Hebrews’ writer writes: “How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by those who have spurned the Son of God, profaned the blood of the covenant by which they were sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of Grace?” (Heb. 10:29). In effect, the Hebrews writer says, “You can’t go back.”
Let’s be honest: there are times when each of us wishes our faith didn’t ask as much from us. We wind up organizing church events for people who don’t come. We have to get out of bed on our only day off. We can’t do all the things that television causes to look so appetizing. Then we start to think that our faith is certainly cumbersome, not allowing us to do all the things we’d like. And we wonder what life would be like if we didn’t have God telling us what to do all the time, which we guiltily admit to ourselves sounds pretty good.
Prayer starts to come harder. We begin to think of places where we can get a better return on our hard-earned money. Lies come easier. We find an unlimited number of excuses for being away from the Lord’s Table.
God, this whole faith thing is costing an awful lot more than I expected. Can’t we just tone it down some? No sense being fanatical about it, is there? I thought faith was supposed to help me feel better about myself.
All of a sudden, we hear the echoes of the Hebrew writer saying, “You can’t turn back. You can’t return to the security of your former life, because you died and your life is hidden now in Christ. You must stay the course. You must grow.”
“But it asks so much of me.”
“We are not here simply to exist. We are here in order to become.”
“I don’t know if I’ll survive the changes God requires of me.”
“One thing’s for sure: you won’t survive not changing—because not changing is, by definition, death.”
“But, I’m afraid.”
“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God.”
Integrity Can Be Lonely
“All of them deserted him and fled” (Mark 14:51).I was reading an article not long ago about a famous preacher. One of his admirers made the comment that one could tell this preacher’s ministry had “integrity” by virtue of the number of people in his church (50 bazillion people, or some other astronomical number). I often hear something closely approximating that same sentiment from well-meaning church folk. I was talking to a colleague on the phone awhile back, when the topic of one of this state’s “premiere” evangelists arose (I’m not sure how “premiere” qualifies as a theological descriptor). He said: “Well, look how many people he draws. He must be doing something right.” To which I replied, “Obviously, he’s doing something right — but it may or may not have anything to do with God, or faithfulness, or discipleship.”
I was taken aback by the assumptions underlying such a statement, that is, that God is most intensely present in the large, the successful, the well-attended. I am amazed that people who read the Bible are still naïve enough to make comments to the effect that the bigger the church, the more “integrity” is in evidence. If mere size is the only criterion for judging faithfulness, then Jim Jones had more integrity, was blessed in richer fashion than 99% of the ministers in the world. If size is what God uses to show us who is doing a better job at proclaiming the Gospel, then the bozos on televisions who preside over vast broadcasting empires are, by definition, closer to the kingdom of heaven than the rest of us laboring in tiny, “unblessed” congregations lacking “integrity.”
On the other hand, that leaves us in pretty good company—I mean, what with Jesus dying abandoned and alone—presumably stripped of his blessedness and integrity. (His ministry fell on hard times. I imagine it was hard to make budget after Good Friday.) Where did we get the idea that if it is getting bigger, God must be in the middle of it? Is God to be found in the market analysis? If popularity is the standard by which faithfulness in ministry is judged, then Jesus is not the person we ought to hold up as the standard-bearer for our vocation. Because Jesus nailed all that hooey about popularity and big crowds and succeeding according to this world’s standards on a cross one Friday afternoon. Tell Jesus how blessed he was as you stare into his face on the cross. (Just try not to get any blood on yourself. It can get messy being a Christian.)
That is not to say that the Gospel doesn’t have appeal; it does. But any appeal that Jesus has has to do with losing our lives, with turning the other cheek, with the first being last, with forgiving our enemies and those who persecute us, with selling all that we have and giving it to the poor, with dropping our nets and all the things the world says we need to be successful, in order to pick up our crosses and follow him. (Try selling that stuff with your anointed prayer cloths. “User-friendly God,” indeed.) The appeal of Jesus is to the last, the least, the lost, and the dead—presumably because they are the only ones who know that they aren’t successful enough to sail in under their own steam. At least in the gospels, it is precisely the big religious muckity-mucks that Jesus avoids like the plague. Jesus isn’t impressed with toothy smiles, blow-dried hair, and healthy Neilsen ratings. He spends his time with those that this world has declared losers.
Jesus doesn’t call us to succeed; he calls us to die. Success is his alone; and alone is how he died. Sometimes, integrity can be lonely.
Tying It All Together
When God created us, God gave us a special gift unique to human beings. It has to do with our ability to think. Of course, other animals can think—they have a sort of rationality we recognize. What sets humans apart is our ability to think about thinking. Put differently, we have an awareness that ties our past, present, and future together in, what we experience as, a long and consistent chain of consciousness. Not only do we have memories, for instance, we can recall those memories, enjoy them, study them, and in some ways re-live them as often as we need to. It is our memories that give us the wisdom we need to flourish in the present, and the confidence that our lives will continue to have meaning in the future.
The church, from its earliest days, has recognized the need to be intentional about attending to memory. Every Sunday we eat a meal that recalls for us the saving love of God that has formed us into the people we are—which calls attention to a larger, but often unremarked truth: communities have memories. And community memory must be just as assiduously attended as our personal memories. In fact, we say that the table set by Lord is a table of remembrance. Every time we gather around that table we set about the practice of remembering. But a big part of what communion accomplishes goes beyond rehearsing the story of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection—as important as that is. As the body of Christ, every time we come to the table we not only remember, but we re-member everyone who gathers around the table with us, past, present, and future. In other words, the body of Christ consists of all those members who not only spread across the globe, but who spread across time. We are who we are because of those who’ve gone before, and those whose way we are presently preparing.
Douglass Boulevard Christian Church has a memory that stretches over parts of three centuries. At present we‘re experiencing feelings of great anticipation about what the future holds. We’ve had many new faces in our midst who lead us to think about the possibilities ahead of us, and that alert us to God’s movement in our community. It’s an exciting time to be at DBCC.
But as aware of the future as we are, we cannot leave the past behind. As William Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” That is no less true in the church, where, surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, we’re aware that who we are is inexorably linked to who we’ve been. As we chart new courses, discerning God’s future, it’s important to remind ourselves that we’re not departing from or abandoning our past, we’re extending it. That is to say, we’re carrying it with us everywhere we go, with everything we do (whether we want to or not). The new kinds of ministries we’re engaged in at DBCC aren’t a departure from, but a continuation of the kinds of ministries we’ve always been engaged in—social justice, spirituality, compassion, and education. We are busy carrying on the tradition that was lovingly stewarded, then handed down to us by those who came before.
On the surface, what we do may look different from what we’ve done in the past, but at its heart, our first responsibility—which is to to equip disciples for the reign of God—remains the same; and it ties together our past, our present, and our future.
Sermon Podcast: "Treat 'em Like Gentiles"
Here's this weeks's sermon podcast, "Treat 'em Like Gentiles" delivered by Rev. Derek Penwell:
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Treat ‘em Like Gentiles (Matt. 18:15–20)
We live in a society that’s grown increasingly permissive. That’s not news to you, right? Scandals in politics, in the church. Corruption. Violence. Treachery. You stay out of my business, and I’ll stay out of yours.
We’ve come a long way down some very undesirable roads, both as a nation and as a church. With the media and liberal preachers forever expounding on the virtues of “tolerance and diversity,” we bought into the lie that it doesn’t matter what I do, as long as nobody gets hurt. And the logical conclusion of such an argument is that nobody (and I mean nobody) better tell me how I’m supposed to live. How I choose to live my life is my decision, it’s between God and me. Butt out!
Of course, it hasn’t always been that way. There was a time when the needs of the community superseded the demands of the individual. But to say that today is to be labeled a socialist. There was a time, however, when the church had authority, and that authority meant something. And with all the permissiveness in our culture, it doesn’t seem too outrageous to think that the church might move to regain some of that authority. It has to do something. The church can’t stand idly by while everything deteriorates. There has to be accountability somewhere.
I'm a Minister
I’m a minister. Which is to say, I work as a minister in a church. Historically, I’ve found myself reluctant to offer that bit of information in casual conversation, not because ministry occupies a position inherently more shameful than a host of other vocational options, but because when people find out that I’m a minister they either want me to answer their questions about I watch TBN, or they want to impart some theological nugget they’ve mined from The Prayer of Jabez or The Left Behind series. Please don’t misunderstand—I like questions. In fact I entered the ministry because of some of the questions I had about life and its ultimate meaning. My problem lies not in questions in themselves, but in questions about whether or not I believe that the World Council of Churches, Democratic politicians, and certain cartoon characters on prime time television form a shady cabal intent on ushering in the anti-Christ and a one-world government—complete with standard issue UPC codes emblazoned on everyone’s forehead, or whether I’ve finally come to my senses and realized that mega-churches are the goal of God’s reign here on earth.
The fact is I like being a minister, in large part, because of the conversations that attach to a life spent following such a strange, quixotic, compelling character as Jesus. The conversations, however, that seem to me to be important to have center on questions of justice, non-violence, grace, faithfulness, friendship, and devotion, rather than the sort of mass-produced fare provided by a popular religious culture that asks nothing more of Christians than that they act nice, refrain from swearing in public, and support any military action proposed by the American government as, ipso facto, God’s will.
To put a finer point on it, I like being a minister at Douglass Boulevard Christian Church. I’m blessed to belong to a community of faith that takes seriously our call to live out the example of Jesus in the best way we know how. DBCC is a community unafraid to take a chance on following Jesus down a dark alley. I like that. I like the sense of adventure I find at DBCC, as well as the adventurous thoughts I have when I think about what we can do together.
I guess this is all a long way of saying that my thoughts about ministry have evolved since coming to Douglass. Many of the things I do don’t even feel particularly like work. In fact, now when I’m asked what I do, I tell people I’m a minister at this really great church that seeks justice for the marginalized, that provides embrace for those who’ve been excluded, that looks into the eyes of the forgotten and says, “You’re welcome here.” Though we’re not perfect, we are constantly looking for ways to grow and be better.
I’m a minister. I just thought you should know.
Who's Steering This Thing?
"Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, with trembling kiss his feet, or he will be angry, and you will perish in the way; for his wrath is quickly kindled. Happy are all who take refuge in him" (Psalm 2:10-12).
In the uncertainty leading up to an agreement on raising the debt ceiling, the financial markets have taken a hit. As I write this the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Dow Jones is posting its "first seven session slide since July 2010." Republicans and Democrats are fighting it out to to see who will be able to claim to represent "what the American people" want. What bothers me, though, is that while both are laying claim to exceptional financial vision, they will try to situate themselves as having been right all along, while both will say that the other side of the aisle has been hopelessly tone-deaf to the needs of "the American people," and is therefore incapable of managing the ship of state. Inherent in such a political argument is that somebody, or some party of somebodies is ultimately in control—that all that stands between us and happiness and prosperity is the right political representation and the silencing of the opponent. Precious time is wasted while the parties speak about their ability to exert dominion over the economy. I hope the irony doesn’t escape us.
I love to feel in control. I imagine, therefore, that other people feel this way. Further, I imagine that people who have power are prone to feeling this way (which is probably why they got into the power business in the first place). The illusion that we can ultimately order our world in such a way as to preclude inconveniences like poverty, crime, racism, discrimination, and danger is presumptuous at best, and idolatrous at worst. We live and move and have our being in ways that suggest we have conjured up life, movement, and existence by our own initiative — by having such things as a sound domestic policy and a strong military. We have repeatedly failed to see that life itself is a gift. We have no more real control over our world than we have over God.
And maybe that is the point: We think perhaps that by our tireless organizing and speculating and legislating that we can finally impose order on God — and in the process become (of sorts) gods ourselves. The problem with that, of course, is that God is even more stubborn about maintaining control than we are.
Thank goodness for that.
Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth.
True Nonconformity
“Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh” (Romans 13:14).
“The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products. Images of movie stars and famous athletes, of serene lakes and macho fishing trips, of elegant dinners and romantic interludes, of happy families packing their station wagons for a picnic in the country–these tell nothing about the product being sold. But they tell everything about the fears, fancies and dreams of those who might buy them. What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 128).
Advertising, at this point in our cultural development, is the proverbial straw that stirs the drink. We know that. Instinctively, somehow, it makes sense. If consumption is the gas that drives the capitalist machine, we understand that somehow or another we must be motivated to go to the pump and do our part to keep the whole thing humming along. Of course, advertisers do not want us to think of it in such vulgar terms. Otherwise, the magic would be gone. Rather, advertising is designed to keep us from thinking much at all, except insofar as it can get us to think about ourselves. And in that sense, advertising is less concerned with selling us a new product as it is with selling us a new vision of ourselves as the sort of people who might benefit from buying a product.
In other words, commercials are inherently preachy. Only the moralizing is so subtle that we hardly even notice it. Later Postman says, “The television commercial is about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales, which is to say, it isn’t. Which is to say further, it is about how one ought to live one’s life” (p. 131). The seduction happens so effortlessly that we hardly even feel it.
Why, though? Why does it work so well? I think commercials have the power to shape us because we are so preoccupied with ourselves. It seems as though we care less about being good people, for example, than about being perceived as good people. Why? Because while actually being good takes a great deal of hard work, looking like a good person takes very little effort at all–just the right kind of aftershave and life insurance. Nowadays, one doesn’t actually have to put in the grueling hours it used to take to be smart; one need merely stay in the right hotel.
Paul, however, suggests a way to release us from the relentless grip of commercial culture. He tells us to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh.” If what we are primarily concerned about happens not to be our own image, but that of the one who gives us a self with which to be concerned in the first place, then psychodramas about acne and sports utility vehicles will have lost their power over us. By understanding that what we truly need is not the tweaking provided by the right brand of toothpaste or the coolest brand of beer, we begin to see ourselves the way Christ sees us, rather than the way Madison Avenue needs for us to see ourselves.
According to Paul, maybe being your own person isn’t such a great deal after all. Living the life Jesus calls you to live . . . now, that would be true nonconformity.