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Almost two months ago I wrote a short reflection on Advent and the Occupy movement. It went to print this week. Perhaps, at this point, the piece is no longer relevant. Here’s an excerpt:

 

In this season of Advent, as we dwell with Mary, the one who is filled with Jesus, we let her words draw us into resonances of the gospel we may not have heard before. Mary’s words are living and active. They resound from places we may not have thought of as hospitable for God—like the womb of a poor teenage girl, or like the tent cities of the Occupy Wall Street movement, among protestors with these slogans: “End corporate greed,” “People over profits,” “Money for jobs and education, not wars and occupation.”

Mary’s words and these words resonate with each other, inviting us to consider what it would mean to let God’s Word echo through us today: to say, with Mary, full of grace, full of Jesus, God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.

 

For the rest of it, go to The Mennonite magazine website: “Rejoice with the lowly“.

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The first Sunday of Advent always shocks me out of the Christmas season. My sermon this past Sunday turned toward the apocalyptic.

 

In Oakland, Calif., I bet the moon and stars were darkened with clouds of tear gas as nonviolent protestors faced the terror of paramilitary police in the streets. For people in cities across the U.S., the sun turns to blood as they recover from the violence of pepper spray burning their eyes.

The people in the streets are an apocalyptic announcement that this country, that this world, can’t go on in the same way — that, to use the language of Jesus, the powers will be shaken (Mark 13:25Mark 13:25
English: Contemporary English Version (1999) - CEV
25 a ; ; b . The stars will fall, and the powers in the sky f the powers in the sky: In ancient times people thought that the stars were spiritual powers. will be shaken.”

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). Or, if it does go on, if nothing changes, if the current power and economic arrangement does go on and is able to crush the poor, then the protestors will be back, perhaps after a long silence. But they will return with an apocalyptic announcement that unveils the violence and greed of this system, an announcement that calls for the end of the current state of affairs.

The first Sunday of Advent shocks us into awareness; it wakes us up and invites us to consider all the ways Jesus is wrapped up in the cries for a new world, for all things to be reborn, created anew, restored.

 

You can find a short version of it on the Mennonite Weekly Review blog: An Apocalyptic Advent

And you can read the complete sermon here: An Apocalyptic Advent

I wrote a reflection on how my church called me into ministry and formed me as a pastor. Here’s an excerpt:

Long before that moment, long before I discerned God’s call, the Spirit was working through the hands of the community, molding me into a pastor. With their hands, the people led me into ministry. I still remember Fred’s prayer on behalf of the community as they laid their hands upon me and impressed God’s calling upon my life: “Make us partners with Isaac in ministry, constant in support, gentle in criticism, prayerful in all things.”

The people of Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship created space for me to discern my call as pastor. They continue to sustain me in ministry. Together, we discern God’s voice in one another. Together, we feel our way into the mission of God as the Holy Spirit reaches out to us through each other. Together, we are the movements of Christ’s body drawing us into communion with God.

For the rest of it, follow this link to the Faith and Leadership magazine: Led into Leadership.

 

I’m been a member of a Mennonite church eight years now, and I’m still trying to get a handle on what it means to be a Mennonite. Last year I was able to visit congregations across the United States as an attempt to experience the diversity within the Mennonite denomination. I ended up writing a set of reflections on my visits. If you are interested in reading up on contemporary Mennonites, here’s a pdf of my booklet:

Life in the Body: Reflections on Mennonite Church USA (2011)

I wrote a reflection on worship experiences with an emergent church and with a Mennonite church. Here’s how the article starts:

Emergence of the Word

I knew it was the right place because the sound of the bass made the sidewalk tremble. The electronica house music beckoned me through the doors. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see a large room with what looked to be a dance floor and a single bar stool at the center. The music faded out and a band, hidden in the shadows, started to play. On the large screen above them pictures and video clips danced with the ambient music. I joined the others assembled for worship as we found our seats around the dance floor. Soon a barefoot man walked into the middle of the crowd and picked up a microphone that was lying on the table. The band continued to play, but now in a hushed whisper. “As the band plays,” the man said, “you are invited to wander around the room to the three stations for spiritual practices.”

The music picked back up and the man withdrew from the floor. Some people stayed in their chairs, eyes closed, bobbing their heads to the music. Others walked around the room, visiting the stations. In one corner white candles surrounded a few images of Jesus and saints. In another corner people were writing thoughts on the walls or in notebooks on the ground, and some were painting on large canvases. The last corner had a few tables with loaves of bread and bottles of wine. People tore chunks from the loaves and poured wine into paper cups. Free wine seemed like a good idea, so I poured myself a generous cup and went back to my seat.

 

If you are interested in reading the rest of it, visit The Other Journal: Forms and Flows of the Word.

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A couple months ago was a fun first, a note from a publisher offering to send a copy of Peter Rollins’ new book, Insurrection, in exchange for a review.  I had just listened to Rollins sermon about pyro-theology and had found it one of the more interesting sermons I’d listened to in  a while.  And, of course, a free book couldn’t be passed up.  Of course, with kids and all, the review is a little late in coming, but it’s also given me time to chew on the book for a while.  My short review: it did indeed do a lot of valuable “insurrecting”—turning up the earth or burning down the sacred cows—but I’m less sure about what was re-constructed in the end.

Driving the first half of the book is the theme of needing to create a religionless Christianity, which he connects to Bonohoeffer’s criticism of religion being “a way of approaching God as the solution to problems such as fear, ignorance, or despair…. whose only job is to provide us with a psychological crutch” [xiv]. Indeed, this is an old theme, one that Bernard of Clairvaux talked about as “the four degrees of love”  which progresses from loving only ourselves, to loving God for what God can do for us, to loving God for who God is, to loving oneself solely for God’s sake.  And so Rollins endeavors to push a church largely stuck at stage two past the safety fence and off the cliff in hopes they will land at least in stage three.

To believe is human; to doubt divine  encapsulates the first few chapters and it gave me pause as someone who’s often found atheism to be a tempting option.  What Rollins means is that we naturally desire the care of “one who would forever cradle us and never forsake us….  We find great solace in the idea of someone presiding over the world who guarantees that our small and seemingly insignificant lives are being seen and cherished” (7).  No doubt, the safety, comfort, and eternal happiness promised by an omnipotent and benevolent being sounds like a pretty good option—the opiate of the people to quote another critic of religion from a time ago.  And so Rollins points out how the safety blanket of church, the continual optimism of our preachers and worship songs, even our cynicism about certainty or strident unbelief in God all “treat God as an object there to tell us it’s all going to be OK” (47) by shielding us from doubt, anger, and any sense of divine abandonment.

What does Rollins want, then, if not church or modern atheism?  Crucifixion is the necessary medicine; the experience where God forsakes God.  A true undergoing of crucifixion, of participating in it with Christ, is necessary to to strip away our various mythologies and comforts that are part and parcel of the religious view of God.  To quote another mystic, the dark night of the Soul cannot be avoided as part of the spiritual journey.  A quibble I have here, though, is that while Rollins might push us towards the dark night by exposing our religious practices as mere safety blankets he also appears to think it is a stage that can be voluntarily entered into.  I’m not so sure about that—like most parts of the spiritual journey it seems to be something that comes upon you and when forced turns out to be a shadow of the real thing.  I’m also not so sure how prevalent this “avoidance of death and meaninglessness” is.  Maybe I’m out of touch, but most of the folks I know seem very aware of their own and the world’s shitload of suffering.

Moving on, the second half of the book, Rollins looks at what follows Crucifixion, Resurrection, and what that looks like.  If the problem is a Christianity that protects us from doubt and anxiety and it is the true experience of Crucifixion that confronts us with the death and meaninglessness from which we hide, then Resurrection is a way of truly affirming life in the midst of that death (108).  One of my favorite parts of the book is when he fleshes out this idea (maybe because it sounds so Mennonite):

 [L]oving God directly becomes problematic…. [rather] God is loved through the work of love itself…. To approach God as a person we will meet in a future time, who is always avoiding us or whom we occasionally bump into, like some friend at a party, misses the properly theological insight that God is manifest only in our embrace and affirmation of the broken world…. And thus God is present where we love [others]. (118, 124-125)

As much as I like Rollins’ insistence on loving the other as the way in which we love God, this is also where I disagree as well.  For in his insistence on finding God in the other comes a rejection of “thin spaces” (124) where God is also experienced.  Yes we see, hear, and love God through others, but I want to leave room to also see, hear, and love God in nature, in prayer and meditation, in music, in solitude.  Admittedly, these ways of experiencing God are often considered more “direct” and thus preferred and sought after and that should be avoided.  But to say God is only found in loving another leaves out too much and could end up leaving us a God who is solely a social interaction, who is wholly immanent and in no way transcendent.

The “pyro” in Rollins’ pyro-theology is great, containing much that pushed me towards introspection and honesty about my doubts and tendency towards using God as a crutch.  The “theology,” or re-constructing of it, was a little less convincing, and for that I’m more inclined to download the free copy of Clairvaux’s “On Loving God” which intrigued me with this line:

Sometimes a slave may do God’s work; but because he does not toil voluntarily, he remains in bondage.  So a mercenary may serve God, but because he puts a price on his service, he is enchained by his own greediness.  For where there is selfinterest there is isolation; and such isolation is like the dark corner of a room where dust and rust befoul.

Here’s part of the sermon I preached this past Sunday:

Can you imagine a Father with a womb? That’s what the church Council of Toledo declared in 675 CE: “One must believe,” it says, “that the Son is begotten and born not from nothing, nor from some other substance, but from the womb of the Father [de Patris utero], that is, from his substance.”

It says, in Latin, “de Patris utero” — literally, from the uterus of the Father. A couple hundred years before this confession of faith, this confession of God with a womb, Augustine of Hippo makes a similar claim as he works through the passage we read from Psalm 110. Traditionally, Christians have taken this Psalm to be the words of the Father to the Son, “The Lord said to my lord,” as it says in the first verse. In verse 3, in the version of the Bible Augustine is reading from, the Father says to the Son, “out of my womb before the morning star I bore you.” So Augustine writes, with Psalm 110 and John 1 in mind, and says, “Let us then understand the Father saying unto the Son, ‘From my womb before the morning star I have brought thee forth.”

To imagine a Father with breasts and a womb stretches our imagination, inviting us into very bodily metaphors, and to reach through them into God, into God’s life, a life that reaches through us and stretches out beyond us, affirming who we are, while inviting us to think beyond fixed genders.

God bends gender, this way and that, twisting genders into one another, forming life-giving combinations. As I sketched briefly tonight, there’s a rich tradition in the church of thinking about a God who fuses and transgresses our ideas about gender. When we say that God is a Father, we have to imagine someone with womb. But more than just imagining God in this way, as Christians we are invited into a relationship with this mother, into our mother, who holds us within her — this One who lives for our sake, letting her life flow into ours, providing a place for our bodies to grow within hers, being patient with us as we kick her from within the womb, forbearing us as we take over her body from the inside.

 

For more, go here: the father’s womb

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Our church is doing a series on God and gender. I kicked it off with a sermon about sexism. Here’s a passage:

Like I said before, all of this should make us realize that it has always been difficult to talk about God, to represent God with our words, with pronouns, because She is not a man, nor is He a woman — we stumble over our words. We are at a loss to find the perfect language to represent God. But this loss, this hesitancy, is part of the good news, because it leads us into new forms of expression, new ways to communicate what God is like, ways that involve our whole lives, not just our words, but all that we are, which brings us back again to sexism, to the ways that the church, through the ages, has restricted who has been allowed to represent God, to name God, to display God’s life.

Church — congregational life, our lives together as God’s people — is how we spell out the name of God, the reality of God. So, gender matters in who we commission to preach, who we authorize to serve Communion, to pray and read the Bible for us, and, who we think should care for our kids in the nursery. That men and women do all of these things in our church has everything to do with how we communicate the reality of God. It’s not just about pronouns, about whether we call God she or he; it’s more than that. It’s about how we let men and women represent God’s care for us in the nursery, and it’s about how we let women and men speak, how men and women embody, gender and all, the Word of God from the pulpit. Through us, God becomes gendered as God reaches through our gendered lives.

 

For the whole sermon, follow this link: She is not a man…

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I preached a sermon about the vice of stability. Here is part of it:

I guess, with all this talk of movement, of shifted from place to place, I’m pushing against a conversation that is happening a lot these days in some Christian circles. There’s lots of talk of the need for stability, of staying put, of sending down roots, of being planted, of sticking to a place. Now, don’t get me wrong: I do think there’s something really important about stability — about caring for a piece of land, about sticking with a community even when you can’t stand the people around you. But I think the language of stability — the virtue of stability, a vow of stability — causes just as many problems as it attempt to solve.

For one thing, all this talk of the need for stability just sounds so Southern to me, Southern in the bad sense: people should stay where they belong, stay in their place, for the sake of stability, in order to keep the peace, so we can all sip sweet tea on our porches, just like our people have done for generations.

When I hear this, this talk of the virtue of stability, I think about the lives of migrant workers, who move with the seasons, with the rhythms of nature; they are wanderers, like Israel, uprooted and replanted by a desire to provide for their families; they are like birds, following the seasons, building and abandoning nests along the way.

Immigrants also expose the underside of communities who prize stability above all else, because migrant families are such an unstable population, uncommitted to notions of civic engagement or building for the future or investing in sustainability — those values are for the landed classes, people with roots, with investments, stable owners not nomadic renters.

 

For the rest of it, click here: “Uprooted and replanted.”

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Here’s the beginning of my sermon from September 11th:

How many times do I have to forgive? It’s a good question. After someone has wronged you again and again, at some point, don’t you have to be done with him or her? At some point, aren’t you justified in rejecting them, in giving up on them, for the sake of your own health, for the sake of your security, for the sake of your ability to go on with your life?

“Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”

Jesus responds with a story, a parable, about the kingdom of heaven, a story about what God’s reign is like, about what God is like. I think the story exposes something hidden within Peter’s question. His first inclination is to think about how he has been wronged, to worry about who has sinned against him, to consider who he needs to forgive and how many times. His first inclination is to think of himself as a victim—the one who needs to forgive, not the one who needs to be forgiven: If my sister or brother sins against me, how much should I forgive?

 

For the rest, look here: Chapel Hill Mennonite, Sept 11 sermon.

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