Monthly Archives: September 2013

A Homily for the Blessing of the Animals, 2013

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Today is our annual Blessing of the Animals, a day when we remember the witness of St. Francis of Assisi and remember to the goodness of God’s creation. For some, the Blessing of the Animals may be little more than a gimmick. For others of us, it is a way of acknowledging the relationships we have with our pets, the reality that these relationships can be deep, long-lasting, and fulfilling, and that through them, we can experience the love of God.
When we bless our pets, as is the case when we take the time to bless or give thanks for the fruit of the earth, the beauty and bounty of God’s creation, we remind ourselves that our relationship with God is not merely an inward, spiritual thing. It is also bound up with the material world, the creation that God made and gave us to be stewards and caretakers of. Continue reading →

This week’s update on homelessness in Madison

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It’s increasingly clear that there will be fewer services and no day center available for homeless people this winter. Pat Schneider has the story. Her reporting on the exchange between Mayor Soglin and Alder Palm:

Mayor Paul Soglin forcefully repeated his conviction that the city cannot and should not be expected to take care of homeless people, many of whom he believes are dropped off in downtown Madison by nearby communities or agencies like the state Department of Corrections.

“I want to know why some struggling household in this city should pay for that,” he told members of the Board of Estimates. “I’m sick and tired of seeing letters in newspapers saying ‘you have responsibility to take care of the homeless.’ Oh, there are no homeless in suburban communities, no homeless in the townships, no homeless outside of Dane County?”

Palm responded that if people are living here now, they’re Madison residents.

“We should treat them like they are our neighbors. I’m sorry if there’s a huge political battle with the state, other municipalities and neighborhood associations,” Palm said. “At end of the day, none of that helps people trying to find a warm safe place to stay and get assistance.”

Ah, but there’s the newly renovated Central Library where homeless people can spend the day. Here’s Joe Tarr’s story.

We’ll be talking at Grace this evening at 7:00 about these developments and what else we might do to respond to the ongoing crisis in our neighborhood.

 

 

The Banality of Evil

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I saw Hannah Arendt over the weekend. It’s a very good film directed by Margaretha von Trotta with Barbara Sukowa in the title role (The two have collaborated often before, most recently in the bio-pic of Hildegard of Bingen Vision).

I was as excited when I heard about this movie as I had been when I heard about Vision. There was a period in my life when I was very engaged with the history, religion, and culture of Germany of the first half of the twentieth century. Long ago I had read Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. I was also familiar with the biography and thought of Martin Heidegger who appears in the film and with Karl Jaspers who directed Arendt’s dissertation.

I’m interested in the nature of evil, both intellectually and as a pastor and was curious to see how von Trotta and Sukowa would tell the story.

Hannah Arendt was the Jewish-German-American philosopher and political theorist who coined the phrase “banality of evil” in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem. The movie gives us a little bit of background about Arendt, including her relationship as a student with Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, but its focus is on the trial of Adolf Eichmann and on Arendt’s efforts to make sense of the evil of the Holocaust and the evil of Eichmann.

It’s a movie about thinking, a theme Arendt first brings up with Heidegger as a gangly student. She wants him to teach her to think. Throughout the film, we see her thinking, almost always with a cigarette in her hand. She may be staring out the window, staring at her typewriter, or lying on her day bed avoiding the calls from William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker who had contracted with her for a series of articles about the trial.

We also learn about the controversy her articles and then book unleashed. Her interpretation of Eichmann was widely condemned in Israel and in the US for letting him off the hook. Even more controversial was her charge that Jewish officials in the Third Reich (die Judenräte) collaborated with the Nazis.

Von Trotta made the decision to use footage from the trial in her film. Although a number of reviewers have criticized her for it, I found the scenes from the trial especially powerful and unsettling. Eichmann is shown to be a little man, perfectly ordinary, just as Arendt described, on display in a glass cage. He doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on around him and the fact that he had a cold during the proceedings makes him seem even more pathetic.

It’s sometimes said that Arendt got the philosophy right but history wrong–in other words that she was correct in claiming that the horrors of the Holocaust were often perpetrated by ordinary people following orders, but that in the case of Eichmann, he was in fact a committed Nazi and Anti-Semite. There’s evidence on both sides of this issue though I find Roger Berkowitz’s defense of Arendt in the New York Times convincing:

Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats, but by joiners.

That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world.

Fr. Robert Barron points out the Augustinian background of Arendt’s position. He quotes her:

In a text written during the heat of bitter controversy surrounding her book, Arendt tried to explain in greater detail what she meant by calling evil banal: “Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension, yet — and this is its horror! — it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world.”

Arendt’s dissertation was on the concept of love in Augustine. Augustine finally began to move toward Christianity when he came to understand that evil is non-existent, in-substantial. Arendt’s contrast between radical and extreme could be traced back to Augustine.

The film left me with some unsettled questions, specifically about the relevance of Arendt’s analysis to the present. We have seen some horrific deeds in the last decade or a little more. The images from Abu Ghraib, the revelations that the CIA and other US agencies used torture, the ongoing use of drones, and most recently the examples of whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Peter Ludlow makes the connections between them and “the banality of evil” here.

The Parable of the Dishonest Economy: A Sermon for Proper 20, Year C

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I’ve got a history with this parable that goes back thirty years. Back when I was in seminary, I took a class called Exegesis and Preaching. Exegesis is a fancy word for interpretation, by the way. It was team-taught by two people. One was Helmut Koester, Helmut is retired now but he was one of the most important New Testament scholars of the day, and Harvard was then clearly the center of New Testament scholarship in the world. The other professor was Peter Gomes. He died a couple of years ago but he was considered one of the best preachers in America. Continue reading →

Structure, Re-structure, Anti-structure, Missionary Society? Re-imagining the Episcopal Church

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Quite simply, the Episcopal Church is floundering (I know the conservatives have been saying that for years). First we had the dust-up over the UTO. Then, earlier this week, we learned that the Episcopal Church will from now on be known as “The Missionary Society” (and the snark was unleashed in the twitter-verse). Most recently, the Task Force on Re-Imagining the Episcopal Church issued an interim report.

It’s pretty clear from all this that “The Leadership” hasn’t a clue what it’s doing. To mishandle the UTO situation so badly suggests a fundamental misreading of the Church (it’s recently aborted advertising campaign and new name are additional examples). The problem is structural, of course–the relationship among the various entities in the Church aren’t clear (Presiding Bishop, General Convention, Executive Council, churchwide staff). Tobias Haller has some helpful background on this. He also asks an important question:

one begins to wonder if all the turmoil at the (inter)national level is really worth it, and that a radical revisioning as a network isn’t the best idea.

In fact, that seems to be what the task force seems to be proposing:

They also begin to suggest the specific roles that the Episcopal churchwide organization might play in cultivating and supporting the life of the church of the 21st century. Its role might shift from a primarily corporate or regulatory structure as we have had in the past, to a network, fostering collaboration and shared identity across Episcopalians and across different entities in the church. Imagine a churchwide structure that “crowd sources” various mission initiatives among the membership rather than legislating and funding them through a centralized budget and bureaucracy.

But isn’t the UTO basically a late-nineteenth century version of crowd sourcing?

If this re-structuring is to succeed, it has to deal with the contradictions and confusion at the very heart of the beast. Identity is important, of course, but clarifying and streamlining the maze of structure described by Haller and Mark Harris is the central issue. Harris has done a good job of explaining the underlying issues in the UTO controversy,  the “branding” silliness, and and the leadership crisis at the top.

Meanwhile, the House of Bishops is meeting in Nashville and yesterday they, too, talked about re-structuring, with conversations around the questions raised by the TREC interim report, and a “draft primer” on Episcopal ecclesiology.  There’s an update here.

As I reflect on all this, I think the bishops are pointing a way forward out of this mess. We need to begin with the church–ecclesiology. Let’s get clear on what we understand the Church in our particular context as Episcopalians to be; then create bodies that reflect this understanding and can carry forward our mission. And if that means abandoning structures like the Presiding Bishop, a churchwide staff, even General Convention, that may have served us well in the past, so be it.

It’s not just that we’re beholden to past structures. We’re beholden to past conceptions of what the church is and how it should incarnate itself in the world. We’re also too dependent on governmental, corporate, and legal frameworks that try to shoehorn the church into structures they can understand, regulate, and co-opt.

The title of this blog post alludes to work by Victor Turner, the twentieth century anthropologist and theorist of ritual. As a historian of Christianity, one of my interests was the interplay between central or institutional authority and local and individual expression of faith. There has always been a tension between forces of institutionalization and centralization on the one hand, and the local and individual, between the letter and the spirit, or between office and charism.

Pope Francis alluded to this very tension in his interview this week when he recast the notion of “thinking with the church” away from the hierarchy toward the whole people of God. What he had to say addresses our particular context as well. Although Episcopalians don’t use that image at all, or accept the notion of the magisterium, we are struggling with something similar: the institutional church’s natural tendencies to centralize, bureaucratize, and dominate over against the diversity of local experience.

Who speaks for the church? Is it the structures, or is it the whole people of God? As we move forward, I hope all of us continue to ask this question

 

 

Thinking with the Church–Some reflections on the Pope’s Interview

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The internet and Christianity are abuzz with the interview Pope Francis gave with Jesuit publications.

What surprised me most was not the soundbytes pulled out by reporters about the hot-button issues but rather the thoroughly Ignatian tone of the entire piece. Pope Francis is not just remaking the Church and the Papacy, he is bringing to the fore the Jesuit mode of proceeding. His talk of discernment, his humility and simplicity, his approach to spirituality and prayer, his demeanor all point to his Jesuit background.

But at the same time as he is revolutionizing the Church, he is also revolutionizing the Ignatian tradition. There is no better example of that than in the section of the interview “Thinking with the Church.” James Martin, SJ says that what Pope Francis said here has “immense ramifications” for the Church.

Pope Francis is referring to a section appended to the Spiritual Exercises: “Rules for thinking with the Church.” Most famously, Rule 13 which reads:

To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it, believing that between Christ our Lord, the Bridegroom, and the Church, His Bride, there is the same Spirit which governs and directs us for the salvation of our souls. Because by the same Spirit and our Lord Who gave the ten Commandments, our holy Mother the Church is directed and governed.

Pope Francis rewrites this rule, emphasizing that the Church is the whole people of God, not just the hierarchy, and that it is as the whole people of God that one needs to “think with the Church.”

Pope Francis:

“This is how it is with Mary: If you want to know who she is, you ask theologians; if you want to know how to love her, you have to ask the people. In turn, Mary loved Jesus with the heart of the people, as we read in the Magnificat. We should not even think, therefore, that ‘thinking with the church’ means only thinking with the hierarchy of the church.”

 

“This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.”

As an aside, having taught Ignatius many times over the years, requiring students to read both the Autobiography and The Spiritual Exercises, I always struggled with students’ preconceptions about the Jesuits (“The shock troops of the Counter Reformation) and more broadly Roman Catholics. It was always a challenge to try to get them to understand the flexibility, adaptability, and moderation of the Jesuits, all of which were keys to their success in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The “Rules for Thinking with the Church” were in part Ignatius’ attempt to help later Jesuits learn from his experience. When we read, we should think white is black if that’s what the Church says, we assume the worst of the Jesuits and the Roman Catholic Church. A more charitable reading would be that we should submit our own reason and perspective to the long perspective and wider vision of the Church. Pope Francis, by taking “hierarchical” out of the equation, broadens the perspective still further.

The back story on how the interview came about is here.

From James Martin’s commentary:

But there is one thing of which Pope Francis is sure.  In the best Jesuit tradition, which asks us to “find God in all things,” the pope speaks movingly of his commitment to finding God in every human being.  That is his certainty.  For me, this was the most moving part of the entire interview: “I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life.  God is in everyone’s life…Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else—God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life.”

“Discerning the Papal Interview” (From Eric Sundrup, SJ in The Jesuit Post)

There is much for all of us to ponder here. Pope Francis has had an enormous impact on the Roman Catholic Church in the few months of his papacy; he is also challenging all Christians to a more humble, careful, and discerning approach in the world.

Strategic Planning in the Diocese of Milwaukee

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I was one of the co-conveners of the Strategic Planning Task Force created by Bishop Miller in 2012. We completed our work earlier this year and issued a report to Diocesan Executive Council. At Clergy Day today, Bishop Miller announced that it will be the task of the Executive Council in 2014 to begin implementation of some aspects of the task force’s findings.

In this blog post, I am going to extract some paragraphs from that report. A full version of it is available here: taskforcereport_revised

From the Introduction:

As we worked together, we began to ask some hard questions of ourselves, of each other, and of Bishop Miller and diocesan staff. These conversations helped to deepen our understanding of our particular religious and cultural context. We began to delineate a series of values that we thought characterized our shared commitments as the Body of Christ in Southern Wisconsin and honored our Anglican and Episcopal roots. These conversations culminated in a values document that is included here.

There are significant challenges facing Christianity in twenty-first century America. The Episcopal Church, like other denominations, has seen significant decline in all numerical benchmarks, from membership and average Sunday attendance to financial support. In the wider context, survey after survey shows that increasing numbers of Americans no longer claim any religious affiliation (the so-called “nones”), with that percentage of the population rising to 20% in some recent polling. The number of young people without any religious affiliation is much higher, nearing 40% in a recent survey. Equally dramatic, the number of Americans claiming to be Protestant has fallen below 50% for the first time in the history of the US.

The trends in the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee reflect these larger national developments. Since 2001, total membership has declined from nearly 14,000 to around 10,000; average Sunday attendance from nearly 6,000 to 4,000. A number of our parishes are struggling financially. As population continues to shift within our region, churches that were built in 19th or 20th century population centers may not be well-positioned to connect with current areas of population growth that reflect contemporary lifestyle patterns.

Our tendency is to interpret these trends as a narrative of decline from a glorious past. But the history of our diocese teaches a different lesson. The Episcopal Church in Wisconsin began with the heroic efforts of Bishop Kemper to plant churches on the frontier. Lay people shared his vision and sacrificed time, energy, and financial resources that built many of the churches and institutions that now make up the Diocese of Milwaukee. Along the way, many other churches and institutions (schools, mission efforts, and the like) were founded. Some thrived for a time and died; others were transformed to meet the needs of new situations and communities. Our history is a story of innovation, creativity, and mission. It is a story of success and failure.

Our greatest challenge in thinking about the future is simply this: we lack signposts and maps that lead us forward. It is fairly easy to read the “signs of the times.” It is much less clear how we might venture into the uncharted territory of the future and create an Anglicanism that is faithful to the gospel and to our tradition and that speaks an authentic gospel clearly, convincingly, and compellingly in our new context.

What is a diocese in the twenty-first century?

We discerned in the initial stages of our conversation that the idea of “diocese” is itself a matter of considerable confusion. When we say “diocese,” do we mean the Bishop and Staff? The congregations, ministries, and entities that are the institutional forms of our life as Episcopalians? Do we mean the clergy? The lay people? Do we mean the geographical borders within which we live? Do we mean all the people who live in our area, or only the Episcopalians? Often, we use the term “diocese” to refer to Nicholson House, Bishop Miller and his staff, and use the term to distinguish between those structures and people and the local congregation.

Our current, perhaps unstated, model of the diocese is based on the life of Corporate America, with Nicholson House as the “home office” and Bishop Miller as our CEO. That model is more a reflection of twentieth-century American institution building than it is of Episcopal history, the history of the Christian Church, or indeed, of Scripture. Are there other models that are more faithful to our tradition and to scripture, and more adaptive to our current context? How can we all, clergy and laity, in all of our congregations, claim our shared identity and shared responsibility to be the Diocese of Milwaukee?

Our conversations about what we mean by “diocese” coalesced in the following mission statement:

As the body of Christ in Southern Wisconsin, the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee witnesses to the love of God in Jesus Christ through faithful, effective, and innovative ministry, carried out by congregations, clergy and laity, worshiping communities and other mission-focused ministries.

The Way Forward: 

We are truly at a crossroads. The path that has brought us here is clear but we cannot turn around and retrace our steps. Looking ahead, in one direction lies a clear road, a journey of decline, irrelevance, and ultimately death. We have resources adequate to oversee quiet and comfortable internments of most of our congregations and ministries, in five, ten, or twenty years. Some may be able to hold out longer but their ends are assured as well.

But we have a choice. In another direction lies an uncharted path, full of possible dangers and completely unknown. The Christian Church, Anglicanism, the Episcopal Church have all faced such crossroads in the past. We are here today because our fore-parents chose the path into the unknown, leaving behind the comfort and certainty of past and present for an unknown, uncharted, and challenging future. We are faithful to their legacy only if we repeat their choice. If we do so, we will be like Jesus’ first disciples who instead of wallowing in fear and sadness when he departed them, obeyed his command to

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Mt. 28:19-20)

Task Force Recommendations:

  • Every member and entity of the Diocese must recognize that together we make up the Body of Christ in this area. As Paul writes in I Corinthians 12:20-21: “As it is,  there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’.” The strong must support the weak, and the weak should not reject help that is offered to them.
  • The Executive Council will accept responsibility for working with challenged parishes to identify current problems and begin thinking about more effective approaches.  The financial stability of some congregations increases the urgency of this task.
  • The Bishop, Diocesan staff, and leadership will encourage and engage in innovative and creative new ministry initiatives.
  • The Executive Council, with the assistance of Diocesan staff, will develop and promote methods by which two, three or more parishes and entities may join to do ministry in a collaborative fashion.
  • The Bishop, Diocesan staff and Executive Council will to creating an atmosphere of trust, collegiality and teamwork as it works with all parishes on these issues.
  • The Diocese will commit to developing effective communications between Diocesan offices and congregations and among congregations, clergy, and laity.
  • The Bishop, staff, lay and clergy leadership will commit to learning from, sharing with, and encouraging conversations with other dioceses engaged in re-imagining and innovating ministries in our changing cultural contexts.

God Seeks Sinners, not Saints: A Sermon for Proper 19, Year C

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The Rev. Thomas Ferguson, Dean of Bexley Seabury, an Episcopal educational center in the Midwest, preached this morning at Grace Church. Here’s what he said.

It’s a pleasure to be back in the great city of Madison, which my wife and I called home for five wonderful years.  My wife Shannon served as director of Christian formation for the diocese of Milwaukee, including running summer camps at camp webb, and I was interim chaplain for a time at St Francis House, the chaplaincy at UW Madison. Continue reading →

Thank You, Mr. Mayor!

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I’ll admit I’ve been critical of Mayor Soglin’s statements and policies regarding homelessness. At times, it has seemed that he has wanted to avoid the issue entirely or evade the city’s share of responsibility to address homelessness and the underlying issues that contribute to it. In recent weeks, however, he has seemed to have something of a change of heart.

The inclusion in the city’s capital budget of money towards the construction of up to 100 units of single room occupancy for homeless or recently homeless people is a very important step. With a rental occupancy rate of around 2%, there are simply not enough vacant units to house people in Madison and little incentive for landlords to rent to low-income people.

Even more encouraging is what happened yesterday. Mayor Soglin involved himself personally in the plight of a homeless family. After seeing them at a bus stop on his way to work, Mayor Soglin went to the office, turned around, and spent considerable time ferrying them to various agencies in an effort to find them housing. The article is here.

He learned first-hand about the limited services available and about how difficult it is to access those services. These are things those of us who work with homeless people know all too well. Indeed, the family Mayor Soglin worked with yesterday had stopped by Grace earlier in the week. He also probably experienced the frustration and anguish many of us do when our efforts to find housing or other help fail.

Of course, the city can’t solve the problem of homelessness by itself but it needs to engage constructively with the county, with social services, and with advocates to address both the lack of housing as well as the underlying reasons that contribute to homelessness.

I’m grateful to Mayor Soglin for his pledge to address these issues, and for taking the time to get to know and to try to help a homeless family yesterday.

The shelter system and the prison system

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A really fine article by Pat Schneider on the direct line from the prison system to the homeless shelter.

Linda Ketcham, executive director of Madison-area Urban Ministry, a nonprofit agency that assists criminal offenders returning to the community, estimates that 75 to 80 percent of people her agency assists in its offender “re-entry” programs are homeless. “The shelter system is the only option“ for many of them, she said.

I’ve blogged about this before here. I can confirm several points in the article. I know that guys come straight from the parole office to the shelter. I know that sex offenders that are released to their own communities come to Madison because there’s no place for them back home.
I remember several years ago a young man, a teenager, brought by corrections officials to the shelter from whatever prison he’d been in elsewhere in the state. His parents came down too. They wanted to know about the shelter, how he would fare, what would happen to him. For whatever reason, he wasn’t released to them. What I remember most about him was the look of fear on his face. Whatever he’d faced in prison was nothing like the uncertainty he was facing now. I have no idea what happened to him.
His reaction is quite common among those I’ve talked to who have just been released from prison. They’re facing incredible odds in their efforts to put their lives back together. In addition to all the social services they need, they also need a support system to help them, to encourage them, and to offer a helping hand when they make mistakes. Instead, they come to the shelter where they’re anonymous, where they’re surrounded by people who may or may not want to help them, and where access to the services they need is a maze in a city they probably don’t know.
The re-entry program run by MUM mentioned in the article does amazing things.