Unfinished Business

When I first began teaching, I tried to have all my semester grades turned in before commencement, so that I could enjoy a sense of closure as I sat there in my academic regalia and watched graduating students stride down the field house aisle and into their future. These days, I don’t even bother to try to hit that deadline. I’m so slow and tired by the end of the academic year; I can’t push myself hard enough to make it. Instead, I usually stumble along right up to the Wednesday after commencement weekend, when the registrar insists we turn in our final grades.

I suppose I have simply gotten used to unfinished business. As more academic years slide past and pile up behind me, I have less a sense of closure in May than a sense of constant motion. Even this year, when two of my own children are graduating—one from high school and one from middle school—I’m having a hard time savoring the moment. It all seems to be flying past me in a blur.

Perhaps this is why Psalm 90 has been on my mind, a psalm about the passage of time, the ephemerality of life. For God, a thousand years are like a day, and our little human lives are quick as a breath and no more substantial. Humbled by this reflection, the psalmist pleads, “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Teach us how very small we are. Melt our self-importance away in the light of divine perspective.

I’ve always loved how this psalm ends. At first glance, it seems to shift topics. “May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us; establish the work of our hands for us—yes, establish the work of our hands.” Where does work come into this? After meditating on the brevity and sorrows of life, now we’re talking about the “work of our hands”?

Yes. Exactly. This is how we make meaning out of years “whose span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” We busy ourselves with “the work of our hands.” That’s what the favor of the Lord looks like: something to do in life, a meaningful task. The Hebrew word for work is very general—it simply means “activities” or “deeds,” not only tasks at work or home but all our interactions with others, all the ways we weave ourselves into the world.

Whatever it is we do, though, our business will always be unfinished. I think of this as I close the books on one semester and notice another one appearing the horizon. I think of this as our graduates move on, so many papers and projects behind them and so much life ahead of them. I think of this as a parent, as I wonder if I’ve done enough and taught my children enough and equipped them with everything they need for the next stage.

The answer to that, of course, is no. That is why we need the prayer at the end of this psalm, and we need to pray it twice: “Establish, yes, establish.” The favor of the Lord looks like work, but the outcome of that work is the Lord’s. We cannot ever do enough, and we cannot know what the work of our hands will mean to others, not fully. That is in the hands of God.

In the end, this is a psalm about letting go in trust. So hard to do, but what choice do we have? We can only try to be faithful, and then let go with a prayer: “May the favor of the Lord rest upon us.”

Making the Case for Church

Someone had to come out and say it eventually, and Lillian Daniel was the brave one. Her blog post “Spiritual But Not Religious: Please Stop Boring Me” raised a ruckus in September of 2011 when it appeared in the Huffington Post. The short essay describes her encounter with a man on a plane who, learning that she was a pastor, felt compelled to explain to her how spiritual he is, and how he does it all without benefit of clergy, or church, or any of that organized religion jazz. Daniel’s essay offers a withering reply to such people, pointing out how narcissistic, shallow, and mainstream they are, despite their imagined uniqueness and profundity. Daniel’s critique is harsh—deliciously so for those of us long committed to the church. We may have frequently thought these thoughts, but we would only dare speak them aloud in the privacy of our own living rooms.

Well, Daniel put it out on the net, and it went viral. Not surprisingly, her post swirled up some rough weather. She was called smug, a bitch, a religious bigot, and other names you can imagine. Tolerance and diversity, after all, does not extend to religious people, since religion is obviously the sworn enemy of tolerance and diversity. It’s fine to bash religious people, but when a religious person strikes back, woe be unto her.

So what happens when your blog post garners 579 comments on the Huff Post? That’s right: you publish a book. Daniel is an established writer, contributing regularly both to the Huffington Post and the Christian Century. She already has two books published, one on testimony and one co-written with another pastor on the clergy life. Her new book, which just appeared in January, places an expanded version of that viral essay at the front of a flotilla of her other short pieces, many of them previously published. It’s called When “Spiritual But Not Religious” is Not Enough: Seeing God in Surprising Places, Even the Church.

I’m a fan of Daniel’s writing and happy to recommend her to those who have not read her before. In her day job, she is senior pastor at a congregational church in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Her wry humor and spiritual depth remind me of early Barbara Brown Taylor, and she represents the best of mainline sensibilities.

I’m not sure what to make of this particular book, however. I was once told by a wise editor that a title is a promise to the reader. This title seems to promise that the book will make a case for the church to the skeptical reader—not just Christ, or the faith, but the church. The back ad copy seems to confirm that purpose:

While so-called “spiritual” life keeps people self-focused and vague, religious people have something that spiritual people do not: centuries of careful religious thought, ongoing meaningful debate, and, most importantly, a supportive community that challenges and strengthens their faith. Humorous and sincere, this is a book about people finding God in the most unexpected, unspiritual places: prisons, airports, yoga classes, committee meetings, and strangest of all, right there in their local church.

All right, I thought, when I cracked the book open, let’s hear it. Bring it on! I would love to hear an extended argument for organized religion and the institutional church. Obviously I don’t need that argument for myself, but it certainly would be handy when I encounter the spiritual-but-not-religious skeptic on a plane or wherever else.

So I dove in and found myself enjoying the essays very much. I especially appreciated the longer ones in which we begin by strolling along with Daniel through some intriguing aspect of modern life, then suddenly a scripture passage sneaks up on us, and we realize we are in the middle of an affecting sermon, with Jesus standing right among us, warning about the Pharisees or remarking on the older brother of the prodigal in ways directly pointed at our lives. The other essays, on immigration reform and animals on planes, a little kitty who lived a brave life, teaching masters-of-ministry students in prison—all great stuff. I think my favorite might be a beautiful piece on the mystery of marriage in which, before a wedding ceremony, the groom reminisces with Daniel about running wild in the church building as a kid. He asks her if kids still do that, and she assures him they do. But walking down the aisle and committing to marriage, she tells him, “may be the craziest thing you’ve done here yet.”

Unfortunately, when it comes to that argument for the church promised by the title and back ad copy, I don’t think the book delivers, not even in an indirect, narrative sort of way. Those of us already in the church will find Daniel a congenial companion. We’ll nod knowingly and appreciatively throughout. But I doubt anything here would convince a church skeptic or prove useful in addressing one. Granted, a collection of essays may not be the best way to make such an argument anyway. Short essays are notoriously difficult to mold together into a coherent collection. They tend to fall apart like too-dry cookie dough, especially when, as here, writings of widely differing lengths are mixed together. And what happened in the editing process so that the original blog post simply appears without comment as Chapter 19, when we’ve already had a longer and better version of it as the opening essay?     

Still, the problem here is not the writing, but an overpromise for the book’s agenda. In her book-related speaking engagements, Daniel seems to be engaged in a public accounting of what’s good and valuable about religion and the church—doing in person what the book doesn’t exactly do. So good for her. She’s absolutely right that religious people should not always be on the defensive, fielding outsiders’ bigoted (let’s just say it) accusations about the Holocaust, the Crusades, and abortion clinic bombings. 

I wonder, though. Is a defense of the church even possible? Even with the most airtight arguments or winsome stories, could we ever convince the skeptic that the church is a good and beautiful place to center your life? I realize that apologetics, of which this is a sub-variety, serve more to assure the faithful than convince the “heathen.” At best, apologetics can clear away a little brush and open up some space for other forces to work.

But it has always seemed to me that loving the church is simply a gift. Why do some kids brought up in the church stick around and others wander off? It’s not always about some grievous wound. And love for the church is not the same as accepting Christian truths. No doubt you know people who more or less assent to faith propositions, but just aren’t interested in the church. How do you explain that? The church fails to “appeal” and “be relevant”? I suppose, but we’ll always fail at that, and many of us love the church anyway.

The only thing I can think of is that loving the church is a gift. Some of us love the church sufficiently enough to show up fairly regularly; others of us love it enough to serve it with our lives and labor. Either way, I think this love is simply given to many of us, like a complementary tote bag, when we surrender to faith.

The gift is not always a blessing. Sometimes loving the church hurts, because Christ makes the church out of people, and people fail. As Daniel sardonically notes, church skeptics would like the church a lot better if we could get rid of all the people in it. I would add: Love for Christ first is the only way to survive love for Christ’s church.

And that’s the hardest thing to explain to an outsider. Many of us can testify that encountering God in church is not surprising or strange at all, but a phenomenon upon which we have scaffolded our lives. We encounter God in the faithfulness of good people, in the prayers and songs in which our voices join, in the dying and rising pattern of our lives together—but all of this, all of it, is an inexplicable mystery: the Spirit imprinting the image of Christ upon us.

Quintessence of Dust

Last night, thanks to the cleverness and curiosity of internet geeks, my husband and I were able to listen for about three hours to Boston police scanners—live-streamed over the internet—during the operation that captured the Boston bombing suspect. We knew, before it was broadcast on the TV news shows, that he was hiding in a boat parked in a driveway on Franklin Street. I can tell you that the words “the suspect is in custody” were announced on the police scanner at 8:42 p.m. EST.

We had the TV on, too, but muted. We saw the images of police vehicles and ambulances gathered in the streets of Watertown, Massachusetts, with hundreds of law enforcement people standing around for hours, watching and waiting. We didn’t have to listen, though, to the news show hosts chattering away to fill the wait time, conveying no actual information and interviewing whatever tangentially relevant guest they could get on the phone. Instead we heard the police doing their job. It was fascinating.

What impressed me most was the careful competence of the Watertown, Boston, and state police; the FBI; and the various bomb squads, special ops, K-9 units, hostage rescue teams, EMTs, and firefighters. It took a long time to get the guy because they were thinking through every possibility—does he have bombs? could he blow up the boat’s gas tank? if there’s a firefight, would all our guys be out of the line of fire? should we use the FBI dog or the Boston police dog if he runs? We didn’t hear them ask these questions, but we could surmise them from the communications. We heard the people on the ground call for light from the helicopters to check for movement in the boat. We heard them report the use of the flash-bang to stun the guy. They communicated with each other, thought of possible scenarios, relied on their training. They were very, very patient because they had to get it right.

After it was over, before we started seeing video on TV of the law enforcement people leaving Watertown to the grateful cheers of residents—an impromptu small-town parade, complete with people waving American flags—we heard the various units congratulating each other over police radio. “Great job, everyone.” “High fives all around.” “You guys were awesome.” Even from 800 miles away, I felt grateful, too, for all these people in high-stakes jobs doing their work well, behaving with professionalism and care, serving others.

Of course, the law enforcement people were only part of the heartening side of this story. Many people acted generously and heroically in the immediate aftermath of the bombings. The FBI actually crowd-sourced the suspect identification project, and within hours they had identified the bombers. (Excuse me: alleged bombers.) The people of Watertown, though terrified, cooperated with police and stayed in lock-down for about 24 hours. So many people honored the basic social contract of being good citizens, helping others—so much decency, common sense, and care.

What do I make, then, of the dark discouragement that has been on my mind most of this week? A fertilizer factory explosion in Texas killed 14 people and wounded 200, with 60 still missing. Congress utterly failed to pass even the easiest measure in a series of proposed new gun laws, the background checks that a huge majority of Americans favor. A This American Life episode from a few weeks ago described in heartbreaking detail how a high school in South Chicago manages to struggle through the days when they lose, as a matter of course, several students per year to neighborhood gun violence.

One more. I had the privilege last weekend of attending the premier of my colleague Stephanie Sandberg’s new play, Grains of Hope. Stephanie interviewed over a hundred refugees and refugee advocates living the Grand Rapids area and, with her students, she created an inspiring play to tell their stories. All the words in the play come directly from the interviews. Since I’ve been studying immigration issues with my own students all semester, I knew these stories, but seeing them performed was a visceral reminder of the terror and fear from which many of them come. In many places in the world, the social contract has collapsed completely. Militants arrest people randomly in the middle of the night, people are forced into refugee camps, boys are brainwashed into rogue militias, women are captured and gang-raped. Decency and good will are overwhelmed by evil and rage. It can happen very quickly.

So today, I don’t know what to make of these contrasts. People can be so desperately evil; people can be so bravely good.

I could “explain” it theologically. I know the terms, I know the routine. But right now, the theological explanations seem like sticks we throw helplessly at a terrible mystery.

I wondered, as we listened to the police scanner live-feed, what the young man in Watertown was thinking as he lay in that boat for hours. For the last two of those hours, he was surrounded by the full-on power of just about every law enforcement outfit in New England. He had to know there was no way out. Did he feel remorse? Was he pondering the moral quandary of his existential state? Was he balanced on that narrow line—so dangerously narrow—between our darkest impulses and our better selves, thinking perhaps of the violent history of his Chechen heritage, contrasting that with the cheerful complacency of decent Americans among whom he had lived for many years? Was he writhing in the grip of some warped view of reality in which he was a hero, surrounded by oppressive tyrants? Or was he just too exhausted and injured to think? We may never know.

I wonder: how does God tolerate, let alone love, the exasperating contradiction of the human race?

Low Sunday, Doubting Thomas, and Story as Sign

I've always liked the story of doubting Thomas. When I wrote this meditation several years ago for Lectionary Homiletics,    I finally realized just how important he is.

John 20:24-31 comes round the lectionary circle every year on “Low Sunday,” that anti-climactic day when the entire church staff, having pulled out all the stops for Easter, drags back to church in a state of exhaustion. The trumpets are back in their cases, the lilies are beginning to wilt, the second stringers are in charge of leading worship—and the text of the day brings up the touchy subject of doubt.

In the literary arc of the Gospel of John, however, this text is the climax. Both scholarly and literary reasons argue for Chapter 21 as an appendix, a kind of seaside coda in mezzo piano. The major fortissimo cadence chord sounds in chapter 20:31.

This little pericope resolves the issues of signs and belief that have occupied the gospel writer from the first chapter. Who is this Jesus, and how do we know who he is? John’s magnificent prologue announces immediately that our previous ways of speaking cannot convey an adequate answer. The writer must break through ordinary referential language and use a comprehensive metaphor: Jesus is logos. Throughout the gospel, we see an emphasis on metaphorical thinking. In episode after episode, John depicts Jesus striving to get his listeners to think in new categories. This leap corresponds to the way metaphor works: metaphor combines unlike things to create a “new referential access,”[i] a fresh and enduring means to comprehending something that was previously incomprehensible. In John, this new access is given the shorthand term “belief.”

Unfortunately, very few people make the leap immediately and easily. “The light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not overcome (comprehended, understood) it.” In fact, all of us need prompting. The gospel is everywhere sympathetic with our need for evidence, for signs. It’s true that signs are not enough; some people insist on ignoring them. But signs are necessary, as they jolt us (like metaphor) out of our old perceptions.

The signs that Thomas insists on in verse 25 are very specific to the situation and to the particular truth claim at hand—that Jesus is not dead, but alive. Because of this specificity, Thomas has gone down the ages as the doubter, the empiricist, the fellow who needs material proof. The famous painting by Caravaggio, Doubting Thomas, epitomizes this Thomas-as-empiricist tradition. Jesus is pulling back his robe while Thomas leans in close, his finger buried up to the first knuckle in Jesus’ wound. The other disciples, we notice, are not exactly indifferent. They are crowding in to get their own good look.

We are sometimes told that Thomas’s approach to belief is overly fastidious, second best if not suspiciously over-scientific. If we wish to be truly spiritual, this way of reasoning goes, we will not insist on putting our finger in Jesus’ side. On other occasions, we may hear the opposite view: Thomas takes on the role of the doubter’s hero, the only truly modern disciple. In this case, we’re told that Thomas’s empirical needs are completely valid. After all, Jesus himself validates them, kindly delivering precisely what Thomas demands. In the Caravaggio painting, Jesus’ own hand rests on Thomas’s wrist, guiding his fascinated touch.

In the context of the gospel as a whole, I think we should neither scold nor idolize Thomas. He is not so different from anyone else in this gospel. They all needed signs and proofs, too. People came to believe in Jesus when he demonstrated clairvoyance or healed lifelong disabilities or multiplied loaves and fishes. As for the particular question at hand in Chapter 20—is Jesus alive or not?—the other disciples needed their signs and got them. The beloved disciple saw the empty tomb, Mary Magdalene heard Jesus call her name, the others received his warm breath.

Thomas, therefore, is like all of them and all of us. His second name, Didymus (the twin), perhaps signals that he is of two minds. He is both doubter and believer at once. The two states of mind wrestle inside him, and in that sense he represents us all.

For that reason, I see Jesus’ words in verse 29 not as a scolding dismissal of Thomas, but as a gesture of mercy directed right at the reader. After all, we never walked the streets with Jesus, we have never seen the nail prints. Jesus says here to us, “I know it’s hard to believe when you haven’t seen me as these people could. Blessed are you for accepting the testimony of this writing.”

Seeing is believing—this is the idea (rooted right in the close relationship between the Greek words for “see” and “know”) that the gospel writer persistently deconstructs throughout the gospel. Some who saw did not believe. Even those who saw needed to break through to a new way of thinking in order to believe. Here the writer wishes that those who have not seen might yet believe. This is the purpose of the gospel: “Jesus did many other signs…  But these are written that you might believe.” The document itself becomes testimony, a mediation between sign and belief.

Belief in what, exactly? Often in this gospel, the word belief is used without much precise content. It signals an openness to something new and a trust in the person of Jesus. That was the best the characters in each story could manage in the moment. (John 11:27 is one exception.) But here, for the benefit of the reader, the word belief is followed at last by specific propositional content: “that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” The content is the result of sustained reflection on the events recorded here. 

This is not to say that the ultimate goal of this “new referential access” is merely a propositional statement. If so, the gospel would be only one verse long. Instead, we are given the stories of the gospel as sign, “that we might have life.” The stories become miracles for us. They are a mediation through which we can see a Jesus we have never seen, as Jesus himself is a mediation through which we can see a God we have never seen. 

Thomas is not a counterexample for right belief, then, but a metaphor in his own way. He signals in his passionate insistence how we are to respond to these texts. See the nail marks in these stories; put your finger in these words.

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[i]           Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford UP, 1985), 57-58.

The Problem with Palms

Let’s admit it: Palm Sunday is a problem. I know I shouldn’t be questioning a moment in the church calendar that goes all the way back to the third or fourth century, but why do I always vaguely dread this day?

Here’s how it usually goes down. You arrive at church, and a smiling usher hands you a little palm branch. Your fellow parishioners, likewise armed with palm branches, line up as best they can, the adorable little children in floral dresses (girls) and tiny sweater vests (boys). Adults of various ages are doing their best to look cheerful, when actually everyone is feeling awkward. The music revs up—something processionalish—and a little parade begins. “Hosanna to the King of Kings!” we’re all supposed to say, or sing, or otherwise convey.

At this point, we congregants are essentially playing the role of the crowd in the Triumphal Entry narrative from the gospels. We’re supposed to be feeling joyful, because Jesus is the King of Kings, and here he comes in triumph, the humble king whom prophets foretold as Savior. Except that this is the beginning of Holy Week, and Jesus is coming into Jerusalem to die. Unlike the crowds in the story, I know exactly what’s coming, and I do not want to wave a little palm branch about it.

Later in the service, if things go as usual in my experience, we will once again be compelled to play the role of the clueless crowd against our will. Someone, typically the preacher, will scold us for turning on Jesus just a few days later and shouting “Crucify him! Crucify him!” How fickle you are! How quickly you turn away from the Jesus you praised just moments before!

But wait a minute: I didn’t sign on for this crowd role in the first place, and now I’m getting scolded?

This is not meant as a criticism of worship planners. In fact, I sympathize with the challenges of planning a Palm Sunday service. So much paradox. Sure, we can sing: “Ride on, ride on in majesty/ In lowly pomp ride on to die.” But apart from that, how do you deal with the weird contradictions of significance and feeling that characterize this event in the narrative of Jesus’ life?

The rest of Holy Week is much easier. On Maundy Thursday we remember the Last Supper and Gethsemane, and we enter into grief. On Good Friday we meditate on the crucifixion and feel sorrow. On Easter we celebrate the Resurrection and feel joy. Easter Vigil, for those who observe it, is a helpful bridge, emotionally and dramatically, from the former to the latter. But on Palm Sunday we’re faced with a triumphal entry that is not actually triumphal and a cast of characters who feel all the wrong things. So how are we supposed to feel? Ironic? How do you create a worship service around that?

This whole challenge is made worse by the trend toward observing “Passion Sunday,” in which we attempt to cram not only the Triumphal Entry but also the entire Passion narrative into one fast-paced Sunday service. Jog-trot through it all, take a deep breath, wait a week, and show up again on Easter.

I understand why churches do this: it’s because so few people attend the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday specialty services. I get it: people are busy. It’s tough to spend virtually an entire weekend at church. And I really do understand worship planners’ compromise solution: better to do a little Passion stuff the Sunday before than to have people skipping over it completely and leaping right from palm parades to flowers, bunnies, chocolate and Easter joy.

This is not an ideal solution, however, because at the root of this problem is the inherently dramatic nature of liturgy. Liturgy enables us to re-narrate our lives, to shape our own little stories so that they take on the contours of the great narrative of Redemption. Holy Week is the heart of that drama, and we need time to walk through each of its stages. We should accompany the disciples at the Last Supper, and toward Gethsemane, and at the foot of the cross, and at the empty tomb. But we can’t do it all in one hour! These are hard emotional places to go, and we need time to enter into each of these moments, feel what we ought to feel, speak what we ought to say. This is why the church in its wisdom has spread the dramatic arc of Holy Week over several services over several days.

From this perspective of liturgical drama, we might now be able to discern the essential problem with Palm Sunday. For this first act in the Holy Week drama, we are asked to make what turns out to be a false start. The crowd and the disciples were feeling triumphant for all the wrong reasons. I realize this can be turned toward one of two useful lessons: either we are reminded of all the ways we have wrong expectations about Jesus, or we are reminded that this is indeed the beginning of Jesus’ triumph through sacrificial love. Fine, but those are matters of understanding rather than feeling, so that the drama of the service itself feels manipulative and untrue. We’re asked to play roles we can’t really inhabit and feel things we know we shouldn’t feel.

What’s the solution? I don’t know. The one Palm Sunday service I recall actually enjoying and appreciating, at St. James Picadilly in London, involved a live donkey. Never underestimate the power of livestock combined with the Book of Common Prayer. Short of that, though, I think Greg Scheer, the Minister of Worship at my church, has a decent solution cooked up for this Sunday.

He was given the task of planning a Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday service that involved a reading of Matthew 26-27:25 rather than a sermon. So he took all the episodes of the Jerusalem sequence and used them to give resonance to our usual liturgical structure. The greeting, for example, briefly explains the triumphal entry to give context to our little palm procession. The confession evokes the cleansing of the temple, and the assurance comes through Jesus’ remarks about wishing to gather Jerusalem as a hen gathers her chicks. The anointing at Bethany sets up the offering, and of course an evocation of the Lord’s Supper leads us into the communion sequence.

What I like about this is the way it reorganizes all the dramatic moments of the passion sequence, subsuming them into the liturgical drama of our usual Lord’s Day service of Word and Sacrament. This is a Sunday service, after all, which in the Reformed tradition, even in Lent, is a Resurrection celebration, an eighth day, a retelling of the covenant story from creation to the consummation. Later in the week, we will enter into particular moments along the Holy Week dramatic arc. But on Sunday, we have a larger perspective. We do not have to be stuck in the role of the clueless crowd for a whole service; instead, we can stare down the week to come as the redeemed people of God.

So I like Greg’s solution in theory. We’ll see how it turns out in practice this Sunday. If it doesn’t work, I’ll propose that next year we’ll have to try a live donkey.