Proper 11

I'm preaching again this coming Sunday, which is my final day in Tennessee. The text is Ephesians 2:11-22. This passage is right in my wheelhouse; it's one of the most important declarations of ecclesial unity in the New Testament. If I were Episcopalian, I might just get up in the pulpit, read the passage ten times over, and sit down.

As it stands, I don't feel like I'm in a position to preach about division in somebody else's house. And I am finding that it's a little tough to pull together a message that is about such a fundamental matter as this. To me, it's like trying to preach on John 3:16 or Psalm 23. So this week is an exercise in resisting the temptation to make everything new and innovative.

Last week's sermon

I was in Chicago over the weekend, and Chicago told me they want to see my 7/5 sermon. Here it is.

Proper 9

I'm preaching this Sunday at our "contemporary" service. The Gospel lesson for this week is Mark 6:1-13: the rejection at Nazareth and the sending of the apostles in mission. I'm still struggling through the early fog of what to say. So far, the only thing that has occurred to me is what NOT to say. The Old Testament lesson, 2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10 tells of David's covenantal installation as king of Israel. What better occasion than the Fourth of July to conflate biblical Israel with the United States? The Methodist Church's General Board of Discipleship stands at the ready.

Theolog has their weekly lectionary post up, and Ekklesia Project usually publishes theirs on Wednesday. I'm planning on steering clear of both King David and George Washington, and zeroing in instead on the "virtue" of insulating ourselves from risk and failure. I'm an extremely conservative person in this way, so passages like this week's reading from Mark are a true challenge for me. We'll see what direction the sermon takes. I had to turn in a title to the church office yesterday, so I went with the sufficiently generic, "Go With God."

Surveyor in a strange land

One of the most interesting aspects of our recent trip to Honduras was taking part in a community needs assessment. The Methodist missionary who works on health issues in Danli developed this four-page survey in conjunction with the municipal health board. Members of our group paired up with members of the Methodist church and went to different neighborhoods, administering the survey door-to-door. The questions deal with community life (What are the disadvantages of living in your community? What, if any, services does the government provide to this community?); nutrition (What foods do you eat most frequently? How do you store them?); and health (When someone in the family is ill, where do you go? Are there insect problems in or around the house?).

Clearly, this was never going to be a scientific survey. Over five days, we collected maybe 300 or 400 surveys in a city of 100,000. The responses vary wildly, reflecting both actual differences and differences in the way questions were interpreted. Furthermore, I don't think the surveys will tell anybody much that they didn't already know. If people don't have running water or electricity, those are the biggest thing they desire. Every community could use additional sources of work. The people who live by the dump would prefer not to live by the dump. The people who live in the flood-channels of the river would prefer not to live there, but at least they can live there for free.

These excursions were eye-opening for us North Americans, but interestingly, they seemed at times to be eye-opening for the congregants we accompanied, too. I found that really striking, and increasingly I am believing that that was the real objective of the survey project. The city government is not going to see the survey report and say, "Well, now that we finally know the people want water that won't make them sick, let's get to it!" But by involving the church members in investigating the problems, and in visiting people poorer than themselves, the missionary has achieved a big first step: she has eight or ten church members who are invested in improving living conditions in Danli, and who are asking, "Why not?"

We got to see the wheels start turning on this during a debriefing conversation one afternoon. People were throwing around a lot of ideas about water solutions might be brought to a neighborhood we'd visited, but they weren't gaining any traction because that's a big capital project. It takes a lot of other people to invest in and execute such a plan. Then the discussion turned to some more basic health and hygeine practices. A few noted how there were great differences in cleanliness from house to house, and that these differences didn't necessarily correspond to how much money the family had, or even the type of home. Then, before they settled into a resigned critique of people who don't keep a clean house, the missionary said, "If I could help you to receive training as health educators, would you be interested in returning to some of these places, and helping people to make simple changes that would improve the health of their families?" And now they're off and running.

I think I loved this part of our trip because we learned a ton, and contributed almost nothing. I spent three days with the same partner, a young woman named Karina, and mostly my job was to carry the vitamins. But here was a genuine opportunity for us to travel to another country and meet people as they really exist: not at a clinic or construction site, not just at a church service, but at their homes on an average day. The question I'm really turning over right now is whether this kind of experience is necessary for meaningful personal interaction and transformation. In other words, do we have to look for less concretely productive projects for U.S. mission teams if we want them to have more transformative experiences? Does the labor get in the way of the learning?

Also, God willing, this will be the only time I have to wear a turquoise mission team t-shirt in the airport.

I always wondered where myths about welfare came from.

Oak Ridge, TN

Grace in Sickness

"Two weeks ago, none of us probably imagined we'd be gathered here today for the purpose we have." With these words, my senior pastor began the funeral of a beloved church member who passed away suddenly about a week after I arrived in Tennessee. During the course of the funeral, an interesting refrain kept popping up: "He was taken from us suddenly, but that's probably the way he would've wanted it. Always looking out for others, he wouldn't have wanted his loved ones to be burdened by a long illness." It was always said with great tact, and never meant to minimize the sadness of his passing. But we all seemed to be invited to find some consolation in his swift death.

In a 1956 letter, Flannery O'Connor wrote, "Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies." O'Connor, who herself died of lupus at age 39, could not be accused of any naive romanticization of illness. At the same time, O'Connor was abnormal. Her stories drew their power from the peculiar light in which she viewed human experience and suffering. Many of her characters found their salvation in death (although it is interesting, in light of her quotation about sickness, to note that most of these saving deaths were sudden; she rarely portrayed sickness).

I fully believe that profound spiritual transformation can happen during illness and at the deathbed. Heather has been writing some great stuff on this, from her perspective at Hospice Africa in Kampala. But I suspect that most of us would have a hard time agreeing with O'Connor that sickness before death represents one of God's mercies. With friends whose parents have died after long illnesses, and with an aunt just beginning her own battle against cancer, I don't exactly feel like they're getting the good end of the deal. I envy the man whose passing is quick and peaceful.

The medieval study of the ars moriendi generally viewed the Good Death as one that involved minimal suffering, but sufficient time to prepare the soul, get one's affairs in order, and say goodbye. In other words, you have to know that the end is coming. Who doesn't want that? Yet, as she always tends to do, Flannery O'Connor haunts me. Her observation pulls back the veil on the ars moriendi, and asks a dangerous question: When we say that we desire God's mercy, do we mean it? Or do we actually desire only a small dose of God's mercy - just enough to wake us

up, and let us get things in order?

Wise guy

Here is the best answer anyone gave to one of our community assessment questions in Honduras:

Q: How often do you eat eggs?

A: Well, it depends on the chicken.

I traveled 1000 miles north, and ended up in the Deep South.

We returned from Honduras late Sunday night. It was a really wonderful, interesting trip: I had fun seeing the city of Danli, got to meet a lot of interesting people from both Honduras and the United States, and also did some good thinking about international short-term missions work.

The most interesting thing we got to do was to help with a community needs assessment: a four-page questionnaire regarding the health, nutrition, and quality of life of a household. We accompanied local church members in going door-to-door in a few different neighborhoods. It was really a unique experience to get to visit people in their homes, to see what their life is like, and to have an excuse to ask them lots of personal questions. You don't get that kind of interaction when you stay put in a centralized location (e.g. a medical clinic or construction site).

I expect I'll write some more about the community assessment work as it relates to broader questions of short-term missions towards the end of this week.

Going to Honduras

On Saturday at 3:30 am, I will be leaving from the church parking lot with a group headed to Honduras. We'll be in the town of Danli, which is a mercifully short distance east of Tegucigalpa, on a pretty major-looking road.

View Larger Map

While we're there, we will be working through United Methodist Volunteers in Mission to conduct an eye clinic as well as a community needs assessment. For the eye clinic, we are bringing an $11,000 piece of equipment called an autorefractometer, and 1200 pairs of donated eyeglasses that were collected by the Lions Club.

I've also been warned that I might have to preach while we are there. Because I'm, you know, the pastor.

Summer 2009

Now that I'm finally clear of all my term papers, I have a moment to update you on my summer plans. Through a Ministry Fellowship grant from FTE, I'll be spending my summer investigating models of congregational mission work. Specifically, my interest is in how to overcome the false division that exists in many churches, in which "mission" work is what we do to help others while discipleship and formation are the things we do to further our own spiritual journeys. In my own experience, and I think throughout much of Christian history (especially within Wesleyanism), works of mercy and engagement with the world have been integral to faith formation. I'm hoping this summer to dig into this idea a little more.

To that end, here's what I have lined up:

May 24-July 19, I'll be working as an intern at a Methodist church near Knoxville, TN.

June 5-15, Mission trip to Honduras with the church

July 9-11, Ekklesia Project conference, Chicago

July 22-August 5, Duke Divinity pilgrimage to northern Uganda

August 16-19, FTE Ministry Fellows gathering

Then it'll already be time to get underway with the Fall semester. I'm really looking forward to all of this, and hope to be posting reflections about ministry experiences (like last summer) as well as occasional snippets about my thinking regarding the role of missions in the local church. If you've got a good reading suggestion on that topic, I'm all ears.

Winding down.

There will be no full-blown Summer Wrap-Up post. But it is the case that Thursday was my last day in the office, and Sunday will be my final worship services at the church. My last act as an intern will probably be on the softball diamond Sunday afternoon.

I've learned a lot this summer, including new words such as Carb Day, tornadic, and cornholing. I also learned some things about life in the church. When I consider all I've learned, and all the people I've met, May 10 (when I drove out here) feels like it was a very long time ago. At the same time, I've been saying that I really only felt like I "hit stride" out here during the final month, and from that perspective, it feels pretty abrupt to be finishing up right now.

In either case, I am ready to go, and looking forward to a little time in New Jersey, a place where we don't need weathermen with special adjectives telling us to get in the basement right now.

Final week in Indy

I'm told that in past summers, the church has had their Duke intern preach on the final Sunday of the internship. I'm glad that I was able to preach on my second-to-last Sunday, so that I could focus on the sermon without simultaneously needing to focus on packing and goodbyes.

However, I'd been pouring so much of my time into preparing the sermon (and the final session of Bible 101) that I really don't have much to do this weekend. Apart from some final evaluation type things, there is nothing immediately obvious that I should be doing, and there's not much incentive to go find things to do. I feel done.

So, this is a good week for reflection & wrap-up discussions with folks here at the church, and I'm grateful to have the time to do that. I'm also looking forward to packing up the station wagon and heading back east in five days.

Sermon audio!

Sermon went pretty well today. Thanks to everyone who sent a good word my way last week! If you're interested, you can listen to the audio by clicking this link. (Or right-click it to download the file, which is almost 5 MB.)

CLICK HERE

Otherwise, you can also find it on iTunes by searching for "North Church Sermons Indianapolis."

Also, here's the text.

Just believe in the Bible, okay?

The biggest issue I've had to wrestle with this summer has been how to understand the authority of Scripture. It's a lively question here at the church; many in the congregation are retired clergy, and many others have gone to seminary. There's a strong current of folks who find Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong to be the most helpful biblical theologians. They are great people, really active in the ministries of the church, and really sincere in their desire to grow as disciples. But they're alarmingly comfortable with dismantling biblical texts in order to identify the "spirit" of the text - God's real meaning. I have yet to meet someone who has uncovered a "spiritual reading" that convicts them of anything.

So that's been the backdrop for my teaching the Bible 101 class, and my preparation for this Sunday's sermon. I've heard the horror stories of seminary interns or new pastors who come out into the church, guns blazing, trying to set everyone right. It's always a disaster. I think I am more humble and sensitive than that. But how do I encourage people to see the presuppositions they are bringing to the Bible - that it must make rational sense, for example, or that God must be "moral" by some objective standard - and to consider a different presupposition: that this is the word of God, for the people of God?

I emailed one of my preceptors from the Divinity School to ask him if he had a book recommendation - something that might be a sort of indirect response to Borg's Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. He came back with a superb suggestion: N.T. Wright's The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture. I'm almost done with it. At only 140 pages, it is an ambitiously concise survey of the history of approaches to Scripture, including his assessment of how we find ourselves snarled by the false choice of literalism-or-liberalism. The final chapter contains a lot of specific ideas for moving forward, but I haven't read that yet.

In the meantime, check it:

“There is a great gulf fixed between those who want to prove the historicity of everything reported in the Bible in order to demonstrate that the Bible is ‘true’ after all and those who, committed to living under the authority of scripture, remain open to what scripture itself actually teaches and emphasizes. Which is the bottom line: ‘proving the Bible to be true’ (often with the effect of saying, ‘So we can go on thinking what we’ve always thought’), or taking it so seriously that we allow it to tell us things we’d never heard before and didn’t particularly want to hear?” (Wright, 95)

Recap: Bible 101, Week Three

For some reason I had a smaller group for class this Sunday: about nine people, instead of the 15 or 20 I’d had the first two weeks. As Heather pointed out to me last night, a week ago I was frustrated with how sidetracked our conversation had gotten when discussing the OT, and was wishing for fewer students so that we could have a better conversation. So, that’s what I got, and on the balance I think it probably was a better conversation.

In trying to give them a background against which to read the NT, I decided to start by talking about Acts, and almost all of our time ended up being consumed by the details of Acts and what we know about the earliest days of the Church. I feel pretty good about this; I’d rather spend time focusing on the actual biblical witness than talking about the quest for the “historical Jesus” or some similar diversion.

Things hit a bit of a snag when we got to the end of Acts, where I asserted that Paul made it to Rome and preached the Gospel there (true), that Acts says nothing of the end of his life, but that he mostly likely was executed (true), and that he didn’t want to be executed in the same manner as Jesus, so he made them crucify him upside down (false; that was Peter).

This week’s handout is a one-page spreadsheet of the books of the New Testament with information about their approximate date and probable author.

Play time

This morning our Children's Pastor led a training session in the children's teaching method we use with the 1-3 graders. It's called Godly Play. It has been around for a couple decades, and they use it for the kids at Duke Chapel, among other places, but I really didn't know anything about it.

It's a really interesting program in that it structures the whole class time with great intentionality, from the moment each child enters the room (one-by-one, with a personal greeting) until they leave (one-by-one, with an individual blessing). Each week they move the hand on a big clock-like liturgical calendar. The main part of each class is the story, when a storyteller recites (from memory) the Godly Play story for that week. The stories all use unique sets of figurines & props. The stories are written by the Godly Play curriculum, and they are based on either biblical narratives, parables of Jesus, or (occasionally) on more abstract concepts, like "I am the light of the world."

I was really shocked by how theological it is. I really don't know how to relate to children as people, and I have very little concept of what they can understand or remember. But compared with the high-fructose VBS curricula that are out there, Godly Play is just wonderfully solid. It is totally oriented towards creating a reverent, sacred space in the children's classroom. To be honest, the only thing other than church worship that it reminds me of is Mr. Rogers: when the show shifted over to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, you knew that something special was happening. It's like that.

Anyone else have any experience with this program?

Pastoral Care

I knew at the outset of this summer that among the many duties of a minister, pastoral care is my biggest blind spot. The situations in which people need their pastor to be present - illness, divorce, imminent death of a loved one, unexpected death of a loved one - these are, for the most part, foreign to my experience. Furthermore (or perhaps as a result), I don't really know quite what they hope the pastor will do or say during a visit, and intercessory prayer presents something of a challenge to me.

But I'm learning. Next week I'm going to spend half the day with our Pastor of Care & Nurture, and this afternoon I will go to a nursing home with another associate pastor. But I wanted to get something in here about my trip to the hospital last Wednesday afternoon.

We (the associate pastor & I) visited a woman who had been in a coma since having a stroke on that Sunday. She was in her forties, and had had a really tough time over the years with alcohol and with heartbreak. It had taken a toll on her body, and here she was, being watched over in the hospital by her mother. That Wednesday morning, the doctors had told her that the brain damage from Sunday's stroke was something from which she would not recover, so by the time we arrived, they were mostly just watching her breathing, to make sure that she stayed alive until her brother arrived from Wisconsin. She passed on Saturday morning.

Both mother and daughter have had a long relationship with the church, but the mother is very active here, and right now is totally standing on the church, and on God, to support her; in the last eighteen months she has lost a husband, a grandson, and a daughter. Today we will plan the funeral.

I don't have any grand lessons from the visit, but it was a confusing time. I was uncomfortable, and scared by the situation; I have never been in the room with a dying person before, or been part of a conversation about a person's imminent death. When we got out of the room, I was sweaty and choked up. On the other hand, it was a very peaceful time. There was no uncertainty about what was going to happen, and the mother's sorrowful resignation to God was really a profession of faith. Those really are sacred, grace-filled moments.

Recap: Bible 101, Week Two

This week's topic was the Old Testament. I figured that the most profitable thing for everyone would be to spend the time trying to get our minds around the basic contours of the story of Israel. I'm talking mainly about the political history: enslavement, exodus, entry into Canaan, monarchy, exile, etc. Any piece of the Old Testament, from the short stories we learn in Sunday School to the prophetic books and even the wisdom literature, cannot be fully understood except in relation to this long narrative of God's gracious election of Israel to be a light unto the nations.

We did some of that, and you can view the information I prepared here. But predictably, we also spent quite a bit of time discussing the interpretive challenges that the OT poses for (some) modern Christian readers. When I asked what these challenges are, class members quickly brought up divinely sanctioned violence, divine anger & retribution, and the male focus of the narrative. Nobody directly brought up the question of how to see Christ in the OT while still respecting the OT's integrity as Hebrew Scripture. But in a way, all those questions are related to our impulse to disregard the difficult parts of the OT -- to consider it, in a word, old.

We ran into a few pretty strongly held alternative perspectives. I understand the desire to feel free to pick and choose which Scriptures are normative for me, but I am surprised with how comfortably people talk about actually doing that. There doesn't seem to be much sense that such an approach even needs defending. I didn't respond as well as I wish I could have; how can I take three or four Divinity School lectures and turn them into bite-sized nuggets that I can use in a setting like this? Sometimes you have to throw up your hands and say, "Well, yes, if I thought God was some sort of ethereal process, then I probably would feel free to do whatever I wanted with the Bible, too." I was helped a lot by having Heather in class with me; she was visiting Chicago and Indianapolis over the holiday weekend, and she brings a lot of knowledge about the Bible and biblical studies to the table. Also, she don't mess around.

I'm starting to see that each week, we are getting into the topic I intended to cover in week four: how to approach the Bible both critically and faithfully. I don't have any idea yet what we will do during that class, but I actually am preaching that day, and my subject is our reverence for Scripture. That's fortuitous, but it leaves me thinking, "What do I say during the hour-long class that is different than what I say during the sermon?" Maybe I can just give them an hour of B-material that didn't make it into the sermon itself.

Next week is the New Testament. I'm not sure what direction we'll head yet, but I think I am going to put on the brakes a little bit. This is supposed to be introductory, background information, not a discussion of hermeneutics.

Recap: Bible 101, Week One

In week one of my "Bible 101" class, we discussed the formation of the biblical canon. We focused mostly on the New Testament; since the New Testament was formed more recently than the Old (i.e. it's not just a clever name), we know more about the process by which they formalized the NT. At the same time, there seem to be a lot more conspiracy theories about the formation of the NT canon. Why did they exclude certain texts? What has the church been hiding for two millenia?

We led off with an exercise that forced them each to make a short list of the most significant films of all time; then they had to pair up and consolidate their lists (dropping a few films in the process), then pair with another pair, etc. The idea was to simulate a process of consensus-building when people are operating with different criteria.

Then we segued into some actual historical information. Using my notes from Dr. Rowe's New Testament class and a few other resources, I put together a brief timeline. During the class I also made a (probably ill-advised) attempt to explain Gnosticism in about four minutes, in order to show why the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, and Judas were all excluded from the canon. I was tempted to point out just how crazy they seem - the Gospel of Peter describes a walking, talking cross that followed Christ out of the tomb (see paragraph 10) - but given all the water-walking, blind-healing, and resurrection in the canonical Gospels, my hands were tied.

I think the thing I most regret not making time for was a discussion of what "Holy Scripture" means. We give that unique title only to these certain texts; what does that mean for how we approach them? How does this understanding guide our interaction with other texts? Is it bad to read noncanonical gospels? What about other nonscriptural texts that we revere. Can we read Augustine in church, or Luther? Can we read passages from MLK's speeches? Can we compose liturgies using the words of Bono?

This week I'll be working on figuring out how to give a one-hour primer on the entirety of the Old Testament. I have a sinking feeling that Ecclesiastes is going to get the short end of the stick.

Church softball bragging.

Today I had a nice surprise: TBS was carrying the Mets-Yankees game, so I got to see my first Mets game in a while. It was fun to watch the Mets win one (too rare of a thing), and in that bizarre weekend-warrior sort of way, it was the perfect pump-up for this afternoon's church softball game. Because of the stellar performances of past Duke interns, including one who had played two years of collegiate softball, there is a lot of pressure for the summer intern to contribute on the diamond. Much to my surprise, in two games I'm 5-6 with two singles, a double and two triples; five runs scored. We're 2-0. That's more than anyone on the Mets can say.

Watch for something on Monday recapping today's first installment of "Bible 101".