Showing my work: part one...

NOTE:  Over the next few days I will updating and adding to this post.  I am calling it "Showing My Work" from a comment my wife made recently.  It stems from a blessing and a curse I have experienced most of my life: many times an art work or song will knock me on my ass and fill me with awe and gratitude; but when I try to articulate what I discern as either a mystic or a musician, there often seems to be something missing.  I can't tell you how many people have said to me:  I don't get your connections?  

That used to make me crazy, until I came to grasp that it was a blind spot that could use more light.  So, when talking about a spirituality of music, for example, I now try to carefully "connect the dots" between why I experience something as simultaneously ecstatic and revelatory for me and how it connects with the wider Christian tradition.  In other words, I try to "show my work."  As an intuitive, this isn't also a simple matter but because most people are not intuitives, it is essential.  So, here goes...

Part One:  Showing My Work

The Canadian theologian, Douglas John Hall, has been making an essential observation about the Church in North America for the past twenty years:  namely, that we have become more of a “side line” institution than anything resembling a “main line” organization; and, this dis-establishment of Christianity holds for us the promise of greater fidelity to the way of Jesus Christ than anything we experienced during the era of American civil religion.  In a word, he argues that now that we have become irrelevant to the status quo, we can live more simply and joyfully into a more authentic discipleship.

In his life works – from the three volume systematic theology Thinking/ Confessing/Professing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context to his award-winning distillation of Luther’s theology of the cross, The Cross in Our Context:  Jesus and the Suffering World, and Waiting for Gospel:  An Appeal to the Dispirited Remnants of the Protestant Establishment – Hall explains how our social irrelevancy can be a double-edged blessing.  We no longer have to live as custodians and/or slaves to the status quo.  As people shaped and guided by the Cross, we can forsake the path of power and embrace a life of solidarity and compassion.  We can abandon the assignment of being sacred apologists for the status quo and give ourselves to small acts of mercy and tenderness.  Hall concludes:

…to my mind the only Christianly authentic way of meeting the challenge of this second great metamorphosis… would be to:  1) Frankly and openly admit the reality of the humiliation of Christendom; 2) Resist the temptation to regard this great change in purely negative terms, as though the failure of a form of Christianity meant the failure of Christianity itself; and 3) Try to give our disestablishment some positive and meaningful direction rather than simply allowing it to happen to us.  (Waiting for Gospel. P. 60)

Hall goes on to quote the Anglican Bishop or Edinburgh, Richard Holloway,

who observed that when the Emperor Constantine refashioned the Jesus movement into Christendom at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, one form of the faith ended and another began:

Historians have traditionally seen (Nicaea) as the final triumph of the Church and the beginning of its long dominance of European history. It established dogmatic Christianity in a long partnership with the world of political power that became known as Christendom – and only in our day is it in its final stages of dissolution.  So glorious and powerful was the institution of Christendom that it was almost impossible to see through it to the man who stood behind it, the peasant from Galilee who had refused to cringe before the very powers that crucified him and was later, officially, to deify him. The fascinating thing about our own day is that, as the political and theological structures of Christendom crash down before our eyes, we can see once again, through the rubble and dust of the centuries, a clearer picture of the prophet of Nazareth.  (ibid)

As a pastor and artist, I both confirm and experience the effects of Hall’s analysis on a regular basis.  The Church as a social institution is not only irrelevant but largely forgotten.  No longer is a “first church” necessary in any tradition because nobody notices or cares. In a recent sermon I called, “New Directions out of Our Old Ways,” I put it like this:

We come out of a story of power – a story of being in control – a story of being in charge.  That is what it meant to be the historic first church of our town:  our members called the shots and set the social, spiritual and economic agenda for the whole community.  In fact, you could not even organize a town in Massachusetts without first calling together a congregational church. But 250 years later that is no longer true:  we are NOT the movers and shakers, we are NOT those in control and we are NOT ever going to be in charge again (thanks be to God!)

When we are honest, our nation is becoming a post-Christian society – our small city is becoming a truly multi-cultural and multi-faith town – and Pittsfield is never going back to a manufacturing and industrial economy no matter how strong the nostalgia for General Electric’s heyday might burn in some hearts.  So now that the old realm is over, what is our new story?  How do we discover new directions from out of our old ways and live into actions that point towards God’s hope and peace?

I then when on to offer three suggestions about what our new “narrative home” might include: 

1) Exchanging privilege and power for tenderness; 

2) Exploring small acts of hospitality with our new neighbors; and

3) Embracing humility and playfulness as our modus operandi rather than ponderous obligation. 

As is often the case, however, my conclusions were not entirely self-evident to the wider congregation. In fact, as I have heard over and over throughout my ministry, people need me to be more didactic in drawing my conclusions.  I can’t tell you how many times I have shared a song that drips with theological significance to me only to hear someone say with sincerity:  “I don’t get it.”  Like my high school algebra teacher always said: “Show us your work, man!”  Clearly there are times when I need to do a better job of lighting the pathway I have discerned in pursuit of new insights.

So, what follows will be my thinking about how I arrived at my three concluding points involving tenderness, hospitality and playful humility.  I will draw from the wisdom of Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, Mary Oliver, Richard Rohr, Robert Bly and Douglas John Hall as mentors.  I will freely engage the use of poetry and the arts as sources of both inspiration and insight. And I will try to offer a nuanced accounting of why the context of Christian disestablishment in North America is a blessing not a curse.