A Sacramental View of Denominational Anxiety in the PC(USA), Part II

When I was a young man I watched the new guy strut into my pastor's pulpit and preach with a scripted yet impersonal eloquence.  The next week I saw that all the pew racks were fully stocked with the proper number of hymnals and Bibles and with newly sharpened pencils and everything.  The next week I was on my way out the door because the new guy was a control freak.  It may have taken a couple more months to accumulate enough reasons to leave that church, but my tipping point was literally a sanctuary full of sharpened pencils.

I didn't make an appointment to talk with him about the pencils.  We spoke about other things that were on my mind, and I pretended I was listening but was really just checking off my list of accumulated offenses to justify breaking fellowship with that congregation to go to another.  Once I'd done my duty of giving him a chance to talk, I walked.

Never once did it occur to me how I'd hurt that church's members or pastor.  Never once did I consider what it meant to the congregation that baptized me to take all their love and care and support for granted and leave without so much as a thank you.  I mean, these people poured money into the plates to I could make crafts in Sunday School.  They bought cases of grapefruits and oranges and lightbulbs and popcorn to help me experience more than they could give me.  They came to my performances and applauded my trumpet playing and celebrated my successes and prayed for me from the time my parents carried me to the font.

My baptism didn't mean much to me.  I didn't understand nor appreciate the depth of the promises  which that little church both made and kept on my behalf.  Neither did I think I owed them a thing.  I let sharpened pencils push me over the edge and broke fellowship with them.

Anxiety has a way of gathering all our attention onto just one fearful thing until that fearful thing becomes all we see and care about and talk about.  That one fearful thing then becomes emblematic of all the problems connected to it, and we bind ourselves to that emblem of our fear, and we spread our fear, and we become consumed by our fear.  Not wanting to be accused of such anxiety-ridden perspectives, we begin to apply reason to justify anxiety, and we lay a path to alleviate anxiety by cutting it off either by eliminating the source or removing ourselves from the source.

It wasn't about the pencils.  This young man who loved his pastor was grieving his absence.  No one could take his place.  No one should even try.  It's offensive, don't you know, to see anyone else step into that pulpit or sit behind that desk.  But I couldn't deal with my grief.  I didn't know how.  So I bound it all up in criticisms over freshly stocked pew racks and the like until I actually believed this is what was really bugging me, and I left.

My lack of understanding the meaning of baptism back then proves to be more profound than in the way I dismissed the church gave itself to me.  I also did not allow my whole self to belong to Jesus.  I did not look to him to bind up my wounded and broken heart.  I did not place my fears over losing my blessed pastor into his hands.  I did not act like one who belonged to Jesus, and did not avail myself of his peace that passes all understanding.  So I denied not only my belonging to that congregation, but also my belonging to Jesus.

Today I have the privilege of standing on the other side of the font to baptize those who come, either by virtue of their decision or by their parents making promises on their behalf. I get to reach into that font and seal promises made, sacramental promises, of belonging both to God and to each other. Somewhere in the midst of water and promises there comes the Holy Spirit to make the belonging both binding and effective in the eyes of God.

Today I also have the heartache and grief of watching people in droves miss the point of baptism.  I get to see those whose accumulated grief and anxiety have pushed them over the edge and caused them to believe breaking fellowship is what they must do to find relief.

If my church sees baptism is only a single event and not a life-long metaphor to continually call us into belonging to God and each other, then I'm failing as a Minister of Word and Sacrament to drive that point home.  Because of baptism, we belong to God and to each other.  Because of baptism, we work things out.  Because of baptism, we rely fully on Jesus.  Because of baptism, we give him all our anxiety and fear instead of spreading it amongst ourselves.  Because of baptism, we live, not as fearful folks, but as forgiving folks who bear with one another in love.  Because of baptism, we belong.

And so the Spirit combines with the water to bind us together in a commonly shared seal of belonging to God and to each other. "For you are not your own; you were bought at a price," (I Cor. 6:19d-20a). We belong to God for all eternity. And by baptism in Christ, "we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others," (Romans 12:5). We belong to each other from cradle to grave.

And now that this blog on the Font is joined with that previous blog on the Table, I've got to ask a question.  If the Font calles us to belong to God and to each other, and if the Table calls us to reconcile with one another as Christ has reconciled us to God, then why aren't these sacraments sufficient counter-balance to all the anxiety over how the church chooses to relate to people who are gay?  Why is the call to belong to God and each other, and the call to reconcile with God and each other, not of sufficient value to keep us together?

A Sacramental View of Denominational Anxiety in the PC(USA)

I'd attended a Greek Orthodox service some years ago with my long time friend.  He snuck me into the choir where I had to fake my way through a floating tenor line of liturgical chant, including transliterated Greek stuff, and, I can say with certainty, I've never uttered the words "Lord, have mercy," more in my entire life.  Like many mantras, it started off interesting, then got boring, and then started to shoot roots into heart and mind and soul - "Lord, have mercy," "Lord, have mercy," "Lord, have mercy...."

The priest spoke the words of consecration over the bread and the wine and then offered the invitation.  I jumped at the chance to receive the sacrament that embodies our chant.  But just before it was my turn my friend jumped the line, whisperered to the priest that I had no relation to the Orthodox church, and he quickly withdrew the elements.  Instead he reached for anointing oil, touched my forehead, and directed me back to my seat in the choir.

I was confused, angry.  I actually cried.

Later I came learn that this priest did not remove the sacrament as an act of judgment.  He was reacting to how he'd been trained to understand that passage in I Corinthians 11:27-29, which concludes with this stern warning: "For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself," (NIV).  In the Orthodox tradition, as in the Catholic and Episcopalian, to properly recognize the body of the Lord means to accept that, at the time communion is served, that bread and wine actually become the real body and real blood of Christ.  He knew I held no such belief, and so his removal of the elements wasn't judgmental, but pastoral.  He simply didn't want me to eat or drink judgment on myself.

But the Reformed understanding of the body of the Lord is quite different.  We don't focus on the elements of bread and wine, but on the greater body of all those who confess Christ Jesus as Lord throughout the world.  To us, the proper understanding of the body of the Lord is one that seeks to reconcile with those other Christians from whom we've been divided, either by family infighting or political agenda or cultural barrier or theological disagreement or social issue.  Our table challenges us to look past all those barriers to see, not a communist or a bigot or a radical, but only another person who is also in desperate need of the grace of Jesus Christ.

Reconciliation, then, is key to the right celebration of this sacrament.  And I fail to see how separation, especially while throwing words around like "apostate" and "heretical," can ever do honor to the table that calls us, demands of us, a full view of and respect for the whole of the body of the Lord.

To me, it's just not worth the risk, the deep spiritual and theological risk, to leave.  The level of discomfort may have risen several degrees, but the table calls us to overcome that and far, far more as we learn to properly discern the body of Christ.

Lord, have mercy.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

There's nothing like a good moral controversy to pare away assumed values from real ones.  The Presbyterian church's hullaballoo over a change in our ordination standards is providing ample tension to provide that clarity.

Long ago I had a very different value system than I do now.  My hatred and disgust toward gay people was readily buttressed by traditional church views on homosexuality.  No church I ever attended nor any Christian I'd met would condone the thoughts that led me to demonize all gays as hell-bent child molestors, but there wasn't any real challenge to these thoughts, either.

I literally used to think it was a good idea to gather all gays into concentration camps and let them just die off so we wouldn't need to put up with them any more.  I would secretly cheer the reports of those who'd go into gay bars and start clubbing them with baseball bats.  And the Bible, I believed, backed me up as it condemned homosexuality as an abomination to God and gave witness to the broad destruction of entire cities full of those dreaded homosexuals. 

Yet this same Bible, which I have always maintained to be God's powerful and living word, has been pouring words of grace like water over the jagged edges of my hate and wearing them down.  At times it came in torrents to tear dislodge my deeply held and staunchly protected Biblical position.

It had to be two decades ago but I can still smell the chapel and feel the warm dim lighting spilling over the image of the Holy One suffering.  A man not much younger than me sat in a pew crying.  I remembered how just the year before I'd met Jesus in that same pew and was reduced to tears by his undeniable grace, beauty and truth.  So I assumed he was having a come-to-Jesus moment and sat beside him to join in the blessing.

That wasn't what was happening there at all. 

Steve was dying of AIDS.  At fifteen years old he came out to his parents and they kicked him out of the house.  Steve drifted south, far past the Hudson Valley and into a the kind of Sodom and Gomorrah community in South Beach where anyone would sleep with anyone.  He confessed being part of a lascivious lifestyle where he'd had some 400 partners in six years, and he had no idea when he contracted AIDS or any idea how many he'd given it to.  Could the death of some or even all of those men be on his head?  He'd come to this Christian weekend retreat to be healed, to be forgiven, to be received back into his parents' home so he wouldn't have to die alone.

Here was one who actually embodied all the ugliness I'd assumed was true of all gays.  I should have been physically sick.  I should have been spewing merciless raging judgment.  But God would not let me give that hatred any voice.

I sat there. With him. Listening.  I let him blubber all over my shoulder and wondered if I'd catch his disease but, oddly, I was not afraid.  A torrent of grace had cracked the very base of my hate and gave me, of all people, compassion for him.  We prayed and I carried him to his cot because he was too weak with grief and guilt to walk.  God asked me to play the role of Samaritan to this left-for-dead homosexual when my instinct would have been to whistle for dogs to gnaw on his dying flesh.  In the days and years to come I'd realize the unsettling truth that the hatred I'd leaned upon for so long had no ground in the gospel.

So my value started to change.  My respect for scripture deepened as I grew to understand it as a story of God's long-suffering grace and love toward a fallen and perpetualy failing people.  Rather than hearing the Old Testament as a tale of a jealous God punishing a wayward nation to scare them into obedience, I started to hear it as a story of a gracious God continually restoring an undeserving people to call them his own.

Then, finally, I could see the connection between Christ and these books of Moses and David and Solomon and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos.  Jesus did not come to punish and scare us back into a right relationship with God, but to extend God's grace to all of us undeserving people.  Straight or gay, we're all undeserving.  Straight or gay, God's grace is available through Christ.

Now, back to the current hullaballoo with people leaving churches and churches leaving the denomination.  I certainly do understand the tension, and I can also articulate my displeasure with an ordination standard that claims we will be "guided by" instead of "obedient to" holy scripture.  If I wanted to, I could focus on that grievous loss and reel off a hundred pages against this clear diminishment of scriptural authority.  I could rally a church behind a call to leave a denomination that no longer adheres to the clear meaning of God's word and take them confidently to a more comfortable place.  I could find ready metaphor in scripture to smooth the journey - from casting out the immoral brother to rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem to brushing dust off our feet, there is plenty to draw from upon exit.

But I've got two substantial issues with embarking on an exit strategy. 

First, I've got to put the new ordination standard into perspective.  It is one paragraph in a Book of Order that is in service to our confessional standards, and our confessional standards still maintain a high view of scripture.  To leave over this phrase in this paragraph is reversing the priority of these documents.

The church needs those with a conservative view of scripture.  We need the tension and abrasion of all our members to keep our coroporate discernment process intact.  We need those of conservative leaning to remind us of the importance of the intractable truth of the plain meaning of the text just as much as we need those of liberal leaning to remind us of the importance of textual and historical criticism in our hermeneutic.  Without these remaining in fellowship we will fall into the comfortable death of group think.

Second, while exit can be scripturally justified and a more expedient path to alleviate the anxiety of a congregation, it is not my value.  I've been more influenced by Paul's continual theme of keeping the church together despite its deep divisions, of honoring and supporting one another despite different cultural contexts, of maintaining a body with a wide variety of parts working toward one goal - the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is a gospel that makes people whole.  A divided church can't give fair witness to that with integrity.

I am thankful for this gut-wrenching time in our church because it is making clear to me the essential need to stay together, develop community, hold deep and honest conversations, and celebrate the faith that calls us to be one body.  As the song goes, "We are one in the Spirit/ We are one in the Lord/ And we pray that our unity will one day be restored."  Then, Lord let it be, they'll know we are Christians by our love.

What's the Problem Here?

With a handful of churches in the pipeline to leave the Presbytery and some twenty or so identifying themselves as disaffected with the denomination, it seems that there's a big problem to solve.

But the problem we've got to solve before we can solve the problem is that no one agrees on what the problem actually is that needs solving.

For example - seventy-five years ago the very first Othodox Presbyterian Church was birthed by folks who walked out the door of the church I currently pastor, Nottingham Presbyterian.  It's interesting to listen to folks in both churches tell the story.  Nottingham folks think it was about the (then) newly expressed support for the ordination of women in the church, but the OPC folks say that wasn't it at all, but about a change in what they considered an essential tennet of the faith in the Westminster Confession.

The same thing's going on here.  Those who are staying in the PC(USA) assume the others are leaving over the issue of ordaining people who are gay.  But those who are leaving say that gay ordination is a symptom of a greater illness, namely, that the church is losing its grounding in the authority of scripture.  They point to the new language in the ordination standard which reduces the authority of scripture to more of a guideline than a rule, effectively rendering one essential tennet of the reformed faith, sola scriptura, as toothless as a duck and as bendy as Gumby.

We can't solve what we can't define.  It's as simple a concept as you'll find in Couple's Counseling 101 - first you've got to agree on what the problem is before setting strategies to take care of it.

Today we're arguing over the argument.  The more liberal believers want us to agree to disagree, as if that's a value held by conservatives.  But those are uncomfortable words to the conservative believer, because agreeing to disagree means agreeeing that scripture can have a wide range of interpretation, and that means scripture isn't as universally authoritative as a conservative might hope, and you've got to draw the line somewhere.  The conservative believers want everyone to reign in that wide-ranging hermenetic and show a little restraint, in part because the leap from "thou shalt not" to "it's okay" feels really academic and tricksy and complicated.

So what might both sides want?  In a word - relevance.  Both sides want to be relevant.  The one wants to be relevant to a culture that increasingly lables the church as homophobic, hateful and bigoted because of its's traditional stance opposing homosexuality.  There is a strong desire to remove that significant judgmentalism so the public can once again tune its ear to the church's message of a God who so loves this world.  The other side desires relevance, not by compromising standards, but through the power of the truth of God's word in Christ Jesus to transform each individual and culture.

And tucked somewhere in there is a glimmer of light, a thin slice where the Venn diagram of conservative and liberal overlaps a percentage of a fraction of a hair of a degree.  Both still want to reach the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Same goal.  Different path.

Just don't tell the other side that because the reactionaries already have a hair trigger.  One will be quick to accuse the other of presenting a gospel of works righteousness because they demand
the change of a person's sexual identity before being fully incorporated into church life, and reactionaries on the other will quickly fire back that a gospel built on no authority is no gospel at all, but a whisper of half-truths leading to nothing, and then we'll be right back to nowhere.

Further, both believe they are best representing the love of God, but the one is leaning pretty heavily on love as grace and mercy and hospitality, and the other is leaning pretty heavily on love as discipline and obedience and walking down narrow paths and the like.

This reminds me of Emil Brunner's masterful work in The Christian Doctrine of God, and particularly that part where he discusses the Biblical attributes of God and finds what appears to be a massive and irreconcilable incongruity between God who is Love and God who is Holy (The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1949, chapters 14 and 15).  In sum, if God is Love, then God can accept and forgive and show grace to anyone at any time.  But if God is Holy, then God, who can't abide sin, can also show Divine Wrath to destroy anyone at any time.  Love and Wrath are contradictory charateristics that can't co-exist.  And we all know that God can't self-contradict because then God would cease to be God.  God must be the same yesterday, today, and forever to be truly God.

Now we've got a big old theological problem.  It appears that God's own definition of God's self doesn't mesh, and so the entire premise of religion, or belief in a perfect God, is about to collapse into a giant party for atheists everywhere.

Enter Jesus, through whom the full Love of God demonstrated and on whom the full Wrath of God is poured.  Because God is Love, God pours the fullness of his wrath for all that is not holy on God's own self, and both the Holiness and Love of God, in their fullness, are preserved and expressed.

In the current debate over which part of the church is best representing God, either through grace extended to all God's people or through the pursuit of holy obedience to God's word, it seems neither side is getting it quite right.  The answer, says the wisest bumper sticker ever, is Jesus.

Not missing this point, both sides would co-opt Jesus to be their standard-bearer.  The one lifts up Jesus who eats with sinners and condemns the obedience-based self-righteous leaders.  The other lifts up Jesus who said he didn't come to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them.  It's as if there are two different Jesuses to herald.  I'm telling you, it's all making my head spin.

Remember that bit about the split that gave birth to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church?  There aren't but a handful of folks still alive since that split and they were too young at the time to really know what was going on.  Still, the story of why and how and who was hurt has been passed down from generation to generation, essentially perpetuating the division.  But just recently Nottingham celebrated her 200th anniversary and sought to acknowledge the work of those institutions that have been integral to her history.  The Othodox Presbyterian Church was among them and was honored for their pursuit of theological integrity and their position in the community as a beacon of light and haven of rest.  Their pastor shared it with the church, many cried, and healing started.

We may never agree on what splits us.  But what binds us is Jesus.

The High Holy Day of All Retail

The count down to the High Holy Day of All Retail, Black Friday, has begun.

So one of my kids says to me, “Daddy, I want a Kid’s Puffy Furh Real Zhu Zhu Remote Controlled Dolly-Wet-Wet.  The pink one.”  At least, I think that’s what she said.  All I really heard was “Daddy, I want another blow-molded plastic thing with hair and batteries.  The pink one.”

How did she decide in her heart of hearts that the one thing that would make her life complete would be possession of a Crazy Wall-Runner Flashmatazz Accessories Sold Separately Batteries Not Included– the pink one?  It sure didn’t come from any profound understanding of the connection between her developing sense of self and the longings of her soul.  The Disney Channel flashed a commercial in front of her like a wiggly jigger in front of a striped bass and she bit.  Hard.

As a parent, I’m failing.  Marketers are steering this tender young heart readily and steadily toward whatever will separate me from my money just because they know parents really love to see their kids smile, and smiles are easy to produce with Gizmologicons Packaged With a Million Twisties in Pink.

Somehow those slick sales gurus know how to keep my kids from thinking deeper than three inches.  They’ve created the expectation that joy comes from flashy new thingies.  And if I ever want to see my kid bound into my arms with gratitude, I’d better hightail it over to the Stuff Mart to feed the mechanism that’s hijacking my kid’s imagination.

But in the end, We the Parents, in order to form a More Perfect Family, will win.  We will show them the Failed and Broken Toys whose only friends are Dust and Mite.  We will remind them of the fever pitch they made when they believed the hope and joy of all humanity lay with that pink plastic blow mold with hair, and how that hope and joy faded even before the batteries did.  We will grab them by the ear (metaphorically) to issue forth proclamations of true gratefulness and profound thanks for the free and priceless Stuff That Matters Most – faith, family and freedom, love and life, and above all, the matchless and boundless grace of our God from whom all blessings flow.

Why the Belhar Confession Should Be Adopted - a response to Mr. Alan Wisdom

Why the Belhar Confession Should Be Adopted

The Belhar merits inclusion in our confessional standards because no other confessional standard speaks to the essential balance of unity, reconciliation and justice so powerfully, nor ties the church’s mission to the nature of Trinity so humbly and beautifully.

Don’t let the two simple statements that kick off the confession scoot past you.  They may not be flowery or loquacious.  They don’t need to be.  These statements are the framework for the entire confession.  The Belhar is meant to reflect the working of our Triune God by calling us to embrace unity, reconciliation and justice in equal measure in all we do.  It intends to draw our eye, not myopically on our immediate circumstances, but far more broadly to embrace the whole of Christ’s church everywhere.

Belhar calls us to unity, not just within our own sanctuaries but among all Christian churches.  Belhar calls us to broker reconciliation, not just between dissident members or families, but between severed denominations and, most importantly, between the broken world God so loves and the Christ of our salvation.  Belhar calls us to justice, not only to see how inequality takes power out of another’s hands, but to be our metric for the success of all we do in Christ’s name.  Most significantly, the Belhar challenges us to work on all three concurrently, urgently and equally.

There aren’t a whole lot of churches that do this well, or even try.  A church that excels in keeping unity within its membership often does so at the cost of alienating other congregations by constantly defining self against her neighbors.  A church that majors in evangelism often fails when it comes to standing up for social justice issues.  A church that readily pickets and petitions and participates in politics may not have a clue how to do so in Jesus’ name.

Belhar won’t stand for this nonsense.  Belhar will challenge churches to break out of these broken and ineffective patterns.  Belhar will make us ask important questions so our ministries are fully formed to reflect the God we serve and not just the traditions of our parishes.  To the evangelistic will come questions about offering tangible salvific acts to the poor, the orphan and the widow.  To the reclusive will come questions about their ministry with the greater Body of Christ.  To the politically eager will come questions about their willingness to abandon religious language when making a stand. 

Further, Belhar won’t allow us to consider racism as all but dead in the water.  Racism is a persistent evil with deep, deep roots.  Think outside of America for a moment.  In Chiapas, Mexico, the Mestizo govern and hold all property and consider the indigenous natives of Mayan descent as dogs.  In India a social caste system amounts to a religious oppressive force perpetuating the cycle of poverty.  Israelis and Palestinians see the other, not as children of God, but as thieves stealing holy ground.

And here in America racism still thrives, not only in the kind of outward rejection, isolation and stereotypical assumptions we can all identify, but more surreptitiously in institutionalized policies, learned distrust and shared communal pain.  The Belhar makes us ask why only blacks were crowded into the Superdome when Katrina hit, why Franklin and Marshall College is surrounded by ancillary business when Lincoln University is not, and why there remains such a real tie between opportunity and race.

The standard of the Belhar on this persistent evil won’t become moot until all people are treated as equally as they’ve been created, nothing more or less.

This said, the Belhar is not just about racism.  Its principles of unity, reconciliation and justice apply to any place, person, or institution where disunity, division and injustice are in play.  As such, the application of this confession is as broad as all human endeavors.  Were it a single issue standard it would not be worthy of adoption.

Alan Wisdom’s approach to oppose the adoption of the Belhar consists of locking it down to a 1980’s South African context and then dismembering it by not only tearing out its redundancies with other established confessions but also by seeking to dislodge the arguments for adoption with the refrain that the language of Belhar isn’t strong enough.  Add to that a criticism that this confession isn’t Christological enough and you’ve pretty much got his stance figured out.

But if you apply this argument to existing confessional standards, then neither would we have the Shorter and Larger Catechisms as these could be seen as redundant iterations of the Westminster Confession, nor would we hold to Barmen as it was formed in a 1930’s German context.

Mr. Wisdom consistently asks us to compare the context of Belhar’s writing with the Presbyterian church of 2011 in America.  That too, is off.  We are not a national church.  Ours is a global church with missionaries worldwide, and so deliberation of the Belhar must be considered from a global perspective.  Each time he asks “does this make sense in the PCUSA of 2011?” he does so with a false assumption that our analysis of the confession is American only.

That assumption alone underscores the need for Belhar’s call to keep the whole Church in view.

Finally, the argument that the Belhar is not strong enough in its Christology can be met on two points.  First, the Belhar would stand alongside existing standards expressing a high Christology, not overshadow or replace them.  Second, the Belhar brings a theocentric, Trinitarian element to the formation of our ministries, and in that, is unique.

If so discerned, the Belhar can retool our approach to being Christ’s church.  It can lead us to develop and implement well-rounded discipleship initiatives that seek not only shalom in ourselves but also shalom in our community.  It can expose our willing participation in divisive systems and help us challenge those systems to embody equality.  It can help us create ministries that embrace the ideals of unity, reconciliation and justice.  Through it we will see the church move from fractured to cooperative, homogenized to diverse, insular to missional, stagnant to nimble and suspicious of our differences to respectful, even grateful, for our differences.

I urge you to vote to include the Belhar as a confessional standard for the PC(USA), and thank you for your prayerful consideration.

Not a Proud Presbyterian

The worst thing you can say about an Amishman is that he's proud.  You never want to tell a father that he must be proud of his son, or tell a farmer that he must be proud of his team of Percherons.  It's anathema, a profound insult.  Pride is to the Amish spirit as rattlesnake to the nervous system.  There is no room in the Amish heart for pride.

We who are not Amish are proud of pride.  We cultivate it, promote it, generate it.  We push for pride in our schools, pride in our kids, pride in our work, pride in our families and the obstacles they overcome.  Pride is a good thing, a compliment, a word born of the right mix of hard work, good choices, loyalty and love, and who would stand opposed to those values?

Certainly not me.  Work hard, make good choices, stand by the relationships and the decisions that got you where you are, and be generous with your heart.  That sounds like a winning combination of laudable values.  So why the disparity between these two perspectives on pride?

The Amish know that pride is as smooth and alluring as 100 year old barrel aged whiskey.  Indulge too much and I don't care how expensive the shot - it'll turn you into its slave.

The things we are proud of become the things we defend, whether they're defensible or not.  They become the things that are most important, around which we've even wrapped out identity.  We are proud of our heritage because that's where we came from and it's who we are, even if that heritage is marked by quick temper or thick headedness or historic supremacy or learned distrust.  We are proud of our kids, and that pride has led many parents to develop massive blind spots to their childrens' capacity for evil.

Pride plugs ears, stops up hearts, drowns out reason, implodes self-understanding, controverts wisdom, erodes relationships, misaligns priorities, protects privilege, twists truth, justifies sin, celebrates selfishness and elevates entitlement.  Pride goes before a fall.

That said, do you believe that the collected discernment of the many can come up with a better idea than one person?  Aren't dictators like Qaddafi fools for failing to listen and yield to the collective voice of the majority?  Aren't governments like Yemen and Syria becoming unruly, quite literally, because they are trying to restore "order" through military action and placating the masses with condescending and empty promises?  And what "order" are they trying to restore but the one that keeps the powerful in power?

One great wisdom of Presbyterian polity is that it requires humility.  Let the debates carry on while the thing is being deliberated, and hold passionately to the side you champion.  Be vocal and definitive, yet listen, listen, listen far more than you speak.  Then, once the process is complete and all sides are heard and all points are prayerfully considered, then the matter is settled by the discernment of the majority.  The collected wisdom of the majority becomes the united voice of the whole Church (G-1.0400).

Or so they say.  If the collected wisdom of the majority is to become the united voice of the whole church, both the winners and the losers of the debated article must adopt humility and take on that characteristic of Christ who, "though in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant," (Philippians 2:6-7).

Here's what this means to me:  The ones who lost the debate must bow to the collected wisdom of the majority, and the ones who won must seek to come underneath the wounded and serve them.  "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.  Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others,"  (Philippians. 2:3-4).

The fracturing of the church is along pride's faultlines and the failure to both serve and submit.  It isn't going to work as long as the winners stand on their victory and demand submission with phrases like "get over it," or "you can always find another church."  And it isn't going to work as long as the losers demand that their perspecitve be served with phrases like "We have just begun to fight," and "Here I stand; I can do no other."

Pride goes before a fall.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that the cohesiveness and mission of the church is threatened by proud Presbyterians.  There are plenty of proud Presbyterians on all sides of all issues, but the unity, purity and peace of the church cannot abide pride.  It is the proud hand that tells the foot it is not part of the body because it is not a hand.

There are lots of things I don't like about the church, but I choose to be part of a church that values a process that debates and considers and prays over its decisions, because this requires of all its members a Christ-like humility of laying down entitled powers to serve the other.

And here's another beautiful thing about our process.  Decisions can be changed.  We can bring concerns from the grassroots up to be considered by the entire church.  We can scruple our disagreements because we recognize that even all the debating in the world won't get every perspective heard.  We can acknowledge that "God alone is Lord of the conscience," and find a way to work together within a broad doctrinal spectrum.

Why do I say this is beautiful?  It sounds chaotic, as if it gives the discontented fertile ground to sow their discontent and stand on ceremony and not adopt a humble heart.  But it's beauty lies in providing voice for the marginalized and power for the disenfranchised.  It allows the Church to continually acknowlege that, though it's discernment model is the best in the world, it's still an imperfect collection of the thoughts of a fallen people, and it allows for continual listening to the movement of the Spirit who alone lifts the scriptures from stagnant to being "living and active," (Hebrews 4:12).

So I ask you to pray a dangerous prayer with me.  Ask God for humility.  Ask God to melt pride's faultlines until they become smooth roads.  Ask God of this for yourself, because to pray for the humbling of another is itself a prideful prayer.

Irreconcilable Differences Are Usually Not

Life vs. Choice.  Evolution vs Creation.  LGBT vs. Leviticus and Romans.  Israel vs. Palestine.  Global Warming vs. Big Oil.  These are the big issues of our time in our churches, although most don't see it that way.  To most people, the argument is already settled.  All they have to do is convince everyone else that they're right.

So the weapons of debate are fashioned and reinforced.  We've got scientific data to contradict your scientific data.  We've got scriptures to trump your scriptures.  We've got anecdotal evidence that's far more emotionally gripping than your anecdotal evidence.  We will force votes, enact laws, lobby for reform, make pilgrimages, hire strategists and do our level best to make sure you understand why we're right and you're wrong.

It's a great day for freedom of speech.  It's a sad day for mature dialogue.

Honestly, it doesn't really matter what the issue is.  The process is the same.  Side A gets all up in arms about their platform and works dilligently to convince the rest of the world that they're right.  Side B gets all up in arms and works dilligently to convince the rest of the world that they're right.  Launch the attack ads and lawsuits.  Hire the lobbyists and raise ridiculous amounts of money.  Coordinate an editorial campaign and exploit the other's weaknesses.  Tell compelling stories in movies and music.  Tap into the power of celebrity and opinion makers.  Drive that wedge issue home!

This is not about reconciling.  This is about winning.  This is not about relationship.  This is about demonizing the other.  This is not about unity, purity and peace.  This is about trying to create safety through sameness.

It doesn't work.  It never has, at least when humans are involved.  From failed attempts at utopian societies to the rise and fall of the Third Reich and from papal bulls to dictatorial regimes, from the Roman Empire to the Mayans to the Dynasties of the far east, there has not been one single attempt at creating safety through sameness that has succeeded.  Even if you dial it down from an international scale to what, in the grand scheme of world events, was a piddling little dispute between Peter and Paul over whether Gentiles had to be circumcised to be Christians, the push to require conformity has never worked.

Reconciliation does not mean to make things the same, to homogenize.  Reconciliation means to settle, to resolve.  There are countless issues that will never be resolved so long as we continually accept the false idea that resolution equals sameness.  However, if we apply enough resources, creativity, time, patience, prayer and understanding and there can be a reconciliation, a settling of the matter, a resolution.

That takes maturity, a commodity we are grossly lacking.  Anyone can scream their position and draw lines in the sand and alienate all the others who don't agree with them.  That takes no more maturity than a five year old already possesses, and we have a plethora of highly educated and/or elected and/or ordained and/or public figureheads shouting  like five year olds from the tops of their idealogical spectra at all the lesser thans who don't agree with them.  What we don't have nearly enough of are the folks who disagree yet are willing to actually reconcile without bullying.

And I personally can't stand it when people use the Bible as their main bullying tool, as if their self-assured pride in having figured it all out means no one else could possibly have a valid Biblical point to make.

As a Christian, I take wholeheartedly the idea that, because I have been reconciled to God through Christ, I now bear the responsibility of being a minister of reconciliation.  To me, that means far more than just learning how to tell the story of my relationship with Jesus.  It also means nurturing humility and a servant's heart after Christ's example as Paul so eloquently expresses in Philippians 2.  It means finding a way to come alongside those with whom I disagree, not to cajole or coerce, but to love and to serve and to try to understand.

It also means I have to learn to live with tension.  Not that I get all worked up and anxious because of unresolved issues, but that I recognize the differing points of view without being immobilized.  To some, that comes across like I'm indecisive.  On the contrary, I've decided to let differences exist in tension with each other.  I certainly do have positions on all of the above and reasons to back them up.  But to me, it is more important to maintain both personal integrity and interpersonal relationships than to alienate those whose opinions and rationales differ from my own.

The Straight and Narrow (But Not What You Expect)

For thirty-three years the PC(USA) has been debating the ordination of gay and lesbian people to offices of elder, deacon and pastor.  Over the past five years, according to a NYT article found at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/us/11presbyterian.html?_r=2, the PC(USA) has lost 100 churches to more conservative denominations, primarily because of this debate.  It's not that those churches have ceased to exist.  They've just moved on.
Google "PC(USA)" and "gay ordination" and you'll find most of the pages announce the death of the church.  The theme is that the whole "gay issue" will drive membership away, create unquenchable conflict and draw down the wrath of God on the denomination, its pastors and its members.

I wonder when Westboro Baptist will start picketing PC(USA) funerals.  (BTW - I couldn't remember their name so I googled "crazy baptist" and, no joke, it was the first hit via Wikipedia.)

This may very well damage this church, but it won't be for the reasons being trumpeted.  It will be because the denomination is homogenizing over social issues and losing the breadth of perspectives that enable them to discern, imagine and implement effective ministries.

In my limited experience, this is pretty typical of liberal movements.  There's plenty of room for everybody but conservatives.

A by-product of this homogenization is the conflict that goes along with it.  Those who seek holier ground on the other side of the denominational fence rarely go with hugs and kisses.  They go with bitterness, disappointment, and even maybe a degree of pride.  And then there are those in the denomination who aren't helping matters at all with their "don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya" attitude.

Some middle governing bodies (like the Presbytery of Donegal) are trying to find a friendly way to let churches leave in order to honor their continuing labor in the work of the Kingdom.  It is a gracious way part amicably.  It's like honey coated schism.  Time will tell if the result will be reconciliation and renewed partnership across denominational fences.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine, also a pastor, needed to visit a church in some degree of turmoil.  He came back to his own church in time to eat lunch with a visiting high school choir.  One of the boys admitted he doesn't go to church at all and then said, "It just seems like you all are at war with each other."

Indeed.

Who in their right mind would believe that this is an institution founded on and grounded in the love of God?  Who would ever take us seriously when we talk about the need to forgive one another as Christ forgives us, or to love one another as Christ loves us?

Now I do understand and empathize, even deeply, with those who say that leaving the denomination isn't about the gay issue but about scriptural authority.  I know that there is a huge difference between confessing that you are "obedient to" scripture versus confessing that you are "guided by" scripture.*  To say "guided by" is way too wishy-washy, as if the Bible only offers suggestions and not commandments, advice and not wisdom, convenience and not commitment.  To be "guided by" leads to a 'pick and choose' approach to scriptural authority.  You've got a point, and a very good point.  The dilution of scriptural authority is a serious, serious issue.

At the same time, there needs to be some ground given on what it means to be "obedient to" scripture.  I have yet to meet a Christian who upholds all the household codes in Leviticus despite the fact that they read like commands.  The argument excusing obedience is that these folks are under a new covenant in Christ so the old rules don't apply.  But at the same time the Levitical code condemning homosexuality still has traction.  Isn't that also 'pick and choose?'

So while some churches look for straight pastors and narrow biblical interpretive standards, they've got to wrestle with what scriptural authority really means.  They've got to come to terms with their own lack of a consistent approach to reading and interpreting scripture.  It's an issue with which every church suffers.  None of us hold the Interpretive Key to the Mind of God.

These fellowships also need to consider what withdrawal from the denomination might mean in the bigger picture.  What does it say about the way we love, forigve and reconcile in Jesus' name?  What if withdrawal signals to homophobes that they now have a safe place to congregate and celebrate their hate?

And then what about the next issue?  When a church decides to separate rather than reconcile, then that becomes a more ready option the next time around.  It becomes a more valid option for discontented members to find a new home when trouble pops up.  It becomes a metaphor to pave the way for members to cut off their own relationships.  It could undermine a pastoral objective to preserve and strengthen marriages and families.

Am I just spouting off, or is there evidence for this?  Schism is part of our American spiritual heritage.  We wouldn't have had pilgrims settling this continent if they could have worked things out at home.  With that heritage, we break up over non-essential issues far more readily than we're able to come together through shared essential common ground.  Splitting up is what we do.

Here's how it works.  A Divisive Issue arises.  People focus on the Divisive Issue.  They rally around the Divisive Issue, draw their lines in the sand over the Divisive Issue and start calling whomever is on the other side whatever name might smear them best.  There are those who call for civility, but their soundbites don't get picked up by the media.

Finally the anxiety level is so high that there can be no creative solution to this Divisive Issue but to divide.  One side blames the other for creating a problem.  The only resolution, they argue, is to be rid of the ones who are to blame.  It doesn't matter if they oust the blame agent or ouster themselves.  The point is that cut-off appears to be the only path available to give them relief.

But then the next Divisive Issue comes along.  And then the next.  And then the next.  It's about universal savlation or civil rights or women holding office or immigration or flags in sanctuary or gay ordination or, as in the case of the split between the Christian Reformed Church and the True Christian Reformed Church , a dispute over serving meat vs. fish on Fridays during Lent.  And in every single case we have failed to work it out.

This self-amplifying cycle of anxiety ends with the dissolution of relationship, the breaking of covenant, the narrowing of perspectives to the remaining like-minded folks, the name calling and the high school choir member who's never been to church observing that we're always at war with each other.

We need a better way to deal with whatever Divisive Issue comes our way.**  This pattern ain't working.  It's insane that we keep doing the same thing hoping for a different result.  The hand can't say to the foot that you don't matter because you're not a hand, but that's what we do over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

If we, who are the Body of Christ, keep up with this self-amputation, our own metanoia as a church will not resemble Jesus which is trusted with "the ministry of reconciliation."

Here's my Occam's Razor solution, which really isn't mine at all, but the wisdom of someone way smarter - "Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ forgave you," (Eph. 4:13, NIV).  Here's another - "Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another.  Forgive as the Lord forgave you.  And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity," (Col. 3:13-15, NIV).

May the straight and narrow path we seek be one that balances on reconciliation and forgiveness as we pursue our life together as the Body of Christ.



*For the uninitiated - the new language that makes room for gay ordination says that the church will be "guided by" the scriptures as opposed to being "obedient to" the scriptures as the old language stated.

**There is a creative idea floating about where the conservative end of the church would form it's own non-locative Presbytery with the stated purpose to dislodge existing Presbyteries.  This is not a move toward reconciliation.  It's more like how a wasp kills other bugs.  The wasp lays it's eggs in the larvae of the bug so that, when they hatch, they eat the larvae from the inside out.

Unity, Reconciliation, Justice and The Belhar Confession

The Belhar is literally framed by a confession of our Triune God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One God now and forever.  There is perhaps no other doctrine in the church more difficult to grasp than that of Trinity.  We've heard many ways of describing this mystery of God, but each and every one of them falls short of expressing the depth of relationship existing in the Godhead.  Of all the analogies and descriptions, the one I've come to embrace is that of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons of the Godhead, wholly distinct yet wholly indistinguishable.

Dante referred to God this way.  He imagined God to be like three distinct yet indistinguishable cirlces of light.  If you imagine three circles, you've divided what is indivisible.  If you imagine only one circle, you've blended what is unique.  This is a perfectly apt description that cannot be imaged without devaluing either God's unity or God's individuality.

This is an image of balance.  There is no hierarchy.  Each is inextricably woven with the other.

The Belhar calls the church to embrace her mission with the same level of balance and connectedness, and in this the Belhar is unique among the Reformed standards.  Framed by a confession of our Triune God, the Belhar calls each congregation to a balanced, woven, equal ministry of unity, reconciliation and justice.

Wisely, the Belhar avoids that classic Trinitarian misstep of modalism (which is heresy) by not assigning this three-in-one mission to any person of the Godhead.  Modalism is attributing one particular work of God to one particular person of the Godhead, such as referring to God as Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer.  This reduces God to a set of job descriptions and misses the essential nature of God's intimate relationship.

Rather, the Belhar calls the church to work on the relationship of these three objectives of unity, reconciliation and justice as they work for the singular purpose of communicating salvation.  Such work is necessary - absolutely necessary.

In my observation and study, churches tend to major in either unity, reconciliation or justice. They'll be good at evangelism, but won't engage social justice issues. They'll go after systemic problems in the community, but won't have a clue how to do so with an obvious witness to Christ. They'll circle the wagons to protect the membership from possibly divisive issues needing deeper dialogue, study, prayer and action. Such protectionism may uphold the church's unity but at the expense of relevant and responsive.

Now, there are those who see Belhar as a threat. I've heard the arguments:  it'll force us to accept unacceptable behavior, or it's too rooted in the racist underpinnings of apartheid to be relelvant, or (related) we have overcome racism in our day so this confession is moot.  Let me address these one at a time.

First, we must remember that the Belhar is being proposed as an addition to existing standards, not as a replacement.  While the Belhar certainly does call the church to repent of any form of divisiveness either in its own life, the community, or the institutions it supports, it will exist alongside our other confessions which are more specific in their definition of what is and is not acceptable Christian behavior.

Second, it is rooted in the context of apartheid.  That should not be a strike against it any more than one might dismiss C.S. Lewis or Deitrich Bonhoeffer for writing from the context of the second world war.  Both of these contexts have exposed historic and institutionalized sins used to leverage power and advantage while keeping others oppressed.

Third, I am a racist and am not proud of it.  Even though I adopted a daughter without condition of race and served on the board for the Institute for Healing Racism and have repented of the outright racist actions of my youth by finding and apologizing to those whom I'd hurt, I still live fairly comfortably in a world where racisim persists.  I bank with institutions that have scrutinized more deeply than necessary a person of color's loan application.  I shop at stores where plain clothes security guards track the movements of color and the visibly poor.  I eat at restaurants where the servers are women, the cooks are men and the busboys are Mexican.  I live in a community which assumes Hispanics are only here for free health care, to take our jobs and to sell drugs to our kids.  My racism is rooted in the sad fact I don't do enough to combat these realities because it would upset my primarily comfortable existence.

When we adopted our daughter ten years ago we weren't even done with the home study before we were picked to be parents.  Less than two months later we were on our way to meet her and take her home.  Now that's really, really fast -far quicker than anyone had prepared us for.  Conventional wisdom said it would take more than a year, maybe two.  Why so fast?  In America, for every white baby born there are seven (usually white) adoptive families waiting.  White families tend to do the majority of adoptions because white families tend to be more affluent.  That, in an of itself, points to instituionalized racism.  But for every seven black babies born there is only one family waiting, and for every five bi-racial, Hispanic or Asian baby there's only one family waiting.  Our culture still imagines and accepts monochromatic families as the norm while six out of seven black children and four out of five Hispanic children head for foster care.

Consider our missionaries and their fields.  In Mexico a Mestizo (a person of both Hispanic and native descent) is far more accepted than a native of Mayan descent, and the racism perpetrated against these people is as atrocious and blatant as pre-Civil Rights America.  In India the caste system is upheld by assumptions based on the shade of your skin.  And need I say anything about the ongoing struggles of Palestinians and Israelis?

So, no, we're not over it.  Not by a longshot.  We may have rooted out the personally objectionable language and most obvious practices of segregation, but the institutionalized racism, the lingering assumptions, and the general connection of either poverty or opportunity to race is still very very much alive.  And dreadful.

The Belhar won't tolerate ideological division, race based division, institutionalized division or classist division.  It takes seriously what we already proclaim, namely, that we are all created in the image of God whose only hope is in Christ Jesus our Lord.  That is the levelest of playing fields.

If the Belhar is any threat, it is a threat to the way the church carries out her ministries.  The Belhar will challenge us to galvanize an equally balanced, three-pronged, distinct yet indistinguishable approach to all we do to bring both tangible and eternal salvation to every person God has given to our care.

Be Still

Imagine you're in a dentist chair all numbed up with two people manipulating implements in your mouth.  That would be a bad time to start expressing yourself or wiggling about.  Stillness in a dentist's chair is highly valued.

It's also a sign of humility.  You've got to put everything else on pause.  No phone calls.  No texting.  No facebook.  The work at hand is important enough to cut out any and all distractions.  Be still.

Stillness is even more important in metanoia.  But unlike a dentist's chair where the risk of personal injury keeps you as motionless as a mummy, the stillness one seeks before God is not only of the body, but of the mind and soul as well.  That stillness, where the mind is vacant and the soul rests without worry, is almost impossible to achieve.

We just like noise.  Maybe not the screaming daycare center kind of noise, but some flow of thought or data or music or conversation or RSS feed is omnipresent in our lives.  And if we're not analyzing or thinking or gathering info while we work, then we're relaxing with some plugged in, battery operated or splined distraction to shut down the day's cranial taxations.  One way or another nearly every waking moment is filled with noise whether it's beneficial or not.

The stillness we're after is not the kind where your mind can drift off to wherever, or even a nap where cognizence is lost.  This stillness comes from a place where you are relaxed, aware and listening.

Thomas a Kempis observed that "habit overcomes habit."  If we are in the habit of filling our minds with noise, then we need to cultivate a habit of stillness to replace it.  A wonderful practice of the ancients of the faith, beautiful in its simplicity yet challenging to get right, is the Jesus Prayer.

The words are not complicated - "Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."  Anyone can articulate them and repeat them. It's achieving a stillness of mind, body and soul so that you sole awareness is of God's presence in this prayer that is so, so hard, especialy for western Christians.  In the same way that lights always burn through the night so we can't know true darkness, so also we are unable to tune out noise and thoughts to know true stillness.

Find a quiet, comfortable spot where you can sit for a while, but not so comfortable that you are lulled to sleep.  Try not to fidget or shift.  Just be in one place - no cell phone, no music, no television, no distractions.  You are here to give God your full and undivided attention.

The Jesus Prayer is as rhythmic as breathing.  As you may know, the Hebrew and Greek words for Spirit in the scriptures also mean "wind" and "breath."  The ancients had a ready ability to accept that the very air we breathe is a gift from God who is the Lord and giver of Life.  We are constantly surrounded by the Spirit of God Whose breath literally permeates every fiber of our being.

Breathe deeply.  Become aware of the Spirit of God filling you, refreshing you, bringing life.  Imagine that you are breathing, not with heaving shoulders or expanded diaphragm, but through your heart.  And as you draw this life-giving breath, speak these words in your mind, "Lord Jesus, Son of God," as if you are filling your whole self with Jesus.

As you exhale, become aware of being emptied, of driving the choking spent breath from your whole self, and speak these words in your mind, "...have mercy on me, a sinner."  Imagine your sin leaving you, making room to be filled once more with God's Spirit.

Say this over and over, focusing on the words, the breathing through your heart, the Spirit of God filling you and emptying you, and let all other concerns simply fall away.  Lose awareness of ambient noises.  Be still, and know that God is God.

At first, I'd suggest setting a target of 200 repetitions without interruption, although I'm reticent to do so.  Most of us are so goal oriented that we'll focus more on counting to make the goal than on the prayer itself.  Our faithfulness really is that fragile.  Yet without a goal, you may end the prayer too soon before you realize the blessing of stillness before God.  You could set a timer for an hour or so if need be, but that may create a certain level of anxiety that the prayer "isn't working yet and time is running out."  Our faithfulness really is that fragile.

It's good to note that this is not an efficient prayer.  It does not play by our rules.  It is not beholding to our deadlines and schedules.  It never really finishes its work.  It is rather like a fractal, a monumenntal mathematical art where the repetition of pattern draws you to finer exploration of its infinite nature further in and deeper down.

There are monasteries in Greece, just west of the vast region of Macedonia, set atop massive fingers of rock some three hundred feet tall.  Monks first climbed these rocks to find cliffs just to be apart enough from the world to pray this prayer.  Some are still accessible only by rope to keep tourists away.  There, lifted above the cares of the world, monks would engage this prayer twenty, even thrity thousand times a day, and still not feel as though they've heard all God has to say to them.

Let that encourage you to try and to continue.  The first time I brought this to the leadership of the church, I gave them each a beaded bracelet with nineteen smaller beads and one larger one and asked them to pray through ten laps and remain silent until the morning.  They thought I was being unrealistic and tried to negotiate a lower number, but I just sent them to pray.

In the morning the reports came in how beautiful and engaging the prayer was.  They wanted more time in silence to draw near and asked for more beads to bring the prayer home to their spouses and children.  They found a friend in the prayer and not an unrealistic burden.

One final note - ou will not master this prayer until God has completely mastered you.

Sandboxes, Schism and Emotional Cut-Off

Richie had a nice sandbox under the deck of his house.  Ours was splintering and had little maple trees making a go of it, but his had clean sand and smooth seats and loads of minature construction equipment to load up and dump.  So whenever he'd invite me I'd hop the fence and dig in.

As it goes, he had his way of loading a Tonka truck and his idea about where to dump it and I had my own.  So we'd argue and fuss and he'd remind me that this was his sandbox, after all, and his toys, so I'd better do things his way.  I never wanted to do things his way.  Within about five minutes he'd take his toys and disappear into his house, making sure I knew I wasn't invited inside.

His toys and his ideas meant more to him than our friendship.  Likewise, my ideas meant more to me than respecting and honoring him.  Suffice it to say that, to this day, we still haven't friended each other on facebook.

Isn't that sad?  You might even say it's immature.

Richie and I were practicing a form of emotional cut-off.  Emotional cut-off comes in a host of distasteful flavors such as giving someone the silent treatment or unfriending someone on facebook to remaining closed-off and unapproachable to others to running away or divorce or, at it's most severe, through physical violence such as committing suicide or murder.  Each of these forms clearly vary in severity, but are rooted in the same emotional stance.  Cut-off is one person's way of saying to another "I'm done with you!"  It elevates the issue between two people so much that the issue becomes more important than the relationship itself.

Cut-off is defined many ways by many people.  Dr. Murray Bowen, who pioneered the study of families systems as single emotional units back in the 1950's, sees cut-off as the most extreme form of emotional distance.  Rabbi Dr. Edwin Friedman, a student of Bowen's who expanded family systems theory to observe natural systems, talks about it in terms of emotional distance.  Roberta Gilbert, M.D. is a contemporary family systems thinker in D.C. who sees that how we handle cut-off is key to how we manage all our relationships.

With apologies for oversimplification of their profound thinking, I'd like to suggest that cut-off, be it a momentary storming out of a room or a permanent violent act, is rooted in prideful self-assurance.  One person becomes absolutely convinced that their way of thinking is the only way of thinking and can make no room to open his or her mind.

Some dear friends who are members of a conservative evangelical church are currently feeling some painful, passive-aggressive emotional distancing.  They've come to believe that gay people are also God's children who desire mercy and grace in their lives.  So when they met a teen who'd been kicked out of his house when he came out to his parents, who was struggling to find a consistent place to eat and sleep, they invited him into their home, set up the guest room, and chose to love him in the same way Jesus showed love to the outcasts of his day.

This does not square well with Christians who have separated homosexuals from "neighbor" status (as in "love your neighbor") and reduced all gay people to being abhorrent and perverted aberrations of God's sexual plan.
The cognitive dissonance between their actions and the members' judgements proved too great for some to bear.  To be fair, these judgments were not supported by the church's leadership.  Relationships between them and other members started showing signs of strain.  Anxiety spread like vibrations through a spider's web.  Some proved that their thinking was too inflexible to embrace this act of generosity, love and mercy.

Now they have another decision to make.  Do they work on the cut-off relationships or do they accept cut-off as a sign that it's time to nurture other relationships?  Working to reconcile cut-off relationships is hard.  Accepting cut-off galvanizes the rigidity that led to that emotional distance.

Theirs is a microcosm of those churches threatening schism (another form of cut-off) from the PC(USA).  There are those who want to demonstrate love to the broken by removing institutionalized barriers set up to prevent homosexuals from ever being ordained.  Then there are those who want to uphold the standard of considering homosexuality an abomination before God and believe that love includes discipline and repentance.  Those who aren't going to get their way on this one are looking for another home.

Unfortunately, the leaders on both sides of this issue haven't demonstrated the emotional or spiritual maturity to manage cut-off.  They've let the unthinkable become a real option.  Some are planning to take their toys and go to another sandbox.  Others are ready to kick them out with a resounding good riddance.  Why is this unthinkable?

I can think of two reasons.  First, it's reactive and not responsive.  It's letting emotion drive the rationalizations of both sides rather than using reason to understand and manage emotion.  In so doing, our eyes are no longer focused on the salvation that binds us into one body.  Ours is a discipleship where faith seeks understanding, not where emotion seeks justification.

Second, this reactivity is driving those who've taken baptismal vows together, shared communion together, grieved together and prayed together to say "I want nothing to do with you anymore," and formally end their shared communion.  I understand why people choose to manage anxiety through cut-off, but I certainly don't agree with it.

Cut-off does not heal with time.  Cut-off only heals with mature interaction.

The denominations where churches are finding hermeneutical cover aren't necessarily going to share a communion table with the PC(USA) any time soon.  Neither is the PC(USA) going to offer an olive branch to those who've made it easy to enact cut-off.  These are in effect saying to each other that their version of Christianity is so distasteful that we can no longer work together.  That's institutionalized, hyper-rationalized, emotionaly driven "I'm taking my stuff and never playing with you again" cut-off.

And even though this hurts - not only the people in the churches but moreso the mission of the church - we are showing time and again that we'd rather spend more energy alleviating anxiety through cut-off than managing anxiety through relationship.

This does not square with these words in II Corinthians 5:17-19:  "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself in Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them.  And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation."

Why did this happen?  Why are we pursuing a path of emotinal distancing instead of reconciliation?  What is driving not only this split, but every other schism the church has sufferedn in the past?  I'd like to share a line from Friedman's Generation to Generation.  This ought to make you think.  "Emotional distance is perplexing.  If there is too much, it is not possible to have a relationship; if there is not enough separation, it is also not possible to have a relationship," (Guilford, p.42, 1985).

Maybe, just maybe, the reason we can't withstand the tension is that we were too close to begin with.  Maybe our attempts to homogenize the faith within ever-narrowing boundaries as defined by position papers and A.I.'s and the church's courts indicate a lack of healthy relationship in the first place.

Funeral Humor

The family was early and the funeral home was late.  By the time I showed up a scene was brewing, temperatures were rising and no one was thinking.  Mom had been cremated but the sexton dug a full grave opening.  There was a six foot drop and everyone wanted to know how Mom was going to be put in the hole.

Several ideas came to mind.  Do we just drop her in and hope she doesn't spill out?  Do we have someone jump in the hole to place her gently?  What about a ladder?  But each idea was kiboshed by the "someone will be traumatized" argument.  After all, who wants to remember a day because they had to climb into Mom's grave?

So I approached the sexton, a rather humorless fellow, who sat quietly in his truck within earshot, not saying a word.  "Can't we just cut a shelf at the head of the grave so I can place her?"  "Sorry," he said with a tone that was far more patronizing than apologetic, "but I'd have to charge the family for another grave opening."  "There's a shovel right in the back of your truck.  I'll just dig it myself."  "I can't let you do that, sir.  Too many roots.  You might hurt yourself."  "But can't you see that this isn't going to work?  The family is here to grieve, and you created this problem..." but before I could finish, he just rolled up his window and turned on the radio.

Meanwhile the kids in the family were out looking for rope.  Whether it was to tie around Mom and lower her in or to tie around their waist to hoist them back out I can't be certain.  I decided to try again with Mr. Lifeless and knocked on his window.  He turned the radio down, not off, and rolled the window half-way and blew smoke in my general direction.

"I get it that this is about money.  Listen.  You'd have to fill in the grave anyway, right?"  Reluctant agreement seemed to be acknowledged in the form of a slight head bob counterweighted by a solid sideways glance.  "So why not fill in the hole now?  That way I won't have subject their mother to an atomic drop."  "Won't that be traumatizing to the family?"  Like he cared. 

Off he goes, at a snail's pace, to get the equipment.  There were several machines to choose from, but he fired up the articulating front loader with the five yard bucket, jammed it into high gear, and nearly ran over several other stones as he made every effort to be neither subtle nor accurate.  The family huddled at a safe distance.

Finally the funeral home shows up and tries to take over the situation.  The director does triage both for his business and the family.  He puts Mom down on some wooden planks under a tree, grabs me for a quick assessment of the situation, assigns the other men in matching suits with brass nametags to make various phone calls, and slips into the family's huddle to deliver the play.

That's when the sprinklers kicked on.  These aren't typical lawn sprinklers with a gentle rythmic spray.  These shoot inch thick jets over a 50 foot radius.  "Mom's going to wash away!" There was no safe spot.  The director pulled his coat over his head and charged for the cremains which, by the way, took a direct hit and rolled off the planks.  He paused a moment to consider who needed his coat's shielding most - Mom's urn or his combover.  For the first time that day, someone made a smart decision in the moment.

Mr. Lifeless high-tailed it back to the shed to shut off the water, belching a huge plume of black smoke which, of course, kind of settled right in around us.  We coughed and smoothed our clothes and forced a bit of composure, tried to remember why we'd gathered here in the first place, and carefully stepped over puddles around a grave filled askew with random piles of dirt blocking access.

"Dearly beloved...."  We laughed and cried and prayed and sang and did the "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" thing while I'm wondering if I ought to amend it to "mud to mud," but didn't.  Thank God for good decision number two.  At the end I knelt to lower Mom to her resting place, then got on hands and knees because he'd filled the middle more than the edges, and still couldn't quite reach.  Nothing left to do but say a prayer and hope for the best.  She landed softly, albeit a bit crooked, and we said our last goodbyes.

Overreacting

Ever since hearing of the quake and tsunami devastating northern Japan we've been glued to news reports about the efforts to cool down the Fukushima Dai-Ichi reactors.  Every newscast carries animation to help us understand how the reactor core and cooling processes work to keep the radioactive rods from overreacting and melting down.  We know the rods are kept in a protective sheathing to contain the radioactivity and then immersed in water to keep them from overreacting.  The steam produced in a controlled system turns turbines to make electricity while pumps continually push fresh water into the reactor core.

Without a constant supply of water to properly dissipate the heat of the rods, the sheathing melts, the radioactive material is exposed, and the best anyone can hope for is containtment.  That's a partial meltdown.  A total meltdown is when the overreacting material melts through the concrete and steel housing designed for containment and makes contact with the soil and groundwater.  From there the fallout spreads to impact every system on earth.

Overreaction occurs when coolant systems fail.  Meltdown occurs when containment systems fail.  Fallout is the irreversible damage done.

Now, it may be too soon to use this story as an allegory for spiritual development.  It may feel like I'm belittling a truly tragic set of circumstances which, if the worst case scenario plays out, will have immense global implications on world health, food supply, marine life, economics, energy policy and foreign policy.  Fukushima Dai-Ichi could possibly be remembered as the single most devastating event in human history.  Even if the best possible solution plays out, there is no doubt this will find its way into the arts as an apocalyptic metaphor representing the volatile combination of technological hubris, human complacency and natural disaster.

That said, the teachable moment shouldn't be lost.  A great hindrance of spiritual maturity is anxiety.  Overreaction occurs when coolant systems fail.  Meltdown occurs when containment systems fail.  Fallout is the irreversible damage done.

Anxiety, not doubt, is the opposite of faith.  Doubt assumes a bit of faith because it motivates us to find answers to questions that aren't currently known or obvious, demonstrating that the person having doubts somehow believes there is an answer yet to discover.

Anxiety is a loss of faith.  It is believing that whatever is pulling the rug out from underneath you will succeed and take you down.  It is a loss of faith in the One who said, "In this world you will have trouble: but fear not! for I have overcome the world."  It is giving in to the crisis of the moment without holding on to the hope we have in Christ.  Anxiety produces panic (which is the opposite of peace), douses hope, and stresses out those closest to us with worry for our well being.

Anxiety is also a normal part of life.  God built us with the capacity to be anxious.  But why?  For what reason did God build this into our being?

Properly controlled, anxiety is a gift, making us aware of where in our life we have not yet fully invested trust in God.  We hit these anxious moments and can turn to God in prayer, knowing that we are invited to cast all our anxiety on him, instructed not to worry about tomorrow, constrained to put all our hope and trust in God alone and nothing (or noone) else.

Anxiety by its very nature resists control.  It will take over our lives if we let it.  It will combine with every other anxiety-producing element of life, seep through whatever containtment mechanisms we've constructed, and cause fallout in the form of stress-related disease either in self or in the system's symptom-bearer.  That fallout can be almost any malady from a reduced immune defense to ulcers to addictive patterns developed as containment mechanisms.  It can destroy relationships and not only keep an individual stuck in an immature cycle, but can even restrain an entire family, company, or church with self-defeating fear and self-destructive behavior.

Anxiety resists containment.  We want to mitigate the anxiety we feel so we share it.  We tweet and update statuses and text so the world will know that something isn't right with us.  We may even try talking to another person.  That, however, isn't preferred.  It's almost as though we'd rather have the sympathy of many than the counsel of one.  Oddly enough, if you weigh it out, sympathy is anxiety's best friend.  It makes you feel good to receive sympathy, so you actually retain anxious patterns to get a greater payout.

But God did not make us to be driven by fear.  God made us to live by faith and has given us two truly effective means to deal with the anxiety in our life, namely thinking and prayer.

Thinking is severely underrated as a spiritual discipline, probably because we don't do it very well.  We may let our minds race and lose sleep "thinking" about whatever problem is in front of us, but that's not thinking.  That's really just rationalizing and validating worry.  Thinking is about gathering facts, recognizing limits, and finding creative solutions with those facts within those limits.  Thinking is using the forefront of your brain so we don't cave in to more automatic, emotionally driven reactions.  Thinking generates considered responses.  Worry generates knee-jerk emotional reactivity.

Thinking is not a bad thing for people of faith to engage.  God, who created us in God's own image, is the one who created the laws of phsyics in a logical manner to give order to the universe.  As God's own, we are blessed with a certain capacity to reason and find order where anxiety prefers to be locked in chaos.  Now, we're only given about 3-1/2 pounds of grey matter to work with, so thinking has natural limitations.

Prayer is the other tool God gives.  We're not very good at this, either.  Maybe it's because we don't really pray, but rehearse our worries over and over and over again in order to justify our fear before God.  We don't really give it over to God whose limitless love conquers all fear.

Prayer, of the kind that releases anxiety, is engaging in a conversation with God through stillness and listening.  It is founded in a faith that trusts in the Maker of heaven and eart, believes in ultimate and complete redemption through Christ, and finds its form in relation to the Holy Spirit.  Prayer is a humble revelry in the whole of God's Triune Being, one in three and three in one.

These are anxiety's coolant systems which need to be constantly applied to prevent meltdown.  The containment system is direct communication.  Rather than spreading anxiety to the world and heaping your worries on top of others, spreading chaos, it is always, always, always best to communicate directly and individually with the one you identify as anxiety's source.  That's containment.  That's keeping the issue between two people rather than passing dirty laundry along to friends and family.

Employing these three things in steady, constant measure - thinking, prayer and direct communication - won't magically end all the anxiety of life, but it will help you mature in your faith by teaching you to stay cool in order to prevent emotional meltdown and fallout.

Be at peace,
Pastor Dave

When Fidelity + Chastity = War

To some in the Presbyterian Church (USA) these words are a battle cry, a call to arms to defend all that is holy.  To others in the denomination, these words are a putrid barrier to Jesus' command to love one another.  For twenty+ years this phrase has been hammered and sharpened and driven as if it were the single issue defining the faithfulness of a church.

For those who don't know, the "fidelity and chastity clause" is a phrase within the ordination standard in the PC(USA) which essentially declares that an ordained Minister of Word and Sacrament must maintain either fidelity in marriage or chastity in singleness.  The phrase was inserted in the late 1980's clarify what is, and what is not, appropriate sexual expression for the church's ministers.  It was also an atttempt to shut the door on the discussion about ordaining homosexuals.

The phrase has done for those supporting homosexual ordination what Governor Walker did to galvanize union workers.  Instead of being the last word on this issue for the church, it became the fighting words over which several churches have left the denomination, bitterly, with anger and accusations of faithflessness being spewed by both sides.  The longer the debate lasts the more harsh the division.  Labels of "Liberal" or "Conservative" have become code for either the support or defeat of that fidelity and chastity clause.  Liberals take pride in their desire to love without boundaries after the example of Jesus.  Conservatives take pride in their desire to uphold the living and active Word of God.  And because of one issue, the two sides have made it as if the example of Jesus and the Word of God can't coexist.

Polarization has led to the demonization of those we once called brother and sister.  When letters arrive at my office to sway my opinion one way or the other, they make statements like "we still believe in the Word of God," with the obvious implication that those who disagree with them do not.  They come like salvos daring the church to make a move, to cross that last line in the sand to force their church to leave, as if the grass really is more holy on the other side of the fence.

Polarization has led to Bible abuse on both sides.  Proof-texts are launched as if these should end all debate, and both sides are frighteningly close to looking like those lunatics at Westboro Baptist, as if one side's particular version of righteousness is the only version of righteousness God can bless. 

Polarization plays to fear rather than rational thought.  It invokes fight or flight, or in this case, both, as people press against the boundaries of their side.  It amplifies anxiety and, in our effort to bind it off so we aren't so profoundly stressed, we either huddle in with those who think like us to find support with our position, or we scream, passively or aggressively, that the others over there are just wrong.  Can't they see that?  Why can't they see that they're wrong?

Polarization leaves scars that don't fully heal.  The American Civil War was waged 150 years ago.  No one alive has firsthand knowledge of the issues that justified that war's atrocities, but I can tell you as surely as I am alive that the Mason-Dixon Line, which is within sight of this church, is far more than an historic boundary to settle the land dispute between the Penn and Calvert families, and that the Confederate flag is far more than a statement of southern heritage.  As pastor of a church which suffered schism 75 years ago over a change in confessional standards that let women be ordained, I can tell you that no living member of either the church or the other one down the road was olde enough to experience the dynamics of that split, but distrust lingers, buttressed by pride in the side chosen.

Polarization is spreading through the church.  Now, I should point out that we come by it quite naturally.  Schism is in our cultural DNA.  There wouldn't be Presbyterians in America if we could've solved our differences in Scotland, or if the Dutch Reformed could've plugged their own theological cracks in the dam back in the Netherlands.  Our history is to fight and split.  We find the line of demarcation and choose sides far more readily than we work to maintain the unity, purity and peace of one Body with one Head.  Sadly, we'd rather cut off the hand because it is not a foot, despite the way it cripples our ability to witness to the gospel that proclaims "Behold! I make all things new!"

I would ask the battalions on either side to lay down their mightier-than-sword armaments, come out of their entrenched positions, and embrace the wideness of God's mercy which outstretches our own.

The various Presbyteries (a body of regional church representatives) are voting on a resolution that would remove the "fidelity and chastity" clause and replace it with a more generalized standard.  My presbytery, the Presbytery of Donegal, will take up the question this weekend.  Frankly, the insertion of the original clause doesn't make any sense to me.  If you can, just for a moment, take a break from the raging background debate and ask yourself, "Does it make sense to lift up one area of life over every other to determine one's faithfulness to his or her calling?"  Why does it make sense to single out sexual issues but not issues of greed, honesty, jealousy, pride or addiction as we declare who can or can't be ordained?  Don't these sins have enough of a long-standing track record of destroying congregations to merit specific language in the ordination standard?

The original insertion of this clause was a mistake in the first place.  The life of the ordained is under constant scrutiny in all areas of that person's life.  People hold their pastors accountable for the cars they drive, the way they keep their house, the behavior of their children, their managerial skills, their willingness to sacrifice, their educational level, their speaking ability, their counseling perspective, their availability, their pastoral presence, their dress, their fitness, their hygiene, their personality, their relationships.  Every part of a minister's life is observed and judged.  The church's presbyteries have the right and responsibility to examine the whole of a person's life in guiding him or her to a faithful position that will earn for them the ear of those needing to hear the gospel message.  The presbyteries can decide for themselves what, in their particular context, is most important. 

My vote will be in favor of the change in language because, on its own, the new language makes sense. 

My prayer is that the polarized will stop blaming the other for causing the sky to fall.