Monday, September 2, 2019

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.



[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”.

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



"Jesus ate with sinners
And they killed him for it”
That is what
my friend liked to say.

We might add:
Jesus thought everybody
Would be better off
Sitting at table together
Eating together
Breaking bread together

No hay duda
Jesús ama a todas las personas
él comió con todo tipo de personas
Y nos invita a hacer lo mismo
We might say
“the more the merrier”
Jesus would have said
“the more diverse the better

las personas más diversas
que pueden reunirse - la mejor vida será

Steven Tyler from
Aerosmith Sings:
Give me some love!
We're all somebody from somewhere
Some mama, some daddy,
Some big, some little, some left, some in the middle
Some white, yellow, black or red

Todos somos personas de Dios
Moldeado y creado por Dios.
Aliento dado por dios
Todos somos tipos de la imagen de Dios
Y somos amados
For me
One of the times
When Christianity
is at its best
is when people do just
what Jesus invites us to do
eating
feasting
with
different people
sitting

and knowing one another
deeply enough
to know each other’s stories
with the capacity
to pray for each other

Dios imagina una gran fiesta
con todas las personas
Para toda la gente
Donde estamos familia
Con una mesa donde encontramos
Jesús y la realidad de nuestras vidas

these ideas were so very powerful
so deeply imbedded
in Christianity
that we see them reflected
in the Hebrews lesson
appointed this morning

el libro de hebreos
fue impactado
por la visión de Dios
y las palabras de Jesús

(Written some 50 or so years
After Jesus’ resurrection)
The author reminds the Christians:
No descuides la hospitalidad
con los extraños.

Do not neglect hospitality to strangers
No descuides compartir lo que tienes
Do not neglect to share what you have

No descuides hacer
buenas obras
Do not neglect to do good works

But this is not new
This is not a new theology
Or new ideas
                                    esta no es una idea nueva de dios

This is God’s ancient truth
            una verdad muy antigua
God’s ancient desire

For instance
This is part of what Jeremiah is
Trying to explain to the people
In God’s prophesies

Jeremiah is telling the people
They have been greedy
They had forgotten what it meant
to be a stranger in a strange land

They had forgotten that they were to take care of the
Widow and the orphan
The poor among them
The stranger in their midst
They forgot the hospitality
Required of the people of God
They forgot the hospitality which
We find in Jesus actions
And in Jesus words

de hecho
todos los profetas
le ha recordado al pueblo de Dios
que se meten en problemas
cuando se olvidan
cuidar a las personas
a las viudas y huérfanos y los pobres

The powers that Jesus is addressing
Are political and religious powers
A dangerous combination
And these powers believe
That to be right
To be righteous
You have to leave people out
You have to be separate from others
los poderes en este mundo
mienten
nos dicen
para ser justo
que tenemos que dejar a gente particular
afuera de nuestras vidas

para ser justo
tenemos que tratar a unas personas
en una manera diferente

pero
no es la manera de Cristo

The false gods of this world tell us
To be worthy
We must shut others out
And eat only with the right people
Among the other righteous
Eat only among the godly
the faithful
the pure and the clean

This is not Jesus’ way
Not God’s way

Jesus says
“Be humble”
Humble
Theologian Frederick Buechner writes
humility doesn't consist of thinking ill of yourself
but of not thinking of yourself much differently
 from the way you'd be apt to think of anybody else.”[i]

antes de que podamos
sentarnos a la mesa
con personas diferentes a nosotros
debemos ser humildes
debemos practicar la humildad

Jesus continues by suggesting
We need to eat with each other
Across class boundaries
Health boundaries
Racial boundaries
Political boundaries
We need eat together
At the same table

We need
invite the poor
invite those
who can never repay what we give

para ser como dios
Jesús dice
Da generosamente
vive generosamente
comer
y cenar
con los que no pueden
volver a pagarte

God in Christ Jesus
Is not a transactional God
God is not making deals
For the faithful
For the righteous

No
God is inviting everyone
Into God’s grace
And to sit at God’s table

La verdad es que
no llegamos a la mesa
haciendo feliz a Dios
Dios es feliz porque llegamos a la mesa
porque ponemos mesas
afuera en el mundo
dentro de nuestros
barrios
donde todas personas
se unan a otros

pero estamos
en una temporada en este país
donde tenemos una gran división

We live in a time of bitter division
A time of distrust in the foreigner
A time of distrust for other citizens
A time of scarcity
A time when we believe
Some are better Americans than others
Some are better Christians than others

vivimos en una época
en la que
juzgamos a los demás
a través de los ojos políticos
o ojos nacionales
            y no con los ojos
                        de Jesus

A time when we all too easily
Try and fit in
Rather than be part of
The unrighteous
The despised
And the unwanted

es lo que es ser humano
deseamos ser aceptados
no queremos ser rechazados
y muchas veces
intercambiar la visión de Dios por el bien de pertenecer

God invites us to be virtuous
Dios nos invita a ser virtuosos
Ejemplos de compasión - compassion
Who respect others – mostramos respeto
Who are loyal to God’s vision of one community
And model grace.
que somos leales a dios como comunidad de gracia

God has invited us
Into God’s great narrative
Dios nos ha invitado
a la gran narrativa de Dios
God’s great banquet feast
And to that feast
God has invited all people
El gran banquete de Dios
Y a esa fiesta
Usted y yo estamos invitados
a ser un nuevo tipo de comunidad

We have an opportunity
tenemos ante nosotros
un momento de gran desafío

In the year that is before us
We have an opportunity
To live into the great
Invitation of God
To be different
To be a community
Of humble brothers and sisters
Sitting around God’s table
And in God’s house
In this way what we discover
As Jesus says,
Righteousness is not something
Attainable in this world
But in the world to come

el camino hacia la justicia
es solo pasando
por este mundo
alrededor de una mesa común

And the only way to get from here to there
Is to participate in God’s story
And join in what God is doing
here and now


So it may be Steven Tyler’s song
But it is God’s message:
Give me some love!
We're all somebody from somewhere
Some mama, some daddy,
Some big, some little, some left, some in the middle
Some white, yellow, black or red
Give me some love!





[i] "Humility," sermon discussion from Frederick Buechner, Frederick Buechner Blog.

Monday, August 26, 2019

God Calls Us By A New Name


Sermon preached on proper 26C at All Saints Cameron.


Check out this episode!

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