0 Wearing Ashes in the Soviet Safeway
Last night after the Ash Wednesday Service I ran to Safeway to procure a few (non-meat) products for my dinner. That’s right, not only am I giving up farting for Lent (see earlier, evidently inflammatory, post) my wife informed me yesterday we’re also giving up meat for Lent.
I tried to point out to Ali that my commitment to give up the latter was in direct contradiction to and would most certainly frustrate my attempts to give up the former. My wife though doesn’t just give things up for Lent each year. She’s hard core. She gives up something for Lent each year but also the things she’s given up in previous years. Thus I’m now on the hook for forty days of not farting in my wife’s vicinity while being sustained on a diet of beans, vegetables and fruit.
Anyways, I was standing in line in the small, Soviet-esque Safeway near my house, about 4 people back. I could hear the bagger and the teller whispering words like ‘what’s’ and ‘going on’ and ‘holiday’ and ‘apocalypse’ and ‘probably’ and ‘something’ and ‘in’ and ‘Revelation.’
They were staring at the black, greasy cross on my forehead.
When I got to the checkout, one of them asked me furtively: ‘So, uh, is it like a holiday or something? Or did you go to a funeral?’
Thinking that would certainly be a memorable- and probably psyche destroying funeral- I replied: ‘It’s Ash Wednesday.’
‘Oh, right!’
Long pause.
‘What’s Ash Wednesday?’
And I replied with exactly what I’d told the congregation 30 minutes earlier: ‘Ash Wednesday is the day we remember that life is a gift from God by remembering our mortality.’
Longer pause.
‘I don’t get it.’
I kind of just smiled and swiped my debit card not wanting to venture too much more into this conversation and not because there were a dozen people waiting behind me impatiently with their lunch meat, TP and Crystal Light.
I didn’t want to say much more because, in all honesty, I still hadn’t processed or recovered the night’s service.
Less than hour before, I had traced an ugly black cross on a child in my son’s class and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
Words that become jarring when spoken on to a 10 year old’s forehead.
And after her, several people back in line, I traced the same bruise-like cross on the forehead of someone whom I’ve grown to love over the past 8 years. Knowing that if I stay in this congregation for a while longer I’ll likely perform this person’s funeral, I said to this friend: ‘‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’ I fought back the sudden urge to cry.
And after that friend came another soon after, someone with whom I’ve shared many a laugh on mission teams in Guatemala. On him, I traced a brooding black cross and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
There were others like that.
Like the parishioner whose battle with cancer I’m privy to. When I marked him with the cross and said ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return’ the words rung with a painful truth.
Or the parent worried that their child will one day make good on threats to return themselves to the dust prematurely.
And then there was a handful of complete and total strangers. People who came in off the street because they saw the service announced on the sign out front. To these strangers, I drew an executioner’s tool on their forehead and basically said: ‘Remember, eventually you’re going to die.’
More so than any other holy day in the church year, Ash Wednesday affects me.
On Ash Wednesday it’s as though every one gathered in the pews becomes a walking, talking, breathing (for now) illustration of the day’s meaning: that life is fragile, tightrope experience, sometimes precious and sometimes terrifyingly awful and that, good or bad, it will one day end.
In so many ways, we’re finite. Just a part of the world God made. Like dirt.
But were it not so, our lives would cease to be gifts.
We don’t preach a sermon on Ash Wednesday largely because we don’t need to. The people in the pews are the embodiment of the message.
Here’s what I mean.
0 Wearing Ashes in the Soviet Safeway
Last night after the Ash Wednesday Service I ran to Safeway to procure a few (non-meat) products for my dinner. That’s right, not only am I giving up farting for Lent (see earlier, evidently inflammatory, post) my wife informed me yesterday we’re also giving up meat for Lent.
I tried to point out to Ali that my commitment to give up the latter was in direct contradiction to and would most certainly frustrate my attempts to give up the former. My wife though doesn’t just give things up for Lent each year. She’s hard core. She gives up something for Lent each year but also the things she’s given up in previous years. Thus I’m now on the hook for forty days of not farting in my wife’s vicinity while being sustained on a diet of beans, vegetables and fruit.
Anyways, I was standing in line in the small, Soviet-esque Safeway near my house, about 4 people back. I could hear the bagger and the teller whispering words like ‘what’s’ and ‘going on’ and ‘holiday’ and ‘apocalypse’ and ‘probably’ and ‘something’ and ‘in’ and ‘Revelation.’
They were staring at the black, greasy cross on my forehead.
When I got to the checkout, one of them asked me furtively: ‘So, uh, is it like a holiday or something? Or did you go to a funeral?’
Thinking that would certainly be a memorable- and probably psyche destroying funeral- I replied: ‘It’s Ash Wednesday.’
‘Oh, right!’
Long pause.
‘What’s Ash Wednesday?’
And I replied with exactly what I’d told the congregation 30 minutes earlier: ‘Ash Wednesday is the day we remember that life is a gift from God by remembering our mortality.’
Longer pause.
‘I don’t get it.’
I kind of just smiled and swiped my debit card not wanting to venture too much more into this conversation and not because there were a dozen people waiting behind me impatiently with their lunch meat, TP and Crystal Light.
I didn’t want to say much more because, in all honesty, I still hadn’t processed or recovered the night’s service.
Less than hour before, I had traced an ugly black cross on a child in my son’s class and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
Words that become jarring when spoken on to a 10 year old’s forehead.
And after her, several people back in line, I traced the same bruise-like cross on the forehead of someone whom I’ve grown to love over the past 8 years. Knowing that if I stay in this congregation for a while longer I’ll likely perform this person’s funeral, I said to this friend: ‘‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’ I fought back the sudden urge to cry.
And after that friend came another soon after, someone with whom I’ve shared many a laugh on mission teams in Guatemala. On him, I traced a brooding black cross and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
There were others like that.
Like the parishioner whose battle with cancer I’m privy to. When I marked him with the cross and said ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return’ the words rung with a painful truth.
Or the parent worried that their child will one day make good on threats to return themselves to the dust prematurely.
And then there was a handful of complete and total strangers. People who came in off the street because they saw the service announced on the sign out front. To these strangers, I drew an executioner’s tool on their forehead and basically said: ‘Remember, eventually you’re going to die.’
More so than any other holy day in the church year, Ash Wednesday affects me.
On Ash Wednesday it’s as though every one gathered in the pews becomes a walking, talking, breathing (for now) illustration of the day’s meaning: that life is fragile, tightrope experience, sometimes precious and sometimes terrifyingly awful and that, good or bad, it will one day end.
In so many ways, we’re finite. Just a part of the world God made. Like dirt.
But were it not so, our lives would cease to be gifts.
We don’t preach a sermon on Ash Wednesday largely because we don’t need to. The people in the pews are the embodiment of the message.
Here’s what I mean.
1 My Son’s Friars Club Roast of Me
This is what my son, Alexander, served up last night for our Fat Tuesday Comedy Roast of the Pastors.
At first, Elaine and Teer asked me to roast Dennis tonight. But that would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
So I decided to roast my Dad instead.
I think my Dad is the awesomest guy in the world. Of course, so does my Dad.
People are always asking me what it’s like to be a pastor’s kid. And I’m always like: ‘I don’t know. Don’t clowns have kids too?’
Here at church, all my Dad talks about is God, Jesus, the bible.
But at home, all my Dad talks about is himself: how awesome he is, how “brilliant” he is, how funny he is, how talented he is.
And he is talented. In ways you probably don’t know. For example, did you know my Dad can sing? It’s true.
On those rare occasions when my Dad actually takes a shower, you can hear him in there belting out ‘You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.’
My Dad has other talents too.
He knows how to tell my Mom to fix the car.
He knows how to ask my Mom to get her tools and fix the sink.
He knows how to hold tools for my Mom when she’s hanging shelves.
Now, some of you people make fun of my Dad for wearing booty shorts to church.
Let me just say, you’ve got it easy. You’ve got nothing to complain about.
Imagine what it’s like for me. Imagine what it’s like to get picked up at school or swim practice by a Dad wearing booty shorts?
Imagine what it’s like when your classmates ask: ‘Is that guy in the tights your Dad?’
And in those moments all I can say is…‘Well…..I’m adopted.’
I mean, my Dad’s tights are so tight I can tell exactly how much change he has in his pocket.
Seriously, as bad as my Dad dresses at church, you should just be thankful he’s dressed at all.
At home, my Dad just walks around in his whitey tighties.
In fact, I don’t have an alarm clock. I don’t need one. I know it’s time to wake up in the morning when I hear my Mom yell: ‘Jason, you can’t walk around like that. Put some pants on.’
Some of you are critical of my Dad, from time to time. But it doesn’t really faze him.
Narcissism is helpful that way.
If you really want to upset my Dad, don’t criticize him. Just show him the trailer to the Blind Side. It only takes about 3 seconds of the Blind Side for my Dad to start crying like a baby with a poopy diaper.
Here at church, you hear my Dad talk a lot about how Dennis is old, forgetful, lazy, obvious, boring, tired, uninspired, old, predictable, vain, shallow, past his prime, full of himself, phones it in, takes credit for others’ work….
just to name a few things.
But here’s the funny thing—- at home, that’s exactly how we talk about my Dad.
He’s just like Dennis.
But with less hair.
You may have heard already that this year our project in Guatemala is toilets.
Thousands of kids die in places like Guatemala every day from diseases they get from dirty water. So it’s an important project for you to support.
It is also an appropriate project for my Dad considering how
A) my Dad is full of it
and
B) how much time my Dad spends on the toilet.
He goes in there and…….disappears.
He spends more time in the bathroom than those old guys at Mt Vernon Rec Center.
We don’t know what my Dad does in there.
The lunar cycle goes faster than my Dad’s potty breaks.
Thank you for coming tonight. I hope you give lots of money so that tonight will be a success.
I’m sure that if it is a success, my Dad will say it was his idea.
5 Counterfeit Gods: A Reflection from Julie Pfister
It’s Ash Wednesday, the day the Lenten season begins. Lent is a time when we imitate Jesus’ own time of testing in the wilderness by confronting the sin and idols in our own lives.
We will observe Lent this year by preaching on the themes in Tim Keller‘s book Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters. Some of you have insinuated my blog could use a ladies’ touch. Well, here to prove I’m responsive and always a good listener, to reflect on the book, I’ve asked Julie Pfister, one of the most authentic Christians I know, to blog her way through the book.
I have had them myself; stickers on my shiny new SUV (not new or shiny anymore) showing that my family was on its way. A few of the right schools, waiting and hoping for that empty spot on the back window to have just the right University stickered to it showing the world just how smart and perfect the little family that I had made was.
Like most of us, I didn’t realize it as it was happening. Pride, like any other idol can be insidious, and so difficult to spot. But my children, my seemingly perfect little family was on its way. I wanted room in my car to carry around the whole hockey team. I wanted my kids to want to have their friends come to my home where I could serve up the milk and cookies.
They did for a while. Then, things started to awry. As Keller put it, its not that I loved my children too much, I just didn’t have any room left in my heart or time in my schedule (or theirs) for God. I wanted my children to be happy, successful, loving and to love me! Perhaps it is partly because of the culture I grew up in that the desire for the perfect little family was so important. Having happy, successful, smart, athletic, caring, loving children would validate me as a person – especially since I had quit my job and “sacrificed” (oh please) my career to raise my kids.
Like any false idol, it didn’t take long for the cracks in my perfect little life to really start to show. My children and family are a wonderful gift and precious blessing to me, but I learned a long time ago, what Keller reminded us, that until or unless we stop trying to map out perfect little lives for our children, and trust God to be their God in the inevitably bumpy and even tragic path that HE has for them, we will be brought to our knees.
Do we pray that they will be Humble, shunning the world and the trappings of success and searching for God? How do we view others children who go off the chosen accepted cultural track…high school, college, graduate degree, career, family, Do we think that there is something wrong if our children “choose” a different path? Are we not quick to give a qualifying response when we tell someone that our son or daughter is not in college? How honest can we be with each other when people ask how we are? How is Sally….Can we really just honestly pray that they will know God? Will we or they be ok if we pray that God will use them, that they will seek God and God will seek them…..if that means that they go against the cultural norms? How can we as parents hope that God will break our children’s hearts so they can be desperate for HIM. Do we trust God enough to want that sort of brokenness for them? What if we pray that our children KNOW God? Do we trust him with the pieces of their broken hearts? Do we trust Him to ???? It is so counter-intuitive for me as a mother for my children to want to feel the emptiness and desperation that I have felt. Do I want my children in the pit of despair?
That same pit that Christ reached down and pulled me out of and set my feet on firm ground and put a new song in my heart! I loved teaching at the Day School. With each new class I always felt a twinge of envy along with the joy of meeting the bright and shiny precious, babies and the hopeful, loving parents that brought them. I wondered how they might feel if their child called them something horrible and told them they hated them.
I hoped and prayed that their child would never get beaten to within an inch of his life or disappear for days and weeks at a time. I wanted to go all Isaiah on them and belt out….Get on your knees NOW and study and learn all that you can….not from Dr. Spock but from the Author of their Life….the Ultimate Educator….so that you are as ready and STEEPED in God and His Word that “when the rest of life unravels” He and his Word will be such a part of your fabric that you will not.
Some people still tell me, hoping to not offend, that I used to remind them of Barbie….Unless I missed the happily broken, God fearing, Grace loving, sinner Barbie, there is no resemblance.
3 My Friars Club Roast of Dennis Perry
First, I think I need to offer the disclaimer that it’s not easy to speak last at such a dud of an event- especially when you consider that this is a church not a comedy club and all of you, besides Steve and Kathy Larkin, are sober right now.
Just looking at you all gathered up here on stage, I think I speak for everyone when I say…I expected you guys to have more talent.
You guys gave up the State of the Union for this? I know these are partisan times but I think we can all agree that you made a bad decision.
But seriously, it’s a great treat to have Bill Perry wheeled in here tonight. I joke about Dennis, but Bill Perry’s so old that whenever he stops moving, people throw dirt on him.
You all have gotten to know Bill pretty well, but you might not know his wife, Carol. Or, as Bill’s lawyer calls her: ‘Jailbait.’ Bill and Carol met in school. He was her 2nd grade teacher.
Alexander, my son. I mean it from the bottom of my heart when I say: You’re grounded for the rest of your life.
Andreas, what a song! There’s a lot of words I could use to describe how I feel about your music. I just can’t say any of those words in church.
Teer, I used to hate you for being the taller, stronger, younger, handier version of myself. Now I just hate you.
And Elaine, I take back every compliment I ever lied to you about.
And Terri Phillips. Not only does Terri make this church hum, she’s also the only straight person to have ever worked at the Walt Disney Store.
And Leah…our Staff Parish Chairwoman, I just want to say…you did an incredible job, absolutely amazing. The beauty and power of your musical gifts is exceeded only by your character and leadership and compassion and generosity and innocent humor. If you have one flaw, Leah, it’s that you can’t relate to all of us who have flaws.
According to the late Steve Allen, the “art of the comic roast lies in the speaker’s ability to hug the line of what’s appropriate and clean without going over the line.
I think we can all agree that’s a skill I have in spades.
So it’s not that I don’t have the requisite skills to roast the Rev Dr Dennis Wayne Perry, a man whose name will go down in history with names like Michael Scott, Gomer Pyle and Roscoe Peco Train.
It’s not that I don’t have the skills to ridicule our fearless figurehead.
I just don’t know if my heart is in it.
Frankly, I’m appalled at some of the things I’ve heard said about Dennis tonight. I don’t mean here. I mean backstage. Terrible, insulting, emasculating, hate-filled things that you can never take back. And that was just from his wife.
And so it’s not that I can’t roast Dennis for your sick, twisted pleasure. I just refuse to be a party to it.
I’m sorry, but someone has to draw the line. Who am I to attack Dennis Wayne Perry? I mean, I work with him. I spend nearly every day with him. I’ve known him for 20 years, and the only thing I think when I look at this man is ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’
Why would I tempt the providence of God to afflict me as he’s afflicted this man?
To reduce me to a humorless, passionless, useless husk of my former self, haunting the halls of Aldersgate Church like some walking, talking VH1 Behind the Music cautionary tale of former potential wasted.
I won’t do it.
Many of you know that the church world is littered with ministers whose success eventually went to their heads: Billy Graham, Jimmy Swaggert, that lady with the purple hair on TBN.
But not this man. I’ve worked with this man for 8 years, and I can assure you this man has never overreached. He’s never attempted to do anything that was in any way different from the last thing he did. And that kind of unchanging sameness is just so refreshing in a church.
Instead of roasting Dr Perry, we should be honoring him.
This Rev works hard for you. Any one on staff can tell you, he’s working on the same thing on Thursday that he was working on on Monday. He never gives up. He never throws in the towel even though he types like a stroke victim relearning the use of their limbs.
Dennis Perry works hard. He’s not a quitter.
Not like that quitter Pope Benedict.
Who this week announced he’s gotten to the age when his tired, broken body, diminished mental faculties and antiquated job skills meant he could no longer lead the Church. To do so, Pope Benedict said, would require everyone else to do all the work behind the scenes while he got the credit.
Quitter, I say.
But not Dennis Perry.
Dennis Perry doesn’t let his worn-out body, rapidly fading mind, and prehistoric job skills stop him from showing up to work at least a couple of hours a week to take credit for our work.
No sir, he’s not a quitter.
And instead of roasting him we should honor him. Or at least just enjoy his company tonight. Between nose jobs, vacations, holy land trips and sabbaticals, this is the first weekday Dennis has spent at church in 3 years.
We should honor him, not lampoon him.
In these hyper-partisan times, Dennis Wayne Perry is perhaps the last remaining bipartisan citizen among us.
He expresses his ‘reach across the aisle’ spirit by sharing the same hair stylist as Gov. Mitt Romney. And in his work ethic and career achievements, Dennis strives to perfectly embody Barack Obama’s famous line: ‘You didn’t build that.’
We should honor this man, not ridicule him.
Because Dennis Wayne Perry- he’s not just a great man. No sir. He’s a great boss too.
Having Dennis Perry for a boss is almost like not having a boss at all. You have the freedom to do anything. All it takes is telling Dennis Perry: ‘Remember, we talked about this two days ago.’ And Dennis will agree, pretending to remember the conversation we did not have two days ago. He’s a great boss.
I don’t know whose idea tonight was, but I don’t think we should roast Dennis. He doesn’t deserve it, and he might not be able to take it. You might not know from his superficial, shoot from the hip sermons but Dennis Wayne Perry is a sensitive guy. He’s not Andreas Barrett sensitive, but he’s a sensitive guy.
He’s been sensitive- some might say touchy- ever since his twin brother made millions by recording ‘Islands in the Stream’ and starting a successful franchise of Fried Chicken Restaurants.
So I don’t want to be a party to this spectacle of shame.
For one thing, just to be honest, I don’t know if I trust myself to roast Dennis. You might not know that I harbor some unresolved anger towards Dennis Perry. You see Dennis Perry wouldn’t perform my wedding to Ali, 10 or 12 years ago.
Dennis wouldn’t perform my wedding, which is preposterous because we all know Dennis Perry will marry anyone. He’s the Johnny Cochran of the wedding industry. From drive-by I-Do’s to Destination Nuptials, Dennis Perry will marry any biped with a faint heartbeat and a roll of quarters.
But he didn’t marry Ali and me, and, truth be told, I’ve always been a little bitter about that, and that’s why I think we should focus on praising Dennis not poking fun at him.
For example, a lot of you give me credit for my ability to use words, like foreskin, to create mental pictures that stick with you long after the sermon ends.
But we should give credit where credit is due. I’m a novice compared to Dennis. Just consider this verbal-visual gem that Dennis once served up in a word picture that sticks in the mind like genital warts: ‘One morning when my daughter was a little girl she snuck into our bed and aroused me.’
Absolutely brilliant! He said that six years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday. I might have just said something wooden and pedestrian like ‘my daughter woke me up.’ But this man, this man is a master wordsmith I can’t possibly ever hope to match.
And we should celebrate him for it not roast him.
I mean- what would a roast of Dennis even look like? Me making jokes about how old Dennis is? How lame would that be? I guess I could stand up here and joke that Dennis’ life is like a glass that’s half empty, but technically at his age the glass is 2/3 empty, and we all know that last third is always just backwash.
And yes, I know make jokes on Sundays about how Dennis is old and forgetful and lazy and complacent. But that’s just a preacher’s exaggeration.
I’ve known Dennis for 20 years. His forgetfulness and laziness and complacency have nothing to do with his age.
I knew Dennis when he was young and, other than the obvious physical and mental deterioration, he’s the same person today he was then.
The first time I met Dennis was in a worship service my mother forced me to attend when I was a teenager. I’ll never forget that sermon.
At the beginning of the sermon, Dennis had us turn to our neighbors to share something, while he tried to come up with a sermon in his head.
After we shared with our neighbors, he told us he had three points for us and asked us if we were ready. We said yes and he began to preach.
He preached for about 20 minutes and then he told us what his second point was.
That was the first time I met Dennis.
Since then, he’s been a mentor to me, a father-figure, a colleague and partner and a friend. He’s taught me most of what I know and if there’s something I don’t know it’s because he has the wisdom to let some lessons get learned on their own.
I’ve no doubt that in some part of me my desire to become a minister was also a desire to become like Dennis.
Without a father in my life, Dennis filled that role for about an hour each Sunday. We now know each other well enough to finish each other’s thoughts. After my wife, I trust him more than anyone in this world.
Without sounding too cheesy or preacherly, I should say that my relationship with God is the most important thing in my life.
And Dennis is the one responsible for that relationship and so he will always be one of the most important people in my life and that’s why I’d never, ever dream of roasting him.
1 An Atheist’s 10 Commandments
Alain de Botton, author of The Consolations of Philosophy, has this list of virtues or ‘commandments’ for those who can’t believe in the God of the more famous 10 commandments. This is a good list; in fact, in several ways this list seems a bit more practical and everyday than the list Moses brought down with him.
But de Botton’s list suffers from the same mistake as though who wish to post the Mosaic Commandments in public spaces: it’s a list of virtues stripped of any guiding narrative or interpretative community. Just as it’s not self-evident what it means to refrain from covetousness (in the case of scripture), it’s not self-evident what the practice of empathy entails. One person’s version of empathy will differ markedly from another person’s definition based upon the narrative around which they orient their lives. For Christians, after all, any definition of empathy, hope, forgiveness etc is determined and shaped by the Christ story. Because that’s our narrative we’re stuck with a 70X7, turn the other cheek notion of forgiveness.
It’s not a question of whether we will be shaped by a guiding narrative but which one we will allow to shape us. The very notion that we don’t need a controlling narrative to our lives is in fact the narrative of modernity; it’s its own story.
- Resilience: Keeping going even when things are looking dark.
- Empathy: The capacity to connect imaginatively with the sufferings and unique experiences of another person.
- Patience: We should grow calmer and more forgiving by being more realistic about how things actually happen.
- Sacrifice: We won’t ever manage to raise a family, love someone else or save the planet if we don’t keep up with the art of sacrifice.
- Politeness: Politeness is closely linked to tolerance, -the capacity to live alongside people whom one will never agree with, but at the same time, cannot avoid.
- Humour: Like anger, humour springs from disappointment, but it is disappointment optimally channelled.
- Self-awareness: To know oneself is to try not to blame others for one’s troubles and moods; to have a sense of what’s going on inside oneself, and what actually belongs to the world.
- Forgiveness: It’s recognising that living with others is not possible without excusing errors.
- Hope: Pessimism is not necessarily deep, nor optimism shallow.
- Confidence: Confidence is not arrogance – rather, it is based on a constant awareness of how short life is and how little we will ultimately lose from risking everything.
2 Jesus Farts: A Lenten/Valentine Meditation for My Wife
The incarnation is one of the primary theological convictions of the Christian faith.
We believe the Holy Spirit “overshadowed” Mary and, through her, God took flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. That’s our claim at Christmas. As St Athanasius put it, God became what we are so that we might become like God.
God became what we are. In all its dirty, unpleasant particularity. Jesus was fully human, as the Nicene Creed says. Not mostly human. Not pretty much human with all the crappy, embarrassing or difficult parts left out.
Most often we use words like incarnation or we talk about ‘God taking flesh’ without getting down to specifics about what that entailed or included. It’s like when it comes to the incarnation, there’s a subconscious part of us that screams: ‘Stop: TMI!’
The Gnostics, early Christian heretics, were the first to get squeamish about the implications of incarnation. The idea of God taking up residence in a human body just seemed unseemly once they stopped to consider all the dirty little goings on in their bodies during the average day.
Unseemly or not, the Church has always stood against Gnosticism and the various other heresies that have wanted to put an asterisk after that part of the creed ‘and became truly human.’
Like it or not, in Jesus God had a body just like yours.
Jesus may have been without sin, but he wasn’t without boogers. Jesus not only wept, you can bet your @#$ that he wiped his @#$. There aren’t any Carols about it (future undertaking?) but part of what we’re professing at Christmas is that Mary’s boy (aka: Lord of Hosts) grew up to spit,, poop and fart. He had moles on his skin, dirt on his feet and underneath his fingernails, and a smell that I’m sure his mom could recognize on his clothes. Contrary to Dan Brown, I don’t think Jesus had a thing with Mary Magdalene, but since he was fully human, you can be sure he didn’t escape puberty without a______________.
In a sense then, such things as farting are profoundly powerful theological expressions, for they convey God’s absolute solidarity with us in the incarnation. Just as water signifies the invisible grace of our justification and just as wine and broken bread signify Christ’s atoning work, so too is farting a sort of olifactory sacrament, signifying God’s absolute identification with us, TMI and all, in the incarnation.
As I tell my wife, ‘it may smell bad and be immature-according to your bourgeoise, Victorian, elitist standards- but what I smell…is the totality of salvation.’
Problem is, my wife doesn’t like it. The farting.
And that’s a problem.
Because, after all, my love for her is also supposed to be a sacrament, a visible sign of how God loves us.
And- okay it’s a bad analogy- just as Christ gave up his life out of his love for us, so too should I be willing to freely give up what I so frequently squeak out. Out of our love for her.
So this Lenten season, while other believers give up chocolate, porn, meat or drinking, I will be doing my ascetic best to give up farting.
I don’t want to puncture any images of holiness, decorum and perfection you might already have associated with me, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that I think Jesus probably had it easier in the wilderness than I will over the next 40 days.
1 Finding Jesus By Leaving The Church
Most of you are probably familiar with Fred Phelp’s Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas. Even if the name doesn’t ring a bell, the image of angry ‘Christians’ picketing funerals with signs reading ‘God hates fags’ will most certainly ring a bell. In fact, I’d wager that the evangelism dollars spent by all of Christendom over the last 10-15 years have been a waste when compared to the ubiquity of Phelp’s hate-mongering. To a huge proportion of the unchurched public, Phelp’s message and methods are Christianity.
Even though they’re not.
My first encounter with Westboro Baptist Church came when I was in seminary and Phelp’s crew was in town to picket a local Episcopal Church. Their level of anger seemed almost alien. I mean, no one’s that angry, all the time, right? Only self-righteousness could provoke such contempt.
So I was surprised to discover this story floating under the radar. Fred Phelp’s two granddaughter, Meghan and Grace Phelps, have left Westboro Baptist Church.
They’ve left the church. They’ve left the church’s teachings, They’ve left the endless schedule of protests and pickets, which they’d participated in since childhood. They’ve left their hometown. And their family.
What happened?
According to Meghan, she finally discovered how wrong her family and church had been by listening to a rabbi talk about Jesus.
It’s a great story. No, it’s a hopeful one that has the potential to be great.
This story a warning that not every church and not everything in church is holy, and it’s a reminder that God’s grace can and does come to the most unsavory of characters.
Just after 11 last Sunday morning at Old First Reformed Church in Brooklyn, the Rev. Dr. Daniel Meeter is starting the Sunday service as he always does. He runs through the opening salutation and the collect for the day, and then he welcomes everyone to church as he always does, introducing Old First “as a community of Jesus in Park Slope where we welcome people of every race, ethnicity and orientation to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.”
The congregation—some eighty strong on this sunny but cold February morning—is the usual mix of Park Slope churchgoing types: a smattering of journalists, a few artists, a handful of old ladies, some rambunctious children. But in the back row of the tin-ceilinged, wood-floored hall, there’s a visitor. It is Megan Phelps-Roper’s first time not only at Old First but also at any church not called Westboro Baptist. Yes, that Westboro Baptist, the Topeka, Kansas, congregation that has become famous (or infamous, depending on your viewpoint) for its strident views on sin (and the abundance of it in modern America), salvation (and the prospective lack of it), and sexuality (we’re bad, in far more colorful terms).
For nearly all of her twenty-seven years, Megan believed it: believed what her grandfather Fred Phelps preached from the pulpit; believed what her dad Brent and her mom Shirley taught during the family’s daily Bible studies; believed (mostly) what it said on those signs that have made Westboro disproportionately influential in American life—“God hates fags”; “God hates your idols”; “God hates America.”
Megan was the one who pioneered the use of social media at Westboro, becoming the first in her family to go on Twitter. Effervescent and effusive, she gave hundreds of interviews, charming journalists from all over the world. Organized and proactive, she, for a time, even had responsibility for keeping track of the congregation’s protest schedule. She was such a Westboro fixture that the Kansas City Star touted her—improbably, as it turns out, because a woman could never have such a role at the church—as a future leader of the congregation.
Then, in November, she left.
I first met Megan in the summer of 2011, when I went to Topeka to spend a few days with the Westboro folks for my book project. During that visit, we talked about faith, we talked about church, we talked about marriage (and Megan’s feeling that, given the prospects, it would require no small amount of divine intervention in her case), and we talked about Harry Potter (for the record, she’s a fan). She seemed so sure in her beliefs, that I could not have imagined that some fifteen months later, we’d be having a conversation in which she tearfully told me that she was no longer with her family or with the church.
Mostly, the tears have subsided—“in public, anyway,” she says one afternoon, as we sit in a Tribeca café. “I still cry a lot.” Forget what you know of the church. Just imagine what it is like to walk away from everything you have ever known. Consider how traumatic it would be to know that your family is never supposed to speak to you again. Think of how hard it would be to have a fortress of faith built around you, and to have to dismantle it yourself, brick by brick, examining each one and deciding whether there’s something worth keeping or whether it’s not as solid as you thought it was.
As we talk, Megan repeatedly emphasizes how much she loves those she has left behind. “I don’t want to hurt them,” she says. “I don’t want to hurt them.”
Her departure has hurt them already—she knew it would—yet there was no way she could stay. “My doubts started with a conversation I had with David Abitbol,” she says. Megan met David, an Israeli web developer who’s part of the team behind the blog Jewlicious, on Twitter. “I would ask him questions about Judaism, and he would ask me questions about church doctrine. One day, he asked a specific question about one of our signs—‘Death Penalty for Fags’—and I was arguing for the church’s position, that it was a Levitical punishment and as completely appropriate now as it was then. He said, ‘But Jesus said’—and I thought it was funny he was quoting Jesus—‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ And then he connected it to another member of the church who had done something that, according to the Old Testament, was also punishable by death. I realized that if the death penalty was instituted for any sin, you completely cut off the opportunity to repent. And that’s what Jesus was talking about.”
To some, this story might seem simple—even overly so. But we all have moments of epiphany, when things that are plate-glass clear to others but opaque to us suddenly become apparent. This was, for Megan, one of those moments, and this window led to another and another and another. Over the subsequent weeks and months, “I tried to put it aside. I decided I wasn’t going to hold that sign, ‘Death Penalty for Fags.’” (She had, for the most part, preferred the gentler, much less offensive “Mourn for Your Sins” or “God Hates Your Idols” anyway.)
What “seemed like a small thing at the time,” she says, snowballed. She started to question another Westboro sign, “Fags can’t repent.” “It seemed misleading and dishonest. Anybody can repent if God gives them repentance, according to the church. But this one thing—it gives the impression that homosexuality is an unforgivable sin,” she says. “It didn’t make sense. It seemed a wrong message for us to be sending. It’s like saying, ‘You’re doomed! Bye!’ and gives no hope for salvation.”
She kept trying to conquer the doubts. Westboro teaches that one cannot trust his or her feelings. They’re unreliable. Human nature “is inherently sinful and inherently completely sinful,” Megan explains. “All that’s trustworthy is the Bible. And if you have a feeling or a thought that’s against the church’s interpretations of the Bible, then it’s a feeling or a thought against God himself.”
This, of course, assumes that the church’s teachings and God’s feelings are one and the same. And this, of course, assumes that the church’s interpretation of the Bible is infallible, that this much-debated document handed down over the centuries has, in 2013, been processed and understood correctly only by a small band of believers in Topeka. “Now?” Megan says. “That sounds crazy to me.”
In December, she went to a public library in Lawrence, Kansas. She was looking through books on philosophy and religion, and it struck her that people had devoted their entire lives to studying these questions of how to live and what is right and wrong. “The idea that only WBC hadthe right answer seemed crazy,” she says. “It just seemed impossible.”
The act of leaving Westboro is as weird as the church itself. Sometimes it’s described as a shunning process, but that’s not entirely apt. It is, in the eyes of the remaining members, a sort of death, but it’s a gentle one, because the carcass isn’t just dumped or ignored. One church member, who has lost two of his kids to the outside world, told me that he still loved them and that he set them up as best they could with what they’d need to start their new lives—some money, some household goods, even a car.
Megan didn’t leave alone; her sister Grace decided to go with her. They stayed just one night in Topeka. Then, after returning to their family home to retrieve some things they’d not packed the night before—“it was so weird and horrible to ring the doorbell,” Megan says—they left town.
They decided to disappear for a while, and found rooms in a house in a tiny Midwestern town. They needed space—to think, to read, to imagine what had previously been unimaginable. Their lives had largely been scripted, and “now that we’re writing our own script, everything seems a lot more tenuous,” Megan says. “We needed to think about what we believe. We need to figure out what we want to do next. I never imagined leaving, ever, so I never thought about doing anything different. I have no idea what kind of work I want to do, or where to live. How do people decide these things?”
Once a constant Tweeter, she hasn’t posted anything online since October. “I don’t know what I believe, so I don’t know what to say,” she explains. “I haven’t been ready to talk about any of this.” She’s only doing so now, and briefly, because, she says, “I was so proactive before and vocal about the church. My name means something now to others that it doesn’t mean to me. I want people to know that it’s not now how it was.”
But how is it going to be? She’s still not sure. They’ve been trying new things; one of their housemates made sushi one night, the first time Megan tasted raw fish (“yum!”). They read a lot—“I liked ‘The Sun Also Rises.’ There was a quote that was perfect for where we were: ‘Wonderful how one loses track of the days up here in the mountains.’ And you know what else I loved about it? I could be completely mistaken about what the book means, but where the book began and where it ended was the same. It makes your problems seem like small things. It gives you perspective—well, it gave me perspective, that my problems in the grand scheme of things are not as horrible or monstrous as they seem.” They talk to each other for hours each day, about religion, about God, about the Bible, about the future, about how to treat people, about “what’s right and what’s wrong—capital R and capital W.”
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4 Top Ten Things About Being A Pastor: #1
Okay, so some of you give me crap about always being snarky, sarcastic and cynical. So, I thought I’d do a decidedly uncynical series of posts: Top Ten Things About Being A Pastor.
#1: Grace Happens
Before I graduated from Princeton, Dr Robert Dyksta, my theological Jedi master, lamented that I was about to serve in a denomination whose system of appointing pastors ‘contradicts everything we know about psychology.’
I asked what he meant and he replied by explaining how it’s a given that people in congregations wear masks, keep up pretenses and are reluctant to let others see what’s behind the curtain of the self they show others.
He then offered me this wisdom: ‘If you’re going to stay a Methodist, then you should tell your bishop you’ll serve wherever they send you so long as they’re willing to leave you there for at least seven years. It takes that long for people to reveal who they are behind their masks, warts and all.’
In other words, it takes time and patience to see notice grace at work in people’s lives.
But seen it I have and that, by a long shot and then some, is the best thing about ministry.
I could tell you about the woman whom I’ve known these past 7 1/2 years, who seems a completely different person these last few years than the one I knew the previous years. To be honest, our relationship back then was often marked by mutual frustration. Today I think of her as something of a cross between a friend and a surrogate grandmother. What accounts for the change in her? She credits it with a spiritual discipline she started practicing a couple of years ago, intentionally praying the shema every day and daily committing herself to loving Christ and through him, others.
Grace has changed her.
Maybe that doesn’t strike you as a Road to Damascus type of story but it’s real and it’s just one example of many I could give.
I could tell you about the woman who, having been cared for tenderly by a black nurse, at the end of her life confessed and repented of her racism.
I could tell you about husbands and wives who, after much painful work, have forgiven one another of adultery, abuse, addiction. You name it.
I could tell you about prodigals who’ve come home, mothers and fathers who’ve worked at welcoming them and elder brothers who’ve looked themselves in the mirror to finally confront the nasty self-righteousness in them.
I could tell you about people who’ve come to faith by dirtying their hands serving the poor, and I can tell you about individuals who’ve given over hundreds of thousands of dollars for the poor because God Christ has been generous to them.
I could tell you about people who’ve lost a child.
And lost their faith.
And found it again.
Even then I’d only be scratching the surface of what I could tell you.
Not only was Dr Dykstra right. His point has turned out to be the best thing about being a pastor. If you give it time, you get to see.
I can’t prove God exists, and there are those dark days and dark moods when I wrestle with my doubts and fear I’ve given my life to a fool’s errand.
But what I can prove, what I can point to and say ‘See, there it is,’ what I know without ever a day of doubt, is that grace is real.
It happens.
0 The Boy Scouts’ Policy, Culture and Emergence Christianity
In 2005, Matthew Fox, a disaffected Dominican, posted his own, new 95 Theses on the church door in Wittenburg, Germany- the same door Martin Luther famously nailed 95 Theses of his own, an act of defiance against Mother Church which supposedly ignited the Protestant Reformation.
Casting himself in Luther’s role (talk about self-important ego), Fox declared that it was time for ‘a New Reformation.’
And then with his theses in the church door and the media’s eye upon him…
Nothing happened.
In fact, unless you have a remarkable memory for minor, two-bit media stories, the only Matthew Fox you’ve ever heard of is the dude who played Jack, the hero in Lost.
This is my point. Christians, Protestants at least, imagine the Protestant Reformation happened in a vacuum. We have an Idealist assumption that Great Men and/or Great Ideas change the tide of history. And so, Luther, armed with hammer, nail and his individual conscience made the world something it would not have been without him.
But, as anyone who didn’t sleep through every minute of AP European History in high school knows, that just isn’t the case. The Protestant story was but one component of a much larger cultural shift.
The Reformation wasn’t sparked by Luther’s 95 Theses; Luther’s Theses were a product of the cultural phenomenon of reformation.
During this same period, Western Europe experienced massive political change as it transitioned from feudalism to nation-states. That shift was occasioned by the rise of a new economic system, mercantilism, which was made possible by vastly more efficient means of travel. The period we call ‘the Reformation’ with our in-house church lingo was actually the first Information Age, sparked by the advent of the printing press. What was happening in the church was only a small part of what was happening culturally.
Rather than Luther changing the tide of history, as Protestants like to imagine, Luther was swept up by the tide of history, taking the shifts and discoveries of the culture and applying them to his religious context.
What’s this have to do with Emergence Christianity? Or the Boys Scouts’ policy on homosexuality?
Last week, in response to a post I wrote about the Boy Scouts’ possible change in policy, in which I noted that the culture is rapidly moving away from the Church and BSA on this issue, a friend pushed back that perhaps the Church should be wary of accommodating to the culture.
I understand that caution. As a post-liberal, I have an affinity for the argument that the Church should be a distinct, alternative to the culture. And yet, I think that profoundly misunderstands (or at least misstates) how culture functions.
Culture isn’t an ‘other’ to which the Church or Christians can determine to be set apart from or independent of. It doesn’t work that way, even if we wish it did. As James Davidson Hunter puts it, culture is a thick web of structures and networks that shape all of us. It’s unavoidable. You can’t retreat from culture or out of culture; you can only contribute more culture.
So, when it comes to issues like the BSA’s looming decision, we can talk about how the Church should be an alternative to the culture and not accommodate changing trends but to do so is to live in a fantasy world. ‘Church’ isn’t an institution. It’s a movement of people and, like it or not, those people have been shaped as much- if not more- by the culture of Will and Grace as they have been by the culture of traditional (whatever that really is in the end) Christianity.
We can’t pretend to be independent of and an alternative to culture. We can only contribute more culture (Christian culture) and choose the spots, topics, issues and idols from which we call people to repentance. And, as I mentioned in a previous post, I personally don’t see homosexuality as the most urgent Kingdom witness Christians can offer our culture.
And that brings me to Emergence Christianity.
In case you’ve been living in a cave (or just aren’t a pastor or youth director) Emergence Christianity names a movement/trend/shift in the traditional Church as it reacts to postmodernity. As with the seismic cultural shift that marked the Reformation, Emergence Christians see postmodernity as an analogous paradigm shift that’s only just begun and will be long-lasting.
In mainline seminaries all across the country, in typical late-to-the-party fashion professors are breathlessly trying to inculcate future pastors in the “techniques” and “aesthetic sensibilities” of Emergence. But rendering Emergence Christianity into a technique that can be taught, I think is a mistake akin to crediting Luther the author of what we call the Reformation.
The real offering Emergence Christianity has made the larger Church isn’t in techniques, aesthetics, fads or rebellious counter-theology.
It’s in their recognition that the Church finds herself in a new cultural situation. As was so with Luther, our challenge is to determine how best to incarnate the Gospel in our time and place.