Church in the Mess

Travelling to Israel as a Christian Pilgrim, you see a lot of churches.  I thought I’d write about just two that I’ve seen in the past few days.

Peter's House Church

The first is in Galilee.  Capernaum is a small town on the sea where God decided to go local.  Jesus of Nazareth moved to town and most of the healing stories come from here.  Most of the disciples came from right in town, and Peter supposedly came back and had a house Church after the Resurrection.  I lived this summer in a House Church, and so seeing his supposed house church, related to the beginning of the Christian movement, really had an effect.  The inside was circular, surrounded by benches, and I could see having a potluck meal and simple sharing of communion around that circle, much like we do at Hawthorn House.

Above the House Church the Roman Catholics have built a spaceship looking sanctuary.  At first I thought it looked oppressive, squashing the original church, but I got another view from the ruined Synagogue up the street.  The movement got too big for a house Church.  The question seems to have been, and still is, how does someone keep the core of the story alive in big buildings with big budgets and programs.  How do you feed thousands, millions, billions really, from the same bread?  I think the Church is still trying to work that out.  As I swam the next morning in the Sea of Galilee, I could just make out the ruins as the sun came up over the lake.  Galilee is a wonderfully peaceful place, would that the tranquility there spread over the whole Church.

The other Church we saw just today, the Dominus Flevit, or “The Lord Wept.”  The title comes from Luke 19 :41-42 “As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”  The Church is teardrop shaped and looks out over Jerusalem, the city still fraught with intense conflict.  As we sat on the Mt. of Olives, outside the Church looking over the city the power of Jesus’ tears still held.  When will peace come to this land?  Surely the conflict here is sacramental, emblematic of the deep conflicted nature of humanity and creation.  We dream of peace, we long for justice, but they seem so unrealizable.  Being human seems to work as an exercise in patience and hope, in the face of signs that tell you to do otherwise.  Still, the view is miraculously beautiful, the City with its towers and domes.  Somehow coming here brings you to what is basic and central.

I hope this last week and a few days to continue to enjoy the adventure, to live in the midst of  the confuse dynamics and relationships of this place, but to enjoy the gift of being here for now.

Inside and Outside the Walls.

Jerusalem is real.  I keep having to tell myself that.  I am really here.  I’ve spent the past several years learning about this place, and I’ve spent my life hearing stories that happened here.  If you can say anything about Jerusalem, it is real.

I keep having the experience of reality, stark and undefinable.  I wrote to a friend the first couple of days in the country that the experience is “spooky powerful.”  I had that sense when I stepped in front of the Holy Sepulcher, the place where Jesus rose from the dead.  It was that it happened, here, it was real.  I had the experience again today stepping into the church of the nativity.  The world stopped making sense, it just was.  Even with Nigerian and Russian pilgrims jostling each other in the line to walk into the cave where Jesus was born, even with the hubbub of cameras and Greek Orthodox chant, something was very real.

We followed the monophysite Armenian patriarch’s parade through the streets and ended up at the Wailing Wall last night to watch the gatherings for the beginning of Shabbat. As the Jews were roaring their songs and dancing in circles, the call to prayer sounded from the Al Aqsa Mosque right above them, up on what the Jews regard as the temple mount and signs in the area declare that Israel will one day rebuild the temple.  (Muslims revere the place as the site where Muhammed ascended to heaven and brought back holy revelation from God about how to pray, so they aren’t really enthused about the Jews wanting to knock down their shrines to build a temple.)

It was so beautiful, and sooo sad. There is so much tension and power struggle between these traditions, and so much deep faith. It’s moving and maddening. Religion is a mess, and to come to a place that is fought over as the holy site by three religions just hurts and brings profound joy.

Today we went to Bethlehem.  In order to do so we had to leave Israel and enter the Palestinian West Bank.  The experience was eerily familiar after years of crossing the San Diego border into Tijuana, Mexico.  I found it incredibly appropriate that Jesus was born outside the walls and announced to outcasts.  The walls only went up a few years ago, and the distinctions they enforce are stark.  Palestinians live in rather extreme poverty compared to the wealth of the average Israeli.  Many are not allowed to leave the city in which they live because they are cut off by the wall.  Without any recourse to trade, and scarce jobs in Bethlehem, the economic situation grows worse.  We saw a large settlement camp just inside the Palestinian area, with its own fenced off road only for Jewish settlers.

This is a photo of a mural on the separation wall.

I of course love the Spanish, which translates.  ”Viva Free Palestine, even under the fascist wall!”

Jerusalem is very real, the beauty and the conflict, the pain and the joy.  I feel incredibly luck to be here, to walk in these spaces, to feel the reality.  I also feel overwhelmed and unable to process it all.

Well, the call to prayer I’m hearing out the window means it is close to dinner time.  I hope this finds you all well.  Feel free to leave me some love on the comments board.

You can find even more pictures here.

Incarnation and beginnings

Sermon preached Dec. 27 at St Barnabas Church, Denver, CO

How does it begin for you? Is there a moment that radically changes your narrative, the story of your life with God? “In the beginning,” these are the words that start the Gospel of John. “In the beginning.” John starts at the beginning because he wants to talk about God on a very basic level. Beginnings are a good thing to talk about as Christmas.
We speak of God using many different languages. I don’t mean languages like Spanish and English, but that when we talk about God we choose our metaphors based upon who we are talking to. With scientists we might talk about the original energy behind the universe. With artists we might talk about the spark of creativity and imagination. So John speaks the language of Greek Philosophy to talk about God. He speaks about God as “Logos,” word.
For the greek philosophers this word, “word” or “logos” held a great deal of meaning. Logos was a way of talking about the principle that tied the universe together. Logos was language, thought, the energy that animated the universe. So much of John’s hymn would sound familiar to a Greek philosopher, or to people living in the world of Greek thought. The Logos was God.
A couple of years ago I met an emergent church leader from England, Jonny Baker. He talked about an English Christian community of skaters who has re-written this “hymn to the logos” using their own language. In England skaters talk about skating, and specifically those moments when all seems to be in synch, when the distinction between you, your board, and the skatepark disappears. They call these moments “flow.” One is said to be “in the flow.” And so they re-write this hymn: In the beginning the flow was with God, and the flow was God. All things came into being through the flow, and without flow nothing was.
This is the way that John uses Logos. John re-contextualizes the language of God for a specific community. And John does more. John starts at the beginning, at the start of all time. He then uses the language of Greek philosophy to talk about God in a new way. John says the Word, the Logos, was with God and the Logos was God. John talks about God primarily as relationship. This pushes Greek Philosopher and traditional Jew alike. The Jewish theologians would say “God is one.” How can you talk about God’s relationship with Logos? Greek Philosophers would be confused about what God there was beyond Logos. Logos seems like enough. This discussion of God as relationship sets up a big fight in the early church over whether Jesus was divine, and this fight eventually lands us with the doctrine of the Trinity. What John is affirming is that God is all about relationship.
If John is challenging the Greek Philosophers by claiming God, Logos, is about relationship, he causes a train wreck at verse 14. John writes, “the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” This is wild. This is like saying, “hey kids, the principle of being that unites the universe has moved in down the street…let’s go help unload the Uhaul.” This makes no sense. Philosophical principles, metaphors for the inaccessible God do not “set up their tent” in the neighborhood, but that’s what the Greek says. The Logos “set up camp” among the people. This makes no sense. It makes no sense.
This leads me to the question: What are the moments in your life that don’t make sense? What hand reached out when it shouldn’t have? Who said ‘I love you’ at a time you felt unloveable, or ‘I forgive you’ when you felt unforgivable? Whose words brought you out of pain? What are the moments that don’t make sense for you?
Hopefully there are several. Maybe there is one in particular. Moments when someone reached out, held us, cared for us, understood. The sacred spaces of time when we could hear from someone who really mattered to us words we shouldn’t have been able to hear. I think that John is writing to say this has happened. God has broken in. God has changed the game. The God who is relationship, has entered relationship with creation in a new way.
We have a God who chooses us. Our God moves into the neighborhood, and disrupts the flow of our daily lives. The dynamic loving presence, the deep breathing rhythm of the universe breaks the veil, comes with a Uhaul and invades our space. This is what Christmas is about. John doesn’t talk about shepherds and mangers, John talks about beginnings. New beginnings. So often in the evangelical churches we are asked to talk about how our relationship with God got started, how did we accept Jesus? John starts somewhere else, not with our action but God’s. God broke the rules to reach out and be with us. Relationship starts not with our action, but God’s. That is what incarnation is all about. Incarnation is a breaking of the rules for the sake of relationship.
As Christians we have a responsibility to theologize our reality, to look for and name God’s presence in our life. If incarnation forms part of the bedrock of our faith, of our understanding about the deep reality of the universe, how does incarnation play a role in our life? How do we become the hands that reach out to the outcast? How do we become the forgivers who forgive the unforgiveable? How do we become the lovers who love the unloveable? More than that, how do we move beyond seeing this reaching out, this forgiving, this loving as simple “social action.” How do we come to see that when we act this way, we participate in GOD’S ongoing work, God’s ongoing incarnation. We break rules because God breaks rules for the sake of relationship, for the sake of love. To the extent we experience and express senseless love, God continues to be incarnated, to begin again in this world of ours.

Music 9 for 2009

My friend Luke asked a bunch of us from the Hawthorn Community for our “top tens” for music for 2009.  I decided to go with 9, and to note my heavy indebtedness to Luke for this list.  This list is also apparently heavily indebted to the great state of North Carolina, toward which I am seemingly more and more drawn…  I’m listing individual tracks, but in all of the cases I recommend the album as a whole.

9.  The Fray  “The Fray” -Ungodly Hour

This breaks the mold of hipster-esque “I have sophisticated taste in music” right at the get go, but two of my friends from high school are in The Fray, and so I feel I am obliged to ignore the scoffing at their popularity.  I thought their second major-release album was better than the first, and I will continue to brave the hordes of emotional high school girls to listen to them.  “Ungodly Hour” is haunting, mostly due to Ben’s drumming.

8.  Neko Case “Middle Cyclone” -People Got a Lot of Nerve

“So the saying says, an Elephant never forgets.”  What a genius way to start a song.  Oh, I know, and lets end the album with a half hour of crickets tweeting in a swamp.  In between this chick-rocker does some serious damage, and I love it.

7.  The Dirty Projectors “Bitte Orca” -Temecula Sunrise

A guy named Luke showed up at Hawthorn House this summer, trying to drag us all to see some group called “The Dirty Projectors.”  The show was sold out before we figured out we should have gotten tickets.  Luke ended up influencing a lot of my musical taste for the summer season, and this album was the keystone in it all.  Listening to “Temecula Sunrise” as we drove through Temecula on the way to camp at the La Jolla Indian Reservation was a highlight of the season.

6.  The Mountain Goats “The Life of the World to Come” -Hebrews 11:40

This fall has been about “eschatology” for me, contemplating how faith relates to the hope we have for the future, what the end times looks like, how we imagine “thy kingdom come.”  How do we live that now?  I read this album (which I’m still working my way through) as a musical meditation on eschatology, and how can a Bible nerd not include the Bible album.  I picked the song from Hebrews because that book of the Bible has been shaping my theology lately, but listen to the whole album.  The music is FANTASTIC.

5.  Madera Limpia “La Corona” -Boca Floja.

Technically this was released in 2008, but NPR didn’t catch on until early 2009, and so white people started listening later.  This album is the antidote to the hours upon hours of crappy Reggeaton I was forced to listen to in Honduras.  Madera Limpia is a young group from Guantanamo, Cuba.  There lyrics are inspiring, positive toward women, and build up La Raza.  They also will make you run faster.

4. Ben Folds “University A Capella” -Effington

Ben Folds decided to release a “greatest hits” album by allowing various University A Capella groups to record his songs.  The result is brilliant.  Ben recorded a couple of songs himself, layering track upon track of his own vocals.  This version of “Effington” is fantastic.  I listened to it while driving by Normal, Illinois this summer and laughed.  If there’s a God, He is laughing at us, and our football teams.

3.  The Avett Brothers “I and Love and You EP” -I and Love and You

The Avett Brothers are by far my favorite discovery of 2009.  About 4 different sources brought them to me at the same time, and I am thankful.  The EP that came out before the album “I and Love and You” is fantastic, especially “Kick Drum Heart.”  The album itself is great as well.  These boys make me want to move to Western North Carolina.

2.  Regina Spektor  “Far”  -Laughing With

I’ve been listening to Regina for five years now.  My buddy Trent and I discovered her at two in the morning on MTV2 in 2005, and I never looked back.  Her album this year adds to the phenomenal collection of music she has generated.  Her song “Laughing With” is beautiful theology that became my theme song for my summer CPE internship.  No one laughs at God in a hospital.

1.  The Decemberists “The Hazards of Love” -Annan Water

By far the zenith of my 2009 musical life was witnessing the Hazards of Love tour by the Decemberists at the Fillmore in Denver, CO.  The album, like most Decemberists albums, tells a story.  The show was staged almost as an opera, with costume changes and lighting effects.  Colin Meloy is a wicked genius.

Unmarked Obstacles May Exist.

Saw this sign skiing yesterday.  I thought it applied to seminary, and to life.

Hope your holidays are free of as many unmarked obstacles as possible!

South Africa

I just went and saw Invictus. It made me miss South Africa. Thought I’d share a video from my friend Ryan who is living there for now.

The Emergent Church Needs an Ignatius

I wrote this for class, but thought it might make for some conversation…Jason…

At Convention last Spring, the Diocese of San Diego heard Phyllis Tickle talk about “The Emergent Church” and cite one of my seminary professors, Bishop Mark Dyer, to say that every 500 years or so the church has “a rummage sale.”  What exactly is emerging?  The answer is up for grabs.  As we shift from the “Modern” to the “Post-Modern” era some argue that we need a leader like Benedict of Nursia, the founder of Western Monasticism.  They say we need someone who can draw us into small communities which preserve Christianity as the world crumbles.  I want to briefly examine this call for a renewed Church through a “new monasticism,” arguing not for a new Benedict but for a new Ignatius of Loyola.
The call for a “new Benedict” came perhaps most famously in the finals words of After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, who argues that Western ethics is crumbling, but the idea is older.  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “The restoration of the church will surely come from a sort of new monasticism.”  Wilson-Hartgrove has founded a “new monastic community,” a small group of people who share common property and a rule of life.  Some are married, some not.  All are working for justice and sharing a Christian journey together.  Such communities exist all over our country.  The question is: how will these communities relate to the wider Church?  Most are led and populated by pioneering young adults not attached to any denomination or structural body.  If the Church to emerge anew, to be “restored” in the words of Bonhoeffer, the relationship of these communities to the wider body of Christ must be considered.
I don’t believe the Church is really looking for a new Benedict to draw up a plan to safeguard culture and faith in the storm.  The search is for a new Ignatius of Loyola.  Ignatius was a contemporary of Martin Luther and lived in the midst of the great fights of the Reformation.  The antithesis of Luther, Ignatius advocated total allegiance to the Church.  He famously said, “I will believe that the white that I see is black, if the hierarchical Church so defines it.”  Such a suspension of reason rightfully bothers members of the Protestant Episcopal Church, but it is a spirit of absolute commitment to the ongoing life of the Church which animates the statement.  Ignatius founded an order, the Jesuits, whose members like Karl Rahner and Jon Sobrino have famously helped reshape the Roman Church.   Francis Xavier, one of the first seven Jesuits, set a pattern for missionary service in the order that continues to this day.  The ongoing commitment to the hierarchical life of the Church comes with a drive out into the world.
The principle difference I see between Benedict, as understood and called for by some in the discussion around “emergence,” and Ignatius, is directional.  Those who argue for a “new Benedict” envision a Church behind monastic walls, guarding the valuable faith from the stormy future.  A new Ignatius would call us out to engage in the world, with a strong commitment to the apostolic Church (hopefully with more room for independent thought.)  An article in The Christian Century describes the new monastics saying “Each of the communities I visited seeks also to serve the wider church—and even to convert it.”  If the goal of “the emergence” is to convert, reform, and engage the present Church, to help it to engage missionally in the world around it, we need not a new Benedict, but a new Ignatius.

Obama, war, justice, and hope…

“If you want peace, work for justice” -Msgr. Oscar Romero

I’ve been thinking a great deal about The Nobel Prize speech given by President Obama earlier this week, mostly because a number of friends have sent me links to articles or their thoughts about what Just War or Just Peace would look like. Partly I am in awe that someone as articulate as Barack Obama sat and listened to me for a little while. I thought his speech itself was masterfully written, tracing the outline of contemporary war history, and outlining a pragmatic philosophy for peace building.

My friend Brad sent this article along about the influence of Reinhold Neihbur on Obama. I found it fascinating, but not that elucidating. Neihbur took such a range of positions on war in his time, ending in a place of pragmatism just short of Just War theory. Obama’s speech seemed to uphold this place, but the pragmatism seems to stop short of real substance.

Brad also sent along this article about how the President came to his decision for a troop surge in Afghanistan. I can tell you that the tension in Washington this season has been palpable. Healthcare, Financial Policy, Gay Marriage in the District, and other arguments have left people taxed and tired. But the waiting game for Obama’s decision on Afghanistan was the most intense of them all. What would be our new foreign policy? Would the president listen to his Vice President and advocate the use of drones and selective strikes? In the midst of all the pressure, it was simply impressive how long the president took to think through his decision.

He made the announcement just in time to give the most important speech on war/peace policy in recent history. What disappoints me about the Nobel Speech is that Obama does not talk specifically about the shape of anti-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Let’s be clear. President Obama did not decide to go to war. He inherited two wars, and now has to decide what impact his actions will have for the United States and in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decision to emphasize counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, to make a costly commitment to lasting security, was a tough one. Between the two potential options presented: a surge for the sake of counter-insurgency OR intensified impersonal drone strikes, I am impressed that the president made the costly but I think right decision to commit troops and work for security.

What I didn’t hear, what I’m waiting to hear, is a strategy for bettering of the life of the common Afghan cjitizen. If we send troops to provide security that is step one. In a country with rampant illiteracy, why not send teachers? why not send doctors? why not send community organizers? why not send experts in government? why not send David Plouffe to find and create a political campaign for a young upstart Afghan with a vision of Hope for her people?

Until we complement our armed forces with a serious, organized, and funded strategic force for the upbuilding of just society, we will simply be fighting unjust wars. When armies become security mechanisms for bands of teachers and organizers, then we will see the start of that gradual evolution of humanity that Obama desires so much in his speech. Some have called such work the building of the Kingdom of God. Let’s hope.

Advent Wilderness

One voice beckons to us this season.  John, the baptizer, the cleanser of souls, calls us out of the humdrum to join him in the wild.  In all of the Gospels John calls from the wilderness, and it is to the wilderness we are drawn.  Why the wilderness?  What can we draw from hearing John’s voice as one beyond the borders of society living wildly?

I have found some of my closest spiritual kin living in the mountains.  The liminal experience of leaving civilization for the society of pine trees and snowy peaks draws people of a depth and awareness that I can’t reliably depend on finding in “Christian community” in the city.  Many of my closest friends hesitate when asked about their religious walk.  They find God most concretely in nature, feeling the deep breathing of the Creator when the first beams of the sun tickle their face as it rises over the Continental divide, or in the intricacy of the veins of a leaf.  Urban churches leave them dry, so they return to the well of nature as they reach out to touch the divine.

I believe God can be found in the wilderness because it is in the wilderness that we are free from human constructions of reality.  Out of the cities and societies we create and manipulate we find raw reality, unspoiled by human hands.  I remember coming back from backpacking trips in my teens to return to the “real world,” and wondering which world was more real.

This is why John calls us to the wilderness.  He asks us to leave the world we have created, to experience the raw world of the Creator’s palette.  He beckons us to see beyond our limited understanding.  This is how the kingdom becomes incarnate, out by the raw wildness of the Jordan River.

We are called out from under the fluorescent lights of the shopping mall, out to bathe in the glory of a star-lit night.

Advent 1 Sermon

My second sermon from St. John’s Lafayette Square

I don’t know if you’ve seen the trailer for the new movie “2012.”  If you haven’t, the trailer is a series of images of the end of the world.  We see meteors, volcanos, earthquakes.  In one scene you see a Tibetan monk standing atop the Himalayas watching a flood wave cover the world’s highest mountains.  In another a wave reaches here in Washington, toppling a huge ship on top of the White House.  I don’t know if the wave makes it to St. John’s, it’s not in the preview.  I guess we’ll have to see the movie to find out what happens to our Church.
I love these kind of movies.  They’re never really great cinema; no movie of this genre is going to win an Oscar, but I really like watching cities crumble, buildings fall.  The explosions are incredible no?
These are not new images.   We have very similar images in our gospel today.  As human beings we have always wondered about the end of time. In the times of Jesus, people were interested in the end of the world as well.  The streets of Galilee and Jerusalem were full of prophets talking of the final things.  So of course Jesus talks about the final things.
What is interesting is that Jesus doesn’t seem focused on images.  His is the language of metaphor.  He doesn’t develop particularly brilliant word pictures, images like “2012.”  Jesus seems more concerned with attitude.  He says that people will be fainting from fear.  The world will be characterized by fear, terror.  In the midst of this Jesus has a commandment for his followers: levanten la cabeza.
Levanten la cabeza.  When facing the worst of life, up unto the end of the world, levanten la cabeza.  Christians are to be characterized by an attitude of hope, active hope.  Levanten la cabeza.
This commandment is important for us today, because many of us already know what it is to live in a destroyed world.  For many in our society, in our family, the world has already come to an end.  Their world has been torn down by poverty, by racism, by sexism, by depression, by disease.  So many in our society live in a destroyed world.  This command has deep meaning for those facing a world destroyed: levanten la cabeza.
When we encounter systems that seek to destroy our humanity, or the humanity of our neighbor, levantando la cabeza, lifting up our heads, is a radical action.  Levantando la cabeza means confronting the systems that sinfully seek to deny our identidad, identity, as beloved children of God.  Levantando la cabeza means standing up for our rights, and the rights of others.  Levantando la cabeza means hoping actively through seeking justice, through pursuing education, through organizing.  Levantando la cabeza means claiming our social identity as God’s beloved community, and enacting the justice and love that characterizes that community.
The commandment has social implications, and also personal implications.  We have a responsibility to allow the command to levantar la cabeza to transform the way we live our personal lives, our family lives.  When we find ourselves in places of depression, of unemployment, of sickness, Jesus commands us to levantar las cabezas, to live into our identity as children of God, beloved creatures.
Whatever attitude or person desiring to negate our identity as beloved daughters and sons, querida/os hija/os de Dios, is sinful.  There are few people I have more respect for in life than my friends who have stood up, who have levantado la cabeza in the face of domestic violence.  They have claimed their identity as children of God.  They have said, you cannot treat me this way for I am a beloved child of God.  I am inspired by their courage.  I believe this is the kind of action Jesus commands when he says, “levanten la cabeza.”
Today we begin the church season we call Advent.  We begin what we call “a season of expectation.”  What Jesus’ command, to levantar la cabeza, says to us is that as we wait, we hope.  Esperamos con esperanza.  We have a commandment that guides our attitude about expectation.
We lift up our heads, because we already know the end of the story.  I don’t mean I know the end of the story specifically.  I wish I was one of those preachers who could prophesy the end of the world for you.  I wish I could point out exactly who was the antichrist, and give you the hour and time of the second coming.  I could make a lot more money that way, like the writers of the Left Behind series have.  I could sell images of the last things.  People love talking about the end times.
In the end, I don’t think the Bible is particularly clear about what exactly will happen.  Jesus gives us images, but they are not fixed.  What is important is our attitude.  We walk with cabezas levantadas, heads lifted up, because we have a reason for hope.  Jesus says, levanten la cabeza porque viene su liberación, lift up your head because your liberation is coming.  The new world, of justice, of love is coming.  The promise was made to us in our creation, in the love of God made flesh in Jesus.  We have value.  We are loved.  Wait with hope, Esperen con esperanza hermanos y hermanas.  With an uplifted head, we will be the first to see the coming Kingdom.  Levanten la cabeza.  Amen.