April Church Newsletter
March 23rd, 2010 § 2 Comments
It’s hard to believe it is April already! It means that I have been at Lebanon Mennonite for five months, that summer is just around the corner, and one of my favorite days of the year is upon us: Baseball Opening Day. As many of you know, I suffer the dreaded curse of not just loving a sport that plays 162 games a year, but am hopelessly tied to the Chicago Cubs who have not won a championship since 1908 (but I think this year is the year). As one of my favorite theologians, Stanley Hauerwas, writes about moving back to the Midwest:
I accepted my destiny and again became a Cubs fan. This commitment came at the same time I was convinced by John Howard Yoder that I had to become a pacifist. I like to think that being a Cubs fan and a pacifist are closely-linked—namely, both communities teach you that life is not about winning.
As Opening Day draws near I will most likely take time to watch one of my favorite movies, Field of Dreams. Now if you live outside of the world of baseball you might not know that for many people baseball has a kind of poetic nature to it that crosses over from just being a game to being a pastime. Field of Dreams is just one of many movies that exemplifies this kind of mystical picture of baseball.
But none the less, baseball season draws near and that means I get sucked into this thing I would not desecrate. For instance, during the off season stories have been reported that a Toyota sign is being considered to be put up at the hallowed Wrigley Field (where the Cubs play). Now plenty of baseball stadiums have signs and advertisements all over them, but since 1914 Wrigley Field has always been one of the few places that has not been touched by the marketing craze. The ivy in the outfield kept ads from being put there and for the most part the park remains clean of the visual distractions most modern facilities have. Yet as we all know about some of our favorite places, they can’t stay pure forever. Many of us know of a beautiful park that was torn up for a strip mall, a childhood playground paved into a highway, or a remote spot that now has become a tourist destination. And so at some point what was sacred for us becomes exploited and Eden fades as only a faint memory of what once was.
So, why am I talking about baseball in the church newsletter? Part of the explanation for doing so comes from a scene in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby. At a luncheon, Gatsby introduces Nick Carraway, the book’s narrator, to a man named Meyer Wolfsheim. After lunch, Gatsby explains to Nick, "He is the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919." Nick is staggered. "It never occurred to me," he reflects, "that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people…" The feelings that many of us share around baseball, running, fishing, quilting, cooking, or woodwork are comparable to a notion of faith. When we participate in these activities or go to these special places we sense a sacred quality that God has connected to these parts of life, a sense of the good that we feel here that shows up rarely, but it is something that needs to be protected and not merely played with. What we see even faintly is a picture of the goodness of God and a peace that aches for Eden.
Recently I read an article in a Christianity Today publication that explored this exact turn in baseball. The article follows the story of the Brooklyn Dodgers leaving for Los Angeles and the turmoil it caused. The article closes with this though:
All fans know that three words, whether spoken by villains or saints, kill the spirit of whatever sport of which they’re said: It’s a business. Baseball is not a business, any more than is marriage, or teaching first grade, or playing four-square. If we want to raise boys and girls who will come, like the aging Satchel Paige, to preach "the sanctity of the double steal and the blessedness of the bunt," we will find ways to preserve and protect this treasure. And chances are, if our children learn to feel the sanctity of the double steal, they’ll come to know other realms of sanctity, too—and perhaps gain the courage to construct ways of guarding them.
I understand that many of you don’t feel the way I do about baseball, but shortly after Opening Day we will celebrate Easter, the resurrection of Jesus. And the question that spurred these reflections is what sacredness do we want to celebrate on that day? Do we want to model for the younger generations among us that our Church is a place among places, that Easter day is just another day, that the communion we take is merely a remembrance of something we know only on the inside? Or, do we want to speak in wonder, poems, and whispers about a secret that is sacred that we are both dying to share and wanting to protect from being trampled upon by the forces that would seek to commodify it, sell it, or turn it to from sacred to profane? So, as excited as I am for Opening Day the day, what I greatly anticipate the most is the day when we celebrate, pray, and tell the stories of the One who defeats the powers that enslave our world and frees us to worship without fear because of Resurrection. Easter is always better than Opening Day.
where you do not want to go.
March 11th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Before I begin I should say I had a great time at MHGS. I say this because as hard on it as I am I did enjoy myself, learn a lot, and grow with a group of great people.
A couple of weekends ago Rob Bell visited the seminary and had a good interaction with students there. I watched the exchange online and enjoyed seeing Rob interact with people at MHGS. After he attended the school he wrote this on his webpage:
I had the chance to speak at the Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle. Those folks are so far out ahead. When you start there, you essentially do group therapy for a while, because, as they say, “you can’t take people where you’re not willing to go yourself.” Brilliant. This kind of holistic, flesh and blood, theological education is where it’s at.
Here I think Rob points out very clearly what is billed as the central experience at MHGS, Practicum. For many people at MHGS this type of situation is a well needed breath of fresh air that helps them get perspective on their lives. For many students the Practicum experience is a gateway to professional one on one therapy that continues healing for them but at times can turn into a sort of fetish for the MHGS student.
But I think my biggest problem about what Rob’s quote states is that it signifies an attitude that floats around the school that therapy is the thing that is going to take us to the places where we are not willing to go.
Granted, I am not the typical MHGS student, but practicum never met in that way. Maybe I wasn’t open to it, or it was the wrong time, or I was just too worried about passing. However, practicum served as a good opportunity to try on different modes of listening, and understand issues of transference. But there are those at the school who would echo what Rob is saying here and that therapy is the realm where we will surpass where we will go.
On a biographical note, when I was halfway through MHGS I started volunteering bi-weekly at a ministry for the homeless. It was the place I didn’t want to go but I found myself there none the less. I would sit and talk to people who from week to week couldn’t even remember my name. I soon learned that I had nothing to offer them, but I kept going and through the process people close to me began to notice I was changing as a person. After I graduated I started spending three mornings a week with the folks at this ministry. I would come into the house in the morning put on a pot of coffee, do the dishes, and just sit. Some days I broke up fights, some days I hung out in garden with them, some days I helped them with laundry. I prayed a lot. It was a humbling time, but with little else to offer it was what I did. This was the place of transformation, my holistic, flesh and blood education.
Before I came to MHGS I read a Brian McLaren book (I can’t remember which one) where he laid out that seminary could be a place where people came together and did things like this. I had misinformed myself enough to think this is what Practicum was and failed to ask the right questions before attending. While Practicum and therapy was for many students what Rob says it is I felt lost with the singular option I was expected to fit into.
This is my problem – when I think of flesh and blood, holistic theological education I don’t think of the classroom or the therapy session with other emerging adults, but of the places that Jesus will carry my body that I do want to go. When I hear what Rob describes I just can’t imagine the therapeutic experience aimed at creating a healthy individual who can enter into community changed but something else. I think of places we could not go but for Jesus carrying us there. Sitting in silence (see the bottom of this article by feminist theologian Sarah Coakley), placing our bodies between conflicts, teaching at risk youth coffee skills, joining a black Pentecostal church, going to the godless, working with the homeless, prostitutes, or the mentally disabled. I think the key thing for me is that I am convinced going places where we don’t want to go involves Jesus carrying our bodies there and not just our minds/souls.
I was one of a few students that got votes to address the graduating class and was asked to pray at the ceremony. Being aware that people thought of me as one to address the class I began to ponder what I would have said if I was giving one of the speeches and the only I think I could think of is this section of John that I feels gets to the heart of what I was trying to say during my time at MHGS:
Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, "Follow me!"
Advice from Hauerwas
March 9th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Never lie. Never Lie.
And you’ll discover that is hard work. And part of what it means not to lie is to preach truthfully and what it means to preach truthfully is to preach in manner that you expect God to show up because the Word has been proclaimed. As soon as you hear a minster say, “As my six year old was saying” you know its going to BS. Because its going to insight on the human condition that anyone could have at the Kiwanis club. What it means to preach truthfully and not to lie is to be willing to say when you don’t know what needs to be said…”But that we do see Jesus. We are not sure we know what needs to be said. If I said more than that I would be lying to you. But we do see Jesus.”
I also of course think it is very important to see Jesus in the body and blood of Christ… That won’t make us more faithful but at least God promised to kill us if we do it unworthily or at least make us sick. And I figure that that’s better than dying of boredom. If we return to Eucharistic celebration in a serious manner who knows what God would do with that. What it means to be a Christian is very simple. It means you worship Jesus. But it forces a extraordinary intellectual and moral challenge and we need to be people confident that God will help us speak and live appropriate to the speech we have been given. What I hope we do in the divinity school is give you confidence that you can use the language of the faith, Jesus is Lord without apology. Because if you do that God will show up and scare the hell out of you.
I know that I said I wouldn’t post aimless quotes here but at the tumblr instead but I broke that rule with this one. I think it’s because this quote seems anything but aimless.
March 4th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Romano Guardini said the Church is the Cross on which Christ was crucified; once could not separate Christ from His Cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church.
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, 150.
This came up in a conversation with Cabe today and I think it hits on one of the reasons why some of us can never give up the Church. And what we want and try so desperately to see is something that Ephraim Radner points out in hope, “Come and see the Body of our Lord. That’s what Christian ought be saying with respect to their churches. Come and see, but recognize in the body that is our Church the form of Jesus not something else…the Church looks like Jesus.”
March 3rd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Today I had intended to write a post on seminary education using these quotes but somehow lost the thread I was using to tie them all together. If you can find a way to make it happen write the essay yourself but here is what I was going to work with:
Hauerwas as Liberation Theologian?
March 3rd, 2010 § 2 Comments
Recently I had a long conversation with my friend Cabe in which both of us pondered whether Hauerwas’s corpus might be better read as liberation theology for American Christians. I can’t remember who came up with this thought but it gave some shape to my thinking about the critiques Hauerwas receives and what his project holds in our mind shapes the holes and themes we will see throughout his writings. Some who will read Hauerwas’s project as primarily about proposing something counter to identities produced by modern liberalism will find different holes than those who see his project as proposing a Christocentric form-of-life via Wittgenstein.
I had held off on blogging this thought, but today I came across this line in Mangia’s review of Hauerwas’s commentary on Matthew:
As I read the commentary, two things began to dawn on me: first, the extent to which Hauerwas’s whole corpus can be read as a kind of liberation theology for North Americans and Western Europeans, asking the embarrassing question as to how we can be Christians and yet so rich; second, the extent to which wealth and poverty are also themes in Matthew’s gospel.
Here, I agree with Mangia, but instead of using the word rich I would use the word comfortable. I would do this not as an effort to escape a critique of riches but I think Hauerwas seriously wonders how we can as Christians can be so comfortable in what he sees as a deeply disturbing society. Why nobody has yet attempted to read Hauerwas in such a way is beyond me given the large of amount of books we have interacting with his project for someone who is still living.
Luke Timothy Johnson, another scholar I respect, wrote a very powerful rebuke of Hauerwas’s commentary that asked “Hauerwas or Matthew?: Pick one.” While I thought his review pointed to several interesting critiques, I think he misses the question Hauerwas is asking those in biblical studies, theologians, and all readers of Matthew, “Matthew, Hauerwas, or Jesus? Pick one.” Hauerwas has no problem losing Matthew (or himself) in writing a commentary, as long as we find Jesus in his place. Near the beginning of his commentary Hauerwas explicitly makes this point in a discussion of apocalyptic and time:
Apocalyptic is the disruption of time by God’s time so that time might be redeemed. Apocalyptic means that there is another world, another time, than the one in which we live; but it turns out to be the same world in which we live. As Rainer Maria Rilke puts it: "There is another world, the same as this one." We simply must learn to see the world in which we live as the world that the Father created and redeemed through the Son. . . . Matthew’s gospel is, therefore, an ongoing exercise to help us see the world through Christ.
