I go back and forth on whether I should post my sermons online. Part of me feels that because I borrow so heavily from so many sources without showing where I shouldn’t do it. Part of me feels like a bad sermon opens me up to a lot of criticism. They are also extremely unedited because I fill in the gaps when I speak it aloud.
Despite those concerns I have decided that it wouldn’t kill me to share of my sermons online. I will normally post the texts a excerpt, and the rest will appear after the jump.
Texts: Isaiah 62:1-5, Psalm 36:5-10, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, John 2:1-11
What we have here is a God who messes with our expectations. His glory comes in his touch and it can be denied. His signs are not logical precise images but rather precarious moments that not every body sees. A God who bridges the gap between the historical sense of time and divine in way that we don’t quite understand. A God who takes our purification water and makes into a 100 gallons of glorious wine for all to drink so that we have nowhere to wash our hands. This is God who doesn’t function from a economy of lack or need but of great abundance, and it is abundance that makes us uncomfortable.
Now that I am a full time pastor I often consider a conversation that came up several times at seminary. When talking about the church at some point we would all begin to rail on how one medium is done (think worship, preaching, small groups) and laugh at how shallow, individualist, or consumerist some of the approaches we take to these things in the church. While it was a fun seminary thing to do, and many times good points were brought up, for those of us heading towards professional ministry it was a constant reminder that were going to have to do something when were employed.
One particular time this conversation came up was in regard to worship music. Everybody made fun of the Passion movement, repressed sexual lyrics about God, cheesy choruses, and we all had a good laugh. But since I just interviewed for a position that day I asked some of the most vocal people, “Ok, I totally agree with your critiques but when I go to work for a church they are going to want to sing something about God, what should it be?” The first response I got was, “Don’t ask me, I just stopped going to church.” Given that wasn’t an option I pushed a little further to get the general response of “we don’t know.”
“We don’t know” is one thing that often summed up the seminary critiques about the church. So when in the process of stumbling through the blogs I read this week I came across this video.
On the one hand I was instantly drawn toward critiquing the overused buzz word called “missional.” And yet when I got over my need to out think everything I realized this video very correctly displays some of my hopes for Lebanon Mennonite. In this area of the country there is a desire to make an invitation into evangelism and to become another wanna-be mega church. Sure the video isn’t all good but it isn’t all bad. And when I finally came around to not seeing it as just bland apology for the word missional, the video reminded me of am extremely simplified presentation of what Halden and Dr. Nate Kerr seem to be calling for from our churches. (They would most likely put the in place of mentioning the church in second scenario something like the church reminding us of the apocalyptic nature of Jesus in it’s place, but then they lost every non-theologian watching).
All of this to say that I am trying to get over my deep seated cynicism.
Michael Horton: One person pointed out a comment she heard from one of your talks, “Predestination puts self interest out of the equation and this seems to me to liberate one to act on motive more consitent with Christ’s teaching.” And she went on to say of your statement, “A certain self forgetfulness is the point. Like Calvin, Robinson’s cause may be suggested by the word reverence. Her work brims with a deep reference for life for our own lives for others and finally for the mystery of God whom we cannot fully comprehend but whose unmerited grace towards us is the one fact that abides.” Is that fair?
Marilynn Robinson: I think that’s more than fair. I think that’s lovely. I think it’s true also that, you know, predestination as an idea and you could call it providence if you wanted to look at from another side, that’s something that’s all caught up with time. You know the idea that if time unfold sequentially predestination is one thing. You know because it seems to imply that you can’t never act in a way that isn’t predestined, although frankly that’s not the way that theologians understand it. But if time is something else and we only experience it sequentially, then obviously another kind of thing is being described. Something for which we don’t have a vocabulary. But if you take it that you act not in your own interest, if you take it that you can put questions of heaven and hell basically out of account, and act as you do out of the desire to know God, which is what Calvin would say, then it is entirely another thing.
I don’t believe I have ever heard predestination described in such a compelling way. Not sure if I am for it, but it struck as an amazing way to speak of the providence of God.
Listen to the rest here. Her final thoughts on what a good book is should also be heard.
A current high point in my New Year. Eccentric Existence by David H. Kelsey. The remaining Yale School theologian. 1050 pages. Two Volumes. My Christmas money gone.
I am hopeless.
Hello, whoever might happen to still read my blog. One of the activities that I am doing with the youth group this year is the 30 Hour Famine in partner with World Vision. The premise is pretty simple: The youth raise funds for a month and then on February 26-27 we will go 30 hours without food, while participating in a local service project and an experience that challenges us to look harder at global hunger. It is really a great program and the youth have decided to direct our funds to World Vision’s Haiti Earthquake relief. World Vision has worked in Haiti for 30 years and has some 800 staff in country. Please join us in praying for the children and families devastated by the earthquake in Haiti. In joining with the youth I have decided to raise funds as well and participate fully in the 30 Hour Famine. If you are so inclined to support me just click on the link and give whatever you would be willing. Thanks!
Looking back at seminary it would be hard to name the thinker who had the most influence on me, but someone who must be named in the conversation is George Lindbeck. For instance, his thoughts came up this morning while I was reading this article in the New York Times. One of the most remarkable lines from the article reminds me of one of the more prominent discussions that kept coming up at MHGS. Ethan Watters writes:
Behind the promotion of Western ideas of mental health and healing lie a variety of cultural assumptions about human nature. Westerners share, for instance, evolving beliefs about what type of life event is likely to make one psychologically traumatized, and we agree that venting emotions by talking is more healthy than stoic silence. We’ve come to agree that the human mind is rather fragile and that it is best to consider many emotional experiences and mental states as illnesses that require professional intervention. (The National Institute of Mental Health reports that a quarter of Americans have diagnosable mental illnesses each year.) The ideas we export often have at their heart a particularly American brand of hyperintrospection — a penchant for “psychologizing” daily existence. These ideas remain deeply influenced by the Cartesian split between the mind and the body, the Freudian duality between the conscious and unconscious, as well as the many self-help philosophies and schools of therapy that have encouraged Americans to separate the health of the individual from the health of the group. These Western ideas of the mind are proving as seductive to the rest of the world as fast food and rap music, and we are spreading them with speed and vigor.
What Mr. Watters so clearly shows in this article is that mental health and psychology are products of their environments and the goals (ie what is seen as healthy) clearly stem from very western mind sets about the notion of the self and “health.” While most of the people I went to seminary would agree with his general premise, that it is wrong to export this stuff to different cultures because of the colonizing nature of such an enterprise, thinking with Lindbeck gives rise to a different set of questions. What Mr. Watters sees as marks of different cultures (notions of the self, dualities, health of individuals over the group) is exactly what Lindbeck thinks we should be taking away from our religions (which he conceives of in cultural-linguistic terms). Christianity (or fill in the blank religion) clearly has different answers to many of the question we must answer before we begin on the road of mental health and while Christianity has largely not made this clear the rise of Christian counselors as a class (and in some places even a vocation) seems to further continue this colonization of the mind rather than combat it. But Lindbeck would be clear that buying into the Western answers from the get go lead us away from finding how our religion might encompass our world and teach us different patterns of existence that might not rely on earlier cultural constructions.
Mr. Watters ends his articles with thoughts that point to what Lindbeck is referring to and the questions that must be asked if Christianity and world’s religions are capable of sustaining meaning in the face of such a totalizing narrative.
Some philosophers and psychiatrists have suggested that we are investing our great wealth in researching and treating mental illness — medicalizing ever larger swaths of human experience — because we have rather suddenly lost older belief systems that once gave meaning and context to mental suffering. If our rising need for mental-health services does indeed spring from a breakdown of meaning, our insistence that the rest of the world think like us may be all the more problematic. Offering the latest Western mental-health theories, treatments and categories in an attempt to ameliorate the psychological stress sparked by modernization and globalization is not a solution; it may be part of the problem. When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world’s mental distress.
One of the things the church has found so much time to talk about, with so little to say, is human sexuality. I don’t care if we are talking to about liberal, mainline, or evangelical, Christians talk so much about sex, but seldom is anything of interest shared. One prominent blogger laments:
I’m currently on year two in my current position as Minister for Youth & Young Adults, and while we talked about sex for one month during Sunday School, that’s still only four times in over a year and a half. Four times. I wonder if they are getting information about sex from other sources throughout their weeks? I’d guess that they hear TONS of wrong/bad/unhelpful/unsafe information about sex at school – a lot more than four times a day…
I haven’t quite found it necessary to keep track how often a church talks about sex, but by talking about it too much can reduce Jesus to just that? Can we get so wrapped up in exploring sexuality that we lose the importance of Christ?
Now that I am licensed to minister in MCUSA I feel like maybe now I can start taking some ownership in the term Mennonite. Typically I find myself torn between referring to myself as an Anabaptist Christian or as Mennonite. Often when I am given the chance to address Mennonites I say that I refer to myself as Anabaptist amongst them because I don’t believe they really understand the term Mennonite if they think an ethnicity of “Mennonite” exists that can be separated from Christ and if they do they should just get over it and baptize their babies. Outside of Mennonite circles I am more comfortable accepting the term, but I want to be clear my goal is never to be a good Mennonite, but that Mennonite is the term that best locates how I think we are to follow to Christ. However, I do not accept Mennonite as a substitute for Christianity. One of the radical instances of me feeling lost in the term Mennonite happened when I was on a panel with several other younger Mennonites and one person described themselves as an “Agnostic Mennonite” and not a single member of the audience sought to challenge that such a person could exist.
But what I wanted to draw attention to are two separate articles that currently weigh in on this struggle. The first from this issue of The Mennonite by Janet Trevino-Elizarraraz explores the difficulty with this discussion from a Latino perspective. She writes:
Historian Philip Hammond categorizes Mennonites as an "ethnic religion" whereby "ethnic identification can be claimed without claiming the religious identification, but the reverse is rare." What I’m asking for from Germanic Mennonites is rare; I’m asking them to present a living faith divorced from their ethnicity so that people like me can find a home with them, and this faith can speak to my culture as well.
Her article displays how an understanding of Mennonite that stems from not just a perceived identity as Mennonites, but from a particular geographic location can stunt a different cultural expression of what it means to be Mennonite. And while I enjoyed her article it does seem to grant too much weight to notions of culture. Janet accepts the terms that cultures are really at risk here rather pushing how the body of Christ is at risk, a body that is more dictated by our location in it, that is “in Christ”, than our geographic or ethnic locations.
The second article is from the Mennonite Weekly Review by Matthew Krabill (whom I know from sometime I spent at Fuller Seminary) and is written from the perspective of a Mennonite insider. Matthew’s concern focuses more on the growing disconnect between Mennonite and Christianity. He writes:
Part of the problem is that we can be so thoroughly Mennonite that we are no longer Christian. Culturally, this is actually possible, since Amstutzes, Yoders and many others represent ethnic clans with historical ties to Europe. Theologically, however, this is a serious problem. Mennonites are sometimes so inherently oppositional that we define ourselves over against the rest of the Christian family, to a point where our “distinctives” (peace and justice, etc.) become the only story we tell — or at least they are disconnected from central Christian convictions. Put another way, in faithfully being neither Catholic nor Protestant, we adopt an isolationism that has the potential to distance us from our Christian roots altogether. So, for example, while we may affirm a value such as peace, we may not be so sure how it relates to core Christian affirmations such as “Jesus is the Son of God” or “Jesus is Savior.” We may affirm justice but not know what it has to do with the crucified Christ or the hope of the resurrection.
Matthew’s article provides a greater insight into the missional nature of Anabaptism that I think is currently being put together through Mennonites at Fuller Seminary. Here I think Matthew does a better job at connecting the theological beliefs that root Mennonites only as they know Christ, for he notes this is “the firm foundation upon which nothing else can be laid.”
Both of these voices and stories need to be heard in the church and hopefully we can begin to find ourselves no longer engaged in this discussion be moving outward. And as Ephraim Radner pointed out in reference to the Episcopal Church, “the Gospel is alive, and the Church that is Christ’s Body given, takes us to a new place.”
Jesus Christ continually contradicts us and the way we experience ourselves as alive and he compels us to radically redefine what we mean by life. He encounters us the way he encounters the disciples on Easter Sunday on the road to Emmaus. They the ones marked out for death, those who have survived him were really the dead. He the dead one was really the living.
Every time I get a new Moleskine or Field Notes Journal I put a quote on the front page that I feel encapsulates the journey my life was currently on when I started. The quotes have varied from poems, to quotes, to bible verses, some I look back with awkwardness towards and others I am still drawn towards. This quote, I have no clue it was actually from, was on the inside of my journal that I started my final year of college (03-04). That year was a year of pretty big transitions in my spiritual life and ended with my first call into ministry. It’s funny to stumble upon the quote when I was cleaning my office up today because the journey from the day I wrote that to here pretty much contains a continual contradiction of myself by Christ. What I once surely believed was life everlasting has become only the shell of something more, and what I once thought clearly was death has become radically renewed. Looking back at the journey I can see all the fun, the pain, the good conversations, and friends that helped me along the way, but I also wonder what might be coming down the pipe. Next month I get installed as minster at the church and I can’t help but think that means I will again be pushed down that path towards life with Christ, that is in Christ, and yet at the same time I find myself wanting to stop. Can’t I have it figured out at some point? I mean do I really want to always be discovering anew what it means to preach Christ and him crucified? Don’t I ever get a break? And yet on the other side of the want for control and false peace stands the journey I took from ‘03 to the present that says it is worth it.
What does this mean? I don’t know. But the more important question is how long do you hang on to a Moleskine before you throw it away?
After a brief foray into the world of other blogging sites I am back to wordpress much wiser (not really). I don’t know if will take up writing that much again but I figured it would be good to have a blog people can actually comment on without having to sign up for an account. This blog won’t pull in my Flickr updates and will feature less random stuff. If you are interested in still seeing my photos and the oddness I find all over the internets you can check my tumblr. And of course you can read the Barth blog if your interested in that kind thing. Here’s to attempting to be a blogger again.
Grace & Peace
