Not a Snack

This the second in a multi-part series of articles evoked by my consideration and study of the Sacraments, prompted by a meeting of the Missouri Mid-South Conference Creative Faith Project (see also the previous article, "Water Wonders"). It is not intended to provide a definitive position for me or my church about what the Sacraments mean or ought to mean for Christians today. Nor is it intended to delimit the administration of the Sacraments. I encourage readers to respond with comments and questions for further discussion and consideration.

Here's something I thought might be of interest to my friends on the Creative Faith Project.

I plan to use this piece as a part of the ritual for tomorrow night's Sunday Night Light worship service at my church (6pm in the William E. Sample chapel, following dinner at 5 provided by Goodstock Soup in the Inglis Room).

I'd love to know your thoughts upon viewing it, in light of our conversation concerning the sacraments, a few weeks ago.  The song played in the background hasn't my favorite theology residing in it, so please turn down the sound if you find ransom christology objectionable.

I'd taken quite a stand in the meeting about the idea that the Eucharist could be administered as anything other than bread and wine (or, perhaps, a gluten-free alternative and grape juice, as we serve it at First - Webster Groves). Others had suggested that Twinkies and orange drink, or cookies and milk might be substituted for children.

"This is a meal we're talking about here," I insisted, "not a snack!" Later, initiating the ritual for communion, I said, "This is the meal by which all other meals are judged."

Incasts (sermon, February 12, 2012 - unedited version)

[SCRIPTURES for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany]

Listen to the audio of this sermon, by clicking here (*.mp3 file)!

Last week, our signboard created something of a sensation. I like to say that it "went a little bit viral."

In solidarity with the students at Clayton High School who were going to be picketed on Monday, February 6, by the Westboro Baptist Church, I posted a saying I had seen on a placard from a similar counter-protest of WBC, last summer at the University of Nevada - Las Vegas. The message on one side of each of our two signboards (on Elm and Lockwood Avenues), now reads:

As I went out to the parking lot to take that photo, I couldn't help but notice a passerby had pulled into the lot to take a picture of it too.

I don't know whether it was his photograph that made it onto the internet, but on Tuesday of last week, the office received a telephone call from an anonymous caller saying that a photo of the sign had been uploaded to imgur.com and was generating quite a favorable response on the Atheism section of reddit.com.

And it sure was! Altogether, those two websites report 530,583 views on imgur.com; 456 comments on reddit.com’s “atheism” page.  Since last Sunday, we have registered 11 new "likes" on our Facebook page, mostly from strangers.  A separate posting of the photo on the Facebook page (and if I offend anyone by the name of the page, please excuse me:) "We survived Bush. You will survive Obama." now registers over 2,600 "likes" and 747 "shares."

And all of this comes with thanks to the Westboro Baptist Church for showing up at Clayton High School, this past Monday. 

I wish Fred Phelps was around, so I could give him a proper thank you and a smooch.

OK, so I don't really want to smooch Fred Phelps. Furthermore, I'm sure he wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of a smooch from me.

Which reminds me of a story, about another couple of guys who had some difficulty liking each other...

The story of General Naaman and the Prophet Elisha, believe me, is sort of a negative example of the kind of thing I want to talk to you about, this morning.

To a certain extent, I’d like to offer some thoughts on how to build community, but the real emphasis is about the hazards of building a community of faith together.

And the Prophet Elisha here pretty clearly has no presumptions about building community.  He does not want to build community.  As a matter of fact, it’s pretty clear that he has no real interest even in healing a sick man, though that is what he is doing.

Naaman washes in the Jordan,
from ArtBible.com

Naaman was an enemy, after all, to Elisha and to anyone who might have been hearing or telling this story the first few times it went around.  When King Jehoram of Israel makes his complaint that Ben-Hadad King of Aram has requested his holy man to cleanse Ben-Hadad’s general, it is because Jehoram perceives an attempt at provocation to a war that he is not ready to fight.

Furthermore, neither Naaman nor Ben-Hadad desires to soften international relations.  Both of them just want for the general to be better, so that he does not lose face (literally) before his soldiers and thereby diminish the strength and fighting capacity of an army centered on him and his prowess as a warrior.

Basically, nobody here wants the annoyance of handling anything that’s in front of them to be done.

No compassion.

No real caring.

Just a lot of power being bandied about: Naaman and Ben-Hadad bandying military power, Jehoram political power, and Elisha (of course) the power of God.  And none of this power, power to be trifled with.

By contrast there is Jesus in the story related by the gospel according to Mark, today – the occasion in that gospel in which the Christ the healer cleanses a person of leprosy.

“If you choose, you can make me clean,” says the leper, which evokes some sort of passionate response in Jesus.  In some early copies of Mark, the Greek word for Jesus’ reaction means literally, moved with pity.  In others, the word implies  moved with anger.  Suffice it to say, Jesus was moved by the statement of the ritually unclean person.

Jesus heals a leper
Pen and ink drawing; 14.7 x 17.2 cm; c. 1655-60
Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet

Next, Jesus does something truly, truly shocking.  He touches another human being, one with leprosy.

This is a big issue.  You have to understand: this is an ENORMOUS issue!  You don’t touch unclean people!  You just don’t!  If you touch someone unclean, you become unclean too – literally, guilty, and you have to report it to a priest and perform the appropriate sacrifices, and likely you’ll have to spend some time in isolation.  And who, but especially what prophet, can afford that!

So, Jesus shouldn’t be touching him.

Let alone the fact that maybe it wasn’t pity or compassion, but anger, that was the motivation for him touching the guy in the first place… and all because the guy had said, “If you choose to…”

I mean, what kind of attitude is that!  “If you choose to…”  C’mon, buddy, what is with that!  No wonder it’s confusing, to try and figure out whether Jesus was motivated by pity or anger to cleanse you!  You seem to be dealing with a pretty serious dose of self-pity, here!

How disappointing.

In most cases, it always seems, Jesus performs some healing, and tells the person, “Your faith has made you well.”

Not this time, though: this guy is no paragon of faithfulness.  He’s like the psalmist in the middle of Psalm 30, wallowing in self-pity and seeming at least to accuse God of the miserable circumstances being dealt with:

to the holy ONE I made supplication:
“What profit is there in my death
      if I go down to the Pit?
Will the dust praise you?
     Will it tell of your faithfulness?” (Psalm 30:8b-9)

Something like, “You show me your faithfulness, and I’ll show you mine,” the guy is saying.

I would not have been inclined to help this guy out.  There’s just too much on the line.  (Don’t look at me like that.  You think you would want to help him out?  He’s not down on his luck; he’s down on his life!)

It’s Boy Scout Sunday, today, and that time in which we annually celebrate the giftedness of youth involved in scouting, especially the young men who meet with their troop here at the church.  “Be prepared,” is their motto.  Be prepared.

And there certainly is much to be prepared for, when you are part of a movement founded by a man who would touch ritually unclean people without any compunction whatsoever.  One of the biggest circumstances to be prepared for, in fact, is the reality that you will be coming into contact – regularly! – with some pretty unpleasant people… present company excepted, of course!

And when you come into contact with all those other people, which is pretty often, you’d best be ready.  They’ll be wanting your help out of the trouble that they’re in… likely as not, trouble that they deserve, or that they don’t deserve but won’t take the advice to avoid.

Everybody is going to want a piece of you, because you have managed either to steer your way clear, or to work your way out, of the trouble they’re in.  What they don’t know is how much insight you have accumulated or gleaned along the way, and heeded, so as to avoid or step clear of the trouble they’re in.  Because the most problematic part about being part of a religion the founding statement of which was, “Repent and believe in the good news,” (Mark 1:15) is the fact that so very few people are actually willing to change their ways that need changing!

Maybe they’re just not able to change.  I mean, it is not as though our society makes change easy.  We like our slots, our pigeon-holes, our categories, our prejudices; they’re so informative about other people!  So often, poor people aren’t poor because they have brought it upon themselves or because they deserve it, but because their expectations of themselves and what they can achieve are so low!  They know society isn’t going to respect them and their efforts, so why try!

On this Racial Justice Sunday in our denomination, it is on the one hand simple enough to look about and learn the achievements beyond expectations of the host of African American and Asian and Pacific Islander and Latino and Native American people in our country, but it is far more common for us – no matter our ethnic origin or the color of our skin – to presume what any other African, Asian, Islander, Latino, or Native American is going to be like.  And our presumptions are likely as not to be established strongly in our learned expectations.

But this is also Lincoln’s birthday, the natal anniversary of a man who lived by that grand old Republican understanding that the equal creation Jefferson wrote about implies that all should have equal opportunity to assume equal responsibility.  That alone ought to be sufficient motive for any society to heal itself.  Ours hasn’t, but not for lack of opportunity.

And this is Charles Darwin’s birthday, too, you may know – a man whose whole life was dedicated to the understanding that creatures will adapt themselves over time to the environment in which they find themselves, or else will be destroyed by it.

We are our environment.  We create the circumstances in which other find themselves.  We have an inherent obligation, when those others are either defenseless or disarmed, to assure that they may succeed if they desire to.

That will mean, to a certain and very deep extent, that we are saddled with the responsibility to heal the environment in which we have found ourselves – the racial environment, the political environment, the economic environment, the cultural environment.  We are required to do as Jesus did, maybe out of compassion, maybe out of anger, but to do it because we are called to righteousness, justice, and peace.

We have been given a vision of what can be.  Jesus offered it.  He touched others with bold caring.  Those whom society either declared outcast, or rendered outcast, Jesus made (oh, let’s call them) incasts.  The blind, the deaf, the poor, the rich, the lame, the unclean, the stranger, the possessed, and the oppressed – Jesus liberated them all, by touching them.

He didn’t care what others thought.  He knew what God thought of these outcasts.  And he did something about it.

Now, I’m not here to disparage Elisha the man of God.  He was a good man, a fine prophet, a conduit of true power who lived according to that power.  You see, at many points, the Bible itself is not a book or a collection of books, about compassion.  In the case of Second Kings, it’s a book about nationalism and the greatness of the national deity, Yahweh, whose power is for the foreigner, even the enemy, as well as for us.

I’m just not satisfied, in retrospect, that – powerful or not – Elisha took no more initiative to set an example for others, of caring.  True, he did assure that the Aramean General Naaman was healed of his ailment and that Naaman would have no doubt that the God of Israel was the power behind the healing.  But the healing of the skin disease was where the healing ended.  Elisha did nothing to heal the rift between his country and its neighbor; he did nothing to calm the fears of his own king.  In fact, he may have exacerbated both!  Aram and Israel were at war, just a few short years later, according to Second Kings.

No, I much prefer the lesson lived by Jesus, that we need to be prepared to touch the very people we may feel least inclined to, either because of our environment, our history, or our prejudice.

Because the resistance to make contact, the temptation to preserve someone else’s outcast-ness, is entirely our own: “If you choose to,” they will say, “you can make me clean.” And for as much wrong as we may be able to see about them, and for as obvious to us what their right track will be, they at least have the wherewithal to recognize that we have power ready to emanate from us, if we will but make contact… dare to touch.

Water Wonders

This will be the first in a multi-part series of articles evoked by my consideration and study of the Sacraments, during the meeting described below, and since. It is not intended to provide definitive positions for me or my church (well, maybe for me) about what the Sacraments mean or ought to mean for Christians today. Nor is it intended to delimit the administration of the Sacraments. I encourage readers to respond with comments and questions for further discussion and consideration.

I am part of a group from my church, participating in the Creative Faith Project of the Missouri Mid-South Conference of the United Church of Christ.

Led by Associate Conference Minister Marc Wessels and Conference Artist-in-Residence Cliff Aerie, the CFP has convened three meetings of about a dozen churches with groups like my church's during the past six months or so. The third of those meetings took place on Saturday, January 28, at Columbia UCC in Columbia, Missouri.

The CFP has been funded through a grant from the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. For the most part, we consider together enhancements to worship that might be practicable in our local settings, and to share what enhancements have "worked" in our own churches and which have met with some resistance. That makes for a lot of discussion!

The topic for consideration on Saturday, January 30, was The Sacraments, and conversation was invigorating, often provocative, and occasionally controversial.

It might be helpful at this point to explain that, in the United Church of Christ (as in just about every Protestant church), there are two sacraments - Baptism and Eucharist, the latter also known as Communion. In one of our faith traditions - Congregationalism - these two were historically referred to as ordinances, because they were ordained by Jesus himself (baptism in Matthew 28:19; eucharist in 1 Corinthians 11:24-26). And as far as most Protestants are concerned what makes a sacrament a sacrament is Christ's ordinance that practitioners of the faith ought to do these things.

In other Christian groups, but particularly the Roman Catholic Church, there are as many as seven sacraments: Baptism, Confession, Eucharist, Confirmation, Marriage, Holy Orders, and Sacrament of the Sick, which was once known as Last Rites. In each of these cases, they are sacraments because they are "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace mediated by the Holy Spirit of God." In other words, they are occasions when God's presence is incontrovertible and action irreversible.

For most Protestants, especially those in the Reform tradition like the UCC, the sacraments are symbols of grace, though not so much the grace itself. God is present always and everywhere, and what God does cannot have anything added to it or taken away from it, thus making all of life sacramental. But sacraments are another type of thing.

What type of thing are they? the planners of the CFP event asked.

Discussion about Baptism was considerably talk about the ritual, and how it is conducted.

Clergy in the UCC tend to be very, very liberal in their understanding of the person and substance of God and therefore in their use of Trinitarian language. We will often forgo the words "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" in favor of words that are not gender-based. Thus, it is not unusual to find prayers and blessings spoken "in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Comforter" or of "God, Christ, and Spirit." I myself commonly substitute the word "Child" for "Son." Other clergy admitted to calling the Creator, "Father and Mother of us all," though I lean more toward the appellation, "heavenly Parent."

But the command at the end of the gospel according to Matthew is that new Christians should be baptized "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (again, 28:19). And, somewhat with the intention being to prevent "making wrongful use of the name of YHWH your God" (Exodus 20:7), some who are more conservative theologically have determined to use only that invocation as the proper acclamation of the authority by which they baptize. We UCC ministers have found ourselves constrained by tradition and history, also to perform baptisms "in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit," if the baptisms are to be recognized across denominational lines.

Quite honestly, I'm not sure but that this is a good idea. Conformity is not altogether awful, and restrictions on creativity tend often to force greater work to flow. But a feminist and liberationist organization such as ours generally finds the reality simply distasteful, if not offensive.

We all were asked to consider the components of our rituals. Water, obviously I suppose, was the most common component for baptisms, but the location of the water was not necessarily common. I mentioned having performed five immersion baptisms during my career so far - one in the baptistry (pool) of a Baptist church, another in a recreational lake, and three in an Ozark stream. There was also an immersion remembrance of baptism I performed in that stream, but I would guess that the recipient is not referring to it as remembrance but rather as the actual event for him who was baptized as an infant - professional hazard, since you can only be baptized once.

But most baptisms I have done, and most of them that my colleagues talked about, that day, like the one in the photo far above have been performed in the sanctuary of the church I was serving, at its baptismal font, during a worship service. Infants, children, teens, and adults I have customarily sprinkled from a stoop after saying a blessing over water poured from a pitcher or ewer into the basin.

Having the baptisms conducted in a worship service is in keeping with the United Church of Christ emphasis on community. It is in the community that the sacred may most surely be encountered. It was as community that the church was founded. And it is in the community that we live and grow.

So, in the course of a baptismal ritual, the faith community is called upon to support those who say vows. The church responds as a body, "We promise our love, support, and care" of those who are baptized among them.

Though there had been a longstanding, informal practice of UCC clergy performing baptisms outside of Sunday services, the emphasis in recent decades has been toward the reappropriation of the sacrament being as much an element of worship as the sacrament of eucharist has always been.

Strangely, the theological assertion that the Holy Spirit is most assuredly present when the community is gathered, almost eradicates the possibility of performing baptisms elsewhere than in the sanctuary! I say this is strange, because "believers baptizers" will focus on an image of immersion that Paul presents in the letter to the Romans, chapter 6 (vv. 3-5), as the reason why only immersion baptisms should be valid - they emulate death:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (emphasis mine)

Whenever I have performed an immersion baptism, the challenge has come from clergy colleagues, "But how shall the church be acknowledged?" I have always had to respond that I have to count on a broader definition of "church" than the gathering of the people in the sanctuary, and that under such circumstances my congregation - who simply cannot all be at an immersion baptism at once - will have to be represented rather than be in attendance.

Our community cannot trump scripture, not in this case. Lose the right to immerse because the location is inconvenient, and we lose a significant part of our heritage and a powerful symbol of the beginning of faith.

How to Start a Monday Well

I missed getting my daughter up and off to preschool, this morning, but had a pretty good time anyway.

Roger & Jan Barnes, Jane Porchey (at right in white cap), K Wentzien (just beyond Jane), and I headed for Clayton High School at 6:45 a.m. to be part of the counter-protest by that school's Gay/Straight Alliance of students and faculty against Westboro Baptist Church which had announced its intention to protest there, after having had the school on its "radar for quite some time."

The WBC spidey-sense may have been turned on when a son of Fred Phelps spoke at the school, last year, in support of the GSA.

WBC is a confusing organization for many people, protesting not only organizations that support equal rights for all citizens but also military funerals. Claiming homosexuality to be an abomination and an affront to God, they protest the funerals arguing that an American military defending the freedoms established by civil rights groups on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning people therefore deserve protest as well.

At Clayton High, our contingent was happy to meet two more church members - Kin & Peggy Lavender - and members of numerous other Open and Affirming churches. Kirkwood UCC's Pastor Betsy Happel (pictured at left, center) was being interviewed by local TV news when Evangelical (soon to be Peace) UCC's Pastor Katy HawkerSelf and I spotted her. Pastor Jeff Groene of Samuel UCC, Pastor Allen Grothe of Pilgrim Congregational - St. Louis, members of their churches, and members of First Congregational - St. Louis all were there in force (that last bunch identifiable below a sign that read, "First Congregational Supports Clayton HS Students!" I, of course, thanked the bearer of the sign for having represented First Congregational of Webster Groves as well.). Eden Seminary was also well represented by faculty and students in attendance.

The event included quite a range of demonstrators - from our humble selves to a student group silk-screening "Love Conquers Hate" t-shirts as the event went on, and with characters from a Wookie to a Pretty Pony to some fellow skipping in rainbow-striped socks and sneakers wearing a black hooded, full-length cape!

For the students there were commemorative "Love Conquers Hate" t-shirts sold in advance of the day and a "Phelps-A-Thon" website inviting people to make donations per minute based on the length of time the Westboro Baptist protesters either were scheduled to protest or on the length they actually stayed. Both of these efforts were designed to turn a day potentially fraught with hatred into a very positive event in the lives of all those who participated (in the counter-protest, that is).

At 8:04, the crowd of about 1,000 (by my estimate) observed a moment of silence, and the class bells rang to summon students at 8:05. The older members of the group then turned to the students. The young people walked off to their classes to the applause and admiring shouts of an appreciative admirers.

At 8:15, as the protesters departed, the remaining counter-protesters bade them a cheerful farewell with drumming.


God bless Monday.