Practice vs Purity

If we consider that the Pilgrims and the Puritans came together in 1648 to form what became American Congregationalism, one of the main streams which ultimately formed the UCC, it might surprise some folks that, today, many of us who might be thought of as the "Puritan's spiritual children" are less concerned with purity in the church than we are with praxis (or practice).

Nearly every denomination large enough, or vocal enough, to demand media attention these days has been racking up plenty of airtime and column inches with stories of their internal disagreements between factions facing off---to put it very simplistically---over issues of purity vs praxis.

North American Presbyterians, United Methodists, American Baptists, and Episcopalians are awash over issues related to inclusion and biblical interpretation. The Episcopalian debate has spread to the worldwide Anglican Communion, where serious threats of schism are being heard.

No matter the particular issues today, or in the past or next centuries, we will probably continue to have debates over whether the church is the "hospital for sinners," or the "museum of saints."

I grew up in a denomination whose principal statement of faith declared that a church is "a body of regenerate, baptized believers," and who worked rather fervently to ensure that non-regenerate folk (that is unbelievers, sinners, and backsliders) did not have their names on the church roll. Yet history reveals that this was always a hope, an ideal, a goal, rather than a realized reality. In this model, one's baptism is intended to be the outward sign that, though one was once a sinner, one is a sinner no more. Yet the debates were many and intense about what cure there exists for those who "fall back into sin."

As we move toward the end of the first decade of this new century, the church is being faced with a major shift in perceptions of what "church" is and should be. Some have hastened to brand this time as a new reformation. One movement which is gaining a recognizable shape and identity is referred to as the emerging church. (The emergent church is a similar, but, so far, different movement.)

From her study of 300 healty, mainline Protestant churches, Dr. Diana Butler Bass, focusing principally on exemplary subgroups of 50 and 10 churches (composed mainly of United Methodist, UCC, Presbyterian (USA), Episcopal, Evangelical Lutheran (ELCA), and Disciples of Christ congregations), discovered a number of characteristics these churches mostly share. In general:

1. they exhibit a profound spiritual vibrancy, Christian authenticity, coherent faith, passion and purpose that is open and generous, intellectual and emotive, beautiful and just, moving into the future by reengaging their best past.
2. they call their members to lives of transformative engagement with authentic Christian tradition as embodied in faith practices, and encourage them to express their transformation in new ways and directions, "rebirthing tradition" rather than maintaining or improving inherited ways.
3. they focus more on God's grace in the world than on the eternal state of their own souls.
4. their churches are sacred spaces where saints and sinners gather to hear God's word, engage practices of prayer and service, and are transformed through active participation.
5. their churches are communities formed around Christian practice rather than moral or theological purity.
6. they understand that thinking theologically does not mean "arriving at certain conclusions," that their goal is not to arrive at doctrinal certainty, but at awe-filled action.
7. they understand that, though Jesus may be the same yesterday, today, and forever, we change from moment to moment.
8. they adopt a pragmatic approach toward ideas and practices, both new and old: adopting them when they feed the spirit and shedding them when they no longer contribute to life.
9. they understand church as an adventure into creating authentic spiritual community, as a matter of transformed traditions rather than as a matter of organized structures.

These congregations have no desire or interest in "separating saints from sinners." Just as in yesterday's gospel lection from Matthew 13, they are content to let "the wheat and the weeds" grow together, trusting that God's spirit will be at work transforming lives. For my own work, I've come to embrace this parable as definitive for linking what we, here at Pilgrims', and what these other emerging congregations are becoming.

He's Baaaaaaack!

I just realized that my last post here was on May 29. Since then I've been writing, just not for this blog. Following the seminars and the reading which accompanied them, I've spent considerable time and energy writing two papers, one concerning the emerging polity of the UCC, and the other on lessons those of us in the church who've come from mostly west- and northern-Eurpoean climes and persons of other ethnic backgrounds.

The first paper traces the development of polity in the UCC from the 1957 merger which formed this denomination, from a polity with a presbyterian-accented congregationalism to a new model--still evolving--of what we've come to call "covenantal congregationalism" or "covenantal polity." Since this is still a work-in-progress, there's much more to be said and done.

The second paper examines some of the "hidden histories" of groups and movements within our predecessor denominations and the racial/ethnic groups with which they came in contact, through missionary activity and by other ways. The prayer which arises here is that we and our children not repeat the same mistakes and that we find better ways to interact with others we perceive as different.

Holy Conversation on Race

Our denomination has been called to comment on and engage in a "Holy Conversation on Race" during these weeks following Pentecost. Our Florida UCC Conference Minister, Kent Siladi, has posted on his blog (click on the Progressive Revelation link to visit and read it) an excerpt from an article on Race and White Privilege.

During our cluster's clergy fellowship meeting this week, we discussed how it seems that in some of our congregations it's easier to address and resolve issues concerning ONA and LGBT than issues of race. We also reminded each other that race, fundamentalism, and even denominationalism are quite modern constructs which didn't exist as we know them more than a couple hundred years ago. They, as are so many other sociological concepts, products of our post-enlightment culture.

Several members of our congregation have connected with one or another of the projects seeking to map matrilineal, or mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) which is that part of the genetic code of every living person which lives in the nuclei of the cells of our bodies and which we get only from our mothers. mDNA is passed mother to child, and can be passed generationally only from mother to daughter. This means that women who had no children or who had only sons who survived to puberty to reproduce did not pass on their mDNA. This also means that women who abort their female fetuses or kill their female infants fail to pass on their mDNA.

In the larger picture, this means that every person now living is descended from a single female ancestor, dubbed "mitochondrial/matrilineal Eve." mEve lived in east Africa between 100,000 and 400,000 years ago and all of us trace our ancestry to her through six (or seven) of her daughters whose children migrated out of east Africa and eventually populated the planet, replacing other inhabitants with whom they were genetically incompatible.

As these migrants moved and settled in various places, they developed secondary characteristics which we now see in variations principally in skin color/texture, hair, stature, and facial and other bone structure characteristics. However, we have to realize that, as scientific studies have shown, interbreeding has been so extensive that "racial purity" has always been nothing more than a myth. War and conquest with their consequent rape, enslavement, and seduction, not to mention commerce and trade and intermarriage between peoples have served to thoroughly blend the genetic heritage of Earth's population.

The genetic code we receive from our parents helps shape our physical appearance and provides the large part of our personal predispositions to behavior, health, and taste. And our environment provides the rest, shaping our rhythms, associations, language, ethnicity, and familial norms. Who and what we believe ourselves to be is a greater factor in how we live and behave than some set of arbitrary categorizations based on those secondary physical characteristics.

Lots of people eat "grits and greens." Lots of folks enjoy "rap and rhythm" or the classics. Others order their lives according to sexual identity. And how this gets done may have little to do with skin color, facial characteristics, or our "family of origin" or the neighborhood we grew up in.

So one of the first decisions we need to make as we take up a conversation on race, is what do we really mean in the first place by using and defining the term, and whether or not it provides a useful frame of reference in categorizing and identifying people in our day and time. Is "race" a useful classifier or is it yet another tired and hackneyed term best left for dead?

World Economics

I rarely write on this and related subjects, but the continuing rise in energy and food costs has, I believe, captured everyone's attention. Many of my neighbors are seriously engaged in selling their more fuel-inefficient vehicles; a number are getting measured for helmets and are checking out motorcycle and bicycle dealers.

When I think of gas and food in the same breath, my mind travels back to the winter of 1972. We'd just received a settlement from an auto accident and were finally able to purchase a good car. When my eyes fell on that red 1973 Pontiac Grand Am--one of the first off the line of that model--it was (since I was a male of that generation) love at first sight. With gas at 25 cents a gallon who cared that this car with its huge engine got 8 mpg city and, on a good day, 13 highway?

Only months later came the 1973 gas crisis and suddenly this grad student on partial scholarship and an assistantship was paying 400 percent more to feed this baby. In short order it became a "pleasure vehicle" and I adapted to the joys of urban transit. Even after the pump prices receeded to only 300 percent of their prior level, I had to keep my bus pass and use it daily.

But in 1973, just before gas prices skyrocketed, Texas panhandle wheat was going for upwards of $3 a bushel, which meant that a regular loaf of bread was running at about 30 cents. And West Texas crude oil was going for $3.55 a barrel.

Late in 2007 as headlines screamed that, due to numerous factors, wheat was soaring to "record" prices of just over $10 a bushel. Shortly after that the headlines began screaming that oil prices could rise precipitously, sending the prices of gas up and over the $4 per gallon mark. This week, in our area, we're almost there and crude oil is hitting $135 or more per barrel.

Obviously, I'm no economist, but I do possess some basic math skills. Adjusted for inflation and cost of living, a bushel of wheat, $3 in 1973, should be selling for $14 today and a barrel of that crude, then at $3.55, should now be at just over $16.

Yet, the price of wheat, even at "record" 2007 highs, has failed to keep even with inflation, while the price of oil is off the charts. So the farmers and the citizenry of the world in general are even deeper in the hole and the oil barons are riding even higher on their wave of prosperity.

What this means for interstate, much less, international trade, I'm not exactly sure. But I've said for years, since the first gas crisis in 1973, that the price of wheat should be tied to the price of oil as an international standard. Perhaps then, we could have some equity on both ends. So then we say to the oil producers, "Go ahead and set any price you want for your oil, but remember, you're also setting the same price you're going to pay for the wheat you buy." So that, however you cut it, the standard becomes, again as it was in 1973, a bushel of wheat for a barrel of crude. Seems fair to me.

We now return you to the usual daily insanity.

'nuff said

CLICK HERE for a (we hope) final perspective on the J. Wright flap.

Beware the terrible simplifiers....

Politics, Religion...and Athletics

It seems that hardly a day has passed since Christmas that we haven't had to wade through stories of the entanglement of religion in the American Presidential process. For as long as I can remember there have been tensions between the officially athiest government on the Chinese mainland and the people and religious leadership of Tibet---that struggle from China's claim of ownership of Tibet.

Enter the modern Olympics, which, since its inception has always managed to include some significant component of religio-political turmoil. From Jesse Owens and the 1936 Berlin Olympics, with its headon confrontation over Nazi Arianism to the Cold War boycotts which affected the games in Moscow and Los Angeles, we come to the Beijing Olympics of 2008 and the odyssey of the Olympic Torch.

It's unlikely that separating religious interests and politics will ever be fully realized, especially not when we have the quadrennial political, er--religious, er--Olympic, games to arouse nationalistic and athletic fervor.

There were rumors earlier this week that there's a new song being sung on the West Coast, "I left my torch in San Francisco," but this morning's headlines seem to suggest that it did actually make its way out of town.

Closer to home, the UCC ran a full-page ad in the New York Times a week ago, as an attempt to clarify the denomination's perspectives on church polity and conduct. There's another ad running in USA Today this weekend on the call for a national dialog on race. I'm not suggesting that you buy a copy to see the ads---I don't buy either of these papers but that's because I don't buy papers which don't have a comics page---but keep your eyes and ears peeled for any mention of the ads in the media.

Use these links if you want to see the ads without buying the papers. You'll need Adobe Reader to view the PDF files, though.
CLICK HERE to see the NY Times Ad.
CLICK HERE to see the USA Today Ad.

Sounds of Life

I've written recently of the pair of cardinals who come to play outside my window every so often. They were back today playing tag through the trees and vines in the side yards definitely brightening the day here even as the clouds rolled in setting us up for an afternoon "light show" and thunderstorm.

Meanwhile grandson Wyatt, who will be 2 soon, still making wonderful discoveries about his world was captured on video enjoying the "family cardinal" who comes to sing his song in their backyard. Enjoy life and this brief clip about nature's songs and a toddler's joy of life. (Video by Wyatt's mom, Lisa.)