Exploring the Connections

Different Angles on Race

Though I came across these three contributions too late to recommend them to participants in this Sunday morning's conversation (Exploring the Connections/ Christian Social Witness/Brides Room - 10:00 AM), I thought it worthwhile to share their whereabouts. If they stir up some interest, we might find time to discuss them before the Fall class ends.

1. The End of White America (Hua Hsu. The Atlantic, January/February, 2009)

The preface to this longish article reads:

The election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of "whiteness" as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when white is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?

I suspect that those of us with teenagers in our life-space will be less shocked by the article than its title and preface might suggest.

2. THEOOZE.TV - conversation in motion

Spencer Burke & Efrem Smith: Can The Church Become Post-Racial? (video)

3. Post-Racialism or Targeted Universalism? john a. powell (The Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University and Executive Director, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Ohio State University.

Don't be put off by the umpteen million footnotes, and the academic style of this long article. It is worth ploughing through a time or two. I found it very helpful as an aid in untangling the compressed arguments of both 'conservatives' and 'liberals'—helpful enough to promise myself that I'll re-read it several times in the future.

Rationality and faith need each other, says Williams

Ekklesia News Service, Sept 15, 2009

The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that the recent record of a purely rationalistic and secularist approach to intellectual and academic life has sold short both the meaning of rationality and the broad human values nurtured by critical faith.

Dr Rowan Williams' remarks came as part of a week-long visit to Japan for the 150th anniversary celebrations of the Anglican Church there.

He received an honorary doctorate in humanities on the trip, and gave a lecture to students and academics at Rikkyo Gaukin University. The university is a Christian foundation.

He declared: "[T]he sober testimony of the twentieth century is that the rationality of secular thinking is no guarantee of universal understanding and reconciliation. A rationality that has brought us into the age of nuclear weaponry and global economic meltdown invites some sharp questions, to put it mildly."

Dr Williams continued: "However secular our age likes to think it is, the disastrous results of exploitative habits and of financial obsession bring people back to the recognition that they need the element of the sacred in their lives – in the sense that they need the freedom to respond to the beautiful and the puzzling and the tragic, to all the things that we do not have the power to manage."

"It is in this sense that a religiously grounded education is a deeply 'reasonable' one. It communicates the skills we need to inhabit the real world. That may sound a little strange at first. So often, 'living in the real world' is a phrase that people use when they want to justify ruthless competition, mistrust, low expectations. But the reality around us is not simply one of menace and uncertainty, a place in which the other is always a source of anxiety. It is a place that nourishes us and keeps us alive – through material processes and through human community, from family to society."

He said a purely functional account of education runs the risk of missing the true nature of life: "Relating to God requires of us a radical acceptance of the fact that we are dependent beings, that we always stand on the edge of mysteries we cannot fathom, and that the true direction of our lives is not necessarily what our own unexamined and selfish ambition might suggest. Relating to God creates in us the habits of silence and listening, the willingness to be questioned and to question ourselves. Specifically for Christians, relating to God means growing into the role of a child of God, called to maturity, to a life in which dependence and creativity go side by side, inseparably."

Dr Williams argued that the need to develop a new academic philosophy in relation to the environment is an example of how a rational approach could require urgent and radical change.

He said: "[I]f we are seeking to shape a humanity that is genuinely rational, we need to question a very great deal of what has passed as rationality in our habits of production and consumption for the last century. This is not simply about how we avoid catastrophe, though that is serious enough; it is also about what kinds of relationship with the world we live in are harmonious and proper, respectful of the material environment in a way that is in accord with the character and purpose of the creator."

Religion, he declared, must not mirror the tendency of its critics to be inflexibly dogmatic: "It is one of the most poisonously foolish dogmas of modern intellectual life that reducing human motivation and reflection to a pattern of determinism, whether material or psychological, is a mark of liberation and maturity."

"[T]he tragedy is that often the response to this from some kinds of modern religiousness has been the equally poisonous dogma that the critical and sceptical sciences of Darwin, Marx or Freud and their countless followers and revisers must be regarded as destructive of faith and so to be reviled and rejected."

Dr Williams said that the place of Christianity in humanistic education was not the propagation of faith but the nurturing of an academic environment in which true rational exploration could be developed.

What should distinguish a Christian institution, he said, is not so much faith statements as the outworking of these in the style and ethos of a community. "If the whole tone of the institution is one that gives a message that risks are worth taking because there is an ultimate reality to be trusted, that is where the meaning of faith is made plain. 'Faith-based' education is education in the mixture of realism or provisionality with the courage to act, discover and create, to make relations and mend them."

Leading and following

Morning Reflection
Monday, February 18, 2008

Today's Readings for the Daily Office (Prayer Book, p. 953)
Psalms 56, 57, [58] (morning)        64, 65 (evening)
Genesis 41:46-57
1 Corinthians 4:8-20(21)
Mark 3:7-19a

In each of our readings today there is something about the relationships between leader and followers, principal and delegate. 

Joseph rises to a status of great authority in the Pharaoh's government.  We see him leading a bureaucratic agency of the government, overseeing a state program to collect, preserve and store surplus produce during seven years of fruitful harvest.  He has seen in a dream (an economic forecast?) that there will be a prolonged downturn in agricultural production, and he is leading the planning for that eventuality.

I'm a fan of good government.  There are things that only government can do well.  I want government that seeks to promote the well-being of its citizens and respond to those needs that aren't going to be covered in a profit-driven economy.  Good government can think long-term and oversee larger cooperative projects for the corporate good.  But that requires that those who work in government be more committed to service than to power, to be more statesmen than politicians.  You can almost gauge the health or brokenness of a culture by measuring its leaders place on the service-power continuum.  Later in this story we'll see the corruption of Joseph's plan as he consolidates Pharaoh's power, trading food for money, land and eventually freedom, enslaving large groups of hungry Egyptians and neighbors.  Ambitious, power-driven leaders spawn destructive followers.

Paul complains of the arrogance of his "children" in the congregation at Corinth.  He is calling them away from their smug comforts and encouraging them to follow his lead.  He has sacrificed to be the servant of Christ in service to God's people.  He tells them to follow his path of humility and service -- that is the source of true power.  Power comes from God and is manifest in faithful discipleship.  Paul wants to see some reform in the Corinthian church.

And today we see Jesus calling the twelve.  First we see the authority of his ministry.  He travels throughout the Jewish regions, attracting multitudes that are growing beyond one man's management.  His work is healing, exorcism and teaching.  So he appoints the twelve and names them "apostles," a Greek term for messenger.  He delegates them to act in his behalf -- healing, exorcising, and proclaiming the message, first in Israel.  Later he will draw them into the same ministries outside Israel.

We've been given the same appointment.  We are Christ's representatives in our day.  He has given us the message to share and the same ministry of healing and reconciliation.  We are to face boldly the demons of our day, to expose them to the light and strip them of their power.  We are to be the whistleblowers and the people who speak truth to power.  If we do our job well, we'll probably get in as much trouble as Jesus and his disciples did -- religious and political trouble.  The temptation is to kiss up to power, as Joseph eventually did, or to drift toward smug comforts, like the congregation in Corinth. 

For good to happen we need good leaders and good followers.  Servant leadership is the model Jesus gives us.  We are all going to follow someone and some thing.  Will it be in the service of service or in the service of power?  That is a challenge each of us must face.

-- Lowell

The Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

There's far more to Islam than a teddy

by Ed Husain
The Observer, December 2, 2007

Twenty out of 23 children chose to name their class teddy bear Muhammad. A rather sweet gesture, I think. But no. In ultra-sensitive Sudan, parents and a staff member decided to complain against what they saw as a white, female, infidel British teacher insulting their religion. What was an innocent classroom gesture was, yet again, hijacked by Muslim extremists to threats of floggings and demands of shooting after Friday prayers in Khartoum last week.

Last year, it was the Danish cartoons. This year it is a teddy bear. What next? And why this repeated madness? For me, it is not about the possible offence taken at perceived negative portrayals of Islamic symbols, but the repeated calls for death, lashings and stoning. The medieval, literalist mindset that fails to comprehend the inhumane nature of these brutal and barbaric acts, often carried out against the defenceless, is the crux of the matter.

The Western media are right to hold a mirror to educated Muslims by highlighting these outdated practices. Only a week ago, a young Saudi gang rape victim, rather than being counselled and loved, was sentenced to 200 lashes. If the young lady had been a wealthy Saudi with powerful connections, she would have escaped her punishment. Similarly, if Gillian Gibson had not been British, there would not have been an outcry. When Muslims want to appear sanctimonious about newspaper cartoons or a teddy bear, I ask where are the mass protests against the Saudi Wahhabite destruction of the birthplace of Muhammad in Mecca? Or systematic annihilation of Muslim heritage in Medina? Or the organised desecration of the Prophet's family's tombs across Saudi Arabia? We should not be hypocritical in our choice of protest. Mainstream Muslims cannot remain silent as our faith is destroyed by extremists from within, and mocked by agenda-driven, habitual Islam-haters from without. We must have the courage to stand and reclaim our faith.

I write this from a conference in Madrid, a city, like my home, London, that has suffered immensely from the Islamist-jihadist rage. The ubiquitous question here has been: where is the voice of the Muslim majority? Part of the answer is that it is buried in fear of extremist reprisals and concern at breaking ranks with fellow Muslims only to be attacked by fundamentalist atheists for not going far enough.

Last week, I faced former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who levelled exactly that criticism at me. How could I possibly believe? Another renowned British liberal called Islam 'gobbledegook'. Tomorrow, I meet Martin Amis, who has found Islam a convenient whipping boy for all things religious. The contempt for Christianity is just as ferocious. Despite being caught in crossfire between two extremes, I believe in a Muslim tradition, a spiritual path, that can bring harmony between Islam and the West and thereby rescue millions from misery, rigidity and oppression.

If anything, the modern West stems from a Judaeo-Christian-Islamic heritage. More than ever, Western Muslims need to stop viewing the world through bipolarised lenses and assert our Western belonging.

The Spanish Muslim jurist, Imam Shatibi, who died in 1388, articulated the aims of the shariah as preservation of life, honour, property, religion and reason. Leading Muslim scholars in the Arab world today compound this classical Islamic approach. That's not to hide the reality of religious scripture, compiled in a world radically different from ours. Just as in Leviticus we find references to stoning sinners, in Muslim scripture there are some unpalatable references. But these are to be seen in the context of their time. What remain valid are the eternal truths that Shatibi, Locke and others enunciated. Our humanity must transcend adherence to scriptural literalism, especially if it leads to mayhem and loss of innocent lives. The whole purpose of religion is to bring order and harmony to our existence.

Islam is not a monolithic entity. Inherent within Muslim tradition is a plurality of thought, practice and reasoning that can help create a genuine Muslim renaissance or tajdid in Arabic. Just as scriptural references to stoning and flogging are cited by countries such as Saudi Arabia as justification for their horrid practices, in these same texts, we find that the Prophet Muhammad reprimanded his followers for stoning a person who attempted to flee. He also condemned those who killed innocent people. By drawing on these lessons, mainstream Muslims must illustrate that compassion, humanity and sense should override scriptural rigidity understood with anger and revenge.

More than any other Muslim community across the world, those of us who were born, raised and educated in the west have access to both cultures: Islam and the west. It is my generation that can bridge the gap between what seem like warring parties. Our arguments carry greater weight in the Muslim East. Western Muslims have a duty to continue developing what is a nascent phenomenon: Western Islam. We have no choice but to find common ground between our faith and our culture, Islam and the West, and then offer an alternative path to our brethren in the Muslim East.

The presence of millions of Muslims in the West is an asset with which we can bring civilisational harmony. But Western Muslims must, in the words of Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, 'build our home together' with fellow citizens of all and no faith. It is our common bond, being human, which comes first. Our future must be a negotiated one. The Koran repeatedly calls us to think, contemplate and reflect. For how much longer will we be the laughing stock of the world? And all over a teddy bear.

· Ed Husain is author of The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left, Penguin Books (U.K), 2007 

Living the Word: The Untouchables

by Maggi Dawn
The Christian Century, October 2, 2007

For Sunday, October 14, Luke 17:11-19

Some years ago I worked in central London with an organization that reached out to people living on the streets. For most, all we could offer was food, clean clothes and a listening ear, but every now and then we met someone who wanted to find a new life. We ran a halfway house with a simple rule of life where a few people at a time could relearn how to live indoors. Such a change is not easy; a few who came to live with us managed the long, difficult process of reintegration, but more than half gave up and returned to life on the streets.

Living closely with people whom many consider untouchable, I learned more than I gave. One thing I've never forgotten was the way that living on the margins led them to reinvent their social values. In a little community under a viaduct near the famous Portobello Road market, I met an aristocrat who had inherited a huge country estate and been educated at one of the finest universities in the land. The pressure led him to abandon his fortune; now he walked the streets with just a few possessions in a supermarket cart, his cut-glass accent the only hint of where he'd  come from. His best friend, however, was a working-class man from the poorest area of Glasgow. He had dropped out of the education system in his early teens and come to London to seek his fortune. The likelihood of these men becoming close friends in normal society was slim, but in the community under the viaduct, the Scotsman and the English lord found that their differences were immaterial compared to their common purpose—surviving on the streets in a cold climate.

Luke tells us about another community on the margins. Before the advent of modem medicine there were leper colonies on the edges of towns, where the rest of society kept them for fear of contagion. But Luke tells of ten lepers who hoped against hope for healing from the dread disease that ate away at their bodies and consumed their souls. When they heard that Jesus the miracle worker was nearby, they came as close as they dared and called out. Jesus told them to go to the priests, and along the way they found themselves healed.

Often we focus on the one man who came back as an illustration of healing, faith, worship and salvation in the life of the individual. But there's an equally interesting undercurrent. Why did Jesus send the lepers to the priests? Why not heal them on the spot? I think the answer has to do with prejudice, and the way we exclude people from society.

In first-century Israel, priests not only diagnosed leprosy, but also declared a leper ritually unclean. By sending the ten to the priests, Jesus raised the possibility that they would not only be healed but also declared pure, which was essential if they were to reintegrate into society. The twist in the tale is that this particular leper colony was near a village on the border between Galilee and Samaria, communities that were acrimoniously divided. Jews considered all Samaritans ritually unclean, and would travel miles out of their way to avoid having any contact with them.

Stigmatization is a great leveler: while they were ill the ten lepers had discovered that which side of the border you were from meant nothing if you had leprosy. Like my friends under the viaduct, whose differences of class and education were wiped away by the taboo of homeless ness, these ten lepers had become untouchables and had forged their own community on the margins. But once they were healed, the old divisions kicked into play again. Ten were healed, but only nine would be accepted; the tenth would always be unclean because he was a Samari­tan. He knew that barriers to joining society on the Galilean side of the border ran far deeper than leprosy. Perhaps that's why he didn't bother with the priests but turned back to find Jesus.

It was only to the Samaritan that Jesus said, "Your faith has made you well." Maybe Jesus was talking about a different kind of wellness. Maybe he meant that deep-seated human divisions are a much more serious malady than even leprosy-that our souls can be far sicker than our bodies and yet most of us do nothing to heal the breach. Maybe he wasn't commenting on the attitude of the nine who didn't return as much as on the system that would accept them' and reject the Samaritan.

We'll never know exactly what Jesus meant. But the chal­lenge to our concept of the gospel and faith and healing is that they are not merely gifts for the individual, but bring consequences and responsibilities. Jesus healed with compassion and generosity, but he also drew people's attention from their own problems to the bigger picture. We are healed not to stay the same, but to live differently, breaking down divisions in society that exclude people because of their nationality, gender, religion or education.

Where do we place borders that cannot be crossed? Whom do we think of as untouchable because they come from cultural and religious backgrounds that we fear or despise through ignorance or misinformation? 'Where are the nine?" asked Jesus. The nine were right back where they came from, safely on the right side of the border, healed of their exterior problems but locked back into their prejudices. Only one, through faith, became well in the broader sense of the word, realized his freedom and walked away from prejudice. He knew that under a viaduct, an aristocrat can be best friends with a man from the tenements.

Maggi Dawn is chaplain and fellow in theology at Robinson College in the University of Cambridge UK. Her blog is at www.maggidawn.typepad.com.

We all need the Anglicans right now

From Where I Stand, Sept 17, 2005 - Vol. 5 no. 13
by Joan Chittester, OSB

Blaise Pascal wrote once, "The multitude which is not brought to act as a unity is confusion." But in the same place he wrote immediately thereafter, "That unity which has not its origin in the multitude is tyranny." Translation: The multitude needs unity but unity, to be real, requires the assent of the multitude.

Understanding the conjunction of those two ideas -- confusion in the face of uncertainty and tyranny as the substitute for consensus -- may have never been more important than it is right now. If a country, if a religious body, cannot develop a common vision, the chances that they will survive, let alone be effective, are at best low.

That possibility is about to be sorely tested in worldwide Anglicanism. And no one of us need take any comfort in seeing it happen to someone else rather than to us. Yet.

Riven by the internal tension arising over the question of clerical homosexuality among the national churches of the denomination around the world, the delicately structured Anglican Communion, many say, is threatened by schism.

Some would say, "If you don't like it, get out." This "We-are-the-church- crowd" put themselves up as norms of the faith. Those who do not agree with them, who dare to question anything, who open issues deemed by some to be closed for all time, they label "evil" or "dissident" or "unfaithful." Catholics who accepted the notion of separation of church and state, for instance, labored under a shadow of suspicion for years. The loss of the theocratic state after the Protestant Reformation struck a blow at the very theology of power and authority. Not until Vatican II, did the church really accept as theologically acceptable the whole idea of sectarian -- that is, non-theologically aligned -- governments.

The debate over sectarianism may seem almost laughable now, but it was not funny when John F. Kennedy was running for president. The major political question of the time was whether or not a Catholic president could really be trusted to lead a government for the good of all the people, Catholic or not, or be expected to take orders from the pope -- as did the medieval kings before him.

Theology and government are clearly not parallel institutions. They are interactive ones. What affects one will surely affect the other. Which is where Pascal's second insight is the other side of the coin. "Unity that does not have its origin in the multitude is tyranny," he says. Groups themselves, in other words, must have a part in the making of law if the group is to be unified rather than simply repressed.

So the question the Anglican communion is facing for us all right now is a clear one: What happens to a group, to a church, that stands poised to choose either confusion or tyranny, either anarchy or authoritarianism, either unity or uniformity? Are there really only two choices possible at such a moment? Is there nowhere in-between?

The struggle going on inside the Anglican Communion about the episcopal ordination of homosexual priests and the recognition of the homosexual lifestyle as a natural state is not peculiar to Anglicanism. The issue is in the air we breathe. The Anglicans simply got there earlier than most. And so they may well become a model to the rest of us of how to handle such questions. If the rate and kinds of social, biological, scientific and global change continue at the present pace, every religious group may well find itself at the breakpoint between "tradition" and "science" sooner rather than later.

Theological questions driven by new scientific findings, new social realities, new technological possibilities abound. How moral is it to take cells from one person for the treatment of another if all human cells are potentially life generating? Is that the destruction of life? If homosexuality is "natural," meaning biologically configured at birth, why is it immoral for homosexuals to live in homosexual unions -- even if they are bishops? After all, isn't that what we said -- in fact, did -- when we argued "scientifically" that blacks were not fit for ordination because blacks weren't quite as human as whites? And so we kept them out of our seminaries and called ourselves "Christian" for doing it. Without even the grace to blush.

It is not so much how moral we think we are that is the test of a church. Perhaps the measure of our own morality is how certain we have been of our immoral morality across the ages. That should give us caution. We said, at one time, that it was gravely immoral to charge interest on loans, that it was mortally sinful to miss Mass on Sunday, that people could not read books on the Index, that the divorced could not remarry. And we brooked no question on any of these things. People were either in or out, good or bad, religious or not, depending on whether they stood at one end or another of those spectrums.

Clearly, the problem is not that definitions of morality can shift in the light of new information or social reality. The problem is that we don't seem to know how to deal with the questions that precede the new insights. We seem to think that we have only two possible choices: the authoritarianism model, which requires intellectual uniformity and calls it "community" or a kind of intellectual anarchism, which eats away at the very cloth of tradition in a changing world.

The problem is that threatened by change we are more inclined to suppress the prophetic question than we are to find the kind of structures that can release the Spirit, that can lead us beyond unthinking submission while honoring the tradition and testing the spirits.

It's not an easy task. And we have had schisms aplenty to prove it. Catholicism, interestingly enough, has done better at preserving theological differences than we may give it credit for doing. We called the differences "ancient traditions" or ethnic "rites," or "custom," or "the private arena." The church recognized that there were instances or cultures for whom some ideals simply were not true. But those things functioned in a sea of sameness, in cultures essentially monochromatic and in countries basically one-dimensional in language and history.

But now we live in an avalanche of awareness, of cultural interaction, of scientific-technological possibilities. To take too certain a position too quickly can shred groups to pieces now. Churches everywhere are polarized. In a study of churchgoers done in Minnesota in 1983, conservative Catholics and conservative Lutherans had more in common than conservative Catholics and liberal Catholics. But in a social climate like that, how do we maintain the best of the old and admit the best of the new?

Absolutism and judgementalism, insult and downright slander, have poisoned the atmosphere, are making unholy the search, have stifled conversation.

Conservatives, devoted to what they consider unchanging truth, adopt a mantle of fidelity to the past. Liberals, devoted to exploring the moral dimensions of new questions, see themselves as faithful to the future envisioned by Vatican II. But truth is commitment to what's under the changes and renewal is what's devoted to developing a tradition as well as reshaping it. They are not opposites. They are two faces of the same thing and, if we are all to survive together, we must learn to respect one another until the dawn comes and the light shines.

From where I stand, we need those who can develop a model of faith in times of uncertainty in which the tradition is revered and the prophetic is honored. Unless we want to see ourselves go into either tyranny or anarchy, we better pray for the Anglicans so that they can show us how to do that

Coming soon to a church near you

Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB
From Where I Stand: Vol. 5, No. 7
National Catholic Reporter, July 10, 2007

It used to be that if you asked a question about the Catholic church, you got very straightforward answers. No, we did not eat meat on Friday. Yes, we had to go to church every Sunday.

In fact, the answers are getting more confusing all the time. Consider the question of how the newly revised Roman Missal is better than the last, for instance.

They tell us now that Mass texts -- including even hymns -- may not include feminine references to God. And this in a church that has routinely addressed God as Key of David, Door of life, wind, fire, light and dove. God who is also, they tell us, "pure spirit" can never, ever, be seen as 'mother.' Are we to think, then, that even hinting at the notion that the image of God includes the image of women as well as the image of men, as God in Genesis says it does, is dangerous to the faith? Antithetical to the faith? Heresy?

Or, too, we learned that the words of the consecration itself would soon be edited to correct the notion that Jesus came to save "all" -- as we had been taught in the past -- to the idea that Jesus came to save "many." The theological implications of changing from "all" to "many" boggles the mind. Who is it that Jesus did not come to save?

Does such a statement imply again that "only Catholics go to heaven?" And, if read like that by others, is this some kind of subtle retraction of the whole ecumenical movement?

Now, this week, we got the word that the pope himself, contrary to the advice and concerns of the world's bishops, has restored the Tridentine Latin Rite. It is being done, the pope explains, to make reconciliation easier with conservative groups.

But it does not, at the same time, make reconciliation easier with women, who are now pointedly left out of the Eucharistic celebration entirely, certainly in its God-language, even in its pronouns. Nor does it seem to care about reconciliation with Jews who find themselves in the Tridentine Good Friday rite again as "blind" and objects of conversion. It's difficult not to wonder if reconciliation is really what it's all about.

What's more, where, in the intervening years, bishops had to give permission for the celebration of Tridentine masses in the local diocese, the new document requires only that the rite be provided at the request of the laity.

But why the concerns? If some people prefer a Latin mass to an English mass, why not have it?

The answer depends on what you think the Mass has to do with articulating the essence of the Christian faith.

The Latin Mass, for instance, in which the priest celebrates the Eucharist with his back to the people, in a foreign language -- much of it said silently or at best whispered -- makes the congregation, the laity, observers of the rite rather than participants in it.

The celebrant becomes the focal point of the process, the special human being, the one for whom God is a kind of private preserve.

The symbology of a lone celebrant, removed from and independent of the congregation, is clear: ordinary people have no access to God. They are entirely dependent on a special caste of males to contact God for them. They are "not worthy," to receive the host, or as the liturgy says now, even to have Jesus "come under my roof."

The Eucharist in such a setting is certainly not a celebration of the entire community. It is instead a priestly act, a private devotion of both priest and people, which requires for its integrity three "principal parts" alone -- the offertory, the consecration and the communion. The Liturgy of the Word -- the instruction in what it means to live a Gospel life -- is, in the Tridentine Rite, at best, a minor element.

In the Latin mass, the sense of mystery -- of mystique -- the incantation of "heavenly" rather than "vulgar" language in both prayer and music, underscores a theology of transcendence. It lifts a person out of the humdrum, the dusty, the noisy, the crowded chaos of normal life to some other world. It reminds us of the world to come -- beautiful, mystifying, hierarchical, perfumed -- and makes this one distant. It takes us beyond the present, enables us, if only for a while, to "slip the surly bonds of earth" for a world more mystical than mundane.

It privatizes the spiritual life. The Tridentine Mass is a God-and-I liturgy.

The Vatican II liturgy, on the other hand, steeps a person in community, in social concern, in the hard, cold, clear reality of the present. The people and priest pray the Mass together, in common language, with a common theme. They interact with one another. They sing "a new church into being,' non-sexist, inclusive, centered together in the Jesus who walked the dusty roads of Galilee curing the sick, raising the dead, talking to women and inviting the Christian community to do the same.

The Vatican II liturgy grapples with life from the point of view of the distance between life as we know it and life as the gospel defines it for us. It plunges itself into the sanctifying challenges of dailiness.

The Vatican II liturgy carries within it a theology of transformation. It does not seek to create on earth a bit of heaven; it does set out to remind us all of the heaven we seek. It does not attempt to transcend the present. It does seek to transform it. It creates community out of isolates in an isolating society.

There is a power and a beauty in both liturgical traditions, of course. No doubt they both need a bit of the other. Eucharist after all is meant to be both transcendent and transformative. But make no mistake: In their fundamental messages, they present us with more than two different styles of music or two different languages or two different sets of liturgical norms. They present us with two different churches.

The choice between these two different liturgies bring the church to a new crossroads, one more open, more ecumenical, more communal, more earthbound than the other. The question is which one of them is more likely to create the world Jesus models and of which we dream.

There are many more questions ahead of us as a result of this new turn in the liturgical road than simply the effect of such a decree on parish architecture, seminary education, music styles, language acquisition and multiple Mass schedules.

The theological questions that lurk under the incense and are obscured by the language are far more serious than that. They're about what's really good for the church -- ecumenism or ecclesiastical ghettoism, altars and altar rails, mystique or mystery, incarnation as well as divinity, community or private spirituality?

From where I stand, it seems obvious that the Fathers of Vatican Council II knew the implications of the two different Eucharistic styles then and bishops around the world know it still. But their concerns have been ignored. They don't have much to do with it anymore. Now it's up to the laity to decide which church they really want -- and why. Which we choose may well determine the very nature of the church for years to come.

Can we really learn to love people who aren’t like us?

by Jonathan Sachs
The Times (U.K.), June 9, 2007

The humorist Alan Coren was told by his publisher that if he wanted to write a bestseller it should be about sport or pets. So he wrote a book called Golfing for Cats. Today I suspect his publisher would tell him to attack religion. Atheism sells.

First The End of Faith by Sam Harris was a success in the US. Then came Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and A. C. Grayling’s Against all Gods. And now Christopher Hitchens’s God is not Great is high in the charts both sides of the Atlantic.

There have been, of course, various ecclesiastical ripostes, usually that atheism is itself a faith and you can have secular fundamentalists as well as religious ones. This is fine if we enjoy knockabout polemics, but if we are honest, it’s not good enough.

There is a story told about the 1st-century Jewish teacher Yochanan ben Zakkai. A Roman challenged him about a Jewish ritual. Pure superstition, he said. Not so, said the rabbi, and gave him an answer that made sense in terms of his questioner’s beliefs. The Roman went away satisfied. But the rabbi’s disciples said: “You answered him. What will you answer us?”

That is the real question. Atheism does not come from nowhere. Agnosticism and indifference do; people drift, religion ceases to inspire, there are other things to do. Atheism is different. It is a form of protest. Something goes badly wrong in religious life, and people feel moved to write books saying, essentially, “Not in my name”. When that happens, mere apologetics is not enough. When the debate is over, something inside the believer’s soul refuses to stay silent. “You answered him. What will you answer us?”

Secularisation, the great movement of the European mind that began in the 17th century, did not begin because people stopped believing in God. The movement’s intellectual heroes, Newton and Descartes, believed in God very much indeed.

What they lost faith in was the ability of religious people to live peaceably together. Catholics and Protestants had been fighting one another across Europe in what Hobbes called “the war of every man against every man”. There had to be another way. So, first science, then philosophy, politics and culture were rebuilt on foundations that did not depend on doctrine or dogma but instead on experiment and observation, reason and inference.

As then, so now. Sunni and Shia fight in the Middle East, as do Muslims and Hindus in Kashmir, Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka, and Muslims and Jews in Israel. Two things have happened in our postmodern, postCold War constellation. Religion, often as the outer clothing of ethnicity, has returned to the political arena. And religions still do not know how to live together in peace.

In one sense, then, we have been here before. But in another, we haven’t. That’s not just because our powers of destruction have grown, but because global communications technology means that conflict anywhere can be broadcast everywhere. Battles being fought thousands of miles away are transmitted throughout the world, creating tensions in university campuses, charities and churches, polarising opinion, wrecking friendships and dividing societies.

That’s when people start writing books about atheism and they become bestsellers. For the great strength of religion is that it creates communities, and its great weakness is that it divides communities. The two go hand in hand. For every “us” there is a “them”, and the stronger the togetherness within, the deeper the estrangement without. What binds also separates. It always did.

The real battle, and it applies to secular and religious alike, is: can we love, not hate, the people not like us? We are tribal animals. We are hardwired for conflict. Sociobiologists call this genetic coding, Christians, original sin, Jews, the evil inclination. The belief that unites us is that instinct is not the final word. Selfish genes can produce selfless people. Is that miracle or mere chance? Loving creator or blind watchmaker? That is an important question. But the urgent one is: can we, believer and nonbeliever, join hands to become agents for peace against those who seek to globalise war?

Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

Walter Brueggemann to be in Houston

Dr. Brueggemann will give two lectures on the topic: Resources for Living: Consumerism and the Biblical Narrative at Memorial Drive Methodist Church on February 26-27.

For full details, download the .pdf file below
Download mdumc_walter_brueggemann.pdf

Not being enslaved by life as advertised

by Simon Barrow
Co-Director, Ekklesia News Service
December 3. 2006

One of the key sacraments of cultural life in early twenty-first century Britain is ‘the makeover’. TV shows love it, high street stores bank on it, and people who feel otherwise rotten about themselves long for it – a new look, a new style and a new image.

But while accessories (clothes, homes, gadgets, nips and tucks) are sold to us as symbols of newfound freedom, often they just mark us out as brand-loyal. They are fashioned, traded and adjudicated by a system of exchange-values shaped by those with the biggest leverage in the marketplace.

Even rebellion can be co-opted into the makeover economy. Remember punk in the late ‘70s? It started out as a protest against received norms, and within a short period of time it had become a new set of social rules and a new line in fashionable products.

Those who share in the worship of the church are, believe it or not, raising profound questions about the anxiety that lies behind a consumer-based makeover mentality.

Through ritual expression and scriptural subversion they are imperilling the self-image given to then through a marketised culture - allowing their identity to be reshaped as followers of Jesus, instead. Well, they are if what is going on in church is any good.

In St Matthew’s Gospel (10.25b), Jesus is recorded as declaring: “The disciple should be like the teacher, and the servant like the master. If they have called the head of the house Beelzebul [prince of devils], how much more will they malign those of his household?”

The purpose of this tough passage is to provide what these days we might call a ‘product warning’ about the Gospel. It offers an unsentimental picture of what is at stake in belonging to Jesus’ alternative community, the costs it entails, and the confrontations it will create – not least among ‘the religious’.

What Jesus is saying, in essence, is that if we are to be freed from the kind of slavery that masks itself as normality in the world at large, we need to ‘made over’ into a community held together by a very different self-understanding to that which sells itself as instant freedom.

This is dangerous territory. In order to grasp what he’s getting at, we need first to look back at the society behind the text, and to explore some calamitous misunderstandings of a Gospel which announces that “service is perfect liberty” (to use St Paul’s phrase).

Christian faith was itself born into an age of slavery, that of the Roman Empire. It has been estimated that there were 60 million enforced labourers and household slaves across the Emperor’s domain at the time of Jesus. A good percentage of a much smaller known world population, in other words.

As with the debt-slavery of many nations today, captivity in first century Palestine was as much economic as it was political. Alongside conscription, the unsupportable newborns of poor families were picked up as slaves (foundlings). Freeborn people also sold themselves into long-term servitude because of un-payable obligations taken on to survive. And the Empire generally fed itself on cheap labour.

Moreover, the individual slave was wholly dependent upon the status and disposition of the master. This is the immediate backdrop to Jesus’ remarks in Matthew. The Roman system treated slaves as non-citizens with no legal standing. The Greek tradition saw them as inferior and unworthy.

Meanwhile the whole Jewish people were subject to harsh Imperial rule. Yet at the same time they also employed slavery in the running of the Jerusalem Temple and in controlling some disenfranchised gentiles. So the slave mentality was all encompassing. How, then, did Jesus respond to it, and what was his alternative?

First, it seems that he bypassed those considerable parts of his own religious tradition that justified slavery as a divinely sanctioned right of punishment and expropriation– in Exodus, Leviticus and Judges/Joshua, for example.

It has been said that he was silent on the matter of slavery as a political institution, but his own practice declared where he stood. And his identification with the prophets placed him in tension with kingly politics.

Instead, Jesus says that the pupil should be alike to the teacher, and the servant alike to the master. It isn’t a matter of superior or inferior. It’s about refiguring conventional relations. Indeed, curiously for some of his listeners perhaps, he begins by pointing out – in the face of those shocked that his followers broke the restrictive rules of table-fellowship – that slaves are not actually superior to their masters. Just in case anyone had got the wrong idea about all this levelling!

By paralleling the servant-master relationship with the disciple-rabbi one, Jesus was, significantly, reminding his hearers that enforced servitude was actually frowned on by another dimension of Jewish faith (recorded in Leviticus 25.55), one that demanded mutuality among the people under the rule of the God who had delivered them from slavery in Egypt. (Sadly they didn’t extend this ethic beyond their tribal boundaries, but it was a start).

Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus radicalises his alternative vision by declaring that in the household where people are kindred with God they will not lord-it over one another. “It shall not be so among you”. He also blesses the cursed, touches the unclean, and takes upon himself the yoke of slavery that had been imposed on them.

It is in this context that the hard consequences of Jesus’ much more than skin-deep makeover start to come into view. We are all in this together, he says. But watch out. If they call me, your leader, Beelezebul (prince of devils) for healing the sick and sharing food with outcasts, imagine what they’ll say to you? Why the whole household will be considered perverted.

The name Beelezebul, we should note, seems to be the New Testament’s preserved word for the great Baal of Syria, ‘the Lord of the Lofty Mansion’ as one rendition has it. Much more than some trivial local deity, Baal is the archetypal traditional slave owner – and therefore the opposite of who Jesus, God’s person, turns out to be.

But some sections of Jesus’ traditional community seemed unable to distinguish the suffering servant’s code of life from the Baal’s code of death. They condemned Jesus’ rule-breaking healthcare system that gave priority to those with no authorised status in Temple religion. Instead, it seems, they wanted to uphold an interpretation of the Law that maintained their own power and kept others in a condition of servility.

For this reason, Jesus warns would-be followers that his kind of kinship will bring division – even setting family against family. Foes of God’s table-tuning new order are found deep in the household that is called to model it, he says. There can be no easy peace in the face of such enmity. The faithful are those prepared to share the burden of the cross with Jesus, not dump it on others. This involves sacrifice. Crucifixion, remember, is the punishment of a slave-owning system against those who defy it.

The glory of the Gospel is the possibility of a community redeemed from enslavement to the world by the voluntary submission of baptism (as Paul reminds us). In the act of being received into Christ’s death and resurrection we are changed into people who can reclaim Hagar’s rejected son as a source of blessing in his own right (not simply as an incidental offshoot of Abraham). We become persons whose identity is forged through redeemed relationships of costly service rather than worldly domination.

The abiding tragedy in all this, however, is that Christians often prefer the security of the old master-slave pattern, and will fight vigorously to preserve an understanding of God as the one who upholds it, not noticing or caring about its victims ‘outside the gate’ – even though Jesus is there with them.

That is certainly true in Christian history, where Matthew 10. 24-25 (and many other verses in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures) have been used by self-proclaimed Bible-believers to justify the horrors of actual slavery for some eighteen centuries. Meanwhile key figures in the abolitionist movement were portrayed as undermining biblical faith for refusing a surface interpretation that seemed to them to endorse the slave system. (1)

Aware of the power of those who use an inflexible rendering of the tradition to shore up their own position at the expense what the Gospel calls the last, the least and the lost, Jesus told his followers (in Matthew 16) to watch out for the yeast of the Sadducees and the Pharisees – the growth agent of the powerful. (In St Mark it is the yeast of Herod’s party, highlighting the collusion between the religious and political systems.)

Instead Jesus invited people into small gatherings of the odd – bound together by forgiveness, enemy-loving, foot-washing, costly service, anti-discriminatory meal-sharing and other counter-cultural practices which are far from easy in a world that regards them either as weak or subversive.

Some 20 years after Jesus’ Passion, in a city in Syria, Jews and pagans (the people originally shaped by Baal) were eating together on a regular basis. A fresh experience of God through each other had led those men and women to new patterns of behaviour and a different sense of identity. Paul approvingly describes the makeover of those Christians in Antioch in his Letter to the Galatians. (2)

Not surprisingly what was happening proved a scandal to the most conservative elements in the church. You will recall that delegations were sent from Jerusalem asking Paul, and the Christian communities he was encouraging, to desist from such plainly unscriptural actions.

Paul knew that the Gospel was alive in this changed behaviour, but he had scant biblical warrant for his decision to support mixed dining with pagans. Our Gospels were not available at that time. Jesus’ radical table fellowship had not extended beyond his own people, so the argument would certainly have been that this did not overturn the wider restrictions of the tradition.

So Paul’s opponents appeared to have all the best arguments from tradition and scripture. But the Apostle was sure that the experience of God among pagans turning to Jesus Christ matched what he and the Jewish Christians had experienced. This was God’s transforming work, and it was not to be denied.

What this illustrates is that the alternative to the kind of Christian conservatism that would restrict the power of God in the name of a superficial orthodoxy is not a rejection of the tradition, but a re-appropriation of it at a much deeper level, as a lived reality founded on the economy of the Spirit.

In facing this challenge maybe we Christians could begin by asking ourselves how we might give further practical expression to what I would call ‘the strange new peoplehood of God’ which Jesus generates in the presence of those who identify with him – and which for the early Christians proved an alternative source of growth in the face of a culture of conformity. For it is this that lies at the heart of the calling of the Gospel.

NOTES

This article is adapted from a sermon first preached at St Stephen’s, Exeter.

1. It is hard not to see a parallel with the churches’ current turmoil over human sexuality, where ‘the plain teaching of scripture’ is being used as a blunderbuss in the face of deeper interpretations of the transformed meaning and impact of the Gospel.

2. I am grateful to Christopher Rowland of the University of Oxford for reminding me about this connection. My four paragraphs on Antioch are reworked from his in an article he wrote for The Guardian newspaper in 2003. See also: Seeking a better way together.

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) is co-director of Ekklesia. His background is in journalism, adult education, politics and theology, and his weblog is: http://faithinsociety.blogspot.com