Let's Hope.

Let’s hope that this is just creation’s warning. 

Let’s hope that this is creation giving humanity a taste of what she can do if we do not change our ways and start cooperating with each other and with all of life.  

Let’s hope that this is creation urging us not to go back to the regime of greed, exploitation, consumption, injustice, and profit.  Because if this is not a warning, it’s going to get worse.  A lot worse.

Let’s hope that this is creation giving us another chance.  

Let’s hope that this is not yet creation pushing the reset button; but this is her reminding us that there is a reset button.  The health and well-being of the planet takes priority over the wanton destruction and mindless avarice of one species.

Let’s hope that the way creation has so favorably responded to just over two months of a reduction in human “economic” activity, is a message that this pandemic thing is working really well for every other life form on the planet.  They will be fine without us.  In fact, they could get used to this.   

Let’s hope that this is creation reminding us that we are, in effect, the pathogen jeopardizing the future of the whole web of life.  We are the ones liable to be eradicated or culled, to save the larger body.  

Let’s hope we have time.

Let’s hope that, if we do have time, we use it to remake our world so that our life serves God, not money; all people, not just the rich; all of life, not just humans.

Because there will be no second warning. 

Look.  We can fix this ourselves and merely inconvenience a few wealthy people.  Or we can just let the planet fix itself.  That will not be pretty; for us.  We can adapt.  Maybe the planet is tired of adapting to us.

Let’s hope it’s not too late.

Let’s hope.  And put that hope into action building a world of compassion, humility, simplicity, gentleness, gratitude, wonder, justice, healing, and love.

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The First Enemy.

The Apostle Paul says the last enemy is death.  It made me wonder what the first enemy might be.

Maybe the first enemy is ego.  

I understand ego as the voice inside us that incorrectly concludes from our limited sense experience that we are small, alone, and vulnerable in a dangerous world.  Ego projects our personality, which shapes our thinking and acting, adopting the strategies and stories we use to justify and reinforce our identity, our understanding of ourselves.  Since this is all based on the lie of our disconnection, ego serves only to drive us towards the one thing it most fears: death.  Ego and personality thus keep us anesthetized, asleep, and unconscious, separate from the truth and all but dead.  

The consequence basing our existence on ego is a narcissistic nihilism that thinks and acts only for itself and its group.  It functions only out of a narrow, immediate self-interest and desire for self-gratification.  Ego is disordered and misdirected desire.  Every thought and act is distorted and biased according to what the ego wants to gain. 

Ego sees and treats others as competitors and enemies.  Ego takes, wastes, consumes, exploits, objectifies, kills, extracts, and destroys creation.  Its entire agenda is to provide for itself.  

Until ego, the first enemy, is overcome and released, nothing else matters.  It is the primary, if not the only, spiritual task of every human.  Until we recognize that this enemy is even there, and then address it, we remain blind, inert, defiled, deaf, and spiritually dead.

We recognize the first enemy by becoming self-aware.  This is what a tool like the Enneagram is for.  It is designed to make us see how enslaved we are to the personality we have developed as the ego’s exoskeleton.  It sort of separates us from the illusion of our separation, which the ego is feeding us.  We come to understand that our ego is not who we truly are.  

The first step of recovery programs applies here.  We have to step back from ourselves and realize that our lives in our present condition are unmanageable, that we are in a death-spiral, and that we need to change our direction and our way of thinking and seeing the world.  That is, we need repentance.

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Ebb Tide.

Ebb Tide: Reflections on Ministry During a Time of Decline.

In the movie, Born on the Fourth of July, Tom Cruise plays Ron Kovic, a paraplegic Vietnam veteran.  There’s a scene where Kovic is at a bar with other veterans, many of whom fought in Korea or World War II.  At one point it becomes clear that these older men don’t like Kovic and the others coming back from Vietnam.  They consider them failures and losers who did not get the job done.  They shun and disrespect them.  I remember this as Kovic’s low point in the movie.

Sometimes I relate this to my own experience as a pastor relative to my dad’s generation.  Like me, he was also a pastor.  He began his ministry in 1958.  In those days, we couldn’t build churches fast enough to meet the demand.  He oversaw the construction of two churches in New Jersey.  

My ministry began in 1981.  Through my entire career the church has not been able to close churches fast enough.  The last year the Presbyterian Church did not lose membership was around 1972.  I started seminary in 1977.  No one, least of all at Princeton Seminary, foresaw the 40 years of steady and sometimes precipitous decline to come.

Sometimes I wonder if my generation simply did not get the job done.  My dad’s cohort handed us a booming operation.  Did we drop the ball?  Did we not have what it takes?  

I served in ten churches in my 38 year career.  Four of them are no longer in operation.  The other six are at various levels of health.  At best they are holding their own, as it were, and not hemorrhaging members.  But none are booming, as far as I know.  

Just as Vietnam was a different kind of war, compared with previous conflicts, the last quarter of the 20th and the first quarter of the 21st century are different from the 1950s and 60s.  Just as we tried to fight one war with an arrogant mindset based on earlier victories, maybe we in the church just assumed that what worked in 1956 would continue to work in 1986.  My generation was trying to do ministry with the tools and ways of thinking of earlier and very different decades.  That stuff just didn’t work anymore.  We had to reinvent the church for a radically different time on the fly.  Building the plane while it is in the air, as it were.

Trying to finish it before we hit the ground.

That’s what it felt like, anyway.

But maybe even that frame of mind was a bit too frantic.  It was always hard to get away from the ghost of the church growth we knew from childhood.  Certainly, many churches and members remained swathed in, if not paralyzed by, nostalgia.  Ever pretending that this would all turn around if only we were more effective in getting the word out.  Like this was all just a communications problem.  We were still imagining that we just needed to build a new church near that housing development and people would fill it.  Maybe grunts in Vietnam also fantasized they could roll through the Mekong Delta like Gen. Patton churned through Europe.

But maybe, instead of comparing ourselves unfavorably with past heroes, we could awaken to something else going on.  For there is a rhythm to ecclesial life, like the tides of the oceans.  Maybe my time in ministry was like living during an ebb tide, a time when the flood, the action, the energy has receded.

A couple of years ago we took a vacation to Cape Cod.  One day we drove over to the bay side.  It was low tide.  We were able to walk practically half a mile into the bay in the soft, wet sand.  The thing is, during a low tide, you can find all kinds of things you cannot see when the water comes back.  Small puddles full of tiny, busy fish.  Scuttling crabs and other shellfish of different types.  The carved contours of the seabed.  Large rocks, probably dropped there by glaciers.  Gnarled appendages of driftwood.  Seaglass and pebbles.  Lots of shells and pieces of shells.  And of course, plastic….

The church has also discovered a lot of interesting things in the mud, exposed and made available by this low tide in our history.  It reminds me of Phyllis Tickle’s great 500 year rummage sale, where we rediscover treasures in our attic, and consign other formerly important objects to the dumpster.  Had the tide never receded we would not have had any incentive to do anything new.  We would still be worshiping and doing mission according to the models and resources of the 1950’s.  

So, most of my ministry has been about what I could pull up from the wet sand.  I discovered that the ebb tide is a gift!  Once we got over trying magically to conjure the return of the sea, we looked down and noticed what the sea had been hiding.  There is power and potential in the silence and the openness of ebb tide. 

Without this ebb tide, would we have discovered Celtic Christianity?  Would we have recovered practices that the Reformation discarded, like lectio divina, icons, labyrinths, the liturgical year and colors, and nearly forgotten mystic saints like Eckhart, Hildegard, Julian, and others?   Would we have heard the Spirit and the Scriptures calling us to ordain women?   Would we have learned about the Enneagram, the missional church, or liberation theology?  Would we have tried praise music and new technologies?  Would we have even heard the gospel when it challenged us and coaxed is into new and weird places?  

Would we have noticed the pollution and waste that was the by-product of those supposedly great years?  Would we have noticed who was getting run over or left behind by our “success”?  Would we have had the courage to identify the racism in the 1950’s church?  Would we have realized the damage done to faith by an identification with nationalism, capitalism, and militarism?  Or would we just have stuck with the “tried-and-true” strategies, as if they were working?

The future of the church is going to be founded on the beautiful and functional artifacts we dredged out of the sand of ebb tide.  So that when the flow returns, we will find ourselves in way better shape to be, make, and keep disciples.  Will be better equipped to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God, and each other, on the Earth. 

That’s the way I am framing my nearly four decades in this line of work.  I hope I helped churches to stop missing what they don’t have and wishing it would all be the way it was, and begin to open themselves to the wonders we are discovering that we overlooked or never knew about before.  I hope I encouraged churches to look to what God is going to do in the future, and is starting to do now, that is new, wild, and fruitful.    

As for Ron Kovic?  He went on to be one of the most authentic and eloquent voices for peace in his generation.  

God is always turning our failures into triumphs.  That is the message of the cross.  And the meaning of life in an ebb tide.

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Christ vs Christendom.

Since about the 4th century, when the church and the State entered into an alliance, there has been a battle within Christianity.  The church exhibits two wildly different personalities.

Some want to use Christianity as a form of social cohesion and control.  For them, the role of the church is to uphold, support, legitimize, rationalize, and sanctify the State and the “Christian culture.”  At worst, they use Christianity to enforce national adherence to moral standards designed to maintain the status quo and fund the power of social elites.  They reduce “morality” mainly to sexual conformity.  They invent religious rationalizations for war, colonialism, slavery, torture, genocide, and other atrocities in the name of a “Christianity” that is wedded to a particular race, nation, or culture, and therefore subservient to its agenda, no matter how perverse.  Theologian Stanley Hauerwas has adopted the term “Christendom” to denote this system.   

The other understanding of Christianity comes from, well, Jesus Christ.  He was hounded and finally executed by people who pressed religion into service as a way to instill and reinforce cultural moral discipline.  He expresses his low opinion of such uses of religion quite clearly in Matthew 23.  Jesus establishes his gospel community as a counter-cultural egalitarian peoples’ spiritual movement.  Following his example and empowered by his Spirit, they seek to live in the world according to his teachings, which are characterized by healing, compassion, forgiveness, and inclusion.  

Fortunately, in our time, the subservience of Christianity to the State has deteriorated.  This is due to two factors.  In the first place, the world has become “smaller.”  It is both more diverse and more knowledgable.  The official propaganda is harder to maintain.  It is harder to hate the “other” when your kids and theirs play on the same soccer team.  It is more difficult to swallow the establishment’s white-washed version of history when we learn of the experience of its victims, from its victims.  

Secondly, the church was led by the Spirit to pay more attention to “Jesus Christ as he is attested in Holy Scripture.”  That phrase comes from the Theological Declaration of Barmen, written in Germany in 1934, when the collision between Christ and Christendom was particularly acute.  It urges us to turn away from Christendom’s false caricature of Jesus as a heavenly cheerleader for capitalism, militarism, nationalism, colonialism, sexism, racism, and the “moral discipline” those ideologies demanded.  

Unfortunately, Christendom is not going quietly.  William Barr, the current Attorney General of the United States, is quoted as saying that “Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct.”  “Religion,” he says, “helps frame moral culture within society that instills and reinforces moral discipline.”  Therefore, he apparently seeks to bring a false version of Christianity back into the center of American culture.  It’s about using religion for control.

Actually, to a point I agree with him.  Christian faith is indeed intended in part to “frame moral culture within society.”  That’s what Jesus means when he talks about how is followers are to function as “salt,” “light,” and “leaven” in society.  They are to bear witness to his love, according to his teaching and example, in all that they do.  Their presence does subtly flavor the society, moving it more in the direction of the beloved community of God’s shalom.  That has always been part of the church’s self-understanding, as given by its Lord.

But if by “Judeo-Christian moral standards” we mean the dominance by wealthy, heterosexual, white men of everyone else, if we mean using religion to support oppression and violence, if we mean justifying the economic hegemony of owners over workers and the poor, then this is something Christians must resist in Jesus’ Name.  True Christianity is not defined by the dictates of the elites.  Christendom’s maintenance of values and practices utterly foreign to Jesus Christ is a cynical perversion and corruption of Christianity.  Only Jesus Christ defines what faith in him looks like.  And it looks very little like anything of which William Barr would approve.

As a Christian I can think of nothing that would be so monumentally disastrous to the mission of the church than an attempt to impose by force of law a ghastly, hateful, and false version of “Christianity” on a population.  Christianity is already in decline in America especially among younger people, because it is identified with bigotry, racism, capitalism, hypocrisy, sexism, and nationalism.  Who imagines that allowing ourselves to be used as the Gestapo to enforce the interests of rich, paranoid, smug white men is going to help us preach the gospel? 

I grieve that there are so many among us in America who already hold this opinion about Christianity, based on the venal, self-serving, corrupt hypocrisy of several well-known public figures.

The choice then for Christianity is this: a domesticated, locked-down Christendom designed to enforce social conformity and economic exploitation?  

Or Jesus Christ?  Which is to say compassion, inclusion, non-violence, generosity, forgiveness, joy, and humility. 

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