Showing Up

I’m often asked by people how they can help the church.  Sometimes I think the most important act one can do is show up.

However, I believe that the church exists to serve, not to mandate.  Episcopalians tend to have rich lives outside of church.   Obligation isn’t the way we work.  I say “show up” without an urge to yell or complain.

But there is one psychological aspect about the life of the church that is hard to recognize.  Churches demonstrate effectiveness when people are passionate.

Presence is the first step of passion.

Advertisers call this “social proof.”  We want to go where other people are, even if we’re in silence with them.   But it’s not because we just want to prove that church is worth it:  it is an indicator of our own passion for each other.

Sp sometimes the most important work one can do is show up.  Friends show up for one another.  Families do as well.   So the question is:  why do we choose to show up?  What makes us unable to?  What makes us want to?

Why do we engage each other?  Because we see the face of Christ in the long lost friend who unexpectedly shows up at a wedding.  We see the face of Christ in the stranger who has remarkable insight for our current condition.  We see the face of Christ in the person who tells the uncomfortable truth.  We become the face of Christ when we serve.  We become the face of Christ when we build bridges.  We become the face of Christ when we steel ourselves for the future and persevere when times are rough.  And we see the face of Christ when we’re uncomfortable.

I know that for many of us who grew up on rigorous and difficult religions, that when we “appeared” we saw hypocrisy and abuse.    The wealthy got doted upon; the priests often seemed distracted and distant.

But the truth is that people are the church, and that the church is what we make of it.   We don’t own it; It will not always be smooth sailing; but it is worth the work.   The ideal church does not exist except in the end of time.  We can only begin with the people directly around us.

In an age where we are balkanized, holed up in our little ideological huts, weary of arguing our case with people who think differently, the church remains called to be present to the outside world; and we are expected to be present, in some way to one another.  It is not only good for our bodies, and good for our spirit, and good for our communities.  It is precisely what God promises makes our lives meaningful, holy and sacred.

 

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Anglican Priest Gets Caught with PrOn on computer

This is pathetic.

Not just because pr0n is problematic ethically.  That’s the easy answer.

But this is a Christian soldier who made his reputation critiquing the sexual inclinations of others.    He is a poster boy for the log-twig reference our jefe made as reported in scripture.   Yet another example of someone who protests a bit too much.

Of course, a part of me thinks they should be celebrating.   If it’s your average Jenna Jameson flick or Girls Gone Wild clip they could be saying:  “Yay.  It’s not a tween!”  It’s just a priest looking for a little stimulation to take home.  It’s just a guy wanting to be double teamed by a blonde and a brunette.

There are a lot of worse fantasies.

But on a church computer?  Really?

Was he trying to get caught?

Is he a pervert?  Or an idiot?

I wonder if it’s possible to distinguish between pornography and nakedness, critiquing an exploitative industry without condemning our fascination with sex.

He may or may not be a pervert or an addict, but I wonder if a culture of shame tends to exacerbate an obsession with sex rather than develop a healthy understanding of it.   Shame is the root of hypocrisy, or the water that feeds it.

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Learning from Comedy

I once took a class on stand up comedy.   Comedy isn’t simply about the content of a joke.  It’s also about presence.

I found several of the rules useful for preaching – and even everyday pastoral care.  Not that life is always funny – but comedy is not merely about the amusing.  It may also be about seeing the absurd in the everyday, or pricking the consciences of the powerful.  I have often seen the mourning tell wicked jokes at a wake.  And laughter may be one way we heal.

Here are some basic rules I learned from class:

1) Be emotionally full.

No monotones.   Be present!  It’s hard to listen to someone who has no investment in what they’re saying.  It means speaking from your diaphragm, expanding your body, and standing straight.   It can be learned.

2) No place you would rather be.

Preaching is an honor.  People are giving you their time and attention.   It’s exciting to be before people, and they respond to your love and enjoyment of them.

3) Don’t get mad at the congregation.

It’s easy to look at the congregation and see sinners: those who don’t fulfill their obligations, refuse to tithe, misunderstand the church, and don’t provide any help.  Yet, they are there to hear you;  they are motivated by some love of the Lord or they wouldn’t be there.

4) Don’t get mad at yourself.

It’s not always going to be perfect.  Not every sentence you say will be coherent; you may go off track.  If they don’t respond, it might not be you.  If an idea doesn’t work, there will be another time.

5) Keep control of yourself.

Control means good timing; patience; and not crying when you get to a sad story.  Don’t let your frustrations or resentment overwhelm the Good Word you are offering your people.

One need not be funny in a sermon.  Not all priests have that gift.  But presence is a skill that all priests can learn, and can do so to their benefit.

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Gervais has an opinion about something

Ricky Gervais recently penned a little Christmas message in the Wall Street Journal.  He’s the creator of the show “The Office” and a talented comedian. I’m a fan.

In it, he declares he’s an atheist.   And Merry Christmas.

It’s the holidays.  We want to sell a few papers, and everyone wants to know what celebrities think about God.  For every Christmas, the culture wars get a little heated up, fundamentalists and atheists slogging mud at each other, pained at each other’s existence, and the conflict is, in itself, entertaining.  Even recently, atheists have organized to buy advertising on buses and conservative Christians have gotten offended.

I’m for more atheism in the public sphere.  Most of my friends outside of the church are non-believers.  A few of my friends IN the church are non-believers. Few have a deep historical and theological understanding, but for most of them, church is not where they are, or where they’re friends are.

At one time there was greater public dialogue.  Our founding fathers were far more open about religious faith.  They were generally not believers in the sense most atheists critique “belief.”  They had far more honest conversations about the role of religion and religious institutions in society.   In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, some atheists had great popularity.   And religion was not aways a part of political conversation.  It was not always demanded of our presidents before Jimmy Carter.  It may have been the language of civil society, but only a few of our presidents have been religious in any serious sense of the word.  Atheists were rarely persecuted in any serious sense; but they may have joined churches.

And granted, I’m embarrassed just considering conversations between Christians and Atheists. I pity the Christian, eager to please and convert; I empathize with the atheist, surrounded by idiots and hypocrites, insisting on using an obscure language created somewhere on the Alien Planet of the Past.   I think there are plenty of different ways to have conversations about religion and faith, but usually they end up being variations of “you’re an idiot” vs “you have no soul.”

Nonetheless, I was disappointed.  It wasn’t that Gervais had once loved Jesus and then abandoned him at the age of at eight.  Hell, I first gave him up when I was four.  The bible itself for me was a weird, incomprehensible document,  confused on the number of animals in the ark or where Jesus was really from.   When I asked my father about God and Jesus, he gave me a book about Greek myths.   At nine, I confronted a Methodist pastor, a friend of my Atheist father, about dinosaurs.  “Do you really believe that the earth was created in six days?”  After all, I knew better.  The pastor, by the nature of his profession, an idiot.   He came back with “It’s a story,” he said.  “I believe in Dinosaurs also….  It’s a story that we interpret.”  But there he was – a living breathing thinking Christian.

I didn’t give up my atheism there, but realized that I was doing a grave disservice to myself if I thought that religious people were as simple as Gervais presumes.

In plenty of churches, people don’t believe in a God that looks like the God he describes.   So when Gervais argues we’re more like atheists, I wonder if he has read the pagans who accused Christians of precisely this:  our God was more like no-God than the imperial God.    Who are the clergy and lay people who believe in an anthropomorphic God?  No clergy I know; and my unscientific internal polls of my own lay people indicate they’re much more skeptical than your average Ayn Rand reader.

God made him an atheist?  Well, yes.  That’s actually the way Christians have typically described faith – as a “gift.”   It’s the challenge inherited from both Calvinism and the idea of the “invisible church.” His funny retort has been a theological response to understand unbelief.

He compares science’s gifts over the comforts of religion; identifies of cultural taboo with religious creed.  All trite; and all ignorant.  Not even a passing understanding of the church’s contribution to astronomy; or it’s doctrinal antagonism toward folk superstitions.   I don’t need every atheist to get the history right, but it remains disappointing when someone who loves truth can’t get his own facts straight and seems to believe that the content of religion is found mainly in the propositions people make about their faith.  Most clergy would cheer his brief proclamation of the beauties of truth.

Religious people do not oppose evolution.  We enjoy “imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer and pizza.”    A few of us are unimaginitive puppets without heart or joy who won’t watch a Lions game at the local pub.  But Jesus at the right hand of the Father is a place in our imagination that refers to a particular understanding of relationships; we haven’t given up on free will as a way of explaining evil; and we’ve got some pretty great music.   Our heaven is like a wedding feast.  We also had something to do with making beer and wine. Just a little homework, Ricky, and you’ll find that boozing and Godding have a long, intimate history.  Some would argue that without religious institutions, we’d be far more sober than we’d enjoy.

His pedestrian confusion of faith and the afterlife confirms he knows only one sort of believer.  How many mainline Christians actually believe in fire and brimstone?   I asked my senior posse that question a couple years ago.   Not one of them did, although they did express a wish that some people would go there.   They were much closer to the traditional annihilationist conception of hell without any formal classes in theology.  They had just spent probably 10 minutes more time thinking about the question than Gervais.

And last, I just wish he were funny.  But perhaps this is an improvement.  Atheist comedians can now be as unfunny and thoughtless as all the other pundits.  I guess I’m going to have to lower my standards.

But until then, I’m sticking with Woody Allen.

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No Labels

As someone who has often claimed unusual monikers to describe my political persuasion, I’m fascinated by this week’s gathering of a number of politicians and thinkers I respect.  I respect them not because I agree with their political ideology, but because most of them are effective leaders.   They understand power, are committed to the common good, and recognize that ideology isn’t the way to get work done.

But I admit a little puzzlement.   Our current president comes from this set of people.  He compromises.   He takes ideas from different groups.  There seems to be some serious misinformation that President Obama is a partisan, a socialist, a “left winger.” The opposite seems to be the case:  he is a moderate who works with organized power, caught in the middle of a policy fights where there is no serious organized “left-wing.”

I am also confused by the complaint we need a new moderate party.    But moderation seems to be less a set of ideas than a description of a certain sort of person.  Radicals can become practical when necessary; Reactionaries can accept modest changes.    If were actually looking for moderate ideas, our current president embodies it, to everyone’s dissatisfaction.

What we really need is a party that represents the interests – the real interests – of the working and middle class.   Unfortunately, the Democrats have abdicated this role by taking money from Wall Street.  And their supporters – trial lawyers, teachers, unions, African Americans and Latinos – are poor at relationship based organizing.

There is a multi-million dollar industry of not-for-profits, churches, social welfare institutions and schools that have lost their independence from both governments and large corporations.  Progressives who might work for a more responsive democracy entered these institutions, losing their ability to actually build long-term power organizations that could put pressure on the government or businesses.   They do good work, but they are fragmented and ineffective.

The institutions that did not want effective government, who found environmental, civil rights, and workplace regulations arduous have funded, for the last 40 years, a highly sophisticated network that has diminished the power of smaller democratic, people led institutions such as the church.

We may need another party.  But it needs to be a party that is responsive to the great majority of people, and isn’t too timid to defend those interests.   It may look like a labor or socialist party in another country, but I suspect it would be different because Americans have less instinctive class resentment and tend to prize individualism.   But we do have an interest in good schools, a reliable infrastructure, and insurance programs that mitigate the precarity of everyday life.

We definitely need more people who care about the common good.  But we also need organizers who can build relationships with institutions apart from government or business, and a party that can truly represent those interests in the halls of congress.

But if this movement can identify those Republicans and Conservatives who seek to serve the common good rather than destroy it, may it thrive.

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Thanksgiving Prayer

May we who are rich not avoid our responsibility to others, though it may cost us dearly.

May we be generous, though there may be no reward.

May our abundance not deepen our spiritual impoverishment,

Or blind us to material poverty.

May we remember that the wealth we enjoy, came from the hard sacrifices of others.

May we not be so foolish to think we’ve earned all we have.

May we not be so satisfied to think our work is finished.

May we not be so captivated by glamour or status, we forget who loves us.

May we say “I have enough.”

May we say “thank you.”

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Conversation and the Intelligence of Groups

Apparently Smart People don’t make smart groups.

“What mattered instead was the social sensitivity of individual members, the proportion of women (who tend to be more sensitive) in each group, and a balanced participation of conversation.”

The New Scientist writes “Social sensitivity – measured using a test in which participants had to identify another person’s feelings by looking at photographs of their eyes – was by far the most important factor….”  Anita Woolley, the senior scientist also said, “What it suggests is that if you don’t know the social sensitivity of a group, it is a better bet to include females than not.”

In the Episcopal Church, The Rev. Eric Law started the Kaleidoscope Institute to examine and enable diversity in congregations.  His methods tried to ensure that there was greater participation in communities with different styles of communication.

One of the primary tasks of the parish priest is simply this:  to gather and talk.  It need not lead to action (although it may).  There are rules to this:  one person need not dominate the conversation; all should be able to speak equally and freely; people will pay attention to the dynamics of the group.

But this is not that easy.  Congregants may need to be trained and taught.  There is a discipline to maintaining a learning culture that harnesses the intelligence of a group, a discipline which is worthy for clerics to maintain and teach.

I also wonder if this explains problems in churches that are run only by men.

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What is essential for Episcopalians to know?

In the comments below, Laura rightfully asks whether or not knowing the 39 articles are essential.  I’m sympathetic – I have a similar reaction when people parade Saint Hooker as the theological answer to our polity problems.

Perhaps there is another question:  is there a historical and theological narrative to being Episcopalian we assume people should share?  Is there a taxonomy or a lexicon of dates, facts, events and perspectives that we expect to be normative?  There may not be.    Although I understand the sentiment against idolizing the past, or claiming it uncritically, I wonder if our reticence toward naming our tradition inhibits us in other ways.

Are there some basic ideas we expect people to know about our tradition?  I think, for example, that new Episcopalian should be able to distinguish why we are organized differently than congregational churches, peace churches, and The Catholic church.

But should we be affirming denominationalism?   Most of the time I’m anti-denominational, but on the other hand, there are aspects of Episcopal culture (beyond gin and tonics), such as its intellectual and musical heritage, that would want to pass on.  The organizational potential of the Episcopacy has yet to be tapped.

I don’t think that such a list would be long.  But there may be a pedagogical issue here:  I’m inclined toward memorizing, drilling, and testing as legitimate (but not comprehensive or complete) aspects of learning.    How do we describe the shape of being Episcopalian, and what are the events or facts that articulate that shape?

Another way to look at it is we’re playing “connect the dots” with our denominational heritage or ethos.   What are the dots?  Do we need Hooker or the 39 articles?

This is separate from what may be essential for Christians to understand.  Some could be minimalist:  merely be able to be a friend of God and others.  Others might require adhering to dispensational theology.  I might leave it at believing that the church’s teaching about Jesus’ resurrection is the location for our holiness.  That is for another blog.

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Religious People Don’t Know Much

Pew recently came out with a report confirming what plenty of pastors already know.  Americans ill-informed about religion (Here’s the test). I recently purchased Stephen Prothero‘s book on Religious Literacy for the purpose of creating a basic minimum of what a confirmand should know about the faith and the church, adding the particulars of what makes Episcopalians distinctive.

I wonder if it would be helpful to have a basic universal test.  Prothero has a list of reasonable expectations for someone who participates in public life.  I don’t think every Episcopal student needs to know who all the Anglican divines were, but they should know about the impact of Elizabeth on the church, the framework of anti-puritan and anti-Catholic context in the thirty-nine articles; and some of the general tensions, such as evangelical, broad and Anglo-Catholic, within the tradition, without being triumphalist or parochial on our denominational identity.

Granted, a list can get unwieldy.   But knowing the ten commandments – and that there are different versions – the virtues and vices, having some of Jesus’ words known by heart; the order of the Pentateuch and the four Gospels; would seem important to any Christian participating in the public realm.

I wonder if clergy are afraid of teaching too much.  For every Atheist knows that one way to make atheists is to expose someone to as much religion as possible.  Give a young child a bible without commentary, and it will seem like an incomprehensible, dangerous and violent document.  But I suggest it is our duty to handle scripture not merely reverently, but honestly, offering the alphabet of a common heritage that is available to all.

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