Where do we stand? A Homily for Palm Sunday, 2011

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April 17, 2011

Palm Sunday brings us back to that familiar place and that familiar story. We have entered Holy Week and are walking with Jesus and his disciples through the last week of Jesus’ life, commemorating day by day the things that took place that week two thousand years ago. Holy Week is full of drama and emotion and if you participate in the services this week, especially Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, you will experience the depths of human suffering and pain, even as we all look forward to the joyous celebration of the resurrection. Continue reading →

The Budget Debate and Christianity

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I came across this quotation from Paul Begala in an essay by Robert de Neuville:

The budget is a moral document. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be.

The budget debate continues and Christians of various stripes weigh in. Here’s Jim Wallis.

Andrew Sullivan is also struggling:

I believe the federal budget crisis is real and must be tackled by a radical reform of tax and spending soon. I also find it morally hard to deny vulnerable people healthcare that is available and far more effective than ever before in human history.

After quoting the National Council of Catholic Bishops on the debate, Sullivan observes:

But a humane concern for the poor, sick and elderly is integral to the Gospel message and spirit. And my own gut-unease about withholding available healthcare – perhaps more than any other good – from the needy is rooted, I think, in this Catholic admonition.

Debating the Existence of God

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Nathan Schneider’s report on a recent debate at Notre Dame between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig. He also talks about it here. Perhaps more importantly, he points to an essay by John O’Callaghan of Notre Dame who reflected on the debate before it took place. I agree with his advice to Harris that he should read Augustine before going much further.

Giles Fraser reviewed Harris’ The Moral Landscape in The Guardian. It’s worth reading. Fraser gets it right when he says:

First, the atheism. On that useful quadrant – interesting and right, interesting and wrong, uninteresting and right, uninteresting and wrong – Harris is mostly in the uninteresting and right category. Uninteresting because he is concerned only with the narrowest definition of religious belief, and right because the moral and intellectual crimes he pins on this form of belief – its ignorance and prejudice – are so obvious to the western secular imagination that they do not require argument, and certainly not a PhD in neuroscience. Given his definition of religion, his attack on it is the philosophical equivalent of taking sweets from a baby. These things are wrong: “female genital excision, blood feuds, infanticide, the torture of animals, scarification, foot binding, cannibalism, ceremonial rape, human sacrifice”. The list goes on. With regard to the god Harris describes, I am a much more convinced atheist than he – even though I am a priest. For Harris asks constantly for evidence, with the implication that if he discovered some, he would change his mind. My own line would be that even if the god he described was proved to exist, I would see it as my moral duty to be an atheist. An all-powerful eternal despot is still a despot.

He concludes:

For all this, it is not so much that I disagree with Harris. Rather, I am scared of him. And not his atheism, which is standard scientific materialism with the volume turned up. But scared of his complete lack of ambiguity, his absolute clarity of vision, his refusal of humour or self-criticism, his unrelenting seriousness. Harris sees the great moral battle of our day as one between belief and unbelief. I see it as between those who insist that the world be captured by a single philosophy and those who don’t. Which is why I fear Harris in just the same way I fear evangelical Christians, to whom he looks so similar. Like them, he is in no doubt about his faith. Like them, he has his devoted followers. Like them, he wants to convert the world. Well, I’m sorry. I am not a believer.

A new, mass-marketed “Christian” movie

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At least it’s not “The Passion of the Christ.”

Reviews:

  • From America.
  • From Christianity Today: Money Quote:
    Some of the blame must be put on the screenplay, which does manage to nicely honor Bethany’s own real-life hard-won resolutions, but hits some clunky stretches getting there. Oddly, the writing seems to have fallen not only to director Sean McNamara, but to a large team of collaborators whose chief collective credits are Hawaiian Baywatch episodes. This story deserved a better brain trust.
  • From Patheos.

But to secular reviewers, the movie doesn’t seem to stand up; nor do “Christian” movies in general. Andrew O’Hehir asks, “Why are Christian movies so awful?”

There’s a larger question here. O’Hehir is right to point out that:

But when we use the buzzword “Christian” in contemporary American society, we’re talking about a distinctively modern cultural and demographic phenomenon that has almost no connection to the spiritual and intellectual tradition that fueled Dante and Milton and Leonardo and Bach.

It’s also a question asked by James Davidson Hunter in To Change the World, where he argues that contemporary Christians have largely abandoned the arts.

This phenomenon struck me as I was reading an article by Alex Ross on Bach in The New Yorker. Writing about John Eliot Gardiner’s massive project to record all 200 of Bach’s sacred cantatas, he concludes:

There is no way to tell from the sound itself that “Christ lag in Todesbanden” is being played in the Georgenkirche, in Eisenach, next to the font where Bach was baptized, in 1685. Once you know it, though, you cannot forget it. A sense of occasion, of ritual time, is sustained throughout. Gardiner adds layers of significance in his spirited liner notes, which are based on a tour diary: he speaks of visiting Buchenwald, outside Weimar; of a Leipzig pastor’s resistance to East German oppression; of French soccer fans blasting their car horns moments after one performance ended; of a spooky old cleric congratulating the musicians on having administered a good beating to the Devil. Most of all, this mammoth project—an act of devotion worthy of Bach himself—lays bare what is most human in the composer’s enterprise. Listening to “Christ lag,” I pictured Bach’s parents looking on at the baptism of the infant and wondering whether he would live. They had no idea.

At one point, he says, he listened to 50 of the cantatas during a lengthy ride through Australia and says,  “far from getting too much of a good thing, I found myself regularly hitting the repeat button. Once or twice, I stopped on the side of the road in tears.”

The arts created by Christians should have the power to evoke that response in anyone.

On the 150th Anniversary of the Beginning of the Civil War

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Ta-Nehisi Coates on the persistence of the myth that Blacks fought in the Confederate Army. Robert Krick has studied the records of 150,000 Confederate soldiers and has identified 12 as African-American.

A CNN poll that shows 1 in 4 Americans sympathize with the Confederate cause.

Ed Ball, author of the amazing Slaves in the Attic, reflecting on Civil War reenactors converging on Charleston and the lingering racism and white supremacy that he sees as legacies of the war: An American Tragedy.

As I’ve mentioned before The New York Times “Disunion” is a remarkable resource with careful history and insightful commentary.

Historian Adam Goodheart on NPR’s “Fresh Air:”

“I think the South is changing a lot today, even from where it was just a few years ago. Some of the deep genesis of my interest in this subject came about 10 years ago when I traveled through the Deep South, visiting plantations and plantations that had become historic sites. And I found there was this great collective amnesia going on. I visited one plantation in Natchez, Miss., where the slave cabins had been turned into guest rooms at a bed and breakfast, and there were Jacuzzi bathtubs in these places, and it was this incredible example of redecorating the past away. But I think even 10 years later, when you travel through the South and you visit these historic sites, there’s an increasing willingness to engage with the slave past.”

The Myth of a faith-based social safety net

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The Episcopal Cafe addresses the question whether churches and other non-profits can fill the gap caused by budget cuts: The Myth of a faith-based social safety net. It points to a piece by Mark Silk. Here’s the study by Chaves and Wineburg to which both the Episcopal Cafe and Mark Silk refer: Chaves_Wineburg_FaithBasedInitiative&Congregations.

I point this out because I attended an event this morning organized by the Roundy’s Foundation, at which Roundy’s distributed food and money to a number of food pantries and other agencies. Grace’s pantry was one of the recipients. In the course of the program, Chris Brockel of Community Action Coalition cited the increasing numbers of families in Dane County seeking food assistance in the last several years. In fact, the statistics are shaking–a 50% increase in number of families and total number of individuals, seeking food assistance, and a 50% increase in numbers of prepared meals served between 2007 and 2010. Given the level of proposed budget cuts, both on the state and federal level, one can only imagine what the numbers will be like in a couple of years, and the decreased ability of social service agencies to respond to the need. We get much of our food either from the Community Action Coalition (at no cost) or Second Harvest (where we pay only $.18/lb). Of the former, a great deal comes through federal programs.

Here are a couple of photos from the event:

 

Thanks to Roundy’s for their generous donation of food (over 2000 lb) and a check for $500 intended to go for the purchase of perishables.

The Guardian’s “How to Believe” series

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I suppose I first encountered this long-running series when Bishop Alan Wilson wrote essays about the Book of Common Prayer. Since then, I’ve become addicted, even though I don’t often have the time to read all of the entries with the care they deserve. Clare Carlisle wrote about Spinoza, which took me back to a theology colloquium at Harvard I participated in. To be honest, we read Descartes and Spinoza, and Descartes left the more prominent mark on my thinking. Still, reading her essays reminded me of what a fascinating and challenging thinker Spinoza was.

The current topic is Karl Marx, written by Peter Thompson. Here’s what he has to say about Marx’s understanding of religion:

The critique of religion as a social phenomenon did not connote a dismissal of the issues behind it. Marx precedes the famous line in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right with the contention that religion was the “sigh of the oppressed creature in a hostile world, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions” and that an understanding of religion has to go hand in hand with an understanding of the social conditions that gave rise to it.The description of religion as the heart of a heartless world thus becomes a critique not of religion per se but of the world as it exists. What this shows is that his consideration of religion, politics, economics and society as a whole was not merely a philosophical exercise, but an active attempt to change the world, to help it find a new heart. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it,” he wrote in his famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach, the phrase carved on his gravestone in Highgate cemetery.

Some random links on reading scripture

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Mark Vernon exploring the interpretation of scripture by comparing it to interpreting Plato’s Symposium. Of the latter he writes:

It’s impossible finally to decide. There is no one reading of the Symposium that’s definitive. Love, like life, is both of us and beyond us. And this is why the Symposium is a living text, and worthy of comparison with the real Good Book. Ultimately, it’s not rational or even ethical, is not a distillation of wisdom or a consolatory read. Rather, it’s a living text – and hence, like the Bible, has inspired art and further literature, architecture and generations of human beings. It forces us to read between its lines to glimpse something of the mystery of life, and thereby to want to make something of this most tremendous energy in life.

Or, of course, to draw back and flee in the opposite direction.

David Lose, professor of homiletics at Luther Seminary at St. Paul, whose work I regularly engage when preparing my sermons, on the truth of scripture:

the Bible is filled with testimony, witness, confession and even propaganda. Does it contain some reliable historical information? Of that there is little doubt. Yet, whenever we stumble upon “verifiable facts” — a notion largely foreign to ancient writers — we should keep in mind that the biblical authors deployed them not to make a logical argument but rather to persuade their audiences of a larger “truth” that cannot be proved in a laboratory but is finally accepted or not accepted based on its ability to offer a compelling story about the meaning and purpose of the world, God, humanity and everything in between. To attempt to determine whether the Bible is “true” based only on its factual accuracy is therefore to make a profound category mistake, judging its contents by standards its authors were neither cognizant of nor interested in.

And David Steinmetz on the process behind the compilation of the King James Bible.

Mortal, Can these bones live? A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

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April 10, 2011

There are many dramatic stories in the scriptures; many stories that grab our imagination and won’t let go. There are stories that are far-fetched and unbelievable. There are stories of people who, quite literally, wrestle with God. But for sheer dramatic power and shocking imagery, there may be no story quite like the story of the dry bones in Ezekiel.

It has come down to us as a spiritual that became something of a children’s song: “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.” But however familiar we might be with the song, the biblical story in itself presents an even eerier picture, like something out of a horror flick. Ezekiel is brought by God to a valley that is filled with bones. God asks him, “Mortal, can these bones live?” Ezekiel’s response might be a statement of faith but it could also be a sign of his futility, that he thinks the question is unanswerable. In any case, the bones begin to come back together, bone on bone, sinew on sinew. But they do not live. It is only when God’s breath or spirit comes upon them that they come to life. Continue reading →