Blogging toward Sunday: Unwelcome messages

Second Sunday of Advent
Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 1:68-79; Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6

by G. Kevin Baker

Perhaps December in your house is like it is in mine: more guests coming more often, which means more preparation. In my home, messages start showing up in odd places—unexpected and in many cases unwelcome messages. My daughter may wake up to see a “to do” list taped to her favorite cereal box, with the dire warning, “Make your bed before you eat!” My teenage son will find his messages taped to the refrigerator door.

My own messages are usually hanging on the front door just above the door knob, so there is absolutely no chance of avoiding them unless I sneak out the back door or crawl out through a window--which makes it obvious that I've seen the messages.

The messages are almost always about preparation: shopping for presents, picking out trees, cooking for dinner parties and gearing up for family gatherings. We are scurrying around to parties, meetings and malls and spending inordinate amounts of time consuming, working and planning. Tis the season of preparation upon layers of preparation.

The paradox is that the season of preparation is also the season of heightened distraction. While we are rummaging around in the closet for the silver tinsel, the prophet Malachi is warning of a refiner’s fire where silver and gold will be purified and refined. While we are raising a tree to anticipate the gifts that will appear beneath its branches, Zechariah speaks of a mighty savior raised up with the gifts of mercy, forgiveness, peace and redemption. While the malls overflow with people trying to find the best gift for Christmas day, Paul prays that the people in Philippi will be overflowing with love so that they may be found pure and blameless on the day of Christ. While the world announces preparation for a holiday, John announces preparation for a way.

Each passage for this coming Sunday has a messenger jumping off the page; unexpected and even unwelcome messages are all over the place. Christians, of all people, should not avoid such prophetic messages, though we’re tempted to crawl out the window or the back door. The temptation to avoid spiritual preparation may force us to ask difficult questions: do we prefer comfortable holiday distraction to comfort-shattering calls to holiness and discipleship?

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The name “Malachi” means “my messenger.” This message is posted at the very end of the Old Testament, which in Protestant Bibles is followed by the Gospel of Matthew. In 2:17 the people ask: “Where is the God of justice?” An answer follows in this week's reading:

See I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts.

The church confesses that Christmas is the answer to the people’s question in Malachi. Where is the God of justice? We need look no further than the poor Jewish child born in Bethlehem.

But perhaps contemporary people might bring different questions: where is the God of Christmas once the toys are broken, the wrapping paper is at the curb and the time off is over? Where are the people who profess to follow this God of justice during the rest of the year? Does the God we worship on December 25 still resemble the God of Malachi, Zechariah, Paul, Luke, John the Baptizer and the prophet Isaiah?

G. Kevin Baker is lead pastor of Reconciliation United Methodist Church in Durham, North Carolina. He writes regularly for the United Methodist Publishing House.

Working hard? Or working hard at making hand turkeys?

by Steve Thorngate

Faith-based editors, like preachers, approach holidays with ambivalence: there are so many meaningful things to say, yet so few that seem remotely fresh. One approach is to dramatically vary the tone year to year. Last Thanksgiving I wrote a personal post about Black Friday, consumerism and the demands of family. This year I’m posting pictures of hand turkeys.

The Century’s printer pushed last week’s deadline up from Friday to Thursday. So we did what any self-respecting magazine staff with an abnormally quiet Friday afternoon would do: gathered in the kitchen with construction paper, scissors, colored pencils and glue sticks. The result was a wide variety of strange and festive turkeys.

Dan Richardson, our art director, was kind enough to select three top turkeys and photograph them. The first winner he praised for its “slightly frightening beauty”:


This turkey Dan dubbed First in Cool, “with his/her white Kanye shades, his/her Apple sponsorship and his/her androgyny”:


Finally, a two-headed turkey that deserves recognition not only for this uncommon feat but also for its festive feathers and “liberal use of glitter”:


Happy Thanksgiving.

Benedict, TEC and ACNA

by Steve Thorngate

A month after the Catholic Church announced new “personal ordinariates” for disaffected Anglicans, the question here in the States remains: what, if anything, will this mean for the Episcopal Church (TEC). . .and for the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), the umbrella group of U.S. conservatives outside TEC?

Ian Markham addresses this question in the Century. Markham—dean of Virginia Theological Seminary, a DC-area Episcopal school—discusses Pope Benedict’s new variety of ecumenism, the differences that exist within ACNA and the challenge to TEC going forward.

(See also this roundup of highlights from the ocean of ink spilt just after the Vatican’s announcement and this pair of news stories.)

The worst kind of middle ground

by Steve Thorngate

The Democrats have built their majority by expanding their tent; as a result there is now a sizable group of antiabortion Democrats in Congress. The new abortion divide—intra- along with inter-party—has shaken the Democratic consensus on health insurance reform.

In a commentary for the Century, I take a look at the Stupak Amendment, the 11th-hour addition to the House health-insurance bill that would ban abortion coverage in the bill’s “public option” plan and in most plans sold on new insurance exchanges. I argue against the amendment on the grounds that it would perpetuate further the existing income gap in abortion access.

While Americans lack consensus on abortion rights, our laws too often reflect a perverse consensus on whose rights matter most: it’s far easier politically to go after those with less money. The centrist position on abortion (to the extent that such a thing exists) tends to focus on low-income women and the sets of bad choices they’re often faced with. It downplays the tougher ethical questions: what about women with comfortable incomes and good insurance who simply don't want to have a baby? Should they have access to elective abortion?

If the Stupak Amendment becomes law, they may well be the only ones who do. All eyes are on the Senate, where Sen. Orrin Hatch is expected to introduce a similar amendment to the Senate's health-insurance bill.

Credit and community

by David Heim

The recent big news in my hometown, a suburb bordering Chicago, is the closing of a locally owned bank. The bank ended up with many of the bad assets held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but it didn’t qualify for a government bailout and didn’t have enough capital of its own to satisfy bank regulators.

The news was especially painful because this bank truly was a community bank: it invested in areas of town where business owners were struggling, and it provided local government with credit for special projects. It provided a no-interest loan to launch a Jesuit high school on Chicago’s West Side, where the public high school had been shut down. The weekly paper was flooded with testimonials about how the bank and its president, Mike Kelly, had been partners in community projects. It seemed every nonprofit and every social cause in town had a story to tell about how Kelly had provided key financial support.

Someone observed that Kelly’s bank was, unbeknownst to most of us, like the Bailey Savings & Loan in It’s a Wonderful Life—part of the glue that held our town together. Kelly was, by all accounts, far from being a George Bailey: he was a shrewd and tough-minded negotiator who ran a highly profitable network of banks. But he also believed that capital and credit were to be used to build community. It was enough to make you want to go into banking—at least the kind of banking Kelly practiced.

Blogging toward Sunday: The melody of hope

First Sunday of Advent
Jeremiah 33:14-16; Psalm 25:1-10; 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13; Luke 21:25-36

by Leonard Beechy

Many of us who enjoy the novels of Kurt Vonnegut were surprised to read these words among his last public utterances before his death in 2007:

But no matter how bad things may get for me, the music will still be wonderful. My epitaph, should I ever need one, God forbid: “The only proof he ever needed of the existence of God was music.”

The surprise was not in the mention of God—God comes up frequently in his work—but in the implication that God was for him a proven reality, that Vonnegut believed. Yes, we know him well enough to be suspicious of this; his career was built on irony, wisecrack and self-parody. He was also a passionate ethical humanist who regarded all communal religious expression as so much Bokononism (a fictional religion in Cat’s Cradle that exists for the purpose of manufacturing harmless falsehoods).

Still, I’m with Vonnegut when it comes to God and music. Advent in particular arrives for me through the vehicle of melody and lyric. In three descending notes, the tenor sings, “Comfort ye,” and I am all ears and heart, ready. An organ plays ten unadorned tones—“O come, o come, Immanuel”—and I’ve already joined the prayer. Longing, exile, displacement—they don’t have to be conjured up; they’re there within me, waiting to resonate with the first tone, the first plaintive voice.

Mark Twain is often identified as Vonnegut’s predecessor, while Emily Dickinson, at least at first glance, seems like his exact opposite. On second reading, though, the likenesses are striking: the droll and epigrammatic style, the fascination-from-a-distance with God, the breezy eccentricity in the face of life’s Big Questions:

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

For me, Advent sings hope’s “tune without the words.” There are words in Advent, of course. For this first Sunday there is a messianic prophecy from Jeremiah, an individual lament from the Psalms, an eschatological discourse from Jesus, a joyful outburst from Paul. But their effect is cumulative and indirect. They wash over us, more music than message.

Running through and around the texts of Advent, we hear the melody of hope. The dizzying variety of historical circumstances these texts traverse reminds us that, while exile and devastation are persistent realities, so are God’s love and promise, a tune that “never stops—at all.”

As Vonnegut put it in his evening-of-life credo, “No matter how bad things may get . . . the music will still be wonderful.”

Leonard Beechy is a high school English teacher and a regular contributor to the Mennonite Publishing Network.

Remembering the Jesuit martyrs

by Steve Thorngate

There’s another anniversary to mark this month, a reminder that the symbolic end of the cold war didn't stop its proxy hot wars in the developing world from lingering on. Twenty years ago this week—a week after the wall fell—Salvadoran soldiers murdered six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter on the campus of Central American University. The civil war between the U.S.-backed military government and a coalition of leftist militias lasted two more years.

This week, President Mauricio Funes—El Salvador’s first president from the party that grew out of the war’s rebel forces—awarded the slain priests the country’s highest honor. This weekend, thousands will travel to Georgia for the 19th annual protest of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly the School of the Americas), the U.S. military facility where most of the killers were trained—and where Latin American military and civilian personnel continue to be trained today.

Salvation by pastor alone

by Tom Steagald

Most Christian congregations confess that the faithful—and, we should hope, even the unfaithful—are saved by “grace alone.” In fact, like the foolish Galatians, we have turned to a different gospel. What we really believe—individually and corporately, spiritually and pastorally, vocationally and ecclesiologically—is that salvation (read “success”) is the result of “work alone.” Or if not work alone, then work mostly, which, unlike grace and faith, produces measurable results and therefore testifies one way or the other to a minister’s effectiveness or a congregation’s vitality.

One practical consequence of this theological eclipse is easy to observe: how many of the mailings filling pastors’ inboxes are selling techniques? The latest products for programming? Some new skill set that will increase attendance, engender enthusiasm, generate giving?

Eugene Peterson laments our temptation and tendency to substitute technique for spirituality. One result is impatience: we have to get busy! Another is fear: if we don’t do this now, the church down the road will do it, and we'll be left behind. Yet a third result is the kind of frustrated and often quixotic jumps pastors make from church to church when a new building, staff, program or pulpit/platform seems more amenable to their goals. These idolatries and self-deceptions prompt Peterson to encourage pastors to cultivate a spirituality of both place and incarnational patience.

I should disclose that I recently received a nice "promotion." In my new pastorate—where I'm thankful to be and thrilled to pitch my tent—I've been trying to locate and avoid the traps set for all ministers. Here’s one: even well-meaning congregations often believe they will be saved not just by work, but by the work of the pastor: her preaching and personality, his pastoral care and visitation, the winsomeness and marketing and programming that will change the old First Church from “inglory” into glory.

We in the trade are prone to lament our congregations’ unrealistic, unyielding and even idolatrous expectations. But I suspect that secretly we are flattered by it all. For all our protestations, the most dangerous trap is one we set for ourselves: many of us desperately want our people to be dependent on us, want the flock to turn to us in every little crisis to solve every problem and sign off on every decision. Their high regard can assuage our insecurities. It can seem to validate the call and reward the sacrifice. John Baillie identified this pastoral neurosis for what it was when he confessed that his "care of others" was often simply a "refined" form of self-care.

As I start work in a new place I think of the Baptizer’s benediction: “I must decrease and He must increase.” What does salvation by grace alone look like in the local church?

Tom Steagald is a United Methodist pastor in Shelby, North Carolina. He's a contributor to Feasting on the Word (Westminster John Knox), and blogs at Prayer Pilgrimage.

Megachurch introverts, too

by John Dart

The Century’s November 17 cover story asks, “Can Introverts lead?” The author, Presbyterian minister Adam S. McHugh, assembles a variety of sources and concludes that charismatic, hard-charging and gregarious pastors cannot count on these traits alone to sustain a lasting ministry. In other words, introverts may say, “Yes we can.”

McHugh’s analysis appears to apply to big-church pastors as well as others. I recently attended the joint meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Religious Research Association. During one panel, researcher Warren Bird mentioned this surprising figure, from a Leadership Network survey this past spring: 45 percent of lead pastors of megachurches—those averaging at least 2,000 worshipers weekly—confess to being at least somewhat introverted.

Now it’s true that a shrinking violet would have a tough time at the helm of a megachurch: only 3 percent of megachurch pastors said they are “very introverted,” while 26 percent are “very extroverted.” Forty-two percent went with “somewhat introverted.”

Stereotypes are shattered in other theoretically extroverted occupations as well. Johnny Carson admitted he was shy by nature, as did some of his Tonight Show guests. But in performing as talk show hosts, comedians and actors, they had the courage and justification to display an outgoing demeanor.

Likewise, I am not an extrovert, despite a long reporting career. But in my “PRESS” role I am emboldened to do my job in pursuing news sources and asking pointed questions. My introvert side helps when envisioning the story and writing it up.

Does the call to ministry and ordination allow an otherwise-introverted pastor to become gregarious, bold and determined when the situation calls for it?

Blogging toward Sunday: Good news that remains

Reign of Christ (Proper 29)
2 Samuel 23:1-7; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37

by Leonard Beechy

When my class finishes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, the discussion often comes around to the title. What’s so great about Jay Gatsby, who has renamed and reinvented himself, and amassed an ill-gotten fortune, all in pursuit of Daisy, the wealthy golden girl? One of my brighter students dismissed Gatsby as “a stalker with means.” All agree that Daisy herself is no prize, certainly unworthy of the single-minded devotion Gatsby lavishes upon her.

Which is, the students and I eventually agree, the point. It's not the object of Gatsby's dream, but its intensity—his “capacity for hope”—that makes him great in the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway and, presumably, of Fitzgerald himself:

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.

When lapsed Catholic Fitzgerald phrases this in New Testament language he reveals a lot about himself and how he read his time. The dissipating devotion to unworthy loves and objects is the theme of Fitzgerald’s life, and also that of the postwar, Lost Generation America he epitomized forever when he published the novel in 1925.

In that same year, and looking around at that same Lost Generation, Pope Pius XI published Quas Primas, establishing the Feast of Christ the King. The encyclical targets not only the loss of faith—the rising tides of secularity and disillusionment—but also the rise of bad faith: faith misplaced in materiality, violence, earthly systems and “human power.” With the rubble of war still surrounding him, Pius proclaimed that we must look for “the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ,” a kingdom that

demands of its subjects a spirit of detachment from riches and earthly things, and a spirit of gentleness. They must hunger and thirst after justice, and more than this, they must deny themselves and carry the cross.

In establishing Christ the King Sunday, then, Pius’s heart was in the right place—as is ours when we find ourselves a little uncomfortable with the whole business. We soften its patriarchal edges by calling it “Reign of Christ Sunday” and soften its monarchical edges with tricks like “Kin-dom of Christ Sunday.” We do our best to avoid conservatism’s worst impulse: denying modernity by insisting that truth is inseparable from old metaphors and old oppressions. We must not preach bad news.

But let’s also make sure to preach good news to a generation no less lost than that of Fitzgerald, whose shimmering prose reached out toward a transcendence he saw as having fled. It hasn’t; it rules, and that’s good news. Let us preach devotion to a beauty that is not “vulgar and meretricious,” but elemental, profound, divine, in whose service both we and the world are made better—something, in Fitzgerald’s fine words, “commensurate with (our) capacity for wonder.”

Leonard Beechy is a high school English teacher and a regular contributor to the Mennonite Publishing Network.

Don't give up meeting together

by William H. Willimon

Crossposted at the North Alabama UMC site.

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Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.
Let us not give up meeting together,
as some are in the habit of doing,
but let us encourage one another (Hebrews 10:24-25).

The single most revealing measurement of a congregation’s health and spiritual vitality? Attendance at worship. That’s why, in the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church, the attendance number is reported every week by our churches on the Conference Dashboard.

That’s why the cabinet and I have set for ourselves a goal of 4 percent increase in attendance in our churches in 2009. Church attendance among Christians in Alabama is the second highest of any state in the nation, so this is a goal we can reach.

“Let us not give up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing,” says the writer to the Hebrews. It’s sort of a comfort to know that, even in the early church, some Christians had to be encouraged to come to church!

It’s also a reminder of how important it is to be together. “Christianity is a social religion. To turn it into a solitary affair is to kill it,” said John Wesley. You just can’t follow Jesus alone. Discipleship is never do-it-yourself. Christianity is a group thing.

Who is a Christian? Someone who has not given up meeting together. That’s not all that needs to be said about Christianity, but down through the ages we have no record of a single faithful disciple who refuses to gather with other fellow believers.

“That we may spur one another to good deeds.” This statement is a reminder that worship together is not only a way to love God but also a way to love our neighbor, to fulfill our responsibility to be “our neighbor’s keeper,” to “spur one another to good deeds.”

“I didn’t get anything out of your sermon,” says someone emerging from church. This statement betrays a misunderstanding of Christian worship.

Most of us learn that the supreme test of worship is not what I get out of it but also what my neighbor got out of it.

One reason why people may avoid Sunday meetings together is that it is so much easier to be vaguely spiritual, to cling to your cherished notions and misconceptions, when you have no fellow Christians to challenge and “spur one another.”

All over our conference, in churches large and small, this Sunday about 100,000 of us North Alabama Methodists will convene. We haven’t given up on Jesus’ promise to meet us when just two or three of us gather. We will gather, praise God, seek divine guidance and correction for our lives, and spur on one another, by the grace of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

William H. Willimon, a Century editor at large, is United Methodist bishop of the North Alabama Conference.

On the shelf: Methland by Nick Reding

by Steve Thorngate

In 2006, Congress passed the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act as part of the Patriot Act. By then, methamphetamine abuse had grown quickly in the public imagination from a B-list drug problem to an epidemic. Meth was causing serious problems—some obvious and others less so—all over the country. CMEA helped control the retail sale of meth ingredients such as pseudoephedrine (nasal decongestant). But was it as helpful in combating these problems as congressional fanfare indicated?

Journalist Nick Reding spent an extended period of time in the small town of Oelwein, Iowa, before and after passage of CMEA. In Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, he tells the story of the town's intertwined histories with economic depression and meth. Reding takes the time to get to know a number of the major players: the meth cooks, traffickers and addicts; the mayor, prosecutor and doctor. He profiles these individuals with empathy and respect, as well as tremendous journalistic insight.

Before CMEA, the police were busting local tiny-to-medium-scale labs on a regular basis. The book's most haunting episode tells of a cook who blew up his house, melted off much of his face and begged the cops to shoot him. After the law passed, much of this drug-production activity ceased, and with it the sense of national emergency. But meth use didn't take the same hit, as Reding learned on a return trip to Oelwein. Cracking down on small-time cooks in the States didn't end the demand for their products, and larger producers in Mexico were happy to pick up the slack.

Methland closes with Oelwein slowly, hesitantly on the mend. Reding, who acknowledges that the town's comeback has continued, has taken heat from area residents accusing him of factual errors and sensationalism. But Oelwein aside, Reding's analysis of the far-reaching causes and effects of meth is persuasive and sobering, and his portraits of people and places are engrossing.

No place to call home

by Richard A. Kauffman

I’m sitting in a coffee shop surrounded by homeless people. It’s cold and rainy outside, and they’ve come indoors to escape the chill.

I’ve been noticing a difference in the homeless people I see in my town. They’re looking more middle class. As they wile away the time in the train station, coffee shops or the public library, they have that telltale sign—they’re burdened down by bags and suitcases.

Foreclosures play a role for 15 percent of the newly homeless in the Midwest. Many of these people move in with family and friends and sleep on sofas until they wear out their welcome. Then they’re out on the street looking for shelter, or they live out of their cars.

As I sit here working on my computer, I’m drawn to the young mother next to me. She’s overly solicitous about her toddler’s behavior. Even though he’s rather quiet and well-behaved, she keeps him on a very short leash. I’m sure she doesn’t want to attract attention. But in spite of themselves, the homeless do attract attention. Some people find their presence in public places a nuisance, especially if they’re loud or scruffy or smelly.

I do wonder where this mother will spend the rest of the day. Where can she go? While many churches in this area, including my own, participate in the PADS program, which gives people a place to sleep on a rotating basis, the homeless can’t stay in these churches during the day. They must keep moving.

Providing child care for the homeless could be a mission opportunity for some churches. Open up the nursery for children to play in, the library for adults and children to read, the fellowship hall for adults to play table games. Serve them a healthful lunch.

Or churches might start by asking the homeless themselves what they need. One congregation in Seattle provides a drop-in center in a renovated house where people can do laundry, use the Internet, read the paper, do their own cooking and store their belongings in a secure room for the day. The church discovered that soup kitchens and food banks were providing enough food in their area; by focusing on other amenities the church filled a gap in people’s daily quest for survival. “It’s a place you can go and be a human being,” said one man who uses this drop-in center.

As I’m just about ready to leave the coffee shop, a man walks in and joins the mother and child. They greet each other warmly, and then he starts picking up their many bags, getting ready to leave. I have no idea where they'll go next. But my thoughts go with them.

Blogging toward Sunday: Warning signs and grounds for hope

24th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 28)
Daniel 12:1-3; Psalm 16; Hebrews 10:11-14, (15-18), 19-25; Mark 13:1-8

by A. Katherine Grieb

In the state where I live sometimes it's hard to tell which is scarier, Halloween or election day—a useful reminder that Christians are constantly besieged both by supernatural powers and by the results of our own sinfulness, whether individual or communal. Recent tragedies in Texas and Florida vividly focus our attention on the already overstrained system of military deployment and the rising rate of unemployment in our nation—and on the tremendous human costs of these: overwhelming stress, fear and despair. Every day the newspaper reports another teen suicide, drug overdose, drunken-driver fatality or story of a parent who's killed a spouse, children and self.

When we turn to the news of the world and the health of the planet, the amount of suffering and sorrow is almost unbearable. I force myself not to turn the pages too quickly in self-protection—and I'm one of the lucky ones who has work, food and housing and a stable government. I can only imagine the terrors faced by other people in our world, especially children.

As always, the word of the Lord is right on time. Although we may not have expected to hear much "good news" from apocalyptic texts such as Daniel and Mark, they seem to know what we need before we do. They comfort us by confronting us, forcing us to decide between reality and illusion. They ask us hard questions about where we put our trust.

Daniel 12 is well known as one of the go-to places for framing a biblical doctrine of the resurrection of the dead: "Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt." The wise shall shine like the stars, fixed and bright-shining forever. The vision given to Daniel (and also to us) is one of hope in a time of anguish such as the world has never seen.

Who will deliver us? Who is Israel's protector, the deliverer of the people of the book? The revealed name "Micha-El" means "Who is like God," which is both a question and a proclamation. As a question, it reflects the song at the Red Sea: "Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendor, doing wonders?" The implied answer is "No one!" There is no one like God, who alone deserves our trust. God is the only one who can deliver us.

"Micha-El" is also—and Christians especially find it natural to read it this way—a confession of faith. Yes, there is one "who is like God," who was with God in the beginning, God's Word and Wisdom, Jesus Christ, whom we name God and Lord, among the plethora of possible gods and lords whom others trust.

Daniel 12 is well paired with the beginning of Mark 13. Here, Jesus' disciples, instead of feeling overwhelmed by anguished suffering, are blissfully unaware of danger as they stroll the temple grounds. Mark paints them as Galilean bumpkins impressed by Jerusalem skyscrapers: wow, check out these huge stones; what about the height of this temple! (In fairness to the disciples, even worldly travelers today stand amazed at the size of the stones supporting the temple mount, and these are not the stones of the building itself, now completely demolished.)

Jesus is unimpressed: "Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down." In Mark's story, the disciples take a while to process this information. Later, as Jesus is sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, a smaller delegation asks him privately, "When will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?" The rest of Mark 13 is Jesus' answer to these two questions, in reverse order: first warning signs, then the question of timing.

Jesus warns his disciples not to be led astray by premature announcements of the end times. Drawing on the traditional description of a false prophet (one who will lead many astray), Jesus anticipates the apparently perennial phenomenon of dramatic predictions of the immediate end designed to frighten God's people into whatever particular form of repentance the prophet prefers. Bad news sells: "if it bleeds, it leads" is the mantra of our news media, and bad news about the end times has been selling well for many centuries.

The best antidote to fear-mongering prognosticators is prayer like that of Psalm 16: "Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge." Who is like God? Thanks be to God for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!

A. Katherine Grieb teaches New Testament at Virginia Theological Seminary and is the author of The Story of Romans (Westminster John Knox).

The day the wall fell

by Steve Thorngate

I’m pretty excited about the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street’s first episode, but it’s definitely not the most significant thing to commemorate this week. That would be the fall of the Berlin Wall, 20 years ago today.

The New York Times has a terrific interactive feature, with then-and-now photographs of Berlin for comparison. And here’s some great annotated footage from 20 years ago at the Brandenburg Gate:



Image by Sue Ream, licensed under Creative Commons.

The controversial peace thing

by Tom Johnson

I was teaching an adult class at an area evangelical church when we fell into a discussion (diversion, rabbit trail) about how Paul was asking the Thessalonians to live counter-culturally. (See especially 1 Thes. 4:1-12.) I said that we Christians in America today may not feel this contradiction on a daily basis the way someone living in Thessalonika would.

Immediately one of the participants spoke up with, “Oh yes, we do! Why, this very Sunday a church just up the road is having a peace thing with Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and God knows who else. What kind of a witness is that? Talk about cultural compromise!”

“Yes,” I replied, “my wife and I are the greeters for it.” After the laughing died down, I tried to outline and illustrate three ways one may interact with one’s cultural setting (we were getting even farther from the Bible study, and I heard about it later):

• complete cultural compromise (you can’t tell the Christians from the pagans)
• complete cultural rejection (Christian music, Christian schools, Christian textbooks, Christian realtors, Christian yellow pages and, for Christ’s sake, no Halloween or Easter bunnies!)
• somewhere in between (where most of us live)

We have to decide daily how to live so as to please God in a thousand small decisions. (I was hoping to bring the class back to the text.) The goal, I said, is to be “in the world” though not “of the world.” This elicited many nods.

But my interlocutor was not finished: “When the Bible says ‘blessed are the peacemakers,’ it is talking about peace with God—not with other people!” Since the peace event was not focusing on peace with God (though I’m in favor of it), I suggested that peacemaking in the Bible might be about both God and others (even Buddhists and Muslims), while one peace event was about as significant for world peace as lighting a candle in broad daylight.

We went back to Thessalonians and finding other ways not to talk about sex. When I left, I promised to talk about something less controversial the following week: why there is no such thing as the rapture in 1 Thes. 4:13-18 . Who knew adult education could be so much fun?

On the shelf: The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History by Ian J. Bickerton

by Richard A. Kauffman

A year ago I was on a tour of Palestinian villages that had been overrun by Jewish militias in the 1948 war. In one village our tour guide had been a 26-year-old father of one when the invading forces bombed his village. He escaped with his family and parents and took refuge in Nazareth.

The village was reduced to rubble, although the invaders tried to preserve the houses of worship. A small mosque remains, but it was partly bombed too, and Catholic and Orthodox churches stand almost within a stone’s throw of each other. An Orthodox congregation returns here each year during Holy Week to have a service.

After touring the Orthodox church, we noticed several young Jewish families from a local kibbutz having a picnic on the lawn between the two churches. One member in our group, a Syrian-American, asked our tour guide to ask these families if they knew this once was a Palestinian village, which he did. They seemed startled by the question at first, but then one young father said, “We don’t like to be reminded of that,” adding, “When you read history, you have to know there are two sides of the story.”

Indeed, there are two sides to the story, and usually we hear only one or the other. But Ian Bickerton, a self-declared secular humanist historian, brings a sense of detachment to the intractable conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. He attempts to write a balanced history going back to the British Mandate in Palestine following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and up through the Israeli invasion of Gaza in late 2008.

Bickerton, who teaches at the University of South Wales in Sydney, has a bias that I share. He believes that none of the wars between Israel and its neighboring Arab states have made it any more secure, that the continuing hostilities between Israel and Palestine only deepen the resolve of the two parties to yield no ground and that there can only be a nonviolent resolution to the conflict.

In response to Abba Eban’s famous quote that the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity (to make peace with Israel), Bickerton gives ample evidence that Israel too has passed up many opportunities for peace. He is particularly helpful in describing the mythologies each side perpetuates that stand in the way of a nonviolent resolution: Israel’s leaders are trapped by the collective Zionist memory of persecution and discrimination. Palestinian leaders cannot free themselves from the diet of grievances against the invading Zionist enemy recounted to them since childhood by family members.While Bickerton deals extensively with the United States’ role in Israel, he thinks that role is largely overstated and that the U.S. doesn’t have as much influence over Israel as it thinks it does. The idea that an Israeli/Jewish lobby controls American policy is without sufficient documentary substantiation.

In the end, Bickerton has to acknowledge that the balance of power falls heavily on the Israeli side. Therefore, to tell both sides of the story accurately, as he attempts to do, must seem biased in favor of the underdogs from the perspective of Israeli partisans.

Back in that bombed-out Palestinian village, our guide asked the Jewish father whether he knew a certain person in his kibbutz—a Jewish veteran who was crippled by the 1948 war. He knew the man, and instantly there was a bond between these two men, a Palestinian and a Jew a generation apart. “I’m for peace,” the Jewish man said to us as we were parting. May it be so, but it likely won’t happen without more of his generation learning the other side of the story. And vice versa.

Sojourners on sex

by Bromleigh McCleneghan

Sojourners promised me that if I renewed my subscription, they'd send an issue with the headline “6 Rules* for Shameless Sex.” What can I say? Sex sells.

Keith Graber Miller’s article (free registration required) tries to reclaim the power and joy of human sexuality while avoiding a “naiveté or excessive optimism about our sexual selves” that he sees in the reclamation of sex as a gift of God. He calls for “a counter-cultural way of living, not like the sexually repressive way of previous decades but one with an open, positive view toward sexuality—and a clear witness against the abuses of this remarkable gift of God.”

His guidelines have low and high points. I’m always disappointed to read tired examples, such as Graber Miller's use of this line from Vanilla Sky: “Don’t you know that when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise whether you do or not?” I first encountered this in Lauren Winner’s Real Sex a few years back and it annoyed me then, too.

Graber Miller tells us that marital sex is good, that Jesus had a body and that “Jesus knew what it was like. . .to be subject to the same sexual desires that we are, and he empathizes with those desires.” I would not want to be the youth group leader trying to share that script with a room full of teenagers. He also claims that hooking up among college students is not the exercise of “sexual freedom” it purports to be. He goes on to criticize the term "safe sex," noting that contraception cannot protect against betrayal, jealousy, grief. Perhaps he thinks these are even more serious hurts than STDs—a case I’d like to see anyone make to one of the 20 percent of young adults infected with herpes (a lifetime companion).

In any case, abstinence won't protect against such emotions, either: they are an inevitable part of becoming an adult and having any sort of relationships, sexual or otherwise. Falling in love, making deep friendships and sharing one’s most intimate self is risky business. The argument for safer sex practices isn’t that they make sex risk-free; it’s that our hearts and souls can often be healed in ways our immune systems can’t. Safer sex practices are about managing risk. Being in relationship always involves risk; it takes faith.

Graber Miller does make some constructive additions to Christian conversation on sexuality. He notes that masturbation is “one of the most common sexual experiences” and that “for many of the young people I come across in various religious settings, the church’s attitude of strict condemnation does more to alienate them from the church’s teaching than it does to deter them from self-gratification.” Other moments stopped me in my tracks: I had no idea that Renaissance painters depicted the infant Jesus’ genitalia to represent his humanity and the true difficulty of a commitment to celibacy. I read in horrified wonder that the U.S. now has more sex shops than McDonald’s restaurants.

The most promising points for furthering discussion come in Graber Miller’s twin conclusions. First, the church has spent 30 years yelling about homosexuality without understanding human sexuality in its fullness or broader context. Second, “we need to recognize that what we really yearn for in life is intimacy rather than the stimulation of genital nerve endings.”

This turn to intimacy is critical: how will we have faithful, engaged, intimate relationships with friends, lovers, family members? How will we negotiate being together, sharing our lives, given the complexities of our hearts and bodies? These are the questions that will lead us forward, and Graber Miller is wise to point us in this direction.

Bromleigh McCleneghan is associate pastor and director of Christian education at Baker Memorial United Methodist Church in St. Charles, Illinois.

Blogging toward Sunday: Two widows, true to type

23rd Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27)
1 Kings 17:8-16; Psalm 146; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

by A. Katherine Grieb

For most of canonical history, Mark's Gospel has been considered an ugly duckling and its author a clumsy yokel. It can hardly be a coincidence that this Gospel was recognized as a swan and its author newly discovered as a literary genius after the development of sophisticated cinematic technique prepared us to read it better. Only then could scholars recognize ancient textual equivalents to contemporary filmmaking strategies.

Preachers of this Gospel would do well to imagine themselves directing it: what is the equivalent in Mark's text of the camera's unswerving focus on the glass of milk being carried up the stairs in Hitchcock's Suspicion?

In today's Gospel passage, the camera focuses first on Jesus, who is warning his disciples about the scribes "who devour widows' houses" and "say long prayers" as they do it. As we are mentally digesting this warning, our view is enlarged to a full panorama of the temple court and its treasury. The scene is one of bustling activity: people moving back and forth, many rich people putting large amounts of money into the temple treasury.

The camera pulls back to focus on Jesus as he sits (the traditional posture for teaching) opposite (one of Mark's loaded prepositions) the temple treasury. Jesus is opposed to the temple authorities, especially the scribes whose injustice to widows he has just exposed.

As if on cue, a widow appears in the midst of the crowd. We would not have noticed her in the commotion, except that Jesus points verbally at her simple gesture. The camera zooms in for a close-up shot: she puts in only two small copper coins—a penny. Why does Jesus single her out for attention?

As we wonder, along with the disciples, the camera catches her disappearing into the crowd again: we saw her only for a few seconds. Now the camera closes in on Jesus' face as he tells us that "all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on." The camera pulls back and the screen fades to black as Jesus' words sink in.

The Greek word behind "all she had to live on" is ambiguous. It can mean "her whole living," as in the story of the widow of Zarephath who fed Elijah, the man of God, from the little she and her son had left to live on. She trusted in God's faithfulness and in the word of the Lord spoken by the prophet. The same word—"bios," from which we get "biology"—can also mean "life": this widow, at the mercy of unjust scribes in the temple, is nevertheless offering to God, through the temple, "her whole life."

Some recent commentaries fault the widow for colluding with unjust and exploitative economic structures and fault Mark for having Jesus endorse her behavior. In their eagerness to provide a political reading, they may be missing a theological one: the widow is a type of Jesus Christ who similarly chooses to give "his whole life" in the face of those unjust structures that destroy it.

For preachers so inclined, all four lessons read in concert invite a typological reading of the death, resurrection and second coming of Jesus Christ. The widow of Zarephath approaches the death of her son and herself by trusting God, who proves faithful. Ahab and Jezebel, who crush the poor (e.g., Naboth), reap drought as promised, but God "executes justice for the oppressed," "gives food to the hungry" and "upholds the orphan and widow" (Psalm 146). God's word, like the jar of meal and the jug of oil, does not fail. These two lessons point ahead to the faithful death of Jesus and God's faithfulness in raising him from the dead.

Mark and Hebrews point backwards to the cross: Mark's widow is a parable of Jesus' own death; Hebrews complements that local human story by describing the cosmic significance of the atonement. Hebrews also points ahead: Christ will appear a second time to save those who are eagerly awaiting him. We are challenged to trust God's faithfulness as much as these two widows, the psalmist, Mark, Hebrews and our Savior did. Will we let ourselves be "typecast" in Mark's movie?

A. Katherine Grieb teaches New Testament at Virginia Theological Seminary and is the author of The Story of Romans (Westminster John Knox).