Sermon for 20c preached at Epiphany Houston. Really liked the exegesis by Robert Farrar Capon.
Monday, September 23, 2019
Thursday, September 19, 2019
A Dissipative Moment for the Church
Leadership for the moment is bound to context and culture. This is a bit of leadership thinking that I think remains relevant.
A
Dissipative Moment
Some say the church is dying, but I
am unconvinced. Rather, we are living and ministering in a dissipative moment.
Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, helps me with this idea. He won
recognition for his understanding of a new concept he called “dissipative
structures.”[i] In nature there is a contradictory
reality, and that is that disorder can be the source for new order. Margaret
Wheatley explains: “Prigogine discovered that the dissipative activity of loss
was necessary to create new order. Dissipation didn’t lead to the death of a
system. It was part of the process by which the system let go of its present
form so that it could reorganize a form better suited to the demands of its
changed environment.”[ii]
Our problem is that we in the
Church are formed by a perspective that is rooted in Western science. We
believe that entropy is the rule and that if we do not constantly work harder
and harder to keep pumping energy and resources into the system, then the
system suffers from entropy—it loses steam and dies. Yet even now life is
flourishing and new life is being born. Of course, you immediately can see that
this is a biblical understanding, but as Episcopalians, sometimes it is easier
to see it through the eyes of science.
Prigogine offers that in a
dissipative organization those things that interrupt and interfere are
essential to the health of the system. The system receives the communication
and decides if it is to respond, change, or ignore it. Change happens either
way. If the disruption grows so that the organization can’t ignore it, then
transformation and rebirth are possible. Wheatley says, “Disorder can be a
source of new order, and that growth appears from disequilibrium, not balance.
The things we fear most in organizations—disruptions, confusion, and chaos—need
not be interpreted as signs that we are about to be destroyed. Instead, these
conditions are necessary to awaken creativity. . . . This is order through
fluctuation.”[iii]
We are in a dissipative moment. We
cannot ignore the flotsam and jetsam of the future that is even now washing
upon the shores of the Episcopal Church. We can see partly what will only
become clearer in time. We have for too long suffered the sin of trying to get
it right, and the shame of coming up short. But in a dissipative era we must
have a greater sense of process and participation and experimentation.[iv] If we are to move outside of our
centralized structures and old exoskeletons, we must shed our skins and put on
new ones. Jesus says, “No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the
new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be
destroyed” (Luke 5:33ff).
A new urban and suburban world is
emerging. We will continue to see people move toward the cities of the future.
What we are experiencing across the Episcopal Church is globally true. People
are entering city life by the millions and will continue to do so for a long
time to come. The shape of our cities and the multiple possibilities for
Christian community are before us. We have an opportunity. The question for us
as we stand in this dissipative moment is, will we shrink from the challenge or
face it?
It is important for us to see
clearly the changes that are already affecting our congregations and
communities in order for us to see the future that is before us. It is time we
step into the future and begin to plant these new communities. What will they
look like and how will they make their way into the new missionary age? The
Christian in the new millennium will bring new challenges and opportunities.
For us to be successful, we will need leaders who are digital natives and who
can act within this new world. We need different kinds of leaders, and we need
to rethink ways of forming and training leaders. This particular task will
require that we revisit how we raise different vocations within the community.
It has been given to this generation to undertake the dissipative moment and to
answer these questions. We are a living church with a vital and necessary
mission in the world.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid., 21. Wheatley is getting her information
from the landmark paper by Prigogine and Stengers, published in 1984.
Sunday, September 15, 2019
Saturday, September 14, 2019
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.
Monday, September 9, 2019
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.
[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.
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Quotes
- "Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process." Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- "Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer." Oliver Wendell Holmes
- "Perfection, in a Christian sense, means becoming mature enough to give ourselves to others." Kathleen Norris
- "Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can." John Wesley
- "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." G. K. Chesterton
- "One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans." C. S. Lewis
- "When we say, 'I love Jesus, but I hate the Church,' we end up losing not only the Church but Jesus too. The challenge is to forgive the Church. This challenge is especially great because the church seldom asks us for forgiveness." Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey
- "Christians are hard to tolerate; I don't know how Jesus does it." Bono
- "It's too easy to get caught in our little church subcultures, and the result is that the only younger people we might know are Christians who are already inside the church." Dan Kimball