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Moving this site over to Medium.
I’ll be moving over the Medium as soon as all the domain forwarding gets taken care of. Until then, you can get there at https://medium.com/preaching-from-the-rood-screen
Why Trump Troubles My Soul
The question of whether or not to speak out in politics is a hard one for me as a pastor. On one hand, in American politics the separation of church and state makes publicly endorsing or criticizing specific candidates problematic if not in many cases unethical. My experience is that people of various political persuasions can be devout and effective disciples of Jesus, and that the political process at its best can sometimes even help us work out how our faith is manifested in the world. On the other hand, to say that religion and politics are not intertwined is an obvious untruth. While Jesus did not work for political change per se, the political ramifications of his message of peace and love were radical. One only has to remember that he was executed in a manner that indicated the Roman Empire considered him a threat to its sovereignty. In a normal political climate, the actual difference between party candidates might be small enough for me to feel that remaining silent was an option.
But what do you do with Donald Trump? Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times this morning:
It’s not just that Trump re-tweets to his six million followers a quote attributed to Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” It’s not just that Trump refuses to condemn David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who has expressed support for him. It’s not just that violence is woven into Trump’s language as indelibly as the snarl woven into his features — the talk of shooting somebody or punching a protester in the face, the insulting of the disabled, the macho mockery of women, the anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican tirades. It’s not just that he could become Silvio Berlusconi with nukes.
At times in the last week I have found myself in wonder, actively agreeing with commentaries by David Brooks and Max Lucado. I especially appreciate Lucado’s commentary, which may put him at odds with some of his base of support. If Brooks and Lucado cannot remain silent, it seems to me that I should speak as well. I feel it is better to speak now, before anyone is the nominated candidate of the Republican Party.
This has nothing to do with the labels of “Liberal” or “Conservative.” Indeed, as many have pointed out, you really can’t nail Trump down on certain core issues of conservative ideology. It has to do with what Cohen identifies as the basic way Trump operates. I believe Trump is articulating nothing less than a new form of American Fascism. I want to define that carefully, because people often confuse fascism with socialism, due to the Nazi Party being the “National Socialist” party.
The best definition for the sake of this argument is that of Robert Paxton. He writes that fascism is "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."1
One has to remember that in both Italy and Germany of the 20s and 30s, the backing for the regimes were not Marxist, but capitalist. The Third Reich was very profitable for Krupp, Porsche and BMW. The victimhood and decline implied in “Making American Great Again” and the purity language used against Muslims and Hispanics make this definition seem to fit in a frightening way. Note that I am NOT making a Reductio ad Hitlerium argument that Trump is like Hitler per se. Indeed, as John Lukacs argues, there may be no such thing as “generic” fascism. Each fascist regime has been unique, and each may simply be an enculturated expression of extreme populism.2 However, there are enough similarities in the way fascist regimes are structured and how they come to power that we should be able to draw historical lessons without immediately jumping to Holocaust parallels.
Of course, my primary concern is in the sphere of religion. A couple of days ago, I heard a conservative pastor discussing the support of Evangelical Christians for Trump. He related that many Evangelicals feel that the political process has failed them on the issue of same-sex marriage. Therefore, they have given up on the process of turning politics to reflect their values, and instead simply want to see a “Strong leader,” no matter what views they espouse. We have seen this before inside fascist regimes. What is even more chilling is that intelligent people often are part of this process.
In Weimar Germany in the 1920s and 30s, many of the leading theologians, such as Gerhard Kittel (Whose Theological Dictionary of the New Testament is still in widespread use - “Little Kittel” is part of my Bible software), Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch also desired a strong leader to lift Germany out of the disastrous economic situation following World War I. Each worked out a reasoned (albeit extremely narrowly-reasoned) interpretation of the faith to support the rise of fascism. These days, we mostly remember the “Confessing Church” of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but it is important to remember that millions of Christians felt that their faith was compatible with fascism, and that many well-known Christian leaders in the “German Christian” movement actively supported it. This is the problem with the “Christ of Culture” model described by H. Richard Niebuhr in Christ and Culture. In this case, a good part of German Christianity truly lived into Marx’s criticism as an “Opiate of the masses.”
Donald Trump is not Hitler or Mussolini, but that does not mean that his rise is not the harbinger of a new form of fascism. While Christians can hold different political viewpoints, I would venture to say that the opinions Donald Trump espouses have little to do with debate of substantive issues and much to do with fear and destructive nostalgia for a time that never was. I appeal to fellow Christians: Can his violent, mysogynistic, and racist narrative be harmonized to the Beatitudes, or the Song of Mary? Can his divisive rhetoric stand alongside Jesus’ high-priestly prayer that we be one? Where in the Gospels or Epistles do we find support for the idea of a “Strong Leader” no matter what his scruples?
Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, socialist or capitalist? Christians disagree - but we can all find a place within the tradition. Every point in history where populist militarism and nationalism have twisted and compromised Jesus’ message has led to tragedy. There is simply no place for the Lord of Peace inside fascism.
I’ll give the final word to Robert P. Ericsson, Whose 1985 book Theologians Under Hitler feels much too relevant,
”The scenario to fear, then, is one in which a combination of crises makes life difficult. … If this is coupled with a meaningful attempt to follow democratic principles, … beware. Then we will hear calls for toughness, for law and order, for national unity. We will be tempted to sacrifice some democratic principles and civil rights for national wellbeing. … Will we avoid being the Kittel, Althaus or Hirsch of that time? Will we avoid using our intellect to rationalize a position that protects our comfort and best interests, closing our eyes to the pain created for the different or less fortunate among us? Until we have pondered the questions, we will do well not to condemn Kittel, Althaus and Hirsch too loudly.” 3
Paxton, Robert. The Anatomy of Fascism. Vintage Books. ISBN 1-4000-4094-9. ↩︎
Lukacs, John The Hitler of History New York: Vintage Books, 1997, 1998 page 118 ↩︎
Ericksen, Robert P, Theologians Under Hilter, Yale University Press, 1985. p. 200. ↩︎
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your sight” - a State of the Parish Sermon for 2016
A sermon about the Abundance of God and how that should effect our discourse, utilizing the miracle at the Wedding of Cana, St. Brigid's Prayer, and former senator John Danforth.
On The Primates Statement 2016
The Primates Meeting in Canterbury has released a statement
“requiring that for a period of three years The Episcopal Church no longer represent us on ecumenical and interfaith bodies, should not be appointed or elected to an internal standing committee and that while participating in the internal bodies of the Anglican Communion, they will not take part in decision making on any issues pertaining to doctrine or polity.” This is a response to the change of marriage canons at our General Convention this summer. In some ways, this doesn’t change much. We have already been excluded from communion ecumenical and interfaith bodies for several years. In many ways, this at least sets a date at which time this exclusion will end.
The first thing I would say to anyone who is using language of being “Kicked Out” of the communion, is that this is a far cry from that. What IS the Anglican Communion? There’s actually not just one definition, but many. Each member church defines the Communion in a different way. Ours is defined in the preamble to our Constitution thus:
The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, otherwise known as The Episcopal Church (which name is hereby recognized as also designating the Church), is a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, a Fellowship within the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, of those duly constituted Dioceses, Provinces, and regional Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury, upholding and propagating the historic Faith and Order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.
The working definition for American Episcopalians of the Anglican Communion is that it is made up of churches that are in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury. This means interchangeability of ministry and sacraments with the Church of England. Nothing in the entire process from the Windsor Report to now has changed that relationship with Canterbury. The relationship between The Episcopal Church and some other churches in communion with the CofE has changed, but that does not effect anything within our constitutional definition. So we have definitely not been “Kicked Out.”
What is being effected is the way we participate in the “Instruments of Communion” that act as consultative bodies in the Communion. The Anglican Communion does not have a constitution. There are three Instruments: The Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates Meeting. None of these instruments have juridical authority in any of the member churches of the Communion, and the way they interrelate is likewise not specified in any document. A good question is why the Primates Meeting feels it has the authority to do this. While the Primates Meeting certainly has the authority to determine its own membership and rules, they seem to imply they have authority to define that for the Anglican Consultative Council as well, which is more broadly representative and is the only instrument with representation of the laity. We’ll see how that plays out.
My overall feeling is kind of “Meh.” I get the distinct impression that these measures are ones of a Primates Meeting that is tired of fighting and wants to get on with other things. As to our “punishment,” I’m going to quote from a post by my colleague the Rev. Miranda Hassett:
I am the mother of a straight white male. One of the most important things we’re trying to teach him, as he becomes a young man, is the value of being an ally. Standing up for your friends who are girls facing sexism; kids of color facing racism; queer kids facing homophobia; differently-abled kids facing all kinds of barriers. Being an ally, we tell him, means there might be times when you get in trouble or have to deal with some crap, because you’re standing with your friends. That’s OK. In fact, it’s better than OK. And we won’t be mad.
I won’t use the word “Prophetic,” because that’s a word that is thrown around a lot with no connection to its meaning in the Hebrew Scriptures. But if this is the price we pay for creating a church I feel I can raise my children in without having to have extended discussions of why if we love their GLBT friends we won’t let them marry the people they love, then I’m fine with this.
At the first Lambeth Conference in 1867, the main topic was how to discipline the “radical” Bishop of Natal John Colenso, who among other things held up the idea that the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures were not written by Moses or always scientifically accurate. He also criticized the treatment of native Africans during colonization. As we look back on that first decision to criticize and ostracize Colenso on the basis of things that are unremarkable or even heroic today, maybe we can hope that the current decision of the Primates Meeting will be seen this way in the future.
While we think of the visit of the Magi as a pastoral scene, they actually bring danger to the infant Jesus. Nevertheless, they are examples of faith for us.
Enrico, the Iberian Flea - A Children’s Christmas Sermon
In which I completely geek out over the interplay of truth and myth and how they relate to the Christmas story. Also, did I mention Star Wars?
Mel Gibson and Progressive Orthodoxy
Earlier this week, Bp. Dan Martins posted “Jesus, Mel Gibson, and the alpha issue,” in which he somehow tied together whether people liked Gibson’s epic “The Passion of the Christ” with their views on theological orthodoxy and what is often termed progressive social justice issues. He posits that if you are “Conservative,” you probably like Gibson’s film because it emphasizes Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection. You are therefore orthodox theologically and probably have certain positions on social issues. On the other hand, if you are “Progressive,” you probably don’t like the film because it does not cover Jesus’ life and teaching. You are therefore most likely to underemphasize the ontological work of Jesus, favoring a social justice approach bereft of depth in the unique Christian witness.
Megan Castellan and Steve Pankey have already written on this strange exercise in cinematographic dualism. For many of us who are “Younger” in the church (And I need three sets of quotes around that), this is a tired and useless dichotomy that we have heard most of our lives. My personal experience is that for those of GenX and below, creedal orthodoxy is much more prevalent than is was in the preceding generation. Those of us holding this position see those creedal formations as requiring a push towards equality and parity in all areas of society. I’m not a person who believes in women’s, civil, and GLBTQ rights and just happens to be a Christian. I am a person whose experience in “Generous orthodox” worship and study in the Christian tradition has led me to those positions.
We, the youngish (Maybe that’s better) Progressive orthodox, have spent our lives being told by our elders that we can’t be who we are. The Conservatives tell us that if we want to use traditional language liturgy, we should logically hold to their idea of “traditional marriage.” The Progressives tell us if we want to support GLBTQ inclusion, that we should be working to throw out all of our historic liturgies. But here we are - people who will march for marriage equality or #blacklivesmatter but prefer Rahner to Spong and Von Balthasar to Borg. We might utilize “Messy Church” or a table eucharist during the week, but we still want high mass with chant on Sunday. To ignore this trend is to continue to live in the seminary memories of the 1960s and 70s, and refuse to see what the Spirit is doing in the Episcopal Church (and other denominations) today.
But perhaps my biggest qualm about Bp. Martin’s post is the way he treats criticism of Gibson’s movie. I find the movie repellant. This has nothing to do with Bp. Martin’s split between those who emphasize Jesus’ teachings and his salvific actions. It has to do with the fact that this movie is simply violent pornography. It is, in my humble opinion, heretical theology that glorifies the violence against Jesus and makes an idol of it.
If we look at the Gospel accounts (remember that Gibson’s movie uses A LOT of extra-Biblical material) and the way Jesus interacts with authority, we see that he consistently refuses to be drawn into human pre-conceived notions of power and status. When the disciples want Jesus to hurry to meet someone important, he stops to interact with those whom the disciples deem unworthy. When Pilate asks, “So you are a king?” Jesus replies, “YOU say so.” Most importantly for this argument, when the soldiers go to break the legs of the crucified, they marvel that Jesus is already dead. Jesus doesn’t suffer MORE physically than any of the hundreds of thousands that are tortured and crucified by the Romans. In fact, the actual Biblical account seems to indicate he suffered LESS.
Why is it important that Jesus suffer less? Perhaps because like with the disciples or with Pilate, Jesus refuses to be constrained by our human concepts. The kind of worship of the violence perpetrated on Jesus in the film (one medical professional remarked Jesus shed more blood in the film than contained in six men) is an attempt to tame Jesus - to fit him into a category we are comfortable with. This is Jesus the action hero, not much different from Gibson’s other heroes, Mad Max or William Wallace. We’re honestly lucky Gibson didn’t insert a training montage.
But the real Jesus, the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity, the crucified and resurrected Lord, did not die to glorify violence of any kind. He died quickly, in order to point to the fact that not even the violence of the of the combined political and religious authorities of his day could define who he was. He refused to participate or present an opportunity be used in the cycle of violence. It took centuries of popular piety and an erratic filmmaker to reverse that intention and turn it into a fetishized spectacle of gore that fit more neatly into our human narratives of violence, thereby robbing it of its true power.
The crucifixion is important. Every Good Friday I repeat the words, “We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.” But the redemption of the world is not accomplished by HOW MUCH humanity made Jesus suffer, it is accomplished by who Jesus IS, namely the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity.
In a day and age when violence committed under a patina of religiosity is causing so much death and destruction in the world, we as Christians need to admit that it’s our problem too. When we religiously glorify violence of any kind, even that committed against Jesus, we fuel the cycle of violence. Jesus, as René Girard remarked, is the one that shows the absolute lie of the ultimate efficacy of sacrificial violence. Jesus is no longer bound to the cross, and neither are we as his followers.
This is a really long way of saying that Bp. Martin’s use of the metaphor of Gibson’s film is problematic. It’s not that a Progressive orthodox like me has trouble with Jesus’ salvific action, because that’s core to my faith. In fact, Jesus’ actions we commemorate during the Triduum are the foundations on which my belief in social justice issues rest. If Jesus did this for us to show us the powers and principalities could not bind him, why do we continue to bind each other in chains of racism and sexism and all the other “isms” that harm the children of God? And why do we continue to insist that humanity, in whatever group we are discussing, needs to be divided into opposing camps that can’t find common ground?
Putting on the Armor of Light, a Sermon for Advent 1 C.
Saving the Shire
(This really IS a response to the Where is your Galilee” question as part of the Acts8 BLOGFORCE. As Bp. Curry says, “Stick with me now….”)
One of the unfortunate decisions in the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings (LOTR) films was to omit the chapter “The Scouring of the Shire” from the book The Return of the King. In that chapter, near the end of the trilogy, the returning Hobbits find the shire subjugated and industrialized by Saruman and his followers. From a mythological (Actually Mythopoeic[1]) perspective, this is the key to the book. The Hobbits represent the average readers, who are taken on a mystical journey, face travails, prevail over evil, then return to their world to bring it healing. The Hobbits not only drive the invaders out of the Shire and return it to it’s agrarian base, but make it better than it was through their wisdom, abilities and the gifts of the elves which they acquired during their quest. In LOTR, the industrialization of the shire under Saruman was not just about factories and waste, but is a metaphor for the loss of meaning in society - a loss of the value of story in the face of bare empirical reductionism.
If you can’t tell from that previous paragraph, I’m a geek. I often tell people that I was a geek long before I was a Christian. I saw Star Wars before I ever saw The Ten Commandments. I read Dune before I read the Bible. I’ve been a Dungeon Master longer than I’ve been baptized. I grew up in South Central Kentucky, where most of my contact with Christians had to do with people telling me I was going to hell because I didn’t go to their specific church. While I thought Jesus was an interesting figure, I couldn’t get past what I saw as the bigotry and anti-intellectualism of his followers. Christianity, as I saw it, was a narrow, moralistic path that seemed to have very little joy. It was a reductionistic way of thinking completely bereft of the power that I found in the books of Tolkien, Herbert and Asimov. I felt more community in 12 hour gaming sessions of “Star Frontiers” than I did in any of the student led prayer meetings that occurred around school events.
I was ignorant enough of the Christian story that when I read the C.S. Lewis Narnia series, I didn’t pick up on the rather heavy-handed allegory. I remember loving the character of Aslan and thinking, “If the God of the Christians was like that, I might be interested in Christianity.” There seemed to be no correlation between what was going on in Narnia and what I was hearing from the Christianity around me.
I became a Christian gradually and somewhat grudgingly - my stepfather was hired as the organist of the Episcopal Church and so I became an Episcopalian by default. The initial attack into my skepticism was liturgy and community. I had been led to believe that Christianity was about the acceptance of certain empirical propositions about God and Jesus. But as I spent time in my new church, I found that little time was wasted on that. Instead, it was all centered around building community inside and outside the church, as well as worship which featured re-telling the story of Jesus and re-enacting it in a communal way. This was from an unexpected direction, and I found myself bringing my guard down bit by bit.
The major turn towards faith took place when I started to look at the Bible critically. As long as the characters of the Bible were sterile, saintly characters, I had no real use for them. But when I began to read the Bible as literature, it came alive for me. As a person who had immersed myself in story in both reading and creating my own through tabletop role playing games, I could relate to real, mixed-motive characters. Abraham and Ehud, Jael and Rachel became characters as interesting as Gurney Halleck and Hari Seldon. It worked the other way too. After I had studied the Genesis account in a mythological manner, I found I could read Tolkien’s Silmarillion all the way through - something I had attempted several times before without success. The Bible became a way to expand my imagination, rather than shut it down. It was now possible to think about Christian religion in a new way - as a story with incredible power. But I still needed a further step.
It was Lewis story of coming to faith that brought me in totally:
On that fateful night in 1931, Lewis was in the midst of a fretful return to religious faith. Raised as an Irish Protestant, he had become an agnostic as a teenager. Though he came back to accepting the idea of a divine presence in 1929, he continued to resist Christianity. It remained for Dyson, a High Anglican, and Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, to push him over the threshold — though it literally took them all night. As they marched back and forth along Addison’s Walk, Tolkien argued for the literal and mythological truth of the Resurrection of Christ.
By all accounts, the key moment came when Lewis declared that myths are lies, albeit “lies breathed through silver.” Tolkien replied, “No, they are not,” and demanded to know why Lewis could accept Icelandic sagas as vehicles of truth while demanding that the Gospels meet some higher standard. Hours past midnight, Tolkien finally went home to bed, leaving Dyson to carry on the campaign. Tolkien’s argument — that the Resurrection was the truest of all stories, with God as its poet — may not sound particularly convincing to nonbelievers (nor indeed to some Christians), but to a man committed to the idea of myth as the only way to express higher truths, it was irresistible. Two weeks later, Lewis told a friend he had once again fully embraced Christianity: “My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.” [2]
(This is a fictionalized video of Toklien and Lewis' conversation. It's from EWTN, so it portrays Tolkien as the self-confident Roman Catholic and Lewis as a kind of slow student, but the dialogue is helpful.
While it’s often novel for people who know the Bible to read it as literature for the first time, for me as a religious outsider familiar with imaginative literature, it was the necessary step to be able to accept it as truth. For some Christians, it seems necessary to hold the Gospel as an exclusive truth that is unique from all others. For me, it was necessary that the “Christian Myth” was NOT unique in many of the archetypes and stories it uses. It was the fact that it had all the humanity of the other stories, but was transcended by divinity. Christ is the myth-made-man that gathers in the truth of all of humanity’s myths and brings them into focus. Christ is THE story, embodied. I am not saying that Jesus did not exist, or that his Resurrection is purely a metaphor. I believe in the bodily Resurrection. I mean that God uses story as a primary means of imparting meaning, and that Jesus as one person of the Trinity is the ultimate meaning.
(I’m getting to the point. I’ll sit down in a couple of minutes.)
In our culture, we are bereft of story. The enlightenment, while providing us with many benefits that I would never speak ill of, has left us with a lesser view of the power of fiction. We now say that something is “Only a story,” inferring that since it does not bear up a strict factual truthfulness, that it must have less value. Despite that, as human beings we derive all our meaning from story. Therefore, we invent new stories to fill that meaning gap. These days, they are usually stories of political certitude backed up by niche media. In my opinion, part of the reason (beyond economics) why groups such as Al Queda and ISIS are able to recruit effectively is that people are growing up in a world bereft of narrative. Eventually, the narratives of politics wear out. They don’t have depth and they leave one wanting more. People will reach for any meaning if they have none.
Christianity has that depth of story. We have THE story of the people of God culminating in the person of Jesus. In itself it is compelling if we don’t sanitize it. It speaks deeply to people if we don’t require subscription to moral codes and creeds before they hear it. It can be life changing for people who immerse themselves in other kinds of story if they are allowed to hear it that way - with it’s native power.
This is my Galilee: The Geeks. My people. People who hunger for and immerse themselves in story, but have not been able to hear Christ’s story in the same way, quite often due to the actions of his followers. As Episcopalians, we have the temperament and tools to be able to be the Jesus Movement to my people. We can present the narrative as narrative, while still holding onto its divinity.
Those of us who have experienced the life-transforming story of Jesus have, like the hobbits, gone into the world of legend and saga and returned changed. We can transform the Shire, returning the tradition of the past while bringing the best of the present. We can encourage tolerance and respect for all despite holding onto our particular truth claims. The challenge lies before us. “Go!”
To close, a paragraph from JRR Tolkien’s essay On Fairy Stories:
I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe.[3] But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. [4]
Mythopoeia (also mythopoesis, after Hellenistic Greek μυθοποιία, μυθοποίησις “myth-making”) is a narrative genre in modern literature and film where a fictional mythology is created by the writer of prose or other fiction. This meaning of the word mythopoeia follows its use by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1930s. The authors in this genre integrate traditional mythological themes and archetypes into fiction. (From Wikipedia) ↩
The Real Fellowship of the Ring - Salon.com. www.salon.com. Web. 16 Nov. 2015. http://www.salon.com/2003/12/03/tolkien_lewis/ ↩
Eucatastrophe is a term coined by J. R. R. Tolkien which refers to the sudden turn of events at the end of a story which ensures that the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending, and very plausible doom. The opposite of catastrophe. (From Wikipedia) ↩
“On Fairy Stories by Tolkien.” Excellence in Literature by Janice Campbell. Accessed November 20, 2015. http://excellence-in-literature.com/childrens-literature/on-fairy-stories-by-tolkien. ↩
Telepresence and the Eucharist
This past Sunday the Episcopal Church installed it’s new Presiding Bishop (PB), the Most Rev. Michael Curry. This was the fourth PB installation that has occurred during my time as an Episcopalian. I never saw the liturgy for ++Browning. I watched ++Griswold and ++Schori’s installations at later dates on DVDs. This time, the technology was good for watching online.
We had added the “Rood Screen” and a projector a couple of years ago. I don't use our screen for liturgy or singing, but only for preaching and announcements (See my initial post here). This time, I decided to move our Sunday late service time by an hour so that we could take part in the service in Washington by webcast.
The technology worked well. It required a small amount of audio tweaking and we had one ten-second point of buffering, but was otherwise smooth. Since the tech went well, I was a little more present to think about what it was that we were doing - the positives and the possible dangers.
I am well aware I am not the first person to use telepresence in worship. I’ve been to non-denominational megachurches where the pastor's image is projected life-size onto a screen on the stage for the sermon. The way we as Episcopalians approach sacrament would raise questions in such a venture. If the Eucharist is a celebration of the church gathered for worship with Christ in the center, what does it mean when the primary celebration is happening a thousand miles away?
First of all, let me be clear about my role. Even though blessing of the water of Baptism and the celebration of the Eucharist were taking place on the screen, they were also taking place in my congregation. I said the words along with the celebrants in Washington and the people were responding, so I have no question about validity of sacrament. I have a hard time seeing us ever being in the place where we could accept that a priest at the other end of a video connection could effect Sacramental action remotely.
I was acutely aware from the beginning of planning of the tension between beautiful liturgy and showmanship. As one blogger put it recently, “The distance between a brazier of incense at Compline and a fog machine at a concert is not all that great.” Despite being a technophile, I am inherently suspicious of projection screens in worship because of the way we passively receive from them in the rest of our lives.
I was also concerned about the idea of locality. The Eucharist is a rite that should reflect the gifts and limitations of a real local congregation as we bring them before God. The use of a projected cathedral liturgy could both make it an over-the-top show, and destroy that sense of who we are when we gather as a church.
The experience was positive, although I am still in a stage of reflection at this point. The first thing that made it work was the nature of the event. Using telepresence allowed my congregation to participate in the service as a worship experience together that they could have only otherwise experienced as more of a production and then only as individuals. It brought us together with those in Washington and other sites to experience an important moment in our lives as Episcopalians and celebrate that with sacramentality. When my people pray for ++Curry in our Prayers of the People for the next nine years, they will have a memory to draw on rather than just his name.
The second thing that made it work was the fact that it was an occasional occurrence rather than the regular way we worship. Using that method regularly would, I believe, change the entire focus of worship from the locally gathered community to the show taking place elsewhere. Instead of being a celebration of local gifts brought to God, it would have hampered local gifts by setting a standard to which we could not aspire on a Sunday-to-Sunday basis. So in short, I would say it was a great enhancement to my congregation's worship life, but only because it's not what we usually do. The very nature of it as a special event made it possible to use it to allow my people to experience the wider church without it hampering the local, weekly way we worship.
Tech is what we make of it. It neither inherently enhances or destroys community. It always brings with it promises when used well and dangers when used badly. I am pleased that Sunday we appeared to be able to use the tech well.
Fr David uses the story of Melchizedek and the Epistle of Hebrews to look at Jesus’ work on the cross, particularly through the works of Rene Girard. A sermon for Proper 25 B, 10/25/15
Persecution Vs Privilege and County Clerks
You hear a lot these days about Christians being “Persecuted” in America. This is despite the fact that we hold an overwhelming majority of positions in the national, state and local governments. As a student of Church History, I would say that very little if any actual systematic persecution is taking place of Christians in America. What is instead happening is that Christians are mistaking the loss of privilege for persecution. The difference is important. Perhaps the best recent example of this is the case of Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis in Kentucky. Her office continues to refuse marriage licenses to Same-Sex couples despite instruction from both the Governor’s office and the ruling of a federal judge.
Davis claims that since her version of Christian belief holds that marriage can only occur between men and women, that having to issue a civil marriage license to a same-sex couple would be a violation of her religious freedom. She also refuses to let her deputy clerks sign because her name still appears on the license. This means that same-sex couples who are citizens of Rowan County must travel to a neighboring county for a civil marriage license.
There are Christian voices claiming that she is being subjected to religious persecution. This flies in the face of the history of religious accommodation in America. Employers must provide "reasonable accommodation" to those with a religious scruple. BUT the employee MUST be able to perform the basic functions of their job. Allowing a Sikh to wear a turban against dress code while teaching school does not effect the basic functions of his job. That's a reasonable accommodation. A Hindu claiming that although they work as a butcher they will not kill animals isn't a reasonable accommodation. The job of a county clerk is to uphold the Constitution as interpreted by judicial process. County clerks issue marriage licenses under the laws and interpretation set by the state. If one is led by one's religious beliefs to be unable to fulfill the basic functions of that job, then that job is unsuitable for you by your own choice. It's not persecution. No more than refusing to hire an Orthodox Jew for a factory shift on a Saturday when that person has indicated they absolutely cannot work on the Sabbath. Could reasonable accommodation be made? Maybe, if the clerk would allow a deputy to sign the licenses. Instead, she seems to be dwelling on an incorrect interpretation of religious freedom.
It's not persecution we are talking about - it's loss of historic Christian privilege in America. The fact that she thinks she could be in the legal right here indicates how much Christian privilege still remains. People that are incensed by this "assault" on her "religious freedom" would be scandalized if this principle were applied to the beliefs of other religious groups. What if a Hindu refused to issue marriage licenses to people who were of different castes? What if a Muslim refused to issue marriage licenses to marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims? Let's broaden that principle out. What if a Jew who was head of the USDA decided that it was against his religion to supervise inspections of pork? How about a Rastafari police chief who refuses to enforce marijuana violations? No, only supposedly Christian beliefs have this protection. Thats privilege, even if it is waning.
Davis is free to believe whatever she wants. No one is trying to get her to change her religious beliefs. As Judge Bunning said in his ruling,
"Davis remains free to practice her Apostolic Christian beliefs. She may continue to attend church twice a week, participate in Bible Study and minister to female inmates at the Rowan County Jail. She is even free to believe that marriage is a union between one man and one woman, as many Americans do," .. "However, her religious convictions cannot excuse her from performing the duties that she took an oath to perform as Rowan County Clerk."
In some ways, I find this highly ironic. At the same time some in America are talking about Christians being persecuted, they are simultaneously insisting that someone not face the consequences of their "Christian" belief. In other words, they want to say they are persecuted, but not face the suffering that would take place if actual persecution were taking place. It's the best of both worlds. You get to hold onto the reigns of power but get the satisfaction of false victimhood.
As a Christian minister, I find this misuse of religious accommodation reprehensible and counter to the Gospel. When Mary sang her song during her pregnancy, she told us that Jesus would "Bring down the mighty from their thrones and exalt the lowly." Jesus did not lead from a position of temporal power. Neither did Paul or any of the apostles. The fusion of church and state did not happen until the reign of Constantine. The ramifications of that are still playing out over 1500 years later. The idea that public office is the place where a Christian should enforce her beliefs on others over and against the law of the land has nothing at all to do with the teachings of Jesus. It has everything to do with age-old human problems of power and insecurity.
If we want to be Christians who follow Jesus authentically, then we need to ditch the language of persecution. It only belongs in places of actual persecution, like parts of the Middle East and Africa. We need to embrace the fact that our privilege is dying. We should welcome that, because when our privilege is finally dead, we will be standing closer to Jesus.
A sermon for the 50th Anniversary of the martyrdom of Jonathan Myrick Daniels - Proper 14B. Video from “Here Am I, Send Me: The Story of Jonathan Daniels” at https://vimeo.com/14117023
A Sermon for Proper 13B by the Rev. David Simmons, ObJN. Sometimes we become so obsessed with the details of what Jesus says and does that we forget to follow Jesus himself.
A Sermon for Proper 12B - The Rev. David Simmons, ObJN. For us to see the world properly as children of God, a sense of wonder is required.