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Dead Man Walking During the Season of Lent

2011-04-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

How interesting to be going through a transition from Skyline Church, where I have been privileged to serve for the past 14 years, to Asbury Church, to which God is leading me to help nurture and encourage the movement of God's people gathered there. The resources I have gathered to help me navigate this passage describe leaving a long-term pastorate as a form of death - saying so many goodbye's and handing over ministry tasks among the saints here that have defined me for so long to other capable followers of Jesus who will carry on some of these tasks and lay others that have meant so much to me aside. At the same time, we are in this season of Lent walking together a spiritual path of remembrance of Jesus' journey to Jerusalem and the cross - a journey that beckons each of us to take up our cross and follow Jesus - to lose our lives to save them.

This journey of Lent calls into question everything we think we know about death and life. We think that death marks the end of our lives - the obliteration of all that we are. We fear death, as the last inevitable sign of our weakness and powerlessness before the power of evil and darkness in this world. Each day of our lives when we sin, and fail ourselves, or others, or God, by doing something that breaks our connection to God and others or failing to do something that would strengthen our connection to God and others, we draw closer to the ultimate separation from all things which is our death.

Or so we think.

The death of Jesus is so different from any of these misconceptions - these haunted dreams we carry with us about death - that his death on a cross in Jerusalem redefines what it means to die (and what it means to live). Throughout this journey of Lent, Jesus reminds us of the inevitable destination: the Son of Man will be handed over to his enemies; he will suffer terribly; and he will be put to death. The disciples don't want to hear it, of course. What can his demise mean for the movement toward God that his life represents that they have each given up everything to follow? Without Jesus, they are nothing. They will be utterly lost. Yet on he leads them towards the Holy City where he will suffer and die for the sake of love. On he leads us all.

You get the idea that Jesus has in mind a different destination that the one that strikes fear into our timid hearts. He walks resolutely and purposefully toward this death; this death begins to look like what he was born to do. And as we follow Jesus in our own time, toward our own inevitable death, we can learn something invaluable by resisting the temptation to move to quickly to the resolution of Easter and the miracle of the resurrection.

In my own between time, God calls me to pay close attention to the way Jesus journeys toward Jerusalem and death. He walks with an absolute trust that follows a trajectory beyond the veil of death - his own death or the death of his followers or the many, many people he has come to love. And he invites me (and you) to walk on this reimagined path as well (those who cling to their lives will lose them; but those who lose their lives, for my sake, will find true and abundant life).

So what does walking along this new path that leads to and beyond death look like? The principle characteristic of this path is peace - freedom from anxiety and fear - a peace that defines each step with intentionality and gratitude. There are no coincidences and nothing is left to blind chance. Every moment on the path that leads beyond death participates in an eternal unity that profoundly connects to God. We ware walking this path, yet every step brings us to an arrival, a homecoming, a place of belonging - we are at any particular "here" for a reason - receiving and participating in God's presence and power as we bestow and receive the blessings of all creation.

Can we ever say enough about this peace that passes all understanding? The angels sang of this blessing Jesus would bring to all people at his birth. On his last night with his friends, Jesus blessed them with peace - not as the world gives - but the peace that enabled him to lay his life down for his friends, and to invite them to love each other as he loved them. We cannot imagine the power and promise of this peace of Christ - our birthright. Peace that transcends pain, paves the path of forgiveness, invites us to rejoice in all things, swallows up death in victory, and trumpets the nearness of the Kingdom of God.

He has not left us orphans. We know the way he is going. Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Toward death, certainly, but also in peace that sees beyond the death of our pride, our fear and our isolation, toward communion with God and with all creation. I should be glad for such a death.

Thursday, 27 January 2011. A new day.

2011-02-26T06:57:00.000-08:00

(Note: I wrote this Blog the second morning after I learned that the Bishop had appointed me to leave Skyline after 14 years. At the time, I did not know which church I would be privileged to serve, but only that I would have to leave.)

I am slowly getting used to the idea that this Summer will mark the end of 14 years of service as a co-pastor among the saints gathered at Skyline United Methodist Church. In these few days that mark the savor of that growing idea - while at the same time not knowing about what the next invitation to serve will involve - I have the luxury of reflecting solely on what these past years of ministry have meant to me and to others.

That I understand this waiting time as a luxury marks the gift of wisdom in this time of waiting and watching with Jesus. Even though most times I sleep; yet he rouses me. I have felt the sleep of emotional numbness as I have given vent to my darker angels in the past couple days - mostly to Vicki. A quarter of my life - how that phrase has become something of a mantra, meaningless beyond an expression of exasperation. Longevity cannot by itself reveal any self-apparent truth about the meaning of my life.

I have lived in the unfolding of the time here among a particular group of people (always changing and transforming before my eyes, even as I have changed and transformed in relation to them and apart from them). We have blessed each other with our lives of faith in the midst of circumstances beyond our control and beyond our understanding. We have honored the relationship between us as best we could, learning to live with the ways in which our actual choices do not match our expectations of ourselves and each other.

I have known much grace here, much inner growth, much sorrow, and a great deal of joy. Together we have built a living monument of praise to God, and a house of hospitality to the strangers in our community who have become our companions. We counted the cost as best we could, but we could not have known the true cost - so we have learned to live with the consequences of launching into unknown and unproven territory. And in a way, my leave-taking at this particular time marks a necessary payment of that debt we incurred in the hopes and growing convictions of our prayers.

I have always known that it would be me who would be called to head out into the waters of the unknown - who would depart on a voyage of discovery to a far country. If that is payment to secure the victory we have long pursued, it is a payment I am glad to make, on my behalf and on behalf of so many others. And truth be told, I relish the promise of cutting the lines to shore and putting to sea again. Joy commented that I have tasted the bitterness of rejection of the prophet in his own country. She hopes that in that far country, I will find a people thirsty for the passion that is my life.

Yet in this blessing of time before the lines are cut, God invites me to discern what has happened here, to me and through me. I have chased the wind of uncertainty too long since Derrick called; now I can attend to the blessing placed in my hands: the gift of knowing where I stand before launching into a new place among a new people.

The flood of versions of this story give the impression that nothing - or only one thing - can be known about what this time together has meant. Joy wisely reminded me that no pastor acts alone, but that we all are products in so many ways of the people who gather at the churches we serve. My unidimensional pronouncements - of any flavor - take flight from the delusion of my autonomy.

Then, too, there is a deep context we ignored at first, but which asserted itself as the years unfolded. We merely added a chapter to a story told by others in and beyond the church called Skyline. The first seven years here marked my ignorance of that story; the second seven blessed me with a vision that we were neither alone nor singularly responsible for the undoing of nearly everything we had done when we arrived here.

Besides the context of a stagnant, conservative, homogenous demographic, we inherited a story of volatility, transition, conflict and mistrust between laity and clergy, and schizophrenic theological identity. What we have built together here has become an oasis of hospitality to strangers and all manner of spiritual searching - and that not without cost. Yet even the cost itself marks a measure of spiritual maturity here that fits into the larger story of Skyline.

From it's inception, this community of faith has always been marked by an invitation to costly investment of self and to a demanding and unsettling wideness of understanding spiritual hospitality. We have not buried that talent, but have consciously nurtured it in the fires of anxiety, indifference and hostility. Time and again, we have traded away comfort for what we discerned together to be faithfulness to a Savior who died to set all people free and who called us to take up our crosses and follow.

As co-pastor here, I have certainly made my share of mistakes. I have been impatient for change and I have talked when I could have profited more by listening. At first, I spent too much time working on the wrong kinds of things, and at the end I struggled daily with the paralysis of what I perceived to be a world without a map. Yet for all of these mistakes, grace abounded in and beyond the walls of myself - expanding even my notion of self.

So many walls came down for me while serving here with Vicki and with the saints at Skyline. Through it all, we never seemed to forget our first love. We witnessed the power of Christ to break down every barrier that separated us from each other and from God that we forgot what it was like to live beyond faith; we assumed God would act to strongly support our hearts that belonged to God alone. The horse would talk, though we could not know when or how.

More than anything else, I learned to walk by faith here among the saints at Skyline. I did not teach this trust, but I participated in the way this entire community claimed it. Each one mattered (and matters) far more to any of us than the 99. For us, the time was always propitious to follow in the path of faith, though we walked through the valley of the shadow of death. We learned to trust in God together, not measuring the consequences of our action but realizing the enormity of the cost of inaction.

Perhaps it is no mere coincidence that I am physically stronger now than when I arrived 14 years ago. The past seven years of famine have been for me a time of unprecedented growth in soul and body, as if I have been training for some great event. And regardless of the future, I have come to know that the event for which I train is the unfolding of each day following God to places where darkness pretends to reign. Though I cannot light them all, and though no one else may know, I have the strength to light up the darkness - and to bear witness to the light - wherever and to whomever God calls and sends me.

There is no good time to do a wrong thing. Skyline is the place where heaven and earth meet. We are on a journey of faith, and though we are on vastly different places in that journey, yet we can journey together. You preach the Gospel - we will run the church. Festival of Light. All means all. God bless our pastors. Jesus saved my life. I have been searching for a place like this. Come as you are. Transform us, O God, from getting here to being here. We're going to do something a little differently today.

I have learned that I cannot do this alone - but I have also learned that I do not have to do this alone.

Just like we planned!

How Skyline Has Changed Me - January 26, 2011

2011-02-26T06:53:00.000-08:00

(Note: I wrote this Blog the morning after I learned that the Bishop had appointed me to leave Skyline after 14 years. At the time, I did not know which church I would be privileged to serve, but only that I would have to leave. I remembered an old pastor prophesying that Skyline would change me and I took the time this cold January morning to reflect on how Skyline had changed me in the last 14 years.)

Since arriving with my wife and co-pastor, Vicki, at Skyline in the Summer of 1997, I have matured in the areas of conflict management, postmodern theology, evangelism and ecclesiology, and clergy-lay partnership in ministry. The experience as co-pastor here for 14 years, through two church splits and a two million dollar construction project, has given me deeper insight into faith, pastoral leadership, and who God creates and calls me to be as a person. I have exchanged a one-size-fits-all church "growth" model for a more responsive emerging church model at resonates especially with people in search of a faith relevant to postmodern life.

At Skyline, I have come to see the role of pastor in the context of the ministry of all believers. Our lay partners in ministry here have taught me both the extraordinary power of God's Spirit poured out on all believers as well as the perspective of pastoral leadership in articulating both the shape of God's presence in the gathered believers and the trajectory of God's movement among God's people. At seminary, I came to accept the dogma of a gulf between professional and lay Christians. The people at Skyline have given the lie to this myth, and have encouraged me to speak the truth in love as I have listened to and witnessed the courageous power of their faith.

I have witnessed the best and worst in people here and in myself, and have come to rely time and again on the miracle of God's forgiveness for us all. At times this miracle leads to a transformation in others, but always it opens the way to an inner transformation in me. The most profound change I have experienced as co-pastor here involves the peace these repeated and sustained transformations have wrought in my soul. Peace in parting (by death or other leave-taking); peace in the stillness of waiting (while God's presence deepens); and peace in witnessing in awe and wonder that truly "in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose".

That peace in Christ, as a weaned child on its mother's breast (a bittersweet comfort if ever there was one!), has become the only meaningful consolation and affirmation of the narrow way I am following. That peace has calmed my inner fears and doubts, and stilled the raging storm of my ego and anxiety when all around me seems to indicate failure and danger. That peace has become the author of my faith in God, in cemeteries and contentious meetings, whether the people of God (or especially when I, myself) fulfill, exceed, or fail to meet my expectations.

Most especially, that peace has sustained me when the image I carry of God burns to ash in the fire of life. In the wake of that profound silence, I have learned to pray in the darkness until light shines again - knowing beyond understanding that it shines whether I sense it or not. I have walked often enough in the valley of the shadow of the death of my dreams and of my faith in God at Skyline, with a changing cast of companions on this journey who encourage and confound, challenge and heal me along the way - but without fear. I have learned that in the faithful act of returning to the grave to minister as I am able, resurrection dawns, and with it, a transformation of the relationship and the calling I thought I had known.

Dying and rising so many times here, I have learned to leap into chasms of darkness in the exhilarating knowledge that falling does not kill me - the fear that pins me to the precipice alone has the power to kill - and that power has long been broken here. And if it is not exactly flying, it is a form of falling with style and grace. The things have tried to do here at Skyline have not always (perhaps never) had the effect I originally intended. But the fact that they have turned out serendipitously has taught me to offer my creativity and conviction (and to listen without judgment as a non-anxious presence) in the certain faith that God will honor such offerings by incorporating them into a tapestry that looks like a plan in retrospect.

Of all the things I have tried to accomplish while serving as co-pastor at Skyline, none compares with the humbling and profound honor of serving as a foster parent to several children over the past few years. Apart from the people of Skyline, I would never have been able to answer this call to welcome the strangers which has profoundly transformed and blessed my life. Through the welcome Vicki, Joy, Eli and I have been able to provide for others, we have found a place at the table God sets for us all. As the experience of fatherhood converted me to a new sense of love (giving and receiving this love), so too has the experience of sheltering a child of God as a foster parent converted me to a new way of life in God's love.

I take my leave indelibly marked by this transforming love, filling and overflowing my life. The blessing to love and live as a generous friend to those to whom love is a stranger marks and guides my life now as never before. I have come, as Jesus comes, that they might have life in all of it's abundance. I am a traveling midwife who will stop at nothing to assist in birthing that abundant life in all of God's children - paying no heed to the Pharaoh.

I bring a fearlessness and reckless creativity to the pastoral ministry, wherever God sends me from this place of transformation among the saints gathered at Skyline. I mock the Pharaoh, and I follow blindly in the path of Jesus, crucified and risen, not only on the third day, but in me, and in every gathering of saints with whom I am privileged to serve.

And one final reflection:

Serving as co-pastor with Vicki for the past 14 years has been the catalyst for every transformation I have celebrated above. Surely we have experienced a profound synergy in our partnership and in our love, but that synergy has made possible a wealth of partnerships in ministry at Skyline and beyond, in the larger community we serve. As a co-pastor, I have learned to value the other parts of the body of Christ of which I am a part. And because of this partnership in ministry that extends beyond the two of us as co-pastors, any ministry in which I am involved in the future will also be an expression of my love and partnership with Vicki.

Nothing - absolutely nothing that has happened here at Skyline in the past 14 years - could have happened without the synergy and support of our ministry as co-pastors. We modeled partnership and mutual interdependence for others and for each other. That model created sacred space to nurture great faith in times of despair, light in places of darkness, and fierce hope where the path gave way to wilderness. Our partnership with each other and with other ministers at Skyline made a way where there was no way, time and again (just like we planned).

So our partnership does not end with this parting - or rather, with this new way of serving together with God in each other and in other members of the body of Christ. Before serving as co-pastors at Skyline, my vision of our partnership in ministry and in love was bound by restrictions of space and time. But serving together for so long at Skyline has revealed the many ways in which our partnership in ministry and in love transcends and is not dependent on those restrictions. I understand now that just as nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, so too can no space or even time prevent us from serving in the profound realization that God's love binds us together in the midst of a great cloud of witnesses.

Since we are fully committed to God, we know that God will strongly support us, wherever we serve (2 Chronicles 16:9a). And wherever God sends each of us from this gathering of grace and love, we will serve in the power of our love for each other, and in the mutual encouragement and wisdom we give to each other day by day. I leave this particular expression of co-pastoral ministry in the knowledge that every calling will of necessity be a co-ministry. In short, I go knowing that neither I nor Vicki will ever have to serve alone - God will always provide gifted partners with whom we can be in ministry.

Two Concerts at Christmastime

2010-12-15T07:51:00.001-08:00

We attended two concerts in the last two nights. We watched the first one, Messiah Rocks, at the DuPont Theater, and performed the second one, Festival of Light VI, at Skyline. Whether listening or singing, I experienced a surprising sense of celebration and joy.

I had sung the Messiah several times in college, graduate school and while serving at my first church, Bethesda UMC in Salisbury, MD. I know the tenor part of the Hallelujah chorus by heart, as well as several more of the choruses and tenor solos. But Jason Howland's fresh approach to Handel's classic oratorio opened a window of fascination for me to hear and see (and to participate in) the celebration of God's gift of the Messiah in a new way.

From the opening guitar and violin riffs, as the tenor sang "Comfort" with an easy confidence and infectious enthusiasm, my tears told me that these old songs had discovered a new way to speak to the deepest longings of my heart. The concert Friday night reminded me what its like to breathe the fresh air of (there's no other way to say it) salvation.

I'm not talking about a ticket to paradise. Nor do I mean some imagined divine seal of approval for a particular religious understanding. By salvation I mean the foundation of the hope of creation and the joy of life in all it's fullness. Perhaps because these concepts are so mysterious, they can only be glimpsed in the majestic mystery of song. How telling Friday night when the performers repeatedly invited us all to join in that song: "For all of us a child is born!"

Then of course, we had our own songs to sing the following night. It was the concert that shouldn't have been. We faced so many obstacles and scheduling crises, they ceased to surprise us. And for an hour Saturday night, we came together as a band in a way I could never have imagined.

And it was fun.

For most of the previous five Festival of Light concerts we have put on at Skyline, the music has involved far more work for me than play. For one thing, the project of an hour-long concert involves many hours of creative, musical, interpersonal and technical skills. And for various reasons, the task of music selection and rehearsal direction has fallen to me.

For the past five years at Christmastime, I have felt too keenly the responsibility of pulling everything and everyone together for the FOL concert. And before last night, I had always assumed that this crushing responsibility came with the territory of taking on such a difficult task. Last night should have been worse because of all of the difficulty we had pulling everything together in the days and weeks before the concert.

But perhaps because of the over-the-top difficulty we navigated en route to the concert, adapting became a part of the plan. Gregg McCauley said it best after the show when we were backstage together: "life is improv". In the weeks leading up to the concert, and during the Festival (in every sense of that word) I discovered the joy and not the cynicism of that statement.

I've been reading a bit of philosophy lately. Through the tough sledding, I've discovered some insightful statements about the nature of life that invite me to focus on the simple daily transactions between our experiences (life that happens to us) and our creative response to life (so much more than merely reacting).

So much of the life we experience runs counter to what we expect, we run the risk of being immobilized by our frustration that nothing goes according to our plan. Recently I read an evolutionary sociologist's contention that without forgiveness, community would be impossible - because humans consistently fail each other's expectations.

Sometimes, these failures involve moral violations. But most of the time, failed expectations signify only that we are vastly diverse creatures. I suppose they also remind us constantly of our limited perspective of the world. And in one sense, that nagging reminder of our blindness and contingency only adds to our anxiety, fear and loneliness.

But in another sense, we can interpret our boundedness on all sides as a vast network of experience, perspective, and creative response that expands our sense of self and profoundly connects us to the human community. Two people standing back to back see completely different views of their world, but together they can see a range of nearly 360 degrees.

The secret involves recognizing that the limits of our perspective, precisely those places where our expectations are thwarted, form the gateways to the vast frontiers of human community. Repeatedly as the concert approached, I found it easier to look beyond the frustration of my failed expectations of others because new possibilities emerged - both in my (new) reactions and the creative wonder of others' lives.

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul celebrates a God
"who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us" (Ephesians 3:20). Our thwarted plans make way for new possibilities beyond what we can ask for or imagine. So when another person does not (or cannot) meet my expectations, I am learning to expect a creative response (from both of us) that expands my imagination.

This year's FOL concert far exceeded my expectations and imagination. I stood amazed at the many unexpected creative gifts of people connected to me with bonds of forgiveness, understanding and creativity. And I learned to be amazed at myself - especially at the ways I am learning to look beyond my frustration to the very real possibility of amazement and wonder.

So we sang. And we danced. And we were not for a moment trapped in anyone's expectations (least of all mine!) of how a concert should go. We were singing love songs to our Savior, who confounds and expands our expectations of ourselves and of others every moment. The words and the music flowed. A child joined us and danced while we sang. And the music flowed far beyond our ability to perform it - in everyone who was present not merely to witness but to participate in the joy of a Festival of Light.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never overcome it!

Cultivating Gratitude Year-round

2010-12-01T09:23:00.000-08:00

Brooks Twilley shared with me a recent (11/22/10) NPR radio interview between Dan Gottlieb Ph.D, host of Voices in the Family, and Dr. Robert Emmons, professor at University of California, Davis. His primary interests are in the psychology of gratitude and the psychology of personal goals. He's the author of "The Psychology of Gratitude." The show's a rebroadcast and originally aired in November 2009. Brooks asked me for my thoughts about the conversation, which I felt was so meaningful that I wanted to share them in this blog.

You can listen to the conversation here.

I like boiling happiness down to faith (hope), forgiveness (grace) and gratitude (praise). I heard once that persons who commit suicide suffer from a catastrophic contraction of their perspective of these aspects in their lives. Suicide, in this sense, becomes a fatal symptom of depression. They talked about the truncation of options in life being related to ingratitude later in the program.

I also enjoyed Dr. Robert Emmons' definition of gratitude as thoughtfulness and remembrance. Another way of thinking about the way they talk about the physical/neurological/psychological (as well as spiritual) effects of gratitude, thoughtfulness and remembrance is meditation, or perhaps contemplative prayer. Vicki recently read a great book titled "How Prayer Changes Your Brain" that explored the power of prayer from a neurological perspective. Some of this reminds me of the Psalms that catalog the good things that the community of faith remembers and celebrates God doing among them over time, and the old hymn: "Count Your Blessings".

The concept of movement beyond self focus to connection to others is the sine qua non (without which none) of any authentic religious practice and understanding. And I liked the concept of distinguishing between gratefulness as a desire or attitude rather than a feeling. The conversation about giving up the illusion of control (and self-sufficiency) and gratitude as acceptance was powerfully helpful in articulating what happens in religious, transformational experience of "the Holy".

One caller struggled with his inability to believe in a God/god who could receive his thanksgiving. When the host talked about giving thanks to the animals and the people who brought the food to the table, I was reminded of the prayers in the Cormac McCarthy book, The Road. I don't think being grateful to specific people and not wanting to deflect this feeling of gratitude to a transcendent reality (god?) because a person does not have an experience of God/god is necessarily a bad thing. I love that the caller felt a tug drawing him to experience what the AA group calls a "Higher Power", and I believe that to settle for anything less would prevent him from experiencing the blessing of getting in touch with the reality of what I call God.

To put it another way, I think the pathway to experience the transcendent reality of God/The Holy/The Divine is precisely through the immanent/incarnational relationships with real people in real circumstances of life. Ironic that I was just reading in 1 John 4 this morning:

16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
17 This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus.
18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
19 We love because he first loved us.
20 If we say we love God yet hate a brother or sister, we are liars. For if we do not love a fellow believer, whom we have seen, we cannot love God, whom we have not seen.
21 And he has given us this command: Those who love God must also love one another.

The caller who talked about raising a special needs child and being grateful for every little thing hit home with me, as a sibling of a special needs person, and as a parent of foster children. The issue of the human need for the contrast of adversity in life (between good life and bad life) in order to "wake up" to gratefulness says something about the question of the necessity of evil in a cosmos/universe/world created by God - and of the necessity of suffering. Near the end of the conversation, I loved the observation that people who have experienced great loss are the most grateful - for all of the little things in a life that becomes precious in every little moment. I remember a book by (social scientist) Dan Ariely called "The Upside of Irrationality" in which he described persons who had endured great pain and healing (as he had, as a burn victim), even partial healing, had a far higher tolerance for pain than people who had not experienced great pain and healing - precisely because those who had suffered a great deal believed things could get better through the pain of suffering.

What a fantastic conversation to share with people struggling in times of deep uncertainty.

Washing Dishes and Walking the Talk

2010-11-16T20:33:00.000-08:00

Tom DiCampli read from an obscure visionary passage in Daniel in worship at Skyline yesterday and ironically claimed (twice) that he was "no theologian". Then, after confessing the unintelligibility of the text for him, he shared an explication of the meaning of the text he had discovered through a process of reflection and meditation: he read to us from a prayer journal in which he had recorded his reflections in a burst of insight he received while washing the dishes.

I thought of Brother Lawrence, a simple spiritual sage of another time who celebrated the practice of the presence of God in all of life experience - particularly while doing mundane tasks such as washing dishes. I wondered at the courage it must have taken Tom not only to read the scriptures for us, but to follow his heart and to share such powerful, intimate testimony - to recognize that we must not merely be hearers (or readers) of scripture, but that all scriptural encounters can become invitations to a living interpretation of the profound truths embedded in the stories and mysteries of scriptures.

I also recalled the first time I witnessed the miracle of speaking in tongues in a Pentecostal worship service, when after the sermon, a member of the congregation spoke in an unknown language for perhaps a minute, followed immediately by an interpretation by another member of the congregation. What struck me was two simultaneous and related insights: first, how utterly mundane the translation of the mysterious language was; and second, the miraculous sense of God's presence among us that we experienced by witnessing the spiritual courage of the two among us who made themselves totally available to God for the sake of us all.

Jesus taught that we know the tree by its fruits. Perhaps no theology can unlock for us the mystery of faith. But all theology must stand or fall on the fruit to which it bears witness and which it inspires. Tom inspired me not necessarily by the content of his epiphany, but by the tremendous courage it must have taken for him to bear witness to it's reality in his life. Jesus also made a great deal of fuss about the absolute necessity of bearing witness to our experience of God's presence and realm - and the consequences of our choosing to bear witness or to extinguish the light under a bushel. Tom's witness set the stage for similar encounters with God among everyone in worship who listened to his powerful testimony.

After Tom read the scripture from Daniel, shared his testimony of spiritual insight, and prayed over Vicki, I listened as Vicki shared the stories and reflections she had experienced in her reading of the text. She also complained about the apparent impenetrability of the text, but (like Tom) ironically went on to explicate the story for our time and experience. Once again, I marveled at the courage and faith Vicki demonstrated by walking a path on which she was ostensibly lost, yet walking with confidence and complete trust that there was a way regardless of her ability to perceive it.

And perhaps the greatest irony of all was the fact that the essential kernel of insight both Vicki and Tom sought to communicate to us was an assurance of God's sovereign, benevolent care of the world regardless of the delusions and pretensions of events and experiences that seemed to contradict our faith in God's loving presence and redeeming power among us. Each of them in their own way bore a living testimony to God's reality and reign even as they could not fully realize those realities. Vicki also shared a collection of stories and testimony from others from within and beyond the Christian tradition reinforcing this message of hope in the reality of God, which gave me a sense of powerful assurance tat something far more powerful was at play in the confluence of these diverse human testimonies of experience than mere wishful thinking.

Then Vicki called Dr. Lee Anderson to join her and to share with us the story of a journey of a calling that the Governor of Delaware recently celebrated with an award for excellence in service to the community. Dr. Anderson bore witness to the power of God to dismantle even the barrier of death that pretended to separate her from her father. And once this barrier had been overcome, she experienced a succession of walls that came tumbling down and made possible the restoration of suffering families, kindled the power of forgotten life legacies, and created a profoundly miraculous community of former prisoners freed from hopelessness for joyful service and love toward one another.

Not surprisingly, the congregation at Skyline celebrated Dr. Anderson's story with a spontaneous standing ovation. It reminded me of the way we recently celebrated the recognition (again, by the Governor) of Joe Masiello as Delaware's Teacher of the Year. He is another of the Skyline saints who dares to believe that his faith can draw out the best in children in a classroom or in a refugee tent in Haiti.

Now, as all of this celebration of the signs of the assurance and power of God's presence in our midst was going on all around me, and as Vicki lifted up a picture of our community of faith as "dangerous" to the powers that pretend to rule this world, I began to experience a healing vision. The vision extended to a place of peace a nightmare I had in seminary over 17 years ago - a nightmare I had not thought of again until this week, when I stood helplessly watching as doctors and nurses tried to determine the nature of a health crisis earlier this week that left our daughter, Joy, in pain and unable to walk for several hours.

In the dream, I led a party of pilgrims into a vast desert wasteland in search of a holy place of refuge. We traveled for days - weeks - in the hope at I could lead the party safely to our destination, an oasis of spiritual and physical refreshment and healing. One night, after everyone else in the party had succumbed to sleep, and I sat alone by the dying embers of a fire under a vast expanse of stars, I came to a startling realization: I was hopelessly lost. Moreover, I was profoundly alone, as this realization came with an acceptance of the fact that I would have to carry this burden alone, in order to preserve a measure of hope among the pilgrims who trusted me.

There was much more, of course, involved in my carrying the burden of despair alone among the pilgrims. In the movie, Das Boot, a senior enlisted man upbraids an officer to whom the task of command has fallen when the captain dies. The inexperienced acting captain has shared his angst with the crew and has admitted to them that he has no idea what to do next. The burden of command, lectures the senior enlisted man, involves bearing the hope, the sense of mission of the crew even when hope is lost or imperiled by circumstance or fate. In a similar way in my dream, I felt a sense of grave responsibility (even trust) for and among the community for rising in the morning and for leading us all with purpose and faith, regardless of my doubts or despair.

Some Gethsemane prayers must be prayed alone - while the rest of the company sleeps.

My sense of helplessness, fear and anger by my daughter's bedside ushered in a fierce remembrance of this long-ago dream on the eve of my ordination as a Methodist pastor. But as I experienced the palpable hope of group of pilgrims at Skyline in worship the following day, I caught a glimpse of the dawning of a resurrection of hope in what I had mistakenly named a nightmare. As we sang, prayed, testified, witnessed, and proclaimed the hope of the world among us Sunday, it dawned on me that another way to think of my lostness in the dream was of a disorientation/reorientation experience of transformation.

In other words, what if, in the morning after the dream takes place, I realize that we have in fact arrived at the place for which we have been looking: and the place is a community of pilgrims, celebrating God's presence on the way. To discover such an epiphany, one (especially one bearing the responsibility of leadership) must necessarily undergo the despair that creates a way for a new understanding of direction and purpose to emerge. And Sunday, as I celebrated a sense of having arrived in a place for which I had long searched, I celebrated the nightmare of failure that made possible that realization.

If I would save my life, I must lose it.

Today is Monday, as it happens, and the realities of what it means to lead a community of faith in the midst of uncertainty and doubt make themselves at home in my life. The financial report does not look promising and bills abound. People struggle with stubborn personal failings and with the pain of the personal failings of others around them - they wrestle with prayers for healing of body, mind and soul seemingly unanswered. Yet on we pray and on we walk in faith.

Pondering the End Times - and What That Means Today

2010-10-05T07:25:00.000-07:00

Human history is replete with cycles of ominous political or environmental circumstances attended with prophets confidently predicting the end of all things. We witnessed this phenomenon most recently as 1999 clocked over to 2000, and it appears we are witnessing it again. Logic says that at some point (astronomers tell us that in 2 billion years when the sun consumes half of our solar system, including the earth!) the prognosticators will be right. History tells us that there is always a crowd that will be drawn to these prophets, even when they are wrong (when the date passes peacefully and the world continues).

I read an interesting book about this phenomenon a couple of years ago – Michael Shermer’s “Why People Believe Weird Things”. His answer: Because we want to. There must be something comforting about knowing how or when it all ends, even if that means trading away a future. Shermer devotes a chapter to apocalyptic prophets and their followers over the last two centuries in America and Europe. I was particularly amazed at his finding that when the prophet was proved wrong, his followers typically hung in there with him when he announced that he had made a miscalculation and adjusted the end date to another time in the not-too-distant future.

I have always taken my cue from Acts 1:6-8.
“So when the apostles were with Jesus, they kept asking him, "Lord, has the time come for you to free Israel and restore our kingdom?" He replied, "The Father alone has the authority to set those dates and times, and they are not for you to know. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere-- in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (NLT)

Jesus’ authoritative “[These end times] are not for you to know” followed by his command to tell people about him everywhere seem straightforward enough to me. Getting all wrapped up in predicting and worrying about “those dates and times” is an age old human temptation Jesus addressed in the Sermon on the Mount:

32 These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs.
33 Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.
34 "So don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today's trouble is enough for today. (Mat 6:32-34 NLT)

That said, since our own scriptures include sections of apocalyptic literature, I have a theory about why – which has little to do with knowing or predicting things that Jesus tells us are not for us to know. I believe that the apocalyptic stories and visions are not about the future, which, thanks to God’s gift of free will, is an ever-unfolding tapestry of our making as co-creators with God. I believe that these stories and vision are about our own time – our present. They are a warning, to be sure, of the probable end points of a trajectory of our present actions and behaviors, perhaps. But I think that even more, they are a way of understanding what is happening now, and how we might make better choices, by adopting a perspective of one who looks back toward our present from one possible, nightmarish future.

I believe that apocalyptic literature is like the game we play with ourselves at times when we imagine what a person from the future might say to us – the advice they might give to us, given what they know about the consequences of the decisions we make now. One key element of apocalyptic literature lost on the false prophets who use it as a scare tactic for gullible believers unfamiliar with the teachings of Jesus involves the triumphant way in which God’s kingdom rule prevails. If we have faith in such a future, we can live in hope that this will be true regardless of the many ways in which our senses tell us otherwise – and make choices as if it were already true. So ironically, apocalyptic is not about the end of all things, but a new beginning of hope in the midst of chaos – it’s a way for the blind to see.

In our upcoming worship series: “Letters from the Future: Daniel’s Apocalypse” we hope to explore the many messages of hope from this apocalyptic message written in the between times of the Bible, when the prophets were silent and shortly (a century or two) before Jesus’ birth. The book of Daniel looks both to the past (the exiles in Babylon) and to the future (to a time when the Ptolemies no longer desecrate the Temple and Jewish culture. The upshot is that the people whose lives are enriched by the stories are empowered to live in their own time with a renewed sense of God’s rule in history. And in that sense, they (and we) create a new future by the way they live in the present.

In addition to the worship series, I’m offering a Sunday morning Bible study linking scripture texts with a series of apocalyptic movies from the past five years, starting October 17. If there is enough interest, I’d be happy to offer the course during the week as well. I pray that looking at these tales of a dark and terrible future will enable us to live now as if our lives and the choices we make have significance in creating a new future – a future where all people recognize and rejoice in the Kingdom of God drawing near to us all.

Peace,
Bo

Cormac McCarthy's The Road (to what it means to be human)

2010-10-01T09:44:00.000-07:00

Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic tale The Road compels you to travel to places you might not want to go. The slow moving story traces the agonizing journey of a boy and his father who walk across a barren, hellish landscape toward the death of all things. Along the way, they struggle to remember and to act as the "good guys" in a landscape haunted with roving bands of "bad guys" who threaten their survival (and the survival of their identity) at every turn in the tortured road.

"You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?
Yes.
He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? He said.
Yes. We're still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
Okay."

(P. 77 - the man has just killed one of the bad guys)

The Road cuts life to the bone in search of the essence of life - that which survives until the bitter end - perhaps the foundation of life and or love and hope. McCarthy's experiment or perhaps parable makes its home among our most terrible fears about the thin veil of modern sophistication straining against a postmodern universe of nihilism and despair. I have been impressed of late at the proliferation of apocalyptic tales that one reviewer theorizes cropped up in the wake of 9-11. All of them seem more to me about our present than some nightmare of a future. The Road journeys through the landscape of our lives, asking the kind of penetrating, uncomfortable questions that we've been too anesthetized (by comfort) to ask.

"They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don't dream at all. You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don't ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you'll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you won't survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe into it being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart."

(P. 57 - the man's wife leaves them both for death)

McCarthy invites us to explore the ashen barrenscape of life without labels, where the labels have ceased to carry meaning because even the memory of the things the names represented has vanished. The names of people, for instance, relationships between people, the names of dates and years, species of animals long extinct, and plants and foods that have vanished from a burning, cold planet. The Road points to a destiny worse than death - a road that leads to annihilation of existence and memory - of nearly any meaning humanity could have imagined in our sojourn on planet earth.

"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of it's referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."

(P. 89 - by the fire at camp)

On the Road, we experience only the silent, menacing present - all past and future have been obliterated. Stories of these time frames have been exposed for the lies that could not protect us from our inevitable end - books are good only as fuel for the dying fire. And our beleaguered anti-heroes choose only when they will die - most likely by suicide - as they walk from oblivion into oblivion. Yet on they walk, improbably, as the man blows on the embers of the "fire" he claims the boy, especially, carries within him.

It is not the fire of the scorched earth, but a fire of warmth and light, that keeps the two wanderers alive in body and spirit on each successive, relentless cold night. Like their campfires, the crushing reality of despair mutes this fire within - yet it stubbornly refuses to wink out forever while there is yet one human being to tend it. The man lives only that the fire within the boy will never go out, and we know from early on that there will not be enough fuel for the fire within both of them.

The Road defines humanity as a pilgrim species, forever on the move as we bear this fire. One of my favorite passages reveals the way our life in the present reshapes our past into a future we stride into with each step we take in the present. When we don't know where we are going, we refuse to stop (though some of us do refuse) and continue to put one foot in front of the other. Though we never learn the details of the catastrophe that brought humanity to its knees, The Road renders this memory moot in relation to the task we face in each present moment. McCarthy beckons us to step into the eternity of each unknown moment free of the determination of the past or of the future.

"Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake up from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning and thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."

(P. 131 on dreams, reality and memory)

Without spoiling the ending, I mention here only that McCarthy invites us to consider the monstrous cost of attempting to control or to assure our destiny, or the destiny of those we love. The Road paints a monochrome vision of hope and also of grace in a harsh environment that appears to deny both. We cannot know what the end of the road looks like, or where it leads. But the boy, especially, asks the man in us all to count the cost of looking too far down the road.

I was glad to be released from this dark and haunting vision, and yet it remains with me like the smell of smoke in my clothes after sitting by a campfire at night. While there are still fish in the waters, birds in the sky, and cattle on the green earth, a boy and a man whisper relentlessly in my ear to attend carefully to the map of the universe borne by every form of life - including my own - on my leg of the journey. We, too, carry a fragile but relentless fire, capable of ravaging or renewing the earth and others on this journey who wonder whether we are bad or good.

Unity and Agency - Divine and Human

2010-08-06T07:25:00.001-07:00

I've done some more thinking about God this trip. I was experiencing gratitude for the journey I have thus far experienced in my life of faith - or in my life illuminated by faith. Having received it from my forebears, I have come to own my faith, even as I realize more and more each day how much "my" faith redefines and claims me.

Unity and agency have consumed my thoughts about faith this trip on a couple of my walks and rides. Unity has become the foundation of my new faith home, of late. Agency presents my mind with far more misgivings, so that I begin to wonder whether agency is more useful as a way to anthropomorphize God than it is a way to describe God.

Agency (at least agency as we understand it) involves the ability to affect action - not in some way that merely calls the nature of the thing so affected the agency of divinity (a la Clockmaker) - but action that in some sense reflects the consciousness of divinity. Agency is God's action in the world that reflects and results from the consciousness of God. Judaism and Christianity call this God's will.

And because the universe is a closed system, the way we think of God's agency must change or die, because the present concept of divine agency violates the observable laws of the known universe - at least in terms of Newtonian if not necessarily in terms of quantum physics. What is more, any conception of direct divine intervention in human affairs must account for the apparent amoral (or immoral) caprice or indifference that prompted the Greeks to imagine a divine game of dice on Mount Olympus.

One handy fallback position invokes the tawdry "God's ways are not our ways" cliche, a meaningless attempt at theodicy that ignores the imago Dei aspect of the Jewish tradition and incarnation of the Christian conception of God. Philip Clayton calls God's agency the push of the divine Spirit communicating with human beings, who must decide to act or not on these experiences of divine nudging. I begin to wonder if our (religious adherents') inability to comprehend God's agency stems not from the inadequacy of our theodicy, but from a misapprehension of how agency might "work" from a perspective that takes seriously a spectrum of existence from quantum to cosmic.

To put it another way, I propose to consider agency from a perspective of unity of all existence, at all levels of existence. From such a perspective, the human agent ceases to be the primary referent for agency. In fact, such a unifying perspective not only allows for a reconsideration of divine agency, it transforms our comprehension of human agency itself.

Ironically, the best way for me to begin such a project involves reexamining our notions of human agency, as well as our notions of selfhood. My chief assumption about my own agency involves my creation of a reality outside myself that initially takes form within myself - in my mind or in my will. I think; therefore it is. I want to do something and I do that something.

I think of this process most powerfully in any act of creativity, art or handiwork. I conceive and design a bookcase; I build a bookcase. What I conceived in my mind, I brought into the reality I share with others as an object that more or less reflects my original conception. The act of composing a text (poetry, prose, or a play) involves this process of willing some idea into action or reality.

This will-to-action process serves as a basic definition of agency for any agent we could consider. Such a definition links agency to consciousness, which is why an inanimate object could not exercise agency. This definition also leads to the notion at any animate creature could exercise some form of agency - exerting some form of change on it's environment based on conscious or instinctive will.

But I do not have to explore the boundaries of this definition (sea anemones, a virus or plankton) to expose some serious dilemmas attendant to this definition of agency. And the immediate problem this conception of agency faces is the ubiquitous relational nature of all possible forms of agency.

Take for instance the example of an author composing a text. The language, grammatical conventions, style, form, models of inspiration, and potential recipients of the text (including the author) all precede and inform the text before the "author" conceives it. In the case of language, grammar, literary form, and cultural context, these preconditions of the text bind the text in a way that dictates what any author can conceive or create.

Any agency an author might exercise would be culturally and relationally contingent to such an extent that to consider the text solely the creation of an author-agent would require an act of Herculean myopic blindness in perspective. How else could any other reader ever understand or appreciate such a creation? Yet this blindness to relational and cultural contingency results from the ubiquity of the phenomenon itself: we can no longer see what pervades our existence. Here is the chief problem with our notion not only of agency, but of our understanding of the individual self.

Not only human will, but human identity lies in the vast context of relational and cultural contingency. We cannot comprehend ourselves other than relationally. Cultural norms and values define the spectrum of possible manifestations of self and give comprehensibility to any possible manifestation of self. Any personality trait lies within a spectrum of similar manifestations of this trait. We do not understand these traits other than in comparison these other manifestations. Any self is only comprehensible as a self in terms of it's relationship to others.

Thomas Jefferson Questions

2010-08-06T07:23:00.001-07:00

Thursday, July 29, 2010
Smith Mountain Lake State Park, Virginia

Enough of that.

I wanted to write about my experience at Monticello before the trip is over. I want to write about several things that struck me about the place and about the man:

1. The ways in which we are trapped by our time and the ways in which we are able to transcend our time. It would also be important to think about the many ways in which my own time hems me in as well as creates new opportunities to launch me into transcendence.
2. The necessity of reading, reflection and tireless observation to feed a hungry mind.
3. The fleeting nature of achievement and what it means to truly succeed. Jefferson listed his top three achievements when designing the epitaph on his grave monument - serving two terms as president of the United States did not make the list. And on a related note - Jefferson listed his occupation in the 1800 census as "farmer" and felt profoundly humbled by his appointment to follow Dr. Franklin as US Ambassador to France.
4. The importance of designing one's surroundings to enhance creativity and inspiration (this is one of the most important veins of thought I'd like to pursue.
5. Jefferson's young wife died in childbirth near Vicki's age when she barely survived giving birth to Eli. If Vicki had died then, what would the widower Bo have to say to me now about my relationship to Vicki in the ensuing years of our life together? How could I keep this favor and my deep gratitude for it always before me?
6. How would I design a house tailored to my needs and aspirations? Where would I build this house?
7. What does it say about Jefferson that he bequeathed to Virginia a institution of higher learning, to the Library of Congress the bulk of his substantial personal library, but to his family a crushing debt that forced them to sell his beloved Monticello and nearly all of their belongings?
8. On a related note, I'd like to think some more about Jefferson's decision to build his house with a minimal stairwell and nearly useless dome room...

Now the fire is settling to embers and we are sleeping our last night in the woods on this trip before packing for home tomorrow morning. I'm standing fire vigil and getting a few last thoughts on disk before retiring with my family. We've had a great trip and coming home will be chaotic by comparison.

Misty Mountain Musings

2010-08-06T07:21:00.000-07:00

Sunday, July 25, 2010
Misty Mountain Campground, Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia

We have holed up here for a few days (since arriving Wednesday night, late), mostly lazing around in the intense heat and humidity. We did get to Charlottesville on Thursday and took the walking tour of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. Ate some ice cream afterwards. The kids spent some time in the pool here and have been glad to have the WiFi access and their iTouches and cell phones. I think we've all read a little bit, except for the boys.

Each of the four mornings we've spent here, I've gotten exactly what I came for - peaceful mornings by a little creek in the woods to read and think in silence, while the cicadas and birds sang to me their love songs. Most nights, Vicki and I have been able to walk together (though it's been a purposeful walk to get points). The kids seem to be getting along well together - especially Eli and Elijah.

We've taken a number of calls from people in our church - about someone threatening suicide, another leaving the church because we aren't the kind of pastors they wanted us to be, the sadnesses attendant to the dissolving of a marriage union, and whether to hold worship in the Grove this morning when it's going to be another scorcher.

For some reason, we have not felt too overwhelmed by this seeming inability to "get away" on our vacation. Thanks to the WiFi, I uploaded Ruthann's sermon notes and Pat's weekly announcements to the church web site on Thursday. Two things come to mind: the community of people we have come to love so much is never far from us, and we are indeed well away here in this place of serenity.

I've finished three books so far on this trip. The first, a collection of sayings of fourth century desert fathers edited by Thomas Merton, has profoundly reminded me of the necessity of humility and patience in my life. Oddly enough, a trip like this gives me the perspective to appreciate the wisdom of these twin foundations of an undivided life.

The second was a follow-up book by Dan Ariely on the nature of human irrationality. He stressed the value of testing our many irrational but cherished assumptions about life and human behavior. He also advocated apologizing, showing our appreciation for others, driving hard through bad experiences without pause, and breaking up good experiences so as not to get used to them and devalue them.

One thing he wrote caught my attention particularly. We often make decisions that repeat earlier decisions we have made, according to his research. We repeat patterns of behavior because we are creatures of habit, but also because we like to affirm things we have already done. When we make rash decisions in the heat of emotion, Ariely has found, we later repeat those rash actions without thinking - or even without the heated emotion that led to the original decision.

This pattern makes a case, Ariely writes, for thinking very carefully when we are angry or sad or carried away emotionally. And for sleeping on a decision we feel the need to make in the sway of these emotions. The decisions we make now set in motion a pattern for the future. We can escape this pattern only by the kind of deep introspection that we typically avoid in our daily life. Patience pays off rich dividends. So say Ariely and the desert fathers.

Another of Ariely's gems involved advice to anyone looking for love. He has little positive to say about dating sites, which cater to the needs of databases, rather than people, and which only confirm our bias for the appearance of beauty. Instead of comparing our statistics, Ariely counsels, we would be far better off engaging in virtual dates, sharing our thoughts and stories and learning about each other - as far as the online dating scene goes.

This counsel seems obvious enough. But it was the canoe metaphor that caught my attention. Ariely wrote that paddling together in a canoe places a couple in a strange and challenging social situation that enables each of them to witness how their potential partner behaves when faced with a challenge - and especially how they treat someone in a relationship when challenged. Very good advice. If they can't find a canoe, any atypical social endeavor would probably do.

The third book, Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," examined relationships from an entirely different point of view. In a vicious story, the love of a woman proves fierce and undying. Meeting such a woman results from grace, not planning. The love the results from such an encounter demands only gratitude and appreciation; it refuses to judge but remains true.

Extending Beyond Ourselves in the Body of Christ

2010-07-19T14:51:00.000-07:00

There is a beyondness to life I have held in the hands of my soul. A place where the parallel lines come together (though I have not seen this place). Throughout human searching, we have posited this place in a far away realm, though there was one who taught that it encroaches upon us everywhere.

I have not seen this place, but the notion that we swim in it tastes of the kind of irony that calls to me (and that refuses to let me go). To say "beyondness" gives me a way to put my fingers on this relentless, undeniable itch of my consciousness - a maddening truth that eludes me just when I look for it, but that teases me like a cricket in the corner of my bedroom. I live in this place.

The Body of Christ and the Kingdom of God. The Way. These keys, these talismans create a framework for exploration, for exploring the beyondness. Yet for many they seem to stand for the end of the journey - they circumvent the journey altogether. We - all of us - can only attest to what we know. And some of us must guard the walls while others are driven to move out ahead in the darkness.

The Body of Christ holds together the grace of the incarnation, Immanuel; the sacrificial healing work of the crucifixion; and the miraculous hope of the resurrection, both in the person of Jesus (who becomes the Messiah) and in the lives of all who follow The Way. The last two cannot be teased apart - the resurrected body and the body of his followers and disciples - who have unfortunately come to be called (and who identify themselves as) merely believers.

Life in the Body of Christ goes far beyond belief. We who are members of this body do not accede to some principle or doctrinal concept. We give our lives entirely over to the will of Christ. I write in the general sense of this yielding, because not one of us can live each moment in the path of the Master. Yet his hold on us is fierce and unrelenting, perhaps especially when we attempt to thwart it and go our own way.

I offer this caveat when writing about anything (will, desire, identity) that could be construed as "mine": the Way of following Jesus the Messiah involves coming to know myself from God's perspective, reconstruing the way I understand who I am. This process leads to what Christians call "dying to self" and the miracle of "new life in Christ".

Jesus leads me to a larger comprehension of who I am - a relational understanding of myself as a member of the Body of Christ a body which encompasses all of creation, and not merely the church, or any subset of that creation). The themes of dying and rising again are typically thought of primarily in an ethical sense, but if the definition of "sin" includes this larger sense of life in God, then dying and rising "in Christ" contextualizes all ethical considerations (good and bad behavior) as manifestations of my understanding of "self".

Here is what I mean: if I understand my identity solely from my personal perspective, I also define "the good" from that perspective as well. Self-preservation and gratification become the highest aims and drive all my ethical considerations. In the epistles, this ethical behavior is called the way of "the flesh" and "captivity" to (false or distorted) desire. But if I understand myself as a member of the Body of Christ, the perspective of my desires enlarges beyond the narrow horizon of my "self" and I identify with the "other" (and by this I mean any "other") as part of my self.

Anyone who has experienced love for another person (or perhaps also for another animal, or even a special place) can attest to this enlargement of perspective and desire. As love grows, what begins as a largely selfish desire can expand imperceptibly but powerfully into life with and for another. The Prayer of St. Francis celebrates this love in the phrase "for it is in giving that we receive". When the desire of my partner (or friend, or child, or parent, or lover) conflicts with my own, we seek a mutual reconciliation, or offer each other the gift of subordinating our self-limited desire in order that the one we love might be fulfilled. Sacrifice is certainly one manifestation of this giving attitude, but so also is mutual fulfillment.

The Pauline correspondence includes a statement about a spouse whose desire is for her (or presumably his) partner. When my "self" becomes inextricably related to all "others" in the Body of Christ, my desire expands to consider the needs and concerns of others, in the spirit of a marriage partnership (a union where two are joined as one). As Paul writes, when one experiences joy or sadness, all experience joy or sadness in the Body of Christ.

This unity of identity, perspective and desire in the human community (and perhaps also in all creation - the community of the cosmos) relates us all to what humans have for ages called God. Jesus the Messiah lived in a constant state of awareness of his relatedness to God (a state he consistently called "The Kingdom of God") and invited his followers to experience the "drawing near" of this Way of being in community with others and, through them, with God.

The fourth Gospel includes Jesus' bold claim that he was constantly motivated and moved by the will of God: "The Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise (John 5:19 NRSV). This understanding of God's will involves not necessarily (or merely) knowledge we can know; those who inhabit the Kingdom of God experience life animated by God's desire - God's love for all creation and all humanity. Life in Christ cannot be reduced to a system of belief - it reorients my identity entirely in union with God and the whole of creation. And this radical reorientation makes possible a new life in Christ, inspired and empowered by God's love for all.

Dallas Willard, a contemporary Christian theologian, has defined the Kingdom of God as "that place where God's will is perfectly done". The opening petition of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples in Matthew 6:9-13 bears witness to the fact that "Your Kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" and connects the concepts of God's Kingdom and God's will. Later in the same prayer, Jesus reverses the formula, where God's forgiveness of "us" reflects our own forgiveness of "others".

Like the Body of Christ metaphor, the Kingdom of God encompasses all creation in a cosmic perspective that redefines our identity. New actions and behaviors that reflect a deep respect and regard for others flow from this identity "in Christ". Jesus radically defined this new identity for his disciples by inviting each one of us to become a "servant of all". Thomas Merton, in his introduction to The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings of the Desert Fathers of the fourth Century writes: "Love takes one's neighbor as one's other self...It is hard to really love others if love is to be taken in the full sense of the word. Love demands a complete inner transformation - for without this we cannot possibly come to identify ourselves with our brother [or sister]. We have to become, in some sense, the person we love. And this involves a kind of death of our own being, our own self."

Choosing to serve others involves a mastery over the delusion of our selfish desires that frees us to love others. Laying down (aside) our lives for the sake of God's love for the Other leads us to share in the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah in our lives. We become the Body of Christ dwelling in the Kingdom of God. Doing for others as we would have done to ourselves results from this expanded notion of Self - this behavior signifies that Jesus has accomplished the transformation of our individual, solitary life into the life of God. We are One, even as Jesus and the Father are One.

Kevin Roose Finds Friendship at Liberty

2010-07-06T15:33:00.000-07:00

I recently read "The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University" which describes Kevin Roose's semester "abroad" at Liberty University in an attempt to bridge the gulf that separates evangelical culture from the mainstream. Liberty, the school that the Rev. Dr. Jerry Falwell built in the heyday of leading the Moral Majority movement, stands at Ground Zero of the culture war between Christian Fundamentalism and Secular America. Roose, a sometime Quaker at Brown University who assisted A.J. Jacobs writing "The Year of Living Biblically", spent a semester as a student at Liberty to search beyond the distorting stereotypes of evangelicals to find friendship and understanding.

Roose's ground rules (matriculate incognito and no cheap shots) dictated that this bridge crossed one way from his progressive point of view to the more conservative, dogmatic religious point of view. When Roose came clean and identified himself the following semester (during a return visit to Liberty from Brown) as an undercover writer, his friends at Liberty lamented the lost opportunity to reconsider the ways they might have cleaned up their act if they had related to him as an observer rather than an insider. That said, they trusted what they felt was a genuine friendship with "Rooster" enough to look forward to his book about his experience with them at Liberty.

That, and they grieve that he is not in fact a born again believer in Jesus.

The chief learning of this study involves the transcending power of friendship. If Roose fails to thoroughly explore the impact of some of the negative aspects of evangelical culture (e.g., tolerance for violent language toward homosexual persons and an educational model that stifles inquiry), he takes pains to describe Liberty students as a far more diverse, interesting and sympathetic group of people than their opinions reveal.

From the outset of his experiment, his family and friends fear that he will not be able to hide and will be singled out for ridicule. But their worst fears involve what might happen to him if he converts to evangelicalism - a fear Roose shares. In fact, he does convert to admiration for the power of profound support (love?) in this closed community. So while he refuses to cow to the young earth creationism taught at Liberty (one of only twelve post-secondary schools that teach it in America), he appreciates the depths of analysis involved in his Bible survey and religious and theological history courses. And though he cannot reconcile himself to the casual attitude about hostility directed against homosexual persons, Roose comes to crave the experience of love he feels when a Liberty student or professor prays over him.

During Roose's semester at Liberty, a student at neighboring Virginia Tech went on a killing rampage that prompted Liberty students to pray for healing for the victims (as well as interpreting the killing as a mysterious if troubling aspect of God's will). At the end of the semester, the legendary Dr. Jerry Falwell himself succumbed to a heart attack and died, days after Roose authored the last print interview Falwell granted. And as with the Liberty students themselves, Roose paints a complex picture of Falwell, ultimately praising him for his authenticity, even when that authentic style demonizes others in God's name.
Throughout the book, Roose wonders what will change in his life as a result of his semester "abroad" at Liberty. And though he is unwilling to acknowledge Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior by semester's end, he returns to Brown powerfully affected by his Liberty experience. A Liberty professor articulates for Roose the power he has experienced in prayer by telling him that whatever else prayer accomplishes, prayer changes the one who prays. This change and the experience of being cared for and loved when being prayed over, stand as the most powerful aspects of Roose's experience at Liberty.

The other major impact Liberty has on Roose involves the "liberty" inherent in the many restrictions of the "Liberty Way", a massive code of conduct restricting everything from movie watching to relationships between women and men. On the down side, Roose questions Liberty's hyper focus on sexual morality while ignoring social morality. Yet Roose acknowledges the freedom he experiences as he attempts to live within the confines of the highly restrictive moral code.

At Liberty, Roose enjoys waking up in great physical health on Sunday mornings, refreshed instead of dehydrated and hung over. And the Liberty dating experience, confined to chaste conversation and chivalry, opens up an opportunity to relate on a powerfully intimate level that sexual intimacy ironically circumvents, in his experience. Even the worship experiences, while not convincing Roose of the soundness of the ideology in the sermons, nevertheless draw him into an experience of being cared for by a community that surrounds him with support and calls him to join in their expressions of praise and joy.

When Roose reveals his ruse, his former friends at Liberty express their dismay only that he has refused to receive the gift of salvation in Jesus they have offered and with which they have surrounded him at Liberty. Even so, they encourage him to take the better parts of his experience as to season the "world" outside Liberty with salt and light. And though Roose will never again threaten passers-by with eternal damnation in order to evangelize them (as he did as part of a Spring Break evangelization team in Ft. Lauderdale), he does offer to pray for a friend who travels to a dangerous country.

Perhaps the saddest moment in the book involves a statement a Liberty student makes after a day of "cold call" evangelism. After negative encounters with nearly everyone she approached, the woman tells the group that she has resigned herself to a life isolated from the non-Christian community, whose members will shun and ridicule her for her beliefs.

Roose stakes his semester on the premise that evangelical followers of Christ can enjoy friendship with non-evangelicals and people of other faith traditions, or no faith traditions, setting aside their theological and ideological differences. The fact that he managed to do so only by posing as an evangelical student at Liberty fails to support his thesis. Yet Roose was certainly aware of the divide, and managed to enter into genuine friendships with most of the students at Liberty. And while he did not convert to evangelical Christianity, he returned to Brown having made peace that passes understanding.

Oil Spills, Prayers and Babies with Eyedroppers

2010-06-30T08:55:00.000-07:00

The Louisiana legislature officially declared Sunday, June 20 a Day of Prayer in the wake of repeated failed efforts by BP and the US government to stanch the relentless flow of oil into the Gulf in what has become the worst environmental disaster in modern history. The lawmakers invited people to invoke the hand of Providence to heal this wounding of the earth and it's inhabitants because we have grown frustrated with humanity's efforts to handle this crisis.

This call to prayer prompts in myself and in our society an exploration into the nature of prayer and the God to whom we pray. We refer to disasters of this scale caused by storms as "Acts of God" regardless of our theology. Predictably, reaction from the New (read: "loud and proud") Atheists among us assumes the knee-jerk caustic tone of mockery and derision. God is a delusion, they say, and an infant sucking up an eyedropper of oil on the beaches accomplishes more than the prayers of any deluded multitude.

Yet religious adherents of any flavor would be hard-pressed to deliver incontrovertible evidence of the kind that skeptics demand that prayer actually "works". And it would be hard to imagine anyone, regardless of their religious fervor, who in their heart of hearts expects that the combined prayers of the faithful will in some demonstrably miraculous way turn the tide of this monstrous environmental disaster. More on that thought later. For starters, if prayers somehow moved God to intervene in a way wholly inconsistent from the way of the world in which this disaster occurred, we would be forced to contend with an incomprehensibly capricious God.

The skeptics compare the apparent passivity of prayer to action and agency (the ability to affect action) in the world. Entering this debate, I am intrigued and frustrated by the false dichotomy of action/inaction or cause and effect presumed by the principal antagonists. My love for God-in-others informs and in enriched by my search for Truth. I spend much of my time listening to stories of ways in which the practice of hope creates fertile ground for new life - in a symbiosis that transcends the boundary between the spheres of the physical and metaphysical. The Scriptural invitation to "pray without ceasing" recognizes the ubiquitous nature of prayer, not only in this boundary zone, but extending deeply into all realms of existence.

My daughter senses this symbiosis in prayer. We talked about the false dichotomy implied by the debate between skeptics and believers over the "usefulness" of prayer in response to the current environmental disaster in the Gulf. She suggested that the most powerful promise of prayer in this situation would be the creation of a sense of culpability and repentance in the experience of prayer. This experience of repentance, she believes, would lead to a communal response to this crisis and to the cultural practices that fostered it.

Prayer, in this perspective, serves as an analog to the efforts of BP to drill relief wells that will render the frantic, ineffectual efforts to cap the damaged wellhead moot. Like the relief wells, prayer holds out the possibility of reaching the foundation of a cultural pattern that has inevitably led to this current disaster. I join the skeptics in using the word "possibility" above because the practice of prayer cannot guarantee this broadening of perspective, nor can it determine the actions or effectiveness that might follow such spiritual and communal consciousness. Yet without this awakening, ignorance and chance must necessarily govern all "action", like leaving the cleanup to an army of infants with eyedroppers - the blind leading the blind.

We who follow Jesus the Messiah grope in this kind of darkness as well. Yet moments of clarity and vision dot the landscape of uncertainty, creating enough of a pattern and perspective - even a Presence - we are boldly hopeful enough to name God. Our prayers enfold us in God as they bind us to all humanity and all creation. The prayers of the faithful (and hopeful) create a vision that makes possible a life free from the prison of systemic evil. We hesitate because we know that the power of prayer lies precisely in it's relentless call to die to the blindness we confuse for sight in order to raise us to new lives in a realm where God's will is perfectly done.

In America we have learned to hedge our prayers by passing the ammunition (and in this case, the eyedroppers). Yet if this present crisis could catalyze something truly transformative, we (believers and skeptics alike) would do well to put away our childish notions of effectiveness and open ourselves to the possibility of new life in a vast communion that extends far beyond our garages and climate-controlled SUV cabins. What a tragedy it would be to simply clean up our mess while hurtling toward the brink of greater disaster in the blindness that causes this and many other disastrous collisions of unconsciousness.

So I will continue to live in a state of prayerful awareness and anticipation. I join others, skeptical and faithful, who have ceased a fruitless search for a bigger eyedropper. Though I am still captive in a world encompassed by myself and those I love deeply, surrounded by strangers and darkness, I have yet seen intimations of a larger, more comprehensive creation that refuse to leave me alone in my delusions. And with each moment in prayer, the realm of God draws nearer - and with it a new birth into a communion far, far beyond the confines of this womb of myself.

Holy Week 2010 - A Resurrection of the Body of Christ

2010-03-31T09:06:00.000-07:00

During this season of Lent, I've been consistently invited into sacred spaces of waiting - with people who are dying to this life (and wondering without knowing what happens next), within silence together with other pilgrims not searching for answers but content with stillness together, experiencing worship itself as a pilgrimage (and enjoying the journey together), and waiting in the confusing timelessness of the hope of healing from an injury.

So much of this waiting is new to me - though it shouldn't be - that it feels in many ways like a new birth. This season of Lent, I have with the earth shaken off my slumber - even as my (limping) pace has slowed to allow time for silent waiting in the presence of God (?) that defies any attempt to contain or explain it (or even to claim it). As the earth leans again into the warming rays of the Springtime sunlight, I have been reminded everywhere I turn that while I can participate in Spring, I cannot hasten its arrival. So, too, with God.

Lent this year has been a journey of waiting - but as I have slowed my spiritual pace, I have begun to notice many things that escaped my attention before. As I have settled into places of tension in my life, and in the life of my family and church community, I have found that submitting to the death of my attempts to flee or to relieve this tension in destructive ways has given rise to the realization that this tension will not kill me - it becomes a catalyst for creativity and abundant life.

I have begun to see the community of people gathered at Skyline for the treasure we are - by no means perfect but holding onto a vision of God's love for all people with passionate intensity and faith. Seeds that have been nurtured in the warmth of the tension we have experienced for several years now are beginning to sprout and to give some indication of the potential explosive growth in grace and love through our life together: in reaching out in love in many tangible ways to people in our surrounding community (people searching for sanctuaries of wellness, healing and recreation for the body and the soul).

Jesus, who invites us to this place of tension and creativity, paid with his life for his refusal to bow to the pretend gods of convention and compromise in his day. Yet he continues to invite us all to follow him into a realm of God's presence and power breaking in on all who are willing to wake from our contented sleep into a vision of a world where peace, love and merciful justice prevail. And because that vision conflicts constantly with our world and with our lives, to walk into this vision is to walk into unbearable tension. Jesus reminds us with his life and with his death that this tension cannot kill or silence us - only our fear of it.

Love binds us - binds the poles of tension to relate them if not to reconcile (or to remove) them. In this love we live and move and have our being. Jesus reveals this Love to us and calls us to life in Love - Love that birthed us into existence, and that now calls us into Life in all its Abundance. Follow me, he calls relentlessly and patiently. To the cross, where you will surely die to a false notion of your self-hood that hopelessly traps you in a prison of your own making. Follow me through the cross and beyond, to a place of existence beyond yourself - to a place of being for others, of communion in that Body that transcends all dividing walls and participates in an ongoing ministry of reconciliation for all people - for all creation.

So don't let's rush too quickly into Sunday. How can we ever hope to interpret the emptiness we will find there unless we have watched and waited with Jesus, who knows and shows us to be the Way where he is going? It's Wednesday, time for silence. And tomorrow the time of our betrayal will come. Yet he will not refuse us a place at his Table, knowing what it means to dip bread together with us in a common bowl. Then the howling crowd, and the terrible silence of Friday afternoon, when he will have to die alone because we will have deserted him (not wanting to walk into that pain). And a Sabbath that forces us to rest in (an uneasy) peace. And then (we know) another week will begin. A dawning of a new creation as the Spirit hovers fitfully yet purposefully over the face of the deep darkness.

Let there be Light. And he will shine in us.

Skate Park Revisited - Meeting Tonight 3-23-10

2010-03-23T09:14:00.000-07:00

We've got a lot to talk about tonight! Here's some of the things I'd like to share with you.

1. I was unable to attend the public planning meeting about the Newark, DE skate park on Paper Mill (at the Curtis Mill site), but you can sign a petition here in support of the park and see the plans options (Option 2 does not include a skate park) here.

2. I'm hoping that we can sponsor a Skate Jam (Day) on or near June 21, 2010, Go Skateboarding Day. The good folks at Switch Skate Shop in Newark, DE are interested in helping us by contributing some elements for use that day. Epworth UMC in Rehoboth Beach, DE has sponsored several of these events, and one of their pastors, the Rev. Pat Laughlin, has passed along some good advice about how to run such an event that I will pass along to you this evening. Pat also put me onto a YouTube video called "Nowhere to Go" advocating a public skate park in Rehoboth Beach - like the one in Smyrna, DE.

3. If you don't already know about it, Family Life Church has been running a Skate and BMX Park under 141 in Newport, DE for over 12 years. For the past few years, a group in Wilmington has been raising money for a public skate plaza in Wilmington near the Blue Rocks stadium. The guys at Switch told me that some skateboarders in our area like to go to a privately run skate bowl constructed by a Christian in PA (20 miles from here) who runs a ministry called threesixteen skateboarding.

4. Even putting together a day-long event requires some careful planning to avoid what skatepark planners call the "Crashup Derby Factor" (poor arrangement of elements that contributes to skater collisions is what our underwriter is most concerned about). I ran across a site called Skaters for Public Skateparks that has lots of info about planning a park and ordered a Public Skatepark Development Guide for us to take a look at. Last summer, we saw some skateboarding elements in a campground in Wisconsin made by a company called SunRamp. Switch skate shop can also help us with plans for elements.

5. If all of this seems a little overwhelming, consider this: there are scads of kids in our area who like to skate - and very few places for them to do so legally and safely (think of the many "No Skateboarding" signs the litter our public spaces). Sakteboarders already use our parking lot to gather and skate. I have driven through Deacon's Walk streets so crowded with kids on skateboards and their friends that I had to stop the car and wait for them to part. Churches that want to offer skateboard facilities typically do so with a price tag attached (attend Bible study in order to skate). I'd like to think that at Skyline, we offer people Christ by living his love in such a way that people won't have to be coerced into falling in love with God.

In short - the time is right! Thank you for being a part of this dream.
Bo

The Inside Scoop for "Let it Snow" Sunday

2010-02-05T11:16:00.000-08:00

Sermon Notes for Luke 6:43-45

Key verse: Luke 6:45 “A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart.”

Watch the sermon online!

Our passage today comes from the section in Luke called the Sermon on the Plain and is parallel to the more familiar Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. Here, Jesus talks about the nature of discipleship as more than just words. He invites us into a relationship with God which will change our hearts and in turn change our behavior. Recent studies on religion show that Christian leaders used to believe that the change pattern began with belief: believe, behave, belong. In other words, people believe in Jesus first, which changes the way that they behave which in turn gives them a feeling of belonging. However, postmodern people prefer to belong first; they long to be in authentic relationships which then impact how they live. The pattern now looks more like this: belong, behave, believe. As people relate to others and get a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves, they begin to live differently which then leads to seeing life differently, through the eyes of belief. Jesus seems to imply this relational-based pattern here: a relationship with God changes our hearts which changes our behavior and then leads us to see Jesus for who he really is. Faith involves more than just saying the right words or believing the right things or even keeping the right laws. Instead, the relationship with God changes the very essence of who we are.

What does this have to do with our topic on measuring success? Many times we become tempted to succeed at all costs because it makes us look good and we think we can do good things. But, if we lose our integrity in the process, we accomplish nothing. We may all nod our heads in agreement with this, but living it is harder than it seems. The world does not reward doing what is right; it rewards doing what is profitable and what looks good. So, we find bankers facing lawsuits because they stretched or withheld the truth in order to make profits. What about ourselves? Do we cheat on our taxes because it gives us more money? Do we step on people in order to promote ourselves? What is the cost of all of this? Jesus also asks: “What good does it do for a person to gain the whole world and lose their soul?”

So, how can we keep our soul intact? Jesus says its about bearing good fruit, which comes from a good and healthy heart. In reflecting on this passage, several others come to mind. Read the verses below and reflect on how Jesus may be calling you to cultivate the love in your heart in order to be successful in heaven’s eyes.

Jeremiah 17:10 (The Message) “I, God, search the heart and examine the mind. I get to the heart of the human. I get to the root of things. I treat them as they really are, not as they pretend to be."

Matthew 7:16-20 (New Living Translation) “You can identify them by their fruit, that is, by the way they act. Can you pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? A good tree produces good fruit, and a bad tree produces bad fruit. A good tree can’t produce bad fruit, and a bad tree can’t produce good fruit. So every tree that does not produce good fruit is chopped down and thrown into the fire. Yes, just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions.”

Matthew 12:33-35 (New Living Translation) “A tree is identified by its fruit. If a tree is good, its fruit will be good. If a tree is bad, its fruit will be bad. You brood of snakes! How could evil men like you speak what is good and right? For whatever is in your heart determines what you say. A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart.”

Psalm 1:1-3 (New Living Translation) “Oh, the joys of those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or stand around with sinners, or join in with mockers. But they delight in the law of the LORD, meditating on it day and night. They are like trees planted along the riverbank, bearing fruit each season. Their leaves never wither, and they prosper in all they do.”

Ephesians 3:16-19 (New Living Translation) “I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.”

Ultimately, then, we do not make our tree good; a relationship with Jesus does. It changes our hearts and our lives, our actions and our beliefs. Then, we find true success in the eyes of our Creator. How might Jesus be calling you to cultivate this heart of love? How can you spend time basking in that unlimited resource? How can you let that love overflow into your words and actions and relationships daily? How can our outer lives reflect our inner hearts?

This is Skyline. Where the light of God's hope dawns.

2009-12-04T06:30:00.000-08:00

This first week of Advent at Skyline, my days were filled with a mixed bag of prayers, a hospital visit, scripture study, several meetings and calls to members and friends of the church and another pastor, as well as a negotiation with a contractor for tree removal and some slight assistance for the repair of our boiler. After Sunday's miraculous worship filled with baptism, music and celebration, the days of the rest of the week have been a decided mix of the mundane and routine by comparison.

A pastor and member of St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Wilmington have invited me to participate in their series of Lenten reflections next Spring, entitled "God's Inclusive Love: No Limits" primarily because they had heard of our decision to welcome LGBT persons with open arms at Skyline. Our conversation has become a time of reflection for me of the cost and the blessing of following One who calls us to bear a cross for love of the world. I have especially been drawn to the many stories of refugees from the war of hatred and exclusion who have been drawn to our community of faith, and who have transformed both our community and our experience of God's love and grace.

My favorite statements include one who celebrated the community "saving his life", another who shared that our community had revived her nearly extinguished hope that she could love Jesus among a community of people who loved Jesus - and who loved her. When I am troubled by the thoughts of the cost of our discipleship, I remember those who had given up on the church and who came to experience God again among us. Several Sundays ago, a friend put his arm around me, looked back into the sanctuary full of followers of Jesus and said: "They won't let God die, will they?!"

This is Skyline. Where the light of God's hope dawns.

We met with a truncated Staff Parish Relations Committee Tuesday evening to draft a Profile of our church for the Bishop and Cabinet to review as they consider whom to appoint as pastor of Skyline in July 2010 (for the past 13 years, the Bishop has appointed Vicki and me to serve for another year here). We prepare the Profile every year, and this year we celebrated some miraculous ministries, hopes, and descriptions of the people God has gathered into a church called Skyline.

What are the ministries we celebrate here and hope to expand?

Contemporary, experiential worship services; diverse music ministry; outreach to unchurched people in a postmodern context; children’s ministry that celebrates the presence and participation of children in worship and in the life of the church
We hope to expand our outreach to all persons seeking a deeper relationship with God, especially those who are marginalized in society and in the church; youth ministry in and beyond the church; and serving as the “town center” for the community of Pike Creek.

what are the short-term ministry goals at Skyline: (1) Youth Skate Park; (2) Outreach and Advocacy Ministry for Justice Issues in our Community; (3) Volunteer Center for Missions; (4) Mentoring ministry for at-risk youth; (5) Wellness Center for spiritual and physical health; (6) Alternative Worship in an emergent/post-modern style and setting.

What are the pastoral characteristics most helpful in Skyline's ministry?

Flexibility, delegation, and empowerment of lay partners in creating experiential, contemporary worship; openness to receive Christians who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered as full members of the church; ability to nurture all members toward expressing God’s calling in their lives in and beyond the church; embracing shared ministry with laity, in a church that celebrates the dispersion of power and initiative.

On Wednesday evening, I gathered with the the choir to rehearse a song they will sing during our Festival of Light concert next Saturday, Dec. 12 at Skyline. After sharing and celebrating our joys and concerns in prayer, we sang a celebration not only of the birth of the Christ child at Christmas, but in every heart and in every moment of our lives. We sing in the hope that our song will bring God glory and draw especially those people who have given up on hope.

This is Skyline. Where the light of God's hope dawns.

Yeasty Living

2009-11-20T07:43:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking about yeast, and how it makes or breaks the breadmaking process. (Of course, I have other things in mind besides breadmaking.) Get a bad batch of yeast, and you're looking at a ruined, sagging loaf of worthless sludge. Put too much fresh yeast in a loaf, and the bread will explode (and sometimes, this isn't funny at all). And the most insidious part of this story is that you cannot know what you've done until it's too late to do anything about. There's no feedback until the end - the whole process is built on faith and experience.

So much of breadmaking - and baking in general - involves a bit of flying blind. The muck you've got when you prayerfully place the goods in the oven cannot be even remotely related to the product you're hoping for is the magic works as promised (like it did for Mom when you were wholly unconcerned about whether or not magic worked - because you took for granted that it simply and always did). And even though baking is a science - pure chemistry - there are many ways for the batch of gook to go south on you when it gets too hot in the kitchen.

So we're always a bit surprised when it all comes out well, and no one more than the cook, who would prefer the rest of us enjoy the feast in blissful ignorance of the measure of anxiety that forms the part of all but the simplest recipes. Farmers probably share this kind of anxiety during the growing season - or perhaps it never lets up for them from seed to market. Yet they plant.

To live in this kind of realm is to never be free of the necessity of flying blind, of faithfuly planting that which we cannot see but for eyes of faith. And the connection happens often enough that we continue to plant and to knead and to mix the ingredients in the ways that have been gracefully handed down to us. We will hand these ways down to our children, it goes without saying. The holy books in our kitchens explode after generations until interrupted by indifference and the lack of time to have faith in a process you cannot control.

Those who continue to hold to these practices infiltrate the earthly family with the yeast of our fierce hopefulness. Thankfully, it doesn't take much to expand and rise the whole of the earth in faith, hope and love. We remain fresh and waiting for the baker woman to knead us into the measures of flour and dough. We do what we do. Spread throughout the whole in the quiet, determined way the woman's strong fingers find every yeastless place with careful precision. Later, when the heat is on, we will expand, and the gooey mass will rise - nearly imperceptibly at first, but later unmistakably and ubiquitously.

Inevitably.

The Light that Shines on our Functional Atheism

2009-11-09T12:53:00.000-08:00

November 11, 2009

I’ve been reading and thinking a great deal lately about how we go about thinking theologically in the church and the way we live out our theology in the church community. More and more as a pastor, I’ve become aware of the horrible tensions between what we say and what we do because, as a “company man”, the institution of the church requires my absolute allegiance to theological formulations I am acutely aware the church neither believes nor lives out in our daily life. And as a Christ follower committed to the Truth, Life, and Way of Jesus, I find it increasingly unbearable to live as a pastor as if this tension does not exist.

In other places, I have called this exploration a “Quest”, and wondered whether or not the motivation for such a quest comes from merely selfish or more altruistic intentions. But increasingly I sense that my position in the church as a pastor places a heavy responsibility on me to speak not only for myself but for the communion of the saints, living and ancestral. And it is in this communion of faith where I sense the gulf between our creedal statements of faith and our practical understanding of God and way of life devoted to God and to each other, particularly as we understand that way of life as the one we call Messiah lived it.

I see this gulf everywhere in the life of the church. Social researchers have long exposed the lack of any significant social distinction between Christians, in particular, and other communities of human beings, though there are many notable individual exceptions, and perhaps a few communal exceptions, like the Mennonite and Amish communities of faith. But what I have observed as pastor runs far deeper than these social manifestations of Christian faith. Parker Palmer has called the way Christians approach God in postmodern life “functional atheism”, a term that describes the theology of a people who live as if God makes no real claim on their lives (Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, Jossey-Bass, 1999).

Functional atheism manifests in ways that go far beyond holiness or righteous living. As a pastor, I have lamented not only the profound level of scriptural illiteracy in the Christian church, but also the many ways in which sociological realities and concerns trump any real form of theological struggle among those of us who claim to follow Christ. The reason we do not know how to engage in theological discernment stems in large measure not from apathy or ignorance, but from our very real fear of where such discernment might lead us.

Lay persons abdicate all responsibility for theological reflection to the clergy (only performed after the fact, if at all, in order to justify our preconceived notions and ideology). And if they disagree with the clergy, they simply find a pastor who espouses a theology more conducive to their way of thinking, rather than engaging the offending pastor in a dialogue that could be fruitful or transformative for the relationship. Clergy are only too happy to accept this no-contest plea from laity, at least until we realize the tyranny of popularism requires us to seek not the truth but a justification of the current social reality.

As a backdrop to this morbid dance, we idolize some imaginary divine ally who puts paid to all who argue against us – not that we would actually have to live by any of our arguments, but so that we might be vindicated among those who cannot see the world as we do. And since we know that such an idol is but a fantasy, and all we hear conclusively from heaven is silence, we conclude that there is no God but our own power to have our way in this world – be it the power to persuade, dismiss, or dominate.

And since the “real” God will do none of these things, we quite consciously overthrow God (who at any rate allows this overthrow without protest) and live as if God were not a part of human existence even and perhaps especially in the church. (I say especially because the church places such a relentless value on articulation.) We prefer this rebellion and idolatry to the intolerability of a silent and apparently impotent deity – yet for some reason our makeup requires that we maintain a façade of faith in such a deity, at least in ceremonial form. I cannot fathom for whom we play this religious act – unless we put it on for ourselves.

Here is the grand lie and its rationale: we need it in order to anesthetize the pain of the nihilistic reality of our Faustian bargain. We leap from the searing frying pan of a God who leaves us entirely alone into the consuming fire of utter separation and meaninglessness. And who wants to face up to such a brutal reality? So we speak on God’s behalf, as infallible holy persons who know the secrets of the infallible holy books, in order to pierce the deafening silence from the deep wells of our souls, where no one remembers how to seek a God we have ceased to hope might be found.

The key to our lust for unchanging Truth lies not in its infallibility but that it lies within our grasp – that we can know and claim such Truth – about God or ourselves. We will trade anything for the existential comfort that comes with certainty – even God and whatever we mean by freedom or justice – or even life itself (in all its abundance, whatever that means). We who claim allegiance to the Christ idea appreciate the incarnation (how conveniently articulate) but not the enigmatic Rabbi Yeshuach who even now refuses to be comprehended or claimed by any of his disciples. Dostoyevsky speaks for all of us in the dungeons of the Inquisition: “Go away, or we will kill you again.”

Yet incomprehensibly, he refuses to die.

Of course I would pin the blame (or credit) for the persistent awareness of the gulf between what we say and do as Christians on our namesake – even though we have transformed his name into a hope. He speaks as one with authority, not necessarily because he has “descended” from “heaven” but because he relentlessly lives into the promise of a realm of truth and life which claims us but which none of us can claim. Like a bull in a China shop, he tramples conventional ways of making peace with hopelessness and of sleeping with the enemy, regardless of the consequences for himself or for anyone who dares to come along for the ride. Because he has not come to bring peace.

The stories told with voice and ink and blood convey a sense of passionate identity that refused to rely on any of the conventional ways in which human beings typically seek meaning. Like his mentor, John, Yeshuach lived a wild and untamed life to its violent (tragic? Or inevitable?) end, and promised to accompany anyone with the chutzpah to leap into this passionate whirlwind of reckless, angry love. He also promised pain, injustice, and enslavement to a fearful path of destiny beyond ourselves.

How we have tamed him – mocked his euangelion and the martyrs of his Way, of whom the world was not worthy – and killed him endlessly on the cross of our comfortable, controllable “faith”.

But how else could we have created a powerful, popular faith expression in the world? After only a mere three centuries of sporadic debate about whether or not cowardice and apostasy negated discipleship, the young church was more than ready for the killing embrace of the Emperor – the true (or at least realistic) god of all gods. How much more efficient could be our penetration into heathen lands and peoples who would inevitably fall beneath the boot of raw power. And once we had sealed our pact with power, it would cease to matter with whom we allied ourselves. Any rabid, effective dog would do. Power and infallibility would come to justify any means toward the end of “saving” the world from ambiguity and the maddening call of a crucified “lord” to empty ourselves for others.

We believe in God the Father Almighty…

And yet… and yet. Like sand agitating relentlessly within an oyster, the life of a savior who suffered in life and in death refuses to bow to the idol we have fashioned of steel, silicone and weapons grade plutonium. He mocks our houses of worship where we insulate ourselves from suffering and ruthlessly enforce a homogenous form of faith in ourselves. The revolutionary rabbi taunts us as we read (while anxiously watering down) the incendiary stories his early followers called euangelion. We would mob and carry him to the brow of a cliff and toss him to his death to shut him up if we could only get our hands on him – yet he passes through us like a draft, the source of which we dare not discover – because we know his breathing on us keeps us alive in this coma in which we have learned to settle.

…the resurrection of the body…

How persistently he called to his rotting friend, after days of comforting rest from the labor that is life. Did he weep because he can never leave us alone? Because he knows he bids us to die again and again? We sleep while he prays, sweating blood as he wrestles with the silent God who places relentlessly before us the cup of sorrows. Yet every time we gather to break and bless and chew and swallow we are remembered into his body, forever broken and spilled out. Every time we rehearse the ancient stories, a fire kindles and then rages within us that wearies and overcomes our attempts to hold it in.

Our darkness cannot comprehend such light. We cannot know, even dimly. But perhaps it is enough to know that we are known. Enough to be overwhelmed by love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Our theology and our sociology can be far more tentative – more awestruck by the sense of the realm of love that never – never fails. Perhaps this, finally, is the measure of life in all its abundance – to live beyond either questions or answers about the nature of God or humanity, embracing love that never fails in every moment of our lives, fearlessly, relentlessly, even recklessly, in the wake of a savior who beckons us to suffer together for love without end.

…and the life everlasting.

Bonhoeffer's New Wine

2009-11-04T03:14:00.000-08:00

I need to say more about Nashville, and what happened when I rubbed shoulders in a great cloud of witnesses whose love reminded me who God calls me to be. We become who we are created to be only in companionship with others who push us, hold us and release us in the dynamic kind of interpretive, improvisational dance of our lives. And I don't much care if that dancing metaphor sounds overly dramatic - human life is dramatic and miraculous, even as it can also be mundane and heartbreaking.

One of the speakers at Nashville invited us to take another look at Bonhoeffer's "Life Together". As I began to read this fascinating journal of a triumphant community of resistance to the monstrous hatred of Hitler's Germany, I was struck first by Bonhoeffer's invitation to recognize my own community of faith - the people who gather as Skyline - for the miracle God has created us to be for each other and for our neighbors.

Bonhoeffer writes that the kind of gratefulness a prisoner feels for a visitor who brings encouragement into darkness can multiply a thousand times over when we are surrounded by pilgrims on the journey of faith. But we often take each other for granted, of course, precisely because we are surrounded by an embarrassment of riches.

I remembered the way I used to feel so isolated as a Christ-follower and officer aboard USS Bunker Hill, in the vastness of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. When I would gather with a few others to pray or to read the scriptures together, I would often feel as if we were the last Christians on the face of the earth. I missed the hymns and the liturgy and the fellowship of the congregations of Christians God had surrounded me with in my youth. A Chaplain visited us when we got in helicopter range of the aircraft carrier in our Battle Group, and I wept as I received communion.

Jesus knew far more about wine than I do.

But when he spoke of the new wine of God's realm, he decanted an overflowing cup from his experience of wine to demonstrate something about those who dared to believe in his message of God in the midst of our life together. The frothy, fermenting "fruit of the gods" that refused to be contained reminded Jesus of those who left behind everything to follow him - those who would go where they did not wish to go after he released them to invite the world to celebrate God's love in a community called the Kingdom of God.

Our capacity to refresh others who are thirsty for love staggers our imagination. If we could but have a taste of what it is like to bring another (a stranger? a friend? a sibling?) to life, we would gladly accept Jesus' grace-filled invitation to pour us out for the sake of God's love for our hurting and lonely world. Our worship is a never-ending party - a celebration of the new wine, the very best wine of God's love, flowing without measure. It pours into the streets that stream from where we gather to return and search out the parched and dry.

New wineskins deliver the wine of gladness and reception into improbable but amazing grace. They do not contain it; there is no time or need to patch old containers, weary from holding it in. This wine is restless for the celebration - to be consumed and to consummate the marriage of God to the whole human community - indeed, to all of creation.

I drank this new wine to the dregs among pilgrims gathered in Nashville who gave their lives to minister in the name and power of Jesus to all people. This wine also flowed through my life into others, and I found that being poured out makes room for the never-ending stream of God's grace and love for the world. And I know that what draws me back to the saints gathered at Skyline is the reckless way we welcome the Messiah to recommend the vintage of our love to any and all who dare to believe in a world redefined by the love of God in all people.

Pour it on, God!

Back to Galilee

2009-11-02T07:50:00.000-08:00

Last week, I spent six days in retreat, worship and contemplation of ways in which I can walk the journey of life as a pastor as a pilgrimage with good friends. Sixty of us gathered in Nashville to worship, reflect, exchange gifts of encouragement, and prepare to return to Galilee in anticipation of meeting Jesus in the daylight and dishes. After a rough journey home through delay and turbulence, I arrived home in a different state of mind and spirit.

During the week, Vicki asked me to tell her what was happening in Nashville, among the gathered pilgrims and falling leaves. I didn't have to think long. I told her that we all were learning the grace of walking in the Way of Jesus the Messiah as a pilgrimage rather than a solo journey - we did not have to do this alone. And I get the feeling pastors aren't the only ones who need to hear this gracious invitation to join a great cloud of witnesses as they seek God in the journey of life.

None of us returned with a ToDo list, or a 10-step process for turning things around. One of my friends voiced an invitation to treat their family members with a holy regard. On the flight home, the flight attendant reminded me that there "may not be a later". As I reunited with my family on All Hallows Eve, I savored the hugs we shared and listening to their stories of the week I had missed while in Nashville, as much as I enjoyed groping for words to tell about my adventure there.

And though I'll have more to say as I sift through the many memories of that week, I know for certain that I rediscovered a sense of my first love of God, and the people God loves, in the holy place we gathered in near Music Row and Vanderbilt University. Strangers who became companions in an instant of conversation or sitting quietly together in worship reminded me again and again of the irresistible love of God that drew and draws me to serve others in the name of Christ.

We reflected on the cycle of Grace and the cycle of Works, and the waxing and waning of our souls in both streams. I knew that my ability to trust God's love determines the direction of grace or works I pursue - my need to determine the outcome or the faith I experience simply and always to fall into love. To give into a stream of God's grace involves letting fears go as the tide washes over me and bears me to others. We talked often of fears and anxieties the crowd out our ability to fall into love.

And when I returned to the dishes? I discovered that the sense of grace waxing under a swelling moon returned with me. As I walked to church to gather around a table and talk of God's surprising and mysterious movement in our lives, Debbie Christie called me to tell me our nursery caregiver was unable to watch over the infants and toddlers. So I allowed the flow of grace to take me to watch over them.

I had baptized many of those little ones, but we had not played much together. And as we sang songs and danced in the chaotic flow of the nursery, I enjoyed the freedom they gave me to sit on the floor and enjoy learning about life. Vicki preached upstairs, but my return to the nursery seemed a fitting return to Galilee for me. I was looking for Jesus and found myself surrounded by toys and exuberant toddlers in the Kingdom of God.

Wake Me Up When September Ends

2009-10-17T19:48:00.000-07:00

We had a rude awakening at September's end this fall at Skyline, when our Administrative Assistant informed us that she would be unable to cover our pay with the money she had in the bank as the month came to a close.

Yeah. I said rude awakening. I wasn't kidding.

Now before we get into interpretation mode, there's this little matter of "What Do We Do Now" that fairly screams for attention, and it got all of ours as October winds started blowing. We gathered leaders and contacted the people we are accountable to - we prayed and planned and spent some time with mentors and spiritual advisers. And we let everyone at Skyline Church know what was going on.

Which was weird at first. But refreshing in a way. Before we let the congregation know, the weight of the problem gave us little room to breathe. Here's how bad it got: I called the Navy recruiter in Philadelphia and started the process to become a navy chaplain. Serving as a chaplain is an honorable path - but if I had followed it at this point in my life, it would have meant an unending separation from my wife and children.

On October 5, we met with out District Superintendent, who directly supervises us and who advises the Bishop regarding appointments for all churches in the Wilmington District. We told him about our financial situation at the church. He told us to hang tight, at least until next July.

There's a funny thing about ordination. When we became United Methodist pastors, we vowed to serve the church and only the church - working 100% as pastors, resident theologians, spiritual counselors, and church administrators. This present crisis brings those vows into crystal clear focus. We serve under orders.

And so far in October? We've received offerings sufficient to cover expenses for two consecutive Sundays. The members and friends gathered Sunday have responded to our full disclosure with a renewed sense of calling and conviction - just as we have. The work and ministry of this faith community continues with passion and hope. Members face medical, spiritual and financial difficulties with courage - in the midst of a supportive and loving community.

Our theme this year is God's Future - with Hope. Yup. That's the ticket. I'm on board.

A Church Without Walls

2009-06-23T05:04:00.000-07:00

On Monday evening, after 21 months of conversation and study and dialogue, the Church Conference of Skyline UMC voted 48-6 (with 2 abstentions) to adopt an expanded Mission Statement of welcome to all people into a community of followers of Jesus (regardless of age, racial, ethnic or national origin, physical or mental ability, marital status, religious experience, affectional orientation, gender identity, or socioeconomic status). Such debate as there was focused on why we would need to specify who we are welcoming, when the word All might suffice. The overwhelming majority felt that while most churches claim to welcome All, the reality is that they restrict their welcome to exclude people on the margins of society - the very people Jesus came to serve. The group hopes for the day when spelling out our welcome won't be necessary, when the walls are broken down - but 86% of the 56 members of the church who voted felt that our church needs to make an explicit welcome statement to people for whom All does not in fact mean all in typical churches.

The Statement adopted June 22 reads:

The Mission of Skyline United Methodist Church is to
Reach Out to all people seeking a deeper relationship with God, regardless of age, racial, ethnic or national origin, physical or mental ability, marital status, religious experience, affectional orientation, gender identity, or socioeconomic status,
Welcome them into a community followers of Jesus who freely choose to worship, serve, and live together prayerfullyand in peace following a Methodist understanding of God's gift of grace,
Equip them to live as the Holy Spirit gifts and guides, and
Send them to serve and reach out to all people in Christ's name.

Before the vote on the Welcome Statement, there was considerable debate over the budget. We recognize that we have paid a price for standing with people on the margins, and that we will continue to pay a price. Many in the church want to see us fail - they would rather shut us down than see us open our doors to all people. As we consider the plans God has for us (Jeremiah 29:11-14a), I feel a sense of hope that outweighs fear. Among those who voted last night were our children (including our foster daughter). They joined us in voting to be a part of a church without walls, and then they served us communion. We have fought for the past few years here for their place in God's house as much as anyone else's. Whatever the future holds, last night we affirmed a Light that shines in the darkness (of fear and ignorance and hatred) that can never be extinguished.

Scripture and Prayer

2009-06-16T09:48:00.000-07:00

I write today in response to a query from a good friend about my purpose in offering a Bible study on scripture and homosexuality (in particular) and about my overall understanding of the place of scripture in spiritual discernment, vis-a-vis the many other ways spiritual seekers experience the presence and guidance of the Divine. Joy puts it best when she summarizes that scripture and prayer (in words and in action) are profoundly related and necessary to each other, both in confirming and in conforming (transforming) human experience of the divine.

As an ordained pastor, I am accountable to scriptural authority - but the interpretive latitude of that mandate embraces tradition, reason, and experience in what amounts to an understanding of ongoing inspiration, at least in practice (if not officially). Of course, in the church, the latitude is considerably more vast - given what many pundits call scriptural illiteracy in the church (among laity and clergy, to be blunt). That illiteracy accounts for our flocking around such spurious projects as "The Prayer of Jabez" or "Your Best Life Now".

As I continue to grow in faith, especially in the wake of Divinity School, I experience scripture in the way I have been taught that an icon functions in prayer, as a spiritual catalyst or window through which we can (though by no means always do) experience greater clarity of understanding of God's presence, will and Way. I have come to understand that scriptural authority is not inherent in itself, but lies in its appropriation in the faith community that gathers around it to confirm their experience of the Holy in every generation and to reinforce the Spirit's call to live for God and others.

Different people will understand scriptural authority (and it's place in Christian discernment) in different ways - as the scriptures themselves amply attest. My purpose in offering an examination of scriptural passages traditionally used in the church to justify discrimination and abuse of homosexual persons is to demonstrate one way to resolve an apparent conflict between scriptural discernment (an apparent divine justification of punishment of homosexual people) and human experience (the fruit of faithfulness and love expressed in the lives of homosexual persons). I do not believe there is any conflict - traditional interpretations of scripture notwithstanding.

I am well aware that there may be no receptive audience for what I have to say. On the one hand, those Christians who hold to a more traditional (they might claim that it is more "literal") understanding of scriptural interpretation and authority certainly argue that my interpretation is de facto liberal revisionism in order to reconcile scripture to the higher authority (for me, they might argue) of human reason and experience. On the other hand, someone who holds a far more nuanced understanding of scriptural authority and interpetation might see my project as an anachronistic gloss on a hopelessly time-bound document that has little contemporary relevance either for religious or philosophical seekers of Truth. I prayed long and hard about scrapping the entire project for those reasons. But in the end, I felt I needed to speak my mind, not so much for the defense of scriptural authority, but as a testimony and thanksgiving of how scripture functions in my life as a means of discernment and experience of the reality of the divine in the human community (past and present).

Given my profession as a scholar of scripture and a theologian, I suppose my passion for this project should come as no surprise. I grew up in a tradition that valued scripture as the sine qua non of spiritual discernment, and I continue to experience God's presence in it's profound testimony. Though I no longer understand scriptural inspiration in a magical way (i.e., divine dictation), I value more than I can say the power of scripture to draw me into conversation with a community that spans six millennia and more of companions in this spiritual journey that is life. These include nomads, prophets, poets, kings, beggars, lepers, messiahs, disciples, governors, soldiers, revolutionaries, farmers and fishers, shepherds, prostitutes, children and their parents. They are not dead to me. Their testimony (both implicit and "literal") interprets my life and experience just as I am compelled to interpret its mysterious meanings (sometimes a different facet with each fresh reading), and calls me far beyond the boundaries of myself - to experience something that begins to take the shape of what we (too casually, more often than not) refer to as God.

I am a student of literature, and the scriptures are certainly great literature. But I have inherited, for better or worse, a tradition of interpretation and a community that has gathered and gathered around this collection (canon) as a vessel for understanding God's ways among the human community. Their relevance or authority in every generation comes from our engagement not so much with the words but with the community that gathered around those words in many ages and times. We ratify their authority and ability to "lead us into all Truth" not a priori, because they are the Holy writings, but because more and more of us experience their power to interpret our experience (of prayer and of life) as related by love to one another and to God. For some, this happens on a surface level that I am tempted to dismiss as naive and immature. At moments of better clarity, I realize that even in this apparent disparity, God's grace meets each of us at our point of need and receptivity.

Outliers and the Fate We Make That Makes Us

2009-06-02T05:36:00.001-07:00

Bo Gordy-Stith's review of Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers: The Story of Success" (Little, Brown and Company, 2008)

I've just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest study of human behavior, Outliers, about the backstory of success in America and to a lesser degree, in the world. The other books are The Tipping Point and Blink, both of which I enjoyed immensely. Outliers did not disappoint. Gladwell delivers a diverse range of applications of his thesis with humor and the kind of penetrating wisdom you would expect from a poet who can reveal some hidden secret in something you think you know all about but have never really seen.

Someone asked me if Outliers was a religious book, and I told them that it could be a way to understand the more subtle and powerful ways of grace in our world. But while Gladwell prompts an exploration of the road to success (and how we might widen it a bit), his definition of success creates an extraordinary tension he can never resolve.

Stratospheric success, it turns out, according to Gladwell, involves the gift of talent and extraordinary, relentless hours of practice - 10,000 hours of practice. That's the kind of precision Gladwell delivers repeatedly, like the fact that you can recall a series of numbers you can recite in 2 seconds, or how the ability to stay with a math problem for 22 minutes makes the difference between excelling in math and merely surviving. Or if you're a southerner who has just received an insult, you'll walk to within 2 feet of a bouncer before turning aside, rather than 6 feet (for anyone not from the south). All of the numbers, of course, are based on studies Gladwell cites to buttress his argument that reads more like a conversation over a really good meal.

The last tidbit exemplifies the thesis that gives the book title an ironic twist: in addition to talent and determination, outliers are inevitably products of their families and the larger communities (living and dead) and even history - in other words, they're not really outliers at all - they're inescapably woven into the human social fabric. And though Gladwell spends much more time exploring this thesis than suggesting ways to capitalize on it in society, he repeatedly asserts that taking the social environment part of the success equation far more seriously would result in far more opportunity for success.

Near the end of the book, he cites an inner city school program that closes the well-known learning gap between rich and poor students by extending the classroom hours and nixing a three-month summer break (where studies Gladwell cites demonstrate the real reason for the learning gap between rich and poor occurs). Earlier in the book, Gladwell writes about a group of geniuses followed by a sociologist whose success or failure correlated well with the income and education levels of their parents. The extended hours school program recognizes this cultural reality and then mitigates it essentially by removing the kids from their unsupportive home environment.

Another example of what Gladwell refers to as taking cultural factors seriously involves the retraining of Korean pilots in the wake of a series of accidents. Recognizing that a Korean culture of deference to superiors made it difficult for co-pilots to correct pilot errors, an (American) consultant banished the Korean language from the cockpits, essentially creating a competing cockpit culture that would allow the egalitarian cooperation necessary to safely fly commercial jets. And of course it worked.

But this is just where Gladwell's highly entertaining book leaves me unsettled. The author shifts between the draconian social re-engineering I mention above on the one hand and a resignation to the fate of (for instance) being born in 1835, 1917, 1951, or on January 1, which would give you a much better chance to be one of the richest persons in the history of the world, a highly successful Jewish lawyer in New York, an architect of the PC revolution, or a professional Canadian hockey player, respectively.

Radical social reengineering (or, more to the point, eradication, as in the Korean Airline cockpits) to level the playing field for far more people to succeed and "luck" (to use Bill Gates' words) form opposite poles of Gladwell's study of success. But I can find no middle ground - no spectrum of what I have come to call Grace in between the harsh poles of Make and Fate. In the end, Gladwell refuses a "bloom where you're planted" ethic for a success standard imposed by a non-existent patchwork culture he forms from Asian rice paddies to European tailors and obnoxious air traffic controllers from the Bronx - all with the goal of getting into a mythical house on a hill, via a road marked with 10,000 hours of unrelenting toil for greatness.

His epilogue is a colorful description of his own patchwork Jamaican/English/African cultural history, which makes a kind of sense, given the thrust of his thesis. The view from his house on a hill must be marvelous, and he justly recognizes that it is built literally on the foundation of the backs of his tireless and blessed forebears (blessed by fortune in ironic ways).

As it happens, I'm also reading Tom Sawyer to my 12 year old son and 11 year old foster son, each night as they go to bed. They boys love the hero of the quintessentially American tale, and strive to emulate him in their lives. They look forward to a golden summer of delights at the helm of a mountain bike, in the pool, surrounded by budding beauty they (like Tom) are beginning more and more to appreciate, and at the computer screen, where they live out a heroic existence Tom would not have been able to imagine. My son is gifted with extraordinary intelligence in math and science. My foster son is a whiz on the basketball court and skating rink - and is remarkably observant. My daughter already dreams of putting her considerable empathy and music talent together into a career in music therapy.

The idea of sending them to a rice paddy this summer to increase their chance at success seems to mock the very idea of success. And grace. No doubt hard work finds its own reward. But the culture that nurtures them and my wife and me encourages us to value other virtues as well, like friendship, sacrifice for others, and Sabbath. And grace. Which promises me and my community that God has indeed gifted us all for a purpose.

In the midst of his discussion of the arduous labor involved in rice farming in China, Gladwell defines what he calls meaningful work. To be meaningful, Gladwell asserts that work must involve (1) a clear relationship between effort and reward; (2) complexity; and (3) autonomy (p. 236). Those sound like the reflections of an entrepreneur - an author, perhaps, from the vantage point of the house on a hill. They are the words of a self-made man (albeit haunted by the injustice of fate that allowed him to make himself on the backs of others).

The words I would use to define meaningful work would be challenge, variety, and value (not merely defined in terms of money, of course). Life work should be stimulating, worthy of the creator and their creativity, and it should make the world a better place. Perhaps that's too much to ask, but in the end, I'd rather not settle for anything less (for myself or for anyone else). Success does not mean masking my cultural impediments, but recognizing in them (and in myself) unique strengths and (as I would label them as a pastor) gifts from God.

Gladwell entertains, surely. And he has collected a stunning amount of data to ponder the meaning of success. But his title dooms his thesis by posing an insoluble dilemma: how to escape the bonds of one's culture in order to achieve “success”. He is right about one thing, certainly. There are no true outliers in the human community. No islands. We are bound together in a shared history and family, and we truly succeed only when we reclaim both our cultural heritage as a gift - and our lives as God's gift to the human family.

Worship at Skyline Retrospective

2009-05-14T05:07:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Colossians 1:15-18 this morning and thinking about how grateful I am to have been a part of the worshiping community at Skyline for the past year. Our theme has been sharing the generous treasure of God, and I have witnessed much sharing in our worship experience. So many people have gathered in the spirit of 1 Corinthians 14:26 and shared generously of themselves that our time of community worship has spilled out in many ways into the rest of our week. Musicians, actors, technical support persons, artists and designers, guests with an invitation or appeal to serve, dancers, preachers, ushers and greeters, persons dedicating themselves to God, caring prayer ministers, and all who gathered faithfully every Sunday at Skyline - each of us has brought our needs and our abundance to God and to the rest of this community to give God glory and honor in our worship.

I remember the special dance on Christmas Eve, when we watched a celebration of Mary's fearfulness and faithfulness unfold before our eyes that special night. I remember the many opportunities we had to hear an impassioned invitation from a representative of a ministry beyond the walls of our community (Urban Promise, Perpetual Prosperity Pumps, Delaware Foster Care, Friendship House, Habitat for Humanity, Juvenile Diabetes Reasearch Fund, among others) and the many people who responded with their feet as our worship continued in our foyer and beyond. I think of the special times of dedication of ministers, when we reached out our hands and hearts for a blessing, baptisms, communion and anointing into membership - high holy moments when we enacted the scripture promises around which we gathered every week.

I remember and give thanks to God for the spontaneous eruption into applause (some churches call it hand praise) when we weren't quite ready to finish singing to God's glory. Over this past year, the bands led us into the throneroom where we danced and acted out the drama of God's grace - singing and proclaiming by our words and by our actions the abundant life of Jesus the Messiah in our midst. We participated in a living sanctuary, where all people are truly welcomed and invited to live fully into the Kingdom of God. We came to be filled, and discovered the bounty that God had already provided in our lives as we shared with God and with each other.

There were times last Fall when I wondered whether we had not asked too much of this congregation as leaders. Yet even through the struggle of the past couple of years to determine who God is calling us to be as a community, we have gathered for worship in spite of our fear and inability to know how this journey will turn out. Jesus Christ has gathered us. And even when we have not been able to see eye to eye, we have always been able to join our hearts in praise of an awesome God. And with the Spring, Skyline seems to be experiencing a new awakening of spiritual vitality in worship. This vitality has arisen out of a diverse (but not divisive) community gathered at the gentle invitation of Jesus - in whom all things truly hold together.

My prayer for the coming year, as we celebrate especially God's plans to give us hope and a future, is that we will discover fresh ways to unite our worship together with our worship in daily life. I pray that we will be able to open ourselves to God's leading in worship, creating space for spontenaety, improvisation, the leading of the Spirit, communal discernment, interaction and moments of response, and all of this in a way that invites but does not compel participation. I pray we will learn to be at peace in silence, waiting together on God. And I pray that we will integrate conscious, intentional practices of waiting on God's Spirit together, and together following the promptings of our awesome God.

Moving on

2009-05-06T07:54:00.001-07:00

I want to quit. Sometimes. Like today.

Not life. Sometimes, I want to quit hoping - and simply live til I die, til others die around me. That is the inevitable path we take, regardless of our outlook. Love and hope are interchangeable, it seems to me. Both are ways we cope with this inevitability. Of death. Not with rage, but with a kind of persistence in the face of so much that would contradict hope. And love.

I could join others in this act of inaction. They poke fun, or they ignore my efforts at living by hope. Mostly they ignore. Me and anyone else who dares to live by hope before death claims us. Or life. The blunt hardness of it. The tenuous skin of handling life - of taking what comes and dealing with it - stretched far too thin over a sea of chance and complexity that mock any attempt at control. We dance as if walking on water - and even our dance resembles the staggering fall of a drunk. We know where this is going. Where it has to end.

Yet some of us dance anyway. And the thing of it is, we don't always fall. Sometimes, the reeling becomes a reel, a launching impossible apart from the terrifying leap into love we take daily, moment by moment, in the face of the maw of uncertainty. We fall. And some of us discover in the act of falling a kind of flight - not so pitiful or pitiable as it might seem from the perspective of those who watch us fall.

Like martyrs who pushed through throngs of would-be faithful, reaching out trembling hands for the blessing of a touch - as if such a tenuous connection could transfer even a glimpse of the leaping life (no, it cannot). Though once having tasted this life (abundant?), I know that nothing else could satisfy the thirst borne of that first taste. I'm cursed with hope. With love that refuses to let me out if its clutches, no matter how hard I kick and scream and rage against its refusal to let me go. To reject me once and for all and let me die in pieces.

I am sacrificed on the altar of love and hope in this world. I have no choice. Nor can I keep it to myself. The curse plays out from my original choice to cleave to hope and to risk love. Relentlessly. There is no longer an option to choose not to choose. I have made a choice that forever defines me, that defines the life I live. Hope eternal, rebirthing relentlessly without mercy, every time I die. I may hide in shame in the garden for an hour or two, but there is an appointment that will be kept in the cool of the afternoon, when the wind blows.

Then demons return to find no room in this house. They go away, empty-handed. As always. Here is where hope lives. On and on.

Skate Park @ Skyline

2009-04-28T06:03:00.001-07:00

Greetings!

Thank you all for expressing your interest in exploring the idea of a skate park at Skyline for youth in our area. The following people decided to vote with their feet Sunday, April 19 and the following week: Josh Magnusson, Lynn Fahey, Cindy Sisofo, Tim Transue, Deb Ressler, Kari Butts, Lori Citro, Ivan Turner, III, Sarah Sacconey, Gwen Cichocki, and Joe DiEmidio.

At this point, I'd like for us to introduce ourselves to each other, and share what attrancted us to this kind of mission/project, and what we might be able to contribute. I want to set a meeting date, so we might also want to let each other know when would be the best time to meet (weekends, weeknights, etc.).

Kari Butts works at Heritage Elementary School, and shared with me Sunday (April 26) that she has already met with more than a dozen 5th graders (who traded away their recess to meet with her to talk about a skate park) and will be surveying them to get an idea of what they would be interested in. A couple of you have shared with me that you might know about some funding sources we could explore.

I spent yesterday visiting area skate shops and came up with the following info: The Newport Skate Park might be the best place for us to begin exploring what might be involved in putting a park together. The website says they're open on Wednesday nights, so if anyone's up for a field trip, I might be going tomorrow night. They've been running since 1997, and are an outreach ministry of Family Life Church.

At a skate shop in Newark, I saw a flyer about the Wilmington Skate Project. It looks like they're halfway toward a goal of raising $800,000 for a skate park to be built under I-95. They run Skate Jams to raise money and awareness from time to time, setting up elements in parking lots, and several hundred skaters always show up.

That's about all I have so far. Let us (everyone in the group) hear from you. Let me know if you're a Facebook maven, to see if it would be worth starting a group there. Check the church website, or simply share your comment on this Blog and let's see where we stand. Feel free to share why you signed up to join us, what attracts you to this project, what kind of vision you have for what you hope we will be able to accomplish (and when we might accomplish it), and what you think you might be able to bring to the effort (information, expertise, passion, research, etc.).

Let's get it on.
Bo

Review of Christopher Hitchens' Book: "God is Not Great"

2009-04-01T14:44:00.000-07:00

I’ve just finished reading Christopher Hitchens’ “God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (New York: Twelve Books, 2007). It’s one of a half-dozen or so atheist screeds that have been making the rounds since our communal 9/11 scare in America, in the new world order where fear and finger-pointing are the new gold rush territory for hucksters. After my review, I quote a few of the reviews which closely examine Hitchens’ naïve argument for an Enlightenment utopia.

As a deconstructionist, Hitchens presents some well-worn arguments that monotheistic faith is based on fables used to explain a pre-scientific understanding of human existence as if he discovered them. He presents the argument that the story of the woman taken in adultery in John 8 and the ending of Mark are not found in the earliest manuscripts as “shocking” (p. 122) and “astonishing” (p. 142). Yet even translations of the New Testament published by conservative publishing houses have acknowledged these facts in the texts themselves for decades. Hitchens, who only quotes the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, apparently did not know this until he read Bart Ehrman, who Hitchen’s credits with the “astonishing finding” of the short ending of Mark (in Ehrman's 2005 book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.).

Other reviews comment on similar factual blunders, or on Hitchens’ presentation of editorial gloss as fact in this work purported to be a paean to reason, Truth, and enlightened discourse. Which raises a problem when considering Hitchens’ other arguments and factual claims, covering a huge swath of human history, theology, and scientific inquiry. From a macro perspective, his argument that religious expression has been tainted with atrocity in the course of human history sounds plausible enough. Yet to leap with Hitchens to the conclusion that all religious expression must be so tainted (the thesis of his book) requires faith that his patchwork anecdotal claims are both representative and accurate. And close examination of many of these claims would strain all but the most blind faith.

His commentary on the Hebrew and Christian scriptures "covers" a bare 26 pages. The Qur’an gets another 13 pages. Søren Kierkegaard examines the story of the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) in over 100 pages of his 1843 book, Fear and Trembling. Hitchens claims to cover the “plain meaning of this frightful story” in a paragraph. In this, Christopher Hitchens shares far more in common with Christian fundamentalists than he cares to acknowledge (and who for him represent the sum total of Christian experience). Here lies Hitchens’ argument’s greatest flaw in rationale: straw-man arguments can only be a strong as the version of their adversary’s claim they attempt to undermine.

As a Christian pastor and theologian, I don’t need an atheist to make me aware of the misdeeds of the church throughout history. Nor do I need him to point out for me the discoveries of scriptural textual scholarship, criticism and archaeology. Hitchens trots forward the archaeological research works of Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (page 102) as evidence that the "Mosaic myths" of the Exodus and conquest of the promised land "can be safely discarded". I have read their books with fascination. They have enriched my reasoned faith in God and in the patchwork stories of generations of people who have sought to know and worship God and serve each other in love. I have used Bart Ehrman’s books on New Testament textual criticism in my sermons at Skyline UMC. So many of the “show-stoppers” Hitchens employs as proof that religion and the "god" of religion are no longer useful in a technologically advanced world are for me but another sign that the church is a curious incarnation of the divine and humanity at our best and worst.

Here’s an amazing news flash for anyone convinced by Hitchens’ anecdotal arguments: religion is neither the cause nor the cure for the human capacity of evil and of goodness. Neither is religion some monolithic reality, in its bewildering variety of expressions and practices throughout human history. It can claim no monopoly on morality or truth, or freedom from error. What it can demonstrate is a vast collection of human experience of love, truth, and striving after the ever-elusive goal of escaping the bounds of self in search of unity with a reality that encompasses and transcends the mystery of life.

A man of letters can surely appreciate the power of metaphor where the sum of observable facts cannot begin to do justice to the reality to which they only hint. Religion is itself a grand metaphor – a collaboration of the human tribe throughout time that persists not merely because of our desire for spiritual comfort but precisely because of our insatiable thirst for knowledge and inquiry. No human discipline or tradition holds a monopoly either on epistemology or pedagogy, including science, reason, art or any other human expression of understanding and contemplation. That Hitchens claims that his own pedagogy and experience qualify as the pinnacle of human understanding seems more than a little absurd – and dogmatic.

At times, he asks to be left alone. For the most part, Hitchens lives in an imaginary world where it would be possible to divorce human understanding from religious experience and understanding. He frequently resorts to name-calling (“stupid” and “boobie” are his favorite epitaphs for anyone who disagrees with his assessment of religious experience, which he repeatedly boils down to a fear of death). Which brings me to a final point.

Christopher Hitchens wears his personal religious experience like some chest of cub scout achievement awards, which he believes gives him the street cred to critique Christian Protestantism, in particular, from within. That his grandmother was Jewish does not, however, give him some sort of inside track on understanding religious experience, any more than does his abandonment of the Anglican expression of Christianity at the age of 9 (when his tutor, Mrs. Jean Watts, overstepped her understanding of theology on a nature walk – see pages 1-3). Basing his understanding of Christianity on his dogmatic (his claims to the contrary notwithstanding) re-reading of anecdotal history and a 9-year old experience of Anglican faith is like calling his baptism into the Greek Orthodox Church in order to marry his first wife a conversion.

That Hitchens' argument with religious excess is justified goes almost without saying. As a Christian ordained minister, I fight against misogyny, bigotry, racism, homophobia, and nationalism that masquerade as religiosity. Though I treasure, study, and regularly preach on passages of the Christian and Hebrew scriptures, I do not worship them by treating the translations or manuscripts as "infallible" – or stoop to such a transparent way of privileging my interpretation over any other. I apply the many understandings of textual criticism not to undermine but to understand this collection of human experience and wisdom about the search for and experience of God. As a pastor, I don’t threaten children or adults with hell or any other kind of punishment, though I have many times personally and corporately experienced the power of God’s forgiveness in Jesus the Christ.

I am not planning anyone’s demise in Hell, as Hitchins claims I am. I am a follower of the Way of Jesus the Christ because I have, since before and long after I was 9 years old, repeatedly experienced in myself and witnessed in others the transforming power of the new life an experience of Christ's presence makes possible. For me, and for the community of Christ-followers with whom I am privileged to serve, our experience of the religion of Christianity, not merely in our own time but for many generations preceding us, has been a calling to live in ways that recognize our lives and the lives of others as a gift from God. We experience this faith practice intellectually and spiritually. The most common expression of our faith is our daily response to God’s call to relinquish a subjective delusion and empathize (in thought and action) with the human community.

That we or other followers of Christ sometimes get this maddeningly and sinfully wrong does not stop us from daily striving to keep faith with God and with each other. That is the leap we make every day. For us, the doctrine of the atonement does not so much represent a gruesome get-out-of-jail-free card as it does an invitation to see our lives as a sacrifice of love to others – particularly to others in need. Every Sunday, we gather not “to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness” (p. 6), but to celebrate life itself as a magnificent gift we can choose to offer to others – and thereby to God.

Hitchens joins a long line of prophets, priests and believers (notably Isaiah and Jesus) in naming some of the sins of the church. His conclusion that these sins constitute sufficient rationale that “religion poisons everything” betrays his own myopic hubris and naiveté concerning the human capacity of evil and goodness. He is, after all, a reporter of human suffering, and claims some mythic objective stance from which to judge the compass of human striving for knowledge and understanding. He mistakes inquiry for wisdom, and does not practice or value the very real need for empathy in his writing.

Here are some quotes from other reviews of the book I found particularly interesting:

I write in the book [I Don't Believe in Atheists] that not believing in God is not dangerous. Not believing in sin is very dangerous. I think both the Christian right and the New Atheists in essence don't believe in their own sin, because they externalize evil. Evil is always something out there that can be eradicated. For the New Atheists, it's the irrational religious hordes. I mean, Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. Both Hitchens and Harris defend the use of torture. Of course, they're great supporters of preemptive war, and I don't think this is accidental that their political agendas coalesce completely with the Christian right.

…I think part of the problem is people who create a morality based on their own experience, which is what of course the New Atheists and the Christian fundamentalists have done.
…I think people who start dividing the world into us and them fail to have empathy.
…I'm not a cultural relativist. I don't think that if you live in Somalia, it's fine to mutilate little girls. There is nothing wrong with taking a moral stand, but when we take a moral stand and then use it to elevate ourselves to another moral plane above other human beings, then it becomes, in biblical terms, a form of self-worship. That's what the New Atheists have, and that's what the Christian fundamentalists have.

(Chris Hedges, in a March 13, 2008 interview with Charly Wilder on Salon.com)

Of this last objection, at least, Hitchens seems well aware, and he devotes an entire chapter to arguing strenuously that both the Nazis and the Communists were effectively religious and effectively theocratic, their secular experiments poisoned by religion. But with this move he begins sawing off the very branch he occupies, since if faith tends to infect even secular politics, then what separates Hitchens from his religious enemies?
The absence of ideology, he would doubtless claim, and the commitment to skepticism and humanism, "free thought" and above all Science. But Science is not a moral teacher, and Hitchens is nothing if not a moralist, passionately invested in such notions as universal human rights, the wastefulness of violence, the particular inviolability of children, and so forth. Where he finds these principles, I am uncertain, but then he seems to be perplexed as well, given how quickly his attempt to apply evolutionary theory to the thorny problem of abortion collapses into unfortunate-sounding appeals to "creative destruction" and "the pitilessness of nature."

This detour into Social Darwinism is mercifully brief, and for the most part Hitchens hews faithfully to Thomas Jefferson's famous attempt to carve all the miracles out of the Gospels and leave the ethical teaching intact. I do not mean to give offense in calling Hitchens a quasi-Christian moralist, but in his better moments that is what he plainly is—a true believer in the branch of the Enlightenment tradition that is epistemologically materialist but otherwise takes its cues from Christianity. The trouble is that this two-step contains a certain contradiction, which is why liberalism has tended to lurch in one direction or another ever since—toward a spineless relativism on the one hand or a scientistic utopianism on the other, with New Testament morality the first thing to be jettisoned in either case.

(Ross Douthat – The Claremont Institute for the study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, July 9, 2007)

What Hitchens really wants to toss into the pyre is religious coercion, whether it is parents scaring children into belief with the idea of Hell, American religious groups attempting to ban stem cell research or foist creationism into the classrooms, the Catholic Church bewailing that condom-use is worse than AIDS, or the Islamic fanatics who are trying to impose their more militant brand of religion on the rest of the world.
…Hitchens closes his book with a chapter called "The Need For a New Enlightenment," in which he asks us to eschew blind credulity; to resolve our ethical dilemmas not with outmoded religious texts but with the literature of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Schiller and Dostoyevsky; to pursue unfettered scientific inquiry; and to divorce sexual life from fear and tyranny. Well over a century ago, the German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called for a similar new enlightenment, yet the century that followed his was plagued by blind credulity which in turn hoisted dangerous wannabe demigods to the helms of several nations.
Today, when our personal freedoms are stronger than ever, we are seeing a resurgence of this dangerous credulity.

…Hitchens' subtitle, while catchy, is misleading. It is a statistical fact that the majority of religious people support the separation of church and state and practice their religion in an innocuously personal way. Religion also enriches people's lives and gives them hope in their darkest moments. When Hitchens says religion "poisons everything" or is a "threat to human survival," he is only half right. He certainly gives us egregious examples of religious people or religious teachings that would cause any sensible person to recoil. But one wonders how much of what Hitchens takes to task is religion as a motive or religion as an excuse.

— Jeremy Carlos Foster (jcarlosfoster@gmail.com)
Flak magazine

Book Concept (Late entry from Oct. 8, 2008)

2008-12-19T09:13:00.000-08:00

Here’s some more info about the concept for a book God and I sketched out today (October 8, 2008)

Title: “gods of Metal – Hearts of Stone: a pastor reads the clobber passages”

Chapter outline:

1) Strange bedfellows: how incest, child sacrifice, man-sex and bestiality are linked together in Leviticus 18 and 20 (hint: it’s not about sex)
a) Unpacking Leviticus 18 – incest laundry list followed by unlikely trio (preamble & postlude)
b) Leviticus 20 adds and deletions – embedding the trio and the new order of the list
c) Where else Molek appears: Jeremiah, Isaac, and Moses (Ex 22)
d) Where else bestiality appears: Dt 27 (another 10) and the tauromorph (Ex 32 and 1 Ki 12)
e) The needy of Ex 22 and Dt 27 and Lev 19
f) Lev 20 and the punishment that fits the crime (see also Dt 27 curses)
2) Stranger in a strange world: the girls that didn’t make the list (and why we don’t notice them)
a) Daughters unprotected – adultery and property rights – this is a different world
b) Rethinking the list – when is this happening? Vulnerability and sleeping with the enemy.
c) Dishonor in Lev 18 and 20 – who is harmed and who cares
d) Rape and its aftermath
e) Sodom and Dinah – and restoring Benjamin
3) Unlocking the adjective code: man-sex and other detestable abominations in the Hebrew Bible (looks are deceiving)
a) Review of the adjectives used in Lev 18/20
b) The consistent link between “detestable” and idolatry
c) Other (surprising) detestable things
d) Why detestable? (and why even asking that question makes all the difference)
4) (Not) idol chatter: how the Ten Commandments bless the beasts and the children (and why we should care)
a) Something here about child and animal sacrifice?
5) Through a glass darkly: Tamar and the abundance of bronze at the tabernacle gate (ask the dogs and whores whose it is)
6) Exchanging glory: how reading Romans 1 and Leviticus 18/20 makes sense of man-sex (don’t skip the intro!)
a) Draw on some other exchange passages
7) The Sin of Sodom: Ezekiel’s wheel and the dust on Jesus’ sandals (why reading trumps assumptions)

Id’ love to know what you think.

Peace,
Bo

Notes for Luke 7:36-50

2008-12-19T09:09:00.000-08:00

Key Verse: Luke 7:47 “I tell you, her sins—and they are many—have been forgiven, so she has shown me much love. But a person who is forgiven little shows only little love.”

Of all the Gospels, Luke’s account most troubles those of us who consider ourselves to be among the privileged/blessed caste of society. When young Mary sings her “Magnificat” to her cousin, Elizabeth, she celebrates that with the birth of Jesus (and God’s calling to her to give birth to the Messiah), God “has done mighty deeds with His arm; He has scattered those who were proud in the thoughts of their heart. He has brought down rulers from their thrones, And has exalted those who were humble. He has filled the hungry with good things; And sent away the rich empty-handed” (Luke 1:51-53). He has Jesus preaching not on a Mount, as in Matthew 5-8, but on a level plain—where Luke includes not only the blessings for the poor but a series of woes (curses) for the rich, well-fed and comfortable (Luke 6:17 and 24-26).

Luke surprises us. Where Matthew (5:32) allows men to divorce their wives in cases of sexual immorality, Luke (16:18) makes no allowance for such an exception. Only Luke includes women among the disciples of Jesus—and names them (8:1-3). Matthew repeats Mark’s story of Jesus’ invitation to the young man to “go, and sell your possessions and give to the poor” in order to inherit/obtain eternal life (Mark 10:21; Matthew 19:21). But in Luke, Jesus invites the disciples and everyone in his “little flock” to do this (Luke 12:33). And in Acts 2:44-45, Doctor Luke reports that the post-resurrection followers did not think that Jesus was merely speaking metaphorically!

Luke records more parables (28—compared to 23 in Matthew and 9 in Mark)—and more parables not found in the other Gospels (15!). These include challenging teachings of Jesus that stretch self-proclaimed insiders to comprehend a larger and more inclusive Kingdom of Heaven: the Good Samaritan (10:30-37), the Rich Fool (12:16-21), the Great Banquet (14:16-24), the Lost (prodigal) Son (15:11-32), the Rich Man and Lazarus (16:19-31), and the Pharisee and tax collector (18:10-14).

Luke alone begins Jesus’ ministry with his rejection in Nazareth, when he read from the scroll of Isaiah and proclaimed the ancient prophecy that “the Spirit of the Lord had anointed me to proclaim Good News to the poor... freedom for the prisoners (and oppressed), and recovery of sight for the blind” had been fulfilled as they heard him read it (Luke 4:14-21). And in chapter 24, the Gentile doctor Luke, who traveled with Paul on his missionary journey, concludes his Gospel with a post-resurrection story of how two unknown disciples encountered the risen Lord Jesus when they invited a stranger to join them for supper (Luke 24).

In 7:36-50, Luke profoundly edits the story of Jesus’ anointing found in Mark 14:3-9, Matthew 26:6-13, and John 12:1-8. He completely alters the location, time, and characters, retaining a bare skeleton (reclined, woman, alabaster vial of perfume, Jesus, denarii, and anointed), into which Luke inserts a story similar to a parable found in Matthew (18:23-24) but not Mark, the theme of which (in Matthew) is: “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”.

Luke’s version compares the reception Jesus receives from his Pharisee host and a “woman in the city who was a sinner” who crashes the party with perfume and tears (in a story that parallels the parable of the Pharisee and tax collector in Luke 18:10-14. Jesus reproves the Pharisee for the inhospitality that reveals the poverty of his love, and blesses the woman whose faith (and grateful response to God’s forgiveness) has saved her.

The Pharisee mocks Jesus as a poor prophet for refusing to treat the woman with contempt. Yet Jesus, who has in the previous passage commented on the character of the prophet John, proves by his interpretation of what their respective actions demonstrate about the state of their hearts that he is indeed a true prophet, worthy of our welcome (see Luke 4:24) with water, a kiss, and anointing oil.

Questions for Reflection
If you invited Jesus to your home for dinner, what kind of welcome would you give the Son of God? Who would you have the most difficult time accepting as a party crasher in desperate love with Jesus?

What sin in your life can you offer to God for forgiveness and healing? Can you imagine what your life would be like if you accepted God’s invitation to be free? What do you think Jesus would prophecy about you? About Skyline Church?

Luke loves to tell stories about dinner parties that bring together unlikely guests and nourish them all with blessings. When have you attended such a dinner? What happened? How did you encounter Jesus?

No Room in the Inn this Christmas

2008-12-19T04:37:00.000-08:00

This Advent Season at Skyline, I reflect on the ways that the debate over the morality of sexual/affectional orientation and gender identity are playing out in our country and in the church - and especially here at home at Skyline Church. While most people seem to agree that homosexual persons should be tolerated (I am among those who call the church to go beyond toleration to respect) and not condemned or judged - many Christians believe the Bible (and God) condemns homosexuality as a sin, and that people who disagree with them have traded scriptural morality and the faith in favor of popular, politically correct liberalism.

Newsweek magazine published a Dec. 6, 2008 cover story by Lisa Miller about homosexuality, the Bible, and gay marriage. The article provoked a predictable storm of responses representing a full spectrum of outrage and agreement - including many who recognized the need for thoughtful exploration and conversation. You'll find a great follow-up article with comments from a United Methodist and Baptist pastor representing both "sides" here.

Yet even in that debate, the underlying assumption is that we must choose between fidelity to the "clear" judgment of scripture (which - this logic assumes without question - condemns homosexuality) and soft-hearted, "anything goes" compassion toward and acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered persons and their "lifestyle" (which - it goes without question in this logic - is sinful and depraved). As a pastor and theologian who believes that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality, I find this presumption on the part of those who disagree with me a ploy to end the conversation before it even begins.

In his excellent book, What Christians Think About Homosexuality: Six Representative Viewpoints (Bibal Press, 1999), L.R. Holben surveys six (not just two) Christian points of view on Homosexuality, each of which draws on biblical and theological perceptions. While I certainly acknowledge that not all scriptural interpretations are equally faithful, to argue de facto that an interpretation contrary to the one you hold is invalid or immoral seems to me to be more self-serving than an honest pursuit of faithful understanding.

In our community conversation about how God calls us to live at Skyline, we seem to agree that homophobia is bad, and that we should treat homosexual persons "just like everyone else", regardless of what we believe scripture teaches about homosexuality. For some (including most who hold to a conservative understanding that the Bible condemns homosexuality), that agreement should render the rest of the debate moot. In fact, they express great fear about having the conversation at all. Shouldn't it be good enough that we are nice to one another?

Of course, some of these people disagree about what being nice means. Some argue that while they agree we should not bar the doors to LGBT folk, we should prohibit them from joining (until they repent and change or become celibate), or if we allow them to join, we should prohibit them from doing some things that heterosexual members can do (like lead, teach, or preach) because they are a particularly stubborn form of sinner. Here, of course, lies the problem (if you happen to be a homosexual follower of Christ, or a pastor who loves and respects them).

The common theme for everyone in this camp is not only an exclusive claim to faithful (moral) scriptural interpretation, but a refusal to acknowledge that LGBT persons are marginalized in the church at all. These persons of faith question the need for labeling anyone in our welcome statement because they perceive that singling out LGBT persons accords them a kind of unfair, privileged status in our church (or that it promotes "pro-gay theology" or the "homosexual agenda"). Some even argue that if we specifically welcome LGBT persons, then they (who are heterosexual) will not be welcome in our church.

As a pastor here, I believe that God is calling me to invite our church to consider another way to live together before a watching world. I'm not deluded enough to think that my understanding and interpretation of scripture would convince everyone at Skyline to agree with me that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality - but I do hold onto the hope that we could all acknowledge that the sparse scriptural foundation of a traditional Christian condemnation of homosexuality is not as clear as we have been taught to believe. If so, I pray that we could live out scripture as a community of Christ followers where there is no more Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, black or white, gay or straight - where we could simply all be Christians - one in Christ Jesus.

When Paul wrote the verse I've paraphrased in Galatians 3:28, he used specific labels to paint a picture of a more whole community of faith - Gentile, slave, female. He followed a scriptural tradition of naming the nameless and marginalized in order to ensure their place in God's Kingdom, just as Jesus did in the beatitudes on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:3-12, following in the tradition of the prophets (see, for instance, Zephaniah 3:12) and the lawgiver, Moses (see Exodus 23:9-11).

Jesus recognized the need to call attention to the fact that the community that called itself by God's name had become unfaithful in closing the doors to the kingdom to lepers, tax collectors, the poor, children, women, and of course, Samaritans. In one of his most pointed parables about God's judgment, Jesus used a series of labels to name the people with whom he particularly identifies in our world: the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned (Matthew 25:31-46).

And in our own time? What could be more relevant to our faith practice that the way we will live together as an Advent community - a community that acknowledges differences in our gender identity and sexual orientation, not as deviations from some perceived norm (like heterosexuality), but as yet another example of the extraordinary diversity of God's good creation. What could be more appropriate during the season when we remember the Holy family could find no welcome in the inn - than that we experience in our own embrace of a "stranger" a "welcome home" from our awesome and living God?

Pastor Bo Gordy-Stith
Third Week of Advent, 2008