Je ne suis pas Charlie!

/ daniel p. richards / 2 Comments

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Je ne suis pas Charlie!  I am not Charlie.  But I am learning to love him while disagreeing with everything he stands for.

After the horrific events in the last week, I saw a number of Christian leaders and social commentaries lead with the French slogan “I am Charlie” or Je suis Charlie.  This strikes me as extremely shortsighted.  I know the impulse.  There is a victim, and we want to identify, empathize, and support victims.  We fear terrorism too.  We value freedom of the press.  We are love the French, sort of, in America.

But, I am a little horrified too.  I am familiar with Charlie Hebdo.  I have read the magazine and seen the comics over the years.  And I have to say, “No.  I am not that.”  And I don’t think Christians should be so quick to claim something that is not good, may even be evil, either in the name of empathy or freedom.  Charlie was and is a source of horrific themes of misogyny, racial and religious stereotypes, and sexual and gender ridicule.  We cover these things politically. We allow them as a matter of social order.  I am not going to argue for censorship.  But as a Christian, I have found this magazine to be offensive at a level that would make Alfred P. Newman blush with shame.

We have to be more discerning than Je suis Charlie.  We don’t have to become neonazis to stop on the side of the road and change their tire.  We don’t have to become prostitutes to care for them in the hospital.  And we don’t have to think every kind of speech or action is okay, even if we allow it politically.

My fear is that the United States is losing its ethics.  We are losing our ability to think and reason beyond the soundbite.  And this is incredibly dangerous.  The tendency to think thin thoughts that are not centered in a way of being that is deeper than the current context is not simply a symptom of our age; it is a loss of an internal moral compass.  It hearkens to 1935.

We see this everywhere in media.  The bad guy does bad things, so we do bad things to the bad guy and cheer.  We torture our enemies.  We murder their children.  We hate them.  We call them names.  We ridicule them.  We kill them and anyone around them out of the clear blue sky.  And we call it good.

But we are not Americans first or French.  We are Christians.  And our Lord has told us how to respond when someone hits us, when someone calls us names, when someone hates us.  He showed us on the cross.  And those commands are not conditional demands.  They come before the pledge.

I do not condone the violence done in Paris this week.  No one should.  It was evil.  The people who were shot were human beings who were loved by God and us.  We, as Christians, must love them and do.  All of them.

This is the brutal end of our Gospel.  It may cost us our very lives, but we even then we have nothing to fear.  We are a people of love.  Charlie Hebdo did not represent that.  Neither did the terrorists.  Neither do our drones.  We must find a new way forward.

I am not Charlie, but I love him, even if he hates me.  But I don’t have to pretend like he is right, either.  I can love my enemy and bandage his wounds.

Going after the Omni’s – Seeking a God who is more than All That

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Why go after the omni’s?

In a great deal of the pop theology of the church, we live with this trinitarian phrase description of God as omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, or all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-present.  This phrase as a phrase is a frustrating one for me as a pastor and coffeeshop theologian.  It is TBV: true but vapid.

It is frustrating as a pastor because it is unbiblical and completely devoid of creativity and relationship.  It says true things in a way that brings in a constellation of meaning that is untrue, or at least unrelated to the God of the Bible and Jesus.  It brings us a whole lot closer to the question, “Can God make a rock so big he can’t move it?” than to Jesus’ statement to Philip, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”

As a coffeeshop theologian it is frustrating because it is sort of true.  God is powerful and knowing and present in a complete way, but that statement of absolute power, knowledge, and presence is presented out of a distant god as force way of thinking. I have often been tempted and even subscribed to this way of thinking.  It is not necessarily pantheism or panentheism as a classically defined.  I could draw some lines around it, but it was very much a god as Force, as in May the Force be with You.  Over time, I have been converted by the Bible to a more personal view of God, not as in my-god kind of personal, but in a view of God as person who is involved in the narrative of creation and life, a God on the hillside and mountainside bargaining with Abraham and arguing with Moses and on the cross.  A God of love rather than a force of love.

It has become a justice issue for me.  I am using that term on purpose because everything is a justice issue these days.  Justice for women and gays and blacks has us scrambling to figure out language and relationships both real and imagined.  It has us waving banners and posting online, but I don’t think much is at stake for most of us right now if we are honest.  The civil rights movement in the 1960’s was violent because the stakes were life and death, poverty and wealth.  Right now the stakes where I live are comfort and conscience, wealth and its distribution.  These things are important, but they are not causing the pillars to shake, are they?

No, I think this language about God puts our meaning of justice at stake, and this issue then risks some more nuanced and possibly dangerous earthquakes.  If God is a force of love, then everything is equal and should be equally applied, which gives you and me an awful lot of freedom to decide what is important right now.  We look at the field and choose.  Our vision is not pure, however, because we are really shaped by the local culture and media.  This is not evil, but it is not necessarily Christian either, even when the culture claims to be Christian.

If our starting point for understanding God is personal, our Lord God*, who created the world, loves the creation, and made us to be emissaries and caretakers, image-bearers or name-bearers, then our sense of justice is very much at stake because we have to take into account what that personal God cares about and names.  We have to look at what we can know about God, what has been revealed, and how we submit to the cares and loves of God.  I think that puts us in a pretty terrible position culturally.  Love as a force is pretty great.  Love as submission to a loving God is pretty demanding.

So let’s set some stakes that are biblical.  God created the world and loves it, placed humanity in the world to bear God’s image, and even when humanity went awry came to us time and time again to reveal God’s ways and intentions.  Ultimately, God came to form a covenant with the Israelites that they would bear his image and name in a particular way in how they lived with God, each other, and the land, especially the land of Canaan.  They failed often, but God continued to be faithful to them and to the promise that one day there would arise one who would restore the place of the Israelites as the savior people, the image bearing people set free and a place of knowing God for all the nations.

This promise was kept in Jesus of Nazareth, we believe as Christians, who bore the image of God without sin and chose to face the powers of death that constantly bound both the people through sin but also through the institutional sins of rule and religion.  In Jesus, God was revealed, we believe, as incarnate and loving, forgiving and merciful, just and holy.  The order is important.

God loves the creation and human beings.  God is protective of the least, as is often repeated in the Scriptures, the poor, the widow, and the orphan.  I would add barren women and wanderers, the dispossessed and the oppressed.  This is not a surprise in Jesus, somehow over-against his Hebrew faith.  It is the natural shape of the landscape of the Torah described by the prophets.  Jesus “gives meat” to the God revealed in the Law and prophets, writings and histories of the Hebrew people.  The God who created human beings cares for them, especially when they are vulnerable, oppressed, and crushed. The God whose love often turns from wrath to mercy.  The God who relents from destruction time and time again.  Not always, but often.

God’s wrath has to be understood in the context of God’s love.  It is not, as the Reformed tradition has sometimes claimed, that God is holy and therefore offended.  That frankly doesn’t hold very well with the Bible.  God is holy, but that holiness is loving.  God loves and is therefore just.  God’s love is a creator’s love and therefore whole and holy.  We are incapable of directly apprehending God because we are limited.  We are called to be God’s stewards in the house of creation, despite our limitations and lack of apprehension.  We are to care for people and things, order people and things, and to do so in God’s name as an act of worship and love of God.

Okay, so let us return to our original formula through justice.  Justice in God’s house has to be based on who God is, what God is like, what God cares about, and who God wants us to be.

God as creator of the world gives us some pretty immediate theology.  God is outside the creation, as must be true to create it. God is not a part of the creation and so is not bound by it or its limitations.

Is God therefore all-powerful?  We have to say “yes,” and Jesus says, “Nothing is impossible with God.”  But God works in and through the creation and humanity.  Does God ever “break the rules”?  There are certainly miracles, but they always involve humanity and creation.  I would point rather to God as Creator than God as All-Powerful because the claims of the Bible are typically creative claims.  I would say with Paul in Romans 4:17 “As it is written, ‘I have made you the father of many nations’—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” ESV  God is Almighty because God is creator and holds all life and being itself in love.

Is God all-knowing?  There are lots of Scriptures that indicate that God knows the future, though usually “plans”, and that God knows human beings and even in some places “all things.”  I would not argue that God does not know all things, but rather that there are many indications in the Scriptures that God interacts with creation in a way that indicates real dialogue and open-ended possibility.  He asks Adam and Eve where they are and what happened.  He calls Moses and bargains with him.  Does God’s plan change for Aaron when Moses says he cannot speak?  I would say, yes, out of deference for the way of God in the Bible.  Jesus even asks God to let the cup of crucifixion pass from him.  If he, God-incarnate, did not believe that it could be otherwise, why pray it?  So while I would say God is all-knowing, it is pulled back in relationship with humanity.  This points to that great rabbinic idea of zim-zum where God pulls back to make creation, allowing creation the space to exist and humanity the room to have freedom within his will.  So maybe I would say God knows all the possibilities and is able to see where all outcomes lead, even be able to weave all outcomes to one, the bringing to completion the will of God in the day of completion, resurrection, judgement, and justice and peace.

Is God all-present?  Maybe.  There are many examples in the scriptures where God’s presence, especially mediated by the angels, is less or more.  I might argue that within the Biblical world God’s presence is always somewhat mediated, first by angels, then Jesus, and ultimately the Holy Spirit.  The place that Holy Wisdom has in that or the shekinah, we could debate, but the presence of God if it is always there directly is certainly mediated to humanity and through creation and humanity.

So while you can say God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, that is a pretty thin statement in a Biblical faith.  It isn’t that it isn’t true, so much as that it is vapid.  It does not offer the creativity and relationality of God-in-Jesus revealed in the Bible.

So let me turn finally to justice.

The Rule of God: we are to be a people who live in the world as God’s emissaries and stewards.  But if we are to do that our very desires and the shape of our thinking have to be subject to God.  If we are to be just, it must be God’s justice.  As we return to women and gays and blacks, to put it bluntly even grossly, or more broadly to humanity and issues of our day, we cannot be for injustice, and we cannot not love any human being.  We have to love even our enemies and bless those who curse us.  Sounds self-sacrificial, doesn’t it?  But this is God’s will, that we should love people and care for the creation.

But we also have to subject ourselves as followers of Jesus to allow God’s will be my will, God’s justice be my justice, God’s love be my love.  It is a lot easier to say God is love, so when I love I am being like God.  The truth is there, but the order is wrong.  I must seek God’s love to be my love, so that I don’t distort it.

I must care for the creation and love human beings, all of them.  I cannot make them subject to God; I can only love them and proclaim what I know.  I can order my life to reflect God’s will, justice, and love.  This means trying to live the grace that God has for me.  I don’t deserve God’s love, and other people don’t have to deserve mine.  I will be merciful and just no matter what.

This may be the heart of the new reformation we are in.  As in the former reformations we argued over the definitions of grace as a commodity given, an object, in our current age we are coming to understand that grace is not a commodity but the nature of God, and the arguments are over the demands that “giving meat” to that grace places on us.  I am to be grace, but that gets complicated quickly.

If grace is love then I have to love humanity, but what do I do when humanity is unloving?  What do I do with someone who refuses to be transformed by God’s grace?  Do I stop loving them? Do I try to destroy them?  Do I continue to do my work and ignore their sins?  I think the answers are in the sermon on the mount and the parables and teachings of Jesus, but I don’t like them very much, because my fleshly self wants this to be about me and me being right and safe.

I would like it if God were just a force like gravity so that I could tip my wings and fly, bending and using God like the forces of nature, but God is beyond all that, alive and personal.  I am not called to fly but to walk with God, to know God and be transformed by God, to be like God towards other people and God’s creation.

As an aside, I fail at this all the time, every day, right now.  My failure doesn’t start in my actions, but rather in my heart and mind.  I want to order and shape things for myself, like some Ayn Rand disciple rather than Jesus’ disciple.  That ignores my true nature; it even destroys it over time.  I have to be converted in the heart while I am learning to do as God would have me do.  I fail at this in my marriage and my family, in my church and in my world.  I am getting better, but thank God I am following Jesus and have the Holy Spirit dwelling in my very being, working to change me and redeem me, to set me free from the accumulation of all those other decisions and selfish habits.  I  am being redeemed.  I have been forgiven.  I will probably need more of both tomorrow.

So, as a pastor and a coffeeshop theologian, as a human being, I want more God than the all-that one.

*The objections for Lord are well known and acknowledged.  While I do not claim that God is gendered and acknowledge that the word Lord is, I don’t have a gender-neutral word in English for one whom we submit to that is understood in the same way.  I am trying in my limited way to get to a more open language of God that is still faithful to the revelation of the Word and the Scriptures.

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Grace Episcopal Church Christmas Letter

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Grace Episcopal Church
                                                                                                                                       Christmas 2014

O, friends and family of Grace,

It is Advent, and we are waiting. Three Sundays ago, The Rev. Katheryn King encouraged us to be impatient, to long for the coming of Christ. As I prepare for the coming services and sermons, I am reminded of the promises of God in the prophets and Gospels.  I long for the Wonderful Counselor, the Prince of Peace, the God Emmanuel – God with us, who comes at Christmas. I long to see the Day of the Lord when all things are reconciled to him, so I lean into the prophets and face a choice.

We have had a darker Advent in 2014.  We are facing news of racial tension, wars, violence, victimization, and disease. Like the first chapters of Luke, we see people tossed around by capricious and controlling acts of governments around the world. We face our own sins as a nation, seeing again our reaction to violence with more violence and wonder how we can justify or atone.  Our family and maybe yours has faced losses and death. Many of us carry into this season of bright lights and shiny wrappings buried griefs and barely hidden sufferings.  Where is God in all this darkness?

Of course, there is also other news. Our economy is starting to recover, oil prices are providing relief for all of us, and at least we are admitting our past sins and seeking atonement, maybe. With our deaths and struggles, we have also had births and baptisms, weddings and celebrations, growth and wonder.  Our families may be struggling, but we are struggling together. We are taking up our faith in worship, study, and service. We have been waiting and welcoming Christ among us.

Yet here in our waiting we all face the choice of Isaiah 61: do we proclaim the day of the Lord’s favor or the Lord’s vengeance? As we read these texts, we certainly believe that the Lord loves justice hates robbery and wrong . Like Jesus’ day, the violence and injustice of our day demand a response. God would surely be justified in vengeance.  But then we follow Jesus into Galilee in Luke’s Gospel and see something amazing. Jesus lifts up this text in Isaiah 61 in the synagogue and names himself as the one who fulfills it. But, he leaves out vengeance.

How can God’s justice be sought without vengeance? How can we turn the other cheek in such a day as this? How can we love our enemies and bless those who curse us?  This is our Christmas work, to follow the God-incarnate Christ-child into the quiet night and bear witness like the shepherds of the work of God to under throw the world, to love us into holiness rather than beat us into submission, to bless instead of curse, to bring forgiveness instead of vengeance.

If Jesus is the prince of peace, then God’s Rule is the reign of peace brought about by our being transformed into love, justice, and peace embodied rather than enforced, and we all have work to do. Thank God for the Holy Spirit.

This is our season, people of Grace. We are to incarnate Christ’s peace, love, and justice in our everyday lives, in our words and actions. We are to bear witness in our choices to the God who is with us, within us, and in our darkest days by bearing his light through us by Grace. We begin here, gathered on Christmas eve again, seeing the light of Christ come in and lifting our voices in hope together, in proclamation of the good news, breaking bread together, and welcoming our Lord again, God Emmanuel.
In Christ,

The Very Rev. Daniel P. Richards, Rector & Dean

Intimacy and Incarnation: Christmas and Love

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Okay, so I am not a great husband.  My personal history and my lovely wife bear this out.  I am constantly in reform, always reading and realizing what a dope I am maritally.  So it is with relish that I approach premarital counseling as a priest.  Don’t worry, I always send couples with big obvious issues away to someone who knows what they are doing, but the rest I figure I can at least save from my stupidest mistakes.

Actually, my general plan is to present some models and guide couples into a series of conversations with a little well-seasoned wisdom from someone who has been there.  I really do read a lot because I really do feel inadequate to be married.  But then we all are according to David Schnarch, PhD.  He is the therapist I use the most.  His book Passionate Marriage should be on your reading list if you are a person.  There is no qualifier for that because the book presents deep wisdom about life through the lens of marriage and sex.

I will not go into the whole thing here, but I have preached about it before.  (See Sounds Like Grace at gracetc.blogspot.com.) So as I said in the sermon, this year I was asked to do a wedding the weekend before Christmas, and I said yes.  It was a great wedding, wonderful couple, great church, and I was only mildly stressed by it all.

But it weirded my preparation for Christmas.  We have seven services between Christmas Eve and Day, beginning with one for our Jubilee Ministries Community, and going through a whole gamut of styles and shapes.  I preach along an arc, so I don’t bore myself or the people who come to multiple services.  So I have been thinking and writing about Incarnation for a while in preparation, like normal.

Incarnation is the theological notion that God is made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth.  The enfleshed reality of God is a hard one to swallow these days, and I think more people doubt Jesus’ divinity than his teachings, though to be honest the teachings aren’t all that popular at the implementation level.  Jesus is God and fully human.  This idea is at the heart of our faith.  I think it is beautiful, and while it is unique in Christ, it is also made true in all of us in Christ.  But what does this have to do with sex?

Intimacy is this loaded topic for most of us.  We want more, we want to be closer to our spouses and other people, yet being close to people freaks us out.  It brings up some pretty basic insecurities and even existential terror.  We are scared of intimacy because it asks us to be open, honest, present, vulnerable.  It asks us to have integrity and stay close as we become scared.  Scharch points out that self-validated intimacy is the only real kind we can have, really, because we can do it no matter what the other person does.  I can show you who I really am.

It doesn’t really matter what you do in response.  I cannot control you.  I want to, but I can’t.  What I can do is soothe my fears and anxiety and stay present with you.  You have to choose your response.  In marriage it would seem that this is what we want from our spouse.  Show me who you are and I will love you, we seem to say.  But we don’t really either, because their self revelation, while not demanding anything in itself, changes our relationship and challenges us and our ways of insecurity and fear.  It asks us without asking us to show up and reveal ourselves and love them by giving like the little drummer boy, the only gift we really have.

And so we get back to incarnation.  In Jesus, God reveals God’s own self.  And it does not seem to demand anything really.  I think that is why we prefer Christmas to Easter sometimes.  God shows up.  God Emmanuel.  We long for that, and yet when God does show up, even mediated as angels, what do they have to say every time?  Peace.  Be still.  Chill out.  Calm down.  Mary, Joseph, the shepherds all are told.  Do not be afraid.

This Christmas, what if we entered into this divine offering of God’s self, this earthy and heavenly intimacy without fear?  Can we be present to God’s self and unhook our fears and expectations, our self-doubts and self-concern and trust that God loves us and just wants us to show up?

To be able to be present to another while being intimate requires self-differentiation.  We have to recognize that we are not our partner and see them as they are.  This is harder and more demanding that it sounds as I write it.  My wife and I laugh about her leaving town a couple of years ago, when I bought Velveeta shells and cheese.  She was startled to realize that I would choose something she would never choose.  It was like a revelation to her that I would eat it.  It was also a massive disappointment, and it challenged my secret love of fake horrible cheese-like products.

Now I am no master of intimacy.  I have often hidden, like others, behind all sorts of defenses, from anger and distance to knowledge and judgement.  I am amazed this Christmas at how the Gospels and Jesus’ teachings point right through all of these issues and call us to live courageously open, intimate lives.

I don’t think this is possible without strong morals and integrity and boundaries.  If we are to able to stand so close to others and hold ourselves open and loving, we have to be able to do so without victimizing the other or abusing them or losing ourselves in sloppy sentimentalism.  We need the whole teachings of Christ.  Love and courage and holiness together.

So it is Christmas, and I am trying to figure out how to talk about all of this.  Are you more open this year?  Are you more courageous and loving?  Are you more holy?  I want that intimacy with Amy that we both long for, and I fear that I am going to have to keep growing up to get there.  I want that intimacy with God that I hear promised in the prophets and in Christ.  And I fear that I come to the manger as a place of hope of course, but also a place of challenge to my deepest, most human self to be with the God who loves me enough to show up, vulnerable, honest, and holy.

A Mini-Sermon: Fields of Wheat

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In my office at the church it is such a common occurrence that I get thanked profusely and sometimes with tears for the work that I get to put a face on.  I rarely have done much other than served as a vehicle for others.

The blessing is that I get to be there when the realization comes that a grace too big to be repaid has just entered into your life.  I get to be there for the usually quiet “thank you.” Sometimes all it took was an envelope or a piece of paper or a pile of boxes or a card or a key.  Sometimes I have had to cajole and coerce people to open their hands and hearts to something that is too big, too gracious to be acceptable.  Again, it is important to know that I am rarely responsible for the gift, I am a delivery guy, a butler in this house of God we call Grace.

And I have one little sermon for this moment that many people have heard over the last decade or so.  It may be my best sermon.  It goes like this.

Look, we are all just heads of wheat in a ripe field of harvest.  The Wind blows, and we bow.  Today I am bowing to you, and you are overwhelmed, but there are a million heads of wheat bowing behind me.  I can bow to you because they are bowing to me.  Tomorrow the Wind will change, and we will change directions.  Then you will bow to someone else, and so will I.  This moment, right now, let me bow to you.  You will bow too, and this is the way of God in the world.  The Wind blows, and we bow, and Grace is passed from one to another like a harvest in the wind.

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Be generous this Christmas, for we all bow and are bowed to again.  I love you because I am loved.  May the Wind blow through us all.

Living a Prophetic Advent

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Living a Prophetic Advent in Times Hungry for Prophets
Advent has come again: the season of prophets and promises, longing and hope. Living after Pentecost, we people of Jesus are always in a season of Advent, in a way. On the other hand, the promises and hope that we remember in the prophets and the story of Advent are fulfilled already. The Rule of God has come in the person of Jesus and is the lived reality of his church. (Or it is supposed to be.)

This year we in the United States have been starkly reminded of the “not yet” of our hope. In many ways the reminders around the world have been pretty stark: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, ISIL, Hong Kong, Ferguson, New York, Berkeley. We live in a moment that is hungry for a word from God. We live in a time hungry for God’s salvation and justice.

It is easy as a Christian to want to wrap a blanket of nostalgic theology and pageantry around our faith and settle in to watch the snow outside the window and maybe a little Charlie Brown or Jimmy Stewart. But this is a season of prophets: of holy wilderness rather than comfortable living rooms, of robes of righteousness rather than snuggies.

But I am not in Ferguson or New York. I am not in Syria or Bethlehem. How do I live into this season of prophets in my comfortable living room and the gentle snows of my northern Michigan home?

The Christian life, every Christian life, is a witness to reality, either God’s or the world’s reality. We bear witness with the choices we make wherever we are. I have to choose to bear witness to God’s Rule. It may not be great because my situation does not demand greatness, but it is essential nonetheless if the people here are to hear God’s Word spoken and have their world transformed.

I have a choice at the grocery store and in the library, in my practices of Advent and my driving as to what I bear witness to. In the Bible Jesus never demands that we believe in the virgin birth, rather he tells us how to live. We are to be humble and just, merciful and forgiving, loving and endlessly reaching out to others in grace.

This must be the essence of our Advent; to live this way must be at the heart of our worship and our practices. I am to tell the truth and love others. I am to speak wholesome words and build up those who are torn down. I am to be just and merciful in my business.

Imagine an Advent when black and Hispanic people were treated fairly and justly by white people in the United States, not just because of laws but out of real love and faith. Imagine being a police officer who tried to do his job and had people forgive them when they overreacted or failed, who was loved even as they administered justice. Imagine being forgiven at work and encouraged at home. Imagine being treated as a human being.

We have come such a long way in the last four hundred years as a nation, but it is very clear this year that we have a long way to go. What role can the church play in helping the United States move toward justice and mercy? I am not sure that the answer is going to be offered by our political parties or our political binaries? We may have to dream again, but I know that it will begin where Jesus did, in the hearts, souls, and minds of those of us who follow him being changed.

We have to bear witness to a God of grace and mercy and justice and provision in our everyday decisions and actions. This witness may be costly. We will probably get taken advantage of and ridiculed and challenged, but not much. Keep it in perspective. I bear witness in a really safe place. I have angered people and been called names, but I do not fear for my life or even my job.

One of our witness points for the church in my town, made up of all our different denominations and congregations, is in housing the homeless during the harsh winter months in our buildings. It costs us convenience and building maintenance, odors and space. Sometimes it costs us comfort and safety. It has cost us very rarely in theft and harassment. But every time we face some change in costs, we get anxious. Someone will question whether it is worth the costs, but it always comes back to a simple expectation. “I was hungry and you fed me.”

We house and serve the homeless and poor, the drunks and the hungry, the rich and the well off, Republicans and Democrats, the calm and the angry, the yogi and the banker, the believer and the wanderer. We are all of those things in our little church, and in our church we are none of them. We are the witnesses of a different world where God is calling us all to the table, to serve and love each other in worship to him who comes to us again in Bethlehem and Ferguson, and even in Traverse City. In our faithfulness we bear witness by living humbly and justly, mercifully and forgiving, loving, and endlessly reaching out to others in grace whether they can pay us back or not, whether they join us in this new world or not.

We are prophets of promises already fulfilled and still not yet.

None of this seems like enough when our neighbors are being shot or choked in the streets, when our incarceration rates and arms productions surpass every other nation, when extremists are taking over nations and our media, when we face wars and rumors of wars, famines, earthquakes and signs throughout the world. But this is the way of Jesus, to live a new reality as we hope for it, to risk the small costs and the large ones, to love our neighbor and bear witness as we pursue justice and mercy.

In our love we become bearers of the Word of God, like Mary on her donkey following Joseph to Bethlehem without a room waiting for them, displaced by an unjust act of government, and yet singing the song of God in the wilderness between dangers, pregnant with hope and a new reality.

We begin where we are, living bold lives of love and service, like candles against the night.  It may be your place to take to the streets and protest, but it is surely all of our time to reach out to our neighbors and have dinner with them, to stop and thank a police officer for their service in these hard days and offer mercy to those who don’t seem to get it just right, knowing how much forgiveness we have required of others and of God.  We all have to choose a prophetic Advent.

May our parties and our dinners and our worship services and our letters and presents and ministries this Advent be prophetic, declaring God’s wild and unmerited love in a world that is suffering again.

Along the Way: Advent, Attention, and Elegance or Krista Tippett does theology and I complain

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from wvtf.org website

from wvtf.org website

Elegance, Attention, and Advent

I have been annoyed recently at the NPR-shaped faith of the Episcopal Church. I am not innocent of the charge since I listen to National Public Radio all the time at home. (Diane Rehm’s Weekly News Roundup on Friday (my sabbath) is my chance to catch up the with the nuances of the week’s missed stories.) But I was appalled this year when Krista Tippett’s “On Being” episodes were being offered as material for classes through our denominational press’s catalogue. Our faith is Christian; and though Ms. Tippett is one of my favorite interviewers on the radio, she is under no obligation to present our faith or teach it. I am deeply concerned by the scarcity of resources we are actually putting into the primary activity of making disciples as a church, and this seemed like one more reason to cry out for conversion and a return to our raison d’être as a denomination.

Don’t worry, I rant about this stuff all the time to everyone who will listen. Pray for my children. They have to hear me muttering about this kind of thing all the time.

Despite all this, I like “On Being,” especially the unedited interviews that you can get online or through the podcasts of the show. I prefer the unedited version because I read many of the people she interviews and get their processed and canned thoughts all the time. My longing is for the conversation that we rarely get to hear from those who are producing the mental and spiritual diets so many of us eat. I commend the interviews with Jaroslav Pelikan and John O’donahue to you especially; oh and Seth Godin and . . . well you get the idea.

This last week I found Paulo Coelho. Like many others, I have read and been moved deeply by his novels and drank his interview with Ms. Tippett like afternoon wine. But I was pulled up short by his answer to her request for a definition of his use of the word “elegance.”  (This transcript is from the show’s website.  I have only edited out Ms. Tippett’s unimportant utterances for flow.)

MS. TIPPETT: I want to ask you about elegance. Something you talk about as a virtue, you know, we talked about the virtue of love, and friendship, and boldness, but [I am] very drawn to your use of the word, elegance. Talk to me about the place of elegance in life’s pilgrimage.

MR. COELHO: Elegance is simplicity. I believe that we need to be elegant, because people confound elegance with fashion. And that has nothing to do. I learned about elegance not because I was reading about fashion, blah, blah, blah. Because one day I was in Japan and I saw a just totally empty house. And then they have a small detail like, a flower arrangement, or a painting. And the rest is empty. And I said, oh, my God. What is this? This guy, it was my publisher.

And he said — I will never forget — he said, “This is elegance.” I said, “Elegance?” He said, “Yes, because here, there’s only one detail that you can pay attention. And, because of this elegance is to get rid of all the superfluous things and focus on the most beautiful one.” In this case it was this flower arrangement. So, for me, when I looked at the mountains to the Alps here …that was the line. And I see this white snow and I said, oh, my God, God could have created snow as a rainbow, you know, full of colors. But then this would be a disaster.

You know? Because the beauty of the snow is because it has only one color. The beautiful desert that I — I love deserts, by the way.

MR. COELHO: I spent forty days in the Mojave Desert back in 1989, and it was so magical, so magical, so magical. So every time that I travel, I visit the desert. But then back to elegance, elegance is that. Is to go to the core of beauty, and the core of beauty is simplicity.

There is a lot of material for life in the whole episode, but this one idea resonated with me as we look at the season of Advent and the prophets.  In some way Advent is about preparing to have your world changed again, and we think of that in big ways like birth, but the call this year is something closer to Coelho’s insight.

When my wife was pregnant with my son this was obvious in an Adventish kind of way, and when we were preparing for our marriage or getting ready to move the same preparation themes of life came up.  When we know that our world is going to change and that we are going to have to change with it, we prepare ourselves.  This is Advent, right? The prophets in our lives warn us ahead of time that we will have to change.  When we are at our best we listen to them.

On the other hand, what Coelho is talking about is actually closer to the spiritual insight that most of us prepare for and have at Advent and Christmas.  We focus on this singular elegance for a moment, and it changes, or can change, our world.

Elegance and Christmas.

The problem of course is that we come to Christmas through Advent by adding things to the room rather than taking them away.  We add in events, extra projects and trips to the mall, relatives, obligations, church services, and wrapping and decorations.  We don’t remove distractions, we multiply them.

The prophets often went to the desert places to strip away the distractions and listen for the word of God.  Mountains, wilderness, and especially the long horizons of the actual desert have often served to put would-be prophets today in the clearings of life to hear and see what God is doing.

I start longing in December every year for the desert, and not particularly for the weather.  (That comes in March when winter is not relenting this far north.)  I long for the midday escapes along Trail 100 from my condo in northeast Phoenix or the far end of the road that used to take me to the Seven Springs trailhead out east of Tucson: the places where with a few quick steps and fewer provisions I could be out of reach of the demands of the season and regain my sense of clarity.

John the Baptist seemed to see clearly what God was doing in Jesus.  He was not pulled away by the Zealots’ cries for justice and liberation, nor was he falling under the spell of the religious powers of his day, nor was he far away in his hopes from what Jesus would do (despite my favorite author’s depiction of their conflict in the Last Temptation of Christ.)  No, John’s simple cry set up Jesus’ later one: “Change your mind; the Rule of God is in reach.”

I have to change my mind again this year.  Repentance is not a one time thing.  I have to clear away the clutter that I let build up, and honestly that I decorate this time of year with.  I have to give up my Zealotry and my religious ideals, even as I practice my faith and strive for justice; I have to give up my bitterness and self-righteousness.  I have to clear space and go into the wilderness of silence, the landscape of God.

Theology is not really in statements about God anymore than coffee is in the grounds in a coffee filter.  Good theology is in conversation and prayer.  It is the moment of actual thought and creativity.  The statements we pass around are like mementos of those other moments when we were together and thinking and speaking and creating with God.  I think that is why I like the longer unedited interviews of Krista Tippett and her guests.  They capture moments of theology.

I hate that they would be turned into curricula frankly because I want a church that is capable of the conversations, rather than a congregation that listens to my statements.  I want a people who can speak and think and create those moments, loaded with Scripture and poetry and wilderness experiences, a people who can speak for God like a community of prophets wandering in and out of the wild places of life renewed with a divine love that is elegant and clear.

Instead we so often just listen on our way to another cluttered room, busy and scattered.  As a shepherd in a world of busy, educated, and beautiful sheep, I want to call out and lead my Master’s flock away from the city streets and stores to wilderness at the feet of Mount Horeb where the bushes are alight like Advent candles and God speaks from the flames.

Clear your mind, the Rule of God is here.

Spring 2013

Spring 2013

Eschatology and Gratitude – Lessons Along the Way

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It is the long view that matters when setting a course. You cannot neglect short-term details, but it is the long term goal that sets the course and allows corrections and a final sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.

“Well done, my good and faithful servant.” That simple phrase from a parable of Jesus sets my long term goal. To have my master come and say, “Well done.”

The master matters to me. God’s character really does completely change what that goal means and could mean for me as a direction in life. It changes my everyday reflections, prayers, and actions. I know that God’s will for human beings is love, justice, and peace.

Shaping my life to follow the Way of Jesus involves some pretty mundane decisions and some really important ones. I greet people I don’t know at the coffee shop, and I don’t watch some movies because I follow Jesus. I try to know the homeless as human beings and not merely a collection of maladies and presuppositions because I follow Jesus. I pray the daily office, gather with others for eucharist, and talk to God all day because I follow Jesus. I tithe because I follow Jesus.

I don’t think God will love me because I follow Jesus and do these things. This is a vital theological point. I do these things because God loves the world, and this is who our master is. If we are going to worship and claim God as our master, we follow Jesus and do these things.

One of these things is thanksgiving. We give thanks to the God who made us and the world, who loves us and the world. On a simple level, we have life and salvation, grace and forgiveness. Everything we have is from God.

“All things come from thee, O Lord; and of thine own have we given thee.” This offering prayer is based on David’s final prayer to God before the assembly of Israel (I Chronicles 29:14). It sums up beautifully all that we are saying about gratitude.

We give thanks in all things because all things come from God. This orientation shapes us away from the greed and self-orientation of our contemporary world. It puts us in right relationship to the God we serve in each other and the world.

A Coffee Connoisseur (Snob) Thinks about Creation and Creativity

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So two weeks ago I was drinking a freshly roasted, and dark enough for a change on my small roaster, Sumatra Mandehling from a Chemex filter in a Hario v60 pour-over filter holder.  It was good but really overly refined for a Sumatra coffee.

You see, Sumatra coffees are famously funky; grown on volcanic soil and notoriously poorly sorted has meant that for more than twenty years there has been a sort of typical Sumatran flavor that was reliable crop to crop.  Some of that was due to, of course, to the unique growing conditions of the tropical South Pacific Island and its volcanic soil.  But, a great deal of the earthy and unpredictably unstable quality was due to the coffee being mostly grown and picked on small family lots or yards and poorly picked through leading to a diverse lot of beans that varied in color, size, and density.

These days, a lot has changed.  Twenty or more years of success in the market has meant that Sumatra has better coffee growing conditions, better pay to farmers, and more strict quality control measures than twenty years ago when I first had a cup of coffee that was single origin designated.

That cup was darker, more uneven, and had a wild quality that took that funk that I would describe as orange clay earthiness and layered in complexity with bright overtones and periodic notes of white orchid aromas and pungent citrus that was just short of the sharp smack in the face of grapefruit.  The overall quality was wild and dark, like being chased through a dense forest by an unseen tiger.

These days Sumatran coffees are more regularized. They have a more sophisticated, straight forward predictability.  It is ecotourism compared to my fearful flight from the teeth of that clay come to life in stripes.  This is advancement.  Everyone involved is benefitting from these advancements, but I cannot help but miss that cup that first captivated and chased me two decades ago.

I have an odd memory for flavor, I guess, but this moderated coffee has reminded me of Epictetus’s maxim that you can’t step in the same river twice.  Now he had never eaten at a McDonald’s, but he lived at a time when the world was still wilder, even than now.  Though it should be noted that the trees of Greece were already being lamented by other voices.

Coffee is a fruit, an organic substance that is grown not manufactured, and it changes lot to lot, season to season.  I cannot ever have that original cup of Sumatran Mandehling, even if I could find the exact yard those beans were grown in, could process them the same way, and brewed on the same machine.  Not one stage of that hypothetical is remotely possible.

How many pursuits in life are a search for that moment when something magical happened, when the right set of circumstances came together in a perfect moment of revelation?  Life is a river that moves and dances, always with new circumstances coming upstream or down, with new growth on the banks, new animals and fish, different climate effected by volcanoes or factories a world away.  Everything moves, and the water for my coffee is not the same today either.

Life is never caught, never repeatable.  We remember but from a constantly new place.  Even our memory is created.  I am God-obsessed and think God must be a weaver at the loom of creation, moving the shuttle of this moment across billions upon billions of threads, pulling together themes and re-tying broken or lost or ended lines.  Every single moment the coming together of a universe in a verse of the song of creation, a line in the poem of making.

This cup of coffee is a new thing, a taste of the creation coming together from several places in the world all at once.  Water from a cold Great Lake watershed, beans from a yard turned field on a tropical volcano side, gathered by locals and sold to a processor from Milwaukee who wanted to do good, who shipped by way of a freighter from Norway whose Chinese captain now claims Canada or Oakland as home, delivered by American men of so many descents they are a confusion of history to my father’s warehouse in Mississippi, where I bagged them up myself, unaware of how much of the world went into that bag of burlap.

Yes, I roasted them at home on a small roaster that it takes forever to get up to heat in our midwestern fall as the snow drifts over my green yard for the first time this year, and I recalled that first cup of Sumatran coffee I ever had two decades ago.

Dear reader, I hope you are a creator.  We are children of the God of the Loom, makers and creative caretakers of the world.  You were designed to work the loom of creation, bringing together threads and themes in new and fascinating ways, whether you are making a cup of coffee or teaching children or running an office or painting a landscape.

You are a maker.  Creation is the work of weaving the threads of the existing world and its constant changes and movements into new moments of creativity.  A businessman looks at the people in his office and, knowing them, weaves a marketing plan that utilizes their unique skills and abilities and personalities to enable clients to reach potentials that would be impossible without his imagination and prophecy.  A craftswoman takes a file to a rough metal housing and shapes the sounds of a concert pianist fingers from force to force of sound through miles of metal cord.  What will you do with the raw clay before you? What breath will you breathe into creation?  You have been given the breath of God at your making, O little creator, O child of God.

Make something new.

Taste and see that the LORD is good. Psalm 34:8

*Take a look at our family business.   Coffee Bean Corral:  You can find Sumatra coffee and all the stuff a maker of coffee needs, including roasters there.

More than Remembrance: Worship

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In the movie Fight Club the members of Project Mayhem, a male bonding and domestic terrorism experiment in intentional living, lose their first member, and after the founding member tells them the name of their comrade, they repeat it like a mantra.  His name was Robert Paulsen.

When we stand in our parish for funerals, many people mistake the service for a simple act of remembrance.  For many people, we could just chant, Her name  was Mary Smith, and I suspect many families would be happy.  I believe that later most would feel dissatisfied, but they likely wouldn’t know why.

A funeral service is supposed to be an act of worship directed to God, our Creator and for Christians our Abba.  We offer up our loved one in a liturgy that places their life into the story of God’s creation and redemption.  We thank God for who they were and are.  We pray in faith and thanksgiving for the safety and home that we believe they now are.  I know in an age of disbelief and worship of the self, that gets missed most of the time on the conscious level, even for many Christians.  But it matters.

Take Hobo, a local homeless man who died in our community, by which I mean both city and church.  He was not a member exactly, but a fixture, someone who regularly used the services of the church and joined in worship at times.  He was an alcoholic and former drug user who sold drugs years ago by his own admission.  He was a wreck and a holy man.  He searched for God in prayer and baptismal water baths.  He blessed others and kept more than a couple of our local homeless people alive in brutal weather and worse loneliness.  He shared what he had.

His story is not simple as I learned over the years of knowing him.  He had left behind several children by several women.  His brief periods of sobriety had created hopeful dreams of family that faded as he would slip away for months at a time, eventually not coming back to reclaim the ruined dreams he had left behind.  His brief work as a smoke jumper left him with skills that he used make it through dangerous times, whether self-made or not.  He had taken a lot from others over the years, but he also shared what he had.

I met with him formally to hear what I think of now as his last confession and his last stand.  He was clear that he had left behind alcohol and drugs in time to be clear-eyed about meeting his Lord, whom he believed had forgiven him.  I believe that too, though even that is not simple.

Hobo left behind genuine friendships and saved more than a couple of lives, but he also left behind broken lives and people he would not give the time of day too, even when they needed him.  I loved him the way pastors love their people, and his loss to me was real, and so was my disappointment that he didn’t father his children or husband his “wives” of whatever status.

When we gathered at Grace Church to lay his body to rest and to let him go to his Lord, it was important to many around him that he would not be forgotten.  But it was more important to me to offer him up one final time with his community and the royal priesthood of the church, to name the ways that God-in-Christ came through the cracks in his life, and to thank God for him.  I also prayed that God would forgive him and heal his children and the women he left behind.  His funeral was not merely a remembrance, though we did remember him.  His funeral was worship for the God who made him, the God he betrayed, and the God who loved him anyway and kept showing up to work in and through his life.

His life mattered to God, and it mattered to the people around him and to me.  I have no idea what Hobo and God will have to say to each other when they stand face to face, but I know what my hope and faith are for him, for you, and for myself.  I hope that his prayer found their intention, and I have faith he can sluff off the sins he had held on to for so long; that is, after all the point of the cross. I hope his sins fall away in the lives of those he left, and that God grants redemption to those who remain.  I believe that he was set free two thousand years before he was born, and that he was searching for that freedom all of his life.  My hope is that he found it.

Whether he did or not I have to leave between him and God.  Between you and me, I loved him and was loved by him the way pastors and their people love each other, the way human beings love each other.  He blessed me and gave me the honor of offering his life up before his friends to his Lord.  He gave life, and he took life.  In the end, he was more than just a name to be remembered: he was a reason to worship God in praise, thanksgiving and repentance.

Amen.