Author Archives: djgrieser

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About djgrieser

I have been Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, WI since 2009. I'm passionate about Jesus Christ and about connecting our faith and tradition with 21st century culture. I'm also very active in advocating for our homeless neighbors.

Moved with pity: Lectionary reflections for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, Year B

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This week’s readings.

The stories of lepers in the gospels always bring to my mind images from the 1959 movie Ben-Hur. If memory serves me correctly, there was a time, when Ben Hur played every year on network TV. For those of you who don’t know it, it was one of those movies Hollywood did so well in the 50s. Lavish productions, casts of thousands, lots of drama, and occasional camp. Ben-Hur is most famous for the chariot race that served as its climax, but what has stuck in my mind all of these years are scenes set in leper colonies. The movie showed in graphic detail everything Hollywood thought about the disease—people living in horrible circumstances, segregated from society, ravaged by the disease, having lost limbs to it.

Hollywood got it wrong. What the movie makers were depicting was Hansen’s disease and it was a horrible disease, made more horrible by society’s treatment of lepers. But when leprosy is mentioned in the bible, it’s not Hansen’s disease that’s being described. What the Bible refers to is a whole range of skin diseases, and the restrictions about it are not primarily intended to prevent the leper’s infection of other people, but rather to preserve the purity of the community. To make this point clear, in the chapters of Leviticus that detail what leprosy is and how it is to be handled, there is one very interesting instruction. If you have white blotches on your body, the priest is to confirm that you have leprosy, but if the skin disease is such that you are entirely covered with white, from head to toe, then, you are free of contamination. Moreover, it wasn’t just human beings that could have leprosy—cloth, or even houses could be certified by the priests as contaminated with leprosy.

So the leper who came to Jesus for healing in this week’s gospel was suffering from one of these skin diseases. What mattered more than the malady itself was the elaborate code of instructions that detailed the leper’s complete exclusion from the community. People certified as lepers by the priest were completely ostracized from society. They were to tear their clothes, keep their hair unkempt, shout “Unclean, unclean” whenever they encountered other people, and live outside the community.

Most important of all, is that biblical leprosy was something for the priests, not the doctors, to deal with. It had to do with the ritual life of the community and as such, the priest’s certification of leprosy or of freedom from leprosy impacted whether or not an individual could live in community or participate in the community’s ritual and religious life. One way to think about a leper in biblical culture was to think of him as “a dead man walking.”

Jesus has spent some time in Capernaum, healing the sick, and has told his disciples that he intends to take his show on the road, to go about the villages of Galilee, preaching the good news. But as he goes this leper gets in his way.  The leper doesn’t simply ask Jesus to heal him. Rather he says, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” That’s odd enough—I’m sure we all would be thinking, why would Jesus not choose to help this man?

What’s even odder is Mark’s next comment. Our translation reads, “moved with pity” but in fact the Greek reads implies that Jesus’ guts were turned over. And there’s another possibility—some Greek manuscripts read “moved with anger.” So this is not about compassion or feeling sorry—Jesus is deeply affected by this encounter. There are two ways of reading Jesus’ response. Either way, he is overwhelmed with emotion. One option is to interpret his response to the leper as compassion or pity at his plight, being forced to live alone, isolated from human contact and from access to the divine, forced to scratch out a living by begging and humiliation.

The other option is to read Jesus’ response to the leper as anger at the leper. We have been emphasizing the urgency of Mark’s gospel. Just before this encounter, Jesus has told his disciples that part of his task was to preach in all of the towns—the encounter with the leper slows him down, but also potentially prevents that mission trip. By touching the leper, Jesus has himself been made unclean, and should probably remove himself from society as well.

He responds to the leper with a demonstration of his power and authority, by declaring that he is clean. And he does it in dramatic fashion, by touching him. By declaring him clean, Jesus is usurping the authority of the priests who had that power, and by touching him, Jesus was challenging the rules of clean and unclean that were the focus of the restrictions against leprosy, and the focus of so much attention by his contemporary Jewish compatriots.

Jesus tells the man to go to the priests, to get certified that he’s clean, but the man doesn’t. He also doesn’t heed the other instruction Jesus gives him—to say nothing to any body. Now what’s odd about this is precisely the certification—in order to be reintegrated into the community, in order rejoin his family and friends, in order for him to have a role in the ritual life of Judaism, this man would have to receive the certification. The priests labeled him a leper; now it is up to them to label him clean.

The story ends on the oddest note of all. Because the cleansed leper did not obey Jesus’ request that he remain silent—how could he have? Jesus’ reputation spread far and wide and he was no longer able to go about openly. He couldn’t enter the towns of Galilee where he wanted to preach and heal. So he was stuck out in the countryside.

As I’ve been thinking about this story, I keep coming back to those things in it that perplex me. One is Jesus’ response to the leper’s request. Was he angry? If so, why? Was he moved with pity? One of the things that Christians have tended to do over the centuries is to turn Jesus into a savior that responds to our requests and needs with joy and sympathy. That tendency is present even in the gospels where often the very emotional language that Mark uses to describe Jesus is toned down in Matthew, Luke, and John. We have a hard time imagining a Jesus who might get angry when confronted by a leper, or even, might be so moved by his plight that his stomach turned.

Jesus was on the road, doing important business when this leper confronted him, and he had to stop for him. It was an encounter that changed both of them. The leper was healed, but Jesus had to change his plans. He had to call off that mission trip. He could no longer enter the towns he had planned to visit. In a way, he and the leper changed places. The healed leper could now go wherever he wanted, he could proclaim the good news, but Jesus had to let people come to him.

Lots to think about this week.

Preaching Scripture, Teaching Scripture, and the Episcopal Church

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Today was one of those days when the Holy Spirit moved.

I’ve been struggling to rethink several things: First of all, how do we create community in a downtown parish when the primary point of contact is the worship service? We can’t hope to get most of those people to stay for coffee hour, let alone get involved more deeply in the life of our parish. Second, how do we do adult education or formation when we get a smattering of people to attend our adult forums, and handful of people to come out at night if we offer something substantive?

And then I read George Clifford’s essay about reading and interpreting the Bible at the Daily Episcopalian. The reality is that for most of those who attend our services their only contact with scripture is listening to the readings on Sunday morning. What we do with those scriptures on Sunday morning is the primary lens through which they will hear them.

I may have had Clifford’s essay in the back of my mind as I began thinking about today’s sermon. I certainly had in mind the fact that we were going to push name tags today. We’ve had too many visitors, too many newcomers in recent months, and we aren’t getting connected with them. But I wanted that connection to be with more than the preacher and celebrant. I wanted to make connections across the pews, across the aisles.

So here’s what I did. I got people talking to each other, and talking about the gospel. I told them to introduce themselves to one another, and to talk about what was puzzling, or problematic, or strange in today’s gospel reading. I walked up and down the aisle and I heard the buzz. It was amazing. I had to interrupt after a couple of minutes, and I invited them to continue their conversations at the peace, and at coffee hour. And then I invited them to share their questions.

And I was surprised. They asked the right questions: Why did Jesus tell the demons to keep silent? Why did Jesus have to go away for privacy? Why did he heal Simon’s mother-in-law so that she was able to get up and serve them? Now, granted, Grace Church is a highly educated congregation, but in my experience, a good education does not necessarily mean that someone is capable of asking intelligent questions about scripture.

But here’s the thing. I’ve been Rector of Grace for nearly three years, and for nearly three years, I have been asking just those sorts of questions about the text in my sermons. Over those three years, this congregation has grown accustomed to pay attention to the reading of the gospel, and, I suspect, to look for those interesting things in the gospel, things that might catch my eye, because chances are, I’m going to talk about them.

I remember the days when I was on the other side of the altar, when I was sitting in the pew, listening to the readings, and wondering what the preacher would do with the text. I remember listening to stories from the Hebrew Bible being read, and looking across at other people and seeing the questions in their eyes, and then waiting for the preacher to talk about those amazing stories, and being disappointed when instead we heard about their latest trip to the Grand Canyon.

Each Sunday, we hear three texts read plus a psalm. Each Sunday there are worlds that we encounter in those texts, the struggles, hopes, and faith of generations past. Too often, preachers recoil in fear from those texts, avoid talking about them, avoid their difficulties, avoid the obvious questions that any careful reader would have. We don’t take the texts seriously and we don’t respect the intelligence or faithfulness of our listeners.

I am more and more convinced that serious Christian formation, serious education begins in the pulpit and in the pews, that for us to once again become a people of the book, a people of scripture, a community interpreting scripture together, we have to do it on Sunday mornings, in the context of the liturgy. If for no other reason than, if we don’t do it there, we won’t have another chance.

And here’s the other thing. After the service, a parishioner pointed out that I could have done something quite different with the texts that would have made a perfect connection with our focus on name tags. Each of the lessons, he pointed out, had something to say about names, about the power of naming. And then he said, “Well, I’ve given you your sermon idea for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany in 2015.” Indeed, what a gift!

Welcoming, Healing, and Discipleship

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Today, we decided to push nametags for everyone, so I wanted to do something in the sermon that would connect with that. Today’s gospel wasn’t an obvious fit, and in any case, it’s one of those passages that doesn’t preach itself. I finally figured out how to do it, and some of my sermon is below.

But I began in the aisle which isn’t my practice. I began with an allusion to a piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago about welcoming the stranger. At the early service, I asked everyone’s name, and then asked them to talk about the gospel with me. At 10:00, I had people turn to their neighbors. Here’s what I meant to say:

Continue reading →

Slavery, Racism, and the letter of a freedman to his former master

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You probably saw this letter making the rounds this week. It’s a remarkable thing, from a former slave in response to the request of his former master that he come back to work for him. Among the choicest bits:

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living.

…

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

 

When the letter was posted to yahoo, the comments thread focused on the impossibility of it being authentic. I won’t link to that, but it’s what the “racism” in my post title refers to.

Others have dug more deeply into the letter’s provenance. It was dictated by Anderson, and published in The Freedmen’s Book. Others have discovered that Anderson was living in Ohio as late as the 1900 census, and they have also discovered much of his family tree. Fascinating stuff.

Music, Faith, and Skepticism

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Using the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams as a starting point, Terry Teachout asks, “How can skeptics make convincing works of art?” His answer? Of Vaughan Williams’ work he writes:

an artist need not be an orthodox believer—or, indeed, any kind of believer—to be inspired by the eloquence of scripture and the transforming power of faith. You can, I suppose, dismiss that message as purest Victorian hypocrisy, but to listen to the G-Minor Mass and the Fifth Symphony is to know that the greathearted genius who made them was the truest of believers in the power of art to uplift and ennoble the souls of his fellow men. We should all be such hypocrites.

Vaughan Williams is an interesting case, because of the popularity of his hymns among Anglicans (and, indeed, English-speaking Christianity). How many people have come to faith, or had their faith strengthened, by “For all the Saints” (Sine Nomine) or “Come Down, O Love Divine” (Down Ampney)?

Jeff Warren is exploring the relationship between music and religious faith from a slightly different perspective in a series of essays on BioLogos, specifically, with reference to human evolution. In the first essay, he writes:

considering music as culturally embedded lets us recognize something quite different from the arguments that musical meaning is either subjective or encoded within the music itself. Music does allow for subjective response, but not truly autonomous response—our experience of music occurs within the bounds of cultural norms.

The tendency in Western thinking about music to conceive composition as creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo), not only seems to put the composer on the same level as God the Creator, but it also seems to deny the importance of community and relationship.

In the second essay, he looks more closely at what neuroscience is learning about music. According to Warren, neuroscience also points to the importance of cultural appropriation. Working with the ideas of Eric Clarke:

Clarke – an Oxford scholar trained as a psychologist and musicologist – offers an ecological theory of listening that examines organisms listening in their environment. He argues that “we all have the potential to hear different things in the same music – but the fact that we don’t (or at least not all the time) is an indication of the degree to which we share a common environment, and experience common perceptual learning or adaptation”.5 This runs contrary to at least the popularized versions of the neuroscience of music — which attempt to unlock a singular biofunctional “key” to understanding music — and moves us back toward the essential idea that music, for all its neurological components, is also a cultural phenomenon that must be examined in terms of human relationships.

In the third essay, Warren draws on the work of Ian Cross, who

Cross asks if music might have been the most important thing we ever did.2 The key to his argument is that music’s “floating intentionality” allows for a kind of mutual participation among different individuals that he calls “entrainment,” opening the possibility of shared emotional states that may have been critical to the evolution of culture.

From this brief survey, he concludes:

I have approached various topics relating to music and science to show that encountering other people is foundational to musical experience. If music is fundamentally inter-relational, then all musical experience has ethical implications, and that needs to be considered in any scientific investigation. But how might this understanding contribute to the charged discussions on the role of music in worship services?

Or to put it another way, “musical encounters can and should be enactments of loving your neighbour.”

This puts the “worship wars” in a completely different perspective.

Embodied faith

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One of the fascinating questions for theologians and scientists is the relationship between our brains and religious experience or religious faith. The underlying question goes back at least to Descartes (you know, cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am”). But, in fact, the question lies at the heart of Christian anthropology, the relationship of body and soul. Whatever the traditional understanding of that relationship, it is profoundly challenged by contemporary neuroscience and philosophy.

Mark Vernon points to the problem:

A diverse group of philosophers and scientists are now arguing that the dominant 20th-century view of cognition, as a capacity of brains or minds, is inadequate. The alternative is often called embodied cognition. It examines the evidence that our bodies play a vital role in how we engage with the world. According to this view, bodies are not just life-support systems for the brain or sources of sensory inputs. Rather, bodies are integral to human thought.

The implication is clear. If bodies are integral to human thought, they are also integral to our religious lives.

He concludes:

if a religious sensibility needs an embodied foundation, this would explain why spiritual directors advise individuals to make pilgrimages, to experience liturgies and rituals, and to discipline and pattern their lives. These are activities that are about letting go, which is also a letting in. Something opens up to a new experience of life. Illumination is gained. Faith known first in the body may be the result.

Vernon is writing in response to a  series of posts by Julian Baggini, “Heathen’s Progress.” Baggini responds directly to Vernon’s views in another post, “The modern believer is not suspicious enough:”

A persistent pain is a pretty good indicator of the presence of bodily damage; the feeling that you have been touched by the Holy Spirit is only a good indicator that you have had a generic religious experience, shared by many the world over, and you have interpreted it according to the narratives and belief systems familiar to you.

Wherever one stands on this issue, and to the extent that every thought, including a religious idea or experience, is in some sense embodied (at the very least it is the product, in some sense, of neural activity), religious faith, or experience, is embodied.

But this raises another question: “Why might our minds be better suited to religion than science?”

Religion involves cognitive representations and cognitive processing that come naturally to human minds, while science traffics in radically counterintuitive representations and in forms of cognitive processing whose acquisition and mastery require disciplined reflective activity across many years of formal education.

For me, among the intriguing questions, apart from the theological and scientific questions, is the significance of all this for contemporary Christianity. We are seeing radical change in the nature of Christian community, with the decline in attendance and membership in mainline denominations and the rise of social media. What does embodied faith look like for young adults who connect via texting or facebook but may not attend services? Even more important, given the importance of embodiment in Christianity, the incarnation, the notion of the community as the body of Christ, embodied practices from the Eucharist to shared outreach, how do we make the connections with the bodies that shape and are shaped by belief?

Segregation past and present, racism past and present

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Walter Russell Mead points to a WSJ article describing a study that concludes:

Fifty years ago, nearly half the black population lived in a ghetto, the study said, while today that proportion has shrunk to 20%. All-white neighborhoods in U.S. cities are effectively extinct, according to the report.

I read this after a conversation with a parishioner that began by him asking me about the South Carolina primary and continued with his first encounter with segregation and Jim Crow while being based near Ft. Worth, TX during WWII.

It’s wonderful that American metropolitan areas are less segregated today than fifty years ago, but the WSJ article goes on to point out that there remain glaring differences in racial inequality: “Minorities at every income level tend to reside in poorer neighborhoods than whites with comparable incomes.”

Part of the reason for this enormous change is the migration of African Americans back into the “sunbelt.” Both retirees and younger people have moved in search of jobs and better quality of life. Immigration has also played a role.

God and the Gods–Lectionary reflections for 5 Epiphany, Year B

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This week’s readings are here.

One of the questions that struck me yesterday as I was listening to the readings (hearing someone else read them aloud often brings new insights) was the status of “the god’s” in Paul’s discussion of eating food offered to idols. Here’s that text: 1 Corinthians 8:1-13. 

Paul isn’t exactly clear on the status of other gods: “Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth– as in fact there are many gods and many lords– yet for us there is one God…” On the one hand, it seems he denies the reality of those gods, but here, he admits to the existence of “so-called gods.” One explanation for this lies in the hierarchical understanding the universe in hellenistic thought, an understanding Paul shares. There are principalities, and powers, spirits, divine beings, that inhabit the various realms that exist between earth and heaven. They may not be precisely gods, but they have powers that vastly surpass human power.

In this week’s lesson from Hebrew Scripture, we read from Isaiah 40. This passage comes from what scholars call Second Isaiah. This section (40-56, more or less) derives from the period of exile in Babylon in the sixth century. It is evidence for the remarkable transformation that is taking place in theology among the exilic community (most scholars conclude that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, was compiled in this period). Second Isaiah is reaching toward a monotheistic theology that would come to characterize Judaism. We see some of that here.

Earlier in chapter 40, the prophet has proclaimed God’s power and wisdom. He compared Yahweh to the image of a deity:

To whom then will you liken God,
or what likeness compare with him?
An idol? —A workman casts it,
and a goldsmith overlays it with gold,
and casts for it silver chains.

Those are verses 18-19. In our passage, the prophet praises God as creator of the universe and as the one who establishes and unseats the world’s rulers. 40:26 is particularly interesting, both in the Babylonian context and in light of Genesis 1. The prophet asks,

“Lift up your eyes on high and see:
Who created these?
He who brings out their host and numbers them,
calling them all by name;”

Two points. First, the reference is to the stars and asserts God’s power over them. In addition, the use of the verb created–the only other instance of the use of this word is in the creation accounts of Genesis, describing God’s creative activity (this from Steed Davidson at workingpreacher.org). In Genesis 1, the creation of the stars makes explicit the limits of their power: “let them be for signs and seasons and days and years” and “let them rule over day and night.” Specifically, the stars, sun and moon do not have power over human lives or fates.

We tend to assume that our understanding of God, is static, has always been the understanding of Christians, if not of Jews (there’s that whole trinitarian thing, after all). In their own ways, both Second Isaiah and Paul are grappling with the relationship of their monotheistic beliefs (that God is one) and their belief in a universe that is filled with other divine beings.

Our problem in the twenty-first century isn’t quite the same–we worry more about whether we can say that other religions might be true, whatever we think of their deities. Still, I wonder about the resonances of both of these passages for the contemporary life of faith.

Why I despair of the future of the Episcopal Church

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The Executive Council of the Episcopal Church met over the weekend and received this dire report about decline in the church. One word description: catastrophic! But that’s not what sends me into despair or wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s the dust-up between the Presiding Bishop and the President of the House of Deputies (You’ll recall that there was a similar controversy at last fall’s meeting over a presentation by Bishop Stacy Sauls).

Over the last decade, pretty much every measure of health of the church has declined by between 10% and 20% and our leadership is arguing over whether it’s appropriate for the Presiding Bishop to communicate directly with General Convention deputies. You can read about it here, if you’ve got the stomach for it.

We’re in the midst of an existential crisis, and our leadership argues over its rights and prerogatives. I don’t care about the merits of either position and above all, I dread what’s going to happen at General Convention 2012, what actions it will take that will divert our energies, attention, and passion away from ministry and mission. I cite two examples

1) The denominational health plan. However praiseworthy its intent, however just and equitable its origin, it is instilling fear in this neck of the church. Those of us with excellent healthcare at reasonable prices fear being forced into less generous plans at higher premiums. Clergy fear the loss of full benefits because of the requirement that laity and clergy receive the same benefit. All of the parishes in our area are facing budget shortfalls as it is, and are contemplating laying off staff. The requirement to offer same coverage for full-time lay employees will probably mean that many parishes will simply reduce the hours of their lay employees. There is deep concern about the way the Denominational Health Plan is being implemented? What is GC doing to listen to and respond to these very significant concerns? I, for one, have heard nary a peep out of those who in their wisdom passed the legislation.

2) Same Sex Blessings liturgies. In 2009, General Convention mandated that the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music gather resources for such liturgies. Rather belatedly, the SCLM began publishing such resources (this past fall). Belatedly, because among the documents is one entitled “educational material for diocesan conventions” that appeared on December 13, 2011. That’s two months after we held our convention in the diocese of Milwaukee.

In 2003, we were completely unprepared for the impact of General Convention, understandably so, because of the date of Bishop Robinson’s election. In 2012, we know what is coming. We know that there will be media scrutiny and intense discussion in the Anglican blogosphere,  From what I can tell of the materials produced by the SCLM, and from what I can tell of what I’ve read, they seem both somewhat superficial and often incomprehensible.

For me, the important question is this: How is General Convention preparing us in local parishes deal with the controversy? And I don’t primarily mean the conversations over the shape liturgies might take.  What materials are they providing local clergy to deal with the phone call from the local newspaper reporter who is writing an article on the topic and interviewing conservative Christian leaders as well?

Once again, my guess is that General Convention is going to leave us to our own devices, ill-prepared and ill-equipped to deal with the local consequences of its actions and increasingly curious why so many of us in the church want to have nothing to do with it.

That’s why I despair of the future of the Episcopal Church. I’ve been active in the Episcopal Church for two decades, I’ve been involved in parish leadership for a decade, and every General Convention in that time has contributed to conflict in the parish and led to diversion of precious resources of time, energy, and passion. I’m looking forward to GC 2012 with fear and trembling.

 

 

The Holy Spirit, an unclean spirit, and the Reign of God: A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B

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January 29, 2012

I never know who or what I might encounter when I get the phone call from the fishbowl, the receptionist and hear the words, “there’s someone here who wants to talk to the pastor.” Well, I know a couple of things. Whoever it is, isn’t Episcopalian. And I also know that whatever their problem is, it’s likely I can’t do much to help. Usually, it’s a request for money for rent or utilities, or bus fare. Occasionally, they just want to talk, like the guy a few months ago whose lead question was something about human nature. Then there are those who have really serious problems. Continue reading →