Dear Pastor: Are you singing?

Note: I'm sick as all get out, I have too many things about which I am agitated and which *demand* that I write about them, and I got into an online conversation yesterday that messed with my head. So, this, and maybe the beginning of a new sporadic thing...


Dear Pastor:

Congratulations on getting through another Sunday. We both know that's never as easy as it might seem, although it's possible your Sunday is longer and more stressful than mine.

Now I know that in my small church down here in Florida, I probably don't have quite the variety of concerns to wade through in any given Sunday or service as you do. You might be preaching two or even three services, for example, and who knows how many meetings or consultations as well. For myself, I have got to get over this stupid flu before I can function anything much like normal.

Nonethless I have a question for you. I'm still a relative newbie at this pastor thing, and maybe I can learn something from you about how to go about all of this. So, here is something I'd like to know:

What do you do when your congregation is singing?

I mean, I presume you're in the sanctuary, not "waiting in the wings" for some strange grand entrance thing, right? So you're there in worship, presumably on the platform or stage if there is one, right out front where the congregation can see you. So what are you doing when the congregation is singing?

Are you still mentally riffing through your sermon notes? Scanning the congregation to check attendance? Looking dignified?

Or are you in fact singing?

I hope that last is the answer.

I'm sure you have seen all the indicators that of all the stuff that happens in a worship service of whatever sort, the main thing that most congregants are likely to take home with them is something that was sung in the service, most likely something the congregation sang itself. We'll try to be expansive here; those might be good ol' traditional hymns, gospel songs, choruses of some ilk, possibly global song, Lots of possibilities for what the congregation might sing during the service--whether at the beginning, right before or after your sermon, or at the very end. Whatever those songs may be, are you singing them as well, with the congregation?

Of course, I'm presuming here. I suppose it's possible that the congregation of your church doesn't really sing. That would be terribly sad, but I suppose it's possible. So what music is taking place? Is it a praise band or whatever those are being called these days (I have trouble keeping up)? Or do you have a highly professional choir and orchestra carrying the musical load? Either way, that's really sad.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of choirs. But that's not meant to be all there is. Otherwise you're having a concert with a speech instead of a worship service, aren't you?

But anyway, whatever singing is going on, what are you doing when it's going on? Here's the thing: I'm pretty sure you'd go ballistic if you found out the choir, for example, was pretty visibly not paying attention to your sermon, wouldn't you? Heads would roll. Hopefully you, in turn, manage to at least give the impression that you are paying attention to what they're doing when the anthem is sung.

And naturally, of course, you will want to give proper respect to the congregation as they, the people, do the work of the people -- as they do liturgy.

After all, you wouldn't want to give off the impression that the music in the service is just filler, would you? You wouldn't want the congregation to believe that their participation in the service is just tap dancing until the Main Event (your sermon, naturally) comes? You wouldn't want to do that, would you? Certainly you don't actually believe that, do you?

So, pastor, when the congregation, whether "lustily" as John Wesley might put it or more tentatively, launches into their sung participation in worship, what are you doing?

I hope you're singing.

You better be singing.



(to be continued...) 

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.

Say what we mean to say

So a few weeks ago I was slumming about social media, when a video link came across one feed or another. I must have been overly bored or overly curious, because I clicked.

(If you're easily triggered about things like booze, don't watch. You've been warned.)


(Still, you've been warned.)











The video that came along was visually clever, but musically about as predictable as possible. The slow build over repetitive guitars, the rather vague lyrics, the rather thin wastrel voice ... it's a worship song! And it is, of a sort.

Directness in our music is a valuable thing. There's value in naming who and what we sing about early and often. I hope that is so obvious that it didn't really need saying.

What might need saying is that such directness is also useful, even needful, when our designated 'worship' is over.

We suffer, I think, from an unwillingness or inability to speak directly. We get fumble-mouthed, or we count on others -- better speakers than we, or more informed, or something -- to do the speaking for us. Whether it is from fear of seeming "too political" or simply fear of not being able to back up what we say, we shrink back.

Well, if "politics" is at root the basic mechanisms by which human beings get things done or not, it is inevitable for the church to be "political" unless it locks itself up tight in the sanctuary and never sticks its head out. And for the backing it up part, I'm pretty sure your pastor would love to help with that.

For this Reformation Sunday I had the silly epiphany that the word "Protestant" invariably contains the word "protest" if you actually spell it right. You'd be hard-pressed to know that if your only clue about mainline Protestantism was its public behavior, or that would have been the case in an awful lot of places before Charlottesville. Even so, in other venues the fellow clergy of those hardy souls haven't picked up that torch so much. With a few notable exceptions in high places, the mainline can be awfully muted.

That helps nothing.

This is one of those sermons I preach mostly because I need to hear it; if it's useful to anyone else, good.

So, mainliners (especially the painfully introverted ones), how do we speak up and speak clearly?

So, anybody wanna go nail some theses to the door?

Leave Main Street USA behind

You may not know that my wife is a fairly serious addict of Walt Disney World. Yes, she'll also generally want to see Disney movies and other stuff but Disney World is her place of bliss. I don't share that enthusiasm, but I try to go along with it because marriage. (My one complaint is that I think we should visit Disneyland at least once, which she has no desire to do.)

Admittedly I use those trips (outside of one, for Epcot's Food & Wine festival in the fall, which I use for...food) for different purposes than does she. Usually I'm mentally deconstructing the place, trying to shake out clues to the culture that made that spot so ridiculously popular. While this works to varying degrees in the different parks, it's never more rewarding (or depressing) than in the flagship park, the Magic Kingdom.

While virtually anything in that park is ripe for such rumination, it's entirely possible that ther is no more fertile ground for it than the very entrance to the park, once you get past the ticket booths and gates (and security): the Town Square and Main Street USA.

It's the site of parades every day (at least when the park doesn't get closed by hurricanes). Behind the somewhat gaudy nineteenth-century-ish veneer, it's all about what a Main Street is frequently about: selling stuff -- in this case Disney merchandise, naturally, with some food thrown in.  It's generally crowded and noisy and extremely white (in terms of the Main Street it portrays).

It's fairly public knowledge, I think, that Main Street USA is Walt Disney's attempt to recreate (in an idealized fashion to be sure, as memory tends to do) the Main Street of his hometown in Missouri. Walt did not include one for obvious reasons, but I have to wonder what church or churches were on that "real" Main Street when he was growing up. It would be interesting to know, I think to have a clue about just what churches were busily fitting themselves into the culture, personal and commercial, exemplified by that Main Street.

May I suggest that, for some segments of the church today, that Main Street USA is a pretty good representation of the problem of some of our mainline churches and denominations?

Nostalgia can be deadly, you know. The more we yearn for what is past, the more we choke off whatever future is out there for us. And yet so much of the mainline -- from the folks in the pews to the folks running things on higher levels -- are profoundly hung up on (a) preserving what little "Main Street" real estate we have left, holding on desperately to the last little shreds of influence we have (or think we have) in Mainstream America, or (b) desperately trying to get back. For every visionary you see in a pulpit or an office or a classroom trying to urge the church forward, there is at least one desperately trying to get back to Walt's Eden, between the millinery shop and the ice cream parlor.

But that's not the place for the body of Christ to be, and it never was. The poor and the oppressed may be on Main Street in your town, but they're decidedly not on Main Street USA. And (painful as it is to say sometimes) where they are is where the body of Christ needs to be.

Even this mainline guy (UCC, right?) falls for the seduction of Main Street USA... *sigh*

Time to relocate. Put out the FOR SALE sign and look for a place closer to the need. It's not without pain (I'm not above a good chili dog at Casey's Corner), but Main Street USA is not our home, and we don't need to get caught up in trying to hold on to what should never have been ours. 

The Year of Matthew 10:34

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace to the earth, but a sword.
For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daugher-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's foes will be members of one's own household. 
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 
Those who find their life will lose it; and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

Matthew 10:34-39


(Reminder: evangelicals, you were told way back at the beginning of this blog re-reboot that this blog was not for you.)

I'm not sure how much this kind of thing gets beyond what might be called "church Twitter," but if you note much of that you are probably aware of the release of the "Nashville Statement" earlier this week. (Google it; I have no intention of propagating it further than it has already spread.)

The statement has already been torn apart in multiple fashions. Its attempt to situate an anti-LGBTQ+ screed in the church's historical belief is punctured here by some historians; other groups have offered point-by-point rebuttals like the Denver Statement (spearheaded by mainline-ish quasi-celebrity pastor Nadia Bolz Weber); pastors have noted its odd lack of scriptural foundation (no reference to the "six verses" or "seven verses" in particular); petitions have been signed and so forth and so on. It made for an active week on "church Twitter."

In short, many far more skilled and informed pastors and scholars and writers and other folk have debunked the content of the statement to a degree I cannot hope to match much less exceed. Go read. Inform yourself.

My intent here, on the other hand, is to argue that at least one part of the "Nashville Statement" should absolutely be taken seriously.

Article 10 of said statement is for some the most brash part of the statement, claiming as it does that "it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faith and witness," and that the issuing speakers "deny that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christian [sic] should agree to disagree." In short, you cannot disagree with the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (the issuing group behind the manifesto) and be a Christian, according to the CBMW. Its president, Denny Burk (who seems awfully famous for reasons I cannot fathom), flat-out calls Article 10 a "line in the sand." It is meant to exclude.

OK, fine, I'm not part of your group.

As I have noted, this blog is addressed to my fellow dying mainliners, that twig of the church that others like either to belitte or ignore. The likes of the CBMW are certainly not under my authority to any degree. I, however, am not under their authority either, and frankly their orders do not apply to me. Trying to do my job and fulfill my call in the corner of the church I now occupy is enough challenge for me. I care about those persons, particularly those LGBTQ+ persons who are yet again being dragged through the slime by some particularly hateful pastors, who are directly harmed by the statement. The persons who issue such statements are irrelevant to me and have no place in my thought or theology, outside of the occasional sermon about those who get hung up on "statutes and ordinances."

Other mainliners do not share my indifference. The whole reason "church Twitter" gets all riled up is precisely because such hardcore evangelicals cannot resist rising to the bait when groups like this bleat out statements like this. Personally, my blood pressure couldn't take such regular "engagement" in such disputes, but it's not my place to judge them either.

What I do have to go on about, and be a little bit of a jerk about, is the degree to which mainliners tend to get fluttery about this to the detriment of being about our business of serving and following.

We have a lot to do: welcome to the unwelcome; care for those for whom nobody cares; proclamation of the gospel without bullying; non-stupid worship; presenting our bodies as living offerings and being transformed by the renewing of our minds and such work as that. We'd also be well-advised to get on with welcoming and loving those who are targeted by these occasional blasts from the would-be popes of evangelicaldom. Instead, we have this bad habit of getting obsessed with the ones doing the blasting.

I so wish we would grasp the truth of Matthew 10:34.

At the risk of trumpeting my own sermon, it's not about seeking to cause division. It is, however, also not about avoiding division, about being so cowed by those who come bringing the sword that we forsake our call to follow and serve. It emphatically is not about engaging in some kind of "let's not offend anybody" straddling that does nothing but shield the bullies.

It is about living in the light, living in Christ, living as if Jesus were going to show up tomorrow (after all, He just might), which only happens by living in love. If that means the sword comes, then the sword comes.

Cutting to the chase for us mainline types: our call as a people of God, as followers of Christ, is not enhanced by getting into these pitched battles with these militant forces of fundamentalism. It's not our call to fight that war.

Maybe our call is to be the medics, the ones who are called to extend ourselves out into the battlefield to gather up the wounded, to bring them in to safety and welcome them and care for them and even join with them in doing Christ's work in God's world.

Can we please get on with it?

Maybe we're called to be stretcher bearers in the church wars?

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?

From mainline to front line

I have seen more than one tweet or Facebook comment in the last twenty-four hours suggesting that for those who wondered how they would have acted or reacted in the era of the civil rights movement, well, you're finding out now.

To be sure there's some truth to that. It might be slightly more accurate to say that if you haven't yet, you will soon.

I say that only in the sense that such realization might be forced on you in a way it has not necessarily been yet. You may not live anywhere near Charlottesville, Virginia, but don't be under any illusions that your town is necessarily immune from such white supremacist violence.

So I've been looking at my own town of residence with an eye towards what might incite the nation's white supremacists and Nazis and violent racists of whatever stripe to show up here.

I've never lived in Charlottesville, but in my time in Richmond I ended up making a lot of visits, some of them for work or internship reasons. Gainesville is not that much like Charlottesville. The vibe and culture are quite different. The point here is not to prefer one or the other (and neither of them will ever hold a candle to Lawrence, Kansas, to me anyway), simply to note that they are very different towns.

The universities housed in those towns are also quite different. They both claim a role as the "flagship" universities of their states, but otherwise they work in very different ways. UVa can be much more of a "snob school" than UF can get away with being, due to varying regulations and attachments that require them to take students that wouldn't get into UVa. Partly as a result, UF is larger. In fact, it is (blank)ing huge. I had no idea when I moved here how large it had become. It's like a freakin' educational Death Star.

But the two towns and universities housed in them have a few slight similarities. Both Charlottesville and Gainesville (as do many university towns) sit in pronounced contrast to the parts of their states immediately surrounding them in terms of educational level as well as social and political attitudes. But other than that, there really isn't anything in Gainesville that should set off the firestorm that happened in Charlottesville, right? No renamed park or removed statue...

Oh. Forgot about "Old Joe."

That's a statue that currently stands on the grounds of the local county administration building, placed  in 1904, and now a source of disagreement. The most recent move by the local county authorities has been to offer it to an area United Daughters of the Confederacy group (the organization that originally placed the statue) who would then be responsible for its removal from public property (supposedly it might be moved to an area with a number of graves of Confederate soldiers).

For the moment this resolution seems to have held sway. But who knows? What if some copycat bunch of hooded sheets decides to cause trouble when the time for removal arrives? So, it's not impossible for something to happen.

And if it does I have no choice to be on the front line.

That's part of the call for the mainline right now. If we're really going to live up to the gospel we claim, we have to been there when the likes of this weekend's marauders in Charlottesville show up in our towns seeking to commit racial terrorism under the guise of "free speech." We have to stand with those being terrorized, even (dare I say especially) if it's risky. We cannot pretend that racists and those hated and hunted by racists are somehow equally at fault.

Furthermore, we have to take our cues from the ones hated and hunted by those racists, the people of color who face this threat basically for waking up in the morning. It's not our job to come in and save the day; it's our job to be there with the ones who are under threat.

A lot of mainline pastors, including some old seminary classmates and friends, did this beautifully this weekend in Charlottesville. Singing "This Little Light of Mine." Praying and singing and worshiping God. Together. And then standing in the way of the racists.

Not every individual is physically capable of that kind of literal standing on the front line. But the mainline really has to, individually but even more collectively, be there with the ones who really do know what persecution is. Otherwise we might as well just go ahead and die off like all those evangelicals keep saying we're gonna do.