What is the church for?

I lead a parish and deanery, I work (overwork) for the institution, and I have for most of the last twenty years (I had a year off in 1998.)  I am an insider.  So I get naturally defensive when people say they are spiritual but not religious or Christian but don’t attend.

But I also get it, time is precious.  Why am I giving up the most precious resource I have for an hour or more a week? In a world like ours, with so many things competing for our time, with kids and work and activities, something that is going to ask for more has to have a purpose.  I get it.

The problem is that the church is inherently made up of people who assume that its importance is obvious and agreed to: people like me.  But as soon as I typed that first question I stopped.  I have a particular way of talking about this, and there is no short way around the question.

Jesus probably wasn’t intending to create a diocesan structure made up of parishes with a clergy person and committees and mission statements, much less a national church or pope.  So why do we have all of that and why should you join it?

First off, I think Jesus was inaugurating a reality, what he called the kingdom of God, which is the way things are but do not appear to be currently.  This reality is based in who God is, what God intends, who we are, and who we are to be in relationship to God, the world, and each other.

These things about the kingdom of God are true now, even though they are not obvious; that is why I am calling it a reality.  God is abba now.  He is loving and compassionate and made the world in love.  It is a complex world in which we have a role as God’s children and stewards, the caretakers of God’s creation.  We failed to live in our boundaries right from the beginning.  Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is an analogy that we still make true on a daily basis.

Jesus talks about humanity in terms of being God’s children.  This Hebrew concept still lives in our current language.  When my dad says that I am my mother’s son, he is saying that I have her character.  When Jesus tells us to live as God’s children, he is telling us to have God’s character, and then he carefully teaches what that character is.  We read about forgiveness and get stuck on needing forgiveness, but Jesus focusses in the Gospels on us being forgiving, on us forgiving other people’s sins.

We were to wake up to our reality, be born again into the reality of God’s abbaness (I made that up), our status as God’s children in Jesus, and that we have God’s Spirit dwelling in us, as Paul focusses on, teaching us, giving us life, and enabling us to embody God’s rule of love and compassion.  In this way we take on our full humanity as it was intended, mature human beings taking care of the world and living in peace and love with each other.

This work sounds soft in the face of violence, oppression, racism, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation.  But it is courageous and brave, honorable work. It is human.   It is the natural state of the whole and healthy human being.  This is obvious to all, even if rarely experienced.

So if this is the reality that Jesus inaugurated and taught and made real in his death and resurrection, taking away the consequences of our failure and revealing God’s love and forgiveness in his sacrificial death and bringing new life in his resurrection, then why the church?

Couldn’t we just live into that reality on our own? I think we probably can, but I cannot sustain it very long by myself.  I need a community to hold and mold me.  I need to be taught the teachings of Jesus and the Bible and our tradition.  I need to be told about the world that I can’t always see.  I need to be supported in the mad trust in a reality that seems at odds with the messages of my culture.  I need to be with other people who believe and who love that way.

And I want a place where I am treated that way, as a human being.  Not a consumer or merchandise.  Not a supporter or an enemy.  Not a machine or an idea.  Not an animal or a plant.

I completely understand that church has failed to be that for many people.  But I have hope.  And I am doing my part.  Jesus told religious people, the chief priests and elders in the temple, that the tax collectors and prostitutes were going into the kingdom of his Abba ahead of them.  That’s still true, I guess.  At least I know I have tasted that kind of love and reality in some strange places, like bars and back rooms with disaffected people.  But I so often get little tastes at church, where I put myself in the way of grace with a whole lot of people who are very, very different from me and find myself at home in the house of God with my family.

And like my own family, I get all kinds of frustrated and angry, but I also get loved and helped out, reminded and remade, and I am doing my part.  I am not just a recipient in church, I am a participant.  I am making the place along with a whole lot of really cool people who are not like me but not so very different either.

So yes, I think you should join a church and help to make it.  Help make it a little more like God’s house, full of human beings in our infinitude of graces and failures, care-taking creation and each other into a more holy human divine house of love.

How to Pray.  First off, let’s begin with a simple description.  Prayer is communicating with God.  So it is important to me as your priest (for the length you read this piece anyway) that you know who God is.  I believe in the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.  That God he called Abba, “daddy,” and spent a great deal of his teaching on his character as a loving, compassionate, healing, forgiving, who had a vision for “his” children.  We call that vision “the kingdom of God” where we love, care, heal, forgive, and live with each other in peace.  Oh, yeah, and care for the Creation.  We are made for this.

Now, my understanding for this is hugely shaped by my kids.  I love them and have hopes for them, and I want them to come and be with me, to talk to me, to be respectful and honest, to bring me their whole selves, and to grow.  I want them to live into my hopes for them, but that is not all of our relationships.

So how can this image help you pray?

• First off, just be with God.  Pay attention to the fact that God is present.  How do you hug a Spirit?
• Second, bring your self and your stuff.  God can deal with you in your pettiness and your world changing awesomeness. Read the Psalms and other prayers of the Bible. They are full of petty whining and greatness.
• Third, be reverent which is just respect for the divine.  I would extend this outward from prayer.  Be reverent about the name of God and God’s children.  Human beings are holy (even if they don’t always live into it.)  Your prayers should be deeply reverent of God, human beings, and the Creation.  Just like my kids get my best when they speak carefully of others.
• Fourth, just be with God.  Let yourself be loved too.  Too few of us are practiced at being loved.  Most people don’t know how great God’s love is.  It gets relegated to an idea (the cross or salvation or some creed.)  But the God I know and worship in Jesus is wildly in love with you.  Yep.  Even though you are weird and broken and tattooed or have those odd-looking chicken legs.  You know God knows those legs and loves them as surely as I love my children’s quirks and beautiful idiosyncrasies.

God wants you to hang out.  I miss my kids when they are off being themselves in other rooms.

Now, I am not a great dad.  I have issues with control and self-centeredness.  I embarrass my beloved family too much to even capture here.  But I want the best for them.  I want their wholeness, and I want my children to be responsible and free, loving and kind and good.  And I want them to share that part of them too.

I want to hear their stories and heal their hurts.  I want to let them handle what they can and defend them to no end.  And I am a mediocre dad.  Imagine what God must be like, loving and balancing love for seven billion of us.  Disappointed and hopeful, tearful and laughing.

So crawl up next to God and bring your whole self.  That is the essence of prayer.

or How to Make a Simple Topic Everyone Knows Really Amazingly Boring

As a priest of the church and a pastor I have the spiritual gift of obfuscation.  I can take the most amazingly simple thing that anyone already has deep experience of and make it long, dry, and almost incomprehensible.  It is really impressive to watch.  I can use long words for common ideas.  Where one syllable will do I can use forty.  I can craft sentences of Pauline length with neither clarity nor purpose but that make you feel like you have heard something both understandable and meaningful when really you’ve just heard me blowing wind with no Spirit.

I try not to use this gift.  But as we come to the third part of our Trinity of Formation I want to be clear and concise and understandable.  I want to, but the topic lends itself to poetic philosophy, and I like the sound of words.

In our Anglican-Benedictine model, we have looked at the Office and the Eucharist, Father and Son.  They both demand submission in a way: Office to the universal praise of the Church Universal and to the Father’s world; the Eucharist to the community of royal heirs priesthood and the Reality of the Rule of God.  We turn now to the Spirit and prayer.

The Holy Spirit is described analogically as breath or wind.  It is this ethereal quality that makes it hard to talk about with any clarity.  Add to that the Spirit and language about her is always feminine, and our tradition is very masculine dominated and therefore less fluent in the language of the feminine, and you begin to see why we just don’t have good words for the Spirit’s work.

I am personally frustrated by trying to read anything about the Holy Spirit because it falls into one of two camps.  There is the language that feels ungrounded in anything but emotion and built with fluff.  It is “airy” language and borders on feeling New Age, to use that hackneyed christian insult.  (I use the lowercase to designate a cultural but not faithful use of the adjective.) Writers who base all they have to say in experience and resort to stroking emotions and Chicken Soup for the Soul stories and reflections to the get across blunt unformed opinions that reflect both a lack of depth and Scripture.  It feels fake and shallow.  The christian section of your local bookstore is filled with this stuff.  It is little better than New Age writing except that Jesus is mentioned.

That sounds bitter, but this kind of writing and reflection almost pushed me out to the church.  When it passes for formation and teaching, it becomes destructive because it separates the disciple from reality and the Bible.  It shows up in every sector of the church, so I don’t want to point at Pentecostals, Evangelicals, or Catholics alone.  (Episcopalians tend not to publish much of this stuff, because when we want inspiration we turn to NPR apparently. See here.)  I know that it is inspirational to many people, but I really thought I had to leave the church to find real grounded thinking for a long time as a youth.

On the other hand, trying to read Moltmann’s The Spirit of Life is not the most soul-feeding work for most people.  It is good theology but grounded in a vocabulary of insiders.  The vast majority of work on the Spirit feels either ungrounded of buried in church jargon.  I say “vast majority” but what I mean is really not very much.

“Serious” theologians avoid the Spirit for the most part or say so little as to be useless.  See Tillich’s third book in his trinity.  Count the number of times he talks about the Spirit.  Even N. T. Wright, whom I read with relish and mustard like ballpark franks, says almost nothing about the Holy Spirit.

I have found a few resources that are worthwhile.  But mostly I end up flipping pretty fast when it comes to the Spirit, too.  So as a reader, I might have skipped something, but I also have come to understand.

It is hard to talk about the Spirit.  Jesus says that you can’t see where the wind comes from or where it goes in reference to the Spirit and Spiritual People in talking to Nicodemus.

In our formation model, the Spirit though is a whole lot easier to talk about.  The Spirit is freedom.  She breathes and moves like wind through the world creating, shaping, and giving life.

So in our prayer life, we come to the third leg of our practice, which is what most of us call prayer, or talking to God.  I want to give you a definition that is more poetic.  Prayer is letting the Spirit have you.  

I mean free prayer, mental prayer, prayer of the heart, however you want to talk about individual being in community with God.  It is far more than talking to God, but it includes just talking to God.  We enter the Spirit like we open our arms into the wind on the beach after a run.

We let God breathe into us in the Spirit.

That is prayer.  Paul uses very similar language.  The Spirit moves within us, in our spirits to pray and make new.

There is a whole lot of new science that points toward neuroplasticity, that our brains continue to grow and form new patters and pathways for neurological signals.  Many of us have the idea that our brains get certain patterns and get stuck in those patterns.  We got that idea from science, which assumed that nerves did not continue to grow or regrow after trauma.  Science was wrong.  Newer science shows conclusively that we can not only change neural pathways, but new neurons are being born and growing all the time.  This means that we continue to learn.

The Spirit is making us new as we allow the Spirit to create us through study and thought, but also through prayer when we let the Spirit move through us, teach us, and pray through us.  When we open the Bible, we are saying in essence, “Spirit, teach me.”  When we enter silence and let the Spirit breathe through us, we are saying, “Holy Spirit, make me.”

This is not airy language, it is Biblical and scientific!

In our model, it is also practical and individual.  It is practical because just as we submit to the church’s praise and community, we submit to the Spirit’s work within us and learn things more deeply than either praise or community can teach us.  It is where we internalize the work.  We take that formation into prayer and let it be worked on, or opposed.

The Holy Spirit does not only confirm but also sifts and discerns truth for us.  It is this discernment that is also vital.  While submission to the church in time and community is important to formation, so is learning to trust the voice of God speaking in the Spirit within you.  You are an individual and God works with individuals, as much as with the Church and church.

In this prayer there is tremendous freedom.  Martin Thornton makes the point in several places that this freedom in prayer is a balance to the submission of Office and Eucharist.   In the Anglican tradition we have Julian of Norwich and Margery of Kempe.   Both of these women had visions and writings that would be considered heresy, except that they weren’t.  Both were honored in their day and still hold their own as deep theological women of the church.  He credits this to the freedom offered in our tradition by having a solid foundation in the other two functions of formation and prayer.

So pray wildly.  Let the Spirit have you.

Before I end, let me say why ontology and Entering God’s Court.  The Spirit makes us human.  Our being (ontology) is contingent on our having been God-breathed clay.  When we let the Holy Spirit breathe in us and use us, we are returning or turning to our true being.  It is amazing to me that this work, while deeply individualistic in nature, actually turns us outward to the world and each other.  It should, therefore, make us better stewards of creation and more human in our relationships, responsible and relational, as well as worshipful and reverent.

The Spirit comes from the court of God, naturally, since the Spirit emanates or exists from God as God.  This reality is present to us, the court of God or heaven, as we enter the Spirit, or let the Spirit enter us.  This Reality as I wrote about in the last post should be present in the community gathered, but it is also available in prayer.  But that Reality puts us in communion with God and our neighbor.

The caveat is that we can get distorted and therefore misapprehend Reality.  We need a community to discern and hold that Reality with us and sometimes for us.  We need to be bold in our grasping the Kingdom and humble in submitting to God and the community of the Church.  That is why the Spirit is never spoken of possessively.  The Holy Spirit is never quite “my” Spirit.

I have written before about my life falling apart.  Its no secret that in seminary I fell to pieces and got put back together.  That process of healing is still where my language about the Spirit was formed.  For a couple of years, I did the Ashtanga Yoga primary series in my little room alone as an act of prayer and sweat.  There is nothing mysterious about the series; it was memorizable, involved my whole body, hard, and free.  Later it would be running or Crossfit.  But I would get to the end and lay in corpse pose, laying flat on my back, wrung out and calm.  My brain would finally be still, and I could feel God breathe through me.  It was a tangible experience of the Holy Spirit.  I would let the Spirit have me, and I would end up crying or laughing, integrating big ideas and just luxuriating in the shades of sunlight dancing through the leaves outside my window on the walls of my room.

The Spirit spoke so directly in those hours because I had broken everything that normally gets in the way.  These days I am trying to listen just as hard without having to destroy everything to hear.

I generally avoid politics other than to say that you probably shouldn’t vote like me.  I am a priest who believes that if I do my job as pastor, teacher, and preacher, then the congregations I serve will draw sound conclusions and vote from a conscience that is formed and informed by more than my simple point of view.

People of good faith may be led to radically different conclusions at the ballot box.  This confounds politicos and citizens alike, but it is vital to healthy democracy.

As a Christian and even more as a pastor and leader, I believe strongly that Christians should vote and be involved politically.  Think of it this way, for most of history the king or queen was seen to hold great authority and responsibility given because of their role in governing a portion of God’s kingdom.  Note that authority and responsibility went together.

A good Christian king could not feast while those in his care starved.  The victory gardens at the palaces of British nobles during the World Wars ought to stand in strong and disgusting contrast to our presidents’ vacations over the last thirteen years.  [And yes, that apostrophe is in the right place.]

We, of course, don’t have sovereigns.  We have citizens.  [We are ideally a Benedictine country, if you have been reading along.]  As citizens, we hold authority and responsibility like sovereigns of old.  Our primary place to practice those is in the ballot box.

So why is our citizenship so dumbed down that our presidents can call us “consumers” without an outcry?!  Because we often practice voting like idiots drug around by our media and public opinion disconnected from anything that could be considered value or virtue.  (Occasional outcries over the scandals of Instagram or freezers of money not withstanding, most of the media is playing our emotions not our values or virtues.)

Or worse, we becomes fans.  In the techisphere, fanboys are those people who love a product or product line because of the label on the back rather than the performance.  I am typing this on an Apple, by the way, while listening to my outdated iPhone.  Branding in politics may be breaking down, or at least we hope so.  But with the growth of money and advertising, we look more like people who know nothing being led by commercials rather than open debates about vital issues.

It is refreshing as an American to watch British parliamentary debates where the Prime Minister has to field questions from their colleagues on the floor rather than our president choosing who to answer from the press corps.  Genuine thought and responses, with wonderful hooting and name calling, but face to face and responsive.  (Swoon.)

So what is an American to do?

• Define your values as a citizen.  What is most important to you and why?  As a Christian my values are set by Scripture, tradition and reason; but I prioritize them and should be able to at least understand my own point of view.  (That’s part of what writing is about, no?) Bonus points for being able to articulate those core values and beliefs.
• Name the virtues that you consider essential to being a leader in our politics.  Vote for those who have them.  I don’t want a rat who votes my way in leadership.  Even if he gets my issue right, he will sink the ship and spread plague.  See history for examples.  And no rat comes alone to the ship.
• Prioritize issues that are important to you.  I am heavily involved in homeless ministries.  I prioritize issues around poverty and business responsibilities in my own local and state politics.  Healthcare reform should help people not end up on the streets because of bill poverty.  IF the reform doesn’t do that, I am against it.  But my city mayor is not in any way involved in healthcare reform.  So this takes a little work to separate local from national, state from international issues.
• Take your values, virtues, and issues and make them measurable and specific.  Here is where Hyrum Smith’s FranklinQuest model becomes vital in not-stupid politics.  We have to make our values relate to our votes and our local activities.

Two big missed opportunities are staring us in the face in this regard.  The Occupy Movement and the Tea Party both failed, and they have failed for a simple reason.  They had trouble stating clearly defined values and virtues, sticking to them and making them actionable.

I can’t write a book this week because I have other priorities that compete for my time.  Everything cannot be equal.  I have to define priorities and rank them and work on them one by one.  In a group this takes leadership.  In our nation it takes a genius that both movements missed.  There were too many priorities and too little leadership to define what was going to be the ONE thing to focus on.

A digital camera can focus on several things at once, but we can’t.  We have to take that model of ranking daily actions and apply it to our elections and local actions.

This isn’t sexy.  It’s adulthood.  It is hard, intelligent work.  It would be nice if the commentators on t.v. would help us, but we are going to have to take responsibility to think for ourselves.

Honestly, I want to tell you how to vote.  Of course, I do.  But as a pastor my value is a church of mature people living into God’s dream, and treating you like idiot fans is not going to get me there.   So my virtue becomes a focus on my job of forming disciples who know how to pray and worship, study and think, serve and love in the name of Christ.

It’s a matter of responsible authority.

I love good preaching.

Okay, I am a preacher by trade.  I am a decent preacher by practice. You can hear my sermons at Sounds like Grace or gracetc.org .  I love getting to hear really good preaching.  I hate bad preaching.  Abhor. Loathe. Detest.  Judge.  Oh, yes, I judge and judge with disdain and anger when I feel like an opportunity has been wasted.

The Good News is my life, and I want it getting out.  I have range.  Don’t guess that I don’t.  I appreciate when someone has a different approach that is theirs and it works.  Case in point, I was a young Southern Baptist who had never heard a woman preach until college.  A Southern Baptist pastor the Rev. Julie Pennington-Russell changed my world when she preached a sermon that I simply didn’t have the self to preach.  It was a sermon from a woman’s perspective, and it was beautifully constructed and delivered and handled Scripture and truth with integrity.  I was then, and I am still blown away by a good sermon.

I have been an Episcopalian for fifteen years now; most of those years have been in professional ministry.  And the preaching here is not famous for being great.  Oh, we have our bright spots.  But we are far more likely to produce good vestments than good sermons.

Don’t take it personally, yet, if you are a preacher or you love one.  Maybe your pastor is the exception.  But so many sermons lack one thing.  Just one thing.  Most people don’t know what the Heaven they want to say.  Know what you are trying to say, and the rest will pretty much flow.

Here are the basic four principles of good preaching.  I can help you.  Contact me if you need coaching.  Contact someone.  For the love of God.  But these four rules will get you started.

1. The first thing you have to figure out is what you are trying to say and what you are actually saying.  Know what you are trying to say.  Be able to say it in one sentence.  Even if no one else knows what you are trying to say, you should.  Then pay attention to what your congregation is hearing.
2. Talk with your audience.  Look at the them.  Listen to them.  Their understanding is your goal, so pay attention and communicate with them.  If they don’t understand what you are saying, back up and say it again.  Repeat something.  Ask questions.  Honor them.  Love your congregation in the sermon.  Trust them.  Without this number one is a waste of time.
3. Be yourself and have fun.  I like obscure things and use them often.  Greek, history, odd moments in the Simpsons.  I once based an entire sermon on a Bob Marley song.  It was a hard sermon, and I am not sure more than two of two hundred of my parishioners like Bob.  But they loved the sermon because I was having fun and it was authentically me.  People want to hear what you have to say about these great truths and mysteries.  That isn’t the same as preaching your self or your politics or your issues.  But use what you know and love to communicate God’s word.  You will have more fun that way, and fun is infectious.
4. Pray.  The great black baptist pastor who taught me preaching invited a younger pastor to preach (not me).  Afterwards he told him he wouldn’t have him back because although the sermon was clever, it was not steeped in prayer.  You could tell.  Your people can.  In the end, preaching is an act of faith and worship, of love.  Steep your sermons in prayer.  Be humble.  Seek God’s word before and during and after.  People don’t really hear us.  They hear God speaking if we are faithful.  I have had people get things from sermons that were not in my prep at all, but that they needed.  My prayer is that they hear God.  Listening to the sermon should be like opening the Bible.  We are saying, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.”

I preach without notes so that I can communicate rather than read.  I don’t memorize my text; I learn the text.  I write out the Biblical texts every week at least twice.  I read the New Testament passages in Greek, as best I can with lots of study helps.  I make mind maps and plans.  I have multiple examples, and most of them are extras.

After studying, I try to discern what God is saying in the texts, in my community, and in me.  I write out the sermon in a kind of outline form, which looks more like ugly word art than a manuscript or even an outline.  Then I write it out again.  And almost always a third time.  Then I look for the central single statement I can boil it down to.

Then I take that statement and look for an analogy or story or picture that will precisely draw that statement in people’s minds.  People should go home with an image, a picture, a story, and most importantly a greater understanding God and the Bible.

Don’t draw out every conclusion.  Trust your people to think and pray and mull.  Leave open what is open.  I want my people to think and pray and mull, so I leave things in every sermon undone, un-concluded, un-finished.  End strongly.  Make A point.  But don’t make every point.

The people you are talking to are the living, breathing, walking, working, singing, dancing Children of God, heirs of the Rule of God, the royal priesthood and keepers of mysteries.  Don’t talk down to your congregation! Ever.  You are not that holy.  You are a butler, a servant to these holy people.  Honor them, and they will listen to you.  You can be direct, honest, even mean without treating someone as less than you.

 

The example.  This last Sunday was these four texts:  LECTIONARY.  The final sermon at 8 was this one: SERMON.

The prep included several pages of notes.  Here are two examples.

The central conundrum as I understood it was that we are not called to this work and life for ourselves.  We are called to move outward, to grow up past the law into the ethics of ownership which includes some real responsibility.  In the previous weeks I had used the Keys to the Kingdom as a central image and wanted to talk about the bishop giving you those keys at your confirmation.  But after the first run through, I realized it was too small an image, and the sermon was too heady without a stronger image for Sunday morning.

Now my Saturday night congregation is primarily the long-time faithful who include about 25% retired clergy every week.  There are Jungian Christian explorers and older women who have carried the church for decades.  Collectively there is like a millennium of experience of faith there, so I don’t do a whole lot of drawing conclusions, almost always leave in the notes and obscuranta, and can leave a heady sermon knowing they will take it into their hearts.  I do have to be directive about encouragement, hope, and the need the church has for them to give back their wisdom and learning and faith.

Sundays is more mixed.  The eight o’clock service is quiet and is between Saturday night and Sunday at 10 am in terms of maturity.  I bring in more imagery and explanation, filter out most obscure note things, and start to draw more clear and concise conclusions.  I don’t have to push as hard emotionally with this group.  They are focused, and the service is quiet and easy to keep focussed without much rhetorical work.  I don’t have to repeat much and circle back as intentionally as the later service with music and kids.

Sunday at eight is a solid group though, and quick to laugh.

So you can see the development in the sermon, imagery, and delivery.  If you look back on the sermon blog, you can find Sundays where two versions are included and can compare.  Finally, I always circle back to the sermon in the welcome and announcements.  It is the place where I am reminding people of how to make this concrete and what they are bringing into the Eucharistic prayer and communion.

I hope this is fun for you.