The Legend of the Sycamore Nut

Reblogged from Parson Carson:

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On a lighter note, I tend to pride myself on having a reasonable amount of common sense. I also pride myself on my knowledge of plant life. Therefore I only have jetlag to blame for the following incident.

On our first night in Bethlehem, we were served some nuts (pictured above) as an appetizer. We all commented on how tasty they were, and even suggested that they were like peanuts, only better.

Read more… 119 more words

I, too, fell for the ruse of the sycamore nut. My friend Parson Carson's reflections are funny and, since I was tricked too, a little sad.

Thought for the Day

A new hypothesis: in any organization the people who talk will likely – and literally – have a say. This is irregardless of whether or not what they have to say is of merit, value, or aid. The talking itself will, more likely than not, lead to ascendancy in an organization.

South Park on the VP Debate

I couldn’t help but think of this joke for some reason…

“I Hear That There Are Divisions Among You”: Discerning the Broken Body at General Conference 2012

Courtesy UMNS

So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup. For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves. (1 Corinthians 11:27-29)

The matter of unworthiness has a sticky history in Protestantism.  Most astute readers of Scripture now agree that Paul’s concern for “eating unto damnation” was not an issue of individual sin, but rather of communal brokenness that made a mockery of the Lord’s Supper.  At issue in Corinth was not a bunch of sinners eating something that they had no business eating (for we are always sinners asking for scraps and sips of grace), but that the community was unmaking the Body of Christ by scandalous practices: ignoring the hungry, getting drunk before the holy meal, etc.  I have been reflecting on these passages as I wonder about one particular act at General Conference: the use of Communion as an act of protest.

A couple of quick notes: I am not a liturgical scholar, just a pastor who is interested in improving the celebration (both qualitative and quantitative) of the Eucharist my church. My chief issue is with the context of the Communion and not the particular motivations of those who went to the table that day (read: I would find it just as problematic if another caucus, say Good News or either side of the Israel/Palestine debate had taken similar action).  Lastly, in the interest of fairness, I have invited Rev. Becca Clark, the elder who presided at this action, to share her perspective and respond if she so desires.  I am a big believer – and General Conference illustrated this too well – that a major drawback of social media is the ability to snipe one another at a distance.  I have given Becca a head’s up so that this might be a more civil dialogue, and she kindly granted me permission to share some of her thoughts as part of this initial post.  A video of the events in question can be found here. (The video comes from the YouTube channel of the IRD, but rest assured that this is not an endorsement.)

Eucharist As An Act of Protest

From her own blog, here is Rev. Clark’s recollection.  After the Conference rejected several petitions, including an “agree to disagree” statement led by Adam Hamilton and Mike Slaughter and enduring some inflammatory rhetoric

… we did the only thing we could do.

We set the communion table in the center of the room. We welcomed the visitors and supporters from outside the voting bar and delegates from the floor. We blessed bread and cup. I was the elder closest to the bread, and I lifted it in the air, breaking it as we are broken. I looked across the table and through my tears I saw my new friend and fellow laborer for justice, Gregory Gross, holding the cup.

We sent servers with (gluten free) wafers and cups of juice to serve those around the room. Some bystanders received communion with from those with whom they disagree, and some refused. I served those around me, offering them the Body of Christ as we all wept.

We stayed at the table when the session attempted to reconvene. Unable to get the delegates back to their seats and the visitors off the floor– indeed unable to even to get people to stop singing, the Bishop had no choice but to call for an early lunch.

In our correspondence, Rev. Clark indicated that the group had discussed the possibility of this being viewed as an unseemly act:

We discussed the use of the sacrament and the dangers of being perceived as politicizing a sacred gift. We also talked about maybe an affirmation of baptism instead. But what we decided was that the moment, no matter how the vote went, would be one of brokenness and deep pain for roughly half the room no matter what. And yet, in this brokenness and division, we are still one, and we still believe that God is able to bring healing, indeed salvation, out of the deepest pain and division.

A fundamental question seems to be, was this an act of unity or disunity?  Was this a kind of prophetic sign-act, calling the assembly to a unity that was not yet a reality, or did it drive that wedge deeper? According to Rev. Clark, their thinking was that the Eucharist

was one standout example of what it means, theologically and spiritually, to live in the broken but believe in the whole and hope for the future we cannot see. Was there ever greater brokenness than the division, distrust, and ungodliness that led to Christ’s sacrifice? Is there any better example of how the broken becomes whole than the bread shared, the cup poured out to make us one?

To be sure, the Eucharist is a prophetic act, a sacrament that looks forward to God’s full reign of peace, justice, and love.  We learn much about how to live the truly human life, the grace-enabled life of holiness, at God’s Table.  Thus, the Eucharistic celebration is always an act of protest against brokenness, evil, and injustice in whatever forms.

But what about “Make us one?”

Paul seems clear that the brokenness of the community makes a mockery of the Lord’s Table.  It is one thing for a Chinese house-church to break bread and share the cup in the midst of their persecution, as a remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice and anticipation of the New Creation against all the facts of their present situation.  That is a truly sacramental, Christ-centered protest.  Likewise, Oscar Romero lifting up the chalice in the midst of his enemies, knowing the danger he faced to bring God’s justice to his beloved El Salvador, was an act of protest.  He died protesting, a martyr at the Table.

It is an altogether different kind of act if it is undertaken in such a way as to highlight a division in Christ’s Body, to drive the wedge deeper, to coerce and manipulate.  This is precisely where this action became problematic.  Communion is always to be an act of and with the whole assembly.  In our recently approved study of the sacrament, This Holy Mystery, we find this guiding principle:

The whole assembly actively celebrates Holy Communion. All who are baptized into the body of Christ Jesus become servants and ministers within that body, which is the church…The one Body, drawn together by the one Spirit, is fully realized when all its many parts eat together in love and offer their lives in service at the Table of the Lord. (19)

Communion is the sacred meal that is at the heart of the life of the church.  Because it is Christ’s Table, it unites us as few other practices can.  As we share a loaf and cup, we are reminded that though we are many, we are indeed one through Christ Jesus.  I think, for instance, that it would have been entirely appropriate for the presiding Bishop to call for bread and cup and offer the Eucharist as a means to call us back to our center.  Something like this would have accomplished what I believe this group intended.  What actually occurred, though, was the interruption of perhaps the most important gathering of the world-wide church so that a particular caucus could make a statement in the form of a sacrament.  It seems to me that, however good the intention, the use of Communion at the height of a very heated debate made a Christ-centered act something much less.  The whole assembly may have been welcome, but those at the table had taken it by force, making Christ’s Table effectively their table.  In this, the witness of the Eucharistic table was sullied.  Again, from This Holy Mystery:

Communing with others in our congregations is a sign of community and mutual love between Christians throughout the church universal. The church must offer to the world a model of genuine community grounded in God’s deep love for every person. (35)

Celebrated well, the Eucharist accomplishes this.  At the Table, we see the world as it should be: all are welcome, all are invited to acknowledge the good news of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, and to feast of his holy body and thus be made into his likeness.  At General Conference on May 3, what should have been a liminal space, a “thin place” in the language of Celtic Christianity, became little more than another booth for another cause in the exhibition hall.  Genuine community, already stretched, became less possible by this act.  Mutual love was not encouraged.

The Missing Peace

I asked Rev. Clark for details of the liturgy that was used as they occupied the center table:

I was a delegate, so what I knew was get to the communion table. Someone will bring bread and juice. The ordained elder closest to the bread– which ended up being me– was to take the bread, silently pray words of blessing and institution, and break it. The rest just happened. By the time I was holding the bread, people were singing “let us break bread together.” the man who lifted the cup is a deacon and we had served on committee together, so it was a blessing to see him across the table. I prayed as best I could what I remembered of the communion liturgy, which I have memorized, but that day felt like– pour out your Spirit on us. We’re broken too and we want to be one body, like the bread makes us one. One with you and Christ. One with each other some day. Broken as we are, let us be your body for the world.

Many people served out of napkins of wafers and cups of juice. When I offered bread to those near me, I said, “the Body of Christ, broken as we are broken.”

Perhaps the greatest problem was all of this is that it was not a reconciled community that celebrated.  Because this was an act of a few and not the whole, there was no opportunity for the whole assembly to go to the table forgiven and reconciled.  In the UM Book of Worship, the following suggestions are given under “An Order of Sunday Worship”:

The people may offer one another signs of reconciliation and love, particularly when Holy Communion is celebrated.  The Peace is an act of reconciliation and blessing, based on New Testament Christian practice…it is not simply our peace but the peace of Christ that we offer. (p. 26)

Again, this particular debate would have been a perfect occasion to ask the assembly to pass the peace.  But because this was forced on the assembly by a few, no reconciliation was possible.  In fact, the ability to join hands, listen to each other, or even “agree to disagree” was damaged, not helped, by this act.

Rev. Clark acknowledges that not all will approve:

I recognize it was not an action everyone can stand behind. However, my intent was to be pastoral in a moment of brokenness and call us to the reminder of the “reason for the hope that we have” that God can and will make us whole.

The fact that I cannot stand behind this matters little, to be honest.  Our leaders seem much more concerned with institutional survival than sacramental faithfulness.  And yet, I felt this warranted comment.  In all the Twitter chat and Facebook rants, the voluminous articles and conversations about General Conference, I found it astounding that no one raised this particular question.  For a church that claims John Wesley as its founding father, an Anglican priest who loved the Lord’s Table and went to great pains to encourage his people to celebrate it regularly and properly, this is a sad commentary indeed.  In a world of partisan politics, bitter divides, and thoughtless polemic, the Eucharist should be one place where God reaches through all of the muck and mire to speak a word of grace and peace.  The Lord’s Table is where, like Christ, we are taken, blessed, broken, and given.  To make the Eucharist our act instead of God’s, a mere tool in a game of political manipulation rather than a sacrament of God’s grace, is a great disservice to Christ and his church.  The words of Brian Wren remind us what can and should happen in this holy mystery:

As Christ breaks bread and bids us share,

each proud division ends.

The love that made us makes us one,

and strangers now are friends.

Sadly, this particular time at the Table exacerbated each and every “proud division.”  Strangers became even more estranged.  The body was not discerned.

Kýrie, eléison.

The Flight From Conversation At/About General Conference 2012

 

Just a few, potentially unconnected thoughts:

“And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher, patient, correcting opponents with gentleness…” (2 Timothy 2:24-25a)

Why is there so much interest in the Twitter-verse?  Social media is great in many ways, but producing quality, in-depth conversation is not its chief good.  Why is there so much concern for what folks are Tweeting about the proceedings?  Adam Hamilton, apparently unhurt by but still concerned about the ire being thrown around during his presentation recently, met with young delegates to address their concerns. He spoke pointedly about the dangers of social media, and how easy it is to make someone look good or foolish based on what we preachers would call prooftexting.  He lamented how snark has replaced honest conversation.

Sherry Turkle of MIT recently recflected,

Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.

We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.

At and around GC there seems to be little reflecting, lots of reaction; little conversation, much activism.  Attempts at “Holy Conversations,” some quarters report, failed.  I doubt a conversation will ever be holy so long as folks cannot bear to hear a contrary opinion without running to feelings police.  This may sound unnecessarily harsh, but I don’t intend it to be.  It is more a concern for the power play that is the “hurt feelings” routine.  I think I even read about a bishop saying they were hurt because someone else was hurt.  Where does it end?  I think, more often than we would care to admit, the claim to hurt feelings in church gatherings large and small is a power play that should not always be taken at face value.

And why are the young delegates and young clergy being coddled so much?  For the record, I’m allowed to say this, as one of the few under-30 pastors in the church these days.  Why are we so interesting?  I want to know what old, experienced pastors think.  I want to know what leaders think, people who have been around a while.  I suppose I am not a good enough American, because at the end of the day I don’t think everyone’s voice has remotely the same merit.  In some churches everyone defers to the old guys with the long beards and funky hats.  We seem to be running the opposite direction: the people with the youngest, hippest audience, or those with the largest twitter following, are determining how we go about this work of “holy conferencing.” 

I’m not sure there will be much faith left to pass on if the future of the church is dependent upon what a million 19-year-olds can fit into 120 characters at a time.  If we were praying as ardently as we were Tweeting, we’d look more like a church recognizable to Jesus, the apostles, and John Wesley.

 

All Religion is in Trouble…Even Atheism

It is commonplace in the rubble of the mainline denominations these days to drone on and on about the sorry state of the church in the West.  We go to workshops, blog, read books, and wallow in anxious conversation all with the same subtitle: “How do we not die?”  Not exactly a vivifying conversation.  We think the non-religious forces are winning; that secularism is successful and popular “New” Atheism is ascendant.  But is atheism doing so well?

If you actually listen to the things that atheists are saying, there is little here that is a challenge to faith of any brand, much less that of Christians.  Indeed, atheist literature and public discourse tends to be just as vain as popular Christian discourse.  So laments Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart:

…it seems obvious to me that the peculiar vapidity of New Atheist literature is simply a reflection of the more general vapidity of all public religious discourse these days, believing and unbelieving alike. In part, of course, this is because the modern media encourage only fragmentary, sloganeering, and emotive debates, but it is also because centuries of the incremental secularization of society have left us with a shared grammar that is perhaps no longer adequate to the kinds of claims that either reflective faith or reflective faithlessness makes.

Yes, reading Hart for long periods of time will hurt your brain.  He is as acerbic as he is brilliant, which is a feat.  Nonetheless, I think his premise is hard to argue against.  Case in point: an interview I read over on MMA Weekly with Seth Petruzelli, an MMA fighter (most famous for knocking Kimbo Slice off of any serious fan’s radar) who happens to be an outspoken atheist.  He explains how his first conflict with religious members of the MMA community came on the set of the reality show The Ultimate Fighter:

The first time it actually came up was in season 2 of The Ultimate Fighter in the house. Marcus Davis, he’s a pretty hardcore Christian and a lot of the guys in the house were the same way, especially with Matt Hughes being one of the coaches. There’s a scene actually in The Ultimate Fighter house where me and Matt kind of get into an argument for about 15 minutes or so about the bible, and obviously I think the bible [sic] is a bunch of BS, and that obviously struck a nerve with him.

To be an atheist is to – “obviously” – believe that the Bible is “BS”?  That is a stronger claim than many Christians would make about the holy books of other communities.  I have certainly never taught my people that the Koran or the Vedas are “BS,” even though I would not say that these words are inspired of the Triune God.  And yes, if you dismiss the word of God as BS, them’s probably going to be fighting words (unless you’ve been reading a lot of John Howard Yoder).  Petruzelli further describes the conflict with an outspoken Christian fighter:

We kind of had an argument back and forth, with me coming out on top obviously cause you can’t argue with science. Science trumps faith in all aspects of everything. But they had group bible sessions in the house and I just kind of had a little dialogue obviously with Marcus Davis too about it, all kinds of stuff in the bible [sic].

Is this the kind of reflection that the supposedly super-rational New Atheism is producing?  At what point will the hackneyed ‘science vs. faith’ thesis be done with?  Granted, there are Christians that still have not gotten the memo that science is not something to fear.  But we’re working on it.  There are plenty of Christians working in scientific fields who are faithful people.  Christians need not shun the search for truth in whatever form.  Thoughtful atheists should see the dialogue not as science vs. faith but atheism vs. various kinds of theism, Christianity among them.  The scientific method, which, if my high school biology class was right, deals with observable, verifiable, and repeatable phenomena, can neither confirm nor deny the presence of a deity.  Even psuedo-scientific work that purports to “prove” a divine intelligence can only get us to a vaguely theistic being, not the Triune God revealed in the Bible.  Neither faith nor non-faith should claim to be provable by science.  Doing so, whether one is a Christian or an atheist, belies a fundamental perversion of what faith actually is.  To whit:

Faith to me is intellectual bankruptcy…I have faith in my fighting ability because there’s facts to back it up and that I can fight. Blind faith? Like I said, it’s intellectual bankruptcy, it’s a cop out. Tim Minchin has a great quote about this. ‘Science adjusts its views on what is observed, and faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.’

Intellectual bankruptcy?  Ouch.  That aside, Petruzelli confuses confidence with faith.  “I have faith in my fighting ability because [there are] facts to back it up.”  If there are facts to back “it” up, then what you have is not faith.  As Hebrews 11:1 makes clear,  “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  There may be evidence of faith, indeed, fruits of the Spirit, or the inner witness so important to Wesley and other spiritual writers, but this is not the kind of evidence that will be observable under a microscope.  It’s also just barely worth pointing out that there is no monolithic “science,” and that the work of Thomas Kuhn and others shows how often scientists disagree on, willfully distort, and ignore supposed facts.  Scientific revolutions often only occur after a long, hard fight about what indeed the science is saying.

It seems somewhat unfair to criticize Petruzelli, who, as far as I know, has no theological training.  I don’t mean to be unnecessarily harsh, and I like to think that I’m equally critical of poor arguments made by Christians.  He is, however, making some striking claims in a very public space, and I think that makes confrontation both fair and necessary.  The Church must have answers to such arguments, for in the years to come they will only get louder.

If only a serious dialogue with atheists was possible.  When I read folks like Nietzche, I am challenged to think about my faith, to really question its basics.  This is a service to the faithful, for our critics really are our friends.  To return to a fighting metaphor: if Nietzche’s arguments are useful sparring partners, then, by comparison, the shallow vitriol of the New Atheists can only be described as the vain thrashing of an infant fighting off a clean diaper.

We’ll let a more skilled combatant fight the closing round.  Hart expresses disdain for such a-thinking (see what i did there?) with adroitness, arguing that today’s atheists

 …lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefathers in faithlessness. What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel. So long as one can choose one’s conquests in advance, taking always the paths of least resistance, one can always imagine oneself a Napoleon or a Casanova (and even better: the one without a Waterloo, the other without the clap)…A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.

May God grant us the blessing of able conversation partners, and save us from shallow faith, whether it is our own, or that of others.

P.S.  For the record, I think Damon Martin’s piece drastically overstates the place of religion in the fight game.  Atheists may be offended that there are so many nods to Jesus in the cage, but beyond post-fight shout-outs and mildly offensive clothing, I don’t think there is much substantive Christianity there.  More likely is that, in an increasingly secularized world, many folks in the media are frankly caught off guard when someone like Benson Henderson (or Tim Tebow) makes public statements of faith.  Rather like the pagans of bygone (?) eras, cultural observers and elites are surprised to find a small cadre of men and women who will not sacrifice to the official cultus and, rather offensively, talk about God beyond the privacy of their own closet.

Flotillas and Foreign Policy

In seminary, a buddy of mine who was interested, like me, in both foregn policy and theology introduced me to a great resource called STRATFOR.  It is essentially a private inteligence company used by governments, corporations, and private individuals.  You can pay for their full line of resources, or sign up for free analysis that comes on a weekly basis.

Today’s article had some very interesting analysis of the situation with Israel and Gaza:

This maneuver was far more effective than suicide bombings or the Intifada in challenging Israel’s public perception and therefore its geopolitical position (though if the Palestinians return to some of their more distasteful tactics like suicide bombing, the Turkish strategy of portraying Israel as the instigator of violence will be undermined).

Essentially, they argue that the flotilla is less a humanitarian relief effort, as stated, and more a political ploy designed to weaken the position of Israel.  it makes perfect sense, really; Israel has been backed into a corner – either don’t show force have their position weakened in the region, or respond as they are expected to and weaken their position on the international scene.

Judging by how often video of an Israeli “commando” raid is currently playing on the news, its obvious this tactic is working against Israel.

The STRATFOR piece goes on to suggest that most people in the international community – not having a taste for complexity – won’t see this situation for what it is (a geopolitical chess match).

How true.  As Tom Friedman once wrote, “When it comes to discussing the Middle East, people lose their minds.”  For most of us, our picture of Middle East relations fits into a very simple narrative such as Israeli aggression, or Palestinian terrorism.  We like one side to be wholly right and one side to be wholly wrong.

In that part of the world, it’s almost never the case.  That remains true in this instance, also.

[This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR]

Why stay Christian?

The darkness within my church is real, and it has too often gone unaddressed. The light within my church is also real, and has too often gone unappreciated. A small minority has sinned, gravely, against too many. Another minority has assisted or saved the lives of millions.

The preceding reflection is part of a larger essay by Elizabeth Scalia on why she remains Catholic in spite of the recent controversies in her church.  I must confess, I have sympathy for her and all other faithful Catholics.  Their church has been under a media assault for some time now, and it seems that the detractors are now focusing their energies on Pope Benedict.

Why sympathy? Because Catholic problems are Christian problems.  Everything else aside, I confess Christ alongside my Catholic brethren.  A tear in the Body affects us all.  The danger is to see the recent controversies as exclusively Catholic.  Protestants too have our share of pastors who abuse laity in various ways, and higher-ups who attempt to cover it up.  Likewise, there is much light in spite of – and alongside – the darkness.
The light shines in the darkness, we might say, but the darkness captures all the headlines.

A sermon for Tuesday of Holy Week: 1 Cor. 1:18-31, “The Foolishness of the Cross”

18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ¹⁹For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’ ²⁰Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. ²²For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, ²³but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.26 Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. ²⁷But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; ²⁸God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, ²⁹so that no one might boast in the presence of God. ³⁰He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, ³¹in order that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’

Holy week goes on.  We remember the last days of our Lord, and anticipate both his death on the cross and his glorious resurrection.  If we stop and think about it, it is a strange thing to come together and celebrate the suffering and death of God.  One of our Bishops, Will Willimon out of Alabama, has written, “One of the dangers of being in church as often as I am is that it all starts to make sense.”   In other words, we who go to church, who pray, who search the Scriptures and partake of the Lord’s Supper, are in danger.  The danger is assuming that all the puzzle pieces fit, that all this gospel stuff really and truly makes perfect sense.  If we lose a sense of mystery, a sense of strangeness about this faith that has laid claim on our lives, we should also worry that we may have lost the true message and ministry of God in Christ Jesus.
Mystery is at the heart of our faith.  Has anyone read The Shack?  We recently did it as a group study at my church.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, The Shack is a book that deals heavily with the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Now it is fiction, but it deals seriously with the relationship among the three persons, how they relate to one another.  Many of us who read this together discovered that thinking about the Holy Trinity really made our brains hurt!  How can one be also three? How can  we believe in the three “persons” of the to which Scripture witnesses are still together one, and only one, God Almighty.  In our group we went around and around this question, and at some point we simply agreed to get comfortable with not understanding.  The Trinity is not a doctrine that we hold because it is logical, or because it is easily explained, but simply because this is how God has been revealed to us.  This means we cannot downplay the mystery or smooth the rough edges of the Trinitarian relationship without being untrue to God at a very basic level.
It is equally mysterious and odd that God would choose to initiate the salvation of the world on a cross.  Paul tells his church at Corinth that Jesus’ crucifixion  was  a stumbling block to Jews, and foolishness to the Gentiles.  While Christians know the cross as “the power of God,” the world scoffs and laughs.
In reading this passage, though, I found myself wondering: do we Christians treat the cross as foolishness? Whether we mean to or not, whether we are conscious of it, do we fail to proclaim the cross of Jesus?  I think it happens more than we want to admit.  I think that we are tempted to do this in two ways: we avoid it when possible, and when we are at last confronted with the cross, we sometimes dilute its power and message.
First: we avoid the cross.  On one level, this is natural and understandable.  I doubt that Jesus would have had to teach his disciples to “Take up your cross and follow me” unless they did not have their own hesitation.  The cross means suffering, humiliation, pain, and death.  It is not natural for us to run to it; only the Spirit of the living God to help us to embrace that cross in faith, hope, and love.
But on another level I think we tend to do it intentionally.  Let me put it this way: if you wake up one morning and decide you want to be a successful preacher, or write Christian books that will sell a million dollars and make lots of money, you only need to follow one piece of advice.  Do you want to know what it is? It’s very simple, now.  Deceptively simple.  Here goes: avoid talking about the cross at all costs.  As one scholar put it, “The cross was a lousy marketing tool in first-century Palestine, and it is for us today.”  The kind of Christianity that people want to hear, the kind that sells books and packs stadiums, has very little to do with the cross.  Oh, they will talk about Jesus.  They will talk a lot about Jesus.  But it is never the Jesus we meet during Holy Week, the Jesus with stripes on his back and a crown of thorns on his head.
The Jesus that sells is the Jesus that preaches success and blessing, health and wealth, the Jesus that gives us five simple steps to better living, the Jesus who promises to give us nice things if we work hard, smile a lot, and think positive.  That’s the Jesus we see so often on TV and in popular books, a Jesus with a three-piece suit and a smile, but never a cross.  As American Christians, we eat this up.  It has hardly a pinch of gospel to it, and not one splinter of the cross, but by golly, it sells.  And so, we avoid the cross when we can.
The other danger is that, when we do encounter the cross, it is a cross that does not look at all like the cross of Jesus.  For instance, when did Christians begin to take the cross so lightly that it became a fashion accessory?  When does it mean when someone like Madonna can wear a diamond-encrusted cross and no one thinks a thing of it?  We would think it very strange if someone put emeralds on a miniature noose and hung it around their neck.  Likewise, we would probably do a double-take if we noticed somebody with a gold lapel pin in the shape of an electric chair.  And yet we never think twice about seeing the Roman cross, a tool of empire, the form of punishment reserved for the worst criminals and traitors, as simple decoration.
Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.  I have a love-hate relationship with the local Hobby Lobby where I live now.  Anybody every been to a Hobby Lobby?  OK, well for those who haven’t, Hobby Lobby is a craft store on Christian steroids.  It is like a giant Michael’s or A.C. Moore; people flock there to buy everything from fabric to scrap booking materials.  They also have a lot of home decorations, everything from furniture to paintings and every kind of knick-knack you can imagine.
Now, they have a lot of Christianity-themed items.  I should say that I have a lot of respect for the owners of Hobby Lobby; it is a very openly Christian business and they are closed on Sunday.  And the store is a cool place to shop; I’ve bought some neat prints and other things for my home there.  All that is great.  But there’s just one thing I can’t get over: their selection of crosses.
Hobby Lobby has a huge selection of decorative crosses.  I don’t even know how to describe all the various kinds of crosses they have.  There are crosses with the Lord’s Prayer on them; crosses with favorite Bible verses; crosses with patriotic quotes; just about anything you can imagine.  Some of them are downright strange.  You can‘t make this up, folks: I was there a couple of weeks ago, and they had an antique-looking, Western-themed cross with a longhorn’s skull on it.  What does that even mean?
But those aren’t the ones that bother me.  The crosses that bother me are the cute ones.  Do you know what I’m talking about?  Crosses with pastels and flowers; ‘Precious Moments’ crosses; crosses that don’t look anything like they have anything to do with the suffering and death of Jesus.  One time, they even had a cross in pink Leopard print.
A cute cross, a pretty cross, is no cross of Christ.  It may look good on a wall, but we should get over the illusion that these have anything to do with Jesus’ passion.  The cross means pain and death, and there is no getting around this.  As the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard put it, “Remove from Christianity its ability to shock and it is altogether destroyed.  It then becomes a tiny superficial thing, capable neither of inflicting deep wounds nor of healing them.”
My brothers and sisters in Christ, let us not shun the cross, nor pretty it up and make it easier to bear.  As our Lenten journey nears completion and we draw near the Easter victory, the cross that Christ asks us to take up is a cross like his: ragged, blood-stained, and fatal.  It is the cross of a savior who asks us to do nothing but die to ourselves. To the world such a cross is ridiculous, utter foolishness, but to us, as Saint Paul says, it is the power of God.
Tony Campolo tells a story about a man who walked up and down the streets of downtown Philadelphia wearing a sandwich-board style sign over his shoulders.  On the front of the sign was written, “I am a fool for Christ.”  As you might imagine, many who approached him would snicker and laugh at the man as they drew near.  But they all became silent as they continued to walk past him and read the other side of the board: “whose fool are you?”
Easter approaches.  The world is busy buying chocolate bunnies and dying eggs.  But in various places, Jesus’ disciples gather in his holy Church to remember that the new life promised at Easter is not possible without this foolish, rugged old thing called a cross.  We can be wise in the world’s eyes, or fools for the sake of Christ and his cross.  Whose fool are you?
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

Things I Never Expected as a Pastor: Jewelry Parties

After a meeting this evening, I was invited (unbeknownst to me) to a jewelry party.  One of my members was throwing a Mary-Kay-esque jewelry party and needed a 10th person to get some kind of bonus prize from the company rep.  She asked me to come by the room afterwords but didn’t say why.  Upon entering, I learned that I had filled out the magic number and she got a prize.

At first I was annoyed.  “This is what my time is being used for??”  But then I paused.  I was being arrogant.  I’ve been arrogant.  To an extent, I think, I’ve let an elite seminary education get in the way of my ministry.  After all, the Christian movement gained much of its momentum by the one who wrote,

I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.  (1 Cor. 9: 22b-23)

Sometimes being a pastor means being a counselor.  Other times a teacher.  Sometimes it might mean babysitting, or video games.  Sometimes it is as high and lofty as Holy Communion.  And maybe, just maybe, sometimes being a pastor means being a warm body at a jewelry party. 

Why the hell not?