Daily Archives: June 16, 2011

Blessed are the uncool

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Facebook friends shared the following link with me: http://rachelheldevans.com/blessed-are-the-uncool

Thanks for this link. Serendipity, I suppose. A (possibly homeless) man walked down the center aisle last Sunday during the service, came right down to the front pew, said something aloud to me, that I couldn’t quite understand.  When he came in, muttering to himself, and then spoke aloud, I got into traffic cop mode, wondering why the ushers hadn’t bounced him from the service, annoyed at the disruption, worried about how visitors or members were reacting. Then he sat down, was quiet for the rest of the service, came to the altar rail and received communion in tears. His presence was a blessing to me, if to no one else.

At our midweek service yesterday, a young man attended who I suspect suffers from cerebral palsy. He had trouble finding pages in the prayerbook and speaking the responses. But we adapted to his pace and welcomed him. He’s visiting from out of town for a couple of weeks, had fallen in love with Episcopal liturgy as a college student and came to worship with us. It was a gift and a joy to have him present in our small congregation and remind us of just what Evans writes about: Blessed are the uncool.

Breaking up with God: I didn’t lose my faith I left it.

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An interview with Sarah Sentilles, author of Breaking up with God: A Love Story.

The title seems to be a takeoff from Lauren Winner’s Girl meets God, but given my recent posts here and here, it probably deserves a mention.

For me, this is the money quote from the interview with Sentilles:

People assume I’m an atheist, but I’m not. I don’t know what I am, but if I had to choose a label I’d choose agnostic. When I say that people usually ask me if I think God exists, and I usually give them the answer that my teacher, Gordon Kaufman, used to give me: The question of God’s existence isn’t the right question because it won’t get you very far. It’s a question human beings can’t answer. If we take God’s mystery seriously, then we can never know. I think there are better questions that we can be answering: What does a particular vision of God do to those who submit to it and to those who won’t submit to it? What difference is my version of God making? Who is it harming? In one of his books, Kaufman writes, “The central question for theology… is a practical question. How are we to live? To what should we devote ourselves? To what causes give ourselves?” He argues that theology that does not contribute significantly to struggles against inhumanity and injustice has lost sight of its point of being.

Full disclosure: Gordon Kaufman was one of my professors, too. He was also a member and sometime pastor of the Mennonite Congregation of Boston, to which I belonged during the 1980s.

That ultimately God is mystery is not a radical or heretical notion. Going back to the early church (at least to the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus) the idea of negative theology, that the only true statements one could make about God were about what God is not, is a perfectly acceptable, if somewhat difficult to understand, methodology. Of course, Sentilles goes further in the interview, making clear that much of her problem is not about the notion of God, but about institutional religion. I am always saddened when people come to that point because for me the Incarnation is all about the messiness of the mystery of God being contained, experienced, and expressed in the ordinary, human, and accessible.