overstatement.org (my personal blog)
umcofhartford.org (my blog as pastor of my church)
nyachealthcare.org (my blog as health care reform advocate for NYAC).
This is out of hand. So I’m thinking I got to simplify. So, starting soon, I will mirror my posts here and on my church’s page. That way, I’ll still keep these blogs active, but I won’t have to come up with multiple content. On the other hand, if I want or need to post something just to this blog, I will still be able to do that, so no worries.
I also am changing the theme around a bit. For the two of you who ever read this, let me know what you think.
By what measure – in general – can we say the church has succeeded or failed?
I think about that question a lot, and I think it is impossible to answer definitively. Typical answers include measuring attendance or membership, looking at budgets or buildings, examining the vitality of programs and outreach.
But somehow those measurements fail to get at the idea of “faithfulness.” If you think about it, the church is not called to “succeed” or to “grow” or to “expand” like an empire or a business or a disease. It is called to faithfully follow Jesus. Jesus teaches us that we will be known by our love for each other – not our big buildings, not our media campaigns, not our large worship services. Our love.
In that light, a recent sign of real failure has emerged. This survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows that people who attend church more often are more likely to think that torture is either often or sometimes justified.
This is despite the fact that every mainline church body I know of has publically opposed the use of torture. Futhermore, it is hard to find a moment in scripture when Jesus infers some kind of support of torture. If we are to be known by our love and are to give our lives for others and love even our enemies, then the torture of another human being would be in the category of “things that are incompatible with Christian teaching.”
If the church has failed to communicate such a basic value to its own membership, how on earth can anyone take the church seriously? We are failing because we are not faithful. We are failing because we are not authentic. All those other measures of success seem irrelevant when you consider this monumental failure.
2 – Go to Quotations Page and select “random quotations”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.
We ask you to consider your sins. We remind you of your mortality. We call you to repentance.
It’s not exactly fun. But it’s part of a process – a process that takes some time, requires some soul searching, demands we face some tough realities. But the process doesn’t stop there. It ends in new life, new possibilities, new hopes. It ends in the ultimate promises of our God, who never abandons us and always welcomes us home.
But you can’t get to the end without starting with ashes. Jesus began his ministry with a 40 day struggle in the desert. There he faced his demons and temptations, and discovered who he was and what he was made of. He learned the truth about himself. And once we learn the truth about ourselves, there is no power that can overcome us. We are ironically liberated by our awareness of our limitations. We come to terms with our fundamental humanity. Ashes mark us as mortal, less than God, limited, frail.
It is true that there is much goodness in each of us. It is also true that we have all fallen short of the glory for which we were intended. Ash Wednesday points us to both of these truths – it reminds us that we are worthy of God’s love – but it also reminds us that we are frail. The frailty is hard to face. But it is only conquered by facing it.
This Lent, I hope to take the steps I need to take to face myself – to honestly assess all that I am and all that I am not. I hope to better understand why I do some of the destructive things I do. And I hope to overcome one or two of my bad habits. Most of all, I hope to realize the love of God – a love that accepts my frailty and faults, while also calling me to be more than I presently am.
But the risk to Apple is far higher if we imagine the grim possibility that Steve Jobs is unable to return to work. I’m not saying that because there is any shortage of good people at Apple. The company’s top management ranks are filled with some very skilled executives, including Tim Cook, the company’s chief operating officer, who will step in for Mr. Jobs while he is on leave.
But the essence of Steve Jobs — the obsessive visionary who involves himself in the smallest details of Apple’s products and advertising — has fostered what is in effect a corporate operating system that will need to be completely upgraded whenever a successor is named.
Steve Jobs deserves a lot of credit for the success of Apple. Before he returned, the company was headed in the wrong direction. But, somewhat ironically, it was headed in the wrong direction because it was doing all the things that conventional business wisdom said it should do – going after market share above all else, sacrificing quality for price, forgoing innovation for mass appeal, even licensing the operating system to other vendors ala Windows. Everyone would have said that Apple was doing the right thing…until 6 months later when they were in the stinker and Steve returned.
Steve has succeeded by doing innovative things well. The iPod almost single-handedly resurrected the company – who would have thought of that? The iPhone could have been a crappy “iPod with a phone” but instead Apple created a whole new platform for mobile applications. The point is that Apple has succeeded when it ignored common sense and when with great design and great ideas.
Steve is not the only guy around with great ideas. Apple has a great team in place to carry the company forward. The success of Apple depends less on Steve Jobs than on Apple’s own faithfulness to its customers, its vision, and its tradition of no-compromise design. It is still the case that only Sony among electronic companies ever gives Apple a run for its money when it comes to designing consumer technology products. Apple will continue to be the leader in computer design so long as Apple refuses to do what popular corporate wisdom says. When Apple sticks to her guns, Apple comes out on top, Jobs or no.
It’s a tough book to read, because it is unflinchingly violent. It is violence that still manages to disturb, despite my healthy diet of violent images in the mainstream media – from Quentin Tarrintino to the Dark Knight. It is – in a strange way – refreshing to recognize that violence can still jar, still shock, still offend. I think that is one of Cormac’s gifts as a writer – that he makes violence so visceral, so demanding. He paints a world I don’t want to be a part of….
….and he also manages to force me to realize that I am a product of that same world I find so distasteful. That is what is so powerful about his work I think – that it disturbs and fascinates with its violence – but it also connects us to it, holds us responsible through some distant chain of fate in reverse. I want to wash my hands of the blood.
As I thought about Gaza, and Blood Meridian I realized that violence is always designed to seem distant, remote. Wars are fought on distant shores, where the bloody mess and the dusty rubble can be ignored by those who find it easy to turn away from it all. Israel refuses to let the media in to Gaza – I suspect because they know the benefit of keeping us all distant from the reality of violence. Hamas, for their part, shows little of their missile launches, and paints a picture for us to gain our sympathies. Both sides know how removed we are from violence – even violence of our own making.
I don’t pretend to know what Cormac thinks about anything. But I do read in his books a somewhat desperate effort to make us face the bloody, destructive facts of our history and our present. Maybe if we looked at it in all its horror, we’d be less inclined to participate in it.
I’ve been getting a lot of email expressing outrage at the selection of Rick Warren to offer up his prayers for our new president. One friend has sent me a laundry list of outrageous videos showcasing the offensive comments Pastor Rick has made about gays and lesbians. For instance:
His logic evades me. Yet there are a lot of people who listen to this guy and give him credit. Most pastors I know, even progressive ones, have a copy of Warren’s Purpose Driven Church and many have his more recent and more popular Purpose Driven Life. He’s had an enormous impact on the church in the US. But his language on homosexuality is laughably ignorant and blatantly homophobic. I have both his books. The “church” one is a helpful book for pastors to think creatively about church structures. But the “life” one reads more like a laundry list of do’s and don’ts, and expresses his right-wing agenda in a no-compromise way. I understand that Warren had done much to help victims of AIDS and has tried to reach across boundaries of “liberal” and “conservative.” Nevertheless, he has also expressed hateful opinions about gays and lesbians, comparing homosexuality to child rape and bestiality. Sadly, he doesn’t get it. I’d like to put a reading list together for him, and I’d include the following for his information and enlightenment:
Now, I realize he isn’t going to read that stuff, but those books, along with a host of others, really helped my perspective on these issues. More to the point, though, is the fact that the media has almost totally ignored the man Obama has selected to give the benediction. Rev. Joseph Lowery has a distinguished career as an advocate for the outcast. A civil rights leader, he has been in the trenches for a long time working for justice. He is a United Methodist pastor, which of course makes me proud. But he is also a clear voice for justice for all God’s people, and has publicly called for the full-inclusion of gays and lesbians in the church and beyond. I wish progressively-minded people would focus as much attention on Lowery and his message as they have complaining about Warren. Heck, we should all just ignore Warren and turn our attention to a man who has really struggled, advocated, fought and risked for the least and the lost – a man who has embodied the gospel message with his whole life.
Here is Lowery speaking controversial yet prophetic words at the funeral of Coreeta Scott King – embodying the spirt of MLK:
And here is some more information about Lowery at Wikipedia.
A recent Advent sermon from Steve Bauman struck a cord:
How this season before Christmas has devolved in our time is quite pathetic. The post-modern Christmas phantasmagoria is all about escape, distraction and consumerism and has little to contribute to the living of our days beyond a bit of merrymaking, which is alright so far as it goes, I suppose. Those of you that know me, know I’m all for some excellent merrymaking.
Merrymaking is one seasonal obligation, the other concerns buying lots of stuff and whatnot to keep our economic engines humming — especially this year. Don’t you find it darkly ironic that one our most sacred ritual seasons has been so completely subsumed by global consumerism that our political class would just as soon all of us spend ourselves into oblivion as the year comes to an end as a kind of sacrifice to the economic gods?
Each year I walk through the elaborate displays at my local mall. In the center of the mall is a fantastic altar to the Consumer Gods of Christmas and their symbols: Santa Claus, reindeer, candy-canes, gingerbread houses. No sign of Jesus. No sign of anything that might transcend the mall itself, let alone the limits of our lives and the powers that be.
What if the church offered a real alternative? What if we refused to be complicit with all the simplistic merry-making and saccharine sentiment and destructive overindulgence and instead simply offered a baby, born in a manger, born to transform the world, born to show us a new way of living, born so that we might have life – abundant life – not discounted, mega-sized, tinsel-wrapped life – but authentically abundant life? What if we were faithful to that?
I find it hard to do the things that I want to do. Why is that?
First of all, what do I want to do? I want to read more. I want to write more. Those two seem preeminent. But I also want to spend more time with friends and family. I want to excersize (really). I want to travel. I want to spend time enriching myself and my life.
But there seems so little opportunity for those things. Just finding an hour a day to read is challenging enough. Work gets in the way. Especially when you have as many evening commitments as we pastors tend to have. And other things suck up my time – How many times have I plopped down in front of the television just to space out for a few minutes only to find the energy to turn the television off a few hours later?
The point is that I have the time I need. But I find it hard to use it the way I want.
I read a book called the Now Habit once. It had an intriguing premise. The basic idea was that you should discern what you really want to do, and then schedule the time to do those things on your calendar BEFORE you schedule anything else. In other words, really pirortize what is really important to you. I think that is a great idea! Maybe I’ll spend some time this week doing just that before Advent comes and the year ends without me even realizing it!
For the first time in my adult life, this truly is a historic election.
Every four years they tell us how “historic” the election will be. And they always seem to tell us that the “young people” will be “rocking” the vote. And every four years I think “what a bunch of hooey.”
But this year is different. We really do have a historic moment on our hands. We could elect the first black man to the highest office in the land and the most powerful position in the world. That is truly amazing. Barack in the White House will truly transform the way our nation perceives “black people” in a way that nothing else could. Young black boys and girls today will live in a world where they can honestly believe that anything is possible for them.
That’s not to say that racism is going away. Far from it. But it is to say that today, our nation could model for the world what it really means to be a pluralistic democratic society. Considering the last two elections that is quite an accomplishment.
Today is not only a great day for ethnic and racial minorities. It’s a great day for the idea of the American Dream. The dream is worth preserving, but it is also worth amending. Obama does both for us, in one pull of the voting booth lever. He reminds us that here, unlike most other places in the world, people can rise from anywhere to achieve greatness. And he also reminds us that all of us are in this thing together. Obama will be our president – my president – as much as he is anyone else’s – because he exemlifies what it means to dream that dream. And the dream is not about a big house or a new car. It is about acheiving greatness through the bountiful opportunity our nation has always tried to provide. Greatness will mean more than making money or becoming famous. With Obama in the White House, we can hope that the American dream will be about making our nation great again – with liberty and justice for all.
Those colors kinds clash. The text is clear – but the texture is terrible. The drop shadow is amazingly cheesy. I feel kinda ashamed about the whole thing. But to be honest, I whipped it up in about ten minutes in the Gimp, and what do you expect? I’m not a graphic artist. I can barely get my wordpress installation to run the way I want.
So, can someone please make me a cool banner? Come on – some artist or something?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
- W. B. Yeats, from “The Second Coming”
Something to consider in this season of passionate intensity.
I have been a professional minister for almost ten years. I don’t know how this happened, but here I am. It is sometimes a strange realization for me.
Professional ministry in the church today is difficult. Ministers are seldom afforded sufficient time to do their jobs. The demands on ministers far exceeds the explicit expectations of the job. I find this the most frustrating part of my job: not being able to do it.
I suspect that is an unusual problem for ministers compared to other professionals. In other professions, your provide your service or skill, and you are paid for it. I know it isn’t always quite that simple. But for clergy, exactly what is expected of us varies wildly from congregation to congregation, season to season. I would say that in my experience I generally spend half my time on my stated job description, and the other half of my time on a wide variety of tasks outside of my actual job description and training.
In addition to distracting and confusing, this reality makes it difficult to know how you are being perceived and evaluated. Am I being judged by my performance of my stated duties? Or is it the plethora of “other things” that determine how I am perceived? When conflict erupts in the congregation, as it often does, it is difficult to unpack all of the competing and conflicting expectations that have given rise to the conflict.
I’ve read a few books on being a pastor. Some of them seem to suggest that clergy should be super-humans, capable of doing all their pastoral duties and also able to clean the toilets and fix the roof. At the same time, we are repeatedly encouraged and even pressured to make sure we devote enough time to “self-care.” The conflicting messages can be maddening.
What is a pastor to do? The answer, I think, is provide leadership. Our churches are in decline in part because our laity are not acting like disciples. We have failed to create communities of passion and joy. If our laity are engaged in meaningful ministry that effects real transformation, I suspect our pastors will spend less and less time outside of their job description. That means someone has to show them the way out of the wilderness and to the promised land. It’s not an easy job. And sometimes it’s quite depressing and discouraging. At other times you get a glimpse of the kingdom.
