Faith – Page 92 – Pocket Sized Pastor*

Do Seminarians Dream Dreams of Electric Chapels?

I think, maybe, just maybe, I had my first seminary dream about General Seminary last night. I’m not sure how the dream started and I don’t think my seminary was the point of the dream at all but, there it was, hanging out. However, GTS wasn’t located where it usually is in Chelsea; nor was the entire campus there. Rather, the front of the chapel was located in my neighborhood of Washington Heights. And, not only that, it was not really a chapel anymore. It had become one of those storefronts where the merchandise spills out into the street and the entire front is covered in clothes hanging from hangers. And the front was entirely black because it was covered in cassocks. They had cassocks of all sizes! Small, large, child-size, etc. I think there was even a cassock spanx option and, I kid you not, they even had those half mannequins, the ones that are just legs but have some extra room in the back (if you know what I mean) to model jeans, with cassocks on them. Cars, taxies, traffic, and people were wizzing by as I stopped to take a look. My friend Anne came out to talk to me, and several of my friends were moving cassocks from one spot to another. I don’t think they were actually trying to sell anything – they were just moving things up, down, left, right, and using that giant hook to reach the top hangers. And the chapel even had its own awning with pigeons walking along it.

The Chapel of the Good Shepherd as a literal storefront church – that would be pretty wild. I don’t think of mainline protestant churches as storefronts. Even the storefront churches in my neighborhood are being closed down and transformed back into restaurants, stores, and condos. The very idea of a “storefront church” seems rather foreign in a neighborhood that is being gentrified. But it would be wild to take the seminary’s chapel, a chapel that is designed to perform the daily office, and that is locked inside the fortress walls of General Seminary, and put it right out there, on the street, so that anyone could access it. It seems that every week, as I leave seminary, someone on the street and speaks to me that they didn’t know a church was there until they heard the chimes. People don’t really look up, they don’t see signs labeling the building or the entrances; something needs to catch their eye or their ears and intrude into their iPod/iPhone earbud shielded worlds. I wonder if a storefront full of black cassocks, on a Good Friday, when the sky is darkened as Jesus’ breathed his last on the cross – I wonder if all that pious black, would somehow crack into a random passerby’s world, just for a moment, or if, being New Yorkers, we’d need a little more – like some chimes, a loud cry, or maybe a Mr. Softie Ice Cream truck – church style. Hmmm. I don’t know. But a Mr. Softie Ice Cream truck playing A Mighty Fortress is My God might get noticed.

Rethinking Heaven: Teaser

It seems that Time Magazine didn’t want to let Newsweek be the only one to talk about Jesus this week. Rethinking Heaven is Time’s foray into eschatology. I wish I could read the whole thing but I’m not a subscriber. The cover enticed me and, I’ll admit, I want that guys shoes. However, the Politico Playbook felt like sending out a teaser today.

Heaven Can’t Wait: Why rethinking the hereafter could make the world a better place”: “Angels and harps are all well and good, [some younger] Christians believe, but fighting HIV/AIDS is more urgent. This younger generation is driven by … issues of social justice like combatting slavery and homelessness. … The debate doesn’t fit easily on the usual left-right, blue-red, liberal-conservative spectrum. … The divide isn’t about a secular ideal of service vs. a religiously infused vision of reality. It’s about whether believing Christians see earthly life as inextricably bound up with eternal life or as simply a prelude to a heavenly existence elsewhere. …

“I’m a Christian-a poor one, to be sure-who keeps the feast and says his prayers . For me, the scholarly redefinition of heaven as a manifestation of God’s love on earth … at once puts believers in closer proximity to the intent of the New Testament authors and should inspire the religious to open their arms more often than they point fingers. Heaven thus becomes, for now, the reality one creates in the service of the poor, the sick, the enslaved, the oppressed. It is not paradise in the sky but acts of selflessness and love that bring God’s sacred space and grace to a broken world suffused with tragedy until, in theological terms, the unknown hour when the world we struggle to piece together is made whole again.”

Now, I know that this is a generalized news magazine and, based on the quote above, I’m pretty sure that they’re arguing for a scholarly redefinition of heaven that is based, largely, on what is going around in “Evangelical” circles ever since Rob Bell wrote his book last year. “Evangelicals” seem to make a lot of noise so and they seem to have numbers, so they get the articles. But I’m having a hard time seeing how this redefinition of heaven is “new.” I’m currently reading Carl Braaten’s Eschatology and Ethics for my Ethics class and his book, in many ways, is about a basic definition of eschatology where the future is breaking into the current world. It is an eschatology grounded in the gospel of Jesus Christ which “announces the future with the power to shape the present(pg. 70).” And this idea isn’t new. Braaten’s book was written in 1972 and I’m sure that Luther, and Augustine, wrote similarly. My guess, in many ways, is that Time’s new article is a story on the re-structuring of what The Book of Revelation says. It sounds like the article is going to report that young Christians, now, are not buying into the escapism that dominated the conversation, in certain Christian circles, for so long. And, sure, I could easily attack the line about creating heaven on earth but I’m gonna give the quote the benefit of the doubt and let it slide because, well, I don’t have the full article.

It was well planned to leak or release this article on Maundy Thursday. Later this evening, I will gather with my fellow Christians at my field site and we will wash each other’s feet. We will share in Holy Communion and we will, at least briefly, share in Christ’s service. At the end of the service, the altar will be stripped, and the lights lowered as we begin the walk into Good Friday. A rethinking of heaven, grounded in a “realized eschatology” grounded on…something…, could be linked to the act that we commemorate today in our liturgy. But I wonder if this article is going to miss the boat when it comes to mainline churches, especially us Lutherans. I’m pretty young, and I haven’t been in this church for decades, but this image of eschatology appears to play a role in what the Lutheran church has done for many, many years. Luther’s cry for all of us to be “little Christs” to one another is a cry that hasn’t just been rediscovered now. And I hope that little bit shows up in the article. If it doesn’t, then that might be a sign that us Lutherans need to do a better PR job.

Pietism 2.0, the New York Hipster Jesus

I know I shouldn’t read Andrew Sullivan. I know that I disagree with most of what he writes and, to be honest, his most recent editorial about Christianity is no different. He feels the need to jump on the Jefferson bandwagon and mistake Jefferson’s Americanizing of Jesus as, somehow, anti-political-power. Jefferson’s Jesus is not an exaltation of Jesus but rather a reduction of Jesus into a time specific, American, identity. Jefferson’s legacy, when it comes to Jesus, is to do what America does all the time about Jesus – molding Jesus into what they project onto the Jesus project. Jesus doesn’t break into the world but, rather, Jesus is a product of an idealized, American world.

That’s what really gets me about Sullivan. The argument for a simplified Christianity, a Jesus-focused Christianity, is an old argument. The Reformers of the 16th century pushed for that. The men and women who went into the desert pushed for that. The ancestors to current American Evangelicalism pushed for that. Hell, pietism and my pal Henry Muhlenberg pushed for that. What Sullivan is arguing is a return to what Spener wanted in the 17th century – a visualized, simplified, transformative Christianity that is visibly seen in the church. The true church, then, is the church of Jesus! Simplicity! That’s the key to thing. Even Sullivan’s argument about Francis is all about simplicity. His argument is that Christianity is overload, too political, and too influenced by “worldliness.” Sullivan sounds like many of the young, hipster-esque non-denominational pastors out there but also sounds a lot like those who feel that Jesus wasn’t divine but, rather, a moral teacher. The idea is to strip Christianity back to Jesus – with the assumption that we, unlike the disciples in Mark, get it and we know even better than Peter, John, James, and Paul.

But here’s where Sullivan really blows it and that’s with the statement “As Jesus was without politics, so was Francis.” What? Or how about “When politics is necessary, as it is, the kind of Christianity I am describing seeks always to translate religious truths into reasoned, secular arguments that can appeal to those of other faiths and none at all.” Or, better yet, let’s make silly arguments and throw out parts of the gospel story by claiming that the patrons in Luke and Paul didn’t exist: “Jesus, like Francis, was a homeless person, as were his closest followers. He possessed nothing‚Äîand thereby everything.” All of this is, in reality, unscriptural. It’s a reduction of the complex reality of the what the scriptures are. It also tries to remove the current church, or argue that the crisis in the church can be resolved by removing itself out of its reality and where it is. By excising true Christianity from the rest of reality, true change can occur, true love can flourish, and we can get everyone to like us. Or something like that.

What Sullivan should be arguing is the question that Christianity has been working out since Constantine converted: how does Christianity work when it is in a position of political power? Because we still HAVEN’T figured that out (though I think Two Kingdom’s theology gets that bit right :p). And it doesn’t matter if its right wing or left wing, social justice oriented or rapture-focused, any Christianity in a position of political power is going to find itself in a dangerous position because of the political reality and visions within the gospel itself. A reduction to just a “Jesus focused” reality won’t change that problem. And we know that won’t work because we’ve been trying to do that for two thousand years. Reducing our actions to just what Jesus did, or taught, or what we believe Jesus did or taught, in many ways, denies Sin. It denies the need for Christ to die. And it reduces faith. Removing complexity from Christianity, Jesus, and God does the opposite of what Sullivan claims he wants to do. It’s not about accepting mystery and burying complexity into the mist of “somewhere else.” It’s actually how we get ourselves off the hook from the troubling parts of scripture, the complexity of canon, and the complexity of our own history and story. And why should we deny that? The Gospel is bigger than our complexity; God is bigger than our own failures; and we should own it, and never, ever, runaway from it.

A Note to the Church while talking about Trayvon Martin

My friend Jan found my cat’s tag sign on the Lower East Side of Manhattan – that cat gets around!

I know I’ve been avoiding talking about the Trayvon Martin murder in depth. The event was tragic, terrible, and I feel for the all the families of the victim. The amount of videos, press information, and criminal reports I’ve read about the event is staggering compared to how I usually follow events like these. I’m hoping an arrest is made and criminal charges are pressed on Zimmerman and I’m appalled at the blatant racism that has been displayed by many, many people. It’s a reminder, to me at least, of how far this country has yet to go in regards to racial acceptance.

Bishop Hanson’s message was right on target, I think, and I’ve heard that Martin’s death has been on the radar of faithful Christians all over the place. It’s discussion has caused some soul searching, empathy, and it seems to be in the air even if its impact might be minimal in some places. But I would like to share one suggestion to those in the church who would like to discuss this attack (and racial issues) in general: please don’t use the word “become” as in “what has our society become that allows this to happen?” Speaking for myself, that phrase just shuts me down. In that one simple word and thought, what I see is a romanticism of the past, a rejection of all the other cases of racial violence/discrimination that have happened over the years, and a misidentification of the fact that race in the United States is still a big deal. Discrimination is still a big deal. We, collectively, are not moving away from some golden age but, rather, we’re suppose to be on track towards something better. The amazing thing is not that such an event happened but, rather, that there has existed, and continues to exist, a systematic structure in our society’s very being that allows such a thing to happen. If you are speaking of the law and searching for the gospel, if you are trying to tell the church how the world truly is, focusing on that one act isn’t enough. The groundwork that led to such an event is bigger than that and is built into our very bones. That’s sin and that needs to be talked about, and not washed away under some assumed golden age that was in our recent past.

Today’s reading in the lectionary for Holy Week is John 12:1-11. “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me” Jesus said to the disciples after they complained about Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet. I’ll admit I’ve always struggled with what Jesus said. Even when I exegete it, contextualize the story, and reframe the discussion to argue that what Jesus is commenting on is the lack of faithfulness that the disciples have, I still always return to that phrase “you will always have the poor with you” and shudder. It’s always struck me as an un-hopeful phrase. We will always have the poor with us? Really? We’ll always have the rejected, the unwanted, those who we don’t want to belong? We’ll always have people that we will not invite to our table but that only Jesus will? Always? For all time? Sheesh. What kind of Messiah are you, then? Can’t you just go ahead and take care of it all, wipe the poverty, injustice, fear, from the world, and end the very idea of the poor? I know that the Old Testament told us to let the poor glean but you just marched into Jerusalem with palms and garments thrown on your path – can’t you do MORE?

Today, for me at least, what Jesus tells the disciples is how I’ll frame what the church needs to say about racial injustice in this country. Don’t romanticize the past and claim that the “poor” were never there. Don’t, also, claim that this will be a topic that we’ll ever NOT have to talk about. We don’t, really, live in a post-racial society. We don’t live in a post-class society. We don’t live in a post-gender society. We don’t live in a post-sexuality society. As a church, we need to be honest and keep describing how the world truly is. The world needs to be broken into, changed, and made right. And as we march through this Holy Week, towards the Cross, lets try to keep all of this in mind. We’re not re-enacting the passion story – we’re proclaiming it because it is still needed to be heard today.

Cradle Rock ‘n Roll

Yesterday, I stumbled into my field education site, hopped up on caffeine and barely awake. The night before, I stayed up till 2 am writing a seven page paper on six verses of Galatians (and misspelling Jesus in Koine Greek in bold letters on the front page) and my body was feeling the effects of a long week. When I arrived, I realized I forgot a scheduled event for that afternoon. I met up with the CYF director (and ended up calling her by the wrong name and insisting that my semester was ending in January rather than May), and waited for the event to begin. We were going to hang out with some new born babes.

There’s been a mini-baby boom at my field site with more than half a dozen babbies entering the world since October. All of them are adorable and lovely with my kidling, I think, the next one on the list. All the moms and dads were excited to learn that my wife and I were expecting and the advice came pouring out. Ideas about how to walk up five flights with a stroller were shared as well as how to get the kid to quiet down if walking around and bouncing isn’t working (do a few squats with them – I must remember this). We all sat around, chatted, and I even held a babby for the group picture! It was a lot of fun.

Near the end, I was asked if I was excited about the upcoming birth, scared, or both. I answered honestly that it depends on the time of day. Most of the time, I’m super excited. Other times, I’m freaked. But, over all, I’m looking forward to meeting the little guy. Just a little more than 3 months! AHHHHHH.

Closeted Christians and Sympathetic Procurators

Last night, I made my acting debut.

During Lent, my internship site has a midweek service series that involves readings, prayers, and a dramatic presentation. The dramatic pieces were taken from a series of unlikely and hypothetical meetings of characters, and their families, in the passion story of Jesus. The scripts were reworked six years ago (and reworked again for this season) and my supervisor asked me to be involved. For the last service (last night), my wife and I played Pontius Pilate and his wife. It was fun because we got to have a play fight and argue about the nature of Jesus after he was crucified.

Now, I’ll admit that the script was difficult for me to work through mostly because, well, there was quite a bit of imagination infused into this scene that seemed problematic. There was an attempt, in some of the formulation of the script, to actually make Pilate’s wife a secret-Christian and make Pontius Pilate a sympathetic character. And I really really really dislike these ideas. Sure, it’s possible to read that lens into the gospels but just because that can be read into the story does not mean that it is actually life-giving. I really actively fought against this perspective and my wife did too. It’s one thing to identify with Pontinus Pilate and dwell deep with why the gospels depicted him (and his wife) the way they do but it’s quite another thing to romanticize the characters away from their own contexts. We’ve already had that in the Acts of Pilate and I don’t think we need to do that again.

However, I really had a lot of fun doing this. It was stressful worrying about it, seeing it on the calendar, organizing rehearsals, and trying to memorize my lines. I really am bad at memorizing things so I spent quite a bit of time on the subway annoying my fellow riders by reading and moving my mouth at the same time. I didn’t have a costume (though I dressed in a shirt and tie, feeling like I was making a contemporary commentary on our real world) and, at the last minute, I discovered I really like props. The folks in the front row got to witness my use of puns and humor by noticing that I had a file with Jesus’ name on it in the “out box” on my desk. I’m pretty proud of that joke actually.

Afterwards, I was amazed with the reflections that people gave me and I realized that I’d make a terrible actor. It seems that in the other dramatic presentations, there was a change that occurred with at least one of the characters on stage. The character would move from one place to the other. However, in my scene, the characters, at the end, ended up in the same place where they started. People expected Pilate to change but he did not. He thought Jesus was silly and insignificant and that is where he ended up. And that, it many ways, is my own take of who Pilate was. Rather than my embodying the character as it was written, I imposed my own view of the character onto the script and I refused to let him change. He flustered but I changed the script before I changed my view of Pilate. I want Pilate to be a jerk and stay a jerk. I don’t have any need to make him a sympathetic character and I think its problematic to do so. So I made Pilate come off as a jerk even if the script explicitly did not do so. I wouldn’t be a good actor because I would refuse to let the character be as they are written. But I did enjoy pretending to be an actor one for the first time last night.

Silver Chalice, Dish Soap, Love Affair

This morning, while serving as an acolyte at my school’s chapel, I discovered a fun fact. It seems that if you use dish soap to clean a silver chalice, the soap clings to the silver and does not come off if you rinse it. For those on chapel duty, or who are partaking in the heavenly meal of Eucharist, you are left with communion wine that tastes not only a tad soapy but the taste lingers for quite awhile. So, when it comes to silver chalices, the method used to clean cast iron pans works best or else Jesus just doesn’t go down easy. Though I guess you could run with this idea and make quite a few jokes about Jesus being the New Dawn. Anti-bacterial Jesus, leaves hands lemony fresh!

Future Hope

Yesterday at my field site, I helped lead our youth education for our middle schoolers. There were about seven of us in a smallish conference room and rather than going over the lesson for the day (from a curriculum that is just a tad too Arminian for my tastes), the CYF director suggested that we do a “Hot Topics” session. With the Trayvon Martin shooting in the background of the news, we thought it might be smart to take their pulse, see what they’ve heard, and just provide a space where they could talk about it.

Now, like most groups, there’s no way that we’re only going to stay on one topic for an entire hour. We covered a lot of ground – from video games, the problems downloading from X-Box live through some local news events and the last episode of “The Walking Dead.” We did get around to Tryvon Martin and we had a great conversation. I asked them about hoodies, fear, stereotypes, and what they thought that happened. Now, I’ll admit that I have a certain perspective on what happened and that my view did infiltrate the conversion – but I really tried to focus less on what happened in Florida and more about what happens in their lives in New York. I was impressed with how up-to-date on local events they were. They knew about the controversies we’ve been having over the stop-and-frisk policy of the NYPD. They had all experienced or witnessed the ageism associated with their being young kids and whenever they are “in packs.” And since they all live in a large city with a huge variety of people, they did share some common sense experiences of how they handle each other and other people. They also were honest about times when they felt discriminated against. We also shared what racism and stereotypes were. It was great being able to share my own experiences of being on the negative end of stereotypes and racism. Eventually, one of the kids even brought up what it means to be an American and I asked each of them what that meant. It was great because race, skin color, class, gender, sexuality, or anything like that didn’t show up in their definitions. They sounded so optimistic, I almost got emotional. I just wanted to tell them “NEVER CHANGE! Keep being open! Don’t limit your definitions to ‘a look!’ America should be bigger than that! My olive toned future kidling will greatly appreciate it!” I didn’t say that, of course, but I guess I’m optimistic about the future too.

Conquistador Paul

In my course on First & Second Corinthians, we examine the letters from Paul through various perspectives, contexts, contemporary theological movements, and racial/ethnical/colonial lenses. It involves a lot of reading of contrasting opinions and views that usually leaves my brain feeling over-saturated, full, and completely confused which is a lot of fun, to be honest.

This past week, the concept of Paul as colonizer came up. I’ll admit, I struggled with this view a lot. In certain ways, this image makes sense. Paul, leaving Judea & Antioch, traveled through out Asia Minor and Greece, established (or met with) communities of the Jesus movement. He viewed himself as the Apostle to the Gentiles and planted communities everywhere. In his letters, we can trace the conflicts he had with the communities he interacted with. This image, of taking the message of Jesus out, into new lands, and waving his authority around, seems to match our understanding of what it means to “colonize.” And, for post-colonial people, seeing Paul as a colonizer helps to build a lens of Paul that doesn’t assume that the authoritative structures that he interacted with (or revolted against) and that later Christianity developed and imposed on others, should be accepted as the default meaning of what the Scriptures says. This image worked in the classroom and I saw many of my classmates move see this image of Paul and relate it to colonial movements throughout history. But I struggled with it because I really have a hard time seeing Paul as a colonizer since the image of colonization that I envision is what happened in the New World. England, France, and especially Spain’s, use of military force, economic might, and disease to destroy, conquer, and the native americans of the Americas is how I imagine colonization to be. It’s hard for me to see Paul as a conquistador since he didn’t have a Spanish Galleon supporting him (though, legend has it, he did have the horse).

Of course, my model of colonization isn’t the only one that existed in the world. The British experience in India, the United States with Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and other stories of imperialism doesn’t necessarily follow the New World movement to a T. But there is the issue of force applied to those situations and this force seems non-existing in Paul’s letter. Sure, Paul throws his authority around and tries to claim that he has force (and his language can be very violent and angry), but he doesn’t have the external force that I envision colonizers to have. And his argument for the subjection, or containment, of the subs-sections of his community, while forceful, are actually limited in the larger scheme of things. It was Rome, not Paul, who was the imperial power and it was Rome, not Paul, that re-founded Corinth as a Roman colony. The best image, in my mind, for Paul would be if Native Americans had sent a mission to Spain in 1510 – a mission that didn’t involve them arriving in chains.

Now, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to see Paul as a colonizer nor do I think it unreasonable to see the later pastoral epistles and its structuring of authority as a direction towards imperialism. Nor should my problem with seeing Paul as a colonizer in anyway get Christianity off the hook for its role in the history of imperialism and colonization. But I just can’t seem to subjectively withdraw, take a step back, and see him as the role of the conquistador. And the fact that I keep using that term is part of the problem. My own experience, as a Mexican-American, has embedded my image of colonization through the hispanic experience. It isn’t that I don’t have the imagination to see the colonial experience through other lenses but that I can’t seem to just…get it. I guess that’s one of my biases then.