Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Tell us something we don’t know! Pew poll discovers that Americans are ignorant about religion


In an article in today’s New York Times, “Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans,” Laurie Goodstein reports that Americans scored poorly in a test of basic knowledge about religion, according to a new Pew poll.  This will not be news to any clergy, although she writes, “Clergy members who are concerned that their congregants know little about the essentials of their own faith will no doubt be appalled by some of these findings:
  • Fifty-three percent of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation.
  • Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ.
  • Forty-three percent of Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the foremost rabbinical authorities and philosophers, was Jewish.”
Appalled, yes, surprised, no!  I can’t imagine any members of the clergy who aren’t well aware of the ignorance of most people about religion. One of the biggest perennial tasks of local religious leaders is teaching their congregants about the basic tenets of their own faith, not even to mention other's.

And preachers are well aware that they have to fill in a great deal of background for their listeners to have a context to understand even the most well-known biblical stories.

This lack of knowledge is not just a feature of the uneducated. I have known very intelligent professional people with Ivy League educations who were biblically and theologically illiterate.

The reasons for this are complex pieces of large cultural changes, but signal a pervasive secularism that shapes even religious people.

My own passion for what I call “remedial catechesis for adults” led to my writing A Course in Basic Christianity. You can learn what it is about and how to get it here.

Monday, September 27, 2010

“Huswifery” by Edward Taylor

Make me, O Lord, thy Spining Wheele compleate.
       Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee.
Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate
       And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee.
       My Conversation make to be thy Reele
       And reele the yarn thereon spun of thy Wheele.

Make me thy Loome then, knit therein this Twine:
       And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, winde quills:
Then weave the Web thyselfe. The yarn is fine.
       Thine Ordinances make my Fulling Mills.
       Then dy the same in Heavenly Colours Choice,
       All pinkt with Varnisht Flowers of Paradise.

Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will,
       Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory
My Words, and Actions, that their shine may fill
       My wayes with glory and thee glorify.
       Then mine apparell shall display before yee
       That I am Cloathd in Holy robes for glory.

(Edward Taylor, 1642-1729, was a New England Puritan pastor and poet.  He was the pastor and teacher at the Church in Westfield, Massachusetts and wrote poetry as part of his personal spiritual discipline, leaving instructions to his heirs that they were not for publication.  They were all but forgotten for two hundred years.  Thomas Johnson discovered a 400-page quarto of the poems in 1937 in the Yale Library, and published some of them in the New England Quarterly, which established Taylor as a singular American poet of his time.  This poem, “Huswifery,” is probably his best known.)

Friday, September 24, 2010

Atonement: P.T. Forsyth on the Finished Work of Christ

Among all the historic disagreements and discussions on the meaning of Jesus Christ's atoning death, a pivotal issue is whether the “work of Christ” is a finished work, or whether some level of human participation is necessary to complete it.  One of the theological sins of certain brands of evangelicalism is more of an emphasis on what we do (a conversion, a decision, being born again, etc.) than on what God has already done for us (and for all.)

I ran across this passage in P.T. Forsyth's Work of Christ in which he parses the issue quite clearly and cleverly, making no mistake that the “work” is finished, but also referencing the role of the Holy Spirit in the church.
“You are afraid of God,” you hear easy people say; “it is a great mistake to be afraid of God. There is nothing to be afraid of. God is love.” But there is everything in the love of God to be afraid of. Love is not holy without judgment. It is the love of holy God that is the consuming fire. It was not simply a case of changing our method, or thought, our prejudices, or the moral direction of our soul. It was not a case of giving us courage when we were cast down, showing us how groundless our depression was. It was not that. If that were all it would be a comparatively light matter.
If that were all, Paul could only have spoken about the reconciliation of single souls, not about reconciliation of the whole world as a unity. He could not have spoken about a finished reconciliation to which every age of the future was to look back as its glorious and fontal past. In the words of that verse which I am constantly pressing, “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.” Observe, first, “the world” is the unity which corresponds to the reconciled unity of “Himself”; and second, that He was not trying, not taking steps to provide means of reconciliation, not opening doors of reconciliation if we would only walk in at them, not labouring toward reconciliation, not (according to the unhappy phrase) waiting to be gracious, but “God was in Christ reconciling,” actually reconciling, finishing the work. It was not a tentative, preliminary affair (Romans xi. 15). 
Reconciliation was finished in Christ’s death. Paul did not preach a gradual reconciliation. He preached what the old divines used to call the finished work. He did not preach a gradual reconciliation which was to become the reconciliation of the world only piecemeal, as men were induced to accept it, or were affected by the gospel. He preached something done once for all–a reconciliation which is the base of every souls reconcilement, not an invitation only. What the Church has to do is to appropriate the thing that has been finally and universally done. We have to enter upon the reconciled position, on the new creation. Individual men have to enter upon that reconciled position, that new covenant, that new relation, which already, in virtue of Christ’s Cross, belonged to the race as a whole . . . The first thing reconciliation does is to change man’s corporate relation to God. Then when it is taken home individually it changes our present attitude. Christ, as it were, put us into the eternal Church; the Holy Spirit teaches us how to behave properly in the Church.  (P.T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ, p 86-87.)
I am struck by the last line.  Would that more people would learn how to behave properly in the Church! I always thought it was a behavioral issue, but apparently it is a theological one as well.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Clam chowder, clerihews, and Cardinal Newman: The best from my browsing this week

Here are some of the best of my recent browsings:

Scott Carson at An Examined Life laments the return of the right to intellectual darkness in his insightful post The Rightward Turn.

Pastor John Castricum shares the recipe for his award-winning clam chowder  at Reflections of a Reformed Pastor.

Halden Doerge over at Inhabitatio Dei gets a lively discussion going on the question: Is there a postliberal theological project?

For those word nerds among you who actually know what a clerihew is, Kim Fabricius has a funny post at Faith and Theology called Poetic Graffiti: clerihews on ten modern Christian poets.

The quick-changing world of information technology is highlighted in a post at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab about how the magazine Foreign Policy is e-publishing (through Amazon) a book about Afganhistan by war journalist Anna Badkhen, comprised of her daily dispatches.

A thoughtful piece appeared in the Christian Science Monitor on the Pope Benedict XVI’s beatification of John Henry Newman. They quote my friend Gabe Fackre, “The heart of ecumenism [or interfaith work] is when each tradition brings its own gifts to the other.” Newman, Fackre argues, was known for the idea that theological ideas have a “trajectory” in which “you don’t abandon the teachings but let them flower – the ordination of women might be an example. It is a very supple concept of doctrine that is a long way from Benedict, who seems to rigidify doctrine.”

Friday, September 17, 2010

When Blogs Die



You know the signs. First you notice that a favored blog on your blogroll hasn’t had a post in 5 months. That is often the end, but sometimes there is a preliminary stage, akin to Elizabeth Kubler Ross’ stage of denial. The blogger appears and posts an apology for slackness. “I’ve been . . .
  1. Sick
  2. New child
  3. Writing my dissertation
  4. Rereading the Church Dogmatics in German
  5. Working too hard
  6. Leveling my blood elf ret pally
  7. Moving
  8. Despairing of life itself
Do not be fooled by this desperate act of repentance or by the pledge to lead a new and upright blogging life. Chances are this blog is going to die and soon.

Our internet presence gives us the illusion of both transcendence and permanence, but it is an illusion. Both our blogs and our selves are finite and destined to die. I have already outlived one blog, where I posted for years. When the Webmaster of the site changed programs the archives disappeared, with all my posts. Many I had saved as a Word document, but some were written on the blog, and so lost forever. There is one I wrote when Bard Childs died about a gracious personal encounter I had with him that I wish I had. Oh well, sic transit gloria mundi, sigh.

Our blogs exist as fragile lines of HTML code. They can vanish like the morning dew. Yet, it is also possible they can outlive us. I was on Linked-In the other day, and they suggested people I might know and one of them was a dear friend of mine who died way too young two years ago.

Either way, both our blogs and we are going to die, so “teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12)


To replace some of the dead blogs I have added some new ones to my blogroll that I like:  Cathedral Bells,  Chrisendom,  and Intersections.  Enjoy them while they last.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Night Elf witnesses in Moonglade: WOW Evangelism


Some days I will bounce around the blogosphere, connecting to interesting posts I see on the Blogrolls of people on my Blogroll (and they say the internet is a time waster!)   I find that there are a lot of interesting blogs by young Christians.  This often makes me feel somewhat fogeyish, but it is also refreshing to get a glimpse into their world and the situations and issues with which they are grappling.

One of the more intriguing posts I have run across recently was by a young Christian on the ominous sounding site Reflections of a Broken Man. He describes how he was playing the popular MMORPG game World of Warcraft and struck up a (typed) conversation with another player.

In the midst of this conversation it comes out that she is having some life scuffles, and he admits he is a Christian. She seems interested and the next thing he knows is he’s witnessing to his Christian faith.

So much of what passes for Evangelism these days is pretty ham-handed and insensitive (“taking prisoners for Christ”), but I was touched by the genuineness and grace of this encounter, as well as the incongruity of it taking place in Moonglade by some guy behind a dopey Night Elf toon (at least that is what it looked like in the picture (above) he posted.)

For the whole post go here.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Your Opinions Stink! A quick guide to the New York Times Op-Ed Pages


I am a long-time reader of the New York Times, and of its Opinion Pages, and lately I’ve been noticing that I know pretty much what each of the contributors is going to say about any particular subject even before I read their pieces.

To get to this point I have had to spend thousands of hours of my time and untold amounts of my money. So as a public service to the rest of you I offer this template that you can use to know what each one will say before they say it:


David Brooks: We rely too much on government and not enough on ourselves because our values stink.

Paul Krugman: If you would listen to me the economy wouldn’t stink.

Tom Friedman: The rest of the world is increasingly beating us at our own game because, although we didn’t used to stink, now we do.

Nicholas Kristof: There are a lot of stinking things going on in the world, and we stink for not doing enough to stop them.

Frank Rich: Republicans are evil, and those who don’t oppose them vigorously enough stink.

Maureen Dowd: Everybody stinks, and I get paid to judge them for it! Cool!

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Is clergy burnout a symptom of a crisis of identity and vocation?


One of the hottest topics in the church right now is clergy burnout. Everyone is in agreement that it is a problem, but when it comes to the solution, not so much. There are a lot of wise, commonsense admonishments about self-care and spiritual disciplines. They should be heeded, but they tend to address the symptoms without asking why burnout is so widespread. And I have yet to see much in the way of an insightful theological analysis.

While it is true that a person in any profession can experience burnout,  I am convinced that there are unique features to the current epidemic of clergy burnout.   And I have been ruminating lately whether clergy burnout is so widespread not merely because of the stresses and demands of the job, which have to some extent always accompanied ministerial vocations, but because of an identity crisis in the mainline church, and a vocational crisis among its ministers.

As I have written elsewhere, the evaluative criteria borrowed from the modern commercial sector, chiefly productivity and efficiency, are inadequate instruments for measuring the success of ministry. In the first place, they do their analysis without factoring in God. In this regard, as in so much of the modern church, they are functionally atheistic, no matter how much God-talk is sprinkled into the discourse. But ministry is largely about God, more precisely, how God uses frail and flawed humans as bearers of his Word.

To understand ministerial vocation this way requires a dialectical approach that sees at the same time the grandeur and misery of ministry, both the possibility and impossibility of the minister's role and tasks.

I turn to Karl Barth for a model of how this might be done, for he does this with his assessment of religion. I recently reread sections of Barth’s Commentary on Romans, and I was struck (again) at how brilliant Barth’s take on religion is. To Barth, like Calvin before him, humans are great makers of idols, and one of our favorite idols to make is religion. All religion is to some extent idolatrous, the Christian religion not excepted, but for Barth, Christian religion, though idolatrous, is also where humanity hears about God, and so is indispensable in the divine economy. God uses what is foolish to shame the wise. He calls it the impossible possibility.

It seems to me, and I speak from 30 plus years in the pastoral ministry, that ministry is best understood employing a similar kind of dialectic. The minister, no matter how talented, is a flawed human being, but God can use him or her to accomplish marvelous things, not least of which is as a bearer of the Word of God, Jesus Christ. Here is another “impossible possibility.”

But sadly, that understanding, and the honesty and humility it requires, finds little purchase in today’s church. For example, I have always been struck by how brazenly worldly our “search and call process” is, and how it so undermines our best theology about the church and its ministry.

To begin with, we have this instrument (now available on-line) called “the Minister’s Professional Profile.” This literary genre (a rare combination of fact and fiction) is used to display a breathtaking panorama of gifts and graces on the part of the minister. One is driven nearly to the point of prevarication in displaying one’s wares to a prospective “employer.” “Who is this grand creature?” one is tempted to ask upon reading the completed product.

Although nothing on the profile is untrue, it is not the whole truth. What is missing is an accurate assessment of one’s feet of clay, and thereby a betrayal of the biblical axiom that “we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God, and not to us.” (2 Corinthians 4: 7)

It is hard, of course, to imagine a process that could accurately do this, and God uses the present flawed one to match up foolish and broken ministers with foolish and broken congregations (they don’t tell the whole truth either), where graceful and gracious happenings can and do occur. That is the point. If this grand creature, the minister, could make them happen, they wouldn’t be grace, but expected, even promised.

And I think one of the outcomes of the kind of mutual deception (and self-deception) that is happening between ministers and congregations is genuine disappointment when the claims and promises explicit or implicit in this circle of self-promotion turn out not to be quite true. The result is often graceless mutual recriminations. Sometimes one is fired, or, more often, demoralized into moving on. It is epidemic, and it is not good for the church or its ministers.

So I am convinced that much of what passes for burnout is merely the symptoms of an untenable arrangement.  Clergy have both sold and been sold a bill of goods that they can neither deliver to the church nor receive delivery from the church. And since the mainline churches (at least in America) are an institution experiencing a half-century of precipitous institutional decline the opportunities for failure and disappointment are almost limitless.

The measures of success the world values will most likely elude the minister. Indeed, a “successful minister” is an anomaly in a faith with a cross at its center.  It takes a hearty sense of Christian vocation to handle this. For many the very nature of the task will get you quickly to burnout. And, as the models for ministry has become increasingly professionalized, more and more ministers will find themselves wondering what they have got themselves into.

The prescriptions for burnout typically ignore this fundamental disconnect between Christian vocation and cultural expectation. They only address the symptoms.

And how do they address the symptoms? In reading the literature about clergy burnout I am struck that the prevailing prescriptive model is “wellness,” a useful term borrowed from the health field. Now I am married to a public health nurse and have a great respect for the wisdom and applicability of the idea of wellness. I’m all for wellness.

And I think the argument is sound that seeking wellness, physically and mentally, is good Christian stewardship.

BUT, wellness isn’t a category that can carry all the Christian freight. If wellness is the new secularized salvation, it suffers from its inability to address fundamental human predicaments such as sin, death and the persistence of evil. A century ago P. T. Forsyth criticized the church of his day for having a religion of amelioration, and it seems to me that wellness is the personalized version of that. Our mainline churches continue in a religion of amelioration, they want to make things better (more peaceful and just and green), and I am all for that, too. But both social amelioration and personal wellness are implicates of the Gospel, and not foundations. That is, they are fruits and not roots.

The real root is God’s love for us and for all creation, acted out in the grand Christian narrative from garden to New Jerusalem, with its very center and core in the atoning cross of Jesus Christ “for us and for all men.” Where that is not preached and heard the fruits will be sparse.

So clergy burnout seems to me to be largely about the identity crisis of the mainline church, and the vocational crisis of its ministers. And a realistic assessment of the situation from a worldly point of view offers little to be hopeful about.

But those who believe in the God who raised Jesus from the dead wait eagerly for new possibilities yet unimagined.



For more of my ruminations on the stresses of pastoral ministry see these posts: 

Saturday, September 11, 2010

“God is our Refuge and our Strength”: My Post 9/11/01 Sermon


(I preached this sermon on the Sunday after the 9/11 attacks.  In it I said: “Let us not dignify this event with the term ‘war.’  These terrorists are not soldiers, but criminals and murderers and should be dealt with as such by the constitutional processes of sovereign states and international law.  What we need here is not revenge, but justice.”  I wonder what the world would look like today if our leaders had not thought of it as a war?)

God is our Refuge and our Strength

This is the third time I have been called upon to speak this week, to try to put into words what we are thinking and feeling in response to the extraordinary events of last Tuesday. We had an ecumenical service Tuesday evening at First Baptist Church sponsored by the Pittsfield Area Council of Churches, and on Friday we had a service of prayer and mourning at noon here at First Church in response to President Bush's declaration of that day as a national day of remembrance.  I will say today what I have said on both those occasions, that it is good you are here!  It is good to be together with our neighbors and fellow citizens at a time like this, and it is good to be quite intentionally in the presence of God in public worship.

To be together in community and before God is a healthy response.  Abraham Lincoln once spoke of the “better angels of our nature.”  I think being together before God is responding to the better angels of our nature, and it is my fervent prayer that we Americans will continue to respond to what is best in us, as opposed to what is worst.

We have seen extraordinary acts of courage and heroism in these days.  But we have also seen acts of cowardice and mean–spiritedness. Since Tuesday New York City firefighters and police have responded to over ninety false alarms and bomb scares a day in contrast to the typical seven.  Throughout our country mosques have been stoned and vandalized.  Our Arab–American neighbors fear for their security and safety.

It is often true in history that evil begets evil, and I worry about that now.  Hate can spawn more hate.  A time such as this is a critical time for us all, individually and as a nation.  It is, among other things, a holy time, in that it is a time when we can be in touch with what is deepest and most abiding in our lives.  We are at a tipping point that can determine both the path and the direction we will go.  Billy Graham at the service on Friday at the National Cathedral said that we can either implode as a nation our show strength.  I think that is the choice.  And I trust as people of faith we will have the resources that can help us choose the good and not the evil, and to be on the side of life and not death.

We have looked evil in the face this week.  We have seen the slaughter of innocents in the thousands.  As Mayor Guiliani said on Tuesday night, when the death toll is finally counted “it will be more than we can bear.”   It is hard to take in the damage that this act of terrorism has caused, and hard as well, to accept the impetus behind it.  It is hard to accept that there are people out there who hate us and want to kill us.

I don't know about you, but I found it difficult to get much done this week.  I found myself in a daze.  I kept returning again and again to the TV.  I was both repulsed and transfixed by the unfolding events.  I couldn't take my eyes off it.  How many times have we seen the pictures of that second plane crashing into the World Trade Center?  There have been times when I find myself suddenly choked up, or silently weeping.  Wednesday night on TV I saw the changing of the guard a Buckingham Palace, and the British military band was playing the Star Spangled Banner.  I completely lost it.

So before we do much else, we all have to somehow take in this act of terror, and acknowledge it and the feelings that go with it.  It will require some time, but unless we do take time to absorb the shock of it, we will not be able to do what we are called to do next, whatever that is.

Nancy Taylor, our new Conference Minister and President of the Massachusetts Conference, wrote to all the clergy on Tuesday.  Among her reassuring words were these: “I encourage you to pause in the face of the enormity of what our country and our world is just now trying to comprehend.  Take time to talk to each other about your feelings; to share how you will address the events of this day with your children; and to allow yourself to cry, pray, and cling to each other and to the God whose heart was the first to break when the first airplane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City . . . and whose heart is breaking still.”

Take time, she says, and she is wise in saying this.  I want to tell you how much her new ministry has meant to me this week.  I have never met her, but within hours of the first crash, I had from her a thoughtful pastoral letter, with scripture and prayer.  She has been a parish minister and brings those good pastoral instincts to her new position.  So I share with you what she shared with me, the admonition to take the time to really face what has happened, and to do it in the context of faith, with scripture and prayer as resources.  The scripture Nancy Taylor sent me was the 46th Psalm, which I had already been reading.  It is one of my favorites.

“God is our refuge and strength,” it begins, and then it goes on to say, that because God is our refuge and our strength, “we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea.”    Well, the earth has changed, the strong towers have fallen, the nations are in an uproar . . . but WE WILL NOT FEAR!

How can we say that?  Only faith can say, “We will not fear.”  This is not wooly–headed optimism, or denial of harsh reality, but faith.  The reality is that the world is a dangerous place, bad things not only do but have happened to innocent people, the ordinary rhythms of life have been shattered by an extraordinary act of evil, and it is not over.  So fear is the sane, natural and honest response to such earth–shattering and life–changing events, and we have known fear, and we have felt fear, felt it in our gut along with anger, sadness, and pain.

So how can faith say, “we will not fear?”  We can only say “we will not fear,” if we can say “God is our refuge and our strength”  Therefore! We will not fear.  The setting of Psalm 46 is a world turned upside down:

“Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble with its tumult.”

This is not just trouble, this is TROUBLE with a capital T.  The language of the psalm is the language of cosmic upheaval. The waters are the waters of the firmament above and beneath the earth; they are the primordial waters, the symbol of chaos, the tohu wabohu of nothingness.  And the mountains that shake into the heart of the sea are not just any mountains, but the thresholds and foundations that hold up the world.  In the psalm's vision the waters above and the waters below, the waters that God pushed back on the third day of creation, threaten to flood back in.  The roaring and foaming waters are more than a storm, they are chaos, a sign of all that threatens God's order.

Many Biblical scholars think Psalm 46 may have been written when the Assyrian King Sennacherib came to conquer Jerusalem in 701, but it hardly matters what the original catastrophe was, the psalm speaks to every catastrophe which is earth-shattering and fear–inducing.  The mythologized cosmic TROUBLE  of the Psalm is of a kind with all the trouble we see, whether it is Sennacherib at your gates with his whole army or terrorists flying jumbo jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Trouble is often where faith is born. We find faith in a God who is our refuge and strength, because only in trouble do we need a God who is our refuge and strength. Frequently it is only when we have our confidence knocked out from under us, that we are we ready for the Word of God.

And so it is that the therefore that comes before “we will not fear” refers to God our refuge and strength.  Our lack of fear is conditional; it is trust in God alone, rather than some easy calm of our own devising.  It is not the false security of walls or weapons.  No missile shield defense system can give us this kind of confidence.

This confidence in God is captured in Martin Luther's hymn based on Psalm 46: “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” which was then put into English by Thomas Carlyle as “A safe stronghold our God is still” and, better known in America, as “A Mighty Fortress is our God” by Frederick Hedge.  In any version of the hymn, God the fortress stands in contrast to all strongholds built with human hands.  Listen to this: “And though this world with devils filled, should threaten to undo us.  We will not fear, for God has willed His truth to triumph through us.  The prince of darkness grim, We tremble not for him, His rage we can endure, For lo! his doom is sure, One little word shall fell him.”

We see in Psalm 46 another vivid contrast, that between the roaring, tumultuous waters of chaos and the “river whose streams make glad the city of God.”  Where before God restrains the water, here God sends the water for a life–giving purpose.  God tames the waters of chaos and makes them bring forth life and peace.

What is the alternative vision to chaos, disruption and desolation?  Listen with me: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High.  God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved.”  How like John the Divine's vision of the river of life describes it as flowing from the throne of God  and the Lamb.  “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city.” (Revelation  22:1, 2a)

Nancy Taylor writes, “It seems to me that we Christians, above all other people, are equipped to face the evil and the terror that have befallen us, because we know that there is another world beyond this world, where all weeping and pain shall cease, where evil does not reign, and where we will find ourselves in the warm embrace of our God.”

But God does not ignore evil.  At the center of our faith is the symbol of the cross.   How significant that our most important Christian symbol is not the scales of justice, nor the tablets of the law, but the cross on which we human beings crucified the Lord of Glory.  And it is at the foot of the cross that we can best understand this evil act, for the cross addresses human beings not at our best but at our worst.  There, at the cross human evil collided with divine love.  There, Jesus stretched out his arms and died, with forgiveness on his lips, that the whole world might come into his loving embrace.

And there, at the cross of Christ, is the power that created and sustains the universe.  A power more powerful than evil and hate.   Evil and hate killed Jesus, but he didn't stay dead!  Osama bin Laden is a formidable adversary, a rich powerful man bent on evil, but as Luther said of the evil one, “we tremble not for him,” nor for any other terrorist.

Let us be clear about what happened on Tuesday.  Terrorists committed mass murder on innocent civilians.  There is a lot of talk about war, and it feels like war, and the pictures from the devastation look like war, and it may take the resolve of war to address terrorism. But if this is a war it is only a war in the metaphorical sense of say, the war on poverty or the war on drugs.  Let us not dignify this event with the term “war.”  These terrorists are not soldiers, but criminals and murderers and should be dealt with as such by the constitutional processes of sovereign states and international law.  What we need here is not revenge, but justice.

Their intention was to create terror, to destroy our way of life.  And their act of evil can only threaten our way of life, our free institutions, our capacity to travel and meet, and go about our business without fear, if we let them!  If we let them make us hate and fear they win.  But we will not let them.  Because “God is in the midst of the city, it shall not be moved.”  God is with the innocent victims in New York and Washington, God is with the relief workers, and God is with us, right here, right now, with you and me in our broken-heartedness, as we face a world forever changed.  But we can face it, and we will face it, with character and courage and faith, for God is in the midst of us, our refuge and strength; therefore we will not fear.”   Amen.

A sermon preached at the First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on September 16, 2001.  This sermon was also published in “He Comes, the Broken Heart to Bind:” Reflections on September 11, 2001. Edited by Frederick R. Trost, Confessing Christ. 2001.

Friday, September 10, 2010

A Fire Too Far: Ruminations on New Media and Christian Faith


In the days before the Internet and the 24/7 new cycle the announcement by an obscure Florida pastor that his church would be burning copies of the Koran might have attracted a column inch in the back pages of The Gainesville Daily Register, or get picked up as a nutty bit of ephemera by Paul Harvey.

No longer. Terry Jones (wait, wasn’t he with the Pythons?) has had his 15 days of celebrity, outraged pretty much everybody, and been addressed by the President of the United States, among other dignitaries.

Jones has also managed to convince inflammatory Republicans that there actually can be a fire too far. That anybody or anything could even momentarily unite the gladiators on both sides of the culture wars is worthy of note.

I will spare you the obvious pieties about this sad affair. For a thoughtful post on it I refer you to Debra Dean Murphy (who I just discovered and have added to my blogroll) .

What particularly interests me is how new technologies reshape the way Christian faith is perceived. For example, in eighteenth century New England, itinerant evangelists like George Whitefield and Gilbert Tenant changed the face of Puritanism by staging huge public revivals. This shifted the authority away from the settled pastors in local communities to the popular evangelists. Harry Stout has called Whitefield the first “rock star.” Better roads allowed people to travel greater distances, and printing and high literacy facilitated communications about the revivals.

Likewise, the locus for Christian authority in America away from the mainline to conservative evangelicals in the Twentieth century is still a story that remains to be written, but once again it was about the democratization (and vulgarization) of Christianity away from elites, and it was facilitated (once again) by new technologies. For example, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell used television to collect large audiences to promote their particular brand of conservative faith.

So now we are watching in real time the power of social networking (Jones got the kerfuffle started on Facebook) and other media to quickly gather eyeballs if not hearts and minds.

I would like to dismiss “events” such as Jones’ provocation as mere ephemera (just as I mistakenly did with the rise of the Christian right for too many years) but when people’s lives become at stake and the President of the United States feels the need to engage the subject it becomes hard to dismiss.

The rise of instant internet communication has been widely praised for its democratizing tendencies (such as last year’s Iranian “Twitter revolution”), but I wonder if we are now seeing clearly the darker side of instant communication?

Does the quickness and brevity of the new media inevitably shape the message? (see Halden Doerge’s insightful post on patience and blogging. He is speaking only about blogging, but many of the same issues obtain).

I argue that it is the humans who use the communications media who shoulder the moral responsibility for the messages they put out. It is too simplistic to blame the media (although there is a long history of blaming any new media for the decline of civilization, religion, civility, etc.)  The medium is not the message (or not the whole message, at least.)

Christians believe we live in a fallen world, and that everything in creation can be used for ill as well as for good. Should the new media be any exception?

So how should we use the new media?  Perhaps that is a subject that could benefit from some discussion in congregations and Sunday Schools. New media arrive with a false sheen of authority.  Remember when something had authority just because it was “seen on TV?” And remember when early e-mail users forwarded every stupid hoax and rumor as if it were true just because someone had sent it to them? In time the wise learn how to use and not use these tools.

Some choose to forgo the new technologies altogether, and that is a choice one is free to make, but I personally find enough of value in them to want to use them wisely.

Which leads me to ponder whether one of the spiritual disciplines for Christians (and others) in our time might be a healthy skepticism about any information we take in from any source. And ancient habits of silence, meditation, and thoughtful reflection might help us decide what is worthy of our precious God-given time and attention.