I cannot go back to your land of gloom

Where black jagged shadows

Remind me of the coming of your doom,

I want my own land.

-Captain Beefheart, Frownland 

So, I gave it a week, I cogitated, digested and did deep breathing exercises, but I’m still not at peace.  I’m not exactly afraid, just annoyed.  The 218^th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) adjourned a little over a week ago.  It’s conclusion was marked by a letter from the our General Presbyter saying, “don’t panic,” which translated into the lingua franca of most rank and file Presbyterians means, “panic, run like hell, get your pitchforks,” or something along those lines.  There was good news and bad news, the good news was that we decided to keep the language in our directory for worship, which defines marriage as being between a man and a woman.  I’m not exactly ready to blow the trumpet for that though, it seems like a bare minimum gesture.  The bad news is that they are going to try, yet again, to remove the “fidelity and chastity”¹ standard from the list of standards for ordination.  The motion to send this amendment to the presbyteries for ratification passed by a narrow, 54% to 46% margin.  I suspect that it is absolute toast in the real world of PC(USA) Presbyteries.  But it’s going to curdle a lot of milk (or leaven a lot of dough, as Jesus would have said).

I’ll stipulate that homosexual couples should get medical benefits, tax credits, whatever they want in order to be functional and secure in our society.  I have no qualms about granting complete civil rights to any minority, in fact I see it as one of the greatest attributes of our nation that, from a civil perspective, everyone has a right to do what they want within the confines of the law.  I’m no anarchist but I think that our current situation imposes far too many man-made rules on people as it is.  Barry Goldwater, in voting against the civil rights amendment of 1964, which he had previously supported, said, “you can’t legislate morality.”  The true strength of our nation stands upon the elevation of liberty as an “inalienable right.”  However, our church, any church, is a significantly different entity from a secular nation and we would do well to be mindful of the difference.

            Heaven is not a democracy, it is most certainly a monarchy and one which abides no rebellion.  The Presbyterian church is a prototypical democracy but a democracy that has sworn fealty to the sovereignty of God.  I will affirm that serving God should include a passion for justice on all levels, standing up for those who are oppressed and lack a voice in the corridors of power.  In 1950 this certainly included homosexuals, it does not now.  To ensure that this remains the case, I say, “let there be civil unions, let them have the full benefit and protection of the law.”  But we must understand that by and large the general population is not going to simply smile and nod and say everything is okay.  I know that justice is near to the heart of God, and my heart burns to see justice done on earth as it is in heaven but I know that our justice will never meet the standard, only God’s justice can prevail.  There is so much injustice that occurs under the sun: starving children in Africa, slavery, young children sold into sexual bondage, people living on less than a dollar a day, millions who do not have clean water to drink.  The plight of Bruce and Andre, living in a loft apartment in Greenwich Village, making $80,000 per year each, doesn’t exactly make my heart bleed.  In fact I can’t remember the last time I read about a Pride Day parade being dispersed by police in riot gear, with fire hoses and snarling German Shepherds.  We all have to deal with being different somehow or other, inflating everything into a “civil right” trivializes, even mocks the struggle for true equality among sexes, races and creeds.

            Yet the issue of homosexuals being allowed to marry and to seek ordination to the office of Elder in the PC(USA) has been framed as a justice issue.  I am forced to ask, “don’t we have better things to worry about?”  Personally, I suppose I could abide having a homosexual colleague, I still think their sexuality is a result of our fallen condition, but for that matter I think a great deal of my own desire and behavior is a result of our fallen condition.  The problem is that what is being sought is the affirmation of homosexuality as a natural, God-ordained condition, not a pernicious perversion of God’s intention.  That is a position I cannot endorse.  Beyond that I must, as a Pastor, stand up for the people I serve, most of whom are good and kind people, who simply see no reason why we have to keep beating a dead horse.  Let me describe the latest people who have joined the ranks of the oppressed: middle/working class, rural people.  Their voices are not heard; in national politics or in the “dialogue” of their denomination.

            I know what you’re saying, “they’re the majority, they don’t need advocacy.”  Yet the pain they feel and the neglect they perceive is real and for our Denomination to ignore that is a perilous mistake.  When I weigh the options, excluding several dozen homosexual people who feel called (and are qualified) to serve God as ordained Elders in the PC(USA), or alienating hundreds of thousands of people who already serve faithfully, who are the lifeblood of the church as we know it, I think the just choice is rather clear.  Let’s not be overly dramatic about the “plight” of those homosexuals who feel called to ministry, they could serve in several mainline denominations (some with less rigorous educational and training requirements) and in any number of non-denominational bodies.  The fact of the matter is that most of them do already.  The people who would be deeply offended by denominational sanction of homosexual behavior, would simply cut ties with the church altogether, letting themselves drift away from God’s call on their lives and from the grace of the community of faith that sustains them.  Working for justice by forcing moral judgments down people’s throats used to be the primary province of the “religious right,” it would appear that the religious left has learned some things.

Footnotes:

¹G-6.0106b of the Presbyterian Church Book of Order, which states that those in ordained positions within the church must pledge to live in "fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness."  This provision has been under attack since roughly 1978 and previous attempts to delete the language have failed by increasingly large margins.

I now believe that you and I are, strangely enough,

included among those who are doomed to live. 

–William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

Imagine a change so traumatic that survival seems like a curse.  If the old ways were good to you, if the status quo made you secure and somewhat happy, then you will not embrace change with enthusiasm.  The voice of the old south rings in Faulkner’s stories but their struggle, is older still, they are the new Hebrews, dispossessed and wandering, their way of life scattered by the rampant recklessness of history.  It is fair to say that certain parts of even our young nation are haunted by ghosts and in many cases you may also say that those ghosts seem to run things at the expense of the living.  What makes many of Faulkner’s works so compelling is that you can easily sense the spectral presence but the author is skillful and intentional in never letting you prove their existence.  But you must acknowledge the howling laments coming from the darkness.

            To survive a “paradigm shift” means living with a certain powerful sense of loss.  I suppose we in mainline denominations must peer into that dismal swamp.  We are losing touch with the religious sentiments of our fellows.  Christianity is doing okay, at least we can hold that faith; it is our specific traditions that are dying.  Across the board independent and non-denominational churches are flourishing (sometimes painfully and briefly but often with some stable success) by embracing and using certain types of theology that mainliners fought long hard battles of orthodoxy to avoid.  The prosperity gospel seems to have deep appeal in an uncertain age, and all sorts of more extreme theological error creep around the edges.

            The young are nearly absent from the mainline and the old wonder why it can’t be like it used to be.  It is strange to me to be among the representatives of a dying tradition.  By nature I want to be an iconoclast, I never like being told, “because we’ve always done it that way.”  I take delight in challenging assumptions and presenting paradox, however, I love many things about the traditions of our church.  There are things I believe to be tested by time, the value of which has nothing to do with simple stagnation.  I cannot abide the assumption that new equals good and old equals bad.  I must be humble enough to recognize that there were men who would regard a cell phone as infernal sorcery who were nevertheless much smarter than me.

            It is narrow arrogance that disregards the best of the past, simply because it’s old.  An abundance of forward-looking eyes tell us we must change in order to attract a new world.  The logic goes that we attract by any means necessary and then try and inculcate the core values of the best of our faith traditions.  The error is that one who does not love the traditions at the start is less likely to endure the discipline it takes to learn them and without learning there is no knowledge and without knowledge there is no love.

            The divide grows between those who loved the old ways on their own terms and those who seek in new, unproven paths the blessings that were richly provided by the old.  The gap was created because too many, including a majority of those who now lament their loss, ignored the discipline of the old ways but enjoyed their bounty.  Without the discipline the luster fades and the dross sets in.  All the young see is age and sadness trying to hand them tarnished antiquity and they don’t want it.  Do  you blame them?

Reasoned discourse seems to have suffered an ugly, public demise.  Yet words fly about in unprecedented quantity, laden with the deliberate manipulative intention of propaganda and the aching, dangerous, vacancy of slogans, mantras and mottos.  Everything is advertising and advertising is everything; sadly that will not improve the world, it will only drive the economy and perpetuate the status quo.  Since the 1960’s we have salved our conscience with well intentioned rallies and causes.  Drawing on the successes of the civil rights movement and the somewhat more ambiguous results of the anti-war protests we have fallen into a culture of mass protest.  Whenever there is a cause, there is a rock concert.  I grew up with it: Live-Aid, Band-Aid, Farm-Aid, Hands Across America, we gathered round, sung We Are the World, listened to John Cougar Mellancamp and went home, feeling better about ourselves but not having made a dent in the real and massive problems of the world.

            The problem is that as long as you can take these placebos and feel better you never really get around to working on a real cure.  Last year Al Gore riled everyone up about global warming and hosted a televised international concert, the main gist of which was to promote driving less and using eco-friendly light bulbs.  Curbing the western world’s voracious appetite for energy is an important cause but look at the modus operandi: sacrifice as little as possible and still do some good.  Such self-righteous hootenannies might actually reduce carbon emissions by some fractional quantity (which because of scale sounds impressive) but it didn’t really stop me from buying a Chevy Tahoe to haul my two kids and all their paraphernalia across Pennsylvania to visit Grandma and Grandpa.  Even if we all drove around in battery boxes, with the way our society is structured around office complexes and box stores we would still beat the snot out of the developing world in terms of petroleum consumption.

            Here’s the thing, when Ghandi and Martin Luther King embarked on their nonviolent protests they made it clear that they were willing to sacrifice more not less in order to accomplish the change they valued.  We have pulled the old bait and switch with their tactics; we now encourage people to do something minimal, like switching light bulbs.  If enough people do it then it will do some good, goes the logic.  These modes of change do not require any sort of sacrifice; they are perfunctory altruism.  Don’t get me wrong, if you can convince people to do these sorts of things you will make a difference on some level, why not use the most efficient stuff if is actually cheaper.  But if you want the world to change you might have to give up something a little more costly.  The glorious triumph of Martin King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is produced not by the hundreds of thousands of people that marched peacefully into Washington D.C. but by the fire hoses, tear gas, billy clubs and police dogs that many of them faced in less glamorous places like Selma, Alabama.  He stood as a symbol of equality, freedom and unity because of all the times he had endured being called “nigger” by “Christian” white people without letting their hate or his get the better of him.  He was able to stand in the shadow of Lincoln’s statue and hold his head high because in God’s plan they would both give up their lives for the same cause.

            It is endurance of suffering and hardship that produces character and it is people of character who can really change the world.  It is the primacy of love, not a million guilty gestures, which will usher in the Kingdom of God.  Jesus did not get too caught up in the adulation of the crowds, he knew that sacrifice would have to be faced alone, and he knew it would hurt.  Each one of us faces the challenge of discipleship.  I cannot and will not “sell” it as something easily done.  The Church, but not only the Church, society in general will rise and fall based on how well we face the true difficulty and sacrifice of changing for the better.  The world is full of complex challenges, which we seem to meet with our eyes willingly closed.  Opening our eyes can be frightening, seeing for the first time would be a terrifying yet wonderful experience for a child born blind.  We must prepare ourselves for the eventuality that what we always imagined the color blue to be like may not in fact be at all what the reality of blue is.  We must prepare to have our assumptions, named, described and challenged in this process we will be humbled and changed, then just maybe we will be ready to change the world.

“This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,” whispered the Rat, as if in a trance.  “Here in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!” – The Wind in the Willows

The stories we read (or are read) as children can often influence how we see the world.  The credit much of the course of my life to the fact that my parents read me such wonderful, winsome and insightful stories as The Wind in the Willows and The Chronicles of Narnia.  The inhabitants of these books have become nearly as real to me as members of my family.  C.S. Lewis’ great lion, Aslan, the Christ figure of Narnia can still inspire my imagination to a true understanding of the Lion of Judah with a power that is found only one other place: in the Bible itself.  Jack and Caitlyn are still sort of in the Dr. Seuss phase, which is fine; his moral wisdom and sparkling insight into the rhymes of life are a good start (much better than the vast quantities of mindless junk that can be foisted off on helpless children).  But I long for the day when they will be able to handle the more complex stories and characters of books with fewer pictures.  I want to be right on the spot so that these amazing creations can seamlessly become part of their world, as they did for me.

            The relationship that children can have to a story is sacred indeed.  Stories told with skill and insight can teach a child things in a pure, intuitive way, so that they “know” it like Rat knows his “song-dream.”  This kind of learning and experience is so difficult in any other form that our system of education seeks to do the exact opposite.  Educational science seeks to fill a child with facts, practical applications, and grammar.  The immediate effect of this approach is to rapidly destroy any real love a child has of learning.  Unless a child is brought to a love of words and story by their parents or other close relative, they are unlikely to acquire one at school.  Such is American education, by the time most children have mastered the technical aspect of reading they have had most of their love of stories beaten out of them and their imaginations permanently damaged.  I’m not against formal education, people need to know how to read, write and do arithmetic.  It’s just too bad that the formal process has to get dragged onto one side of the unnecessary divide between the sacred and the concrete.

            The Rat knows the place is sacred because it is the place that the music sang to him in a dream; the deliberate confusion of waking and sleeping, of hearing and seeing is no problem at all to our poetic imaginations.  It is mystical and beautiful and it makes sense in a way that technically consistent and logical formulations cannot.  The place that rings with the music of the Piper at the gates of dawn is the holy place, the place where they will experience the Presence.  But it is fleeting, a momentary glimpse or the song on the wind.  The Presence will not allow itself to be studied, only felt and experienced by the faithful pilgrims.  In stories we hear echoes and melodies of the song of the Piper and if we listen with passionate intensity we might see and fear and put our trust in the Lord.

            It’s no wonder that in a world where people primarily read newspapers and magazines if they read at all that everyone seems so thoroughly mystified about how to experience the transcendent Presence of God.  The Author has after all chosen the written Word as His preferred mode of communication (verbal and visual are not unheard of but more rare).  I have heard people seem almost proud of the fact that they don’t read but I generally count that as a personality flaw not an asset.  In my mind a person who doesn’t like to read is a lot like a person who doesn’t like dogs (or animals in general), it speaks much more unfavorably about the person than about the object of their disdain.

America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? -Allen Ginsberg, America

Idealism dies quickly. Far more ubiquitous and far more sad than the stereotypical hippie burnout is the Baby Boomer who has seen the things they believed with the clear passion of youth fade away. The dreams of the sixties didn’t burn out, they didn’t blow up, they simply withered. In fact the reality that followed the dream was in fact the entire problem, again the iconoclasts sat in regret of what they had torn down. All the political awareness and “age of aquarius” optimism had dissolved in waves of disastrous over-indulgence culminating in the sort of ultimate consequence of free love: HIV/AIDS. The icons died of overdoses, the concerts became dark and sinister (Altamont), the whole thing seemed to be coming apart at the seams. Civil rights seemed to have stalled and practical segregation had moved in to take over where the federally instituted variety left off. The revolutionary hope of the generation degenerated into what Yeats called “mere anarchy,” it was not what they had hoped.

But they were trying to write a holy litany, they were trying to change the world with peace, love and freedom. It didn’t work but they tried. My generation was spawned amid the failure of their best try, we grew up amid the rage of punk rock but that died too; the silliness of our culture seems to be unstoppable. Movements and music can laugh at it, yell at it, kick and scream at it, literally bash out their brains in front of it but the silliness seems to be the only thing that endures. People are fascinated with frivolity, engaged with materialism, engrossed with shallow self-help philosophy; to the point where they can’t recognize the pure absurdity of their situation.

I think that no generation stands a chance of recognizing how absurd they really are unless they have enough historical perspective to see their own cultural roots and the way that they stand in a long line of silly and futile human endeavors. Learn to laugh at yourself and the world around you, if not for the sheer comedy of the whole thing then at least with a wry realization that we really don’t get much of anywhere. It is impossibly silly to think you can change the future without at least some support from the past, even Jesus didn’t try it that way. The Church is the very metaphor from which Mr. Ginsberg drew his holy litany metaphor. Litany is what the church does, it is an order of worship, it is a prayer, it is communication with God. For secular humanists to even consider writing a holy litany is a silly adventure. Human idealism cannot approach the perspective of thousands of generations linked by a common conversation with the God who has authored the whole narrative.

But it seems the church too often looses its perspective as well. Laughing at ourselves is not one of our strong suits but it should be. We take ourselves very seriously and this is perhaps a fatal point of similarity with the secular world. Christ tried to teach us humility and love, but we seem to exercise neither on a terribly regular basis. Our consciousness of eternity ought to bring us to a realization that we are bound for glory in a way that rises above the absurdity of this world. In that realization we should become powerful agents for change, real change, not self-delusional iconoclastic destruction. Build up the future with love, write the litany while looking carefully in the mirror.

“A time of paradigm shift is a time of deep uncertainty – and such uncertainty appears to be one of the few constants of the contemporary era and one of the factors that engender strong reactions in favor of hanging on to the Enlightenment paradigm, in spite of signs from all quarters that it is breaking up.” -David Bosch, Transforming Mission

“What is a paradigm and how do you know it’s shifting?” you may ask. A paradigm is simply a model, a system of understanding, a framework for how we see the world around us in the broadest sense of the word. But on the cultural level a paradigm is so broad and multifaceted that it is always hard to define in the moment. Just about the time you get a current paradigm figured out, your own understanding of your place in the grand scheme of things begins to push you past your own understanding and into undiscovered country. We are living now in what has been called, with nauseating frequency, the postmodern era. Yet no one really wants to define the term “postmodern,” but most of us have a general sense of what it means and all of us would like to think we have a grasp on it, so we perpetuate the use of the term hoping no one will ever ask us to define it. Thus it has become jargon, a somewhat unintelligible term that is widely used to describe something that everyone thinks they know.

The closest thing we have to a definition of “postmodern” involves the characteristic of rejecting traditional paradigms, such as the “Enlightenment paradigm.” The Enlightenment was the period that began with the Renaissance and continued officially through the Protestant reformation. The Enlightenment paradigm includes everything that we often define as “modern:” science, democracy, industry, academics as we know them are all born of the Enlightenment paradigm. Americans particularly have no frame of reference to understand anything other than the Enlightenment or Modern paradigm. Our nation and our identity as a people were formed by the very zenith of the Modern paradigm. A nation of immigrants would never have materialized in the dark ages and a democratic republic would have abhorrent to anyone who craved stability and security in a world of monarchies. Under the Modern paradigm we have moved, in an extremely short time, from a rag-tag band of rebel colonists to being the one and only nation with real global power (at least the only nation that seems intent on exercising that power).

The idea that the paradigm out of which we were born has ended and is being replaced by a new paradigm is unnerving to our culture and we have all the trouble of an adolescent adjusting to adult life. The Church in America is literally like an old man trying to go out for the high school football team. His motions seem forced and painful and no matter how hard he tries (many of his peers think he shouldn’t even be foolish enough to try) he just can’t “fit in.” The church has adapted to many different paradigms over the centuries, none better than the enlightenment paradigm. But the church has never been quick to change and adaptations have often been painful (i.e. the Reformation) and a defining characteristic of the postmodern era, or rather the on-going change to whatever comes after the modern era, is rapid, discontinuous change. We cannot adapt quickly enough; by the time we get a handle on one aspect of change three other aspects have leapt out ahead of us.

The “deep uncertainty” that now grips the community of the church is in some ways a paralyzing force but there is hope that it may (hopefully soon) let off a spark of creativity that will ignite new passion and new spirit within an old body. Resurrection is one of our themes after all. Perhaps the most dangerous thing in this uncertain time is the stifling urge to hold on to what we know, to cling to the precepts of a paradigm in which we were the big man on campus. Again imagine the aging high school quarterback strutting in front of the current team: an overweight, balding man, with creaky knees regaling young men at the height of their physical abilities with tales of how it used to be. It’s not that his tales are completely uninteresting or his knowledge without value, it is simply the overall contrast that introduces a note of the absurd. The Enlightenment paradigm served the church well, we adopted the spark of inquiry and scholarship and Christians took the lead in art and science. We like to trumpet the fact that such luminaries as Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson and, dare we say it, Charles Darwin, were all men of Christian faith and assumptions. But there has grown a bitter sibling rivalry between science and religion and the narrative reads very much like the story of Cain and Abel. Religion is the older brother, his aim is knowledge and obedience to God. Science has as his aim the knowledge of God’s creation, the physical world. There was a time when both of them could work in the field with one another but now it seems one is always trying to kill the other one. The both take their fair share of fratricidal shots but neither one has succeeded yet.

We find ourselves in a place where we must accept a great number of things that we have utterly lost the ability to change. We must accept the changes in many things that it is futile to try and hold the same. Survival depends on adaptive transformation. For a long time it may have been God’s will to defend orthodoxy and maintain the status quo, however, it seems that since orthodoxy and the status quo are dooming the church to irrelevancy and stifling the message of the Gospel in the process, it must be God’s will that we change. You might yearn for Sunday morning in a town that is quiet except for the gathering of folks in their Houses of Worship. You might pine for the days when your kids could stay out past dark on a summer evening without fear of being abducted by a child molester or tempted by the lure of drugs and alcohol. You might lament the absence of stained glass and tall steeples but those things are going away. Christianity and the Enlightenment went together like chocolate and peanut butter but things are changing. It may be that in the postmodern world, or whatever we end up calling it, the church will once again be able to provide a guide and be a center of the community. I have hope that it will, but given the change that is certainly happening I know the church will look very different from how it looks now. If this makes you feel “deep uncertainty” you’re not alone. Perhaps that is always the great strength of the church, we’re never alone, for God is with us and we are with one another, in community there is always hope.