What If Jesus Had Lived?

I think it’s very important to bring sin out of the individual.  I feel that conceptualizing Jesus as a sacrifice, unblemished and pure, not only fails to deal with the reality of the horrific and unjust nature of his death, but also somehow puts a stamp of approval on that death.  Whether or not Jesus’ crucifixion was an act of selflessness, I feel the movement would have been better off had he not died.  Sometimes we need to make the best of a bad situation, but much of crucifixion talk seems to me like it justifies suffering and violence.

It is hard to know how history might have unfolded had the Jesus story gone differently, but as a Christian, my focus on Jesus is on his life.  I feel there is, in a focus on the cross, a tendency to justify violence and to glorify an event that I have trouble seeing as anything but terrible.  For me, the time after Jesus’ death is a mystery.  I know this makes me a heretic, but I’m not really sure whether Jesus resurrected in any sense of the word… and since I’m not sure of that, I’m not sure what good came of the cross.  Certainly there was something amazing that happened with his followers after his death.  The furthest I want to go with the cross is toward “risk”.  I can think about resurrection metaphorically; I certainly feel that I have had “resurrection” moments in my own life.  They have nothing to do with literal death, though.  I think I tend toward a Markan focus that leaves out resurrection and focuses on the ministry.  That’s just a bunch of my own personal beliefs surrounding this stuff, but that’s where my thinking is.  I would like to think that Jesus would have offered much more to the world had he the chance to live longer.  I’m not interested in celebrating the death of the greatest man who ever lived.  

Ecotheology

How are issues of economic, racial and gender justice related to ecotheology?

The earth is manipulated and taken advantage of just like these minority groups. The same mentality is applied… those with the power deserve the power because it was given to them and is a sign of God’s approval. As long as this is the mindset, instead of justice and compassion-oriented service to this world, those with power will continue to widen the divide and work to the disadvantage of minorities and the earth.

Benediction for an Earth Day Service

God’s created people:

God called creation good. Hear this as a call to be stewards of the earth and to commit ourselves to restoring to goodness our sick planet. Remember that God has no hands but our hands, no face but our face, no landfill but our landfill, no compost but our compost, and no breath of fresh air but those that we breathe in. May we continually breathe in the Holy Spirit and receive God’s blessings. Go forth and create goodness with God!

Amen.

Uhm....

When white American Christians talk about being persecuted…

Meditation/Study Sounds 7: Wind

I invite you to meditate for 10 minutes, using the sound of the wind:

Wind Sounds

Who was Jesus? Who is the Christ?

Jesus was a teacher and healer who felt and understood his innate divinity more than any other being.

Christ is the way that the spirit and memory of Jesus vibrates and resonates in our world today.

Hyperbole and a Half

seekinguncertainty:

writhemic:

everyday.

all the days

So Much Easter in This

Every cell in the human body regenerates on average every seven years. Like snakes, in our own way we shed our skin. Biologically we are brand new people. We may look the same, we probably do, the change isn’t visible at least in most of us, but we are all changed completely forever.
When we say things like “people don’t change” it drives scientist crazy because change is literally the only constant in all of science. Energy. Matter. It’s always changing, morphing, merging, growing, dying. It’s the way people try not to change that’s unnatural. The way we cling to what things were instead of letting things be what they are. The way we cling to old memories instead of forming new ones. The way we insist on believing despite every scientific indication that anything in this lifetime is permanent. Change is constant. How we experience change that’s up to us. It can feel like death or it can feel like a second chance at life. If we open our fingers, loosen our grips, go with it, it can feel like pure adrenaline. Like at any moment we can have another chance at life. Like at any moment, we can be born all over again.
Grey’s Anatomy, 7x01 With You I’m Born Again

The Swan

By Mary Oliver

The Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

Love After Love

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948-1984, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986.

Easter Sermonette

This is a reflection I gave for my church’s 8:00 a.m. Easter service a few years ago. Also printed is the scripture passage used. (NIV)

"After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee.There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.” So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

So: This story begins with the two Marys heading to the tomb after the death of their beloved leader. Maybe we’ve had quite enough Holy Week at this point, but for me, resurrection only makes sense when we start from a low place. These women were all but literally beaten down.

It is an unfortunate truth that most of us know grief all too well. We have experienced stagnancy and aloneness that grief brings, the paralyzing pain and the desire to, perhaps, crawl into that tomb with Christ, move the stone, and sit in the darkness, waiting for enough time to pass that resurrection comes while we sleep.

…But it doesn’t. The story shows that it takes an earthquake and an angel to shake these women out of the reality that grief isn’t the end of the story.

I don’t know how many of you are watching ‘The Cosmos,’ but Caleb and I consider ourselves amateur science nerds, so we have been making time to watch Neil deGrasse Tyson give us a tour of the universe. As he and Carl Sagan have done a wonderful job of showing, the patterns of the universe repeat themselves on both grand and small scales. Sometimes we can better understand a story by making it smaller or more personal, but sometimes the profundity of an experience is best portrayed by the grandeur and extravagance of the universe.

I think Jesus is a supernova in this story. He is a shining star who seemingly collapses into a dense mass of chaos. Jesus’ ministry seems to climax and then come crashing down as he is brutally executed and his dignity reduced to that of a common criminal. Jesus is killed in the most shaming way possible. His followers are dispersed and disoriented. Suddenly the life they thought they were living, their goals and ambitions, their purpose in life comes crashing down. Jesus’ followers may not have understood astrophysics, but they would certainly identify with feeling like masses of dense chaos.

When I dropped out of college (which I did, if you didn’t know), I think I was catering to the chaos within me. I let my depression and eating disorder consume me. I crawled into that tomb and let the failure that I thought I was become me.

I started working full time and tried to brush my struggles under the rug. I tried to fight my disappointment in myself and the disappointment of others. As anyone who has struggled with eating disorders or depression knows, though, pretending doesn’t help. It may get people to leave you alone or to allow yourself to hide behind a facade, but pretending you’re okay when you’re not only makes the pain worse. Like a dying star, you begin to collapse in on yourself. You become alone in grieving for yourself and for the person you wanted to be. You lose sight of whatever light you used to have. Like a dying star, you become self-cannibalizing until you have no more of your energy left to consume. And it seems like that’s the end.

But as the Marys could perhaps tell us, that’s not the end of the story. As is evidenced through the universe, resurrection happens. The explosive deaths of celestial bodies lead to opportunities for Life. Our Earth exists because of a series of deaths and explosions. Often times, we need to die to ourselves in order to be born again, to be resurrected into a new kind of life.

Climbing out of our low points requires us to remember this. When you’re at the bottom of one of those pits, it feels like that’s all there is: more low. But if we look up, maybe there’s an angel waiting to give us good news.

“Do not be afraid,” Jesus says. Resurrection happens. Jesus’ followers realized that it wasn’t the end of the story: there was work to do and growth to happen. In this past year, I got married and I began a Masters’ degree. Five years ago, that felt impossible. Five years ago, I felt worthless, like there was nothing better for me than a job that I hated, than hating my body, than hating myself.

But Jesus rose from the tomb and told us not to be afraid: not to be afraid of resurrection, of the work there is to be done. There is life and meaning and possibility, even when it feels like there can be nothing but more low. It may take an earthquake and it may take angels, but Jesus shows us that even after hitting the lowest of our low points, even after a shaming, public death, even after being stripped of our dignity and worth, we can rebound into an explosion of brilliance like that of a supernova. Resurrection happens in Jesus, in the grandeur of the universe, and in the smallness of our own lives.

I know that now and I hope, when I start losing sight of that, that I can hear the reminder not to be afraid, that I can look up at the stars and find in myself the small light that I need to illuminate the path that is still ahead of me and of all of us.

Failing and Flying

Failing and Flying
by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph

I Said to My Soul...

From East Coker by T.S. Eliot

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope of the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; yet there is faith
But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Good Friday

Part of the work of Good Friday is learning to live and feel darkness, knowing that light will come. I love the Christian tradition because of the life truths it asks us to live again and again so that we can understand the cycles of life: death; resurrection; creative birth; and radical forgiveness, healing, and change. It refuses to look away from confusion, pain, trauma, loss, and resistance. It asks me to sit in the darkness of unimaginable loss and hopelessness and to rise up and bring others with me. It shows me that healing is never solitary and that I am fundamentally tied to my communities in a way that mandates I be loved and love others to the best of my ability and in the most justice-seeking ways possible. Anything remembered cannot be lost. None of us are alone. For all of us in Good Friday cycles of life: keep sight of the light and listen for the still small voice of truth… Resurrection comes. #goodfriday

Good Friday: Low Christology Jesus

Many people struggle with the violence of the crucifixion. Jesus, the central figure of the Christian faith, is violently killed by the Roman Empire and said to have risen from the dead. This idea– that Jesus died and was raised– is the cornerstone of many Christians’ faith. Much of Christendom believes that Jesus’ death and resurrection heals the relationship between God and humanity. The dominant understanding, according to Lawrence Swaim, is that “by dying on the cross, Jesus atones for the sins of humankind and redeems sinners in the process… Human beings may have crucified Jesus, but it was God who gave that crucifixion its redemptive power, thus ensuring eternal life for the believer.”(1) Swaim suggests that this is a problematic aggrandizement of violence and asks if Christianity can exist without the cross. I believe that it can.

In this paper I will suggest that focusing on the life and ministry of Jesus, instead of his death on the cross, offers an imagining of Jesus that highlights justice work and removes focus from his violent death. Ivone Gebara’s ecofeminist Jesus offers an alternative understanding of Jesus as example that can encompass a variety of theologies. I will begin by examining the problematic popular conception of the violently crucified Jesus, as presented by Lawrence Swaim, and consider the alternative lens he offers: a focus on Jesus’ life. I suggest that Jesus from an ecofeminist perspective, as presented by Gebara, conveys a concern for victims of violence and oppression and allows for a variety of theological inclinations by stripping Jesus of the dogmas often associated with him. I will begin by addressing some of the concerns raised by Swaim.

In his article, The Death of Christianity, Lawrence Swaim illustrates how a focus on Jesus’ crucifixion bonds the Christian faith to violence. Swaim argues that understandings of Jesus that place value on his crucifixion and resurrection redeem the violence inherent in a brutal Roman terror tactic. God becomes “…a cosmic thug whose specialty is ritualized human sacrifice and whose preferred method of redemption is public torture of dissenters.”(2) The brutality of crucifixion, imbued with religious value, becomes necessary for the “blood atonement” that many believe is offered through Jesus’ death.(3) This glorification of violence has dangerous implications and results.

As early as Constantine, the violence of the cross seemed to sanction further aggression. After a dream that lead Constantine to believe that the Christian God approved of his military ambitions, he combined the Christian symbol of the cross with his imperial advances and “used” the cross to conquer land and people. This dangerous coupling of Christianity with conquest would continue for hundreds of years via churches and governments. Swaim suggests that “all the violence… can be traced back to the belief that Jesus suffered publicly on the cross for the sins of the world and, in so doing, redeemed the world.”(4) Most of our modern minds know that the violence of the Roman Empire and the countless other eruptions of violence supported and instigated by Christian religious institutions were tragic abuses of power that resulted in lives lost and ruined. Swaim argues that the emphasis on the cross not only leads to a damaging conflation of religion and violence, but obscures the importance of Jesus’ life.(5)

In denouncing the violence of the cross, Swaim asks whether Christianity can survive without it.(6) This leads him to focus on the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the ministry that appealed to his earliest followers. In so doing, Swaim finds a figure that he considers a religious revolutionary. Jesus speaks against the religious establishment, asks his followers to re-think prayer and relationship to divinity, and envisions a spiritual kingdom grounded in love. This Jesus teaches that God’s love is transformational in the lives of his followers and leads to a community that practices radical charity, non-judgment, and humble dependence on God.(7) Jesus’ ministry focuses on the internalization of law that manifests in loving compassion and interdependent community. Swaim differentiates this idea of kingdom from afterlife-oriented ideas of kingdom that are often derived from crucifixion-centric imaginings of Jesus.(8) This focus on Jesus’ life leads not only to abstraction from the cross, but resistance to suffering.

Ivone Gebara takes her imagining of Jesus further; not only does her vision of Jesus avoid unduly sanctioned violence, he resists the hierarchic structures that she sees as threatening to our world and societies. She considers the destruction of the planet and its life (including many human lives) to be important issues for religion to address and asserts that “in becoming aware of what unites us… we will be able to discover once again the meaning of walking Jesus’ path, which is pluralistic and welcomes the presence of a variety of different paths.”(9) She suggests that imaginings of Jesus need to be stripped of rigid doctrine that excludes people and reinforces damaging hierarchies. In letting go of dogmatic understandings of Jesus, many of which are focused on the meaning of his death on the cross, we can find the values we share. As Gebara explains, dogma reduces the nature of our relationships to hierarchies and creates fear of heretical thought. This eliminates “the many paths… and the multiplicity of loving exchanges” that can arise when our understandings of Jesus are allowed to be variant.(10)

In searching for a vision of Jesus that focuses on his life, ministry, and the values he propagated, I believe we can find a figure who would “…strive not for power, but to change the nature of power. [He] would accomplish this through radical love and forgiveness.”(11) This focus away from the cross can encompass a diversity of beliefs. It challenges the violence done in the name of Jesus and reorients ideas of “salvation.” Both Swaim and Gebara see in Jesus a person seeking common ground, community, love, and selflessness– values at odds with violent attempts at power and control like those of Constantine. Focus on the underrepresented members of society and their real, temporal needs characterized Jesus’ ministry. We must consider how a conception of Jesus that supports violence by glorifying the cross puts his message at odds with victims of oppression. “We move away from an excessive emphasis on the figure of the savior… the martyr… as well as the victorious warrior…” and move toward an understanding of Jesus that emphasizes his concern for those suffering.(12)

If we conceive of Jesus not as an individual whose suffering is elevated and central, but as one who was concerned with the suffering of others, Jesus loses the kind of title that can be used to condone violence in any way. Jesus becomes a savior in his example to us, not in his death– he asks us to see our own lives as salvific and asks us to orient our lives toward justice and solidarity.(13) Gebara asserts that Jesus highlighted the experiences of the “unimportant” so that they could “develop their own style of seeking the paths of salvation.”(14) Viewing Jesus through the lens of his ministry, we find a figure focused on alleviating suffering, challenging hierarchy, and supporting a multiplicity of paths.

Lawrence Swaim offers a critical look at how christologies can support and glorify systems of violence and oppression. In examining the gospels, he finds the figure of Jesus to support radical love and non-judgment, values that seem at odds with the history of violence in the Christian tradition. He asserts that by glorifying the crucifixion and developing views of Jesus’ blood atonement, elements of the Christian tradition have implicitly (and at times, explicitly) sanctioned violence. He asks, in light of this reality, whether Christianity could exist without such an emphasis on the crucifixion. Ivone Gebara offers a vision of Jesus as salvific example that addresses his concerns. In focusing on the life and ministry of Jesus, she develops a view of Jesus as intimately concerned about and resistant to suffering, especially the suffering of the marginalized. His focus on the “least important” members of society asks us to stand in solidarity with the victims of society’s hierarchies, including the poor, women, plants, and animals. This view rejects the violence often enacted in the name of Jesus and demands that we consider how our roles in the world are conducive to justice and equality. It brings the focus away from dogmatic conceptions of who Jesus is for our individual salvation and asks us to consider how our own lives can model Jesus and be salvific for the world.

1. Swaim, 20.
2. Swaim, 20.
3. Swaim, 20.
4. Swaim, 22.
5. Swaim, 21.
6. Swaim, 26.
7. Swaim, 22-23.
8. Swaim, 22-23.
9. Gebara, 175.
10. Gebara, 179.
11. Swaim, 23.
12. Gebara, 180.
13. Gebara, 186.
14. Gebara, 180.

Gebara, Ivone. Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999.

Swaim, Lawrence. The Death of Judeo-Christianity: Religious Aggression and Systemic Evil in the Modern World Circle Books, 2012.

Because It's Holy Thursday

Hello. Easter is Sunday. Most people know that as the holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus. As most of us also recall from church or Humanities, the Last Supper preceded Jesus’ crucifixion and is why Christians today almost universally have certain practices. I’d like to share.

Eucharist and agape meals

Eucharist, translated, means “thanksgiving.”

Originally, the Eucharist was practiced as a communal meal, as the depictions of the Last Supper in the gospels suggest. Early Christians shared a meal, confessed their sins, and shared the Eucharist– the meal that unified them in the body of Christ. There was a mysticism attached to this ritual; the Eucharist is a mystical union of believers, somewhere in the middle of Catholic and Protestant intentionality regarding communion today.

Consider this Eucharistic blessing, found in the pages of the Didache, the oldest surviving Christian catechism:

“We give thanks to you, our Father, in behalf of the holy vine of David your child, whom you made known to us through Jesus your child, to you the glory into the ages”
“We give thanks to you, our Father, in behalf of the life and knowledge, of whom you made known to us through Jesus your child, to you the glory into the ages. As this which is fragments, while being scattered upon the hills and brought together became one, so the church shall be gathered together from the limits of the earth into your kingdom, because yours is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ into the ages”
–Didache, 9.2-5

It captures the mysticism of this Christian community, joined together through time and space through the ritual of the Eucharist.

Early Christians also held agape meals, which were basically giant potlucks to feed their religious community and whoever else might need nourishment. It was true embodiment of the movement’s redefinition of “neighbor.”

Crowds came from Jerusalem and Judea and the regions around the Jordan River to be baptized by John. He said to them, “Brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the impending doom? Produce good fruit. Prove that your hearts are really changed. Do not think of saying to yourselves, ‘We are Abraham’s children’ because, I tell you, God can produce children for Abraham right out of these rocks. Even now the axe is aimed at the roots of the trees, so that any tree that fails to produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown on the fire.”
The crowds asked him, “So what shall we do?”
He answered them, “Whoever has two shirts must share with someone who has none. Whoever has food should do the same.”
–Q2

So often we think, I’m a nice person.. Jesus spoke words of truth when he reminded us that everyone is nice to their own friends and family. Rapists and thieves, after all, have friends. The test of Christian faith, I believe, is whether we put it into action– whether we are being nice to more than just our friends and family and giving to more than just our friends and family. Christianity’s intent is to extend our circles of compassion beyond those we might naturally be drawn to love. After all, there is nothing extraordinary about loving and being good to one’s friends and family… pretty much everyone does. Christianity calls us to, as Bishop Spong worded it, “love wastefully.”

And be a simplllllllllllllllle kind of man.

The Prayer of Jesus

Loving God, in whom is heaven.
May your name be honored everywhere.
May your kin-dom come,
May the desire of Your heart for the world be done,
In us, by us and through us.
Give us the bread we need for each day.
Forgive us. Enable us to forgive others.
Keep us from all anxiety and fear.
For You reign in the power that comes from love which is Your glory, forever and ever. Amen.

(prayer from the Sophia community)

I believe the translation intends to portray the panentheistic Nature of God by playing on the words of our traditional translations by saying “in whom is Heaven” and shows how the pursuit of God is heavenly and gives heavenly light to the souls of those who pursue God.

This was used in a Sophia Community (Catholic) service. By kin-dom, I believe the translator intends to convey an idea that “Kingdom” is truly achieved when it becomes “kin-dom,” which is to say when we treat all members of the human family as true family.

And that does it for today, I think.

Through a Prism, Darkly

Our churches need to go back to what we "know" and look deeper.  Perhaps this is what theology and so much of religious work is.  Aspects of Christian tradition are often taken for granted and those of us in dominant cultural positions often neglect the questions of how we got here and whether we should have (and I think the answer is most often "no").  Christianity has bound itself to Western imperialism in ways that have embedded such imperialism into our readings of the text in damaging ways.  What is liberating in some contexts is oppressive in others-- the work of queering theology is the work of unraveling normativity and its tendency toward oppressive categorization.  The image of prism helps us see these unraveled strands more clearly by separating unique interplays with the source material (light).  Our contextual lenses inform our readings of the text in ways that affect meaning and in ways that we are blind to, particularly if we belong to "categories" that operate in oppressive roles/are higher on the (unjust) "hierarchy" that our cultural lenses impose.  The prism allows me to access memory that is not my own in order to hope and work toward a world where our shared memory and experience informs our movement forward.

The Cross

The cross is a tragedy. Just a tragedy. The cross leads to an examination of empire, government, violence, and hierarchy. These things led to the torture and murder of Jesus Christ, a figure of central importance to many of us. The cross leads me to consider the ways that I am complicit or contributing to violence and hierarchy. Kingdom life is the response to the cross.

I’m not interested in glorifying the violence of the crucifixion as some “greater good” and I don’t believe in “salvation” as some act once and forever.

Salvation is about now. NOW. What am I doing with my life? Who am I saving? I need to save myself from complicity in empire, poor government, violence, and hierarchy. I need to help others resist these systems as well. That is how I build the kingdom.

I have never experienced a God who is self-flagellant; I have experienced a God who helps me to resist my own self-destruction and violence in general. I have never experienced a God who is judgmental or angry. I have experienced a God who is intimately— on a cellular level— involved in everything. My awaking to that reality of God allows me to see it in everyone and everything. It is my job to love all of it in a meaningful way. If I am not respecting my planet and my fellow beings, I am disrespecting God. God is the least of these. God is the “all of these”. God is beyond is and within us, but only one of those aspects is one I can truly wrap my head around: the within.

Thomas Groome

"… Our perception and understanding of who we confess as God’s anointed One, the Christ of faith, should be in radical continuity with the identity and praxis of the historical Jesus.  To accept Jesus in faith as ‘Lord and Savior’ requires allegiance to the values, commitments, and purpose reflected in his life; his praxis is the first norm of what we teach about the meaning and implications of Jesus’ life for disciples now."

— Thomas H. Groome, from Sharing Faith: A Comprehensive Approach to Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry

This.  Too often our churches treat "being Christian" as "being able to believe impossible things."  Like, if you can believe that Jesus rose from the dead and turned water into wine, check! you are a Christian.

I often wonder how folks who spend so much time memorizing that book can come to such a conclusion-- which is also why I think our churches are so dangerous!  They too often teach our children to believe whatever the church says to believe and to read biblical passages from a particular vantage point-- one that often emphasizes believing, but seems to miss that JESUS SPENT ALL OF HIS TIME HELPING PEOPLE and he probably wouldn't be too impressed with disciples who don't, like, help other people.

I read a radical Jesus and I aim to speak my own radical truths with as much fearlessness as he did.

Church for the Non-Religious

Church for the Non-Religious


My friends are mostly of an atheist or agnostic variety and almost none of them attend church. A common challenge I face is to explain the kind of faith I think is possible to those who have very clear visions of what God and Church are, based on their (limited) experience of it. Those experiences are real and true to the reality that church has been a damaging place on many levels and in many ways in its various manifestations. My congregation is filled with people who left church because of its abuses and have returned, feeling both angry and in need of spiritual wholeness. Those who don’t make it back in, though, are often in the same place but incapable of conceptualizing a church that has a place for someone who understands the world the way they do. In recognizing that sometimes these folks make it in on an experiment, by the nudging of a friend or peer, or because their niece is being baptized, it’s important to both paint the church in its truths and its resistance to old paradigms, but also to be theologically clear in our articulations of who we think God is and can be in our lives and of what we think church is and can be in our lives. I think that helping people re-imagine God and the church can be very healing and can help bridge the gap between the bitter ex-religious and the enthusiastic progressive churchgoers... a step that’s very important. Many of my friends commented about how wonderful my church was as they perceived it through my wedding ceremony… but none of them have shown up on a Sunday. They have re-imagined what a church community can be and have been healed, in a sense, by witnessing that truth… I still wonder what it takes (beyond a massive, expensive media campaign) to get people to be willing to get up early on a Sunday morning.

... or maybe it's the Sunday morning that needs re-thinking. 

What if worship wasn't the center of church life?  What would fill that space?

Suffering and Holy Week

In a couple readings this week, I looked at different ways to interpret and perform Holy Week Liturgies.

Marjorie Proctor-Smith, in one of the readings, noted the importance of rejecting modes of conveying the suffering Christ which have traditionally been used to support abuse and subjugation of women. In forming liturgy “it is necessary to envision redemption in terms of resistance rather than suffering.” (Proctor-Smith, 103). We too often talk about the suffering of Jesus in ways that glorify suffering or lead to unhealthy, paralyzing conceptions of guilt. Especially for women, suffering stories have been used in damaging ways, in ways that keep all of us in complicity with abuse. The story of Christ’s crucifixion can be interpreted as a “rising above,” a defiance of suffering, as opposed to a framework which has been used to justify spousal abuse and has led pastors to use Christ’s suffering to compel women to return to abusive husbands. She also makes particular note that Jesus suffers only once and does not have to return to the crucifixion again and again. The importance of this should be used as a compelling reason for women to be able to say “no” to their suffering and remove themselves from the circles of violence (Proctor-Smith, 103). She offers to us a view of Jesus bound with the feminine and multiple examples of feminist prayer. While appreciating the very real history of oppression of women in Christian circles and he need for differentiation from a God which has historically been presented as male and as in play in the lives of male figures, I would wonder to what extent the presentation of God as feminine might also be alienating to others or to those of us who desire to remove ideas of gender from the holy. Are there ways to open Jesus to be seen as feminist-friendly in ways that can embrace wherever one is on a gender continuum or that can reject the idea of “feminine” and “masculine” stereotypes? Indeed she makes note of Sophia-Jesus (Proctor-Smith, 98) and ways to view Jesus as embracing the feminine and masculine, but I still feel like this presentation still gives merit to gender stereotypes. I would like to see examples of liturgy that can embrace masculine, feminine, and other perceptions of gender that are more fluid. Speaking to the needs of those who desire to view God in different ways is important and perhaps her God was, in particular, to find uses for the feminine and that can empower feminist ideas, but for my own needs and perspective, I would like to find ways to think of God outside of gender or in ways that see gender more fluidly.

While Proctor-Smith engages the need of churches to be sensitive to a history of oppression and abuse of women, Henry Knight, in the other text I read, notes the importance of creating liturgy and language that can remove us from uses which have been anti-Semitic and disrespectful to our Jewish brothers and sisters, but also complicity in the Holocaust by many Christians. We need to acknowledge Christianity’s part in the treatment of our Jewish friends and how some forms of liturgy can contribute to that damage. He invites us to create liturgy that can bring us past this. His two major scriptural examples were that of Jacob and Jesus. He implores us to use a midrashic way of viewing scriptural stories and invites the lens of seeing ourselves as Jacob, limping home and aware of the strained relationships he has created with his brother, his wives, and his God. As Jacob is understands and acknowledges his flaws, he limps back home to begin the work of repairing these relationships (Knight, 8). This paradigm requires a level of honesty with the history of our tradition, which has been anti-semitic in many of its forms and especially in its presentation of the crucifixion narrative. Knight sees Christ’s suffering on the cross (as well as the suffering of Job) as inherently wrong; Jesus, I think most of us would agree, should not have suffered such a horrible death, nor should he have been put to death at all. We can, however, see this act as one of solidarity. As Christ suffers on the cross, so did many suffer under the Nazi regime. As Christ died for no good reason, so did millions of innocent Jews (Knight, 117). Knight challenges us to abandon traditional paradigms regarding the crucifixion and “say that it is a moral and spiritual outrage to justify anyone’s suffering, whether the most despicable human being or the Messiah himself, for some transcendent reason” (Knight, 109). Justifying suffering fails to acknowledge the horror of the Holocaust. Lifting up the midrashic and PRDS methods, Knight invites us to find lenses that can allow us to find the white fire, the greater, more transcendent meanings of the text and move past more pshat understandings, however important that level is, with a beautiful example of Good Friday Meditations that can offer a more enriching and sensitive presentation of the passion narrative (Knight, 121-125). I would wonder, in light of his proposed paradigm with which to view the crucifixion, if Knight would also offer a correlative Easter/Resurrection midrashic understanding that can incorporate continuing lessons.

Both Proctor-Smith and Knight offer new lenses with which to view Holy Week narratives and ways of framing our sacred stories which are sensitive to those who have been hurt by some historical uses of those stories. In further delving into the different lenses from which liturgy can be seen and the marginalized groups who have suffered from damaging uses of our religious material, we can widen our own interpretations and formations of worship in ways that can be both culturally sensitive and create paradigms designed to resist future oppression. We can continue Jesus’ challenge to radical inclusivity and love.

Marjorie Procter-Smith, Praying with our Eyes Open: Engendering Feminist Liturgical Prayer (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 89-113.

Henry F. Knight, Celebrating Holy Week in a Post-Holocaust World (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 1-21, 101-127.

A Church That is Not a Church

I want to begin a church that is not a church—at least not one that most would recognize. In today’s world, few churches exist in ways that I can respect. Many churches adopt literal interpretations of scripture without considering either historical context or the Jewishness of first-century Christians. Many churches ignore scholarship and modern-day knowledge in order to preserve “faith” in manifestations which most would call ignorance. Many churches abandon scripture in order to re-frame a powerful movement in such a way as to effectively reduce it to a feel-good movie-of-the-week. Many churches disregard rituals that have linked Christians in community through history and throughout the world.

Put bluntly, today’s communities exist as a dichotomy—Communities of closed-minded people clinging to an ignorant interpretation of perhaps the most layered and complex collection of literature in human history --or-- communities of liberal-minded modernists who have managed to reduce a politically-charged, radically inclusive, intense movement of fearless, self-sacrificing individuals to a loosely-interpreted and loosely-followed philosophy which holds no more merit or inspirational quality than a Berenstein Bears book. I believe this is a false dichotomy. I believe there is another way—one which religious scholars have been screaming for for decades.

It is not an easy path—it requires the zeal which seems reserved for the Evangelical movement. It requires a community deeply committed to educating its congregants and freeing scripture from centuries of misinterpretation by not only promoting biblical literacy in new ways, but employing the resources which have been available to students of secular universities for some time. Truly walking the path of the Jesus movement requires commitment to religious education that most churches are afraid to ask of their adherents, but lest we are prepared to lose Christianity to the backward lunacy of the Religious Right, we need to be prepared to challenge ourselves in new ways to restore Christianity to an educated, informed, biblically-literate movement which produces the kind of radically compassionate society that we can call a Kin-dom of God.

Anyone have several million dollars for me?

My Midrash

It reaches toward the sunlight, sprawling, almost, as if it could touch it if it just reached a bit farther.

It begins to sag under the weight of its own effort.

It produces offerings. They glisten and flutter as if trying to catch the sun god’s attention. “Look! I made this for you! Take me with you!”

And it sheds. Exasperated. Another year, another holy season when God left it behind, when God becomes hard to see, hard to remember.

But then! Life finds comfort in it. A creature sees the value in its mangled form. It holds birds gently in its loving arms. They come and go like love, always arriving in a burst of effort and departing in desperation. “It is the way of things. It’s just time to go.”

It just keeps reaching.

I want a tree that is mine, that is me

Christian Eduation

I see adult education being important to my ministry.  I would probably be inclined to develop “read and lecture” type of materials on my own, since that has been my experience of adult learning.  However, I realize that biblical exegesis and scholarship are not as on-the-surface interesting to most folks as they are to me.  Certainly part of developing engaging material is making accessible and comfortable such dense material, but developing dialogue around it is what (I think) translates such material into meaning.  It’s also important for me to consider the needs and wants of the particular group I might be working with, since subjects exciting to me may not spiritually feed others.  “Who needs what as defined by whom?” will be an important question.

 Keeping in mind that the Stages of Faith are not necessarily the norm and that not everyone will conform or process at the same rate, I considered how I might use the stages to shape meaningful material for particular demographics.  When working with adolescents, for example, I might consider the ways that youth, who might be in the “Synthetic-Conventional Phase” might be particularly responsive to imaginings of Bible stories that place themselves in the shoes of particular characters.  In working with adults, I might begin a spirituality group by beginning with articulating beliefs and values (Individuative-Reflective Faith) and eventually progress into discussions of other faith traditions and the tensions we feel with our own faith narratives.  I think that in creating a space of safe dialogue, people may feel willing to explore questions and feelings about their faith and their journeys that may open others to learning and growing in their own understandings.  While adults seem to (according to Fowler) have more variability in their faith understandings and many do not “progress” onto later stages, creating an environment where people can explore their feelings about their faith in safe dialogue may create the space for entering into some of the later stages.

Time Capsule

I am a Christian because I read the gospels. The gospels were not read to me—not on holidays, not at bedtime, not on Sundays. As far as my childhood self was concerned, Christianity had something to do with a baby in a manger who grew up and performed miracles and rose from the dead. If you could believe that, you were in the club. It’s continually strange to me that those remain the emphasized portions of Jesus’ story.

One day when an evangelist handed me a little orange New Testament on my walk home from school, I didn’t toss it on the sidewalk; I took it home and read it.

I am a Christian. Christians, however, make me ashamed to say that. Modern American Christianity, in most of its facets, is ignorant and damaging. What I find in it is a mockery of the life of Jesus. That which I’ve found in religious scholarship and the field of Comparative Religious Studies gives me faith—the message of Jesus continues to be profound and timeless, if it can only be communicated with a background of researched scholarship and in the forms of reason and compassion that I feel were at the core of Jesus’ ministry.

This message— Jesus’ message—will outlast the illogical, foolish, hateful movement that has taken the Christian name. Those of us who write such words now from within the tradition do so because we have faith that the lunacy of the Evangelical movement is unsustainable, but that Jesus’ message will survive it. We write for the foundation of Christianity’s resurrection.

Really, Brad?

@Regrann from @ijessewilliams - …Really Brad? #Regrann

When people try to explain why they want to call God "He"

seekinguncertainty:

When people try to explain why they want to call God “He.”

Interrelatedness and Sin

It is the delusion of separation that allows us to act in ways that do not treat other beings (other “pieces” of creation) as if they are not part of God and part of us.  In essence, sin is cutting the strings of a web; negatively affecting the complex ecosystem that is the unfolding of God.  There is a serious weight to this, but one that we take on together in equal partnership and isn’t accompanied by a focus on ideas on individual piety and anti-body rhetoric.