Let’s Talk About Haiti

by Brent Laytham

As I wrote in our monthly newsletter, I’m confident we are already praying for the Hatian church and people "with our hands and feet, our sweat and tears, our time and money." This way of putting things, and deep wisdom about natural disaster, are found in Debra Dean Murphy’s eloquent blog.

With agrarians like Norman Wirzba and Ragan Sutterfield in our midst, I’ve been mindful that Haiti’s crisis was made over centuries of political and economic injustice, culminating in decades of ecological devastation. Things didn't first go wrong when the earth shook last week, but in the last few decades as deforestation made the soil slide down the mountains and as the best arable land was expropriated to service foreign debt. For now the earthquake is the crisis of the moment, and we must pray and care with immediacy and focus. But Haiti needs more than triage for a sudden crisis. Let our praying and caring have enough perspective to see the larger ecological and economic problems in Haiti, and enough patience to stay engaged long after the Red Cross has moved to the next emergency.

I suggested Prichard's article(in the Evangelicals for Social Action newsletter) for some perspective, and because it links to an organization, Plant with Purpose, which has been attending to Haiti’s ecology for quite a while. Endorser Andy Johnson writes that his Sunday School class has been sponsoring a village in Haiti through Florestra, a Christian non-profit which works to reverse deforestation and poverty. So let’s talk about Haiti. Are there other organizations you would recommend to your fellow EPers? Have you

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Shall We Gather?

by Brian Volck
While we hope you’ve already made plans to attend the Ekklesia Project Summer Gathering, “Wealth and the Household of God,” the practice of hospitality demands we mention upcoming gatherings of these friends of EP:

Bridgefolk, August 21-24
“Between Memory and Hope: Bridgefolk at Ten Years”

Jesus Radicals, August 14-15
“New Heaven, New Earth: Anarchism and Christianity Beyond Empire”

Christian Peacemaker Teams/Peacemaker Congress X, Sep. 17-20
“Restoring Balance: Peace Through Right Relationships”

If you know of other gatherings or conferences of interest to EP endorsers, please share the wealth.

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This Year in Jerusalem!

by Kyle Childress
I’m back from the Holy Land; tired and exhausted yet inspired, challenged, and eager to share the stories with you. My experience of pilgrimage to the Holy Land was almost overwhelming. Every day, everywhere we went, there were biblical sites, holy sites, and historical sites, piled upon one another and impossible to see them all.

Galilee was beautiful. We were there during the rainy season and everything was green (green by Galilean standards). Standing on the top of the Cliffs of Arbela overlooking the western edge of the Sea of Galilee (which is no more than a modest-sized lake) one can see the very route from Nazareth to the Sea of Galilee that Jesus walked. Furthermore, clustered along the lake’s coastline, all within view because they are no more than a few miles from one another are the remains of the villages of Magdala (the home place of Mary Magdalene) and Capernaum. Beyond that, up where the Jordan River runs into the Sea of Galilee, is Bethsaida. All of these villages are easily within walking distances of one another and most all of Jesus’ Galilean ministry happened within these few miles.

Besides how close everything is – it is a very small country – I was struck by how hilly it is. Nothing is built on flat ground; even Jerusalem is built upon a series of hills. Those Galilean villages, so close as the crow flies, are separated by hill after hill. It made we wonder if Jesus walked on the water because it was the only flat and direct way to get somewhere.

We spent a week in Galilee, each morning taking bus rides to different sites and each afternoon we were free to explore more sites or to rest and reflect, pray and write in our journals. The second week we stayed in Jerusalem in a hotel across the street from the wall of the Old City. Outside the city wall, Jerusalem is a bustling modern city. Inside the old walls it is an ancient city with narrow streets made for walking, crowded with tiny shops selling everything imaginable to tourists and pilgrims, the shop owners all yelling, “Come into my shop!” “Very cheap!” and, “This rug is $80 but for you, my friend, I sell it for $40.”

We visited the holiest shrines in Christendom: the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem (inside are the traditional sites of both the crucifixion and the empty tomb of the resurrection). We viewed Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives and walked across the Kidron Valley, through the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Via Dolorosa (the way of suffering). We saw Nazareth up in Galilee and the Mountain of Temptation down near the Dead Sea where Jesus fasted for forty days and was tempted (there’s a restaurant for tourists built on the traditional site of Jesus’ fasting!).

But the highlights for me, without a doubt, were the conversations with Palestinian Christians who are seeking to be faithful to Jesus of Nazareth and his Way of Peace, in face of powerful oppression, violence, and injustice. For example, I visited with Rev. Mitri Raheb, pastor the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem about the ministries of education and empowerment for the Palestinian people. Mitri said there were five things about this Holy Land we needed to know:

(1) There’s too much “peace-talking” and not enough “peace-making.” Like Jeremiah, there is talk of “peace, peace but there is no peace.”

(2) There’s too much politics and not enough care for the polis (the cities where the people live). He said that Condoleeza Rice visited Israel and Palestine 28 times and not one checkpoint was moved.

(3) There’s too much religion and not enough spirituality and real faith.

(4) There’s too much humanitarian aid (it tends to go to agencies and organizations and the Israeli government) and not enough empowerment of the people.

(5) There’s too much “pess-optimism” and not enough biblical hope. “Pess-optimism” is the back and forth between how people feel about the situation in the Middle East. It is up and down, back and forth. But biblical hope is more solid, foundational and leads to the transformation of people from spectators to participants.

I discovered much of the same on a free day visit to the village of Ibillin in Galilee and the home of the Mars Elias School and the work of Archbishop Elias Chacour, whom many consider a modern-day Martin Luther King in Israel. Father Chacour, whom I had the great honor to meet, is a Palestinian Christian who witnessed as a boy his childhood home and village bulldozed by Israel. Nevertheless, he has spent his life and ministry working for the reconciliation of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. His school has Christian children and Muslim children learning how to respect one another. Jewish children are welcome but none come. The Israelis are deeply suspicious of all the school does and what Father Chacour does, although the school does have Jewish teachers along with Muslim and Christian teachers.

A Mennonite friend of mine and I went by car over to the village and toured the school and church. A young Mennonite woman intern from the U. S. greeted us. I got out of the car and she hugged my neck, telling me that she graduated from Elkhart Seminary last May when I gave the commencement address. She and a Palestinian Christian man, who is active in the church and is in charge of construction and maintenance at the church and school, gave us a tour. At one point, we paused in the beautiful Melkite Catholic Church (Roman Catholic but Greek Orthodox in its liturgy, doctrine, and tradition) and he asked me to stand in the back to hear the acoustics. Standing in front of the iconostasis (the screen between the altar and the nave) he began to sing and chant the ancient liturgy. I heard those old, old words, from the back, surrounded by icons of biblical heroes as well as contemporary ones like Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and Archbishop Oscar Romero, and I was mindful of the witness of these Palestinian Christians who at great sacrifice and risk pointed to Christ. And I knew that I was near Jesus.

It was among those Christians where I found the holy land. Or as Father Elias Chacour says, “It is not the ancient stones and shrines which make this land holy but the living stones of Palestinians and Jews who sanctify this land by what they do to make God present.

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King and the Kingdom

by Debra Dean Murphy
Today as we commemorate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it's easy to forget how despised King was in his own time by many on the right and the left, by many within the church and outside it. As the frequency of his public speeches increased toward the end of his life so did his visible rage; as his preaching evolved in the last years, he moved from what Richard Lischer has called a “homiletics of identification” to a “homiletics of confrontation.” The radical politics of the Kingdom that King envisioned—for the church and the nation—did not endear him to either; it got him killed.

As author Tim Tyson has bluntly put it: "In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus, genial and vacant, a benign vessel that can be filled with whatever generic good wishes the occasion dictates . . .The radicalism of Dr. King's thought, the militancy of his methods, and the rebuke that he offered to American capitalism have given way to depictions of a man who never existed, caricatures invented after his death."

Today all over America, preachers and politicians will wax rhapsodic over the "I Have a Dream" speech (the palatable, overly familiar parts of it). There will be marches and parades, with blacks and whites peacefully, optimistically walking hand in hand. These will be earnest gestures of mutual respect and goodwill which I don't mean to belittle. But after the festivities, too many of us will retreat back into lives of segregated comfort and indifference, unable or unwilling to recognize, as King himself did in 1957, that "we can't solve our problems now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power."

More than 50 years later we still can't quite absorb those words. We prefer the "other" MLK--the one who affirms our own outrage at racial inequality. But when Martin insists that such injustice is inextricably linked to an economic system that makes our comfortable lives possible, even as it exploits, debases, and erases the downtrodden and dispossessed, we get nervous. We don't want the justice that King dreamed of to cost us anything.

But of course it will. Another great martyr of the church, Archbishop Oscar Romero, saw it this way, ten years after the murder of King and two years before his own death by an assassin's bullet:

Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know that we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which has turned everything upside down to proclaim blessed the poor, blessed the thirsting for justice, blessed the suffering.

Blessing the poor and suffering and those who thirst for justice: this is the upside-down work of the Kingdom that the powers will not bless--that the powers, in fact, will seek to crush at every turn. (Can we remember on this day that our own government tried to blackmail King into committing suicide?).

In all their humanness--their moral frailty and their exquisite courage--Romero, King, and a long line of saints and martyrs have borne witness to the madness of peaceableness in the midst of violence; of subversive love in the face of all-consuming hatred. And in death, in bodies brutalized by systems propped up by fear, they summon us to our own mad, subversive witness against the powers.

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Hope

by Debra Dean Murphy
When I was in the fourth grade my teacher, Mr. VanNostran, asked us to write our own definition of the word “hope.” I don’t remember the occasion or the context for the assignment; I don’t even remember what I wrote. But I do remember that a few days later, Mr, Van (as we called him) read aloud another student’s definition. The boy, whose name was Paul, was absent that day, and Mr. Van took the opportunity, I think, to teach the rest of us something about ourselves, something about the world, and something about the word “hope.”

Paul was a nice kid—he was quiet and he was poor. Living as we did in rural West Virginia, none of us in that class of fourth graders came from wealthy families. Most of us came from similar economic backgrounds. We were all of modest means—some a little better off than others, maybe, but not markedly so.

But even in places like Appalachia, and especially in places like elementary, middle, and high schools, there are fixed systems of order and rank, based mostly on privilege and popularity. And Paul was not popular. His family was not privileged—at least not in the sense of having the security and advantages that come with money. I don’t remember that Paul was ever mistreated, but I know now with the wisdom that comes with age, that children can be cruel, even when they don’t mean to be, and that sometimes what is most cruel is the indifference with which we regard those around us. We were indifferent to Paul—not overtly unkind, but nonetheless uninterested and unconcerned.

And so I remember to this day Paul’s definition or explanation of the word “hope,” read aloud by a visibly moved Mr. VanNostran, sometime during the school year of 1972: “I hope someone needs me.”

I remember the silence with which we greeted those words. And it wasn’t that Mr. Van gave us a lecture about how each of us should be a better friend to Paul; about how we needed to notice people like Paul who are often invisible in a social world where being cool is the pinnacle of achievement. He didn’t preach to us about the shallowness of giggly fourth-grade girls that would only intensify as we headed toward junior high and high school. He didn’t have to say any of that. Paul’s words had moved us, too. “I hope someone needs me.”

As I’ve thought about that experience off and on through the years, I’ve come to believe that true hope is ultimately about the deepest longing each of us has for community, communion, connection. Christian hope is not wishful thinking; it is not cross-your-fingers optimism. It is, instead, an abiding trust in the good news that God seeks our good, even as God desires fellowship with us.

Our hope as Christians is that we are moving ever more closely toward that communion with God for which we were created, a being-in-relationship that is realized (imperfectly) here and now as we are Christ's body in a broken world.

Advent/Christmas/Epiphany are seasons of hope: Hope that we will once again embrace the scandal of the incarnation, the first advent; hope that we will be found faithful at the second advent; and hope that we will live true to the call of Christ in the meantime. But hope is not sentimental, and God forgive us for the many ways we sentimentalize Advent and Christmas and the gospel itself.

“I hope someone needs me.” The great good news of the gospel is that God needs us—not in order to be God, but so that God’s purposes might be worked out; so that all might be brought into the joy of communion with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, where genuine love, lasting peace, and enduring hope abide. Now and forever.

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Giving Jesus a Makeover

by Randy Cooper
Many years ago a dear Christian sister told me she was convinced that if Jesus appeared in our day, he would surely be a fire and brimstone Baptist preacher. As you might imagine, she admired Baptist preachers who preached hell and judgment. She made Jesus over into an image that suited her own faith and worldview.

She isn’t the first. Human beings were made in the image of God. Yet ever since our creation, we have been returning the favor in a twisted way—making God over into our own image. We all do this. In fact, it is one of our greatest sins.

Albert Schweitzer, the great missionary of the early 20th century, wrote about our tendency to make Jesus into someone who conforms to our own convictions and prejudices. If we are rational, then Jesus is quite the teacher. If we are moralistic, then we view Jesus as an exemplar of good morals. We who have a passionate regard for the oppressed insist that Jesus is the agitator who upsets the political status quo.

Or in these days of political madness, we assume Jesus favors our perspective.

Most common of all, we cast Jesus into the image of a mild, meek, gentle Galilean who would be quite at home in the “flower child” movements that happen along every few generations. Our various sentimental vanities keep us from realizing that we dare not attempt to portray Jesus as upholding our particular values.

The New Testament avoids simplistic portrayals by rooting its understanding of Jesus in the Old Testament witness. Jesus is the slain Lamb who takes away the sins of the world. He is the Judge, the Messiah, God’s anointed one who burns with a holy wrath. Zeal for his Father’s house consumes him. Demons and angels dread him. Satan, the strong one, is overcome and bound by him. War arises in heaven over him. Yet he is also Friend, Slave, Consoler, High Priest who becomes Sin, and Good Shepherd. We come into his presence with singing, but also with fear and trembling.

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What God Intends

by Randy Cooper
Milton Wright was a Bishop in the Church of the Brethren, traveling throughout his denomination until his death in 1917. He is reported to have said that if God intended human beings to fly, he would have given us wings. We know from history that his sons, Orville and Wilbur, thought otherwise.

At times, I find myself thinking this way. I think that if God intended us to have this or that new technology, surely God would have provided it. For example, I care little for cell phones, and only own one jointly with Gayle. If God intended us to talk anywhere, any time, surely we’d have “blue tooth” phones fitted to our ears when we were born. And I find myself thinking this way when it comes to oil and coal. I figure that if God intended us to put carbon into the air, then God surely would not have taken so long and worked so hard to fold these materials deep into the earth. I wonder if God really wants them to be taken from the bowels of the earth and used as we use them.

There I go, thinking like Bishop Wright again.

Actually, my concern is with what the church used to call “poiesis.” It is one of those Greek words, meaning “making.” We get our word “poet” from it. Poiesis is the human endeavor of making things for the world—including art, music, machines, and countless other things.

For the longest time, we have believed that what humans construct or invent is religiously neutral, that all that matters is how we use it. I am no longer so sure. I am wondering these days about ways to recover the religious significance of our “stuff” and of our daily labors. What we do and make must surely be considered in light of truth, goodness, and beauty.

My daughter Margaret attended Millsaps College down in Jackson, Mississippi. There is an unbelievably ugly building on the campus—a relatively new one, built in the 1970’s when people mystifyingly thought that concrete is pretty. It is the “Fine Arts” building.

Go figure.

Let us encourage one another.

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Why Share?

by Kyle Childress
You may remember the Garrison Keillor story of why shopping at Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery in Lake Wobegon is preferable to shopping in St. Cloud at the new Higgledy-Piggledy. Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery has just gotten in a case of fresh cod. “Frozen, but it’s fresher than what’s been in his freezer for months. In the grocery business, you have to throw out stuff sometimes, but Ralph is Norwegian and it goes against his principles.” On the other hand, more and more people have been “sneaking off to the Higgledy-Piggledy in St. Cloud, where you find two acres of food, a meat counter a block long with huge walloping roasts and steaks big enough to choke a cow, and exotic fish lying on crushed ice.”

Keillor goes on to explain that Lake Wobegon does not run on free enterprise, which is based upon self-interest. It is run on loyalty. He goes on to say you can shop at the St. Cloud Mall instead of Lake Wobegon but the St. Cloud Mall isn’t going to come with the Rescue Squad and they aren’t going to teach your children redemption by grace.

For Keillor there is more going on here than simply Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery is small and the Higgledy-Piggledy in St. Cloud is large or that Ralph’s is simple and small-town and Higgledy-Piggledy is glitzy and cutting edge. For Keillor, Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery is about living a shared life, commitment to one another, being there for one another when we’re needed, raising one another’s children, and growing a community together. The Higgledy-Piggledy in St. Cloud is about each person being on his or her own and making choices based upon self-interest instead of what’s good for the community.

Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery is a wonderful analogy with Austin Heights. Our whole perception of what we’re up to around here is a contrast to what usually passes for church life in this country. More and more we find ourselves eating together and working together. Here we are building a shared life in ways surpassing standard and conventional American understandings of church.

Living a shared life has to do with how we share money in our congregation too. In some churches giving financially to the church is sort of like paying your dues for your club membership. In other churches financial stewardship is related to giving your offering to the church down there on Main Street. It is giving money, and giving generously, but giving it to the religious institution. And for many churches, it is like shopping at the Higgledy-Piggledy. You give out of self-interest; what the church does for you in meeting your needs.

Austin Heights is different, and if we’re not different then we want to be different. Instead of giving a tithe down there to that institution, we are sharing our tithes with one another. We are much more like Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery where people shop because they care for Ralph and they know Ralph is a member of the Rescue Squad and teaches their children. We share our money – not with an institution removed from us – but with one another in Christ.

Our budget and our tithing certainly goes to paying the bills around here, supporting mission, and underwriting our expenses. But this is not its primary purpose. The primary purpose of our budget and our tithing is to form us into one body. It is to make us the community of Christ. The budget translates our common faith and common vision into a common life and common purse.

Did you ever think that our biggest witness of being Christian is how we spend our money? When we share our tithes with God and with one another we are saying that we put our money where our mouths and hearts are in trusting and loving one another and growing a community based upon Jesus as Lord.

We do believe in paying taxes partly because taxes help to provide basic necessities and security for needy people beyond us in the whole country. We do believe in giving to charities partly because charities pay for things for which a majority in our democracy would not vote. And we do believe in giving in ways that help others have dignity and a chance at a decent life. But we give to one another in this particular common-life called Austin Heights Baptist Church because we believe that this, the church, is the principal way in which God chooses to make God’s self known in the world. Our shared life, shared work, shared meals, shared money is how God is known.

Acts 4 is a wonderful summary of the life of the early church: They were of one heart and soul and they had a common purse. Luke makes the explicit connection between the life those Christians shared with their testimony of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. People had a sense that Jesus was resurrected and living among them by sharing with one another.

These are worrisome times. And when we worry, like most people, we tend to hold more tightly to what we have or we spend what we have out of some sort of self-interest. But Austin Heights is called to practice something completely different. We share because Jesus Christ is among us.

Let’s be careful out there.

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Forgiveness and Evangelism

by Jessie Larkins
A few years ago, I was a passenger in a car that was in a minor accident in a local shopping center parking lot. Both cars, the one I was in as well as the one that sideswiped us, were traveling at an appropriate parking lot speed of about 2 mph. The collision, which put a fairly large dent in the front fender of my friend’s car and a crack in the front headlight on the other car, resulted in no injuries, no irreparable damage, and certainly no more pain and suffering than that of having to sit in the Wal-Mart parking lot for an hour in the middle of December while the police report was filed. As an adult passenger in one of the vehicles, I was, of course, asked for my license and a brief statement to corroborate the story of the two drivers. Being that it was my first real traffic accident to speak of, I had no idea what to expect after that point. 

Imagine my surprise when, on each of the following three days, I arrived home from school to find my mailbox absolutely overwhelmed with offers from local law offices pandering for my business. 

Of course they assumed that I would sue the other driver for all he was worth—after all, he had cost me at least an hour of lost productivity on a Sunday afternoon, the potential of many future health problems that could, of course, be attributed to this event, as well as untold emotional damage. Was I having trouble concentrating at work?  (Well, yes, but it is two weeks before Christmas—who can focus?) Did I feel a stiffness in my neck or back?  (I have been meaning to get a new bed pillow for that very reason....)  Was I having nightmares as a result of this event? (Should I tell them that just this week I started waking up in a cold sweat worried that I was surrounded by lawyers?) David and I had quite a good time flipping through this legal propaganda—joking about how we should quit our jobs and just hang out in our cars in the blind spots of local parking lots. 

At the end of it all, though, as the daily junk mail was cleared away and dropped into the recycling bin, we would shake our heads and wonder aloud: “Do people really do this?  Do people really buy into this mess?”

Unfortunately, the answer to our question is too often, yes. America in the 21st century is the most litigious country in the world.  We have one lawyer for every 300 people, including children.  We file more than 250,000 lawsuits against one another each year (American Bar Association). Many doctors are forced out of practice because they simply cannot afford the insurance costs to remain in practice. 

We have all heard, and probably laughed, at the headlines: “Woman sues McDonalds because coffee too hot;” “Man files suit against Burger King for obesity.” 

You may have heard the statistic that the divorce rate for Christians is no less than for mainstream culture. There is no evidence that nations comprised of predominantly Christian citizens are less likely to be engaged in war than any other—Muslim or otherwise. The fact that the one holy catholic and apostolic Church now exists in any of 39,000 (!) denominations worldwide proves that we are not always very good at the work of forgiveness and reconciliation (Wikipedia). I found no credible evidence that Christians were any less likely to engage in the vicious cycle of tit-for-tat-get-back-and-get-even.  

If these statistics don’t surprise you, I hope that they at least alarm you a bit. We live in a world where the cycle of retribution and violence will eventually result in what our preacher last week called “Mutually Assured Destruction”—of our marriages and families, of our communities and neighborhoods, of our churches, our environment, and of our nation. The world is in desperate need of a new way of living—you only have to turn on the TV news for about 30 seconds to realize this. This is probably why Jesus took so much time to preach about ethics and how we live as Christians. Perhaps it’s time we paid attention.

In addition to those pesky and demanding Sermons on the Mount and Plain that command us to love our enemies and to rejoice when persecuted, Matthew devotes an entire chapter of his gospel to Jesus’ teachings on how we live together as believers. 

Jesus begins chapter 18 with his discussion of children, commanding that we be a community of hospitality and sanctuary for them. He condemns those who would put a stumbling block to any of these little ones coming to know and love God. 

We certainly don’t need to dig deeply into the news to find evidence of the damage caused to the Church’s witness by scandals and allegations of misconduct towards children.  Next, Jesus tackles this notion of how we deal with conflict within the body.  Our preacher spoke last week about our need to resolve conflict in such a way that relationships remain intact and unity is maintained.  

Finally, today, we come to the climax of Jesus’ teaching in which Jesus addresses the issue of forgiveness.  What is the magnitude of injury at which point it is OK to strike back?  If my neck had been whiplashed in that accident and I still suffered recurring nightmares of that afternoon such that I was afraid to get in my car and had lost my job as a result—then, Jesus, would it be OK to seek recompense? Certainly there must be a limit to forgiveness, Peter claims!  

Peter knows the Jewish law when he asks this. He knows that the Law requires that one forgive injury up to three times. He must feel as though he is being especially generous in suggesting seven as the point at which forgiveness, even of a brother or sister in Christ, must find its limit. I’m sure that Jesus’ response caught him off-guard.

Some translations offer that Jesus’ response was seventy-seven times to forgive a wrong suffered at the hand of another brother or sister. Other translations say seventy times seven, or 490 occasions of forgiveness. Either way, the number hardly matters. “Jesus is telling him not to assume that you can count how many times you offer forgiveness and then be done with it” (Jones).  

The parable offered by Jesus goes, perhaps, to the heart of the matter. He tells the story of two servants—the first who owed a ridiculously large quantity of money to the king, and the second, who owed a large, but manageable sum of money to the first servant. Servant number one we are told owes the king 10,000 talents. A talent was the largest unit of currency in the Roman Empire. ONE talent represented 15 years of work for one laborer. 10,000 talents would then be the equivalent of 10,000 workers slaving for 15 years, devoting the entirety of their earnings to this debt. To put it lightly, this guy’s debt makes even a totaled BMW and back surgery look like peanuts. 

When the debt collector came around, this guy found himself in dire straights, realizing that there was no way he could bargain his way out of his mess. Figuring that this was a pretty good time to beg for mercy, the servant falls on his knees and pleads. Despite such a large debt, the king has compassion for the man, forgives him, and sends him back to his wife and children. On the way, servant one meets servant two, a man who owes him 100 denarii. A denarius was a smaller unit of currency roughly equivalent to a days’ wage for one laborer. Though I would hardly like to give up four months’ salary, this was certainly a more manageable debt. Trying to save face, the first servant calls the second servant to account for this debt. When this debtor is unable to repay, the first servant immediately goes into a rage and imprisons the second servant. When the king gets word of this situation, he goes to the first servant demanding to know why he would not show others the same mercy that he had been shown. 

What this servant failed to account for—what we ourselves fail to account for each time we find ourselves in a position of conflict, debt, or disparity and seek retribution for our wrong rather than forgive—is that he (and we) are debtors long BEFORE we are creditors. The unmerited forgiveness of the king towards the first servant reminds us of God’s overwhelming grace and forgiveness to each one of us. We too have been forgiven a debt that, like that first servant, we could never repay.  The king demands of the servant, and we too must ask ourselves. 

Could we be unforgiving and ungracious to our neighbors and their faults if we calculated our own indebtedness to one far greater than ourselves? 

Even more, having been forgiven this immeasurable debt, how can we not desire that others experience the same freedom that we ourselves have experienced by not having our debts counted against us? 

By telling this parable, Jesus does something that one of my seminary professors used to do to us students when he would write on the top of our papers: “It’s about God, stupid.” He turns the question around to make forgiveness and reconciliation FIRST about God and only secondarily about us. Peter’s question assumes that the limitations of human strength and patience are the measure of forgiveness. Jesus directs Peter not to assume that he is the one in the position of power when it comes to the question of forgiveness. First he says, we must know ourselves as ones who have been greatly forgiven by God. When we replace God at the center of it all, we see that forgiveness is really about who God is; and about who God makes us as forgiven and reconciled people. When our own debt is cleared, is it possible for us to continue to demand repayment from those who owe us? We have no need to justify ourselves any longer.

It seems to me as though the entire gospel is summed up in this short parable. It is the story of God’s unrelenting love, making us the servants who have been set free from our debts in order that we might offer the same to others, witnessing to the benevolence of our king. Jesus knows that forgiveness is contrary to our human instinct to bite back and devour. What Jesus is asking Peter to do is add God’s love and grace into his limited calculation of human forgiveness. In our own forgiveness we find an abundance of grace large enough to not only cover our own debts but the debts of those who have wronged us. Wrong and right are no longer a zero-sum game when God’s grace is factored into the equation. When we do this, we find enough grace and forgiveness to transform every level of human relationship from families to nations.

Forgiveness of the brother or sister who has wronged us is, therefore, a mark of Christian discipleship — a mark of the Christian community seeking to be Christ’s presence in the world. We speak often of the UM mission statement that asserts that we, The UMC, exist as a community of disciples “for the transformation of the world.” Can you imagine the transformation and renewal that might occur if Christians began forgiving others as in Christ they have been forgiven?  If we allowed forgiveness and grace to define our relationship to one another and the world, there would be a radical shift in the way the world sees the church and comprehends the gospel! What kind of community could and would be sustained on the presumption that forgiveness is always available?  Might churches begin to unify rather than divide?  Might the divorce rate for Christians drop below 50%?  Might Christians drop their swords (or automatic weapons) in favor of plowshares (or carpentry tools or educational programs)?  Perhaps it sounds imprudent or naïve, but the imperative of today’s gospel message is that we MUST learn to forgive one another—it is proof that God’s love reigns in our hearts; it is proof for the world that the gospel is more than just words to us.

We are quick to condemn the first servant for his hypocrisy, but fail to realize that we are guilty of the same each time we refuse forgiveness—no matter the cost—to our brothers and sisters.  Too often I hear from folks in all different walks of life that the one reason that they can never imagine coming to church is because it is full of hypocrites. For too long Christians and the church have settled to be defined in the public eye by scandal, split, and disagreement, throwing tantrums and slamming doors, fighting fire with fire (and other weapons of destruction). We are condemned by the ways in which our walk fails to match our talk.  Can we truthfully proclaim a God of boundless love, mercy, acceptance, and forgiveness—can we truthfully claim God’s grace for ourselves—and fail to offer that same mercy, love, and forgiveness to one another or our neighbors? What Jesus offers Peter (and the entire Christian community) in this lesson is a chance to be defined, empowered, and FREED by the love, acceptance, and forgiveness of a God who does not count our debt against us. When we recognize the grace offered to us in such abundance, we are able to surrender our need to nickel and dime, manipulate, harangue, and bite back when wronged—we are gifted to see our brothers and sisters as children of God desperate for an experience of God’s grace.  Because of God’s willingness to forgive and even suffer greatly for our debt rather than have anyone be lost to God, we have a model for our own forgiveness and evangelism. 

Folks are drawn to the gospel by seeing it lived out in real life a thousand times before they understand the words. Folks are desperate for a new way of living that breaks the cycle of tit-for-tat, payback or pay-up. We proclaim a God who has, in Christ, broken the vicious cycle of retribution and violence in which humans have been stuck since our exile from the Garden of Eden. By breaking this cycle of retribution, God transforms and gives new life to our relationship with God and one another by allowing us to participate in the spreading of divine grace and forgiveness to our neighbors.  If we desire that others be drawn into the gospel story—that none be lost to God—then we must first be willing to witness in our own lives to the reality of Christ’s mercy and forgiveness. More than any smart words we could write to persuade others to accept the gospel, offering forgiveness and love—whether to our spouses, our children, our co-workers, people of the opposing political party, our leaders, and even, dare I say, to those who commit heinous crimes against us—is our witness.  It is the hope we share for a world transformed, where the cycle of violence and retribution has been broken by a God who was willing to empty himself into human form—to mount a cross for our sakes even when we were enemies of God—to forgive us seventy times seventy times seventy times (and more) though so often we know not what we do.

This, my friends, is our proclamation of the good news. 

In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven. 

Now, go and share this grace.  Amen. 

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Tasting Death, Tasting Life

by Debra Dean Murphy
(Matthew 14:13-21) Immediately before the story of the feeding of the five thousand is a description of a very different sort of meal: John the Baptizer’s head on a platter. And just as women and children are included among the crowds fed on the beach with bread and fish (a detail unique to Matthew’s version of the story), the female sex is also represented in the account of John’s demise. Herodias, sister-in-law of Herod, asks for the head of the Baptist; her nameless daughter, with no detectable squeamishness, delivers the request to the king and ultimately the plated head to her mother. That women in all of their moral complexity are present throughout Matthew’s gospel (recall also the women who appear in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus in chapter one) is an observation worthy of closer scrutiny. See, for instance, Jane Kopas’ 1990 essay from Theology Today.

Also interesting is the juxtaposition of fear and death (in the story of John’s murder) with that of fulfillment and abundance in the feeding narrative. John’s death is a result of power confronted and hypocrisy exposed; where fear reigns, violence cannot be far behind. Herod’s birthday party is an occasion for the casual disregard of human life to come to a head (forgive the pun) in the expedient execution of a troublemaker. And while this blood-tinged birthday banquet represents the old order with its fear-mongering and death-dealing ways, the feeding of the five thousand represents the new order: fullness of life and health for all (even women and children).

But abundance in the biblical sense is not gross excessiveness. The twelve baskets of leftovers should not be understood as justification for our tendency to accumulate and hoard; rather, they are a reminder that in God’s economy there is always more to share, more to give—and yet the “more” comes not from our own meager reserves but from God’s endless supply of goodness and generosity. And in the sharing and giving of what God graciously offers to us we ourselves are transformed.

I think of a line from Frederick Buechner: Greed is the mathematical truism that the more you get, the more you have. The opposite of greed—the selfless love of God and neighbor—is based on the truth that the more you give away in love, the more you are.

We know this from our experience of the Eucharist, which is never a private meal for me, but is instead that moment when what is taken, blessed, broken, and given (Mt. 14:19) becomes the occasion for the gathered church to understand its very life as gift; to know that the love of the triune God is what makes us who we are and therefore what makes it possible for us to bear witness to that love in a world where the crowds are hungry and there is (seemingly) only a little bit of bread and fish on hand.

Source
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC (Harper, 1993), p. 5.

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The Metaphysics of Discipleship

July 25, 2008
by Halden Doerge
Perhaps the recurring issue in discussions of Christian discipleship regards simply whether or not it is something that Christians should think they can actually do. Not long into the established church's history the notion became prominent that the ethics of Jesus, particularly as recorded in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) and other prominent texts in the gospels (cf. Luke 6:17-46; 14:15-34), simply cannot be done by people who live in the real world. They are rather "counsels of perfection" which are either only for a specific clerical or monastic caste (as in Medieval Catholicism) or they are simply there to remind us all of our complete inability as sinners to conform to God's commands (as in Luther and most of Protestantism after him).

Now of course this whole discourse of perfection, impossibility, and the real world is problematic on numerous levels. If you want to see them all blown out of the water, just read Yoder's The Politics of Jesus. However, here I want to focus on at least one underlying issue that informs how we even imagine the shape of any discussion about discipleship. The first thing to be observed is that, no matter what, whenever we read Jesus' Sermon on the Mount we all have a sense of its radical hardness. Even if we believe it is possible, we know its not very likely. However, if we avoid lifting these discourses of Jesus out of their narrative context, things get more interesting. Jesus seemed to think the very opposite in regard to the message he was preaching: "Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light" (Matt. 11:28-30).

In Jesus' view, the call to discipleship that he was preaching was not something hard and burdensome, but rather a call to leave such burdens behind. Jesus seems to think that discipleship is easy, and that by contrast it is restless striving of the Gentiles and the burdensome commands of the priestly elite that is hard (cf. Matt. 6:32; Luke 11:46; 12:30). In other words, Jesus viewed his call to radical discipleship in a way that is exactly opposite from how we view it when we encounter it. What is to us an impossible demand that must have some other explanation is for Jesus the call to anarchic liberation from the dominating forces of slavery and death.

What I want to suggest then, is that the call of Jesus to discipleship is not merely a moral call to a really, really difficult way of living for the sake of becoming virtuous. Rather it is a call that fundamentally challenges the conventional metaphysics of violence whereby we construe the entire shape of the cosmos. The call to discipleship is a call to nothing less than a counter-metaphysics which suggests that it is in fact supremely difficult to live in this world as a murderer, a liar, or an adulterer. As Stanley Hauerwas has rightly remarked, becoming a liar is a substantial moral achievement. Practicing these acts are what is hard; they are what put us at odds with the shape of the cosmos. Truth-telling, confession, the love of enemies, and the sharing of possessions are not, according the metaphysics of discipleship what make for a difficult life. Rather they are the true shape of human life which, if entered into constitute a cessation of striving against the grain, of kicking against the pricks. In other words, it is the case, as John Howard Yoder said, that "people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe."

None of this is to suggest that discipleship will simply take no effort. The world, which we have come to know in Christ as ultimately bearing the shape of resurrection rather than final death, remains a contested place. The powers of death and slavery continue to rage against the Lord and his Messiah. However, the shape of the universe has been constituted anew in Jesus' resurrection. As such it is those powers and the lives of slavery that attend them that are ultimately out of place in this world. It is lives of sin, violence, and indifference that are ultimately futile and unattainable.

Because Jesus has been raised, his love, which completely defined the shape of his life is inexhaustible.

His love has been terminated by death and yet it still lives. If this is the case then there is no boundary that can threaten the victory of that love. If this is true then the only actions in this world that are ultimately possible, that ultimately will not be undone are the actions of radical discipleship, that is to say, the actions of radical love.

If we wish to push this line of inquiry to its furthest point, we might even dare to say that only the kind of life that Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount is ultimately possible. Such is the sort of description that coheres with the metaphysics of discipleship and resurrection.

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Shrubs and Kingdoms

July 23, 2008
by Debra Dean Murphy
“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” -- Matthew 13:31-33

It has often been pointed out that when Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a shrub, he is having a bit of fun with us. But finding the humor in the Bible isn’t something we overly-serious modern readers are very good at. We’re more likely to treat parables like this one as if they were folk-wisdom formulas for personal or group success. Think about sermons you’ve heard on finances (“your small gift, sown in faith, will produce a big return!”) or church growth (“if we’re faithful, God will make us grow!”).

This kind of life-application theology is well-received in our age of motivational-style preaching, but it is a betrayal of these texts’ deeper meanings and contexts.

Biblical theologian Ched Myers contends that the seed parables in the gospels illustrate vividly the struggle to make a living by dry farming the rocky soil of Galilee. And if the land’s unsuitability for agriculture were not challenge enough, wealthy landlords always extracted enough of the harvest to ensure that the farmer remained indentured to the land, strangling any prospects he might have to achieve even a modicum of economic security.

Against this backdrop of despair and injustice, the promise of abundance—and its fulfillment—is stunning, and amounts to nothing less than the “eschatological overflowing of the divine fullness, surpassing all human measure.”

This agrarian eschatology, as Myers calls it, has a specifically subversive function. The shrub that is the mustard plant in this parable is a deliberate lampooning of the great and mighty cedar tree, used by the prophet Ezekiel as a symbol of foreign domination. The birds that came to nest in the shade of the cedar’s branches (Ezek. 17:23) stand in for the alien oppressors that Ezekiel condemns as the epitome of imperial hubris.

In Jesus’ parable, God’s kingdom is like a shrub, a nuisance weed, really:an out-of-place, hard-to-control horticultural threat to the large, orderly garden that is empire. Not on a par with empire, though; not in any way comparable to its size, strength, or agenda; and not, alas, what many of Jesus’ followers would have wanted to hear, victims as they were of Rome’s imperial hubris.

Imagine being told that the kingdom you had been hoping for, that your ancestors had been praying for all these generations was not, in effect, a mighty cedar or majestic cypress, but was instead a scrubby weed that insinuates itself into its surroundings, altering the landscape, spoiling the environment. (We southerners might think of Kudzu here).

Then imagine being given new eyes with which to see this strange kingdom. Notice the birds in Jesus’ story: The birds which would normally have dedicated themselves to eating up any available seed now rest in its branches. Here is one of Jesus’ little “time bombs” (James Alison’s phrase), for what Jesus is bringing to existence, says Alison, “is something which will even be capable of offering hospitality to those who would have been its principle enemies.”

God’s ways are not the ways of empire;the way of the kingdom is the not the way of domination, retribution, scarcity, and enmity, but of shalom and abundance, of reconciliation and restoration.

We are told in Matthew’s version of the parable that the shrub did indeed grow to become a tree—a miracle in itself, given the plant’s less-than-impressive botanical properties. (In Mark’s version, the mustard plant remains a shrub, perhaps revealing something about that gospel writer’s concern to preserve the utter strangeness of the parable and indeed of the kingdom of God).

But in growing the shrub to the stature of a tree, perhaps something is being communicated to Matthew’s audience about hope. As Myers puts it: “The disproportion between the seed and the mature plant is meant to instill courage and hope in the small and fragile discipleship community for its struggle against the entrenched powers.”

For those who will consider this parable in worship this week, it’s worth remembering that it is something of a holy joke: our hope lies in something as seemingly unimpressive as a pesky weed. The absurdity of it all! But the coming kingdom Jesus proclaims depends on such foolishness, for the cross and resurrection toward which all the parables point and on which they all depend, have the final word and the last laugh.

Sources

Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll:Orbis, 1988), 177ff.

James Alison, Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (Crossroads, 1996), 81ff.

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Imagining the Road We Share

July 22, 2008
by Brian E. Volck
A voice of one calling: "In the desert prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God. -- Isaiah 40:3 (NIV)

“I’ve been to conferences on race and racism before, but this is different,” I was told several times at this summer’s Ekklesia Project gathering in Chicago. I agree. There was far less nonsense and posturing than I’ve endured at previous, allegedly “frank” discussions of race. We spoke, sang and worshiped together, without the “It’s a Small World After All,” ceremonies that suggest a few up-tempo songs will make restitution for centuries of bad theology and worse ecclesiology. The mood steered a difficult course between penitential and determined.

And that’s how I’ve felt since returning to my home church, my day job, my pleasantly uniform neighborhood: penitent for much I have done or failed to do, determined to serve (to the degree I am called) as a means, however small and faulty, of reconciliation. But how do I bring the gift that was this summer’s gathering home? How do I rescue this promising start from the death of deferred good intentions? And yet, having seen and heard how difficult the road to racial reconciliation can be, how do I continue?

I can’t do this alone – it’s crucial to steer clear of that “do-it yourself” trap. We, the church, got ourselves into this mess, and together – as we are led by the Spirit – is the only way we’ll ever get out. But what shared practices must we learn on our way to that place where we can worship every Sabbath together, washed clean of ecclesial vice? Prayer will help, of course, as will penitence and fasting. The vow of continued conversation is essential. The importance of imagination, hard work and hope can’t be underestimated. What am I leaving out? I need you to tell me.

In the wilderness of racial division which the church has so long tolerated, I can’t see the road ahead, nor am I even sure I see the destination, but I know with whom I’ll be traveling. I’ve seen your faces as we shared a meal, heard your voices as we sang in worship, touched your feet as we served one another. Help me imagine what’s ahead. Help me see the highway.

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Behold, How Good & Pleasant

by Brian E Volck
If you mourn the splintering of Christianity, if you pray that all may be one as Christ and the Father are one, and especially if you, in whatever Christian tradition you worship, yearn for a strong ecumenism in which Christians speak from the heart as the Holy Spirit guides them, refusing to merely paper over substantive differences, then there’s something you must hear.

Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, liturgical pit bull of Catholic traditionalists in America, has a podcast recording of Pope Benedict XVI and Patriarch Bartholomew I reciting the Greek text of the 381 Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed together. (You’ll have to scroll down through lots of white space on the link to reach the Greek text itself and the podcast link. The occasion, for those interested, was the liturgy for the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, opening a year-long celebration of the life and ministry of Paul. Patriarch Bartholomew was at the Vatican in part to return Benedict’s recent visit to the Phanar in Istanbul.)

I realize that most Ekklesia Project endorsers are neither Catholic nor Orthodox, a handful at most can follow spoken Greek, and the thought of two patriarchs reciting a creed produced by a council called by Constantine I will strike some as too high church to stomach, but this is a moment of ecumenical history (to my knowledge only the second time this has happened since the 1054 schism), a millennium of division one step closer to healing.

Zuhlsdorf focuses on the wording of the text (The verb “believe” in first person singular, the absence of “and the Son,” and so forth). Other Catholic (see here and here) and Orthodox bloggers seem more taken by the event itself.

What disappoints me, though, is the lack of liberal (“liberal” misses the mark and is something of a category error, I know, but I’m sticking with the vernacular) commentary on the moment. Has the Nicene Creed (or any creed, for that matter) become “so five minutes ago” we can’t be bothered? When the Holy Spirit invites separated brothers to stand and speak together, are we to pretend nothing happened?

(Originally published Monday, June 30, 2008)

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The Full Gospel Anthem

by Jim McCoy

In Jesus Christ we have faith in the incarnate, crucified and risen God. In the incarnation we learn of the love of God for His creation; in the crucifixion we learn of the judgment of God upon all flesh; and in the resurrection we learn of God’s will for a new world. There could be no greater error than to tear these elements apart; for each of them comprises the whole. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

That early evening in Dillsboro was the kind that makes Smokey Mountain summer dusks famous. It was 1974 and I was singing with a resort ministry group. We had just finished an unforgettable feast of trout and country ham at the Jarrett House. Now the little church across the street was pleasantly filled to hear us. The evening could not have been more perfect.

We sang about the goodness of God and the beauty of God’s creation, about understanding ourselves to be persons of worth created in God’s image, and the wonder, mystery and gratitude such a perspective brings. The group’s rich, well-rehearsed harmonies conveyed these truths beautifully. Those in the audience smiled their approval as we sat down, everyone pleased that our message had gotten across.

The pastor stood up and announced that a touring choir from a Florida orphanage was at a service station next door. They were headed for Asheville, but their bus had broken down and could not be repaired until morning. The church folk responded immediately to the pastor’s request for the choir to sleep in the church and invited the children to present their program right then and there.

The 50 young people lit into a high-voltage program conducted by the large, red-faced director of the orphanage. They sang about the wiles of the devil, of the terrible wickedness in the world and of the rewards waiting for us in heaven. Between the songs, individual choir members spoke in graphic detail of the shocking abuse that had been inflicted on them. Through their sobs and heaves they cried that Jesus was coming soon to take us away from this hellhole of a world.

I’ll bet I wasn’t the only one who left Dillsboro that night deeply troubled over the diametrically opposed messages. Yes, economic station and life experiences affect our understanding, but is our faith in Christ that precariously relative?

That’s not a bad post-modern question to keep asking ourselves. But today, more than 30 years later, I’m struck by how these two experiences need each other to mutually deepen and correct. To avoid life’s harsh, raw side with its terrifying evil results in self-indulgently shallow religion that focuses on little more than the inner serenity of materially comfortable individuals. If the story of our identity has at its center a crucified God, we cannot avoid the hoary reality and language of sin and redemption. But to dwell only of life’s gross and sinister evil dulls one to the gentle, abundant gifts that arrive daily from an extravagant God who sends rain on the just and the unjust.

We cannot tear these elements apart. Somehow the resort ministry team and the orphanage choir must sing in harmony in order for the full anthem of the Gospel to resound. To do so, though, yet another note must be sounded.

Both summer dusk beauty and midnight abuse can ignore the staggering news that the re-creative power of God has already broken into the present time. Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are the dawning of a new creation. “When anyone is united to Christ, there is a whole new world (II Cor. 5:17, NEB). When we walk in the light of the resurrection, we give witness to the God whose love has invaded a fallen creation and who will bring to completion the redemption already begun.

Karl Barth says that the Gospel “is not a romantic report about awareness of God in nature.” Neither is it “a set of pious or moral maxims designed to straighten out the world” nor “a legalistic lament about the meanness of human nature.” Rather, “the Gospel is constituted by the mighty acts of God in history for the liberation of the cosmos.”

That’s a Song for all of us to sing!

(Originally published Tuesday, May 13, 2008)

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Coming To Our Senses

by Erin Martin
This year our Lenten journey through the wilderness is not one that we walk alone. The persons who come face to face with Jesus in the Gospel of John on the Sundays in Lent are our traveling companions. Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman, the man born blind, Mary, Martha, even Lazarus, all have a place on our journey with Jesus to Jerusalem. From Sunday to Sunday while each of these persons experiences Jesus in individual ways, collectively they reveal to us the fullness of who we are as well as our total emptiness before Jesus.

In the Gospel of John, the individuals who encounter Jesus each experience him in ways that transcend his or her understanding. Jesus calls upon each person to come to know him in ways that go beyond what he or she already knows. Jesus appeals to their senses, to the expansive ways that humans know, through sight, sound, taste, touch and smell to reveal to all of us how little we are aware of the mysteries of God. First, Jesus challenges Nicodemus to discover rebirth in the Spirit by listening to the sound of the wind. Next, Jesus asks the Samaritan woman to drink in new life through the taste of living water. Jesus then restores the sight of a man born blind and in so doing exposes the blindness of people who see. Finally, Jesus uses the stench of Lazarus’ decaying body to demonstrate to Mary and Martha that even death is not death before God. By bombarding our senses in Lent, Jesus lays bare our ignorance, how easily we are dulled, how little we understand.

Frederick Buechner once wrote, “To repent is to come to your senses. It is not so much something you do as something that happens.” In this season of Lent, I believe that we are being given the opportunity to repent by allowing encounter with Jesus to happen to us. We are being invited to experience God like our traveling companions in ways that are beyond what we already know. We are being summoned to “come to our senses,” to hear, taste, see, and smell anew the mysteries of God.

In an article entitled, “Lent: The Undiscovered Country,” Penelope Mark-Stuart writes, “I believe we frequently fail to appreciate and appropriate the healing gifts of Lent because we are so blissfully unaware we even need them. The false gods of today do an excellent job keeping us distracted from our woundedness. ‘Eat! Drink! Work! Party! Shop!’ they tell us, and the painful, unhealthy, diseased areas of our lives are kept comfortably anesthetized. But when we venture into the wilderness, to a place and time free of distractions, we can come to know that the diversion these gods offer us is, in fact, bondage.” This Lent in our weekly encounters with Jesus may we offer to him the fullness of ourselves, all of our senses, that we might be filled by him, transformed, set free.

(Originally published Sunday, February 24, 2008)

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Unexpected News

by Brian E. Volck
This past Sunday brought NCAA basketball just down the street from my parish on the campus of Xavier University in Cincinnati. We’d been warned parking would be a nightmare for the 11 o’clock mass, so we went instead to St. Joseph’s church, a largely African-American Catholic church in Cincinnati’s struggling West End. My family had worshipped there before – usually at the end of one of our parish’s “urban plunge” weekends – and knew we were in for a powerful experience.

But what struck me more than the heartfelt singing and unselfconscious prayer was the force of scripture proclaimed by mouths familiar with the bitter taste of injustice.

I would have heard the same text well-read in my own parish of overeducated, socially progressive white folk (and, to be fair, a small number of African, Asian and Latino folks, for the most part well-educated and similarly active in matters of peace and justice). Nonetheless, Matthew’s account of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness sounded more authentic – more real – proclaimed by an African-American deacon who treasured every word. More importantly, I heard it differently – and, accordingly, the words meant something different. Different, at least, from what I usually associate with this passage.

The temptation of food means something different when the nearest grocery is a dreary, poorly-stocked hole two miles away instead of my own, familiar neighborhood store full of organic produce and farm-fresh food. Temptations of security mean something different when the family next to you is more concerned about the physical safety of their children walking to school than about the status of Dad’s tenure application. Temptations of power mean something different when your neighborhood is the dumping ground for whatever the latest city gentrification project has displaced. You get the idea.

The Body of Christ is, I know, a strange and wondrous thing, but I felt like an infant astonished to discover for the very first time that I had feet. Where did these come from and how did they become attached to my legs? Of course, I knew a great deal about poverty and racism in my city – enough to teach a course to medical residents about poverty medicine – but here was poverty, injustice and the struggle against racism in my own body – and I didn’t have to travel to Central America or the Navajo Nation to find it. I knew this all before, but in God’s Kingdom, knowing doesn’t count for much.

This summer’s EP gathering will consider how the sin of racism wounds the Body of Christ we call the Church. Pray, my sisters and brothers, that I might hear what waits to be said – what must be said – rightly. And rest assured I’ll be praying for you in case you need the favor returned.

And, as they say at St. Joe's: God is good...All the time.

(Originally published Tuesday, February 12, 2008)

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Mardi Gras

by Debra Dean Murphy
Mardi Gras.

The phrase conjures images of drunken revelry and riotous carnality, tempered with a little voodoo carnivàle. Associated as it is with that most sensual of American cities, New Orleans (at least until Katrina and its aftermath changed the city and our perception of it forever), “Fat Tuesday” seems the antithesis of anything holy or sacred.

But its origins, of course, are in the Church’s season of Lent. Ash Wednesday is preceded by Fat Tuesday ("Mardi Gras" in French) which, historically, was a time to eat up all the rich foods—meat, butter, eggs—you would not be consuming during the Lenten fast. The word “carnival” literally means “farewell to meat”. Some churches observe “Shrove Tuesday” (shrive=to confess) by hosting pancake suppers.

But what does it mean, I wonder, to "feast before the fast" when we are encouraged every day in this culture of excess to feast?

Our mindless gluttony, our promiscuous eating habits (we’ll eat anything, anywhere, anytime) are regarded matter-of-factly. If such habits are questioned at all it is usually from a medical point of view, not a theological one. After all—many rationalize—religion is about what we believe, not about what and how we eat. We know we shouldn’t eat so much but (wink, wink) our cravings are just so hard to control.

The season of Lent stands in stark contrast to such thinking. Lent calls for fasting, prayer, penitence, self-examination, awareness of our mortality, simplicity of living, and a compassionate spirit toward the needy. Yet in an age when self-scrutiny is often mistaken for self-absorption, such a disposition is not easy to cultivate; such a contrast not easy to manifest.

Some of us will give up chocolate or cheeseburgers this Lent, and that may be a start. But without a sustained, honest reckoning of the bad habits, destructive impulses, and false desires that claim us, our addictions and pathologies, both great and small, easily remain intact.

The desert experience of Lent is a great gift and a risky one, too. We risk looking foolish in a world that promotes excess in all things; we risk the realization that we have misidentified our real needs and desires and what ultimately can satisfy them.

We risk, in short, our very transformation.

(Originally published Tuesday, February 5, 2008)

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Eating Locally

by Debra Dean Murphy
I recently finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, a captivating story of her family’s efforts to eat locally for an entire year. From one spring to the next, everything they consumed was either grown in their own modest garden or purchased from farmers’ markets or dairies or butchers in their rural county in southwest Virginia (though they did make a few exceptions for staples like olive oil, spices, and fair trade organic coffee).

This is the kind of book that could get all preachy and high-minded, making the reader feel bad for being such a promiscuous eater, but Kingsolver is too good a writer for that. She simply chronicles her family’s triumphs and failures; their joys and frustrations. As she puts it, this is the story of what they learned, or didn’t; what they ate, or couldn’t; and how the family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the same place where they worked, loved their neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air (p. 20).

So no bananas for this family! The point, though, was not to fixate on what they were missing, “dragging around feeling righteous and gloomy,” but to seek the tangible, healthy pleasures that might be found in bypassing the industrial food economy and exploring instead the local food landscape (p. 22).

One of the many insights in this marvelous book is how Kingsolver’s family came to have a greater humility about the gifts of food and land and shared family work; a humility about the bonds of community that absolutely must be created and sustained if you are going to eat locally.

Humility. We associate that word with lowliness and meekness, and rightly so, but its roots go deeper--literally: “humility” is related to the word “humus,” the dark organic matter in the soil, essential for the earth’s fertility. To practice humility is indeed to “get low to the ground”; to be connected to the most basic things that feed and sustain us.

Jesus advises such a posture in the Gospel reading for this week. He tells his dinner companions that when they are invited to a wedding banquet, they are to “take the lowest seat,” not because he wants them to practice false modesty--as we are often prone to do--but because he wants them to embody true humility.

And then Jesus goes on to call into question our usual guest list when we host a luncheon or a dinner: “Do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

What would it look like if we actually did this? If--along with sending our money to food organizations and delivering meals to the hungry in our community--we also sat down and broke bread with them, talked across a table to them, passed the salt and pepper, shared stories, laughter, probably an awkward moment or two.

We might experience what the writer to the Hebrews predicts: we would entertain angels without knowing it. But this is not something we should romanticize, because there’s risk involved here--the risk that comes with interacting with strangers; the risk of being misunderstood by those who think it's best to associate with your own kind. This is not romantic; this is risky.

But that’s not all. The Hebrews writer says, “let mutual love continue.” “Mutual” means that it cuts both ways; there’s something required of both parties, and there is benefit to both parties. In my church we’re accustomed to being on the giving end--we like to share, feed, clothe, give money. But what would it mean for us to receive hospitality rather than to give it? Can we imagine being blessed by those whom we think we’re blessing? And I don’t mean the warm feeling you get when you help a needy person--that’s still you doing the giving. I mean can we imagine not always playing the host but learning instead how to be the guest?

When we get to the Hinduism section in a World Religions class I teach, I take the group to a weeknight prayer service at a local Hindu Temple. Actually, there are two Hindu Temples on opposite ends of this same street. It used to be a Baptist church on every corner in these small southern towns . . .

When we go there we are out of our element; we are in a foreign land; we experience a different language, different liturgy, different theology; different sights, sounds, and smells. We are guests. And our gracious hosts do not neglect to show hospitality to this bunch of strangers. But it’s hard to be the guests!

When we share the Lord’s Supper we are guests at the Lord’s table. Christ is the host. We receive but we cannot repay. And in this mutual sharing, where Jesus the host feeds us with his own body and blood, we offer ourselves in praise and thanksgiving as a holy and living sacrifice; the "sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name" (Heb. 13:15).

And there is humility in this. We are once again brought “low to the ground”--brought into the presence of the source of our lives and the source of all that is. The bread and wine that we consume may or may not have been produced locally, but in the Eucharist we know where our food comes from: from the one who is the same yesterday and today and forever. The one who invites us to share the abundance of life in him with prisoners and those being tortured; with the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. The one who promises that when we do this--when we practice mutual love--we will be blessed, and we will be changed.

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