Go Find The Lost and Fill My Banquet

Proper 19C Sermon on Luke 15:1-10 list coin and lost sheep.

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Love Me More

This is a sermon preached at the Baylor Student Center. It is influenced by Henre de Lubac's notion that the God of history compels the Christian to collaborate rather than evade God's narrative and work in the world. This is based upon Proper 18C Luke 14:23-25.

 

The picture is of the face of God in Monty Python's Holy Grail - it was W.G. Grace - legendary "Father of Cricket" and physician who often treated the poor for free. 

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Jean Vanier and being witnesses to each others vulnerability

This is an excerpt from  Jesus Heist regarding the reality that we are all better off when we are real with one another and share our struggles. Otherwise, we end up hustling for attention and comparing our insides with other people's outsides. We as clergy know this best. Yet, we oftentimes struggle to be honest with each other about the reality of ministry. You can purchase the book here.

Excerpt from Chapter 10: Walking Together

Jean Vanier, founder of the L’arche communities,[i] believes it is a more nourishing to our human relationships when we share our weakness and difficulties than when we share our qualities and successes.[ii] When we bear witness to the cross in one another’s life, we recognize that “to be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefore unloveable.” Vanier continues, “Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.”[iii] The work of Jesus is the work of seeing one another for who they and we really are. We must quit the illusions of success and perfection. Instead we must own our brokenness, our starvation, our suffering, our struggles, and our deep poverty of spirit. In doing this, we are Christ to the other; we are genuinely present for the other.

Vanier writes, “Jesus is the starving, the parched, the prisoner, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the dying. Jesus is the oppressed, the poor. To live with Jesus is to live with the poor. To live with the poor is to live with Jesus”[iv] This is a tragedy of course. That there is suffering in the world is tragic, and that they should suffer alone is horrific. God in Christ Jesus upon the cross steps into the suffering lives of people to bring about great healing. This is the paradox of Christianity and the cross. So too when we step alongside the lost and least. This living as Jesus, this being, and doing as Jesus is how we are to make our way in the world. Rather than some kind of moral law, Jesus offers us life with one another. In this, there is something beyond a life of agony for all.      

I believe that if we look at Jesus and his relating to others, we see this very different way of living, moving, and being in the world. The church that is challenged to be the ecclesia must learn to stop pretending righteousness in order to enter the world as Jesus does. Furthermore, we can’t expect anything in return—no butts in pews. We enter, witness, and are present at the foot of another’s cross. There is no bait and switch. We are simply giving up our safety and walking into the streets of Nanjing, come what may. We are giving up our safety and entering the fray of the world. After all, Jesus never promised safety. He did promise a cross. We walk into the wilderness with Jesus and we are going to do some things that will make our righteous friends raise eyebrows.

       

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[i] L’Arche communities are residences where people with and without intellectual disabilities share life together. You can read more about their work here: http://www.larche.org/

[ii]  Pamela Cushing, “To Be Fully Human,” Jean Vanier, accessed May 13, 2016, http://www.jean-vanier.org/en/his_message/jean_vanier_on_becoming_human/to_be_fully_human

[iii] Jean Vanier, Becoming Human (Paulist Press: New York, 1998), 10.

[iv] Jean Vanier, Community and Growth (Paulist Press: New York, 1989), 95.

Gimme Some Love At God's Big Table

Sermon preached at St. John's, Austin

Sermon Proper 17C St. John’s, Austin September 1, 2019 Luke 14:1-14

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Labor Day Thoughts on the Labor of the Church

On this Labor Day here are a few thoughts on the labor of the church. It is an excerpt from my book: Vocãtiõ: Imaging a Visible Church.

You can find various versions of the book here.

Humans, Tools, and Commons

Whatever structurally does not fit the logic of machines is effectively filtered from a culture dominated by their use.

Ivan Illich[i]

Teeming Ingots
by James E. Allen, printed by Charles S. White, 1935

Throughout the book Vocãtiõ I have critiqued the post-Constantinian Church and demonstrated how vocations have been compromised by both chrematistic valuation and complicity with secular power. (The word chrematistic means related to or occupied with the gaining of wealth.) But there is still more to say about the impact of our shifting economic practices. Our global economy has obliterated local communities, rendering them insufficient to meet their own needs, and making the people who live in them terminally isolated. The vast majority of human beings do not make anything, let alone make anything for themselves. Berry writes, “Outsourcing’ the manufacture of frivolities is at least partly frivolous; outsourcing the manufacture of necessities is entirely foolish.”[ii] Household economics must reclaim a local focus. “Neighborhoods” and “neighborliness” must remerge as important values. A yearning for neighbors is baked into the small-batch movement, which is reconnecting producers and consumers, and individuals with the creative minds behind the products they purchase.[iii] The small-batch trend is bringing about local production of foods and household goods--many created inside homes and garages. Small batch bread, bourbon, clothing, and the farm-to-table movement are sacramental views of this trend in neighborliness.

The Gospel community can further undermine the dehumanizing practice of the global market by focusing locally and adding value to the neighborhoods where their communities are embedded. The church must partner with others and help people in local communities to relearn the art of household management, which has been obliterated from cradle to grave because chrematistic patterns of exchange have adhered to every part of life.  The Church must help individuals re-member themselves as parts of a family because families are the foundation for rebuilding local communities. Jesus went to families. He met in homes. Family is the core of the shalom community. Chrematistic rituals of exchange wear away family bonds and even collapse friendship circles by the weight of the powerful, urgent drive to accumulate money. Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke to a group of economists about the emerging issues that an unencumbered system of competition has on individuals, their families, and their children. He said,

An atmosphere of anxious and driven adult lives, a casual attitude to adult relationships, and the ways in which some employers continue to reward family-hostile patterns of working will all continue to create more confused, emotionally vulnerable or deprived young people. If we're looking for new criteria for economic decisions, we might start here and ask about the impact of any such decision on family life and the welfare of the young.[iv]

Williams also points out that the human creature is meant for creativity. We have already spoken about God’s invitation to be a partner. But chrematistic systems of exchange force people to live without space for imagination. Imaginative play is how we learn to question, to problem solve, and to see the world with its future differently. Adults need space and time to play as much as children do.

It is the extra things that make us human; simply meeting what we think are our material needs, making a living, is not uniquely human, just a more complicated version of ants in the anthill. One of the greatest legacies of the British labour movement has been a real commitment to this--to the enlarging of minds and feelings (anyone who's been able to see that wonderful play, The Pitmen Painters, will know what I mean). So the question is how far economic decisions help or hinder a world in which that space for thinking things might be different is kept open.”[v]

In Philip K. Dick’s classic sci-fi novel entitled, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, later made into the popular film Blade Runner, androids can only mimic empathy but cannot truly express it. For Dick, empathic connection is the exclusive purview of the human being. Nurturing family and friendship circles through play and a leisurely sharing of life and time expand the human capacity for understanding, sympathy, and empathy. Chrematistic systems of exchange demand that life be oriented around work. Self-interest and success are promoted in the workplace. Williams points out that such a culture, “encourages you to struggle for your own individual interest and success, you are being encouraged to ignore the reality of other points of view--ultimately, to ignore the cost or the pain of others. The result may be a world where people are very articulate about their own feelings and pretty illiterate about how they impact on or appear to others--a world of which reality television gives us some alarming glimpses.”[vi] We generally scapegoat individuals who demonstrate villainous lacks of empathy without looking at the social determinants that make such toxicity possible.

The Church as a community of shalom has much work to do in a world dominated by chrematistic exchange. Christian charity pushes us to reach out to the casualties of society, and the number of broken people continues to mount. The community of shalom is a different kind of life where families are celebrated, new families are formed, and all these families bless one another. People recover the value of the Sabbath. They discover that they are made for partnership with God and that imagination, play, and discovery rejuvenate human relationships. Such a community of shalom names the lie that things and people can only delight us if we have them in large quantities. To actually die with the most toys (a bumper sticker popular in the West) is to die with nothing. God comes as mystery, inviting human participation in a great narrative, which stands in stark contrast to the world where relationships, friendships, and families can only be known as commodities.[vii] Williams points out that “an economic climate based on nothing but calculations of self-interest, sometimes fed by an amazingly distorted version of Darwinism, doesn't build a habitat for human beings; at best it builds a sort of fortified boxroom for paranoiacs (with full electronic services, of course).”[viii] The modern Church has failed at grafting a theology of charity into the dominant culture of chrematistic exchange. The inverse has happened: chrematistic exchange has grafted itself into the heart of the Church. We have made the baptized and the clergy into commodities for the maintenance and support of the institution.

A renewed gathering of the followers of Jesus must break into the world, and break up the world. The gathering where bread is broken, stories shared, and prayers are offered reminds the local community that they are implicated in a narrative of peace. Such a renewed gathering also breaks up the constant work expected by chrematistic institutions. The gathering in God’s name to proclaim the message of grace, reminding each other that all are invited into partnership with God, and giving thanks for a creation that has enough for all is an act of defiance in the face of chrematistic institutions promoting works righteousness, limited success for only the most devoted apostles, and a philosophy of private ownership and scarcity. In his book Political Worship Bernd Wannenwetsch observes,

Worship again and again interrupts the course of the world. Through worship the Christian community testifies that the world is not its own. And this means also that it is not kept alive by politics, as the business of politics, which knows no sabbath, would have us believe. That is why the celebration of worship is not directed simply against this or that totalitarian regime; it is directed against the totalization of political existence in general.[ix]

Christian community is one of the few ways that people can successfully resist the colonization of our bodies by the institutions of chrematistic exchange. We are slowly reverting to a model of social and political life where, through technology, the powers and authorities have a total claim on the body of every human being. Humans, once again, are seen as resources rather than beings.[x] The gathered community of shalom reveals this total control to be a lie. The human body is meant for a different end altogether. Gathering reminds the community of our heavenly purpose. Worship reminds the community of our heavenly purpose. In fact, the true beneficiaries of Easter are those who have suffered and died at the hands of unjust powers and institutions of chrematistic exchange for not even institutions as powerful as these can separate God from the faithful. (Romans 8:37-39) Christians remember the dead when we gather because our remembrance is a sign of our hope, and a declaration that the powers of death will have no victory.[xi]

Sunday morning worship services are being changed as people make new communities that share meals in other settings. Certainly, the missional movement and the farm-to-table gatherings of Christians are whittling away at the traditions we have received through the institutional Church. Borrowed spaces, public and private, are reshaping assumptions about what is needed for gathering. Jesus said that there is something “more here than temple.” (Matthew 12:6) Jesus broke open the centralized faith of his day and redistributed the faith of his forbearers. For instance, Jesus used the term worship in only a few instances.[xii] Worship is indeed part of what Christians do. We continue the notion of giving thanks to God, prayers, and worship that we received from our faith ancestors in the Mosaic or Sinai tradition. But Christians are doing more than simply worshiping God. The very act of gathering in relationship and holding hands resists commodification of our bodies.[xiii]

Another basic tool the shalom community uses to resist colonization is the chabûrah --the feast of friends. Neighborliness, as Peter Block, civic engineer and author, argues, is rooted in friendship. The community has an opportunity to engage in friendship with its surroundings. It bears witness to Jesus’s willingness to eat and drink with others by engaging relationally with the community around him. “Service can be commoditized, friendship cannot.”[xiv] The missional movement across the Church is rooted in this principle of friendship. This kind of friendship leads beyond outreach and the dehumanizing practices of toxic charity into a relationship of collaboration. It breaks open our inherited models of Christian community and knocks down the walls that buffer our private spaces. Friends are not bound by private space or false ideas of secular and sacred, but by agape: friendship love. As Wendell Berry writes, “A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”[xv] He reminds us that the abdication of communal authority to the powers and authorities through governmental systems has freed us from each other in a toxic way. Reclaiming neighborliness as part of the communal life is essential to Christ’s vision. No person can live unto themselves. It is simply impossible. But, more importantly, the personalization of neighborliness returns authority to the members of the small community the local church serves. Its members start to care for one another again, which taps into the inclusive DNA of the Jesus Movement.

A shalom community engaging in friendly partnership with its neighbors will gravitate towards the urgent issues that preoccupy the local community. If people in our neighborhood care about safe public spaces, transportation, economic development, crime, or education, then God cares about these things, as does the community of shalom in a living partnership with the neighborhood will invest in local remedies to all of these issues. It will invest in economic development and partnerships that empower those in need of a better life. Along with the financial investment and time investment, a community of peace will focus on raising up new leaders within their neighborhoods. Indigenous leadership or contextual leadership is essential for the success of such partnerships. This is how friendship works. Friends empower each other to share their voices and do things they did not think were possible. A Church resisting colonization will be busy helping its neighbors invest in each other so that cycles of violence are broken and a new vision of life together in peace becomes possible. Gathering for worship and service bears a visible public witness against the powers of this world, and undermines them by resetting the boundaries of physical space in the world.

            Finally, a community of shalom will resist the powers of chrematistic exchange by recovering a commons that can be enjoyed by every member of a neighborhood. The privatization of land as resources, the eventual carving out of mineral rights, or immanent domain has contributed to our isolation by placing new boundaries upon our shared space. We view space as a commodity we individuals have the right to exploit rather than as part of a created order in which we all live and are invited to be partners together with God in managing. (Genesis 1:26) The transformation of our lived environment from a space held in common to a series of spaces held privately serves the interests of the few while impoverishing the many. This has amounted to a slow appropriation of the “commons.” Historically, the commons in the West, or the word iriai in the East, has designated the environment in which people lived. The commons were governed by custom and were characterized by shared access.[xvi] Ivan Illich explains,

People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households.[xvii]

The openness of the commons meant that people could fish, hunt, graze, collect wood, or plants.

An oak tree might be in the commons. Its shade, in summer, is reserved for the shepherd and his flock; its acorns are reserved for the pigs of the neighboring peasants; its dry branches serve as fuel for the widows of the village; some of its fresh twigs in springtime are cut as ornaments for the church—and at sunset it might be the place for the village assembly.[xviii]

The use of the commons had limitations for the sake of sustainability, but the commons were shared spaces that made gathering with neighbors essential for individual life. The Church’s position towards the practice of maintaining commons in cities and villages began to change in the fourth century. As became normative in Western society, the Church became a private property owner. Somehow the Church must reclaim its critique against the evacuation of the commons. Privatization of common resources inevitably leads to those resources becoming assets that undergird invisible wealth. This is the slippery slope of chrematistic exchange.

Enclosure, once accepted, redefines community. Enclosure undermines the local autonomy of community. Enclosure of the commons is thus as much in the interest of professionals and of state bureaucrats as it is in the interest of capitalists. Enclosure allows the bureaucrats to define local community as impotent to provide for its own survival.

Enclosure of the commons allows for a sort of economic independence upon the enclosed resources and the commodities produced there. Conversely, people become tied to the land in a way that they were not prior to shared commons.

Furthermore, enclosed commons accentuate the separation of the secular and the sacred. The Church can take steps towards eroding private space by stepping across the lines that demarcate such enclosures. First, the Church can become a commons itself, gathering the local community, and sharing its resources for the improvement of the neighborhood. Second, the Church can offer the Eucharist in public and other private spaces. In this way, the gathering of people for Haggadah, the feast of friends, redefines the space. Both of these tools (worship and service) reinterpret the boundaries of church space and reengage neighborhoods across the boundaries of private space. The Church’s reentrance into public environs of any kind is a direct confrontation with the powers and the making of a feast there undermines the stories of scarcity, the survivalist mentality, and expands the political boundaries of acceptance.

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[i] “Silence is a Commons” (1982) [edited] Address at the "Asahi Symposium Science and Man - The computer-managed Society," Tokyo, Japan (21 March 21 1982); as published in The CoEvolution Quarterly (Winter 1983).

[ii] Berry, What, 51-53.

[iii] For more information see my 2016 book entitled Small Batch.

[iv] Rowan Williams, "Human Well-Being and Economic Decision-Making,” The Archbishop of Canterbury, November 16, 2009, Accessed August 14, 2017, http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/767/human-well-being-and-economic-decision-making

[v] Williams, "Human”.

[vi] Williams, "Human”.

[vii] Peter Block, Walter Brueggemann, and John McKnight, An Other Kingdom: Departing the Consumer Culture (Hoboken: Wiley, 2016) 37, 64-66.

[viii] Williams, “Humans”.

[ix] Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, trans. Margaret Kohl, Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics (Oxford University Press: New York, 2009) 127.

[x] Jean Bethke Elstain, "Christianity and Patriarchy: The Odd Alliance." Modern Theology, November 12, 2008, accessed August 15, 2017, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0025.1993.tb00297.x/abstract

[xi] Wannenwetsch, Political,132-3.

[xii] Matthew 14:32, 28:9; Luke 24:52; John 9:38.

[xiii] Brueggemann, Sabbath, 89.

[xiv] Block, “Kingdom”, 132.

[xv] Wendell Berry, "The Loss of the Future." Manasjournal Volume XXI, 47. November 20, 1968. Accessed August 15, 2017. http://www.manasjournal.org/pdf_library/VolumeXXI_1968/XXI-47.pdf

[xvi] Illich, “Silence”.

[xvii] Illich, “Silence”.

[xviii] Illich, “Silence”.