Looking for a Little Respect

“Am I now seeking human approval, or God’s approval?  Or am I trying to please people?  If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Galatians 1:10).

I will ask for “the grace that I may be received under His standard, first, in the most perfect spiritual poverty, and should it so please His Divine Majesty to choose me, also in actual poverty; secondly in bearing reproaches and offenses, thus imitating Him more perfectly, provided only I can suffer them without sin on part of any other person or displeasure to His Divine Majesty” (St. Ignatius Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius).

The inexorable pull of modern life in America is toward respectability.  One way or another, people live their lives in ways calculated to bring them honor in the context of the people or ideals they themselves honor.  If I think that hitting home runs, for instance, is a task worthy of respect, then I practice hitting in such a way as to increase my chances of hitting home runs.  If I think sewing is a demonstration of a certain kind of honorable expertise, I will practice sewing in ways that people who sew well will respect.  If I think making money is a way of earning the respect of those whom I respect, then I will work to make the kind of money that people whom I respect will respect.

Everybody knows it.  I try to write and preach in ways in which people whom I think write and preach well would approve.  Who is immune?  And that is, perhaps, how it should be.  Whether it is carpentry or microbiology, making free throws or cleaning fish, building the space shuttle or rebuilding a carburetor, people, we hope, care about practicing their craft with the requisite skill and integrity.  We assume that when the surgeon picks up the knife or the attorney redrafts the will or the USDA inspector checks the ground beef that not only do they know how to do their work, but that they understand the importance of doing it well.  We want to see them to meet standards, to find respect among their colleagues.  We care about the fact that they seek to impress the people who taught them their craft.  Given the choice between the overachiever and the apathetic slacker, if it’s my teeth about to be drilled, I want the overachiever every time.

All of which, of course, applies to Christians.  Ideally, we strive to practice our faith with integrity.  We seek to walk the walk faithfully.  We crave the honor of the ones we find honorable.  Ultimately, we desire to be pleasing to the one who was pleased to give up his life in dishonor for us.

And therein lies the rub, doesn’t it?  Christians are no different in wanting to live in ways that bring approval.  But the approval we seek cannot be provided by other human beings.  In fact, Paul says that if he had cared anything about human approval he would have sought another line of work.  Being who God calls us to be often leaves us honored in ways that the world has no way of finding respectable.  And that is because the Christian life finds respectability precisely at the point where the world finds failure.  We are honored by a God who finds honor in places the world would never think to look, like, oh, say . . . crosses.

While the rest of the world desperately seeks the honor this world provides (money, fame, glory, education, a big-screen T.V.), Christians seek the honor provided by the one who forsook the honor sought by the world in order to find the honor bestowed only by God.

St. Ignatius tells us to pray not only for spiritual poverty (Matt. 5:3), but, if it be God’s will, for actual poverty.  He tells us to pray to bear “reproaches and offenses,” rather than to pray for the world’s approval.  Why?  Because the call of the Christian life is the call to the imitation of Christ, who bore reproaches and offenses.  Humiliation, apparently, is the name of the path he took on his way to saving the world.

Only in a group of folks as weird as Christians would this reverse logic make any kind of sense.  If respect is what it’s about, I guess in the end it all depends on whose respect you really want.

 

A Note from Gary Gambino

Hello.  I am Gary Gambino and, as the surname might indicate, I'm a "cradle Catholic" who has embarked on a "Magical Mystery Tour" of various denominations since my mid-20s.  The week before Easter I was in a physician's waiting room when the gentleman next to me offered me his Courier-Journal.  Leading the Metro section was a story about how the board of the Douglas Boulevard Christian Church voted to stop signing marriage licenses until everyone, regardless of sexual preference, was afforded that opportunity.  The phraseology is "marriage equality" and is consistent with Christ's own teachings.

I live in Buechel just south of the Highlands, and I made a point of attending their (our) Easter service.  I talked with both pastors and was amused when Pastor Ryan wore as a badge of honor the fact that Pat Robertson thought the church's pastors "were going to Hell."  After learning that the Associated Press had picked up the C-J  story and it had gone worldwide -- viral -- I half expected television cameras to be at the back of the church and was a tad disappointed when none were present.

I advocate for several liberal causes in my private life and on social networking websites.  I have been an advocate for people with disabilities since my injury in 1982 at the age of 18.  This has made me somewhat of an outcast in my own conservative Catholic family, sadly enough.  I did not think a church in my neighborhood (or near it), in arguably one of the more conservative states in the Union, could adopt such a "progressive" stance.  I love this church.  I love the leadership and the members of this church.  Absent a more meaningful phrase, this is really cool.

God bless all who read this.

Gary Gambino

 

Summer Shalom Supper Series

 

Please join us Weekly: June 16—July 14

Thursday Evenings from 6:00-8:00-PM

• Free Admission


• Light Supper Served


• Donations Welcome

 A community conversation: Discerning a faith perspective on drug use and its criminalization in our community

 PROGRAMS & SPEAKERS:

June 16:What does the research tell us?

Dr Linda Bledsoe, Kent School of Social Work

June 23: Law enforcement and incarceration

Kevin Pangburn, Department of Corrections

June 30: Treatment: a provider and a constituent’s perspective

Jennifer Hancock, LCSW

July 7: Perspectives from a District Court Judge and a Kentucky Legislator

Judge Anne Haynie; Rep. Jim Wayne

July 14:  What is the Christian response?

Dr. Derek Penwell

What's in It for Me?

An elderly woman walked into a J.C. Penney department store.  Three young salesclerks were standing there (that was in the days there were people around to wait on you), but since the woman’s clothes were a tattered and worn, they figured that it was a waste of time to wait on such an unlikely prospect.  But there was a fourth young man standing nearby, a devoted Christian for whom kindness was second nature.  He approached the elderly woman, helped her make her purchases and then as she checked out, he learned that she was Mrs. J.C. Penney.

Dan G. Johnson, Neglected Treasure: Rediscovering the Old Testament

 

I find stories like this strangely distressing.  So much of what we do as a society is predicated on the idea that if you do something well enough and in front of the right people, you will receive some kind of reward.  Which is to enter every situation asking, not “How can I be of service?” but “What’s in it for me?”  If we’re honest, this story isn’t about helping someone else as much as it is about helping the right person—and, ultimately, ourselves.

Over the years, I’ve heard so many people say when asked why they stopped coming to church, “I wasn’t getting anything out of it”--as if the primary purpose for gathering for worship was somehow only to get something.  This attitude goes something like, “By Sunday morning I’m usually on Spiritual empty, and I come to church to get a fill-up on God.”  But when that attitude emerges, the church becomes merely another consumer proposition, “I’ll go where I get the most for the lowest cost to me.”

Worship is our corporate prayer to God every Sunday.  The church’s life—the way the church is administrated, the education programs, the fellowship opportunities, the acts of service—is itself a corporate prayer.  In that sense, then, our mindset ceases to be, “What will I miss if I’m not there?” but, rather “What will be missing if I’m not there?”  Each member and friend of the church plays a unique role in the prayer of faithfulness we lift to God.  Consequently, everyone is an equally vital part of the body, even if someone’s role is not always noticed by the rest.

My vision for the Church is that we begin to see ourselves as a family who, when sitting down to the table together, genuinely perceives the family as a whole, not just the sum of its constituent parts.  Indeed, when I begin to understand our connectedness, I’m freed to realize that I’m not in this just for me at all—I’m in this for you as well (and maybe even Mrs. J.C. Penney, too).

 

Here's What's at the Yard Sale!

The Yard Sale will be here in a few days!

Saturday, May 21 from 10:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m.

Here are just a few pics of what we've got.

Kitchen items:



 

We've got a set of four of these:



 

A little nostalgia



 

For the scholar in your life:



 

And to bring you a bit of Holiday cheer:

Growing up without Going It Alone

I guess I realized I was an adult when I found myself in East Tennessee with a new wife and no job. I had graduated from college four weeks earlier, and then got married just two weeks prior to loading up my grandfather’s Chevy pickup and launching out into the great unknown of, what I took to be, adulthood. We moved to Tennessee so I could go to graduate school. There was a little money left over from the honeymoon, which I thought would last us a month or so, providing we could eat on fifty dollars a week. I figured a month would be plenty of time for us both to find jobs and start living like grown-ups.

It occurs to me now that foresight was not a virtue I possessed at twenty-two, because I did not, as I had anticipated, find a job. My wife, at nineteen, already much more readily employable than I, found a part time job as a hostess at the restaurant in the Holiday Inn. Her income, it will not surprise you to know, didn’t turn out to be enough to sustain us. And so, with a nearly empty refrigerator and no prospects for employment on the horizon, we packed up the truck and headed back to Detroit to live with my in-laws.

We didn’t stay too long—though her parents could not have been nicer. After four months we’d both found jobs making sufficient money to move to a small apartment—her working in a doctor’s office, and me in a Speedway.

One might reasonably inquire as to why a situation that resulted in me moving back in with my in-laws made me aware of my status as an adult. Generally speaking, such a move, at least psychologically, means a failure to live up to the standards set for grown-up living. However, it strikes me that though we had folks helping us take care of our basic needs, no one was going to parachute in to right our listing financial ship. A little assistance here and there to help us keep our heads above water, but nobody offered to buy us a boat. It felt lonely at first (and still does sometimes).

But what I finally realized about our predicament was that nobody was going to live our lives for us. Being an adult takes courage and some intentionality, a commitment to hanging on when hanging on seems impossible.

But lest this degenerate into some kind of morally edifying self-help anecdote, it also occurs to me that it’s critical to point out that we were kept afloat. We had people who loved us, who wouldn’t let us fall through the cracks. It is a hard thing to realize that not everyone is so fortunate—and that we could very easily, if just a few things were different, be the people we read about living under viaducts in cardboard boxes. So while living can’t be done by proxy, it can’t be done in isolation either.

Faith, it seems to me, works along the same lines. On the one hand, the spiritual lone wolf is a non-starter; on the other hand, walking through a crowd of people on a journey you happen not to be taking doesn’t make you a pilgrim either. You can neither go it alone nor rely entirely on others to do your work for you. Somewhere in the mysterious middle lies maturity—both as a human being and as a seeker of God.

 

 

Church Yard Sale for the Mission Trip to Mexico

Church Wide Yard Sale at DBCC

All proceeds will go to to pay for airfare and to buy supplies for our renovation of the Casa Hogar Children's Home in San Luis Potosi, Mexico.

We need your help and contributions! In July, our mission team is going to Mexico and we're sponsoring a "yard" sale to help raise funds for the supplies.
We need clothing, household items, furniture, books, pictures, small appliances, linens, etc. - anything you no longer use or need. Bundle towels, sheets and linen sets with masking tape. Bring your items to the church, Tues. - Friday, from 9-2. A call prior to your arrival would be helpful.
We also need volunteers to help with pricing items, set up on Friday, May 20 and workers the day of the dale from 10 a.m. - 2 p.m.

 

What Is the What?

Brief note: Since the church where I pastor, Douglass Boulevard Christian Church, voted on Sunday, April 17 to honor all marriages (gay and straight) by refraining from signing marriage licenses, I have been asked to present a justification of my views on receiving LGBTQ folks as equals in all aspects of the life of the church.  Here is a brief glance at the nature of my thinking on this issue--which is to say an answer to "What is the what?"

On Facebook, as many of you know, I tend to be kind of a smart aleck.  More to the point, I tend to be a decidedly liberal smart aleck—a fact that annoys some people, while others seem more appreciative of my sarcasm.  At any rate, I received a message on Facebook the other day from someone about whom I care a great deal.  It read, in part:

“Many of the people in my generation are politically what they are because of their upbringing. It would do us well to hear the "other" side in a constructive manner. For instance, I have been thinking about the homosexual question, and all of my learning and understanding comes from my conservative teaching.”

The note went on to ask that I offer some clarification of my views on the “homosexual question.”  Notwithstanding the implication that my snarkiness is often less than “constructive,” I take the message to be a genuine attempt on the part of the writer to understand a different view—admittedly, something about which I could do better myself.  Since I believe the request to be a serious one, and since my early “learning and teaching” also came from “conservative teaching,” I feel a certain responsibility to try to offer a serious answer about how I have arrived at my current theological convictions.  And while the nature of the medium in which I provide my response necessarily narrows the scope of how thoroughly I can address each issue associated with this question, I will try to provide a general account of how my beliefs have changed.

At the heart of what my questioner refers to as conservative teaching, it seems to me, is the issue of authority—namely, who or what guides my theological beliefs, and how those beliefs get converted into action.  Growing up, I learned that it was the bible that provided a blueprint for what to think and how to act.  If the bible said it, I was taught to believe it.  On this reading of scripture one operates under the defining assumption that the bible was written with the intention of providing a clearly understandable set of universal guidelines by which to live, one that extends to all times and all places.  In other words, what the bible said 2,500 years ago is just as binding today as it was then.  When it said not to steal, that was a universally binding command.  When it said not to murder, that was meant for me as much as for the Israelites wandering in the desert.  When it said, “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death” (Lev. 20:10), that was supposed to apply to . . . wait a minute.  It was there that I ran into problems with reading the bible as a timeless blueprint, since big portions of it were ignored as being only for certain times and places.

So when Paul said that a woman “ought to have a symbol of authority on her head [either a veil or long hair], because of the angels” (1 Cor. 11:9, cf., also 11:6), and I noticed that the women I knew never wore veils and often cut their hair short, I was told that Paul was issuing only a situational command.  That is to say, Paul was only speaking to women of his time.  But when, some verses later, Paul said, “As in all the churches of the saints, women should be silent in the churches.  For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says” (14: 33b-34), I was told that he was speaking to women of all times and places.  It wasn’t clear to me how I was supposed to tell consistently between time-bound and timeless commands.  I just couldn’t figure out why the command for women to be silent in church should operate beyond the first century Roman Empire, but that the command that women ought to wear veils and refrain from cutting their hair shouldn’t.

I concluded that the church operates in a decidedly different context now—one the apostle Paul could not have foreseen.  That argument began to change my mind about women’s ordination (another “question”—that is, the “women’s ordination question”—I had learned from early on was a theological no-no).  In fact, it made enough sense to other Christians around me that there had already been a substantial shift in many parts of the church over the issue of ordaining women.  As important as that hermeneutical shift was, however, my ideas about women in ministry were cemented when I finally received the honor of working side by side with them as colleagues.  I saw how gifted they were at tasks that I had been taught were to be reserved to males.  I worked with women who could preach and teach and administrate much better than I could (not necessarily a heavy lift, that).  I saw this as a way that, over time, the Holy Spirit was able to reveal a new conception of what God intended.  It didn’t necessarily mean that God had changed, but that the world in which we lived had changed enough that God’s true vision of the way things ought to be could finally be received.

It occurred to me, though, that another gradual revelation of God’s true design had happened even before the shift on women in the church.  The bible, while not commanding slavery, certainly seemed to condone its practice.  In fact, many people who, at one time, defended the practice of slavery did so while standing firmly within the tradition of biblical interpretation, using the bible as the defensive tool of choice.  However, we’ve reached a point where, looking back, it seems outrageous that anyone ever used the bible to defend this kind of treatment of other human beings.  It struck me that perhaps the church’s stance toward gays and lesbians might follow this same trajectory.  In other words, I thought that maybe the Holy Spirit is in the process of revealing to us God’s true vision of the way things ought to be with respect to homosexuality.  If this is the case, then we need not necessarily say that God has changed (though my colleagues who are Process theologians probably wouldn’t object to this description), but that the world has changed sufficiently to be able to receive the fullness of God’s truth on this issue.

But beyond what I take to be the inadequacies of a static view of biblical interpretation that seeks to match the brown shoes of scripture with the often black tuxedos of context, the thing I found most persuasive in changing my theological views of homosexuality was my contact with my brothers and sisters who are gay and lesbian.  In the church where I minister there reside some of the finest people with whom I’ve ever been fortunate enough to work—people who just happen to have been be born loving others of the same gender.  These people are my parishioners; but more importantly, they are my friends.  My gay and lesbian brothers and sisters have the same love for Jesus in their hearts as all the rest of the people with whom I work.  They want to be a part of a community seeking to live faithfully as followers of Jesus.  They want this.  Unfortunately, though, the church has not traditionally wanted them back.  We have caused grave damage to people whose only crime was to be created different.  I found I could no longer view people for whom Jesus died as defective or degenerate just because the object of their affections happened to share the same anatomy.

I don’t have the space to go into a separate exegetical defense of the seven “clobber” passages, those passages in the bible usually cited as arguments against homosexuality; those arguments are well rehearsed on both sides (stay tuned for future articles on the “clobber” passages, where I’ll rehearse the arguments again).  My point here centers on how we identify authority.  I want to be clear about the fact that I’m not suggesting that the bible isn’t authoritative; I believe it is.  Instead, I’ve come to the place where I can no longer accept as authoritative the view that scripture is a handy guidebook, indexed with rules for every occasion.  Scripture acts as authoritative when interpreted within a community that seeks seriously to understand the story of God’s loving interaction with humanity in the person of Jesus the Christ.  And the community in which I interpret scripture consists of people who are better disciples than I am, but whose gender identity or sexual orientation differs from my own.   And, as someone who claims to follow Jesus, my primary vocation is to learn to love others (all others) with the same radical abandon as the Jesus who radically abandoned good sense by answering “the Derek question” and loving me.

 

DOUGLASS BLVD. CHRISTIAN CHURCH VOTES FOR MARRIAGE EQUALITY AND ENDS PRACTICE OF SIGNING MARRIAGE LICENSE

Louisville, Kentucky- On Sunday, April 17, the congregation of Douglass Boulevard Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) unanimously voted to end the practice of signing marriage licenses because they give legal benefits to heterosexual couples that are not available to homosexual couples. Until the church's ministers may confer identical legal benefits on homosexual and heterosexual couples, they will perform only religious wedding ceremonies.

"As an Open and Affirming Community of Faith (a designation signifying DBCC's commitment to full acceptance of all people, regardless of race, gender, age, or sexual orientation), our membership is committed to treating homosexuals and heterosexuals equally. Our congregation believes it is unfair to provide different services and benefits to heterosexual couples than we can provide to gay and lesbian couples," said associate minister Rev. Ryan Kemp-Pappan.

Senior minister Rev. Derek Penwell added, "Heterosexual couples enjoy a number of benefits that result from having state-sanctioned union. They may inherit property, adopt children together, visit one another in the hospital, and save thousands each year in taxes by filing as a couple. Ministers, as agents of the state, have the power to confer these benefits-and the imprimatur of normalcy-on heterosexual couples, but we do not have the honor to bestow these benefits on gay and lesbian couples."

"In our attempt to live out God's call to pursue justice for all, the Elders of the congregation joined the Pastors in witnessing to the right for gay and lesbian persons to God's blessing on their union and witnessing to the Commonwealth toward ending the refusal to recognize these unions," said Rev. Chuck Lewis, Chair of Elders with the church.

Douglass Boulevard Christian Church, founded in 1846, has historically been committed to the pursuit of justice for all people, offering leadership in trying to live out the message of love and hospitality embodied by Jesus. In 2008, Douglass Boulevard Christian Church voted to become an Open and Affirming Community of Faith.
Douglass Boulevard Christian Church is located at 2005 Douglass Boulevard in the Highlands near Douglass Loop.

Douglass Loop Farmers Market: A Ministry of DBCC

“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest.  You shall not strip your vineyards bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus19:9-10).

From early on God showed concern for the way resources were allocated among God’s people, embodying that concern in the law by making certain that those who had little could still eat.  Leviticus reminds us that it’s not enough for those in the community who have enough to forget those without.  Those who had resources were required to look out for those who occupied the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum.  This passage from Leviticus is a glimpse of God’s idea of a social safety net.

In our contemporary world we also have inequities in the way food is produced and consumed.  The Douglass Loop Farmers Market, beginning Saturday, April 16 (10:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m.) is an effort on the part of DBCC to take seriously God’s concern that everyone has enough to eat.  As a ministry of the church the market has three important goals: 1) to provide a place for producers to sell locally grown food, so that they can make a decent living, 2) to provide access to nutritious locally grown food at a reasonable price, and 3) to help create a community atmosphere where we can begin to understand the ways we are connected to our neighbors.  In the service of these goals, we will soon be offering the option—to those able to take advantage of it—of using Food Stamps.  We want to help foster a just, sustainable food community here in the heart of the Highlands that gives producers a chance to sell and consumers a chance to buy.

We will be offering locally grown meat, eggs, produce, honey, herbs, wine, and plants.  To add to the neighborhood atmosphere, we will also be offering a mix of regular food vendors and guest chefs, all to the sounds of local acoustic musicians.  We will be dog-friendly, offering an area for people to tie up their dogs while they shop.

As people of God we have more to do to make certain that everyone has access to the food they need to survive, but this is a good place to start.  Come on out and join us every Saturday!

 

Spreading the Good News

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him.  For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life.  Who is sufficient to these things?  For we are not peddlers of God’s word like so many; but in Christ we speak as persons of sincerity, as persons sent from God and standing in his presence (2 Cor. 2:14-17).

 

We live in a consumer society in which even ideas become merely commodities to be bought and sold according to one’s need.  We sell everything from perfume to industrial cleansers to political platforms to new entrees to religion.  Everything is available for purchase.  Everything is an option in the marketplace.  Individual choice has been elevated to the status of working assumption.  Which is to say, I can believe whatever I want, and nobody can tell me any different.  If I want to believe that Big Macs are better than Whoppers, that’s my choice.  If I want to believe that Danielle Steele is as important an author as Shakespeare, I can do that.  If it is my considered opinion that God is really an alien being who flew in on a spaceship and landed at the pyramids in Egypt, I am free to believe it.  Why?  Because there appears to be no way of verifying these statements.  They all seem to be statements of personal preference, and we all know that we can’t assault the logic of personal preference.

Consequently, when someone stands up and claims to speak for God, we don’t want to say anything negative.  Even though their primary understanding of Jesus may be as a divine cash cow, people listen and figure it’s just another choice in the religious cafeteria—relatively equal in significance and veracity with every other choice.

But Paul says that there are people whose only concern in spreading the Gospel is motivated by self-interest.  So many empires have been built on peddling God’s word, that it’s become a cottage industry.  Power, wealth, fame are all available to those who peddle it best.  Evangelism, in some instances appears to be little more than an attempt at kingdom building.  Only, the kingdom that’s being built has little to do with the kingdom that Jesus announces in the gospels. There are some who cynically sell the Gospel at whatever price will attract the most buyers.  Evangelism is a means to an end, a way to a bigger church and a more impressive budget.

But for us, spreading the good news is an outgrowth of the lives we live.  Our call is to live faithfully.  And as we pass through this life, the way we live, the words we speak, our willingness to embrace the stranger and the outcast speak loudly about who Christ is.  Actually, Paul refers to us almost poetically as “the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.”

It’s not flashy.  But that’s all right, following Jesus rarely is.

 

Japan and What It Means to Follow Jesus

Looking at the pictures of the devastation coming out of Japan as I sit in my overstuffed chair brings into stark relief the vast chasm that separates me from most of the rest of the world.  Reading back over the previous sentence, I can hear my mind consolidating its defenses against the guilt that the fact of that vast chasm raises.  The recognition that I have an overstuffed chair in which to indulge guilty feelings leaves me ambivalent, because in reality what’s going on in Japan right now has nothing to do with me or my fat chair.  All of this has me thinking about how I continue to be amazed at the extent to which I am able to bend the arc of history inward—as though what happens in the world must ultimately have some relationship to me.  I am struck by the thought that pushing past self-absorption is, if not the point of Christian discipleship in the reign of God, then at least one of its most desirable outcomes.

In thinking about Japan (indeed, in thinking about thinking about Japan) the whole issue of discipleship keeps popping up: Where is Jesus in all of this, and what does being one of his follower’s require in the face of it?  Luke tells us in chapter six that just prior to calling the twelve apostles, he “went out to the mountain to pray; and he spent the night in prayer to God” (6:12).  All night is a fairly long time to spend in prayer, which suggests that he had something weighing heavily on him.  After enduring this all-night prayer-a-thon, the first thing Jesus did was call all his disciples together and choose twelve from among them to be apostles, that is, those who were to be sent out on his behalf.  The twelve Jesus chose would eventually serve as the foundation upon which the church would be built—which makes it understandable why Jesus would have struggled all night over whom to call.

Consequently, when in Luke’s version of the story Jesus finally addresses the twelve who’ve been chosen, we have high expectations about the significance of what he will say.  This is what, in our culture driven as it is by organizational business models, we would call the vision speech, the one where Jesus sets down what’s at the heart of the ministry he has in mind (the ministry to which the twelve have just been called).  Luke tells us that while all of his followers are still gathered around him, Jesus begins to clarify the principles of this new endeavor, which is obviously highlighted by this latest major personnel move.  So, what will it be?  What does Jesus indicate will animate the new ministry upon which he and his friends are about to embark?   The first words Luke has Jesus say after calling the twelve?

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.  Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.  Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh . . . But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.  Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.  Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep” (Luke 6:20b-21, 24-25).

Now, I want to say right off that I’m not particularly happy about Jesus’ newly identified Platinum Club members.  By just about any accounting done on a macro level, I’m sure to be lumped in with the latter rather than the former.  When the truth is told, though I sometimes struggle to make ends meet, the ends I have to make meet are quite a bit nicer than most of the rest of the world; and the means I have at my disposal to meet those ends would surely evoke envy among all but those in the highest percentiles when it comes to the world’s wealth.  So, my ox is being gored too as Jesus trots out the core values for the new business model.  Unlike most successful ventures, though, Jesus has the powerful in his sights as the problem, rather than the solution.  This makes things difficult for me, because as an individual, I’d much rather be part of Jesus’ target audience than the targeted audience; and it is as an individual that I am most likely to experience Jesus’ call to discipleship.

The locus of popular American piety, it seems difficult to dispute, resides in the individual.  Most strains of American Christianity set up shop in the heart, falling back on what Charles Taylor has called radical reflexivity.  According to Taylor, radical reflexivity is not only an awareness of the self, but is an awareness of awareness; it is the illumination of “that space where I am present to myself (Sources of the Self, 131).”  It is in this space where I think not only about myself, but about myself thinking about myself that much Christian discipleship gets done—or fails to get done.  I say, “fails to get done,” because, unfortunately, much of the emphasis in popular Christianity rests on getting one’s individual soul “right with God,” on having a “personal relationship with Jesus,” that is, on intensifying radical reflexivity.  Not much gets done when my preoccupied gaze extends only so far as my own navel.  I want to be clear that I’m not rejecting intimacy with God, but rather a view of intimacy that is so self-absorbed that the life of the rest of the world is the camel that must first pass through the eye of my personal needle; which, it seems, is precisely backward from the discipleship Jesus offers.

Unlike the way much of Christianity is presently practiced, following Jesus, if Luke has it anything like right, appears to consist in a radical outward orientation—an orientation, not coincidentally, that is much more difficult for the rich and the powerful, who have more than sufficient resources to maintain insularity.  Of course, even if Luke is right, it’s not immediately obvious just how being poor, hungry, and aggrieved constitute a state of blessedness.  Leaving aside for a moment how Jesus thinks that blessedness will be achieved, I want to suggest that those who follow Jesus ought to be orienting their commitments to him in ways that first involve an outward identification with the poor and the powerless.

All of which brings me back to Japan.  If our discipleship is shaped by Luke, the question of the reign of God has less to do with first renovating our interior lives than with figuring out how to embody the gospel to people up to their knees in mud, terrified of radiation in the air.  Maybe the blessing indicated by Jesus that the poor, the hungry, and the grieving experience is to come through us—whose primary concern is not for ourselves and the state of our own souls, but for the powerless and the state of a world in which the powerless must rely on the good will of the powerful. If picking up our crosses and dying to ourselves means anything, surely it means figuring out some way to be Jesus for people in Japan, for the thousands of Japanese struggling just to hang on, for all the poor, hungry, and grieving—halfway round the world, or halfway down the block.  It is giving our lives first for them and not for our own spiritual enrichment that Jesus identifies as the heart of what it means to be a Christian.

 

The Gift

“When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words.  Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.  Pray in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:7-15).

Do you pray?  I don’t mean when it’s your turn at the supper table, or when someone calls on you in Sunday School class.  Do you pray?  What do you say?  Is it hard to pray?

Prayer has been addressed for so long as a formal thing that is unlike anything else we do during the day.  We expect that prayers follow some kind of standard of length and prettiness; that is, we figure that the longer and lovelier the prayer, the better it is.  And the better the prayer, the more chance we will have of God hearing it and answering it.  Of course, this view of prayer makes it almost a magical incantation.  Which is to say, you have to find the right words in order to yank God’s chain hard enough to get anything done.

Jesus, on the other hand, heads us in a different direction.  Jesus tells us to pray simply and directly.  One doesn’t have to heap on the words for God to hear it—God already knows what you need before you ask.  Prayer is honest communication between us and the one who made us, and who watches over us.

Prayer is not a tool to manipulate God into doing what we want.  Prayer is the foundation of the relationship between God and humanity.  It isn’t designed to convince God to forgive us, or to take care of us.  God has already promised in Christ to do that.  Prayer is a way of allowing us to see our need (for a “Father who art in heaven”, for forgiveness, for bread, for aid in facing trials and temptations, etc.), of admitting that we couldn’t live without God’s grace.

And maybe that’s why Jesus tacks on the saying at the end about forgiving our brothers and sisters who have trespassed against us.  Because if we can’t see God’s grace in forgiving us so that we might forgive others, then we’ll never experience our bread, our trials, or the kingdom of heaven as a gift from God.  If we never get the picture that God’s forgiveness of us frees us to forgive other people (people that the world says we have a right to hold a grudge against), then we don’t have a clue about the rest of what’s involved in being a Christian.  How can God forgive those who have no idea what forgiveness is, or that they even need it?

Prayer is not a mystical formula, or a flowery show of devotion.  Prayer gives us a sense of the majesty of God, and to what great lengths God has gone to show us mercy.  It gives us understanding about gratitude and about whom we depend upon for even the most ordinary things in life.  Perhaps, most of all, prayer allows us to see that God lost in a Son in God’s desire to reconcile—even with those who have done us wrong.

Just Desserts

I received a call this morning that someone had broken into the church.  The caller told me that the police CSI people were dusting for fingerprints and taking DNA samples from the blood that the thief left behind after breaking the security glass in three of the offices—including mine.  The person(s) stole a laptop from my office, as well as one of the security cameras and the hard drive that kept the security footage from the administrative secretary’s office.  It happened on Christmas day.

Today was Sunday, and I had the day off.  However, I came in just before worship let out to survey the damage.  As the parishioners filed out, they were roundly denouncing the display of insensitivity demonstrated by breaking into a church.  I commented that whoever broke in at least had the sensitivity not to vandalize the place.  That would have been much worse.  Then, channeling the priest from Les Miserables, I said what (I guess) sounded like the Christian thing to say: “I hope the person who stole our stuff needed the money for food.”

Nods of chastened agreement.

“Unfortunately,” I continued, “I suspect that the needs were more pharmaceutical than gustatory.”  (Actually, I didn’t say gustatory.  That’s a bit much—even for me.)

More nods of agreement.

It struck me later, however, that, though I had gotten past my initial response (anger), my secondary response was scarcely better.   Implicit in my righteous sounding sentiment was something I complain about when I hear it in the comments of others.  Basically, what I said was, “I might be able to summon up forgiveness, if I know the person really needs it.”  That is to say, I’m happy to forgive folks who can rightly claim mitigating circumstances.  (“Excuse me, but I seem to have run over your Bassett Hound.  Please forgive me; my brakes went out.”)  In other words, people who need to be understood, not forgiven.  But out and out no-goodniks?  No luck.

This need to dispense love, help, forgiveness only to those whom we think deserve it is a problem for people who work with folks in trouble.  We find ourselves wanting to help those in need, but we want assurances that we’re helping people who really need it.  And, for the most part, this is not a bad impulse.  Sometimes our attempts to help those who say they need it serve only to make matters worse. (Giving money to a substance abuser, for example, is like throwing gasoline on someone who’s already on fire.)  Nevertheless, as is often the case when my kids start a sentence with “Dad can I?” the first answer that comes out of my mouth is a preprogrammed no.

But my no to the need of others, starting with my children, probably ought to be more thoughtful.  While it is true that sometimes saying no is the most loving thing to do, saying no as a reflex action betrays the enormous yes that the Christian faith tells us Jesus offered all of us.  Whatever else Jesus said, he certainly didn’t hold out for loving, helping, forgiving only those who could muster a persuasive enough case to convince us they deserve it.  Those who claim to follow him need a much wider embrace, a much more nuanced account of love, help, and forgiveness than that.

None of this is to say that I believe we ought to turn a blind eye.  When it comes time to press this case legally, I will most likely support prosecution.  What I am saying, though, is that maybe I ought to be less concerned with what people deserve than with figuring out the most constructive way to love them—whether they deserve it or not.  Because, Lord knows, I could use a little of that myself.

The Shirt off our back

I am designing a church t-shirt that we can wear in the community to celebrate your connection to Douglass.  Below are a few designs that I have put together please vote in the comments section for your favorite.

Design #1:

Design #2:

Design #3:

Paul Valentine on Mexico

When Derek asked us to relate how and where we saw God in Mexico, I was immediately challenged. One of the things I wrestle with in my life is identifying God... so you might see the quandary I encounter in relating how I "saw God?"

I choose to be a part of the Douglas Blvd. community because I do 'see' something, I am simply unable to give a definitive name to what I see, well, feel really. I find at Douglas an environment where I am free to look, which is no small thing to me.

Derek and I had a conversation while in Mexico about naming (i.e., identifying) God. As the story goes in the Tanakh, when God first revealed to Moses, Moses asked God's name. God replied "I am." That's the best I can do when it comes to identifying God. It seems to me that God is.

Also in the Tanakh, there is a story of Elijah as he neared the end of his life. He too was seeking a clarifying audience with God. Elijah was presented with lightening, strong winds and earthquakes... all grand shows, but God was in none of them. Instead, God presented in a still small voice. I think the message is: God isn't where we might expect God.

Buddhism speaks of the mind as the seat of a sixth sense where we encounter 'God," and teaches that if you look to hard, you will miss the divine, that you 'see God' in your peripheral vision. I see a similar theme in the Tanakh and what the Buddhists teach, that we encounter God in other ways than our five senses, though those may be affected.

Sorry for the lengthy prologue. But, in that context....

There are two things I want to share about my own experiences in Mexico.

The first regards the group of people I traveled with, those from Douglas. We live in a culture that openly declares: "image is everything." Indeed, substance seems to matter very little, if at all, as long as you appear to have or be something. But, remove the smoke and mirrors, and the magician is simply another person. There was little to no smoke and mirrors in Mexico to hide behind, so what we encountered from each other was often real.

While it is possible to maintain an image in a difficult environment, it's a lot harder, and often what's really there is exposed.

What happened in Mexico could be compared to putting 14 people in a small, under equipped kitchen and tasking them with creating a feast for 40 people. Some were experienced chefs, others had never used a spoon. This is the stuff of murders and mayhem, yet, there was none of that. Instead, we left Mexico having prepared a very nutritious and palatable meal. Where there was potential and ample opportunity for strife, I instead witnessed grace and humility. So, if you will, I often encountered God in my fellow travelers.

The second regards the people who hosted us. To sum up, one of the things that most impressed me about our hosts is that they live simply and therefore simply live. There were 33 little children living in close proximity... some might even call it squalor by our standards, yet I felt surrounded by whole and happy people. I witnessed 8 year olds looking out for smaller children, children actually serving each other as a normal course of living. They served without fanfare or motive for reward. If we define immaturity as self absorption, by that definition, most of these children had a maturity about them to be emulated.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Hola from Casa Hogar!

After a good flight through Houston, we arrived in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, at 10:30 p.m. last night.  We were met at the airport by Juan, his son, several of the boys and "our own" Gary.  Like last year, we went to Los Volcanos for late night tacos, and then arrived at the home about 1:30 in the morning.  By the time we settled in to our respective rooms, and turned in, it was almost 3:00 a.m.  Even then, many of us had trouble going to sleep.  We have already felt a lot of camaraderie among our DBCC group.

This morning came early, and there were many hola's and hugs as we saw so many familiar faces as well as new introductions.  Casa Hogar has 32 children now, several more than last year, and it great that we can be a part of their life this week, sharing in work and play, and building meaningful memories for everyone. 

After our morning planning meeting, our group went to Home Depot and Walmart to buy any additional needed items.  Gary had arrived 2 days early to get most of the materials for the electrical rewiring project which will give us a good head start on Monday.  The rest of our day has been spent interacting with the children and settling in.

We appreciate the opportunity and support from our church family, and in the days ahead we hope to share with you our experiences here in Mexico at Casa Hogar in words as well as pictures.  This is a very special place!!

Hasta luego,

Harriet (now Hari')

Mexico Mission Trip 2010

In just a few hours a group of fourteen people (one--i.e., Gary King is already down there) will head out to San Luis Potosí, México--which is up in the mountains of central México.  The group includes Basil and Harriet Hall, Erin McKenzie, Paul Valentine, Charlie Pennington, Karen O'Hara, Geoff Wallace, Sue Raymond, Joe Brown, Bart Mattingly, Hannah Cooper, Ryan Kemp-Pappan, and me.  We are going to work at the Casa Hogar de San Juan, a children's home established by my grandparents in 1964.  Currently, they have thirty-two children ranging in age from four to sixteen.  We will be re-wiring the the children's home, replacing the original wiring from 1967.

Each day this week, as we head through our adventures, someone will be posting to the blog to keep you up to date on what we're doing, so that you can share in the mission of your congregation in another country.  We'll have reflections from members of the group, as well as photos (and maybe even some video) of our travels.  So, check back everyday to see what we're up to!

Please keep us in your prayers, as we keep you in ours.

Hasta verlos, Dios los bendigo!

By Derek Penwell

The Haves and the Have-Nots and How Things Work in the Reign of God

“If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26).

I was listening to a show on NPR the one time, which took as its subject college admissions applications counselors.  Apparently, and I didn’t know this, you can hire someone to help your child fill out college admissions applications, to give her/him the best possible shot at being accepted.  College admissions is a pretty complicated game, played for big stakes.  So it stands to reason that an industry would spring up around helping applicants put their best foot forward.  The catch, of course, is that to avail yourself of these types of services, you have to be able to pay for them.  And, as I gathered from the NPR piece, the whole thing can be rather pricey, leading one interviewer to ask one of the professional admissions counselors if that didn’t indicate some sort of inherent division of access between the “haves” and “have-nots.”  The counselor’s reply caught me up short.  She said, “Well, sure.  But what in America doesn’t cause some sort of division of access between the haves and have-nots?  That’s just the way things work.”

And she’s right, isn’t she?  If you have the money to purchase the help, you have access to places that would be otherwise closed to you.  Who would deny it?  If you have the means to hire someone to put your best foot forward for college admission, you increase your chances of getting accepted.  The whole industry is predicated on the notion that you can get better results from a professional.  But what if you can’t afford a professional to help you fill out the admissions forms?  What if the school you attended was one of the forgotten school systems in rural Appalachia or urban Louisville?

Obviously, there is an inherent division of access between the haves and the have-nots in our country.  Not everybody is starting out from the same place.  Some folks in our country are starting from so far back, they can’t even see the starting line the rest of us started at.  Unquestionably, some people have a head start in life.

Which is why the whole issue of a multi-millionaire white broadcaster—on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech—presuming to lay claim to Dr. King’s legacy, sits uncomfortably with me.  The plea for a color-blind society, in theory, makes sense.  But, let’s be honest, we don’t live in theoretical constructs.  We live in the United States of America, where there is an “inherent division of access between the haves and have-nots.”  To say, for example, that college admissions ought to be color-blind sounds good, and fair, and American.  To say that there ought to be no racial preferences sounds equitable.  But what if you were to say that there ought to be no preference shown for a kid whose parents can afford to pay for a counselor to help fill out the applications forms, over a kid whose parents are struggling to pay to keep a roof overhead?  Realistically, you can’t do that, but you see where I’m headed with this.  The playing field can never be level left to itself because there is an inherent division of access between the haves and the have-nots in our country.

What’s my point?  I’m not arguing (at least here) for a legislative action with respect to Affirmative Action (although, I’d be happy to speak with you about it if you want to know how I feel.)  Actually, I want to go deeper than that to talk about how Christians communicate.  If you happen to be a person of color, you hear things like “there is an inherent division of access between the haves and the have-nots” in a particular way.  People of color know who the “haves and have-nots” in our society generally are.  And when they hear someone blithely dismiss the inequities of access with, “That’s just the way things work,” you may begin to understand how the have-nots hear the haves whining about “level playing fields” and “color-blind admissions policies” and “reverse racism.”  It sounds like a sneaky attempt by those with a head start to hold onto what they’ve historically enjoyed.

And here’s the sad part from where I sit as a Christian and as a minister.  Two days ago, as I write this, a wealthy white man, claiming to be tapped by God for the job, led a group of mostly middle class white folks in a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, declaring a desire to restore America’s honor.  Part of what they believe that honor has to do with is a wish for Americans to stop focusing on the inherent divisions of race, and start focusing on achievement.  But here’s the problem: I’ve heard some of those same kinds of good middle class Christian white folk seek to embrace people of color out of one side of their mouths, while uttering genuinely nice sounding things about “equality” and “color-blindness” out of the other side—because they believe themselves to be starting at the same place in the race as the have-nots, never understanding what the have-nots are all painfully aware of—that the starting line begins at a different point for each of us.  Consequently, our brothers and sisters of color are left to wonder whether or not we really do care about racial unity, because we continue to use the code words that keep them at the back of the line, while making ourselves look fair.

We will have no basis upon which to pursue racial unity within the church until we are honest with ourselves about the fact that the playing field is not level, that it’s not just a matter of hard work, that the language we use, the way we see the world will continue to color our relationships.  Clearly, we all want with Dr. King, a country in which our children “will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of the character.”  But what we Christians need to come to terms with is the fact that not everybody in our country is given the same opportunities to develop the kind of character by which Dr. King thought we all ought to be judged.  Therefore, how we speak about our situation affects our relationship to one another.

Until we begin to understand that as the body of Christ none of us can be truly happy while another of us suffers, we’ll never understand the eschatological vision Dr. King was trying to get us to see.  “Color-blind” is the goal, but before it can ever be embodied among us, we must put away the illusion that we’ve already achieved it.  That’s definitely not “how things work” in the reign of God.

By Derek Penwell

My Favorite Part of Worship

The following is a guest post by Cheryl Cubbage. In case you don't know Cheryl, she is a member and Elder of Douglass Boulevard Christian Church.

Probably because I grew up in the Disciples of Christ church, communion has been the focal point of my Christian worship experience. It was part of my wedding ceremony, and if I’m going to feel like I have adequately worshiped, communion must be part of the worship service. When I go to a non-DOC church, I miss communion not being offered or being offered, but I’m not allowed to participate because I’m not a member. This has always been my favorite part of the service because I feel so engaged with Christ, the community of other believers, and really reflective on my Christian calling and discipleship. This is almost always the point in the service when I am most moved emotionally and thoughtfully. It is such a simple ritual, and yet I am always moved. Communion makes me feel authentically Christian and like I belong to Christ, just as those present at the table with me belong to Christ. I get to hear such varieties of the same experience of Christ from those presiding at the table. I come away filled with hope, love and gratitude and wanting to pass it on.

Which parts of the order of worship do you appreciate, and why? Comment below and join the conversation!