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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June 14, 2016June 10, 2016

Is Scripture Fiction?: Salman Rushdie, St Paul, and the Fictions that Hide

Salman Rushdie, St Paul, and the Fictions that Hide - Is scripture fiction? - read more on KateRaeDavis.com

I recently heard a conversation between Salman Rushdie (author of The Satanic Verses) and Paul Holdengraber (interviewer of NYPL fame).

Rushdie spoke about the letters he wrote to his parents as the start of his career writing fiction:

I was a very bad letter writer. Actually, I now have a lot of letters, because my parents saved them, and so I’ve inherited them. And they’re full of apologies for not having written. All of the letters begin with, I’m really sorry I haven’t written. And then, the usual kinds of fake explanations for why I haven’t written, how busy I’ve been at boarding school, or university. In many ways, those letters were my first works of fiction, because I was very unhappy at boarding school. But I didn’t want my parents to feel that, because my mother certainly felt very sad that I was sent away from home, and wished that I hadn’t been, and my father was spending all this money and taking all this trouble to give me a foreign education in England. So I would make up how happy I was.

The idea of letters as living in the genre of fiction struck me. I think we’re taught that there’s a hard line between fiction and nonfiction, between what’s true and what isn’t. And we’re taught that genres and formats have definite places they live. Letters, we believe, are firmly in the realm of nonfiction, usually somewhere near memoir.

But I imagine Rusdhie isn’t alone in this practice of lying in letters. I imagine many of us have glossed over the ugly parts of our life for the sake of conveying overall well-being. Or scribbled a note on an office birthday card that spoke of more affection than we truly feel. Or have written a less-than-sincere “So happy for you!” on the facebook wall of your friend who just got engaged to someone who provokes feelings other than happiness.

I imagine that we frequently write fiction under the guise of sincerity.

But what really struck me was the implications of that realization on the letters of arguably one of the most famous letter-writers in history: St Paul. He wrote many of the letters that have since been canonized as Christian holy scripture. Depending on which scholars you talk to, he wrote eight to ten of the 27 books that comprise the New Testament.

And I have to imagine that there is some level of fiction in them.

Paul’s letter to the Philippian church comes to mind. While writing it, he’s in prison. Prison, in Paul’s day, was even more harsh than modern day prisons — there was no concept of “human rights” for prisoners. And yet, Paul claims that he rejoices for his imprisonment, for God uses even these circumstances for the advancement of the gospel.

Which … it might be true that he, in his moments of reflective calm and acceptance, understands his imprisonment that way. But it also really sucks to be in prison and uncertain of whether you will be alive or dead next week.

Perhaps, like Rushdie, Paul wrote the happiest version of his life he could, for the sake of the church, for the sake of their hope in Christ.

Although, unlike Rushdie, Paul doesn’t completely avoid the reality of the hardships — he doesn’t pretend he’s not in prison, doesn’t pretend prison is a happy place to be. Paul acknowledges that hardship exists, but frames that hardship in a larger narrative that extends beyond his discomfort.

Ultimately, we see adult Rushdie doing this in a way that his child letter-writer wasn’t able to. In the interview, he frames his hardship in the larger narrative of his father’s care for him, the trouble his father went to for his sake, the benefits of the British education.

Perhaps framing one’s hardships in the context of a wider narrative is not the mark of a saint, but a pastoral task, an interpersonal task. Perhaps finding the happy points is a very human tendency when communicating with those who love us and are far away. The challenge is to balance the reality of the grief with the perspective of the larger narrative in which our grief exists. The challenge is to come to hope.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed it, please hit the starred ‘like’ button below; it would mean a lot to me as it helps others see it. Or, use the social media buttons to share it wherever you hang out online.

Discuss in the comments:

When do you tell fictions as though they’re truth? Or when do you suspect others’ do?

How can you tell the difference between truth and fiction on social media?

May 30, 2016May 10, 2016

Memorial Day Reflections with Owen and Shields

Memorial Day reflections, with help from Wilfred Owens' poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" and David Shields' work "War is Beautiful" - read on KateRaeDavis.com

How Sweet & Beautiful It Is…

British poet Wilfred Owen fought in the First World War; his poems were all written in the span of a year before he was killed in action at the age of 25. Perhaps his most famous poem is titled Dulce et Decorum Est, which highlights the contrast between one moment of war to the wider narrative that is told of war:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

\\

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

\\

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

\\

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

The last lines are a Latin saying that was often quoted at the start of WWI. The translation: “How sweet and right it is to die for your country.”

“War is Beautiful”

In War is Beautiful, David Shields takes up Owen’s theme, carefully curating photos from the cover the New York Times to illustrate the ways in which the Times has led its readers to believe war reflects beauty, love, and God in Christ. Shields’s essay “War is Beautiful, They Said,” concisely articulates the ways in which the Times has taken the place of the WWI-era citizens who encouraged their youth to fight with the phrase “Dulce et decorum est.”

Fusion of Church & State

As a result of his experiences with war, Owen questioned and challenged religion, as is evident in some of his poetry. When the language of self-sacrifice and larger purpose is used by both religion and country, it is easy to equate the call to die for one’s country with the call “to die for one’s friends,” as one oft-misused scriptural verse says. When a soldier realizes that his country’s values have betrayed him, the feeling of betrayal is extended to the religion whose vocabulary and imagery the political leaders utilized. When the vocabulary of the State is the same as the vocabulary of the Church, and when the church quietly acquiesces to such misuse, betrayal by one is equal to betrayal by the other.

In his work, Shields curates a visual argument for the ways in which religious “visual vocabulary” is utilized to incite young Americans to war, or at least to encourage Americans to support the war (or perhaps, at the very least, to stop Americans from actively protesting the war). Shields suggests that in the Times, the imagery of the Church has been coopted for the purposes of the State.

The separation of Church and State is sometimes lamented as a problem in USAmerican society, but history can show us that the separation is for the purposes of protecting the integrity of the Church as much or more so than it is to protect the State. In Shields’s work, we see the modern-day effects of the fusion of these two institutions, making visible — behind the beauty — the death and degradation that come at the manipulation of religious symbols for political purposes.

God

On his section of photographs he places under the theme of “God,” Shields writes that “the Times uses its front-page war photographs to convey that a chaotic world is ultimately under control” (WiB p 9). The photos in this section, to my perception, fall in two categories.

The first: aerial shots. Obama (representative of American power) helicoptering over a city; a soldier (his face obscured so as to represent all soldiers, or perhaps American might) aiming a gun out of an aircraft.

Symbols of power that hover over a city, look over a city — benevolently or malevolently? in protection or battle? The same questions could be asked of these troops as we ask of God.

The second category: Middle Eastern people subjugating themselves — one man is nearly nude, on his knees in front of soldiers’ legs; another is kissing the hand of a soldier as one would a revered priest. They’re subjugating themselves before soldiers whose faces are always averted from the camera or out of shot; again, they could be any soldier, they are there to represent not an individual but a symbol.

The visual signs of prostration and reverence — traditionally religious symbols — are here applied to political and military might in a way that, as Shields theme title suggests, equates American forces with God.

Pieta

Another section is titled “Pieta,” which is a subject in Christian art that depicts the Virgin Mary cradling Jesus, recently dead and removed from the cross.

To summarize this theme, Shields write a succinct equation to illustrate the understanding of the Times: “War death = Christ’s death on the cross. The process of removing the body from the cross and battlefield is sacred” (WiB p 9). The images are solemn beauty; the overtones of sacrifice are palpable.

Beauty / Self-Sacrifice

Shields titles this theme simply “Beauty.” He summarizes the section as “portraits of the other…mostly women and children, beauties seeking salvation. Male sacrifice is consecrated in these faces — [they are] the rationale for going to war” (WiB p 9).

His description makes clear that this understanding of beauty is connected to self-sacrifice for the sake of a common good, or self-sacrifice for the good of another — which is, of course, one way that Christians understand Jesus on the cross (or, more accurately, the singular way in which many USAmerican Christians understand the cross).

The cameras focus on women and children, clear-eyed and suffering, often surrounded by blood or fire. They are sometimes looking into the camera as though salvation from these surroundings lies with us, the American viewer; as if their salvation is dependent upon our support of this war’s continuation.

Differentiation and Memorial Day

Whatever you believe about the political realities or necessities behind the war, I think we can recognize that the daily reality of the war experience contains layers of horror. Even for those who manage to escape physically unharmed (though, arguably, the levels of stress-induced hormones that flood the brains of our soldiers in their formative years means that it’s near impossible to have no physical impact; in a very real sense, no one leaves unharmed) — but even for those who manage to come home physically intact, there is real pain involved: the emotional pain of losing peers, the trauma of living amidst death, the survivor’s guilt.

I know many Christians view war as a necessary evil in our world. Perhaps they’re right. But even so, Shields’s work suggests to me that for Christians to allow the political powers to use our imagery and symbols is to allow the State to displace the Church. To quietly allow the State to serve Death using the symbols that are meant for Life is a betrayal of the gospel.

If war is a necessary evil for the State, let us keep the Church intact so that those who come home from war still have safe place in society, a place that has not betrayed them.

Christ was meant to be the last sacrifice. To glorify soldiers as sacrifices for our society only calls us back to the cross, to a recognition of the two millennia that have passed in which we have failed to construct a society that recognizes Christ as the final sacrifice. Perhaps not only on Memorial Day, but every day, we can honor the soldiers who gave their lives by working for peace, by constructing a society which no longer demands their sacrifice.

Until that day, may we not only remember the soldiers who gave their lives, but also witness to our returning veterans — not only in their triumphs, but in their loss and grief.

May we free them from being anonymous symbols of power on our newspapers in order that they might become wholly human in all beauty and brokenness.

May we help work alongside them to re-connect to the goodness, light, and life that is in the world and in our hearts and theirs.

May we listen and witness to whatever shards of their experiences they’re able and willing to entrust to us, and may we do so as faithfully, attentively, and gently as we witness the breaking of the bread.

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For discussion:

What would need to be included in a photo of modern war for it to be more honest? What would need to be left out, or what editing left undone?

May 26, 2016June 8, 2019

Remixing Symbols: Rosemary and Holy Water, Remembrance and Baptism

In the Episcopal Church, there are certain days on which the priest takes branches cut from the church garden, dips them in holy water, and shakes the branches over the congregations’ heads. It’s a baptism symbol that holds a reminder of our baptisms, a reminder of our identity as the people of God, a reminder that we participate in death and resurrection.

Because my church is in Seattle, our garden holds a rosemary plant. Here, rosemary grows like a beloved native weed. The plant in our garden, bordering the parking lot, is always overgrown, so its branches are always the first to be cut when it’s time to remember our baptism.

Remembering our baptism carries a particular scent: equal parts incense and rosemary.

As a result of this, whenever I cook with rosemary, I find myself remembering my baptism.

My community hasn’t assigned any particular meaning-making to this happenstance connection between rosemary and baptism. If there is any intent in its use, it is to convey the connection between the church and our local place. Or, perhaps, a symbol of provision and abundance.

So I researched the meaning of rosemary — most plants have a symbolic connotation, even if we no longer live by what they once meant.

Rosemary is a symbol of remembrance for the dead. Mourners used to throw it into graves, the way we might today throw a rose onto the casket. (Roses, of course, are themselves symbols: red for love, yellow for friendship, white for youth.) In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia says “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.”

The branches dipped in holy water is one of those moments where symbols align and intermingle and remix without intention on behalf of the artist. I must believe that the Spirit is at work in such remixing.

Because what the practice does — without any need of human intention (though it does require attention) — is it connects death and resurrection. The priest takes rosemary — a symbol of grief, mourning, and death — and uses it as the means to sprinkle the assembly with baptismal water — a symbol of joy, new life, resurrection.

Using rosemary to sprinkle holy water on the congregation connects the remembrance of my baptism more solidly to the remembrance that, in some way, the person I used to be has died.

I remember her. Remember who she was, how she behaved, how it felt to be her. Sometimes, I even miss her. I miss the height and depth at which she experienced emotion, the high degree of passion in her relationships, her quit wit and cutting tongue. She moved through life with little discernment, often finding whichever option meant less pain (bruises were so much easier to tolerate than loneliness). In many ways, it was easier and more fun to be her. Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

And that memory, the memory of who she was and what my life as her was like, makes the droplets of cool water that much more powerful. The water connects me with my baptismal identity, my post-baptism reality. The water reminds me that I not only died but rose again with Christ.

The impact of remembering that new identity is much more powerful when remembered in contrast to what died.

As I’ve grown in my baptismal identity, I’ve gained a capacity to understand my emotions and care for myself in ways that are less destructive. I’ve developed stable and loving relationships that I can actually experience as loving. I’ve learned to tolerate pain in the present because of my hope for the future.

And then I reclaim my baptismal identity. It may have been easier and more fun to be the person I used to be. But the person I’ve become is more loving, more joyful, more compassionate.

And I think I’d rather be as someone who loves joyfully than as someone who has fun.

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April 5, 2016March 31, 2016

Mad Max: Fury Road: On the Blood, Breath, & Name

Max and Furiosa as an image of Christ and the Church - read on Literate Theology / KateRaeDavis.com

If you haven’t yet seen Mad Max: Fury Road — what are you waiting for?! Cancel your evening plans. Oh, and also, here’s your SPOILER ALERT. The scene I’ll be discussing is near the end of the film.

This post is part of a series on the theology of Mad Max: Fury Road. Find the rest of the series here.

The battle is over, the way home to the Citadel is clear, and Furiosa is dying. Max is over her, his face full of concern, attempting to diagnose and discern what she needs.

Jurisic, one of the Many Mothers, is able to tell Max what is happening. “She’s pumping air into her chest cavity. She’s collapsing her lungs one breath at a time.” Max apologizes as he stabs between her ribs to release the pressure. Jurisic again: “She’s exsanguinated. Drained all the blood.” And Max apologizes again as he connects the, as Nux called him, into a Blood Bag. And he tells her, for the first time, “Max. My name is Max.”

(If you want to watch the scene, I found it online: Max Saves Furiosa.)

I first watched this unfold in a packed, emotionally exhausted theatre as tears flooded down my face. What is it about this scene that is so impactful? And whatever that truth is, the emotional response indicates to me that it must be holding something of the divine — what is this scene teaching us, theologically?

Cruelty & Kindness

A forced act carries an entirely different meaning than the same act freely chosen.

Early in the film, the War Boys of the Citadel force Max to become a living blood bag in a dehumanizing show of cruelty and power.

Here near the end, though, Max willingly and urgently attaches his blood stream to hers. The same tube the empire had forced into his arm is now the very object that helps Max revive Furiosa’s life. What the empire had used for evil is now being used for good. It’s a redemptive act.

Which helps highlight, for me, how radical and subversive and grace-ful Jesus was in going to the cross. It was both moments at once. It should have been dehumanizing, and yet he did it in a way that was fully human, never losing (I like to think) his own sense of dignity and freedom.

Jesus has all the kindness and grace of Max-saving-Furiosa under the cruel circumstances of Max-saving-Nux.

An Image of Christ & the Church

The symbols at play in this scene are breath, blood, name.

Each, on its own, has an important history in the Judeo-Christian tradition. And the three are brought together in the one who breathes Spirit into and onto the Church, the one who spills blood for the church, the one named God With Us.

And then I thought that perhaps this scene could read as a sort of image or parable. In parable form, Furiosa might represent the corporate people of God, the Church. Max represents Christ. Jurisic, the Spirit.

To add some nuance: I am NOT saying that the person of Max has a one-to-one correlation to the person of Jesus. Rather, I’m saying that this relationship in this one moment can offer us a way to emotionally experience and understand that relationship in all time. It’s similar to the way that the hood-ornament moment offers an image of the crucifixion moment. I’m saying that when we have moments in which we can’t remember why Jesus’s spilled blood is good news or what it meant for Christ to breathe on us or to offer his blood for us, that the emotions we experience in this scene can help remind us, because they’re pointing to that moment.

I’m also not saying that any of this symbolism is intended by George Miller or anyone else involved in the making of Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s possible to be true to the story and for the Spirit to be at work within our human work of creating (indeed, I don’t know if there is any other way to create), as I get into in the Foundations series.

Ok. With that clarified. Here’s a reading of the “Max Saves Furiosa” scene in parable form (which is notably in the reverse of the Jesus story):

Christ is concerned for the Church. He is with her, near her, hovering over her. But to act, he seems to rely on the Spirit to tell him what the Church needs.

When the Spirit tells him that the Church needs air/wind/breath/spirit (in Hebrew and Greek, these are all conveyed with a singular word), Christ acts decisively so that the Church has the ability to receive it. (For Max, this looks like pushing a knife into her ribcage so she is able to receive air into lungs; in John 20, Christ breathes on his followers as he tells them to receive the Holy Spirit.)

Next the Spirit tells Christ that the Church is drained, that she has no life/blood within her. So Christ offers his blood. (Furiosa receives this through a tube; the Church receives it through Eucharist/Communion/Lord’s Supper.)

Finally, Christ reveals his identity. (For Max, this occurs through giving his name. For Christ, it occurs in his naming at birth and is shown in fulfillment in the resurrection.)

On the Name

A moment on Max’s name. Sometimes Max is short for Maximillian, which means “greatest.”

I like to think that this Max’s name is short for Maxwell, which means “great spring,” as in a life-giving spring of fresh water.

Which reminds me of that moment when Jesus talks with a woman at a well and refers to himself as living water.

Not to say that Max is fully the same as Jesus. But in this moment, this heightens the imagery that Max-as-life-source-for-Furiosa provide in an analogy of Jesus-as-life-source-for-the-Church (and also resolves the question: “Why tell her his name now?”).

Ascension

Jump to the very last moments of the film when Furiosa, the wives, and as many of the wretched as they can fit are crowded onto the ascending platform. Furiosa looks around and sees Max disappearing into the crowd, leaving her and the wives to do the work of re-structuring the systems of the Citadel into more sustainable ones, re-ordering the culture into one that restores the human dignity of the wretched.

It’s a reverse of how we understand ascension. In Christian tradition, Jesus is lifted into the heavens and leaves the disciples staring after him into the clouds.

Here (if we continue the metaphor), Jesus looks up as the Church ascends into the center of power structures in order to dismantle.

In John’s account, Jesus says that his followers will do greater things than he has done. I’ve never really understood what that meant, but I like the image offered in this last moment of Mad Max. Max gives breath and blood to Furiosa so that she can change the systems and redeem the Citadel. Jesus gives breath and blood to the Church so we can do likewise in our world.

This post is part of a series on the theology of Mad Max: Fury Road. Find the rest of the series here.

For discussion: Does reading this scene as an image of Christ and the Church change your understanding of Christ? the Church? their relationship? If so, how? Does it help or hinder?

January 26, 2016March 24, 2016

The Prophetic Works of Lady Gaga

Pop star Lady Gaga is more than an entertainer, she is a prophetic voice. Through fashion and performance art, she functions as prophet for secular USAmerica.

Israel had many prophets, but today the church isn’t adding anyone’s words to the Biblical canon. When did we begin to refuse to see the prophets in our midst?

Prophets Seek Justice

The primary role of a prophet is to work for justice. Prophets actively stand outside of society in order to critique the injustices within society, with the hope of bringing about change and reconciliation. The prophet simultaneously exposes the present reality while developing a vision for the future.

Prophets have traditionally used a variety of tools, including, as Dan Allender writes, “piercing narrative, powerful images, prescient poetry” and a willingness to “bear the consequence of being viewed as an enemy of the status quo.” The prophet employs such artistry and suffering to create a compelling vision of what reality could be if justice were enacted, if love and mercy were lived.

Reconciliation & the LGBTQ Community

Perhaps most notable is Lady Gaga’s prophetic work against injustice against the LGBTQ community. She came out as bisexual to both acceptance and criticism from the queer community: she was accused of not being “gay enough” to claim bisexuality nor to be a representative voice. Regardless of the level of her bisexuality, claiming it to a national audience was a prophetic move: Gaga chose to align herself with the marginalized in a hetero-normative culture. As many prophets before her, she actively stood outside of the cultural norm in order to engage and critique culture’s treatment of a marginalized people.

Lady Gaga worked for reconciliation between LGBTQ and heterosexual persons, who often have been viewed as oppositional. “Born This Way,” was became an anthem for the community. It was significant for its overt shout-out to the LGBTQ community; equally significant is that she included heterosexuals:

“No matter gay, straight, or bi,
lesbian, transgendered life,
I’m on the right track, baby,
I was born to survive.”

These lyrics were an effort to highlight LGBTQ rights, but they were also a way to unite LGBTQ and heterosexual communities. Live performances of the piece end with Gaga and her dance company bending towards one another in a circular, all-embracing hug (see title image). The performance offers an image that speaks to a vision of what our reality could be, one in which gay individuals are not only equal, but lovingly included. Her image calls us toward the possible reality in which we are one, united humanity that includes multiple sexualities and sexual orientations.

Prophets must bear the consequence of provoking controversy and disrupting the status quo. As a result of Lady Gaga’s involvement with the LGBTQ community, rumors circulated in an attempt to shame her. One of the most direct attacks on her sexual identity was the rumor that she has a penis. Rather than retaliating (and effectively proving that she would be ashamed to be part of the transgendered community), Gaga claims to love the rumor. She stated: “‘This has been the greatest accomplishment of my life: to get young people to throw away what society has taught them is wrong.’” If fans believe her to be transgendered and still come to her performances, listen to her music, and support her work, Gaga takes it as a hopeful sign for future inclusion of transgendered individuals in society. Rather than suffer, Gaga reframes the consequence into a cause for celebration.

Another consequence has been the protestors who gather outside of Monster Balls, Lady Gaga’s stadium concerts. One writer recalled a concert in Nashville in which picketers held signs “urging ‘homosexuals’ and other ‘sinners’ to ‘repent’.” During the show, Gaga shouted from stage, “Jesus loves every fucking one of you!” before launching into a raucous performance, “as if to say, the only proper theological response to bigotry and hatred is to dance in its face.” Prophet Gaga practices a living theology; rather than discussing abstractions, she moves into actions.

Reconciliation between the Sexes

In realm of sex, Gaga prophetically exposed the present reality by reflecting back to her audience what the present really looks like, and the reflection is startling. One of the most notable examples is the ‘meat dress’, which Gaga wore at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. Feminist Kate Durbin notes that “masculinists see but a piece of meat, so Gaga gives them exactly what they ‘see’ – a piece of meat. In order, of course, that the Male Gaze might ‘see’ itself.” The powerful fashion image of a woman wearing raw beef exposed the hardness of the heart of USAmerican society.

Some of her other fashion pieces have been similarly tied to society’s treatment of women. Lady Gaga has worn many weapon-inspired bras — a flame-thrower bra in the “Bad Romance” video; a gun bra in the “Alejandro” video; a fire bra on the cover of GQ magazine. Durbin states that, like many women, Gaga’s “breasts were seen as a weapon, therefore she was going to literally turn them into that.” Gaga hears the narrative society tells women and exposes the flaws and pain in the narrative through constructing a powerful fashion image.

Another statement on sex and gender was the introduction of Gaga’s alter-ego, Jo Calderone, at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards. The opening monologue made it clear that this performer was not Lady Gaga as Jo Calderone: “Gaga? Yeah, her,” Jo says while pointing to some vague distance; Gaga is not here. To further emphasize the opposition between Gaga and Jo, he informs the audience, “She [Gaga] left me [Jo].” Gaga, according to Jo, groups him in with other men: “She said I’m just like the last one.” Jo, for his part, dances in a company comprised entirely of men; the audience does not see a single woman on stage during the performance.

Gaga here uses her one body to portray a woman and a man who are in opposition to one another. Similarly, the viewers are one humanity in opposition to one another as a result of the gender divide. The audience knows it to be absurd for Gaga to critique Jo, just as it is equally absurd for Jo to feel left out from Gaga’s life, since they are one and the same. The audience can then look back on themselves and see that they create divides within the one humanity, divides where there should be unity. Gaga-versus-Jo is a picture of humanity, a mirror for how we relate across the sexes.

Prophets Expose Idolatry

An additional role of the prophet is to expose idolatry. James Danaher wrote that in USAmerican culture “what we recognize and revere about a person is their celebrity status.” Celebrity is the new idolatry. Most of us join the game, attempting to construct an identity using various social media to gain some amount of fame. At the same time, we hate celebrities for their status and for having the resources to continually re-create their identities, so eventually we demand their destruction.

Gaga undermined the system of celebrity to show that it leads to death and destruction. In her performance of “Paparazzi” at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Gaga opens by naming the idol USAmericans have come to worship, and recognizes her potential position as sacrifice: “I pray the fame won’t take my life.” The fame is the god that this society has made, and it demands ritual sacrifice. By the end of the show, Gaga is covered in blood and hanging from a rope, enacting her own death.

By walking, willingly, to her own enacted death, she showed the audience what we do to celebrities: we demand violent destruction. The image does what prophetic images are meant to do: disrupt denial and expose idolatry of the heart.

Having shown the audience her destruction, Gaga is then free of the audience’s demands on identity because she has fulfilled that identity and shown that it leads to death. After that moment, all her work is free to be performed without inhibition because it is enacted in the shadow of her own death. The audience are no longer able to impose an identity on her; it is she who identifies herself with true identity/ies.

What The Church Can Learn

Lady Gaga’s work as a prophet within the secular community questions and critiques the church, inviting its members to recognize good news with fresh sight and to return to worship. Gaga, in acting as a secular prophet, aligns herself with the marginalized people of the LGBTQ community. The church should be convicted: we are called to stand with the oppressed and marginalized, and instead are the ones excluding and condemning. As Gaga reconciles and unifies queer and straight peoples, the church creates divides with hateful language on picket signs. Gaga’s work asks the church: what is a loving response to individuals, regardless of sexual orientation? Her scream of Jesus’s love followed by dance questions: what would action look like on your part? Can you ever stop the debates over scripture long enough to act?

Gaga’s use of fashion and performance art raise questions of communication. Gaga confronts the culture through symbols that it fluently understands: music, performance, and fashion. The church insists on using scripture and sermons as its primary forms of engagement, but for many people in USAmerica, the text does not carry authority over their lives. How could the church better engage culture on its own terms? What would happen if we ceased to articulate and defend every position, and made room for a conversation through image and action that made sense to today’s culture, within and outside of the church?

Finally, Gaga’s enacted death that exposed the idolatry of celebrity questions the way the church teaches the narrative of Jesus crucified. We often have sermons trying to explain what Jesus did, but her bloody performance and empty stare ask: how would the church enact the narrative? Pastors try to educate congregants by explaining the historical context of the cross, but what if they moved the narrative into the context of today’s culture? What would we critique? What idols would we expose?

The prophet known as Lady Gaga is doing God’s work in USAmerica. Rather than fight her, the church would be wise to allow itself to be critiqued by her exposures and educated by her forms of communication. After all, God has often provided prophets who have worked outside the church to invite the church itself to repentance; we should not be surprised that the Living God is still speaking, should not be startled to see a prophet in our midst. The proper response might be gratitude and worship: perhaps a dance would be appropriate.

This piece was one of my first that developed theology from culture. Who do you see as currently working as a prophet in the world? How would you like to see the church perform the Christian narrative?

December 7, 2015January 12, 2016

On Prayer & Policy-Making

Prayer & Policy-Making - Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

The divide is growing. In the wake of another mass shooting, the US has entered a now familiar liturgy: people demand changed policies; politicians offer prayers; nothing changes.

This time, rather than placating constituents, the prayers of politicians has been met with backlash. The New York Daily News released a bold cover: “God Isn’t Fixing This.” On twitter, #thoughtsandprayers was trending, with use ranging from a recognition of congress’s inactivity to blatant mockery of prayer practices in general.

Which of course created a backlash against that backlash: Christians defending prayer and speaking against such “prayer shaming.”

Part of what causes my heart to break so deeply in the midst of this conversation is that, across the illusion of the chasm between them, both sides have something beautiful to offer the other side. The Christians are correct in saying we should be praying; the secularists are correct in saying that there should be action.

What made Christianity radical is its anti-theist understanding of prayer, that prayer is never complete until it is followed by action. There are lots of articles and Bible-verse lists about how Jesus prayed: usually alone, often on a mountain or in a desert. But often the sentence about Jesus’s prayer is followed by a sentence about his action. Jesus prays and immediately after, he gathers and teaches. Jesus prays and immediately after walks onto the water to the disciples in a boat. Jesus prays and then raises Lazarus from the dead. Jesus prays and then is arrested and goes to the cross.

For Jesus, prayer seems to be the inhale he takes before exhaling into action. He is filled through the inhale prayer so that he may exhale into action through preaching and miracles. For Jesus, prayer and action are so interwoven as to be inseparable; the prayer is not complete until exhaled into action.

We Christians often end our prayers with the words “in the name of Jesus Christ” or “through Jesus Christ.” We pray in and through Jesus. We receive eucharist that metabolizes us in and through the Christ. We receive baptism that has brought us in and through the church, which we also call the body of Christ.

In these ways, we are living members of the Christ to whom we pray in and through; we pray ourselves into being part of Christ, and pray ourselves into becoming part of the answer to the very prayers we speak. Christian theologian Ronald Rolheiser reminds us that “to pray as a Christian demands concrete involvement in trying to bring about what is pleaded for in the prayer.”

For an everyday example: consider someone who prays for healing for a sick neighbor, but never brings a meal or offers to drive to the doctor. She does the inhale of the prayer, but never completes it in the exhale; she prays as a theist and not as a Christian.

The dynamics might be similar in our nation-wide conversation about gun violence and prayer. Non-Christian people are calling Christians to action; they are calling us to exhale our prayers into action. It is not always done tactfully, kindly, or lovingly, but if we are open to their criticism in the way that Christ received death, perhaps we can develop ears to hear how deeply, prophetically Christ-like their call to action is.

Likewise, Christians are calling the country to prayer. We are right to say that it is impossible to exhale indefinitely; we must inhale in order to receive the Spirit that Jesus breathed upon us. In our inhale, we begin to grow in the ability to discern God’s will for humanity. In our inhale, we begin to let go of what our own desire may be for the future of our country. In order to act lovingly, our actions must originate in prayer.

Secular society is calling the church to action; the church is calling secular society to prayer.

Both sides have something beautiful to offer. We should be praying. Prayer is not complete until followed by action.

Each could be a blessing to the other, if we all soften our hearts enough to hear it. It’s risky. A soft heart is a much more easily broken heart. But perhaps broken heartedness is not an inappropriate response to such circumstances.