Month: October 2008

Visitors to our part of the west anytime between mid-July and October must wonder about the apparent desolation of the place.  Apart from the mountains, everything is some shade of brown, and out on the steeply rolling hills of the Palouse there are very few trees, most of them scrubby.  Golden ripe wheat, fields of stubble and the weedy dirt of fallow brown provide a lot of texture but within a limited palette.  Something else is happening now.  Huge ranges of newly planted winter wheat are coming up a brilliant green against plowed furrows of deepest black.  Pretty soon the higher elevations will be frosted with snow.  By March you can look out over a landscape you swear is carpeted in the most luxurious green velvet ever.  It’s an amazing place. We drive the 150 miles between here and Spokane once or twice a month, and it always changes, it never looks the same twice.  Some visitors wonder about a drive that seems so remote from everything.  We wonder at a drive that is so intimately up close to everything and always someplace worth being in.

So here we are sitting in the Great Hall of the cathedral for our diocesan convention with the theme of living the scandalous gospel.   So what does that mean?  Seems to be some confusion about that.  Older delegates have no idea.  The youth presence has a lot of ideas, some of them quite scandalous.  For something to be scandalous I think it needs to be somewhat embarrassing and generally offensive to a general number of those around. 

One way to do that is the old tried and true method of standing on the street corner, thumping a bible and demanding conversion to Christ.  Many of those who do that are keenly aware of the scandal of their behavior and immensely proud of it.  But even at its best I think it misses the point, partly because it lets too many Christians and would be Christians off the hook.  Having said the Sinner’s Prayer and accepted Christ, what else is there to do?  Heaven awaits so just get on with life as usual.

Living the scandalous gospel in another way brings Christians into contention with life as usual by shinning a bright light on injustice, the plight of those who are excluded, oppressed and in great need.  Christians can easily do that by keeping their eyes on the generalized people in lands far away who are in great distress, and then crying tut-tut while giving a little money for relief before getting on with life as usual.  In too many cases it’s a method for pious avoidance.  A big part of the scandal of the Good News of God in Christ is that Jesus engaged with those at hand whose condition and behavior were an offense, or at least a nuisance, to those in the neighborhood.

So perhaps living the scandalous gospel requires us to truly know about and help as we can the poor and needy throughout the world, but also to truly know and address the issues in our own neighborhoods that create and nourish injustice, exclusion, oppression and great need.  That may very well embarrass us and others and really offend even more.

I’m off to diocesan convention, which, for us, is a three day affair.  I’m fully prepared with a supply of NYT crosswords and a fully charged laptop.  Perhaps I’ll be inspired to write some pithy blogs.  The best convention diversion in recent years was thanks to the generosity of someone who supplied us with Lego blocks, enough to get some competition going between parish delegations.  The theme that year was Building the New Church.  This year’s theme is Living the Scandalous Gospel.  That has given me ideas on so many possibilities, but I treasure my Church, my bishop and am not yet ready to be inhibited.  Besides, I have a reputation to maintain as a serious minded, dignified retired priest. 

I grew up in Minnesota and so am always surprised when the banks are closed and the mail doesn’t come on Columbus Day.  I just have a hard time thinking of Columbus Day as a real holiday.  Now Leif Ericson Day (Oct. 9), that’s a day for real celebration of European discovery!  That I can understand.  Moving to the NYC area, where I lived for eighteen years, was a cultural shock, not because of the size of the city but because of the enormity of Columbus Day, and I never did learn to appreciate it to the satisfaction of my friends and colleagues.  Of course the popular thing today is to celebrate with one hand while thumping the chest and crying mea culpa with the other.  After all, wasn’t Columbus the key to the rape of the Americas by avaricious Europeans?

I wonder if we might consider a couple of points here.  First, along with other less well documented voyages of discovery, Columbus accomplished something quite remarkable that opened up all kinds of avenues for new discoveries in all sorts of ways.  It’s worthy of celebration.  Second, expansion of territory by conquest was not a moral question in those days, not even for the indigenous peoples of the “new world.”  The morality of conquest was not seriously questioned until the 19^th century, and the issue not fully resolved until the 20^th.  What is clear to our eyes as being something reprehensible was, except for a few, invisible to theirs.

Now we more clearly see how offensive much of what the European invasion of the Americas was not only to the indigenous peoples but, for us Christians, to the gospel of Christ and in the eyes of God.  Good for us.  We’ve got wonderfully acute hindsight. Big deal.  How about foresight?  What is it today that we simply cannot or will not see that future centuries will find morally appalling and wonder how we ever did what we did and still claimed the name of Jesus Christ?  I don’t have really good answer, but I think it is a question we need to ask.

Mighty oaks from little acorns grow, but on the other hand, you shall know the tree by it’s fruit, and some acorns are fakes able to grow only brambles and thorns.

It’s always disappointing when the good and much needed work of community organizing is sullied by inept and corrupt practices.  Recent news does not reflect well on ACORN, which is among the more visibly active community organizing groups.  Their blatant disregard for voter registration laws has reflected poorly on everyone else.  To be sure, the history of voter registration fraud is a long one with special mention going to most counties in Texas, Cook County Illinois and all the right wing tricks to keep minorities out of the polls in too many places to recall.  But ACORN is supposed to be among those working hard and honestly for the most disadvantaged so that they can cease to be disadvantaged.  Sadly, I ran into them many years ago, sometime back in the 1970s, when they were active in Sioux Falls, SD and generally managing to muck up everything because they were unwilling to believe that the local business community knew something about poverty and was both willing and had the talent to do something about it.  All they have succeeded in doing in the last few weeks is to jeopardize the diligent work of many others who have given their best efforts to bring new voters on line, and to bring disrepute to community organizing as a whole.  Shame.

Yesterday’s NPR offering informed me about work in the name of voter fraud prevention that has the effect of disenfranchising a lot of eligible voters.  This morning’s news reveals that massive voter list purges in six states may violate federal laws.  All of this brings me to a piece of mail I got a couple of weeks ago.  The GOP in Florida sent me all the forms I needed to sign up for absentee ballots.  To be fair, the forms were in the names of my parents who have been dead for some years now, but that doesn’t seem to bother the Florida GOP very much.  Just an observation.  Make of it what you will.

Later this month I’m going to speak at a community forum on poverty.  My assignment will be to make a case for the theological foundation of a Christian response to poverty.  I’ll be joined by a colleague who will do the same from a Jewish perspective.  Now I’ve got some ideas of where to go with this, but I’d like to hear what you might do if it was up to you.  

I’ve just finished N.T. Wright’s new book Surprised by Hope.  With the exception of his views on homosexuality, I’ve always been a fan of his solid theology and was looking forward to his take on death, resurrection, heaven and the new creation.  It was a little off-putting at the outset because of his superfluous injections of the words ‘liberal,’ ‘progress,’ and ‘evolution’ in places that implied a great distaste for whatever they might stand for but never a definition of what that is.  What I guess is this.  Liberalism is anything that believes that humanity has within itself the ability to accomplish enough good for society that society might become better from one generation to another, and, by implication to eventually become perfect.  Progress, therefore, is the illusion of actually having accomplished some lasting good in society.  His use of the word evolution seemed to point toward something like Social Darwinism rather than any other concept of evolution.  For some reason he took special delight in hammering on Teilhard.  It seemed to me that all of that was a scheme for setting up a number of straw men in order to knock them down in his later arguments.

Because the book was cadged together from a series of lectures delivered in various places over several years, those later arguments became quite repetitive at times. 

You might think from that introduction that I disliked the book.  Far from it.  I loved it.  For starters, you know how hard it is to explain the nature of evil to people, and Wright did a terrific job of it in the simplest of terms: “…it consists in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honor elements of the natural world rather than God…” And what is sin?  It is any and all of that which dehumanizes us.  I like that.

He  insists, and argues well, that bodily resurrection is where our hope lies, and that we need to work harder to help Christians understand that a disembodied eternal life as spirits floating around in heaven is not what is proclaimed on Easter morning.  If, indeed, our souls are heaven bound, it only a temporary state of being until the wholeness of resurrection is accomplished on a renewed earth in a renewed cosmos that has material reality.  I liked his frequent reference to C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce as a way of trying to explain what that might be like.

He pretty much debunked most of the popular thinking about the second coming and rapture, replacing it with what scripture actually says.  The power of the gospel, he writes, “lies not in the offer of a new spirituality…not in the threat of hellfire…but in the powerful announcement that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, that the powers of evil have been defeated, that God’s new world has begun.”  He also urged the Church to restore to its teaching the reality of judgment and the reasons why that is a measure of hope and not threat.

Toward the last third of the book he turned to the role of Christians in the contemporary world which looked a lot like the liberal progressivism he had first ridiculed.  I think the difference is that his brand of progressivism is grounded in biblical mandate rather than the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Why do so many theologians feel that they have to keep battling a 300-year-old not very coherent philosophical movement?

I was also taken by his desire that the Church take sacred space and time seriously, no matter what sort of worship style is preferred.  When he added it all together it produced a new understanding of what it would mean for the Church to be missional, and that is something we can all use.

So there you have it in a few words of gross generalities.  If you want to know the details read the book.  Wright remains one of my favorite contemporary theologians: a stalwart conservative who is really a closet liberal, a lover of the Anglican tradition, and a great teacher.

The Ten Commandments (Exodus version) will be a featured lesson in some churches this Sunday, and in looking at them once again I am reminded of the Sunday School and Confirmation classes that parsed each one for its unique pearl of wisdom and guidance for behavior.  What exactly is stealing?  Does kill mean murder or something else?  How does coveting differ from ordinary sorts of jealousy?  There was no end to it; we could go on for hours putting even the best casuist to shame. 

It took some significant spiritual growth for me to realize that there are really only two commandments:  Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.  Isn’t that what Jesus himself said?  The first four commandments are simply variations on the theme of loving God and establishing some parameters to it.  The last six are all about our relationships with one another, and, again, are simply variations on the theme of living with honest integrity with each other.  Consider, for instance, the commandment not to kill.  At first glance I can be quite smug about it never having even once killed anyone.  But how many ways are there to kill?  Can a cruel word kill some part of another’s psyche?  I think it can and does.  We can and do kill each other in bits and pieces a little bit at a time.  To do that are we not stealing something that is not ours to take?  Isn’t that a form of bearing false witness?  You get the idea.  They are all variations on one commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself. 

That kind of thinking got me to appreciate the Ten Commandments so much more than I ever did as a teenager.  I really don’t care whether they are ever posted in a courthouse of city hall.  That is not where they belong anyway.  But I do think it would be a good idea for them to be posted in each church where the people and their clergy can be brought to appropriate moments of reflection, confession and repentance.