Category Archives: chores

Unraveling Religion

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I recently read Christianity After Religion, a new book by Diana Butler Bass. I reviewed the book here. 


Bass unpacks the struggle in contemporary society between Christian dogma (teachings) and Christian practice (habits). She argues that Christianity in America (and around the world) is undergoing a Great Awakening, the fourth in American history. 


One of the hallmarks of this awakening, Bass writes, is way people are combining their experience of the Holy with reason that comes through study, examination, and experimentation. Faithful people are trying to bridge the divide between the head and the heart and come together in the territory of the Spirit. Bass calls this experiential faith or experiential religion. 


Experiential faith seems to turn the current expectations of  religious life upside down. Bass details how in our vocations and our hobbies, we learn by joining a profession, a group, a mentor. We take on the habits of the people or person from whom we are learning. Over time, we then come to believe things about our profession or hobby- what it means to us and how it helps us. We belong, then behave, and then believe. Yet, we expect people to these tasks in the exact opposite manner when it comes to church.

If you want to knit, you find someone who knits to teach you. Go to the local yarn shop and find out when there is a knitting class. Sit in a circle where others will talk to you, show you how to hold the needles, guide your hands, and share their patterns with you. The first step in becoming a knitter is forming a relationship with knitters. The next step is to learn by doing and practice. After you knit for a while, after you have made scarves and hats and mittens, then you start forming ideas about knitting. You might come to think that the experience of knitting makes you a better person, more spiritual, or able to concentrate, gives you a better sense of service to others, allows you to demonstrate love and care. You think about what you are doing, how you might do it better. You develop your own way of knitting, your own theory of the craft. You might invent a dazzling new pattern, a new way to make a stitch; you might write a knitting book or become a knitting teacher. In knitting, the process is exactly the reverse of that in church: belonging to a knitting group leads to behaving as a knitter, which leads to believing things about knitting. Relationships lead to craft, which leads to experiential belief. That is the path to becoming and being someone different. The path of transformation. (202)
 

With all due respect to John Wesley, I think that’s one of the best descriptions of sanctification this Lutheran has ever read. The contemporary narrative touts Christian faith as adherence to dogmas and standing firmly behind the line of orthodoxy, no toes in sight. That’s Christian perfectionism, not perfection, and that’s not what Bass has in mind. Nor the early church. Nor Jesus. 
We are brought ever closer to the possibilities God has stored within us through our Christian practices. The practices, prayer, study, hospitality, discipline, communal life, create the space for the Spirit to bring us to perfection. We can best learn these practices from people who already love them, who are further along in their “mastery” than we are. 
Here’s the question for us and for our congregations: do we love the Christianity we are practicing? Are we experiencing Christ? Are people learning about the Way of Jesus through us and from us? 
It’s time to consider what it means to belong… to behave… to believe, in that order. Can we unravel what is a couple centuries of religious expectation and knit back together, with the help of the Spirit, a new way of living as Christians? 

Is God visible to you? (Ash Wednesday Sermon)

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Ash Wednesday (Year B, Narrative Lectionary)
22 February 2012
Isaiah 58:1-17, Mark 9:30-50
            What’s the smallest unit of measure in any society? The individual… Individuals make up our families, whether by blood or choice. The solo person gets added to more solo people and then we have a group… a congregation… a town… a state… and so on. There is no such thing as a self-made individual because everyone has some help along the way. No one makes himself or herself from the ground up. What’s the smallest unit of individual? A child.
            In our society, Western society, the child is the smallest individual. When we look at children, we see the possibility of a future productive individual, so we spend our energy in shaping that person. “What about the children?” is such a central question to our way of thinking that we easily miss what Jesus is saying by using a child as an example in this gospel lesson.
            In this period (and for well beyond it and still in some parts of the world today), children were not the smallest individual unit of society. They were the smallest productive members of the smallest societal unit- the family. If you survived infancy, the relief was not only that you lived, but that now you could help out! You could sweep, run errands, change straw, watch animals, help cook… whatever was appropriate for your gender and your family’s status. And you were socially invisible. A child still didn’t count until he or she was marrying out and cost money or marrying in and bringing money. A child is a non-person, uncounted.  
            So when Jesus, sighing over the disciples’ fight about greatness, calls a child… this should get our attention. First, Jesus separates the Twelve, so there must be a larger group. Secondly, the larger group must have men and women in it because a group of only men wouldn’t have children in it. Thirdly, the children might be invisible, but they can hear and they must have known who Jesus was or heard stories about him.
When Jesus sits the Twelve down and the rest of the crowd is close enough for the Teacher to call a child over, everyoneis listening. And then Jesus goes on to say, “Whoever welcomes on such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me, but the one who sent me.” A non-person, an invisible being represents Jesus, God on earth? An emissary represents his or her sender. The emissary of the king comes glittering and riding a fine horse, even if the king is struggling, because how people perceive the emissary is how they perceive the king.
            Jesus is the Divine Emissary. How Jesus is perceived (and received) is how God is perceived (and received). And here Jesus is telling the disciples (and everyone else) that in order to welcome God, you must train yourself to see what you previously treated as invisible.  Invisible like a child. Like a leper. Like a person with AIDS. Like hungry Africans. Like homeless Alaska Natives. Like a teenager with an eating disorder. Like a friend with depression. Like a lesbian or a gay man. Like a couple after a miscarriage. Like a person who goes to prison for murder. In order to welcome God, you must train yourself to see what you previously treated as invisible.
            In the season of Lent, many of us turn inward- thinking about our personal spiritual practices, our internal habits. There is nothing wrong with this. The ashes on our foreheads are also on our hearts, covering our quiet prayers, our doubts, our inward struggles. But Lent is not only about introspection. The inward reflection must be met with outward actions. Consider the words of Isaiah: Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble onself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? Is this not the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”
            Here’s the thing about Lenten discipline. We want to make it about God and me. God and Bob. God and Phyllis. God and Gene. Whether we set aside things that are truly in our way spiritually or whether we take up disciplines to challenge our thinking and our faith, the ultimate result shouldn’t be God and me… it should be God inme. Christ in me. Spirit in me.
            “God and me” is taken care of through Jesus the Christ. But God in me matters to the people I encounter every day. In order to welcome God, we must train ourselves to see what we previously treated as invisible. If you have ashes on your head (or on your heart), if you say you believe, if you wear a cross, if you participate in church activities of any kind… you are an emissary. What you do reflects the one who sends you. What you do reflects on Christ. On your Creator. On your Advocate. The people we miss because they are invisible to us are being denied an experience of Christ because of us. The people whom we engage with grace are having an experience of Christ because of us. Are we willing to open ourselves to greater encounters in Christ and with Christ as we walk toward resurrection?
This Lenten season, are we prepared to die, within ourselves and in our actions, to our prejudices, to our blind spots, to our fears, to our insecurities? Are you prepared to fast from injustice, from anger, from judgment, and from mistrust? Do you believe that you can close your eyes, receive the ashes- that marker of mortality, and have your eyes opened to new possibilities of grace? Are you willing to let Christ do that in you and through you?
             Even on Ash Wednesday, we are Easter people. Resurrection begins right now. You are an ambassador, an emissary for Christ, in Christ, with Christ…
            On each of these forty days, and beyond, God will be encountering you in other people. Do you see them? Do they see Christ?
Amen.
             

The Chore List

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Holy Trinity Sunday, Year A
19 June 2011
Genesis 1:1-2:4a; Psalm 8; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20
            For me, this is the “most wonderful time of the year” because it’s my favorite Sunday. As most of you know, I love the concept of the Holy Trinity. The Three-in-One and One-in-Three God. A relational God whose love outpours in a variety of ways- creating, redeeming and sustaining the world. We have the Father who brings us into a holy and eternal family, the Son who is our brother in faith, and the Spirit who is our advocate.
            I spend a lot of time thinking about the Trinity- possibly more than you do. In fact, I worry that when I mention the Holy Trinity, your eyes glaze over and you stop listening because it is a difficult concept. Thinking about God is challenging enough. Thinking about God in Three persons can seem nearly off-putting.
            So, let’s back off from the idea of the Trinity for a minute and just think about God. Or rather, what do you think God thinks about us? It’s often taken for granted that God thinks about us. We think of what we believe about Jesus and the Spirit. Believing that the coming of Christ and the presence of the Spirit are signs of God’s love for us, then surely God does think about us.
            But the question that the psalmist (the writer of the psalm) asks today is why should we expect God to think of us? When we considered the sky and the stars, for us in Alaska the ever-present sunshine this time of year, when we think of the depth of the ocean and the expansion of creation… why should we assume at all that God thinks of us? Who are we, but blips in human history, in creation history?
            But loving fathers, loving parents, remember each of their children. So surely God does remember us and does think on us. How can we know that? Well, one of the pressing memories I have of my dad is the Saturday chore list. We’d get up on a Saturday morning and there would be a list of things to do on the dining room table. Some of them were standard (clean the bathrooms, wash the sheets, vacuum, etc) and some of them were unusual or depended on the season (stack wood, move the chicken coop, turn the compost pile).
            Here’s the thing with a chore list. In order to write it, my dad had to think about my siblings and me- what he knew we could do and we couldn’t. We might not have always wanted to do the list. We might have thought it was unrealistic or unfair and maybe sometimes it was. Nevertheless, the list meant that our dad was thinking of us. He could have done these things himself, but then we wouldn’t have learned how and we wouldn’t have understood what it means to work together as a family.
            Similarly, we know that God is thinking of us because God gives us a chore list. God could do these things without our help, but that’s not how God decided to work with people. The psalmist notes that from the beginning, what we heard in Genesis, God has given us the responsibility of caring for the earth. This is chore list of stewardship, of creation care. We are charged with caring for animals and plants, for helping the earth to produce and for using what is before us to its fullest and healthiest extent.
            From God, we have a chore list that extends into our life in Christ. The risen Jesus tells his disciples to train others in the way of the godly life, in the way of discipleship. They are charged with extending the care of creation into caring for their neighbors. Caring for them means helping them to understand the realities and possibilities of abundant life in Christ, of joyous life in God.
            We know that God thinks about creation and about people because we are charged with carrying out these activities in the world. When I remember back to the chore lists of my youth, I recall that my siblings and I spent a good amount of time yelling at each other to do more work and pointing out who wasn’t doing their fair share. Now where do I see that behavior repeated…?
            Ah, yes. Many times, that’s how God’s faithful people use our time and talents- pointing out who isn’t holding up their end. We know what the chores are. We haven’t been asked to do things that are out of the realm of our possibility. God could do everything without our help, including making disciples, but then we have no role and, furthermore, we won’t understand what it means to work together as a family.  Without our chore list, our relationship to God and to one another is limited. We just exist, our tasks having very little meaning except to move us to the next day.
            Being given responsibility for creation care and for sharing the good news of Jesus means that God knows us and trusts us. It means that God is thinking of us and trying to include us in the building of the kingdom. Having a list of things to do bring us into a working relationship with God and with one another.
            In the story of creation, all things are relational. Nothing exists on its own. The day has the night, the sky has the heavenly bodies, the land gets the water, and the living things work together. Nothing that is made is declared good until it has a relational counterpart. Those counterparts work together for good, for wholeness.
            So it is between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Three-in-One God works together for good, for wholeness. There is a relationship there that may well be beyond our understanding, but it exists because of the love that burst forth from the heart of God. There is not, there cannot be, one expression of that love and God has three expressions… a Loving Creator, a Healing Redeemer and an Ever-present Inspiration. The chores of being God are shared between the members of the Trinity and the love in that relationship flows forward into God’s relationship with us.
            It is easy to feel overwhelmed by what it seems like we are called to do, but it’s a short chore list and it’s specialized to what God knows we can do. God has even given us the gifts to do these things- to care for creation and to share Christ with all whom we encounter. We are able to do these things because of the grace we have received through Christ. We are invited to do these things through the urging of this Spirit. We must do these things for the sake of God’s name in the world.
            What did Jesus tell his disciples when he gave them their chore list, that Great Commission? “I’ll be with you as you do this, day after day after day, right up until the end of the age.” (Message) You aren’t doing this alone. You’re not even doing it just with other people. The amazing grace of Jesus Christ, the extravagant love of God and the intimate friendship of the Holy Spirit is with all of you!
Amen.