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The backlash of institutions (and their spokespeople) against “Spiritual but not Religious”

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Another week, another study. There are some remarkable numbers here. Among those aged 18-24, 32% prefer no religion; of those between the ages of 25 and 34, 29% claim “no religion;” Among those 35-44, only 19%. But underneath those headlines lies  a more complex reality. They may have no religious affiliation but the vast majority of Americans continue to express belief in God or belief in a higher power. The percentage of those identifying as atheist (3.1%) or agnost (5.6%) remains very small.

This study, as others before it, makes clear that while institutional affiliation may be falling dramatically, religious belief and practice are not declining significantly.

Gary Laderman, chair of the Religion Department at Emory University and scholar of American Religion, points out that the rise of the “nones” means the study of Religion in America is more interesting than ever. He gives several reasons for the rise, one of them is:

Finally, the rise of the “nones” surely suggests it is the end of religion as we know it. Forget churches; forget priests and pastors; forget the Bible; forget organized religion generally. What is sacred are no longer conventional objects like a cross, a singular religious identity like being a Methodist, nor activities like going to church or prayer. Instead, the religious worlds in the contemporary and future United States are robust and capacious, providing an abundance of spiritual possibilities found in unexpected places like drum circles and meditation exercises, sports events and other expressions from popular culture. It is a brave new world for religious Americans who are increasingly unhinged from traditional authorities and institutions.

Elizabeth Drescher is studying the prayer practices of the “nones” and has some pointed questions about prayer divorced from religious traditions and communities.

I’ve blogged about Lillian Daniel’s views before. Her recent book continues to garner interest. I’m not exactly sure who she’s writing for, to reassure those of us who are caretakers of traditional religious institutions are doing valuable work? Is she trying to convince the SBNR folks that their efforts to make meaning in their life are of little value? At least she doesn’t harangue them quite like Rabbi David Wolpe.

One one level, all this consternation from religious institutions and their representatives about the nones reminds me of the complaints throughout history of pastors, theologians, bishops, and other insiders about the behavior of their flocks. In the fourth century, Ambrose worried that the faithful were going out of the city to martyrs’ shrines and not attending his sermons. In the Middle Ages, preachers and priests complained that people didn’t pay attention to sermons or came only when they heard the sanctus bell that indicated the moment of the consecration of the host. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Protestant preachers also complained that attendance at services was poor and devotion languished. Had you asked those who were criticized for their lukewarm faith and behavior, I’ve no doubt they would have responded by saying they were good Christians. They just weren’t the sort of Christians their leaders wanted them to be.

The fact of the matter is that throughout the history of Christianity, indeed, throughout the history of religion, there has been a disconnect between what institutions and sacred experts wanted in terms of behavior (and doctrinal purity) of their communities, and what ordinary men and women actually did religiously, and how they understood and appropriated what they did. What we are seeing is not so much a decline in religious practice or belief, but rather a decline in the understanding that religious practice and belief must be tied to religious institutions. They are free of the religious expectations imposed on them from above.

The question, then, is not how to get people back into the pews, but rather, how can we connect with people who no longer automatically see us as valuable experts on religion or even as valuable spiritual guides? How can we encounter them where they are, invite them to ask their questions, encourage them to enter more deeply into the rich spiritual traditions of Christianity, but at the same time recognize that they may never join the Altar Guild. It’s likely, however, that if we have concrete outreach opportunities for them to engage, they will work side by side with us. To succeed with the nones may not mean getting them to join our churches. Instead, it may mean recognizing the legitimacy of their spiritual journeys and engaging them there, rather than trying to force them to engage us on our terms.

The Changing Sea Project is exploring the spirituality of emerging adults and their relationship with religious institutions. More on the spirituality and religious practices of “emerging adults:”

This group of emergent adults says they feel close to God. They adapt religious traditions according to their own individual needs and desires. But religion has high salience for them. They really care
about the meaning of life and other deep questions. Religious attendance is medium, with some regular attending and others not. They engage in service to others. It’s a religiosity that would not exclude attendance or personal prayer.

And another cautionary note: Young philanthropists want to support causes not institutions:

They have judged previous generations to be largely motivated by recognition for their giving and want little part of it. They want to see societal change through the causes they support; they could care less about the named scholarship fund or the plaque on the wall. Christian institutions making appeals to younger donors need to show how their work is part of the unfolding shalom of God for all of creation.

And

young donors want to be engaged in the work of a cause or institution itself. As the study notes, this is a generation that grew up volunteering and believes that investing time as much as money is essential. But note — this on-the-ground service is also another way that they will assess impact over rhetoric.

Early reflections on the new pope

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The selection of Cardinal Bergoglio as pope set off a flurry of speculation. His opposition to Argentina’s legalization of gay marriage and his role in the “dirty war” came under close scrutiny. How he will negotiate the curia, the crises facing Roman Catholicism, and everything else he has to be and do remains to be seen. But one thing has become clear. He is going to be a different kind of pope. Much has been made of his actions in the first few days of his papacy–returning with the other cardinals on the bus, paying his own hotel bill, wearing his own black shoes rather than the red shoes favored by his predecessors. He has dressed simply, refused to accept many of the symbols of his office, and sought to remain accessible to the people.

No doubt he will disappoint many Catholics and many others who want radical reform in the church. But reform can take many forms. His choice of the name Francis suggests that he will seek to make the church relevant to the lives of ordinary men and women across the world. If he is successful in doing so, not only will that mean a very different church, in the long run, it may also have a profound impact on the Church’s doctrine and practice.

From Reuters:

Pope Francis, giving his clearest indication yet that he wants a more austere Catholic Church, said on Saturday that it should be poor and remember that its mission is to serve the poor.

Is the new pope a reformer? From Phil Lawler at catholicculture.org:

To grasp the full significance of this new Pope’s chosen name, consider this: For 1,100 years, every newly elected Pontiff had chosen a name that had been used by some other Pope before him. Since Pope Lando, who ruled from 913 to 914, every Pontiff on the historical records has a Roman numeral after his name, and the only Pontiff who chose a new name, John Paul I, explicitly said that he was taking the names of the two Popes before him, John XXIII and Paul VI. So when he chose an entirely new name, Pope Francis showed that he was prepared to strike out in a new direction.

James Martin, SJ on the significance of a Jesuit pope

From John Haldane at First Things:

Having held the papacy for most of its history, and watched it go first to a Pole and then to a German, the Italians wanted it back; but they had the problem that much of the recent trouble suffered by the Catholic Church is seen to have arisen, or at least not to have been properly managed, within the Vatican which they dominate. On that account the tide turned against them, but it could have reversed had there been no prospect of timely agreement on a figure from elsewhere.

Another non-Italian European was always unlikely in part because Western Europe is seen to be the site of greatest secularization, and no European cardinal has shown much capacity for dealing with that. At the same time a North American would have been unpalatable to Europeans who dislike the USA’s global power. It was too early for an African or Asian, and so an Italo-South American, with a clean record, high intelligence, evident virtue, and pastoral commitment, who also knows (but is not enamored of) the Vatican, evidently commanded wide-support.

From Simon Barrow (Ekklesia)

Much of what can initially be said of this man may be summed up in the style of the Society of Jesus, which formed the new pope. At the centre of Jesuit life is a combination of the ‘Spiritual Exercises’ set in motion by its founder, Ignatius of Loyola, and a concern to engage the world through learning, culture, social justice, service and ecumenical dialogue.

Jesuits do not have an official habit, but in the Constitutions of the Society, declare: “The clothing too should have three characteristics: first, it should be proper; second, conformed to the usage of the country of residence; and third, not contradictory to the poverty we profess…”.

A collection of reflections from across the world compiled by the Australian Broadcasting Company

John Allen’s analysis of the conclave

Pope Francis I

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The news has broken that Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina has been elected Pope. A Jesuit, he has taken the name of Francis I, no doubt a nod to the Franciscan tradition. He was in contention in 2005 when Pope Benedict XVI was elected and is now 76 years old.

The current take is that he straddles the divide between liberals and conservatives in the church. He has a passion for social justice but is staunchly conservative on sexual matters. As an Argentinian, his election is a symbol of the global shift in the Roman Catholic Church away from Europe.

more here: (from John Allen).

Watching the opening of the conclave with the sound turned off

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I watch very little TV and the only time I watch the cable news channels is if the treadmill I select at the gym is underneath a TV turned to one of those channels. Even then, I don’t hear what the pundits and reporters are saying because my earbuds are firmly fixed and I’m either listening to music of my choice or a podcast (often that of workingpreacher.org).

This morning CNN was showing the mass and the procession of the cardinals into the Sistine Chapel. As liturgical processions often are, it was impressive. And as those of us interested in such matters usually do, I noticed the variety of vestments. Some cardinals were wearing elaborate lace cottas; others had more simple garb. I spied one that looked very much like my own. As is often the case in liturgical processions, the camera caught the hand of a bishop (? he was in a purple cassock) stretching up to rearrange the stole of the cardinal in front of him.

Such processions are intended to convey the majesty and power of the Church. That’s true whether it’s a procession of cardinals or a more simple procession at a parish Eucharist. This one did so. As the cardinals moved from the baroque splendor of St. Peter’s to the Renaissance beauty of the Sistine Chapel with its frescoes by Michelangelo, the images sent around the world were meant to signal to all of us the power, majesty, and endurance of the Roman Catholic Church.

The symbolism, or intended symbolism, of the cardinals’ procession this morning, with all of its pomp, its appeal to historical precedent, and frankly its nostalgia, seems rather hollow in the face of the crises facing the Roman Catholic Church and religion in general in the west. I was struck by the narrow demographic reality of those who will elect the pope, the ostensible head of a church with over a billion members. 115 cardinal electors, all of them male of course, the majority European. Their average age (almost 72 years old) is slightly above that of the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. Remarkably, that’s above the average age of the group that elected John Paul II in 1978 (67). The youngest is 53: Baselios Cleemis Thottunkal of India. 58% of them were named by Pope Benedict XVI. 35% are members of, or retired from, the papal curia (24% in 2005) They are not representative of the world-wide church; but then they are not meant to be. More on the numbers here or here.

Writers for the National Catholic Reporter have this to say about current speculation concerning which cardinals have the inside track:

Many here, following lead of the Italian press, are calling this “a race with four horses.” Scola is said to be in post position, with Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Brazilian Cardinal Pedro Odilo Scherer and at least one American following.

New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan seems to be gaining supporters, the Italian newspapers say, but Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl is a possible compromise candidate should the cardinals be unable to find a pope in the first few rounds of balloting.

The Vatican bureaucracy, known as the Roman Curia, has been the subject of sustained criticism in the 10 meetings, or general congregations, the cardinals have met in over the last week.

The Internet, and especially social media, have dramatically altered the conclave, or at least the world’s experience of it. The difference from 2005 is remarkable. My twitter feed is full of jokes, links to commentary, and comments about the election. There is intense interest in it, even among those of us who are not Roman Catholic. On one level, I suspect that interest is generated by the appeal of contests–whether they be elections or sporting events.

And we might wonder with Garry Wills whether the next pope even matters. Sure, he might be able to make changes in papal bureaucracy; if he’s a miracle worker, he might find a way through the sexual abuse crisis. But can a pope do anything about the increasing secularism of the West and increasing religious conflict elsewhere in the world? We are in an age of globalization but there are also powerful centrifugal forces at work (just ask the Anglican Communion). Will the Roman Catholic Church be any more successful in negotiating among the crises and the cultural forces that are challenging it? Can the head of a hierarchy increasingly isolated from the daily lives and concerns of the vast majority of humanity offer the good news of Jesus Christ in words that connect with them and their experience?

Watching the procession from St. Peter’s to the Sistine Chapel with the sound off may be an apt metaphor for the ultimate significance of what’s taking place in the conclave today and in the days to come.

Electing a pope in the midst of institutional and cultural crisis

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The cardinals have gathered although the papal conclave hasn’t begun. Journalists from all over the world have descended on the Vatican for the election, and speculation is running rampant.

There are two issues that I find important about Benedict’s resignation and the next pope. First, the resignation itself. As many have pointed out, it is a remarkable event in itself, a sign of Benedict’s understanding of himself, his office, and the needs of the Church. Whatever else one might say about Benedict’s reign as pope, and his time as head of the Congregation on the Faith, this humble act sheds new light on everything he’s done so far. It’s radical, ground-breaking, and it will force future popes to take seriously the possibility of resignation. The power and prestige of the office has been changed forever.

The second issue is the conclave and the speculation about who will succeed Benedict. To say the Roman Catholic Church is in crisis is obvious. It is also an understatement. The dysfunction within the Vatican that led to the Vatileaks; the ongoing crisis over clerical sexual abuse, but even more the hierarchy’s complicity in that abuse, have brought shame upon the church and deep despair among both clergy and laity. The episode this past week, with Britain’s only cardinal elector forced to step down and not attend the conclave because of his own past sexual discretions is one sign of the rot at the heart of the system. That another cardinal, Mahony of LA, will attend in spite of his mishandling of the crisis, suggests that whoever is elected will have to work hard to rebuild trust in the hierarchy and the Church overall.

All this suggests that the hierarchy, the cardinals, and the curia have lost touch with the cultures in which the Church lives and have lost touch with much of the clergy and laity as well. As many of those who I link to point out, the Roman Catholic Church is in deep need of reform. The real question is whether the participants in the conclave realize how urgent the need is. Just as the Vatileaks scandal revealed how out of touch Pope Benedict was with the inner workings of the Vatican, and Pope John Paul II’s incapacity in his later years, it may be that those involved in the election have no idea of the depth of the crisis in the wider church and the wider world. We will no the answer to that question when we find out who they elect.

Diarmaid MacCulloch on the crisis in the Roman Catholic Church

Andrew Brown on the three challenges facing the next pope:

  1. the need to reform the Vatican bureaucracy
  2. the crisis among clergy
  3. the crisis among the laity: shrinking membership

An interview with Hans Küng and his Op-ed in the New York Times:

In this dramatic situation the church needs a pope who’s not living intellectually in the Middle Ages, who doesn’t champion any kind of medieval theology, liturgy or church constitution. It needs a pope who is open to the concerns of the Reformation, to modernity. A pope who stands up for the freedom of the church in the world not just by giving sermons but by fighting with words and deeds for freedom and human rights within the church, for theologians, for women, for all Catholics who want to speak the truth openly. A pope who no longer forces the bishops to toe a reactionary party line, who puts into practice an appropriate democracy in the church, one shaped on the model of primitive Christianity. A pope who doesn’t let himself be influenced by a Vatican-based “shadow pope” like Benedict and his loyal followers.

From GQ: background reading on the “Vatileaks” scandal, a profile of the papal butler and the journalist who broke the story

So much from outsiders. Here are some voices from within the church

From Cardinal George of Chicago (who will be participating in the conclave):

So what we expect as Catholics from the pope is simply that he be the successor of Peter — that he be faithful to the charge given him and be the rock who will keep us from floating away into the sea of relativism that is often what we live in, in this particular kind of postmodern culture. That’s the biggest gift he’s going to have.

John Allen has a must-read piece on how this conclave differs from the 74 before it; and especially from the one in 2005 in which Cardinal Ratzinger was elected.

Peter Steinfels writes in Commonweal:

By resigning, Pope Benedict served the church well. He has spared it another prolonged period of mounting disarray. He has “humanized” the papacy, as Joseph Komonchak and others have pointed out. He has jolted the church into allowing that something generally considered unthinkable for centuries is really not beyond doing after all. And he has set the stage for his successor to do likewise.

That is important. The Catholic Church needs shock therapy. True, among the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, millions of saints are leading lives of prayer and charity so ardent, brave, sacrificial, creative, and enduring that they bring tears to normal eyes. They are the best of us—and then there are the rest of us. Except in parts of Africa, the much-heralded growth of Catholicism is simply in line with the growth in population—or not even that. Latin American Catholics are increasingly turning to Pentecostalism or drifting away from religious practice and affiliation altogether, although not yet to the extent occurring in Europe and North America.

I’ll be following America‘s coverage of the conclave.

The Martyr Complex of Early (and contemporary) Christianity

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I saw a review on Salon of Candida Moss’s new book, “The Myth of Persecution.” I had one immediate reaction, “She’s got a great publicist.” I’d never heard of her before, which isn’t surprising since she received her PhD only in 2008 and her first book came out in 2011, after I left the ivied halls of academe.

What drew my attention is that this is a case of someone popularizing what has been basic historical consensus for decades, if not longer. When I was a grad student (now 30 years ago), the myth of widespread Roman persecution of early Christians had already been debunked. Christians were not thrown to the lions in the Coliseum, and there were in fact very few periods when there was a systematic attempt to suppress Christianity by the emperors.

So why all the attention to this book? Well, because Moss is making a connection with the persecution complex of contemporary Christianity. Miller’s review in Salon begins with another debunking, that of the story of Cassie Bernall, one of the Columbine victims, who quickly became famous as a Christian martyr. Moss is interested in the persistence of martyrdom and persecution as themes in Christianity. That’s an important topic, in part because the idea that one might have to suffer for one’s faith is so powerful, even attractive. In early Christianity, there were many examples of Christians who sought out martyrdom, and the same is true throughout history.

And she’s also right that the notion of martyrdom can raise conflict, whether among different Christian groups, or between Christians and an unsympathetic culture, to apocalyptic fervor. If you take an unpopular position and rouse the ire of opponents, that’s a certain sign that you are being faithful to Jesus Christ.

An interview with the author.

It’s true that those who were killed for the faith in the centuries before the toleration of Christianity were smaller in number than imagined by most contemporary Christians. Similar debunking has been done for Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and “Bloody Mary” in sixteenth-century England and also for Anabaptists on the continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Martyrdom cut in different directions, too. If you were unable to make the ultimate sacrifice for your faith, if you recanted, there were potential problems. If you survived, your community wasn’t always quite sure what to do with you. Had you sinned, or did you simply lack the charism of martyrdom? At the same time, there’s probably some truth in Tertullian’s statement from the early second century, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Even in the sixteenth century, rulers worried whether public execution of Anabaptist martyrs might draw spectators to that movement because of the inspirational witness of those who were willing to die for their faith.

In some respects, a worldview that sees inherent conflict between us and them, the forces of good and evil, of light and darkness, of Christ and Satan, is both comforting and safe. Much harder is to live in a world where there are shades of gray and disagreement is not a matter of life and death, and being faithful means negotiating among several possible options.

Silence on the Drones, revisited

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Well, Archbishop Tutu has spoken (and was acknowledged by the Episcopal Cafe) but still from progressive American Christians, little else.

Teju Cole in The New Yorker writes:

We now have firsthand testimony from the pilots who remotely operate the drones, many of whom have suffered post-traumatic stress reactions to the work. There is also the testimony of the survivors of drone attacks: heartbreaking stories of mistaken identity, grisly tales of sudden death from a machine in the sky. In one such story reported by The New York Times, the relatives of a pair of dead cousins said, “We found eyes, but there were no faces left.” The recently leaked Department of Justice white paper indicating guidelines for the President’s assassination of his fellow Americans has shone a spotlight on these “dirty wars” (as the journalist Jeremy Scahill rightly calls them in his documentary film and book of the same title). The plain fact is that our leaders have been killing at will.

Also in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer explores the differences between torture and drones:
In some ways, what’s most disturbing about the Obama white paper is not that it tried to set limits in order to ensure that the drone program was within the laws of war. Rather, what seems more worrisome is what it didn’t attempt to figure out, and which no one else seems to be addressing either: namely, whether conventional laws of war should still apply to America’s unconventional counterterrorism program, particularly now that it is over a decade old, and is seemingly morphing into an endless worldwide lethal manhunt. Drones per se are weapons, and they are not so much the problem as the parameters of the war in which they’re being used.
Mayer’s position notwithstanding, Kelsey Atherton points out something quite obvious though it’s been overlooked by almost everyone, including myself. The so-called “drone memo” isn’t actually about drones at all. It’s about “targeted killing,” in other words assassination. The use of drones is only one possible way in which the US targets suspected terrorists from afar:
We may talk about the “drone war” and debate the drone memo, but we’re not really looking at the use of a specific technology. Instead, the “drone debate” is about policy, and how the United States chooses to attack its enemies in the War on Terror. Fancy as modern drones may be, it’s the policy that makes this kind of war new.
By the way, President Obama refused to deny that he had the right to target an American citizen on US soil with a drone strike.
If Atherton is write to say that to debate drones is to debate the technology and not the underlying policy, then we have an obligation as Christians to engage that deeper debate, whether our nation should assassinate those we proclaim to be militantly opposed to us, without recourse to any legal or judicial framework for making those judgments. It seems to me that such policy is untrammeled, unchecked power which always leads to abuse.

Silence on the Drones–updated

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By and large, the silence continues. There are reposted articles on Christianity Today and Religion & Ethics from years ago (I won’t link to them because it can’t be that difficult to find someone who can write 1000 words on Just War Theory and Drones in light of the new information we are receiving.

But a few voices are beginning to be heard (not on religion sites, on the Washington Post, for example, but they’ve not exactly exercised responsible journalism on this issue (or on the larger issues of war and terrorism). Huffpo Religion promises a conversation on drones tomorrow afternoon. And total silence from the Episcopalians, so far as I can tell.

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite writes in the Washington Post:

One of the most inspiring and even profound speeches on both Just War theory and Just Peace theory I have ever heard was President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In that speech, I argued, “The president said that the ‘old architecture’ of thinking about war and peace is ‘buckling.’ What is required now, argued the President, is to ‘think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of just peace.’” I called this the “Obama doctrine.” I was wrong.

David Gushee of Mercer University, in the Post:

The United States would never accept it if another militarily sophisticated country-China or Russia come to mind-developed a policy in which they routinely launched “targeted” attacks on our soil seeking the deaths of those they identified as “imminent threats” to their national security, accidentally killing innocent Americans on a regular basis.

There is a disturbing combination of American arrogance and self-righteousness at work here. We alone, the exceptional nation, the beacon of freedom and justice, can be trusted with the power to kill our own and others around the world in the name of national self-defense (and global security). And then we concentrate the execution of that policy in the hands of individual officials in the executive branch not subject to external review. This sounds like a people that have forgotten the old biblical claim that “no one is righteous, not one.” Every nation and every individual needs someone looking over their shoulder and checking their exercise of power. All are fallible. Even us.

If you want to understand a little bit of why I am so angry about this, note that today in the hearings for John Brennan, Senators cracked jokes about waterboarding.

Outside of the Christian community, progressives and human rights activists are speaking out. David Cole has 13 questions he wishes the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would ask John Brennan during his nomination hearing.

An earlier piece by David Cole on the released memo addresses moral  and legal questions raised by the use of drones:

In fact, the capabilities of drones raise a number of related questions that go entirely unasked in this paper. Drone technology has made it possible to use lethal force in many situations where we could not or would not have even considered it in the past. Unlike conventional military operations, drone attacks require no “boots on the ground,” and therefore do not pose a risk to American lives. Unlike bombings, they have pinpoint accuracy; they therefore reduce the collateral costs of killing and may be easier to disavow. Because drones can effectively travel the world while being controlled remotely from home, they permit the “war” to move far beyond the battlefield. And drones have made it possible for the US government to do something that was unthinkable before, and should be unthinkable still—to kill its own citizens in secret. In short, drones radically reduce the disincentives to killing. And that may well make a nation prone to use military force before it is truly a last resort. That certainly seems to be what has happened here.

Silence on the Drones: Another Moral Failure of Progressive Christianity?

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With the release of the government’s memo laying out the case for the extra-judicial assassination by drones of US citizens, the media have finally begun to take a closer look at the whole drone war. Greg Mitchell has a useful summary with links.

Tom Junod’s piece is must-read:

The white paper offers a legal opinion, not a moral one, but the questions that it tries to answer are moral indeed:

Do “informed, high-level officials” have the power to kill their own citizens?

Are “informed, high-level officials” acting in the interests of the state ever liable to the accusation that they have committed murder?

These are the moral questions that the Constitution was written to address by means of a legal framework. The leaked white paper seems to address them in a different way, in a kingly way, in an almost pre-constitutional or perhaps post-constitutional way. And so when we read it, we recognize it for what it is: the kind of document that has always been proferred to power. The kind of document that always ends with somebody dead.

But there’s silence among progressive Christians. Not a word yet on Huffington Post Religion. Not a word yet on Religion Dispatches. Not a word yet from Episcopal Cafe.

My questions for all those outlets and for the people who write regularly for them: Where’s your moral and religious outrage at this raw use of unconstitutional power? Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize (remember that?). He’s been hailed as a close follower of Niebuhr. His Second Inaugural the manifesto for a new progressive American Civil Religion.

Obama has refused us as a nation the necessary conversation and come to terms with our use of torture. He has refused to make those who permitted, advocated and conducted accountable for their actions. Three days after he was inaugurated in 2009, he began using drones to kill people he and his administration claimed were enemy combatants.

Christians need to challenge his claims and his administration’s actions. We need to hold him account just as many of us want to hold the previous administration to account for all of the evil it perpetrated. We need to remind him–he is a Christian, after all–of the moral and ethical obligations of following Jesus Christ and we need to offer a clear, consistent, and loud prophetic voice against this evil program.

The Washington Post does have a piece from a Roman Catholic exploring the memo’s use of Just War Theory.

And there’s this from Lawrence Garcia (who is currently attending Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University):

We, as the followers of the unjustly-crucified Terrorist, should, of all people, be vocally against this inhumane use of military might. After all, our King was also the victim of such imperial tactics and realpolitik, and he calls his disciples to sympathize with his fellow sufferers-under-empire. Remember, the cross is not only where sin was dealt with and where Satan was defeated, but also where empire revealed itself for what it truly was,  dispenser of injustice; no matter how much Pilate continues to wash his hands

What’s Love got to do with it? A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany

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What’s love got to do with it?

One of my professors Krister Stendahl, the great new testament scholar, churchman, bishop of Stockholm, once produced a list of the ten commandments of preaching. One of them was, don’t use the word “love” in your sermon unless it’s in the text. Well, it’s in the text today, so here goes.

I Corinthians 13, the so-called “love chapter,” is among the most familiar texts in all of scripture. We hear it most often at weddings, when its language becomes at least in part, a set of instructions for the couple: Love is patient; love is kind. Love is not arrogant or boastful or rude…

But this lovely chapter was not meant to be read at weddings. Paul writes it nearly at the end of a lengthy letter to the congregation at Corinth that he had helped found. He was no longer there but he maintained a close interest in what was taking place there. There’s evidence in this letter that earlier letters had passed back and forth between Paul and Corinth. We also know that he sent messengers to Corinth, and they in turn sent people back to him. Some of this is to be expected. As the congregation’s founder, Paul would have continued to be an important figure, an authority to whom this fledgling group of Christians would turn for advice and support.

It doesn’t take a very close reading of the text to discern that the relationship between this Christian community of Corinth and Paul is strained. There have been challenges to his leadership and to his version of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This tension would grow, I Corinthians doesn’t resolve it at all, and by the time of the correspondence that would eventually become II Corinthians, the two are barely on speaking terms. In fact, Paul implies that during a visit to Corinth, he got in a shouting match with one of its members.

So there is conflict. Some of it is personal. It’s absolutely obvious from Paul’s letters that he wasn’t an easy guy to get along with. Some of the conflict has to do with matters of faith and doctrine, and it’s here that we see some of the deepest disagreements. Many of these disagreements seem strange to us in the 21st century, like the question whether it was OK to eat meat that had been sacrificed to the Greek or Roman gods. Some of the issues are downright bizarre—like Paul’s outburst at the fact that one of the members of the Corinthian congregation is living with, presumably having sexual relations, with a woman identified as his father’s wife. Some of the issues cut closer to home for us, like how to behave in worship, well, how women should behave in worship, and for today, the issue of the nature of authority in the congregation and the relationships among various spiritual gifts.

The last three weeks, we’ve been hearing how Paul tries to explain to his readers the fundamental idea of the body of Christ. All of this conflict has been tearing this little community apart, and from a distance, Paul is trying to remind them that they are all one in Christ. In chapter 12, he is addressing the particular problem of spiritual gifts. The Corinthians seemed to have seen such gifts in a hierarchy with the more spectacular, ecstatic ones, being evidence of a higher spiritual attainment. Paul denies such a hierarchy of gifts: there is a variety of gifts but one Spirit, he says.

Then he appeals to a familiar image, the human body. In 12:12, he writes, “Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body–Jews or Greeks, slaves or free–and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” He continues by pointing out the importance of each member, each body part to the body, and then concludes this section with the observation that no one body part, no one gift is more important, and that not all share in all of the gifts. And then he writes, a verse that oddly is omitted in either last week’s or this week’s reading, “And I will show you a still more excellent way.” That’s Paul’s introduction to chapter 13, today’s reading. And it’s worth pointing out the significance of that little sentence. I will show you—this is the language of Epiphany, promising that God will be made manifest to us. And “the more excellent way” suggests that what will unfold before us is a journey. As we will see, that journey will culminate in seeing God, “face-to-face.”

But first, a little more about the chapter as a whole. It is pure poetry, richly cadenced and carefully constructed to build toward the climax. There are four sections, verses: the first a series of contrasts between conditions with and without love: “f I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” The second, a series of statements about the qualities of love: love is patient and kind. The third, a series of contrasts between the perfect and imperfect, the complete and the incomplete: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. And then the conclusion—the climax, the pinnacle: “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

Paul’s writing about life in community, life in the body of Christ. He’s writing about the love that binds the body of Christ together just as our bodies are bound together by muscle and tissue and tendons and nerves. We can’t be in community together without love; that love which binds us together in Christ, which is a gift of God in Christ. But there’s more here, too.

In the end, Paul is saying that the love we experience together in community, is like the love that we will experience in the presence of God. Our life together in community is like, it’s a foretaste, a simple, a reflection, of the full and complete life lived in God. We see that now, dimly; we experience it, in ways broken by our own fallenness, imperfections, and the fallenness of all humanity. But when we catch sight of it, we are also catching sight of the presence of God.

It was a hard message, hard words to hear in that first century community in Corinth. As I said earlier, Paul’s relations with that congregation would deteriorate after writing this letter, deteriorate so far and so fast that he didn’t dare come to Corinth for fear of what might happen.

It’s also a hard message to hear in this day and age. We know conflict all to well—we know it here at Grace and in the larger community, nation, and world in which we live. Conflict is so prevalent, so much a part of humans being in community that our tendency is too withdraw in disgust, anger, and exhaustion. That’s true of our connections with all sorts of institutions; it’s also true of our attitudes toward the church. Our anger, disgust, and exhaustion often results in us withdrawing from the body of Christ, to seek our salvation on our own, or to cultivate that relationship as individuals, silently, pursuing our private vision of the divine.

Paul understood that all too well. The beauty of his writing here points to his deep and profound dis-ease with life lived in the body of Christ—those words “But now I see in a mirror dimly, then I will see face to face.” Those words testify to the pain between the experience he lives now and the experience he hopes for in God’s presence. But at the same time, he knows that he cannot remove himself from the body of Christ, to do so would be to be cut off from life itself, and from love.

That tension is at the heart of the Christian faith, in the first century and in the twenty-first. To see the other, even in the midst of the most painful and divisive conflict, to see the other as part of Christ’s body, that is the hard work of being God’s people. To see the other—the one we’ve never seen before, the stranger, the alien, the outcast. To see them as part of Christ’s body, to welcome them in and shower them with love, that too is the hard work of being the body of Christ. And when the work becomes simply too hard, the way forward impossible, when there is only pain, or dark, or noisy gongs, at that point of spiritual emptiness, to open oneself to God’s love in Christ, to open oneself to the love of the body broken, that is, to use Paul’s words, to know that “faith hope and love abide; these three, and the greatest of these is love.”