Grieving change, finding a place

We’ve begun a series in our church called “on the move with God.” We started by looking at the life of Abraham, beginning with Genesis 12’s story of God’s call for Abram to leave Haran and move to (eventually) Canaan. Our pastor has chosen this because we are preparing to move into our new building/sanctuary, and that physical move is a visual manifestation of the cultural and social moves we are undergoing right now, both in our church and in the community of Valley Springs. The congregation needs to be brought along, encouraged, and exhorted to recognize, heed, and respond Christianly to the changes we’re facing.

In July I will share in this series, preaching three sermons based on Genesis 32 (Jacob wrestling with God), Luke 10 (The Good Samaritan), and John 20 (Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus in the garden post-Resurrection). As I prepare for this, I am mindful of my own fitful bouts with resisting change in my life. There is a desire to cling to the past, because of all the chaotic things in life the past seems to be the most concrete. The past, frozen in time as it were, it is more seemingly clear-defined. It is manageable. It is easy to access. These are my perceptions, though I know that once one begins really to examine one’s past, the edges are far from sharp, the angles far from right, and the facts anything but cold and hard. Nevertheless, there is something comforting about knowing where you’ve been, even if it’s just where you think you’ve been.

My compulsion is to look back at the past so much that I avoid the present. When I was in Chicago, I spent a lot of time wishing I was back in Portland. Now that I’m in Valley Springs, I catch myself longing for Chicago (and Portland). Perhaps I am much more a purveyor of the “good ol’ days” mentality than I would care to admit.

While still in Chicago, facing the Call Process to Pastoral Ministry for the Evangelical Covenant Church, and the prospect of going literally anywhere for my first pastorate, I finally came to grips and realized I could potentially never return to my “homeland,” Portland and Oregon. Facing this reality, I discovered that I was grieving—grieving the loss of a life changed by circumstances, grieving the loss of a familiar place, mourning the knowledge that my life was inconsequential to the life of the place I’d left behind. Portland would endure and change without me. If I stayed away long enough it could become unrecognizable.

For me, attending to this grief has been difficult but in the long run very healthy. It has forced me back into the moment instead of looking back longingly at a time in my life that was probably not as rosy as I remember it. Acknowledging my grief and living in it has helped me to look forward rather than backward. It may seem a bit ridiculous, all this grief over a state, but if I am willing to go deeper, I discover that Oregon is not the real object of my grief. My life in Oregon was the set, not the play itself. The deeper longing was for familiarity, belonging, and identity. I suppose I look back at my life in Oregon as a time where, in spite of all my angst and frustration and wrestling matches with God, there were things around me that stayed relatively the same. I could count on going up to NW 23rd for a walk and a coffee. I could count on going to a McMenamin’s for a beer and a second-run movie. I could count on going for a run in Forest Park. And most importantly, I could count on spending time with friends and family who also counted all this as their place.

God’s words to Abram in Genesis 12:1 are harsh and violent: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Of course, this statement is also a promise: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (NRSV). Anyone who has spent any time with the writings of Wendell Berry knows that the theme of “place” is predominate. In our quests to understand who we are, we often look externally and supra-geographically: we look to other people to find ways of living, and/or we look to books, television, movies, and other media to aid in our self-understanding. Berry would say that our self-understanding comes by an attentiveness to one’s particularity—one’s family, neighborhood/community, work—things filled with the ordinary. In light of this, Abram’s call seems even more violent, except that in this case God wished for him to be in a place where God’s promises could flourish.

God calls us out of our self and into the body of Christ. We are all a part of the ekklesia, the “called-out community.” This is the place God would have for us—different ekklesias for different people and places, but all ekklesias as part of the Great Ekklesia, the Church Universal. There is a violence in conversion, just as Jesus’ violent death precedes resurrection. The church—the land to which God calls us (like Abram)—is the place where God’s promises flourish because the bedrock of it all is Jesus. It is to this land, this community, that we are called take root.

But this land is foreign to us. It is anything but familiar. It is less desirable because its deeper resources have yet to be discovered. How do we faithfully follow where God is leading when so much security seems stripped away, so much identity lost, so much familiarity gone? Listen to Berry’s words from “People, Land, and Community”:

“When one buys a farm and moves there to live, something different begins. Thoughts begin to be translated into acts. Truth begins to intrude with its matter-of-fact. One’s work may be defined in part by one’s visions, but it is defined in part too by problems, which the work leads to and reveals. And daily life, work, and problems gradually alter the visions. It invariably turns out, I think, that one’s first vision of one’s place was to some extent an imposition on it. But if one’s sight is clear and if one stays on and works well, one’s love gradually responds to the place as it really is, and one’s visions gradually image possibilities that are really in it. Vision, possibility, work, and life—all have changed by mutual correction. Correct discipline, given enough time, gradually removes one’s self from one’s line of sight. One works to better purpose then and makes fewer mistakes, because at last one sees where one is. Two human possibilities of the highest order thus come within reach: what one wants can become the same as what one has, and one’s knowledge can cause respect for what one knows” (in The Art of the Commonplace, pg. 187).

In the final analysis, becoming a Christian means donning a different identity, a different family, a different place, a different geography, a different hope, a different way of life. It means being clothed with Christ, being part of Christ’s Body. We are all called from our personal Harans and Portlands into the promised land: the Kingdom of God. This is the life-long Christian sojourn, our spiritual pilgrimage of conversion and sanctification. It is not self-created, controlled, or owned. It is an obedient response to the call of God. May God give us all the grace to respond, act, go, and live.

"In love" with Jesus

In the back of my Bible I scrawled this spur-of-the-moment thought: “The pace required by programmatic, evangelical-driven churches promotes a hurry-up, pragmatic life and leaves little room for study, reflection, leisure, and discernment.” I think I wrote this before I read Noll’s book. I know I was thinking of my church’s worship service when I wrote this. It’s interesting that we tend to say in sermons that emotions need to be subordinated to God’s will, but our services seem so intent on creating an emotional response. Part of that is the cultural stew we swim in—an environment of entertainment and competition for attention. The is particularly true for worship music. One upbeat song we sing is “I’m in Love with Jesus”:

When I think of you, I get a smile on my face
For this love I feel is more than I can take
Cause you lifted me from where I was
And you set my feet upon the rock
Oh I can’t contain this love
Or the fire that’s in my heart
So I’ll dance, shout, let it all out
Cause I’m in love with Jesus
I’m gonna sing praise all of my days
For he has set me free
I’m gonna tell everyone in this town
That I’m in love with Jesus
I’m in love with him, he’s in love with me
And I’ll never be the same again!

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the words of this song. It expresses joyous faith in God, thankfulness for redemption, and the passionate desire to tell others about this. It is a song of joyful access. Add to this song the rollicking, driving groove of a rock guitar and throbbing toms and you get this feel more acutely.

The problem with songs like this is that they make feelings about God specific. The joyous nature of the words creates no room for those not feeling the sentiments of the song. The song is more about how I feel in response to God. And the response in this song is monotone: happy!

By now I’m sure my biases are evident. I freely admit that I am traditional when it comes to much of our church music. Part of my traditional bent is preference, which is unique to persons and should not be enforced on all people. But part of it is proscriptive, I think. Look at another song of praise and adoration:

Holy God, we praise thy name;
Lord of all, we bow before thee.
All on earth thy scepter claim,
all in heav’n above adore thee.
Infinite thy vast domain,
everlasting is thy reign.

Yes, it’s a stuffy old hymn! Yes, it uses “thy” and “thee.” Yes, it was based on Ambrose’s Te Deum, written in the fourth century. But I think that it provides for a spectrum of feeling all within offering praise to God. The praise is not based on how I feel but on who God is. When you are going through the darkest valley, which is the more inclusive phrase to sing, “When I think of you I get a smile on my face,” or “Holy God, we praise thy name.” Chances are that if the situation is bad enough, both phrases may choke in the throat. But counting all things joy—including suffering—doesn’t mean having a smile on one’s face all the time. It does mean seeking to glorify God in all things, however, and I would rather glorify God with a scowl than with a false smile.

The Scandal

I just finished reading Mark Noll’s landmark book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The book is over 12 years old now, but it strikes me as deeply relevant still. Noll is a historian, but he describes the book “not [as] a thoroughly intellectual volume” but more as “a historical mediation in which sermonizing and the making of hypotheses vie with more ordinary exposition” (from the preface). His thesis in a nutshell is that despite a rigorous, colorful history of American evangelical intellectual study, the fruits of that history have yielded anti-intellectualism which is, Noll argues, an affront to the Creator God who has made all things, including the human mind, to be good. To pursue a life of the mind in a Christian context means to use God’s gift of thinking and study for the glory of God and the edification of the Body of Christ. In essence, evangelicals today need to realize their historical place and identity instead of plastering their cultural (though not perceived so) slogans across the walls of the world and decreeing that these slogans are the essential elements of the Christian faith. They are “distinctive…not essential to Christianity” (243, emphasis his).

This last point is, I think, hugely important, though I as a new pastor am still not quite sure how to translate this to people in the parish. Being a Covenant minister, I can point to the Covenant Affirmations: The centrality of the Scriptures; The necessity of new birth; The Church as a fellowship of believers; The ministry of the Holy Spirit; The reality of freedom in Christ; and the commitment to the whole mission of the Church. I can also quote the phrase: “In essentials—unity; in non-essentials—liberty; in all our beliefs—charity.”

In the last chapter, Noll discusses whether there is hope for the evangelical mind. Again, he reiterates that evangelicals need a historical self-understanding in order help cultivate the evangelical mind. Not only that, but evangelicals need a broader understanding of the world, a willingness to balance activism with study, and healthy ecumenical cross-pollination with other denominations (which seems to be happening more today).

One of my enduring frustrations with many evangelicals has been their disdain for the intellect, their blind acceptance of the Bible, and their assumption that their understandings of how one comes to know God (personal conversion, personal relationship, personal devotions, personal faith) should be standard for all Christians. There is nothing innately wrong with these understandings, but they need to be understood for what they are—specifically Evangelical (capital E). A Roman Catholic would lean more towards the importance of the Mass, being a part of the Church, and following the Church’s teachings—that is part of what makes Roman Catholicism distinctive.

When I came to the University of Portland as a cock-sure evangelical, the Catholicism there threw me. I went through several interwoven stages: all-out condemnation, curious conversation, discovery of commonalities, appreciation of differences, and flirtation with conversion. Now as a (more-or-less) evangelical in ministry, I continue to wrestle with my “Catholic upbringing,” wondering whether I am home or running away. I do grow to realize, however, that my exposure to Catholicism was rather golden—at a university rather than at a local parish. Things always look and feel better at the university (whether or not they actually are). There were plenty of nominal Catholics—the kind we evangelicals have been so quick to condemn—but there were also plenty of devout Catholics for whom faith was indubitably alive and active.

I think these two experiences of mine--going to a Catholic school as an evangelical, and reading Noll's book--are important for me because: the first made me evaluate what I believed in contrast to the environment around me; the second made me more acutely aware of my historical and cultural DNA.

It will not do, then, simply to “agree to disagree,” to “live and let live.” That is not life together. That is not seeking Christian unity. Sadly, we can use our commonality--faith in Christ--as the end rather than the beginning of the conversation. And, as Noll has argued, we elevate our distinctives without understanding them as such. What might happen when we are given the space to allow for a pluralistic expression of faith in Christ, rather than make our evangelically distinctive expression the essential and standard by which one talks about faith?