What am I listening to?

 The title question popped up on Facebook a couple of days ago (I think?), from a colleague/friend asking what music others were listening to right now. I did not answer at the moment, being a bit busy and distracted (my default state these days). When I had a moment to stop and check myself I didn't answer either. I still haven't, mostly because when I finally put my finger on the music that was most occupying my ears and my mind right now, neither of them seemed to be a "jam," and the question did ask what was one's "current jam." Making a currant jelly joke seemed a reach, so I left it.

In fact there are two things that have been lodging themselves on my sonic devices in particular - one which has been occupying my mind for quite a while, and the other coming to the fore more recently, apparently tied to the advent of the Advent/Christmas cycle now upon the church. 

When last I darkened the door of this blog I confessed to an ongoing obsession with the late piano sonatas of Franz Schubert. At that time his penultimate sonata, no. 20, was foremost in my ear and mind. Since then my listening has broadened...all the way to his last sonata, no. 21. In particular the second movement has taken hold. (Fair warning: this movement itself is about ten minutes long, although obviously I consider such minutes to be well spent.)

You will note that this movement ...  is ... slow. Now this is not itself so odd; your average Classic/Romantic era piano sonata has a slow movement. What's odd here is that in this particular case, the first movement of Schubert's sonata is also rather slow, and two slow movements back-to-back is less typical.

Also, this movement is not only slow, it is quite spare, for lack of a better word. Aside from the slightly faster and somewhat fuller middle section, this movement is joltingly spacious in its texture. Rather than being spun out in a line (a not-atypical way to talk about musical melodies or motives), these notes and figures seem almost suspended in empty space. Laden with the burden of pandemic time, it almost sounds as if the notes are socially distanced.

Even when things seem to get busier, the musical activity often consists of repeated notes or figures, which manages to sound busy without necessarily sounding full, at least as Schubert deploys them. And even then, after what passes for great agitation in this movement, the music ultimately returns to the arrestingly spare sonic space of the first section, with slight tweaks of harmony and rhythm,  the emptiness of notes and motifs hanging from gently swaying mobiles in a darkened room. It is not the sound of silence - that is Simon & Garfunkel's territory - but perhaps it is the sound of quiet - quiet in the way Frederick Buechner describes a room where people are not speaking; the room is darkened, perhaps, but not empty. 

I hesitate to guess why this movement has latched on to me of late. Maybe in the deafening emptiness of pandemic-tide the genuine quiet of the movement provides sanctuary. Maybe I'm just really geeked by Mitsuko Uchida's interpretation of the sonata. Maybe it's just the pleasure of ten minutes that invite me not to be overwhelmed or ragged or confronted with the endless rounds of I don't know how to do this that constitute so many of my days in this time. Or maybe it simply invites me in the direction of mystery, and some part of me that is normally shouted down and drowned out sneaks into my consciousness through it.

The second, more recent, more seasonal, and shorter fascination of late is a more modern composition, by an American named Daniel Pinkham. It is the second movement of his Christmas Cantata, a setting of the ancient text "O magnum mysterium." You might notice some similarities to the sonata movement among the obvious differences. 

I have had the intense pleasure of singing this work a couple of times. "Spare" and "spacious" are fitting adjectives here also, and the hints of medievalism add to the effect. This is a movement to tax the breath control of the finest choral singers and brass players, and the sheer length of notes makes more space rather than filling it. 

The effect is, to be sure, deepened by those initial words of the text - O magnum mysterium, "o great mystery." The hearer is led directly into that contemplation, in this case the mystery of the Nativity and Incarnation. The mystery does not avoid the seemingly ludicrous; barn animals the first witnesses of the infant Messiah. There is a thickening of the music as the Blessed Virgin gets her shout-out, a build to a volume climax spiced with discordant intervals and the long sustained notes underneath it all interrupted for a fraction of a moment, and yet at the last it all collapses in slow motion back into the space, the quiet, repeated motifs from the brass and organ strung together and fading away, to one last unresolving chord. 

It is a text for the Nativity, but musically it is all Advent - waiting, quiet, unbearable anticipation. It is much shorter than the Schubert sonata movement, but it is still music that demands time. Somehow, I guess this is something I need in some way or other. 

Anyway, that's what I'm listening to.

Dear Pastor: Music is not magic

You've quite possibly heard or seen it before.

"If we just (implement x kind of music), we'll (get result y)."

Though it seems most often applied to the x and y "do praise and worship music" and "get young people in church", it really can apply across a wide array of musical styles, each of which has an audience, so to speak.

"Big classical choral music"? "People with money." (The public radio approach, you might say.)

"Good ol' gospel music"? "Real faithful Christian folk." (Judgmental much?)

You get the idea, and you can probably fill in the blanks yourself, no matter how broad or limited your musical experience. Whenever churches go looking for a magic elixir to "revitalize" or boost their numbers, music in worship seems to be a really popular place to start.

And on some level, it can work. A newly-instituted contemporary worship service can draw in some of the curious. A big fancy choir can get some onlookers. I don't know of any church that has decided to go whole hog on the gospel song approach out of the blue, but they might just poach a few old-timers from some churches if they did.

So yes, as the title of this article wants to suggest, contemporary Christian music (or gospel song or "traditional" hymnody, whatever that means) probably is bringing Christians together.

It (whichever style you name) is also driving Christians apart.

Note that I have not read and am not at all referring to the content of the article (I assume I'll get around to reading it eventually, but I'm pretty sure it won't be before Easter Sunday). Since the article is in Christianity Today I can safely that their audience is not my audience, or at least my target audience. But the title itself, as a new iteration of this familiar old refrain, is enough to provoke comment.

And that comment is one rooted in nothing more complicated than human nature. Some will glom onto the contemporary thing, others will run from it as fast as possible. And you can go down the line through whatever variety of congregational song you please, and you can get the same result.

There is reference here to a hoary old trope of music as somehow a great unifier. That itself is probably some variant of the even hoarier old trope of music as a "universal language." Do yourself a favor and spend some time with a broader variety of musics from around the world before ever uttering that line, please? For that matter, spend some time with, say, Hildegard of Bingen and Anton Webern and see if that "universal language" idea still makes sense to you. Folks who try to talk the "universal language" thing are probably not widely familiar with a lot of things, or are mostly interested in pushing a highly Westernized version of those musics (this happens a lot in popular music, in which Western - read 'American' - influence is almost impossible to escape).

One could argue that the same thing has been true in what might be called the "global song of the church" as well. Those in various "mission fields" were largely fed translated versions of American or European hymns as the stuff of their worship. It took quite a while to get away from that tendency and to see the growth of more indigenous musical expressions of faith and gospel begin to grow. Even so, any degree to which the "brings people together" argument for global church song might hold water is going to be largely a colonialist legacy as much as anything Christian.

The same is going to be true across other styles as well. The contemporary Christian impulse has a huge component of stylistic export involved, with the style being extremely American even if its biggest producers come out of Australia.

Disturbing colonialist legacies aside, it really never is the music itself that "brings people together." Music is not magic, as the title here suggests. The uniting or dividing is done by people, just as pretty much everything that happens in or to the church, for good or ill, is done by people. If some number of people choose to come to a church because of its musical performance style (and some number in turn choose to leave or stay away), it's the people doing the moving and choosing.

It would be far more accurate to say that in choosing a particular musical idiom for your congregation, you're also choosing a potential "target demographic" that you hope to bring in. If you end up drawing more baby boomers or GenXers than millennials with your contemporary service, which could easily happen, that's another issue, but the choice to plant one's flag in a particular musical category is also a choice about who you want in your church. Frankly, it should be openly acknowledged as such. You'll get exceptions to the rule for sure, but be clear about exactly what you're seeking with your church's musical choices.

This frankly is not even about declaring such choices right or wrong. You do you, dear pastor. But be honest with yourself about exactly what you're trying to do when you make one musical choice or another, and don't expect music to be a magic elixir that brings the entire world (no exceptions) under your roof.

But what about the people who didn't go to the concert?

Dear Pastor: Sometimes they only come to sing

So it was a little less than a week ago that my social media feed offered up this poetic-ish reflection on singing in church. It is at minimum a celebration of singing together as a body, one that emphasizes the corporateness of worshiping in song (as well as the tangible quality of a good solid book of hymns), reveling in so many of the things that even science tells us are good about numbers of people singing together. It is, yes, a celebration.

But I'm not going to lie to you, dear pastor. This is the potential person in the pew who, quite possibly, scares me the most.

This may not make sense, coming from a person who has devoted a pretty decent amount of blog space to the subject of the good things about singing together as a congregation. And yes, it's really a thing I do believe in passionately (otherwise I've wasted a lot of time here).

But...

I have, in this blogspace, advocated for singing a lot of different varieties of hymns as a part of the church's worship. I've advocated for the song of the ancient church, the song of the living church, the song of the whole (i.e. "global" in some terminology) church, and the song of the sorrowing church, so to speak (and these not being exhaustive, but descriptive of the great variety of hymnic inventory available to the church). By no means do I achieve such variety perfectly, but we do "get around" to many different kinds of hymns with varying levels of success.

Now, if that person above happens to be in the pew on a Sunday morning in Gainesville, at least one thing will be satisfying to her: we do use a book (Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal - and yes, we do have the purple one). But that book contains some of that aforementioned variety, and that person in the pew may have some kind of animus against the really old stuff, or the really new stuff, or something from any part of the church in South America. And it's pretty clearly possible that a hymn of lament will be found totally wanting. What then? Is this person gone because we sang something "bad"?

And if that happens, there's no back-up plan, so to speak. The sermon has already been dismissed as a maybe-maybe-not proposition. Prayer and liturgy don't even seem to register at all. What then?

I've also written in this space that, for all the power and vitality and meaning I do grant to congregational song, I've also written the cautionary warning that music is not a neutral agent in any setting, and works its own affective qualities on whatever text is being sung to it. Furthermore, in what seems an egregiously unnecessary warning, music is not the Holy Spirit, no matter how often we may be inclined to deputize congregational or other singing as a reasonable proxy for that Spirit. It is possible, in short, to put too much trust in the hymns, psalms, and spiritual songs we sing.

And if it's possible for us to do so, it's possible for the person in the pew to do so too.

All I can do, as a pastor who is seeking to put together Word and prayer and liturgy and song in some way that actually brings some kind of word to the people, is literally hope and pray that it does so, and if the Holy Spirit jumps in to kick-start that word to the people, God be praised. But I have no control over that. (And by the way, if any pastor tries to tell you that he - and I do mean "he" - does, run. Just run.) I can't please everybody, and I'm not even going to try to claim that I can please God by any of the effort I put into a given Sunday morning. (I suppose the one way that God might be pleased is in my showing up to put in the effort at all. Maybe.)

So, for this person who only comes to sing, I have nothing else to offer. And nor do you.

Here are the songs we sing.

Good luck.

All you have to give is what God gives you, right?

All you can do is start somewhere...

Dear Pastor: Performance-culture fallout (also after John L. Bell)

Continuing to follow some of John L. Bell's points on why people don't sing (in church or much of anywhere), we come to his second reason, in a chapter titled "The fallout from a performance culture." While my earlier blog on similar issues didn't make that explicit claim, a couple of points I did include are related from or perhaps derivable from such a claim:

3) Singing, or perhaps singing with others, isn't "cool." This would the the wannabe-rockstar position, not wanting to share the stage with others. Not super common, but out there.

And:

4) "I don't sound like the person leading the song, so I shouldn't sing." A greater risk in more contemporary settings, where a single lead voice is more likely featured. Also a greater risk if the leader can't resist particular "soloistic" touches in leading the folk. I doubt it's intentional, in most cases, but it still can intimidate folks in the pews out of their comfort with singing.

As noted in the earlier blog, the first of these positions isn't necessarily all that common, but it does happen. If the singer in question is not "in the spotlight," so to speak, it's hard for that person to care enough to sing. This suggests a whole lot of other issues going on in that person's heart, mind, and soul, perhaps beyond the scope of this blog.

That other position, however, is pretty directly related to Bell's point. More precisely, it is a consequence of the importation of that performance culture into the church.

Protestantism in its various forms in the United States has run the gamut of attitudes about the song of the people, from almost a reverse-snobbery of glorifying the rough voice in certain frontier traditions to the near elimination of the song of the people in some more elite Protestant quarters. Different models of providing leadership and guidance to the singing congregation have come and gone, none perfect but some cerainly more effective than others. It isn't as if the focus on individual leaders is new; from "song leaders" to "ministers of music" to cantors borrowed from Jewish tradition, using an individual as leader of the congregation's song (or an ensemble in some cases, such as the paid quartets that sang almost everything in some emerging mainline traditions in the late nineteenth century) has a long history in this country.

In these cases there was and is always the risk of the soloist, often of professional status, intimidating the people in the pews by sheer force of voice, no matter how unintentionally. Being a leader of others in singing makes a peculiar set of demands that is not shared by more straightforward professional singing roles, and not all singers catch on to that. But to understand the particular dangers of which Bell seems to be speaking, it might be more useful to refine the word that Bell uses; perhaps instead of simply speaking of performance culture, it might be more precise to speak of "soloistic" performance culture.

Performance culture can be collaborative. Soloistic performance culture focuses on the "star," for lack of a better word. A "star" doesn't need to worry about whether others can keep up; what he or she does is the focus.

Good leaders, perhaps with some training, are sensitive to the need to lead in such a way that the people are not only able to follow, but are in fact encouraged to do so. This doesn't consist only in the call that "everybody sing!"; it also includes the leader providing a model for singing the song in question that makes it easier and more feasible for the congregation to learn and to sing (particularly in those style traditions where new songs are constantly feeding into the pipeline from Australia or wherever).

And when you're out in front with guitar in hand or behind the keyboard, and you've got a voice that can be soloistic, it can be awfully hard to remember that. And in the end, dear pastor, it may yet fall upon you to provide the corrective and to remind your leaders in whatever style or format that their job is to lead and not to star.

Hear me out here; is it possible that, just maybe, this (while killer for an arena show) doesn't necessarily help a large group of people sing together when they all know they can't sound like this?

Dear Pastor: Why won't they sing?

Time tonight for a few brief thoughts, dear pastor, on one thing that will ultimately vex you to some degree should you start taking this whole congregational singing business seriously. No matter how much encouraging you do, no matter how much support you provide with choir and instruments and helpful guidance, no matter what kind of congregational song you practice, there will be people in your congregation who will not sing.

Why is this?

When singing is about as natural an activity as there is, something that starts happening virtually in infancy, why do so many people stop themselves singing?

A few off-the-cuff thoughts:

1) Some jerk told them at some point in their lives they couldn't sing. To be clear, there will be people who will, frankly, do more harm than good if they try to join the church choir (and I think I'm in the minority about church choirs not necessarily being an all-come affair), but that's not the same thing. Or if folks have somehow decided that if they don't sing like Placido Domingo (or people don't encourage them with such praise) then they won't sing at all, the sin is in their heart. I'll go ahead and say the harsh thing: to refuse to sing with the congregation is to refuse Christian community. Come at me, bro.
But some have been actively hurt by small bitter people and will need a particular kind of encouragement.

2) They aren't used to singing. Let's face it: how many places in society (aside from church) is singing regularly practiced? There are people for whom their only regular experience at group singing is the seventh-inning stretch at a baseball game. (They probably aren't singing the national anthem if it's being "led" by some soloist, but that's another point.) Or if they're a soccer partisan maybe they join in on their club's preferred chants. And that's about it.

3) Singing, or perhaps singing with others, isn't "cool." This would the the wannabe-rockstar position, not wanting to share the stage with others. Not super common, but out there.

4) "I don't sound like the person leading the song, so I shouldn't sing." A greater risk in more contemporary settings, where a single lead voice is more likely featured. Also a greater risk if the leader can't resist particular "soloistic" touches in leading the folk. I doubt it's intentional, in most cases, but it still can intimidate folks in the pews out of their comfort with singing.

5) MEN DON'T SING. Easily the most toxic position out there, and goes with all sorts of other toxic things going on with men in the church.

6) Staying above the fray. Some folks are more inclined to be observers at church than participants. Singing, in that mindset, is too much involvement. Best to remain detached and not do anything that might make me start enjoying this, or - even worse - getting something out of it, or - horrors! - being moved. Worst of all, somebody might invite them to join the choir...

No one of these will explain all the non-singers in your congregation. Some of them may not be present, but I'm willing to bet more than one or a few of them will.

I wouldn't expect this to be a comprehensive list. What reasons for not singing the hymns, or barriers to singing with the congregation, have you experienced? I'd like to hear from you.

...to which some say, "no thanks, I'll pass"...

Dear Pastor: The preacher's voice

Just briefly, I'd like to revisit from a slightly different angle one of the topics already discussed in this series, the role of you, the pastor, in the singing of the congregation (first addressed, in a somewhat minimalist way, in the first entry in which I put forth the radical idea that you should sing when the congregation is singing). Here I'd like to discuss the different ways that will mean something depending on the kind of congregation in which you serve.

You will be vital if you are preaching in a small congregation.

Whether or not that congregation has an organ and/or piano, a music director and/or choir, or (as occasionally happens) relies on some sort of pre-recorded accompaniment to have something to sing with, your voice will matter here and will matter in the most literal sense. They will need your help in some cases to get going. It is possible that in some cases you will be the "song leader" for all practical purposes. (I did have some supply preaching experiences where this was the case before coming to my current position.) Even in the case of a very familiar hymn, a voice to "set the tone" or to provide a focal point for getting the singing started matters. As well, in a small congregation your participation (with a bit of enthusiasm, even) does send the very important message that this activity matters. It's bad enough to blow off the congregational songs in a large, expansive space where you might think you can get away with it because half the congregation can't see you; in a small, close space, the importance of your participation is magnified exponentially. In that situation you are "on stage" more fully and completely in a sense than in the most highly choreographed and scripted "contemporary" worship service, simply because everyone really is watching you. Don't demean the act of congregational singing by your indifference.

In more of a mid-size congregation, the effect may be different. Perhaps there is an organ (still after all these years the best instrument by far for supporting a group of singing voices, but that's a subject for another entry), or at least a piano, for the support of whatever singing goes on. There may be a choir as well (and you'd better believe they'd better be singing the hymns, but again, another entry). Still, your voice will matter, and matter a lot, particularly if you are taking the counsel provided in these earlier entries in this series.

If something less familiar to the congregation is being introduced, as is necessary for a theologically healthy congregation (yes, I actually mean that), it is vitally important that you are singing that song. If you've done your prep work the choir is also prepared to put forth vocal leadership for this new song, and it may even be helpful to have the choir sing a verse of the hymn before having the congregation join in for the remainder. (In some cases, though, a good, "game" congregation might just be better off jumping in headfirst and catching up; it's not remotely a failure if they're finally chiming in strongly by about midway through the second verse.) At any rate, if you've chosen this new thing to sing, it's hopefully obvious that you should be singing it strongly and with engagement, whether you sound like Gomer Pyle or Barney Fife. (Suffice to say that this level of participation is equally important in that smaller congregation too, where you are likely to be teaching the new hymn, and for that matter in whatever size congregation you may serve, when introducing something the congregation doesn't know.)

Now here's the part you may not believe; it might be most important of all for the pastor (or pastors, but especially the lead pastor, whatever that title may be) of a large church to be engaged in the singing of the congregation. Here's why.

Here we are speaking of a congregation with a multi-pastor staff. There may be members of the congregation who participate "up front" in the service's liturgy, leading prayers or reading scripture; there's a good change that there are other pastoral staff who also take leadership in these parts of the service. Indeed, there is some possibility that, until near the time of the sermon, you as the "lead" pastor have not visibly taken a leadership role in the service yet. Up to that point, what visible involvement do you have in worship? Or are you slipping into the role of spectator, watching the "rest of" the service go by until your big moment?

Truthfully, I don't personally know any pastors who would treat the service that way, or at least I'm pretty sure I don't. But honestly, if you're not singing, or if you're at best mumbling along with the hymns, aren't you kinda doing that?

By visible and energetic participation in congregational singing in that setting you are redirecting any straying attentions in the congregation back to the hymn at hand, which you've presumably selected with some intent towards connecting with or reinforcing other elements of worship like, I dunno, your sermon. Your "performance" demonstrates that the hymn matters; your lack of attention or participation in the hymns, as would be the case with any other part of the service, very clearly states to your congregation that it does not.  

So yeah, it matters if you sing. If you have that much trouble, get your church musician to help you prepare. But do what it takes to sing.

(continued...)

I'm not saying you have to go quite this far with it, OK?

When memory attacks

So I suppose this post is a companion piece to this one from almost five years ago.

I'm not sure why -- whether it be the usual stresses of the season, amplified by many pastoral care needs; being rather sick, such that tending those needs becomes unwise or even dangerous; feeling the strain of relationships fading or failing across time and distance; the daily soul-crushing quality of life in 2017; strangely fluctuating weather; or who knows what -- I suddenly started talking about my mother yesterday in a mini-sermon.

We had a "jazz evensong" at the church yesterday afternoon (not really an evensong in the formal sense, but let it go) and, in the spirit of jazz, I concluded my brief reflection should be improvised. I had some basic ideas going in, but I wanted to try to respond to the seasonal tunes played by the quartet in "real time," so to speak.

I'm not fond of unscripted sermons (and I am wildly hacked off by the smug condescension of those preacher-types who insist that memorized sermons are the only way to go; if I'd been able to memorize that much I'd be a singer or actor, or both, and neither musicology nor preaching would ever have crossed my path). The one time I tried to do so, the sermon went twice as long as it should have. And don't even start with that Holy Spirit crap; if the Holy Spirit only "comes upon you" once a week, for an hour on Sunday morning, you seriously need to re-examine your faith.

But, for this occasion, a meditation that was necessarily going to be brief, it seemed worth a shot.

The basics were easy enough to start with -- a lot of popular Xmas tunes (not Christmas carols, but the more secular stuff) have a fairly deep streak of melancholy in them. That led to an o.k. reflection about how this particular season can be deeply painful for some, but in some ways we only harm ourselves if we can't at least acknowledge the grief or sorrow even as we celebrate the joy of the Nativity. Not going to enter it into any preaching contests (especially since it wasn't written down or recorded), but it was, I think, working for the occasion.

Then, suddenly, I was talking about my mother.

You see, she died suddenly twenty-eight years ago today.

I told that story about as much as possible eight years ago, in one of those Facebook notes that I would occasionally write before I discovered blog sites and headed off into the fool's errand of seminary and this regularly-remade blog. I can't say much has changed. As much as I blanch to admit it, there are some years where the anniversary slips by almost unnoticed. Then there are years, like this one, where it smacks me in the face out of nowhere, in the middle of ruminating about melancholy Christmas songs.

I guess I'm caught this time by our relentless drive and unflagging energy to suppress memory that we don't want to recall. We can bury it and push it away and consign it to its place in the murky and unwanted past...until we can't.

Churches do that too, on a much larger scale. We studiously avoid reflecting on the blood on our hands over decades or even centuries, until #metoo or #blacklivesmatter or Roy Moore inevitably shines that infrared or whatever on us that shows the blood we thought we had wiped away ages ago. And it's not just any one branch; mainline church folk owned slaves and oppressed and abused women and settled themselves on land stolen from the native peoples who had lived there for centuries every bit as much as more "evangelical" types did.

Memory is unpredictable. Maybe it's just the not-quite-flu-but-bad-enough bug talking, or other general sources of melancholy, or just the unquenchable need for memory -- even the nasty ones -- to assert itself and force me to look it in the eye and acknowledge its existence, its part-of-me-ness, when I just want to get well and get ready for Sunday. But even if twenty-eight is not a round number, that memory of loss and ongoing absence is claiming my attention this year. I don't quite understand what its plans are for me, as the day winds to its close. But it his here, and it is there, and there is nothing to do but ride through it.

Preaching the sermons we hate

So I hated my sermon this morning.

Not because it was bad sermon, I don't think. Not saying it was Best Sermon Ever, but my guess is it "worked," whatever that means for a sermon. It's even possible it worked too well.

I'm semi-using the lectionary at the moment, so this week I was a week ahead in an ongoing march through Paul's epistle to the Romans. As a result, today's sermon came out of Romans 12:9-21. (For what it's worth, I've been a week ahead for a couple of weeks, and will be for one more, in order to avoid missing Romans 13 when I'm on vacation in a couple of weeks.)

So Romans 12, the first portion of which supplied last week's sermon, is a profoundly rich chapter by any accounting. The first two verses in particular are among the best ever, and what follows from them does so in striking and powerful form. (If you ask me my favorite verse of scripture it could vary from day to day, but Romans 12:2 is always a good candidate.)

The second lectionary chunk of Romans 12 presents one immediate difficulty for preaching; you really could extract about twenty different sermon topics from it without trying too hard. Nonetheless, I did my prep work, muddled through Greek and hit the commentaries and read again and again and finally came to the conclusion that I had, more or less, a sermon. (Make of it what you will.)

By the time I preached it I hated it. Profoundly so.

Some of this scripture is quite beautiful, but some of it is awfully difficult to deal with. Paul wants to talk about how the Christ-follower, living as a living offering to God and transformed by the renewing of the mind, both lives in the body of Christ and in turn responds (as part of the body of Christ) to the larger world outside. Sometimes that means running up against evil, and Paul comes back to that idea in different ways throughout the chapter.

Some of them are easy to get behind or even to cheer. "Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good." Yeah! We can get behind that! (Never mind that we might not always be completely clear on what is evil sometimes, but there are some obvious things out there in the headlines and we can get behind hating that evil!) Woohoo!!

But "bless those who curse you; bless and do not curse them"... whaaa? 

"Do not repay anyone evil for evil"... oh, come on... .

"Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God"... but I want revenge now!!!

"No; 'if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads'." ...you have got to be kidding me...and what does that "burning coals" business even mean???

Finally, "do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good." Again, what does that even mean?

Seriously, what does that even mean to "overcome evil with good"? What evidence exactly do we have that this kind of thinking won't get us killed (in a very literal physical sense these days)?

It's possible that the destructive effect of Hurricane Harvey is illustrating some of these verses for us. It's entirely possible that there are black or Hispanic or LGBTQ+ rescue workers pulling KKKers or neo-Nazis out of the floodwaters in Houston even as I type. They're preaching this scripture far better than I can do.

I don't want to do these things. I should be ashamed to admit it, but that doesn't make it any less true.

There's a lesson, of course. Even as the mainline tries to be faithful and admittedly not die in the process, we don't get to ignore the stuff we'd rather ignore. We're still obligated to preach the tough scriptures and feed those who would just as soon see us go down the drain (and they are out there). If anything, we're probably more obligated to do so, seeing as we know what it is to be endangered by our own hubris and blindness, lest others fall.

Our churches may not worship scripture the way some (*ahem*) Christian traditions do, but we don't get to dismiss it when it becomes difficult. I still need to confront all those unpleasant instructions in Romans 12, not to mention the much-abused first seven verses of Romans 13, famously used to justify a nuclear strike on North Korea just a few weeks ago (remember that?). Far from being a "political" move such is mandatory as precisely a theological imperative in the wake of Robert Jeffress's claims. I can't avoid confronting that (even though the lectionary tries to let me off the hook by leaving those seven verses out of the prescribed reading). It would be no less than dereliction of duty.

Sometimes we are charged to confront other corners of the church, and sometimes we have to proclaim the stuff that we don't even like. Just because I might hate the sermons that result doen't let me avoid preaching them.

Who's rescuing who in the wake of this?

Ridiculous Comparison: The mainline and Broadway

So if the mainline church is lacking in celebrity (whatever that means in churchworld), what of it? Where's the fit? Despite the most virulent naysaying of the vultures, the mainline is not dead yet, and as long as that's the case it maintains some toehold in American religious culture (whether that's a good thing to be part of is a question for another time). So, what is that toehold?

I'm going to put forth a Ridiculous Comparison. I'm liking this so much I'm putting that in caps, as a potential recurring feature of this blog. Or a threat to do so. Who knows? But here goes:

The role of the mainline in American religious culture is somewhat, a little bit, kinda sorta like the role of Broadway in American entertainment. (Yes, I'm currently watching the Tony Awards. Why do you ask?)

No, I'm not trying to make a full-fledged equation betwen the two, although somebody will probably try to claim I'm doing so. But there are similiarities, I think, at least enough to justify a Ridiculous Comparison.

So, for your consideration, a few rough comparisons of Broadway and the mainline:

1. They're both quite overshadowed by far more pervasive and flashier options in their respective fields of endeavor. Speaking of the Tony Awards, the occasion of that broadcast is for an awful lot of people the only awareness of Broadway they ever get. In many ways I do count myself among such people. I don't get to New York very often at all, and while I'll try to get to a show if one comes near me, I'm not living in a place where that's the easiest thing to do.

On the other hand, Hollywood churns along with ridiculous sums of money going into movies that can potentially tank incredibly badly, and yet the cycle happens again and again. If that happened to a producer one time on Broadway you'd probably never hear from that producer for quite a while; Hollywood somehow doesn't work that way.

Throw in television in its various permutations, streaming services, and other entertainment options that frankly encourage people never to leave their homes (or to not look up even if they do), and Broadway becomes a lot of work and a good deal of expense by comparison, at least in the perception of a lot of potential audience members.

A mainline church can seem like a lot of work. If they're doing worship right you can't just show up; you actually are asked to participate. You might even end up speaking as much as the preacher (or is that just my church?). They can be rather hard to find depending on where you live -- the mainline is getting a bit more scarce in some rural areas, for example. Mainline churches don't tend to carry quite the prestige that they once did, and certainly not the sense of social compulsion that once filled pews if nothing else would. Megachurches tend to consume a lot of oxygen in the communities they inhabit, and mainline churches can struggle to breathe. The mainline and its churches don't get to fail; when you go down, you're gone for good. Church celebrity, as noted elsewhere, tends to be an evangelical thing. In multiple ways, the mainline just gets overshadowed.

2. For both, the most vital signs of life are found when those long excluded, and their stories, are , included. Suffice to say Broadway benefits tremendously from the presence of artists male and female (and even in-between), artists of color, LGBTQ+ people, and more that I'm sure I'm not thinking of in every role possible -- on the stage, directing, providing technical prowess, composing, and all the other jobs that make a show happen. Further, an awful lot of the best of Broadway happens not just when the excluded are in the cast or behind the scenes, but also when their stories are the ones being told.

This last point might be more aspirational than current in the mainline, but as far as the life of the church, the places where church is actually showing life tend to be the places where the once-excluded are included. You want examples of the moribund and fading mainline to justify your vulturing? Find the churches where the old white guys still hold sway. When the folks who have spent generations being shoved aside or thrown out or worse are now part of the church, not just on the margins but being heard and welcomed and having more than a token voice, the church is living and even feisty.

3. They are both at their best when they tell the story differently, finding an unconventional perspective to illuminate what we (think we) know. Hollywood can give you movies, for example, based on the events of September 11, 2001. They can give you a movie about what happened on that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, one about the emergency personnel responding to the attack, a forthcoming movie (originally a play, admittedly) about people trapped in one of the towers that day, and so forth. Broadway can do those, but it's at its best when it tells the story of Gander, Newfoundland, the place where all those transatlantic flights on 9/11 landed when they could no longer get into the US. (I really, really want to see that show now.)

Similarly, this may be more aspirational than real, but the mainline church is at its best when it "tells the story slant" (to crib from Emily Dickinson). The more the church opens up the whole of scripture, finding the stories the rest of the church doen't hear or doesn't want to hear or wants to stop anybody else from hearing, the more the mainline is telling the whole story of faith, of salvation, of the relentless God who would never accept human lostness. Are you willing to learn from the midwives Shiprah and Puah, or the slave Onesimus, or the Syrophoenician woman who, when first rebuffed by Jesus, nevertheless persisted? They're not tidy stories, but they still tell us of God's moving among God's people. And those stories certainly haven't been told enough.

Maybe this is silly, but it's not as if we don't have some things to learn as a community of churches trying to be faithful, even if a faithful remnant. If we can learn something from Broadway, let's learn.

A number from Come From Away at the Tony Awards. 

Yeah, I want to see that show.

When (or to whom) not to listen

So the previous entry on this fool's errand suggested that the staggering but "not dead yet" mainline needs to do a heap of listening as it seeks to find the way forward in the Spirit to be (finally, at last?) what God has ever been wanting the church to be. There are limits to that, however.

Folks involved with computer science and programming (and probably lots of other folks) will be familiar with the phrase "garbage in, garbage out" (sometimes shortened to "GIGO"?), an expression that reflects a computer's inability to do anything about the quality of the data entered into it; given flawed data, the computer will duly process that data according to its programming, producing output that is as flawed as the input from which it is generated.

(A further extension of that acronym points to human gullibility about anything that comes out of a computer: "garbage in, gospel out." Now this really begs to be considered in the life of the church, but in its own blog entry, or maybe several.)

So in short, bad input generates bad output. And that certainly has application to the mainline. Given this maxim, we'd better be very cautious about who or what is allowed into the church's head space. Whether it is those who are up to no good, those who are sincerly but desperately misguided, or those who can only envision a rival to be conquered, there are plenty out there who should not be allowed to deposit garbage into the soul of the mainline.

Such as...?

Don't listen to the vultures. You know, those people. Just don't. It's bad for your soul.

Don't listen to the fixers. They often overlap with the above, as in "you're dying but I can bring you back to life." Unless Jesus Christ in the flesh (or in the Spirit) is the one standing in front of you saying this, run. Run very hard in the opposite direction. One thing the mainline absolutely, positively cannot get caught up in is "personality churches." To the degree that any human figure usurps the role of Christ as head of the church, the church is no church and should be euthanized immediately. The mainline has usually managed to avoid such a thing, thankfully, but now is not the time to be anything other than extra-vigilant.

Don't listen to the clone-makers. That would, not surprisingly, be a related category to the fixers, though it might not involve a lone hero figure. Instead it might sound like "if your church would do (x) and (y) etc. like our church does it would be great." No, it wouldn't be great. It would be a pale imitation of something else transplanted into a situation where it (very likely) makes no sense.

Don't listen to the nostalgia-mongers. Now this is the hard one, but every church has them. You know them, the ones who remember when the church was full every Sunday (though what defines "full" can be hard to nail down...), when the choir was the best in town, when all the right people were there...you know the drill. And you also know, dear mainline church leader, that the road that follows Christ never goes backward.

(Somewhat on this subject, I cannot recommend highly enough Kevin M. Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. The title says it all. Even that spasm of everybody going to church and all that was part attack on FDR's New Deal, part "parasitic greedhead scam" in the ever-poetic words of singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn. Just read it.)

Do you notice how these seem to have a lot in common? How to fix. "I alone can fix it." (Really, shouldn't we know better by now?) These are all things that distract one from the hard work of knowing where you are and how you and your church got there, and how you and your church might respond to that particular, distinctive context. (They also tend to involve human heroes, but I harped on that already.) In other words, they lead you away from the hard work of listening. And they certainly don't lead you to the leading of the Spirit.

There are more red flags to discuss and I have a feeling we'll get to them. But in the meantime, a kind of "shaking the dust off your feet" (Luke 9:5) is not out of line here. They don't listen to your testimony, because all they can do is tell you what to do? Shake that dust, baby, and walk away.

One thing that might make all this easier to remember is the hard but needful saying that it is not your  (pastor, educator, member) job to save the church. It is your job to be the church.

Confusing the two only leads to misery. So don't.

A Sermon for the Sunday Before Election Day (and Every Other Sunday)

Grace Presbyterian Church

November 6, 2016, All Saints’ C

Luke 6:20-31

A Sermon for the Sunday Before Election Day

(and Every Other Sunday)

November 1 is, in some more liturgical Christian traditions, observed as All Saints’ Day. (Since in most years November 1 does not fall on a Sunday, many churches will observe it the Sunday following, which is today.) The day is one for commemorating those “saints” who have gone before us in the faith and who, in the words of the Book of Common Worship’s liturgy for the Service of Witness to the Resurrection, “have kept the faith, finished the race, and who now rest from their labor,” who “having lived this life in faith, now live eternally with you.”

I do not know that this congregation has made much of All Saints’ Day in the past, but it might be something we find meaningful going forward. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a number of those who have been members here over the decades have joined the Church Triumphant, and others will in the years to come. Just this calendar year we have mourned the passing of Lorena McAlpine, Ron Nunn, Lynette Ramer, Larke Nunn, and just this week Judy Attaway; all of these have played a role of note in the life of Grace Presbyterian Church. It would be a shame if we did not give our respect to those who have done so much in the life of this congregation for fear of being “too Catholic” or of learning something new.

(prayer for the deceased)

But the occasion of All Saints’ Day is not merely for commemoration of those departed saints, but also for learning from them and the example they lived among us. To be clear, this is not to be a lionization or beatification of these very human predecessors in the faith; the liturgy quoted above (which you’ll hear me use on virtually every such occasion) also reminds us that each of these departed members is “a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming.” It would be misguided of us to claim a perfection they did not have (a fact which they now know so well); rather we are to learn from their example, faults and all, and be moved by that example to live into all that Christ calls us to be.

What today’s scripture shows us is that “all that Christ calls us to be” is a monumental challenge, one that would (if we took it seriously) require us to reorient our entire life together as the body of Christ. Being a saint is tough.

The first portion of the text is Luke’s version of the Beatitudes. We heard the more familiar version from Matthew in today’s responsive reading for comparison. You probably noticed that Luke tells the story a bit differently; Luke’s “blessings” are a lot more concise, less elaborated, and less watered down – for example, “blessed are you who are poor” in Luke’s gospel, not just the “poor in spirit” that Matthew cites.

Luke’s “blessings” sound familiar if you know Matthew’s “blessings,” but are rather more direct and to the point (blessed are you, not those), perhaps we might say “less spiritualized” – very earthy, very real conditions that Luke records Jesus as describing and calling “blessed,” conditions that challenge our ability to grasp what Jesus is saying. The poor, those who weep, those who are hungry, those who are hated don’t look blessed to us. But they are “blessed” with Christ’s favor, and if we truly want to be followers of Christ, not just nominal “Christians” but real followers of Christ – it is our calling to see them as Jesus sees them.

If Luke’s “blessings” make that difficult, Luke adds a parallel series of “woes” that Matthew, for whatever reason, does not record. These “woes” truly challenge our ability to “see through Jesus’s eyes.”

It simply doesn’t compute for us to think “woe to you who are rich,” particularly since our society is geared to revere and even idolize them. To say “woe” to those who laugh now, or those who are full, or those who are well-liked and respected, just doesn’t make sense. But we miss the point; those who have grasped and shoved and grabbed and held the best the world can give have obtained exactly that; the best that the world can give, which is nothing but the foulest refuse next to the grace of God. Woe indeed to the embracers of foul refuse.

Again, this is not “pie in the sky, by and by” stuff; this is where Jesus calls us here and now, even if that requires complete upheaval of the way we live and relate to others. And there is no part of our lives excepted from this.

As if that weren’t enough, Luke then adds a “greatest hits” list of The Hardest Things Jesus Ever Said: “…love your enemies…”; a version of “turn the other cheek”; “…give to everyone who begs from you…” (I routinely fail this one); “do unto others as you would have them do to you.” Again, not pie-in-the-sky stuff; here and now, this is Jesus’s instruction to us.

Now for those of you wondering where the title of today’s sermon comes in…right about here is the spot. Of course this kind of turned-upside-down life is supposed to affect us when we mark those little circles on those ballots Tuesday. Again, no part of our life is exempt; this really is how Jesus is teaching his disciples to live every part of every day. Our “political life” (so to speak) is equally under the mandate to see as blessed who Jesus sees as blessed; to love our enemies; to do unto others as we would have them do unto you. If we are going to call ourselves followers of Christ, we don’t get to take Election Day off.

At the same time, we don’t get to take any other days off either.

We might just find, if we take Luke’s “blessings and woes” and other recorded instructions seriously, that every day of our week looks different. It might make a difference in our weekends outside of the church, whether they be spent at the stadium or ballpark or golf course or coliseum, and might even upset the way we decide which of those to choose. It might even cause us to have to pull back from how we spend our evenings. It could just possibly mess with how we spend our days at work, or even what work we do. It might just, if we really follow through on it, cause us to have to speak up where we might just be more comfortable staying quiet when injustice is done, when the poor are shafted yet again to make life yet easier for the rich, or what little food the hungry have is yet again taken away. And we just might find ourselves “blessed” in ways we might never have imagined, and would frankly rather have done without, if only Jesus hadn’t opened his big mouth and Luke gotten wind of it and written it down. We might even have to rethink how we say “God bless you” to one another, if we know ourselves to be more caught up in the “woes” than the “blessings.”

Blessed are you? Woe unto you? Being a saint has never been easy, but saints have never been more needed, on Election Day and every other day.

For the saints before and among us, and what we might learn from them, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal):

#326 For All the Saints

#550 Give Praise to the Lord (Psalm 149)

#506 Look Who Gathers at Christ’s Table!

#729 Lord, I Want to Be a Christian

Credit: agnusday.org. Is it the devil in the details, or ... ?

What I can handle

Chemo week two is in progress.  The "pump" (I don't hear it pumping, but apparently it is) is delivering the last of my chemo cocktail between now and some time Wednesday, and it remains attached to me until then.  It's a bit of a bundle, not large but awkward, and keeps me from sleeping on my right side if nothing else.
It can be a long day in the transfusion chair.  Fortunately, my professors are kind enough to supply me with plenty to do while in that chair.  In my approximately four-and-a-half hour stint there today I read for Old Testament and Sacraments and completed a morning prayer service to lead the week after spring break (and worked Ray Bradbury into it).  Not bad, but not a form of study inducement I recommend.
Today was different from two weeks ago; at least one patient in the transfusion room was not old enough to be my parent.  For the most part they either have company with them, are glued to the TV (the two are not mutually exclusive), or are asleep or trying to sleep.  At least I add variety to the room, I guess.
The thing about being treated for cancer in one area -- the rectum, in my case -- is that the area in question is not, by a long shot, going to be the only one affected by the course of treatment.  My bladder had nothing to do with this and is yet getting freaked out by the treatment, if nothing else than by getting a continuous feed of liquid for four and a half hours every other Monday.  It isn't the only part in that region, either.  It gets a little difficult to keep up with so many body parts in rebellion.
Eating is also becoming an interestingly unpredictable experience.  I truthfully have no idea at this point what will settle well with me and what will create problems.  Fruits have been cooperative so far, but vegetables far more unpredictable.  A nice salad might sound good right now, but only if I can camp out near the bathroom for the following 24-36 hours.  Beans and peas seem to be o.k., but corn is a raging disaster.  Meats seem more or less cooperative, breads problematic at times.  It's an adventure, and not always one I'm ready to handle.
More than once of late I've seen riffing on the horrid platitude that people exchange, in a well-meaning but disastrous way, with those who have been beset by some hardship or tragedy:

"God won't give you more than you can handle."

One such riff is humorous: a Facebook card that adds the sentence "Apparently God thinks I'm a badass."  The other approach, in more than one source, is a sound and well-needed theological debunking and dismantling of the saying itself.
Let's be clear: I am NOT "handling" this, certainly not by myself.  My wife needs to be elevated to sainthood, I don't give a tinker's damn if she isn't Catholic.  Not only is she taking on even more of the everyday things, she's also handling the business side of the cancer, which should be an automatic in for sainthood.  You believe in supporting the poor, Pope Francis?  Get on it.  By the time this is over we will qualify for sure.
Professors have gone out of their way to keep from drowning me and have been far above accommodating.  Fellow students have quietly stepped in to keep me from wiping out of classes when I've had to miss more than once.  My little on-campus job is still there.  The ministry development office has adjusted to my need to change my plans for internship this summer and next year.  Folks at the church(es) we've attended have constantly been there for support.
Hell, no, I'm not "handling" this.  Not even remotely.
It might seem cruel to say that God deliberately does give us more than we can handle (though not nearly as cruel as saying God creates some specifically for eternal torment, and Calvin got away with that), but maybe it's so.  Of course, it isn't a random bit of torture; we are reminded precisely that we cannot handle things by ourselves.  We aren't lone rangers, and those who insist on riding that way are completely divorced from what God wants us to do and how God means for us to live.
We live dependently on our sisters and brothers in Christ.
We do not handle it by ourselves.  We do not "in our own strength confide" to borrow from Luther's hymn.  We do not beat cancer by ourselves, we do not beat unemployment by ourselves, we do not beat prejudice by ourselves, we don't beat anything by ourselves.
And when we aren't the ones being beset by tragedy or hardship, we're supporting and carrying and bailing out our sisters and brothers who are.
And I have just typed about the most anti-American bit of scribble I've done yet in this blog.  We are the land of "rugged individualism" and all that.  This probably explains why we have done such garbage in the name of Christ.
I've railed against establishment Christianity before.  I'll spare you.  But American Christianity had more or less the culture for much of America's history and absolutely squandered it on comfort and power and moralizing.  We don't know how to live dependently on one another.  We don't know how to trust one another that much.  We have no concept of how those Christ-followers lived in Acts 2, and we'd probably be horrified if we did.
I have not "handled" this illness and treatment, not at all.  I've been carried through it.  I've been bailed out.
And that's what living in the body of Christ means.

On being a human tetherball

A bland day.  Literally, as I am on a clear-liquid diet before a couple of medical tests tomorrow, and figuratively, as being confined to home for the, ah, preparation for those tests cuts me off from the world and from my still-unsettled routine of classes and other activities.  One can only read so much heavy Old Testament scholarship at a time, much to my consternation.
One of the disconcerting things about this health situation is, as any number of people who've been through it will tell you, the waiting.  I'm still miffed about missing that trip to Kansas, but now it's as much about wanting to get on with whatever course of treatment is going to be necessary.  Getting to that point, though, has involved a bit of pinballing.
One goes through a number of different doctors in this process, apparently.  In my case, my primary care physician found anemia in the results from blood work and referred me to a gastrointestinal specialist for that colonoscopy, which revealed the cancer.  That resulted in referral to an oncologist and a surgeon, which also necessitated a radiation oncologist, as well as a different gastrointestinal specialist (one with more experience with cancer) to perform tomorrow's endoscopic ultrasound.  (Also tomorrow is the consultation with that radiation oncologist and a CT-PET scan ordered by the primary oncologist.  I may sleep the rest of the weekend.)
That's a lot of doctors, and the interesting part is that it is awfully difficult to coordinate all of this.  Trying to get three appointments scheduled tomorrow was a rather stressful business, what with the apparent need to register separately for all three, despite all three being in the same specialized facility within the same hospital.  While I try to be a level-headed sort, I don't think I'm the person to be all cool and collected while trying to reconcile an unreconcilable schedule of medical events.  I had to get a little hysterical to get things done, which I don't enjoy so much.
Getting tetherballed around like this pushes me towards being skeptical, to be mild, about people and their reactions in time of need.  Any tendency in that direction, however, is quickly countered by how many people have stepped in to help and support us since this diagnosis.  I've heard from many churches across the scattered trail of our lives pledging our prayers and support.  I've had nothing but support and pledges of cooperation from my professors, and multiple classmates getting class notes for me on those days (like this one) when I have to miss class.  One wonders about the difference between people in relationships and people in systems.  Systems don't humanize.
In the meantime, today is a day for, ahem, staying home.  Tomorrow will be bizarre.  Once these tests are done, hopefully the surgeon and oncologist can get things together enough to decide and put together a course of treatment.  As physically difficult as that is likely to be, it will be mentally some measure of relief.  At least I'll be doing something, instead of waiting.

Techno-bafflement

If you had told me five years ago that by now I'd be on Facebook, text regularly (if almost exclusively to my wife), and have a blog, I'd have first looked at you with a blank expression because I'm not completely sure I knew what any of those things were five years ago.  Once those things were explained to me I'd most likely have stared at you as if you'd suddenly sprouted alien tentacles from your nose.  Things do change, do they not?

I'm forty-six years old.  Not desperately old by any means (and not even that old to be on the fool's errand I'm on--I'm far from the oldest student here), but there's a good chance my life is more than half over, which is a jarring thought sometimes.  (For the record, I was born in February 1965, which if I have things right technically leaves me two months shy of being a baby boomer.  So there.)

In my teaching career I went from looking at classroom technology as mostly an opportunity for something to malfunction to being a regular user of PowerPoint for lectures (and sometimes I was even able to embed links in it!  Woohoo!) and able to use Blackboard to some degree, though probably not to the fullest extent that academic administrators probably hope.  I couldn't have taught popular music without YouTube, another thing I might not have understood five years ago.  (On the other hand, to the very end I was using long-playing records in class as well.  When you're into American music, not everything has migrated to mp3 yet.)

All of which is to say that while I'm not a complete technology failure, I'm probably a good five to ten years behind the curve most of the time, and that is probably a charitable estimate.  I'm not on Twitter, and a truly cutting-edge reader could probably rattle off maybe as many as a dozen technological innovations I haven't mentioned and conclude that I am hopelessly lame, which is probably true.

This is of course a challenge no matter what vocation one pursues, but it is a challenge of particular angst these days in ministerial circles, as the question of technological competency is inevitably linked to the latest missing generation in the church, the one born with iPhones attached to their index fingers at birth (or is an iPhone too hopelessly out of date?  I'm never sure).  The lamenting and angst and hand-wringing comes in several forms.

My current seminary in fact hosts a conference, every fall I believe, on this subject of technology and the church.  Of course, as any academic (professor or student) can tell you, hosting such a conference during the academic year can actually be the least beneficial thing for students on that campus because, well, they have classes at the time, and professors are loath to give up that precious time slot (a problem with which I have sympathy, as one who always felt I was skipping something essential every semester even without such class losses), so the student either misses class or misses the conference -- and since these conferences typically have registration costs involved you can guess which choice the student will make.

One of the conference speakers, though, did give a presentation to students before the gig began, which touched somewhat on the use of technology in the church and its life, though it often got sidetracked onto unrelated stuff.  This presenter is also involved in an "online worship" experience which I actually watched before the presentation.  Definitions of worship are touchy, difficult, and a good way to start a fight, I know this.  My impression of the program I saw, I have to say, was more of a really good talk show interrupted by music and DIY communion.  I guess some people find it worshipful.

This week I've been unable to go online without getting besieged by more rumination about technology and the church.  It comes in waves, I guess.  Adam Copeland, an inevitable moderator of PC(USA) unless he decides to remain among the Lutherans, offered up this thoughtful blog post on the subject, with particular attention to how a pastor or church might be tuned in to how a different generation's use of technology might influence worship in particular, right down to the tweeting of responses to the sermon in real time.  (An aside: our campus actually saw an experiment in this for one of our chapel services this fall, with tweets from the congregation actually being posted on-screen during the service.  I wish I could offer more comment on this, but the presentation software being used -- Prezi, I think? -- did so much swooping from one screen to another that I ended up with about a two-hour attach of mild vertigo, an issue for me dating back to 1993.  So I try not to think too much about that day; it just makes me dizzy.)  

Adam is quite good at asking questions, which is a good thing.  Certainly some flexibility may be in order, and I do believe that there are or have been traditions which included a time for responses to or questions about the sermon immediately after it was over, even without technology added.  I also have an initial concern about loading too many things into the hour, or forty-five or ninety minutes or whatever that a church devotes to formal (i.e. designated) worship.  Schoolteachers over the past decades might relate to how many functions got assigned to the classroom -- needful things, but not necessarily educationally oriented; even state-mandated standardized tests might fall into this category -- that the time for teaching and learning inevitably was damaged to some degree.  I'd hate to see that become a problem in worship, or to be precise more of a problem.  

Let's face it, there are already enough challenges that get loaded into worship, demands that really have nothing to do with worship per se -- positive reaffirmation, patriotic display, cultural conformity, musical "performance", clucking and oo-ing at how cute the kids are -- that it can be tough enough to get any kind of focus on the word and sacrament as it is.  To the degree that flexing our technology muscles becomes merely another distraction it is something to lament; to the degree that it becomes a source of division, even worse.  But I have no answers here, and I'm still trying to work out the questions I do have.

Another FB friend linked to this article from The Christian Century's "Tribal Church" blog section.  This post by Carol Howard Merritt is not strictly about technology itself, but in addressing the "generational roadblocks" of its title speaks to or alludes to technological issues that may -- quite unintentionally -- be hindrances to the more technologically savvy (I'd simply argue that this doesn't strictly have to be a "generational" roadblock; anyone of any age who knows their technology can be put off by how primitive some churches are about it).  

Some of these problems are really so trivial that we should be ashamed of letting them be roadblocks.  To cite only one example: why in the world, indeed, should it be a problem for someone to be in on a committee meeting via Skype?  Heck, I've had master's students who did their oral exams by Skype.  And again this might not be merely a generation issue; imagine the parent with kids who can't find a babysitter for Tuesday nights, otherwise they'd love to be on the (insert name here) committee.  If they have to get up and chase down their toddler before the cat gets flushed down the toilet, no harm done (except possibly to cat and toddler).  Heck, is there a good reason the whole committee can't meet by Skype sometimes?

From another corner came this "Tech Lament" on the "Daily Episcopalian" site, by a vicar named Ann Fontaine.  Fontaine finds herself despairing at an article (linked in her blog entry) observing that a major company has announced plans to go "zero email" within three years, shifting its working collaboration and communication focus to messaging and social network platforms.  I had to agree; thinking of email as outmoded and potentially obsolete was a bit of a jolt, and made me feel older than I usually feel.  But then, as I thought more about it, I had to admit that I really don't use email nearly as much as I used to.  I still get information from the seminary and from some professors that way (though some use Blackboard for information, assignments sometimes get returned by email), and I get plenty of more commercial email (from outright advertisements to newspaper headline emails and such), I don't really send a lot of emails.  

Herein lies a caution, methinks: the technology we so avidly embrace now becomes obsolete sooner than we think.  Not unlike a "contemporary" worship service that suddenly finds itself thirty years out of date, the church Facebook page or blog we prize now may become a white elephant before we know it.  It isn't merely a matter of catching up, but keeping up that becomes the tremendous hurdle -- or series of hurdles -- faced by the church that would be techno-savvy.  

Whatever all of these may portend, I (as usual) find myself thinking in another direction.  Strange as it seem, I'd be the last person to deny the usefulness of these social technologies for more than just funny cat pictures.  The genesis of this whole fool's errand owes much to being able to talk not only to real live people in the flesh, but also real live people whom I could only contact on Facebook, to ask questions ranging from the utter foolishness of walking away from a perfectly good life to do this, to specifics about the seminaries they attended and their virtues.  These are resources I wouldn't have had or known about five years ago, if this vocational nudge had happened then.  So far be it from me to dismiss social technology's potential altogether.

I would like to do one reversal of direction, though, if I may.  Where Adam Copeland's blog above wondered about what technology may bring into worship, I wonder if these social technologies may help us take more out of worship than we've done before.

For example: most churches nowadays have some means of posting each week's sermons online, whether by streaming media of some ilk or simple posting of the text.  How many of these might be enhanced with something as simple as a "comments" function as a means of continuing the discussion beyond the bounds of Sunday morning?  Many pastors I know do post their sermons to their own individual blogs, and I'm sure there must be some churches where sermons are posted with some sort of response capacity, though I'm less aware of these.

And by no means does this need to be limited to the sermon; what about a comment on why a particular hymn was chosen, or what the week's anthem adds to the service?  Or about the missional doings of the church and their relationship to worship?  Or the educational ministries?  If these social technologies offer the opportunity to tie the whole of worship together, to knit it more thoroughly into the life of the community of faith and beyond, and perhaps even to get people who may not ordinarily show for worship curious enough to want to come and see what all the fuss is about... well, this is something I can thoroughly get behind.

Unless I'm misreading things, one thing that the tech-savvy seeker is looking for is transparency -- to be able to question without fear, to know why things are instead of merely knowing that they are, not to be cudgeled by authority for not being certain or for (horrors!) disagreeing.  This is in fact a good thing, as long as the transparency goes both ways, and some genuine hard soul-searching will not be blown off as mere authoritarian posturing.  I don't think the minister needs to be the Wizard of Oz busily pulling levers and pushing buttons while hidden behind the great curtain; sometimes the best thing to do is open up the process and be able to show and say why we do what we do; why we believe what we believe, why we actually insist on something so off-putting as confessing our sins, why the Eucharist is too important to be restricted to a monthly observance, maybe even why an organ is a good thing for a church to have.  But again, this has to go both ways; if questions are going to be asked, answers have to be heard and listened to with the same seriousness and openness.

This is hard, time-consuming work to be sure.  I've consumed a rather large chunk of morning and early afternoon just writing this blog post, and this after several days of thought on it.  But if this kind of opening and connecting can be part of what social technologies can be in the life of the church, then by all means let's get on it.

I'd even be willing to learn how to do Twitter.  If it doesn't become obsolete first.

Christmas Eve, "Christmas Eve," and Getting Totally Gobsmacked By Grace

For a brief while we are in an activity lull.  With my wife's parents in town, we took them around to see a few of the sights of Richmond today, including St. John's Church, where Patrick Henry gave his "give me liberty or give me death" speech back in 1775.  The afternoon is fading, but the Christmas Eve service we will attend this evening is not until 9:00 p.m., so there is a small amount of down time suitable for thinking.

It is Christmas Eve.  Somewhere on the planet, the sweep of "midnight masses" and other late-evening observances of the transition from Eve to Day has already started.  Other bloggers have already covered the degree to which many of these services or observances will, in my evolving view, "get it wrong"; the softening and hypersentimentalizing of the Nativity, with creepily silent baby and odorless barnyard animals.  (I am again reminded of Iona community's John Bell and his reaction to the verse of "Away in a Manger" that declares, "But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes": "Why not?  What's wrong with him?") The whole thing gets "tamed," made much more domestic and acceptable to comfortable modern listeners who have busily been ignoring the prophets of Advent, with their insistence on a world undone.
 
And yet for all of that taming and softening and weakening, that spark is still there; not quite yet has the ember of Incarnation, that thing which makes this whole feast day worth bothering with, completely been extinguished.

Without getting into too much theological deep water or rehashing theological controversies stretching back nearly two millenia, I will simply acknowledge that the whole Christmas event draws its power from the notion that the baby born on that night ages ago was not merely a baby of solely human significance.  Whether one holds that God Godself was present in that child from birth (or earlier) or not, it remains that this child will be the extraordinary God-With-Us, Son of God, whatever term you choose to use.  God Incarnate, God enfleshed.  Presumably squawling like any newborn who ends up being put down for sleep in a manger instead of something more bed-like, with swaddling bands wrapped around as the only protection from the cold, who-knows-what smells wafting all around.

What then are we to do with this Incarnation, this "Word became flesh" as described in John 1?  Or what does it do in us?  Friedrich Schleiermacher published a curious little book (treatise? novella?), Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation, in which he seems to suggest that the most natural, most right response to the Incarnation is joy.  And if we have known that joy, the joy that comes of knowing God-With-Us really is with us, we live with one another in joy.  We share joy and give grace to one another.  We don't necessarily agree, we certainly don't all behave or believe the same way, but we share the joy of God being among us and showing us how to love one another by how God loved us.  (John comes back to that thought a few times in his gospel, and even the first epistle of John reiterates that point as well.)

While I'm still working my way through Schleiermacher's little tome (yes, I deliberately checked it out to read over and around Christmas Eve because, well, that's how my mind works), I am already haunted by its opening.  The assembled guests await the hostess, Ernestine, and her permission to enter the main room and begin the giving and receiving of gifts.  They are, not surprisingly, a tad impatient, but Ernestine has held them at bay, striving to set everything just so and to provide the utmost welcome and hospitality she can.  At last the doors are opened and the guests enter; when they do, however, instead of rushing in and grasping the gifts, they are in fact overwhelmed by what Ernestine has done; the arrangement of the gifts, the decorations, the lights, all is so right, so warm, so welcoming, and done with such taste and feeling (this is an early nineteenth-century German work, after all, so feeling is going to be a major concern) that the guests are drawn away instead to shower their hostess with embraces and gratitude.  In that simple unexpected moment of receiving Ernestine's labor of love, the guests are ministered with grace and given a moment, just the tiniest taste, the barest hint of the joy of the Incarnation shared by one (probably without realizing it as such) with all.  Indeed Schleiermacher's primary aim in Christmas Eve seems to be to show, rather than describe, what it means to be the body of Christ, bound together by this Incarnation joy and the love that flows from it.

It can hit you when you least expect it.  Even as I was reading Christmas Eve on Christmas Eve Eve, I found myself getting gobsmacked by a similar unexpected ministering of grace.  A gift, with contributions apparently coming from about eleven different sources (some of whom I literally have not seen since my high-school graduation night--talk about the incarnational power of Facebook!) through a couple of devious ringleaders, leaving me more floored and tongue-tied than I can remember being since...I can't even guess how long.  And yet, there it was, reminding me that more people care about this fool's errand than I can even guess (though I wouldn't presume that my becoming a Presbyterian minister--excuse me, teaching elder--is all that impressive to all of them, by any means), and that I'm a lot less cut off than I fancy myself to be sometimes.

Maybe your experience of this is different.  Sometimes it might look like something else, I suppose, only to be realized in retrospect.  Still, those unpredictable and unearned moments reward like few things can, in some cases all out of proportion to the size of the gesture and quite without regard to dollar signs.

Christmas Eve draws on.  The joy of the Incarnation awaits.  A blessed and joyous Feast of the Nativity to you all.