Daily Archives: June 16, 2014

Lectionary Reflections: The Season after Pentecost, Year A

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This week’s readings are here.

I’m surprised this year by the abrupt changes in the lectionary in this season after Pentecost. As we move into Ordinary Time, there are almost no sign posts or markers to help us orient ourselves to the Sunday readings. The Gospel plops us back into the middle of Matthew, which apart from its appearance on Trinity Sunday (28:16-20), we’ve not encountered since Holy Week and Easter. And even that was something of an intrusion into our long sojourn with the Gospel of John (from the Second Sunday of Lent through all of the Sundays of Easter). The gospel reading includes sayings about discipleship that are quite challenging but consistent with Matthew’ overall depiction of Jesus.

Almost as disorienting is the reading from Genesis (we’ll be following Track I or the “semi-continuous” readings from Hebrew scripture). But again, we’re plopped into the middle of a much longer narrative arc. We hear the difficult and distressing story of Abraham casting Hagar and Ishmael out into the wilderness. This comes long after God’s call of Abraham in Genesis 12; long after the promise that Abraham and Sarah would give birth to a mighty nation; after Abraham’s two attempts to take matters into his own hand (first by naming Eliezer as his heir, then by impregnating his slave Hagar). The story of Abraham is a story of call and response, of the covenant God made with Abraham, a story of Abraham’s faith and God’s faithfulness, and a story of promises deferred. Abraham’s story ends with the only land he possesses the burial plot he purchased for Sarah, and his only offspring a son Isaac.

Even the lesson from Romans comes as a surprise with no back story. I’ll be writing about that separately in the next couple of days as part of my summer’s exploration of Paul’s letter to the Romans

 

The case against disruptive innovation

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As made by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker. Lepore is a historian who looks at the evidence behind everyone’s favorite theory these days. What she finds is a very mixed bag: cherry-picked case studies and examples where the longer history doesn’t support the theory. More interestingly, she puts the theory in the larger context of theories of history (progress, historicism, secularization). She writes provocatively:

“Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.”

Even more interesting perhaps is her challenge to the adoption of the theory by organizations and institutions other than industry:

Disruptive innovation as an explanation for how change happens is everywhere. Ideas that come from business schools are exceptionally well marketed. Faith in disruption is the best illustration, and the worst case, of a larger historical transformation having to do with secularization, and what happens when the invisible hand replaces the hand of God as explanation and justification. Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries. Journalism isn’t an industry in that sense, either.

For a while, I was collecting links to stories that compared the church to companies like Kodak. These stories all drew parallels between failed industries and the church, with dire warnings about the future of the church if we didn’t change. In fact, many of the problems facing institutional Christianity in the twenty-first century are related to our having adopted corporate models of governance and organization in the twentieth century. Blindly to adopt the language and theories of twenty-first century consultants and business leaders is to make the same mistake. Lepore points out that “industries turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.” As far as I know, we are called to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ.