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Rector's Blog
Thursday, May 26, 2005
I made some new friends this week.
Clary Morris sits at a desk in New York city with a sign on the door: "Office of Liturgy and Music." He does something in association with the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. He emailed me a couple of months ago.
"Would you be willing to host a consultation on worship and technology?"
Consultation on worship and technology?
"We are thinking about 12 people from around the country. People leading the church into new ways of worship."
I didn't really understand what he was talking about. But the Holy Spirit often does his best work when you don't have a clue what's going on.
Sure, come on down. We'd be happy to host you.
What was I expecting: A group of 50-something, black suited, white-collared East Coast Establishment types to drop anchor, thunk, with a stack of prayer books, hymnals, canons and the top 10 organ preludes of the 19th century?
See Bilbo Baggins sitting in his comfortable office in the Shire. Regular routine. Staff meeting. Taco Bell. Answer email. Sermon prep. Hobbits do not go adventuring. They host "consultations" for the "Office of Liturgy and Music of the Episcopal Church."
In walks grey-bearded Gandalf. Only -- instead of beard, earings.
"Hi. I'm Clay Morris."
Uh, nice to meet ya. Like the tattoo.
Then come the dwarfs:
Three Seattle hipsters. Could be Kurt Cobain's little brother and sister. Except for Karen. She is kin to Bob Marley.
A club-crawling New York musician, Isaac. "I really dig the vibe in that prayer, man." "I like my body. I want to worship with it." "I put this back beat on the Sursum Corda, and then loop the rhythm through the Words of Institution and the Epiclesis. Its cool."
R.C.: "I'm the guitar guy at the cathedral in Minniapolis. I lead night prayers with a didgeridoo."
Mel: "I was a 'Seven-day Dove girl.' My skin broke out on the eighth day, after they shot the commercial. Now I'm an artist."
Henry from Jersey City: "My rector is the sister of the actor Matthew Broderick. We are fortunate because she has connections in the theater. Set designers come in and create our worship space."
Suzie: "I divorced him but then he married a friend of mine. Then she divorced him. We both left him for other women."
Thank God for Cynthia and Eric. Normal(?) people.
Of such characters adventures are made. I can't say that we slew the dragon. But I did return to the shire with lots and lots of treasure.
Thank you all for coming. Each of you is an adventure in the making.
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Tuesday, May 17, 2005
[momentary blog hijack by Sara (top row, far right)]
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Monday, May 16, 2005
Anyone who has read the Book of Acts knows that its general theme is what some people today call "Outreach." The classical term for "outreach" is "mission." The Latin word missio means to "send out." Mission refers to the grace that is sent out from the heart of God in an never-ending stream.
Mission, and therefore outreach, is the very heart of the church. It begins in out-reaching grace. When the church centers on its appropriate mission, the heart of the church manifests the heart of God.
A Covenant Group leader opens her home to people proving hospitality where faith may be nourished and nurtured. This is outreach.
A Godly Play storyteller gets down on the flow with a group of six year olds and tells them a Jesus story while making them feel loved. This is outreach.
A group of musicians give up their Wednesday evenings to prepare to lead a congregation in worship. This too, is outreach.
The closer "the sender of grace" stands in relational proximity to "the receiver of grace," the more powerful an expression of outreach -- that is, of the mission of the church -- the interaction becomes.
This is why so many evangelism programs sponsored by the institutional church as a strategy for membership recruitment feels so inauthentic to the genuine mission of the church. Faithful outreach that expresses the heart of God is personal, even intimate. Evangelism can never happen where people fear entering deeply into relationships of spiritual significance with others.
In their efforts to "evangelize," some churches sponsor mass-mailing campaigns and neighborhood canvasses. Though this may sometimes be effective for institutional promotion (doubtful), it does not rise to the level of genuine outreach.
Likewise, what must be said about a church program that contributes money to a food pantry, or a homeless shelter, or a 12-step program, as a substitute for entering into relationship with hungry families, or homeless people, or addicts struggling for recovery? Though this may aid the work of a worthy agency (definitely), it does not rise to the level of genuine outreach.
Genuine, honest to God, life-transforming, mission oriented faithful outreach involves personal investment in the life of another human being. It demands a level of spiritual maturity, of expenditure of time, and of dependence on God's grace, that many are just not ready to accept.
God has always reserved the work of faithful mission to, well, the faithful.
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Thursday, May 05, 2005
Our parish administrator brought a book to the office she picked up at a garage sale for 50 cents. It's called, Vivilore: The Pathway to Mental and Physical Perfection. It was published in 1904.
I know nothing about his book. Reading through it breifly it reminded me of the spirit of the age in which it was writen.
The 20th Century began in a spirit of great optimism. The previous century had experienced the triumph of the Industrial Revolution, and the advancement of science.
The British Empire spanned the globe. The German principalities had recently been united by Otto Von Bismark under the house of Prussia. In Asia, Japan was quickly learning the lessons the Western world had to teach. Russia was a great, though harmless, agrarian empire under the benevolent despotism of Czar Nicholas. And the United States had realized its manifest destiny and spanned the North American continent.
Everywhere people shared a vision of greater things to come. There seemed to be no limit to the power of human creativity and invention.
The aim of the Vivilore reflects this optimism. The following comes the Introduction.
The study of Physics and Metaphysics harmonizes all science, solves the problem of evil, sickness, sorrow and death, and how to rise above them; explains the nature of mind, soul and spirit and makes man the conscious child of the Infinite Spirit, with power to control his body unto perfection and to wield all the forces of Nature for his use and pleasure.
This is quite a promise to make for both physics and metaphysics. To solve the problem of evil, sickness, sorrow and death is ambitious.
A hundred years of human experience has a way of refraiming old perspectives. World War I kicked the guts out of the naïve optimism of the late 19th century. Millions of Ukranians died in the 1930s while Stalin set about perfecting the new communist order.
World War II taught us that eugenics, social engineering and the perfecting of the human race is not all that it's cracked up to be. The war pitted one vision of the perfect society, the purifcation of the Aryan Race, against another vision of the perfect society, freedom and demacracy. Hitler's Berlin and Churchhill's London clearly were not morally commensurate socieities. Nevertheless, they shared a vision of human advancement they were each willing to kill for. The Devil, as they say, is in the details.
The struggle for social perfection did not stop with World War II. The Cold War was half a century of ideological conflict between one group who world perfect the world through an appeal to economic justice, and another who would perfect the world through the promotion of individual freedom.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in the early 1990s it appeared the war was won and that "a new world order" rooted in individualism and democracy could now flourish unhindered by a competing political/economic ideology.
But it was not to be. Rather than entering an idealistic period of freedom, we have discovered a deeper malaise.
We now experience the excesses of individual freedom through insatiable consumption that appear to be burning out the planet, and ravishing the last bits of traditional culture, and turning citizens of the West into addicts all.
China and India have both come on line as major market competitors and consumers of dwindling oil reserves. The Arab world remains restless, torn between Islamic Fundamentalism and 21st century consumption.
In the last century, the church fell victim to the progressive optism of the age. The Kingdom of God was often equated with social progress and the perfecting of the human experience through political and econmic policy.
It seems to me Jesus walked the dusty roads of Galilee and spoke to the crowds in Jerusalem in the midst of the blind, the lame, the sick and the hungry. After he was nailed to the cross, resurrected from the dead, and ascended to the Father, he left a world remaining filled with the blind, the lame, the sick and the hungry.
If the Kingdom of God is all about the perfectibility of the human race, Jesus left the job half done
But what if Jesus' plan was not to fix everyone and everything. What if Jesus isn't invested in social or even moral perfection? What if when the Holy Spirit descended on the Day of Pentecost the divine goal was not human perfection, but something else?
Can it be that, rather than fixing everything, Jesus invites to share the imperfection of our experience? That in sharing our imperfection we transcend it? Can it be that our visions of perfection are exactly the wrong thing to be invested in? That we should turn our hearts to something else, perhaps to find our life in a different domain altogether?
The prayer that Jesus prayed for his disciples may be instructive. He did not pray for the quaility of their lives. He prayed for the quality of their relationship, that they might be one, even as he and the Father are one.
What would happen if we stopped working so hard to be better, and started leaning how to enjoy one another more? Who knows? We might discover what Jesus meant when he said, "The Kingdom of God is at hand."
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