Volunteering at the Food Pantry

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I volunteered at Grace’s Food Pantry for the first time today. It was quite interesting. I’ve not even spent much time in it before, although it has taken up its share of my time. We’ve been awarded three grants this year–from the diocese and the Madison Community Foundation. Most of the money will go to much-needed upgrades and replacement of our food storage capacity (new coolers, freezers, shelving).

I’ve certainly seen pantry guests frequently. They line up outside the pantry before hours; often they linger in our courtyard before and after receiving food, and occasionally seek me out to ask for financial assistance. But for the most part, I’ve not dealt directly with them. I suppose I had the typical assumptions about who makes use of pantries. And certainly there were what might be regarded as stereotypes. What surprised me more were the numbers of young people, single men and women, and some who had jobs. One man told me he was working now for the first time in a while, but he wouldn’t get his first pay check till Wednesday. We gave him things that he could take for lunch. There were others who had come back to the pantry for the first time in four or five years. I was curious about the turns their lives had taken to bring them back to this place.

One of the surprising things was how health-conscious many of our guests were. They wanted to know the salt content of processed foods. They asked for low-fat alternatives. They also were concerned that they not take things that they had in supply. If they had rice, they didn’t ask for more.

There were two ironies I noticed. First was the most obvious, that a few hundred feet away from us was the Dane County Farmer’s Market filled with fresh spring vegetables, meats, cheese and other local food products. We benefited from it this morning. A bakery shared left over scones with us. But that in the midst of all of that agricultural bounty, there are those who go hungry is sobering.

The second irony came from the church itself. We open our doors to the public on Saturday mornings. We invite people in to look at the space, to enjoy the beauty, to sense the sacred. It may be that someone who comes to the pantry might also visit the church. It’s happened once or twice, but usually only because they are new to the pantry and don’t know where to go.

We’ve been trying hard to make a connection between what we do liturgically with our eating and our hospitality. It’s a difficult connection for most people to make even though our central liturgical act, the Eucharist involves eating and drinking. We say we welcome everyone to our table; we talk about the sacred act of eating. We call ourselves a friendly and welcoming parish.

But the pantry reflects those values only very dimly. It is not a welcoming place. There are steps leading up to the door, making it difficult for the disabled and elderly to come in. The entrance itself is dingy, dark, and dirty, and once inside, people line up, as they usually do at social service agencies, taking a number, waiting in line.

Sara Miles in Take This Bread, describes a very different sort of pantry–where there is little distinction between volunteer and guest, with a joyous atmosphere and a marvelous meal for the volunteers, and where the food is distributed, not out of some side room or back door, but from the altar of the church’s sanctuary. That makes clear the connection between liturgy and outreach, the eucharistic feast and the feeding of the hungry.

I’m eager to find ways of making the pantry a more welcoming place, or to make the physical space correspond to the values and attitudes of the church and volunteers. I’m eager also to find ways of making connections between the Farmer’s Market and the pantry. And I hope to broaden the group of those who volunteer–to bring in young people, for example. The pantry should reflect our values as a community of God’s people. It is not a social service agency or branch of the federal government.

Mennonite in a long black robe (i.e. a cassock)

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I read Rhoda Janzen’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress recently. It’s not exactly deep but it does have some amusing moments. Several clarifications are in order, however. First, she glosses over the significant distinctions among Mennonites. Her family is descended from Dutch and North German Mennonites who were invited into Russia in the eighteenth century and created thriving communities there that survived until Stalin. Many had already emigrated to North America in the late nineteenth century, especially to Kansas and the Prairie Provinces of Canada. But many more, including Janzen’s grandparents, fled in the 1920s or even later. Up until the late nineteenth century, they had considerable freedom to organize their lives and communities independent of Russian interference and they developed social, political, and economic institutions and become quite wealthy compared to their Russian neighbors.

Most of what she describes of her Mennonite upbringing and relatives relates to that history: the food (zwieback and borscht), the language (low German), and the cultural experience of living in Russia for over a century.

I grew up in a rather different Mennonite tradition–the Swiss and South German Mennonites who emigrated from those places (and in my case from Alsace as well) to the eastern US in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. My ancestors had very limited freedoms in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had developed a strategy of separation and quietism. Most were farmers in Europe and remained farmers in North America.

Over the years, as I got to know Mennonites from the Russian tradition, I realized how very different our experiences and our cultures were, even though we shared so much. We looked at the world differently; they were much more open to intellectual and artistic pursuits, less suspicious of the wider culture. There was also a tendency to accept influence from the wider Christian tradition. The Mennonite Brethren, to which Janzen’s parents belonged have been strongly influenced by the North American Evangelical Protestant tradition. The other main branch, what once was called “General Conference” Mennonites and merged with the Mennonite Church in the 1990s, was more open to liberal Protestantism. I suspect that it is difficult now, in the twenty-first century, to detect such theological differences. From what little I know, most contemporary Mennonites look little different from most Evangelicals, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.

Perhaps what I liked least in Janzen’s book was the flip, post-modern, ironic tone of so much of the work. I finally extricated myself from the Mennonite Church in my early 30s, but it took great effort, considerable anguish, and some guilt. There are times still when I mourn what I was and could not continue to be; at the same time I have flourished in the years since as I never could have, and most importantly, I have experienced and continue to experience God’s grace and love in my life and in the Episcopal Church today in ways I never could as a Mennonite. And that’s what matters most.

What I really want to read is her memoir of teaching at Hope College, but I suppose that won’t come until she’s safely tenured.

The Heavenly City

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A New Heaven and a New Earth

Easter 5, Year C

May 2, 2010

What’s your idea of heaven? My guess is, if you were to tell me, what you would describe would be a scene filled with images from nature; with beautiful scenery, pleasant breezes, and the like. Perhaps your image would largely be derived from Psalm 23, which we recited last week: “He makes me to lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside still waters.”

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Another survey offers food for thought

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USA Today had an article about a survey of young adults produced for a conservative Christian organization. Some interesting statistics:

Even among those in the survey who “believe they will go to heaven because they have accepted Jesus Christ as savior”:

•68% did not mention faith, religion or spirituality when asked what was “really important in life.”

•50% do not attend church at least weekly.

•36% rarely or never read the Bible.

The headline is 72% of Millenials (i.e. 18-29 year olds) more ‘spiritual than religious’

Of course, for such a survey to be of real use, it should compare results across age cohorts, to see if these numbers have fallen over the decades. Other surveys have done so, and have detected a trend away from traditional religion and institutional Christianity.

Church growth gurus often recommend trying to get more relevant with worship or constructing a product that will sell in this market. But I think that may be misguided. Doing that may only change brand loyalty as it were; it won’t bring people into the store (church). I’ve noticed something interesting at Grace. When we open our doors to the public on Saturdays or during the week, all kinds of people come in. The curious, the tourists, et al. But often people come in, sit down, and stay a few minutes or longer, to pray, meditate, or simply enjoy the space. Who knows whether they will ever come back or what might have been on their minds, but for a few moments, we were there for them.

Thinking about History

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I’ve been thinking about the uses of history. Perhaps, there’s something remaining from the post in which I talked about the burden of tradition that I sense troubles the Archbishop of Canterbury. Then I came across this essay by Diana Butler Bass, excerpted from her book A People’s History of Christianity.

I will grant that most contemporary Christians know little about the history of Christianity. My experience teaching college students was that for Evangelicals, the two thousand years that separated themselves from the world of the New Testament didn’t exist. Trying to get them to understand the very different historical context of the first century was inordinately difficult and getting them to take interest in the lives of Christians in the intervening centuries was almost impossible. With the demise of denominationalism, few of them were even curious about the historical origins of different understandings of the sacraments and other practices.

Bass seems to link the waning interest in history to the Enlightenment and modernity and sees mainline denominations as especially tempted to do away with it altogether. Certainly the Enlightenment bears some responsibility as seventeenth and eighteenth century thinkers tried to break away from the burdens of the past.

I wonder whether the problem isn’t so much ignoring the past as it is constructing a useful past. History is very much contested. In recent months we’ve had controversies over the changing Texas schoolbook standards with their purging of progressive voices and even those aspects of the past that don’t fit in with a conservative Christian reading of American history (like Thomas Jefferson). We’ve had Southern governors honor Confederate History Month with nary a mention of slavery. For many churches, for many Christians, the past isn’t useful because it drags up too much baggage. That’s true for progressive Christians, Evangelicals, and Roman Catholics.

Tradition can be a burden. The stories we tell help to define us individually and as communities, but it is our responsibility to those communities, today and in the past, to tell those stories honestly. I wonder if that’s not part of what burdens the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Why I don’t care about the National Day of Prayer

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Religion has been very much in the news again in recent weeks. There’s the resurgence of the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, those Christians who have started Facebook groups encouraging people to pray for the death of President Obama, and many Christians (no doubt membership in these two groups overlap) outraged over the recent court decision against the National Day of Prayer. I lived in the South for fifteen years, which writer Flannery O’Connor famously called “Christ-haunted.” Since my recent move to Madison, I’ve been reminded that all of America is religion-obsessed—and that’s true of believers, agnostics, and atheists alike.

The current controversy over the National Day of Prayer puts me in mind of an experience I had while teaching Religious Studies at Furman. Although the college’s roots were in the Southern Baptist Convention, it had broken all official ties in the early 1990s over concerns of academic freedom. Still, the student body was made up largely of conservative Christians. At that time there was a requirement of one course in Religious Studies, which most students fulfilled by taking Introduction to Biblical Studies. In one section of that course one year, one student stood out as a misfit. He had grown up in Atlanta but had no religious background whatsoever. He spoke of being hounded in high school by Christians who sought his conversion. That behavior continued in college. Some students made it a habit of holding prayer vigils outside the dorm rooms of unbelieving students.

This young man let it be known in the early weeks of the term that my classroom was one place where he felt he could air his views openly and without fear of retaliation. And he did so, often with considerable relish. Late in the semester, as we were talking about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, he raised his hand as I began talking about Jesus’ words “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others.” He asked, “why is it that Christians always flaunt their religion and their prayer?” He was referring to the common custom of “See you at the pole” where Evangelical students gather around a school’s flagpole to pray. The only effect it had on him was to increase his resentment toward Christians and Christianity.

Christians often claim to be persecuted. Such an assertion in the United States is pathetic. Yes, there are many places in the world where Christians die or suffer serious consequences if they make public confession of their faith. What American Christians struggle with is not persecution but the messiness of living in a multi-cultural society. Every other religion in the United States is in the same position, and occasionally adherents of those religions struggle as well, witness the recent brouhaha over censorship of the TV program South Park.

On May 6, The National Day of Prayer, I will not be leading a prayer meeting. I will not walk across the street from my church to the Capitol and bow down in prayer in a public display of my piety. I will do what I do every day. Following Jesus’ advice in Matthew 6, “But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret…,” I will sit at my desk and pray, “Keep this nation under your care, and guide us in the way of justice and truth.”

Green Pastures and Still Waters: A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter

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Green Pastures and Still Waters

Easter 4, Year C

Grace Church

April 25, 2010

I’m not at all sure why, but this Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Easter, includes readings about sheep and shepherds in all three years of the lectionary cycle. The gospel reading each year for this day comes from the tenth chapter of John, which begins with Jesus’ familiar saying, “I am the good shepherd.” Each year, too, the psalm for this Sunday is Psalm 23: “The Lord is my Shepherd.” If you’re a long-time church goer, the imagery of the Good Shepherd may be so familiar to you that it has become banal, even meaningless.

This, despite the fact that unlike the cultures in which the biblical texts were written, sheep and shepherds are not the stuff of ordinary experience any more. The only time most of us encounter sheep of any variety is when it appears on our dinner plate. And who among us has ever encountered a real, live shepherd?

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The New Yorker on Rowan Williams

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There’s a major article in the current New Yorker on the Archbishop of Canterbury by Jane Kramer. It focuses on the struggles within the Church of England over the ordination of women. The Episcopal Church has ordained women to the priesthood since 1976, and the first woman ordained bishop was Barbara Harris, ordained to the episcopacy in the Diocese of Massachusetts in the late 1980s. The Church of England has been much slower. Ordination of women to the priesthood only became possible in 1994. The article focuses on the current struggle over ordination of woman as bishops. There have been ongoing attempts in the past few years to draft legislation that would make it possible for women bishops, all the while providing room for those who are opposed to it.

One of the reasons for the struggle is the very different religious landscape within the Church of England. Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical wings are strong and well-financed, and well-organized, and threaten withdrawal if they don’t get their way. In fact, many believe that the Pope’s overtures last year to welcome disaffected Anglicans was a thinly-veiled attempt to intervene in the CoE’s internal debates. Of course, things have changed dramatically since last fall, and for the time being reunion with Rome is probably less popular an option for Anglo-Catholics than ever.

It’s a somewhat sympathetic portrait of Williams, who is a theological giant and a deeply spiritual man, caught by the tides of history, both within his national church and in the Anglican Communion. Kramer quotes historians like Diarmaid MacCullogh to put his historical position in some context and the concluding paragraph sums it all up:

It may be that Williams’s ideas have changed, but in all likelihood it is simply that his job has changed. The women urging him on now are really trying to remind him that, however broad his concern and compassion necessarily are, he is also the Primate of a Western country where women priests—as well as a good number of openly gay priests—have played an impressive role in revitalizing Christian practice and, one would have to say, the Christian imagination. When he talks to them about restraint and patience—about the fullness of time and the “positive side to Anglican diffuseness and slowness of decision-making” and his own anguish “trying to counsel patience to people who are suffering more than you are”—they say, as many of them did to me: The fullness of time is fine, but it’s God’s time. We are living now.

Of course, the conflicts in Anglicanism over homosexuality also play a role in the conflict within the Church of England, although the contours of the battleground are somewhat different. And what happens in the Episcopal Church also looms large. It’s pretty clear one of Williams’ main goals, perhaps his highest priority, is to keep the conversation going, to prevent the final act of schism that would mean the formation of new denominations. Whether that’s possible isn’t at all clear.  One sign of the intractability of the positions is a quotation in the article from a leader of the Anglo-Catholic wing, who referred to our presiding bishop as a laywoman.

Kramer compares Williams to President Obama at one point, saying that both rely on reason to bring people together. The obvious inference is that Williams, like Obama, may have to give up finally on accommodating the various sides and push through the necessary changes. I don’t think that’s an apt analogy. I suspect the better clue to Williams’ self-understanding is the observation he makes about conflict within Christianity in the fourth century. Williams is a historian and can contextualize his current situation. But historians also can occasionally be burdened by the power of history and the weight of tradition.

Before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Williams explored disestablishment of the Church of England, which would have been a clean break with the past. It might be time to consider it again.

Elaine Pagels on the cultural impact of the book of Revelation

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A somewhat disappointing talk by Pagels tonight. I was interested to hear her stress the importance of Judaism as a context for John and Revelation, specifically the Jewish Wars. It’s obvious on one level, of course, with the stress in the book on Jerusalem’s destruction but she seemed to suggest that the author’s Judaism was in some way more important for making sense of the visions than his belief that Jesus Christ was the Messiah.

I think you can do that only if you separate out the letters to the seven churches from the visions. For if the same audience is implied then the most important context is the relationship between Christianity and the empire, not Judaism and the empire. I’m still convinced that the book’s overall message is not only to stand firm in the face of persecution, but to force readers to come to see Rome in the same light as the author does, as the great enemy of God.

That’s one of the points of apocalyptic literature like Revelation–to help the reader see the world in a new way, where there is no gray area, just black and white and as the angel said to the church of Laodicea:

“I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. 16So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” (Revelation 3:15-16

April 21: St. Anselm of Canterbury

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Today is the commemoration of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 1109. Anselm was a native of Italy who traveled throughout Europe as a young man in search of learning. He lived before the rise of universities, just when Europeans were beginning to discover logic and the philosophy of Aristotle. In Anselm’s day, most learning took place in cathedral schools or in monasteries, and was very much dependent on the gifts and scholarship of particular teachers. He found his way to Normandy and the monastery of Bec, where Lanfranc was the leading teacher. Lanfranc was called into service by his secular lords who had recently conquered England, and became the Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm would succeed him both in Bec and Canterbury.

Anselm is primarily remembered for two major works and ideas. The first is what has come to be known as the ontological argument for the existence of God (the phrase God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”) and for the Satisfaction Theory of Atonement, articulated in Cur Deus Homo.

Centuries of theology and philosophy have extracted from Anselm’s writing and spirituality the elements of both of these arguments, and in so doing have robbed it of its spiritual depth and power. What you experience when you actually read the Proslogion is not an argument for the existence of God–that’s dealt with in a few sentences–but rather an extended meditation, prayer really, on Anselm’s relationship with and experience of God. He begins with a famous paragraph:

Come now, insignificant man, fly for a moment from your affairs, escape for a little while from the tumult of your thoughts. Put aside now your weighty cares and leave your wearisome toils. Abandon yourself for a little to God and rest for a little in him. Enter into the inner chamber of your soul, shut out everything save God and what can be of help in your quest for Him and having locked the door seek Him out.”

Anselm moves quickly from logical argument to direct address of God, language that explores his own experience of God, and seeks to deepen that experience.

I’ve been in lengthy conversation with someone about the doctrine of atonement recently, a conversation that has focused on the mechanics of the doctrine. When extracted from Anselm’s spiritual life, the doctrine he expresses is cold and bloodthirsty. Yet it’s important to remember that he articulated that idea as an attempt to make sense of his experience, a religious life that was expressed in deep prayer and devotion. Anselm’s prayers are especially beautiful, and he marks an important change in his devotion to the Virgin Mary.

I’m also struck as I read him by his dependence on Augustine. There are times in the Proslogion, for example where it seems he is doing nothing more than paraphrasing Augustine.