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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Better Than Borders and Barriers

by Brent Laytham
Two days into Black History month, on the eve of the Transfiguration, it might be well for us to remember one key theme of Epiphany: Jesus gathers around himself a community of former strangers now become friends, a circle of former enemies now knit together as one family, a body where difference enlivens and diversity enriches.

At the Society of Christian Ethics last month I attended a panel discussion that focused on the racial segregation of Christian worship in the US. Meeting in Atlanta, we took up Martin Luther King’s observation that 11 o’clock on Sunday was and still is the most segregated hour in America. One of the most challenging questions was posed by Bryan Massingale, who asked us when in the last three years we had heard a sermon that condemned racial division or that affirmed God’s vision of a multi-racial church. When? Well, I hope you did during Epiphany

Epiphany is an annual invitation to read and hear the gospel that God shows up to bring us together, that God intends to show the world a better way than borders and barriers,

that God is revealing a new community beyond ‘us and them.’ Nations shall come to your light.

And so we have come, we wise men and women from the east and the west, who have seen the star, made the journey, consulted the scholars, and now offer Christ our devotion, our commitment, our very lives.

But let us wise women and wise men not mistake ourselves for the gospel, never think that the heart of Epiphany (or the heart of the gospel) is our being—or becoming—the diverse, righteous, inclusive church the God intends for us to be. That’s not the point.Yes, we are the magi. But Jesus is the Messiah. He is the light that overcomes darkness, and we stand in his brightness. He is the manifestation of God’s glory, and we dwell in his radiance. He is God’s beauty and wisdom, he is God’s justice and mercy, he is God’s abundant giving of boundless riches showing up, showing forth, showing us the way.

(Originally published Saturday, February 2, 2008)

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Fools For Christ

by Randy Cooper
I’m thinking this morning of Van Thompson. There he is down in Memphis, newly married. To the surprise of some, Van and Kristin have chosen to live in the Binghamton neighborhood, a community riddled with urban poverty and crime. They are two of many Christians moving into the community in recent years in order to bear witness and to offer their bodily presence.

For these Christians, mission and evangelism are not separate from daily living, but are rather a way of life. Mission and evangelism have to do with daily habits and practices that place them beside persons whose walk in life is different from theirs. By placing themselves in such a community, they are availing themselves of God’s Holy Spirit to love the neighbors given to them by God. Only God knows what may happen with “crazy” Christians like Van and Kristin.

And I’m thinking this morning about Duke University. The largest number of Duke graduates in 2007 did not move on to some graduate school in Law, Medicine, or Business, as we might expect.

Instead, the largest single group has been accepted into the Teach For America program. I take this simple fact as another sign of the times. Young adults are becoming passionate about social ills and problems. They know that “things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be.” And many of them are giving themselves to trying to make the world a bit better. I can only guess that some of the Duke parents are saying, “We didn’t pay Duke $120,000 in order for you to be working with children in some poor rural community! Have you gone crazy?”

Who knows? Maybe more of our congregation’s own will consider such life and witness “in the days of their youth.” We should encourage them. They know that things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be. They can join with Paul in being “fools for Christ” (1 Cor. 4:10). And older codgers like most of us might be challenged to recover a bit of our passion for a more just world.

(Originally published Thursday, January 24, 2008)

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Looking Toward Lent

by Debra Dean Murphy

When we take too much pride in “family churches,” where neat, nuclear families dominate, we risk forgetting what Jesus did on Good Friday. “Family churches,” for all their honoring of family life, may limit the much wider embrace of God’s grace. Some priorities valued in family churches can be hostile to individuals who do not fit middle-class paradigms. They can exclude people Jesus would want us to welcome. The world consists of many persons who have had to take different and often painful roads. The true community Jesus seeks makes space for them all. — Peter Storey, Listening at Golgotha

It is not uncommon in a lot of churches, perhaps rural ones especially, for a particular family to be a dominant force in the life of the congregation. The family may be founding members of the church, pillars in the community. They may have donated a prominent stained glass window or paid for the pulpit or altar—maybe even bankrolled the fellowship hall.

While there is usually a genuine love for the church evident in their actions, sometimes the patriarchs (or, often, matriarchs) of these families can exert a pressure on congregations and on pastors that comes close to manipulation, even intimidation. I know more than a few pastors who have felt defeated and demoralized by the stranglehold that a domineering family has had on their church and its life together.

There’s another kind of family dominance that easily insinuates itself into churches—one that Peter Storey alludes to in the quote above. When churches pride themselves on being “family-friendly” congregations, they usually have in mind the typical suburban mom and dad and their soccer-playing children, forgetting or ignoring or dismissing other configurations of family: an elderly widower, a childless couple, a gay or lesbian baby boomer, a middle-aged divorcée. When family-friendly churches talk about family, these are generally not the people they mean; these are not the demographics they target.

But more than that, an emphasis on the neat, discrete nuclear family, misses the foundational point of baptism and of the Christian life in general: that through the cross of Christ, a new kind of family has been formed. We are no longer identified primarily by biological ties, but by the bonds of love that link us one to other, across time and space, as members of Christ’s body, God’s own family. This love is without partiality because its source is the Trinitarian love-in-communion that transcends every exclusiveness. It is not a love that we muster on our own power through will or personal resolve; it is a love imputed to us and efficacious through us. We are its vessels, not its wellspring.

The journey through Lent—the forty-day pilgrimage of prayer and penitence, discipline and discovery—is a journey toward this Love made known in the suffering death of Jesus of Nazareth who, when he stretched out his arms on the cross, embraced the whole world. Without exclusion. Without exception. He made family of us all.

The cross we will travel toward in Lent is that most palpable reminder that Jesus, our brother, has made us all kin.

(Origianlly published Tuesday, January 22, 2008)

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Telephones and What is Good for Us

by Randy Cooper
David Kline is an Amish man. He insists that Amish people are not understood. Amish people are maligned for being against all forms of modern technology. That is not true, he says. Rather, the Amish use only those technologies that, in their best judgment, do not harm their community life.

For example, lanterns are not allowed on their farm field equipment. With lanterns they would be tempted to work into the night hours. And working in the fields past sunset would weaken their family life and would overwork their horses.

Several years ago the question came up about whether David Kline’s community would use telephones. Everyone in the church—the community—met and discussed it a number of times. It took all summer for them to decide whether they would have phones. They finally decided against it. And they had two reasons.

First, they knew that if they began to use telephones, they would carry out conversations less and less in a face to face manner. Second, if they had telephones, they feared that their children would begin talking more and more exclusively to one another. The decision about telephones was made in light of what was good for the community and for the human word. Some people believe we live under a “technological imperative.’ If we can invent it or use it, we do so with little foresight as to the repercussions down the road.

Look at what television has done to family and community life. And people now speak of the “virtual community” of the Internet. Imagine being a part of a church where major decisions of your life are brought to the congregation for discernment.

Imagine being a part of a community where everyone agrees to say “yes” to those things that strengthen the community and “no” to those that weaken it. And don’t dismiss the Amish too quickly.

By and large, theirs is the only agricultural community in the entire country that has maintained relative health in the past 30 years. They have something to teach us.

(Originally posted Friday, January 11, 2008)

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When Eight Days Were Fufilled

by Brian E Volck
"When eight days were fulfilled for the circumcision of the child, his name was called Jesus, which was given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb." Luke 2:21

Back in grade school, I flipped through a highly modernized version of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, and came across this definition of “Sunday”: “In Christian countries, the day of the football game.” While I imagine my sons and I will take in a few downs together some time today, observing Christmas season its full duration is a virtue, brimming with goods “internal to the practice.”

In addition to serving as a day to sleep in late, and watch parades and college football televised from warmer climates, January 1 has variously been identified by Christians as the Feast of the Circumcision; the Holy Name of Jesus; Mary, Mother of God (Theotokos in the East) and the World Day of Peace…and I’m sure I’ve left out a few. So there are a world of reasons beyond the mythical NCAA football championship, no longer even “determined” on New Year’s Day, to celebrate.

So, if you think you’ve already exhausted the season, here are a few items to ponder:

Saint Egidio’s annual Christmas lunch with the poor,

Christianity Today’s visual meditation on the annunciation to the shepherds,

The Matthew’s House Project Christmas meditation,

and Ken Myers’ Christmas letter reflection on the intellectual embarrassment of the Incarnation (I include a fragmentary excerpt below, since Mars Hill Audio has not uploaded the letter to the Internet):

More than just a logical precondition for the Atonement, the Incarnation also establishes the trajectory for our new life as a truly human life. There is a theological link between confidence in the full humanity of Jesus and a recognition of the ramifications of our salvation across the full range of our own humanity, across all of the ways in which we engage God's creation.

Much of modern culture, with its Gnostic undertones, alienates us from creation and its givenness. Theologian Colin Gunton sees the affirmation of the Incarnation as essential to our enthusiastic participation in creation and therefore in cultural life. "A world that owes its origin to a God who makes it with direct reference to one who was to become incarnate -- part of the world -- is a world that is a proper place for human beings to use their senses, minds and imaginations, and to expect that they will not be wholly deceived in doing so."

…But even after 2,000 years of opportunity to reflect on the Incarnation, many contemporary Christians persist in believing in a Gnostic salvation, a salvation that has no cultural consequences. In such a dualistic understanding, our souls are saved, the essential immaterial aspect of our being is made right with God, but the actions of our bodies -- what we actually do in space and time -- are a matter of indifference if not futility. Salvation is an inward matter only. It affects our attitudes and some of our ideas. But insofar as our cultural activities have any Christian significance it is as mere marketing efforts -- things we do to attract others to our essentially Gnostic salvation.

Believing in a gospel that has few earthly consequences is, ironically, just the sort of state our secularist neighbors would wish us to sustain. They, too, are dualists, believing that religion may be a fine thing for people, so long as they keep it private. Their secularism isn't threatened by Christians as long as they aren't too "Incarnational." As long as the cultural lives of Christians aren't significantly different from those of materialists and pagans, secularism is safe. Christians may pray "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," but as long as they don't actually do anything that demonstrates how such a petition should affect their political, economic, and cultural activities, the Enlightenment legacy is safe.

Or, read the latest issue of The Other Journal, in which William Cavanaugh and Eugene McCarraher, both of whom have spoken at recent EP gatherings, are asked about the fallen state of the Creation in which the Incarnate Word pitches his tent.

(Originally posted Tuesday, January 1, 2008)

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