Mission, Ministry, and Buildings

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At Grace, we are about to embark on renovations that are intended to make our facilities more welcoming and accessible to our own members and to our neighbors. It’s an exciting time and although the overall scope of the project remains uncertain, we expect to begin construction in July. The most recent update is available here. My letter to the congregation explaining the scope of the conversation is here: Letter_constructionUpdate5.8.15

I’ve written extensively about this process over the last several years (we began talking about it in 2012) and while we have been concerned about necessary maintenance and upgrades to our facilities, at the forefront of our conversation have always been the questions: “How can the facilities of Grace Church be a blessing and asset to our neighborhood?” and “How can our spaces help our neighbors connect with God and each other?”

In light of those questions, and in light of the financial and human resources we have committed to this process, I have found the following two articles thought-provoking:

Jacob Armstrong, “What if your church had no building?”

In a time when those who don’t already come to church won’t just come to church on their own, we have to be creative in the ways we go to them. It does not mean an abandonment of church buildings or that we should not build new buildings. It does mean that the buildings are used and seen in different ways than they were before and that we must be committed to our communities in ways we weren’t before.

We begin by listening to and learning from our communities (even if we have lived there a long time!). Next we commit or recommit ourselves to the people outside the walls of our church. To reach new people, we have to have a visible presence in our community. Look for ways to engage the community where church members and attendees get the opportunity to live their faith by serving others.

Death and Resurrection in an urban church:

Change also is evident in what’s going on in Sunday school classrooms that sat dark for decades.

Today, they are filled with an unusual collection of small businesses that rent space, together with fledgling organizations that get space for free. Meeting in the church now is a metropolitan youth orchestra and an eclectic mix of artists and, on Sunday nights, 50 or more gamers.

There’s a dance studio and a pottery shop and an office for a small architectural firm. The church acquired a commercial kitchen license, and now people from the neighborhood use it for catering startups.

 

Where might the Spirit snatch us up and take us? A Sermon for 5 Easter, 2015

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I was walking back to my car after a meeting with someone at UW one afternoon last week. It was a beautiful day, and I was enjoying the sun and watching students as they sat and talked and went about their activities. The sidewalks were full; greenspaces were full. My route took me past several campus ministry centers. Each of them had posted, in slightly different language, the slogan “All are welcome,” outside their doors. I started thinking about that slogan. You see it at the entrances of many churches, including Episcopal; or on websites, or in marketing materials. I didn’t go back to look, but I’m sure you can find it in our literature at Grace, as well. Continue reading →

More on Baltimore and our divided nation

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I’ve been reading some powerful stuff on Baltimore and I’d like to share it.

Dave Zirin writes about Camden Yards and the plight of African-Americans

        The scene is as familiar to me as it is repulsive: almost exclusively young, white fans from the surrounding suburbs or the city’s gentrifying neighborhoods, show up and get absolutely shit-faced drunk and either aggressively hit on random women or fight each other before, during and after games. I’ve seen more scuffles outside of sporting events in the last decade than my wife has seen teaching in a DC public high school and it’s not even close. On Saturday, these fans acted like they always act except this time they turned their taunting, frat-house Tucker Carlson comedy routines outward at the people who travelled a short geographical but cavernous psychological distance from West Baltimore. Not shockingly, confrontations ensued although with much of the cell phone video coming from inside the sports bars, the events have been wildly 

A publicly funded stadium is not the root cause of what plagues our cities, but it’s a flashing, blaring sign of a set of economic priorities that like sports has created a country that defines people as winners or losers. But unlike sports, a country where the happenstance of your birth determines what side of that line you reside.

Jelani Cobb, writing in the New Yorker, describes the protests of last Saturday against the backdrop of a baseball game at Camden Yards:

The protest on Saturday migrated south of City Hall, through the inner harbor, and west along Pratt Street toward Camden Yards Stadium, where the Orioles were scheduled to play the Boston Red Sox. At the corner of Pratt and Light Street a few dozen people held up traffic and staged a spontaneous die-in, sprawling themselves on the asphalt in poses straight from crime-scene photos. There was a comparatively light police presence along the route, but dozens of officers in riot gear blocked the crowd from getting near the stadium, which seemed to confirm the protesters’ most damning suspicions. A man near the front shouted, “They only care about the Orioles!”

Another eyewitness account (by d. Watkins), from The New York Times, of the violence that began with taunting from white baseball fans:

Most of the protests were peaceful. The first acts of violence didn’t occur until after a nonviolent, if agitated, protest Saturday night at City Hall. From there, a group of protesters, including myself, marched to Camden Yards, where the Orioles were playing the Boston Red Sox. As we passed a strip of bars, a group of white baseball fans, wearing both Baltimore and Boston gear, were standing outside yelling, “We don’t care! We don’t care!” Some called us monkeys and apes. A fight broke out, and people were hurt.

After that, it didn’t take much. Some people might ask, “Why Baltimore?” But the real question is, “Why did it take so long?”

From Michael Fletcher,  a 30-year resident and former Baltimore Sun reporter:

It was only a matter of time before Baltimore exploded.

In the more than three decades I have called this city home, Baltimore has been a combustible mix of poverty, crime, and hopelessness, uncomfortably juxtaposed against rich history, friendly people, venerable institutions and pockets of old-money affluence.

The two Baltimores have mostly gone unreconciled. The violence that followed Freddie Gray’s funeral Monday, with roaming gangs looting stores and igniting fires, demands that something be done.

Rebecca Traister, in The New Republic, writes about our understanding of violence:

 Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake blamed the conflagration in her city on “thugs who only want to incite violence,” by whom she meant protesters and not the officers who likely killed Freddie Gray. Too many people, she said, “have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs who, in a very senseless way, are trying to tear down what so many have fought for.”

“Senselessness,” in Rawlings-Blake’s formulation, is reflexively connected to looting and burning—as if that looting and burning had no antecedent—but not to the death of a man that no one has explained and that thus, quite seriously, makes no sense. Violent response to that death may be many things—tragic, necessary, regressive, wrong, damaging to already damaged communities—but it is not anywhere near as senseless as the notion that a 25-year-old man who had, as far as we know, committed no crime, is dead from a severed spine. That is senseless. People being furious about it to the point of bursting makes quite a lot of sense.

Here is the crux of these inconsistencies: The way that even the best (and certainly the worst) of us are trained to see, understand, and then tell the story of violence in America tends to work in one direction. We instinctively mark violence’s start at the moment that less powerful people encroach on more powerful people. When property is destroyed by those who do not own property; when cars are burned by protesters on foot; when rocks are thrown by kids at men armed with guns and shields: That is the moment at which we see the kick-off of battle, the opening shots in a war.

Alyssa Rosenberg on The Wire and Freddy Gray:

“The Wire” doesn’t explain Baltimore. Enthusiasm for “The Wire” helps explain how fans of the show would like to feel about Baltimore, cities like it, and the people who inhabit them. We want to believe we have deep sympathy for and understanding of people whose lives bear the marks of institutional racism, decades of dreadful criminal justice policy, hopelessly inadequate educational systems and a profound lack of legitimate economic opportunity. And then we’d like to feel like there’s nothing we really can do, and so there’s nothing we are required to do.

Ferguson, Madison, Baltimore

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When will it end? When will police violence against unarmed African-American men stop? When will we understand that the institutional racism and institutionalized violence against African-Americans, so deeply entwined in America’s history for four hundred years, results in deaths, violence, and destruction?

I’ve been watching my twitter feed burn as Baltimore burns. African-Americans use Twitter to cry out about the injustice and oppression. Well-meaning white clergy, celebrities, and politicians, plead for calm and non-violent protest. My twitter feed burns, Baltimore burns, America burns. Ferguson, Madison, Baltimore.

It’s heartbreaking to watch, and it’s heartbreaking to see well meaning whites plead for nonviolence when injustice and oppression persist; when lives are ground down by the institutional violence and racism of everyday existence; when there is no hope, no future.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who grew up in Baltimore writes powerfully about how Baltimore has come to this point and why we on the outside who call for nonviolence are wrong:

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is “correct” or “wise,” any more than a forest fire can be “correct” or “wise.” Wisdom isn’t the point, tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the rioters themselves.

Read it all here. And read this about the Baltimore Police Department’s history of criminal behavior and violence. The Baltimore Police Department has paid out $5.7 million in recent years in lawsuits over the use of force. That’s a lot of money, but a drop in the bucket compared to the City of Chicago, which paid out more than $500 million between 2004 and 2014.

And these statistics about Freddy Gray’s neighborhood.

It’s not just Ferguson, or Baltimore, or Madison. It’s the USA. Our nation was founded on slavery and oppression. It has thrived on racism and oppression, and unless we can confront our past and present sin now, we will continue to exist thanks to state-sponsored violence, racism, and oppression.

Making Sense of the Good Shepherd in a Violent and Chaotic World: A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, 2015

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The news from across the world continues to horrify us. Just this week, ISIS executed thirty more Coptic Christians, for no reason other than that they were Christian, and probably because Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby was travelling to Egypt, where he would meet with the Coptic pope and participate in memorial services for the 21 Coptic Christians executed by ISIS in January. Last month, Islamic extremists attacked a university in Kenya and killed hundreds of Christians. The death toll rises and as it does, extremist rhetoric in the US is reaching a fever pitch as well.
This unimaginable violence against Christians is occurring as a backdrop to our own culture wars, where debates and conflicts over religious freedom and human rights erupt as politicians, pundits, and media celebrities seek to gain influence, power, and wealth by fanning the flames of hatred and intolerance. The juxtaposition of those images—Coptic martyrs kneeling with ISIS fighters holding swords at their throats over against interviews with conservative Christians in America crying fear of persecution for refusing to bake wedding cakes are so extreme that many of us feel we’ve come unmoored; we don’t know where we’re headed as individual Christians or as Christian communities. We’re not sure what we’re supposed to believe, or how we are supposed to behave.

All this comes at a time when the world, or most of it, commemorates the centennial of the Armenian genocide, the first genocide of the twentieth century, a horror that cast its long shadows even here at Grace, where we welcomed refugee families of Armenian Christians in the 1910s and 1920s, a legacy that is commemorated in one of the stained glass windows to my right.

I’m also deeply concerned about the violence taking place here in Madison. Earlier this week, I listened as the captain of the central district of Madison’s PD talked about incidents that took place in bars and student residences downtown, as altercations that began with words quickly escalated to stabbings and shootings thanks to the prevalence of weapons in our society. Our world, our society, our city seem to be spiraling out of control into violent chaos.

All this may want us to appeal to the image of the Good Shepherd, to rest in the certainty that God cares for us, cradles us in the arms of God’s love and mercy, protecting us from all evil, leading us beside the still waters and green pastures, and keeping all of the concerns and fears of the world far away.

 The image of the Good Shepherd appeals deeply to us, tugs at our heartstrings, tying into notions of God’s loving care for us. It is also very nostalgic, evoking for us ideas of a simpler, less complicated world and time, either individually, when a loving parent protected us from harm, or an earlier era in human history, when life was simpler and less dangerous.

But the emotional appeal of the Good Shepherd conceals the violence and conflict in the gospel reading itself. The discourse on the Good Shepherd occurs at a time in the gospel when conflict between Jesus and the Jewish religious authorities is ratcheting up. In chapter 9, Jesus healed a man born blind, and that entire chapter is given over to conflict over Jesus’ authority to do such miracles, and Jesus’ identity as the Messiah, the Son of God. In the next chapter, Jesus will raise Lazarus from the dead, which seems to precipitate the plot to kill Jesus.

So Jesus’ words about the Good Shepherd come in the context of intensifying conflict and danger. And as even a cursory reading of today’s text reveals, conflict, violence, and danger permeate Jesus’ words. We may overlook that in the powerful emotional appeal of the good shepherd, but after identifying himself as the good shepherd, Jesus immediately states that a good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.

The strangeness of that statement probably doesn’t occur to us, but reflect on it for a moment. What shepherd would do such a thing? What shepherd would sacrifice his life for the life of the flock under his care? Would you? Oh sure, you might put your life on the line to save your family, we might put our lives on the line to protect our deepest held beliefs, or our country. But would you really sacrifice your life to protect a flock of sheep?

Jesus is drawing a sharp distinction between himself and his opponents. He is the Good Shepherd, the one who knows his sheep by name, and whose sheep know him. His relationship with the sheep is intense, personal, connected. In contrast, the hired hand works only for pay, does what he does for personal gain. I wouldn’t go further than that and suggest that Jesus is saying something about his opponents in the religious establishment here. 

Instead, I think what’s important here is the quality of the relationship between sheep and shepherd that Jesus is describing. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. In a few chapters, at the Last Supper, Jesus will say something similar—No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 

At the Last Supper, in several different ways, Jesus emphasizes his love for his disciples, his friends, and the importance of their love for one another. Here, he’s saying much the same thing, using slightly different imagery. The love the good shepherd has for his sheep, the depth of the relationship between good shepherd and sheep is comparable to the relationship between Jesus and his Father—I know my Father and my Father knows me just as I know my sheep and my sheep know my name. His willingness to lay down his life for them, for us, grows out of his love for us, which grows out of his love for God and God’s love for him.

Jesus’ voice and words call us into relationship of that quality, draws us into deep relationship with him and with God, relationship that is modeled on the relationship between Jesus and his Father. It’s almost incomprehensible, the depth and expanse of that relationship—a relationship that is symbolized by the shepherd laying down his life for his sheep. In the laying down of that life, we experience and know God’s love, a love we are called to model for others.

But I wouldn’t take that too far, either. I was reminded this week of the pernicious effects of misdirected attempts to force the laying down of one’s life. I came down for breakfast one morning and found Corrie fighting back tears. I asked her what was wrong. She explained that she had just read the Pulitzer Prize winning series from the Charleston SC Post and Courier on domestic violence in that state. It’s a chilling examination of the ways culture, politics, misogyny, and Christianity combine to put women in danger from their husbands and partners. Pastors admitted openly to telling abused women to submit to their husbands, or holding joint counseling sessions with couples in abusive relationships that led only to more abuse. More than ten years ago, Corrie had organized a symposium on domestic violence and Christianity at the college where she taught. It’s outrageous that all these years later, nothing seems to have changed. Lest we congratulate ourselves in Wisconsin on our superiority, I need hardly remind you of the news stories here of horrific domestic violence.

I’ll just point out what ought to be obvious. Jesus’ words about laying down one’s life for one’s friends, or one’s sheep are an expression of a deep, intimate relationship of love and knowledge. They are not telling us what to do or how to behave. They are not telling us what to do if we are abused or attacked. Get help! Seek protection.

The violence and chaos of our world cannot be avoided by appeals to the saccharine piety of an image of blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus holding a lamb in his arms. We can’t fathom the faith or experience of someone who has been killed for their faith in Jesus Christ; most of us, thank God, can’t fathom what it must be like to beaten by someone who claims to love us.

But we can bear witness. We can bear witness to a Christ who invites us into and models life-giving, loving relationship. We can, in our relationships at home, at work, and especially in our congregation, seek to embody life-giving, loving relationships. And we can call for justice in our community and in our world, justice that embodies such love.

 

Naming Evil: The Armenian Genocide

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Today marks the 100th anniversary of the event that became the Armenian genocide. On this day in 1915, Turkish authorities rounded up around 200 Armenians in Constantinople. Most were eventually killed. Over the next decade, the Armenian population fell from over 2.1 million people to less than 400,000. Diplomats and journalists at the time recounted stories of mass killings and deportations. In 1915 alone, The New York Times printed around 145 articles on the atrocities against the Armenians. Background from vox here and the Times here and here.

The Armenian genocide took place during World War I, when Germany and the Ottoman Empire were allies. After the war ended, the victorious allies carved up the Ottoman Empire. As Amanda Taub points out on Vox:

Several of the Turkish officials who had been architects of the Armenian genocide went on to found the modern Turkish state that emerged from the Ottoman Empire’s ashes.

Those Turkish officials became heroes of modern Turkey, and their reputation wrapped up in the legitimacy of this new state. Admitting that the genocide happened would risk tainting the Turkish state itself, as well as the individuals responsible. “It’s not easy for a nation to call its founding fathers murderers and thieves,” Turkish historian Taner Akcam told the New York Times.

The question of whether to call what happened to the Armenians “genocide” has long been tied up with Turkish nationalism and international politics. Thomas de Waal, author of a recent book on the controversy, explains in Foreign Affairs wonders whether the word “genocide” itself has become part of the problem:

Simply put, the emotive power of the word has overpowered Armenian-Turkish dialogue. No one willingly admits to committing genocide. Faced with this accusation, many Turks (and others in their position) believe that they are being invited to compare their grandparents to the Nazis.

It may be that the word “genocide” has exhausted itself, and that the success of Lemkin’s invention has also been its undoing. Lemkin probably never anticipated that coining a new standard of awfulness would set off an unfortunate global competition in which nations—from Armenia’s neighbor Azerbaijan to Sudan and Tibet—vie to get the label applied to their own tragedies. As the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov has observed, even though no one wants to be a victim, the position does confer certain advantages. Groups that gain recognition as victims of past injustices obtain “a bottomless line of moral credit,” he has written.

Whatever it’s called, it was a crime against humanity, a great tragedy, and a great evil. Humans continue to witness and perpetrate such evils in the twenty-first century. Naming evil, having moral clarity on evil is one thing. Reconciliation is something else. We cannot hope to create a more just and peaceful world community unless we are able to recognize and name evil, and to seek such reconciliation in its aftermath.

NT Wright on the Resurrection

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“Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Jn 21:16

There is a whole world in that question, a world of invitation and challenge, of the remaking of a human being after disloyalty and disaster, of the refashioning of epistemology itself, the question of how we know things, to correspond to the new ontology, the question of what reality consists of. The reality that is the resurrection cannot simply be “known” from within the old world of decay and denial, of tyrants and torture, of disobedience and death.

…

And this is the point where believing in the resurrection of Jesus suddenly ceases to be a matter of inquiring about an odd event in the first century and becomes a matter of rediscovering hope in the twenty-first century. Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.

NT Wright, Surprised by Hope, HarperCollins, 2008, pp. 72, 75

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, April 9, 1945

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Today is the seventieth anniversary of the martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. While in prison, he wrote a series of letters to his close friend Eberhart Bethge in which he began speculate about “religionless Christianity.” While this notion has received considerable attention over the decades beginning in the 1960s, his words remain as challenging and questioning in the twenty-first century as they did when he wrote them while imprisoned for his participation in an assassination plot against Hitler, and as World War II was coming to an end:

Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the “religious a priori” of mankind. “Christianity” has always been a form–perhaps the true form–of “religion.” But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religionless–and I think that that is already more or less the case (else how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any “religious” reaction?)–what does that mean for “Christianity”? It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our “Christianity,” and that there remain only a few “last survivors of the age of chivalry,” or a few intellectually dishonest people that we are to pounce in fervor, pique, or indignation, in order to sell them goods? Are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion on them? If we don’t want to do all that, if our final judgment must be that the Western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians? If religion is only a garment of Christianity–and even this garment has looked very different at different times–then what is a religionless Christianity?

I’ve previously written about Bonhoeffer here and here.

Easter Wings–George Herbert

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Easter Wings

By George Herbert

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
      Though foolishly he lost the same,
            Decaying more and more,
                  Till he became
                        Most poore:
                        With thee
                  O let me rise
            As larks, harmoniously,
      And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

 

My tender age in sorrow did beginne
      And still with sicknesses and shame.
            Thou didst so punish sinne,
                  That I became
                        Most thinne.
                        With thee
                  Let me combine,
            And feel thy victorie:
         For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Resurrection Imperfect–John Donne

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RESURRECTION, IMPERFECT.
by John Donne

SLEEP, sleep, old sun, thou canst not have repass’d,
As yet, the wound thou took’st on Friday last ;
Sleep then, and rest ; the world may bear thy stay ;
A better sun rose before thee to-day ;
Who—not content to enlighten all that dwell
On the earth’s face, as thou—enlighten’d hell,
And made the dark fires languish in that vale,
As at thy presence here our fires grow pale ;
Whose body, having walk’d on earth, and now
Hasting to heaven, would—that He might allow
Himself unto all stations, and fill all—
For these three days become a mineral.
He was all gold when He lay down, but rose
All tincture, and doth not alone dispose
Leaden and iron wills to good, but is
Of power to make e’en sinful flesh like his.
Had one of those, whose credulous piety
Thought that a soul one might discern and see
Go from a body, at this sepulchre been,
And, issuing from the sheet, this body seen,
He would have justly thought this body a soul,
If not of any man, yet of the whole.

Desunt Caetera