Intentionality After Life

We found out today that an undergraduate student committed suicide. Working here at Marsh Chapel, I am involved to a certain extent in the pastoral care of the campus following events such as these. Even as we go about the business of consoling bereft and grieving friends, relatives, classmates, professors and even those who never knew him but still feel the loss deeply, it is a reminder that we have failed to share the life-giving love of Christ as we ought.

My first move upon hearing the news was to look him up on Facebook. What a wonderful tool for ministry! There are two people who share this name here at Boston University. I should not be surprised; there are some thirty thousand students here. It is relatively easy to discern who it is because one is a graduate student. I hesitate, hovering over the appropriate link before clicking it. What would the profile of someone who commits suicide look like? I would expect it to have few friends, few pictures, few groups, few recent posts on the wall, few if any recent entries on the mini-feed. I would expect that the depression that leads to suicide would be reflected in a spare and bare profile. I click the link. I am surprised to find that, in fact, he had many friends, many photos, many groups, many recent posts on his wall, many recent entries on his mini-feed. The two most recent entries are new friends added. My heart pangs, wondering what it will feel like for that friend, also a BU student to learn of his death and to discover that she was the last friend added to his list. I scroll down and discover that he worked locally part-time. What will it be like for his coworkers to learn that he took his own life? I look at this list of "friends in other networks" and discover that he had two friends at my own alma mater. I click on the links to their profiles. They both arrived after I had already left. I can imagine them seeking out solace in the chapel where I used to worship. I realize that I am relating to this poor soul, and that I am relating to him because he is dead; I feel guilty for having failed to relate to him in life.

Tomorrow will be January 22, two years to the day that my friend Linda died. She did not commit suicide; she was murdered in her Baltimore apartment. I knew Linda through middle and high school, sharing in classes together, lunch, rides home. She was in charge of the flag squad that performed with the marching band at football games during her first two years and I was in the band. We were in the National and Math Honor Societies together. She had gone to Johns Hopkins University to study biomedical engineering and was a semester away from graduating. Her death was the advent of my experience with Facebook; I created an account so that I could see her face after she had died. We had lost touch somewhat after high school and I needed to reconnect, to re-relate. Two years later, I still mourn her death.

Last week I learned that the man who killed Linda plead guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. I am sure that for many this brings some sense of closure, but not for me. Closure is when the violence stops, when the death stops. Life in prison is not the death penalty, but in our society it is still a death. We lock away people who threaten the existence of our society and all too often we throw away the key. There is little attempt, if any, to bring healing to such people. There is certainly an intent to break off relationship. This is not courage, it is cowardice. Facing the villainy in others would mean facing the villainy in ourselves, something none of us is wont to do. It is easier, we think, to lock the problem away in a little drawer, along with all of the other things we would rather not face, and forget about them. We never stop to think that we are locking away a part of ourselves as well. We are all complicit in Linda's death. What would cause someone to do such a thing? What are the social, cultural, political, economic, and yes theological conditions that would drive a person to such a drastic point as killing someone in an attempt to steal from them? These are questions we do not like to ask. Instead, we are merely human and allow our fight or flight instincts to take over. Nevertheless, just as we are complicit in the death of this student at BU by suicide because we failed to reach out and relate until it was too late, we are complicit in Linda's death because we failed to relate to the man who killed her, and we are complicit in the killer's death because we fail, day in and day out, to relate to ourselves.

When will we learn to intentionally relate to the living? And why do we wait to relate until death's sting has already been felt?

What Was, What Is, and What Might Be

January 7, 2007
Feast of the Baptism of Christ
Hughes United Methodist Church
Wheaton, MD

Isaiah 43: 1-7
Luke 3: 15-22

Clip from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings: “The Mirror of Galadriel.”

Raise your hand if you remember your baptism.

I remember nothing from my baptism, which is really not surprising given that I was an infant when it happened. I am told that it happened right here in this sanctuary when Rev. Ed Van Metre was the senior pastor, but I must admit that it can sometimes be hard to recognize its importance when I do not even recall it happening! Perhaps some of you who also cannot remember your baptisms can sympathize. I can remember confirmation, up at the altar rail, surrounded by family and friends, when Carl Rife and Carletta Allen were the pastors. I remember my ordination to the diaconate, with my parents and the Lindisfarne Community surrounding me, but that one is easy because it just happened this past summer. But my baptism I do not remember. It makes the notion of “remembering our baptisms,” which we will do shortly, slightly ironic.

Nevertheless, we know that our baptisms do have meaning. The World Council of Churches has attempted to explain this meaning as it is found in all of the churches in its study document Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry. First and foremost, baptism is a sign of new life in Christ and the fellowship of all of the baptized in the body of Christ, the church. For turn-of-the-era Jews and early Christians, water symbolized death, and so baptism is a sign of dying with Christ as we pass under the water, and rising again with Christ as we reemerge. (This symbolism is, of course, clearer in full immersion baptism). Water is used for cleaning and so symbolizes cleansing from sin, conversion from seeking to direct our own lives in spite of God to life in communion with God who pardons and forgives our sins and offenses. As we heard in the Gospel reading, the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus at his baptism, and so baptism is a time when the Holy Spirit descends upon us and remains with us in life thereafter. These shared experiences of meaning in baptism are a sign of our common discipleship and the fact that we are knit together in the one body of Christ. Finally, these shared meanings in common discipleship are a sign of the inbreaking of the realm of God in the present world order.

But how are we to access these meanings if we cannot even remember the event happening? To bridge this gap, I want to briefly explore what the experience of baptism was in the early church, what the tradition of baptism became and is today, and then I will let our reaffirmation or remembrance of baptism serve as a sign of what our baptisms might be, recognizing that the road to sanctification twists and turns and is paved with bumps and dips.

To explore early Christian baptism, I borrow from Aidan Kavanagh, longtime professor of liturgy at Yale Divinity School:

“So they stripped and stood there, probably faint from fasting, shivering from the cold of early Easter morning and with awe at what was about to transpire. Years of formation were about to be consummated; years of having their motives and lives scrutinized; years of hearing the word of God read and expounded at worship; years of being dismissed with prayer before the faithful went on to celebrate the eucharist; years of having the doors to the assembly hall closed to them; years of seeing the tomb-like baptistry building only from without; years of hearing the old folks of the community tell hair-raising tales of what being a Christian had cost their own grandparents when the emperors were still pagan; years of running into a reticent and reverent vagueness concerning what actually was done by the faithful at the breaking of bread and in that closed baptistry. Tonight all this was about to end as they stood there naked on a cold floor in the gloom of this eerie room.

“When all the catechumens have been thoroughly oiled, they and the bishop are suddenly startled by the crash of the baptistry doors being thrown open. Brilliant golden light spills out into the shadowy vestibule, and following the bishop (who has now regained his composure), the catechumens and the assistant presbyters, deacons, deaconesses and sponsors move into the most glorious room that most of them have ever seen. It is a high, arbor-like pavilion of green, gold, purple and white mosaic from marble floor to domed ceiling, sparkling like jewels in the light of innumerable oil lamps that fill the room with heady warmth. The windows are beginning to blaze with the light of Easter dawn. The walls curl with vines and tendrils that thrust up from the floor, and at their tops, apostles gaze down robed in snow-white togas, holding crowns. These apostles stand around a golden chair draped with purple on which rests only an open book. And above all these, in the highest point of the ballooning dome, a naked Jesus (very much in the flesh) stands up to his waist in the Jordan as an unkempt John pours water on him, and God's disembodied hand points the Holy Spirit at Jesus' head in the form of a white bird.

“Suddenly the catechumens realize that they have unconsciously formed themselves into a mirror image of this lofty icon on the floor directly beneath it. They are standing around a pool in the middle of the floor, into which gushes water pouring noisily from the mouth of a stone lion crouching atop a pillar at poolside.

“Then a young male catechumen of about ten, the son of pious parents, is led down into the pool by the deacon. The water is warm (it has been heated in a furnace), and the oil on his body spreads out on the surface in iridescent swirls. The deacon positions the child near the cascade from the lion's mouth. The bishop leans over on his cane and, in a voice that sounds like something out of the Apocalypse, says: "Euphemius! Do you believe in God the Father, who created all of heaven and earth?" After a nudge from the deacon beside him, the boy murmurs that he does. And just in time, for the deacon, who has been doing this for 50 years and is the boy's grandfather, wraps him in his arms, lifts him backward into the rushing waters and forces him under the surface. The old deacon smiles through his beard at the wide brown eyes that look up at him in shock and fear from beneath the water (the boy has purposely not been told what to expect). Then he raises him up coughing and sputtering. The bishop waits until the boy can speak again, and leaning over a second time, tapping the boy on the shoulder with his cane, says: "Euphemius! Do you believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, who was conceived of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and was crucified, died and was buried? Who rose on the third day and ascended into heaven, from whence he will come again to judge the living and the dead?" This time the boy replies like a shot, "I do," and then holds his nose. "Euphemius! Do you believe in the Holy Spirit, the master and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who is to be honored and glorified equally with the Father and the Son, who spoke by the prophets? And in one holy, catholic and apostolic church which is the communion of God's holy ones? And in the life that is coming?" "I do."

“When the boy comes up the third time, his vast grandfather gathers him in his arms and carries him up the steps leading out of the pool.”

This exposition of the baptismal experience of the early church seems quite distant to our late-modern ears, does it not? The greatest disparity is probably that early Christians baptized adults and adolescents, not infants, as is our practice today. The original reason for baptizing infants was the concern that only the baptized could get to heaven. Since the infant mortality rate was high in pre-modern societies, and remains quite high in some societies today, the church was worried about the status of those children who did not make it. The solution was to separate baptism from confirmation, so that baptism is the sacrament of initiation into the church at infancy while confirmation is the sacrament that seals baptism upon reaching maturity. Sadly, as we late-moderns have become accustomed to very low infant mortality rates, although not entirely absent, many of us struggle to find meaning in the theological answer to the mortality problem so many centuries ago. Baptism has become simply what one does upon the birth of a baby: a cultural ritual instead of a sacrament pointing beyond itself. Indeed, there are many Christians who come to church only on Christmas, Easter, and at the birth of a new member of the family; and some who also skip Easter and Christmas, only coming for the baptism.

In his Christmas Eve sermon, Dr. Ennis told the story of a pious grandmother who wanted her granddaughter to be baptized in spite of the fact that the identity of the child’s father was unknown. The pastor did not want to celebrate the baptism without being sure that there was a family to raise the child in the church, but the grandmother was persistent and asked that the issue be taken to the session, the decision making body in the Presbyterian polity. Finally, the question went to the congregation, and the pastor asked who would come and stand with the child and her mother. Eventually, most of the congregation stood with her. My first reaction to the story was, “how could a pastor possibly deny the sacrament of baptism to a child?” Upon further reflection, however, I decided that the pastor was not wrong for being concerned about the spiritual welfare of the child, but he was wrong for assuming that spiritual welfare is dependent upon a Norman Rockwellesque nuclear family. The congregation was right to take up the responsibility their own baptisms placed upon them to stand by the child, the mother, and the grandmother in guiding the child to maturity. In the end, this child’s baptism was given a great deal more gravity than might have been the case if the father had been known, not unlike the story of the birth of another child, albeit many centuries earlier.

The church has a special word for remembering, the Greek word αναμνεσις. This word has been interpreted theologically with regard to the sacraments of the church to mean not simply remembering a past event, but also making it present again. Furthermore, αναμνεσις not only makes the past present but also remembers the future, giving us a foretaste of what might be. It is in this full sense of remembering that I would encourage you to enter into the remembrance of baptism in a few moments. The remembrance of baptism is not a rebaptism, but for those of us who cannot remember our own baptisms, it may mean remembering out baptism as if for the first time since the actual first time is absent to us. Moreover, for all of us the remembrance of baptism is not a dwelling in the past but a movement toward the future accompanied by our family of those baptized into the body of Christ and in the awful or awe-filled presence of God in the power of the Holy Spirit. “But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.” Amen.

Of Babies and Bathwater

January 7, 2007
Feast of the Baptism of Christ
Hughes United Methodist Church
Wheaton, MD

Isaiah 43: 1-7
Psalm 89
Acts 8: 14-25
Luke 3: 15-22

Are you familiar with the proverb “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater?” The roots of this pithy saying can be traced back to Germany in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century and it was even picked up by Martin Luther in the polemical context of the Reformation. The practical context is that babies often used to be the last members of the family to wash in the familial bathwater and by then the water was often so dirty that it would have been easy to forget that baby was there, resulting in baby being carried along when the bathwater was discarded. The meaning of the proverb can be further deduced in comparison with the more biblical aphorism contained in the Lucan gospel just heard: “Don’t throw out the wheat with the chaff,” or more blandly but precisely: “Don’t throw out the good with the bad.”

It is quite easy to draw the analogy between this proverb and the Christian sacrament of baptism, but more difficult to draw the analogy with Jesus’ own baptism. Despite the fact that we have stuck the Feast of the Baptism of Christ on the liturgical calendar a mere two weeks after Christmas, a week after the Feast of the Naming and Circumcision of Jesus and almost a month before the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, Jesus was actually about thirty years old when he was baptized. This is all smoothed over quite nicely by the tradition that has developed of baptizing infants, but this was neither the practice of the early church nor of Jesus. However, this development in the liturgical tradition does point to the depth of meaning Christians find in the sacrament of baptism to the point that it became the guarantor of salvation and so of crucial importance to infants who were at great risk for survival for much of Christian history until the modern period, at least for those of us who live in societies with access to the best of modern medicine; the vast majority of Christians live in the southern hemisphere and go without such niceties.

It is the depth of meaning to be found in the symbol of baptism that makes the proverb of babies and bathwater applicable to Jesus’ own baptism when it is remembered that Christian theology has taken from Paul the metaphor of the church as the body of Christ with Jesus himself the head as one of the primary symbols of Christian life together. We celebrate today not only the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus and the voice of God proclaiming him the beloved two thousand years ago, but we carry that Trinitarian blessing forward into our own historical moment as the body of Christ. We too are beloved of God and hosts of the Holy Spirit and so we are responsible for seeing to it that the precious gift given us in that baby two short weeks ago is not washed downstream in the baptismal waters of the Jordan. In the psalm for this morning we sing of the love God has for us, for
“The heavens are yours, the earth also is yours;
the world and all that is in it—you have founded them.
The north and the south—you created them;
Tabor and Hermon joyously praise your name.”
We are created by God and so loved by God, and thus we must stand in ultimate perspective before God our creator, to borrow a phrase from my teacher Bob Neville. To stand before God ultimately is to stand responsible for the created lives we have been entrusted with living, and this responsibility is taken up in the sacrament of baptism. Baptism is a visible sign of the love God has for us and a reminder of the responsibility that love implies on our part, namely to discern the baby from the bathwater.

Kilian McDonnell finds a similar theology of baptism in the early church, that “the goal of Christian baptism is ‘to become pleasing to the Father.’ The Spirit, therefore, comes down on the Son that he, the Son, might ‘reveal salvation to all,’ to teach us how to attain the Father. The baptism of Jesus sets the pattern for the whole trinitarian economy of salvation.” This sounds rather easy, does it not? If you want to discern the baby from the bathwater, just follow the pointing of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. But this does not really solve the problem; which spirit is the Holy Spirit? There are many spirits blowing about in the world, but not all of them are the Holy Spirit pointing to the baby amidst the bathwater and thus allowing us to stand in ultimate perspective before God our creator.

We can hear these many spirits blowing through our churches quite clearly. How often have you heard it said, “the church really should do x,” or more emphatically, “the church simply must do y”? More often than not it is put negatively: “the church should not do this,” or “the church must not do to that.” How often have you said such things yourselves? I want to suggest that most of these “should” and “must” statements are probably bathwater. Why? Because the whole problem of the baby and the bathwater is that the baby is too small and there is too much bathwater; there are many spirits, but one Holy Spirit.

On the other hand, it is entirely possible that all of the things we “should” or “must” do really are from the Holy Spirit of God, they really are the baby. This seems to be a contradiction; how could the same things be either baby or bathwater, both baby and bathwater? The contradiction is resolved when we realize that it is not the things in themselves that are either baby or bathwater, spirit or Holy Spirit, but rather whether and how the things orient us to be able to stand in ultimate perspective, the meaning they convey for us that allow us to stand before God our creator, that makes them one or the other. The discernment of spirits, of babies from bathwater, is finally a human problem. It is true that we must choose the good, we must choose Christ, but the act of choosing is not the end of the story: we choose Christ when we follow in the way that leads to standing in ultimate perspective, when we seek the Holy Spirit anew in every moment of our lives, when we take up our cross daily.

I have the privilege of regularly attending Trinity Church in Copley Square in Boston, an Episcopal church of about four thousand members that is just completing renovations costing about $54 million. What better context for posing our question: baby or bathwater? It would be easy to say that paying $54 million for just about anything must be bathwater, but my experience at the church is contrary to this. I came into the community as the renovations were underway and have stayed as they come to completion. I have been quite impressed by the insistence of the church leadership, both clergy and especially laity, that the renovations are only significant insofar as they point not only the members of the church but also the entire city of Boston beyond themselves and toward God and neighbor. The renovations themselves do so in that the homeless of Boston who gather at night on Copley Square sleep on the steps and under the porticoes of the church, but the people who make up Trinity Church carry forth their worship, or their work to employ the literal meaning of the word “liturgy,” to the ends of the world. Trinity Church has an annual food drive called “Loaves & Fishes” to help stock food pantries around Boston, they host and fund the Trinity Education for Excellence Program to provide leadership development for students in the Boston public schools, they have been involved in an interfaith effort to bring health care to all Massachusetts residents, and they send several teams to Honduras each year to help with structural improvements, various services, and medical treatment, to name just a few ways that Trinity reaches out to its neighbors.

Trinity Church is a wonderful example of the fact that choosing Christ, choosing the baby, is an issue of orientation beyond ourselves in the midst of many conflicting symbols and realities, many spirits vying for our attention. We choose the Holy Spirit when we choose according to the fruits of the Spirit, some of which Paul outlines in the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These fruits alone, however, are just as prone to perversion as any other norms so long as they are not oriented beyond the people who adopt them. This is why the great commandment, to love God and neighbor, is really one commandment. We are oriented properly to God who is beyond ourselves by also being oriented beyond ourselves toward our neighbor even as we are oriented properly to God who is at the very depths of our being by also being oriented toward our neighbor for whom God is also at the very depths of being.

I would suspect that many of the “should” and “must” directives to be heard in churches are oriented more toward those proclaiming them than they are toward God and neighbor. Many churches are desperate for funds to pay the utility bills, keep up with regular maintenance, and generally keep the doors open. Out of desperation, these churches turn much of their attention to raising money for the sake of the building and to increasing membership in order to raise more money for the sake of the building. Members of these churches are deeply concerned about the facility because it is where their families have worshipped sometimes for generations. Pastors are concerned about losing their pensions and benefits if traditional denominational structures fail. Churches imaginatively construct golden ages from the remembered past, hopelessly and helplessly seeking to establish the foundations to rebuild this ephemeral “Christendom.” Such churches, members and pastors have not just thrown the baby out with the bathwater, they have thrown out the baby and kept the bathwater of fear and illusion!

Glen V. Wiberg elaborates on this by paraphrasing our passage from Luke’s second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, in his Christian Century article “A Costly Baptism:” “A local businessman observing the visitation of the Holy Spirit wants to make a deal. Since everything has its price, he thinks, why not the Holy Spirit? Just name your price! But Peter speaks the terror: To hell with your money! And you along with it! Repent of your arrogant presumptions of striking bargains and offering bribes for God's costly gift.”

The church is guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater not only in its internal concerns but also in how it goes about interacting with the world. Over the centuries, the church has adopted many authorities as trustworthy guides for her members in walking the paths of life. Some of these guides include the scriptures contained in the Bible along with other texts written through the first century of the Common Era, the decisions of councils of bishops especially in the fourth through eighth centuries but continuing into the present for our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, the investigations of theologians shining the light of God through human intellect, and the daily lived experience of each and every Christian in all of its guilt, fear, anger, love, joy, peace, and hope. The problem is that in many churches the guides have become ossified into absolute authorities and so ends in themselves instead of means to the end of standing before God the creator in ultimate perspective. Furthermore, the ability of the church to speak authoritatively into this historical moment is made laughable by reliance upon these ossified authorities, leading many to charge our trustworthy guides with lacking credibility, a charge that holds so long as they remain absolutized. We throw the baby out with the bathwater when we fail to exercise the vocation adopted in baptism to be discerners of spirits in the care of trustworthy guides and instead lazily cling to absolute authorities.

So what is it like to stand in ultimate perspective? I think it is probably a lot like baptism; at least as early Christians experienced it. I quote here from Aidan Kavanagh, longtime professor of liturgy at Yale Divinity School: “So they stripped and stood there, probably faint from fasting, shivering from the cold of early Easter morning and with awe at what was about to transpire. Years of formation were about to be consummated; years of having their motives and lives scrutinized; years of hearing the word of God read and expounded at worship; years of being dismissed with prayer before the faithful went on to celebrate the eucharist; years of having the doors to the assembly hall closed to them; years of seeing the tomb-like baptistry building only from without; years of hearing the old folks of the community tell hair-raising tales of what being a Christian had cost their own grandparents when the emperors were still pagan; years of running into a reticent and reverent vagueness concerning what actually was done by the faithful at the breaking of bread and in that closed baptistry. Tonight all this was about to end as they stood there naked on a cold floor in the gloom of this eerie room.

When all the catechumens have been thoroughly oiled, they and the bishop are suddenly startled by the crash of the baptistry doors being thrown open. Brilliant golden light spills out into the shadowy vestibule, and following the bishop (who has now regained his composure), the catechumens and the assistant presbyters, deacons, deaconesses and sponsors move into the most glorious room that most of them have ever seen. It is a high, arbor-like pavilion of green, gold, purple and white mosaic from marble floor to domed ceiling, sparkling like jewels in the light of innumerable oil lamps that fill the room with heady warmth. The windows are beginning to blaze with the light of Easter dawn. The walls curl with vines and tendrils that thrust up from the floor, and at their tops, apostles gaze down robed in snow-white togas, holding crowns. These apostles stand around a golden chair draped with purple on which rests only an open book.”

To stand in ultimate perspective is to participate in the greatest mysteries of human existence. Thankfully, we have been graced with trustworthy guides and fruits of the spirit at baptism so that we do not walk the path either blind or alone. Let us walk forward together, or better yet take up the dance together with God, renewing our commitment to being a community in love with the baby and unafraid to let the bathwater flow gently away. We are Christians not only as disciples of Christ, but also as discerners of spirits. Amen.

The Unity of the Spirit in the Bond of Peace

Sermon preached at Hughes United Methodist Church, Wheaton, MD on 6 August 2006

As I sat on the balcony of my cousins' house in St. Cergue Switzerland at the end of June, working on my sermon for this morning, I gazed across the wildflower laden fields that surround the house formerly owned by French philosopher Henri Bergson and across Lake Geneva at the grandeour and beauty of Mount Blanc and thought to myself that there could be no better home for the primary institutional representation of the movement toward church unity than in the shadow of such an iconic vista of the glory of God. Last night, at Chicago's O'Hare airport, rewriting the sermon I wrote in Geneva, I was struck by how my change of sermon writing scenery to rushing passengers, cramped waiting lounges and extraordinarily overpriced food is actually a much more accurate metaphor for the ecumenical movement in its present practice. You see, I have spent the last month and a half traveling across three continents visiting and journeying with various expressions of ecumenical community and getting an on-the-ground experience to balance out the idealistic vision of ecumenism that we are sometimes taught in the seminary classroom. This meant that the closely argued, thoroughly researched sermon on the Ephesians 4 text suddenly became inadequate in the face of the deeply personal situations and experiences I encountered.

The passage we read from the Epistle to the Ephesians this morning emphatically exhorts us to "lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called," and then goes on to assign to that life three virtues - humility, gentleness and patience - and one characteristic - unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. It is this latter characteristic that concerns me this morning as it is a perfect definition for the goal of the ecumenical movement. The ecumenical movement is not concerned solely with church unity for its own sake any more than Jesus, in his prayer recorded in the Gospel according to John on the eve of his death, is concerned with unity for its own sake but instead he says that the goal of church unity is "that the world might believe." This is the same thing the writer of Ephesians is concerned with when he speaks of church unity in the bond of peace because belief in Jesus is belief in the Prince of Peace. Thus, the quest for Christian unity can never be a cheap unity, as some would surely have it, but must be a costly unity that will not even be satisfied with peace within the church but will insist upon a peaceful church in a peaceful world, a sure sign of the coming reign of God.

The first community I visited was the Iona Community. The Iona Abbey was rebuilt by the founder of the Iona Community, George MacLeoud, in replica of the 12th century Benedictine abbey that inhabited the site previously. The Iona Community is a disperced ecumenical order made up of men and women, mostly in Scotland and England but also elsewhere around the world, who have dedicated themselves to a life of prayer, bible study, and service rooted in a deep concern for social justice. As my own abbot jokingly pointed out, everything in the Iona community is about social justice, which gets tacked onto the end of every program theme so that the program I attended was subtitled "Gaelic spirituality and social justice" while other programs look at liturgy and social justice, public action for social justice, free trade and social justice, peanut butter and jelly and social justice; oh, wait, maybe not the last one, but they probably could do! The program was entitled "Where Three Streams Meet," which refers to the Gaelic tradition of going to pray for justice at the place where three streams meet. Throughout the week, we cosmopolitan pilgrims in attendance were introduced to Gaelic culture and language, the struggle to keep both alive under the forces of globalization seeking to supplant the Gaelic language, which is so integral to Gaelic culture, with English, and the violence exerted against Gaelic speakers by English speakers in an attempt to assimilate them. This cultural oppression is of concern to God because Christian spirituality is inherent to Gaelic culture and its oppression is a type of structural violence that does not always leave visible scars but deeply wounds the social psyche of these people of God.

My second visit was with the Taize Community in the south of France, a globally recognized ecumenical order that plays host to between three and six thousand people, mostly under the age of 25, each week of the summer every year, and slightly fewer each week the rest of the year. These droves are drawn from all over the world, bringing their various languages, cultures and lives together to share for a week in the daily round of prayer, study, work and rest of the brothers. Unfortunately, violence has broken through the Taize bubble. Some of you may be aware of the death of brother Roger, founder of the Taize Community, just about a year ago. During evening prayer, a woman sick with mental illness entered the church, passed through the thousands of people surrounding the brothers, cleared the verdant wall of shrubbery separating the brothers from the people, negotiated a crowd of small children surrounding brother Roger, and slit his throat. Immediately after it happened questions arose as to whether the brothers would increase security, installing metal detectors at the doors of the church, searching bags when people arrived. After much prayer and discernment, the brothers decided that they would make no changes in how the community operates. There are no metal detectors or searches. The only protection is the same shrubbery separating the visitors from the brothers that was unable at last to protect brother Roger. To some extent this response comes from one of the 45 thousand letters sent to the community, this one from the prior of the Grande Chartreuse monastery, which said, "The dramatic circumstances of Brother Roger's death are merely an external coating that serve to make yet clearer his vulnerability that he cultivated as a doorway by which, by preference, God gains access to us." Being vulnerable means being open, taking risks that we may be hurt or even killed. And yet it is by this very means that we have access to God. Thus the relationship between unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace beccomes clear as it is only when we are living in peace that the vulnerability necessary to spiritual life and thus Christian unity can exist unmaligned by fear and violence.

Last Monday afternoon I arrived back in the US from a two-week Christian Peacemaker Teams delegation to Colombia. While there we met with people, church leaders, and human rights organizations who suffer under constant and violent oppression by the Colombian government and military, supposedly demobilized paramilitaries, and guerillas. We met one family, out of 3 million in Colombia, who have been displaced from their homes due to being caught in the middle of paramilitary and guerilla violence. We met with a women's organization that runs a series of lunch houses to provide inexpensive meals to women, specifically single mothers, and children. They closed up one of their lunch houses one afternoon and when they returned the next morning discovered that the house had been torn down and both the structure and all of its contents had been removed from the site. They arrived to find an empty lot. Their house had been disappeared by paramilitaries! With met with families of victims of a massacre carried out by paramilitaries on the 16th of May, 1998 when they interrupted a community assembly on a soccer field and insisted that 32 men get on the back of a truck. Twenty-seven complied and have never been heard from again. The rest were shot on the spot. We met with union organizers and human rights activists who are unable to spend consecutive nights in the same place for fear of being assassinated. We met with peasant farmer activists who live in their office in the city because it would be too great a risk to go home at night. We met some of the farmers they advocate for who have been driven from their land with equipment provided by the 700 million dollars the US spends on military aid to Colombia each year, third only to Israel and Egypt, and the land is then taken over by president Urribe and the fourteen other major land owners in Colombia who already own 65% of the land. We heard about the Colombian Law of Justice and Peace, referred to by the people as the Law of Impunity, which was supposedly intended to demobilize the paramilitary but has instead had the effect of legitimizing their violence because they have simply reorganized themselves into private security forces and continue to carry out the same violent acts and oppression of the people that they have been engaged in for years, although now the government can deny complicity because they are "demobilized." We observed a demonstration by workers from the Coca-Cola plant who were protesting the assassination, arranged by the Coca-Cola corporation, of workers who sought to organize unions. We visited a community of displaced on the borders of the industrial city of Barrancabermeja and listened as our bus driver recounted how he lived in that ramshackle and destitute villiage thirteen years ago when paramilitaries came looking for him because he was a leading organizer of the workers at Ecopetrol, the nationalized oil company, and not finding him they assassinated his 20 year old son right there in the street where we were standing. We met with farmers who grow coca, used to make cocaine, who grow it not because they want to but because it is the only way they can subsist. Furthermore, US funded fumigations are being targeted by the Urribe administration against agricultural crops instead of coca crops, as evidenced both by the personal stories of farmers as well as the increase in coca production since fumigations began. Plan Colombia is a failed piece of US foreign policy proped up by multinational corporations who have a special interest in the instability of Colombia because it maximizes their profits. It is one of the winds of doctrine we are warned to resist being blown about by as it is trickery and craftiness in deceitful scheming.

So where is the church in the midst of this corruption and violence? To a large extent the churches are complicit in the violence, either turning a blind eye or even supporting and legitimating the structures that perpetrate it. But there are some churches, and sectors of other churches, who have taken a stand on the side of the poor and the oppressed. They have taken the side of peace because they know that it is the will of God, God's dream for the world, that they do so. We heard that 75 pastors have been assassinated in the past 2 years in northern Colombia. We also observed a popular assembly in Micoahumado, a small peasant villiage in the mountains of northern Colombia, which is a grassroots political organization for the surrounding area. At the assembly we watched as its facilitators welcomed the cooperation of Roman Catholic and pentecostal church leaders in guiding, shaping, and providing space for the assembly to occur. Many of the human rights organizations we met with were birthed in the Roman Catholic church and one of the most effective is still led by a Jesuit priest. We heard from a Mennonite pastor about an ecumenical proposal that has been put forward to try to reform the Law of Justice and Peace so that it effectively mitigates continued violence and oppression.

The movement toward Christian unity is an inherently missiological enterprise. Ecumenism has mission at its heart. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who take up the exhortation to "live a life worthy of the call to which you have been called" which takes as its primary characteristic "unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." At its 9th General Assembly in Porto Alegre, Brazil this past February, the World Council of Churches united missions and peacemaking under the banner of reconciliation. They did this in two ways. First, the missions agenda for the next eight years has been set to focus on reconciliation and healing. Second, the assembly approved the faith and order document entitled "The Nature and Mission of the Church" and commended it to the churches for study and reflection. The good news is that the church has not entirely lost sight of the dream God has for the world in which the wolf lies down with the lamb, swords are turned into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. A spirituality of justice and peacemaking is possible only on the foundation of a spirituality of prayer through which God imparts this vision and graces us the courage, strength, and perseverance to attain it. The writer of Ephesians exhorts us to such a life, a "life worthy of the calling to which you have been called," a life characterized by unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Computer Down

Hello all,

My computer is down and won't be up for a while so I won't be posting for a while. Everything is going great and I will post everything once my computer is back up.

Peace!

WCC Day 1

When I finally awoke this morning and took a shower, John and Margaret informed me that Charlotte, who was arranging my visit to the World Council of Churches, had scheduled my first meeting for 11AM. She had told me that she would schedule them for this afternoon so I had to pick up the pace so we could get out of the house and into town in time to drop me at the WCC headquarters and then Margaret could get to her appointment. John, who worked for the WCC for many years in charge of the Muslim-Christian dialogue and then interreligious dialogue in general, coming out of retirement to help with the assembly this year in Porto Allegre, accompanied me to the offices to drop me off and then headed off to the United Nations where he has been working with the newly formed Human Rights Council.

My meeting with Simon Oxley was incredibly informative for thinking about ecumenical theological education and formation. My primary question upon entry was about how to address conflict through ecumenical formation. What Dr. Oxley encouraged me to do was to reconceive my question in order to realize that some degree of conflict is inherent to the formation of a truly ecumenical consciousness, even as the success of an ecumenical community is a function of how it conceives, engages, and resolves that conflict. While for many churches faith is a function of certainty, confidence, and conviction, Dr. Oxley framed the ecumenical vision of Christianity as being more fluid and self-critical. He also made an important point regarding distinction and distance. Often Christian communities conceive their identities by creating distance between themselves and the other in the cause of preserving their particularity. Dr. Oxley made the case for more closely aligned distinctions such that particularity is not lost but enriched and refined by coming into contact with difference, something that I have noticed in my globalization studies but that has yet to become internalized by many identity formation processes.

I had an excellent discussion with the Rev. Jacques Matthey regarding ecumenism and mission and was encouraged to hear that he is working on may of the same issues that we covered in my course on ecumenism and mission this past spring. He indicated a two track program for mission over the coming years, the first being reconciliation and the second being healing. The notion of reconciliation brings in many of the issues of justice that the WCC has historically been known for championing while adjusting the paradigm to help conflicting parties live together in peace as opposed to focusing so much on one group overcoming oppression by another. Reconciliation is understood as reconciliation amongst groups, between individuals, and in the relationship of humanity and God, the last of which brings in the theme of evangelism which the WCC has been accused of neglecting in the past. The healing side of the mission movement takes a holistic approach to the wellbeing of the person, both physical and spiritual. It also brings in the pentecostal experience of healing which is more highly spiritualized than the more secularized western approach. The most interesting thing about these two tracks, from my perspective, is that they lead to a greater integration with what are classically defined as issues off faith and order, namely that of ecclesiology. If the message of the church is reconciliation, then the movement toward ecclesial unity becomes central because the message is eviscerated by the lack of reconciliation within the church. The only coherent response to the churches would be to say "Doctor, heal thyself!" Nevertheless, church unity can never be other than a unity in diversity, and so the tension is really walking a knife edge. We concluded our discussion talking about the changing ecclesial nature of the churches in general and the move to more localized expressions of church as opposed to the large denominational institutions. Rev. Matthey lamented that the WCC has been unable as yet to embody this developing reality even as he predicted the final fall of the institutional denominations in about 15 years or so, making it of central importance to my generation of theologians and church leaders. Clearly, I am in the right place in the Lindisfarne Community since our spirituality is so ecumenical while we express a glocalized church structure.

After that meeting I met up with John and we decided to get some lunch at the WCC cafeteria. On the way we ran into Tamara, an Georgian Orthodox friend of John's who works in the faith and order side of things, and invited her to join us for lunch. She was excited to hear that I am from Boston because she is working on bringing a workshop to Boston to discuss the newly adopted ecclesiological document approved by the general assembly last February. We talked about local Boston theologians to be in contact with and I hope my new position as facilitator of the International Mission and Ecumenism Committee of the Boston Theological Institute might be helpful in making this happen. Our conversation turned to some of the tensions amongst Protestant and Orthodox theologians and I expressed my own identification with Orthodoxy as a way to mitigate the sometimes less than positive effects of the western Enlightenment without falling into a postmodern relativism. Our meeting just went to prove that the chance encounters are at least as important as the scheduled meetings.

After lunch John took me on a brief tour, pointing out the library and taking me into the assembly hall and the chapel. The assembly hall is a warm space with a green tapestry embroidered with an image of Christ surrounded by symbols of the various regional churches and framed by a covenantal arc, a fig tree, and a vine. They are set to have translators into six different languages and generally to conduct business much as any international organization, but with the focal point definitely being Christ at the center of the tapestry. Upon entering the chapel there is a ramp down that is carved with symbols pointing to the water of baptism. There are chairs set up around a central alter with a low, wood carved iconostasis such that worship from virtually any denomination could occur there. There is a beautiful organ and a grand piano for music and there are worship and music books from many denominations and from around the world. Beautiful icons adorn the walls. The chapel too is a warm space, but much lighter than the assembly hall. Perhaps some day I will have the privilege of worshipping there with an ecumenical body of Christians.

We returned to L'Echapee via Nyon so that Margaret could pick up her glasses and John and I went to poke around an old castle and some Roman ruins in the town that dates back 2000 years or more. From Nyon we stopped by to visit Bossey Ecumenical Institute, a center for training the next generation's ecumenists run by the WCC, which now offers both masters and Ph.D. programs. The buildings are classic Swiss architecture and the chapel, similar in style to the one at the center in Geneva but smaller, is in a large stone tower. We walked around for a few minutes and noted the view down to the lake. After returning to L'Echapee we have taken a spot of tea and conversed about the problems and promises of the ecumenical movement and the church in general.

As I sit here on the patio, looking down toward the lake while rain clouds roll in, I am struck how the light haze the clouds bring make the Swiss country side stretched out below us look exactly like the paintings I have seen hanging in galleries in North America. Even as some of the most important international work in the world, including the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the Red Cross, and the WCC, amongst many others, is being done in Geneva, it is only a few short kilometers away that one can find cow pastures and vineyards. Somehow Geneva has been able to find a delicate balance between intense and pressing global concerns and the more pastoral life of the spirit. Where better to explore and to practice ecumenical community?

The Longest Day

The day really is quite long when one stuffs so many hours into it. My Delta Airlines flight from Austin to New York City took off at 7:25AM and landed at JFK at noon. I was rather rudely shocked toward the end of the flight when the flight attendant got on the speaker and asked us to pray for all of the soldiers "doing such important work on our behalf" and then proceeded to play "God Bless America" on the airplane sound system! After quenching my sense of having been insulted, I reflected that what was really going on was a proselytism of the American nationalist religion. Note that I do not call it a religious nationalism, which is the more common term, but a nationalist religion, appearing in this instance in a mostly secular form but frequently appearing in a syncretism with Christianity. Nationalist religion turns the nation state into a deity and takes as its central tenets the authority of the state to set the moral agenda and the sacred nature of national institutions. My orthodox Christian sensibilities were quite offended by this as I was quite sure my rights were somehow being violated; certainly they would have been had the government been responsible for this public enforcement of religious expression. Of course, this sensibility itself is a conflation of religious indignation with nationalist rights. Perhaps it would be framed better to say that the prophet within me wanted to denounce this prophet of Baal as utterly ineffectual and to cry out with Amos:

Hear this word, you cows of Bashan
who are on Mount Samaria,
who oppress the poor, who crush the needy,
who say to their spouses, "Bring something to drink!"
The Sovereign God has sworn in holiness:
The time is surely coming upon you,
when they shall take you away with hooks,
even the last of you with fishhooks.
Through breaches in the wall you shall leave,
each one straight ahead;
and you shall be flung out into Harmon,
says YHWH.
-Amos 4: 1-3

After checking my Europe bag in at the British Airways counter, I took my Colombia bag with me into Manhattan where I joined my uncles, Doug and Alex, for brunch. We went to a restaurant called Imagine. I was quite surprised when they led us through the restaurant out the back into an alley with outdoor seating. My surprise was less about the alley and more about the fact that I realized that this was a filming site for a production made by a couple of Ithaca College Park School of Communications students about getting a date with Drew Barrymore that I had seem with some friends a year ago at IC. This was the restaurant where the date actually occurred! The shrimp quesadilla could have had more shrimp but the margarita and the dessert were both stellar. During our comings and goings from their apartment, we stopped and watched the gay pride parade that started at noon and lasted for about five hours. People lined fifth avenue, 8th, and Christopher St. to watch the festivities. Many of the segments were quite funny and everyone was in good humor about it. It was good to see that at least the whole world has not gone insane.

My flight to London ended up being delayed for an hour and then it took us an hour to taxi from the gate to the runway. Thankfully, this time I was flying British Airways which has superb service and is actually quite comfortable given that I was flying coach. The attendants were very friendly and helpful, although I finally had to tell one of them to stop refilling my wine glass! Now that is a wonderful problem to have! I sat next to a couple heading back to London from holiday in New York. Unfortunately, they ran out of the regular vegetarian meals but they had an alternative in a spinach sandwich that was actually very good. The Indian family sitting behind us was unfortunately not as conciliatory about the situation and made a bit of a fuss about the fact that there were not enough vegetarian meals on board. I slept quite well and woke feeling relatively refreshed, at least as refreshed as possible when sleeping in such small quarters on an airplane.

We arrived in London a bit late due to our late departure and so I got some morning exercise tearing through Heathrow terminal 4 to the opposite end in order to catch my flight to Geneva. I arrived just in time and had a very pleasant flight but unfortunately my checked bag did not, as I discovered upon landing. I met my cousin John at the airport who helped me file the claim with the baggage agency who promised that it would be delivered to the house later that evening. We drove out from the airport discussing the family and arrived at L'Echapee in St. Cergue about three quarters of an hour later. The house is a good ways up one of the Swiss Alps and overlooks Lake Geneva right toward Mont Blanc. Until 1941 it was the residence of the French Philisophe Henri Bergson. It is truly a stunning location with beautiful yards full of wildflowers, (and snails as I discovered in my explorations later in the afternoon). John and Margaret were hosting friends from Brooklyn and currently have a Korean buddhist living on the third floor as he prepares to finish a degree in hotel administration. Margaret served what she described as a modest lunch that started with white wine and sushi, continued with a first course of salmon, and then moved on to the main course of Hungarian style rabbit with sour cherries, various green vegetables, potatoes, salad and bread with a choice of white or red wine. Of course, no Swiss meal is complete without the cheese plate being passed around, and it had to be passed several times as we were entirely taken with the Gruyere and the soft cheese with black truffles in the center. Just as I thought I would burst my belt, John came out from the kitchen with strawberries and whipped cream, a huge bowl of fresh fruit, and coffee. So much for a modest lunch.

We talked together until about 5PM when Margaret and John's friends left and then I took a power nap before John and I took a hike up the mountain to pick up some fresh Gruyere cheese at the local cheesemakers' house. While the cheese was being prepared, we went around the house to contemplate the view of Lake Geneva and the dozen pink pigs in the pen who happily grunted at us. We returned to the house and delivered the cheese only to discover that Margaret had prepared yet another stunning meal, this time consisting of salad, grilled vegetables and meat, more bread and cheese and wine and fresh fruit, and tea to finish off the evening. Margaret kept insisting that it was a modest meal but it was better than I eat except when home with Mom and Dad or when visiting Doug and Alex in New York and we go to some of the finest restaurants. The truth is that it is Margaret who is modest while her food is delectable and superb. Finally, it is time for bed and a much needed rest after such extended travel with very little sleep. I am sure that I will rise refreshed as the bed is very soft and the fresh Swiss air invigorates mind and spirit.

The Promise of Ministry IV: The Power of Prayer

Our silence broke at noon with the pealing of the chapel carillon followed by a procession of the Christ candle, me bearing a bowl of incense, and a choir of handbells. We processed from the entrance to the chapel down to the hall where we would eat lunch. As the bells played, people began to appear from all over the campus, converging on the clarion sound and the wafting incense. As people arrived I contemplated that fact that the emergence from silence had some things in common with our arising from the prostrations during the service of ordination a week prior. We arose as the congregation said, "Awake, O you who sleep, and arise from the dead." The pealing bells rang out as if calling us to arise from the dead. In both cases, it is interesting that death is a symbol of the place where we find a renewed and deeper sense of life, and in both cases that sense of life is brought forth as prayers rise up from the intercessions of the congregation symbolized by the rising smoke of the incense (see Psalm 141). Whether the prayers are silent, as at the conference, or spoken, as at the ordination, it is in prayer that we find the source of our life and being and lift our souls to God in thanksgiving (Eucharist).

Several of the returning fellows spent the afternoon baking communion bread at Laura's home. Laura is a returning fellow who goes to Austin Presbyterian and her husband is also in seminary there. I arrived late, just in time to have missed the actual baking but to participate in the fellowship we shared afterward. It was nice to be able to sit and chat about our lives beyond our preparation for and exercise of ministry. Contrary to popular opinion, ministers are human beings with diverse interests and talents beyond our vocations as servants of God and God's church.

Later in the afternoon we arrived at the chapel for rehearsal for the service Sunday morning. Becky and I had to leave before the service so we helped Gary, one of the faculty worship leaders, prepare the chapel for Taize prayer later that evening. We set up stations around the chapel with icons and candles. We also set up stations with alternative focus points to images as some segments of the church still struggle with the veneration of icons (even though the iconodules won the day at the seventh ecumenical council). For example, Becky and I spent a good half hour traipsing around campus finding branches and rocks and moss and flowers to put in a vase as a floral focus. We also found a mirror and set that up at a station. There was a footwashing station and my new four evangelists stole was draped over the processional cross at another station. It was exciting to be part of the process of conceiving the chapel space to be a place for contemplative multisensory reflection. We entered imaginatively into the experience of members of various traditions to try to create a space that would be inviting and open to all. There is a deeply gratifying feeling in helping people experience the presence of God mediated in ways that they are able to enter into fully.

Following a splendid banquet where I shared table fellowship with four extremely promising undergraduate fellows we returned to the chapel to light the hundreds of candles we had scattered about at the various stations. That process took a good twenty minutes with a dozen of us participating, including having to take the paschal candle down from its stand in order to light it because the torch had run out of wick. I had been invited to participate in the service as one of the four clergy anointing for blessing and healing. I wore my community habit and used the oil that was presented to my by the Lindisfarne Community at my ordination. As the service progressed, people approached for anointing and asked me to pray for specific concerns. The most common themes among them were openness, clarity, and reconciliation. I was struck by how deeply these budding ministers were seeking to align themselves with the will of God, trusting that their own fulfillment is somehow bound up in so doing, even as my own process of seeking was brought back to mind. God gently reminded me through the prayers of the fellows that my own journey toward living into my calling is still ongoing and I too must constantly seek God's will and then accept the grace given to do it. There is a great deal of power in the sacrament of anointing. There is a dialectical process of kenosis (self-emptying) and pleroma (filling) to it where the person being blessed makes room for God in their petition for a blessing and then God becomes present at the invocation of the Spirit in the name of the Holy Trinity. The person doing the anointing becomes a channel of that divine presence and a representation of Christ to the person being anointed. There is a great deal of responsibility inherent in the task and no little risk of abuse of the role. I was humbled that the Lindisfarne Community has regarded me equipped and capable of this task as I prayed for a steady stream of up and coming ministers in the church of Christ.

Following the service was the annual coffeehouse, a talent show of sorts, at which many fellows displayed extraordinary gifts. I presented "the Gospel According to Eddie Izzard" again to uproarious laughter even as I worried about what those I had just anointed might think now that I was spouting "heresy." Others shared talents from the profound to the ridiculous. Several talented singers and pianists shared what they considered to be meager gifts but which were really quite good. My friend Bonnie presented "700 years of the Protestant Reformation upside down," where she stood on her head and told the story of the reformation. Unfortunately, she fell over midway through. She was less than successful in getting back up, and on her third try exclaimed, "I have to tell you about Schliermacher!" which was probably the funniest bit of the whole act. Some of the acts were quite serious, and the evening ended with a presentation of a DVD clip of the work being done by an organization called NASP, a Seventh Day Adventist group, who work in areas that have been decimated by war, famine, natural disasters, etc. Many tears were shed as we observed starved children being laid in coffins and AIDS stricken families huddled together in huts. I felt a deep anger well up within me as I knew that many of these global ailments are well within our reach to address, and yet the sins of greed and selfish pride obstruct even those with the best of intentions. The "politics" of the situations imbue leaders with a fear of taking action, thus legitimating and tacitly approving continued negligence of all life as made the image of the Triune God.

The evening moved from prayer and anointing to heresy and drunkeness. Not really. The heresy of the coffeehouse was all in good fun and I do not think any of us really got drunk as the returning fellows imbibed the liquor that had been given to me by a friend in Mexico to be drunk after my ordination. It is called "Tarrasco" and is related to Tequila but not quite the same thing. A few of us returning fellows sat around late into the evening talking and sharing and imbibing the spirit. It was wonderful to share it with people who had walked with me in my journey into ministry. We promised to stay in touch and said our goodbyes as two of us had to leave at a truly obscene hour in the morning (one at 4:15 and me at 5:25AM!). If the power of prayer that I experienced over these past few days is any indication, then the promise of ministry looks to be a bright future indeed.

The Promise of Ministry III: The Sound of Silence

Silence. The echo resounds as 200 people slowly and silently depart the sanctuary after morning prayer. We began our silence at 9:00 this morning and will break it at noon. Some have eagerly awaited this opportunity since the conference began while others shift nervously at the idea of being alone with themselves and with God for three whole hours. As I pointed out to several friends yesterday, silence really has nothing to do with not talking. The practice of not speaking is simply a tool that makes possible the creation of inner space in which the voice of God can speak. And so we ended morning prayer this morning by saying "speak, God, for your servant is listening."

Evening prayer last night lifted up the faithfulness of God, something that is easy to lose sight of as the realities of ministry are explored in detail during the course of the conference. At morning prayer this morning we introduced a bowl of incense that we borrowed from the Episcopal Church right across the street from the seminary, symbolizing our prayers rising up to God. Tonight we will have prayers around the cross in the style of the Taize Community, who I will be visiting in just a few short weeks. The biggest difference in the conference this year as opposed to the past two years is that this year I am focused on worship. The worship has always been the most striking thing to me about the FTE conferences I have attended, but this year it is really the entire thrust of my being here as a returning fellow. Even as it can be sometimes frustrating and fast paced, there is something truly wonderful about being given the opportunity to create the space for others that was created for me by others at the last two conferences. Before I would enter the chapel for morning and evening prayer and it was there that I was able to bring the new things I learned and the new experiences I had to God, but now I am responsible for creating the space in which over 200 other people are able to do the same thing. There is something appropriate about this taking place just after I have been ordained a deacon and my function in the church has been forever changed. Before, as a lay person, it was appropriate for me to be there in the space that had been created on my behalf even as my very presence shaped the space, and now, as an ordained clergy person, it is appropriate that my role reflects my function in the body of Christ. I find deep peace in that.

The returning fellows stayed in the chapel late into last night stringing beads for short chaplets for use in the chapel service this morning and during the time of silence. During our arts and crafts project, we shared about our faith and bounced around many of the questions that seminarians are want to discuss at any available moment, questions of denomination, theology, hermeneutics, and practice. For some reason, last night I was speechless, which those of you who know me realize is a rare occasion, and those of you who do not know me can probably figure out from the length of my posts. It was as though for me the silence had begun early, not a silence adopted for the purpose of the practice but a deep silence that welled up from God deep within my soul. The questions that were bouncing around the group were the types of questions that I love to dive in and tackle and take apart and analyze and discuss and dispute and even sometimes put back together, but last night I had the sense that any answer would have been inappropriate. I was content to sit and listen and string beads on fishing line. As I considered this experience even as it was taking place, I realized that I have every confidence that I could provide some sort of answer, perhaps even a good answer, to any of those questions, but that doing so, at least then and there, would have been unnecessary, inappropriate, superfluous, and utterly inadequate. Later people in the group asked me questions about the Lindisfarne Community and I responded, but it seemed out of place to speak even as I provided the best explanation I could. There was an existential shift in those moments, a few moments of transcendence beyond the questions and the answers to a deep, profound, even erotic desire for communion with God and with God's people. Now I wonder if this experience is in any way tied to the ontological change that I believe occurs in ordination. Is this an experience of my very being having been shifted? I do not know. That is the best answer I can give to this question, and it was the best answer I could give to any of the questions last night. I have no answers, not real answers, only prayers.

A cool rain has subdued the broiling temperatures here in Austin. It is appropriate that rain accompanies our silence. Rain washes and cleanses the earth and provides sustenance for plants, animals and people. Silence washes and cleanses our souls and sustains us in God's Spirit. Our prayers rise before God as incense, the lifting of our hands as a morning sacrifice. The echo of silence resounds in our souls, effecting our kenosis (self-emptying) to prepare the way for the coming of the pleroma (fullness) of Christ.

The Promise of Ministry II: Challenge and Insight

The FTE conference is proceeding wonderfully. It still seems like there is way too much to do and far to little time to do it in, but in some ways that too is the promise of ministry, our conference theme, so I suppose it is appropriate. Worship has been well received for the most part, although it was reported that at one seminar a Southern Baptist fellow indicated that the service of morning prayer was "cute" but meaningless because we did not have preaching. <<<Sigh>>>

My first seminar was on "Who's Controlling the Sanctuary," which probably should have been required for every returning fellow before we were set loose to plan worship. The seminar leader, Edward Foley, is a Capuchin priest from Chicago, and he pointed out that seminarians enter the systematics or biblical studies classrooms with some degree of humility, but when they get to the worship class they all believe themselves to be experts. He had us reflect on our own presuppositions about worship and then helped us think through a method of evaluating and adjusting those presuppositions. The central questions of the seminar focused around worship as an exercise of power, with power defined as the flow of dominance in a relationship, and defining ritual as a technology for negotiating power. This has been a central concern for the church, a matter of much ecclesiological reflection, during the mid to latter part of the 20th century as an understanding of the role of the laity, beyond that of observer, developed. These are very important questions for me as well as I go to visit the communities at Iona and Taize who have developed ecumenical liturgical resources which seek different flows of power than many confessional bodies. At the same time, Prof. Foley was able to point out that certain aspects of worship that seem to be more distributive of power can actually concentrate power in places we do not necessarily expect. Watching these dynamics in action will be a new aspect to the various visits I make over the course of the rest of the summer.

Following that seminar was a plenary session by Father John Dear, a Jesuit priest who has been involved in nonviolent peace building for over 25 years. This was the perfect lecture for me given the work I will be doing in Colombia in less than a month. John, as he asked us to call him, exhorted us to be disciples of the nonviolent Jesus. He says that the whole point of Christian spirituality is to try to get your life to fit in the life of Jesus, to make sense in the light of the gospel, to be present in the story whereas the spirituality of violence says that violence makes peace; we must throw out gospel and Jesus because they are too naieve and turn to Cicero, Just War Theory, the Crusades, and ultimately blessing killing and war. In no uncertain terms he denounced the spirituality of violence so prevalent in the church throughout history as heresy, blasphemy, idolatry, and sin. It was a poignant reminder to me when John mentioned the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945 because I will be preaching at Hughes UMC on the 61st anniversary of that bombing. It was also poignant when he said that as Christians we should have a vision of the heart that sees every human being as a sister or brother, a child of the God of peace, and so therefore all of us are already reconciled. It is this very reconciliation that is at the heart of the ecumenical movement and at the heart of the text (Ephesians 4: 1-16) that I will be preaching on in August. These are hard things to hear and even harder things to practice, but it was encouraging to know that there are people like John who are willing to do whatever it takes to live into the realm of God here on earth. May God give me strength to walk the way as well.

During the seminar this morning, taught by Dr. Katherine Turpin, we looked at faith formation in consumer culture and came up with "The Beatitudes of Consumerism:"

1 When Sam Walton saw the crowds, he went up to WalMart; and after he sat down, his sales associates came to him. 2 Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:
3 "Blessed are the rich in stuff, for theirs is the large house in suburbia.
4 "Blessed are those who get what they want, for they will be comfortable.
5 "Blessed are those who take out extensive lines of credit, for they will inherit the earth.
6 "Blessed are those who eat at McDonalds and drink at Starbucks, for they will be filled.
7 "Blessed are those who acquire at others expense, for they will receive money.
8 "Blessed are the brand loyalists, for they will see rebates.
9 "Blessed are the salespersons, for they will be called bearers of good tidings.
10 "Blessed are those who buy on layaway, for they are the true worshippers.
11 "Blessed are you when people admire you and envy you and utter all kinds of jealousy against you legitimately on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in the Supercenter, for in the same way they envied the stars in the public eye who were before you."

Dr. Turpin pointed out that being aware of how much we consume and even how bad that is for us and for our world is not enough to actually make us convert from the religion of consumerism, whose high holiday is Christmas with the pilgrimage beginning the day after Thanksgiving and whose priests are sales clerks who receive our sacrifice (money) and then give us our redemption (whatever it was we bought and they even give us a receipt), because there is no motivation to do so; there is cultural capital and comfort built into the consumerist mindset. There must be an experience of justification that comes from beyond ourselves to ignite the conversion process and then we must participate in a community that nurtures the process along if we are to have any chance of successfully escaping the idolatry and blasphemy of worshipping at the cash register altar.

We have been building a lot of periods of silence in to the various worship services in hopes of preparing conference participants for three hours of silence tomorrow morning. Silence was integral throughout the service this morning and the service tomorrow morning is focused on slowly moving into the three hours. There are some people who have expressed some discomfort with the idea, but for the most part people are embracing it and at least are willing to try it. I am excited about that because silence is so integral to my own practice and it is something that I have been lacking over the past few days due to the fast paced liturgical development we have been engaged in. I pray that it is fruitful for everyone involved.