Borrowed Words: Donald's Worries

I am borrowing from the church newsletter article written by my successor at a previous church. Then again, she borrowed from Erma Bombeck. Who in turn was borrowing from a young boy named Donald who was worried about school. So I don't feel too bad about borrowing.

My name is Donald, and I don't know anything. I have new underwear, a loose tooth, and I didn't sleep last night because I'm worried. What if the bell rings and a man yells, "Where do you belong" and I don't know? What if the trays in the cafeteria are too tall for me to reach? What if my loose tooth comes out when we have our heads down and supposed to be quiet? Am I supposed to bleed quietly? What if I splash water on my name tag and my name disappears and no one knows who I am?

How often do we feel this way in church?

How often do those who have no church background or a different background than ours feel like this?

How often do we assume we are supposed to bleed quietly, not let anyone know our hurt, our pain, our brokenness?

How often do we assume no one will know our name?

Donald's worries about the start of school are all too real for way too many people who need a kind and gentle welcome into church.

Uneven Steps

It seems strangely right that the bed and breakfast has such uneven floors and stairways. It is an old building, which has surely settled over many years. And we are taking new steps into strange and uncertain territory as we listen to Brueggemann extol the radical interpretive moves made in Deuteronomy, and so in our faith and preaching, so having uneven steps just makes sense.

Unmetered Worship pt. 2

Building on some of my thoughts in this post, I was listening to Walter Brueggemann field questions this morning, one of which was on the state of contemporary worship and "praise music" (whatever that is). He was asked what he thought of it, and he responded, "I'm an old guy, so I don't like it."

We laughed, and many of those in his same demographic nodded agreement.

He then went on to treat it with some seriousness, and said he saw two problems with praise music as it is currently being done:

1. It does not draw us back into the narrative of faith.

and

2. It is too easily tempted to slide into entertainment.

The first objection is a difficulty not realized by many parishioners of many churches, probably because many of the pastors have failed to frame worship as a draw back into, a foretaste of, a practice of, a recitation of the narrative of faith.

The second objection is to let worship become even more consumeristic than it has already become, and let whim and style rule over substance and deep meaning.

BUT,

What if new music were written in the style of current musical sensibilities, but drew us more deeply into faith narrative, and did so with an intentionality that precluded it being mere entertainment?

What if liturgy were made a living and active force for faith development again (with apologies to those churches for which is already is), and we held these warnings in mind regardless of what we are doing?

I think such music is possible, and hope to be further inspired in its creation.

Is that Isaac Watts I hear laughing in the background?

Inappropriate Behavior

Coming off of this morning's sermon by Walter Brueggemann (don't you just love name droppers?), and having lunch at a place where children got scolded for overfilling their cups at the drink dispenser, I started thinking about inappropriate behavior.

Why do children get yelled at in the grocery store, grabbed and furiously whispered to at funeral visitations, and generally scolded wherever they go?

Mostly, I believe, for acting inappropriately for their surroundings or circumstances. Running around playing tag is inappropriate for a funeral home. Indoor voices only here in the house, please.

Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. (Matthew 18:3-6, RSV)

There is not simply a suggestion that childlike faith is good, there is a warning that without some quality like that of a child, one cannot be a part of the new life Jesus is preaching. With it comes a warning to those who would exploit this childlike quality.

But what is the quality of a child being commended?

Perhaps it is the ability to be inappropriate. I do not mean licentiousness or self-centered greediness or meanness. It is the ability to give an inappropriate response that is of the kingdom, of the neighborhood (to use Brueggemann's term) that Jesus preached. I mean an answer that is inappropriate to empire, to consumerism, to the world that would have us be lovely little cogs and productive little ants and anxious security-minded people who are always at level orange.

A response of hospitality is inappropriate to a threat of violence, and yet it might be an entrance to a whole new relationship and way of being.

A response of joy in the midst of a funeral is inappropriate to "how grown-ups ought to act," and yet how many of us laugh at a memory of our dearly departed with her favorite hat on at a jaunty angle or with his favorite pipe doing a Popeye imitation?

A response of thanksgiving in the midst of suffering is inappropriate (ought we not be yelling that we are the victim here?), and yet Martin Rinkart wrote "Now Thank We All Our God," while serving the church during the Thirty Years War and the severe plagues and famine that followed.

A response of kindness, of forgiveness, of compassion is inappropriate before we secure our recompence and our revenge and whatever passes for justice in our minds and hearts.

Children act inappropriately, as if they don't belong to the situation they are in. Adults reprimand them, teaching them what is appropriate and what is not. We children then become us adults, well conformed to expectations and the ideals of our age.

And yet faith, obedience to the Gospel, often requires an answer, a word, a stand, an attitude so foreign to the situation of the world, that it is hard to give in our conformity.

If we would but remember that we don't belong to the situation or the expectations, we belong to God. And if we are faithful, we will act inappropriately. Not in ways that hurt or demean or damage others or our community or our common humanity, but in the ways that build it up and deny these very hurtful, hateful ways of the world.

To be like a child is more than simply being able to play. It is belonging to a family, a faith, a hope, a life, that disregards the demands and expectations of the world we all think we live in for the sake of the neighborhood to which and in which we all belong.

Thoughts about Sabbath

Here are some random thoughts I have been thinking regarding Sabbath (perhaps notes for a future sermon):

Faith is about service to God, which also means service to the human community. But that service includes ceasing, sabbath.

The new community which is formed by faith is both about work AND rest.

Sabbath means:

• To cease Production and Consumption
• To rest
• To enjoy
• Re-creation
• To breathe
• Too often, it means to be released from a tight or confining place. In the Exodus, Egypt was referred to as "a narrow place." But how many of us have too narrow of lives the rest of the week, seeking openness in worship or in whatever we do on the weekend.

Keeping the sabbath holy, set apart from and set apart for.

2 Chronicles 36:21b - All the days that it lay desolate it kept sabbath, to fulfil seventy years. For the chronicler, it is a theological understanding of the reasons for the exile in Babylon as Jeremiah had predicted. But for some reason it sounds a whole lot like times when we work so hard with no time off until our bodies force sabbath upon us through exhaustion, illness or injury.

Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath: he healed, fed his disciples and all sorts of other things on the Sabbath which got him in trouble with the Powers that Be. But he also took time away, apart, far from the crowds and the preaching and the healing. He wasn't confined to the set schedule of religion, but he still took sabbath. My concern is that I find in this a justification for workaholism that promises to make up for days off not taken or interrupted or truncated or otherwise missed. There is always a danger of finding what I like in scripture.

Poets understand the Sabbath and the preacher's strange relationship with it better than most preachers do. Etheridge Knight wrote about writing 5,000 words one night about how writing poetry is doing something about the world, but his questioner didn't buy it, and neither did he completely. Robert Bly finishes his poem Things to Think with the lines:

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

Healing as Revelation

Looking at the relationship between individual and community forms of revelation drew me to look at the healing stories as revelation. I started looking at them as individual revelations. One person receiving the power of God for life, healing, new life, as opposed to the community stories such as manna in the wilderness.

Once again, my assumptions are challenged by the stories. Let us take the story of the healing of the man born lame in Acts 3:1-10 (RSV).

Now Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour. And a man lame from birth was being carried, whom they laid daily at that gate of the temple which is called Beautiful to ask alms of those who entered the temple. Seeing Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked for alms. And Peter directed his gaze at him, with John, and said, "Look at us." And he fixed his attention upon them, expecting to receive something from them. But Peter said, "I have no silver and gold, but I give you what I have; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk." And he took him by the right hand and raised him up; and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong. And leaping up he stood and walked and entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God. And all the people saw him walking and praising God, and recognized him as the one who sat for alms at the Beautiful Gate of the temple; and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him.

There are plenty of things going on in the story: the disciples continue going out two by two as instructed in Luke 10:1, they go to the Temple for prayers daily, where they meet someone suffering much like the ones Jesus healed, here healed by his followers in his name, an act of the church in the power of the Spirit.

What intrigues me at the moment, however, is how a private and personal event such as healing is the power of God working within the community. Just as the healing stories of Jesus, this healing story impacts the community as much or more than it does the one healed.

1. It startles people. It introduces wonder and amazement, which are the first openings to faith.
2. It upsets the Powers That Be, who have a vested interest in the status quo, even if that means leaving the marginalized, the outcast, the sick and the poor as they are.
3. It reinforces the faith of the faithful.
4. It allowed a teachable moment, seen in Peter’s speech.
5. It fills the community of faith with the Holy Spirit so that they can speak the word of God with boldness, regardless of their credentials and authorization by the Powers That Be.

The healing, important and crucial in the life of the one healed, is also an act of new life that ripples out through the community, transforming it as well.

The Burning Bush and Pentecost, pt. 2

There is a problem with the expectation of the lightning bolt or shaking of the world religious experience as normal is that it sets up some difficulties:

1. It is dangerous for the everyday nature of faith. It can make us miss the simple and the unextraordinary ways of grace. It denies more subtle discernment of life’s revelations. Some revelations hit like the right answer to a crossword puzzle clue about a half hour after setting the puzzle aside. Some moments of absolute ordinariness reveal amazing truths without fanfare or thunderclap.

2. Chasing mountaintop moments can become a goal in and of itself, rather than a means of entrance into more or better service or mission or ministry. Adrenaline junkies understand this problem too well.

3. If the lightening strike epiphany is seen as the only way people are moved and touched and sent by God, then without it, people of faith may feel unworthy or uncalled or unsent.

I say this as a person with a high opinion of the Holy Spirit working in life. It can be at work in ways far beyond and far simpler than a mountaintop moment or being struck blind on the road to Damascus.