The Great Resignation.

I have been hearing people refer to what is going on in many churches this days as “the Great Resignation.”  It is, apparently, a thing.  

As they come out of Covid, many churches are finding that volunteers are no longer interested in showing up.  It is becoming harder to get people to sign-up for the usual tasks that keep ministry going and the institution functional.  I am even hearing of an increasing number of ministers seeking new calls, some saying it is because people in the church have grown nasty and intolerable.  I have witnessed some of this kind of behavior first-hand.

Most of the evidence for this trend is anecdotal and circumstantial, and some do report that, for them, things are more or less normal.  But when something is enough of an event for people to give it a name, it usually means it is real.  

This circumstance meshes with things we are seeing happening in the larger society.  People are quitting or not returning, and seeking alternatives to their pre-Covid lives, changing jobs, homes, relationships, even families.    

I don’t think we realize the degree to which the pandemic shook things up and traumatized us.  We lost 600,000 people.  That’s far more deaths than in all our 20th century wars combined.  Covid touched all of us, and many of us know people who have died.  My wife and I both got the disease; I was merely sicker than I have ever been in my life, while she was in the hospital for a week.  Three friends and colleagues of mine lost their lives from it.  

The disease also exposed fault-lines and weaknesses in our culture.  It occurred during the regime of our most incompetent and divisive President, who managed to turn an opportunity to unite us in a common cause into a deepening gash of political polarization.  It framed the most significant outpouring of civil rage over racial injustice in a generation, when George Floyd was tortured to death on the street by a smug police officer.  Then we had the most secure national election in our history, with record turn-out, only to have the losing party refuse to accept it and institute laws to suppress future voters.  And of course the culmination of all this was in the violent and deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by an armed mob on January 6.

It was a difficult year.  And now it’s 120 degrees in Arizona, the western wildfires have broken out early… and the new government is paralyzed by the filibuster. 

And the Delta Variant spreads.  Which means this pandemic isn’t even over yet.

Like everyone else, the church is shaken and confused.  Some just don’t understand why we can’t go back to the way things were.  Some of these folks are the ones quitting and staying home, others are seeking a new way forward… and getting viciously attacked for it.  These are some one of the reasons things can’t go back to the way they were.  Words have been said, actions taken, gestures made.  These cannot be undone or forgotten.  Relationships have shifted.  We’re in a new and different place.

The Church has been in decline in America for 50 years.  It has been steady except for several inflection points when the bottom seemed to drop out for a while.  One of these was 9/11, which some thought might actually bring people back to church.  It didn’t.  Another was the 2008 Recession, during which many of the norms and standard procedures in the church were simply jettisoned.  (This is when we revised the Book of Order to accommodate the continuing disintegration.)  Now we have the Covid time.

It is too early to tell how (and whether) the church will put itself together after this trauma.  But one thing is absolutely certain: there is no going back.

In fact, I suggest that giving any attention at all to “the way things were” is toxic and possibly fatal.  The redesign has to happen.  From scratch. 

This probably should have started half-a-century ago.  Indeed, the church of Jesus Christ needs constant redesign in light of our encounter with the Word of God.  That is the meaning of that Reformation motto we like to repeat, as if saying the words inoculates us from having to do the work (a common Presbyterian malady): Semper reformanda.  We are “always being reformed” by God.  

How has the pandemic reformed, transformed, changed, and transfigured us?  

Bob Dylan once sang that if we are not busy being born we are busy dying.  How are we busy being born in this time after Covid?  How is Jesus Christ busy being born among us?  How is the Kingdom of God revealing itself in our midst?  How is the Spirit blowing with and within us now?  How is the church of eternity emerging into our lives today?  

Until we address these questions, we will continue the slow-motion shipwreck of the old church until it finally disappears under the waves.

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The "Conquest" of Canaan.

One of the most common and potent criticisms aimed at the Bible and Christianity is that stories like many of those epitomized in the book of Joshua depict a bloodthirsty, genocidal deity, commanding the extermination of whole populations.  Such a god is not worthy of worship, and a community that does worship such a god is barbaric.  If we accept these stories as literal and historical, this is difficult to argue with. 

The movement of the Israelites out of the wilderness and into Canaan has been described as a “conquest.”  Worse, it has been held up as a kind of scriptural warrant for settler colonialism, as if these stories give powerful and violent people a divine authorization to steal the land and take the lives of any indigenous people they choose.  Thus it has been used ruthlessly against native peoples in America, South Africa, Palestine, and many other places.  

These stories start in Exodus and continue into the historical books of the Bible.  But read carefully and in context, they do not provide any kind of Biblical justification for land theft and mass murder.  Here’s why:

1. In the Torah, the Israelites are liberated slaves, on their way to their ancestral home from Egypt.  They are not a well-financed conquering foreign army.  Their goal is not to colonize the people and to place their land under cultivation to benefit a rich ruling class or some distant nation. 
2. The Israelites were from Canaan, where Jacob and his family had lived as nomadic herders; they were not aliens who came from a distance.  Abraham and Sara, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Leah, and Rachel had been bedouin shepherds there.  Their return to Canaan was not so much an invasion as a homecoming. 
3. The named groups said to occupy Canaan mainly referred to the ruling classes of different city-states, who were largely allied with Egypt, and dominated the common people who lived in the countryside.  It was a stratified, class-based society.  We might understand them to be at least reflexively doing Egypt’s bidding in tempting the Israelites back into subservience.
4. Old Testament scholar, Norman Gottwald, suggests that what looks like a “conquest” could more accurately be understood as a peasant uprising, as local people from the countryside joined their relatives escaping out of Egypt to overthrow the oppressive rulers of Canaanite city-states.  It could even be said that the movement was a continuation of the despoiling of the Egyptians by robbing them of their allies and client regimes, and liberating the people.
5. They replaced these local monarchies, not with new kings (until much later) but with a flatter, more distributed, decentralized, and “democratic” tribal confederacy under charismatically selected, often temporary, judges, priests, and prophets.  Through them the people were governed by God’s law and Spirit rather than the whim of kings.
6. The accounts we have of these events were not actually written down for centuries, to address much later crises.  The stories were developed in a way that fostered a national and religious identity that was in danger of extermination.  They are therefore a kind of historical fiction that shapes the past to make sense of current events.  I compare these “conquest” stories to legends about historical figures which are embellished and reshaped to give courage, hope, and resilience to the people.
7. The Church early learned to take these stories “spiritually” in the sense that they are metaphors and allegories about conflicts in the soul.  The various Canaanite enemies represent temptations to idolatry and ego-centricity that have to be “wiped out” or at least controlled in one’s inner life.  The Church had to do this as a way to deal with the contradiction between the life and teachings of Jesus, and stories about apparent genocide and mass-murder.  The stories could not be taken literally, much less prescriptively, by people who understood Jesus Christ to be the Word of God to whom the Scriptures point. 
8. Finally, I wonder if these stories aren’t hyperbolic bluster, like we still hear from leaders in the Middle East and other parts of the world.  Indeed, we sometimes talk like this ourselves in some contexts, like when we use colorful language to describe sporting events: “The Cowboys shot down the Eagles,” or “The Red Sox laid siege to Yankee Stadium over the weekend, outscoring the Bombers 24-4.”  The point is not a sober, accurate historical account, but a deliberately colorful and emotional rendering designed to attract and excite readers.  Fwiw.  

Anyway, my point in all this is that the “conquest” of Canaan cannot reasonably or with integrity be taken literally or historically, let alone prescriptively, and used to justify practices in our time that Jesus and the New Testament categorically reject, like colonialism, bigotry, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing.

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Embracing the Rainbow.

Jesus is famous for including in his movement exactly the people who were hated and excluded by the social and religious conservatives.  Would he not welcome a Gay, Lesbian, or transgendered person who came to him?

One of the most significant indications of whether we follow Jesus or not is our attitude towards LGBT+ people.  Indeed, it has become a test for true discipleship of Jesus Christ.  If our theology is colored by hatred, judgment, and condemnation of this community — or any minority and/or traditionally excluded or  disenfranchised group — it is not based on the teachings of Jesus.  If we are ready to dismiss these people as more “sinful” and in dire need of repentance than ourselves — especially if at the same time we overlook the sins of injustice and exploitation that the Bible does actually talk about a lot — and in which we participate! — we have bought into the standards of the Empire and rejected Jesus.

The Holy Spirit has been, for the past half century at least, using this filter to distinguish the true Church from the false, the followers of the Spirit from those who are obsessed (like Paul’s opponents in Galatians) with other peoples’ flesh, the people loyal to God from ego-centric personalities. 

Because according to the gospels, not only does Jesus not have anything to say about this issue at all, he also is famous for including in his movement exactly the people who were hated and excluded by the social and religious conservatives.  If he could welcome tax collectors and prostitutes, and be accused of being himself a glutton and a drunkard, what do we imagine he would do were a Gay, Lesbian, or transgendered person to come to him?  Would not they be embraced as well?  The only people in the gospels whom Jesus rejects and condemns because of their sins are those who condemn themselves by condemning others: religious hypocrites who inflict moral and religious restrictions on weaker people, and of course the rich.

The few passages on which anti-LGBT+ bigotry has been based have been ripped out of context in the service of self-righteous fear and bigotry.  For instance, we are told that the sin of Sodom was homosexuality; but the prophet Ezekiel explicitly disagrees, insisting that it is social injustice: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy” (Ezekiel 16:49).  So who are we to believe: The purveyors of moral and religious purity?  Or the prophet Ezekiel? 

Other passages have been misused in similar hypocritical ways.  Like selectively harping on some of the prohibitions in the Hebrew Scriptures while disregarding the economic sins that are condemned on nearly every page of the Bible.  Even if all the anti-LGBT+ interpretations were accurate, they would remain a remarkably minor and barely visible theme in the Bible.  For this to get propounded as a centerpiece of Christianity while ignoring the main and pervasive theme of social justice is just paranoid, self-righteous bigotry trumping the Spirit of Scripture. 

The acceptance and full-inclusion of LGBT+ people is an indication of our loyalty to God, Jesus, and the Bible.  It reveals how close we are to Jesus Christ.  It indicates our willingness and ability to set our own irrational, ego-centric fears and prejudices aside for the sake of the love that Jesus commands.  It shows that we follow the Spirit that gives life, not just the letter that kills.  It is a touchstone of actual discipleship.      

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