This is no time to be cute.

When I was a kid, I was taught to sail a boat. It was at a summer camp off the Penobscot Bay in Maine, and we learned the basics of sail-handling, working as a team, and navigation. It was great fun and it was also no time to fool around. One could get clonked on the head by the sail when coming about, or fall in the water, or burn your hands on the line. It was a blast, but one of the lessons I learned at nine years was focus on what one was doing. To be present, attentive, and disciplined.

As one of the wise “old” college-aged camp counselors would say while navigating the sail boat across the bay, “this is no time to be cute.”

I am remembering that lesson because this is one of those strange years when Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine’s Day and when Easter is also April Fool’s Day. This is no time to be cute.

One must tread carefully on Ash Wednesday, because what is called up on this day most centered on penance is at once deeply personal and at the very core to our being and identity. We are acknowledging that we can’t go it alone. We recognize our limitedness. Together we will stare into our mortality. We will face the fact that we are broken. We will recall, I hope, with sadness and chagrin how we mistreat each other and the evil that we do. Ash Wednesday is all about sin.

There. I said it. Ash Wednesday is all about sin.

There is nothing cute about it. But it is very necessary.

And if it feels hard or scary to enter into, it's because the process we are invited into is both. What we are dealing with is both immediate and eternal, a grace that we don't earn but always learning to live.

I have to admit that it took me a while to warm up to the idea of mimicking basketball brackets to think about saints and the nature of holy discipleship as we move through Lent. It's a balancing act, for sure, popularizing contemplation. What we don't want to do is to fall into the temptation to mute the depth, the hurt, the pain, and the implications of human sin with an excess of cleverness.

When I was a clinical chaplain, we'd take ashes around our hospital to patients and their loved ones keeping vigil, This was punctuated by a liturgy in the chapel, and accompanied by an act of confession, absolution, and prayer at each bedside. I was always fascinated that even in the most American Protestant town as you could find, where this hospital was, everyone wanted "in." People would walk up to us and ask for "their" ashes.

Last year, I tried my first "Ashes to Go" at the local park-and-ride and I felt myself leaning over the precipice of the cute. Doing this in the hospital and at the bus stop was, well, different. One was for the sick, and the other was for the busy.

There is a tension between taking pastoral ministry and the Gospel to where people are and the place where it gets cutesy, covering over the rough, uncomfortable spaces. I suspect that this was one reason that Martin Luther got so riled at Tetzel five hundred years ago.

So, I would hope that we avoid the temptation to get cute and draw heart shaped ashes on each other’s heads on Ash Wednesday instead of the smudged cross or to distribute candy along with the Sacrament. And, come Easter morning, it will be interesting to see how we use the most obvious punchline ever handed to every preacher on the planet, but we should probably leave the joke to the professional comics.

Giving in to the temptation of the cute distracts people from the core task of Lent, Holy Week, and the Triduum: that “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).”

We will also miss the irony that while the world is passing out chocolates or playing pranks, it is also revealing-- and trying to cover over-- our deep need for love, our brokenness of heart and spirit, the depth of our division and loneliness, and our powerlessness. One day, the world will be dripping with sentimentality and on the another, crazy with cheap tricks. And on those very days, we will know precisely where the discomfort comes from and can offer God's answer to it.

That doesn’t mean we can’t use the days to talk about what’s really going on. We should never pass up the opportunity to speak about God’s love for us in the person of Jesus. After all, everyone else in the room will be noticing the coincidence along with the preacher. But this is not a moment for cuteness, it is moment of humility. And six week and a half weeks later, it won’t be a time for pranks, but for awe.

God loves us, and through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God is going to the depth of human sin, and into the reality of the human heart, the contrast between what the world values and how God responds could not be plainer. Underneath secular Valentine’s Day is a search for connection and love. And certainly on the first day of April we will discover again that in the resurrection God has turned human wisdom into folly and what will seem foolish to the world is God’s gateway to life.

It might be a good time to crack open the forgotten Inkling, Charles Williams, and think about how romantic love points us to divine love. There might be a chance to think about the contrast (and tension) between God’s foolishness and our own.

See? There’s plenty to contemplate without resorting to heart shaped candies with clever sayings or lame pranks in the hope that we will seem cool. We don’t need to belabor the irony to get the joke.

As for me, I plan to transfer the feasts. We Episcopalians are pretty good at that. I will take my beloved out the weekend before Valentine’s Day, and I will save the foolishness for after Easter dinner (and the liturgical nap).

Jack Chick's mangled witness

Word has come that Jack Chick has died. Maybe you have heard of him, or perhaps read one of his tracts?

From 1964 on, Chick Publications produced little comic style tracts designed to lead a person to Christ in a fire-and-brimstone style. The tightly written and illustrated little vignettes portray a fundamentalist Gospel so stark that even Christianity Today and the Christian Booksellers Association shied away from them as being too harsh and over-simplified.

I first encountered these booklets when I was a teenager in the 1970's. Generally speaking, I found them to be a kind of theological car wreck. Too gruesome to watch, but strangely irresistible. 

They followed me around. Many hours of hospital ministry was spent scooping these (and other) tracts designed to scare the infirm and their loved ones into heaven. I used to keep a bulletin board in my office for such material under the banner "For THIS we had a Reformation?!?"

Every now and then, I will find them left around our parish's soup kitchen, or some kind soul will include them in an unsigned letter designed to correct the theological errors of my preaching or writing. 

My colleague on the Episcopal Cafe, Jon White wrote:

Chick was known for his Chick Tracts; controversial comics rooted in his own fundamentalist Protestant worldview.  His tracts were notoriously anti-Catholic and also attacked Freemasons, Muslims, Jews, and  other groups whose views he deemed contrary to his own evangelical brand of faith.

Chick fell for every religious conspiracy possible; rarely ever relying on actual history or fact...

Los Angeles Magazine reprised a 2003 profile on the news of Mr. Chick's death.

Chick’s most popular book, This Was Your Life!, was published in 1964. At 21 pages, it is a masterpiece of shorthand horror. By the second panel, the Scotch-swilling, ’Vette-driving protagonist has dropped dead of a heart attack. “Review his life!” the Lord commands, and an angel produces a massive CinemaScope screen in the night sky. The man watches scenes from his wasted life, in which he tells filthy stories, leers at blonds (“ummm nice!” he says to himself), and thinks about a ball game in the middle of church.This Was Your Life! created a template—sin, damnation, the possibility of redemption—for scores of future tracts.

The artist’s formula and drawing style have changed little in five decades. When an archivist at the Pasadena Playhouse began rooting through old boxes in the late ’90s, she discovered drawings that he had done in 1948. The single-panel cartoons revealed the same perspiring characters, pop-eyed faces, and 1940s Sunday-comics sensibilities of his current tracts. “He’s not worried about impressing other cartoonists, which is kind of what motivates a lot of cartoonists to pick up their chops a little bit,” says Clowes. “There’s something really interesting about seeing a cartoonist not develop at all.” Art Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, is less kind. “It makes me despair about America,” says Spiegelman, “that there are so many people who read these things.”

Chick’s choice of medium was not that odd—for the 17th and 18th centuries. He comes from a grand tradition of pamphleteers, writers like Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Thomas Paine, who exploited the new technology of movable type to reach the masses in previously unimaginable numbers. Starting in the 1640s, pamphlets about everything from religious reform and phrenology to the injustice of the Stamp Act were everywhere, their authors at the forefront of the world’s first true media boom. In many ways the pamphlets of that era functioned much like today’s Weblogs. Chick, however, has done bloggers one better, finding ways to get his message to places still untouched by the Internet. Missionaries regularly take his tracts into the world’s most isolated regions—and pay Chick for the privilege, at about 14 cents a tract.

Chick's work angered many people, as the comments downstream in The Episcopal Cafe piece illustrates. The Progressive Secular Humanist blog at Patheos was typically unsparing in its criticism of his work, saying: "The comics promoted an extreme conservative Christian message filled with hatred and justified with ignorance."

Anecdotally, at least, I know of as many people driven away from faith in Christ because of these booklets as those drawn towards Him, maybe more. At the very least, it portrays a theology and approach to evangelism as subtle as a sledge hammer breaking up concrete and about as compassionate. 

Christianity Today wrote:

Among comic artists, Chick rose to a level of fascination as one of the bestselling underground publishers in the world. Early news of his death on the site Boing Boing launched Chick’s name as a national trending topic on Twitter on Monday afternoon.

In the late 1990s, a media watchdog site described the secular fascination with Chick: “To some, Chick tracts are American folk art, or even a form of religious pornography, titillating and somewhat dangerous. Chick is the ultimate underground artist: single-minded and self-published, passionately committed to his message without regard for external social forces.”

Chick’s 150-plus tracts center around distinguishing the “saved” from the “lost,” the latter represented by various culture war targets over the years. 

The temptation to schadenfreude is almost irresistible. A lot of people have imagined that Chick has gone straight to hell without passing "Go." These imaginings have been often as cruel as they claimed his tracts were, masking the cruelty as cheap jokes. Like this one:

Over the years, a few Christians have attempted to take on Chick's theology and his narrow view of salvation. Given that the only English Bible he accepted was the King James and his view of the church excluded virtually all other Christian traditions but his how, this could only get one so far. 

It seems to me that maybe the best refutation might come in the form of a little comic book in the style of, well, a Chick Tract. Here is the musing I came up with for a comment I wrote in response to the story on The Episcopal Cafe (full disclosure: I am a member of the Cafe news team):

Personally, and perhaps in response to my own sense of schadenfreude, this is what I imagine might have happened to Jack Chick after his death:

Mr. Chick arrives in heaven and while walking around spots a little booklet on a table and picks it up. Simply drawn and simply written, he is drawn into the story and begins to read.

Titled “Surprise!” the little booklet tells the story of a very religious and zealous man named Jack who, after a lifetime of popularizing a fundamentalist vision of the Gospel, dies and is confronted by God.

In the booklet, we see Jack looking around a wondrous place filled with light. As he enters, he finds the place filled with Catholics who ate “Death Cookies” (along with Orthodox and Coptic Christians, who all look the same anyway), gay couples holding hands, Muslims, Jews, kids who bailed on Sunday school to play Dungeons and Dragons, and even run of the mill agnostics. He looks over and sees Mother Theresa and Ghandi chatting while elsewhere the Pope and Charles Darwin are taking a walk, admiring the view. 

Jack is startled and confused, and asks a passing angel if this is really heaven.Without a word, the angel accompanies Jack to God’s throne where he will receive final judgment.

In the next frame, we see a magnificent but faceless person sitting on the throne drenched in blinding life. The One on the throne begins to describe to Jack that Christ died once for all while we all sinners (Romans 5:6-8) and all along it was God’s will that all God’s sheep would come to the shepherd (John 10:16), even the ones who do not know God’s voice. God tells him that there is no law against a holy life but there are clear signs of holy living for all to see (Galatians 5:22-26). Jack will learn that God desires mercy not sacrifice (Matthew 12:7), love over judgment (Luke 6:37) and wants us do justice and walk with God (Micah 6:8). Finally, in a thunderous voice, God tells Jack that he will be judged according to how he met Christ in the hungry, the naked, the outcast, and the imprisoned (Matthew 25:31-46).

As Jack falls to his knees, shocked at what he has learned, tormented by his failure to heed God’s word, and fearful that he might be cast into eternal torment, he looks up to find Jesus helping him to his feet and welcoming him into a Kingdom more glorious…and more populated…than Jack ever imagined.

In my imagination, I see Mr. Chick finishing the booklet, and looking around, as if for the first time, comprehending the love that drew him in the first place.

At least, that is my prayer.

For those who think that I am being too easy on a person who spewed such hatred and who so badly misrepresented the Gospel to so many, all I can say is that I am mindful of the various ways that I have mangled my own witness in my lifetime. The fact that Chick's reach has outstripped my own doesn't absolve me of the call to humility in the face of the call to serve at once as an messenger of the Good News and as an ambassador of reconciliation. 

First rule of mission: don’t be silly

A sermon on the commemoration of Channing Moore Williams, Missionary Bishop in China and Japan, 1910. 

Unless you are wonky for all things Episcopal, you probably missed this. Recently the Diocese of Oxford in the Church of England published a blog post written the Rev. Paul Eddy called “Ten Tips for a Man-Friendly Christmas Eve Service.”

The Rev. Eddy is a vicar and is also, it seems, their missioner to bring men back into church. You see, the surveys say that men stay away from church in droves except at Christmas and Easter, when presumably, the wives (or their mothers) drag them to church. So he set out ten tips to make Christmas more man-friendly. Well, he did until the Diocese of Oxford decided to take the post down.

Some of the rules are tried and true…stuff clergy hear all the time.  You know, short sermons…don’t let church go on for more than an hour (45 minutes is even better)…easy to sing hymns.

Speaking of that, one idea strikes me as kind of gray: set the Christmas carols in a key that men can sing. We don’t want baritones to unwittingly attempt to sing up in the heavens with the sopranos.  Now I have some sympathy for this idea. For example, I agree with Garrison Keillor that the “Star Spangled Banner” should be sung in the key of G instead of its customary A-flat. But since most Christmas carols are, well, carols they are already in a key accessible to most voices. At least they are to this baritone.

Some of the ideas struck me as downright silly. And these are the ones that brought the most reaction. Among them:

5. Talk about the adventure and danger of the Mission Christ had. Tell the story of a martyr.
7. Employ masculine imagery and language.
8. Play a video clip from an action film as a metaphor.
10. Present Christ the man rather than Christ the infant, and focus teaching on Christ’s power and mission, rather than just his meekness and gentleness.

In short, he is telling us that it’s time for Jesus and his followers to man-up.

This reminded many people about the trend in some churches to combine worship with mixed-martial arts…an attempt to show Jesus as a macho not a wimpy figure that manly-men can really identify with.

We can debate some other time whether or not he has a point...but his solution is to give in to a kind cultural captivity. And not only about assumptions about gender and masculinity, but the temptation to be embarrassed by the radical nature of the Gospel and the temptation to gloss over it's demands. He wants to make the Gospel easy to swallow. 

Proclaiming and living the Gospel requires every day Christians like you and me to experience a kind of spiritual cognitive dissonance. 

If you don’t believe me, look around. 

Here we are talking about Advent as a season to open our hearts to God, to prepare ourselves for the coming of the savior.  Advent is all about the truth that we are at once living in God’s time and in our time at the very same time. We are waiting for God in quiet expectation in the middle of the Crazy Busy Season. We are quietly lighting Advent candles while the culture is talking about magical snowmen and reindeer with headlights. So if you get the idea as you go about your daily living that as Christians we are not speaking the same language…well, it’s because we aren’t.

This disconnect is so built in and so challenging that some Christians want to fix it. Among these are the people who want to trade in one kind of political correctness for the kind that requires every store clerk in the land to wish us all a Merry Christmas…and like it! In their earnest anxiety they miss the truth that all of us followers of Jesus are by definition pilgrims and aliens.

We are tempted to make it so hard that people run away...or make it so easy that the whole exercise seems trite.

But if you think you have it bad, think about the person we commemorate today, Channing Moore Williams. He founded churches in China and Japan and helped form the Nippon Sei Ko Kai, the Anglican Church in Japan.  

Yes, he faced violence. Yes. He had hardship. But to do his work, he had to learn not just a language but a culture. He was not tough, in the popular sense of the world, he was present and persistent. He was quiet and scholarly. Along the way he started several Christian institutions including St. Paul's University (Kyoto), St. Luke's Hospital (Tokyo), and he founded vibrant Christian communities in, among other places, Nagasaki

A missionary once told me that most important skill for in his work was the ability to listen. I think it is true for us, too. Before we can invite people to Jesus, we have to know who we are inviting. We have to hear their story. Lift them up in prayer. Walk with them. Respect them. Having done that, the invitation is natural…and outgrowth of a relationship and not merely a sales pitch. That means we have to be just as at home with Jesus through our prayer, study of Scripture, and our sacramental living.

But above all, we must resist the temptation to the silly. Clever schemes and tricks won’t communicate the Gospel. And even if it fills churches (or auditoriums) these gimmicks will only distort if not outright hide the Gospel.

I mean, look at that blog post I told you about.

Everyone was talking about it—and making fun of the post or arguing for or against it-- anything but the life-changing, creation-healing, reconciling Good News of Jesus. This is why the first rule of mission work is (or ought to be): “Don’t be silly.” At least not needlessly so.

Instead, watch, listen, pray, and when you communicate the eternal love of God to all creation avoid the temptation to resort to gimmicks. 

Once again, the Church is dying! Who's to blame?

We are living in the worst generation. Ever.

Never have people been more unfaithful. Never has society seen as much sin as we see now.

The Church is dying…no one goes to worship. And the ones who do…well, they are bored, disengaged, in search of spiritual junk food, and chase after whatever the preacher or society will tell them. No wonder Jesus called us “sheep!”

It’s true. We must be living in The Worst Generation. Ever. I read right here. On the Internet. So it has to be true.

If all this hand-wringing, mud-slinging, and schadenfreude sounds familiar, it should. Everyone has always lived in “The Worst Generation. Ever.” Let’s step into our Wayback Machine and take a look. 

Church attendance in the US peaked in the middle to late 1960’s, and yet even then The Church was doomed to laziness, shallow faith, apathy, and irrelevance. Theologians like Harvey Cox were telling us to engage the secular world. Sociologist Will Herberg discovered that the vibrant Abrahamic faiths of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, was being watered down into the thin gruel of “civil religion.” John XIII told the church to modernize or die. He reminded the Bishops at Vatican II that the Church was a garden to be cultivated not a museum to be curated.

On the one hand, we struggled with the big issues of the day: war, civil rights, poverty, equal rights for women; while on the other hand, preachers like Billy Graham held massive televised revivals in stadia to revive the Church, and the Jesus Movement became the spiritual version of getting high and checking out. The Church was going to hell in a rocket ship (and for some, The Source of All Our Problems Today). Clearly, it was The Worst Generation. Ever.

Let’s jump back to a place and time when the Church really ran everything. Thomas Hooker, the Puritan minister who founded the Connecticut Colony, left Massachusetts because the Puritans there were too lax (!) in spiritual matters yet too authoritarian in things civil. He routinely preached about the laziness, drunkenness, and spiritual dryness of the people all around him. One sign of how bad things were? The poor state of Church attendance. And this in a Colony with a population in the hundreds and where avoiding church was a crime punishable by the pillory. Clearly, this was The Worst Generation. Ever.

You want to know what triggered the Reformation? It was the lazy faith of that impatient, quick-fix generation called the 16^th Century. The Worst Generation. Ever. A guy named Tetzel was going around Germany selling indulgences…effectively free tickets into heaven…to pay for the seriously over-budget Sistine Chapel in Rome. Not only did the idea of selling seats in heaven make Martin Luther mad, but he was upset that people might latch on to the idea that they could exempt themselves from receiving the Sacrament or going to confession by the mere purchase of a “get out of hell free” pass.

Jump forward. After few hundred years of religious wars over which form of Christianity really ought to run things, Protestantism would elevate freedom of conscience to such a high level that Western religion would see the dual (and often conflicting) phenomena arise at once. First, there was the revolution in science, philosophy, and technology called the Enlightenment, which unhooked both science and economics from religious dogma. At the same time Protestantism would invent revivalism which would evolve into mass-market religion based on private conversion. Both tracks, while in many ways opposite, would forever detach Christianity from the Church as a “holy gathering” of God’s people, essential to ground our ethics and form us in our faith. Over time, we have gradually bought into notion, which we take for granted today, that says that each and every one of us alone has what we need, spiritually and intellectually, to live however we please.

In the face of troubling statistics, we point fingers and lay blame. Evangelicals point to the laziness and squishiness of the mainline, and mainline Christians say that they are the antidote to the cultural corruption and materialism of the Evangelicals (into which we lump in all Pentecostals and Fundamentalists). 

We act like trash-talking poker players. “I’ll call your Jack Spong, and raise you a Joel Ohlsteen.”

Those on the conservative side of the church accuse the “liberal” mainline of being too caught up in sexuality and the issues of the day. Those in the mainline point to Evangelicals who parrot and bless the material values of the culture. Everyone says the other side is a mile wide and an inch deep.

To this bickering, I ask “So what?”

But we are not the first to engage in this kind of theological mud-wrestling. Let’s step back into the way-back machine.

If you set the dial to end of the first century of the Church, you will be astounded to discover how fast the Church fell into rack and ruin. St. John the Divine paints a pretty bleak picture of the state of the church in his seven letters to the seven churches in Asia Minor in the Book of Revelation. From Patmos John saw that only 50 or 75 years after Jesus’ Ascension the Church was already on life support. Laodecia was a “lukewarm” congregation that God was going spew out like so much day old Starbucks. The Christians in Ephesus, Pergamum, and Thyatira had gone to the dogs by eating meat that had been butchered and dedicated (that is, sacrificed) to idols.

Apparently, he saw other Christians as part of the problem. The movement of Christianity away from its Jewish roots into an increasingly Gentile religion was not, for him, the God-given mission of the Church, as we see in Acts and the Letters of Paul, but apostasy and ruin. For John the Divine, any Christian who gives into the prevailing culture will not make it to the Throne of the Lamb. Only a few, 144,000 by his estimate, would hold out in what he saw as The Worst Generation. Ever.

Jesus himself railed against a religious establishment that laid heavy burdens on ordinary people that they themselves would not carry. John the Baptist was in the same tradition. The Prophets routinely witnessed to the power of God, exhorting the faithful to live their faith intentionally, while rounding on prophets on the payroll of the powers that be.

Starting with Psalm 1, the psalter is filled with those who scorn the faithful, persecute believers, and ignore the majesty of God. The various Psalmists are apparently the only faithful ones left anywhere, praying to be upheld in their misery. The Psalms were written during (say it with me) The Worst Generation. Ever.

As long as there have been people struggling to be faithful, there have been people who have been looking around surveying the human condition and have seen “The Worst Generation. Ever.”

It’s true that people have always been pretty creative in finding new ways to hate each other, kill each other, violate each other’s trust, and wreck creation. We steal. We cheat. We lie. We are cruel. We are indifferent. We bob and weave from our responsibilities like the last kid standing in a cosmic dodge ball game. We are human and it’s called sin.

Yet we are also capable of great love, great beauty, and astounding creativity. When we come together in common cause, there’s nothing like it. Over and over again, people turn and help one another in the midst of catastrophe. We wax poetic about the beauty of creation and are always writing and singing silly love songs. We make jokes, cook great food, compose beautiful music, and create works of art. We harness our skill to bridge rivers, fight disease, and put people in orbit. We send robots to the cosmos and into the depth of the oceans just so we can satisfy our curiosity. We are human and we are the imago dei.

And this is why, despite the fact that we are always living in “The Worst Generation Ever,” God goes through all the effort to draw us to God’s self. This is why God sent us the prophets and the preachers…and the poets and the satirists, for that matter…to get us to look around and to see at once how bad we can be and good we can be. There have been people in every age who have exhorted us to choose not only the good but to live as faithfully as we can possibly live. To live faithfully means that we look to God as both our source and as our goal, caring at once for our own souls and being attentive to welfare the people around us.

When Jesus came among us, he went where we went and did what we did to show where that God is with us where we go and in what we do. He held up what was wondrous, confronted what was evil, and healed what was diseased or broken.  He reconciled those who were cast off, brought into the community those who were far away, and challenged those who misused (or under-used) their faith.

And for that, the people in his generation killed him on the cross. Partly because his message of reconciliation was so audacious. Partly because his demand that we live faithfully was more than we could bear. But mainly we could not stand the idea that God could be walking among us.

God did not stop. In breaking the power of death, he rose from death and now, ascended and returned to God’s glory, he has drawn us—all of us—even the members of whatever Worst Generation we happen to live in, to himself.

God has always known that we all live in The Worst Generation Ever…that times are truly hard and challenges are truly great…and he has given us the solution in Jesus Christ. The Ascension reminds us that in Christ, we live in The Most Hopeful Generation. Ever. Earth and heaven are joined and God is drawing all of us home.

There are still great challenges ahead. We have all around the continuing consequences of human sin. Poverty, sickness, and injustice all around us. But, as with every generation, we have a choice. We can join in the selfish fray. We can choose to hang back, in God’s name, shake our heads and yell at unruly people who tromp across our spiritual lawn. Or we can join in God’s hopeful work of drawing all people to God, and to renewed faithful living by doing what Jesus did: caring for the poor, welcoming the outcast, comforting the sorrowful, teaching the eager, and confronting evil. 

To every generation that ever was, God has always responded to our sin and despair with hope, faithfulness and above all renewal. Every generation has seen people who work for the renewing of God’s people. And that in itself is a sign of hope fulfilled.

Maybe they are right. Maybe this is “The Worst Generation. Ever.” If so, then we followers of Jesus are “The Most Hope-filled People That There Ever Was.” 

Evangelical...just not in the way we expect

The news that Rachel Held Evans, one of my favorite Evangelical writers and thinkers, is now a communicant in an Episcopal Church has made something of a splash.

Jonathan Merritt of RNS interviewed her for an upcoming book about her journey and characterized the interview as a defense of her "exit from evangelicalism."

Next month, Evans will release “Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church,” a book that oscillates between stinging critiques of American Christianity and prescriptions for how she believes we can more faithfully participate in church-life. Here she explains what she believes is the key to revitalizing the church and defends her exit from evangelicalism.

 In the interview, Held Evans talks about the spiritual questing of millenials, and why the techniques and strategies of American evangelicalism...rooted as they have been in either marketing, the mall, and pop culture...is not speaking to people raised on the internet and in the shadow of 9/11.

She calls the Church to return to what the church does best:

Sharing communion. Baptizing sinners. Preaching the Word. Anointing the sick. Practicing confession. You know, the stuff the church has been doing for the last 2,000 years. We need to creatively re-articulate the significance of the traditional teachings and sacraments of the church in a modern context. That’s what I see happening in churches, big and small, that are making multigenerational disciples of Jesus.

Actually, this has been the call of the church for a long time. All one needs to do is think of John and Charles Wesley, the Oxford Movement, and Vatican II. When we drift, God has this way of calling us back to our roots...but in the garden where we find ourselves.

So Rachel Held Evans follows in the footsteps of Diana Butler Bass and even C.S. Lewis (to name a few) who found a home in Anglicanism for the expression of a vibrant, expressive, and adaptable Christian life.

But just because Rachel Held Evans is not a communicant in an Episcopal Church doesn't mean that has stopped being an Evangelical. Never mind that there is a vibrant and diverse Evangelical movement (or wing) within Anglicanism. It maybe more accurate to say that she has left "evangelicalism" as the media like to define Evangelicals, but I would suggest that she not left Evangelicalism but that her Evangelical faith has found her a home.

Based on what I have read, she has not left the heart and soul of what makes her a follower of Jesus. Discovering Sacramental living has not caused her to love, read, or attend to the Bible any less. My bet is that just the opposite is true.

Now I admit, from where I sit I see only dimly...through what is written about her journey in the very same media that conflates all Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Fundementalists into one broad category of "Christian"...leaving the rest of us to do nothing but wonder.

And it breaks my heart when people let the fullness of their faith get narrowed by fleeting agenda and movements of whatever age we live it. When people decide that a Christian isn't a Christian because they don't vote in a certain way. But God is not so easily thwarted and even seems to use that, too. It is what God uses to, as the late Bishop Mark Dyer used to say, clean house every now and then.

Still, I think that she has found a home where she can know and follow Jesus more effectively, a home where she can more clearly proclaim her faith, and place where she knows she can invite people in a relationship with Jesus in all the fullness and all the texture that the Spirit allows. Sounds quite evangelical to me.

Personally, I have found my home in the Episcopal Church after a very formative time in the evangelical world. I don't generally call myself an evangelical, not because it ain't so, but because of what the culture associates with the term which causes distraction. I don't like telling people what I am not on the way to saying who I am and whose I am. And the list of evangelicals, both famous and obscure, who have formed me and who don't fit the mold is very long.

One the things that the Episcopal Church does best is its comprehensiveness. We are one of the few denominations who assume and expect that other denominations exist with the same integrity as we are. For all of our supposed stuffiness, my experience is that we know that the tent is pretty big.

At the same time, I also know the amazing diversity of the evangelical world.

The Holy Spirit is pretty good at defying our expectations, which is why the Church, evangelical, mainline, Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, and even SBNR, does not fit into the neat two-dimensional, horse-race categories that modern media needs to fit us into a 140 characters in a 24 hour news cycle.

So welcome to the Episcopal playground, Rachel Held Evans! May your evangelical heart be blessed.

Spoke too soon

It happens. In my giddiness, I spoke too soon. 

A few weeks ago, I wrote that now that the Church of England will consecrate female Bishops, that this meant 

“that among the things that changed yesterday when Parliament and the Queen cleared away the final hurdles to women being consecrated Bishops in the Church of England is that apparently any lingering doubts about the validity of the orders conferred by women bishops in other parts of the Anglican communion has been resolved.”

Well, I spoke too soon. Kelvin Holdsworth, Provost of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow, read the Declaration on the Ministry of Bishops and Priests, the compromise that was written into the enabling legislation. And this is part of what he has to say:

This has come about because the compromise that the Church of England has adopted over the consecration of bishops who happen to be women is to give an assurance that there will still be new consecrations of bishops who still refuse to accept that women can be consecrated as bishops.

This means that some bishops of the C of E will not accept that other bishops of the C of E are bishops at all.

I say that is a novelty and I say that the situation is absurd.

Now, to be absolutely clear, I think that it is a great thing that great new opportunities are opening up to great people. Of course the episcopate should be open to women and men. Of course it is exciting that women are going to be consecrated in the Church of England. The price though, was a muddle that I think that many will one day regret. It is also a price that women are going to be expected to pay.

All this is just a further extension of something that I think will probably one day be called (inaccurately) the Anglican Heresy. I think this heresy (which strictly speaking is more of a Church of England thing than something which affects most Anglicans in the world) is the notion that one should be able to accept or reject a bishop according to whether or not they fit with one’s theological peccadilloes. This seems to me to have come in initially through the ministry of suffragans who often seem to have been appointed to give “theological breadth” to episcopal oversight in any one diocese rather than to simply share in the episcopal oversight of the diocesan. Thus we have had evangelical parishes wanting to associate with and be on the receiving end of episcopal oversight from an evangelical bishop and anglo-catholics doing likewise.

This got worse with the appointment of the so-called Flying Bishops who wandered around the Church of England ministering only to those disaffected by the ordination of women as priests.

It has now reached the point of absurdity with bishops being appointed who don’t believe other bishops being appointed to be bishops.

Notwithstanding the genuine joy that many feel at the forthcoming consecration of female candidates as bishops, I also know both male and female friends who feel somewhat hesitant at the terms on which this will be done.

Are we really getting to a point where some people will be ordained as bishops in the Church of England who will not be able to participate by the laying on of hands in the consecration of other bishops in the Church of England?

If so, that is a novelty of monumental proportions. It is an absurd situation which others within the Anglican Communion are likely to feel very concerned about indeed.

So, the Church of England teaches that a “bishop is a bishop is a bishop” except when someone says they’re not. 

On the one hand, the Church of England is free to create whatever muddle it wants. We (in the Episcopal Church USA) certainly did! On the other hand, how the Church of England handles this sets the tone for all the churches that make up the Anglican Communion. As I previously noted, we have learned the hard way that this type of conscience-clause doesn't work, doesn't satisfy the needs of the uncomfortable because there is never enough assurance, it is unjust because the compromise will fall solely on women bishops, and is a muddled witness. It is one thing to honor the conscience of a weaker brother in Christ (and in this case, the weaker conscience almost always belongs to a guy) but it is quite another to measure our progress according to the comfort level of the most resistant (or the most impulsive) member of the body.  

A person is a person is a person

Does this sound as silly to you as it does to me?

Up until yesterday, if you were an Anglican priest ordained in a Church within the Anglican Communion and you were seeking to get a license to officiate in the Church of England, the gender of the Bishop who ordained you might impact whether or not you would obtain permission to function.

Until yesterday. 

This appeared on Thinking Anglicans this morning:

The Questions yesterday evening at General Synod included this question and answer:

Mrs Christina Rees (St Albans) asked the Secretary General:

Q Is there any longer a bar on a man or woman who, having been ordained to the priesthood by a bishop who is a woman in another province of the Anglican Communion or in another Church with which the Church of England is in communion, being given to permission to officiate under the Overseas and Other Clergy (Ministry and Ordination) Measure 1967, so as to make them then to be as a priest in the Church of England, given a Licence or Permission to Officiate?

Mr William Fittall replied:

A The decision taken by the Synod this afternoon means that it is now lawful for women to be consecrated as bishops in England. The rationale for the bar which the Archbishops have operated up to now under the 1967 Measure has therefore disappeared. The gender of the consecrating bishop will be no longer relevant when applications for permission to officiate are considered.

So among the things that changed yesterday when Parliament and the Queen cleared away the final hurdles to women being consecrated Bishops in the Church of England is that apparently any lingering doubts about the validity of the orders conferred by women bishops in other parts of the Anglican communion has been resolved.

A priest is a priest is a priest. 

When the Episcopal Church regularized the ordination of women in 1976, it did so by simply stating that the canons of this Church would apply equally to women as to men. But there was an allowance for people who did not believe in the ordination of women: that no bishop would be penalized for refusing to ordain any otherwise called and qualified woman nor in placing a qualified woman in pastoral authority in his diocese. No priest or lay person would be penalized for refusing the ministry of women. (Deacons, I suppose, had to live with their discomfort because no one seemed to object when women deacons had the "-ess" dropped off their office and they were integrated in with the other male deacons.) 

It was presumed that this refusal would be for reasons of conscience and not simply because the person was bigoted or sexist. 

The so-called "Conscience Clause" was passed in 1977 after the then-Presiding Bishop, John Allin, offered to resign rather than accept the ordination of women to the priesthood.

"No Bishop, Priest, or Lay Person should be coerced or penalized in any manner, nor suffer any canonical disabilities as a result of his or her conscientious objection to or support of the sixty-fifth General Convention's actions with regard to the ordination of women to the priesthood or episcopate."

Jan Nunley described the "ontological ambiguity" faced by those first women priests that lingered nearly twenty years later:

And for the church's women bishops, the "conscience clause" puts them in a House of Bishops that is not unanimously convinced they even belong there. "Obviously I'm not recognized as a bishop by the bishops who say that women cannot be ordained. I'm not valid for them, I'm 'ontologically impossible' -- that's the language that's used," said the Bishop Jane Holmes Dixon of Washington. "Yet I have polite conversations with some of the bishops who don't recognize me. One evening Mary Adelia [McLeod, bishop of Vermont] and I had a very interesting conversation with a number of the ESA bishops. I think most of the people in that room were dumbfounded. You live with the ambiguity."

Of course, some of these folks who thought that a woman being a priest or bishop was simply impossible have left the Episcopal Church and now another denomination has to live with this ambiguity as the price of their independence.

The conscience clause, which became the norm for the Anglican Communion, did not work both ways. If a male bishop refused to ordain or place a woman priest or refuse to accept the validity of an ordination performed by a woman, that was conscience. If that person was called out on their stubborness, then that was just, well, cheeky.

And apparently in the Church of England those who accepted the equality of orders as fervently were for a long time not as fervently protected those who fought to exclude women...for reasons of conscience. So, until yesterday, those ordained by men might expect that their application to officiate in the CofE would be accepted, there was still some lingering doubt about those ordained by a woman. I'd be interested in hearing stories about both male and female clergy whose orders were questioned because of the gender of their ordaining bishop. 

This matters not because our Presiding Bishop can now wear her hat the next time she goes to England.

And it doesn't even matter that the paperwork might be a little easier for some American priest seeking to spend his or her sabbatical in England via one of those nifty "housing for work" deals that I hear about (but have never tried).

And it doesn't even matter because in hind-sight the conscience clause caused us more trouble by delaying justice and justifying sexism than the ordination of women ever caused by itself. (Imagine, if you will, if we decided that the exclusion of a whole race from orders was merely a matter of conscience. Oh, wait...! We did that! More than fifteen years after a letter from a Birmingham Jail, the House of Bishops finally turned away from that form of incremental racism in shame while at the very same time the House of Bishops was creating this "appeal to conscience!") We are still learning that it takes a while for us to learn.

It matters because the conscience clause got in the way of the practical application of the ordinary-but-revolutionary implication of the Gospel that was right there all along only we were too blind, silly, or prejudiced to apply it: that a priest is a priest is a priest.

And that's important because in God's grand scheme of salvation it turns out that a person is a person is a person. 

So when the first women bishops are consecrated in the Church of England, let's celebrate! But as the first men starts having vapors over the ontological impossibility of it all and claim to be the victims of discrimination, pray for them, and remind yourselves that except for God's grace it was ontologically impossible for any of us to even walk with God, let alone dare to be God's ambassadors of reconciliation. 

Today the Church of England officially teaches that a bishop is a bishop is a bishop. And a priest is a priest is a priest. And a person is a person is a person. Thanks be to God.

Bad evangelism sucks, even if you're an atheist

On the one hand, I hate to link to this but on the other hand it is such an good example of bad religion that it is deserves critique, especially since they brought it up.

This tract, found on a site called "The Oatmeal," is attractive, funny, edgy, in many way true and does exactly what it says it hates.

I get what the authors are saying, bad religion sucks. It is destructive and abusive.

But on the whole this strikes me at the atheist-existentialist version of a Chick Tract. It is attractive, amusing, and hard to put down. They are both theological and philosophical car-wrecks...you ought not to watch but you can't help it. The Oatmeal piece puts down all religion by taking a few truths about how religion is abused, draws broad generalized conclusions about all religion based on the obvious bad examples, and then tells the reader that they are a supremely unreasonable idiot if they continue to follow any religious or spiritual path.

All in all, this thing does for atheism exactly what they say is bad about religion. But instead of yelling for not following a crappy mis-interpretation of holy writ, it yells at you and calls you a jerk for actually believing something other than, well, nothing. And if you must believe in nothing, believe it with all your heart, without question and be disdainful of those who don't believe as you do.

In other words, this is the same sucky, dumbass evangelism that is mainly about making the believer feel good in the guise of wanting to "save" them (in this case, the author wants to "save" me from sucky religion...which apparently is any religion  especially if it looks the least bit traditional).

Go God Go XII
Get More: SOUTH
PARKmore...

Like many atheists (and religionists for that matter) they confuse the content of religion with the process of faith.

And the authors can pretend that the religion they present has no content, but it does. He or she is very clear in his/her belief that the only true faith is that all people are dying meat-sacks in a cosmic sh*t-hole." This is what we call a creed. In my mind this is not a very inviting one, but, it is a statement of faith as much as any. It is a faith that is packaged, sold and marketed (dare I say "evangelized" or "prosyltized" as any in any church).

We may have gothic buidlings and the Bible, yesterdays technology, but y'all use the technology at your disposal for the exact same purpose. Admit it: you want to save me from the sin of my faithfulness.

The author(s?) and I can agree one thing. Whatever you believe should make you and the world you live in better, not worse. If you don't want to suck at your religion (even if your religion is no-religion) it needs to be intentional, provide a healthy balance of inner and outer focus. It needs to help you transcend not reinforce your prejudices.

Healthy faith--whatever the content--is a process and requires both nurturing. It requires a balance of solitude and community.

Healthy faith challenges you to go deeper, expand--not contract--your world. Faith that is healthy gives a sense of meaning and purpose while also motivating you to leave the world a better place than how you found it. Healthy faith causes you to take responsibility for yourself and your world.

A healthy faith is dynamic and leans, by it's very nature, towards truth-telling. It will discomfort the comfortabable and reach out to the oppressed.

Also, good religion--even if your religion is atheism--should cause to one respect people who differ from us without calling them names or belittling either their journey and their choices. This clever tract succeeds by doing the very thing it decries but very attractively.

God for President?

H/T MadPriest and all his minions.

Only essential crap here.

When I see the words "church," "Jesus" and "crap" all on one billboard, it gets my attention.

This billboard has been seen around the Poconos advertising something called "innovationchurch" which used to be the "Lighthouse World Center of Prayer" and before that "Assembly of God Church".

At the end of the driveway going into innovationchurch facility, there are two large cement columns. When they were an Assembly of God, there were two eagles on top of the posts. When they were the Lighthouse World Center of Prayer, they replaced the eagles with lighthouses. Now each pillar sports a colored cubes with an "i" on it.

What really caught my attention, though, is the fine print.

It says: "Less crap. More Jesus."

Really.

I don't know what they are not offering at this church, and they must have tossed out a lot of stuff in all that re-branding; but now we know, it was all "crap."

From their own web site, here is what they believe:

The four essential "core" beliefs that we believe are the heart of the Christian faith are: the authority of the scriptures; the deity of Christ; the atonement through the cross and the return of Christ.

Pretty standard stuff for American Protestant evangelicalism for the past century. Now here is what is not so important to them:

Types of church governments; end-times teachings; the gifts of the Spirit; styles of church leadership; denominationalism; deliverance ministry; the Lord’s supper; healing ministry; and infant baptism. Of course there are many more, but typically when Christians have become divisive over these beliefs it is because they are confusing non-essential beliefs with core beliefs.

Okilee-dokilee. Still pretty standard American Protestant fare.

And, look! The web site says that we should not judge one another and deal with each other in love,

Finally and most importantly, in all our beliefs we show love…

Which is why we call everything we don't like "crap."

What would Supply Side Jesus do?

Andrew Schlafly thinks the Bible is too liberal. Way too liberal. Not too theologically liberal. Too politically liberal. So the founder of conservapedia.com is out to fix that.

The Lead at the Episcopal Cafe reported last fall on the Conservative Bible Project. The goal of the project is to "develop a conservative translation that can serve, at a minimum, as a bulwark against the liberal manipulation of meaning in future versions." Some of their guidelines include:

Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias

Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity

Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level

Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle"

Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning

Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story

Some ideas for work include:

The earliest, most authentic manuscripts lack this verse set forth at Luke 23:34: Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."

Is this a liberal corruption of the original? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible.

The idea is not going away. The AP reported this week:

The project's authors argue that contemporary scholars have inserted liberal views and ahistorical passages into the Bible, turning Jesus into little more than a well-meaning social worker with a store of watered-down platitudes.

"Professors are the most liberal group of people in the world, and it's professors who are doing the popular modern translations of the Bible," said Andy Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia.com, the project's online home....

...This liberal slanting, Schlafly argues, ranges from changing gendered language — Jesus calling his disciples to be "fishers of people" rather than "fishers of men" — to more subtle choices, like the 2001 English Standard Version of the Bible, which uses "comrade" and "laborer" more often than the conservative-friendly "volunteer."

The problem, Schlafly says, is the professors. Professors are overwhelmingly liberal and therefore have slanted the Bible in their direction. So avoiding those pesky scholars, the Conservative Bible Project is depending on their revision to be done wiki-style with contributions coming via the internet.

"The best of the public is better than a group of experts," said Schlafly, whose mother, Phyllis, is a longtime conservative activist known for her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.

(Timothy Paul Jones, a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., who calls himself a theological conservative) says the project is a misguided effort to read contemporary politics back into the text.

Dierdre Good at General Seminary looked at their Gospel of Mark and responded:

"No one thinks any translation is perfect. But does substituting "The Divine Guide" for the term "Spirit" in e.g. the baptism narrative convey Mark's ideas about Jesus' Baptism or the Spirit itself? And the translation of the verb in Mark 1:12 "the Divine Guide then led Jesus into the desert" is just wrong. I simply disagree that translations not using the term "man" to speak of Jesus emasculate him. Changing "scribes" or "Pharisees" to "intellectuals" in passages reporting controversies pits the latter against Jesus. Is this the message we want a bible translation to convey? Finally, the proposed translation of Mark 1:34b: 'he commanded the devils to be silent, because they knew Jesus as God' introduces a description of Jesus that simply isn't in the text."

Okay. So there are a few bugs. I mean, heck, translating the Bible is hard. And what do these Bible scholars know, anyway?

Well, they can cease their labors. Another Biblical non-scholar beat them to it. In 2006, Al Franken came up with this version of the story of Jesus, and it seems to meet all the requirements of the wiki-translation, except maybe for the "dumbing down" part. Presenting "The Gospel of Supply-Side Jesus."