Julian of Norwich, May 8

Posted on by
Reply

Today we commemorate one of the great mystics and visionaries of the Christian tradition. Julian has become enormously popular in recent decades because her theology is well-suited to twentieth and twenty-first century sensibilities. Some quotations from her Revelations of Divine are widely disseminated, like these:

All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

 

What, do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same. But you will never know different, without end.

My Good Friday homily this year concluded with these words.

She is beloved for her deep devotion to Jesus Christ, the infusion of the love of God throughout her works, and for using maternal imagery for God.

For all her appeal to contemporary people, she remains elusive to modern scholarship and elusive to all attempts to appropriate her for contemporary spirituality. We know very little about her that doesn’t come from her own writings. While there’s evidence that she was popular in her lifetime (Margery Kempe describes a visit to her, and several wills mention her), we are certain of neither the date of her birth or her death. Her works survived only in several manuscript copies–suggesting that there was relatively little interest in her writing after her death. It was only in the twentieth century that scholars and then the wider public began to take an interest in her writings.

Contemporary readers of her Revelations may be inclined to overlook her vivid descriptions of the sufferings of Christ as well as her own stated desire to suffer. For example, here she describes the moment of death:

“After this Christ showed me part of his Passion, close to his death. I saw his sweet face as it were dry and bloodless with the pallor of dying, and then deadly pale, languishing, and then the pallor turning blue and then the blue turning brown, as death took more hold upon his flesh. For his Passion appeared to me most vividly in his blessed face, and especially in the lips. I saw there what had become of these four colors, which had appeared to me before as fresh and ruddy, vital and beautiful. This was a painful change to watch, this deep dying, and his nose shriveled and dried up as I saw; and the sweet body turned brown and black, completely changed and transformed from his naturally beautiful, fresh and vivid complexion into a shriveled image of death.

Her writings are rich in detail and in theological insight that bear close study and meditation. But ideas, images, or themes that may seem appealing in the twenty-first century should not be extracted from the context that inspired her–a deep devotion to the passion of Christ and a spirituality that began in the attempt to enter into the passion as fully as possible. Her visions of Christ’s suffering helped her to experience his pain, profound grief at his suffering and death, and as she reflected on those experiences, she began to understand the depth and power of Christ’s love.

(all texts from Julian of Norwich: Showings. Classics of Western Spirituality. 1978)

 

Changing the lyrics of hymns

Posted on by
Reply

In his sermon yesterday, Bishop Miller discussed the hymn “Come Down, O Love divine.” In the course of his comments he mentioned a rather significant change in the text from the 1940 to the 1982 Hymnal. The third stanza of the hymn in our hymnal reads:

And so they yearning strong, with which the soul will long,

Shall far outpass the power of human telling;

for none can guess its grace, till Love create a place

wherein the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling

In the 1940 hymnal, the third line reads:

“For none can guess its grace, Till he become the place”

At the time, not knowing the earlier version, I assumed the change had to do with the gendered pronoun “He.” A quick look at the text suggests another reason–it’s not clear what the antecedent of “He” is. The soul? But when I looked back at the 1940 Hymnal, it struck me that there is a significant theological change to go with the change in wording. For it is not just switching from “He” to “Love.;” the verb is also changed, from “become” to “create.” And thus Love, perhaps God, becomes the main actor, creating space in the soul for the Holy Spirit to dwell; whereas in the earlier version, the sense is more passive; there’s no stated subject and no sense of activity on the part of the soul or of God.

It’s an odd coincidence that I’ve read several items in the past couple of days about the wording of another particular hymn (song?) Bosco Peters drew my attention  to a contemporary Christian song “In Christ Alone” that has become quite popular. It was sung at a recent Synod meeting and he reacted negatively to this line in it:

“Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied”

Peters argues that “these words as interpreted by many (if not most) in that room is heresy.” A follow-up post includes a poll in which you can vote on what you think is the meaning of those words.

A manufactured debate among Kiwis that has no significance for North America? Ah, but a Christian Century article from Mary Louise Bringle, who is involved in the Presbyterian Church (USA) hymnal revision discusses the very same words from the very same song. In the end, it wasn’t included in the hymnal because the replacement lyrics proposed diverged too widely from the authors’ theological perspective. (Peters’ post and readers comments suggest that a good bit of editing is taking place in those congregations where the song is used regularly, but such diversions aren’t possible when copyright permissions are necessary).

Messing with the language of hymns is always fraught with peril as those who were involved in gender-neutral revisions of hymnals over the last three decades can attest. Bringle points out some of the hymns that didn’t make the cut because of gendered language or problematic imagery, but she also writes sensitively about the larger issues at stake.

The song in question deals with Atonement theology and there are few matters that arouse as strong and divisive response as the atonement. From comments on articles, facebook and blog posts, it’s pretty clear that people disagree deeply and many of those who are critical of stances like that of Peters cannot fathom what’s at stake. But it’s also quite clear that one of the reasons passion run so high on matters of hymnody is because our faith, theology, and Christian experience can be profoundly shaped by the hymns and songs we sing and that messing with the words can mean messing with our deepest held beliefs and our deep feelings.

I’m glad I don’t serve on hymnal committees…

Preparing for the future by studying the past: Jackson Kemper, the last Beguine, and the future of Christianity

Posted on by
1

In an earlier life, I was a historian and although I am reluctant to enter any battles about the inherent virtues of studying the humanities nor inclined to argue for the study of history on instrumental grounds, there are times when even a brief foray into history can provide useful perspective from which to study current problems.

So it was this week. I was trying to write about the shape of the future church, to help clarify some work we’d done in strategic planning on the diocesan level. At various points in that process, we had alluded to Jackson Kemper and the missionary impulse that founded the Diocese of Milwaukee. As I prepared to write, I turned to a history of the Episcopal Church and to a history of the diocese. A superficial read of relevant chapters of both works was eye-opening. Typical church histories of the mid-twentieth century are largely stories of institutions–the formation of dioceses, the founding of parishes and other institutions, the inevitable personality struggles between competing egos and competing visions, and the biographies of the “great men.” In the stories I was reading, I learned about failures–failed missions, failed schools, failed ministries. I read of heroic efforts by clergy and laity preparing the ground and planting seeds that bore fruit decades later.

I wondered what readers fifty years ago would have made of those histories. How would they have interpreted them? No doubt there would have been some sense of failures and missed opportunities, but from the perspective of a thriving church and diocese in mid-century, the end of the story was clear–thriving institutions and vital ministries that reflected the bustle of the post-war boom in America.

Fifty years later, I had a very different reaction. Not just because of the different way history is written today (I’m more curious about those lay people, and especially lay women, than the bishops and priests; I’m more interested in the lived religion than in the bricks and mortar, more interested in the edges, the boundaries between insiders and outsiders, the interplay of religion and social forces).

As we stand at the edge of a frontier as vast and unknown as the one Jackson Kemper entered in the 1830s and 1840s, I’m interested in the forms that ministry and mission will take on that frontier. Kemper and others of his generation had a clear sense of what the church should look like. When they established a parish or school, they built edifices that reflected those ideas–solid, sacred buildings of wood, brick, and stone. They built institutions that were meant to serve those churches and schools and were meant to convey a sense of the sacred, of dignity, and of permanence.

The institutional histories tell the stories of those buildings, the ministries and people that inhabited them. But often the most interesting stories are of those institutions that failed, efforts that came to nothing or transformed into something quite different than the original intent, like the quasi-monastic community that founded Nashotah House and moved on to Minnesota.

I was reminded of this narrative of success and failure again this morning when I read an article about the death of the last Beguine. A relic of the Middle Ages, at one time communities of Beguines thrived in the towns of what is now Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Rhine area. They weren’t quite nuns; they didn’t take vows but lived in community, praying, working, passing in and out of their houses. Some of the great spiritual writing of Medieval Christianity are products of the Beguines.  The Church frowned on them, worried about them, and over the centuries sought to force them into more traditional and typical forms of monastic life. They survived through the centuries, a relic of an earlier age and probably not particularly relevant to either the religious lives or the cultures of the communities in which they lived, certainly not after the seventeenth century.

The story of the last Beguine, those episcopal histories I read, were all stories of institutions, stories of success and failure, growth and decline. They teach us important lessons about adapting to cultural contexts and the willingness to experiment. They also teach us about the problems of institutions, the inherent tendency to try to preserve them when they may no longer be needed or wanted.

I would draw two lessons from these stories. 1) the importance of adaptability. The decline of the beguines was only in part due to official resistance. In the long run, changes in society made their very creative response to a particular set of cultural crises basically irrelevant. 2) the impermanence of institutions. Our solid buildings are deceptive and stifle our creativity and the Spirit’s creativity.

Where is the spirit blowing today? Will we have the courage to let it lead us into the future, or will we stay behind the walls of our dying institutions and become the last Episcopalians?

 

 

 

Lingering residue from “Ashes to Go”

Posted on by
1

So I got on the bus today, for the first time since Good Friday, I think. The bus driver saw me, saw my collar, and said, “I remember you (pointing to my collar), we’ve talked about it.” It’s finally Spring, so I couldn’t hide the collar under my winter coat as I’m wont to do if I’m on the bus. But then he said something else.

“That was you out on the sidewalk on Ash Wednesday, wasn’t it?” I said yes. “That’s really cool,” he said, “reaching out to people on the street.”

It’s been almost three months since Ash Wednesday but a bus driver who only saw it as he drove by, and perhaps on the evening news, remembers what we did, and makes a connection for himself, while he also recognizes the potential power of the gesture for other passers-by.

We can never know who we touch, how deeply we touch, and how our actions might be a means for the grace of God to move in the world.

A New Community, A New Commandment: A Sermon for Easter 5, Year C

Posted on by
Reply

Today is an exciting, scary day in the life of Grace Church. After nearly nine months, after several iterations of plans, after dozens of meetings, hundreds of conversations, thousands of emails, we will finally get to see the master plan that has been developed by Vince Micha and his team from Kubala Washatko Architects. Many of us are eager for today’s worship to conclude so we can get on to the main event. Others, I’m sure, are either totally unaware what a master plan might be and how it might affect Grace Church, or don’t care one way or another. Some of you might be thinking that to focus on bricks and mortar is a diversion from what the church really ought to be about. That’s a legitimate concern and unless our renovations are connected to our mission in the world, if our renovations are only designed to make us more comfortable, then we are falling far short of the people God is calling us to be. Continue reading →

Master Plan and Mission

Posted on by
2

We’ve been working with Vince Micha and the Kubala Washatko Architects on a master plan for renovations of Grace Church. Today, they made a presentation of plans with budget numbers. In my opening remarks, I sought to connect the master plan with Grace’s mission. Here is what I said:

Where Anglican tradition engages the contemporary world, Grace Church
opens its doors on Madison’s Capitol Square, inviting all to join us in sharing
the love of Jesus Christ in worship and in outreach to our neighbors and the world. –Grace’s Mission Statement

I took a call this week from someone who was looking for space to use on Saturday morning. A group of runners in Crazylegs wanted to gather for prayer before the race. I mentioned the courtyard but pointed out that there was nowhere to sit and because of logistics, we couldn’t offer them anywhere inside the building that day. Later yesterday, in addition to the food pantry in the morning, in the evening AA met. There was also a dance in the guild hall and a free concert in the nave. Yesterday was a typical Saturday in many respects: several things going on, each of them facing obstacles of one sort or another but still drawing in a few dozen or a hundred people, not counting the guests that slept in the shelter last night. But remember, outside our doors on Saturday morning were the Dane County Farmers’ Market and Crazylegs. Thousands of people passed by Grace Church yesterday as they do every Saturday and during all of those weekends when there are festivals or parades or athletic events that wreak havoc with our parking. Thousands of people passed by our doors but did they notice? Did they try to come in? Was anyone in all those crowds trying to make a spiritual connection?

We are gathered today to hear from Vince Micha and his team about their master plan for renovations. We will also have some rough estimated numbers to go with the phases of the plan. At the end of our time together, Senior Warden Mary Ann Cook will speak briefly about the next steps in the process. She will also talk about fundraising. There are important questions about the financial side of this master plan that need to be addressed. The Vestry is working on all of that and will be communicating with the parish about all of those matters. But this meeting will focus on the architects’ presentation and on your questions related to the plan.

The Master planning process began in a desire to renovate and upgrade aspects of our physical space—the undercroft, restrooms, accessibility, and the like. Over the course of the last eight months, many of you have been engaged in sharing your ideas about our space, our needs, and your hopes for the future. The architects have listened carefully as they developed their plans in response to the themes they heard and these plans are both a response to what we’ve said as well as their vision of what our mission and ministry might look like in renovated space.

But that’s not the end of the process or the end of our conversation. I read our mission statement a few minutes ago. We need to ask several questions. 1) does this master plan embody our mission? Does it help us open our doors? Does it help us share the love of Jesus Christ with our neighbors and the world? If it does, wonderful! If it doesn’t or if it could be improved, then let’s work on that.

There’s a second set of questions that we need to ask. As a number of people have observed, the master plan reflects our current mission and ministry, our current programming. Well and good. But what will our mission, ministry, and programming look like in ten years? Is the master plan flexible enough to adapt to our changing needs and a rapidly changing culture? If it is, wonderful. If not, …

There’s often a tendency, well, I’ll call it a temptation, to distinguish between a congregation’s operating budget and physical plant on the one hand and its ministry and mission on the other. As I’ve said before, I think that’s wrong because it fails to take into account the vision of those who built this church and it fails to take into account the role our physical space plays in our community. There was a lot of open space in Madison when Grace Church was built. It could have been located almost anywhere, but this corner was chosen. Also chosen was a particular architectural style that sought to convey a message in the 19th century city landscape. Our fore-parents had a clear vision of what an Episcopal Church was in a 19th-century state capital. Their vision may no longer have quite the relevance it had 150 years ago. It may be that what we are doing is recasting a vision for an Episcopal Church in a state capital in the 21st century.

One way of asking this question is “How can Grace Church be a blessing to our community?” We have been blessed with a beautiful building, a spectacular location, a long history of civic involvement, and important outreach efforts. How can this master plan help us bless our community?

I would like to highlight several areas of focus that I think should engage us as we move forward with our masterplan.

1)    Helping people connect with the sacred, to find in Grace and in our programs opportunities to deepen their spiritual journeys. Of course, we already do that, through our worship and other programming. But what more can we do? Can our courtyard can become a place for gathering, even meditation? Can  we find ways of balancing security needs with making our nave or chapel open for visitors during the week? Can we, through redesign and greater accessibility, open our doors for outside groups to use our space more regularly, and at the same time develop worship, fellowship, and learning opportunities that take place at times other than Sunday morning and are attractive to those who live or work downtown, especially perhaps to young adults?

2)    Space to experience beauty—We have built a successful concert program “Grace Presents” thanks to the vision and hard work of Bruce Croushore and others, including the late Steve Smith. How can we foster the arts in other ways? Can we create space for exhibiting the visual arts, perhaps drama, encourage other concerts, even a resident performance group? How can we move beyond being a concert venue and become a community that encourages artists to engage the sacred both for the wider community and for themselves?

3)    Can we explore new ways of engaging the community and fostering dialogue and conversation about the role of religion in contemporary life? Our presence on Capitol Square next to the state capital and in the heart of a vibrant city is an opportunity for us to engage our civic community in conversations about the common good, about meaning and value, about the sort of community we want to create in this city and this state. All of these are contentious issues but the question for us is whether we can imagine Grace becoming a place where people of different points of view and perspectives, people from different segments of our community, with different assumptions and values, can come together for conversations that could seek commonality rather than division, hope instead of despair, and unite around a vision that seeks the good of all, not just of a few.

These are ambitious goals, big ideas. They are a combination of things I’ve heard from you over the past months and years, ideas percolating in the conversations around coffee hour, at vestry meetings, and as we’ve talked about the master plan. We might not be able to accomplish all of them, but if we do, and if the master plan helps us to accomplish them, then we will be a blessing to our neighborhood and to the wider world.

 

A faith that is not of our own making

Posted on by
Reply

Some thoughts on reading the Hebrew Bible. Crossposted from chasingyoder.blogspot.com

A few years ago, when I was still teaching Religious Studies at a liberal arts college in the South, I made an off-hand reference to Adam and Eve in class one day. A student raised her hand and asked, “Who are they?” We live in a culture increasingly alienated from its past. That is as true of Christianity as it is of contemporary secular culture.

Read it all here.

The New Jerusalem: Lectionary reflections for 5 Easter, Year C.

Posted on by
Reply

We’ve been reading from the Book of Revelation during this season of Easter. This is the only sustained engagement of the lectionary with the last book in the New Testament. That’s a shame, I suppose, because the richness of the other readings and the difficulties inherent in interpreting and preaching Revelation divert our attention. Looking back through my sermon files, it’s hardly a coincidence that my sermons in the Easter season rarely deal substantively with Revelation before the Fifth Sunday of Easter. There’s another reason for the sudden appearance of Revelation in my preaching in the Fifth and Sixth Sundays of Easter. It’s because, the lectionary readings for those weeks introduce John’s vision of the New Jerusalem.

As a reminder, on earlier Sundays we heard from the very beginning of the book (Rev. 1:4-8) and two different visions of heavenly worship: Rev. 5:11-14 and Rev. 7:9-17. Taken together, these readings along with those for the sixth and seventh Sundays of Easter do little to provide a full introduction to this complex, important, and enigmatic work. And I can’t do that in a blog post, either. Barbara Rossing’s commentaries on Working Preacher offer some introduction and her books also provide understandings of Revelation that go beyond the sensationalistic end-time prophecies of Hal Lindsey and Left Behind.

I spent a good bit of time during my academic career both as a scholar and a teacher, thinking about apocalyptic literature and the apocalyptic worldview. As a preacher and pastor, I have been especially interested in the contrasting images of human community and urban life presented in Revelation. There are two cities described in the book. One is the city John sees coming down from heaven, the New Jerusalem. We only catch a glimpse of it in this week’s reading but God, speaking for the first time in the book since its opening verses, has this to say:

“See, the home of God is with mortals.

He will dwell with them as their God;

they will be his peoples,

and God himself will be with them;

He will wipe every tear from their eyes.”

A fuller description of the New Jerusalem is provided in later in chapter 21 in 22 (excerpts from which are the reading for next Sunday). The key feature highlighted by the lectionary is the absence of a space set apart for God: “I saw no temple in the city; for its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb.”

The New Jerusalem is the second of two cities in Revelation. The other is Rome. We see its fullest description in Rev. 17 when John sees a vision of a whore clothed in purple and scarlet, with the inscription “Babylon the Great, Mother of whores.” She is seated on seven mountains, a clear reference to the seven hills of Rome. Revelation is a text that seeks to instruct its readers in the evils of Rome and in its eternal and totalistic enmity toward the Christian faith. John’s readers were meant to receive assurance that their suffering would be rewarded and that at the end God would prevail.

The vision of a city filled with the divine presence and filled as well with people from all the nations of the world joined in their worship of God redeems the overwhelming biblical understanding of the city as evil, from Genesis, where it is said that Cain founded the first city although through to Revelation itself. The New Jerusalem though is a redeemed and re-created city, inhabited by God and mortals, a community where there is no religious, social, or ethnic difference.

We have all sorts of ideas about ideal human community. In the twenty-first century, we might think of the nuclear family as the model for human community and many of us think of the church as “family” as well. I would guess that few of us would imagine a city as an ideal human community. Cities are dirty, noisy, full of crime. But cities are also redemptive and places where God’s grace is present. They might also be places where God is present everywhere and not just within the boundaries of the buildings or boxes within which we try to confine God.

Young men, alienation, religion, and violence

Posted on by
Reply

Early days, yet and a lot of speculation about motivation. Clearly the elder brother was deeply alienated from American society; the younger brother seems by all accounts to a pretty normal kid, well-liked and popular at his school. Attention will focus on Chechnya and on Islam, but what about the possibility that their turn to the violence of extremism was a response to alienation rather than its cause?

In reading about their background and from those who knew them, I’m intrigued by the similar profiles of Tamerlan and other perpetrators of mass violence (like Adam Lanza and James Holmes). Mark Juergensmayer has this to say of these “lone wolf terrorist attacks”:

Some of these were committed by Christians, some by Muslims, and some by those with no particular religious affiliation at all. In almost all cases, though, these have been instances where lonely, alienated individuals have raged against a society that they thought had abandoned them.

Juergensmayer has engaged in research on the relationship between religion and violence for many years and deserves close reading.

A lengthy piece from AP gives background to the two men.

Some thoughtful, preliminary reflections on the two men:

From Ludger Viefhuis-Bailey, who write a book on Columbine:

The Tsarnaevs’ tweets and social media posts make the brothers appear as aimless young men, failing in their professional and academic lives, fascinated by violent sports, saddled with domestic violence, and confused about their place in American culture and society. Instead of being sleeper cells acting out an Islamic terror agenda, the bombers seem more like the killers of Columbine.

Anne Appelbaum sees parallels between the Tsarnaevs’ and perpetrators of bombings in Europe:

Although very little has been confirmed, the behavior of the Tsarnaev brothers looks less like that of hardened, trained terrorists and far more closely resembles the second-generation European Muslims who staged bombings in Madrid, London and other European cities. Educated and brought up in Europe, these young men nevertheless felt out of place in Europe. Unable to integrate, some turned toward a half-remembered, half-mythological homeland in search of a firmer, fiercer identity. Often they did so with the help of a radical cleric like the one the Tsarnaev brothers may have known. “I do not have a single American friend,” Tamerlan Tsarnaev reportedly said of himself. That’s the kind of statement that might have been made by a young Pakistani living in Coventry, or a young Algerian living in Paris.

David Remnick writes of the Tsarnaev family:

When Anzor [the young mens’ father]  fell sick, a few years ago, he resolved to return to the Caucasus; he could not imagine dying in America. He had travelled halfway around the world from the harrowed land of his ancestors, but something had drawn him back. The American dream wasn’t for everyone. What they could not anticipate was the abysmal fate of their sons, lives destroyed in a terror of their own making. The digital era allows no asylum from extremism, let alone from the toxic combination of high-minded zealotry and the curdled disappointments of young men. A decade in America already, I want out.

Josh Marshall writes in “Young men are weird”):

When we saw those pictures on Thursday it wasn’t clear there would be a foreign connection. To me, frankly, they looked like frat guys. It even occurred to me whether the perpetrators had consciously put on this sort of get up to disguise themselves. Knowing what we know now, that seems unlikely. But when I did see those pictures and see what looked more like frat kids than jihadis or white supremacists the thought that came to mind to me was Columbine — no clear ideology just the hard underlying precipitate of young male alienation, cockiness and aggression.

…

However that may be, and speaking in general as opposed to about this particular case, I don’t think we should see these as mutually exclusive explanations. Particularly in America and with young men like this I think these ideologies are something more like sheaths into which the same young unattached male toxicity is poured.

Is alienation from society combined with aggression more responsible for the Tsarnaevs’ actions than Islam? It’s interesting that reports from Muslims in Cambridge suggest Tamerlan was a problem for the local Muslim community.

Reviving our Souls: A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, 2013

Posted on by
Reply

Reviving our Souls

 What a hard, hard week it’s been. There was the shock of the bombings at the Boston Marathon followed by the manhunt and the surreal day Friday with one of the great cities of our nation, the city Corrie and I still consider home in many ways, on lockdown. There were the suspected letters containing ricin sent to President Obama and other politicians. There was the devastating explosion at a fertilizer plant that killed at least fifteen people, most of them emergency personnel, with many more still missing. There were earthquakes in Iran, China, New Guinea. The national epidemic of gun violence continues unabated with 8 shootings in Chicago on Thursday alone. Our own wider community struggles with grief and all sorts of pastoral issues at well, including very serious illness. Continue reading →