Thanksgiving Reconciliation: Coming Together at the Table

Thanksgiving Reconciliation: Coming to the Table - on family holidays in hard times - read on KateRaeDavis.com

Thanksgiving, as we recognize it today, was invented in hopes of preventing the war that we now refer to as the American Civil War.

The hope was that pulling together family around a table to appreciate one another would keep families together. That one really good meal focused on our gratitude and abundance would help mend differences. That war could be avoided.

Obviously, that it didn’t work.

Still, I think this is the history we should be telling about Thanksgiving this year. It’s a tradition on which we can build.

I don’t know what the table conversations were like in the year 1860. Did matriarchs, in hopes of keeping their sons alive, guide the conversation to each party’s investment in the policies and issues of the national debates? Or did they, like the matriarchs in my home, firmly guide the conversation back to the weather or the game when anything political began to surface?

Regardless of how we, as a people, have answered this question in the past, I know one thing to be true: Gathering around a table isn’t enough on its own. The meal alone doesn’t change hearts or minds. We can eat together and be at each other’s throats, even in the same moment.

I’m considering myself lucky that I chose Christmas to be my holiday with family this year. It gives me just a little more time to prepare myself. And it gives me an opportunity to celebrate the community I’ve found here.

But I also wonder if I’m losing out on an opportunity for reconciliation. My “friendsgiving” group is diverse in many ways, but not politically.

I live in Seattle, a notoriously liberal city. It stands to reason, both by location and by personal preference, that the majority of my friends are highly educated bleeding heart liberals. We grieve this election. We lament the racist systems of our nation, and the white supremacy that is becoming more evident and more powerful.

It might be possible that our humanity is no better and no worse than the white supremacists.

Which is hard to admit, but here’s the thing: White supremacists think they’re better than people of color, for whatever string of reasons. I think I’m better than white supremacists, because I’m more understanding and empathetic and aware of the impact of historical oppression on present systems and aware of my own privilege in those systems.

As long as we’re thinking we’re better than anyone, we’re standing on separate hills shouting, “God, I thank you that I am not like them.” All that’s different is how we define the them. “God, I thank you that I am not like the welfare queens and the homos and thugs.” “God, I thank you that I am not like the ignorant and the hicks and the hateful.”

Perhaps we could stand side by side as we pray, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner, consumed by hatred.”

The familial holiday table a hard place to be in, as a white woman. If I bring up politics, I betray my family. I betray our (not entirely unspoken) agreement to not acknowledge our differences. I betray my role in the family as a peacekeeper. I betray my role as a woman, which requires me to vigilantly maintain relationships.

And yet, if I’m loyal to my family, I betray my black and latino and asian-american friends. I become complicit in their oppression by not working for reconciliation, by not entering into uncomfortable conversations that might lead to new understandings.

The question isn’t if I will betray, or when. The question is who I am choosing to betray in each moment.

I’m hoping to be able to find a way to honor both my family and my friends.

If I can be curious about my family’s understanding, curious about their circumstances, perhaps I’ll be able to understand them. Perhaps my curiosity will spark their own. Perhaps I can listen deeply enough to understand their vote and their viewpoint, to be able to imagine a life that would lead to that understanding.

Perhaps my openness to their experiences will help them relax enough to be open to mine.

And if it doesn’t, perhaps I can be mature enough to deepen the relationship until they are.

I don’t have any delusions that reconciliation across my family will mend the national political conversation. But if enough of us did it, couldn’t it be the start of something wondrous?

As a child, my teachers and family pretended that Thanksgiving was about pilgrims and native peoples making friends. The story is problematic in lots of ways, though perhaps we can use it to practice ways of tolerating complex people in desperate times. Perhaps there’s a way to tell the story that acknowledges that hatred was born of fear, that fear was born of lack of understanding and lack of compassion and lack of imagination in desperate times. That’s a story that feels relevant.

This year, I’m telling the story of the modern Thanksgiving that was born out of the desire to reconcile before our nation was torn asunder. In our era, the table feels like an equally important gathering place. Our geopolitical lines are not drawn so neatly; it is every many cities versus their surrounding countryside, each state’s urban areas versus their rural neighbors. We must find a way to meet at common tables. Change for the nation will only occur through conversations founded on compassionate conversations that go both ways, in the context of meaningful relationships.

In our capitalist society, we readily see “coming to the table” as a metaphor for negotiation.

As a Christian, I am weekly formed to see the table as a place of reconciliation. A place in which bread is freely offered, with nothing asked in return. If I am metabolized into the body of that bread, perhaps I can freely offer my ears and willingness to understand without asking to be understood in return.

I’m not sure I’m strong enough for it. I’m not sure what other options I have.

God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

October 4, 2016October 4, 2016

Unbearable Expectations in “American Housewife”

Review of Helen Ellis's American Housewife - read on KateRaeDavis.com

What does being a wife mean? How does the role of wife impact a woman’s identity?

These are the core questions we address in a bi-monthly in a project called Literary Wives. We read novels with an eye on what they have to add to our understanding of what it means to be a wife and a woman.

Our most recent pick: American Housewife: Stories by Helen Ellis. Check out other thoughts and reviews on the same novel from Literary Wives bloggers! You can find them all through the Literary Wives page.

American Housewife is a despair-filled look at how USAmerican society defines success for women today.

The collection could have easily been called American Woman. The emphasis in the title on “housewife” highlights what her characters reveal again and again: our narrative for the peak of success for a woman in America is to become a housewife.

In one story, “How to Be a Patron of the Arts,” the best friend of a would-be writer tells her “Madam, you are a lady of the house. You are a woman of leisure. That is all anyone in their right mind wants to be.” The statement is silently in the foreground of every story in the work.

“A woman of leisure.” Her time is her own, to do with as she wishes. She is not concerned with rent bills or obtaining food; everything is easily purchasable, with her husband’s paycheck. Her time is entirely her own, to pursue whatever she most desires.

So why are the women of leisure in these stories so discontent?

The answer, as each story adds its own layers to the themes, is complex.

It has something to do with the complete lack of spirit for the options presented women, while also acknowledging the burdensome expectations placed upon them. There’s a component of the soul-sucking nature of being treated primarily as a consumer. And of unfulfilling relationships. And of hitting hard against the limitations of the “women can have it all” myth.

It’s about the lack of desire, options, connections, anything that would provide a meaningful structure to a life.

Ellis’s tone reflects this perfectly. She has a kind of “better to laugh than cry” style, a humor that just thinly blankets the depths of despair.

A thread that runs throughout many of the stories is the failure to obtain “having it all.” You know the “have it all” myth — it’s the one that says you (must be!) the loving wife, the warm homemaker, the caring mother, the successful careerist / brilliant artist, and fit into your jeans from college.

The stories highlight the unrealistic, unattainable nature of this myth. Meeting the high bar of society’s standards of even one component of the “have it all” life is, as her characters reveal, so totally time-consuming as it would be at the expense of all other things.

Ellis sprinkles her stories with women who think they can have it all — only to find out that they delayed having children too long. Or that they aren’t as fulfilled by housewifery as they thought they’d be. Or that they’ve given up their job to pursue their passion, only to find that they self-sabotage their passion for the purpose of maintaining the social image on behalf of the husband, out of gratitude (clean house, social connection maintenance). For one character, trying to pursue just two aspects of the “have it all” life — writing and being the loving wife — results in a merely superficial engagement of both.

The final story has this real-life metaphor of a line: “When ladies try to be perfect, their periods stop.” The perfection of society’s expectations of wifeliness sabotages the possibility of motherhood.

I want to focus on two of the pieces that succinctly express the unbearable demands our society places on women.

“What I Do All Day” and “How to Be a Grown-Ass Lady” epitomize Ellis’s answer to the discontent of womanhood in married USAmerica.

“What I Do All Day” is a narrative of (what the reader can imagine) is a pretty standard day in the life of the titular American housewife, in all its full mundane meaningless absurdity.

It’s startling to realize what a large portion of her day is consumer-driven. Most of her daytime interactions are with inanimate objects (“I berate the pickle jar…I level picture frames”). The automaton narration of the day indicates that there is no joy, no pleasure to be found in the cooking, cleaning, rearranging. It is simply what one days; the fulfillment of a wifely role.

Her emotions are at once entirely relatable, but when written on paper, in a format we normally encounter narrative and adventure, it highlights how silly and inconsequential the fears really are (“I break into a sweat when I find a Sharpie cap, but not the pen”).

A tragic paragraph focuses on her self-image, on the expectations society places on women that are entirely unattainable. She ends the paragraph with, “I drown my sorrows with Chanel No 5” — a body image problem created by society’s consumer-orientation (seeing women’s bodies as objects for the purpose of visually consumption for male pleasure), and also solved by it (with the right product).

Relationally, she is equally without joy. At a party, she feigns interest for the appearance of connection. The one-liners she shares with us, the readers, are without context. That is, they’re without connection to anything that might lend meaning. We feel that the delivery conveys how the relationships feel to her — without connection that might lend meaning.

There are two lines that convey, at once, the depth of emotion and also some level of realization at how foolish and shallow the provocateurs of emotion are. Early on she tells us: “I weep because I am lucky enough to have a drawer just for glitter.” She’s aware of the absurdity of her immense wealth and privilege, even as she has no actionable outlet for it.

And then the final line of the story: “I think I couldn’t love my husband more, and then he vacuums all the glitter.”

“How to Be a Grown-Ass Lady” is an orderless list of commands that outlines the expectations of modern adult women.

Part of me wants to call it absurdist, but it’s so spot-on — I personally recognize these expectations on my adult female being — that perhaps it’s better called hyper-realist.

It covers health, relationships, charity, age-appropriate behavior, listing all these tidbits with the same monotonous tone that conveys everything is of equal importance — which is next to none.

Much of it, of course, is body-image-focused: “Wear sunscreen…don’t bite your cuticles.”

This runs in with the consumer-oriented maintenance that society expects (nearly demands) of women: “Go to the mall for your Clinique bonus gift. .. Get refitted for bras on your birthday.”

According to the demands, we mediate relationship through the purchasable, the consumable: “If your husband wants a bigger TV, for heaven’s sake let him have it”). Or, we must sidestep relationship from being too genuine:”If you don’t like something someone says, say: ‘That’s interesting.’ If you like something someone says, say: ‘That’s interesting!'”

Even charitable giving — historically a source of meaning-making for American housewives — becomes simply a task that one completes to be a grown-ass lady; becomes simply part of the role: “When St Jude’s mails you personalized address labels and asks for a forty-five-dollar donation, write them a check.”

So, what does all this have to say about being a wife?

Soul-sucking monotony. Crushing societal expectation. Dehumanizing consumerism.

Ellis writes, “Marriage is a soft place full of three-thousand-dollar couches and twenty-eight-dollar bottles of wine.” Marriage is defined in terms of what you purchase, is a place of comfort (couches) and numbness (wine).

The last sentence of the last story reveals what I hear the entire collection hinting towards. In the wake of a novel being published, a dramatic attempt at being “good enough,” a woman is in her home “listening for the yellow wall phone to ring.”

Given the modernity of the work (who uses landlines anymore?) and the unusual syntax (“wall phone”?), I have to imagine this is an allusion to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In it, a woman suffering postpartum depression is driven mad by the bedrest the doctor prescribes, and her husband enforces, to cure the depression.

In both stories: after achieving what society demands of us (a marketable work; a child), we’re driven mad by the very thing that society orders us to do.

This book came to me at the right time of my life.

As I discern which directions to advance my career and whether to, erm, advance my family or not, I’m in the midst of sorting out how many roles I can successfully balance (priest, professor, writer, mother…) without going mad myself.

I’d recommend Ellis’s work for anyone in a similar stage of life, or just generally despairing over the difficulty and inability to have it all, do it all, be it all. She’s the friend who will remind you that you’re not alone, that you’re not the one who’s crazy (it’s our society that is), and hopefully help you laugh — or at least wryly smile — at the impossible expectations.

Don’t forget to check out other thoughts and reviews on the same novel from Literary Wives bloggers! You can find them all through the Literary Wives page.

September 27, 2016September 25, 2016

The Spirit of Tradition: The Role of Scripture in Our Lives

A rich man eats a feast while a poor man starves.

It’s a familiar story.

It was a familiar story when Jesus told it two millennia ago, and it’s still a familiar story now.

It’s what comes after that story that makes Jesus’s telling of it remarkable. Jesus uses that everyday story as a background to launch into the story about the conversation he imagines the rich man having with Abraham, the father of the Jewish faith, the one through whom “all the nations on the earth will be blessed.”

And Jesus imagines them having a conversation about the role of scripture in our lives.

The rich man cries out, “Father Abraham, send Lazarus with some water, I’m in agony.”

And Abraham reasons with him, “Remember that in your lifetime you received many good things,” and then goes on to point out, “there’s this chasm between us,” like, I can’t really do anything for you here.

The rich man seems to accept that — he doesn’t argue.

But he does make another request (well, more like a demand) of Abraham, on behalf of his family. “Send Lazarus to my house so that he might warn them.”

And Abraham replies, “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.”

“Moses and the prophets” is a longhand way of saying scripture, but it’s also more evocative than that.

According to rabbinic tradition, Moses wrote the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. To say “They have Moses” conjures the histories and laws contained in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

To say “They have Moses” would evoke the entirety of the laws, which covers many aspects of life — what you do and don’t do on a Sunday, the clothes you wear, how you grow your food, which food you eat, and who you eat with.

More deeply, more centrally than the law, to say “They have Moses” evokes the central narrative of Jewish identity found in the Exodus story.

The Exodus story is about Abraham’s descendents, a few generations on. They are enslaved, exploited, oppressed by the world superpower of the day. They had nothing. And God calls Moses to lead them to freedom, to search for a home, to restore them to their original purpose as God’s people — to bless all the nations of the earth.

To say “Moses” encompasses both story and law, together, because of course they’re intimately connected. It’s been suggested that many of the laws found in Torah would have been for better health of a nomadic people at that time. The law came from and was designed to fit their circumstances. And when those laws first came, they were new ways of living.

Abraham says to the rich man, “They have Moses and the prophets.”

The books of the prophets make up much of the rest of Hebrew scripture.

Each prophet has different emphases, various points they want to highlight, but they all share the task of calling God’s people back to their identity as God’s people. They all call God’s people back to being a blessing to all nations of the earth.

The prophets called people to live into that identity in ways that matched their new context, even when that context was horrific, even when it felt unbearable.

Some prophets spoke when the Jewish people were oppressed or exiled, offering hope or reminding them to continue to be a blessing to others — even their oppressors.

Some prophets, like Amos (whose words the lectionary places alongside the story of the rich man and Lazarus), wrote at a time of relative peace and prosperity, but noted the neglect of God’s laws. Amos says, “Alas for those who lounge on their couches, and eat lambs and calves.” It seems that luxurious opulence and neglect go hand in hand.

Psalm 146 (again, chosen to go along with these texts from the lectionary), succinctly encompasses many of the themes from Moses and the prophets.

The psalm begins and ends with “Praise the Lord.”

The middle verses expand on what it looks like to praise the lord: “Do not put your trust in the political powers, in mortals, in whom there is no help; happy are those whose hope is in the Lord their God.”

It goes on to describe the character of this God by listing the people that God shows concern for: the oppressed, the hungry, prisoners, the blind, those who are bowed down, the righteous, the strangers, the orphans, and the widow.

This is not Time Magazine’s list of the most influential people.

These are not the kind of people you want to aligning yourself with if you want wealth or political influence or military power.

Yet they’re the ones that God has chosen to be God’s people, to go and bless all the nations of the earth. People who are on the bottom of the power chain. People with massive amounts of debt. People who had broken laws or rebelled against the empire. People burdened by disability and disease. People without even the most fundamental markers of social status of family or nation: immigrants, refugees, foster kids.

Abraham tells the rich man, “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.”

And the rich man — who quietly accepted his fate of flames without a drop of water — the rich man says, “No, father Abraham.”

The rich man says that this wealth of scripture isn’t enough.

And you know, he kind of has a point.

Perhaps the rich man followed the law, did everything by the book. He wore the right clothes, he ate the right things, he didn’t work on the sabbath, he gave 10% of his income to his religious institution — perhaps he did everything “right.” He followed the law to the letter.

And then he ends up in the flames of Hades.

The laws of “Moses and the prophets” weren’t enough.

Perhaps what he was missing isn’t obedience to law. Perhaps his error wasn’t a failure to follow the law.

Perhaps what he was missing is the spirit of those laws.

His error was in misunderstanding the purpose of the law.

The law is not a checklist to get to heaven; it’s an aid to help guide us into loving God and neighbor.

Abraham, notably, didn’t have Moses and the prophets; he didn’t have law to follow at all.

All he had was a God who called him to unbelievable tasks. He followed God’s call in ways that were new for his time. For instance, God told Abraham to circumcise himself and all the men in his household. This was a new idea that Abraham followed — and it became a central marker of Jewish tradition.

And Abraham mentions his descendent Moses, who also had no law.

He, too, did his best to follow the demands of a foolish God — a God who sent him into the center of world power with nothing but a long stick. Moses didn’t have a law to follow. He wrote the law, wrote the best practices for living as they travelled through the desert. And those laws became central markers of Jewish tradition.

And the prophets took those laws and applied them to new contexts, in new ways. The prophets followed the spirit, and utilized the law as a way to help a people follow the spirit.

Because, as C Wess Daniels writes, the point of a faith community, “the point of the church is not to be faithful to tradition at all costs. The point of the church is to be faithful to the eternal spirit within the tradition, which is also at work in the world.”

In his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus confronts the idea that following the law is enough.

Jesus invites us to live into the spirit of the law.

He heals on the sabbath. He eats with the most despised people in town. He tells stories and performs miracles in ways that reframe the law as not just a set of rules to follow, but as a way of living that recognizes and loves the ones that the empire has forgotten, ignored, or oppressed.

And in doing so, he again changed the tradition.

Each Sunday, we share bread and cup at Jesus’s table. We do this not because Jesus commands it, not as a checklist on the way to Abraham’s side in heaven. We come to the table to be fed. We come to remember that Jesus feeds everyone. We come to remember that spirit is with us and spirit is for us.

May our traditions guide us in our understanding and experience of the eternal, and push us out into the world — where spirit can meet us, and transform us, yet again.

Originally preached at St Luke’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, WA, on Sept 25, 2016.

In the comments…

What rhythms or rituals do you observe out of habit that no longer have meaningful significance?

Where do you hear invitations to participate with the spirit in the world?

September 20, 2016September 17, 2016

Reflections on A Convergent Model of Renewal

Reflections on C Wess Daniel's "A Convergent Model of Renewal" - read on KateRaeDavis.com

There have been moments when I’ve been in church and my mind drifts from the creed I’m reciting or from the hymn that I’m singing and wonders, of its own accord: What am I doing here? What are WE doing here??

Couldn’t this building be used for better purposes? Couldn’t we all be doing something to improve the community with this hour? What does this hour have anything to do with the rest of my life?

And what is it that keeps me coming back to church?

These are moments in which I’m participating in tradition, but the tradition isn’t connecting to my context.

In language that C Wess Daniels, author of A Convergent Model of Renewal, would use: those questions appear when my community is being conservative to the tradition without being emergent to the context.

I imagine my parents experienced the other side of the spectrum when they visited my college church. I think they were wondering what anything they were seeing had to do with the Christian tradition they knew. It was, perhaps, emergent without being conservative. Contextualized in the culture, but lacking tradition.

It is into these dilemmas that Daniels offers a model of what he calls convergence. He defines convergence as “the interplay between a group being conservative—to the tradition—and emergent—within context.”

Faith communities that are convergent are dedicated to building on the existing tradition in a way that applies that tradition to the current context. It’s a tradition that goes beyond the one-hour service and into the community’s life, goes beyond the walls of the church and into the neighborhood.

Tradition is everything that has shaped an existing community. It includes practices, values, and relationships. It tells you where to sit and when to stand. Tradition is inescapable. Daniels writes specifically of the Quaker tradition, but the same is true for every denomination and faith community. Even for a brand-new church plant, the tradition of the community is embedded in the individuals making up the community. If a church plant is comprised of recovering evangelicals and lapsed Roman Catholics, that will shape the community’s practices and values.

In A Convergent Model of Renewal, Daniels honors the importance of tradition while acknowledging that conflicts arise between a tradition and its application in the ever-changing context of culture.

Too often, churches cling to tradition and shun any new knowledge, wisdom, or information. Churches become champions of tradition at the cost of their relevance. It’s exactly what we see in the Christian-vs-secular so-called “culture wars.”

On the other end of kneejerk responses, tradition is abandoned altogether. In contemporary USAmerica, I think we see this in the rise of the “spiritual nones” (atheists and agnostics), the “spiritual but not religious,” and the “spiritual dones” (professed Christ-followers who don’t participate in a tradition).

Both the traditionalist/anti-secular and the anti-traditionalist/emergent responses are somewhere between inadequate and nonsensical.

Daniels is fighting a hard battle on two fronts.

Traditionalists and relevance-seekers are so often entrenched in this either/or mindset that they’re hardly on speaking terms with one another — and Daniels is adamant that we need both. And not just that we need both camps to exist, we need them to actually become one camp that works together, appreciates one another, even learns from one another.

Daniels argues that when conflicts arise between tradition and context, what’s needed is a transformative convergence that holds both tradition and culture together.

From the tradition side, Daniels gives models of contextual theology (Ch2) with understanding that all theology is contextual. From the emergent culture side, he discusses ways that people actively participate in culture (Ch3). He illustrates why it is not a worthwhile cause to combat culture or tradition, arguing that the two are better together, and that we can arrive at that ideal through remix. “Remix shows tradition and innovation working together to create something new.” As I’ve written before, I strongly believe that Jesus lived this way and wanted us to follow him as remix masters.

I write on the ways Christians use remix in art and ritual. But Daniels looks at the life of the community as the center for and product of remix. For him, remix occurs in the full life of services and relationships and daily living. He argues that the remix isn’t only in the art we produce but in who we are and how we live — together.

And this is why I find his work courageous.

The traditionalists don’t want anything transformed: change from the nostalgia-tinted past is what got us into this secular mess in the first place. At its extreme, traditionalists would prefer to do away with “secular” culture entirely and stick to tradition as they understand it.

And the emergents don’t want anything to do with tradition: it’s tradition that has messy hierarchies, obsolete beliefs, and irrelevant practices. At its extreme, emergents would prefer to do away with tradition entirely and create something new, without all the problems of the past.

These two camps rarely come together for religious discourse.

Of course, when we try to live in either of these extremes, things seem to only get worse.

The Puritans, for example, came to America hoping to build their infamous City on a Hill. It clearly didn’t work out as well as they hoped, largely, I would assert, because they didn’t think through the ways that culture is inescapable. As long as they’re alive, they’ll need to eat and to manufacture and to relate – all these messy things that make up a (ahem) culture.

Throwing away tradition to make something “without all the problems” is equally laughable. How many church plants have tried to make a denomination without the hierarchy and politics and rigid rule- and belief-systems of their parents’ churches, only to find they had replicated the same structures? I won’t name names.

Personally, I’ve tried to choose is something in the middle of these extreme approaches (although I’ll admit I’m sometimes tempted by the emergent side). It wasn’t an option for me to stay in the faith tradition I was raised in, so I did leave. But it wasn’t an anti-tradition move, it was an anti-that-tradition move. In the Episcopal Church, I found a tradition that is more suitable to convergence. It’s this tradition to which I’ve committed myself, knowing that I will work within it to modify and advance it for our current time. And knowing that I’ll have to teach future generations to do the same for their times.

Daniels writes about the importance of committing to a tradition and the culture at once.

He encourages people to become adherents to their tradition in order to create change within it. Adherents experience the conflict between church and context, but rather than entrench themselves on one side of the fence, they work to dismantle the fence.

Adherents develop self-awareness of problems with the current church and – rather than denying or running from those problems – they look to their tradition to overcome the crisis. The tradition, for adherents, holds both the problem and the solution. The solution is in the own tradition’s ideas and practices that are simply applied in different ways, or perhaps applied for the first time in centuries, in order to accommodate the different context.

Adherents step into the complexity of conflict in order to resolve it.

Adherents don’t hate tradition, and they don’t fear change.

To some extent, they must embrace both tradition and change in order to be mission-oriented. Daniel writes that “missiology reminds the church that essential to its very ecclesiology is to be in dialogue with cultural forces, looking for where God is already at work within the world.”

“Renewal must come from the insiders of the movement.”

The point that cannot be overemphasized. When people “leave the church to follow Jesus,” they’re claiming — often against their spoken belief — that following Jesus is an entirely individual activity that has no need for community.

But renewal of the church comes from “the very practitioners who have devoted themselves as apprentices to its texts, virtues and practices.” Not by leaving those traditions to prove how messed up it is.

Daniels’s work is valuable not only because he offers hope that this is possible, but he actually explains different ways that it’s done.

And what’s more than the concepts alone is that Daniels shows us how it’s done.

The subtitle of the book is “Remixing the Quaker Tradition in a Participatory Culture,” but the ideas and its application are much wider than the Quaker tradition alone. If you’re not Quaker, the book is still immensely useful. Consider the portions on Quakerism as a case study for the work to be done in any faith tradition. Chapters 5 and 6 go more deeply into Quaker history and identity than I found useful, but they do provide a framework for how these concepts are discerned and embodied in a real world setting. The concepts are what’s key; the Quakerism chapters simply show how the concepts play out when applied.

Well, that’s way more thoughts than I normally give in a review. I tried to give a thorough overview of his concepts because I’m aware that this work isn’t for everyone; it’s quite academic in tone. That said, I’d highly recommend it –at least the first four chapters—for graduate students or pastors seeking to understand the role of tradition in today’s world, and to understand how to do “relevance” in deeper ways than rock band music.

Disclosure notice: Daniels sent me a free copy of his work after reading one of my posts on remix. He thought that our ideas are in the same vein and that I might appreciate his work.

I may not have picked up his book if I hadn’t been sent it, but I’m so glad he did. It’s a model for the church going forward that I’d been hoping for.

In the comments…

Are you more tempted by the impulse to too-strictly adhere to tradition or the impulse to abandon tradition?

Why do you stay, or why have you left?

August 23, 2016August 22, 2016

Flash Mob Kingdom: Reflections on the Division Jesus Promises

“I came not to bring peace to the earth, but rather division,” Jesus tells his disciples. “Mother against daughter and father against son.”

I struggle with his words. I struggle with the fact that Jesus said these words.

These words have been used to isolate and distance.

The thinking seems to be that Christians are supposed to be divisive. We’re supposed to be countercultural, even — if necessary — counter-familial.

Sometimes a person makes a decision or is a way that his or her family doesn’t like. Perhaps he’s in a relationship with someone of a different race, or she’s in a relationship with someone of the same sex. Perhaps he’s abandoning the family business to pursue his dreams. Perhaps she’s casting her vote for the other party.

“A household will be divided,” hisses one party, ending the conversation — and, at times, the relationship.

My struggle, I guess, isn’t with Jesus’s words so much as it is with the way the rest of us interpret and apply those words.

Because I don’t think that Jesus meant his words to tell us what we’re supposed to do in response to the signs of the times.

Indeed, the passage is actually about what Jesus does in the world, not what we are to do. “I came to bring fire; I came to bring division.”

It is Jesus, by his very presence, who is divisive.

Angels announced his birth with the song “peace to God’s people on Earth” and the promise that he would guide our feet in the way in peace.

The peace he brought in his birth disrupted what the Romans called Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome. The Peace of Rome was about assimilation to the Roman Empire and obedience to Caesar. The Peace of Rome was a peace that meant, simply, the absence of war, the absence of resistance to the empire.

Jesus disrupted the Peace of Rome, bringing the Peace of God, which is much more than an absence of war. The peace Christ brings is the active presence of God with Us.

And division followed.

Division, then, is not the primary goal of Jesus’s behavior. His words here are perhaps best read as an honest description of what will naturally occur as he continues his work of bringing about the Kingdom of God.

Peace and division are both the work of Jesus, not a command to his followers. We don’t need to have divided homes in order to love God. We are not called to judge our families or vehemently defend our beliefs and views.

Jesus is the one who brings the fire, not us.

That said, Jesus’s work of peace and division will certainly have implications for his followers.

Just as living under the Roman Empire came with a certain way of doing things — roads built and traveled a certain way, a rhythm of life and taxes, a pattern of social etiquette and customs — we, too, have a certain way of producing and acquiring items, a certain rhythm of life and taxes, a set pattern of traditions and customs. Some of these are huge systems: our voting schedule, the way we invest money, the way we celebrate Christmas. Others are small: that we have eggs for breakfast, that we walk on the right.

But Jesus tells us that just because our world has a certain order to it, does not mean that the order is God’s.

And as we follow Jesus in his bringing of the Kingdom, the order of our world may be disrupted.

Which part of us loves.

I think our desire to see our world disrupted is why we love the flash mob phenomenon of the last decade so much.

The world has a certain way of doing things, a certain rhythm, a certain pattern. And flash mobs — they know that we have certain expectations for what happens in public places. There are ways the world works. Flash mobs play with our expectations.

My favorite are the flash mobs at malls right before Christmas, bursting into Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. I love the disruption of normalcy, the call to beauty and joy and the holy right in the midst of an everyday place, the call to HALLELUJAH in the midst of our errands.

During the Chorus, there are always a few grumpy people.

And I love them, because they’re just like me. They’ve got their list, they’ve got errands, they’re not about to stop their very productive shopping trip. In the videos, you see them in the background, nudging the makeup artist to continue her work or hurriedly checking out so they can go on about their day.

They are so caught up in what they have to do — so caught up in the workings of the world — that they cannot stop to notice the holy. They cannot hear the call to a holy moment even as they shout over the HALLELUJAHs ringing in their ears.

And it’s disruptive, it’s disrupting what they’re doing, disrupting their entire day. The mall is for certain activities, for commerce, and everyone was doing that, and now there are two things going on: the normal commerce of the world and the outbursting chorus of Hallelujah.

I especially love the Hallelujah Chorus flash mobs most because people join in.

It’s such a well-known piece. You can see, in the videos, people caught off guard, then finding the rhythm, remembering the words and their part, and, with increasing confidence, joining in. They sometimes stumble, they sometimes miss a queue our fall out of step with the timing — but they’re in it.

In a span of seconds, they hear the call to live in a way that is different from the way of the world, stop to pay attention, and then become active participants in this new reality.

And I think that’s exactly what the choristers hope for: that everyone join them, that everyone recognize this is a good and worthwhile activity — at least for the next five minutes.

The choir isn’t there setting out to be divisive. But not everyone is able to hear their action as an invitation. Some stick to the status quo, stick to the way things are — and so there’s division.

Division is not the goal, but occurs as a natural outcome of pursuing the holy.

I think that’s what Jesus is on about.

We’re invited to follow him into a Kingdom way of life, a way that loves of God and neighbor — and that living be divisive as a natural outcome.

There will be others who are so committed to the way the world is that they can’t hear the invitation to the way the world could be.

There was a group of Christians who took seriously God’s command to care for the planet.

They approached their neighbors, in their suburban setting, asking them to begin recycling and found that their neighbors were totally uninterested.

This group didn’t have quite the glamour of a flash mob, but they had read the signs of the times — and they decided to act on it. They started going through the public trash cans on the street to remove any recyclable cans and bottles. They started going through their neighbors’ trash bins, removing what could be recycled.

The neighbors were furious. These Christians were ruining their neighborhood. They told them to stop; they wouldn’t.

It was divisive.

Eventually, the neighbors found a way to get these Christians to stop digging through their garbage: They started recycling.

At St Luke’s Episcopal Church in Ballard, where I serve, there’s group of Christians who took seriously God’s command to feed the hungry and care for the poor.

And so they did, and they do. They cook meals that they serve for free, five days a week, for any and all who care to come.

The neighbors don’t understand; some of them are quite angry. These Christians are ruining the neighborhood.

Jesus’s experience of division might bring us some consolation. The pursuit of the Peace of God is rarely without division.

Jesus invites us to read our times.

To read the movements and rhythms of our culture, our city, and our homes. He invites us to consider: What would it look like to love God and neighbor in this place? How might I pursue the Kingdom in this moment?

And, yes, he warns us that when he shows up it will bring division, disunity — not the division of warfare or indifference, but a division rooted in the singing of the holy in a song that some just won’t be able to hear.

Do you hear the holy song?

Do you hear the Hallelujahs?

Will you join in singing?

In the comments…

Where do you see glimpses of the kingdom in your own life?

Where do you see the kingdom show up in your neighborhood?

What might you do to “join in the singing”? How could you love God and neighbor?

What fears hold you back from joining?

July 19, 2016July 18, 2016

Unity vs. Liberty in Captain America: Civil War

Unity and Liberty compete in Captain America: Civil War . And in our churches. Read on KateRaeDavis.com unity captain america

“Staying together is more important than how we stay together.”

In Captain America: Civil War, Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow says this to Steve Rogers / Captain America. It’s her attempt to keep him from leaving the Avengers, from dividing the Avengers into factions.

Romanoff puts their togetherness above all else. She believes that unity is more important than differences. She believes that what they gain from collaboration is more important than any regulations on that collaboration.

Romanoff is willing to have these hard conversations. She’s willing to engage the variety of beliefs. And she’s willing to mediate between these sad and stubborn men for the sake of “staying together.”

Rogers, of course, disagrees. We knew he would. It wouldn’t be much of a superhero movie if Romanoff’s heartfelt interventions with Rogers and Stark were heard and responded to in a mature and reasonable manner.

Rogers reveals his priority in his response to Romanoff: “What are we giving up to do it?”

He’s focused on what they would each lose in order to stay together. Rogers believes liberty matters more than unity. He believes that freedom to live his personal ideals is greater than collaboration.

I love that this conversation is set in a church.

Because this conversation is always happening in the Church.

Following the memorial service, Romanoff and Rogers are alone in the sanctuary when they have this conversation.

I love it because the debate between unity and liberty is the conversation that’s taken place — continues to take place — in the long narrative of church history.

We’re always debating how to maintain unity while trying to discern and follow the movement of the Spirit.

The trick is that the movement of change looks like an improvement and progress to some. Like it does to Stark in the movie. And at the same time, it feels constrictive and dangerous to others. Like it does to Rogers.

How do we discern what’s true? How do we discern what the Spirit wants? How do we discern the balance between unity and freedom when we hear the Spirit differently?

For instance: The Episcopal Church (the USA branch of the Anglican church) was in conversations around the ordination of women to the priesthood. The sentiment was that we couldn’t do it until we all did it together. At least, it was until a few bishops, in very Captain America fashion, gathered and ordained women, forcing the conversation — and the church — to come up with a different action. They felt that what we were giving up for the sake of unity (namely, women’s voices in church leadership) wasn’t worth the cost.

The Church of England had a different answer: they valued unity above all, and so went much slower. Nearly 20 years slower in ordaining women to the priesthood. But they managed to go through that shift with less division.

Right now, many denominations are in the midst of similar debates.

The United Methodist Church, right now, is in the midst of this debate. The Western Division elected a lesbian as their bishop in a claim for liberty — and in defiance of church rules. Now the wider United Methodist Church needs to decide: Will they value liberty or unity?

I’m not sure if I’m devoted entirely to liberty or to unity. There’s a part of me that wants to cheer the UMC Western Division for boldly following the Spirit and standing for love and justice. And there’s part of me that feels the sadness of possible division. That wants to take hands with those who don’t agree or don’t understand and help them take just the next step toward acceptance. That wants to help people stay together as much as possible.

In Captain America: Civil War, the narrative “wants” us to side with Rogers’ ideals.

We hear this in Sharon Carter’s eulogy of her aunt, right before the conversation between Romanoff and Rogers:

[Margaret Carter] said, compromise when you can. When you can’t, don’t. Even if everyone is telling you that something wrong is something right. Even if the whole world is telling you to move. It is your duty, to plant yourself like a tree, look them in they eye and say, ” No…you move.”

The main piece of Margaret Carter’s advice here was “compromise when you can.” And yet Sharon manages to take the nuance, the exception to the rule, and to transform it into the central piece of advice. I doubt this was Margaret’s emphasis — she sounds more like Romanoff in her initial advice to compromise. Her advice is a call for unity. Sharon adds the emphasis in order to give a message to Rogers — and to move the narrative (and the audience) into more sympathy for the team liberty.

I had hoped that Stark and Rogers would move towards one another in the compromise that Margaret (via Sharon) calls for. That they would enter into the messy tension of unity and liberty and figure out a way they can be together and not feel constrained in the process.

Alas, I hope for the Kingdom.

By the end of the movie, the writers believe they’ve swayed us far enough to team Captain America that it’s okay for Rogers to perform a jail break and that we’ll be … if not happy about it, at least tolerant of it.

But I was disappointed. Rogers strikes me as reckless and individualistic, refusing to see the problems of his actions in a larger system. His actions are congruent with his own values, but he can’t see past his own values to understand his actions’ impact on others or to understand the way his actions function in a larger system.

Which could be seen as the criticism of the movie: Captain America is a stand-in for USAmerica. And Rogers is how the rest of the world, perhaps, views us: as a nation that lives our own values and ideals, imposing them on the world without care what other people or groups they hurt, because freedom and capitalism.

Back to the fact that the unity-or-liberty conversation happens in a church:

You only need to glance at a list of denominations in USAmerica to know that divisive idealism can’t be the direction we continue to follow. We continue to fracture and split the Church, and each time we do, an appendage of the Body of Christ is amputated. Such individualism and divisiveness should be a cause of lament, not rejoicing.

And that’s what I felt when I saw the empty cells of the Avengers’ prison. Not rejoicing in their freedom, but deep sadness at an action that would further fracture the Avengers, their relationship with UN, and their relationship with the global community.

In the comments…

Which do you, personally, tend to value more: unity or individual liberty?

Which does your family value more? your community? your parish? your denomination?

How does that value manifest?

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July 12, 2016July 11, 2016

Fighting with Sin in Captain America: Civil War

We’re told early on: This is a story about grief.

More accurately, it’s a story about the refusal to grieve. And the isolation and destruction that follow.

Early in Captain America: Civil War, Tony Stark presents a new technology to a crowd of MIT students and faculty. He shares an imagined memory of his last moments with his parents. After the program ends, he says, “That’s what I wish happened. It overrides my hippocampus, but doesn’t do anything about my unprocessed grief.”

It was a truth half-wrapped in a sad joke. But it stuck with me the entire film. It provided a kind of frame for everything that followed. What if this whole drama we’re watching is the result of unprocessed grief?

The characters themselves give us their interpretations of the battle-of-wills (and then just plain battle) between Tony Stark / Iron Man and Steve Rogers / Captain America.

For most of the narrative, as the conflict is building, various characters read the core issue as ego, arrogance, stubbornness.

A moment that sticks out in my memory is when Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow confronts Stark: “You are incapable of letting go of your ego for one goddamned second.”

In a Christian vocabulary we have a name for this sort of motivation: pride. We consider it among the deadliest sins. Some people even consider it the root of all sin.

But pride is just a facade, a symptom of the real issue.

The deeper issues show up in the final fight scene.

Captain America: Civil War is a notable break from the explosive, unfollowable choreographed fight that we’ve come to expect from the Avengers films. What we see here is far from a climactic blow-out.

Ultimately, it’s just Stark and Rogers, exhausted, exchanging punches. It’s a piteous and heartbreaking squabble between two men whose strength is only physical, men whose emotional life is too weak to engage the complexities of their crossed desires. Men who would rather kill one another — even be killed in the process — than engage their grief.

The scene can hardly even be called a climactic moment. It’s an anti-climax. A nadir. A canyon.

At that (anti)climactic moment, T’Challa / Black Panther names another layer to the conflict, the motivation that is underneath their pride.

According to T’Challa, pride isn’t the root of their behavior. Vengeance is deeper.

T’Challa says to Zemo, “Vengeance has consumed you. It’s consuming them.”

Which is important for us, a largely USAmerican audience to hear.

Vengeance certainly does consume us, is consuming us, as a whole culture. To take just one easy example: 9/11 is still used to support our presence overseas when we’ve killed far more civilians (like, by multiples) than died in the attacks.

And yet…

This is a story about grief.

About unprocessed grief.

Star’s line early on must contribute to the plot. The writers were too intentional. There are any numbers of technology Stark could have shown, but it was the one about memory. Any number of memories he could have chosen, but it was the one about unprocessed grief regarding his parents’ death. Half the conflict centers around Stark’s unprocessed grief over his parents’ death, and Zeno’s calculated exposure of it.

And his “unprocessed grief” is inextricably linked to that plot.

The other half centers around Rogers’s grief and Zeno’s prodding at that. His grief over the loss of Margaret Carter, yes. But it’s much more profound than that: most people he knew were dead. The culture he knew is gone. Rogers holds the grief of losing an entire world — family, friends, social codes, culture, food, moralities.

Stark wants to kill Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier because Barnes killed his mother; Rogers shouts that it won’t change anything. A rationale that doesn’t get anywhere close to landing because, for Stark, this isn’t about the past — his refusal to grieve means that her death is still present with him.

And for Rogers, who goes to great lengths to protect Barnes — the one person with whom he has a shared past. The one person who can remember his childhood with him. The one person who understands what it is to be removed from your time. It is, in part, his own refusal to grieve for all he’s lost — all the people he knew who are now dead — that pushes him to risk so much to hold on to what he has left.

Stark and Rogers are both unable to make good decisions, to hear what the other is saying, to discuss their options reasonably.

Their refusal to grieve does what sin always does: it isolates and divides.

Sin pits broken people against one another, when the very thing they need could be found by more deeply understanding the soul within the body they’re pummeling.

So Stark and Rogers are tearing each other apart. Because it’s easier to destroy something — even yourself — than to surrender yourself to grief.

Which is, perhaps, the real sin that pride is always masking: the refusal to engage grief.

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In the comments…

Where do you see a vengeance-mentality in your self, community, culture, country?

Where do you see refusal to grieve in your self, community, culture, country?

July 4, 2016July 1, 2016

With Liberty & Justice For All

Examining the application of "liberty and justice for all" against the intent of the divine in Christian scripture - read on KateRaeDavis.com

Gun violence prevention. Marriage. Minimum wage.

Many of the major debates going on in the US today are multiple faces of one core debate. Which do we value more: liberty or justice?

We pledge allegiance to be a nation “with liberty and justice for all.” Which is a poetic and beautiful aim, but misleading in the way it joins the two values. Liberty and justice don’t hold hands so much as they arm wrestle.

Mary Midgley in The Myths We Live By writes on the way that our post-Enlightenment world is captivated (read: held captive) by the poetic simplicity of these concepts. Such simplicity, she argues, obliterates the tension of trying to value competing ideals.

“Enlightenment concepts need our attention because they tend to be particularly simple and sweeping. Dramatic simplicity has been one of their chief attractions and is also their chronic weakness, a serious one when they need to be applied in detail. For instance, the Enlightenment’s overriding emphasis on freedom often conflicts with other equally important ideals such as justice or compassion. Complete commercial freedom, for example, or complete freedom to carry weapons, can cause serious harm and injustice. We need, then, to supplement the original dazzling insight about freedom with a more discriminating priority system.”

I should note that Midgley is English, though the issues she raises in this paragraph are particular relevant to contemporary USAmerica. Unchecked capitalism and weapon-carrying are two freedoms that USAmericans seem to value more than other developed countries.

And to the same degree that we have freedom, we suffer the consequences of freedom in the form of injustices.

To reframe our debates in terms of the values of liberty and justice:

Do we value commercial freedom for corporations, or wage justice for families?

Do we value freedom for near-unlimited access to weapons, or justice for … well, all the individuals and groups who are targeted without trial; just about any group that is feared or hated (persons of gender and sexual diversity, persons of various racial and ethnic backgrounds, persons of certain religions, persons who happen to work at certain places or attend certain schools, or just happened to be in a public space)? In the gun debate, we measure the cost of rampant freedom in the death toll.

Do we value freedom for marriage or justice for marriage? This one is interesting in that whichever we prioritize, everyone gets to get married. So whatever values are informing anti-marriage sentiment, they aren’t very American. And — more on this next — they aren’t very Christian.

In scripture, liberty and freedom are a strong theme.

The words make most of their appearances in Paul’s letters, and usually as a command to proclaim liberty to those who are captive. To Paul, liberty is for the oppressed. Liberty is not for those who are already in power. Those who live freely have little need for liberation.

Paul actually makes it a point to caution on the use of liberty for those who have it or have newly obtained it. In his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul writes “take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.” He’s talking about eating meat; a modern parallel might be how I shouldn’t allow my freedom to drink alcohol to become a stumbling block to those who are newly confronting their alcoholism. But the spirit of his words apply more broadly: the freedoms of some shouldn’t make life difficult for others who have weaknesses.

Justice and her sisters compassion and mercy are also strong themes throughout biblical texts.

Compassion is most often used as a description of God or Jesus. Mercy, too, almost always comes from God. Throughout both the First Testament writings and in the Gospels we hear the refrain “He had compassion on them.”

Who are the “them” that the Holy One has compassion on? The blind, the hungry, the weeping.

Again, it would seem that the powerful, the full, the content, the ones who have their lives together have little need for compassion.

My favorite use of ‘justice’ in scripture is Jesus’s words to those in positions of power and influence. He acknowledges that they do what is right strictly according to the law, but that they’ve “neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” Jesus asserts that the spirit of “justice and mercy and faith” should undergird the law, should inform the carrying out of the law.

What would our world look like if we believed similarly?

What might this election season — or to dream even bigger — what might this country look like if “Christian Values” voters made justice and mercy their primary value?

If liberty is for the oppressed and justice and compassion are for those in need, citizens concerned with Christian values must ask, when considering public policy: Who do these laws favor?

And in wider society, Christians must unite as the voice asking: Who is held captive? What do we/they need to be freed from? What might we/they be freed to? Who has been treated unjustly, and what do we need to do in order to make manifest something closer to justice?

The only one who is fully able to hold the tension of “liberty and justice for all” is God.

Especially when we read “for all” conditionally. When people say these words, they rarely mean it. They seem to mean “liberty and justice for all 4% of the world’s population.” But the words were penned with the intent of a global all.

It is God who grants freedom, who leads the people of Israel out of Egypt. It is God in Jesus who shows what true freedom to love looks like. And it is God who will be able to deliver justice without preference or blindness, God who has compassion on us.

Liberty and justice are ultimately the prerogatives of God, and anything we do in their name will undoubtedly fall short of the ideal.

But I don’t see that as any reason for us to stop holding their marriage as our aim.

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In the comments…

Do you tend toward liberty or justice? What has formed and informed that preference?

Who do you see as captives in contemporary USAmerica? Who is treated unjustly?

June 24, 2016June 23, 2016

What is Sin: Unalterable State or Chosen Behavior?

What is sin: a preconditioned state of being or a behavior that we choose to do? And how does it help us love? - read on KateRaeDavis.com

We’d much rather talk about love than about sin. Eyes on the prize, right? But we can’t get to the prize if we immediately trip every time we stand up.

So we need to talk about sin, about the things that are making us trip. Only by recognizing them will we find ways to move past them — and then begin to move towards love.

Sin is hard to talk about.

Part of this is because it’s so abstract — it’s not a thing we can point to, something with substance and being of its own right.

Even in the realm of characteristics, sin is abstract. We can come up with images for kindness or anger — we even have emoji for them. And we can more or less agree on what emoji mean. But sin … well, I’d love to see someone try to use emoji to represent sin.

Part of this is because sin is beyond a characteristic.

Sin is a preconditioned state of the human community.

This is not to say that humans are bad at their core. Sin is not ontologically defining. It is not something that must be expelled or repressed.

Recognizing sin as our preconditioned state is is simply an honest recognition of the way things are. An honest narration of human development. An honest naming of the fact that we all fail at living fully alive into our flourishing, God-gifted, human identity.

Sin preconditions all behavior, because it is part of the system before any behavior can be chosen.

The “my child is innocent” defense doesn’t work with this kind of sin. Did you eat chocolate while pregnant with your child? Then your child has likely metabolized the product of forced child labor and is now part of a system that is infused with sin. That’s not to condemn you — it just highlights the complexity of the world in which we live and the prevalence of sin that goes beyond any individual behavior. We are born sinners because we are born into sinful systems. No one gets to opt out.

Which can help us grow in compassion towards others. Like you, they were born into a system of sin. And perhaps one with more evil present than there is in your own.

At the same time, sin refers to the behaviors — the chosen actions — that are the natural result of our precondition.

If sin were simply a precondition, we would be freed from responsibility for our actions. It’s just the way we are, we could justify any wrongdoing. We have no real control in the matter.

But scripture repeatedly confronts this notion. The narratives are full of people making difficult decisions. Wisdom literature speaks about choosing between two ways. In the gospels, what makes Jesus compelling is that he consistently chooses a way that is not sin. Even in our sinful state, we have agency in whether or not we will choose sinful behavior.

Recognizing sin as behavior confronts the way we engage our own agency. Recognizing that sin is a behavior confronts us with the question: have the choices we’ve made been for our own desires and comforts, or for the realization of the kingdom of God?

Recognizing sin as behavior draws attention to the fact that we may act in ways that are destructive to others and to ourselves despite our best intentions. Sin is like a hot stove: the stove does not care what your intentions were for touching it; it will still burn you. We know sin by its destructive consequences. And those consequences follow regardless of intentions. Not because God is punishing you — not any more so than God burns you because you touch a hot stove– but because that’s just what sin does.

(As an aside: Redemption is also like a hot stove in that it doesn’t care about your intentions. Jonah, for example, did a famously bad job at calling Nineveh to repentance because of his hatred for them. His half-hearted “Forty more days!” is hardly persuasive. It was lazy, because he wanted them to be destroyed. Yet, despite his bad intentions, the people responded — hyperbolically so — and the city was saved.)

The way we’ve treated sin has been sinful.

In trying to expel sin, correct sin, or repress sin, we’ve done damage to others and to ourselves.

Grace Jantzen, reflecting on Julian of Norwich, wrote that sinful behaviors “are only symptoms of a wound for which God does not assign blame.” Julian went so far as to say that, in the end, sin itself will be rewarded.

Our church foremothers and forefathers did not develop an understanding of sin so that we could do more sin. The vocabulary of sin is meant to give us sight for the ways we are blocked from participation in love. Understanding the ways we don’t receive God’s gifts can help us find ways to outstretch our arms for those gifts. Understanding sin enables broken people to be made whole in God’s love.

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In the comments…

What are ways you or your faith community has tried to expel, correct, or repress sin? What was the outcome?

Do you tend to see sin as more of a preconditioned state (and beyond your control) or a behavior (and chosen)? What needs to shift for you to see it as both?

June 21, 2016June 20, 2016

Modern Demons: The Brothers K, Mass Shootings, and the Demon-Possessed Man

We don’t talk about demons very often these days. I think that it’s one of the concepts we left behind in an effort to view ourselves as more advanced than our ancestors. We think it primitive to believe in spiritual forces that seek to destroy individuals and communities through possession. We hear, in scripture, about the man possessed by a “legion,” a regiment, of demons, and our first thought is: mental illness.

In today’s world, we’re much more likely to talk about ideologies and worldviews, about energies and forces. We talk about how they shape individuals and societies, how they have the power to become obsessions in some. We talk about how they can injure and harm. All of which sounds a bit … well, demonic.

In David James Duncan’s novel The Brothers K, there is a scene that I think reads like an interpretation of the possessed man whose demons drown in a lake. At the point we the story enter, teenaged Peter has just lied down under the sprinkler with his young twin sisters, Freddy and Bet. They’re contemplating the movement of forces in the world — what they call “humps of energy.”

“For instance,” Freddy says, “when a person gets mad at somebody…like when you get really mad and maybe slap somebody or jerk their arm or something, like Mama does to us sometimes, I think an invisible hump of energy might go flying all the way up their arm and right into their skeleton or insides or whatever — a hump of mean, witchy energy — and I think it might fly round and round in there…and go right on hurting invisible parts of the person you don’t even know you’re hurting, because you can’t see all the ways their insides are connected to the mean thing you did to their outside. And from then on, maybe that hump of mean energy sits inside the hurt person like a rattlesnake, just waiting in there. And someday, that energy might come out of them and hurt the next person too, even though the person didn’t deserve it.”

Peter responds, “I think that can happen, does happen. But every witch who ever lived was once just a person like you or me, that’s what I think anyway, till somewhere, sometime, they got hit by a big, mean hump of nasty energy themselves, and it shot inside them just like Freddy said, and crashed and smashed around, wrecking things in there, so that a witch was created. The thing is, though, I don’t think that first big jolt is ever the poor witch’s fault.” The sprinkler hissed.

“Another thing,” Peter said, “is that everybody gets jolted. You, me, before we die we’ll all get nailed —- lots of times. But that doesn’t mean we’ll all get turned into witches. You can’t avoid getting zapped, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. That’s the challenging thing about witches — learning not to hit back, or hit somebody else, when they zap you. You can be like a river when a forest fire hits it– phshhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Just drown it, drown all the heat and let it wash away.”

“And the great thing,” he said, “the reason you can lay a river in the path of any sort of wildfire is that there’s not just rivers inside us, there’s a world in there. Christ says so. But I feel it sometimes too. I’ve felt how there’s a world, and rivers, and high mountains, whole ranges of mountains, in there. And there are lakes in those mountains — beautiful, pure, deep blue lakes. Thousands of them. Enough to wash away all the dirt and trouble and witchiness on earth.”

Bet’s mind had eased down into a place where hiss of sprinkler, splash of drops and babbling of brother were all just soothing sensations. But Freddy was still watching Peter’s face when he said, “But to believe in them! To believe enough to remember them. That’s where we blow it! Mountain lakes? In me? Naw! Jesus says The kingdom of heaven is within you, and we dream up something after death. Something truly heavenly, something with mountains higher than St Helens or Hood and lakes purer and deeper than any on earth — we never look for such things inside us… So when the humps of witchiness come at us, we’ve got nowhere to go, and just get hurt, or get mad, or pass them on and hurt somebody else. But if you want to stop the witchiness, if you want to put out the fires, you can do it. You can do it if you just remember to crawl, right while you’re burning, to drag yourself clear up into those mountains inside you, and on down into those cool, pure lakes.”

We don’t know much about the demons — the energies — of the Gerasene community, where the demon-possessed man was driven from. We don’t know how they came to possess this man, why they chose him, what type of evil they’re about. We only get to hear that they are many — a legion, a regiment. And they have converged in this one body, this one man.

There are many demons in our own culture, whose names we are might know: Homophobia. Transphobia. Islamophobia. Racism. Sexism. Nationalism. Ethnocentrism. Just to name a few. Demons that too often converge to possess one person. They unite under the banners of hatred and fear for the purpose of doing violence and spreading evil.

And then there are the lesser demons: Indifference. Apathy. They may not participate in violence directly, but they compel those they possess to do nothing to stop violence.

Like Freddy said in The Brothers K, sometimes demons come to possess a person when violence is done to them. Last week, the violence that was done extended well beyond the walls of Pulse, well beyond the city limits of Orlando. Many of us felt the impact of the attack — knew that this hatred was directed, in a way, at us. Knew the energy was spreading out across the country. The week before, the anonymous survivor in Stanford named the ways that violence entered her life and chipped away at normalcy. Part of its viral spread was due to the fact that so many women have had similar experiences with those demons.

It seems we are possessed.

And that demon might sit in us, like a rattlesnake waiting to attack the next person. Or we find someone to bear our collective witchy energy, to become our witch, our scapegoat. Theologian and activist Walter Wink says that is what the Gerasene culture has done to the unnamed man. They chain him in such a way that he can break free so they can enact their cycle of drama — catch, escape, injury; catch, escape, injury. Wink says, the townspeople need him to act out their own violence. He bears their collective madness personally, releasing them from its symptoms. He secretly lives out the freedom to be violent that they crave. And he is more miserable for it, and the insure that he remains so.

Last week, people heatedly debated the motives of the massacre at Pulse in Orlando. Homophobia or racism? Religion or mental illness? But there are no easy answers; the name is Legion. Last week, Legion lived in Omar Mateen. The week before, we recognized Legion in Brock Turner. Last year, it was Dylann Roof.

I don’t know what formed these men, what moments — to borrow David James Duncan’s language — what moments caused energy to crash and smash around and wreck things in them. But I do believe they weren’t born so full of hate — hatred came to possess them.

Their actions have, in turn, sent out witchy energy — energy that no one deserved. Energy that crashes around, that possesses, that maims.

The demons are not to be confused with the one who is possessed by the demons.

Like the Gerasene townspeople, our larger culture participates in violent energies. These men bear the collective madness of our society — they internalize and embody our culture’s collective homophobia and racism, sexism and entitlement. When they turn violent, our culture, perhaps, experiences a vicarious release through the actions of the possessed one even as we hate the possessed one.

The good news in our gospel text today is that we don’t have to keep participating in the cycle of fear, hatred, and violence. We can find, in ourselves, those pure, deep blue lakes, and we send the demons down the banks and into their depths. Like Peter said, you can’t avoid getting nailed, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. We have our model in the Holy Crucified One — we know that refusing to pass on the mean energy opens up the possibility of new life. But we have to know our inner terrain, we have to find the lakes.

In the last ten days, I have been brought to tears — with grief, yes, but more often with awe. I have watched people climb their inner mountains and drown hatred and fear in their lakes — sometimes in ways that are so creative and public that it feels like their lake pours out from them.

I see the demon energies die in vigils. I see them drown when Orlando costume designers volunteered to create tall, opaque angel wings for people to wear outside the victims’ funerals to create a safe space inside. In the names of the victims written on the sidewalk in downtown Seattle. In long lines of those privileged enough to give blood. In a spontaneous song outburst on a West Seattle bus of “What the World Needs Now (is Love Sweet Love)”.

It is something truly heavenly. And it is within us.

In the comments…

Where do you see lakes pour out and drown hatred?

What practices help you find your inner lakes?

Thanks for reading!

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