Author Archives: djgrieser

Unknown's avatar

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.

Please don’t call the liturgy police!

Posted on by
Reply

So, I did one of those things you’re probably warned against in Liturgy classes in seminary, but then I didn’t take such a class. Our 12 noon Spanish-language service has been without a regular priest since the retirement of Pat Size last year. It’s a small, but lively and very committed group and we are committed to seeing it thrive and support as long as needed. They continue to worship together, saying Morning Prayer some Sundays, relying on supply priests and occasionally a deacon to lead services. Although this solution may seem to be cobbled together, it has had one great benefit–raising up lay leadership and lay ownership of that worship service, empowering the laity to do the people’s work (liturgy).

When I met with the congregation several months ago to check in and see how I might support their efforts, I suggested on the spur of the moment, that we experiment with me celebrating the Eucharist in English, and they responding in Spanish. Today was our first trial.

It was interesting. Occasionally, I heard English responses to my words, but for the most part, we did it half and half. There was something of a disconnect, for me at least, but at the same time, we did come together around the altar as the Body of Christ, to share Christ’s body and blood, and in that coming together, we became one. It may be that in time, we will all become more comfortable with this experiment and find ways of making it more meaningful. I must say, it is rather odd, though, to use two languages in the liturgy. It seems to go against the notion of “common prayer.” Right now, we are planning on continuing the experiment on a monthly basis for the fall. We’ll see how it goes.

Even Dogs eat the crumbs from their masters’ tables: A Sermon for Proper 15, Year A

Posted on by
3

Proper 15, year A

Mt 15:21-28

August 14, 2011

 

 

 

Imagine you are a parent, a mother whose daughter is ill. You’ve been to all the doctors, they haven’t given you a certain diagnosis, and they haven’t been able to treat her. All they can say is that she’s possessed by a demon. You’re at your wits’ end. You’ve even tried the quacks, the self-styled miracle workers and faith healers. But nothing has worked. Now you hear about this guy who’s coming through town; he’s not from around here, he’s Jewish, and back where he’s from, he’s done some amazing things. So you figure, let’s go check him out.

You see him walking down the road with his entourage, there are lots of people around him, and surrounding him are a bunch of guys who look like his security detail, his handlers. You have no chance to get close to him, so you cry out, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” You’re making quite a ruckus by now, so the security guys, ok, let’s call them disciples, tell Jesus, “send her away.”

This is your last chance to help your daughter and you hope your shouted plea will bring a response, but the guy, Jesus, just keeps walking as if he didn’t hear you. So you keep trying. What do you have to lose? Somehow, you are able to elbow your way through the crowd, get past his handlers. Now, you kneel in front of him and ask again, “Lord, have mercy.”

Now you’re making a scene in front of him, blocking his way, so finally, Jesus has to respond. But does he turn to you in compassion and ask you what’s wrong? No. He tells you that your problems are no business of his. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” In other words, I am here to help Jews, not Gentiles, like you.

In fact, the gospel has made that point even more clearly in its description of the woman as a Canaanite. To call her a Canaanite is bizarre. The Canaanites of course were Israel’s old enemies 800 years before. They had worshipped Baal and his female consort Asherah, and the Old Testament is full of stories of conflicts between Yahweh, Israel’s God, and Baal. So Matthew is trying to make the point that this woman is completely outside of God’s care, she’s not just any old gentile—she’s belongs to the most worthless, most hated group of all.

So Jesus tells you, “look I’ve got nothing to do with you.” But like any loving parent, you won’t take no for an answer. “Lord, help me,” you plead.

Now Jesus responds to you directly, but what he says is hardly reassuring. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” You’re not sure you believe your ears. Indeed, we hearing these words 2000 years later, aren’t sure we get what Jesus means.

But what the meaning quickly becomes clear. You do get it and reply, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ tables.”

Let’s stop right here. Did you get it this time around? Jesus has basically called her (and those of her community) dogs. She doesn’t deny it, she doesn’t bristle at the put down. Instead, she turns it back on him. “We may be dogs, Jesus, but remember, loving masters give their dogs table scraps to eat.”

Now, you’ve finally convinced him. Jesus praises your faith, and your daughter is healed instantly. Not a very pretty story is it? Jesus isn’t behaving like he’s supposed to behave, and the woman isn’t exactly a model of proper decorum, either.

This is may be of the most troubling stories in all of the gospels. Jesus is supposed to be merciful and compassionate, he’s supposed to respond with love and care when someone asks him for help. But that’s not what he does here. It’s not just that Jesus treats her with what appears to be enormous disrespect. It’s that she forces him to change his mind, to do something he seems not to want to do.

This story reminds of something quite important. Jesus is not quite everything we want him to be. We’ve got this warm, fuzzy notion about Jesus and this story breaks that notion apart. We want him to behave according to our standards and expectations, to fit into the box we’ve made for him, but unfortunately, the gospels tell a different story. As much as we want to domesticate Jesus and make his message one that confirms our preconceived notions of faith and of God, the gospels tell a different story. And this story may be the one that is most challenging of all.

One of the things I like about this story is that it shows a woman, an outsider, someone who has no religious power or even religious significance in the Jewish world of first century Palestine, challenging Jesus. More than that, as an outsider, as someone of reviled status, she forces herself into the story. She forces her way through Jesus’ disciples. She forces him to pay attention. She makes him stop in his tracks and notice her. When he ignores her dismisses her, she doesn’t walk away. She flat out disagrees with him, takes issue with him, engages in wordplay, and beats him at his own game.

The story addresses one of the central problems in early Christianity—the relationship of gentiles to the God of the Jews. Now, it’s not a big deal for us, since we are, I presume the vast majority of us, Gentile Christians, we weren’t Jews. But it was a big deal for the first Christians. In fact, in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus ministers to Gentiles only three times and this is the first occasion in his public ministry that he encounters a Gentile. It is clear that his mission is to Jews. After his resurrection, of course, he commissions the disciples to “make disciples of all nations.” But at this point, Jesus’ ministry is to the Jewish community and it may be, that until this encounter with the Canaanite woman, he had no notion that he might also minister outside that community, to Gentiles. Certainly, Matthew places this story here, to use it as a turning point in the gospel.

Just as the Canaanite woman challenged Jesus, this story challenges us. We claim to be followers of Jesus, but this remarkable tale confronts us with two very different models of following him. On the one hand, there are the disciples who are acting here as security guards to prevent unwanted people from gaining access to Jesus. They protect the traditional standards and boundaries of the faith. Moreover, they have not exactly been examples of faith. Jesus tells them more than once, “Oh, you of little faith.”

On the other hand, there is the Canaanite woman who approaches Jesus on her knees, addresses him as Son of David, and says, as we say in the liturgy, “Kyrie Eleison, Lord, have mercy.” In the end, Jesus says to her, “Great is her faith.” It is she that exhibits faith, she who understands who Jesus is, she who is the true follower, disciple, of Jesus.

But her faith is not the docile, simple faith that is so often extolled in works of piety or devotion. Hers is a questioning, challenging faith, a cheeky faith—demanding answers and responses not only from those around her, but also from the very God in whom she believes, the Jesus, before whom she kneels and begs, “Kyrie, Eleison, Lord have mercy.”

The Canaanite woman speaks for all of us when she demands that Jesus help her, because in Matthew’s gospel, it is in part through her demand that the mission of Jesus was extended to us. But she also challenges us all. She demands of us to admit where we stand, with the disciples who maintain the boundaries of comfort and convention, or with a God who is constantly breaking down the barriers that divide human beings from one another, who constantly challenges us to imagine a God whose grace and mercy extends not only to ourselves and those like us, but to all those whom we hate, revile, ignore, and dismiss.

 

Social Media–Assorted links and comment

Posted on by
Reply

The New Media Project, from Union Theological Seminary, has great commentary on the use and implications of social media for religious organizations. Here are some of the recent provocative essays:

“As people ‘of the Book,’ are we instead cultivating a Tweet and sound bite religion as opposed to one of narrative and story?”

Reklis began the conversation by writing:

I want to start thinking about the theology of this future we are living. That is, I want to start thinking about what we can say theologically about the human subjects we are becoming in the face of transformative social media.

I’m inclined not to diatribe about new technology. It’s here to stay, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Even monasteries, designed for retreat from the world, use websites and social media. But the existence of digital technology means we have to work harder to cultivate an interior life that notices. We have to learn again how to converse, to argue, to talk rather than to text.

While the evermore interconnected nature of our world doesn’t change the nature of God, it provides new models that can enrich our understanding. An abstract theological concept such as, “God is everywhere,” is somehow easier to visualize now that it feels as if we can be everywhere at once, if only virtually. The idea that we’re all part of the worldwide body of Christ is easier to grasp in an era in which we are joined in a nexus of communication that brings people together whether they’re across the street or in the mountains of northern India.

Rice points to something important. It’s easy to see the practical implications of social media–the increased power to communicate, the ability to create and maintain relationships across vast distances, but the deeper meaning of relating through facebook and other social media is more elusive. Reslik points in the same direction by asking about what kinds of human beings are we becoming by making use of technology. Rice takes it another step to ask, what is the church, the body of Christ, becoming?

Those of us who are incarnational in our theology may be somewhat suspect of relationships built and maintained through cyberspace rather than through the hard work of being together in community as the body of Christ and sharing the body of Christ.

From Forbes: “Top Ten Social Media Myths.”

More on Michele Bachmann and Religion

Posted on by
Reply

Ryan Lizza’s in-depth examination in The New Yorker.  He talks about evangelical guru Francis Schaeffer, whose book and later video series “How should we then live” chronicled the decline of Christianity from the Renaissance on, and was wildly popular among a certain subset of Evangelicals in the late 70s (I remember trying to read the book at the insistence of a classmate in 79 or 80 and being finding it offensive and occasionally humorous). He also discusses the faculty of the law school at Oral Roberts University. Lizza begins, however, with this statement:

Bachmann belongs to a generation of Christian conservatives whose views have been shaped by institutions, tracts, and leaders not commonly known to secular Americans, or even to most Christians.

My guess is that while particular names or institutions might not be familiar to “most Christians,” these views are widespread, and widely disseminated among the hard-core religious right.
Lizza also discusses the biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Stephen Wilkins, who argues “that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North.” The whole article is well-worth the read.
My previous entries on Bachmann’s religion are here and here.


 

Two articles on grief and mourning

Posted on by
Reply

From Slate, a report on a survey about “what grief is really like.” In this report, a discussion of what grievers wanted from friends and acquaintances:

Asked what would have helped them with their grief, the survey-takers talked again and again about acknowledgement of their grief. They wanted recognition of their loss and its uniqueness; they wanted help with practical matters; they wanted active emotional support. What they didn’t want was to be offered false comfort in the form of empty platitudes. Acknowledgement, love, a receptive ear, help with the cooking, company—these were the basic supports that mourning rituals once provided; even if we’ve never experienced a loss ourselves, we know from literature and history that people require them. Yet as American culture has become divorced from death and dying, we no longer know how to address the most rudimentary aspects of another’s loss—what to say, when to say it, how to say it. Disconcerted by discomfort, friends or colleagues are all too likely to disappear or turn the conversation to small talk in the aftermath of a loss, not knowing what to say. Our survey-takers reported wanting to grieve communally and yearning to find ways to relate to those around them.

Among other things, the article stressed the meaninglessness of platitudes and the importance of rituals.

An earlier article on the theme.

From Salon, Sheila Trask writes about the lengthy grieving process after three deaths in her family.

 

 

The Plight of Christians after the Arab Spring

Posted on by
Reply

Molly Worthen writes about the “persecution complex” of American Evangelicals and their ambivalent response to the persecution of Christians in the wake of the Arab Spring.

Today, we learned that the priest of the Anglican Church in Damascus, Syria, is being forced to leave.

On the other hand, here’s today’s example of the persecution complex at work in the US. A Federal court decided that the prayers beginning Forsyth County, NC county commission meetings were unconstitutional. The outcry has been intense. How 95% of a county (the estimated percentage of its 350,000 residents who are Christian) can claim to be a beleaguered and persecuted religious minority is beyond me.

Christianity and the Arts, continued

Posted on by
Reply

I meant to include links to these two pieces in my earlier post but I forgot about them.

A new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art explores Rembrandt’s “Faces of Jesus.”

“Rembrandt’s concept of Christ changed significantly as his art evolved from one decade to the next,” argues George S. Keyes in his catalog essay, with “Rembrandt’s earlier representations of Jesus [showing him] in dramatically charged events” and later depictions making “Christ… an object of profound meditation.” This evolution can clearly be seen in Rembrandt’s almost endless returning to his favorite story of Jesus on the Road to Emmaus and the Supper at Emmaus. From small drawings focusing on the explosively radiant divinity of Christ at the moment of revelation at Emmaus to paintings such as the Louvre’s 1648 Supper at Emmaus focusing more on the reactions of the disciples than on the more-reserved, resurrected Jesus (whose appearance seems based on the “Philadelphia” head), Rembrandt shifted away from Jesus as the heroic superbeing of antiquity towards a more human, more accessible to believers, and, perhaps, truer face of Christ.

More here. The exhibition will also travel to Detroit. Well worth the trip, I should think. I’m interested in the article’s identification of the Supper at Emmaus as Rembrandt’s favorite subject, especially given the loaded theological significance of the story for seventeenth-century religious conflict. No doubt dissertations have been written on the topic (none of which I plan on reading).

From visual art to music. Peter Phillips’ review of Christopher Page’s The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years. Money quote:

Largely as a result of Guido’s invention, the Latin West had become a place of common worship by the twelfth century, and was given a name: Latinitas. By 1200, clerics envisaged the way they lived and worshipped as being of one tradition with one chant, despite the individual histories of sees such as Milan, with its Ambrosian rites, and the Mozarabic chant in Spain. The Cistercian order was founded by Bernard of Clairvaux to perpetuate the unity of the Roman way of doing things, and staff-notation was from the beginning crucial to their work. During the twelfth century they carried this notation to all corners of the Latin West, deliberately founding houses in remote places.

Of course, the Cistercian order wasn’t founded by Bernard of Clairvaux. Oh, well.

 

Religion and Violence

Posted on by
Reply

Adam Serwer points to a new Gallup poll that explores the relationship between religion and the use of violence among Americans. The key take-away:

Muslims are by far the least likely among all religious groups to justify targeting civilians, whether done by the military or by “an individual person or a small group of persons.” Seventy-eight percent of Muslims say that military attacks on civilians are never justified, while the numbers for Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and atheists hover in the 50s.

Another question asked whether American Muslims repudiated Al-Qaeda: 92% of Muslim Americans claimed no sympathy with the terrorist organization; while only 56% of American Protestants answered the question in the same way.

All the more we ought to worry about Spencer Ackerman’s discovery of a pdf file that seems to have been used as recently as 2009 by the FBI to educate its agents about Islam.

Christianity and the arts

Posted on by
Reply

Several recent essays remind us of the importance of the arts for religious faith and practice.

First, Richard Hays asks, “Why should we care about the arts?” He cites four reasons:

  1. “There is no escaping the arts. They create the imaginative symbolic world in which we live and move; we are constantly surrounded by images, music and stories.”
  2. Worship is nothing else than shaping beliefs and practices into artistic forms and more people (60% of the American population) hear live music in worship than in any other setting.
  3. Participation in artistic performances is useful instruction in faithful discipleship.
  4. Created in the image of a creative God, we are by nature fashioners of images and stories and it is through creativity that we make our selves more fully into God’s image.

I was reminded of the role of the arts in worship this past Sunday while attending services at the church in which I grew up. In many ways, the space is a generic Protestant church–there are no images in the stained glass or on the walls; the ceiling, pews, and front of the church are all plain. What differs from my youth is the presence of instruments in the church–a piano and drum set. But this past Sunday, the hymns were sung in four-part harmony as they were when I was a member. All of them were familiar to me and I was struck by the way in which this unaccompanied, four-part singing had been and perhaps continues to be, an important means for creating and shaping community. As one member shared a story that had to do with singing, I became aware of something else, too: through singing, members also take on particular roles in the community.

A conversation reflecting on the differences between Christian (in this case, specifically Thomas Kincaide) and Modern art poses similar questions. It seems that although most modern artists whose work hangs in great museums are not Christian, or even religious in any conventional sense, but nonetheless, many found that ideas or experiences of the transcendent were central to their work:

Artists who don’t have an orthodox Christian bone in their bodies are making paintings that they’re intending, even in subconscious ways, to function in this very specific, sacred, and you could say a secular-Christian, environment.

One of the conversation partners, Curtis Chang, observed that

When I visited the modern art wing recently, it struck me that there was far more silence and contemplation there than I’ve found at any church service …

Rob Goodman reflects on the differences between bad and good religious art in the course of a discussion of Terence Malick:

But I don’t want to be so hard on Malick’s failed comforter: there’s painfully little any of us can say to grief, or to any of the other human needs that inspire religious feeling. And I think it’s an inability or unwillingness to recognize that fact that is the deeper mistake of bad religious art: it wants to argue us into faith. It won’t rest without a moral, a message, a lesson to take home. But religious persuasion can’t work that way—because religious thought doesn’t work that way.

When we reach for our most fundamental beliefs—whether these are beliefs about a deity, or politics, or family—we aren’t likely to find words there. We’re much more likely to find images, metaphors, memories, half-felt impressions. We’re likely to find, that is, something far more slippery, more vague, more illogical than discursive argument. Words come afterwards—but the fact that they so often rest on a foundation of images goes a long way to explain why the most seemingly persuasive arguments fail so often: why we seek out evidence that confirms our beliefs; why we ignore evidence that does not; why being caught in contradictions often makes us hold on to them even tighter. Arguments rarely touch our central beliefs where they live, and the most perceptive religious thinkers understand this.

I think that’s one of the appeals of beautifully-executed Episcopal liturgy, words that are themselves beautiful, spoken or sung beautifully in a lovely space, all of which connects deeply to images and feelings within ourselves. Oh, it’s not for everyone, of course, but for those who seek beauty in life, may find beauty, and the sacred, in our worship.

“Sometimes the Bible is Wrong”–An Interview with Marcus Borg

Posted on by
Reply

Check it out.

Let me echo the words of Paul, who says we have this treasure in earthen vessels. I think the NRSV translates it as we have this treasure in clay pots. I see the words of the Bible as the earthen vessel. The words are a human product, made of the earth, and yet within this earthen vessel we have this treasure of divine wisdom, this treasure of our spiritual ancestors, the stories and experiences and insights that mattered to them—as well as the limited understanding and sometimes even blindness of our spiritual ancestors.