Monthly Archives: June 2013

More on decline in the Southern Baptist Convention: A mirror image of the Episcopal Church?

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Jonathan Merritt offers advice to the SBC. Some of it might be of interest to Episcopalians.

Of note:

If you review the resolutions, reports, and microphone grandstands of the SBC’s annual meeting during recent years, you’ll find a lot of energy expended on secondary things. The Associated Pressreported this week on how debates over Calvinism is dividing the Convention. Add to this recent squabbles over the “sinner’s prayer” and other lesser issues, and you have a denomination that spends major energy over minor issues.

The SBC’s resolution history also seems to bear this out. There was the ineffective 1997 boycott on Disney, a resolution to retain the traditional method of calendar dating (B.C. / A.D.) in 2000, and a 2011 resolution disapproving of the revision to the world’s most popular Bible translation (NIV), which requested that LifeWay Christian Stores stop carrying it. (One year later, LifeWay still sells the translation.)

If the Southern Baptist Convention wants to regain the credibility, interest, and relevance it has lost, the denomination must learn to put first things first. Namely, sharing the gospel through missions and showing the gospel through acts of service, compassion, and justice.

And this:

Of the 117 resolutions passed by the denomination at their annual meeting since 2000, a breathtaking 70 of them have been political. This includes a 2003 resolution endorsing President Bush’s war in Iraq, a 2008 resolution taking a position in the so-called “War on Christmas,” and a 2009 resolution titled “On President Barack Hussein Obama.”
He concludes:
The denomination must now decide whether to chart a new path for the sake of its future or maintain its current course. But one thing is certain. When the convention gathers for its annual meeting in another decade, people will still be talking. The question is now, “Will anyone be listening?”

Bad Girls of the Bible–Well, No! Lectionary Reflections on Proper 6, Year C

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This week’s readings are here. My sermon from 2010 on these texts is here.

In our readings this week, we encounter three women. One, Jezebel, is clearly understood to be evil. She has already encouraged her husband, King Ahab of Israel, to worship and promote Baal. Now she subverts justice and orchestrates the murder of  the owner of a vineyard simply because Ahab covets the property.

In the alternative reading from the Hebrew Bible, from the track we will be following this summer and fall, we hear the end of the story of David’s rape of Bathsheba and his murder of her husband and of Nathan’s prophetic judgment against David and his house.

And the gospel story is Luke’s account of Jesus’ anointing. An unnamed woman, a sinner, interrupts the dinner at Simon’s house, anoints Jesus’ feet with oil, and wipes them with her hair. After Jesus’ host Simon questions her actions, Jesus tells a parable that sheds light on what she has done. He concludes by saying, “Her sins are forgiven,” and tells her, “Go, your faith has saved you.”

The lectionary’s coupling of the David/Bathsheba story with the anointing presupposes us to imagine that the woman’s sin was sexual. That inclination is strengthened by the highly sexualized act of wiping Jesus’ feet with her hair. The tradition has named this woman Mary Magdalene (although Luke makes no such connection) and has also generally understood her to be a prostitute. But leaping to that conclusion is going much further than the text permits. There are lots of sins that aren’t sexual and we ought to remember that in 1st century Judaism, “sin” meant breaking Torah, which could have been any of the 613 commandments listed by the later rabbis.

There’s something even more curious in the text. The way the gospel writer describes her suggests that something else might be going on. As one commentator translates it, “a certain woman was in the city a sinner.” The word order seems to imply that she was regarded in the city as a sinner. That is to say, we cannot be certain that she is a sinner. All we know is that the city thinks she’s a sinner. This might help to explain Simon’s internal response to the woman’s actions. He wonders why Jesus doesn’t know that she’s a sinner. Her sins are or were not obvious. And the verb tenses suggest that whatever her sins might have been, she is no longer sinning; she has been forgiven already. Her actions in anointing Jesus are expressive of the her love and gratitude at having been forgiven of her sins.

Jesus said to Simon, “Do you see this woman?” Simon saw a sinner; Jesus saw a forgiven and loving woman, a disciple. Is that what we see, a woman who, like the women Luke mentions in the first verses of chapter 8, women who followed Jesus alongside the twelve and the other disciples, women who ministered to him and the others out of their resources?

 

God’s Intrusive Grace: A Homily for Proper 6, Year C

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What is a prophet? It’s often difficult for me to imagine how ordinary churchgoers conceive or understand such central ideas to the biblical story and Christianity as that of prophecy. My guess is that what comes to mind first for many of you is the image of someone who predicts the future, whether that’s a conservative Christian warning us of the imminent return of Jesus Christ, or of a Hebrew prophet proclaiming the coming of the Messiah. Others of you may have in mind a leader or activist for social justice—a Martin Luther King Jr., for example.

Our readings bring us smack up against the idea and reality of prophet, and of its important for the story of the Hebrew Bible and the story of Jesus. At the end of today’s gospel, the people proclaim, “A great prophet has risen among us!” and “God has looked favorably upon his people.” Even casual attention to the readings this morning should see the obvious connection between the gospel story and the story of Elijah we heard read from I Kings.

We heard last week the great story of the contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal. Elijah presents us with something of a conundrum because we don’t see him doing a lot of the sort of prophecy that’s preserved in books like Isaiah and Amos. We see him railing against King Ahab of Israel’s worship of Baal and his support of Baal’s cult but for the most part, we see him doing the sort of mighty works he did in last week’s reading, calling down fire from heaven to consume the altar. Earlier in this chapter, he has been visiting this same widow and her son. It’s during a drought and Elijah discovers that they have enough oil and meal to make bread for one day. Miraculously, the provisions last while Elijah stays with them, so they do not die of hunger.

But now, in today’s story, the widow’s son has fallen ill, so ill that he seems not to have breath in him (note that it doesn’t say he died). Elijah brings him back to life, and the widow proclaims Elijah a man of God.

In the portion from the Gospel of Luke we heard, we have what is a perfect bookend to the Elijah story. Both occur in the same geographical area; both involve widows. Elijah’s resuscitation of the widow’s son is undoubtedly behind the way Luke shapes his story so that his readers can see the connection between Jesus and Elijah, indeed between Jesus and all of the Hebrew prophetic tradition.

From the outset of Jesus’ ministry, Luke has stressed Jesus’ ties to the prophetic traditions. At his first public sermon, Jesus reads from Isaiah,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’

After reading these words, Jesus says, “today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. The statement at the end of the story, that God has looked favorably on God’s people, is a clear reminder of what Jesus

Jesus is not just a prophet, either for Luke or for us; and while Luke amplifies the resonances between Jesus and the prophets, he also distinguishes clearly between them. It is here, for the first time in the gospel, that Luke refers to Jesus as Lord. For his readers, that title would have hearkened back to the Hebrew Bible’s use of Lord to refer to God, but it would also have reminded them of the emperor’s title.

Both of those echoes suggest power and might, but Luke rejects implication. After referring to Jesus as Lord, Luke continues, “and he had compassion on her, literally “he was moved in his guts.” Luke is telling us that Jesus’ Lord-ship is recognized not with the trappings of power, wealth, and grandeur, but in his ministry among the lowly and downtrodden. Jesus is recognized as Lord by his compassion and mercy.

Jesus came to the village of Nain, walking with his disciples. As they arrived, they encountered another procession, a burial procession, as a widow led her friends and neighbors out to bury her son. In fact, think about it a moment. You’re in the midst of deep grief. It’s not just that a loved one has died, though that is an immeasurable loss. Luke mentions that this is the woman’s only son, which means that without either husband or son, this woman is probably left destitute, with no support system. In the midst of this burial procession, a stranger bursts in, interrupting, stopping the inevitable walk toward the cemetery.

Luke makes clear that Jesus’ attention is on the widow, not on the dead son. Three times in a single verse he uses the feminine pronoun:

“When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not weep.” And after Jesus brings the man back to life, Luke says that “he gave him to his mother.” So the focus in this story is less on the raising of the dead son, than on  Jesus’ compassion for the man’s mother.

The extraordinary had come into her life, visiting death upon her and confronting her with an uncertain and challenging future. But Jesus intervened in that procession and in that future, bringing something completely new and unexpected, restoring life and hope to her son and to her.

I’m struck by all of the ways in which we are in places similar to that in which the widow of Nain found herself. Many of us face such uncertainty in our personal lives. For some of us, like the widow, our grief and pain is quite real. Many others of us look ahead into challenging and uncertain futures. We worry about what the next stage of our life will bring. Some of us are focused on larger questions facing this congregation—questions related to the proposed master plan and our future ministry and mission. Some of us are struggling with the Bishop’s letter on same sex blessings, on what that might mean for ourselves or for our loved ones. Some of us are thinking about the widow of Nain, and of widows and orphans in our society, and the collapsing safety net that threatens their futures and their well-being.

We may be so focused on some or all of these questions and concerns, so focused on the mourning processions, real or figurative, in which we are walking, that we fail to see the prophet walking towards us. We don’t notice him stopping the procession, putting his hand on our griefs and worries; we don’t notice the compassion as he reaches out to us. We may not welcome that interruption. It may only be an annoyance.

But here he comes, stopping the procession, stopping us. And here he is stopping us short wherever we are, with the promise of new life and grace. God’s grace intrudes, breaking into our worries and concerns, our grief and our pain, restoring us to life, bringing us new hope and grace. Wherever we are this morning, in our struggles, in our journeys, in our pain and fear, may God’s grace come to us, enliven and restore us, that we too might be able to say “God has looked favorably on God’s people.”

My message to members and friends of Grace Church in response to Bishop Miller’s letter

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My previous post extracts several paragraphs from Bishop Miller’s letter and links to the full document.

For whatever reasons, there has not been a great deal of energy around the full inclusion of LGBT persons in the life of the church at Grace. I have not been approached by couples seeking the church’s blessing. I received very few questions and had few conversations last year during the run-up to and after General Convention. I do know that parishioners have a variety of views on these issues. Our disagreements to some degree mirror the disagreements in the wider church and in our society. I also know that men and women of good will can and do disagree on these issues as on many others and that the positions we take are in response to our desire and efforts to live out our calls to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ.

I am your pastor. I seek to be the pastor of everyone who enters our doors in search of God’s grace and love. I know both the power and fragility of the love of two people and I know how important it is that a couple can find support for their relationship in the body of Christ. That there are couples among us whose relationships cannot be acknowledged and blessed publicly saddens me to the core. It goes against my theology, my experience of the Gospel, and my model of our life together in Christ. I will continue to try to welcome, affirm, and be pastor to everyone—singles, couples, widowed, divorced—who seek to find and live out the love of Christ in their relationships as best and creatively as I can while keeping my vow of obedience to the bishop. And I will continue to pray and work for a deeper and fuller realizing of Christ’s love in all that we as a Church are and do.

Please contact me if you would like to talk about this or any other issue in the life of our congregation or in your personal life. As we continue to strive to discern God’s call for us individually and as the body of Christ on Madison’s Capitol Square, my prayer is the prayer of Jesus that we “may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21).

Bishop Miller’s letter on the Blessing of Same Sex Unions

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On Thursday, Bishop Miller met with diocesan clergy to discuss General Convention Resolution A49 that provides for the blessing of same sex unions. He published a letter yesterday outlining his position. Here are some key paragraphs:
Therefore, I am not authorizing the rite from A049 for use in the Diocese of Milwaukee at this time. However, I have arranged with Bishop Jeffrey Lee of the Diocese of Chicago, for clergy and couples from congregations within the Diocese of Milwaukee to go to the Diocese of Chicago to celebrate the rite, as long as they obtain Bishop Lee’s consent to such an action to take place within the bounds of that diocese. Doing so will result in no punitive or negative response whatsoever from me.
Furthermore, I stated my belief that the right to a civil marriage should be available to all people, regardless of sexual orientation and that I would support those seeking to overturn the ban on same-gender marriage in Wisconsin. I also shared that I have begun to permit partnered gay clergy to preside with the diocese, and that I am open to the potential call of any Episcopal cleric in good standing to a position here.
I am also aware that many of our clergy feel the need to offer a generous pastoral liturgical response to gay and lesbian couples. I have agreed to the formation of a task force within this diocese, comprised of people from across the spectrum on this issue, including openly gay and lesbian people living in monogamous relationships, to consider, and propose the same. At the end of the process, however, as the one given canonical authority to order the liturgical life of the diocese, the decision about the authorization of such a rite rests with me. In our polity, there can be no other way.
The entire document is available: Bishop Miller’s letter
I will have more to say about this anon.

Will D. Campbell, 1924-2013

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Will Campbell died this week. He was a living legend, gifted writer, fearless prophet. I met him twice in radically different contexts. In the 1980s, he was the keynote speaker at a gathering of Mennonite young adults in the Northeast. In the mid-90s, he visited Sewanee for several days, renewing friendships and acquaintances with many activists he’d known for over thirty years. His message in both contexts was unsettling and challenging. It was especially fun to watch him in action in Sewanee where the traditions of the Confederacy were still powerful. Here’s the NYTimes obituary. Here’s the one from The Tennesseean.

Among the most moving tributes I’ve read was written by Bill Leonard, the dean of historians of Southern religion:

Will Campbell was obsessed with grace, especially as it falls on inappropriate people at inopportune times. He is gone from this world, as we all will be, sooner or later, as he’d surely remind us.

Taking a phrase from another of his books, I think he’d say he simply entered the “deep waters” of The Glad River, through which all the sinner/saints have trod. Damn right, Will. Damn right.

From Sojo.net: Campbell’s own story of his theological conversion which occurred as he and his friends mourned the death of Jonathan Daniels:

I was laughing at myself, at twenty years of a ministry which had become, without my realizing it, a ministry of liberal sophistication. Of riding the coattails of Caesar, of playing on his ballpark, by his rules and with his ball, of looking to government to make and verify and authenticate our morality, or worshiping at the shrine of enlightenment and academia, of making an idol of the Supreme Court, a theology of law and order, and of denying not only the faith I professed to hold but my history and my people the Thomas Colemans. Loved. And if loved, forgiven. And if forgiven, reconciled. Yet sitting there in his own jail cell, the blood of two of his and my brothers on his hands. The thought gave me a shaking chill in a non-air-conditioned room in August. I had never considered myself a liberal. I didn’t think in those terms. But that was the camp in which I had pitched my tent. Now I was not so sure.

Among his books worth reading, Brother to a Dragonfly, a memoir of his brother and his journey in the civil rights movement.

It’s not just the Episcopalians! Southern Baptists are in decline, too!

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The usual standard for judging size, growth, and decline of a parish in the Episcopal Church is Average Sunday Attendance (ASA). This method is enshrined in our parochial reports which we have to forward to the diocese and to the national church. It’s not without its detractors and the possibility of fudge but no one has offered an adequate alternative. Tom Ehrich points out some of the problems of ASA in an article. He advocates an alternative:

A much better quantitative measure would get at “touches,” that is, how many lives are being touched by contact with the faith community in its various Sunday, weekday, off-site and online ministries and then, for a qualitative measure, asking how those lives are being transformed.

Of course, one ought to demand a qualitative measure for ASA as well. How many lives are being transformed through our worship?

We’re wringing our hands in the Episcopal Church over decline in membership and attendance and many of our detractors argue our decline is directly related to our liberal theology and morality.

Well, apparently statistics to be published next week show a 5.5% decline in baptisms in the Southern Baptist Convention from 2011 to 2012 and a drop in total membership below 16 million (more here). Most Baptist churches still require baptism of new members (whether or not they’ve been baptized before), so this suggests a precipitous drop in numbers. And no one can blame that decline on liberal theology and permissive ethics (except perhaps the Independent Baptists who regard Southern Baptists as apostates).

Maybe we have more in common with Southern Baptists than either they or we could imagine.

The Search for public space in a city

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As I’ve previously mentioned, we are working on a master plan for renovations of Grace Church. Part of that plan includes conversations about how to make our beautiful courtyard garden more accessible and welcoming to the public. A couple of recent articles may offer insight.

From an article in today’s New York Times:

As more and more educated Americans, especially younger ones, are looking to move downtown, seeking alternatives to suburbs and cars, they’re reframing the demand for public space. They want elbow room and creative sites, cooked up by the community or, like the plaza program, developed from a democratic mix of top-down and bottom-up governance.

And an article on labyrinths in and around Madison

Same Sex Blessings conversation continuing in the Diocese of Milwaukee

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After a lengthy hiatus (since August, 2012), conversations among clergy in the Diocese of Milwaukee will begin again. My earlier reports on the conversations here and throughout the church are available here.

Two developments since our last conversation may affect how we talk together and what we say. First is the overwhelming acceptance of the provisional rite by Episcopal dioceses. Integrity USA is keeping tabs on that here. By my count, only 18 domestic dioceses have definitely said “no” (Integrity includes the Diocese of Milwaukee in that total). The status of another thirteen is unknown to Integrity.

The second important development is the sea-change in American attitudes toward gay marriage. With a majority of the population now favoring it, legislatures continuing to legalize it, and the Supreme Court’s decisions on Proposition 8 and DOMA this summer, there seems to be something of an inevitability about it.

Today the House of Lords in the UK Parliament were debating a gay marriage bill that is opposed by the Church of England. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby spoke against the bill in this speech. Among his complaints:

It confuses marriage and weddings. It assumes that the rightful desire for equality – to which I’ve referred supportively – must mean uniformity, failing to understand that two things may be equal but different. And as a result it does not do what it sets out to do, my Lords. Schedule 4 distinguishes clearly between same gender and opposite gender marriage, thus not achieving true equality.

Anyone remember “Separate but equal?”