Meet me in a land of hope and dreams: Springsteen and Obama in Madison

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Bruce Springsteen sang “Land of Hope and Dreams” at this morning’s rally. Here are some of the lyrics:

Oh meet me in a land of hope and dreams

This train…
Carries saints and sinners
This train…
Carries losers and winners
This train…
Carries whores and gamblers
This train…
Carries lost souls

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have some issues with President Obama’s policies and by nature and temperament, I’m not much for political rallies. In fact, I don’t know when I last attended one. I went today in part because it was two blocks away from Grace Church. But a greater factor was the promise to see Bruce Springsteen (full disclosure: his performance today is the closest I’ve been to a rock concert in a very long time, too). The Boss came out with a guitar and harmonica. He opened with “No Retreat, No Surrender” and also sang “The Promised Land” and “Land of Hope and Dreams.”

What I find compelling about Springsteen is the way in which he gave (gives) voice to a generation. Although he’s 63, the America about which he sings is not the America of the unbroken promises and possibility of a babyboomer generation that went to college, got good jobs, and are now looking forward to a leisurely retirement. His America is the rust belt, a nation populated by (mostly) men who chased a different dream, a dream of a good job on an assembly line, working for a company that would provide a good pension in retirement. That dream was shattered for the rust belt by the late 70s, and Springsteen became the poet of that lost dream.

It was almost eerie to hear “No Surrender” at today’s rally. From the 1984 album Born in the USA, in many ways it’s a typical Springsteen song, evocative of a carefree childhood and the gritty reality and broken dreams of adult life. That it was written 28 years ago was even more poignant; for over that time, the gap between the nostalgic past, the hopeful dreams of a future, and the difficult reality of life today, has only widened. I wonder if he was also alluding to the excitement and hope of 2008 and Obama’s election, and what has transpired over the past four years.

President Obama also alluded to that emotional gap between 2008 and today. Because of Springsteen, because of him naming the chasm between hope and reality, there was a very different feel at today’s rally than I expected. President Obama made his case and urged those in attendance to help turn out the vote.

In her remarks, Tammy Baldwin made the case that the two presidential candidates offer to very different visions for America–between Romney’s “you’re on your own” and Obama’s “we’re all in this together.” I think that’s right and I think that if Obama has made a mistake in this campaign, it is that he has failed to articulate what that vision is, what it means, and what the consequences of the alternative vision are. Springsteen did that, both in his music and in his remarks.

One thing that interests me is the fact that over his career, Springsteen has chronicled the lives and ethos of white working class males, a group that seems to be voting for Romney in large numbers.

But that train carries us all, saints and sinners, winners and losers, lost souls. That’s the vision of America that inspires me. And later this evening, I will be serving meals on that train, to more than a hundred homeless people, none of whom probably were at that rally.

 

What I would say to President Obama if he dropped by Grace Church tomorrow.

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Once again, Capitol Square of Madison will be the site of momentous political events. In 2011, there were the protests which brought over 150,000 people into the streets on cold winters’ days to challenge the policies of Governor Scott Walker. It’s likely that the President’s visit will attract a smaller crowd and part of the reason for that may be his silence during those protests. I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 for many reasons—for the vision of an America united around a common vision. I voted for him as well because of his promises to end torture, to close Guantanamo, to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to bring a new era of transparency to government, especially in the area of national security. I voted for him because of his promise to reform our healthcare system.

President Obama will be a couple of blocks away. I doubt he’ll see the church. I know he won’t drop in to say hello, or for a photo op at our food pantry or at our First Monday meal. I wish he would. Here’s what I’m thinking I would say to him if he did drop by.

How would I assess his first term and the prospects of his second? Four years later, where are we? Yes, Obama has struggled with an obstructionist Congress. He has been opposed at every step by those who wanted to him fail. But he has accomplished a great deal. The economy has recovered; healthcare is law. He has ended discrimination against LGBT’s in the military and refused to defend DOMA. He is eager to pass immigration reform. But I struggle.

What I would ask President Obama would have to do with foreign policy, with military policy, with the National Security state. I have grave concerns about the expansion of drone warfare, of the use of these weapons to kill people in far-off countries outside of the legal system with no oversight from any other arm of government. What are the ethics of such actions? What is the legality? The victims of these strikes have no recourse to the legal system, no right to defend themselves. Even US citizens have been killed in such attacks.

And Guantanamo. All those promises to close it and still prisoners languish there, without recourse to the legal system. Apparently for those caught in it, the only exit is through death, most quickly, through suicide.

There is also the assault on civil liberties at home—the prosecution of whistle blowers, the refusal to bring those responsible for torture to account for their actions. There is also the pandering to Israel, the imposition of inhumane sanctions on Iran, and more. In the realm of foreign policy, Obama’s administration is little different from the worst of neo-con excess under Bush

But between Obama and Romney—is there a choice? The foreign policy debates showed no difference between the two, and on torture, only the littlest difference. Obama has ended it, waterboarding, but apparently Romney continues to see its utility.

There are those who advocate not voting in this election, given these alternatives. Among them are Conor Friedersdorf, progressives critical of Obama’s foreign policy and perceived timidity on a domestic agenda. There are pastors who worry about their vote and their congregations.

What would I ask President Obama if he dropped by Grace Church tomorrow? What about the least of these—those we will be serving at our First Monday meal tomorrow night. What about those victims overseas—in Yemen, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, killed by drones, killed by buttons pushed by American soldiers in comfortable situations thousands of miles away. What about those men languishing in Guantanamo, with no hope of exit, no hope of facing accusers, no hope at all?

To be faithful Christians, to be responsible citizens, we must ask these questions of our political leaders, of our presidents, of those who ask for our vote.

And their answers should help us make our decisions when we enter the voting booth.

A confusion of saints and souls: A Homily for All Saints’ Sunday, 2012

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There’s something of a confusion in our commemoration of All Saints. We’re not quite sure what we should be doing today in our worship. Our lessons, all of them, are among the lessons chosen for the burial service. We are worshiping as the choir sings Faure’s Requiem, and later in our service, we will remember the faithful departed, those of our congregation who have died in the past years, and others, our loved ones, who have died in the past year or before. So, what we really seem to be doing is celebrating what used to be called All Souls’ Day, or what in our calendar appears on November 2, the commemoration of all the faithful departed. Continue reading →

Some thoughtful pieces on Mormonism

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Slate has a lengthy and fascinating essay on Michael Quinn, who was excommunicated by the LDS in large part because of the historical studies he published. A historian with a PhD from Yale he became active at a heady time in Mormon scholarship, when the archives were opened in the 1970s more broadly than ever before. Unfortunately for Quinn, the brilliance of his scholarship did not lead to a brilliant academic career. Forced out of Brigham Young University, he was basically black-balled, prevented from tenured jobs at the University of Utah and Arizona because of efforts from administrators or faculty. On one level, his story is not unlike that of historians of other American religious traditions who have dared to challenge the official story of their communities, but to lose out on jobs at secular institutions because of fear of backlash from the LDS is unconscionable.

Jackson Lears reviews a number of recent works on Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and the history of Mormonism:

As Terry Givens suggests in his probing book People of Paradox, the Mormon divinization of the material, even the banal, is akin to a sacramentalist outlook, but without the sense of transcendence and mystery that a remote God provides. Givens is a practicing Mormon with an uncommon sensitivity to the complexities and the vulnerabilities of his faith. He acknowledges the risk of hubris in the Promethean quest for Godhood, recalling the serpent’s promise in paradise (“ye shall be as gods”). This Promethean impulse is reinforced by a Mormon tendency to use a language of empirical certainty, even for propositions that may seem anything but empirical—a tendency traceable back to Joseph Smith. As a result of his visionary experience, he said, “I have learned for myself that Presbyterianism is not true.” The search for empirical (or pseudo-empirical) certainty, bounded by priestly authority, is one engine of eternal progression. Salvation is a process, not a goal; its core is action, not introspection. Much of this theology resonates with commonsense American sensibilities—the priority of matter, the organizer God, the celebration of doing over being, the faith in progress, the prospect of perpetual personal growth.

Lears links the materialism of Mormonism to its success in fomenting capitalism and in the union of the two finds an explanation for Mitt Romney’s career. That might be going a bit far.

Mormonism continues to fascinate scholars and the general public, in part because of the many secret or semi-secret practices as well as the story of its origins. In the biography of Joseph Smith as well as in the story of finding of the Book of Mormon and the tension between the Latter-Day Saints and mainstream America in the 19th century, there is enough detail to puzzle over. That the modern LDS church presents itself as a denomination within Christianity and that contemporary Evangelicals have embraced Romney’s candidacy, shows how far Mormons have come on the road to respectability. It will be interesting to see what happens between the Mormon-Evangelical alliance if Romney loses.

The Archbishop of Canterbury–Retrospectives and Prospects

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Theo Hobson places Rowan Williams in the larger context of twentieth-century Anglican theology:

In the 1980s, Williams mastered this new intellectual idiom. He presented Christianity as a cultural tradition, the place where a very specific form of meaning is made, shared, passed on; where supreme authority belongs to the “central symbol” of cross and resurrection, which the church performs in the eucharist. When many, such as his Cambridge colleague Don Cupitt, were arguing against traditional metaphysical belief, or defending it in rather dated terms, he changed the subject. The question of what we believe is secondary to the question of what we do, what forms of symbolic communication we participate in, what cultural language we speak. We must rethink our tradition in these semiotic terms. Jesus was “a sign-maker of a disturbingly revolutionary kind”, he writes in an essay of 1987. And Christian culture echoes his sign-making. This communal sign-making is, for Christians, the most authentically basic bit of culture. Is it just another bit of human culture? Yes and no: for here, we believe, the true myth is performed, the fullest meaning is made.

Andrew Brown writes on Anglicanism in the English countryside:

The least glamorous parts of the Church of England are the rural dioceses – Lincoln, Truro, Carlisle, and Hereford. Their problems were exhaustively analysed by a statistically trained vicar in Lincolnshire. Unlike more central or pleasant places, they don’t attract priests from the outside, even to retire. Oxford, for example, has more than 500 retired clergy on its books, almost all of whom are available for minimally paid work.

In the deep countryside, congregations are shrinking and ageing. The other Christian denominations have all already disappeared from rural England. The Anglican vicar who is left will have as many as 20 churches to look after, and if they are not careful they will spend all their time driving frantically between them. The congregations are elderly. They have watched all their lives as fresh initiatives came from London to bring people back to church – and they have seen their children and grandchildren move elsewhere anyway.

And this:

Yet for all this gloom on the ground, the church still seems more important in rural areas than in the cities or suburbs. Lowson says he was surprised to discover, when he moved to Lincoln, that the local press wanted his opinions on all sorts of stories. “In the countryside, the bishop is still a local leader, expected to comment on things, in a way which is no longer true in the cities. Church is still a real part, beyond its own church life, in congregations.”

In some respects, the situation in England is not unlike that which we face in the small towns of the Diocese of Milwaukee. Aging congregations, aging buildings, not enough money to pay full-time clergy. The difference may be the continued central role of the parish church in rural England, because of the Church of England’s history and establishment.

Hobson writes in part to elucidate one of the great problems facing the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the un-churching of England, and especially of the countryside. Whoever will be chosen faces enormous challenges.

John Milbank offered his prescription for a revised Anglicanism in late September. I keep meaning to engage more fully with it but lack the time. The full article is here but its gist is an Anglicanism that looks like Roman Catholicism, with something like a Cardinalate and an enhanced teaching office (ie, Magisterium). And in fact, Milbank’s goal is unity with Rome under Roman primacy.

There is speculation that the Crown Nominations Commission will soon announce its choice for Williams’ successor. It should be interesting.

The Arts and Religion: Some links

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500 years ago today, Michelangelo’s ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel were displayed for the first time. Appreciations here and here. As one of the world’s greatest and most popular works of art, the Sistine Chapel is inundated by visitors and Vatican policy focuses more on crowd control than on appreciation. I wonder if it’s even possible, given the press of people and time limitations, to experience Michelangelo’s work spiritually rather than as a tourist checking off another item on the list.

In a very different vein, Jesus the Artist. Pete Enns writes about the artistry of the parables, and the artistry of God:

Like any work of art, stories “create” new ways of seeing the world—and it is, after all, a new world that Jesus means to create.

Let me put this another way: Jesus himself communicated the deep mysteries of a new way of being through the use of such things as vivid imagery, symbolism, metaphors, and other devices common to artistic expression. In fact, the incarnation, God in human flesh, is not a debate or argument about the nature of God that appeals primarily to the intellect. It is a vivid—and true—demonstration, a portrait, of a radically new and mysterious way of thinking about God, the world, and our place in it.

If this is how God chooses to communicate at the incarnation—the very climax and epicenter of his story—we should not be surprised to see God painting vivid portraits elsewhere in Scripture. This is especially true of Genesis and creation. Something so fundamental to God’s story may need to be told in a way that transcends the limitations of purely intellectual engagement. Genesis may be written more to show us—by grabbing us with its images than laying out a timeline of cause and effect events—that God is the central figure on the biblical drama.

And in a short, confused, and confusing essay, Camille Paglia decries the secularism of contemporary art. Identifying herself as an atheist, she begins with memories of the images at St. Anthony of Padua church in Endicott, NY, describes Andy Warhol’s famous images of Marilyn Monroe as an iconostasis, and complains that “the current malaise in the fine arts is partly due to the rote secularism of the Western professional class, who inhabit a sophisticated but increasingly soulless high-tech world.”

Camille, you can’t have it both ways.

Reformation Day, October 31

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On this day 495 years ago, Martin Luther either did or did not post 95 theses on the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg. Whatever the historical reality, this day is celebrated by Lutherans and many other Protestants as Reformation Day. We Anglicans are uncomfortable with it because we’re not sure we’re Protestant (The Episcopal Church removed “Protestant” from its official title some years ago). Whatever.

I preached this sermon on Reformation Sunday at Luther Memorial Church two years ago.

And because I’ve been thinking a great deal about eucharistic theology, a quotation from Luther’s Confession concerning Christ’s Supper (1528):

See, then, what a beautiful, great, marvelous thing this is, how everything meshes together in one sacramental reality. The words are the first thing, for without the words the cup and the bread would be nothing. Further, without bread and cup, the body and blood of Christ would not be there. Without the body and blood of Christ, the new testament would not be there. Without the new testament, forviveness of sins would not be there. Without forgiveness of sins, life and salvation would not be there. Thus the words first connect the bread and cup to the sacrament; bread and cup embrace the body and blood of Christ; body and blood of Christ embrace the new testament; the new testament embraces the forgiveness of sins; forgiveness of sins embraces eternal life and salvation. See, all this the words of the supper offer and give us, and we mebrace it by faith.” (Luther’s Works, vol. 37, p. 388)

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Love Free or Die

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PBS aired the documentary on Bishop Gene Robinson this evening. Although there were moments of brilliance, humor, and power, I found it by and large unconvincing. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because by focusing on Bishop Robinson’s story, it failed to examine the larger issues at stake. The Archbishop of Canterbury was a caricature and the focus on the Lambeth Conference (a big chunk of the first half of the film) pitted the lone martyr and prophet (Robinson) against the institutional forces of the Church. There was very little attention to the real tension within the church and within individuals over Bishop Robinson’s election and the deep divisions it caused in the world-wide Anglican Communion. Apart from a couple of quotations from Robert Duncan and from some non-Episcopalian protestors at General Convention in Anaheim, or the protestor at Bishop Robinson’s sermon in England, there was no voice given either to the opposition or to the many people who have struggled with the implications of LGBT inclusion in the Episcopal Church.

I also found Robinson’s theological statements, sermons, et al, less than convincing. But he got in a good line on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show: “There was a queen on the board.”

I’ve never met Bishop Robinson. The documentary did a great job of showing his humanity and the toll the years of controversy took on him. But I doubt he was a single issue bishop, and I would have liked to see more of his ministry in the New Hampshire context. The vignettes from his parish visitations were priceless. Perhaps I would have found a straightforward biography more interesting than the LGBT rights focus of the film.

Do buildings matter, or don’t they?

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We have begun a master-planning process to envision how we might adapt our space to the possibilities of mission and ministry in the twenty-first century (I know, we’re already 12 years into the century, but still). Such an effort might seem silly, even foolhardy given the times, the economic realities, and the decline of mainline Christianity. And then there is the question whether we should put time, effort, and money into buildings at all. As one Episcopal site recently explained “Why our buildings don’t matter.”

But let’s face reality. At the end of the day our buildings just don’t matter. The people outside our beautiful buildings are what matters. Because let’s face it—it’s all about relationships, not real estate.

Now, I’ll be the first person to say that our buildings don’t matter–“Where two or three are gathered” and all that. On the other hand, I recently saw a documentary on the architect who was responsible for what became the model downtown hotel–the Hyatt in Atlanta, with a multifloor open atrium and glass elevators. He said something like, in our society, public space is created by private people and policed privately. He was thinking about hotels and malls, of course. But it’s true.

Human beings have sought to delineate space for special uses from the earliest times. The great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade pointed out in The Sacred and the Profane, that one of the key aspects of human religious experience is the demarcation of the sacred from the profane. In traditional societies, even in pre-modern societies, sacred space was set off from ordinary space. He also argued that in the modern world, we’ve lost that sense of distinction between the sacred and profane. Our cities are planned on the grid system with each plot or block of equal importance. Madison differs from that norm in some respects, but the recent conflict over the right to demonstrate in the State Capitol suggests an ongoing battle between the notion of private and public space, space for civic engagement.

One of the remarkable things about church buildings like Grace is the way in which they continue to convey and communicate a sense of the sacred to people who have no sense of the holy. I’ve blogged about it before, but just this week, I saw it happening in the visit of a high school class from Lodi, WI, and in a funeral that was attended by hundreds. When people enter Grace, they encounter the sacred. That doesn’t happen in malls or schools or even in many churches that have been designed to look like movie theaters.

The question for us is how we can adapt our space to enable such encounters with the sacred, and to develop ways of helping people to move beyond an encounter with the sacred to encounter and relationship with Jesus Christ.

I’ve been interested to read about a recent report about the significance of Anglican cathedrals in English life and culture. The full report is here. Media reports are here and here. Remarkably, eleven million residents of England visited the cathedrals during the period surveyed. The report details how cathedrals have become sacred space for the nation, even for non-religious or non-Christians.

This report should give us Episcopalians pause as we reflect on the future of Anglicanism in the US but I’ve not seen much engagement with it on this side of the pond. Kelvin Holdsworth, Provost of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Mary’s in Glasgow, Scotland, ponders the role of cathedrals in the rather different context of Scotland.