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Ideally Doesn’t Live Here Any More

In the 1999 movie Dogma, writer/director Kevin Smith imagines the Catholic Church trying to update its image by replacing the Crucifix (which the Bishop, played by George Carlin, described as “kind of a downer”) with a statue of a standing, smiling, winking Jesus, giving two enthusiastic “thumbs up.” Smith called it the “Buddy Christ.”

The name hit the nail right on the head, capturing the difficulty that churches and pastors have faced for some time, a pressure that only keeps increasing. Do we describe a God who is mighty, awesome, omniscient, and risk making it sound like God is so distant and alien that God must be considered far above us; or do we describe a God who is loving, kind, caring and risk that God’s other-ness will be lost? Are we worshiping a King or going to spend some time “hanging out” with a buddy?

On the other hand, I recently toured Geneva, Prague, and southern France. Neither pictures nor words can capture, describe, or explain the architecture and artwork of some of the churches there. One could spend weeks or months in some of these sanctuaries and not see everything. Other churches had their artwork obliterated during the Reformation. The walls had been painted over, the statues removed. I knew the theological arguments that led the church to take this course of action, but part of me felt sickened.

“Can you imagine trying to compete with this?” someone asked. “Trying to get their attention on Sunday morning must have been impossible.” There was a danger of being overwhelmed, and what preacher wants to run the risk of sensory overload? After all, we believe in the primacy of the Word, rightly preached and heard, and surely that must be hard to achieve when every nook and cranny has something to distract us.

Still there’s no denying that sense of pure awe that comes from stepping into a sacred space which seems enormous and unending, where one could spend a long time learning more about the building and still not know it all. Doesn’t that remind you of our relationship with God? Is it really all that bad to feel overwhelmed by beauty and majesty when you first step into such an immense worship space?

Meanwhile, back in the USA, churches are dropping denominational affiliations (and even the word “Church”) from their names to “appeal” to a wider audience. Mega-church “worship spaces” look like movie theaters. Individual seats have replaced pews. The cross is often pushed to the sidelines or missing entirely. Everything says, “Come in, sit down, relax, enjoy.” But where is the awe?

The Protestant churches have never fully recovered from some practices that it rejected purely because they were “too Catholic.” Go into almost any Catholic church and you will find a bowl of water where you can dip your finger and remind yourself of your baptism. Go into almost any Presbyterian church and you might find a glass of water on the pulpit in case the preacher needs it. Gone are the symbols, now replaced with words. Don’t get me wrong, I love words. Reading, preaching, and hearing are central, vital parts of our practice of faith. But we Presbyterians shy away from mystery, from the intangibles, from those things that might be beneficial but are not easily explained.

We threw out the baby with the rosary beads and found our hands completely empty. What do we have to help us focus our prayer life? Sheer will and determination? Many seem to be discovering that that simply isn’t doing enough for us. If I can go into a beautiful place and be surrounded by things that remind me of God, a place where I have a chance to experience awe and wonder, I’m more likely to find that prayer is possible. Should I need such things? Ideally, no. Ideally, all creation would point our hearts and minds to heaven. Ideally I would only have to close my eyes to block out all that might distract me.

But ideally doesn’t live here any more. I’ve become more accepting, admitting that I need help, even welcoming it, taking it where I can get it. If having my eyes and my ears focused will help my heart, soul, strength and mind to focus too, then that’s help I’m entirely willing to accept.

“Silence in the face of prejudice is an act of hate.”

I saw this quote (and some screenshots) a few weeks ago, but I didn’t have a chance to track down the story. It stuck with me enough that I finally took some time to look into it further, and I found that it came from an interview on MSNBC, entitled Internet rallies around subject of racist meme

The video (from the page linked above) is embedded below. It runs for 5m46s, and I would highly recommend watching it:

However, knowing that these things have a way of disappearing from the Internet, I also wanted to have a transcript of it for later reference. I found a transcript at transcriptsblog.tumblr.com and edited / reformatted it for clarity:

Richard Lui:

Now to a history-making NCAA basketball player who just became the subject of a racist, anti Muslim internet meme. Now, he and his supporters are fighting back. The viral meme was on facebook and twitter feeds. A turbaned basketball player. The racist caption read: “Nobody at school wants to guard Muhammad, he’s too explosive.” The probable intimation? Muslim means terrorist attacks.

As it turns out, this player, this NCAA player, is not even Muslim; he’s Sikh. His name is not Muhammed; it’s Darsh Singh. Many people were outraged, including a friend of Singh’s.

Greg Worthington wrote online, “People need to understand this stuff hurts people. You might think it’s funny but that’s mainly because you don’t know the guy. Perhaps if you did, then you would see this differently.” Worthington explained not only was Darsh co-captain of the Trinity University basketball team, this post has almost 40,000 likes as a result. In addition, Worthington says [Singh’s] jersey currently hangs in the Smithsonian. He - Darsh Singh - was the first turbaned Sikh ever to play in the NCAA. The meme to support Darsh Singh now, in Worthington’s view, the hashtag “Be Like Darsh.”

Joining us this morning, from Dallas, Texas: Darsh Singh. Thanks for getting up, Darsh, and you know when you first heard about this post, you dismissed it, I heard. And if you did, why did you dismiss it at the start?

Darsh Singh:

Well, as a Sikh and as an American, I believe that love is the most powerful force in the world. And this story reinforced that for me.

Now, this person who posted the meme didn’t know me, they wanted to post something out of ignorance, and I had nothing to say to that, it doesn’t affect who I am and my character.

But I was really moved by Greg’s actions, you know. He was compelled by his Christian values of radical love, and he wanted to speak out against hate, and he spoke out on Facebook.

And what was amazing to me is it went viral, his love went viral.

Just by one person acting, so many other people wanted to express love, whether it was because of their faith, whether their values, or just human decency, whatever it was, they were compelled to do so and that’s what was so inspirational to me.

Richard Lui:

Inspirational. You wrote in an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News many things, one of which is this hope. And the response, and I was just mentioning, close to 40,000 likes to his comments, and as well I can’t count comments coming out in support of you. What does that tell you about the way people understand what is now unfortunately trending Islamophobia, but as well as what it means to be Sikh, and to have a Sikh way of life, because those are different?

Darsh Singh:

Right, well, in the Sikh tradition, we believe that every individual has the potential to embody divine love. And what this showed me is that people are recognizing there are no bystanders when you see hate violence.

Hate and when you reach out to people and connect to them, it means something.

Silence in the face of prejudice is an act of hate, and so a lot of people are recognizing that and they’re speaking up. And that’s what’s been really so meaningful to me is I’ve gotten so many messages - this is the good news! - people reaching out and saying “In the past, I’ve seen things, I’ve been silent, I pledge to you that I’m going to speak up from now on.” So that’s really powerful to me.

Richard Lui:

Darsh, that’s powerful, that’s also inspirational as you’ve been saying, and that is the good news. The bad news might be some of the comments you’ve heard recently from Donald Trump and other public figures that are potentially here fueling a wave of was mentioned earlier, Islamophobia, and then - this is what will affect you personally - the SALDEF, the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund did an investigation into this and the report shows that about half of the public associate the turban - which you are wearing - with Islam, and that they believe - and I’m just reading straight from the report here - that Sikhism is a sect of Islam. So you were saying silence should not be used, how might you work towards alleviating that misperception?

Darsh Singh:

You’re absolutely right, when we see, when we hear this increased rhetoric on the airwaves, it results in hate on the ground, right. We’re seeing houses of worship being vandalized, bombed. We’re seeing people being bullied, we’re seeing folks being beaten up.

This is not the America that I grew up in, I was born and bred here in Texas. This is not the America I love. It really breaks my heart, there’s a story of a young sixth grader in New York, who had her hijab ripped off, she was beaten up in the playground, people calling her ISIS.

It really breaks my heart to see that, what are we teaching our kids? What values are we really imparting when we have this rhetoric floating around? And so my humble request to my fellow Americans is to recognize that hate, it comes from fear and ignorance, and it’s the ideology of terrorism, and we have to combat that.

Those who are truly faithful and those who really care about each other as Americans have to step up and say, “If I believe in love, if I believe in compassion, I have to live into it, right? I have to take my thoughts and move it into words and move it into action, and that’s what we can do together to build a more resilient community.”

The devil never stops cooking and brewing these two kingdoms [religion and politics] into each other. In the devil’s name the secular leaders always want to be Christ’s masters and teach Him how He should run His church and His spiritual government. Similarly, the false clerics and schismatic spirits always want to be the masters, though not in God’s name, and to teach people how to organize the secular government. Thus the devil is very busy on both sides, and he has much to do.

[Martin] Luther's Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehmann, 55 vols. (Philadelphia and St. Louis: Fortress and Concordia, 1955-1986) 13:194.

(As quoted by Walter Sundberg in “Word & World,” 28 no 1 Wint 2008, p 29-37.)

This is Jonathan Merritt. I met him at the Buechner Writing Workshop this summer.

Each week he sends out an email newsletter: Faith and Culture 5: “five religion stories you need to know directly to your inbox.”.

It’s become one of my favorite newsletters, and I look forward to getting it each week. I’m passing it along because I think it might be of interest to people who read RF.

If you want even more, I suggest following him on Twitter. He brings up a lot of good stuff during the week, too.

He’s also on Facebook for people who are into that sort of thing.

…the supreme object of Christian knowledge, Christ’s love, is so profound that its depths will never be sounded and so vast that its extent will never be encompassed by the human mind. **That which it is absolutely necessary to know, in fact, surpasses knowledge.** There is a note of ultimate mystery about the divine intervention of which Christ’s love is the manifestation, yet, as Caird (70) says, “the attempt to know the unknowable is a paradox which is at the heart of all true religion.

Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians (WBC 42; Accordance/Thomas Nelson electronic ed. Waco: Word Books, 1990), 213.

Emphasis Added.

I think it was Aquinas who said that the problem is not that God is unknowable, but infinitely knowable. There is always more to know than what we know.

One should expect that parents would lose their minds long before their children. But in the case of the famed evangelist Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, it may be the other way around.

Franklin Graham, Muslims, and Immigration - The Atlantic

Franklin Graham would be entirely un-noteworthy except for his father’s name; the problem is, he isn’t half the man his father is.

Did you hear about the pastor who was arrested for not marrying a same-sex couple? What about the publisher that got sued for refusing to censor anti-gay verses from the Bible?

Both of these stories have been exposed as fakes of course, but that didn’t keep hundreds of thousands of conservative Christians from sharing them online this week. When I pointed out to a friend that the story he had just shared on social media wasn’t true, he replied, “well it might as well be. Christians in this country are under attack.

Great article from Rachel Held Evans.

#Rachel Held Evans

One of Jesus most famous teachings is, “Do not judge or you too will be judged.” But in the very same chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus also teaches that we should judge people by the “fruit” of their lives. What gives? Is judging others an absolute no-no or have we misunderstood Jesus’ teaching?

Good read.

Hardest to accept, though, is the moral premise implied throughout the encyclical: that the only legitimate human relationships are based on compassion, harmony and love, and that arrangements based on self-interest and competition are inherently destructive.

David Brooks, Fracking and the Franciscans - The New York Times, criticizing Pope Francis for wanting human relationships to be based on the values of Jesus rather than Ayn Rand.

This almost seems like a Saturday Night Live skit of something that a Rah-Rah "Fracking Is Awesome!" capitalist might say, but he seems to be completely serious.

Some people cannot be parodied.

Often, those complaints about poorly trained ministers result from toxic churches where few pastors could succeed, experts say. By Brian Kaylor Church...

“Toxic church leaders are emotionally immature and lack self-awareness,” Perry explained. “The emotional immaturity is expressed in hypersensitivity to perceived wrongs, selfishness in social situations and inability to control impulses such as temper and bullying verbal behavior,” he said. “A 60-year-old church member can suddenly display the emotional instability of a 3-year-old.”

In a rare few cases the toxic people in church “are just plain mean,” he added.

Given the potential havoc toxic emotions can bring, Perry recommends churches consider the emotional maturity of individuals when filling leadership positions.

“Very often the toxic personalities are strong personalities and find fulfillment in intense church involvement,” Perry said. “But that involvement comes with a high need for control and adulation.”

When the expectations of an immature leader are not met by other church leaders, frustration boils over into disruptive behavior.

There are toxic church leaders in the pulpit, and in the pews.

I’ll just add one comment that a former colleague shared with me:

“We put up with behavior in the church that we wouldn’t put up with anywhere else.”

And when those people control the agenda, other people (clergy and congregation members) leave.

Did you ever get the feeling that the world is a tuxedo and you are a pair of brown shoes?

George Gobel

One night in 1969, Bob Hope and George Gobel were scheduled to be on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. But when it was time for George to come on stage, Dean Martin walked out instead.

After Johnny talked with Dean and Bob for awhile, George eventually came out too, near the very end of the show.

There they were: Dean Martin, Bob Hope, and George Gobel.

Chances are that you’ve heard of Bob Hope and Dean Martin.

Chances are good that you haven’t heard of George Gobel.

Getting onto The Tonight Show was a huge accomplishment for a comedian. There was an entire generation of comics who talked about their first appearance on Carson’s show, what it was like to make Johnny laugh, and how they felt when Johnny called them over to sit and talk with him after they did their stand-up routine.

Before George came out, Johnny had said that he considered George one of the funniest men in the business.

But when George came out and found himself having been completely upstaged by an unannounced appearance of Dean Martin, and sharing the stage with Bob Hope, George said:

“Did you ever get the feeling that the world is a tuxedo and you are a pair of brown shoes?”

Everyone burst into laughter, including Johnny, Dean, and Bob. It was a great line, and seemingly spontaneous as well.

But I think at least part of the laughter was because everyone could relate to that feeling of not fitting in, to looking around and feeling like you don’t measure up.

That was how I felt on Wednesday during the Frederick Buechner Writer’s Workshop. I was blown away by the remarkable lives that people were living, the books they had published, the experiences they’d had, and how they all seemed to be living more interesting lives, not to mention being younger and better looking than me, which I know I’m not supposed to care about.

But I do.

There’s no sense denying it. I mean, I’m certainly not fooling myself about it, so why pretend?

Thursday morning, Barbara Brown Taylor admitted that she felt extremely overwhelmed and anxious about the idea of being the keynote speaker at (quote) “the very first Buechner Writer’s Workshop? Are you kidding me?” She explained that she had tried to mask her anxiety by trying to call it “enthusiasm” although it didn’t seem to work, and she expressed great relief at having finished her last lecture.

Now, I haven’t done a scientific survey, but I feel confident that I can pretty much guarantee that many of the people came to the workshop largely due to the fact that they would have a chance to hear Barbara Brown Taylor lecture. They know her books, they respect her writing, many would no doubt say that they love her writing. The idea that she could feel intimidated by us seemed laughable to me.

But it was still true.

I was very glad that she had shared this truth with us, because it was a good reminder. It’s always difficult to face those fears, and they don’t go away with experience or success or anything else.

I had a chance to talk with her during one of the breaks, and she asked me if I was “having fun”. I hesitated.

“Oh no!” she said. (Thinking back on it now, I wonder if she feared I was disappointed in her lectures.)

I told her that the conference had been great, and then explained how I had felt Wednesday. She seemed to relate immediately, I think she may have even winced as she imagined what that felt like. It wasn’t hard for her to do, however hard that might be for me to imagine.

“It was a ridiculous pity party, and I snapped out of it once I got it out of my system,” I told her.

“Wow, you did that pretty fast!” she said.

“Practice. I’ve had a lot of practice.” The key is identifying when it happens, not trying to deny it, and then just leaning into it. At least that seems to work for me. It’s easier to plow through it than try to fight it off and wrestle with it. Instead I go, “Oh, ok, we’re doing this again? Fine, here we go.” I think about all the things I wish that I had done differently, and I remind myself of all the things that I wouldn’t want to trade or give up. Truth be told, I have a life that a lot of people would love to have, and it’s important not to forget that just because I haven’t done all of the things that I think I should have done and accomplished all of the things I wish I’d done.

I don’t have a grand life lesson here. It’s not going to be the last time I feel like a brown shoe in a world of tuxedos.

It’s not quite imposter syndrome. It isn’t feeling worthless. I didn’t need anyone to remind me that I’m a beloved child of God. I just needed to get it out of my system, sort of like a 24-hour flu. Someday I hope to get the Pity Party Purge down to maybe 8 hours or less.

p.s. - you can find clips on YouTube by searching for “George Gobel” and “Tonight Show”. None of the ones I found were particularly good quality, but they are there if you want to see it for yourself.

Huh.

#technology

We have this saying in our office: “Stop trying to make an apple tree produce pears. Go plant a pear tree.” Very few of us are Gandhi, but we can still be the change we want to see. The first step, I think, is recognizing that you may not be able to change that Old Thing. So just go build/plant/create/whatev a New Thing. Don't worry: a lot of people still like that Old Thing. That apple tree will still get watered.

Landon Whitsett Executive & Stated Clerk at Synod of Mid-America (PCUSA)

#Landon Whitsett

You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Anne Lamott

(Traveling Mercies; on page 22 of Bird by Bird she attributes this to "my priest friend Tom")

#Anne Lamott

I come from Baptist stock, and I get that the believer’s baptism thing is central and formative. But the tone of the reaction to Kennedy reveals the ready slippage in some circles from “this is how Baptists do it” particularity to “this is how real Christians do it” sectarianism. I have little patience for the suggestion that baptizing a young child is “an injustice to that person.” We do it with water; we do it in the name of the triune God. And we do it trusting that God’s grace is the operative thing.

Still seeking an ecumenical spirit on baptism | The Christian Century

All Christians should strive to avoid confusing “this is how we do it” with “this is how real Christians do it” but some have more trouble with that concept than others.

thisistheglamorous-deactivated2

Newt Gingrich

Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) led the push for Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Following a disappointing election in November 1998, he announced he was stepping down as Speaker and resigning from Congress.

Gingrich later admitted that, while he was pushing for Clinton’s impeachment, he was engaged in an affair with a Congressional aide. “There were times when I was praying and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong. But I was still doing them,” Gingrich said in 2007. He later said the situation was “complex and, obviously, I wasn’t doing things to be proud of.”

Bob Livingston

After Gingrich announced his resignation, Republicans unanimously selected Rep. Bob Livingston (R-LA) to succeed him. Livingston represented the party as Speaker-elect in the led up to the impeachment vote.

On the day of the impeachment vote, Livingston announced he was resigning following revelations that he had engaged in an extramarital affair. According to Hustler Magazine Publisher Larry Flint, who offered a reward for information about the sex lives of members of Congress, he “found four women who said they had been involved with Mr. Livingston over the last 10 years.”

Dennis Hastert

Following Livingston’s resignation, which occurred on the same day the House voted on impeachment, Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) quickly gained support of the Republican leadership to succeed him as Speaker-designate. He began formally serving as speaker in January 1999, and held that role while the Senate conducted their trial on the articles of impeachment.

On Thursday, Hastert was indicted on charges that he illegally structured $1.7 million in payments to an individual in an attempt to cover up prior misconduct. According to reports, the payments were allegedly intended to “conceal sexual abuse against a former male student he knew during his days as a teacher in Yorkville, Ill.” The LA Times also reported that “investigators also spoke with a second man who raised similar allegations that corroborated what the former student said.”

reformingfaith

Matthew 7:3-5

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.

Recently eight churches in Fountain Hills, Arizona, posted banners announcing a collective sermon series entitled “’Progressive’ Christianity: Fact or Fiction.” The Rev. Bill Good of Fountain Hills Presbyterian Church, and president of the local clergy association, mischaracterized in his first sermon a distinction between “Progressive Christianity” and what he called “Biblical Christianity,” insinuating that Progressive Christianity is not Biblical nor a valid expression of Christian faith. We respectfully reject this false dichotomy and claim what is often labeled as Progressive Christianity to be a faithful expression of Christian faith in the spirit of Jesus Christ who crossed cultural boundaries and challenged traditional norms for the sake of God’s love, especially for the poor, oppressed, and socially marginalized. The entire spirit of this campaign is not in keeping with the teachings of Jesus Christ. As clergy members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the same denomination as Rev. Good, we, the undersigned of this statement, celebrate the vast diversity of expressions of Christian faith present in the Body of Christ—the Church universal—and further state that Rev. Good’s views do not represent our views, the views of the Christian congregations we serve, nor the views of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is a Christian denomination and has been, and continues to be, a classically liberal denomination of Christian faith that attempts to honor diversity of opinion and faith, even protecting the voices of minority positions, while still keeping to the essentials of Christian faith. We are hesitant to define these essentials, understanding that we will make mistakes and are still growing in our understanding of God’s will. We tend to be cautious around any dogmatic statements or claims of absolute truth because God is infinite and cannot be contained by the limits of human understanding and language. Each statement that is made, however, combined with the many statements and understandings offered throughout our historical tradition, offer glimpses of truth that help us discern God’s will for our lives today and for the positive and faithful transformation of the world according to God’s creative love and grace, as revealed through Jesus Christ.

Faith Fight – Fountain Hills, Arizona « Faith & Coffee

Signed.

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