Category Archives: faith

Still Waters

Posted on by

“Still waters run deep.” When I was in high school, a junior, I was riding up a chairlift on a ski slope with another ski-club member, a senior girl. I didn’t know her very well, not at all really. We talked a bit and then she said to me, and I was a taken aback a bit (a lot, really), she said, “You seem to have your shit together, why?” Well, I was taken aback because I knew I certainly didn’t have all my “shit” together, taken aback because she used the word “shit” (to swear was to sin in my household), and taken aback a Senior was asking me, a junior, a question like that.
I John was the Epistle reading for Morning Prayer the latter part of April. John talks a lot about our call, our obligation, our privilege to love. That word, “Love.” So much of how we understand that work in these days tends to verge almost exclusively on either sentimentality or lust of some sort. “Love” within the Christian Life is neither. Love, in an understanding that is rooted in the teachings of Jesus and really throughout the Holy Scriptures, seems to be something far more significant, difficult, meaningful, and far deeper than mere sentimentality or banal lust.
We who call ourselves Christians really do need to discover anew a definition for love other than the definition(s) determined by our culture, ingrained within us through enculturation, and vividly demonstrated by our prevailing culture. I think if “love” is our goal, our experience… if we have been re-formed into the way of life of the Body of Christ – then others cannot but notice a difference in us.
What is this kind of love – it is peace generating. Peace first within our own lives, and then from the wellspring of our experience we are able to better influence those around us and the culture for peace – inwardly, outwardly in our relationships with others, and within our national experience. Anxiety rules the hearts of so many people these days, and not just because of our economic woes-of-the-moment.
What is this kind of love – that we love even our enemies. This is profound, and profoundly difficult. In fact, I venture to say that it is nearly impossible without the renewing and reconciling endeavor of Christ within us. Too many of us that call ourselves Christian in these days have capitulated to the culture and act just like it – animosity, hostility, hatred, verbal and physical violence, abuse and manipulation, an unwillingness or inability to compromise with those with whom we disagree, a national attitude that simply says “seek out and kill our enemies.” In the end, this does not bring peace, stability, security, or freedom. The violent world looks at the Church and sees themselves. They see a better example of “Christian love” in the life of Ghandi, a Hindu. We fail to love as Christ calls us to love. Again, this is profoundly difficult and certainly not sentimentality.
What is this kind of love – I consider the welfare of others before myself.
What is this kind of love – 1 Corinthians 13:3-8a (ESV)

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.

Is this how love looks among us?
Now, I don’t claim for a moment that this girl sitting next to me on the chairlift was suddenly exposed to an incredible example of God’s love by me, a 17 year old kid, but through something completely unrecognizable by me she found something different in my life – something that she didn’t have. I asked her what she meant by, “have your shit together.” She didn’t really know, but she said to me, “Still waters run deep.” The only difference I can even begin to fathom would have been the very beginnings of formation, or change within me, as a result of Jesus Christ. If we give ourselves to God and the pursuit of love as God determines it to be, God will do a renewing work within us, He will re-form us out of these worldly systems and into something profoundly deeper. It is His way, though. There are now short-cuts or alternative methods.
I think if we give ourselves to seeking the love God calls us to, the life, really, there will be a change within us that is somehow visible to a world were love has become anything but… love defined not by the whims of “trendy” born of psycho-social insecurity and not by the Author of love.

Keeping Holy Ground

Posted on by

From this months issue of Christianity Today (May 2009):

Keeping Holy Ground Holy

The average person is not at all repelled by Gothic or Romanewque architecture,” says Robert Jaeger, executive director of Partners for Sacred Places, a nondenominational nonprofit that preserves and renews historic church buildings in the U.S. “The average person finds the symbolism and the craftsmanship compelling, beautiful, and comforting.”
There’s a desire out there to connect with something ancient, something transcendent,” asays Ed Stetzer, director of Lifeway Research and author of Lost and Found: The Younger Unchurched and the Churches that Reach Them. “there’s a hunger to move beyond a bland evangelcialism into something with more historic roots.”
Last year, a LifeWay survey commissioned by the Cornerstone Knowledge Network found that unchurched adults prefer Gothic church buildings to utilitarian ones, challenging the conventional wisdom that medieval-looking churches feel out-of-touch and stuffy to seekers. LifeWay showed over 1,600 unchurched adults four pictures of church buildings, ranging from mall-like to Gothic. The majority prefered the most ornate church.
“The study probably tells us that the appearance of a traditional church might not be the turnoff that people assumed in the seeker age,” Stetzer says.
Of course, Stetzer also notes that in North American and Europe, the congregations with the oldest buildings are the ones struggling the most to retain memers. THere’s a difference between admiring a building from the street and going inside to connect with a congregation”
Buildings don’t reach people, people reach people,” says Stetzer. [Nathan Bierma. 2009. “Keeping Holy Ground Holy – A new survey suggests seekers are not looking for user-friendly, mall-like buildings.” Christianity Today, May, pp. 36.]

For a generation (or two), the buildings provide us an opportunity for piquing interest and are a tangible invitation to enter in. We see this at my parish all the time. But, whether people stay or not depends on whether something is going on within the place. That “something” is not the building, not nice people, not a cornucopia of programs, not socio-political positions, but whether God is encountered in the midst of the people in the context of worship, the Eucharist. It is the encounter with God and the real change that such an encounter causes within that will cause people to stay.
What to do? Even the writing of the article reveals a passing way of thinking – “Seeker” is passé. Current day evangelicals are generally better in shifting with the times, but there isn’t the moderating influence of the Tradition. Here is the pressing problem with the Episcopal Church. We are the ones with the old buildings and a dwindling membership. Yet, we are the ones with all the attributes that should be attracting “seekers” of the younger generations.
We continue to be stuck, and for too many of us we continue to believe that it is “moving the furniture around,” programs, social activism, and many other things that bring people in and cause them to stay. Those things don’t, in most cases.
There has to be a lessening of “scheming” to “save us” and more of the simplicity of the foundational principles of the faith, the Tradition, that which has spiritually enlivened and feed people for two millennia, that which has survived – more about Jesus as the person He claimed (claims) to be and less of what we want to imagine Him to have been or to be coming from both the imaginations of conservatives and liberals. This also means, of course, that the architectural styles of church buildings are a bit moot – people will stay where their souls are touched by God.

Wish Fulfilments

Posted on by

Here are a few paragraphs from an Easter message appearing in the TimesOnline (UK), that religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill describes as an example of “Radical Orthodoxy,” by N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham.
The Church must stop trivialising Easter –

“The stories of the Resurrection are certainly not “wish-fulfilments” or the result of what dodgy social science calls “cognitive dissonance”. First-century Jews who followed would-be messiahs knew that if your leader got killed by the authorities, it meant you had backed the wrong man. You then had a choice: give up the revolution or get yourself a new leader. Going around saying that he’d been raised from the dead wasn’t an option.
Unless he had been. Jesus of Nazareth was certainly dead by the Friday evening; Roman soldiers were professional killers and wouldn’t have allowed a not-quite-dead rebel leader to stay that way for long. When the first Christians told the story of what happened next, they were not saying: “I think he’s still with us in a spiritual sense” or “I think he’s gone to heaven”. All these have been suggested by people who have lost their historical and theological nerve.
“The historian must explain why Christianity got going in the first place, why it hailed Jesus as Messiah despite His execution (He hadn’t defeated the pagans, or rebuilt the Temple, or brought justice and peace to the world, all of which a Messiah should have done), and why the early Christian movement took the shape that it did. The only explanation that will fit the evidence is the one the early Christians insisted upon – He really had been raised from the dead. His body was not just reanimated. It was transformed, so that it was no longer subject to sickness and death.
“Let’s be clear: the stories are not about someone coming back into the present mode of life. They are about someone going on into a new sort of existence, still emphatically bodily, if anything, more so. When St Paul speaks of a “spiritual” resurrection body, he doesn’t mean “non-material”, like a ghost. “Spiritual” is the sort of Greek word that tells you,not what something is made of, but what is animating it. The risen Jesus had a physical body animated by God’s life-giving Spirit. Yes, says St Paul, that same Spirit is at work in us, and will have the same effect – and in the whole world…”
“Easter has been sidelined because this message doesn’t fit our prevailing world view. For at least 200 years the West has lived on the dream that we can bring justice and beauty to the world all by ourselves.
The split between God and the “real” world has produced a public life that lurches between anarchy and tyranny, and an aesthetic that swings dramatically between sentimentalism and brutalism. But we still want to do things our own way, even though we laugh at politicians who claim to be saving the world, and artists who claim “inspiration” when they put cows in formaldehyde.
The world wants to hush up the real meaning of Easter. Death is the final weapon of the tyrant or, for that matter, the anarchist, and resurrection indicates that this weapon doesn’t have the last word.”

Kerygmatic Vocation

Posted on by

“Our Christian faith — and correlatively, our account of apologetics — is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in recognition of truth. (We also end up committed to ‘Constantinain’ strategies that, under the banner of natural law, seek to build a ‘Christian America.’
“To put this in more familiar terms, classical apologetics operates with a very modern notion of reason; ‘presuppositional’ apologetics, on the other hand, is postmodern (and Augustinian!) insofar as it recognizes the role of presuppositions in both what counts as truth and what is recognized as true. For this reason, postmodernism can be a catalyst for the church to reclaim its faith not as a system of truth dictated by a neutral reason but rather as a story that requires ‘eyes to see and ears to hear.’ The primary responsibility of the church as witness, then, is not demonstration but rather proclamation — the kerygmatic vocation of proclaiming the Word made flesh rather than the thin realities of theism that a supposedly neutral reason yields.”

James K.A. Smith, PhD., Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?; p. 28.
I wonder whether a lot of this modern/postmodern stuff is a replying anew the differences between Platonic and Aristotelian thought? Between Augustinian and Thomistic thought?
The latter is being played out in this new world of Post-Christendom, particularly within the context of the American Culture-War dynamic. What do we make of this?
Frankly, as I continue to move into the idea of re-formation out of the “Systems” (City of the World) and into some sort of “other than” (City of God) — perhaps a move out into the desert, metaphorically speaking — the rethinking of how we perceive and live out this Christian Life in our changing national context (really this ground shift of perceptional foundations within the culture), the more I am drawn to pre-Constantinian examples of Christianity. A “kerygmatic vocation.”

Stuff

Posted on by

“… I want to suggest that, quite unlike the anti-institutional mentality of postmodern “spirituality,” it is actually a robust, vibrant, liturgical church that speaks meaning in and to a postmodern world.”
James K.A. Smith, PhD., Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?, Series Preface, p.9

Shadowland

Posted on by

We look, we see, we observe images flashing, ever flashing before us. Time continues, images pass, this is our context. “Reality,” we say, for this is all we see. “Truth,” we say, for this is all we know. Shadows, all.
Up is down, right is left, wrong is correct. Orwell has his day. When all we know is shadow, unrecognized perhaps, all that we understand develops as distortion. When we point and say, “freedom-questioners,” it is the distorted shadow we choose to see passing along the wall – torturers, real. We don’t know the truth. Worse yet, we willfully turn away from the real because we like the shadows so. We are in darkness, and the light is not within us. If we say, “Do unto others whatever is necessary to make us feel safe,” who are we, really?
How can those who claim Christ justify the use of torture? When what we believe we are as a people turns to be only a shadowy distortion of the Christian Life, then what? It isn’t even just a pale image of the real dancing before us, but a further distortion of the shadow of the real as we are chained to the deleterious influence of a culture that is moving ever more steadily away from the principles of Christ, which is not and has never been Christian in reality. Do we turn to freedom or do we stay chained? Too often, we willfully choose to imbibe the misshapen dark shadows and call them… good, call them real, call them of God.
If we are to ever turn to leave the cave that is the distorted life, we must realize the need to leave behind much of what we have been enculturated to accept as a given and what we have become, inwardly. We hear cries, “America is a Christian nation…” I don’t know what to do with that statement when related to a justification of torture, unless I face that fact that too many of us want deception, want dark shadows because for some warped reason they feel “right” and “safe.”
We must be re-formed out of the corruption of our individual and common souls. Our understanding of our imagined faith in this time and within this cultural context has been left wanting, and it has resulted in a deficient faith. We see the result in a people who believe themselves to be good, god-fearing, and patriotic claiming that treatment of other people, enemy terrorists they may be, in ways that if turned upon these god-fearing people would be deplored by them as horrific and unjust, but this distorted faith has brought them to a point of willfully condoning torture. The question is not, “What have we become,” but asking whether there will be a turning from the distortion by realizing that this is what we have made of ourselves. God help us.
Update, from The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan:
The Abuse of Religion:
I’m going to read the full Senate report this weekend but I am struck by one footnote a reader directed me to. It’s a memo related to the torture of Qahtani in Gitmo, written January 17, 2003, and documented that he had been “forced to pray to an idol shrine.” One recalls similar abuse of religious freedom at Abu Ghraib, which the Senate report unequivocally blames on official policy at the highest levels:

One Muslim inmate was allegedly forced to eat pork, had liquor forced down his throat and told to thank Jesus that he was alive. He recounted in broken English:
”They stripped me naked, they asked me, ‘Do you pray to Allah?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ They said ‘F – – – you’ and ‘F – – – him.’ ” Later, this inmate recounts: ”Someone else asked me, ‘Do you believe in anything?’ I said to him, ‘I believe in Allah.’ So he said, ‘But I believe in torture and I will torture you.’ ”

This from an administration more deeply committed to public Christianity than any other in recent times; and from a military one of whose commanders had publicly pronounced:
“We’re a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian … and the enemy is a guy named Satan.”

The future looks like the past…

Posted on by

“The future is around all of us, and it looks very much like the past.” – Mother Superior Sheeana, at the founding of the Orthodox School on Synchrony
[From: Sandworms of Dune, by Brian Herbert & Kevin Johnson; pg. 539.]
In the context of the book, the above is a positive statement. Again, in my mind, it brings up aspects of our present culture that work contrary to our future well-being. One of those aspects is a generation’s disposition to believe that the past is bad or a least a negative. I keep coming back to this 2,009 year-old thing we call Christianity. The past is full of horrific atrocities and glorious accomplishments, but all that humanity has been through over these past millennia within the Christian experience presents to us today, from that which has survived and still speaks, a wisdom that we need to pay attention to.
In my context, with our gasping attempts to save this Church we flail around with the same attitudinal mistakes that led us to this place. We think that in our modern and sophisticated age we can create with our own new thoughts in our own way the solutions for a new dawn, a new order, a Utopian vision of our own making. We fail to realize that the Tradition provides us with what we need as a solid foundation upon which to build, because within the lived experiences of people over thousands of years is wisdom. That which speaks to the deepest part of us remains, survives, and calls out deep to deep despite our tendency to look upon past understanding and experience as pedestrian, antiquated, primitive, unenlightened, and not up to the challenges of 21st. century existence. What has survived for 2,000 years will survive another 2,000 years. Technology changes (and I’m glad of that), but the human “heart” remains the same.
Our challenge is to see the wisdom in and understand the ancient-future process of steady re-formation within ourselves as we give ourselves to this faith, die to ourselves and live to the life God sustains. How do we do it in this time, within this culture, recognizing that our lives are of an ancient-future dynamic – we receive from ages of ages and pass onto world without end.

Discimination, Civil Rights, Religious Freedom…

Posted on by

Politically speaking, I have always been drawn to Libertarianism. There are shortcomings, of course, like in any “System of this World,” including my belief that the common good needs to be given a far greater emphasis within Libertarian thought than many Libertarians I know tend to give it. Perhaps, however, if greater attention is given to the common good in opposition to individualism then it might cease to be truly “Libertarian.”
Anyway, I’m linking to A Stitch in Haste post entited, “On Religious Bigots’ New-Found (Faux) Libertarianism,” a blog-post of a self-described Libertarian about the Religious Rights’ campaign to oppose any type of legal consideration for the civil rights of gays because they claim that equal protection or anti-discrimination protection of homosexuals as a minority class would conflict with their right of free exercise of religion (believing that homosexuality is sin and should be opposed at all cost for the sake of the moral health of homosexuals and society in general).
A portion of their argument revolves around the perceived religious right that Christians who oppose homosexuality can deny their economic services or products to homosexuals because providing such things to homosexuals conflicts with their religious belief. For example, a Christian doctor that believes homosexuality is a sin should be able to refuse to artificially inseminate a lesbian couple or a Christian owned camp-ground should be able to say, “No,” to a gay couple that wants to use the pavilion to get married.
To be honest, I think they should have that right, regardless of whether I agree or disagree with the outcome, despite that fact that I might be discriminated against. And the Libertarian blogger seems to agree – to a degree, I suspect.
Yet, and here is the kicker, as the blogger suggests, the Religious Right is not willing to be consistent with their arguments or positions (shocker, I know!). The reality is, and most people get this, they only want freedom for themselves and their positions. They only want to discriminate against – homosexuals! When the same logic is used against other minority groups, such as blacks or Jews or the handicapped, they would absolutely deny a religious right to discriminate, but for homosexuals they hypocritically demand such a right. Their arguments are not based on logically consistent and rational precepts, but only on their right to discriminate against homosexuals. The author writes:

If the religious bigots really want to invoke libertarian arguments to legitimize their bigotry, then they better be prepared to be judged by real libertarians about the entire spectrum of libertarian issues — including separation of church and state.

As I just wrote, I think there is the possibility for provision for people to not provide services to others for whatever reason. I know that is not politically correct, and perhaps for reasons of the common good it is wrong of me. Yet…
The thing is, if groups of people want to make the argument that they have a right to discriminate against others (for religious or any other reason), then they cannot turn around and scream bloody-murder when they find someone or other groups that discriminates against them – which is exactly what the Religious Right is doing.
If they want to discriminate, then they must be willing to suffer the consequences (which they aren’t) and be willing to be discriminated against (which they aren’t). You can’t have it both ways – you can’t demand the right to discriminate and expect no one to discriminate against you! If I declare my believe that there is an aspect of civil liberty is to either give or deny to others my services or products, then I have to be willing to acknowledge that others have the exact same right to deny me their services or products. The question is whether I’m willing to face such discrimination. Of course, I’ve encountered too many “liberals” who declare no such right to discriminate even as they so obviously (and blindly) discriminate against those with whom they disagree.
Hypocrisy abounds in America, and regretfully within Christianity (nothing new, anywhere, I know). It is one reason why so many people look upon the Church with such disdain or indifference. We are our own worst enemies.

Time

Posted on by

A foundational principle of The Christian Life is to be ever mindful that we are from ages to ages, world without end.
This human experience, this Christian Life, is a 2,000 year experience. Stop and think about that for just a moment. Two thousand years! Then, being grafted into the Jewish experience, another 2,000+ years can be added to ours. We trace ourselves back in time 4,000+ years.
Too many Christians act out of extreme insecurity, as if this present time and this present culture can be a detriment to the continuation of the Kingdom of God. I think our collective acting out is due to a lack of understanding that we have survived every naysayer, every controversy, every persecution, and every prediction of growing meaninglessness and death. The other side of the insecurity coin is when we become overly confident by thinking that is it because of our human endeavor that the Church has continued on, rather than God’s divine doing. My call is to live into the transformation that beings me into thousands of years of Life.
Our perspective should not be so short, so limited, so culturally myopic. We think of time, really, practically speaking, to be a lifetime – perhaps a couple generations of living relatives, but that is about it.
That which has survived for 4,000 years… for 2,000 years through persecutions (given out and received), though a myriad of cultures, through controversies, through wars and rumors of wars, through the whims of fallible humans thinking that are the very conduits of God – that which is maintained through ages of ages I think is pretty darn reliable.
This is a critique of our oh-so-modern-and-smart deconstruction of and repudiation of and attempted transformation of the Tradition. Do we really think that 100 years of attempted overturning of 1,900 years of lived experience makes us something special? Really?
We receive, we maintain, and we pass along this Christian Life. We attempt to make it better and we attempt reform by our bound-up and limited vision… but despite our attempts that which will remain and be given over to the next generations, for another 2,000 years more, will only be that which touches deeply the human heart as it longs for reconciliation with the Creator.
Now, I’m not suggesting that change is bad or is not needed. Change is a given! We are in need of reforming, continually. Too often, however, what we envision to be in need of reform is not. We are foolish to think that we are so smart now, in these limited days, that we can ignore the lessons of the past – ages of ages. Listen, listen carefully, to the Tradition. That which has survived through the millennia is slight, but it is deep speaking to deep and of the essence of The Christian Life. Our perspective of time is everlasting, but we limit ourselves so when we do not recognize it.