Monthly Archives: May 2014

A Collect for the Feast of the Ascension

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Almighty God, whose blessed Son our Savior Jesus Christ ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things: Mercifully give us faith to perceive that, according to his promise, he abides with his Church on earth, even to the end of the ages; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

While preparing for Wednesday Eucharist, this collect caught my attention. I immediately assumed that it was modern, but no, according to Hatchett, it derives from the Leonine sacramentary. The first thing that caught my attention was the phrase “that he might fill all things.” My assumptions must have been in overdrive because I thought it had to be a typo–“fill” instead of “fulfill.” But no. Jesus Christ ascended into heaven [so that] he might fill all things. Ascension is not about explaining why Jesus is no longer present among us but about proclaiming Christ’s omnipresence in the universe; to use the words from the Epistle of the Day, he is “all in all.”

Even more interesting is the focus of the petition. The prayer is not asking help for us to believe in the ascension, but rather that we might have faith to “perceive that … he abides with his Church.” To put it another way, it’s harder to believe in Christ’s continuing presence in the Church than in the Ascension.

On second thought, that might not be so strange at all, given the realities of the church in the twenty-first century.

The Idols of the City: A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, 2014

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I’ve long been interested in how our built environments, our cities, for example, reflect our deepest values and passions. You can see that clearly in a city like Madison, which was laid out as Wisconsin’s capital, with capitol square in the middle and streets radiating out from it. If you’re familiar with cities on the east coast—Boston, for example—you know that such planning isn’t always the case. In Europe, it’s interesting to see how order and power were imposed and projected on capital cities—Paris or Vienna, for example.
What do the cities of today say about our values? On the one hand, there are cities like Detroit, that have collapsed economically, demographically, and politically and have become laboratories for experiments in creating new ways for people to come together. On the other hand, there are cities like San Francisco where gentrification is running amok, with housing prices again going through the roof, and forcing lower income and working class people to relocate. Madison is closer to the latter than the former as we are seeing a boom in the construction of upscale apartments across the city but especially downtown. We’ve been learning about the consequences of such economic growth—increasing inequality, growing gaps between rich and poor, white and black. Continue reading →

So, who’s going to church?

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A Pew Survey entitled “I know what you did last Sunday”
got a lot of attention last week. In separate telephone and on-line polling, the survey shows that more people claim to attend religious services when asked by a person (36%) than online (31%).
Mark Silk looks more closely at the numbers. First, he points out that the Pew survey seems to over-report attendance. A number of studies in the 1990s that used polling, self-reporting, and actual counting of people in the seats, showed actual attendance to be in the 20s. In other words, unless attendance has increased in the last twenty years, Pew is still getting results that suggest people exaggerate their religious involvement.

Second, Silk makes another very interesting observation. The same gap between phone and online responses exists for atheists, agnostics, and nones that exists for religious people. That is to say, they feel guilty about not attending services and over-report their involvement when responding to a telephone interview.

Perhaps most interesting of all, however, is this: “more respondents told the telephone interviewers that they had no religion than said so online.”

His conclusion:

What it suggests it that, as of today, Americans believe there is nothing socially undesirable about saying you don’t have a religion. To the contrary, we may be entering an era when identifying oneself as having a religion is less desirable than identifying oneself as belonging to one. And that’s true even as it remains socially desirable to go to church and believe in God.

In other words, there are more people out there there who are Catholics and Southern Baptists and Episcopalians than are prepared to admit it to someone on the telephone.

Interesting indeed!

I am the Way–Jesus’ words of comfort: A Sermon for the 5th Sunday of Easter, Year A

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A story like that of Stephen’s martyrdom works powerfully on our imaginations, just as it has worked powerfully on Christians throughout the centuries. Upon hearing or reading it, we might wonder whether we would have the faith to make a witness like that of Stephen, or wonder perhaps if we took our faith as seriously as we ought, we might face the same sort of persecution. Continue reading →

It wasn’t a pretty sight–Thoughts on the meeting of the Dane County Board of Supervisors

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I attended the Dane County Board of Supervisors meeting last night where I spoke in support of the resolution to purchase 1490 Martin St. for a permanent day resource center (The gist of my remarks are here). Coincidentally, a staff member from the Turkish parliament was there to observe the proceedings. He is interested in democracy and local politics. Both of us learned a great deal.

It wasn’t especially edifying. Many people spoke in opposition to the resolution. A large number of those who expressed their opposition were homeless themselves or advocates for the homeless. Many other opponents are neighbors of the facility. Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows. One heard again and again from neighbors about the problems center guests would bring into the neighborhood; the danger they presented. These are arguments brought up every time efforts are made to expand services or locate new programs and facilities in neighborhoods, towns, or cities throughout Dane County and the US. These are arguments some of those same progressives will angrily rebut when their own efforts are being challenged. Last night, however, because NIMBY sentiments played into progressives’ hands, the arguments were allowed to stand.

I’m grateful for those who have worked so hard over the last months and years to make the day center a reality and I am eager to watch how plans for transportation and renovation move forward. I am also excited to see the Day Center open on November 1. It’s the culmination of many people’s dreams and will fill a huge gap in our community’s services for the homeless.

A report of the meeting is available here.

 

Why I support the proposed site for the day resource center

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The Dane County Board of Supervisors will be debating a resolution to purchase a property on Martin Street to be used for a Homeless Day Resource Center. In recent weeks there’s been a good deal of debate about the merits of the location and various problems including adequate transportation and water supply. This is only the latest chapter in an ongoing saga about which I’ve written repeatedly over the last several years.

There are valid concerns about the location. It has been the site of Porchlight’s Hospitality House which has operated in part as a day shelter. Over the years, transportation has been inadequate. The location is just off of a major bus line, but it is not downtown and the vans that have shuttled guests from downtown homeless shelters and other agencies have not always operated at an optimal capacity.

But I think efforts to seek a thirty-day delay in the purchase of the property are misguided. I doubt that any amount of money would be able to shake loose a suitable downtown location from property owners, and even if it were miraculously able to do so, a downtown site would still have to overcome massive resistance from downtown residents, business owners, as well as city staff, alders, and the mayor. So at the end of the thirty day delay, we would be left with one option on the table, the same Martin Street property with thirty fewer days to prepare for a November 1 opening date.

A delay, or worse yet, a County Board vote against the purchase of the property, would make it more likely that we would face another winter with cobbled-together and inadequate provisions for resources for homeless people.

There comes a time when advocates have to re-shape their visions and hopes for the futures to reflect political and community realities. This seems to be one of those times. The tentative plans for the center include necessary services like laundry, showers, and storage as well as opportunities for guests to connect with social service agencies that can help them find housing and the other support they need. Supervisors and homeless advocates should work together in the coming months to ensure that the important questions are answered adequately, issues resolved, and that the Day Center will be ready to serve the homeless community at the earliest possible date.

Recent articles on the controversy are here and here.

 

 

 

The Good Shepherd, Mother’s Day, and the Power of Images: A Sermon for The Fourth Sunday of Easter

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The past few weeks, I’ve had a number of interesting, often dispiriting conversations. I’ve listened to homeless individuals or families who are struggling to get on their feet, gain some stability, and make new lives for themselves. I’ve talked to academics on the job market whose hopes and dreams for a tenure-track job, the goal for which they’ve been working so hard for so many years, seems little more than pie in the sky. I’ve talked to people who are hurting in all sorts of ways and grasping for something to hold onto in difficult, sometimes hopeless circumstances. Continue reading →

Julian of Norwich, May 8

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Julian of Norwich

Julian is among the most beloved of medieval mystics and visionaries in the twenty-first century. Her sheer joy in the love of God in Jesus Christ, her vivid writing, and her use of maternal imagery to understand and explain God’s love have all endeared her to contemporary Christians and seekers. What’s often ignored in contemporary appropriation of her thought and spiritual wisdom is how profoundly late medieval her sensibilities were. Whatever we find compelling in her today is dependent on piety and psychology that are deeply alien to us.

To wit:

She begins her Revelations of Divine Love by describing her desire to a “bodily sickness … so severe that it might seem mortal.” She wanted her illness to be so serious that she would receive last rites and that she would have “every kind of pain, bodily and spiritual, which I should have if I were dying, every fear and assault from devils, and every other kind of pain except the departure of the spirit…”

She was granted her desire, received her illness and last rites. It was during the last rites that she received her first vision, as the body of Christ on the crucifix carried by the priest came to life and began speaking to her.

She describes her visions in great detail, especially with regard to Christ’s suffering and blood:

… I saw the body bleeding copiously in representation of the scourging and it was thus. The fair skin was deeply broken into the tender flesh through the vicious blows delivered all over the lovely body. The hot blood ran out so plentifully that neither skin nor wounds could be seen, but everything seemed to be blood. And as it flowed down to where it should have fallen, it disappeared. Nonetheless, the bleeding continued for a time, until it could be plainly seen. And I saw it so plentiful that it seemed to me that if it had in fact and in substance been happening there, the bed and everything all around it would have been soaked in blood.

And near the point of death:

After this Christ showed me part of his Passion, close to his death. I saw his sweet face as it were dry and bloodless, with the pallor of dying, then more dead, pale and languishing, then the pallor turning blue and then more blue, as death took more hold upon his flesh. For all the pains which Christ suffered in his body appeared to me in his blessed face, in all that I could see of it, and especially in the lips… The long torment seemed to me as if he had been dead for a week and had still gone on suffering pain, and it seemed to me as if the greatest and the last pain of his Passion was when his flesh dried up.

By all means, Julian should be read and meditated upon. We have a great deal to learn from her but the fullness of her witness should not be silenced by our modern sensibilities.

Burning hearts, open eyes, practicing Resurrection: A Sermon for 3 Easter, 2014

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There’s a wonderful poem by the great Kentucky poet Wendell Berry that ends with the line: “Practice Resurrection.” Throughout the poem, Berry gives advice to the reader to act and live against the grain, to challenge the consumerism culture, capitalism, and militarism of our age. The poem is entitled “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front” and it’s something of a description of the way Berry has spent his life. That last line intrigues me. I’ve seen it quoted lots of times in the last couple of weeks, in this season of Eastertide, and every time I see it used, I wonder what the person who has quoted it or posted it thinks it means, what they mean by it.
Practice Resurrection. What might that mean?

Continue reading →

The Folly of “Progressive Christianity”

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Recently a book entitled Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity came across my desk. Written by David M. Felten and Jeff Procter-Murphy, it’s a companion to the dvd series Living the Questions. I had explored that series as a possibility for adult Christian education programming some years ago but found it unsuitable for reasons that now escape me (although it’s pretty pricey).

In the preface, the authors suggest that unlike the dvd series which was intended for use in churches, this volume is directed at a somewhat different audience, it’s for seekers, “those who seek to go beyond the stagnant clichés of faith and pursue the questions that deepen your understanding as you make your way through a lifelong spiritual journey.”

Many of the talking heads that appear in the dvd series and are spokespeople for liberal Christianity and popularized New Testament scholarship also figure prominently here: Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, John Shelby Spong. The book offers lengthy quotations from these and other writers who seek to offer a compelling vision of liberal Christianity for the twenty-first century.

The authors themselves claim that they want to take scripture “seriously, if not literally.” Unfortunately, one gets little sense of a serious engagement with scripture. They are quick to scoff at the gospels’ accounts of the appearances of the Risen Christ to his disciples, for example, calling the Jesus who appears in these stories “resuscitated” and the accounts as a whole as “jumbled.” They discount Paul’s discussion of resurrection in I Corinthians 15 as a “tortured discourse” and seem to think Paul himself discounted the importance of the reality of the Risen Christ (even though his own encounter with the Risen Christ was the basis of his faith, call, ministry, and claim to apostleship). Oh, there was some sort of experience, the authors (quoting Spong), seem to admit, but let’s not worry too much about the empty tomb or those fanciful tales written in the gospels.

In fact, the authors seem not so much interested in offering a compelling account of the Christian faith and life for contemporary readers. They are much more concerned with taking potshots at conservative Christians, conservative politics, and, when they bother to mention anything in the Christian tradition between the New Testament and the present, it’s to criticize things done in the name of the church, or outmoded theological doctrines. So Augustine of Hippo is blamed for the doctrine of original sin; Anselm is criticized for his doctrine of atonement, and they joke about Luther’s belief in the reality of the devil. It struck me that like many fundamentalists, these authors think there is nothing meaningful or important in Christianity between the New Testament and the present moment. Unlike Fundamentalists, they don’t seem to think scripture bears witness to the faith of early Christians, or that the faith of those early Christians bears any relevance to contemporary humans.

The authors conclude with the following:

When mystery is embraced, freedom is embraced. Openness is embraced. The journey is embraced. Far from being cast adrift, those who embrace mystery are set on a lifelong path of discovery, growth, and gratitude for the wonder of it all.

There may be a great deal of wisdom and truth in that sentiment, but if it’s the wisdom of progressive Christianity, count me out. The words of St. Paul resonate much more powerfully with me today:

 We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (I Corinthians 1:23-24)