saints herald

I am now participating in a group blog called Saints Herald. It’s a group of young adults in the Community of Christ church who have something to say about their church.

Come on by for a visit: http://saintsherald.com/

prayer

…Be awake to the Life
That is loving you and
Sing your prayer, laugh your prayer,
Dance your prayer, run
And weep and sweat your prayer,
Sleep your prayer, eat your prayer,
Sweep, dig, rake, drive and hoe your prayer,
Garden and farm and build and clean your prayer,
Wash, iron, vacuum, sew, embroider and pickle your prayer,
Compute, touch, bend and fold but never delete your prayer.
Learn and play your prayer,
Work and rest your prayer,
Fast and feast your prayer,
Argue, talk, whisper, listen and shout your prayer,
Groan and moan and spit and sneeze your prayer,
Swim and hunt and cook your prayer,
Digest and become your prayer,
Release and recover your prayer,
Breathe your prayer,
Be your prayer.

From Life Prayers by E. Roberts & E. Amidon

salvation through kinship

I have been watching a lot of this show – Big Love – lately, and have been thinking a lot about the ideas around salvation that its characters and their context(s) have. In case you are not familiar with it, it is a show about a suburban polygamist family, with three wives living in houses side-by-side, each with their own children, and the husband going back and forth between the houses. The wives share the responsibilities for cooking, caring for one another’s children, and home-keeping. It is about their struggles with their pasts, their struggle to fit-in and appear “normal”, their struggles with the complexities of their relationship, and their attempts to be faithful to “The Principle” of plural marriage that they feel is their spiritual and religious calling, by way of their own interpretation of the tradition of Joseph Smith. (sideline: this show fits surprisingly well into the current milieu in the US and Canada of self-created new-age type religious or spiritual pursuits, where the only authority is God/higher power/divine energy and then the self to interpret, with no accountability to traditions or other persons.)

In many ways, more than anything else I think I would sum it up as being a show about desire. There’s the sexual side of desire that’s depicted – both for the adults and the teenagers in the show. There’s the consumerist-culture aspect of desire that’s depicted in one character’s compulsive online shopping and subsequent gambling compulsion. There’s the desire for success in business and enterprise that the husband in the show is constantly pursuing. There’s a desire for family and meaningful community that I think hooks the desire of the viewer as the idealized shared suburban home-stead is depicted. There’s a desire for acceptance and love that every character seems to be pursuing. There is also a desire for salvation, for eternal life, that characters often remind themselves and each other of as being the primary reason that they are engaged in this often difficult and complex family grouping. I think these various desires, their honest depiction and the forthright way they’re addressed, are what really make the show compelling – who among us can’t identify with desire, misplaced or otherwise, and the problematic pursuit of its fulfillment?

In many of the churches that trace their history to Joseph Smith (”Restoration” traditions, if you will, named for their pursuit of restoring Christ’s church to a perceived earlier and more accurate form), one’s salvation rests heavily on or in one’s family. If one isn’t at least married, and hopefully with children, one is risking one’s mortal soul. In Big Love we view an extreme playing-out of this situation, where the reward of ruling a planet comes to men who have multiple wives. But even in the more socially-acceptable, non-polygamist “regular” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, family in the here and nowis essential to one’s everlasting life later on.

I would say that in my denomination, which comes from the same Restoration tradition, there are still lingering idea(l)s of the necessity of family for salvation. I know many single people (including myself) in the church who have experienced pressure to find a (heteronormative) relationship and get married – even when that pressure is presented as seemingly “well-meaning” assumptions. I also know several married couples who have experienced pressure to have children, regardless of their own desires or abilities to include children in their family circle. Of course, people would never tell one another that their lack of spouse and family is a threat to their salvation, but nonetheless I think these pressures are the residue of the family-as-salvation formula that is found in the early Restoration churches.

While it’s problematics are clear to me, the salvation-through-kinship formula has a certain amount of pull on my own desires. For me, the two primary problematics are: the focus on salvation as something for the afterlife, rather than a work God is carrying out here and now; and the heteronormative assumptions about family that the formula prescribes. Both of these, I think, can actually be unbound from the tradition by using the tradition itself in creative and redemptive ways!

The idea of salvation as only being something for the afterlife is one that can even be taken apart by the Gospels, where Jesus talks about the “Kin(g)dom” that is already among us as well as being as-yet-unfulfilled. Joseph Smith had a focus on the importance of place and attempting to live here and now as if we are in God’s promised future – “Zion”. The heteronormative family-form prescription can, I would dangerously venture to suggest, be taken apart with the tradition’s most problematic and often embarrassing practice of polygamy. Now, let’s be clear, polygamy is not an ideal! Its assumptions about male patriarchal power, female submissiveness, and hierarchical placement of wives all make it very troublesome. However, what I am saying is that it is a way of having a non-normative family whose formation is grounded (ideally!) in the pursuit of a spiritual calling, a call to live in communion with others, rather than the pursuit of relationships and family for personal gain.

These thoughts of mine are still in their infancy, and I recognize their dry, tinderbox character that could easily be ignited by carelessness. However, I think it is high time we started talking more openly about how our sex lives, family lives, and desires influence and relate to our salvation, or our perception of our salvation. Perhaps by reclaiming the idea of kinship, of communion as location for salvation, and being more conscious of our desires and their both positive and negative pulls on our lives, we can move forward in paths of Christian discipleship that stand more strongly in the face of a far too individualistic and materialistic culture.

what is church?

“Church” is an interesting word. It is multi-valent, multi-layered, and carries many meanings. It is a building, where something pertaining to religious practice takes place. It is a doctrine in the Christian faith. It is where Jesus is when “two or three are gathered”. It is an institution. It is a practice. It is a divinely-ordered way of being. It is a way of seeing the world.

There have been a myriad of examples over time of what church can look like. It’s a few people meeting regularly in a home to share meals and tell stories. It’s a “righteous” few who believe particular things in particular ways. It’s a place people go on Sunday morning because they think they “should” go, or are afraid of what people might think about them if they didn’t go. It is a community of people who share each other’s joys and sorrows and do their best to be present for one another. It is people who plant gardens in vacant lots. It is a place people go for a hot meal and a warm bed.

I’ve come to understand church to be one of the most complicated doctrines in Christian theology because it is so loaded – it is an institution, and yet it is so much bigger than what we understand institutions to be, it is noble ideas and lofty goals and it is also destructive and can bring out the worst in people.

I believe that Christian discipleship must be lived out in community, as the ability to live in peace with others is fundamental to what it means to be a disciple. I also know, however, that we often fall short of actually supporting one another in our discipleship.

I’ve been working with a committee on writing a statement about ecclesiology – the theological word for what we believe about church. It’s a hard task, really hard. And yet I hope that this struggle and difficulty means that we are actually perhaps getting at some truth about what church is about.

The picture at the top of this post is of an art piece that used to be in a public park here in Vancouver, the sculpture is entitled “Device to Root Out Evil”. When I first saw this piece I gasped in excitement at the novelty of an upside-down church, as there are definitely days when I feel like the church ought to be turned upside-down. When I learned the title, I was even more in awe of it, realizing what a critique it poses to all churches. Christianity has thought of itself as such a device for far too long. What if what church is about is not rooting-out evil, but cultivating goodness and flourishing? What would that look like?

I think this question of how the church ought to view it’s task and what that is is a question of utmost importance. All Christians should be engaged in the task of exploring how best they can live out their discipleship in community – in church. This may not look quite the same as it has in the past – in fact, it probably shouldn’t look at all like it used to – and that’s a good thing, because God is always doing new things and calling us into new life. How will you contribute to this exciting discernment of community?

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jazzlawyer/59200450/
The photo above is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

the gospel is political

I overheard an interesting conversation while grading papers at a cafe this afternoon.

Two well-dressed businessmen are having coffee, my ears perk up (involuntarily! what is it about people talking about faith in public places that always draws my attention?) when one tells the other that he is Catholic and his wife regularly attends a Catholic church. He says he would too “if there was a good priest. But this one,” he lowers his voice and surreptitiously looks around, “this one is a homosexual, a blatant homosexual. And he’s always going on about how we should be on the side of the immigrants, always so political! He’s always preaching politics, which have no place in the pulpit.”

He sees me looking at him (I can’t help but look!) and lowers his voice further, I look away, pretending not to have heard. Later on I hear him say “You know, a good priest is worth his weight in gold.” I repress my desire to say “The priest you’re talking about sounds like a very good priest to me.”

How interesting that people have such set-in-stone views about the role of church, what it is about, what it means to preach “good news,” the gospel. I wonder sometimes if these people have actually ever read the Bible, have actually ever realized how political the gospels are. There really is no getting around the fact that Jesus’ admonitions that we feed the poor, liberate the oppressed, free the captives, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, aid our neighbour – even if that neighbour is very different from us, are all actions that carry political weight these days. To be on the side of those who most need help is political, no matter how you try to frame it.

To be clear, I’m not saying that we ought to do-away with the separation of church and state or anything like that, what I am saying is that to call oneself Christian is to recognize that there are certain issues one ought to take a very political stance on. I’m also not advocating blindly following every political assertion a minister makes from a pulpit – I say this as a minister who regularly stands behind a pulpit – but I do encourage everyone to think critically about how what you believe relates to how you live your life, in all of it’s aspects, personal, political, and banal included.

kind stranger sighting

Kind stranger sighting: I think this will be the third time I’ve written about this sort of thing. I can’t help but want to share when I see strangers doing caring things for other strangers, these situations make my heart leap and give me immense hope.

This is short and simple but lovely:

When I was climbing up the stairs from the train platform to the street on my way home last night I saw a man in a business suit helping an elderly women carry her personal grocery cart (one of those tall cloth bags on two wheels) up the stairs. It was so very touching. They parted ways at the top of the stairs, but I can’t help but think there was a taste of the kin-dom, a taste of salvation in that moment, both for them and for me.

eschatological hope

At the end of January I finished-up the bulk of my theology teaching gig (still have plenty of grading to do yet) and closed out my final lecture with the clip above. My final lecture was on, of course, “final things”, the big theological word for this being “eschatology”. This area of theology is a rather interesting one, a bit unwieldy and sometimes frightening even, the ways that it has been used and misused are not always pretty or helpful. Fears of a neo-apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenario are cultivated by bad eschatologies. Paralysis about any influence we might be able to have over the state of our environment is triggered by bad eschatologies. An exclusively “me and Jesus” faith with no accountability to one’s fellow human beings can be perpetuated by bad eschatologies.

Bad eschatology bothers me because it often leaves people hopeless, which is the complete opposite of what a good eschatology should do for people. Eschatology can inspire people to be their best selves, to believe in the value of this earth our home (the only home we have), to see their interrelatedness to all other people, to believe in the inherent worth of others, and to believe in their own inherent worth. Eschatological hope is hope in not just the possibility but the probability of new life available for all of creation (that includes us humans!), throughout creation, all the time. This probability lies even at the heart of apocalypse – which I argue, if you look at the breadth of apocalyptic literature in the Judeo-Christian tradition, has nothing to do with the end of the world and everything to do with the destruction of that which is not life-giving in order to make way for the flourishing of life.

Eschatological hope is not pie-in-the-sky “Polyanna” hope – though I do think poor Polyanna gets an undeservedly bad rap for her hopefulness, if more people had that type of optimism, I think the world would be a better place… but I digress. Not pie-in-the-sky hope but hope with teeth, with muscles, with grit, hope that is willing to sweat a bit, hope that knows that hopefulness can be painful, can be dangerous and even deadly. Yet hope still must live on, for without it, why then should we live?

This gritty eschatological hope is what I think Martin Luther King Jr. is talking about in the clip above. It’s about the hope for a better future that both Moses and King had even as the faced their own impending deaths. This is Christian hope: audacious, unyielding, foolish, and unabashed. It is the kind of hope that comes from truly loving God and neighbour – the ultimate goals of Christian discipleship. It is this hope that overcomes even death to say that life will flourish despite all that would say otherwise. It is hope that defies fear and strengthens us for an uncertain future – which is always how the future stretches out before us, open, uncertain, and therefore full of possibility.

My prayer for us all: that we might be strengthened and strengthen one another in our hope, for it is our surest ally in promoting the flourishing of life for all of us and indeed the whole creation. Dare to be foolish, dare to hope.