Avdat

You Tube Friday, San Jose edition

Because General Assembly is meeting this week, and what's GA without a little love 'n' justice?

Open letter

Dear members of First Presbyterian Church,

I understand that you are upset that a local businessman wants to establish a Coyote Ugly Saloon in your neighborhood.  I can sympathize with your bewilderment and misgivings.  I too did not know that a woman's navel could be pressed into service as a shot glass until I became more familiar with this establishment, thanks to the Charlotte Observer handy link to their website.  Like many of you, I am a happily married man who has engaged in monogamous, procreative sex.  In short, Coyote Ugly is not my scene. 

That said, I am perplexed by your determination to strangle this new business in the crib.  We mainline Christians are chronically shot on young adult members.  A bar like Coyote Ugly is bound to bring gobs of young adults to the very gates of your facility.  This is an opportunity for ministry, an opportunity that I fear you may be missing. 

You have to wonder if the thrill of slurping tequila out of a scantily clad drunk woman's belly button is worth the one-two punch of shame and a raging hangover that inevitably finds its mark the day after a night at Coyote Ugly.  More to the point, what's the real attraction of such a bar?  Boredom?  Pain?  Loneliness? 

The Church does provide a way to scratch all three itches.  As for boredom, there is the adventure of following Jesus Christ in a world that rejects his ways of justice, peace and fidelity to the Father. 

Regarding pain, there is a balm in Gilead.  The Spirit is our Comforter and ministers to us in the Word and the Sacraments and in casseroles baked and shoulders to cry on. 

Concerning loneliness, the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace that prevails among disciples is certainly more healthy and enduring than the one-night stands that sprout like weeds in springtime at Coyote Ugly Saloon.  Why, I met my wife at Church!

So, why not let the lost sheep of our generation, the lonely, the hurting and the bored, congregate in your neighborhood, and offer them something better?  Rather than packing out the City Council meeting, why not establish a Coyote Ugly ministry?  Why not beef up your offerings of A.A. groups, and singles ministries? 

It has been done before.  Jesus showed up for worship on the Sabbath, but he also ate in the homes of sinners.  Please forgive me for appealing to that hackneyed wrist bracelet, but there's no doubting what Jesus would do and where he would go if a Coyote Ugly Saloon was established in his community.

The Son of Man came to seek out and save the lost.

Thinking out loud toward Sunday

It's not entirely clear that Karl Barth advised ministers to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  Still, it's not a bad homiletical strategy.  Applied this week, it seems to cry out for some reflection on a creation God deems "very good," and the bodies of children floating in the storm surge of the Burmese cyclone and crushed in the Chinese earthquake.

I'm not sure where my sermon is going yet.  But in addition to the Bible and the newspaper I'm relying on David Bentley Hart's The Doors of the Sea, a short volume about theodicy in the wake of the 2004 tsunami. 

In response to the book's subtitle, "Where was God in the tsunami?" Hart is surprisingly sympathetic toward atheistic complaints that such disasters must needs overthrow faith in a loving, omnipotent God: 

After all at the heart of all such unbelief lies an undoubtedly authentic moral horror before the sheer extravagance of worldly misery, a kind of rage for justice, a refusal of easy comfort, and an unwillingness to be reconciled to evil that no one who believes this to be a fallen world would want to disparage.  For the secret irony pervading these arguments is that they never would have occurred to such consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral universe of a Christian culture.

And he is surprisingly harsh in dismissing Christian apologists who (apologizing for what?  Their faith in God?  God's ways in a world of tsunamis?) would justify the calamity by appealing to God's inscrutable plan, or simply chalking it up to rough, divine justice.  I found myself remembering this post from my Ivy Bush days which cites the Calvinist Jesuit John Piper as an example of all Hart finds wanting in Christian discourse in those shocking, waning days of 2004.  Hart uses Ivan Karamazov as a blunt object to smash such apologies to smithereens.

Hart's argument is that we need to reclaim the biblical worldview that the world, though created good by God, is nevertheless in servitude to evil forces.  The world that is is not the world that God intended it to be.  And examining the fossil record or feasting one's eyes on the fauna that rings the Indian Ocean cannot teach us this.  Only when history is seen in light of Revelation do we see it as fallen, yet hoping for redemption.

God's sovereignty, as Hart sees it, cannot be understood in terms of God being the author of all that happens, for even if God's willed it for a greater good, that would still make God the author of evil, and any morally serious person ought to revolt against such a God, as indeed Ivan does.  God is the prime cause of everything, but things can and do run amok in the chain of secondary causes that God's sovereignty permits. 

For Hart, God's sovereignty must be understood as God's ultimate victory over all that has besmirched this world, including the corpses of children buried in rubble and floating in the flood waters.

Hart's argument wraps up with a bracing defense of God's impassibility and a passionate complaint against Calvinist determinism.  You can see the latter quietly developing through this short volume, but when the wave finally breaks, it's rather powerful.  What's interesting is that both God's impassibility and Calvinist determinism are in great disfavor in mainline Presbyterian seminaries these days!

At that old Ivy Bush post, I remarked that Calvin's high doctrine of providence was a pastoral argument.  It was meant to reassure suffering people that their lives weren't in the hands of a capricious fate but of a loving and sovereign Father.  Hart decries how that same argument, in the hands of Piper and his ilk, is used to reassure not the survivors of natural disasters, but those of us who watch from the comfort of our living room Lay-Z-Boys:

(W)ords we would not utter to ease another's grief we ought not to speak to satisfy our own sense of piety...

Only a moral cretin at that moment would have attempted to soothe (a survivor's) anguish by assuring him that his children had died as a result of God's eternal, inscrutable, and righteous counsels, and that in fact their deaths had mysteriously served God's purposes in history, and that all of this was completely necessary for God to accomplish his ultimate design in having created the world.  Most of us would have the good sense to be ashamed to speak such words...

And this should tell us something.  For if we would think it shamelessly foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another's sorrow is most real... then we ought never to say them.

It is often remarked that Job's friends did well when they sat in silence with him for seven days.  Where they went wrong was when they began to open their mouths, for rather than comforting Job, they went about justifying God's ways in the world.  This earned them a sharp rebuke from Job and in the end, an equally sharp rebuke from the very God whose ways they sought to justify.

Hart admits that in the face of such massive suffering, silence might be the best option.  But he ventures to speak nonetheless.  So I have to speak on Sunday.  I still don't know what I'm going to say, but I think that I'd better not say anything unless I can imagine that between the Bible in my right hand and the newspaper in my left, an earthquake survivor stands in my presence waiting to hear what I have to say.

I'm up for it

Tomorrow is National Bike to Work day.  HT.

I'd do this every day, but in mainline congregations of older members there's an expectation that the minister make pastoral calls in pressed slacks and clean shirts, preferably free from sweat rings extending down the sides of one's trunk.  And, unlike some of my relatives who work for corporations, or megachurches, there's no shower facilities here at good ol' John Calvin Presbyterian Church.

But since all that's on my schedule tomorrow is sermon writing plus a little disc golf with a teenager, it fits my lifestyle for this particular day.

I think it's worth wondering about how certain cultural expectations are at variance with good common sense.  I hear that everyone but lawyers have abandoned suits in south Florida, but honesty, they could be done away with in most places in the United States, at least in the summer.  Even far northern cities like New York and Philly are south of those latitudes from whence came the bulk of immigrants accustomed to wearing wool even in July.  And not only are they far to the south of Great Britain, Ireland, Germany and eastern Europe, but they're hot and miserable in summertime.

I know.  Part of what makes fashion fashionable is willingness to submit to a certain amount of physical or financial discomfort.  But heat and humidity and the prospect of even more on the horizon, thanks to global warming, do make me wonder when convention has taken leave of its senses...

Presbytery PC

Yesterday's was a pretty good presbytery meeting.  But it did have its moments.  Over a year ago some folks proposed that Salem Presbytery apologize to all those adversely affected by the November 3, 1979 massacre in Greensboro.  A strange thing for Salem Presbytery to do since it didn't even exist in 1979, but mainline Protestant guilt knows no bounds! 

The Presbytery referred the idea to a committee (naturally).  After a year's work, they came back yesterday with a report shorn of calls for an apology, but with a call to work to end racism.  Well and good.  Some liturgical options include using the Confession of Belhar in worship (good) and "Consciously refrain from using the word 'white' as symbolic of goodness while using the word 'black' as symbolic of evil."

Hmm.

Next item on the agenda:  the Peace and Justice Task Group presented The 14 Point People's Agenda for NC in 2008 for "prayer and study."  It was presented in that pedantic, preaching-to-the-choir style that the left wing of the mainline denominations excels in.  The ironic part came when one speaker, addressing one of the 14 points, invited us to sing the refrain to We've a Story to Tell to the Nations:

For the darkness shall turn to dawning

And the dawning to Noonday bright

And Christ's great kingdom shall come on earth

The kingdom of love and light.

Wait.  Didn't we just say we weren't going to use such metaphors for good and evil?

Old habits die hard.

Bush vs. Pittsburgh Presbytery

I'd been feeling better about the health of my denomination.  But this week, not so much. 

Some background for non-PC(USA) types:  Like a lot of Christians we Presbyterians have been duking it out over homosexuality for going on a generation.  1997 was a milestone year. The denomination amended its Constitution by adding specific language to bar the ordination of gays and lesbians:

Those who are called to office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman (W-4.9001), or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament.

Most every year there have been votes to amend or rescind this language, all of which have failed by narrow margins.

In 2006 the denomination's Task Group on Peace, Unity and Purity made an interesting recommendation:  to resurrect the old concept of "scruples" for use in ordination standards.  Time was, candidates for ordination had to declare a scruple if they disagreed with a part of the Westminster Confession.  The governing body then had to decide whether or not said scruple was a significant enough departure from the essentials of the Reformed faith to warrant saying No to the candidate.

The PUP Report proposed letting elders and ministers declare a scruple about their ability to comply with the fidelity and chastity language.  The examining body, Sessions in the case of elders, and Presbyteries in the case of Ministers, would decide whether or not to allow the ordination to proceed.

It amounted to a states rights approach to the ordination issue, rather than a federalist approach.  It won approval by a strong majority.

I liked the compromise.  There is no consensus on homosexuality in the PC(USA).  And while this drives advocates on both sides nuts, it seems to make sense to simply acknowledge it and sidestep it, rather than suiting up year after year for more trench warfare that fails to break the stalemate.  By retaining the long-fought-over language but giving some flexibility in applying it on a case-by-case basis, neither the far left nor the far right got what they wanted, but the broad middle of the denomination did.  They got a way to walk the Church back from the precipice, and move forward by focusing on mission and not on bruising annual fights over ordination standards.

But last week the Permanent Judicial Commission of the PC(USA) (our Supreme Court) ruled that scruples are for opinions only, and not for behavior. 

This really stinks.  The denomination had finally found a way to agree to disagree, but the PJC has torn it all up, and so now we are almost certainly back to where we were in the late 90s, with our annual fight like hell over homosexuality date in early-February, the meeting when presbyteries usually vote on proposed changes to the Constitution.

"Activist judges" can be found on the right as well as the left.

I feel sorry for the members of the PUP Task Group who risked friendships with their respective allies in order to reach out across fault lines, found some way to compromise with people with whom they strongly disagree, showed the denomination a healthy way forward, and now have it all flung in their faces.

And I think that the right wing of the Church will rue the day they "won" this victory in court.  They are slowly losing the argument on the legitimacy of same-sex relationships.  A compromise that let them retain their ideal language while leaving the door ajar for a gay or lesbian ordination here and there was about the best that they could have hoped for.  But now that the battle is joined again, it will continue to be fought until the fidelity and chastity language is stripped from the Book of Order.  And then they will have lost the war.

A Pyhrric victory indeed, this case.

Mumble, mumble

Presbyterians don't do religion, reports Jennifer, who's blogging again after a long hiatus.

I've found that Presbyterians are eager to invite people to church but loathe to talk to people about Jesus Christ.  There's any number of reasons:

1. The whole "I'd rather see a sermon lived than hear a sermon preached" mentality,
2. Isn't that what Jehovah's Witnesses do?
3. Observance of the ironclad "Never talk about religion or politics" rule that governs social norms in the circles Presbyterians frequent,
4. I really don't know much about Jesus, despite my lifelong association with the church, and I wouldn't want to make a fool out of myself by opening by big mouth.

And since this is the case, there's really no mystery as to why we continue to dwindle as a denomination.  Why would you associate with a body of people who are unable or unwilling to explain the rationale for their existence?

Even granting the dubious consignment of religion to the private world of values, what's odd about that person Jennifer quotes is that (s)he won't even do God-talk in the home and by the hearth.  You wonder if there's similar reticence when it comes to articulating, say, a rationale for voting Democratic.  Or adopting a vegetarian lifestyle.  Or choosing such-and-such magnet school for their child.  Or whatever.

Presbyterians are sooooooo cool!

How cool?  you ask.  Cool enough that Stephen Colbert calls us out in I Am America (And So Can You!):

Presbyterians are identical to Methodists except that one of them says "debts" instead of trespasses" in the Lord's Prayer.  Hundreds of years of bitter armed conflict have failed to resolve this difference.  How many more lives must be lost?

As many as it takes you wingnut Papist!

Also prominently displayed in Colbert's book is the nifty Presbyterian logo, displayed here FYI.  Ours is far snazzier than the United Methodist cross, with it's red bathrobe-looking flame draped over the cross's right side.  If I do say so myself.  Plus our cross isn't just two intersecting lines.  It's got, like, symbolism!

And now a short list of loser denominations not mentioned in I Am America:

• Lutherans
• UCCs
• Pentecostals
• All "nondenominationals"
• Disciples of Christ
• AME

I wonder how much the publisher had to pay for the right to reproduce the our cross in Colbert's book?  Maybe the denomination made it available gratis.  A form of evangelism, you might say.  At any rate, despite our dwindling numbers, Presbyterians have once again demonstrated our relevance to pop culture and the general American public.  And that's what it's all about, isn't it?  Relevance!

Tenure has its privileges

Speaking of no one's willingness to accept responsibility for the preparation for ministry process in the PC(USA), it's worth mentioning that the denomination's Office of Examination Services refuses to publicize the pass/fail rate for ordination exams by theological institution.  This is ridiculous.  My son's second grade teacher is more accountable for the academic achievement of her students than John Leith, Stanley Hauerwas, or any Ph.D., tenured professor was/is.

Marginal ministry

Here's an article by William Willimon that I would have loved back in seminary, but reading it with 13 years of parish ministry under my belt just makes me want to drive to Alabama and strangle the man.  Willimon is characteristically gleeful about the disestablishment of the Protestant establishment.  He despises those who would minister to the "cultured despisers of religion."  He invites us to embrace the sheer weirdness of the gospel, and the weird, malcontents on the margins of society who've always been more receptive than most to welcoming Christ.  The vital center is vapid.  To quote Molly Ivans, "The only thing in the middle of the road is yellow lines and dead armadillos."

OK.  Fine.  I agree with all that. 

That said, my career thus far has afforded me more than a few opportunities to minister with the marginalized:  mostly poor white trash, juvenile delinquents, the elderly and cranky, and the mentally ill.  And let me tell you, ministry with folks at the center is a lot more pleasant. 

From the stale comfort of Will's bishop's chair, it certainly must seem dashing, romantic and adventurous to be a post-modern David in the wilderness, gathering to oneself everyone in debt, distress or discontented, anointed to lead God's revolution.  In fact, it's hot in the day, and cold at night; there's only bugs and snakes to eat, and that fed-up lot will quickly become fed up with you.  People tend not to get better, and they tend to let you down or flat out turn on you.  And all you did was give them a cup of cold water in the name of Christ.

Instead of waxing romantic about the gritty glories of post-modern, disestablished Christianity, Willimon would do us clergy a favor by sitting us down to soberly count the cost.  Otherwise, get thee to a bland, suburban megachurch.

Another thing.  If Willimon's a bishop, he must realize how short a leash so many of his congregations have their clergy on.  If you want a mosh-pit ministry, a hip-hop ministry, a meth-mouth ministry, a runaway ministry, then it takes time and money.  Most lay people are really not that willing to put significant time and money into ministry that does not directly benefit them or their demographic cohort.  They are especially unwilling to give their ministers permission to sink their time and energy into marginal people. 

Willimon's article is running in Journal for Preachers, but my impression is that the preachers by and large understand that there's no going back to the 50s.  It's the lay people who don't get it.  I hope that Willimon is using that lovely Methodist bureaucratic instrument called the Charge Conference to put the fear of God in a few prissy blue hairs here and there.  Maybe he can even drag one of those pierced, angry kids out of the mosh pit and bring him into the memorial library at First Church wherever, to sort of defile the place simply by having him sit in one the comfy chairs.  Sure it's exploitative, like the limousine liberals bringing Black Panthers to cocktail parties on the Upper West Side, but it would play to Willimon's flair for shocking people.

He just needs to shock the people who need to be shocked.