Not Leaving Church.

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What if people were invited to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe?  What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at church? What if church felt more like a way station than a destination?  What if the church’s job were to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in, by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church? 

― Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

This sentiment of Taylor's disturbs me.  Perhaps I take her words out of context; I haven't read the whole book.  But some friends of mine passed this along on Facebook to much approval.  Let me respond to her "what ifs" one by one:    

1.  What if people were invited to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe?  

Most people go through their existence assuming their ego constitutes their entire being.  What people "already know of God" in this condition will of necessity reflect and express nothing more than their own egocentric desires and fears, memories and imagination, pleasures, and pain.  Certainly, we might see this as a good place to start... but affirming people who imagine that "what they already know of God" has anything to do with the real God does them a disservice.  

Listening to such people share "what they already know of God" reminds me of people telling what they already know of Mongolia, having never been there, or talked to anyone who has been there, or even read about it.  We would hear what they thought or imagined about Mongolia, which would tell us absolutely nothing about the actual, real Mongolia.  We've all heard that parable about the blind people trying to describe an elephant by their own limited experience of different parts of the elephant?  Well this sounds more like a bunch of people trying to describe an elephant... when they have never actually even come close to one. 

Taylor assumes, it seems to me, that God isn't real in God's Self, but rather a conglomeration of individuals' imaginings about "God."  And as Dostoevsky famously said, if there is no God, everything is permitted.    

After 40 years of ministry, I can report that what a lot of people already think they know about God scares the shit out of me.  Some still hold toxic versions of God they received from oppressive religious institutions... both victims of this experience and those who still maintain and enforce that regime.  Some think God is little more than a spiritual mascot for the American Empire, equating Christianity with patriotism and nationalism.  Some imagine a God who exists to serve and bless them personally... and they may get angry and disillusioned if that God screws up and permits something bad to happen to them.  Or they imagine a God who keeps and checks a list to reward the nice and punish the naughty, like Santa Claus.  And so on.  God as philosophical problem, God as obsolete mythical sky fairy, God as Creator of cosmic beauty, God as surrogate parent....  I suspect any list of imagined Gods would be nearly as long as the number of humans on the earth.   

At best, having people share their personal images of God tells us something about their own personalities and neuroses.  That has some value as a starting point for psychological therapy.  But it tells us nothing about God.

Yes, we do come to church to learn what we're "supposed to believe," because it is by believing, which means by trusting in and walking with God and others in discipleship, that we come to know and see God's Presence.  This does not happen by an individual thinking about it in isolation.  It only happens in community with others, some of whom have traveled further on the path.

Taylor states it in a somewhat pejorative by saying "supposed to believe," as if faith and belief have nothing to do with our actual experience.  As in, "You know God in your heart, but the church dictates that you're supposed to believe something else."  As in, "You gonna believe your own experience or some church doctrine?"  As if beliefs have nothing to do with reality.   

When I visit a doctor, I expect them to listen very carefully to my story.  I do expect them to listen to how I feel.   But I can tell that to anyone for a lot less money.  I also rely upon their education and expertise as someone who knows more than I about how to proceed.  In other words, I count on them to tell me "what I should believe" based on his medical knowledge.  When they tell what not to eat or what kind of exercise or therapy will help me, and when they give me prescriptions for specific medicines, I trust their judgment.  I believe them, and I show this by doing what they say to do. 

This works for any kind of personal growth and healing.  I have to begin with the humility to recognize the inadequacy of what I already know.  Isn't that the point?  Whether it has to do with learning a skill, recovering from an injury, or overcoming an addiction, we can't depend on what we already know about anything.

2.  "What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at church?"  

What if what someone is "already doing in the world" contributes to the destruction of the earth and people, even though they think it God's will and do it for the greater good?  If we start with each person's individual, egocentric version of God, the consequences in people's actions can get quite catastrophic.  Do I really need to explain how people invent versions of God to justify, explain, rationalize, and defend their bad actions?  Can we imagine someone whom the church might not want to bless "for what they are doing in the world"?  I can.  

Certainly we need to celebrate people when they do good things in the world.  That expresses discipleship.  But we don't find ourselves often faced with the choice of doing more at church or doing things in the world.  Most of us figure out how to do both, as each supports the other.

3.  "What if church felt more like a way station than a destination?"

Taylor again indulges in a characteristic polemic strategy of pretending we have to choose between two opposites.  As if here the church may either function as way station or a destination, but not both.  Maybe she means that she experienced church as a dead end, or an end in itself, and would prefer if the church actually gave her resources for living in the world.  In that case, I agree.  At the same time, life goes on, and the places we com to serve both as way stations and destinations.  

On the one hand, the gathering community needs to give us tools and equipment for the life of discipleship in the world.  People should not think it sufficient to just show up in church once a week.  Merely attending a language class accomplishes nothing; I have to go out and use the language in conversation for the class to have purpose.   

On the other hand, the church does offer a destination in the sense that what goes on there has some intrinsic value.  Everything does not have to prove its utility according to arbitrary secular values.  If I go to a concert or an art museum, or read a novel or watch a movie, I do not expect it necessarily to have some tangible benefit down the road.  Maybe I experience something as fun in itself!  We don't have to be on the clock all the time.  Staring out the window can have value.  Surely simply being moved by the beauty, community, meaning, stories, and music of worship has value as well.

Finally, ought we not cultivate a sense of presence/destination all the time?  "Be here now," as so many mystics have said.  I can travel somewhere and be present where I am along the way.  Maybe cultivating this perpetual presence needs to happen all the time, wherever we find ourselves.

4.  "What if the church’s job were to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in, by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church?" 

One early skit on Saturday Night Live was a fake ad for "Mr. Tea," a machine like a Mr. Coffee, except for tea.  When demonstrated, first you put a tea bag in a cup, then you put the cup into bottom of the Mr. Tea, then you pour boiling water down through the Mr. Tea into the cup... basically the same procedure as for a Mr. Coffee.  Of course, the machine itself does nothing, which generates the humor.

But if we have a church that only wants to hear of people's imaginary personal fantasies about God, and then sends them out to share that God with others, what function does the gathering serve at all?  It sounds like a Mr. Tea only without the tea bag.  People come in and people get moved out the door in the same condition.  Maybe while they sit in church they find some kind of affirmation for their personal, individual caricature of God, and receive permission to live according to that opinion?  Which they were going to do anyway?  Only now they can do it without feeling judged by the church?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a book called The Cost of Discipleship in which he describes "cheap grace" in almost exactly this way.  The church simply affirms people, requiring nothing of them, least of all any kind of behavioral change, which would look like "works righteousness," a very bad thing.

With churches following this approach, it does not surprise me that attendance continues to tank, and the numbers of "nones" and the unchurched keep rising.  People just decide they can get uncritical self-affirmation elsewhere.  They will particularly not seek it in a place that continues to have a reputation for offering very critical condemnation of non-conforming people.

Of course, Taylor critiques that latter version of the church, which she seems to identify with the very idea of church generally.  As if we might find the antidote for the church of condemnation in her alternative church of universal, uncritical acceptance and approval.  Another artificial dichotomy and choice.

Jesus intends the gathering of his disciples to serve as a place of transformation and growth, repentance and renewal, blessing and vocation.  When it devolves into a dead end of condemnation, conformism, and surveillance, it certainly forecloses on that identity.  But a church of cheap grace, which just affirms every ignorant prejudice, mindless self-gratification, and nostalgic or utopian fantasy, doesn't work either.  Not if the church exists to form people who follow the Way of Jesus.  Surely Jesus calls us to a Way distinct from these two choices of exclusive regulatory club or anything goes, tell-people-what-they-want-to-hear party.  In other words, maybe God needs people in the church because God's wants them in the world witnessing to the good news.  Maybe God intends the church to be the place where we learn how to follow Jesus in the world.

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I do not find it helpful to pretend we have these oppositional choices, like church OR world, believe OR follow, acceptance OR condemnation, way station OR destination, moving them out OR keeping them in, and so forth.  Maybe this works as a way of demonstrating one's frustration with the way things happened in the churches some folks grew up in.  But if we hope to move forward, I suspect we will have to adopt a better and frankly more inclusive approach, one that does not reflexively devalue the central role of the gathering of disciples -- the church.  

Far from functioning as a repressive, restrictive, regulatory institution designed to squash all individuality and creativity, Jesus sees and institutes the church as a gathering of his disciples for healing and mission.  Discipleship simply cannot happen apart from the community of those who follow Jesus: the church.

We cannot follow Jesus as separate individuals; discipleship only happens in and by the church.  Devaluing and even rejecting the whole idea of the necessity of a gathering of Jesus-followers plays directly into the agenda of Empire which depends on people believing themselves to be separated individuals, who think that selecting from the binary "choices" presented by the ruling powers means "freedom."

The Empire wants us to believe in and follow whatever amorphous, individualized, ego-centric God we "already know," and reject any God that the church suggests we "are supposed to believe."  What if, instead of following the Empire's subtle lure of personal independence, asking only what we have been taught to prefer, we gather together around the Word of God, Jesus Christ, as attested in Scripture, and grow into  a new way of thinking and acting?  What if we thought in terms of both/and, breaking artificial dichotomies, false binaries, and toxic adversarialities, realizing that we are all one in Christ?  What if we began to understand that in order to access our true and essential Self, we have to identify and decenter our adapted, ego selves, coming to realize our participation in and connection with all creation?   

Now, I realize that this doesn't actually happen in many churches.  But our agenda should involve finding ways to let the true church emerge among us, not abandoning the vision altogether in favor of the atomized, egocentric individualism the Empire keeps force-feeding us.              

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Reflection on Judges 21:25.

In college I read and found myself deeply influenced by philosopher Allen Wheelis' book, The End of the Modern Age.  Wheels contends that placing humans at the center primarily characterizes the Modern Age.  This removes God to the periphery, at best.  It reminds me of Dostoevsky's famous phrase, that, "Without God all things are permitted."  We find his view expressed in the Bible in Judges 21:25: 

"In those days there was no king in Israel; 

all the people did what was right in their own eyes."  

For some, this sentiment, which we loftily call "Humanism," articulates the ideal libertarian paradise that Modernity has always sought to institute, where each person has the freedom to do whatever they want.  Those of us who grew up in the 1960's knew this as a basic motivating ethos of the counter-culture: Do your own thing!  "Go where you wanna go, do what you wanna do, with whomever you wanna do it with" (The Mamas and the Papas).  The idea that everyone has the inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" appears in the foundational documents of the USA.  Everyone gets to do what is right in their own eyes!  All things are permitted!  Cool! 

Our society raised and indoctrinated people to adhere to this humanistic libertarian philosophy.  Unfortunately, the reality of existence in which people do what they want and "everything is permitted" looks very different from the paradise it produces in theory.  

Every person does not have equal gifts.  Some have more strength, some have different skills and abilities, some we consider more attractive.  The individuals with greater wealth and power have more opportunities to pursue their own happiness, and in the name of that goal they invariably infringe upon if not totally remove the freedom and wealth of other, weaker, people.  Which means that our glorious and aspirational declarations of human equality has the actual effect of instituting a class system with some at the top doing as they please and taking what they want, while compelling everyone else to work to make that happen.  We end up with greater inequality and worse injustice.  

Modernity, capitalism, and even what we call democracy have always worked out this way.  The man who proclaimed that business about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right for everyone... owned slaves.  The Constitution he and his associates framed assumed that only white, male, property owners would have the right to vote.  The economic system their descendants designed demanded and enabled the raw exploitation of other people's labor and the wanton extraction of the planet's "resources."  The nation they founded spread across land stolen by violence from indigenous peoples, with much of the work done by enslaved Africans.

Humanistic individualism requires an underclass of exploited workers to enable the ones believing that everything is permitted to keep on doing whatever right in their own eyes.  Hence colonialism.  

The biblical text offers the remedy of a king.  Sadly, the Israelites understood this to mean a king "like the other nations," and in the next few books, they get their wish. Predictably they start by splitting into two kingdoms.  With a few exceptions, the monarchs of Israel and Judah reveal that leaving things up to humans results in disaster.  For everyone doing what is right in their own eyes without God invariably produces tyrants.  Resulting in Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, and Caesar....  Social Darwinism became the primary political ideology of Modernity.  Humanistic libertarianism comes down to survival of the fittest.  Obviously.  The prophet Jeremiah observes that when each acts according to the stubbornness of their evil will (Jeremiah 18:12) disaster results.

Ion such a situation, the excluded and marginalized have to fight and shed their blood to gain rights that the establishment proclaimed as inalienably given to all.  Only by laws limiting the freedom of the owners and privileged class could others attain such "natural" rights.

As a solution, the biblical text alludes, not to a human strong man, but to the Israelites' only real King: YHWH, God, the Creator.  We find the only path forward for humanity when we stop imagining that everyone doing whatever they want will ever work, and realize that only humble submission to the Creator's will allows us to dwell together in peace and justice.  We need to follow a Higher Power, One not defiled and corrupted by egocentricity, but in Whom we may find true equality and freedom.

We see embodied before us the Creator's will in Jesus Christ, who exhibits compassion, forgiveness, generosity, humility, gentleness, inclusion, and love.  We participate in the only sustainable Way for humans to live together on this planet when we gather in communities that seek together to actually follow him.

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Israel/Palestine and Indigenous Peoples' Day.

Yes, I have to agree with President Biden that the Hamas attacks on Israel last weekend were "sheer evil."  These were horrific and vicious acts of callous mass murder of mostly civilians, and we need to condemn them in absolutely unambiguous terms.  As a Christian I must stand with the victims of cruelty and violence, no matter their nation or religion.  That is the example Jesus gives us and even takes on himself.

At the same time, when the media presents these attacks as "unprovoked" or somehow occurring out of nowhere, they continue a long tradition of ignoring or down-playing the continuing, daily indignities and atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestinians, which have intensified in the last few months.  The capricious home invasions and demolitions, the theft of ancestral land, the kidnapping and torture of children, the murders, the disappearances, the mass incarceration, the use of chemical weapons against civilian populations, the attacks on Christian and Muslim holy places, the constant harassment of check-points, and so on and on, do not justify Hamas' atrocities, but they may somewhat explain them.

On Monday we celebrated Indigenous Peoples' Day in the US, a day reclaimed from a celebration of Christopher Columbus, whom we now know committed some extremely evil acts himself, in addition to being the spearhead of European colonization of the Western Hemisphere.  I read a little book on the history of the Native tribes where I now live (in the Finger Lakes region of New York), and heard the author speak last night about that story, which continues today.

For over two centuries, the American media depicted Indigenous peoples in the same biased way they now report on the Palestinians: by framing them as at best backward and at worst evil "savages," perpetrating violence against innocent settlers.  I learned about US General Sullivan's ethnic cleansing operation in 1779, systematically burning crops and villages, causing the survivors to walk to British Fort Niagara for shelter and relief.  The old people and babies all died on the trip, and the winter killed many more.  Yet Sullivan got a county named after him, and his expedition has been celebrated by white people ever since.  And this is just one local incident in a systematic genocide that in many ways continues.

The other day someone griped about how the Palestinians were ungrateful because, after all, the Israelis "gave them Gaza."  I replied that this is like asking the Indians to be grateful because the Americans "gave them" Pine Ridge.  Palestinians have been in Gaza for thousands of years!  Yet our media and government often treat them like invaders!  

A few summers ago I served as part of a church delegation to listen to the Shinnecock people on eastern Long Island.  A few hundred Native people live on a small reservation on a peninsula in the Hamptons.  The local white people do not understand why they don't just sell their property and move elsewhere.  After all they could probably get a billion dollars for it, easy.  That's over a million dollars for every person on the reservation.  But they do not want to leave for any price.  They have stewarded that land for over five-thousand years.  Their ancestors' bones lie under that soil.  They know every tree.  White people, who boast about arriving all the way back in 1629, have no comprehension of this kind of connection to land.

When I visited Palestine I spoke to farmers the title to whose land has stayed in their family for over 900 years.  And yet the Israelis worked bureaucratically and by encroachment and sheer violence to appropriate it for another one of their illegal settlements.  We planted olive trees.  Settlers would come at night and pull them up.  

The difference between what we see happening there now and what has taken place here for 300 years escapes me.  We see in both cases people taking by force territory that does not belong to them, and in the process displacing or harassing the people who have lived there for many generations.

And I think this explains why the American media and government choose to frame Middle East conflicts with a bias in favor of the Israelis.  If we recognize the suffering of the Palestinians, we may have to address our own behavior as a civilization based on land theft and genocide.  We might have to stop thinking that only white lives -- and agendas, projects, profits, and power -- matter, and we can't have that.  (We also bear a lot of guilt about the way Europeans treated the Jews over the centuries, and sometimes continue to treat them.)

The more we learn about the history of colonialism, the more repelled we have to feel about the nauseating violence, arrogance, and terror applied as white people took over this continent.  We fortunately have managed to change our collective minds about Columbus.  We have begun to recognize the original inhabitants of the land, and to rename things.  The entertainment industry depicts Indians much more favorably than they used to.  Some churches make strong statements against the Doctrine of Discovery, the thin 16th century legal/theological cover for colonialism in this hemisphere.  Again, admirable.  But these initiatives don't threaten us or cost us anything.  They don't change the situation on the ground or in people's lives.

When I went to Standing Rock in 2019 to join in the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, I saw flags representing many Native peoples, around the world.  Among them I noticed a Palestinian flag.  Palestinians are also Indigenous People.

The war on Indigenous Peoples is a major and necessary feature of Modernity.  It expresses the racism, expansionism, militarism, and predatory economic philosophy that has dominated the way Europeans think and act for 500 years, and which now threatens the very ability of the planet to sustain human civilization at all.  We see perhaps the most active and violent front in that war in Israel/Palestine.  And it just got worse, and will continue to deteriorate with a tsunami of bloodshed ahead of us.  The Palestinians will bear the brunt of this.

In the meantime we pray with and for the Israelis who lost loved ones so horribly last weekend, and for the security of their communities.  And we pray for the people of Gaza as they once again have to endure intense bombing, compounded by being cut-off from needed resources.  We contribute what we can to alleviate the suffering and heal people.  We hope the leaders on all sides act with compassion and reason, and use this tragedy to figure out a better solution to this long-festering crisis.

And perhaps we will come to our senses and realize together in this conflict -- the one in Israel/Palestine and the ongoing consequences of colonialism around the world, including here -- that we need to live together in respect and harmony, learning from and celebrating each other in peace.

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