Retired Pastor Ruminates

“Retired Pastor Ruminates” is moving and changing its name

2011-06-28T15:27:00.002-04:00

I'm not moving, but my blog is, and I'm giving it a makeover.

First of all, I am changing the name. Several friends and colleagues have lately challenged me on whether there actually is such a thing as a retired pastor, and if there is, am I one of them?

I have give this some thought, and have decided that they are right. Although I no longer serve a congregation I still have a ministry to offer the church in my thinking and writing and conversations. I am not a retired pastor. It has taken nearly seven years for me to come to this conclusion, but it feels like the correct one.

I must admit I have some nostalgia for Retired Pastor Ruminates, and especially for its loyal followers, who Pastor Karl Duetzmann once nicknamed “Rumination Nation.” I hope you will all come over to the new site.

So the new name is tentatively When I Survey . . . ruminations, reviews, recipes and rants. I'll live with the new name for awhile and see how it works out.

The second change is the format. Everything that was on RPR will be on the new site, but I think you will find it has a cleaner look and things will be easier to find. I am changing from Blogger to WordPress. My friend Jason Goroncy from New Zealand helped me move everything over last week when he was visiting.

So the changes are mostly superficial. Whatever I call the blog I will still be ruminating on a variety of topics near and dear to my heart. And I plan to put all my recipes up on the new site from now on (and you can still find them all in one place at Rick's Recipes).

As always this will be free site with no ads. So come on over and check out When I Survey . . .

Ruminations on hermeneutics for adult Christian education

2011-05-26T11:57:00.000-04:00

When I wrote my A Course in Basic Christianity (which I thought of as remedial catechesis for adults) in 1994 I outlined a set of criteria and assumptions behind my method. The final assumption dealt with hermeneutics. In reading it now I see how much I was influenced by Karl Barth, Hans Frei and Brevard Childs. It is my hope that these thoughts will be useful to pastors and teachers leading adult education. Here is an excerpt:

“The communal language of the church is irreducible and must be taken on its own terms. The whole project has been guided by a set of hermeneutical assumptions that inform the way Scripture in particular and theological language in general are treated. In some respects these assumptions run counter to the assumptions that have guided the modern academic study of Scripture and theology.

Modern approaches to the Bible have been dominated by the historical–critical method. These were the methods in which I was trained in college and seminary and they continue to yield genuine insights into the truth of the texts. Nevertheless, I came early in my ministry to regard them as “good servants but bad masters” and I have gravitated toward a hermeneutic that takes the finished text much more seriously.

In a comparable way modern theologians have often accepted the ideologically driven “hermeneutics of suspicion” as the basis for their approach to Christian language. Again, I have been well–exposed to these approaches and take with appreciation their genuine insights into both the human situation and the history of the formation of sacred texts. Nevertheless, I find them all seriously flawed as the basis for either constructive theology or hermeneutics and have looked elsewhere for the proper interpretive tools to do my work.

My decades of experience teaching adults in the mainline church have taught me that they are eager to get various interpretive tools in hand to keep the texts as objects of scrutiny. They want background in history, archaeology, or other sciences to tell them “what the text meant.” These tools can be helpful and necessary, but can also get between the interpreter and the text. To know that the Red Sea in Exodus “is really” the Sea of Reeds which sometimes dries up before an East wind, or that “the eye of a needle” may refer to an ancient narrow gate in Jerusalem is to miss the point of the biblical narrative. Likewise, various points of view from psychology, political theory, the experience of ethnic groups and women, and the like, have all been put forth as necessary preconditions to understanding texts and Christian discourse.

This course has tried as much as possible to reject such claims to some independent viewpoint. These may enter the conversation but cannot preempt the meaning of Christian language or rule its plain or literal sense out of bounds by some other authority.

I have come to believe that the church's communal language in creed, doctrine and liturgy, and especially Scripture, from which the others are derived, is irreducible and must be taken on its own terms. Frei was describing Karl Barth's position when he said:

There can be no systematic ‘pre–understanding,’ no single, specific, consistently used conceptual scheme, no independent or semi–independent anthropology, hermeneutic, ontology or whatever, in terms of which Christian language and Christian claims must be cast to be meaningful (Hans Frei, Types of Theology, 1992, p 156).

Which is to say that in the end it is the texts that judge us rather than the other way around. I am convinced that A Course in Basic Christianity can be used profitably by people with a variety of backgrounds, theologies, and points of view. All it asks is that the subject matter of Christian faith be taken seriously.”

(From the Teacher's Guide, A Course in Basic Christianity)

(Photos, from top: Karl Barth, Brevard Childs, Hans Frei)

Reflections on The New Century Hymnal

2011-05-23T16:19:00.003-04:00

Reflections on The New Century Hymnal

Richard L. Floyd

(Note: In 1995 the United Church of Christ had just published The New Century Hymnal, which was the first denominational hymnal to take a radical approach to the issue of “inclusive language.” The hymnal was from the first very controversial, and objections to it were raised on both poetic and theological grounds.

In Eastertide of 1996 Confessing Christ sponsored a symposium at the Congregational Church in Boylston, Massachusetts to raise some of the theological issues raised by the language changes in the hymnal. Members of the Hymnal Committee were invited to come and speak, as were people from Confessing Christ.

I was on a panel responding to some of the speakers. I had prepared some remarks, but they have never appeared in print, and I just found them in a computer file while cleaning out an old computer. It is an old battle now, but at the time it was pretty contentious and it was interesting for me now to see what I had to say at the time.)

I’d like to thank Herb Davis and Confessing Christ for inviting me to give some remarks today about my response to The New Century Hymnal. My friend Ted Trost, who is a historian at Harvard, has reminded me that the German Reformed Church (one of our UCC predecessor bodies) fought bitterly over the language of the liturgy for over a generation and somehow stayed together. Some of you have indicated that you think the UCC is being split over The New Century Hymnal, but I hope that it isn't so. I would hope the United Church of Christ can have this extended conversation about the language appropriate for the church to express it faith without ad hominen attacks, “telling the truth in love” for the up-building of the church.

We all know that this subject can evoke strong feelings, and that many in our time have decided certain practices are tests of faithfulness. We need to have this conversation without “unchurching” each other. I am sorry that my friend and former colleague Ansley Throckmorton feels that she was called a heretic earlier today. I didn't hear Dr. (Richard) Christensen call anyone a heretic.

What I did hear him say is that that certain ways of talking about the faith have been judged by the church over the centuries to be false or inadequate to express the truth of the Christian faith. This is a descriptive and critical task without which no church can long survive and still be in continuity with the one, catholic and apostolic church.

To use but one example that Dr. Christianson mentioned: to substitute “God” for “Father” in the baptismal formula or in a hymn, as The New Century Hymnal sometimes does, is to express a subordination of the other two persons of the Trinity, for if the first person is God, it would follow that the second and third persons are not God. It is texts we ought to be scrutinizing, not people. And it is heresies that ought to concern us, not heretics (although to even imagine a conversation about what constitutes heresy in the UCC is to invite a giggle.)

I need to say at the outset that there is much to like about The New Century Hymnal. It contains over 600 hymns, a complete Psalter and both a scripture index and an index keyed to the Revised Common Lectionary. The editors have found lots of fine new hymns and commissioned others. They have returned many old favorites dropped from previous hymnals for being pietistic or otherwise theologically or musically deficient, such as the “Old Rugged Cross,” “In the Garden” and “Amazing Grace.” They have cleaned up the “thees” and “thous” in old hymns and made the language about people gender-inclusive, removing phrases like “brotherhood of man” and “sons of God.” All this needed doing and if that is all the hymnal committee and editorial panel had done I think the NCH would have been well received and widely used.

But the committee went very much farther in their agenda to remove words they deemed “offensive” and it is the way that they revised the hymn texts that have made this hymnal so controversial. The language of The New Century Hymnal is, as promised, “new.” In the new hymns this can be refreshing, but with well-known favorites, the ones the faithful have in their memory banks, it can be jarring.

Masculine images for God have been nearly eliminated, as have most personal pronouns for God and Jesus. The word “Father,” considered patriarchal, is out. “Lord,” considered sexist and classist is out, except where it was returned to refer to Jesus (as demanded by a spontaneous floor vote at General Synod.) Hierarchical images are greatly reduced as are spatial metaphors for transcendence. Images that might be offensive to some people of color or people with disabilities have been eliminated so that references to darkness are out, such as “Dark and cheerless is the morn unaccompanied by Thee” from Isaac Watts’ “Christ whose Glory Fills the Skies” (a hymn that sadly didn't make the cut for this reason, I would guess.)

The creators of this hymnal hoped that, in Chairman's James Crawford’s words, “the church will discover a language that stretches the dimensions of justice and helps reveal the unfathomable depths of the God of the biblical faith.” (Introduction to NCH) Fair enough, but how has this been done?

When I think of the debate surrounding the hymnal I am reminded of the Prego Spaghetti Sauce commercial. Do you remember it? When the Italian-American brother comes into the kitchen and asks his brother what he is cooking? “I’m cooking spaghetti sauce.” “Does it have ripe tomatoes like mama’s?” “It's in there!” To each question about ingredients the brother answers, “It’s in there.”

And The New Century Hymnal is like that. High Christology? It’s in there. The pre-existence of Christ? It’s in there. The Trinity? It’s in there.

So the problem is not the exclusion of the main features of our tradition. No, the problem is that to avoid words deemed offensive the TNCH has put them into a kind of code, and the coded language will confuse and mystify the faithful and prove inadequate to nurture new generations of Christians into the way the church speaks about the things of our faith.

I am convinced that in many cases the language of TNCH does not adequately express biblical faith, and I fear that a congregation who uses the TNCH as the sole source of its hymnody for a generation is prone to suffer a theological deficiency, a condition not unknown to our churches already, and which is, in some cases, a terminal condition. This is a terrible disappointment for those of us who have been working hard in local congregations to raise the bar of biblical and theological literacy.

I have several specific major objections to what TNCH has done theologically to hymn texts:
First of all, the decision to eliminate “Lord” for both the first and the second persons of the Trinity has dire consequences. “Lord” is the typical way of referring to the God of Israel in the Old Testament, and it was the conviction by the early church that they could call Jesus “Lord” as well that led to their earliest confession of faith: “Jesus is Lord” (Romans 10:9; 1 Corinthians 12:30).

The New Century Hymnal eliminates Lord in several ways. It simply replaces it with “God” in some cases, such as in #479, a metrical paraphrase of Psalm 23 from the Scottish Psalter sung to Brother James' Air. It is a good hymn (I have chosen it for tomorrow, which is Good Shepherd Sunday.) But to sing “the Lord is my shepherd” is better in several ways than “God is my shepherd.” It is true to the 23rd Psalm and it retains the nice Trinitarian ambiguity about whether we refer to the first or the second person (or for that matter the third, “the Lord and giver of life!”) Christians have always heard and sung this psalm Christologically, but that is harder now that we have God as our shepherd, and if the pattern is repeated, as it is in TNCH, you invite a non-Trinitarian and non-Christological perception of deity, leading to a Unitarianism of the first person, which is, I am afraid a tendency of this hymnal, as it is in many of our churches.

My second objection to the method of the TNCH is what I call “the violation of authorial intent.” To enlarge the palette of words and phrases that refer to God is a laudable aim. Let a thousand hymn writers flourish! But TNCH has a heavy hand with old texts, bowdlerizing the poetry that authors created. It pains me to see, for example, the poems of Isaac Watts and the prayers of PT Forsyth (not to mention the Nicene Creed) given new renderings that say things the authors never said, or worse, sometimes the exact opposite of what they originally said.

My final objection is the elimination of personal pronouns from The New Century Hymnal. Not only is the repetitive use of “God” to avoid “him” awkward and distracting in hymns and liturgies, but the theological implications of a depersonalized deity run deep. How long will it take for a new generation of churchgoers, hearing and saying liturgies and singing hymns that never use a personal pronoun to begin conceiving of God as something like “The Force” in Star Wars?

I know a great deal of time and money went into the production of this hymnal, and many of the people involved are long-time friends and colleagues of mine. I question neither their sincerity nor their faithfulness. But I do believe that the language guidelines they employed, while right-minded, were wrong-headed. Political ideology is the enemy of art (and in this case, liturgy.)

Given the freedom our polity affords local congregations I am guessing that many of them will choose not to buy The New Century Hymnal, and I would advise them not to. But it saddens me to have to say that, since a good opportunity for our denomination to have a hymnal that binds us together has been wasted.

Ruminations about the End of the World on May 21: Howard Camping and William Miller

2011-05-19T12:15:00.002-04:00

The final return of Jesus Christ on the last day is an article of Christian belief, but the track record of those who have predicted the day is not good. In fact, so far, they are batting .000.

And while the predictors were scouring their Bibles for clues they must have missed these texts:

“But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. . . You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” (Matthew 24:36,44)

“But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come.” (Mark 13:32)

So now California evangelist Howard Camping is predicting that this Saturday will be the day. Perhaps he would be well served by the example of William Miller as a cautionary tale.

Who was William Miller? He is not remembered by many these days, but he was once the leader of a huge religious movement. As a long-time resident of Pittsfield, Massachusetts I have seldom if ever heard his name come up when the famous sons and daughters of our city are listed.

But, yes, he was born here on February 15, 1782, and moved to Low Hampton, New York when he was four, which may be partly why he is not owned as one of our famous native sons. The other reason may well be because he failed in his big life project, for he is best known as the founder and leader of the Millerites, a millennial sect that predicted the end of the world and the Second Advent of Christ in the mid-nineteenth century.

Miller himself never set an exact day for the Second Advent, saying, “My principles in brief, are, that Jesus Christ will come again to this earth, cleanse, purify, and take possession of the same, with all the saints, sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844.” When that time frame came and went, a new date was discerned, April 18, and when that date went by without incident Miller publicly said, “I confess my error, and acknowledge my disappointment; yet I still believe that the day of the Lord is near, even at the door.”

That same summer at a camp meeting in New Hampshire one of Miller’s followers, Samuel Snow, delivered a message that the real date had been determined to be October 22. Thousands prepared for this day and when it too came and went (in what became known as “the Great Disappointment”) the movement lost steam, although Miller himself continued to wait for the second coming until his death in 1849.

So now Howard Camping is predicting that this Saturday, May 21, will be the day, and again thousands believe him. But I am still going to mow my lawn and prepare my sermon for Sunday just in case he’s wrong.

Let me end with some “end of the world humor”:

“If your contractor gets raptured, how would you know?”

And this one from my friend Andy Lang: “What do you call a person who sells hats and believes in the imminent end of the world?”

“A premillennialist millenarian Millerite milliner.”

A book review of Elizabeth Strout's “Abide with Me”

2011-05-14T12:52:00.004-04:00

Reading Elizabeth Strout’s Abide with Me reminded me how fiction can sometime capture the truth of things better than a factual account, just as a fine painting can sometimes be more truthful than a photograph of the same scene.

I heard Strout speak a few years ago at a Bangor Theological Seminary Convocation, and I knew her book was about a congregational minister in rural Maine, but I only just got around to reading it. I'm glad I did.

The resonances for me to my own life are striking. I am not Tyler Caskey, her protagonist, but I did begin my ministry in a couple of very small rural Maine towns that bear a notable resemblance to the fictional West Annett. And I left those congregations to become the chaplain at Bangor Seminary, which is the model for Tyler’s alma mater, Brockmorton Theological Seminary (a whimsical reference I am sure to my late former colleague, iconic Bangor New Testament Professor Burton H. Throckmorton.)

Like Tyler I married a Massachusetts gal who came up to live with me in the parsonage to much speculation. There are many differences to be sure: I started my ministry in the mid 70’s and Tyler in the late 50’s, but things in small town Maine hadn’t changed all that much.

Stout deftly describes the “wheels within wheels” complexity behind the seemingly simple social life of a small Maine town. The people of West Annett endure the soul-numbing endless winter, and they are unaware of how they have embraced their dearth of possibilities as a virtue.

Strout takes her time. You know from the first page that some bad things have happened to Tyler Caskey and the denizens of West Annett, but she is no hurry to tell you what they are. Her storytelling is like peeling an onion, and that in itself captures the rhythm of these small towns, where nothing ever seems to happen on the surface when it is really as busy as an ant farm just below.

Tyler himself is a loveable character, too earnest by half, with his love of Bonhoeffer, his tenderness toward is wounded young daughter, and his quiet faithfulness in his daily round. Strout knows her church, and she knows something of the grandeur and misery of the ministry, as the minister can move in a minute from reading the Cost of Discipleship to hearing tawdry local gossip or the sordid confession of a soured marriage. Her cast of characters will bring a smile to many a rural parson: the hostile husband reading the paper in the car in the church parking lot, the loyalist who routinely phones Tyler to warn him what's up, several variants of antagonists, and the married woman with a crush on the minister as well as a bone to pick.

Strout observes her characters with clear eyes, and her depictions at times just miss being cruel. If you care for these flawed people at all it is because of something like grace, since they are not “good” people in the way that real people generally are not. Yet in the end, in keeping with its subject matter, this is a story of redemption. Strout doesn’t clean up the messiness of life, but she knows that the holy rhythm that runs from Good Friday to Easter isn't confined to ancient Jerusalem.

I don’t want to give too much away. Read Abide with Me. It’s the kind of book that when you finish the last page and close the cover you are already missing the characters.

(Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout, Random House, 2007.)

Happy 163rd birthday, P. T. Forsyth!

2011-05-11T22:09:00.000-04:00

It is not every week that one gets to celebrate the back-to-back birthdays of one's two favorite theologians, but this is the time. Yesterday we raised a glass to Karl Barth's 125th birthday and today we raise a glass to P.T. Forsyth on his 163rd birthday.

Who was P. T. Forsyth? Peter Taylor Forsyth was born in Aberdeen, Scotland on this day in 1848 to a family of modest circumstances, educated there through his university years, spent a semester studying in Germany, and became a Congregationalist minister serving in five successive congregations in England. At the turn of the 20th century he became principal of his denominational college in London and proceeded to produce 25 books and hundreds of articles until the time of his death in 1921.

Like Karl Barth his theology was hammered out on the anvil of weekly preaching and pastoring. But he identified the inherent weakness of the human-centered “theology” that prevailed in his time (and dare I say ours) two decades before Barth.

Not everything he wrote translates to our time, but his writings reflect his deep love for the Gospel and his prescient insights in what that Gospel might mean for all manner of human endeavors. At the heart of his thought is the “work of Christ”, what God has done for us that we cannot do for ourselves in the atoning cross of Jesus Christ. Understanding the love of God as “holy love” he called into question the flabby religious sentimentalism of his time in the name of the God who takes sin and evil seriously and has acted to overcome it.

Writing in the early 20th century, years before the two world wars and the holocaust, his was an isolated prophetic voice that we can now see in retrospect understood both the evil that humans can do and the vast love of God acting to redeem and save these same humans “not at their best, but at their worst.”

He is not a household name in the theological world, and he has had scant attention by the academy, but preachers of all stripes know and love his writings. We give thanks to God for him and his labors on behalf of the church on this his birthday.

Happy 125th Birthday, Uncle Karl!

2011-05-10T17:15:00.001-04:00

Today is Karl Barth's birthday. The pastor of Safenwil, the drafter of the historic Barmen Declaration, and the author of the monumental Church Dogmatics was born this day in 1886, and died on December 10, 1968 (the same day as Thomas Merton).

Love him or hate him, if you take Christian theology seriously, you must read him and deal with him. He first came to the world's attention with his incendiary commentary on Paul's Letter to the Romans (Romerbrief, second edition, 1922) which Karl Adams described as falling like “a bomb on the playground of the theologians.” I personally consider Barth's Romans to be one of the most significant and incandescent Christian writings since the closing of the canon.

I have been a pastor for over thirty years and no sermon preparation was ever complete without checking the index to the Dogmatics to see what Uncle Karl had written about the text under consideration. His exegetical rigor, his mastery of the breadth and depth of the tradition, his grasp of the issues confronting the interpreter, and his unflagging faith in the God whose love is revealed in Jesus Christ make him still a singular figure within the church and its thinkers.

So tonight I will raise a glass to Karl Barth, as I give thanks to God for him and his labors on behalf of the church.

Spring comes late and slow to the Berkshires

2011-05-07T14:10:00.001-04:00

We had a tough winter here in the Berkshire Hills, tons of snow and only now in May are we enjoying a brief and somewhat damp and cool Spring. Nonetheless, it is beautiful. I heard this poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins on the Writer's Almanac today. It is one of my (many) favorites of his:

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

(Backyard photos by R. L. Floyd)

Who will be saved? Ruminations on Universalism

2011-05-05T12:20:00.006-04:00

I haven’t read Rob Bell’s hot new book Love Wins (and I probably won’t) but we theologs owe him a debt for igniting a spark of interest in an old doctrine. When universalism makes the cover of Time magazine something is up (although does anyone actually read Time anymore?) And now newspaper covers consigning Osama bin Laden to hell have aroused more popular speculation.

Next month's MCCM Barth pastors' study session will take up the subject, and the Confessing Christ Open Forum list-serv conversation has been talking about it.

So now some thoughtful and edgy posts about the “new universalism” have flown about in the last few days, for example a lively critical one by James Smith here, and responses by David Congdon here, and by Halden Doerge here. Halden invites more serious theological reflection on the subject, so I thought I would put in my two cents.

My interest in the subject was renewed not by Bell's book, but by a close reading of Jason Goroncy’s St Andrews doctoral dissertation two summers ago. His final chapter posits that the whole trajectory of P.T. Forsyth’s thought (centered around the holiness of God) should have led him to a doctrinal universalism but didn't (Hope I got this right, Jason, your typescript was lost in my sewer disaster. I hope it will be a book someday!) Jason and I had some good back and forth on this, and he makes a strong case, but I suspect Forsyth knew what he was doing by exercising a theological humility about the final decrees of God.

I must confess that I may have a regional prejudice. Here in New England we have Unitarians and Universalists. We joke that the former hold that humans are too good for God to consign to hell, and the latter hold God to be too good to consign anyone to hell. The latter is better than the former but neither takes an adequate account of sin and evil. Gabe Fackre has taught me that eschatology (how it ends) must always be in conversation with theodicy (why is there evil?)

What makes the “new universalism” new is that Rob Bell is a card-carrying Evangelical, and his departure from orthodox evangelical notions of salvation and hell are what make him newsworthy. Various stronger and weaker views of universalism have been heard from mainline pulpits for nearly two centuries with nary a magazine cover.

My own view, influenced by Karl Barth, Forsyth and Fackre, is that because of the trajectory of the whole Christian Story (with its center in the atoning cross) we have a right to hope for and pray for a universal homecoming, but this can only be an article of hope and not an article of faith. This brings me short of a doctrinal universalism into what George Hunsinger once described to me as a “reverent agnosticism” about who will be saved. This keeps the proper Reformed safeguards against not taking sin, evil, and the sovereignty of God with utmost seriousness.

For a useful and thoughtful review of the issues see Gabe Fackre’s foreword to Universalism: The Current Debate, (Robin Parry and Chris Partridge, editors, Paternoster, 2003). Here is an excerpt, where Fackre talks about the 1954 World Council of Churches assembly theme, “Christ, the Hope of the World.” (I seem to recall that he was in attendance):

One meaning (of hope) . . . is the “sure and certain” noun usage. Given Easter, there will be an Eschaton. We need to get that message of hope out to a hopeless world. A second meaning of the word has to do with aspiration rather than accomplishment, the conditional rather than the unconditional. Here hope is often a verb rather than a noun, as in Paul’s comment on Timothy’s possible appearance in Philippi, “I hope there to send him as soon as I see . . .” (Philippians 2:23 NRSV). Karl Barth’s view of the apokatastasis is of the second sort, as in these words from Church Dogmatics IV/3/1: “We are surely commanded to hope and to pray . . . cautiously yet distinctly that. . . His compassion should not fail, and that in accordance with His mercy which is ‘new every morning’ He ‘will not cast off forever.” (Lamentations 3:22f, 31) [478]. Of course this “universal reconciliation”is not a doctrine for Barth as is too often charged. He explicitly denies that: “No such postulate can be made even though we appeal to the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” (477) It is not “an article of faith” but rather an “article of hope” in the second sense of that word. . . .

Of course it is an awkward position, violating the canons of Aristotelian logic. If all the world takes part in Christ’s humiliation and exaltation, as Barth argues, how can it be that everyone is not saved? The logic of Barth’s theology runs up against the firmness of his commitment to the divine sovereignty. At the end of the day, our rational standards are not the last word. Who is Aristotle to tell the majestic God what to do? At work here is a Reformed stress on the divine freedom that trumps our human logic.

So in the end we hope and pray for the salvation of the world, for what Fackre calls a “universal homecoming,” not because we cling to a doctrine of universalism, but because of the God of Holy Love whom we know in Jesus Christ.

Who said it: Mark Twain or Clarence Darrow?

2011-05-04T14:39:00.002-04:00

I ended my ruminations on the death of Osama bin Laden yesterday with this quote: “I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”

I said it was by Clarence Darrow, but my sister-in-law just informed me that it has been winging its way around Facebook as being by Mark Twain.

A Google search was inconclusive. Mark Twain is alleged to have said all kinds of witticisms that he never really said. Likewise, if Mark Twain isn't cited it is often Samuel Johnson or Yogi Berra. But as Yogi once said himself (or did he?), “I didn't really say everything I said.”

So who said it?

Check out Darkwood Brew: Who knew a mainline congregation could do high-quality online programming?

2011-05-04T13:58:00.002-04:00

Last week I enjoyed getting to know a fellow United Church of Christ pastor named Eric Elnes at a Colorado mountaintop retreat. On Friday Eric inconvenienced himself to get up early and drive me a couple of hours to the Denver airport to get me home. In the car we had a fascinating conversation that touched on things as diverse as video games and the possibility of post-mortem salvation.

Eric is the pastor of Countryside Community Church in Omaha, Nebraska, and is involved with a unique and creative on-line ministry called Darkwood Brew, which he describes as “renegade exploration of Christianity's outer edges.” This isn't the first time Eric has launched out in new and innovative directions in his ministry. Some of you may recall Eric's book about walking across America, Asphalt Jesus: Finding a New Christian Faith along the Highways of America.

Now there's Darkwood Brew. What is it? Well, it's a bit hard to describe, but here's an attempt. (Better yet, when you are done reading this, go here and see for yourself.)

Darkwood Brew is broadcast on-line via streaming video each week. The episodes take place in an informal studio/coffee-house setting. Each week a topic from scripture is developed that runs through the entire episode.

The teaching is in short bursts and accessible to laity, but it is by no means simplistic (Eric himself has a Ph.D. in Old Testament from Princeton Theological Seminary). Each episode is punctuated with some incredible jazz by Chuck Marohnic and his band “The Brew’s Brothers.” These are professional jazz musicians, and the music itself is worth checking out the site.

The episodes are designed so that small groups watching remotely can pause at intervals and share in the discussion.

Typically on an episode there is a live Skype visitor to weigh in on some aspect of the days theme. I saw an episode on Galatians with NT scholar Beverly Gaventa from Princeton via Skype. Good stuff.

The pacing on Darkwood Brew holds your attention and the discussions, though dealing with serious topics, are often lighthearted and full of humor. This weeks episode (May 1) deals with the “Doubting Thomas” story in John’s Gospel and features a Saturday Night Live type faux infomercial for a diatery supplement called Certitude. Very funny.

The production values of this site are very high, but in no way slick. I typically have an allergy to Christian media, but I’m telling you Eric and his team are doing an amazing piece of ministry and evangelism here.

So check out Darkwood Brew. Their motto is “You May Not Like It.” I’m guessing you will.

Ruminations on hearing of the Death of Osama Bin Laden. Can Christians Rejoice?

2011-05-03T11:31:00.002-04:00

The death of Osama Bin Laden stirred up so many emotions in me I have been having trouble sorting them out. I recalled the horrors of 9/11, the innocent victims and their families, and some of the same grief and sadness I felt back them flowed over me again.

I also thought of how this one man helped make my country a more fearful place. I thought of waiting in long TSA lines in airports, and I thought of the shame of Abu Graib and waterboarding, and the two wars we engaged in because of him (one of them quite mistakenly.) I think of not only those who died on 9/11 but also of the thousands of innocents who subsequently died in Iraq and Afghanistan as victims of war.

And I ruminated that in some very tangible ways Osama Bin Laden succeeded in diminishing my country, at least for a time.

And so, watching the reports of the mission on CNN (as entertainment) was at first thrilling, but later unsettling. I watched the Mets and Yankees fans chanting USA, USA, and people pouring into the streets to celebrate.

I understood the celebrations, but they also bothered me. I imagined that the families of the victims were not cheering USA, USA in the streets, because Bin Laden’s death doesn’t bring back their loved ones.

As the various responses to Bin Laden’s death came in I waited for a word from people of faith that might help me.

One of the first was from Presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee, a Baptist pastor, who has obviously not read Rob Bell’s book Love Wins because he said, “Welcome to hell, Bin Laden!”

That wasn't helping me any. I thought the Vatican got it better with this:

“Faced with the death of a man, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibility of each and every one of us before God and before man, and hopes and commits himself so that no event be an opportunity for further growth of hatred, but for peace.” (Mutatis mutandis, the Vatican missed the memo on inclusive language.)

I was convicted by the statement that “a Christian never rejoices.” Since there were thousands of Christians celebrating in the streets at that very minute I understood that the Vatican's statement was prescriptive and not descriptive. And so I long for a day when that is true of all of us, Christians, Muslims, Jews and all others, when we rejoice in the death of no one.

So it is the rejoicing that troubles me. The death of this man who attacked us and killed so many innocent victims is not the primary issue for me; it's the excessive celebration (and unbridled patriotism) that unsettles me.

I pray for a more peaceful world, one where the hatred that fueled Bin Laden (and often the response to him) will melt away, and no more innocent victims need die and none need to be afraid.

Am I glad he is dead? In the end my own position is close to what Clarence Darrow expressed when he said: “I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”

Was Christ's atoning death an expiation or a propitiation? Ruminations on the cross.

2011-04-23T14:47:00.006-04:00

One of the perennial questions about the meaning of Christ's atoning death is “was it an expiation or a propitiation?” In other words, was the atonement performed towards us, or towards God? Both “expiation” and “propitiation” are terms used of sacrifice, but expiation implies a sacrificial taking away of some sin or offence (i.e. “Christ died for our sins”), whereas propitiation implies assuaging the anger or injured honor, holiness, or some other attribute of God.

An expiation changes us, taking away our sin, whereas a propitiation changes God, satisfying whatever needed to be satisfied. These are not mutually exclusive, obviously, but different atonement theories will stress one or the other. For example, in Abelard's theory, nothing is offered to God, the atonement is a demonstration of God's eternal love, whereas in Anselm's theory the atonement is an offering to God, reconciling sinful humanity to God. The former risks, among other things, falling into subjectivism and failing to take God's anger, honor, or justice seriously enough. The latter is criticized chiefly for turning the anger, honor or justice of God into a third thing beyond the Father and the Son, a necessity to which God is somehow obligated.

A further criticism of propitiation language is that it promotes views of atonement that have elements of punishment in them, thereby making its view of God morally objectionable. There is always a danger when the justice or wrath of God is separated from God's love.

But do we have to choose between expiation and propitiation? Aren't they both rightly part of a full-orbed understanding of the cross? Theologian George Hunsinger seems to think so, and in his fine book on the Eucharist, offers this useful analysis:

“God’s wrath is the form taken by God’s love when God’s love is contradicted and opposed. God’s love will not tolerate anything contrary to itself. It does not compromise with evil, or ignore evil, or call evil good. It enters into the realm of evil and destroys it. The wrath of God is propitiated when the disorder of sin is expiated. It would be an error to suppose that “propitiation” and “expiation” must be pitted against each other as though they were mutually exclusive. The wrath of God is removed (propitiation) when the sin that provokes it is abolished (expiation). Moreover, the love of God that takes the form of wrath when provoked by sin is the very same love that provides the efficacious means of expiation (vicarious sacrifice) and therefore of propitiation.” (George Hunsinger, The Eucharist and Ecumenism: Let us Keep the Feast. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008: 173-4.

It also keeps us from a careless separation of God's love and wrath, and helps us realize that God's love is not some avuncular tolerance, but holy love. God doesn't tolerate our sins, but takes them away.

(Some of the above is excerpted from my When I Survey the Wondrous Cross: Reflections on the Atonement , Pickwick, 2000, Wipf and Stock, 2010)

(Picture: Matthias Grunewald's Crucifixion from the Isenheim Alterpiece)

Ronald McDonald for President: It could happen!

2011-04-14T20:50:00.006-04:00

Fast food icon Ronald McDonald shocked the political world today by announcing his intention to seek the Republican nomination for president in the 2012 election. Early poll numbers have been impressive, as Mr. McDonald’s celebrity quotient and name recognition are off the charts.

Political analyst Robert Blake says, “Basically, no one can beat this guy on his celebrity, now that Liz and Michael are dead and Tiger is on the ropes. Maybe Oprah could do it if she was interested, but hey, this guy's got the numbers!”

Major GOP leaders say they are interested in his candidacy, and representatives of the evangelical right say that some of his previous indiscretions can be overlooked and that he has changed on some major policy positions. Also he is working on overcoming earlier allegations that he is “a clown.”

(Note: None of this is intended to be a factual statement.)

Remember when there were grown ups in politics? Me either.

2011-04-13T11:51:00.002-04:00

Several of my “friends” have posted this on Facebook:

“Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took billions in TARP money, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes?   Yeah, me either.” (I can’t trace the original source)

It is catchy and captures the frustration many share about the inequalities in America and the basic unfairness of the way things are getting played out.

What is puzzling to me is that while my first response to this was that it was a more liberal Democratic sentiment, some of my more conservative friends, even some Tea Partiers, have reposted it.

What can account for this? Somehow Americans on both sides of the political spectrum and in both political parties understand themselves as victims of powers and forces larger than they are.

This makes for a reactionary politics that values blame, undervalues compromise, and makes actually governing difficult. Which perhaps is why a pragmatist like President Obama is attacked by both the right and the left, and why we have seen such swings in the mood of the electorate in the last two elections.

Nobody is happy with the way things are. Everybody is like Howard Beale in Network, “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it any longer!”

But there is no agreement on whom to blame: is it Wall Street? Public sector unions? Big government? The richest Americans? The undeserving poor? Illegal immigrants? The list goes on.

Republicans and Democrats alike seem more interested in the other guy getting the blame for what goes wrong than actually accomplishing good for the country.

So in keeping true to my thesis that we are a blame society, who do I blame? First, I blame us, the electorate, for being lazy and shortsighted, self-centered and ignorant about how government works. And, as a reflection of us, I'm blaming our politicians and their unyielding partisanship in the face of big problems and issues. Where are the Moynihans and Fullbrights of yesteryear who could reach across the aisle? Is anybody else longing for some statesmen (of both sexes)? For some bi-partisanship? Or just some grown ups?

“Don’t Know Much about History:” Michele Bachmann stumbles with the facts again

2011-03-13T12:00:00.004-04:00

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R.Minn.), who has been reported to have Presidential ambitions, told prospective voters in Manchester, New Hampshire, “What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our extreme love for liberty. You're the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.” Those battles were actually fought here in the Bay State.

This is not the first time that Bachman has gotten confused about our history. A few days before her rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address she gave a rambling and highly revisionist speech in Iowa that touted the freedoms of immigrants when they arrived in America. She said then that: “It didn't matter the color of their skin, it didn't matter their language, it didn't matter their economic status.” She also praised the founder fathers (including John Quincy Adams) who she said “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”

Many of the founders, including George Washington and (famously) Thomas Jefferson in fact owned slaves, and while she was right that Adams fought tirelessly against slavery he was not a founder. And the Constitution itself, which she considers a sacred document, defines a slave as 3/5 of a person.

This “three-fifths compromise” of 1787 is found in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

You would think that a leader of a movement that calls itself the “Tea Party” after the BOSTON Tea Party would know something about our early history. Boston is in Massachusetts.

But as Jillian Rayfield wrote in her blog today in The New Republic, “I'm starting to wonder if the Republican policy of recruiting its female political talent heavily from the beauty pageant circuit may not have some downside after all.” I didn't say that, but it's something to ruminate on.

My top ten “opinions” that might get you fired

2011-03-12T14:21:00.000-05:00

The head of National Public Radio had to resign this week because one of her fund-raisers told some prospective donors that many in the Tea Party were “seriously racist.” The donors were actually plants and made the statement public. Oops! It was clearly an unwise and impolitic thing to say, especially as NPR was facing a funding vote in a Republican led Congress, but it was hardly a lie. There have been well documented examples of racist rhetoric and signs at Tea Party rallies, and some of the animus against President Obama seems racist.

A survey by the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race & Sexuality examined the racial attitudes of Tea Party sympathizers. Their conclusion: “The data suggests that people who are Tea Party supporters have a higher probability”—25 percent, to be exact—“of being racially resentful than those who are not Tea Party supporters,” says Christopher Parker, who directed the study. “The Tea Party is not just about politics and size of government. The data suggests it may also be about race.”

And last July the NAACP told the Tea Party movement to repudiate the racist elements in its midst. So the statement, while imprudent, was not without some factual basis.

So all this got me ruminating, and I decided, as yet another one of my high minded public service efforts, to share some other “opinions” that could get you in trouble:

Having civilians walking around with handguns is really dangerous and bad for society and should be regulated.
Evolution is the best scientific hypothesis to explain the change over time in the inherited traits found in populations of organisms.
President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, and never lived in Kenya.
President Barack Obama is not a Socialist (in fact, he is a Democrat).
There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Drilling for deep oil in the Gulf of Mexico poses a serious threat to the environment.
Global warming is real and caused by humans.
The Bible was written by people and has a literary history and needs to be interpreted (the same is true of the Constitution.)
The health care bill was not a government takeover of health care, and never contained plans for any “death panels.”
The earth is not flat.

As the late great Daniel Patrick Moynihan is reported to have said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts. ” If you want to get your facts straight, here are a couple of good web sites: http://factcheck.org/ and http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/

Washington Post reporter David Broder died yesterday, and he was known to be a strict fact checker. Would that there were more like him.

“Don’t Know Much about Geography:” Mike Huckabee’s Map of the World

2011-03-03T17:54:00.006-05:00

So let’s not be too hard on poor Mike Huckabee for saying that President Obama was born in Kenya. I don’t know about you, but I always confuse Kenya with Hawaii. They’re both far away and they both have hot climates. Yeah, I know one is an island and one isn’t (I can’t remember which) but they are practically the same.

And his mistake is not really his fault since Huckabee didn't get taught geography when he was a kid growing up in the Duchy of Grand Fenwick (see note below) because of Fenwickian proto-Republican budget cuts.

Besides, he wasn’t really putting down the President by saying he was born in Kenya. After all, think of the foreign policy and national security experience the President got from keeping an eye on the Russians across the Bering Straits, or is that someone else?

Huckabee is surely right that a history of foreign travel is a big liability for an American politician. We know George W. Bush hardly ever traveled, so there you go.

(Note: “The Duchy of Grand Fenwick is no more than five miles (8 km) long and three miles (5 km) wide and lies in a fold in the Northern Alps. It features three valleys, a river, and a mountain with an elevation of 2,000 feet (610 m). On the northern slopes are 400 acres (1.6 km2) of vineyards. The hillsides where the ground is less fertile support flocks of sheep that provide meat, dairy products and wool. Most of the inhabitants live in the City of Fenwick that is clustered around Fenwick Castle, the seat of government. About 2 miles (3 km) from the City of Fenwick is a 500 acre (2 km²) Forest Preserve that features a 20 foot (6.1 m) waterfall and attracts many birds that the nation claims as its own native birds.[1] The Duchy, ruled by Duchess Gloriana XII, is described as bordering Switzerland and France in the Alps. It retains a pre-industrial economy, based almost entirely on making wool and Pinot Grand Fenwick wine. It takes its name from its founder, the English knight Sir Roger Fenwick who, while employed by France, settled there with his followers in 1370. Thanks to Sir Roger, the national language is English.” Wikapedia)

(Note 2. One of my readers e-mailed me to correct me that Mike was actually born in Hope, Arkansas. Well that does it for his presidential hopes, since we have had lots of presidents from Kenya and Hawaii but none from Hope, Ark.)

“He Wants A Piece of Your Cookie!” A Rumination on the Assault against our Public Life

2011-03-01T14:39:00.000-05:00

The assault on unions now taking place in Wisconsin and elsewhere seems to me to be part of a larger war in which the enemy has been defined as our great public institutions (of which we were once so proud), our schools and our cities and especially government at all levels. All this in the name of an “economic responsibility” that is anything but responsible if it robs great masses of people of a decent wage, a sound education, and the kind of community services that make life livable.

In an address at Amherst College in 2007 entitled “A Great Amnesia,” the incomparable Marilynne Robinson said, “Now we speak of the great mass of people as workers who must be conditioned and pressed toward always greater efficiency, toward accepting lives they do not define or control, lived in service to some supposed greater good that is never in any humane or democratic senses their own good or their children’s good.” (Harpers Magazine, May 2008)

If we balance budgets on the backs of our workers, our teachers, our firefighters and police, we will be creating a meaner and less equitable society.

The “Tea Party” movement went to the polls in droves last November to demand fiscal responsibility. Is what is taking place in Wisconsin really what they wanted? There is a tale making the rounds on the Net: “A unionized public employee, a Tea Partier, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes eleven cookies, looks at the Tea Partier and says, "Look out for that union guy -- he wants a piece of your cookie.”

I am glad the workers in Wisconsin are putting up a fight. Some things are worth fighting for.

A Rumination on Loss

2011-02-01T16:17:00.004-05:00

A therapist friend of mine believes that most of us, most of the time, given the choice, will choose to feel guilty rather than powerless, since guilt implies that we might have done something different and, thereby, had a different outcome, giving us the impression of some control.

I’ve experienced my share of both, but it is powerlessness that is my theme today. A little before 9 am on Thursday last, I was preparing to go snowshoeing. There I was sitting in my pajamas in my living room when I heard a distinct sound like “glub glub,” the dreaded noise that tells you it is time to call your sewer guy to clean out your line.

Martha was down in Boston to be with her sister who had just had knee surgery, so I picked up the phone and called her to get the name of our sewer company. While I was talking to her I heard with rising panic the loud sound of fast running water, and I ran downstairs to see what was up. A heavy flow of sewage was pouring out of the downstairs toilet into my living quarters.

Still holding the phone I asked my wife how to turn off the water, and I did that but to no avail. Then I turned off the toilet, but still the deluge continued. I stood there barefoot in raw sewage powerless, watching as my den and library filled up with dirty water.

What to do? I called 911. ( I was reminded of the old Smothers’ Brothers bit when Tommy fell in a vat of chocolate, and he yelled “fire,” figuring no one would come to rescue him if he yelled “chocolate”!)

The fire department came in about ten minutes (that was the last call I could make as the water shorted out the phone. I searched for my little-used cell phone.)

Meanwhile, I watched dirty water rising into my living space, darkening the wall-to-wall carpet. We have a raised-ranch, so there is no basement. Soon the carpets were all covered. The heavy flow then went over the threshold into the garage, and then, when the garage was covered, out into the driveway. This went on for over an hour.

Eventually the DPW came and found the sewer clog in the street and it stopped flowing, and I was faced with the dismal aftermath. Being a Calvinist I have never liked the nihilistic metaphor “Shit happens,” but it seemed apt now in a quite literal way.

I called a cleaning service and soon they drove by my house to a neighbors and I chased them down. “We’ll be down soon, they said” Later they arrived, and the first thing the guy said was, “Your house is trashed!” (He was obviously on loan from the Diplomatic Corp.)

What had to be done? The rooms must all be gutted and sanitized. Everything paper, cloth, leather, or porous that was touched by the 4 to 6 inches of raw sewage must go. The door frames must go. The sheet rock up to six inches above the water line must go.

These rooms contained the ephemera of my life. My beloved books were in these rooms, Bible commentaries, most everything by Karl Barth, everything by P.T. Forsyth. Lots of novels and poetry. Most of these have been boxed and moved to high ground. How they fare from the days of humidity and odor only time will tell.

Into the dumpster go my Harvard blue books; old term papers (“Antiochene versus Alexandrian Exegesis” for Gerald Cragg); a friend’s dissertation (sorry Jason); high school basketball and cross country clippings (“Floyd leads strong harrier field!”); papers and articles from my radical anti-Vietnam days.

My children’s pictures were in these rooms, as were Christmas ornaments from 35 years of family Christmases (recently packed away so carefully).

Into the dumpster go my first stereo speakers, KLH, from1972. They were still sounding great.

The dumpster is covered with today’s snowfall and today it is a repository of my life’s momentos. I understand that they are not the life itself.

And as losses go, this is a relatively small one. Nobody died. It is only stuff. I could be living in a tent on a medium strip in Haiti.

Still, every loss resonates with old losses. And my litany of old losses is a long one: my mother died when I was 18, the same year the city took our home to build a school. Some best friends from childhood, college and seminary were all gone by the time I was thirty. Then ten years ago I lost my health, and six years ago I lost my vocation. Lots of losses.

Loss, powerlessness, and vulnerability remain my unseen companions. Since my bike accident ten years ago I have lost the illusion that the world is a safe place. I don’t feel safe in a car. I don’t feel safe in my own home. I feel the world is a dangerous place. The world is a dangerous place.

But I remain one who stands under the word of God, and so I turn to the Psalms, especially the Psalms of Lament. They have a formal structure that simply put goes something like this: “complain, complain, complain, complain, praise.”

Psalm Six is a good example. Here the poor Psalmist is crying all night and day over his troubles. His bones ache. His soul is in anguish. He’s got enemies (the usual stuff). He’s had a bad day. He argues with God that if God lets him die he will no longer be able to praise him (a sort of pre-death Kubler-Ross bargaining.) In the end he is satisfied that the LORD hears and receives his prayer.

Sometimes that’s all you get, but it is enough.

My Ten Guidelines for Oversharers

2011-01-20T11:56:00.004-05:00

Our little family was on one of those cool Hebridean car ferries, traveling from Oban to Mull on our way to Iona, when I first ruminated on the American national trait to share way too much information with total strangers. My five-year old daughter (this was 1989) had just commented, “Duddy, there are lots of Americans on this boat!” I was reminding her that, although we had lived in Britain for several months, we were, in fact, ourselves Americans, when we were set upon by two very friendly Mid-Western American women who had overheard our conversation.

Within minutes we knew where they were from and the names of their children, their children’s spouses, and their grandchildren. And when they discovered I was a minister, they felt compelled to tell me all about their church, their pastor, and all their activities in the congregation.

Perhaps none of this would have struck me as particularly strange if I hadn’t been a foreigner in Britain, but the contrast was evident to me. Everybody in England had been quite pleasant to us during our stay, but with few exceptions maintained a certain reserve that I actually came to appreciate.

When we left Oxford that summer, I said my goodbyes to college dons and staff, and several remarked, “But you’ve only just arrived! We will miss you.” While I believe they were sincere, I was amused by their heartfelt goodbyes in that they had barely given me the time of day.

I liked it in Britain, but I must confess that I’m an American oversharer, and that I come from a family of oversharers. I was one even before my brain injury, which adjusted my social filters to, shall we say, a more porous setting.

I come by it honestly. My Dad, of blessed memory, was at times an oversharer. One Thanksgiving dinner he launched his own campaign of “shock and awe” (shock to the grownups and awe to us kids). My Uncle Dick was expertly carving the turkey with an electric carving knife (remember those?). My Dad felt the need to share that a former secretary of his had committed suicide using such an implement, but his telling was not nearly as discreet as mine here. I suspect that there were lots of leftovers from that meal.

The Internet was made for oversharers. Blogging or updating one’s status on Facebook offer hourly temptations. So in yet another of my high-minded public service offerings, here are my ten guidelines to avoid oversharing:

Never post on the Internet when you are intoxicated. Trust me on this. You may wake up to see that cute little red flag with lots of numbers in it on your Facebook page, and smile and wonder, “Which of my carefully crafted witty status updates are all my ‘friends’ responding to?” Moments later you are mortified to suddenly remember that last post you made right before bed, which seemed like a good idea at the time. It wasn’t.
Remember the old adage about the difference between major and minor surgery? “Major surgery is surgery on me, and minor surgery is surgery on someone else.” The same is true for the difference between interesting surgery, and boring surgery. And no surgical scars please. Remember LBJ? Nobody wants to see your scar.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your friends the Andersons, and you ask your friends the Smiths if they know the Andersons, and the Smiths say, “No,” don’t tell the story.
If your child or grandchild just learned to use the potty that is a grand thing but don’t share it. Same thing for cute pictures in the tub. Cute now, but the kid might not appreciate it when he’s 13 and the class bully finds it on the Net.
Your Irritable Bowel Syndrome may well be very preoccupying to you, but it is not of general interest. In my thirty years of pastoral ministry I patiently listened to people’s accounts of their bodily ailments. We call it an “organ recital.” You can and should share such concerns with your pastor and your doctor, but not with the world, and not on the Internet.
Pastors are notorious for telling cute stories about their children from the pulpit. Everybody loves this, right? Well, no, actually. The children usually don’t. I would ask for permission. Same policy for posting. Children and other family members have a right to privacy. I have sometimes observed this rule in the breach, as my children have noted.
When I go on vacation I take lots of pictures, and love to look at them again and again to relive the experience. This is something that you want to share with all your friends and dinner guests, right? No. Pictures of other people’s vacations are not everybody’s idea of a good time.
We live in an age of scientific miracles, and have medications available that can make us feel younger, happier, healthier and, just better. Nobody wants to hear which ones you are on.
Have a new hobby? Yoga or origami? Just because it excites you doesn’t mean it will excite others. Same for religion. If someone asks you what you believe, don’t lay out your systematic theology. Say, “I’m a Methodist.” Or, “I affirm the Nicene Creed.” A balance between talking and listening is a good anditote against oversharing. Remember Bette Midler’s character in Beaches? She says, “But enough about me, let's talk about you, what do You think about me?” Don't be her.
Tighten up you privacy settings. Not just on Facebook, but in real life. All of us experience ups and downs in our lives. Most of us are battered and worn one way or another. Some of us have had really traumatic events that have left us permanently scarred. How and when (and whether) we share these parts of our story is something each of us must discern in our own way. But such sharing implies some level of trust and intimacy, and although the Internet may sometimes give the appearance of allowing that, it is a risky medium for such sharing. Be careful with yourself and others.

But I’ve shared too much.

(And yes, I know “oversharers” isn't a recognized word, but it will be. Just watch!)

Ridiculous and sublime: Richard Bauckham's “The Pooh Community”

2011-01-14T12:25:00.002-05:00

More and more I am finding satire the proper vehicle to address some of the more foolish antics of both the church and the academy. So I was delighted to come across Richard Bauckham's delicious deadpan savaging of his own guild in his lecture “The Pooh Community,” in which he employs some of the methods of contemporary New Testament scholarship to analyze A.A. Milne's “Winnie the Pooh.”

His careful sifting leads him to posit the existence of several “communities” behind the final redaction of the text. Here's a sample:

“The very distinctive nature of the Pooh community can be further appreciated when we compare it with other children's literature of the period, such as the Noddy books or the Narnia books (though it may be debatable whether these were already written at the time when the traditions of the Pooh community were taking shape). Words and concepts very familiar from other children's literature never appear in the Pooh books: the word school, e.g., is completely absent, as is the word toys, even though the books are ostensibly about precisely toys. Conversely, the Pooh books have their own special vocabulary and imagery: e.g. the image of honey, which is extremely rare in other children's literature (not at all to be found in the Narnia books, e.g., according to the computer-generated analysis by Delaware and Babcock), constantly recurs in the literature of the Pooh community, which clearly must have used the image of honey as one of the key buildingblocks in their imaginative construction of the world.

The stories afford us a fairly accurate view of some of the rivalries and disputes within the community. The stories are told very much from the perspective of Pooh and Piglet, who evidently represent the dominant group in the community - from which presumably the bulk of the literature originated, though here and there we may detect the hand of an author less favourable to the Pooh and Piglet group. The Pooh and Piglet group saw itself as central to the life of the community (remember that Piglet's house is located in the very centre of the forest), and the groups represented by other characters are accordingly marginalized. The figure of Owl, for example, surely represents the group of children who prided themselves on their intellectual achievements and aspired to status in the community on this basis. But the other children, certainly the Pooh and Piglet group, ridiculed them as swots. So throughout the stories the figure of Owl, with his pretentious learning and atrocious spelling, is portrayed as a figure of fun. Probably the Owl group, the swots, in their turn ridiculed the Pooh and Piglet group as ignorant and stupid: they used terms of mockery such as 'bear of very little brain.' Stories like the hunt for the Woozle, in which Pooh and Piglet appear at their silliest and most gullible, probably originated in the Owl group, which used them to lampoon the stupidity of the Pooh and Piglet group. But the final redactor, who favours the Pooh and Piglet group, has managed very skilfully to refunction all this material which was originally detrimental to the Pooh and Piglet group so that in the final form of the collection of stories it serves to portray Pooh and Piglet as oafishly lovable. In a paradoxical reversal of values, stupidity is elevated as deserving the community's admiration. We can still see thepoint where an anti-Pooh story has been transformed in this way into an extravagantly pro-Pooh story at the end of the story of the hunt for the Woozle. Pooh and Piglet, you remember, have managed to frighten themselves silly by walking round and round in circles and mistaking their own paw-prints for those of a steadily increasing number of unknown animals of Hostile Intent. Realizing his mistake, Pooh declares: 'I have been Foolish and Deluded, and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.' The original anti-Pooh story, told by the Owl faction, must have ended at that point. But the pro-Pooh narrator has added - we can easily see that it is an addition to the original story by the fact that it comes as a complete non sequitur - the following comment by Christopher Robin: "'You're the Best Bear in All the World," said Christopher Robin soothingly.' Extravagant praise from the community's major authority-figure.”

To see the entire lecture go here.

Richard Bauckham is a theologian and biblical scholar who was Professor of New Testament at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His web site is here.

Thomas Aquinas ("Venus" by Bananarama)

2011-01-08T12:27:00.000-05:00

My high school buddy Larry Grubman put me onto this hilarious video. No need to slog through the Summa anymore. It's all here on YouTube:

Epiphany Ruminations on the Mystery of Baptism

2011-01-06T14:06:00.002-05:00

I have been schooled to consider baptism with a theologian’s precision, what it is and what it isn’t, what happens and how, the various forms and their respective pitfalls. Nonetheless, baptism continues to possess much the same air of unfathomable mystery for me that my marriage does, that there is more going on here than can be properly named or known.

My own infant baptism, however inadequate (as my Anabaptist friends may regard it), held a strange hold over me during my growing up years. I have been accused of having high-church inclinations for a Reformed pastor, and surely my baptism at St. John the Divine in New York, the world's largest Gothic cathedral, got me started down that path. My godfather, Bill Warren, was an Episcopal priest, a lovely man who served in remote parishes in Alaska and Arizona. He was a Jungian analyst who was fascinated by Native American spirituality. A bit of a mystic, his baptismal present to me was a red Morocco leather-bound copy of The Imitation of Christ.

It sat unused until I found it pristine in its dusty box on my bookshelf when I was about 19. My mother had recently died, it was the late sixties, and I was something of a lost soul at the time. I carried that little book around in my knapsack while hitchhiking across America in the summer of 1969, and it had an importance to me far beyond its content, which I found kind of creepy, to tell the truth. It had become for me a talisman of a lost home and family, and of some connection to the boy I had once been in church, singing in the choir and loved by the congregation. Later, when I read about Martin Luther's “I am baptized” in the midst of his battles with the devil I resonated with that.

Now mystics, talismans and incantations to ward off evil are pretty far afield for a Reformed pastor-theologian to travel. It’s a long journey from Thomas A Kempis to Karl Barth. But still, six decades after I received that sacrament in the cathedral, baptism remains an inextricable (shall I say indelible) stamp on who I am, for better or worse.

I started ruminating on all this today because my daughter was baptized by my hand on this day, Epiphany, twenty-six years ago, and she is now discerning a call to serve in leadership in Christ’s Church. She is halfway through divinity school preparing for ordained ministry. I couldn’t have imagined that when I was a child, as there were no ordained women in my church when I was growing up. This is just one of a great many surprises that have taken place throughout my journey. So many changes, and so much of what I once took for granted is lost or long-gone. But baptism remains, full of promise and hope and heavy with many mysteries, connecting the journey of one generation of those who share Christ to that of another.

Some of my other posts on baptism:
Ruminations on Baptism
George Hunsinger: Answer to a Question about Baptism

My Most Popular Blogposts of 2010

2010-12-31T12:59:00.007-05:00

The year past marks the first full year of Retired Pastor Ruminates and once again I turn to Google analytics to have fun with the numbers. The site had 14,234 visits, with 21,648 pageviews and 9,744 visitors. You came from 104 countries, in this order: United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India, Germany, Philippines, South Africa. The US visitors came from all 50 states and two territories.

If there was a theme for the year it would have to be the poor morale of mainline clergy and the peculiar pressures on that noble vocation these days. The most popular post by far was my “Ten Highly Effective Strategies for Crushing Your Pastor's Morale,” a snarky piece of satire that seemed to strike a nerve. It was especially popular with Episcopalians and made its way to Episcopal Cafe. Whether this means that Episcopalians have worse morale than other clergy is anybody's guess.

My second popular post was a jokey piece on Nebraska football that got posted on something called Huskerpedia (I'm not making this up) and went viral. For a time I considered putting “Nebraska football” in the title of all my posts (ie.: “Eschatology in late Barth and Nebraska football”) but decided that it would be wrong.

As usual, the interface between theology and ministry (my preoccupation) was the topic of many of the popular posts. Several of them deal with clergy burnout, and a couple others poke fun at some of the antics of my denomination, the United Church of Christ. There is more satire this year than last, as I find myself drawn less to the jeremiad and more and more to the “modest proposal.” Whether this is a sign of wisdom is an open question.

My post “Pastor's Aren't Prophets” got picked up and, in a much edited form, reposted on Duke's Faith and Leadership blog. One of my own favorites that didn't make the top ten list is my satirical take on the New York Times Op Ed pages: “Your Opinions Stink.”

I recently read a fitting quote from Samuel Johnson, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” So there you have it.

I am glad you have found your way here. Thank you for visiting and I hope you come again from time to time in 2011.

Here's the whole top ten list:

Gone to Look for America

2010-12-18T12:48:00.004-05:00

When my wife’s position fell to the sickle of the Great Recession we decided to seize the moment and go on a road trip to Arizona to see our son who is in law school there.

So we spent all of October and the first couple of weeks of November on an excellent adventure across America, receiving the hospitality of family and friends, with some nights in Best Westerns to fill in the gaps. Every town in America worthy of the name has a Best Western and a Subway, and I imagined the archaeologists of the future deciding these were the hallmarks of American civilization in the early Twenty-First century, much as a stoa was in the Hellenistic culture of the ancient world.

Subway is important, too, because you can split a foot-long “Veggie Delite” for 5 bucks and cheaply get enough fresh vegetables to avoid scurvy.

Our trip took 43 days; we drove 7,601 miles and visited 27 different states. The sun was shining all but two days. No car trouble. One oil change.

Some highlights:

The Frank Lloyd Wright house “Falling Waters” in Western PA
A stay at Potawatomi Inn in Pokagon State Park in Indiana
My Coe College Reunion where I sung in the alumni choir with my former director, Dr. Allan Kellar
Seeing my first newly shot bison carcass outside Pierre, SD with “Roger from the Prairie”
Badlands National Park in SD
The Black Hills National Park and Mount Rushmore in SD
Devil’s Tower in Wyoming
A few days in a friend’s cozy cabin outside Rocky Mountain National Park in CO
Taking the waters in Glenwood Springs, CO
Arches National Park in Utah
Driving through Monument Valley on the border of Utah and Arizona
The sun on the red rocks in Sedona, AZ
The Calexico concert at the Rialto in Tucson
Hiking Bear Canyon outside Tucson
Eating Texas barbecue in El Paso, TX
Eating a chicken fried steak in Ozona, TX
The Riverwalk in San Antonio, TX
Seeing the Alamo after all these years since my Davy Crocket cap
Eating the best Tex-Mex food on an outdoor patio (in November!) in San Antonio, TX
Seeing my first bayou
Eating blackened redfish and seafood gumbo in New Orleans, LA
Seeing how beautiful the Old South is in the fall, with yellow leaves still on the trees.

The autumn of 2010 was a season fraught with fear and anger, with a highly divided electorate during a nasty campaign season. We saw evidence of that on billboards.

Still, the countryside abides and rolling through the miles one is struck by its vastness and the diversity of its scenic beauty.

Here’s what I noticed about Americans:

They don’t use their blinkers.
The obesity epidemic is not a fiction of the media
“Beef: It’s what’s for dinner!” is not a marketing slogan, but a way of life
They like to drive big trucks

Here’s what I noticed about America:

Texas is really big
The Interstate Highway System is an impressive piece of infrastructure
Our National Parks are stunning
There are many sections of many towns and cities that could be anywhere in America
You can get the same Subway sandwich made exactly the same way in all 27 states that we visited, except no provolone in Mississippi
Many cities in the South still look prosperous (perhaps they won the Civil War after all)

Many thanks to all the wonderful folks who hosted us.

(Photos from top: Rocky Mountain National Park, Arches National Park, Mount Rushmore, The Alamo)

Let’s Get Keith Richards to General Synod!

2010-11-10T19:42:00.001-05:00

The United Church of Christ’s “Let’s Get a Celebrity” Sub-Committee” in Cleveland has recently been promoting getting Ellen De Generes to come to our next General Synod, but I think Keith Richards would be a better idea, and here’s why:

I know Ellen is a big gay icon and all, and I like her as much as the next person, but Keith is a way bigger celebrity, and let’s face it, he’s hipper, too.

Sure, there are other hot celebrities right now, but their minuses outweigh their pluses. For example, take Lil Wayne. He’s a person of color, which is a plus. He wears a cross around his neck, and has a couple cross prison tats, which are pluses. But he is in jail on weapons charges and might be too dangerous even for Synod. See what I mean.

Or take Bristol Palin. She’s young and she’s a Christian, and she been on Dancing with the Stars, which are all pluses. But she’s not our kind of Christian and she’s too Republican, which are deal breakers.

I could go on and on, but I think it has got to be Keith. He has a new autobiography out, and he is on the cover of the current Rolling Stone, so this is definitely a Keith Richards moment.

He has some minuses it’s true. First of all, there has been some unsavory behavior in the past, but who are we to judge, especially a big celebrity like Keith. Secondly, there is no evidence he is a Christian. But, hey, I haven’t heard anything about Ellen being a Christian either. And years ago we had Carl Sagan as the keynoter for the big-church Orlando Conference. When someone asked him if he believed in God, he said, “No.” That wasn’t a deal breaker then, why now? And Keith once sang in an Anglican junior choir. That's good enough for me.

So I say. Let’s get Keith Richards to Synod!

“God Gives the Growth:” A Retirement Sermon

2010-10-01T15:38:00.000-04:00

“I planted, Apollos watered, but it is God who gives the growth.”

1 Corinthians 3:6

I am honored that Dick asked me to preach on this special day. He has been my friend and colleague, mentor and frequent conversation partner for many years. I give thanks to God for him.

Dick has been a faithful minister of the Word of God among you for over two decades and now he and you come to the end of that ministry as he retires. I have just gone through this myself, so I speak from experience when I say it is a time fraught with meaning. Like a trapeze artist who lets go of one trapeze but hasn’t quite grabbed a hold of the next, the transition from ministry to retirement can be at the same time exhilarating and frightening. And I daresay the analogy holds true for a congregation saying goodbye to their pastor and wondering about the future without him.

As we give thanks for Dick’s ministry, it might be profitable for us to consider what Christian ministry is all about. What is a minister? A minister is, quite simply, one who acts on behalf of another. We see this usage in European politics, where governments have a foreign minister or a minister of finance, for example. Such ministers represent and speak on behalf of their governments. Their authority derives from those they represent. It is not their own.

In much the same way our ministry belongs to Jesus Christ and we represent him as his ministers. Our ministry isn’t a possession that belongs to us, but a call we obey, a service we carry out for another. It is easy to forget this, especially when one has been around as long as Dick and I have been. In our weaker moments we pastors can take on a King Louis XIV sense of self-importance. Recall how Louis said, “Après moi, le deluge: After me, the flood.” I shared with Dick some advice that your former area Minister Richard Sparrow gave me one time when I was worrying about what would happen after I left my pastorate of 22 years. He said, “Rick, it was Christ’s church when you got there, and it will be Christ’s church after you leave.” Which was to remind me that ministry always builds on the work of others. As Paul told the Corinthians, “I planted, Apollos watered, but it is God who gives the growth.”

Paul was addressing divisions in the Corinthian church. Although the Greek word for “divisions” is schismata, from which we get our English word “schism,” schismata does not really mean factions or parties. More precisely it means a “tear” as in a fabric, or like a run in a stocking. It seems the Corinthians have broken into quarrelling factions around their various leaders.

Paul admonishes them to overcome their differences and become united. The Greek word translated as “united” means literally to be “knit together,” the very same word found in Mark’s Gospel (1:19) when he is describing the mending of fishing nets. So we have a vivid image here that we miss in translation, the image of the church as a torn fabric that needs to be mended.

But the disunity of the Corinthian church is more the symptom of the disease rather than the disease itself. The actual disease is their false understanding of what the church is, and what the ministry is.

Paul gets a little sarcastic toward these followers of different leaders: “Has Christ been divided?” He asks them. “Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?”

You see the problem? Have you ever known people who join a minister rather than a congregation? It happens! People join a minister because the minister is a spellbinding preacher or a compassionate pastor or an attractive personality. The problem is that when the minister in time shows the inevitable feet of clay they become disenchanted. Or when the minister moves on or retires their ties to the church are flimsy, because they have joined the leader and not the church.

That is what has happened in Corinth. Some have joined Apollos, a teacher who came after Paul in Corinth. Some have joined Peter. Some even regard Christ as their leader, as if he were just another human leader.

Some Corinthians have a magical understanding of their baptism, so that they have come to believe that the minister performing their baptism bestows more or less power depending how wise and spiritual he is. It is like someone here in Acton saying “I was baptized by Dick and not by Gail, so my baptism is better (or worse).” Or even more absurdly, somehow by baptism they would say, “I belong to Dick.” So Paul asks sarcastically, “Were you baptized in the name of Paul?”

And what is it that the Corinthians believe makes one leader better then another? The criterion seems to be the capacity to speak “eloquent words of wisdom.” Paul founded the church in Corinth by preaching the simple good news of God's love and mercy in Jesus Christ, the message of the cross, the message of the forgiveness of sins. Paul's message was not Paul himself, nor was it Paul's wisdom or Paul's rhetorical eloquence. His message was Jesus Christ and him crucified.

But the Corinthians have mistaken their leaders for the traveling sages of the time who were known for the beauty and cleverness of their speech. Paul wants to distance himself from these wise men, and he wants the Corinthians to know, by contrast, who he is, which is a minister of Jesus Christ.

“I am merely a messenger,” he says. “Don't mistake the messenger for the message.” Don’t look to Paul's eloquence or Paul's wisdom, but to the Gospel. For the power of the cross is a power made perfect in weakness, a power that might be obscured by eloquence and human wisdom, but one that is brought to light by the miracle of being shown as powerful even in the weakness of the messenger, just as God displayed his awesome power in the weakness of the crucified one, who died on the cross for us.

There are still all manner of attractive and eloquent purveyors of religion and philosophy around. You only need a TV remote to find good examples. And truth to tell, even in the church we are tempted to run after the wisdom of the age.

But if the church of Jesus Christ is to have vitality, integrity, and unity it will come out of its own life, not from the wisdom of the age, but from the power of the message God has given to us. And you and I and others like us in local congregations, in all our weakness, will be the bearers of that message and the living embodiment of its power. That is what a congregation is, for better or worse, the living embodiment of the Gospel.

Many people, perhaps all of us on some level, come to church to be taken care of, to be told what to do: by the Bible or the bishop or the pope or the newest book, somebody. If only the right leader would come along. But we see in the scriptures today that even the Apostle Paul struggled to get it across that it isn't the messenger– it is the message, and it isn't the leader– it is the church, the body of Christ, where the power of God resides through grace and the gifts of the Spirit. Paul had every right to be proud of the Corinthian church. After all he was the founding pastor. When he says, “I planted,” he means just that. But that is not all he says. He says, “I planted, Apollos watered, but it is God who gives the growth.” He knew the power was God’s power through the Gospel and not Paul’s power through personality, talents or training.

That has been one of the gifts you have been given in Dick Olmsted, a gifted leader who has never forgot for a minute that it isn’t his Yale Ph.D. or his keen intelligence or any other human attributes or endowments that have made him a good minister of the Word of God.

As today’s political consultants would say, he has stayed on message. And Dick is well aware that the message applies to him as well as to you. To understand means to “stand under”, and Dick had stood under the Word of God, and preached to you as one forgiven sinner to another. He never forgot the great Reformation insight that we are at the same time sinners and justified before God, which is why he ministered to each and all of you without fear or favor. Because he knows that he is a minister, one who represents another, and a messenger, one who brings good news, and a witness, one who is always pointing beyond himself.

In 1995 my family and I traveled to Colmar, France to see Matthias Grünwald’s painting of the crucifixion in the famous Isenheim altarpiece triptych. A reproduction of this masterpiece hung over Karl Barth’s desk as he wrote his Church Dogmatics. One hangs over my desk, and one hangs over Dick’s desk. I chose it as the cover of my little book on the cross and atonement. It is not a pretty picture, but it is a powerful one.

In the painting John the Baptist points at the crucified Christ. Now this is not realism or historical accuracy, as we know that John had lost his head long before Good Friday. But Grünwald is trying to convey a deeper truth than the facts. He is depicting John as the witness to Jesus Christ. John’s pointing finger is strangely elongated, to draw your eyes to it and then to where it points.

Grünwald shows John as the representative Christian, the one who always points beyond himself or herself to Christ. And the Christ he points to is not Christ the teacher, Christ the prophet, or Christ the moral example, but the crucified Christ. For whatever else we might say about Jesus Christ, the one thing we must say is that he was crucified for us, and was raised on the third day as a divine vindication of the power of his weakness. Christ’s atoning death does for us what we cannot do for ourselves, freeing us from sin and death. To be a witness to the crucified Christ is to insist that God’s love is stronger than human hate, and God’s grace is greater than human sin. That truth remains a scandal now as it was then, because it challenges the wisdom of this age as to what constitutes real power and authority.

Because in the topsy-turvy values of the Gospel the first shall be last and the last first, the exalted will be humbled, and the humble exalted, the poor will be filled and the rich sent empty away. In God’s economy power is made perfect in weakness, and for all our accomplishments, in the end we have nothing to offer to God but our sins. These are not the values of Donald Trump’s Apprentice, to say the least. And neither is it the wisdom of the age, but it is the message of the gospel, the message that a minister of the Word of God is called to deliver.

So you can see that this ministry of witness to Christ can be very frustrating in human terms. Which is why I took up cooking years ago as a hobby, because when you cook you see results right away. The meal either comes out or it doesn’t. When people enjoy it you feel satisfaction and you get compliments. But being a minister of the Word of God isn’t like this. This pointing to Christ doesn’t usually manifest in immediate results. It’s more like being a gardener, a matter of planting and watering, and letting God use what you have done for his purposes, which remain mysterious. For you never know what seeds you sow, or who is ready to hear what word and when, a word that might even change their life.

In Stephen Ministry we teach that ministry is process oriented and not results oriented, and at first this really frustrates the Stephen ministers. Because we Americans are not good at waiting for God to give the growth. We want dominion and power and control. We want to force our will on things. The wisdom of this age demands results, and even ministers give up and give in and talk about our congregation’s attendance, or our budgets, or our additions, or our programs, or our new members. And don’t get me wrong, I am always grateful for any visible signs of vitality in Christ’s church.

But the truth about the church is that we can have the most beautiful building, and the biggest endowment, and the most eloquent preacher with a string of degrees after his name, and we can be so friendly we will melt the snow right off the roof, but if the message of Jesus Christ and him crucified, the message that God loves and forgives us, isn't preached and heard and lived it all counts for nothing. “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

And in each generation, God raises up witnesses, messengers, ministers, like Dick Olmsted, for which we give thanks. Some will plant, others will water, but it is God who gives the growth. Amen.

(The Reverend Dr. Richard L. Floyd, Pastor Emeritus of First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Congregational, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on June 19, 2005 at the Acton Congregational Church, on the occasion of the retirement of the Reverend Dr. Richard Olmsted.)

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

2010-09-28T13:56:00.000-04:00

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.

“Huswifery” by Edward Taylor

2010-09-27T11:53:00.000-04:00

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.)

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

2010-09-24T16:01:00.001-04:00

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.

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

2010-09-21T13:58:00.001-04:00

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.”

When Blogs Die

2010-09-17T12:39:00.001-04:00

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 . . .

Sick
New child
Writing my dissertation
Rereading the Church Dogmatics in German
Working too hard
Leveling my blood elf ret pally
Moving
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.

Night Elf witnesses in Moonglade: WOW Evangelism

2010-09-16T11:32:00.000-04:00

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.

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

2010-09-15T13:48:00.010-04:00

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!

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

2010-09-12T13:04:00.001-04:00

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:

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

2010-09-11T09:37:00.000-04:00

(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.

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

2010-09-10T11:25:00.001-04:00

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.

Donald Bloesch: An Appreciation

2010-08-31T10:11:00.005-04:00

Theologian Donald Bloesch died a week ago at the age of 82. His friend and colleague Gabriel Fackre paid tribute to him in Christianity Today and commented that he was “underappreciated in his lifetime.”

His denomination (and mine), the United Church of Christ, certainly never paid him much heed. Fackre said, “Don was never given the recognition due to him in the UCC because he was a feisty critic of the liberal establishment. We both were doing our best in the United Church of Christ to call it back to its original ecumenical vision.”

But whether he got the recognition he deserved or not in the United Church of Christ, he never left it, and in doing so he embodied a steadfast commitment to church that reflected his own deep catholicity. In this regard he was an evangelical catholic in the best sense of the word, but he defied easy labels. He himself used such dialectical phrases as “progressive evangelical,” and “Ecumenical orthodox” to describe himself.

He called himself an evangelical theologian and he was on the board of Christianity Today to prove it, but he was never at home with the obscurantism and anti-intellectualism that so often attached itself to the label evangelical.

He came by the term honestly, since he was actually a big E evangelical, being born into the Evangelical Church, where his father and both his grandfathers were ordained ministers. The current minister of the First Evangelical Church in Bremen Indiana found his baptismal records. The records state: Donald George Bloesch, born, May 3, 1928, baptized, June 24, 1928. His father Herbert Bloesch was pastor there at the time.

The Evangelical Church (which joined with the German Reformed in 1934 to form the Evangelical and Reformed Church) was a German immigrant church with a lively combination of theological rigor and deep piety that clearly shaped Bloesch’s own approach to his theological projects.

In 1957 the E and R joined with the Congregational Christian Churches to form the United Church of Christ and that became Bloesch’s church until he died.

Bloesch was actively involved in theological renewal movements in the United Church of Christ, and wrote the Dubuque Declaration, which became the statement of faith of the Biblical Witness Fellowship.

I think of Bloesch as an accessible interpreter of large theological ideas. He introduced many evangelicals to the thought of Karl Barth, a figure often viewed with suspicion in their camp, and to P.T. Forsyth, the great British pastor theologian of the cross. Bloesch brought fresh readings to these and other figures. His writing is easy to read and infused with a warm-hearted piety. Like Barth and Forsyth he wrote primarily for the church, not the academy, and he knew that fruitful theology grows best in the rich soil of active church life and personal piety (what today we, but not he, would call “spirituality.”)

Another corrective Bloesch’s theology offers to his evangelical brothers and sisters is an appreciation of the length and breadth of the church, that is, tradition and ecumenism. Fackre notes in the CT article that scholars as diverse as Roman Catholic Cardinal Avery Dulles and Reformed theologian T.F. Torrance paid tribute to Bloesch in the 1999 festschrift volume Evangelical Theology in Transition.

I am proud that he was a theologian in my denomination, and grateful for his contribution to the great church which he loved.

Ruminations on Burnout: “Should clergy really be ‘working?’”

2010-08-25T12:32:00.004-04:00

Clergy burnout is a hot topic now. My two most popular posts of late have been been Pastors in Peril, and the snarky satirical Ten Highly Efficient Strategies for Crushing Your Pastors Morale.

And when the New York Times notices religion at all it is usually some aspect of it that is aberrant or weird, but, lo, there have been a couple of articles this month on clergy burnout. For a compendium of recent articles on burnout in the media and blogosphere you can go here to Jason Goroncy’s ever-dependable site Per Crucem ad Lucem, where he is doing a series on clergy burnout.

It is a vast topic to cover, but here is one of my small ruminations:

I think the whole category of “burnout,” although quite real, is also a bit of a red herring. All the articles agree that clergy are overworked. And when cast in terms of “work” that is undoubtedly true.

My question is simple: “Should clergy really be working?” Or to put it another way, “When did what clergy do come to be understood as work?” Clergy have always been busy doing what clergy do, visiting the sick, attending to the dying, preaching and administering the sacraments and the scholarly preparation for same. The “work” clergy are now expected to do is a category drawn from the industrial and post industrial West, and seen in terms of their terms of efficiency, productivity, and professionalism.

I submit that this is a category error, and that the expectations of this category are one of the causes for burnout. On reflection I realize that an embarrassing amount of the “work” I did in my over thirty years in pastoral ministry was designed to give the appearance of being effective, productive and professional, to my congregants, the greater community, and to myself.

And I think many clergy share this loss of confidence about their core identity and engage in “the sin of bustle” (P.T. Forsyth) to convince the world that they are useful, valued, and worthy of the high social status to which they aspire.

Years ago one of my GE manager types got on my oversight board and hounded me into doing detailed hourly logs of what I do as part of a compensation review (I know this sounds like Dante, but it really happened.) I was insecure enough to hold my doubts and my tongue, and dutifully filled them out, but a good deal of the time I found myself in comic reflection. For example, when I was thinking about whether Paul’s radical theology of justification in Romans led to antinomianism while soaping up in the shower, was I “working?” Or am I working right now while I ruminate, for I have no position and am not being compensated for it?

My point is that the role of clergy is not something you put on and take off like a cloak. The clergyperson was once the “the parson” (person), and embodied the church in some way. We reject that model because it was patriarchal and hierarchical, and with good reason, but we have lost something as well. Ordination was never about the intrinsic qualities of the ordained. All the way back to the Donatist crisis the church asserted, “The efficacy of the sacrament does not depend on the sanctity of the celebrant.”

That is to say that ordination was never about the gifts and graces of the ordained, no matter how impressive. Rather ordination was the church conferring authority and its requisite graces on the ordained for the good of the church. When we lost the model of embodiment for clergy we turned to function, and looked around for models from the society. That is where we are today. Now there have been many good things to come out of the professionalism of the clergy, but much has been lost.

It seems to me no accident that the declining mainline clergy are much more preoccupied with compensation and various “work” related protocols than the more robust evangelical and Pentecostal churches. In my own United Church of Christ we have compensation recommendations based on seniority, experience, size of congregations, and all the measures that corporate America would value. The result of this is that we have priced many small congregations out of full-time ministry, and discouraged many talented clergy who feel called to serve these churches from doing so.

We also have guidelines for how many hours (divided into parts of days called “units”) that pastors should be “working.” Like so many things in our churches these suggestions are right-minded but wrongheaded. Because ministry can’t be cut into tranches like pate.

The category of burnout is a symptom of what happens when you take on these models. If your criteria for “success” is efficiency and productivity you will always fall short, because ministry is neither efficient nor productive in the terms of the world.

The real measure of ministry is faithfulness, because the ministry belongs to God, and God is famously difficult to evaluate. Paul said, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gives the growth.” Ministry is about planting and watering. We seldom see our results.

The attempt to quantify the “work” of ministry fails before it begins, because it is based on a secular model. Look at how we talk about it: The pastor goes to the “office” (not the study), and keeps “office hours.” And how is the pastor deemed “successful?” By how much money is raised? By how many new members are brought in? Are these the real measure of the dominion of God?

How many faithful mainline ministers in demographically unfruitful vineyards have cast a covetous eye on thriving churches in more fertile spots? Or at their evangelical brothers and sisters? How many have secretly perused a brochure for a Willow Creek or Schuller workshop on church growth when the door to their “office” was closed. And how many have accepted growth strategies and practices that neither their hearts nor their theologies truly believe in?

This is some of the climate in which clergy burnout, by whatever name, flourishes. Because if one ceases to believe in the integrity and importance of what you are doing, than it doesn’t take too much “work” for it to seem like too much. And conversely, clergy who know what they are doing and love doing it would seldom describe their busy lives by the word burnout. Paul describes his various trials and tribulations, which could match any modern pastor for being overworked and undervalued. But he saw his ministry as a sharing in the ministry of Christ, including his cross, and rather than being burned out he could rejoice in his afflictions.

So it is not just about how much a cost we pay to do our ministry, for faithful ministry always comes with a personal cost, but whether we believe in what we are called to do, and know what we are doing and why we are doing it.

It is like the old joke about the pilot who comes on the intercom and announces to the passengers, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news! The good news is that we are making great time. The bad news is that we are lost.”

The good news is that clergy are working harder than ever. The bad news is that they are burned out. Because when you don’t know what you are doing, you don’t know when you have done it.

Religious Freedom: Which narrative will prove true?

2010-08-24T16:08:00.001-04:00

Americans are justly proud of our freedoms, and near the top of the list is freedom of religion. The first amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise therof.” Article VI prohibits religious tests for public office. A rich diversity of religious faiths, unprecedented in human history, have lived together in our land and shared a vision of America as a safe social space for the free practice of religion.

That is the dominant national narrative, but it is only half the story. If you look at the history of our country closely you can’t help but notice a counter-narrative, one in which religious bigotry is as American as apple pie. For example, the “nativist’ movement which arose in the 1840’s in response to an influx of Roman Catholic immigrants from Europe. It culminated in the (aptly named) “Know-Nothing Party,” who ran the former President Millard Fillmore for President (he lost.)

The result of this climate of fear was a disgraceful period that saw periodic mob violence, churches burned down, and some Catholics killed. The rhetoric was alarmingly similar to some of what you hear today about immigrants, that they threaten the culture of the country, and about Muslims, that their religious beliefs are incompatible with the American way of life.

In the 1920’s the anti-Catholics, including the Ku Klux Klan, claimed that Catholicism was incompatible with democracy. At that time, the response of the Catholic Church was that the nativists didn’t represent American values as much as they did, since the Catholics believed in freedom of religion. They had a point.

Roman Catholics today are in the mainstream of American life, and constitute the largest Christian denomination in the country by far. It is hard for young people to imagine the rancor created by the presidential campaign of Al Smith, a Roman Catholic, in 1928, or of John F. Kennedy in 1960. In the dominant narrative those ugly nativist impulses in our national psyche have been put behind us.

Sadly, this seems not to be so. The perfect storm of a national immigration crisis and a recession have rekindled atavistic tendencies to fear and hate the Other. In the case of immigration this is not generally cast today in primarily religious terms, as many immigrants are Catholic.

But the raging debate over the proposed Islamic Center in New York shows that religious bigotry lives on. Is every one who opposes the building of this center a bigot? Certainly not. But the conversation is salted with enough starkly anti-Muslim rhetoric to disturb anyone who believes that freedom of religion is a cherished feature of our national identity.

In American life we do not have to like all religions, or believe that they are all true, but we do have to allow them the same freedoms we have to their beliefs and worship practices. The current debate, cravenly inflamed for political purposes, is really about which narrative will be found to be true about us. Are we peaceful, tolerant and generous, or are we fearful, hateful and selfish? Will we be American patriots, touched by “the better angels of our nature?” Or will we be “Know Nothings?” These questions hang in the air.

(Picture: Roger Williams)

New poll: One out of Four Americans is not paying attention!

2010-08-20T16:07:00.000-04:00

Against all the facts, 25 % of Americans believe that President Obama is a Muslim, according to a new poll. It is hard for me to find the words to express how discouraging that piece of information is.

I have it on good authority from reliable personal contacts that President Obama and his family were members and regular attenders at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which happens to be the largest congregation in my denomination, the United Church of Christ. Yes, that is a Christian Church. The members of such churches are Christians.

The Obamas would probably still be members there if Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor, hadn’t got off his talking points and scared many of the electorate during the campaign.

That the Obamas have not found a church home in Washington, D.C. may be a result of the painful memories of the Wright incident, when the 24/7 news media scoured Wright’s sermons for evidence against the candidate. That some of the phrases they took out of context sounded very much like the kind of thing that many of us preachers have often said from the pulpit made them sound no less scary when played back on Fox “News” (sic).

Like Supreme Court nominees who do best to have no record to derail their nomination it may be prudent for a president of the Untied States to detach himself from church membership to avoid defending every jot and tiddle spoken from the pulpit of his church.

The irony now is that the Obama campaign nearly got derailed when the media portrayed his Christian pastor as being a loose cannon, but apparently a good 25% percent of the electorate never even heard about it. Or maybe they forgot, which is even more discouraging. So I don't know, I must conclude that one in four Americans is just not paying attention.

But one thing I do know for sure, the right wing demagogues, and the benighted citizens who pay attention to them can’t have it both ways. President Obama can’t be BOTH a Christian with a dangerously unstable former pastor and be a Muslim. He just can’t.

Ten Theses about Interim Ministry

2010-08-09T15:35:00.004-04:00

1. The chief purpose of long interim ministries is to provide a regular supply of jobs for ministers who are unwilling or unable to take a settled pastorate. This is not a good thing. Although a good interim minister can be a gift to a congregation, he or she is no substitute for a settled pastor. Interims work to contract, they often don't live in the communities they serve, and they are not going to stay. It is a different kind of ministry, and the longer a church has an interim minister the longer it is deprived of the covenantal relationship that comes with having a called and settled minister.

2. During my 30 years in the ministry the length of interim ministries has expanded from a few months to two or three years (or more.) Meanwhile settled ministries are getting shorter, so the only difference seems to be less accountability on the part of the interim minister. Many seem to prefer it that way.

3. Interim ministers were once typically retired experienced pastors who preached, did pastoral care, and kept a light hand on the organization while the congregation sought a new settled pastor.

4. Today, interim ministers lead elaborate congregational self-studies, change the structures, rewrite the by-laws, and generally move the furniture around in ways that were once considered to be the job of a settled leader.

5. The reason that the extended length and the frenetic re-shuffling of interim ministry is justified as necessary is because the leave-taking of a pastor is considered to be such a trauma that only expert interim leadership can help the congregation heal from it and prepare for new leadership. It is true that there are such traumatic situations, such as the death of a pastor, cases of clergy abuse or misconduct, or where there has been profound conflict. These situations may well call for extended interims. But the new model for interim ministry assumes that every transition needs such a long and intense interim. They do not. Why then are all interims expected to be so long? See #1.

6. The model for much interim ministry is a family system model where congregations are seen as dysfunctional systems and the former pastor (actually called the BFP “beloved former pastor” in some interim training) is seen as the problem. Sometimes this is true. Usually it is not, but the one-size-fits all template is demeaning to former pastors who have served faithfully. One must wonder if it can be possible that every pastor’s predecessor was incompetent, lazy, controlling or evil.

7. Long interims frequently dissipate the momentum of many church programs, make the congregation feel adrift, lose the allegiance of many long-term members, and often leave the new settled pastor with a much-diminished congregation. This scorched-earth policy allows for little continuity between pastorates, and means the new pastor often must “re-invent the wheel” in a new setting.

8. Interim ministers have their own networks, and often work outside the existing judicatory processes. They can and often do function as a free-floating class of paladins for hire that raises fundamental questions about the meaning of ordination and the accountability of the ordained. Ordaining someone to interim ministry is a (new) practice that needs serious scrutiny.

9. Because the models of interim ministry are derived largely from psycho-social systems theory and/or corporate management models they have little regard for the church’s own grammar of how to be church. These interim models are very thin on the ground when it comes to theology. This mirrors a general trend in ministry toward professional identity over the ancient churchly arts of soul-craft and ministry of the Word of God.

10. Lay persons in leadership during a time of pastoral transition are well-advised to carefully query potential interim ministers about their model of interim ministry. Question the assumption that every church needs a two or three year interim. Maybe you do, but ask why? Ask if the interim is planning on doing a lot of restructuring, and if so, why? The congregation should decide what it needs from an interim, and not hire an interim to tell it what it needs from him or her. An interim is just that, an interim who gets you through a period to allow the “search and call” process to take place. The rule of an interim should be like a doctor: “Do no harm.” A good interim will leave a small footprint.

Disability and Grace

2010-08-04T14:17:00.002-04:00

Ten years ago tomorrow I went over the handlebars of my bicycle and landed on my head. I have written about that day elsewhere. Since that time I have been grappling daily with being brain injured. Of course, before that day I grappled daily with being human, an enterprise that continues, but brain injury complicates it considerably.

In fact, “a complication” has been a useful way for me to think about brain injury. My injury is, of course, in common parlance, “a disability,” and the Social Security Administration has recognized mine as such. It is a credential I would have preferred not to have needed, but it makes me officially disabled.

Yet, I don’t really think of myself as a disabled person, any more than I think of myself primarily as a white person, an ordained person, or a male person. All these realities inform my identity but do not, even in the aggregate, constitute it.

I have always had an allergy to identity politics, and question whether it is helpful for one to think of oneself as primarily identified by race, gender, sexual orientation, or for that matter, disability. If pressed for an identity I would pick a really big one, such as “created in the image of God,” and its new creation correlate, baptism. I say this because I believe that any identity that ignores our relationship with God is bound to be too narrow, and lead to some form of self-deception.

But I understand why people with disabilities often choose to make their disability a primary identity, because other people certainly use disability as a social marker, just as they do for race and gender. If you are in a wheelchair or walk or speak differently that will be part of what defines you. And many people can’t look beyond the obvious. People have a fear of disability, that if that can happen to you, it could happen to them. I think there is also a tendency to distance oneself from the disabled by blaming them for their disabilities. They must have brought it on themselves by bad behaviors. This helps us maintain the illusion that we can have control over protecting ourselves from becoming disabled by being careful. And sometimes it is true that persons acquire disabilities from poor life choices, but most times that is not true.

My disabilities are largely hidden, since I am able to walk and speak. Nonetheless, enough people in my community know about my accident and its aftermath that I find myself in awkward social situations where people aren’t sure how to approach me. My memory is largely unimpaired (and was good to begin with), but the assumption is that brain injury is largely about memory loss, so I find myself in these painful (and sometimes comical) encounters in the supermarket where people are trying to tell me a story but filling in huge amounts of unnecessary back-story (like the names of their kids that I baptized and have known for over twenty years.) Others talk really slowly and enunciate carefully, and I must resist the temptation to say, “I’m brain injured, not stupid.”

Many people just want me to recover and be better, though I will always have a brain injury. “How are you doing?” they ask empathically and I really want to say fine, but, of course, I am not fine, so I resort to something like, “I am doing OK.” Sometimes I say, “For a man in my condition, I’m in great condition.”

A lot of dealing with injury is self-care, and it is frustrating how much of my time and energy goes into just keeping healthy. There are many things I could once do but now cannot. One of the reasons I resist disability as a primary identity is the temptation to use it as an excuse to do less than I can. For I can still do many things, and need to do them, even when it is hard. The daily challenge is to find the sweet spot between too much and too little activity, and of course, when you live with others, this balance is not always completely under your control. Sometimes I choose to overdo just because the thing I choose is important enough to me to pay a price for several days. But I can only do so much of that or I risk my health, which is easier to protect than to restore.

There is also a level of dependency involved with disability that is very hard for me. I rely on my wife and children and family for love and support and a great deal of care-giving. So in some very real sense my injury is a family affair, something that has to be factored in to all our interactions. I want to be strong and brave and independent, but have to face my reliance on others. The positive part of this is that I often experience their care for me as grace, that is, as something freely given though undeserved. And I am often in awe of their patience and forbearance with me, for I am not always the easiest person to be around, especially when I am tired, which is much of the time.

Even before the accident I was powerfully moved by the pathos at the heart of the Christian story: how God’s power is made manifest in the weakness of the cross of Jesus Christ. I have recounted often before that my mother died when I was 18, and that my return to Christian faith as a young adult was the result of a struggle to make sense of a world where such losses (and others) take place. It shouldn’t be a surprise that I became a theologian of the cross, which I see, not as a symbol of violence and brutality, but as the place where God’s reconciling love encountered human sin and overcame it.

These last ten years have made me more acutely aware that faith lives in the midst of weakness. Disability has sharpened that awareness for me, but one doesn’t have to be disabled to experience human weakness. As a pastor for over thirty years I learned that people undergoing a crisis of loss or humiliation could often hear the good news of the Gospel in fresh new ways, or even for the first time. In such moments God speaks. Perhaps only when enough of us is cleared out of the way to silence our own voices can there be the space for us to hear God.

My injury and its deficits also complicate my spiritual life, and that too, has made me aware of faith as a gift that I can’t create in myself. “Grace,” I once heard James Forbes say, “is where you find love in full bloom in a climate where it is too cold to grow.” I'm not very good at faith anymore, so it seems even more of a grace when it is there at all.

During my long ministry I was privileged to spend many hours with the aging and dying. They have been my teachers, helping me prepare for my own aging and dying, and also for disability, which shares many of the same features of limitation and loss. In all these challenges of living one relinquishes features of your previous experience of living. This is painful, but faith can enable us to exercise “a holy relinquishing,” that is literally “graceful.” I have been blessed to witness this again and again among those who retain a wonderful dignity in the face of the indignities visited upon the old, the sick and the dying.

Ultimately, grappling with the complications of disability (or just humanity through its life stages) exists within a horizon of hope. This too, is a gift of faith. I have stood at hundreds of funerals and proclaimed, “‘I am the resurrection and the life, ’ said the Lord,” and that promise gives me hope.

I don’t know what that new reality will be like, but I cling to bits of Scripture that give us hints and clues. Paul says, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. ”(1 Corinthians 13:12)

The scripture that speaks to me most about disability comes from the vision of John the Divine as reported in the 21st chapter of Revelation. John looks up and sees a new heaven and a new earth, and a New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven. He says, “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

I take comfort from this promise that God’s ultimate intention for us is a community where we don’t suffer pain or death or loss. That would have to include disability. No more sleepless nights, no more depression, no more chronic pain, no more anxiety and fear, no more shame. No more of all the things that beset us in this earthly life. Quite a vision!

This horizon of hope often allows me to bounce back from my set-backs, to experience forgiveness for my failings, to face the challenges and complications of each new day, and to enjoy the quotidian little (and sometimes not so little) graces that visit me unbidden and unexpected.

When Theologians Order Apple Pie

2010-08-02T13:14:00.003-04:00

Not long ago I had a lovely lunch with my wife and my daughter at The Student Prince, the iconic German restaurant in Springfield, Massachusetts. After I had completed my würst plate, the waitress asked me if I would like dessert, and I said, as I patted my stomach, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” She said, “Excuse me?” My daughter, who is a student at Yale Divinity School, shot me a look, and said, “She didn’t get your biblical reference, Dad.” “No thank you,” I quickly added, “I’m full.”

I don’t know why I do this. My family is habituated to my obscure asides. My own family of origin was a biblically literate outfit, and biblical references were sprinkled liberally into our conversation. Perhaps I am nostalgic for a day gone by. I started ruminating about Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative; his magisterial account of how we got from a society where people place themselves within the Biblical story to a society where most people don’t even know it. That got me thinking about one of Stanley Hauerwas’ probing questions: “What story do you tell yourself after you have told yourself you have no story?” Or something like that.

That got me thinking about what Stanley might have said to the waitress: “What kind of apple pie do I order after I have told myself there is no apple pie?” And, just like that, a new game was born called “When Theologians Order Apple Pie.”

Please feel free to add your own examples. Here are some of mine.

Waitress, “Would you like dessert?
Reinhold Neibuhr: “The apple pie here isn’t as good as people think it is!”

Waitress: “Would you like dessert?”
Karl Barth: “Yes . . . and no.”

Waitress: “Would you like dessert?”
Rudoph Bultmann: The widespread belief that it was an apple that tempted Eve is not in the text, which merely says fruit. It could have been a date or a pomegranate. We don’t know, but the mythic form of the pericope suggests it doesn’t matter. Do you have anything with dates?

Waitress: Would you like dessert?”
Marcus Borg: I know that the apple pie here isn’t really apple pie, but I believe it might be satisfying nonetheless.”

Waitress: “Would you like dessert?”
Walter Brueggemann: “I will eschew the apple pie, which symbolizes the hegemony of the American Empire, from which the church is, or should be, in exile. Just black coffee.”

Waitress: Would you like dessert?
Mary Daly: I choose to call you, not a waitress or a server, for those are demeaning andro-centric and hierarchical signifiers. You are a “pie BRINGer.”

Waitress: “Would you like dessert?”
Paul Tillich: “The apple pie represents our eternal human longing for a pre-lapsarian Eden, despite the obvious fact that apple pie cannot be turned back into apples.

Waitress: “Would you like dessert?”
Jonathan Edwards: “We can see in a piece of apple pie the deep essence of God’s love, a reflection of the love each of the persons of the Trinity have for one another. But, no, just a glass of water for me, thanks.”

Waitress: “Would you like dessert?”
P.T. Forsyth: “Whenever I eat apple pie, I am reminded that God the holy Father acted decisively in the atoning cross of Jesus Christ to overcome the great breach between God and humans caused by our sin. Do you have any shortbread?

OK, kids, you get the idea. All you theo-bloggers and bored theological grad students who read too much and don't have anybody that's interested, here's your chance to shine. I want to see Rahner, Van Balthasar, Aquinas, Anselm and the Cappadocians before the week is out. Best entries get to buy a piece of apple pie for themselves.

My Top Ten Reasons why Anne Rice would hate the United Church of Christ:

2010-07-31T11:38:00.000-04:00

When writer Anne Rice recently said she’s done with church, the UCC Office of Communication in Cleveland started a Facebook page called “You’d like the UCC, Anne Rice.” But I am convinced that they are wrong, and here’s why:

1. We are not the Roman Catholic Church. Yes, we Reformed Christians do believe that we are included in “the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” of the Creed, but don’t bet the farm that Anne Rice thinks that. When she says she is done with “the Church” she knows just what church she is done with. When Philosopher George Santayana said he didn’t believe in God, he clarified by saying, “And the God I don’t believe in mother’s name is Mary.” Anne isn’t looking for liberal Protestantism.

2. She would love all our social views, but hate our religious ones. Yes, we affirm science and tolerance toward women and gays, and affirm birth control, and other progressive stuff. She would like that. But she would hate our distrust of authority, our shoddy theology, our aversion to dogma, our rejection of the cross, our sloppy liturgies, our tortured language. She would do better to search the database for subscribers to the New York Times or the New Yorker or join a book group.

3. We use grape juice at communion. C’mon.

4. We’re a tiny franchise. The Roman Catholic Church has 1.1 billion members. We have 1.1. million members (about half what we had when I was ordained) and are shrinking fast.

5. We are afraid of the Dark Side. Anne is a writer of Gothic vampire novels. What would she think of our chirpy optimism. How the church of Calvin and the Puritans came to have such a sunny view of human nature is one of those great imponderable mysteries, but Anne would hate it.

6. She would have nothing to push back against. Anne likes to fight with authority, but we don’t have any worth fighting with. She would hate that.

7. She would miss the thick texture of the Roman Church for our trimmed down decaffeinated Protestantism. Think about it: no Veneration of Mary, no stations of the cross, no fasting during Lent, no confession. Anne wouldn’t like it. She just wouldn't.

8. Our meeting houses have too much light. Anne is a “Gothic” novelist. Guess what kind of architecture she wants in her place of worship? Trust me on this one.

9. She would hate the New Century Hymnal. Why? Because she’s a writer and respects authorial intent and felicity of language.

10. She might get tired of hearing about how great we are because of our enlightened social views, and actually want some Christianity.

Anne Rice repudiates Christianity (again)

2010-07-31T00:21:00.001-04:00

So Anne Rice, who was raised a Roman Catholic, but repudiated it and became a bestselling pop writer about vampires (as everybody knows), later decided that Christianity was, after all, pretty great, and wrote a bestseller in 2008 about her return to the faith. Cool. Everybody is entitled to change her mind. Glad to have you back, Anne.

Not so fast! Now she has decided that Christianity isn’t so great because of all the hateful toxic human stuff that flies under it’s banner, and so she has repudiated it again, which is fine, since we all change our minds from time to time, and God knows she has a point.

But, unlike the rest of us, Anne doesn’t have the luxury of nobody caring what she thinks, so she comes off, at least to me, as fickle and maybe not quite as serious and committed as one would hope.

Then my crowd, the United Church of Christ, which never misses an opportunity to brand itself as the Christian equivalent of the unCola, launches a publicity campaign to say, “Hey Anne, you’d love us, cause we’re cool and don’t hate science, gays and women, and are very welcoming and all (and practically don’t sin, except for our really big self-righteous thing.) So come join us.”

I’m troubled that our faith has became part of a big public relations campaign within the culture of celebrity. It is true that the Christian brand has been degraded by sinners, but, alas, there is no one else left to represent it.

A visit to Olana, home of Frederic Edwin Church

2010-07-28T15:10:00.003-04:00

I have lived in the Berkshires since 1982, but had never visited Olana, the spectacular home of landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church, until yesterday, despite it being only an hour away by car. We live just a few miles from the border of New York State, but for some reason it acts as some sort of invisible force field so that we go in that direction to see the sights far less frequently than those here in Massachusetts.

But I knew about Olana, because a few years ago I had heard an interesting paper given about it at the Monday Evening Club by Ron Trabulsi. When the members came to comment on his paper I think I was the only one in the room who hadn’t been there, so I resolved to go.

And I’m glad I did, because Olana is well worth a visit. It is a fascinating place with a fascinating story. Frederic Church (1826-1900) was a New Englander who came to the Hudson River Valley when he was eighteen to study with Thomas Cole, the English-born American artist who is generally considered the founder of the influential Hudson River School of landscape painters.

Church was able to be a painter because he came from a prosperous family. His father was a silversmith and watchmaker in Hartford, and his grandfather had founded the first paper mill in the Berkshire town of Lee, about ten miles south of where I write this.

Like Cole, Church painted lush atmospheric landscapes of the American frontier. These suggested something mystical about the young country’s land and water and air, and they were very popular. After a trip to South America Church painted a landscape of a scene in Ecuador he called “The Heart of the Andes” (1859, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.) He took this painting on tour and sold tickets to see it. Eventually he sold it for $10,000.00, the highest price for an American painting at that time.

But these big spiritual landscapes were in time to fall out of fashion to the, you guessed it, Impressionists, and Church put more and more of his attention to the development of Olana, which is itself a work of art.
He had the time, the talent and the money to make his home into a life project.

He knew the site for he had sketched from the place that was to be Olana back in 1845, when he was studying with Cole. In 1860, just prior to his marriage to Isabel Carnes, he purchased the 126 acre farm near the town of Hudson and overlooking the Hudson River. He built a cottage, laid out an orchard and gardens, and dredged a lake out of a marsh. In 1869 he purchased a wood lot on the top of the hill, and this is where he would build Olana, an eclectic villa incorporating several styles of architecture.

Olana is a unique blend of Victorian architectural features with Italianate influences and Moorish decorative motifs. When Church would travel his painterly eye would be attracted to some design feature that would later make it’s way to Olana. He traveled to Mexico later in life, and brought ideas he had seen there into the decorations.

Olana is hard to describe because it is so eclectic (even eccentric). The thing that holds it all together is Church's own painterly vision and decorative sensibility.

Olana is now run by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation. They have a good web site to describe how to visit. You can only see the inside of the main house on a tour, which you should do. Several of Church’s paintings can be seen, as well as some by Cole.

The grounds are also lovely, as Church shaped them by his own designs. Take a picnic and sit by the lake. There is an extensive system of trails and carriage paths, so bring your walking shoes. The whole visit was an experience of a day gone by.

(Photos by R. L. Floyd)

Cycling and sportsmanship: Should Alberto have waited for Andy?

2010-07-19T17:49:00.006-04:00

In today’s Stage 15 of the Tour de France, race leader Andy Schleck put a punishing attack on rival Alberto Contador on the final big mountain climb that Contador may or may not have been able to answer. But we will never know, since Schleck dropped his chain and had to climb off his bike to put it back on. By the time he got moving he had lost precious seconds, and, it turned out, the leader's yellow jersey, since Contador, who was behind him by 30 seconds, gained 38 before the stage was over and is now in yellow.

When the Spaniard climbed up on the podium to claim his yellow jersey he was booed by a number of the spectators, and speculation arose that he had unfairly taken advantage of a mechanical situation. A visibly angry Schleck (right) seemed to think so during an interview after the stage, and this sets up a real shootout between the two young riders, who are riding at a level far above the rest of the peloton.

Even veteran British commentators Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen were divided over how to interpret the event. Liggett thought what Alberto did was cricket and Sherwen, not so much.

It is understandable to feel bad for Andy Schleck for losing his lead in such a way, but I hate to see shame fall on Alberto, a two-time Tour winner, who is, by all accounts, a decent guy.

Here are some of my ruminations.

First of all, I won’t say chains never fall of bikes when you haven’t made a awkward shift, but I can say it has never happened to me. Years ago when I starting time-trialing, I dropped a chain in a 40 K trial with about a mile to go. When I told Vince Conway, the veteran cyclist who ran the event, he described what I had done as an “illegal shift.” Chances are Andy Schleck made an “illegal shift” that dropped his chain. That would put this in a different category than getting caught in a crash outside your control.
It is not apparent the Contador even knew exactly what happened. He saw Schleck falter and scrambled to take advantage over a formidable opponent. This is, after all, a bike race.
The code on this kind of thing is vague and relies on a leader to enforce it. I really don’t think Contador could have waited and made the rest of the riders fall in line. He isn’t the padron that Lance Armstrong or Eddy Merckx were in their heyday. It is unlikely that chasers Denis Menchov and Sammy Sanchez would have stopped.
Still, waiting would have been a nice gesture befitting a champion, for Alberto would clearly have been risking his own chances to win the race if others hadn't followed suit.

So, should Alberto have waited for Andy? Hard to say, but I would have liked to see it. As it is the rivalry should heat up. I expect Andy to attack on the remaining two Pyrenean mountain stages where he excels, which will make for high drama. Especially since there is a American named Lance Armstrong languishing in 32nd place, who would like to go home from his last Tour with something to show his fans and his sponsor. I expect he will try to win one of these stages as well, although it is hard to know how he can stay with these two amazing riders. Stayed tuned.

George Hunsinger receives Barth Award

2010-07-10T12:56:00.005-04:00

Congratulations to George Hunsinger, who has been awarded the 2010 Karl Barth Award conferred by the Protestant Church in Germany. It couldn't have gone to a more deserving recipient. George is to my mind one of the outstanding “doctors of the church” in our time, and certainly one of the best teachers I have been privileged to have. The Statement of the Jury cites his work as an interpreter of Karl Barth, his excellence as a theological teacher, his ecumenical commitments, and his political engagement, especially his campaign against torture. The full text is printed below:

Explanatory Statement of the Jury regarding the decision to confer the 2010 Karl Barth Award of the Union of Evangelical Churches (UEK) in the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) to Professor Dr. George Hunsinger, Princeton, USA

With George Hunsinger’s work we honor his interpretation of Karl Barth’s theology and the political testimony that resulted from it as well as his achievements as a teacher of theology.

George Hunsinger has dedicated decades of his theological work to the interpretation of Karl Barth’s theology in the American context. His introduction, published in 1991 “How to read Karl Barth: the shape of his theology“ (German translation 2009) has become standard literature in the US. As the director of the Center for Barth Studies in Princeton, from its foundation in 1997 until 2001, he produced a collection of studies on various political, theological and ecumenical aspects of Karl Barth’s theology (“Disruptive Grace”, 2000). In his illuminative explanation of the approach and logic of Barth’s thoughts Hunsinger reveals their relevance for present day issues. He proves to be not only a sophisticated interpreter but also a challenging partner in the theological and political debates of our times. Hunsinger reminds us with Karl Barth that: “The event of Jesus Christ is not only a past fact of history, but also an event that is happening in the present here and now, as well as an event that in its historical completeness and full contemporaneity is also truly future." For Hunsinger, to learn from and with Karl Barth also means to be free from “Barthianism” and to engage in new ways, for example in ecumenical dialogue.

George Hunsinger’s theological achievements are linked to his critical view of the present and to his political engagement. For decades he has been active and most effective in the defense of Human Rights. He has always warned against the resolution of political conflicts through military means. In 2006 he initiated the National Religious Campaign against Torture (NRCAT). What then began as an appeal by 150 Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other people of conscience in Princeton became one of the most important NGO’s in Washington DC. Hunsinger refutes all attempts to legitimate torture as self defense in the context of the “War against terror”. His argument is that “torture is the ticking bomb!”. To accept torture would itself be the explosive that destroys democracy.

By awarding him the Karl Barth Award the Union of Evangelical Churches (UEK) also wants to honor George Hunsinger’s merits as a theological teacher in the full sense of the word. As an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church George Hunsinger not only taught the Bible in his congregation but he was also involved in creating the “Presbyterian Study Catechism” of 1998. This Catechism combines the explanation of the traditional elements of the Christian faith with comments on their social and political implications. Hunsinger thus overcomes the false alternative between “traditional faith” and “progressive politics” and thereby becomes a bridge builder between liberal and conservative Christians. He teaches that “the chief criterion of social witness is conformity to the enacted patterns of the divine compassion as revealed and embodied in Jesus Christ”.

The UEK thanks and honors George W. Hunsinger for his exemplary theological thinking, for his political testimony and his ecclesial teaching in the sense of a truly “generous orthodoxy”, a world-oriented interpretation and practice of Church Dogmatics.

Bishop Dr. Hans-Jürgen Abromeit, Greifswald Director

Dr. Hans-Anton Drewes, Basel Professor

Dr. Christiane Tietz, Mainz June 15, 2010

Ten Highly Effective Strategies for Crushing your Pastor’s Morale

2010-07-01T14:17:00.001-04:00

In the past most congregations’ attempts to demoralize their ordained leadership have been haphazard and ad hoc, although still surprisingly effective. In the interest of bringing more rigorous and systematic approaches to these efforts here are some of my modest proposals:

1. Schedule a weekly meeting for your pastor to sit down with the treasurer (or, better yet, the assistant treasurer) to “go over” every business expense. Be sure to inquire if certain expenses are legitimate, such as the purchase of a Marilyn Robinson or Gail Godwin novel from the pastor’s book allowance (“Should we really be paying for your chick-lit?”) Or a long-distance call to a neighboring pastor friend from seminary. Do such expenses really profit the church? And what about this big expense for 14 volumes by this Barth guy? Do you really need all of these? And his title sounds so, well, dogmatic!

2. Plan a regular talk-back session after worship so that members can query the pastor about her sermon, or the worship service, or about anything else, for that matter. It is always good to question why the pastor chose scripture lessons that are so negative, referring to such old fashioned concepts as sin, unrighteousness and repentance. Suggest more uplifting themes in the future. “And, by the way, why don’t we ever sing Christmas carols in Advent?”

3. Make sure to have an annual customer satisfaction survey where every member of the congregation fills out an anonymous questionnaire about their views of the pastor’s performance during the previous year. Make sure all the negative (or ambiguous) comments are read aloud at several meetings, and publish them without attribution in the church newsletter.

4. Vote to hold all meetings in the living room of the parsonage during the winter as a way to save money on heat, but be sure to pitch the idea as good stewardship of God’s creation so your pastor will feel too guilty to protest.

5. Cut the mission budget to balance the budget. Better yet, ask your pastor to choose between a raise in salary or an increase in the mission budget. This would be a good subject for an extended conversation at a congregational meeting. You can never talk too much about clergy compensation at a congregational meeting.

6. Set up a pastoral oversight committee to regularly monitor the pastor’s performance. Focus attention on any negative (or ambiguous) comments from the questionnaire (see # 3). Make sure to put into place measurable metrics and target goals for new members received and money raised. Hourly work logs are always effective as well.

7. Whenever your pastor goes away and returns from denominational meetings or continuing education events never miss an opportunity to ask, “How was your vacation?”

8. Make sure the pastor is made aware of the two biggest complaints, namely, that he is never in the office, and he doesn’t make enough home visits. That the two cannot both be true will not diminish their use as morale crushers.

9. Tell the pastor that there are anonymous complaints that a. your sermons are too long; b. your voice is too soft to be heard (especially by the deaf); c. your spouse is not involved enough (or too involved) in the life of the congregation; d. your child shouldn’t have been given the lead in the Christmas pageant; e. your lawn needs mowing; and f. you were seen in shorts at the supermarket. This is just a sample list. Use your imagination.

10. Constantly compare your pastor to his long-tenured saintly predecessor, with special attention made to his never asking for a raise for himself or his staff.

If your pastor balks at any of these attempts, just mutter words such as “accountability,” “transparency,” “standards,” or “professionalism. Pastors are loath to appear to be against any of these concepts so cherished by the managerial class.

(Picture: “The Scream” by Edvard Munch)

“The Future of Newspapers:” The Second Annual Martin Langeveld Interview

2010-06-11T10:21:00.004-04:00

Just a year ago I blogged an interview with Martin Langeveld called “The Future of Newspapers.” Martin, a former newspaper publisher, had recently given a paper by that name to the Monday Evening Club, a group we both belong to. Martin has been tracking this story for several years with regular dispatches from the front on his blog at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. He also comments on this story on his personal blog, News after Newspapers. I thought it would be interesting to see what developments have taken place in the year since that interview, and Martin has kindly consented to another interview.

RF: Thanks for taking the time to do this, Martin. Your interview a year ago was among my most visited posts. You seem to be the go-to guy on this story, with your extensive background in the newspaper business. Any chance your reporting will become a book someday? Or is that just another dying medium?

ML: I have a feeling that books will be around a lot longer than newspapers, because people want them for their permanence — they've never regarded newspapers that way. Printed text and graphics in books is a data storage medium, and one that has proven extremely durable (in contrast to various electronic media that are already obsolete, like 8-tracks and video discs). Printed news on newsprint is not data storage, but simply a convenient delivery mechanism that can be replaced if something better comes along, like digital delivery in one format or another. So can books, and that's indeed happening — but for many people and many purposes, the user interface as well as the permanence of the printed book won't be improved enough in a digital format. I don't imagine church liturgists reading the scripture lesson from an iPad, for example (although come to think of it, why not, really?). As for me writing a book, it could happen, but I'm not working on anything. I think there is an overarching story to be told about the decline of American newspapers that has been going on for the last 50 years, but that's a pretty big project.

RF: One of the things I took away from our discussions last year was that the “crisis” in the newspaper business was actually not a new event so much as a continuation of a declining trend going back to the 1960’s. What has happened since last year?

ML: More of the same. The industry has still not had a calendar quarter with growth in total ad revenue, and paid circulation continues to fall at a pretty disastrous pace. Late last year industry execs began to tout an improving picture in the form of "moderating declines" — that is, a reduction in the annualized rate of loss from more than 20 percent to something in the teens. This is good news only if you're Dilbert's "pointy-headed boss," who said in a recent strip, "We’ve been doing great since we redefined success as a slowing of failure.” The figure for first quarter of 2010 which just came out is a loss of 10 percent. (It was a loss of 11.4 percent in print, a gain of 4.9 percent in online advertising — the first in two years, combining for a loss of 9.7 percent overall and the 15th losing quarter in a row.) It's possible that the second quarter will show just a single digit decline, with some companies reporting gains. But remember that this is on top of four years with a cumulative loss of about half (46 percent) of total newspaper ad revenue, and the recession officially ended six months earlier. And of course there is absolutely no indication of an end or reversal of those 50-year trendlines (lower household penetration on the circulation side, and smaller share of total U.S. ad spending on the advertising side).

RF: On your Nieman blog you have been making and tracking your predictions on this story. How have your predictions panned out this past year, and what do you see taking place by this time next year when we do our third annual interview?

ML: I posted the results of my 2009 predictions back in December, along with a new set of predictions for 2010. As it turns out, I was right that the stock market would be up about 15 percent during 2009, and that newspaper stocks would beat the market. (Basically, they had nowhere to go but up or out.) The rest of it was a mixed bag, with more wrongs than rights. I was most wrong in thinking that newspaper revenue would stabilize by the end of the year — as noted above, the losses were still well into the double digits at year-end. So for next year I'm being more cautious. My first-quarter ad revenue prediction was actually very close; I predicted a loss of 11 percent, it came in at 10 percent. I predicted online revenue would break eight consecutive losing quarters with a break-even result; it came in with a 4.9 percent gain, as noted above. I predicted a 7.5 percent circulation loss for the six-month period ending March 31; it came in at 8.7 percent weekdays and 6.5 percent Sundays. I also made a prediction regarding tablets — this is back in December before iPad mania began. I expected Apple's tablet to hit later in the year, but I predicted a price point of $500 plus the data plan; it's actually $499. Beyond that, I predicted there would be a wave of consolidation in the newspaper industry, which hasn't happened yet, but the year's not over. I also said that there will be big growth in the consumption of news on mobile devices, which includes tablets. And my bet on the Dow for 2010 is that it will be up 8 percent. So far it's down 2.5 percent, so I guess I'm looking for a bounce. And I said that newspaper companies would lag the market as revenue continues to decline — that's true of the New York Times Company and a few others, but not of Gannett, McClatchy and Scripps.

RF: Electronic readers existed this time last year, but it would have been hard to predict their burgeoning popularity, especially Apple’s iPad. How does this new technology impact the newspaper?

ML: Right, the iPad is just huge, with more than 2 million units sold so far. I posted a set of strategic suggestions to publishers with respect to the iPad and other tablets, which has gotten a pretty good response. Here's the original post at NiemanLab; I refined this into a white paper at “News After Newspapers.” To put it in a nutshell, I think that publishers need to take tablets seriously, especially the iPad. Tablets will be much bigger as leisure-time devices than as workplace tools; they'll be used at home and on vacation; they'll be used in conjunction with other media (like surfing the web while watching TV). As confirmation, there's already data showing that iPad share of web browsing peaks on weekends. And because of their leisure-time utility, tablets will power a major increase in online shopping, which has been kind of stuck in neutral for a few years. All of those are good reasons for publishers to explore how to use them. Nobody really knows yet what kinds of news and advertising formats will work best on tablets, but the experimentation has begun.

RF: I read the New York Times for free on-line most weekdays (I buy the print version on Sundays). The Times has announced it will begin charging for on-line content next year. There are some successful pay-for-content periodicals (I pay for both the Economist and The New Yorker, for example), but when Newsday put its on-line content behind a pay wall last October they only attracted thirty-five paid subscribers. What’s your best guess about the Times experiment?

ML: I'm reluctantly coming around to the idea that the Times might make this work, just as the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and others have done for some time already. You might still be able to read a lot of Times stuff for free, because they'll be setting the threshold before the meter starts to run pretty high. This is counterintuitive — they believe that their most loyal, most intensive readers are will be willing to pay, so they'll charge them and not the casual browsers. And they may be right. But I think that a year from now when we do this again, while the Times pay system might be working, most content at most newspaper sites around the country will still be freely available, because the kind of content that most papers can offer, relative to the richness of the Times, simply doesn't give them any pricing power. If they try "paywalls" of any kind, most newspapers will be disappointed.

RF: I first heard the anecdote from you about the student in the focus group who said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.” When you told that to the Monday Evening Club, several of us were dismayed by the story, as if it depicted an uninterested and disengaged youth. But this past year I find it to be more and more true. In a media-saturated culture where we are all plugged in, the news more and more does seem to seek us out. And part of what that means is that by the time my wife asks me if I know about something she is reading in the daily newspaper, I have usually known it already for a day. Clearly the role of the daily in dispensing the breaking stories is changed. Is there a new role for them?

ML: Yes, but many of them don't really understand it, unfortunately. The right role for a local news organization (let's start by not calling it a news "paper") is to be a platform-independent generator of news content. That means gathering news and distributing by whatever means are most appropriate, in a continuous cycle. That might include sending out Tweets about breaking news, as well as using Twitter and text-messaging to source information from readers; doing the same on Facebook and on reporters blogs; building multiple versions of a story that can go out as an email alert, a web site story, or via a tablet or smartphone app; and participating in and moderating reader comment discussion of it. The printed newspaper becomes a niche product with content pulled out of that stream every 24 hours for distribution to those who prefer that format, but it should no longer be the organization's core, driving product.

RF: Last year you mentioned the loss of classified ads to the internet as another piece of the crisis. I notice that my kids and their young adult friends buy and sell everything on-line, from apartments to cars and pets. What has happened to that trend in the past year, and what does it mean for newspapers?

ML: That trend has continued unabated; classified advertising revenue was down 38 percent during 2009 and another 14 percent in the first quarter of 2010. It's running at about one-third the pace it was five years ago, still sliding, and it's never coming back. What newspapers should worry about now is whether retail advertising and shopping on iPad and other tablets can take a similar bite out of what's left of newspaper display advertising and insert advertising. That's a real danger. There are no retail marketers or advertising agencies trying to figure out how to spend more money in newspapers. They're all interested in how to do more advertising and selling on mobile devices of all kinds.

RF: Thanks, Martin. We’ll see if newspapers survive long enough for us to have another interview next year.

The Ministry and its Discontents: Pastors in Peril

2010-06-03T16:31:00.002-04:00

I know a lot of ministers. That might seem like a statement of the obvious coming from one who has been a minister for over thirty years, but I know even more ministers than you might think. For one thing, I was a seminary chaplain for several years and all my former students are ministers. And I had three sabbaticals in British universities where ministers were being trained. And I was in a D.Min. degree program where all my classmates were ministers. Add it up and it is a lot of ministers!

And since early in my ministry I have been asking them to put me on their church newsletter mailing list, and a number of them have. Many of those have converted to e-letters lately, but still, I get a pretty steady stream of newsletters from congregations, and it is fun to see what my ministerial friends are up to.

Except when it isn’t fun, and that seems to be happening more and more lately. I will grab and read a newsletter and immediately start noticing little hints of trouble. I then typically say to my wife, “Uh oh. So and so is having a disturbance in the Force in his or her congregation!”

Now I recognize that the ministry has always been a perilous profession. I recently read George Marsden’s fine biography of Jonathan Edwards, and was reminded that Edwards was handed his walking papers in Northampton before he came over here to the Berkshires. This is the same Edwards that not too many years before had been the toast of the Reformed world for his participation in and reporting of the awakenings in New England. So it can happen to even the best and the brightest (and as in Edwards case, the wounds are often at least partly self-inflicted.)

So pastors in peril are nothing new, but I have been noticing a discouraging pattern in my newsletter reading lately. And I must interject here that I have known lazy and incompetent ministers, and others who were just in over their heads, but that is not what I am talking about here. Several of my friends who are smart, wise, bright, hard-working and faithful have suddenly found themselves in peril.

Typically it starts with some sort of a parish self-study or pastoral assessment. That should be harmless enough, right? Who can be against transparency and accountability? But my heart sinks when I read in the newsletter about the formation of such a group, because sure enough, when the results come in there are “concerns” about the pastor, and a special committee is created to “address the concerns.” The newsletters typically report such grave findings in a kind of code, but you don’t have to be a genius to read between the lines.

So “steps are put in place” to address the concerns. The committee may or may not be led by a sympathetic leader but it doesn’t really matter that much because the process itself has a certain trajectory. If there is a lay “antagonist” in the congregation he or she (or they) will certainly find a way to get involved.

There soon follows what I call “leadership death by a thousand cuts.” The ministry is quantified by every measure, by hours spent, by visits made, by hours in the office. Careful time logs are kept. Business expenses are microscopically scrutinized.

At this point the healthy trusting covenantal relationship between pastor and people has been replaced by a suspicious contractual arrangement that will almost inevitably end in mutual blame and bitterness. Some pastors will buckle under and keep their “job,” others will devise an exit strategy; one of my good friends just left the ministry, to the church’s loss.

Here are some observations and thoughts from my ruminations on this trend.

1. The roles and assumptions behind this scenario betray a flawed understanding of the church and its ministry. First of all, an ordained minister of Word and Sacrament is not an employee of the church. Ministers work in the church and with the church but not for the church. Ministers are not hired, they are called, and nothing betrays the flawed ecclesiology behind pastors in peril as much as the contractual language of the modern corporation that is frequently employed. “We pay your salary, you work for us.” And behind that view is the idea that the minister’s “job” is to do the work of the congregation, and the laity’s “job” is to oversee that work, which is quite the reverse of the minister providing leadership to the laity to let them be the church of Christ in their community.

2. When the congregation understands its mission as the maintenance of its own institutional life, the pastor’s role is to be the general factotum who facilitates that life. The flawed model here is that the church is to be a chapel to the culture, which is a Constantinian model left over from a Christian society. This is why the place where pastors are most in peril is in “tall steeple” churches that by virtue of their social and economic location have been able to pretend that the Constantinian church is still alive and well.

3. But the truth is that that model of church is not alive and well, and the current recession has hit even prosperous congregations hard enough to expose the institutional weakness of a church that needs big infusions of cash to maintain its place as the chapel to culture. When the numbers (members and money) slump, than the lay leadership turns to corporate models to remedy decline, ie. change the CEO. Or at least demand better numbers (“metrics”) soon if the relationship is to continue.

4. To meet the new expectation of better numbers the imperiled pastor must show vigorous signs of improvement that are quantifiable. More visibilty in the community, more calls and visits, recruitment (not evangelism) to get more members to come and help prop up the sagging finances. But “what profiteth a man if he gains the numbers and loses his soul?” By ramping up an already frenetic pace to show results the pastor is depriving himself or herself of what is really needed in the situation, which is holy imagination. I would argue that more time in the study and at prayer would be better use of the pastor’s time than more energetic involvement in what P.T. Forsyth once called “the sin of bustle.”

5. An ill-conceived pastoral evaluation will almost certainly bring out some discontents among the congregation. These discontents may be based on the minister’s real or imagined failings or they may result from a variety of mutually exclusive understandings of the pastor’s role. Clarity about that role, and about the congregation’s mission, will help avoid such situations. I once heard Roy Owald of the Alban Institute say a pastor should never be evaluated apart from an evaluation of the congregation. That sounds wise to me. And the dreaded congregatonal questionnaire evaluation should be avoided at all costs. Oswald suggests that both pastor and congregation ask each other, “What do you need more of from me, and what do you need less of?” This mitigates the adversarial tone of the evaluation processes.

6. The rigors of pastoral evaluations are the final proof that even though pastors may preach salvation by faith they are often held to a standard of salvation by works. This is yet another triumph of law over Gospel.

7. Finally, the church of Jesus Christ is not a religious club. Its mission and ministry is Christ’s own, which is the reconciliation of humanity to God and to one another. Christ has already accomplished that work of holy love in his atoning cross, and so, to quote Forsyth again, it doesn’t have to be “produced so much as introduced.” Like Christ, his church does not live for itself. A congregation that understands that will no longer focus on its own institutional life, but reach out of its walls to embody Christ in its community and the world. The pastor’s role is to help them do that through Word and sacrament and visionary leadership. The good pastor sows and waters, feeds and encourages. If the congregation demands that he or she just run errands for them they will dampen the pastor’s morale and distract both the pastor and themselves from their true and glorious vocation to be the church. And whenever that happens it is a shame, and will please no one but the devil.

Ruminations on John 14:8-17: The Christology of Pentecost

2010-05-19T13:07:00.001-04:00

My friend and United Church of Christ colleague Herb Davis writes lectionary study notes weekly for the Confessing Christ Web site. These are uniformly thoughtful and inspiring, and reflects Herb's life-long engagement with theology and church life. Herb is also one of the best preachers I have ever heard. Here are his reflections on the Gospel reading for Pentecost Sunday, John 14:8-17:

“It is fashionable to say,‘no one knows God’ or ‘there are many ways to God.’ Both statement may be true. Moses' request to see God was denied to protect him. God is wholly other, so in a sense God is not accessible to humans. These are not John's concern. He know that if you see Jesus, you have have seen the Father. If you know Jesus you know the Father. The Father we see in Jesus is one who loves the world, who lays down his life for us, who is not ashamed of us but invites us to dwell with him forever. The Father we know is the judge we love. John is convinced that the God we know in Jesus Christ is to be proclaimed to all the world. The world needs to know and love the Father we see in Jesus.

Yet at the same time we are like Philip who is unsure, who have difficulty seeing the Father. The Jesus we meet is a scandal. There is no solid proof that this is the One. There is no absolute certainty that we have made the right choice. The Father we see in Jesus is not a noble, exalted man we seek but a Jew who dies on a cross.

Yet the Holy Spirit teases us, woes us, and sometimes convinces us that this crucified and risen one, this pushed aside one, this down-trodden, rejected, mocked one is truly The One, the face of the Father, the very heart of God. Miracle of miracles we believe!

So we celebrate the Pentecost, the miracle of miracles that a people still gather to praise Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Miracles of miracles is that there is still a people who keep watching and waiting for the new creation and get a glimpse or whiff of the Kingdom's presence. Miracle of miracles there is still a people who bear one another burdens. Miracle of miracles we see in our midst greater works than those of Peter and Paul and the Apostles. We know that what we ask in Jesus' name is done. Like Jesus the church is a scandal. There is no positive proof that we have received grace upon grace, love never ending. There is always the temptation to celebration Pentecost as an event in the past, to be nostalgic, to dress up in red and light flames of fire and remember the ancient Pentecost. John will not allow us to live in the past. The work of the Holy Spirit is a present work. The Mighty Acts of God are present in our midst. Greater works than these are alive in us who in spite of the darkness, Confess Christ as Lord of Lords, very God of Very God. We can't help ourselves! Jesus always a scandal is in our midst.”

I especially like the reminder that the work of the Holy Spirit is a present work.

“Justification and Justice: Good News and Good Works”

2010-05-18T14:13:00.000-04:00

1. “Does justification by grace through faith (God's good news) call us to good works of justice?"

This question requires an affirmative answer but one with qualification, especially in light of the way both “justification” and “justice” are often understood today. The problem of a privatized understanding of justification and a secularized understanding of justice (identified below in question 2) are a modern development which cloud the intentions of the Reformers, who saw the hand of the sovereign God in all things in heaven and earth in ways we do not. Both Lutheran and Reformed articulations of the Pauline concept of justification by grace through faith carefully guarded the primacy and sovereignty of God as the actor in salvation. So, the Augsburg Confession, for instance, insists “we cannot obtain forgiveness of sin and righteousness before God by our own merits, works, or satisfactions, but that we receive forgiveness of sin and become righteous before God by grace, for Christ's sake, through faith, when we believe Christ suffered for us and that for his sake our sin is forgiven and righteousness and eternal life are given to us.” (Augsburg Confession, Article IV).

Likewise, the Westminster Confession (and Savoy Declaration) state: “Those whom God effectually calleth he also freely justifieth; not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous: not for any thing 'wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ's sake alone; nor by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on him and his righteousness, by faith; which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God.” (Westminster Confession, Chapter XI, I.) This is language which is confident in its assumption that the primal theological issue is salvation of sinful mortals before the holy God. That God was sovereign over nations and societies, as well as over persons, was also taken for granted. The Reformation Christian, Roman Catholic, as well as Protestant, was located in a Christian state, despite disagreement over the exact confessional nature of that state.

The “good works of justice” which flowed from justification were described in the Reformation Confessions under the category of sanctification as “good fruits” or “good works.” (Augsburg Confession, Article VI, “The New Obedience,” and Article XX, “Faith and Good Works”; Westminster Confession, Chapter XIII, “Of Sanctification” and Chapter XVI, “Of Good Works”) Here again, God's sovereignty as the actor of salvation is carefully protected. “Faith should produce good fruits and good works . . . but we should do them for God's sake and not place our trust in them as if thereby to merit favor with God.” (Augsburg Confession, Article VI) “Their ability to do good works is not all of themselves, but wholly from the Spirit of Christ.” (Westminster Confession, Chapter XVL)

To the Reformers the doctrine of justification needed no justification, as it seems to today, against the charge that it led to a privatized faith. Rather it protected God's sovereignty and initiative in the act of salvation and in the processes by which the salvation takes hold of people. That “good works and responsible service in the whole world” (Invitation to Action, p. 9, paragraph 6) were the fruits of justification was not questioned.

2. How does the atoning "work of Christ" inform out work?

The “lost chord” in modern mainline Christianity is atonement: the conviction from which the church was born and by which its life was fueled for centuries. Because of this loss the question of the proper relationship between justification and justice, between what God does and what we do, is the critical theological question for our time. In the modern period Christian faith has increasingly been understood as a religion of amelioration, rather than a religion of redemption. Thus understood, Christian faith is reduced to a series of ethical imperatives; guidelines for relationships of human being to human being, rather than of human beings to God.

Christians of an earlier time knew themselves the recipients of redemption by an act of a righteous God, so justice was, for them, the social righteousness demanded by the righteousness of God. For example, P. T. Forsyth (1848-1921) could write: “Righteousness is applied holiness,” and (quoting Wernle) “ ... it is in the doctrine of justification that Christian theology and Christian ethic meet.” (The Christian Ethic of War, pp. V and 165)

When justice is wrenched from justification the church loses its way and finds itself running errands for society, rather than confronting that society with the grace and judgment of the cross of Jesus Christ. Where the cross is seen as a sign or symbol, even of high principles, rather than as an atoning act of the Holy God, the church will understand its primary charge to make like sacrifices on behalf of others. Jesus is then seen more as model and exemplar rather than as savior. But classical Christianity, in a variety of formulations, asserted that only God can save, that God doesn't show something by the cross but does something on the cross. The cross is not an object lesson or demonstration, but a divine act of life which justifies sinful humanity before the holy God.

Certainly there can be disagreement on the theological articulation of the atonement, but can we question the fact of atonement itself and remain identifiably Christian? My "bridge-repair" suggestion is renewed attention to the Biblical conviction of the holiness of God and the sinfulness of humanity. The "work of Christ" might then have its ethical content restored, so often lost when we focus on the person of Christ using metaphysical categories. In theological terms this means Soteriology precedes and controls Christology.

3. How are Christ's obedience and ours related?

The “Joint Statement on Justification” from the Lutheran-Reformed Dialogue (Invitation to Action, p. 9, items 2, 5, 6) offers these summary statements: “This gospel is the good news that for us and for our salvation God's Son became human in Jesus the Christ, was crucified and raised from the dead. By his life, death and resurrection he took upon himself God's judgment on human sin and proved God's love for sinners, reconciling the entire world to God . . . This doctrine of justification continues to be a meassage of hope and of new life to persons alienated from our gracious God and from one another. Even though Christians who live by faith continue to sin, still in Christ our bondage to sin and death has been broken. By faith we already begin to participate in Christ's victory over evil, the Holy Spirit actively working to direct our lives . . . As a community of servants of God we are called and enabled to do works of mercy and to labor for justice and peace among individuals and nations.”

Emilio Castro's evocative book title “Sent Free” captures the dynamic relationship between justification and justice. We are not justified out of the world but for the world which God loves and for which Christ died. Of special importance today is a new understanding of humanity's relationship to the created order in the light of the atoning work of Christ, which brings about "a new creation.” The World Council of Churches now identifies “The Integrity of Creation” as a concern along with “Peace and Justice.” These emphases properly recognize that the gospel has implications not only for individuals but for nations and societies as well. There are cosmic implications to the work of Christ, and justification must not be understood in a social vacuum.

But neither can justice take the place of justification at the center of the gospel. The ethical fundamentalism of some Liberationists resembles nothing so much as Biblical and confessional fundamentalism in its resistance to critical questions. To view the issue of inclusive language, to take one example, solely as a justice issue, without regard for substantive theological issues, is to mistake the complex for the simple and to risk the church's teaching and witness. Another example where we have lost the proper relationship between justification and justice is this: Certain associations in the United Church of Christ are requiring candidates for ordination to document their commitment to justice issues. This is right-minded but wrong-headed. It puts the ethical cart before the theological horse. But a vacuum will be filled, and since the historic religion of redemption has given way to the religion of amelioration there is a certain logic to this new requirement. How uncouth it would seem today if a Church and Ministry Committee would inquire of a candidate, “Do you believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins?” Would a negative answer be outweighed by a dramatic commitment to peace and justice? Whose peace? Whose justice? Will volunteer work for “Right to Life” be accepted or rejected? On what grounds? Since we are not saved because of works, neither should we be ordained because of them?

Our works of justice must be eschatological and symbolic. We still bear the burden of a Constantinian conception of Christendom, when a sectarian and missionary model of the church more closely approximates our situation in the modern world. One mission instrumentality executive confessed: “We cannot deal with every social issue, but we look constantly to determine how we can make a difference.” (S. Rooks) This recognizes the proximate nature of all our good works, and expresses a proper Christian humility. Justice understood apart from justification can easily become functional atheism, losing sight of God's primacy and sovereignty, which is what the doctrine of justification by grace through faith is meant to insure.

(I delivered this paper at the Seventh Craigville Theological Colloquy, Craigville, MA, July 16 - 20, 1990.)

(Photo: R. L. Floyd, 2010)

New England Puritan Ghosts: Why Hawthorne “Got” Melville

2010-05-03T12:58:00.002-04:00

My town sits on a particularly rich literary and intellectual “trade route.” Most notably Moby Dick was penned here in the mid-nineteenth century (see my post Moby Dick as Theology.) Moby Dick wasn’t the commercial success Melville had hoped for, but Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom it was dedicated, understood and appreciated it.

I have ruminated about why Hawthorne “got” Moby Dick, when most of the critics of the day saw merely a dark muddled fish story interrupted by frequent wordy digressions on whaling.

The answer I think, and this is hardly a new theory, lies in their common New England heritage and the ever-looming memory of the two centuries long Puritan experiment, by their time for all practical purposes over. Hawthorne, of course, wrote the enduring iconic Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, which every American schoolchild must read. That The Scarlet Letter is more about Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century neighbors than about his seventeenth-century Puritan forbears should not let us underestimate its importance in defining Puritanism in the popular imagination (any more than Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, another school favorite, should, although it too is less about the Puritans than it is about its own context, the social hysteria of 1950's McCarthyism.)

The third canonical school text on Puritanism is Jonathan Edwards’ notorious Enfield sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a brilliant but scary depiction of the fires of hell and the tenuousness of human life. To those of us who have actually read other Edwards' sermons, the choice seems largely to have been made on the basis of dramatic impact, and not to get too paranoid, another piece of literary ammunition to discredit the Puritans. At least “Sinners” is an actual Puritan text.

But even Edwards’ ritual enemies often admit he is a towering intellectual figure. Recently I have been reading in and about him, and the first thing that struck me is that a mere 100 years separates Edwards Freedom of the Will (1754) from Moby Dick (1851), both written here in the Berkshire Hills but in different intellectual worlds.

Much changed here in that hundred years. For one thing, when Edwards lived, Pittsfield didn’t exist as a city, but was part of the much conflicted frontier, the “howling wilderness” as Edwards was to describe nearby Stockbridge, to which he came in 1750. I like that the local community college has a “Jonathan Edwards Library,” but Edwards died in 1758 and Pittsfield wasn’t founded until 1764. But it is the Berkshire Community College so the title is apt. I once delivered a community forum lecture on Puritanism there and, while the students were attentive and eager to engage, their knowledge of Puritanism in general and Edwards in particular was spare, and largely formed by the aforementioned canonical school texts.

Pittsfield was named after the British Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder, who so influenced the future of North America by his efficient administration of the Seven Years’ War. The first minister of Pittsfield’s First Church of Christ was Parson Thomas Allen, Harvard trained but influenced by the New Divinity of the Edwardsian disciples that developed Edward’s themes after his death. (I was the eighteenth minister of that church.) By Melville’s time in the mid-19th century my eighth predecessor John Todd (1800 -1869) was the incumbent, but there is no record of Todd and Melville crossing paths that I have found. Todd thought of himself as being in the Puritan succession, but the grand granite meeting house he built in the Gothic revival style points more to the prosperous 19th century Congregationalism of the beginning of the Gilded Age than to the Puritans.

All thoughtful New Englanders in these times had to engage the legacy of the Puritans. Edwards himself in the mid-eighteenth century was dealing with a changing world far removed from the world of the 17th century founders. It was his genius to cast the theological preoccupations of that world into the new thought-forms of the Enlightenment. He wasn’t the only bright young man in his time to read Locke and Newton and have his eyes opened, but he seems to be the only one who didn’t turn away from the old verities, rather he used the new learning as tools to express the old truths.

But by the mid 19th century it was more the novelists than the theologians who were grappling mightily with the themes of the founders. So Melville’s fish story plumbs such deeps as election, predestination, and theodicy. Where Edwards found human freedom in the affections, Melville finds the demonic in human obsession. Hawthorne’s village soap opera explores old themes as well: covenant and community, morality and hypocrisy.

That is why Hawthorne “got” Melville. He understood what Melville was trying to do, because he was trying to do it as well: make sense of this rich and ambiguous religious and intellectual legacy that had so shaped the American mind and soul for better and for worse.

That Puritanism, real and imagined, continues to be a template for American ideas, even in our own time, is as true as a quick look at the rhetoric of American Exceptionalism proffered by the W. Bush era neoconservatives as a defense of the Iraq war demonstrates.

Which is to say that the ghosts of the founders’ faith linger. Perhaps a more nuanced reading of their actual beliefs and positions would result in a more nuanced approach to the issues they raised.

Volcanoes and ash plumes: Ruminations on global interconnectedness

2010-04-19T11:03:00.001-04:00

The most recent news from Iceland is mixed: new tremors in the volcano, but a lower ash cloud. That should help free up air travel and help thousands of stranded passengers get to their destinations. Most of us know somebody who got grounded, and was trying in vain to get home from a business trip, or to fly to Boston from Europe for the fabled marathon there today.

The situation reminds us that we do live on a small planet where all our lives are interconnected.

Jim Gordan, who blogs from the UK at Living Wittily, reflects thoughtfully on this in his post “when the global becomes local and the international becomes personal.” Here is an excerpt:

Ease and safety of travel has become such an integral part of what we take for granted as normality, that this past week has created a new level of awareness of just how vulnerable technology is to the elemental physical forces that drive and shape our planet.

Easy now to slip into apocalyptic scenarion; but just as easy to assume that once the direction of the wind changes the situation will revert to normal. Somewhere between apocalyptic meltdown and complacent unconcern is the harder reality of having created a world dependent on air flight, air freight and air defence systems. And for the first time total shut-down has simply negated that assumption. The unprecedented now has precedent. In a world where risk assessment, risk management and rehearsed emergency scenarios have become standard activities of corporate bodies, it seems this particular combination of circumstances escaped the risk assessors and the Hollywood script writers.

Jim continues to write about the upcoming British elections, which may or may not be of interest to you depending on where you live, but he concludes his post with a call for prayer for the manifold needs of our world, and that is a message all can heed.

“Thumbs down” to Hewlett Packard! Ruminations on the Morality of Built-in Obsolescence

2010-04-15T12:49:00.001-04:00

Is anybody else out there as frustrated as I am by the built-in obsolescence of IT products?

When I upgraded my Mac to “Snow Leopard” (OS 10.6) recently, all of a sudden my wonderful Hewlett-Packard “All-In-One” printer, scanner, copier became a “One,” that is, just a printer.

So I bit the bullet and called HP support, and got a charming and helpful person who basically said, “We don't support that product.” I asked her if they anticipated creating drivers for it? “No, we no longer support that product.”

Which translates into, “We are not creating drivers to make the product you bought from us a few years ago functional, because we want you to buy a new product from us and put the old one in the land-fill.” SHAME!

My machine was about three years old. Would we accept that from a company that made, say, refrigerators or lawn mowers?

But their policy of built-in obsolescence is smart from a purely economic point of view, because I did end up buying another product from them, a good product at a good price (I had to spend the better part of another afternoon on the phone with them to get it to work on my Mac, but that is another story for another day.)

So I didn’t even punish them for their policy by buying from another company. Why? Because their product was better and cheaper, and every hardware company, even my much-favored Apple, builds in obsolescence with constant newer, better and faster software. If you want to stay up, you have to pay up!

But what happens to all these old computers and printers that still work fine, or would if they could run the newer software? They get thrown away and added to the garbage of the planet.

So what would a “Green” IT company look like? And at what point would it become in these companies' best interest to attend to being good stewards of the earth? Just wondering.

Willis Elliott on Atonement vs. Reconciliation

2010-04-13T10:52:00.001-04:00

My friend and Confessing Christ co-conspirator Willis Elliot, who is a polymath, Biblical language scholar, churchman, provocateur, nonagenarian, and a long-time interlocutor, is the guest poster today.

I asked, somewhat rhetorically, in an earlier post why so many in the church like the word reconciliation, but do not like the word atonement, even though they translate the same Greek word (Katallage)? My answer was that reconciliation is something that we need to do, and atonement is something only God does, and that we tend to prefer the things we have control over rather over the work of God in Christ, not that they are in any way unrelated.

Willis' response (on the Confessing Christ Open Discussion), as per usual, was thick with insightful word study, and is not for the faint of heart. But you atonement scholars and fans who visit this blog, and you know who you are, will find his insights useful.

Willis writes:

“ON TARGET, man! “Reconciliation is something that we need to do, and atonement is something only God does.”

Katallage - the word you mention as for both - had, as its street-meaning, money-exchange. No matter how high & wide a plant grows, it never loses the reality of its SOIL: no matter how diversified the meanings of a word (its “semantic domain”) become, it never loses its contact with the STREET (by which I mean its origin in common, earthly life).

Now, Rick, I'm probably about to tell you nothing you (an "atonement" scholar) don't know. I'll call it “How to access [enter into] a word.”

1
Back to the plant metaphor: first, I want to know the ROOT(s) of the word. Kat[a]-all-ag-e is the action (ag) of interchange (kata) with another (all-os). Second, I want to know the STREET meaning(s): (1) money-exchange, commerce, business; (2) the change from enmity to friendship; reconciliation, restoration. Finally, I want to know the CHURCH meaning(s) - “church” in the broad sense of special, particular.

2
The Greek general & Christian lexicons note a special Christian meaning of katallage: reconciliation with God through Christ, at the divine initiative ("by God alone," & therefore "received" [*lamban-*] as a gift by believers - believing receivers). / But I found none using "atonement": that technical word seems limited to Greek theological dictionaries. The Eng. wd. (says Mer.-Web. Online) - earliest, 1513 - meant "reconciliation" (now obsolete); means "the reconciliation of God and humankind through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ"; & (3rd meaning), "reparation, satisfaction."

3
Synonomies expand from verbal “semantic domains” to conceptual domains answering the question What word-group relates the word-meanings to what “central truth” (the phrase on p271 of R.C.Trench's Synonyms of the NT (1854; my copy, 1906). In article lxxvii, he's discussing apolytrosis/katallage/hilasmos - “three grand circles [or ‘families’] of images” of the Cross' verbally “inestimable benefits.” “Scripture . . . approach(es) the central truth from different quarters,” which “supply the deficiences of one another.”

The article is six pages, assumes a reading knowledge of Latin, & uses extensively the Greek & Latin Fathers. Here, I'll only mention the first word (redeeming from captivity through payment of a ransom; cessation of bondage from sin as slavery) & the last (Christ as both “priest and sacrifice” propitiation: it's “richer” than katallage - which states only THAT we enemies have become God's friends: hilasmos explains HOW this came about [“satisfaction, propitiation, the Daysman, the Mediator, the High Priest”]). / Now for the middle word, KATALLAGE - reconciliation (“the making up of a foregoing enmity”); “atonement” in its original sense (but it has come to have the full meaning of hilasmos: propitiation). (For the meaning-change, Trench refers to Skeat's Etymological Dictionary of the English Language.) Rick, I've hit the high spots of Trench's article, which uses Greek/Latin/German. A classic widely-deeply researched & profoundly thought through, written while carrying on his day-work as an Anglican archbishop!

4
Trench's article fights those who want so to translate these words as to delete “the wrath of God.” Today, we have to fight what you well call a “bloodless theology.” Not just "God is love," but (as a Methodist pastor, a niece of mine, wrote me a few days ago), “God is only love” (her description of the theology of the BOM [Board of Ordained Ministry] on which she serves). Said she to me, “when [against that narrowness] I mentioned obedience, sacrifice, and accountability,” there was “only silence.” "Few speak on behalf of the Scriptures, . . . honoring the Lord, who has so graciously given them [the Scriptures] to us.” / If God is “only love,” he's not fully personal, with the full moral sense & full range of emotions. Note how Trench (156 years ago!) insists that without God's wrath, theology trivializes sin, which is no longer an enmity against God setting God in enmity against sinners.

In katallage, God “laid aside his holy anger against our sins, and received us into favour, a reconciliation effected for us once for all by Christ upon his cross” (p273; the “secondary” meaning is that we are “daily,” “under the operation of the Holy Spirit,” to dispose of “the enmity of the old man [within us] toward God”: “‘Be ye reconciled with God‘ [2Cor.5.20]”). The anti-wrath-of-God crowd make the secondary meaning primary “to get rid of the reality of God's anger against the sinner,” & “sin as a state of enmity (echthra) with God (Ro.8.7; Eph.2.15; Jam.4.4), and sinners as enemies to Him and alienated from Him (Ro.5.10; Col.1.21; which sets forth Christ on the cross as the Peace, and the maker of peace between God and man (Eph.2.14; Col.1.20).” On pp275-6, Trench goes into detail (with a flood of texts!) on the NT deleting of blood sacrifice for the appeasement of deity: “priest and sacrifice,” previously divided, were “united in Him, the sin-offering by and through whom the just anger of God against our sins was appeased, and God, without compromising his righteousness, enabled to show Himself propitious to us once more. All this the word hilasmos, used of Christ, declares." (Hilasmos is sacral, its context sacrificial; katallage is only reconciliation-restoration, without the later sacral meaning of “atonement.”)

(Thank you Willis. Used by his permission.)

Doubting with Thomas: Ruminations on John 20:24-29

2010-04-10T11:14:00.000-04:00

“How can I believe in God” asked Woody Allen, “when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?” Allen is humorously raising the question of how a good God allows bad things to happen. He raises the question about religious knowledge when he says, “I am plagued by doubts . . . if only God would give me some clear sign; like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.”

That makes us laugh, but who among us has not been troubled by questions and doubts at some time in our life. I think that the story of “doubting Thomas” is probably in the Gospel of John because, even in the early generations of the church, faith in the Risen Christ was not an automatic thing. Faith was hard to come by and hard to keep in those days just as it is today. So Thomas is a stand-in for all the doubters then and now.

The problem was that Thomas was not present the first time that Jesus came to the disciples, and he won't accept their claim that Jesus is alive unless he can see him with his own eyes and touch him with his own hands.

The disciples had been hiding. They had bolted the door and were listening for the dreaded sound of footsteps on the stair when suddenly Jesus was among them. He stood there in their midst and he told them to breathe in his breath, his holy breath and spirit, so that they could go out into the world again and perform his holy work.

Thomas is told of this event, but he says that, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.” And a week or so later Jesus does appear to them again and this time Thomas is there, and he sees Jesus and touches the wounded hands and side, and only then can he say, “My Lord and my God!”

Jesus replies to Thomas, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not see and yet believe” which refers to every generation since then which cannot see Jesus but relies on the testimony of those like John and Mary Magdalene who did see.

And yet often we remain like Thomas. We do need some evidence. Roughly two thousand Easters have taken place since Thomas's day, two thousand years' worth of people proclaiming that the tomb was empty and the dead Christ alive among us to heal, sustain and transform. But in one sense it is not enough. If we are to believe in his resurrection in a way that really matters in our lives and in the life of the world, we must have some experience of it.

And so it is that when and where people believe in the resurrected One, they have in some sense seen him, or at least known him, sensed him. If we are not to see him and touch him as Thomas did, we still must know him.

For now as then, it is not Jesus's absence from the empty tomb that convinces us, but his presence in the midst of us. Easter is not the celebration of the absence of his body from the tomb, but his living presence with us now.

So how do we know him when we can't see him or touch him? In Luke's Emmaus story the disciples knew him in the breaking of the bread, and we still know him in the supper he told us to continue in memory of him. And it is not just his memory we know but his real presence.

We may know him in the Word while reading the story in the Bible or hearing a sermon. We may know him in moments of prayer, in moments of deep need or dark despair, or in moments of great joy, such as a baptism. We may know him in service with others, in the joys and challenges of living in the church, which is his body. We may know him by a sick bed or in the hour of trial over a life-changing decision. There are many ways to know the risen Christ, but touching the wounds of his body, as Thomas did, is not one of them.

So we walk by faith and not by sight. Our faith lives among our doubts. “Doubts,” says Fred Buechner, “are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.” It is often our doubts that get us thinking and moves our faith to a more mature level. In some real sense we never stop being Thomas the doubter.

Life is complex and mysterious, many questions and concerns do not lend themselves toward easy answers. Yet it is precisely there in the complex world where faith must live if it is to be faith at all and not mere wishful thinking. But that is precisely where we still meet the living Christ, in the real events and commonplaces of daily life. An apocryphal gospel that didn't get into the canon supposedly written by Thomas himself depicts Jesus as saying, “Cleave a piece of wood and I am there. Lift up the stone and you will find me there.” Which is to say there is no place on earth or in our lives too remote or outlandish for the One who came to save us all.

So we must again and again look for the risen Jesus in the ordinary day to day events of our lives. And we look for him amid our doubts. Unlike Thomas we do not get to touch him. But we can know him, and in the end we really do walk by faith and not by sight. But our faith in him is not blind faith. Faith is trust, and we generally trust only those whom we have experienced as trustworthy.

If we believe that Jesus is alive it is because at some time in our life he has made himself known to us. If we have not touched him, he has touched us, so that we have been able to say, as Thomas did when he touched that wounded side and held those ruined hands, “My Lord and my God.” Amen.

(This is an excerpt form a sermon I preached on April 14, 1996, entitled “We Walk by Faith.” Picture: Caravaggio, The Incredulity of St. Thomas)

“Witnesses to the Resurrection” Church scandals and the faithful who stay

2010-04-08T21:44:00.004-04:00

My friend Tony Robinson, author, speaker, preacher, and peripatetic traveler for the good of the church, is an acute observer of what is going on in our world.

I heartily recommend his website Anthony B. Robinson, and especially the page called “What’s Tony Thinking?” A few days ago he posted some good thoughts from Peggy Noonan on the Roman Catholic clergy sex abuse story. He wrote:

“I am becoming a fan of Peggy Noonan's Saturday columns in the Wall Street Journal. This week she wrote on the Catholic clergy sex abuse troubles concluding by saying, “There are three great groups of victims in this story. The first and most obvious, the children who were abused, who trusted, were preyed upon and bear the burden through life. The second group is the good priests and good nuns, the great leaders of the church in the day to day, who save the poor, teach the immigrant, and literally, save lives. They have been stigmatized when they deserve to be lionized. And the third group is the Catholics in the pews--the heroic Catholics of America and now Europe, the hardy souls who in spite of what has been done to their church are still there, still making parish life possible, who hold high the flag, their faith unshaken. No one thanks those Catholics, sees their heroism, respects their patience and fidelity. The world thinks they are stupid. They are not stupid, and with their prayers they keep the world going, and the old church too.

One might say the same of many “heroic laypeople” in all sorts of congregations and communities of faith amid failures of leadership and scandals and disarray among higher ups. So many good people keep on keeping on in the face of disappointment, deceit and challenge. They are the witnesses to the resurrection.”

That last observation is a particularly wise one, I think. I can remember sometimes looking out at the congregations I have served after a particularly nasty fight over something ephemeral and wondering, “Why do they even bother to come back every Sunday? There must be more here than meets the eye.” And, of course, the answer is that there is!

As somebody once said about Noah’s ark: “If it wasn’t for the storm outside, one couldn’t stand the stench inside.” Still, Tony is just right. These faithful are living witnesses to the resurrection.

Spring busts out in the Berkshires, but “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

2010-04-07T21:39:00.004-04:00

T. S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruelest month,” but it was another poet that better described our Berkshires today.

After recent rains the season's first really hot day brought out the early buds, as well as lawn rakers and walkers out taking the air after a long winter indoors.

The Forsythia bloomed since yesterday, and the branches are full of the delicate gold that a week from now will be the green leaves of spring.

Our great New England poet Robert Frost described such days in his poem:

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;  
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.  
So Eden sank to grief,  
So dawn goes down to day.  
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost
(October 1923, The Yale Review)

(Photo: R. L. Floyd)

Eastertide Ruminations on Committal Practices around Cremation

2010-04-06T13:33:00.004-04:00

My mother died young at age 53 in 1967, and by her request was cremated. There was a moving memorial service for her at our little church, but the “cremains” remained in a box inside a cardboard box on my father's dresser for years, since my bereft and broken-hearted Dad either didn’t know what to do with them, or just couldn’t part with them. Some good pastoral care would have been helpful. For years I felt no sense of place to pay my respects to my mother or grieve or do whatever one needs to do at a graveside.

Many years later my Dad remarried a wonderful woman named Virginia, and my Mom’s ashes went along with him to his new household. He was blessed with ten very happy years with his second wife, and then in 1983 he himself died at the age of 69. My wife and I were privileged to be with him for a couple weeks at the time of his death, although I had left for a few minutes to have a swim in the ocean when he actually died. When I saw my wife standing quietly on the shore I knew he was gone.

Later that week I received a phone call that from anybody else but a gracious soul like Virginia might have been extremely awkward. We were preparing for my Dad’s graveside committal (unlike my mother, he had chosen to be buried), and Virginia asked me and my sister and brother, “What should I do with your Mom’s ashes?” He had held onto them all those years.

So we all huddled and decided they should go into the ground alongside my Dad's body and that's what we did. So my sister, brother, my Dad’s wife, and I saw both my parents committed to the ground in “The sure and certain hope of eternal life,“ despite the fact that they had died 17 years apart. And it probably wasn’t with those words since it was a Quaker cemetery (Virginia was a Quaker and my Dad had become one), and Quakers are short on liturgy. Nonetheless, now we have a place, even if it is far from where we live.

We know their remains are just that, but rituals and sacred sites have their place in our lives. Once in answer to a question about multiple spouses in heaven, Jesus said that “when the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven,” so I anticipate in faith that God will sort it all out on the Great Day of Resurrection.

Cremations were rare back in 1967, and my mother was a practical Christian woman with a proto-Green streak. Today cremations are much more common, but our committal practices have not caught up with that reality.

A friend of mine sent me a link to today’s Christian Century blog. There is a moving and instructive article by Thomas Lynch called The holy fire, Cremation: A practice in need of ritual. Lynch is a writer (a good one) and a funeral director, and I recommend that every pastor should read this piece, which can be found here.

The Resurrection is not a metaphor: “Seven Stanzas at Easter by John Updike”

2010-04-05T13:26:00.004-04:00

A few years ago, a friend of mine, a college professor, was driving by a local Lutheran Church and saw in big letters on their sign, THE RESURRECTION IS NOT A METAPHOR!

Those who read this blog know my love for the work of John Updike, one of our best Twentieth Century Christian novelists. His poetry is pretty good, too. Here's his take on the wise Lutherans' signboard.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

by John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body.
If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the
amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
eleven apostles;
it was as his flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that – pierced – died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of
enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a thing painted in the faded credulity
of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier mache,
not stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will
eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the
dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not make it less monstrous,
for in our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour,
we are embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

– John Updike, “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” in Telephone Poles and Other Poems (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964), 72–3.

(Photo by David Macy: Easter, yesterday, North Haven, Maine)

On Easter Day, on Easter Day

2010-04-04T08:58:00.003-04:00

On Easter Day, on Easter Day
The angel rolled the stone away.
Let all good Christians sing and pray
On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, on Easter Day

A new creation came to stay
To take the sting of death away
On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, on Easter Day
   Christ came among them, so they say,
And shared his story on the Way
   On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, this Easter Day,
   We come to worship, sing and pray,
And share his presence, come what may

On Easter Day.

(Picture: Resurrection by Matthias Grunewald, Colmar, France)

“He descended into Hell.” Ruminations on the Work of Christ between Good Friday and Easter

2010-04-03T12:24:00.003-04:00

One of the most problematic phrases in the Apostles’ Creed for many people today is the assertion that Jesus “descended into Hell” (descenit ad inferos in the original Latin.)

Some congregations just omit it, others alter it. Some say he descended “to the dead, ”which seems to me to be redundant after we have just said, “He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.” The United Methodist Church omits it altogether. It doesn’t appear at all in the Nicene Creed, although there is a long tradition of iconography in the Eastern Church of the “Descent into Hell.” The Athanasian Creed contains it.

For this post I am going to skirt the complex question of what the term “hell” even means. For many believers today the phrase means nothing more that the agony of Jesus’ death on the Cross, a metaphorical Hell. It was certainly at least that. I think it is means more.

It must be admitted that the Scriptural evidence is slender. Among the texts used are: Ephesians 4:7-10., 1 Peter 3:18-20, and 1 Peter 4:6. None of them are without ambiguity.

But the belief that Jesus descended into Hell is an early one in the church. A creed from Syria in the Third Century says that Jesus was “crucified under Pontius Pilate and departed in peace, in order to preach to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the saints concerning the end of the world and the resurrection of the dead.”

The early doctrine based on this phrase is “The Harrowing of Hell,” attested to by several of the early important Church Fathers, including Tertullian, Origen, and Hippolytus. Later Ambrose of Milan (who may have been the principle author of the Apostles Creed) refers to it.

The thrust of the doctrine can perhaps best be stated by the current catechism of the Roman Catholic Church which asserts: “In his human soul united to his divine person, the dead Christ went down to the realm of the dead. He opened Heaven's gates for the just who had gone before him.”

Since I generally operate out of what I call “a hermeneutic of trust” for both Scripture and the ancient traditions of the church, the first questions I ask are why is it there? And what does it mean?

The obvious answer is that there are three days between the death of Jesus on Good Friday and his Resurrection on Easter. So where was he and what was he doing?

My answer to both those questions is a simple one. It seems to me the descent into Hell functions theologically to show the scope of God’s saving work in Jesus Christ. Eastern icons often show the Resurrected Christ rising out of Hell dragging Adam and Eve with him, one with each hand.

Whether it is symbolized by this deliverance of our original forebears, the preaching to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or to all who died before the first Good Friday, his descent affirms that there is no place, even Hell, where Jesus’ saving work cannot go, no corner of the cosmos untouched by his atoning Cross. This reminds me of the words in Psalm 139, where the Psalmist asks God, “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there? If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. (Vs. 7, 8.)

This is the love that will not let us go. This is what Jesus died for.

To end this meditation I share an irreverent contemporary prose-poem sent to me from a friend of mine, which imagines Jesus waking up in Hell:

Goodtime Jesus

by James Tate

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

Good Friday: “Sometimes it causes me to tremble!”

2010-04-02T11:05:00.001-04:00

“Sometimes it causes me to tremble” is a line from the refrain of the well-known spiritual, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” The trembling comes upon the witness to Jesus’ crucifixion, and like many hymns and spirituals puts the singer or hearer in the role of a witness to the event.

This is a particularly modern approach, an existential one we might say, where the “religious affections,” to use Jonathan Edwards' term, are profoundly moved by contemplating Jesus on the cross.

But there is another parallel tradition as ancient as the New Testament that sees in the death of Jesus not merely a profoundly agonizing event which moves the witnesses, then and now, but also as an event that changes the whole world, even the natural world.

In theology talk we would call the Cross of Jesus a “cosmic and eschatological” event, meaning that its implications were both universal in scope and ultimate in time.

We see some of this imagery already in, for example, the Gospel of Mark, our earliest Gospel, where he describes the earth darkening at the hour of the crucifixion, and the veil of the temple being torn in two. (Mark 15:33 and 38)

Matthew’s account says even more of this kind of thing: “The earth shook and the rocks were split.” (Matt. 57: 21b) Luke adds that “the sun’s light failed.” (Luke 23:45)

P. T. Forsyth once got at the cosmic implications of the Cross by saying that the very atomic structure of the universe was changed by this event. Whether he meant this as science or as a metaphor, either way it points to the vast repercussions of the moment when “They crucified my Lord.”

Earlier generations were more able to see in such an event, not the merely personal and individual, where our time seems to want to safely relegate all religious phenomena, but the cosmic.

Here’s an example of such a cosmic view from Frances Quarles, a Seventeenth Century poet, which refers to a trembling that shook not just the believer, but the earth itself. He doesn't ignore the personal. On the contrary, he asks, if these senseless things can tremble so, “Shall I not melt one poor drop to see my Saviour die?”

The Earth Did Tremble

“The earth did tremble: and heaven’s closed eye was loathe to see the Lord of Glory die.

The skies were clad in mourning, and the spheres forgot their harmony;

The clouds dropped tears.

The ambitious dead arose to give him room; and ev’ry grave did gape to be his tomb.

The affrighted heav’n sent down elegious thunder;

The world’s foundation loosed, to lose their founder;

The impatient temple rent her veil in two,

To teach our hearts what our sad hearts should do:

Shall senseless things do this, and shall I not melt one poor drop to see my Savior die?

Drill forth my tears and trickle one by one till you have pierced this heart of mine, this stone.”

Frances Quarles, 1592-1644

Maundy Thursday Ruminations about Jesus’ vocation and ours with help from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

2010-04-01T11:09:00.007-04:00

The Passion narrative is “thick,” and no day in the church year has more going on in it than today.

First of all we have the Lord’s Supper, which I believe, along with many scholars, contains authentic words of Jesus, in which he tries to give his disciples an interpretive framework for understanding the meaning of his upcoming death.

Luke describes that immediately after the Supper “a dispute also arose among them about who would be the greatest,” which suggests that Jesus' interpretive framework had gone right over their heads. (Luke 22:24) This is neither the first nor the last time that the church didn't get it.

Then, Luke tells us, they all left the Supper and took a postprandial stroll to the Mount of Olives, where Jesus goes off by himself, a “stone's throw away” and prays to the Father, “If you are willing, remove this cup from me, yet not my will, but yours be done.” (Luke 22:42)

When the church later came to assert the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, that he was “truly human and truly divine,” few episodes in the Gospels show his human nature better than this small episode.

We have seen throughout this Gospel (Luke) how Jesus has been steadfastly intent on his vocation to go to Jerusalem and die. At one point in the story (Luke 9: 51) we are told that, “he set his face toward Jerusalem,” a quote loosely based on Isaiah 50:7, where the Psalmist says he has set his face “like a flint.” That’s a pretty strong image of determination.

Yet here, in this prayer, he ponders in prayer to the Father if there might be some way to get out of his calling. It is not a long moment, for immediately he says, “yet not my will, but yours be done.”

It may not be a long moment, but it is a significant one, because it seems to me that no Christian vocation, and I don’t mean merely that of the ordained, is without the temptation to find a shortcut, an easier way, certainly a way that avoids a cross, either, as in this case, literally, or in most of our cases, metaphorically.

Dietrich Bonhoefffer, one of our modern saints and martyrs, wrestled mightily with his conscience about his decision to participate in a plot to kill Adolph Hitler. The plot failed, and he was executed by the Nazis for his part in it just days before the war ended. Whether you support his decision (many Christian pacifists, for example, do not) you must admit the integrity and courage of his act. It was, as well, an obedient act, as was Jesus’ decision for the cross. This is at the heart of Christian vocation, where Jesus calls each and every Christian to, “Take up your cross and follow me.”

But how do we know how to do that? Where are we called to be, and what are we called to do? After all, the word vocation means calling. And where are we to find our particular cross to take up?

Bonhoeffer himself provides a template. He once wrote, “Either I determine the place in which I will find God, or I allow God to determine the place where he will be found. If it is I who say where God will be, I will always find there a God who in some way corresponds to me, is agreeable to me, fits in with my nature. But if it is God who says where He will be, then that will truly be a place which at first is not agreeable at all, which does not fit so well with me. That place is the cross of Christ.” (Meditating on the Word, p 44–45).

There is much more still to take place in the story on this Holy Thursday, but in this small anguished moment of hesitation, we get a glimpse of the human struggle to be faithful to the hard road of Christian vocation, what Bonhoeffer called the “The Cost of Discipleship.” The alternative to vocation, I think, is self-deception.

(Picture: The Agony in the Garden by El Greco)

Can Judas be saved? Ruminations on his role in the drama of Redemption.

2010-03-31T12:36:00.003-04:00

Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve Apostles, and the one who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, has become a byword in English for a betrayer.

None of us is a stranger to betrayal. It is a particularly painful experience because it comes at the hand of someone we trusted; someone we thought would look out for us; someone we loved, and believed loved us. We must consider that one of the sufferings that constitute Jesus’ passion must have been that he was betrayed by one of his close friends, a member of his inner circle.

For my Holy Week devotions this year I have been reading At The Cross: Meditations on People Who Were There by Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart (IVP, 1999), two fine scholars from the University of St Andrews. I highly recommend it.

Their meditation on Judas is particularly insightful. Although they admit that Judas’ deed was a dark one (“there is no getting Judas off the hook”), they assert the paradox that his betrayal was a necessary act: “The structure of the Gospel plot demands it.”

And it is quite true that Jesus speaks repeatedly, not only that he will experience death, but that he will “be given up” to death. So Judas is the instrument of that happening, and therefore an important player in the narrative of the passion, what I like to call “the drama of redemption.”

But though Judas plays his part in the drama, the Christian tradition has pretty consistently painted him to be an utterly despicable character. I have been ruminating on this, since it raises many questions, some of which I will leave to others to address.

But with the help of Bauckham and Hart, I have two thoughts to share about his role.

The first is Judas’ solidarity with all of humanity. We are all, to some degree or another, betrayers. There are the big betrayals, of course, like marital infidelity or financial shenanigans like the recent ones by Bernie Madoff. But there are also the little daily betrayals where we break trust with those we love and care for, and in this case Judas is not so different from all of us. His sin is different in degree and not in kind.

My second thought follows from the first, and that is whether Judas can be saved? The Christian tradition has generally said no. Perhaps I have fallen under the spell of Karl Barth’s alleged universalism, but I believe in a God whose mercy is so vast that there might be a place for Judas in it.

I don’t make the move to dogmatic universalism, because the separating of the “sheep from the goats” is God’s job and not mine. I think I have also been influenced by a fine dissertation I read this summer by Jason Goroncy, in which he asserts convincingly that the trajectory of P. T. Forsyth’s theology should (but doesn’t) lead him toward dogmatic universalism, a belief that all will ultimately be saved. I still don’t know whether I am there yet, but I have been ruminating about the “love that will not let me go.” As a theologian of the cross and the atonement I would be the last to limit its power and scope. Who can say where the saving work of Jesus Christ ends?

Is this another scandal of the cross? It just might be. Have you noticed that in many of our theological discussions about who is in and who is out with God, we naturally gravitate toward the extreme cases: Hitler, Stalin, and, of course, Judas. This lets us off the hook. But it shouldn't. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

One of the most powerful and poignant moments for me every Holy Week is when I come to the line in the passion hymn Herzliebster Jesu where the congregation sings, “I it was denied thee, I crucified thee.” That pretty much settles for me the ever vexing question of who killed Jesus. Yes, the Romans, but they were stand-ins for all of humanity. Still, from the cross Jesus forgives his murderers, and by extension, us.

So if I can be saved, can Judas be saved? I am not the one to say, but I am intrigued by what Bauckham and Hart do in their meditation. They end with a poem that speaks to this very point, an “imaginative construal between Judas and Jesus in death, which ironically brought Judas much closer to his master than any of the other disciples, as they hung on their respective trees.” I am reassured that I am not the only one who sometimes has to turn to a poet when the language of theology reaches its outer limit:

The Ballad of the Judas Tree

In Hell there grew a Judas Tree
Where Judas hanged and died
Because he could not bear to see
His master crucified
Our Lord descended into Hell
And found his Judas there
For ever hanging on the tree
Grown from his own despair
So Jesus cut his Judas down
And took him in his arms
“It was for this I came” he said
“And not to do you harm
My Father gave me twelve good men
And all of them I kept
Though one betrayed and one denied
Some fled and others slept
In three days' time
I must return
To make the others glad
But first I had to come to Hell
And share the death you had
My tree will grow in place of yours
Its roots lie here as well
There is no final victory
Without this soul from Hell”
So when we all condemn him
As of every traitor worst
Remember that of all his men
Our Lord forgave him first

by D. RUTH ETCHELLS

These mediations are particularly significant to me since they were developed for a Good Friday service at St. Andrew's, St. Andrews, Scotland, very near to where we lived, and where we sometimes worshipped, during our sojourn there in the Spring and Summer of 1995. Alas, we left a year too early to hear them there, as they were done in 1996 and 1997.

(At The Cross: Meditations on People Who Were There by Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, InterVarsity Press, 1999)

Why was Jesus' cross different? Ruminations for Holy Week

2010-03-29T16:00:00.001-04:00

When I was a young boy in Sunday School, I somehow got the idea that Jesus' crucifixion was a unique event. I knew about the two brigands that were with him on Golgotha, because I had seen a particularly gruesome picture of the three men on crosses in a Bible picture book. But I thought this was the only event of its kind, and I didn't learn until sometime much later that crucifixions were a common occurrence in the Roman Empire during that time.

Crucifixion was the dark side of the Pax Romana, that period of political stability that for over a century kept the peace from Rome out to the edges of the known world. During that time there were tens of thousands of crucifixions by order of Roman authorities. Crucifixion was so common that poles were permanently set up in many public places so as to be ready when needed. When Jesus carried his cross on Good Friday, and later, when Jesus was too beat up to continue, when Simon of Cyrene carried it for him, it probably wasn't the whole cross they carried, but just the top cross bar. The upright poles were most likely there all the time, kept in readiness. In that world at that time crucifixion was a daily fact of life.

And yet, curiously, the accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus that we have in the Gospels, as brief as they are, are the most extensive accounts of crucifixion we have in ancient literature. If you stop to think about it, it makes a certain sense. Crucifixion isn't something one wants to talk about or write about. It just wasn't a topic for polite society. No, the upper classes of Roman society didn't want to think about crucifixion.

Nonetheless, they tolerated the practice as an expedient way to keep the masses in line, as you and I, to some degree, tolerate capital punishment in our country. Such punishments are always for others, not for us. And educated, literate Roman citizens need not fear crucifixion. Nobody they knew needed to fear crucifixion. Crucifixion was reserved for nobodies: slaves, bandits, rebels, and conquered enemies.

And so it was that, when Jesus was crucified on that hill in Jerusalem, he died the death of a nobody, the death of a slave. We can well imagine how this must have been profoundly disappointing to his followers. You get a hint of this almost wistful disappointment in Luke's story of the walk to Emmaus. The risen Jesus, unrecognized, is walking with two disciples and Cleopas starts telling Jesus about Jesus, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” (Luke 24:21)

Those high hopes about Jesus were what the triumphal entry of Palm Sunday was all about. When Jesus came into Jerusalem the people put down their garments in his path and waved palms. It was a royal entrance. Every Jew knew that certain things had to happen before God came among them in his fullness. The Romans had to be driven out, the temple purified, and a descendant of David take the throne of Israel once again.

So on Palm Sunday Jesus comes into Jerusalem and gets a king's reception. The crowds shout “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highes theaven.” This is messiah talk. And messiah talk isn't just religious, it is political. The Romans must have been justifiably nervous. There were big crowds there for the Passover festival. A messianic pretender could only mean turmoil and unrest.

And to exacerbate things, the very first thing Jesus does after coming into Jerusalem is to cleanse the temple. This is more than just messiah talk now. This is a highly symbolic messianic gesture. I am sure there were many that day who sadly shook their heads, and saw a cross in Jesus' immediate future. They knew, as Tom Wright once said, “people who said and did the kind of things Jesus said and did usually ended up on crosses.” The Romans were not patient with insurrectionists and revolutionaries, even if their claims were wrapped up in religious talk.

So there seemed to be only two possibilities. Either Jesus was who he said he was, and he would drive out the Romans and take the throne as the anointed one of God, or he would end up on a cross. But what nobody anticipated is what actually happened. Jesus failed to conquer the Romans, and he was crucified, and that should have been the end of it.

But, as we know, it wasn't. If it had been we would never heard of Jesus. At best, he would have been a minor footnote in the history of ancient Palestine during the years of Jewish unrest under the Romans. Another messianic pretender who got himself crucified by the Romans and that was that.

But that isn't what happened. Something else happened. The claim then and now is that God raised Jesus from the dead, and not just temporarily like Lazarus was raised from the dead to die eventually, but that Jesus was raised to never die again. Indeed, the claim then and now is that Jesus shares in the divine life, that to know Jesus is in some very real sense to know God.

And, as Ephesians 2:5-11 proclaims, it was his death itself that makes him worthy of the name “Lord,” a name previously reserved for God. As one of our hymns on that passage says, “T'is the Father's pleasure, we should call him Lord, who from the beginning was the mighty Word.”

(Photo; R. L. Floyd: Celtic cross at First Church, Pittsfield)