Pastor's Page

Respectability

Tue, 15 Oct 2019 15:10:20 GMT

Respectability is a subtle master. As long as one travels the middle of the road the guard rails on the left and the right are scarcely noticed. It is safe, comforting, and even alluring to be among so many fellow travelers. There is no obvious constraint; only the gravitational pull realigning us to a broad conformity. Go along to get along. Should one be tempted to step out of line, to go one’s own way, to question what has already been answered, to challenge conventionality, there are only two possible outcomes: surrender or marginalization.

The problem with respectability is that it is anchored tightly to the ephemeral and the superficial while presenting itself as permanent and foundational. Respectability once required women to keep their ankles covered, men to be the head of the household, and children to be seen but not heard. The custodians of respectability were horrified when four mop-tops from Liverpool invaded America (and it’s all been downhill ever since). It was once perfectly respectable to speak of dark-skinned people as brutes and savages, homosexuals as mentally ill perverts, and women as homemakers. Some attitudes and actions we can simply dismiss as quaint expressions of a by-gone era; others continue to reverberate to our time constricting our imaginations regarding what is decent, just, and virtuous.

Jesus cared nothing for the canons of respectability in his own day. He would not be fenced in by guard rails designed to keep the good in and the bad out. Jesus purposely transgressed social boundaries, associating with the poor, touching lepers, including women in his entourage, embracing children. He confronted the pious, challenged the hypocrisy of the ruling clique, and exonerated sinners. Jesus did not soft-pedal the demands of his gospel in order to be more appealing. "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34) "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple . . . none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” (Luke 14:26-27, 33). All of this came at a cost: opposition, rejection, humiliation, execution. That’s what respectability does.

Like Jesus, Paul also flaunts the scandalousness of the gospel. He knows well the inherent unbelievability of the message of a crucified Messiah. Ordinary common sense dictates that a crucified person could not be the King of the Universe. It is and always remains foolishness and a stumbling block, Paul insists. But however outside the realm of respectability, this claim is in fact the truth and the power of God.

The more I read the Bible the more I think that the respectability I was raised in and to which I have done my best to conform is not only not the gospel, but is actually a detour from discipleship. I wonder if following a crucified Messiah may require a different path, outside the guard rails, where being polite and nice, where fitting in and avoiding a scene are not the salient virtues. Perhaps naming Jesus as Lord is a grace-filled (and terrifying) opportunity to finally be free of this respectable world and instead, to serve as agents of a new creation yet to be born.

Fritz

Come Follow

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 14:11:37 GMT

At dawn on April 9, 1945 the pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by Nazi authorities for participating in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler and overthrow the government. He was 39 years old. Bonhoeffer had been incarcerated for two years, mainly in Tegel prison in Berlin, and then briefly in Buchenwald, and finally at Flossenburg. He left behind a legacy of academic work, treatises, letters, and diaries – 16 volumes in the standard English and German editions - as well as international friendships across Europe, England, and America. His theological work was original, rooted in his practical experience as a pastor and instructor, and tantalizing in its suggestiveness left tragically unfinished. His commitments were courageous. Much of his writing reflected upon the joys and challenges of Christian life through the prism of the simple question, “What does Jesus Christ mean for today?” Since his martyrdom, Bonhoeffer has only grown in stature, being claimed as inspiration by liberals and evangelicals, socialists and capitalists, theists and atheists.

In 1951 Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s student and closest friend, published his letters from prison under the title Widerstand und Ergebung ( Resistance and Submission ); it was translated into English as Letters and Papers from Prison , becoming a sensation and creating a popular hunger for all things Bonhoeffer. His little book, Life Together , a reflection on his experience with the underground (and ultimately banned) Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde, has become a modern devotional classic. But it is probably his book Discipleship, first published in an abridged English translation as The Cost of Discipleship in 1948, that is his most enduring contribution.

Discipleship is a meditation on Jesus’ famous “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew 5 – 7), reflecting on the nature of Jesus’ call, the response in obedience to follow, and the consequences of such a commitment. The opening pages of the book contrast “cheap grace” with “costly grace.” Cheap grace is that which leaves the recipient unchanged. It is grace without repentance or remorse. It is grace that leaves the recipient in thrall to the world. It is going through the motions. “Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church . . . [It is] preaching forgiveness without repentance; it is baptism without the discipline of community; it is the Lord’s Supper without confession of sin; it is absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without the living, incarnate Jesus Christ” (DBWE 4: 43, 44).

Costly grace, on the other hand, is authentic grace. It is grace that takes hold of a person and at the same time sets one free. It is grace as a yoke which binds one to he who calls and also to others who hear the call. “Costly grace is the hidden treasure in the field, for the sake of which people go and sell with joy everything they have. It is the costly pearl, for whose price the merchant sells all that he has.… It is the call of Jesus Christ which causes a disciple to leave his nets and follow him.… It is costly, because it calls to discipleship; it is grace, because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly, because it costs people their lives; it is grace, because it thereby makes them live.… Above all, grace is costly, because it was costly to God, because it costs God the life of God’s Son and because nothing can be cheap to us which is costly to God” (DBWE 4: 44, 45). Costly grace leads one through the cross to resurrection.

Grace is free but not cheap. It is a gift unbidden and undeserved. Grace is costly because it demands surrender, sacrifice, and obedience. Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?” (Matthew 16:24-26) Bonhoeffer put it even more starkly: “When Jesus calls a person, he bids that one come and die.”

A priest friend of mine was fond of reminding us at every turn that it’s easy to be a fan of Jesus; it’s hard to be a disciple. Real grace, authentic grace, costly grace is demanding; it requires commitment. Counterfeit grace leaves us feeling good without being good. Costly grace lifts us up into authentic humanity; cheap grace leaves us sedated but not healed.

Fritz

God's Migrants and Ours

Sun, 16 Dec 2018 01:43:08 GMT

The story we tell and treasure among ourselves at this time of year is a story of migrants. It is the story of peasants driven by the demands of an Empire utterly indifferent to their particular circumstances or well-being. It is a story that, despite our best efforts (spoiler alert: there is no cozy stable, no friendly animals, and no little drummer boy), cannot be romanticized into sweetness, but is a tale of hardship and risk.

It is actually two stories with two different but related villains. Luke tells of Emperor Augustus, who despite his remoteness, can by mere decree compel a young woman to make an arduous 100 mile trek over rough and dangerous terrain while carrying a near full-term pregnancy. Matthew relates a different tale, of King Herod, a petty dictator tolerated by his Roman over-lords. Herod’s legendary paranoia and tyrannical rule result in the flight of the holy family, seeking asylum in Egypt of all places.

Displacement is what happens to poor and powerless people in the Bible on a regular basis. Jacob and his tribe end up in Egypt trying to escape drought. Generations later their fate is slavery. Elimilech and Naomi likewise seek to escape famine, migrating to Moab and making a life there that will include a Moabite named Ruth. The Assyrians destroy Samaria and the Northern Kingdom, banish the inhabitants, and transplant settlers loyal to the empire. And of course, Babylon will follow and defeat Assyria, and ultimately destroy Jerusalem, the Temple, and every social institution, imposing on Judah the great catastrophe of Exile .

Through all the heartbreaking experiences of displacement, believers – Jews and Christians – are strictly enjoined to have special regard for the gerim (a Hebrew word variously translated: sojourner, stranger, alien, immigrant), that is for those outsiders who happen by choice or circumstance to be among us. The ger is not to be despised or exploited, but rather included in the community and offered hospitality. The alien, along with he widow and orphan, are entitled to the gleanings from the field. They shall not be deprived of justice. Indeed, they shall be loved because (1) God loves them, and (2) because God loved us when we were slaves (slavery being the opposite pole from hospitable treatment). Moses puts it succinctly (Deut. 10:17 -19): For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

This text, it seems to me, is only a short step from Jesus’ own radical injunction to love our enemies.

Admittedly, a few proof-texts cannot solve our current immigrant / border control issues. However, we can derive an orientation that clarifies what is permissible and is useful. For instance, any policy that neglects compassion and relies on and promotes fear, suspicion, and hate toward migrants violates the spirit of our most deeply held religious beliefs. Likewise, any practice that utilizes children as a deterrent and justifies making children into orphans is not worthy of support or consideration. As the storm clouds gather at our southern border and the situation careens toward lethal force – an impending massacre looming that seems desired by some - it would be well to remember that the lord of the universe was born far from home in an alley, a migrant whose first bed was an animal’s feeding trough, because there was no room for them in the inn.

Fritz

The Radical End of the Status Quo

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 01:29:49 GMT

The Renaissance emerged from the High Middle Ages beginning in the 14th Century. Centered initially in Florence, its influence rippled to every corner of Europe and permeated every human pursuit: art, music, architecture, literature, economics, politics, war, science, philosophy, religion. Some of the greatest figures in Western Civilization were associated with the Renaissance: Dante, Petrarch, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Dürer, Galileo, Copernicus, and many, many more. Less a movement than an ethos, the diverse Renaissance personalities shared a common inspiration: the recovery of Greek and Latin classics. The motto of the Renaissance became ad fontes : “to the sources!” The way forward – they insisted - the flowering of European culture, the “new birth” was possible only through a recovery of classical wisdom.

Luther was not a Renaissance scholar; rather he was trained in the prevailing scholastic tradition of the Church. However, ad fontes had a particular resonance for him: Instead of Greek and Roman classicism, “to the sources” meant back to Scripture and to Augustine. Calvin, as a lawyer, was more thoroughly immersed in Renaissance humanism than the German monk. (His first book, for example, was a commentary on the great Latin writer Seneca’s De Clementia). But following Luther he came to see “the sources” as the Bible and the works of Augustine. For both Luther and Calvin the Church had gone off its rails and any hope of restoration required reaching back for a usable past. All of the reformers, in spite of their many and passionate differences, had this in common, that the way forward had its origin in the first principles articulated in a classic age.

The Reformers were committed to a fresh start, a foundation laid bare and ready for new structures to be built, bedrock freed from centuries of accretion. They were, in a word, radicals (from the Latin radix meaning “root”) – that is, those determined to return to the root of the matter and only then to proceed from there. They thought that returning ad fontes – to the Bible preeminently, and to a few early saints, especially the Bishop of Hippo – would free them for the constructive task of faithful living. If they, in turn, stumbled along the way, we should not forget that at their best they also pointed to a Savior more radical than we usually admit.

To bear in self-identification the name “Christian” is to be rooted in the one who is the way, the truth, and the life, to draw our sustenance from him, to find in him a clarity and purpose obscured and distorted in the world. To follow him is to find ourselves witnesses to extravagant forgiveness of the blatantly unworthy, promiscuous association with obvious undesirables, and fierce rejection of the conventionally pious. To be in his presence is to hear the call to love God, to renounce self, to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies. To receive his grace is to know ourselves to be, in fact, lost sheep and prodigal sons.

The temptation of every Christian is to domesticate Jesus, to reduce him to someone palatable and

manageable and convenient. But Jesus will not be so tamed. He would sooner go to a cross. Jesus is perhaps “too radical for Georgia,” but to those who are being called, those who have ears to hear, he is our root, our source. By returning to him we find our true identity and by proceeding from him we find our vocation in the world. While all the world can see is a radical as extremist who disrupts the status quo, we are rooted in the radical who as an act of mercy and of love promises not to leave the world as it is, but to make all things new.

Fritz

A Land of Many Gods

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 00:14:23 GMT

It was not too long ago that the so-called “new atheists” – people like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens - were prominent on the talking heads circuit, their anti-religion message resonating in an era of religiously inspired terrorism and Evangelical bluster. Debates with the self-appointed protectors of religion (meaning Christianity) and a spate of best-sellers put them in the spotlight for a brief time. Looking back, it appears that they came and went like the flavor of the week. What remains is the status quo ante: a surfeit of gods, each one clamoring for our attention and loyalty.

In short, the challenge that persists in and around the church is not the new flash-in-the-pan atheism, but rather the age-old glut of gods. After all, the First Commandment is not “You shall believe in me,” but rather, “you shall renounce all other gods.” The task of faithful people is not artfully to arrange a hierarchy of greater and lesser loyalties, but rather to love God with all our heart and soul and strength, a love so complete there is no room for any other. Whether in the Israel of Deuteronomy, or the Wittenberg of Luther, or the Geneva of Calvin, or even the Cobb County of 21st century America the problem is the same: how do we remain faithful to the one, true God and reject the seductions of the many other deities who would enroll us in their idolatries and so subvert our faith. We may inscribe the slogan “in God we trust” on our money and on our license plates, but the counter-question is, ”Which god?”

Luther, in his Large Catechism, puts the matter succinctly: “God is that in which we are to look for all good and in which we are to find refuge in all need. Therefore, to have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe in that one with your whole heart. As I have often said, it is the trust and faith of the heart alone that make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true one. Conversely, where your trust is false and wrong, there you do not have the true God. For these two belong together, faith and God. Anything on which your heart relies and depends, I say, that is really your God.”

Calvin agrees, and goes further: “. . . [human] nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.” In spite of the

grace that flows into our lives, we are constantly tempted to invest our love and commitment in things and ideas and practices that cannot sustain their devotion.

The outcome of our situation - being drawn to God and being, at the same time, prone to idolatry - is that we increasingly have difficulty distinguishing between the one, true God and the gods of our own creation. Our trust is more likely in the world’s largest economy than in the God who demands we care for the poor. Our reliance is in the might of world’s most richly funded and equipped military rather than in the God who calls us not to victory but to sacrifice, and promises to be with us. Perhaps most insidiously, we are most enthusiastic toward all who promise to satisfy our desires and our hearts cling to any who will assure us of our own essential goodness (and therefore our deservedness). In fear or uncertainty or in fevered narcissism we seek out gods who will serve us, satisfy us, comfort us. Like the ancient Israelites and their golden calf, we are fully capable of creating our own gods, all decked out in red, white, and blue: gods who will gladly fawn over us, justify any behavior, assure us of our inherent superiority, if we will only give up our loyalty.

The antidote to our idolatry is remembrance. Moses, giving his last advice to the Israelites before they cross over the Jordan, repeatedly calls them to remember who God is by remembering what God has done. By refusing to forget, by ritualizing remembrance (see Deuteronomy 6:4-9), the people may resist the constant inclination to idolatry, and prosper in the presence of God. For us, remembrance focuses on the ritual of story and the table: “Do this in remembrance of me,” Jesus says, while at the same table we affirm a summary of the story: “Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.” To know the one, true God, the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God of Moses, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we must remember the story of Jesus. This is the essence of Christianity, that we are formed by the story of the one we call Lord and that we tell the story in word and deed in the world. It is this simple repetitive act of rehearsal, in worship and devotion and prayer, in our going out and our coming in, that will guard us and free us from the clutches of the false gods that roam the land. Do you know the story? Can you tell it to your grandchildren?

Fritz

A Beginning Proposal

Sat, 15 Sep 2018 23:56:49 GMT

Once upon a time the word “politics” signified “the art or science of government” (Merriam-Webster). Now it is

commonly a term of derision. The use of “politics” today implies manipulation, dishonesty, and other scurrilous behaviors. “Playing politics” means maneuvering for personal advantage. An unscrupulous politician is a redundancy. Politics is polarizing, divisive, distasteful – best not talked about in polite company. Our national founders feared the turn toward political party as the sectarian end to true democracy (although it wasn’t long before there were Federalists and Jeffersonians heaping calumny on each other).

Religion is, likewise, a potentially inflammatory term, best kept to oneself. This is the Enlightenment solution to generations of bloody and destructive religious conflict: privatize religion, making it a matter of personal choice and preference, untouchable from the outside, and hence free.

The problem is that the more we marginalize these two areas of passion – religion and politics – the more dangerous they become, festering in the darkness when they might better serve us in the light. Each comes to occupy a tyrannical and authoritarian place, unchallenged and unchallengeable, carefully enshrined in an echo chamber of one’s particular ideological bent. Indeed, we often fail to see how sickly and insubstantial our own convictions are until they are exposed to the full light of day.

I know that one widely held conviction is that we should keep politics out of the church. My simple proposal runs in just the opposite direction: I believe that our church should be a place where free and passionate political discussion occurs as a matter of course. The payoff for such an unconventional commitment would be two-fold: a benefit to our fellowship in that we could finally express what we have heretofore kept carefully suppressed; and a benefit to each other and the society we keep as we practice and model civil and engaged exchange. We might even rehabilitate “politics” itself.

Two things will be necessary for such a change to take place. First, we will need to trust each other – trust that the goal is not defeat of an opponent, but rather mutual, if slow, progress toward the truth. Second, we will need to improve our political and theological literacy. Repeating ideological talking points designed to reinforce the convictions of true believers will be totally inadequate for engaging those who have a different starting point and a different world view. In short, we will need to learn how to make arguments that might convince rather than bludgeon; we will have to learn again how to offer personal testimony rather than calling down revealed truth. In the church, the structure of such arguments might be: “Because I believe this [theological claim], I affirm/support that [policy or program].”

I have been told that “everyone knows where I stand [politically].” I doubt it. While I have not hidden my disdain for the present administration, no one has inquired about my particular objections or why I hold them; nor has anyone challenged my views, or tried to open my mind to some more adequate truth. It may be polite to pass off everything as “You believe what you believe, and I’ll believe what I believe . . .” but it surely is not a recipe for Christian fellowship. We owe each other more than an empty tolerance.

Let’s talk!!

Fritz

Moving Out, Moving In

Wed, 15 Aug 2018 23:38:12 GMT

Moving is hell. But it is not punishment. Neither God nor the Devil has any need to afflict us during a move. There may be the occasional annoyances orchestrated by junior demons, but experienced tempters know when to step back and watch (so says C. S. Lewis). Moving is hell. But it is a hell almost entirely of our own making. Like Jacob Marley we have forged, link by link, the chains that now bind us. The physical challenges, the emotional assaults, and the spiritual anomie all are rooted in choices we have made over years, or even decades.

Recently Ann and I had begun seriously contemplating moving out of the Columbia Seminary home provided for us. We loved our house, our neighborhood, and our proximity to CTS and our friends on faculty and staff. But Ann had always wanted a house of her own – and neither of us is getting any younger. Our reasoning was straight forward: someone else – a new professor and family, for instance – should benefit from a residence in one of the excellent school districts in the state (as we did with Gabe). In addition, mortgage rates had begun climbing. Now seemed like the right time. With the help of some realtor friends, we made our way through the morass of home buying, visiting and evaluating potential sites, making offers, and finally closing on a townhouse nearby.

Our move seemed so simple at the beginning. We were not downsizing appreciably. Since the new is only 4 miles from the old, we thought we might simply transfer much of our stuff from one to the other, skipping the packing step. None of it really worked the way we envisioned it. New kitchen cabinets took some time and are only now receiving finishing touches. Comcast TV and internet was supposed to be easily installable, but instead required service visits. My car flashed an engine light and required me to spend a morning and then a day waiting for repair. While square f ootage is comparable, the space is allocated so differently that simple transfer was not realistic. After establishing patterns over 13 years, now we have to rethink what goes where. Fortunately, we have leniency from CTS and can take whatever time we need.

The problem with any move is, candidly put, stuff – the stuff we have accumulated almost imperceptibly over the days and years. Contrast Jesus, who sent out the Twelve and “ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.” (Mark 6:8-9). Jesus warned his auditors that nothing is more spiritually dangerous than the stuff with which we fill our lives, that possessions possess us, “for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:20).

Our move has revealed a side to me that I do not like to acknowledge, and manage most of the time to keep even from myself. I have too many books, too many movies, too many CDs. I have too many clothes. We keep too much food in our large refrigerator and our walk-in pantry. I am a model of socially acceptable excess. I have become skilled in finding ways to fit more and more into diminishing space, while ignoring any reasonable divestment. Beneath a thin façade of moderation is an indulgence and glut that cannot be pleasing

to God.

Theologically speaking, moving is a call to repentance, an invitation to change our lives, an opportunity to turn

from what burdens us, and instead, to simplify our lives. I for one intend to answer that call.

Fritz

Independency

Sun, 15 Jul 2018 23:15:56 GMT

There are many things to celebrate and many ways to do it on July 4th. For some it is a welcomed mid-summer break; for others a family party; for still others a community festival. At its base, however, we would do well to remember that we are celebrating not our actual independence from British rule, but rather our declaration to that effect. The founders did not designate the capitulation of Cornwallis at Yorktown (September 3) or the ratification of the Treaty of Paris (January 14) – the military and political ends of the Revolution – as Independence Day. Instead, they chose the day when colonial representatives announced their freedom from colonial rule as an idea and a fact. Colonists were independent of British rule, they insisted, on the

basis of mere assertion. With “repeated injuries and usurpations,” the King had descended into a despotism and tyranny that not only justified but even necessitated dissolving the political bands binding colonists

with motherland. Seven more years of conflict would be required to turn declaration into reality. Indeed, some historians argue that America would be finally free of British rule only after the successful conclusion of the War of 1812.

We should not underestimate how dangerous this idea of independence is. John Calvin insisted to his dying day that there was no right inherent in faithful citizenry to overthrow a ruler, even a despotic one. When his fellow French Protestants – undergoing brutal persecution - sought his advice, Calvin could only offer two choices: martyrdom or flight into exile; deposing a lawfully established ruler was not an option. Calvin’s younger colleague, John Knox, himself an exile from the Marian persecutions in England, had a different idea. Knox argued that neglect of the gospel mandates or abuse of one’s position (which were for him two sides of the same coin) was justification for faithful resistance and even revolution. What Calvin thought unthinkable, Knox promoted as not only possible but necessary; it was the duty of the faithful to secure fidelity in leadership. Thus, Knox could harass the young Scottish Queen, the Catholic Mary Stuart, right out of Scotland. For Knox no political leader has legitimacy simply on the basis of birth or position, but only on his or her conformity to the gospel. Similarly, no subject is under obligation to an unfaithful leader; just the opposite, subjects have a duty to expose, punish, and even depose such leaders. Ordinary people may stand in judgment of their rulers. Their difference on this crucial point drove a wedge between Calvin and Knox that was never reconciled.

The American Revolution was possible not in Calvin’s terms, but only as a Knox-inspired rebellion. It is no accident that many of the most outspoken proponents of independency were Scottish and Northern Irish immigrants who combined no great love for England with a pro-revolutionary religious fervor. Among the most vociferous was the famed Scottish preacher and president of the fledgling Presbyterian school in Princeton, John Witherspoon. The only clergy-person to sign the Declaration, Witherspoon was a tireless agitator for American separation (and a special target of British wrath), justifying his position and exhorting others from every pulpit to which he was invited.

One of the ironies of revolution, whatever their initial justification, is that once the revolutionaries seize power, their objective inevitably shifts to securing their own right to rule. In different ways this has been true of the American, French, and Russian revolutions as well as the colonial rebellions of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Successful revolutionaries become custodians of power, admitting only to the need for occasional reform which will not threaten their entrenched position. In short, revolutions become domesticated; then they become the status quo; and then they descend into mundane corruption. Perhaps on this 4th we should remember the bold claims of self-governance articulated in the Declaration, but also another of Jefferson’s words (in a letter to James Madison): “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

Fritz

Sabbath

Fri, 15 Jun 2018 04:52:08 GMT

One of the great mysteries of human civilization is how a tiny middle eastern cult managed to make its own distinctive view of time into the world standard. Days are easy to understand; months correspond roughly to lunar cycles; and even years correspond to the stars and the seasons. But a seven day week reflects nothing in human experience. It is ideological, not experiential. The story of a six day creation and a seventh day to rest may be the basis of the idea or its justification, a chicken-and-egg kind of puzzle, but it doesn’t explain how such an idea has persisted and become universal across cultures and religious identities.

Of course, it is the seventh day that particularly interests us. The seventh day is the special day; the others are ordinary. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD . . .” For Jews, sabbath begins Friday at sundown and ends Saturday at sundown. Christians early on adopted the Roman practice of midnight-to-midnight days and shifted Sabbath from the end of the week to the Lord’s Day, the first day of the week.

The practice of Sabbath remains varied, ambiguous, and largely negative. Clearly, “keeping,” “remembering,” or “obeying” the Sabbath has meant identifying what we can’t or shouldn’t do: work most obviously – although defining “work” has vexed the faithful down

to the present day. Many Protestants added entertainments” as something to be avoided. Luther shifted the focus from rest to holiness: “ because we all do not have the time and leisure, we must set aside several hours a week for the young people, or at least a day for the whole community, when we can concentrate only on these matters and deal especially with the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer, and thus regulate our entire life and being in accordance with God’s word. Whenever this practice is in force, a holy day is truly kept ” [Luther’s Larger Catechism ]. In the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the dual nature of rest and devotion is succinctly stated: “ The Sabbath is to be sanctified by a holy resting all that day, even from such worldly employments and recreations as are lawful on other days; and spending the whole time in the public and private exercises of God’s worship, except so much as is to be taken up in the works of necessity and mercy .” [A. 60].

Jesus was regularly in conflict with the devout of his day over what was permissible and what forbidden on the Sabbath. Mark says that Jesus was grieved at his opponents’ “hardness of heart,” and condemned them for having distorted priorities: “The Sabbath was made for people, and not people for the Sabbath.” Jesus is in good company. Amos the prophet upbraids his auditors for hiding behind Sabbath regulations while “buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.” Likewise, Isaiah identifies genuine sabbath observance as the touchstone of faithfulness: I f you refrain from trampling the sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs; then you shall take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken. [58:13-14].

What is surprising is how little reflection we have received from our theological forebearers on the notion that we worship a God who rests and invites rest. Surely in a world like ours where the drive is always in the direction of more production, more acquisition, and more consumption, this idea of a God who rests is destabilizing and subversive. Yet many Christians have so abandoned even the vestige of Sabbath that only Chic-Fil-A is recognizably Sabbatarian in our culture. Indeed, we have become the people of Nine Commandments (or less). Rest is inviting, but we really don’t know how to do it without becoming legalistic. Worship is worthwhile, but for an hour, not for a day.

Walter Brueggemann’s little book, Sabbath As Resistance , will help us reflect on the meaning and practice of Sabbath. There will be other resources as well, including each other. Join us for a fellowship meal Wednesdays at 6:00 (soup du jour provided; bring a side or dessert to share), and discussion to follow at 6:45.

Fritz

Love, Love, Love

Tue, 15 May 2018 04:32:12 GMT

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.

Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.

Nothing you can say, but you can learn

How to play the game

It's easy.

All you need is love . . .

By 1967, The Beatles had become worldly wise, perhaps even a little bit cynical. They were certainly not any longer the artists of I Want to Hold Your Hand and Please Please Me . In the summer of 1967, between Sgt. Pepper’s and the so-called White Album , they released a non-album single, All You Need Is Love . Far from a paean to the power of love (as some commentators would have it, ignoring every musical and lyrical cue), All You Need is ruthless satire, mocking the idea of self-sufficient love. From the pretentious sample of La Marseillaise that opens the song, to the sneering brass on each chorus, to Paul’s exhortation near the end for everybody to join in, to the reference to Yesterday and She Loves You , to the lyrics of limitation, the song is testimony to what love cannot do. The cloying sentimentality of popular notions of love will no longer do. It’s not that easy.

By way of contrast, one might consider the Biblical view of love. There we find love of God as a commandment and love of neighbor as its corollary. Throughout the Biblical traditions love is not a feeling or an idea, but rather a commitment and an action. Love is what you do – and it’s far from easy.

Love in this sense is not caught like a virus; nor does one fall into it. Rather, love is exemplified by God and instilled by the Holy Spirit. Love cannot be earned or deserved; it can only be gratefully received and freely given. God is the source of love, and in divine loving sets us free as only the beloved can be free to be loving as well. First John insists that because God is love, both the beginning and end (the alpha and omega) of love is God. Thus love is not primarily a philosophical idea, or a sociological construct, or a psychological phenomenon, but rather a theological revelation. God is known – and desires to be known - in divine acts of love which are expressed in self-sacrifice, in choosing to side with the needy against the self-sufficient, and in speaking the truth. We see these attributes embodied in Jesus who is the epitome of self-sacrifice, whose ministry focuses on the sick, the demon-possessed, the poor, and the marginalized, and who himself is the way, the truth, and the life. Torah repeatedly affirms that as an expression of God’s love there is special divine concern for widows, orphans, and sojourners (this last sometimes translated “aliens” or “strangers”) – that is, those who have no standing in society must receive determined care because they are the ones with whom God has chosen to stand in their need and vulnerability. God does so not because they are particularly lovable or deserving but because God’s chief attribute is “ hesed ”, a complex Hebrew word which the King James translators rendered “Steadfast love” but

which also carries the idea of covenant loyalty. God, it is often said, abounds in steadfast love, but that love is persistent and enduring even when met with the frequent hurtful cases of unfaithfulness.

The apostle Paul’s brief meditation on love which is now one of the most familiar texts of the Bible – misapplied regularly in weddings – also emphasizes the sacrificial character of love, its perseverance, the need love yearns to address, and its ties to the truth. While nothing could be further from the apostle’s mind than a couple entering wedded bliss, his view of love is entirely in keeping with the Hebrew/Old Testament view of love which was his heritage. Then he goes further: God’s love comes to us not when we have turned the corner or come to our senses, but while we were weak, even ungodly, sinners at enmity with God. The formula holds: God loves the poor, the stricken, the marginal, the broken, the struggling, the foolish, even the enemy – and as God’s people in the world so should we. Love one another; Love your neighbor; Love your enemy. It isn’t easy. It’s certainly not romantic. (Everybody sing!) It is, however, work of the most vital kind. Indeed, it is the way of the pilgrim in this world, going out from God filled and overflowing with blessing only to end up where God is. We have been made, Augustine writes, for God, and our hearts are restless to they find their rest in him.

Fritz

Jesus Christ SuperStar

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 03:32:29 GMT

In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania circa 1970, Jesus was in the air. Jesus freaks – shaggy boys and earth-mother girls – were sidewalk evangelists, passing out tracts and confronting any who would listen with the need and possibility of salvation. Church youth groups and Young Life chapters were burgeoning with teenage boomers. The musical Godspell had originated as a master’s thesis at Carnegie Mellon University; and Jesus Christ Superstar was seen for the first time on stage by an audience of 13,000 at the Civic Arena. I began my sophomore year that September at Bethel Park High.

It was a formative time for any teenager, an impressionable time – and I was impressed by Jesus Christ Superstar. I was not alone. Following the success of the Who’s Tommy , Decca Records was bold enough to release a double disc concept album by unknowns about the last days of Jesus. Even Decca did not expect what happened: the album soared up the Billboard charts, finishing 1971 as the number one album of the year, ahead of such enduring classics as All Things Must Pass, Tapestry , Sticky Fingers , and Pearl. There followed stage productions on Broadway and the West End, and then around the world; and there was a major Hollywood movie filmed on location in Israel. Of course, there was also backlash: charges of sacrilege, outraged cries of blasphemy, and album burnings. But no protests could eclipse the fact that millions of children and young adults learned Tim Rice’s lyrics by heart, and many came to understand the gospels through the frame of Jesus Christ Superstar .

I was reminded of my debt to Lloyd Weber and Rice watching the excellent NBC production this Easter Sunday. After all these years of study and devotion, I was still rapt from the opening guitar licks to the closing credits. My favor was more than mere nostalgia or sentimentality. Tim Rice, the lyricist, captured the gospel in a way enduringly compelling to me these many years on.

The key decision was not to base the story on a particular canonical gospel (like Godspell did with Matthew) but rather to approach the drama from Judas’ perspective. Judas thus is elevated from a few lines in the canon to the sympathetic, central character, caught between his admiration for Jesus and his devotion to the movement: “Jesus! / You've started to believe / The things they say of you / You really do believe / This talk of God is true / And all the good you've done / Will soon be swept away / You've begun to matter more / Than the things you say.” Ultimately, this Judas will betray Jesus not out of greed but out of loyalty to the cause he thinks Jesus now endangers. Tragically, he discovers that the man and the message cannot be so easily disentangled; nor can his devotion to one be separated from the other. In the end Judas cries out bitterly to God, half in confession and half in accusation: “My mind is darkness now / My god I am sick / I've been used / And you knew / All the time / God I'll never ever know / Why you chose me for your crime / For your foul bloody crime / You have murdered me! / You have murdered me!” (The chorus sings in the background, “So long, Judas / Poor old Judas.”)

Jesus, in this telling, has paid the price for popularity. Everyone wants some piece of him: the sick want to be healed; the disciples want their place in the sun; the crowds want a spectacle; the zealots want his endorsement of their revolution; the priests want a scapegoat. Seen from the perspective of Gethsemane, Jesus struggles with doubt: “I only want to say / If there is a way / Take this cup away from me / For I don't want to taste its poison / Feel it burn me, / I have changed I'm not as sure / As when we started / Then I was inspired / Now I'm sad and tired / Listen surely I've exceeded / Expectations / Tried for three years / Seems like thirty / Could you ask as much / From any other man?” Nevertheless, doubt finally gives way to petition and petition to (re)commitment: “Show me there's a reason / For your wanting me to die / You're far too keen on where and how / But not so hot on why / Alright I'll die! / Just watch me die!”

JCS ends with crucifixion and an implied burial; there is no Easter. Instead, there is the perennial question of followers: how does one love the leader? Mary Magdalene acknowledges her struggle early: “I don't know how to love him / What to do, how to move him / I've been changed, yes really changed / In these past few days / When I've seen myself / I seem like someone else.” Fraught with sexual allusion, the song is ironically about a passion beyond sexuality; if it were not, Mary implies, she would not be in the slightest confused. However, it is when part of the song finds its way into Judas’ dying, guilt-ridden anguish that we can see it more thematically: “I don't know how to love him / I don't know why he moves me / He's a man / He's just a man / He's not a king / He's just the same / As anyone I know / He scares me so! / When he's cold and dead / Will he let me be? / Does he love me too? / Does he care for me?”

Jesus may be a superstar in this drama, but he remains an enduring enigma whose death has often transcended and sometimes even obscured his message. One reason that Jesus Christ Superstar endures – and 10 million viewers tuned in to see – is that even though we know the ending, the aftermath, now stretching to two millennia, remains cloaked in mystery. The whys of God’s particular choices remain inscrutable. Like Mark’s gospel, in which the men forsake him and flee, and the women say nothing to anyone for they were afraid, still the word has gotten out. He is risen. We are the living proof of this miracle.

Fritz

Our Thoughts and Prayers

Fri, 16 Mar 2018 03:19:13 GMT

The Lord said: Because these people draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote; so I will again do amazing things with this people, shocking and amazing. The wisdom of their wise shall perish, and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden. (Isaiah 29:13-14)

For flattery is on their lips, but their heart is set on their gain. (Ezekiel 33:31)

It’s a scene replayed over and over again. We might call it the standard script: in the face of some crisis or tragedy – a school shooting, a flood, a hurricane - our elected leaders are reduced to “thoughts and prayers.” This is generally followed by some compulsory hand wringing and postures of sympathy. What does not follow in this script is any commitment to meaningful action. Sometimes there is even an explanation or assertion regarding the inability to do anything: it’s too hard, it’s too complicated, it’s too costly; it’s too controversial. Indeed, what we have grown accustomed to seeing from those in charge is a well-practiced impotence.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not against thinking and praying; in fact, I regard these two as among the most noble of human endeavors. But offering up “thoughts and prayers” in our present civic discourse has become code for “there’s nothing more to be done.” Emptied of all commitment, “thoughts and prayers” becomes mere platitude. Check off the box. Move on. The fact that we are left in thrall to the status quo (the “present evil age” Paul calls it) simply does not enter the conversation.

The Parkland school shooting has presented us with an amended script. While the usual suspects have offered the usual empty condolences and their “thoughts and prayers,” the teenagers have been adamant about specific action. They have made it clear that platitudes and " blah blah blah" are neither sufficient nor acceptable. They have been articulate, politically savvy, moving in their testimony, and insistent that their loss result in significant change. How long they can hang together is anyone’s guess, but the odds are against them. Sooner rather than later there will be another massacre and the attention of the nation will start over with the next cycle of “thoughts and prayers” and handwringing.

The fact that gun ownership and gun control have become an intractable problem (and only here in America) points to a pervasive confusion of values, a society-wide, cruel neglect of responsibility, a twisted will that has sacralized what is profane, all to a degree that might aptly be characterized as depraved. Even so, one must be careful making faith claims. Jesus, after all, speaks not a word on guns. He does however speak to violence, to retaliation, to self-protection, all of which he is against. In the violent world of Jesus’ day he did not arm his disciples, but knowingly sent them out “as sheep among wolves.” He refused to defend himself physically or verbally, and went to his death “like a lamb led to slaughter.”

Perhaps the best Christians can do is to confront the clash of faith and civic values and expose the fallacies underwriting our present national predicament: that violence can only be subdued by the threat of greater violence; that more guns and more powerful ammunition make us safer; that the right to bear arms is a sacred right transcending all others; that the individual right supersedes the common good; that killing for a just cause is righteous and heroic. And then Christians need to vote.

The chief civic option that we have – and share with every other citizen – is to vote the bums out of office and then to elect officials that will do more than offer us their “thoughts and prayers.” 33,000 Americans die from gun related causes every year. 17 of them got our attention for a fleeting moment. How many more have to die?

Fritz

Free Exercise

Fri, 16 Feb 2018 04:08:07 GMT

When the founders proposed a Federal Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation they encountered some stiff resistance, particularly in Virginia, among those who were suspicious of centralized and powerful government. A compromise strategy gained traction through the ratification process, to amend the Constitution with more explicit language addressing the concerns of the resistance. Ultimately twelve amendments were proposed, ten were ratified, and these became known as

the Bill of Rights. The first concern to be addressed was limiting government involvement in religion: the Federal government (and later the states as well) was prohibited from establishing a particular expression of religion as official, or of threatening the religious commitments of individuals.

In adopting the First Amendment (which also affirmed free speech, free press, and free assembly) the states enshrined a powerful tradition later known as Freedom of Religion. It is hard to imagine now how revolutionary it was then. Few Westerners believed it possible to have a unified state without a state church at its center. One might explore limited toleration, but religious dissenters, it was thought, threatened the well-being and coherence of society. Madison and his small band of followers insisted on an American experiment in which religious sentiment and commitment were personal and individual (but not necessarily private) and should be free from government coercion. In the First Amendment freedom is not reciprocal; instead, religion – and not simply the church – is protected from government involvement. A “wall of separation” is Jefferson’s terminology, but it is not the language of the Amendment, which puts no limits and offers no walls to fence in or keep out religion.

One result of this radical idea was a land brimming with religious experimentation. There were, of course, Presbyterians and Congregationalists, Baptists and Methodists, Episcopalians and Lutherans, all trying to preserve their traditions and beliefs in an ever more competitive marketplace of theology and practice. There were also, at the beginning, a few Catholics, almost no Eastern Orthodox, a tiny number of Jews; Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others from the East would come later. But there were home grown practitioners: Quakers and Shakers, Mormons, Millerites, Adventists, Christian Scientists, Pentecostals, Wesleyan holiness groups, sects and cults proliferating at a prodigious rate, all making their way in this land that by its freedom encourages fertile, boundless religious imagination. Free exercise indeed!

Our Wednesday Study, starting February 21st, will survey a small slice of the American religious experience: Christianities in the 20th Century. We will explore the social gospelers who discovered in the Bible their central concept of a kingdom which could not be reduced to personal salvation, but required civic engagement. We will turn to the movement called Fundamentalism which began as a response to the rapid social and intellectual change of the gilded age and became ever more defensive and insular in conflict with mainline churches and society. We will explore the phenomenon of Pentecostalism, the rise of Dispensationalism, and the reform of Fundamentalism known as Evangelicalism. We will briefly engage the thought of two influential public theologians, the brothers Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr. We will take a look at the trajectory of Catholic experience from marginalized minority to mature and fully engaged American tradition. We will dig into the recent rise and fall of the Christian Right as well as their successors, the so-called New Evangelicals. We will explore the industry of Bible translation and publication, and we will lift up some of the most influential and contentious Supreme Court decisions.

In twelve weeks we will cover – or if not cover, at least touch upon – movements, thoughts, and personalities that are still relevant today. Names like Walter Rauschenbusch, C. I. Scofield, Aimee Semple McPherson, Hal Lindsay, Billy Graham, J erry Falwell and many others, famous and scarcely known, will make their appearance. It will be only part of a much broader and deeper story, the story of religion in America, but it will be a start. I hope it will be enlightening. Come join us Wednesdays in Fellowship Hall Room B beginning February 21st, 1:00 – 2:30, or 7:00 – 8:30.

Fritz

Irony and Tragedy

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 03:55:15 GMT

As the Twentieth Century dawned, William McKinley was preparing to run for a second term as President of the United States. The last president to have served in the military during the Civil War, he was a popular supporter of big business, American expansionism, and the Open Door Policy (international free trade with China). McKinley’s vicepresident, Garret Hobart, had died in 1899, and so the ticket needed a running mate. Some thought that a young rising star in the Republican party, New York governor Theodore Roosevelt, would be a compelling choice. But there was opposition. Senator Mark Hanna, one of McKinley’s closest confidants, distrusted Roosevelt’s reformest agenda and charismatic impulsiveness. Ultimately, Republican power broker Thomas Pratt, Senator from New York, carried the day with cynical logic, proposing that there was no better way to marginalize TR than to kick him upstairs to the powerless position of vice -president.

Ah, the best laid plans . . . McKinley, in a rematch of 1896, defeated the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, this time in a land slide. Ten months later he was shot in the abdomen by an anarchist while visiting the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Eight days later he was dead of infection, and TR was sworn in as the 26th President of the United States (at 42 still the youngest person ever to hold the office).

Roosevelt was an unconventional Republican who stirred fear and resentment among the party regulars. He aggressively prosecuted the business and manufacturing monopolies that were the foundation of the gilded age; he passionately supported conservation; he pushed for more regulation, especially with regard to food safety; and, in his most populist voice, he promised ordinary Americans (including Negroes) a “square deal.”

A month after assuming the office, TR nearly derailed his presidency and his political career. In an act of hospitality and political innocence, Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, whom he had met numerous times and carried on an engaged correspondence, to a family dinner at the White House. Unknowingly breaking one of the most sacrosanct of Southern taboos, TR inadvertently ignited a firestorm of protest and recrimination. “U.S. S enator Ben ‘Pitchfork’ Tillman of South Carolina sputtered: ‘Now that Roosevelt has eaten with that n---r Washington, we shall have to kill a thousand n----rs to get them back to their places.’ The Memphis Press Scimitar called the evening meal ‘the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.’ The Richmond News declared that Roosevelt ‘at one stroke and by one act has destroyed regard for him. He has put himself further from us than any man who has ever been in the White House.’ The governor of Georgia, Allen Candler, said, ‘No southerner can respect any white man who would eat with a negro.’” James K. Vardaman called Roosevelt a "little, mean, coon-flavored miscegenationist." The White House, Vardaman said, was "so saturated with the odor of the n---r that the rats have taken refuge in the stable." Vardaman was elected governor of Mississippi the following year.” [Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another

Name, pp. 167ff.]

This vitriol and virulence represented a generations-long enculturation of white supremacy and brutal racism, unbroken and largely unchallenged until after World War II. Blacks in the South were subjected to unrelenting terrorism after the ignominious end of Reconstruction in 1877. Jim Crow laws systematically excluded them from any political process. They could not vote, run for public office, or serve on juries – in spite of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the fact that in SC, GA, AL, MS, and LA they were a majority of the population. Laws like vagrancy and adultery were promulgated to target black men and provide a ready excuse for incarceration. Those convicted of minor offenses entered a sophisticated system of peonage from which there would be no escape save death. They were sold (or leased) to corporations and farmers, and sent to the mills and mines and fields, a disposable form of cheap labor which had the added benefit of suppressing any organization of free labor. Subject to horrific tortures and beatings, housed in squalid conditions, malnourished, many thousands died. Birmingham became the industrial center of the South built on just such legalized slavery. Five decades after the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, President Woodrow Wilson, good Southern Presbyterian that he was, reintroduced segregated work spaces in Washington D.C. Today, there is scarcely a corporation or institution in the South that does not have roots deep into the system of involuntary servitude which for 100 years after slavery victimized blacks, shattered families, and built wealth that they would never share in.

One of the great ironies of our history is that at the turn of the Twentieth Century when 8.8 million citizens, almost all living in the South, were being systematically terrorized and denied even basic human rights, let alone American political values, at the same time American elites were debating whether or not the country should colonize territories like Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, extending to them the divine blessings of American freedom, democracy, and prosperity. The tragedy is that in a country that so often fancies itself “Christian,” so few churches and church people spoke or acted on behalf of the afflicted.

Fritz

When He Returns

Sat, 16 Dec 2017 03:29:27 GMT

In 1979 Bob Dylan confounded his fans and critics alike, as he so often had before, releasing an album of Christian fundamentalist stock called Slow Train Coming. Few were enamored with his turn to the religious, and as a second-year (know-it-all) seminarian I was certainly among the skeptical. The lyrics showed little of the startling originality that had made Dylan an iconic streetwise poet for a generation. Indeed they were what one might reasonably expect from a new convert – a “baby Christian” who could only cope with the either/or, black-and-white piety: “You either got faith or you got unbelief / And there ain’t no neutral ground.” So much for honest, real-life doubt. Still, for all its faults, Slow Train had something that could not be simply dismissed. Barry Beckett’s keyboards and Mark Knopfler’s excellent guitar work provided musical heft underneath Dylan’s now plaintive, now demanding, now exhorting voice. The songs – with the exception of the juvenile “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” – had a certain pop stickiness that refused to be forgotten. The plaintive “I Believe in You;” the throbbing “Gotta Serve Somebody;” the sweet “Precious Angel;” the expectant title song “Slow Train;” the confessional “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking”; none of them are among Dylan’s best work and yet they still play in my head nearly 40 years later.

One thing that intrigued me then and has continued to fascinate me to this day is the theme of Christ’s return, running through many of the songs and culminating in the final cut, “When He Returns.” Wherever Dylan learned the faith, his lessons included a heavy dose of eschatology. And why not? The doctrine is creedal: “From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” It is Biblical. Jesus taught followers to pray earnestly, “Let your Kingdom come and your will be done on Earth as it is (already) in heaven.” The apostle Paul wrote often of Jesus’ parousia – his coming. Jesus himself promised a return. Almost all of Jesus’ parables are about this coming Kingdom. And yet this fundamental (!) belief of historic Christianity is almost completely ignored in mainstream churches.

There are reasons for this neglect. Most recently, the dispensationalist distortions so popular in their fever dream literature from Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth to the LaHaye and Jenkins Left Behind series, reading the geo-political signs of the times for Armageddon and the Rapture, have alienated as many as they have fascinated. Predicting the end times has a long and endlessly alluring history in America, but it is fraught with disappointment. Ultimately, mainstream Christians have found the present to be much more engaging than speculation about the end times. Even so, the abuse of doctrine does not merit its abandonment.

Advent reminds us that the whole of Christian life is lived out in the light of God’s promise to restore all of creation, that we have our purpose in God’s determination to free the entire cosmos from the stranglehold of sin and death. The world, Advent insists, is far from God’s purposes and estranged from God’s glory.

That much seems obvious, when we hear daily of yet more astounding horrors. But God has not given up on us. Instead, of wrath and judgment and punishment, God has plotted a course of forgiveness, love, and restoration. Advent helps us put the birth in perspective, not as an end to the story but as a beginning (as all births are), pointing toward its culmination and fulfillment. In Advent we are waiting with great anticipation for God’s final act: the coming of a King and a Kingdom. Until that time we have a story to tell and work to do. We are like Robin Hood and his merry band, resisting the evil incursions of Prince John, and faithfully enduring until the King returns. May it be soon.

Come Lord Jesus.

Fritz

Gratitude → Generosity → Thanksgiving

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 03:12:59 GMT

Something is terribly wrong. It seems like our world has gone out of joint. Mean-spiritedness prevails. Ignorance is lauded while knowledge is demeaned. Vitriolic and incendiary speech is praised as “telling it like it is.” Scapegoating has become commonplace. We are increasingly insensitive to the violence and cruelty that pervade our common life, while at the same time we turn a deaf ear to cries of injustice arising from the abused and marginalized. The politics of hate and fear and resentment stir up deep and sinister passions even as governance is made more and more difficult. Selfaggrandizement is the order of the day. “We the people” has been displaced by the regnant “I.” Surely we are approaching the edge of the abyss. Surely the end is near.

A century ago W. B. Yeats could write as if for today:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

In the face of “mere anarchy,” despair is a reasonable response. Things seem to be getting only worse. Perhaps we should simply “eat, drink, and be merry,” live in the moment, let tomorrow’s problems be for tomorrow (going first class on the Titanic, one sociologist has called it). Perhaps this is the best we can do in a world plummeting toward Hell.

Or, we might re-engage the teachings of the faith.

Calvin taught that the appropriate and necessary response to God’s grace is gratitude; that gratitude provides the fertile medium for

generosity; and that generosity impels the faithful to acts and attitudes of thanksgiving. Gratitude is the antidote to the self-concern which is poisoning our life together. When one is grateful, one is turned away from the need to earn or deserve, and instead turned toward the source of unmerited good. We receive blessing upon blessing not because we are good, but because God is good. Grace is bestowed upon us not because of some inherent quality or divinely discerned potentiality in us, but rather because God is love.

The fruit of gratitude is the virtue of generosity; it is the capacity to give as God gives: freely, without regard for the merits of the recipient, because we have something material or spiritual to give – a word of encouragement, a helping hand, a hot meal, a prayer. Like any virtue, generosity must be cultivated and practiced and encouraged. It is the work of the church to provide this saintly exercise so that acts of generosity become opportunities for celebration; they are themselves moments of thanksgiving where again we rejoice in the giver of all good gifts and praise the God who empowers us to do good deeds in the world.

For Calvin, Christian life is lived in this ongoing cycle of gratitude, generosity, and thanksgiving which takes us outside ourselves to both the throne of God and the needs of the world. To be sure this is not a program or solution to the world’s ills. But it is an answer, a bold refusal to be co-opted by the corruption and chaos of this world, a steadfast commitment to being God’s people in the midst of this “present evil age.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

Fritz

Insufficient Funds

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 01:59:59 GMT

Most of us know the concluding words of Martin Luther King’s address to the assembly gathered on the Washington Mall in 1963. Indeed, the speech has come to be known as the “I Have a Dream” speech. The soaring rhetoric is memorized by children and rightly treasured by all Americans. However, few remember – or ever knew – that the context of the speech was a massive protest, or that the “I Have a Dream” conclusion followed four pages of pointed indictment of everyday American racism, including this paragraph:

“In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent

words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every

American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be

guaranteed the "“Unalienable Rights" of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has

defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred

obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "“insufficient funds."

We have a carefully selective memory when it comes to our history. We conveniently forget that King was endlessly harassed by local, state, and federal law enforcement; that he was the particular bete noire of J. Edgar Hoover; that he was despised and decried as an “uppity n—r” for daring to speak not only on race, but also on the injustice of labor relations as well as the perversity of the Vietnam War; that many Americans thought he got what he deserved when he was felled by an assassin’s bullet. It is not too much to say that it is whitewashing of our history to embrace the dream without acknowledging the protest.

The neglect and abuse of history for propaganda purposes is a regular feature of our civic life. Admittedly, there is no history that is objective or complete – only tales woven together for some subjective purpose. But some purported history is so tendentious as to be little more than a lie. For instance, a century long campaign by those who romanticize the Lost Cause has succeeded in transforming Robert E. Lee into the “Noble Confederate” in the popular, ahistorical imagination. A similar alchemy, thankfully less successful, has been practiced by those who want us to believe that the Confederate Battle Flag (technically, the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia) is not a symbol of slavery and white supremacy but rather a symbol of Southern heritage and culture (these, of course, are not mutually exclusive). In short, it is not taking down or moving monuments that whitewashes our history. I think we would be truer to our national ideals if we were scrubbed free of every Robert E. Lee monument (just as we have managed quite well without any Benedict Arnold statues). The distortion of history comes most often when it becomes fodder for entrenched political standing. That is to say, history is most often distorted by proponents of status quo rather than activists for change. If this is ultimately unavoidable, it should also be resisted (which requires citizens actually to be conversant in both history and myth).

When Colin Kaepernick knelt in protest during the National Anthem last year, he became an object of controversy; as so often happens, the substance of the protest was ignored by the outraged righteous, shifting to a furious rejection of the form of the protest. Kaepernick was clear in subsequent interviews that his intent was to call attention to the gap between American ideals and American practice which regularly leaves people of color outsiders to justice and victims of law enforcement. His protest was peaceful, dignified, and effective. Now, kneeling – a posture of deference and submission – has been declared from on high to be

“shameful” and “disrespectful.” As I watched the various protests around the NFL last week, I wondered where we go from here: must one not only stand but place hand over heart to avoid reproach? Must one not only stand, hand over heart, but also sing our Anthem – or at least mouth the words – to qualify as a true patriot? When will we actually address the injustices that are roiling our society?

The President, an expert in changing the subject, has whipped up hatred of the protester rather than constructively addressing the substance of the protest. This is not a new strategy: from slavery to women’s suffrage to civil rights to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, protesters have been reviled, marginalized, beaten, even killed, in an attempt to divert any attention from the need for social change. Even so, brave and patriotic citizens have courageously risked themselves to remind us that America can and should be better. For many, Martin Luther King’s bad check is still bouncing half a century later; the irruption of xenophobia, racism, and fascism in recent times threatens everything we love and treasure about this American experiment. Passions are being stirred, hatred and resentment whipped to fever pitch, all while our government fails to govern. We can be better . . .

Fritz

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Fri, 15 Sep 2017 23:30:24 GMT

We walked . . . and walked . . . and walked some more. We walked on marble and granite and cobblestone and gravel through narrow streets in places that existed long before motorized transport. We walked through the picturesque village of Castelmola perched precariously on top of a mountain in Sicily and then down below to the historic resort of Taormina. We walked around the beautiful, tiny island nation of Malta. We walked through the shops and museums and monuments of the Greek islands of Mykonos, Santorini, and Rhodes. We walked step by step to the highest point in Athens, to the Acropolis where the Parthenon still stands 2500 years after it was erected in honor of Athena, the patroness and protector of the city. We walked among the partially excavated remains of ancient Corinth, the Corinth of Paul’s day. We walked through the monastery at Monte Cassino and the palace at Caserta. We walked through the churches and monuments of Rome and the Vatican. And even when we were not ashore we walked on board a ship so mammoth – 16 decks high and 1000 feet long – that 3500 tourists and 1200 crew never seemed crowded.

We saw amazing things: the remains of a megalithic temple on Malta, perhaps the oldest existing religious site on earth, composed of huge limestone blocks of many tons quarried from nearby and dragged on stone balls to their present location. On Santorini there is a Bronze Age village called Akrotiri being excavated which shows incredible technological development including hot and cold running water and toilets! Akrotiri, like more Pompei, was apparently the victim of volcanic eruption, although its residents had enough advance warning to flee before they were buried in ash. Some think this village is the basis of the legend of lost Atlantis. At Monte Cassino we entered through a door labeled PAX (peace) into the fountainhead of all Western monasticism, the Abbey where Benedict promulgated his famous Rule in the 6th Century; and at the same time we looked far down into the valley where 55,000 Allied casualties fell in one of the most horrific battles of World War II on the road to Rome. We spent a couple of hours at the 18th Century Palace of Caserta, a 1200 room monument to Bourbon self -aggrandizement designed to rival the opulence of Versailles. From the Acropolis in Athens we looked down to the Agora – the marketplace – where Socrates and Plato and Aristotle had taught and provided the intellectual foundation for all Western culture; and to Mars Hill where Paul revealed an “unknown” God (see Acts 17). In Rome we spent four hours rapidly moving through the miles of corridors and collections of the Vatican Museum, into the silent sacredness of the Sistine Chapel, and on to the awesome, cavernous St. Peter’s Basilica.

Standing in the center of the largest church in the world, I couldn’t help being awestruck by the confluence of genius in a single time and place, represented in the splendor of art and architecture all around us, names like Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael (and I’m not talking turtles!), and so many more; at the same time, as an heir of Luther, I couldn’t help also remembering that it was funding schemes for this very building that led directly to the Reformation.

Everywhere we went we were amazed by the beauty of artistic expression, by the achievements of human ingenuity, and by the lavish magnificence of human building, and we were humbled by how little we know – how much more there is to know – of the human saga of which we are such a miniscule part. Travelling is enriching, and challenging, and exhausting – and then it’s time to return, however changed, to the place where we belong. It’s good to be home.

Fritz

Bad Religion

Tue, 15 Aug 2017 23:15:26 GMT

Five years ago Ross Douthat, the conservative Catholic op-ed columnist for the New York Times, published his book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics . Some of you may remember that it was our discussion book for our summer soup and fellowship potlucks in 2012. Douthat’s thesis was two-fold: (1) that there is such a thing as “bad” – that is, twisted, distorted, destructive – religion; and (2) that authentic Christianity is not threatened by Islam or Hinduism or even atheism, but rather by the pseudo-Christianities that have proliferated in our culture. The first aspect is critical in a culture where indifference often masquerades as tolerance and anything labeled “religion” is relegated to the safety of personal preference. The second aspect is important because if religion is considered at all, it is most often the religion of the immigrant outsider that garners suspicion. Islam in particular has been battered by the ignorant, the fearful, and the bigoted who would reduce one quarter of the global population to terrorism. Douthat’s focus is much more on the American experience, and more narrowly on the American Christian experience: he argues that traditional Christianity, once the social, moral, and intellectual center of the culture, has been “warped into justifications for solipsism and anti-intellectualism, jingoism and utopianism, selfishness and greed” by the false Christianities whose success is the downfall of a positively religious America. In some ways – but less vitriolically – Douthat is channeling the Apostle Paul who insists that the greatest threat to the well-being of the Galatians is from the inside: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.”

Confusion comes in many different packages. There are the promoters of Jesus as self-help guru who will bestow wisdom and well being if you learn and apply the proper techniques and take the appropriate steps. Once it was about “turning your scars into stars,” or “turning your lemons into lemonade;” now in the bigger, faster, and slicker 21st Century it is “Your Best Life Now” and “Become a Better You.” From there it is only a short step to the prosperity gospel that has exploded in the last decades. If you pray enough and do enough and give enough (especially give) then God will return to you riches of the most worldly kind, because God is a sugar-daddy who delights in nothing more than handing out treats to the deserving. Alongside self-help and prosperity are the practitioners of rigid orthodoxy who construct a sieve of doctrine and (more often these days) social pronouncement. Those who have the right position on the issues of the day – abortion, homosexuality, birth control, sex, free-market capitalism, global warming, creationism, etc. – are the true Christian saints; the rest are damned.

Since 2010 there has been a Bible Study in Washington D. C. led by Ralph Drollinger (who sports fans will remember as the 7- foot back-up center to Bill Walton in the UCLA glory days). Mr. Drollinger’s mission is to increase the righteousness of the nation by increasing the righteousness of its leaders. Apparently, he has been successful in attracting many high-profile officials to his program, including quite a few of the Trump cabinet, senators, and representatives. Drollinger’s goal is not out of bounds, but his teachings make him suspect. He insists that ecumenical efforts, including prayer breakfasts, are by nature syncretistic and not pleasing to God, since “God only hears the prayers of leaders and citizens who are upright . . .” He boldly proclaims that God is a Capitalist. He regularly dismisses policy based pursuits, claiming that winning souls is the only business of the faithful. He denies the possibility of climate change, not for any scientific rationale, but because of God’s promise to Noah. Add a full dollop of anti-immigration, anti-Catholicism, anti-feminism, and anti-homosexuality and you have a pretty good example of the toxic stew that is bad religion.

Any religion that divides and denigrates, that promotes hate, suspicion, and fear, that turns us in on ourselves rather than out to the world, that sees itself as a club of the meritorious rather than a hospital for the infirm, that relies on the persistence of good deeds and right thoughts rather than amazing grace, that favors the winners in society to the losers, the wealthy and powerful to the poor and needy, any religion that fails to turn us from self-satisfaction to gratitude is BAD RELIGION. The antidote that Douthat offers is what he calls “traditional Christianity.” I must admit that it’s attractive – but dangerous. Anyone who picks three hymns each Sunday knows how difficult it is to identify the traditional. Traditional is easily reduced to what I agree with, what is familiar and comfortable to me. I am more inclined to say that what we do to counter bad religion all around us is to passionately engage with the risen Christ made known to us by the Spirit through Scripture. However, this is no panacea: after all, even Satan can quote the Bible. “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world.” (I John 4:1).

Fritz

Reflections on the Fourth

Sat, 15 Jul 2017 23:01:00 GMT

"Jefferson gave us the words, Lincoln made them soar."

The story is a familiar one, but it bears repeating, at least in synopsis: The Second Continental Congress, with mostly the same delegates as the First, convened in Philadelphia in May, 1775 following the hostilities in Lexington and Concord. Among the first decisions of Congress was the authorization of a Continental Army and the appointment of George Washington as its commanding general. Throughout the summer, fall and into the winter, delegates wrestled with the shape and extent of independency. There were strong advocates for a complete break from England, but many thought the just grievances of the colonists could be adjudicated favorably without such a radical course of action. A last ditch effort at reconciliation, the Olive Branch Petition, was rejected by the crown, and the colonies were declared to be in rebellion by George III in August 1775.

In January 1776, a 46-page pamphlet called Common Sense was written by a recent immigrant, Thomas Paine (but published as an anonymous tract), tilted popular colonial opinion decisively in favor of independency. Paine's incendiary propaganda fired the colonial imagination, but still it took six months for the Congress to act. In June, three committees were appointed: one to compose a Model Treaty to serve as a template for international relations; a second to propose Articles of Confederation for the governance of the colonies/states; and a third to draft a justification for independency.

The committee of five charged with the task of drafting the declaration included John Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman. The four thought that Adams should draft the statement, but Adams prevailed upon Jefferson to do so and he (and the committee) agreed. Jefferson wrote the Declaration in seventeen days, with input from the committee. On June 28th, the draft was placed before Congress where it was reduced by a fourth and carefully edited ("mangled" Jefferson insisted). On July 2nd, Congress took up Richard Henry Lee's resolution for independency from June 10th. Ultimately, 12 colonial delegations voted for and New York abstained. On July 4th, the Declaration was approved without dissent, and on the 19th it was decided that the Declaration should be engrossed (on parchment), signed by members of Congress and titled "The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America". Most of the signatures were affixed on August 2nd, although some much later.

The Declaration was conceived and composed as a justification for political independence and the necessity of war. But today, it lives in the American consciousness - and indeed as an inspiration around the world - as the sublime expression of human character. The Declaration's second sentence, so brilliant in its articulation, has become among the best known sentences in the English language: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." Its dazzling rhetoric, its power in the directness of noble aspiration, its profound simplicity eclipses everything that follows. The complaints, the denunciation, the determination, even the pledge, ar all cast in dark shadow by the luminosity of unalienable rights, included but not limited to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It didn't happen all at once, or even in the first few decades of the Republic. There are few citations of the Declaration prior to the Civil War. It took the 16th President, surrounded by death, to imbue the Declaration with life: "Four score and seven years ago..." In just over two minutes, Lincoln could harness the genius of Jefferson to the American dream, not just a dream of economic fulfillment or self-aggrandizement, not just a goal of dominance militarily or economically, but a vision of genuine human virtue and communal commitment, not of independence, per se, but of liberty - "a new birth of freedom". Jefferson gave us the words, but Lincoln made them soar.

The founders boldly declared independence as a fact and a necessity at the beginning of a war that would continue for seven more years and that they had no reasonable expectation they could win. Later they would commemorate the birth of a new nation not in military victory (for instance October 19th, the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown), but in the articulation of an idea and an ideal of unalienable rights - an ideal that we are still trying to live up to. In these present evil days, as democracy limps badly, and plutocrats subvert the republic, and demagoguery, never very civil, is what passes for rhetoric, it would certainly benefit us to remember that what makes America great - and can do so again - is the spirit of that first July 4th.

Fritz

Summer Reading

Fri, 16 Jun 2017 02:46:06 GMT

One hundred years after the revolution that ended Tsarist Russia and shook the West as well, I realize I know nothing about the events and personalities that shaped that tumult and still reverberate today. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin are little more than names in a rogues’ gallery to me, and the course of the revolution that introduced the world to Communism is likewise opaque. With Russia in the news every day, and with a spate of new books pouring from the presses in conjunction with the centennial, this seems like a good time for me diminish my own ignorance. Most especially I am interested in the American response, from early fascination to mid-century hysterical fear to hardened antipathy, that have left our society inoculated against any viable left-wing politics.

For those who like their summer reading to be big, sprawling, trashy novels, the Russian Revolution may be a bridge too far; I fully understand. My own dear wife occasionally dismisses my enthusiasms and eccentricities with the suggestion that I have “a high tolerance for boredom.” In my defense I insist that I am never bored. However, my second project, I hope, will be of broader interest and involvement. The lectionary from June 18 to September 17 suggests a sequential reading of Romans which I have decided to take up as the sermon text for our worship each Sunday. I therefore invite you to join with me in reading through Romans at least once a week (about an hour’s commitment) through the Summer.

It is fitting that we immerse ourselves in Romans for no text has been so consequential and transformative to Christian faith as Paul’s magnum opus. Augustine, searching for spiritual sustenance, described how he heard a mysterious child’s voice chanting, “Tolle, lege” (take, read). He took up a Bible and read from the first lines he saw, “let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” (Romans 13:13-14). He was baptized shortly thereafter by Ambrose, became a priest and then a bishop, a defender of the faith and a saint. A millennium later an Augustinian monk named Martin Luder (soon to be known as Luther) discovered his “paradise” verse in Romans 1:17 "The one who is righteous will live by faith" (ironically, the apostle quoting the prophet Habakkuk) and proceeded to turn the European world upside down. Four hundred years later a

young Swiss pastor in the little town of Safenwil would write an idiosyncratic commentary on Paul’s letter which it was said “fell like a bombshell on the playground of theologians.” Karl Barth would go on from there to become the dominant Protestant theologian of the 20th Century. Reading Romans has always been challenging, disorienting, and above all dangerous. It also has been found from time to time to be the avenue of God’s comforting and reorienting grace. “We can,” Luther insisted, “never read it or ponder over it too much.” But proceed at your own risk.

A third project seems particularly timely as I reflect on the news of the latest irruption of racism: basketball star LeBron James’ home defaced with a spray-painted racist epithet. This summer I would like to have a conversation about our diverse experiences of race. For most of us, that means reflecting on what it means to be white in America. Toward that end I am suggesting that we use our Summer Fellowship Potluck time (starting June 21st) to eat together and to discuss the often submerged and suppressed realities of race in our time. The memoir Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race by Debby Irving will be our entré into this difficult topic (I will be ordering copies – let me know if you want one.)

Fritz

The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth

Sun, 16 Apr 2017 02:31:42 GMT

“If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the trust, and the truth will make you free.” John 8:31-12

The cover of the most recent Time Magazine blares the question in black and red: Is Truth Dead? (mimicking the famous cover of 50 years ago: Is God Dead?) One might hope for a sophisticated cultural and philosophical grappling with the state of veracity in America. But then one would be disappointed. Instead of analysis and thoughtful engagement with the nature and consequences of a society that no longer cares about the verifiable and the testable, we get yet another pedestrian catalogue of our president’s famous estrangement from the world of fact. Whatever one may think of our president, he is not the cause, but only the most obvious symptom of our cultural malaise.

Once upon a time truth-telling was regarded as a prime cultural virtue. We told stories to our children, including George Washington and his famed cherry tree, to indicate the character traits most admirable to our common weal. Every child learned the punch line: “I cannot tell a lie . . .” Of course, one could tell a lie, but then one would not be like George Washington, since his virtuous status – and ours – must be built on his commitment to truth, come what may.

The personal and societal consequences of failing to tell the truth were once considered so dire that their prohibition was enshrined in the Ten Commandments (number 9 if you are a Calvinist). The despicable character of purveyors of falsehood is a common theme in Proverbs: “An evildoer listens to wicked lips; and a liar gives heed to a mischievous tongue.” (Proverbs 17:4). I Timothy groups liars with murderers, fornicators, and slave traders (among others). Satan himself is described as the “Father of Lies” in John. Dante, in his guided tour of hell ( inferno ), encounters liars and falsifiers in the deepest part of the eighth circle (only the treacherous are more tortured than they in circle #9). Their penalty is an eternity of unshakable thirst.

Unfortunately we are now a society alienated from our history and our traditions. The internet is a wonderful tool and resource, but it is also a cesspool of the malicious and the malignant. Retweets and forwarded emails threaten to submerge us in garbage at the thoughtless touch of a button. Slant and spin have given way to outright falsehoods repeated over and over until they, in a dark alchemy, become the truth. Science itself has been twisted, distorted, and dismissed as just one more version of the real. The result is that we have become desensitized to the difference between truth and falsehood, and incapable of even the slightest outrage at the absurd or the pernicious masquerading as fact. Instead we greet each assault on common sense with a shrug of the shoulders, and embrace the perversity of “alternative facts.” You have your truth and I have mine. We are all indifferentists now.

Whatever the state of our (un)civil society, surely it should be different in the church. After all, we are committed to following the one who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Just before his arrest Jesus prayed that his followers might be “sanctified in truth” (John 17:17). Love, Paul insists, “rejoices in the truth” (I Cor. 13:6). When Pilate confronts Jesus at his trial, he mistakenly believes that he is in charge, but in fact it is he who is being judged. He asks Jesus “What is Truth?” – that cynical and pretentious worldly ploy - not knowing that he stands before the truth, not as idea or concept but as person. When we simply shrug and go on, when we dismiss the offensive with “whatever,” we are more like Pilate than like Jesus. We have sold out to indifference. By way of contrast, our Presbyterian forebearers wrote that, “no opinion can either be more pernicious or more absurd than that brings truth and falsehood upon a level, and represents it as no consequence what a man’s opinions are” (F-3.0104). Surely the Church should be fiercely committed to truth-telling as a matter of basic integrity and faithfulness, regardless of how the world conducts itself. Surely we should oppose in principle the small, proliferating falsehoods that erode any sense of the truth. We will be free only insofar as we are bound to the truth (John 8:30ff).

When I was a child I was fascinated by Perry Mason. At the end of each episode someone would be called to the stand, sworn in, promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (so help me God), and be examined by Mr. Mason. Through Mason’s brilliance, dedication, and tenacity the truth always came out. Those were the days. Today we are not sure whether truth lives; but if dead we know for sure we couldn’t get a quorum to gather for the funeral. In the midst of this present evil age the question persists: will the people of God submit to the way of the world or experience the freedom of the Truth?

Fritz

Martin Luther (1483 – 1546)

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 02:07:26 GMT

In 1934 Michael King, a pastor from Atlanta, and ten colleagues went on a tour of the Holy Land and then briefly to Germany. Michael was so inspired by the moral strength and courageous conscience of Martin Luther that upon his return he changed his name, and that of his five year old son, to Martin Luther King. For the admiring pastor, Luther exemplified the bold freedom which comes from devotion to God’s Word: “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.” (Luther on trial at the Imperial Diet of Worms in 1521). Reflecting on this name change, Timothy Lull, in the aftermath to his recent Luther biography, points out that Luther himself had modified his family name – from Luder or Ludher – in order to reflect the Greek word eleutheria , meaning freedom.

For Luther, freedom rightly understood was the essential characteristic of the Christian: not freedom of choice which looms so large in our milieu, but rather freedom to serve, a dialectic captured in two succinct statements: “A Christian person is s free sovereign, above all things, subject to no one. A Christian person is a dutiful servant in all things, subject to everyone.” ( The Freedom of a Christian ). How both claims are true is the burden of much of Luther’s theology. Such freedom is impossible without the “joyous exchange” whereby Jesus takes our sin upon himself and clothes us in his own righteousness.

Luther is perhaps the most well known figure in history, and yet he remains the subject of widely divergent interpretations. He is a hero of conscience to some, a “wild boar” making a mess of the vineyard to others. He could be a comforting and sensitive counselor to the spiritually struggling, but also a crass and vituperative critic of those who opposed him. In his lifetime he inspired many admirers, had a small circle of trusted friends, and enraged a large army of enemies from the Popes, to Catholic theologians and church representatives, to those he deemed fanatical Christians. His public life was lived in out-of-the-way northeast Germany, but through the newly emergent technology of moveable type he was published and read far and wide, throughout the German states and indeed all of Europe. From 1521 he was confined to the protection of the Saxon electors, excommunicated and under the Ban of the Empire. Some revered him as a reformer, others as a revolutionary, but Luther thought of himself as a prophet, giving the faithful a lifeline to endure the depredations of the Antichrist and the end times. He was an Old Testament scholar who spent the last decade of his life teaching Genesis, but it is his reading of Paul and the gospel he found particularly in Galatians and Romans that has formed the basis of all Protestant theology. He demolished the Roman sacramental edifice and replaced it with the famous solas : Scripture alone, faith alone, Christ alone. Throughout his life he suffered from a lengthy catalogue of infirmities, and yet he maintained an awesome schedule of teaching, pastoral care, and writing that would test the endurance of a healthy person. For more than half of his life he was a celibate monk, but he married in 1529, became a loving husband, and rejoiced in his father role to six children. His famous last words, written half in German and half in Latin, were Wir sind Pettlar. Hoc est verum. “We are beggars. That is true.”

Join us Wednesdays beginning March 8th as we explore the contributions of Martin Luther 500 years after his 95 Theses lit the fuse of Reformation.

Fritz

Two Ways

Thu, 16 Feb 2017 02:49:10 GMT

“When Jesus calls a person, he bids that one come and die. ”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Biblically speaking, the “world” is a decidedly ambivalent concept. On the one hand, the “world” (that is, the cosmos – the entire material order) is created by God, loved by God, and is the focus of God’s redemptive activity. God is reclaiming the world as a divine possession. On the other hand, the reason that this reclamation project is necessary is that the “world” represents what is in opposition to divine purposes, afflicted by self-destruction and sin, and under the aegis of the Prince of Darkness. The delusionary and seductive qualities of the world lead inexorably away from life to alienation and death.

Much of Christian history can be read as an attempt to negotiate the narrow path that rejoices in God’s love of the world without becoming “worldly” – that is alienated from God’s purposes. The Puritans formulated this aspiration as being “in the world, but not of the world.” The problem is, of course, that we are by nature part of God’s creation and never fully separate from the world. We cannot help but be worldly if by that we mean creaturely. After all, Adam was created not from nothing but rather “from the dust of the earth.” We necessarily have material needs that reflect our material origin and reality. Plato insisted that the destiny of enlightened humans was to shed the material husk of the body and liberate the spiritual essence trapped there; many Christians have followed him in this. But again, Biblically speaking, the contrast is not so much between spiritual and material, the spirit and the flesh, as it is a choice between ways of being in the world: the way of the world or the way of God. Kierkegaard insisted that this can never be “both/and” but always must be “either/or,” an ongoing and perpetual choice. So Moses: I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live ( Deut. 30:19 ) .

Jesus puts the choice succinctly: If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me (Mark 8:34). In our own time Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it quite bluntly: When Jesus calls a person, he bids that one come and die . It is not, on the face of it, an attractive sales pitch. James puts it even more pointedly: Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. (James 4:4).

Often our choices do not appear so stark in real life. Our cultural commitments are so much a part of us that we cannot see them for what they are or where they lead. It is easy to imagine that being American and being Christian easily dovetail. Indeed, each of us has successfully domesticated the claims of the Gospel, reducing Christian faith to feeling good about oneself and Christian life to being nice. Disagreeing without becoming disagreeable is still a desirable goal in many churches (if no longer in the political realm). And yet the Gospel keeps pushing out of the wrapping we have carefully provided. From time to time, we remember that Jesus did not say, “Be nice;” he said “Love your enemy; pray for those who persecute you.” Jesus did not say, “Stand up for yourself;” but rather, “turn the other cheek; go the second mile.” Jesus taught that the things we acquire and accumulate do not enrich us, but in fact imprison us. Jesus said that those who are well have no need of a physician, and so devoted himself where he was needed: to the poor, the marginalized, the ostracized, and the disenfranchised. Jesus argued that real status is directly proportional, not to wealth, or might, or fame, but to service among the least of these. Jesus did not encourage his followers to arm themselves, for those who live by the sword will die by the sword; nevertheless, he sent them out as sheep among the wolves. Jesus blessed the poor, those who mourn, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers – in spite of the fact that every appearance seems to suggest that it is the rich and powerful, the confident and the self-aggrandizing that have already cornered the market on blessings. Jesus told the crowds that anyone who would find his or her life must first lose it.

The Apostle Paul knew that proclaiming a shamed, convicted, and executed criminal to be the savior of the world could only sound like nonsense and utter foolishness to his Corinthian audience. Still, he insisted, he would know nothing among them “except Christ, and him crucified,” confident that God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom.

Christians are, moment by moment, faced with a choice: the way of the world or the way of Christ. On Sunday, we boldly proclaim our allegiance: Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life; on Monday we return to the world. After all, fitting in is not so bad – and not nearly so dangerous as discipleship. However, in a world darkened by fear, addicted to violence, self-centered and self congratulatory, a world where the strong crush the weak, where the innocent are often the victims, where “winning” is everything, where getting is far more important than giving and the individual supersedes the common good, in a world such as ours of lies, innuendo, and half-truth – wouldn’t it be good if a few who knew their Lord actually followed his lead down a different path? This is our witness and our mission.

Fritz

Saved by Grace

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 02:03:43 GMT

“Christ’s righteousness becomes our righteousness and all that he has, rather, he himself, becomes ours.”

Martin Luther’s theological conviction regarding the radical primacy of divine grace is still shocking today as it was 500 years ago. In his own day, Luther was trained in the prevailing scholastic theology of the Late Middle Ages, which insisted that God’s grace was necessary to assist sinners to righteousness. Individuals, it was argued, were responsible to do what they could – including repentance and appropriate acts of penance - and then a graceful God would honor the effort and complete the process of sanctification. Run the race as best you can, and trust God finally to carry you over the finish line. As the conflict between Luther and the Church intensified, the gulf regarding the nature of grace deepened and widened. The more the Church insisted on human effort, the more Luther proclaimed God’s unmerited and pre-emptive gift. The more Luther immersed himself in the Psalms and letters of Paul, the more certain he became that the theology of his day had turned things upside down, making God’s grace, God’s forgiveness, and God’s love dependent first and finally on human effort, merit, and acceptance. Instead, he argued that real state of affairs is that Christ is freely given as a gift, without merit on the part of any recipient, and that from that gift streams the appropriate response of good works. As First John claims, “we love because God first loved us.”

Then and now, there were many who would protest that the gift must be accepted. God, they say, makes Christ and his benefits available to all, but only when Christ is received, accepted, and taken to heart are persons “saved.” The rest are “lost.” The eternal destiny of each person thus rests not with God’s choice and decision but with his or her choice to accept or reject God’s gift. But notice how this puts the priority on human effort: whatever God does, we have the final say.

For some this was simply the necessary consequence of free will. Erasmus, perhaps the greatest scholar of the Reformation era, wrote a famous tract entitled “The Freedom of the Will”. Luther responded pointedly with “The Bondage of the Will”. For Luther, sinners were quite simply incapable of choosing God. The good news of the Gospel is that God chooses sinners and sets them free, such that “Christ’s righteousness becomes our righteousness and all that he has, rather, he himself, becomes ours.” God’s grace does not merely assist, but transforms, or better, recreates.

This is, perhaps, too heavy a dose of theology for the new year. But in defense, it does have some practical import. Luther saw in himself and his fellow monks a sincere desire to please God and an unrelenting sense of fear – even dread – that nothing that was done was ever good enough or holy enough to satisfy God’s expectation or to placate God’s ire. When he discovered, through his study of Scripture and with the aid of his teachers, a different God, graceful, forgiving, and loving, he also was set free to make his life a thank-offering to this Generous Sovereign, enduring even death threats for the sake of the truth. I can’t help but think that our world would be a much better place if Christians simply lived joyful and thankful lives in response to this graceful God.

Fritz

Waiting for the King

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 01:50:35 GMT

“Will I ever learn that there'll be no peace, that the war won't cease until He returns?”

In the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood cinema entered a golden age in which the confluence of talent and technology produced some of the greatest films ever made. On the one hand the rapid advancement of film and sound equipment made films more and more technically superior. On the other hand, turmoil in Europe resulted in a steady stream of talented artists making their way to southern California. Holding it all together was the emergence of a powerful (and later, stifling) studio system, composed of the “big five” (and some others): Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, and RKO Radio.

Among the refugees who would make some of America’s greatest films was a young Budapest-born director, Mihaly Kertesz, who in America would be known as Michael Curtiz. His efforts would make stars of Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Bette Davis and his flexibility would be on display for 35 years and 175 directorial credits including swashbucklers, dramas, and even musicals. At the top of Curtiz’ achievements are Casablanca , Yankee Doodle Dandy , Mildred Pierce , and The Adventures of Robin Hood .

It is this last mentioned film, the classic action/adventure/swashbuckler, that interests me as an Advent tale. Everyone knows that Robin Hood “robs from the rich to give to the poor”, but this characterization actually distorts the main theme of the story. Robin and his merry men are not merely heroic and romantic outlaws; rather, they are fighting desperately to hold evil Prince John and his minions at bay until King Richard returns from the Crusades to reestablish his rightful rule.

It is this element of waiting for the king that is central to Advent and to the whole of Christian faith. Jesus will return Acts (and much of the New Testament) insists and the Apostles’ Creed affirms. This orthodox claim does not give credence to the fever-dreams of the Dispensationalists who divide the world’s population between the raptured and the left behind. But it also does not undergird the commitments (or neglect) of main -line Christians who favor progress over apocalypse.

The story of Robin Hood reminds us that waiting for the king is neither passive nor progressive. We do not believe we can or should do nothing in the face of the world’s corruption; but at the same time we do not embrace the Promethean notion that we are, bit by bit and step by step, building the kingdom. Like Robin Hood, we will not cede the land to the forces of darkness; at the same time, the actual Kingdom building must wait for the King.

In 1979 the ever mercurial Bob Dylan surprised his fans and critics alike with an album of Christian songs called Slow Train Coming . The concluding song, When He Returns , is an amazingly mature reflection on this foundational Christian conviction of Christ’s Parousia – his Advent – expressed in classic lament for our present evil age. Dylan espouses a recognition of our limitations: while waiting is not merely passive, it is still waiting. There are important things we cannot achieve: “Will I ever learn that there'll be no peace, that the war won't cease until He returns?”

Advent is a time for all Christians to refocus our lives and ministries on the promise of a coming kingdom and a king coming to rule. It is this promise which allows us to hold on, to work for good and oppose evil, and to bear witness to our faith with acts of kindness - until He returns.

Fritz

Recovering Our Voice When the City Needs It Most

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 01:37:26 GMT

“Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7).

Jeremiah is the prophet of bad news. Most of this very long book is dedicated to “plucking up and pulling down, destroying and over-throwing,” with only the sparsest sprinkling of “building up and planting.” The message is clear: God is outraged at the persistent infidelity of the people – everyone from the king to the priests to the prophets to the peasant farmers. Their behavior, from the least to the greatest, is characterized as promiscuous adultery. Therefore, catastrophe will follow: Jerusalem will fall, the Temple will be destroyed, the city depopulated and the leading citizens all deported. Life as it had been known – religious, political, cultural – will simply cease. Worst of all, the pagan Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian horde will be the chosen instrument of God’s righteous wrath.

The glimmer of hope – and it is a fleeting glimmer – is that destruction and exile might not be God’s final word. One might dare to hope not only for survival, but indeed for restoration – at least for some. Getting there will not be easy. Jeremiah’s counsel is one of

non-resistance and constructive engagement: accept the devastation of war and pagan rule as the well-deserved chastisement of an aggrieved God. Resistance is disobedience. Even the deportees should make a life and a home for themselves in the land of exile. “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jer 29:7).

The predicament for exiles then and now, for immigrants, and also for the church is how to honor the sense that we are where God places us, without losing ourselves in the relentless sea of culture and society. Put another way, how do we “work for the welfare of the city” without becoming acculturated and assimilated in the process?

H. Richard Niebuhr, in his classic Christ and Culture (1951), developed a five-fold typology for studying the different strategies that churches have used through the ages to engage their surrounding culture: the two opposite poles represented by models of Christ against Culture and Christ of Culture, with three other types in between: Christ above Culture, Christ and Culture in paradox, and Christ transforming Culture. Niebuhr himself favored the transformational model, but he was well aware that influence is always a two-way street: both Church and Culture may be transformed in unpredictable ways in the encounter. Indeed, nobody has more clearly described the domestication of the gospel in the American mainline churches: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross” ( The Kingdom of God in America ,

1937).

Presbyterians have always chosen public engagement with society, even as persecuted dissenters in England. Seeking the welfare of the city has always been a Presbyterian priority. However, we have not always been so attentive to the attendant dangers of assimilation that domesticate the Gospel and mitigate our distinctive voice. In this sickening electoral season (which will certainly not end on November 8th), it would be good to recover our Presbyterian voice, not only for the integrity of our mission before God, but for the welfare of our country where God has placed us. For instance, with the constant clamor for the “middle class,” it would be well if we reminded ourselves and the world that God’s chief concern is for the poor. In the midst of the incessant stoking of seething resentments, it would be good for us to offer the central Gospel affirmation of God’s grace and our gratitude. In the prevailing atmosphere of fear, suspicion, distrust, and even hatred, directed particularly against those who are not white and not Christian, it would be a revelation to recover the Jesus who embraced lepers, tax collectors, sinners of all sorts and even gentiles, and taught his followers to love their enemies. We can only contribute to the genuine welfare of our city if we remember who we are.

Fritz

Feeding the Hungry

Sat, 15 Oct 2016 05:07:26 GMT

“”I beg you remember this without fail, that not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth but theirs."

Chrysostom

When I was a child I would often return home after a hard day at play and announce to my mother, “I’m starving!” Mom was typically preparing dinner at the time, and she would grant permission for a cookie (cookie consumption was carefully controlled in my household) to tide me over until dad got home. Of course, I wasn’t really starving – and I couldn’t eat a horse! Indeed, throughout my life I have never known real hunger beyond some self-imposed fasts. My greater challenge has been to constrain my appetite and my calorie intake. All things considered, it is a nice problem to have.

I remember my first awareness of the human devastation wrought by war and nature: in 1969 images of infants with stick-thin limbs, distended bellies, and unfocused eyes began vying for television time with reporting from Vietnam. The Biafran – Nigerian civil war became an international humanitarian crisis (and the origin of Doctors Without Borders). A year later world attention refocused on Bangladesh; a decade later it was Ethiopia. Today it is Syria. In every instance it has been children especially who have borne the wrath of the cruel all-consuming gods of war.

Internationally the statistics are staggering: today as many as 795 million people (more than one tenth of the world’s population) suffer from the effects of chronic under- or malnutrition. Always children are the most visible victims. The causes are many: poverty, dysfunctional government, destructive agricultural policies, population growth, conflict, and global warming and resulting climate change all feed a system which is the epitome of a vicious cycle. Thus, there is a clear connection between poverty and hunger, but the connection goes both ways: poverty leads to hunger, but hunger also causes poverty. It has been well and convincingly demonstrated, even with a population pushing toward 800 billion, that the planet can provide enough food for all. The problem is largely one of distribution, and therefore of politics: as long as food is a convenient weapon of war and bargaining chip for diplomacy we will continue to have runaway global hunger.

If the hunger realities in the world are so big and so complicated as to make our heads spin, surely the situation in our own back yard is more comprehensible. According to Feeding America, a leading hunger research group, 13.9 % of the population of Cobb County (just under 100,000 residents) are “food insecure,” that is, they don’t know where their next meal is coming from, or they sometimes must choose between a meal and the rent, or utilities, or medicine, or transportation. Nearly 50,000 qualify for government nutrition assistance programs like SNAP and WIC ($2025 net monthly for a family of four). For thousands of children in our neighborhoods, their school lunch, at reduced price or free, is their main meal of the day - of course, only when school is in session. Feeding America estimates that unmet food needs in Cobb County would require an additional $52 million, a large number until you remember that we are just now erecting a billion dollar edifice, half or more of which will be publicly funded (not to mention $800 million of Georgia taxpayer funds poured into road construction that will only benefit those wealthy enough to own and operate a car).

For us, providing for basic human need is not merely humanitarian duty, but gospel mandate. Jesus insists that it is neither knowledge of doctrine nor pious practice, but rather providing food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare to the neediest among us that will receive the invitation, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father . . .” (Matthew 25). John Chrysostom, the great 4th Century preacher, put it even more pointedly: “I beg you remember this without fail, that not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth but theirs.” MUST Ministries helps us respond to this mandate, combining our donations with others to provide 76,000 meals, 72,000 nights in shelter, 255,000 summer lunches, 252,000 articles of clothing, and a ton of food a day.

This Fall JKPC is partnering with Holy Family Catholic Church (and their social service arm St. Vincent DePaul) along with the

social workers at our four C.A.S.A. elementary schools to provide food boxes to 60 needy families in our neighborhood. While

we certainly want to provide a special Thanksgiving meal for these families, our intent is at once more practical and ambitious: to provide food for the whole week while children are out of school (Check elsewhere on our site about suggested donations). Thanksgiving is an important day, but people need to eat on the other days as well. We know that even our best and most generous efforts will not “solve” our hunger problem even in some place as small as our corner of East Cobb. But 60 families will be blessed, Christ will be proclaimed, and we will give thanks to God that that much was possible.

Fritz

American Exceptionalism

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 04:40:41 GMT

"We Americans (and we Christians too) have regularly forgotten who we are, and neglected “the better angels of our nature.”

Like so much else during this election season, the term “American exceptionalism” has become a political litmus test, defining who might qualify as a true patriot. For some, the phrase expresses the conviction of American moral and spiritual superiority in the world. America, they say, is a shining “city on a hill,” an exemplar for all the world to follow. It is, wrenching Lincoln’s words from their historical mooring, “the last best hope of earth.” Such high flying rhetoric may have some positive value, leading Americans to a renewed and constructive commitment to our national role on the world stage; but too often such language merely stokes the fires of xenophobia, the simmering racism, the violent militarism, and the religious intolerance which can be seen down on the street. Indeed, in this mode, American exceptionalism becomes American exemptionalism, a refusal to acknowledge any principles or rule of law outside ourselves. America, they say, is above and outside critique from any other quarter. Chauvinism has thus become a national virtue, and its chief expression is hubris.

The founders certainly had an awareness that they were doing something new, but the idea that America is exceptional appears to have originated in the 1831 travels of the French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville, whose observations were published in the classic Democracy in America a few years later. Toqueville described America as exceptional, not in the sense of superiority, nor as an exemplar, but rather as unique; he traced this uniqueness to the convergence of three factors: a “strictly Puritanical origin,” “exclusively commercial habits,” and geography. Tocqueville went on to insist that Americans could be devoted to practical pursuits and not descend into barbarism because of their proximity to European civilizing influences in “science, literature, and the arts;” thus, while Europe carried the burden of civilization, Americans were unencumbered to work and enrich themselves.

One may push behind Tocqueville to the founding documents for a more political and less sociological view of American exceptionalism that nevertheless shares his view of the uniqueness of the American experiment. The American founders were committed to building a country that revered the sacredness of each individual and understood rights to be inherent in the person rather than the state. They didn’t think they needed to argue this, or prove it; it was “self-evident,” an axiom of their political theory. Further, they insisted that government was only legitimate insofar as there was consent of the governed; rulers serve the people and not vice-versa. And thirdly, they proposed that the nation would exist and thrive better without a single state-endorsed religion, and so prohibited government interference, through endorsement or censure, with personal religious choice, as well as banning any religious test for public office.

It is impossible to overstate the revolutionary nature of our founding movement. The accepted principles of civil, personal, and religious relations that governed European society were turned on their head and reinvented. Still, we should note in fairness that the principles articulated by the founders were then and are now more aspirational than actual: American exceptionalism, no matter how noble, has not eradicated the deep fissures of racism that continue to plague us, nor the temptation to impose military solutions to international issues, nor the animosity toward immigrants, nor the enmity toward other faiths. In spite of our exceptionalism, all of these, and a myriad other social issues, continue to simmer and sometimes threaten to boil over in our midst. In short, we Americans (and we Christians too) have regularly forgotten who we are, and neglected “the better angels of our nature.”

A case in point is the recent shameful spectacle in Newton County over the future construction of a mosque. There in

the historic courthouse in Covington, hundreds of intemperate voices of fear, hatred and ignorance drowned out any

proponents of decency and rationality in a delirium of bigotry that struck me as both profoundly un-American and

fundamentally anti-Christian. There wasn’t even a plan to object to, only the specter of a stereotyped Islam to roil the

waters. As a flyer passed out among the attendees perversely insisted, “No good Muslim can be a good American” (it

wasn’t long ago that this was said of Catholics). Surely both our political tradition and our religious commitments require us to do better and to be better.

The fact that we fail to live up to our exceptionalism either as Americans or as Christians does not mean we should

surrender to the forces of darkness among us. It does however call us to humility and repentance, even as we redouble our efforts to be more true and faithful. Martin Luther King concluded his famous “I Have a Dream” speech with

these words: “. . . when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every

state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews

and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,

‘Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’” Today, Dr. King would no doubt add “Muslims and

Christians” to his list. Today our faith – religious and political – is being tested and judged by how we choose to be

with and for the Muslims in our midst.

Fritz

Looking for Another Word

Mon, 15 Aug 2016 04:10:42 GMT

"Perhaps we modern-day Christians would be much more credible if we were much more radical."

Words sometimes have a life of their own. There is, of course, the denotation captured in the dictionary, the accepted definition(s); but then there is the connotation, the emotional baggage attached to a word. A word like “Fundamentalist” was once a description of a person (including many Presbyterians) who believed that there were many things that good and faithful people could agree to disagree on, but that there must be a core to which all believers might assent, a common foundation of basic beliefs and practices that mark the common Lordship of Jesus Christ. Fundamentalists sought a place to stand in an increasingly complex and diverse world. It didn’t take long for the word “fundamentalist” to acquire a wholly negative connotation: a fundamentalist is a rigid, narrow-minded, often bigoted, extremist who uses the Bible as a sledgehammer to bludgeon opponents into submission. A fundamentalist, in popular parlance, is now one who is anti-intellectual and antiprogress.

The phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” has become an identity-shaping slogan in recent years. Proponents use it freely to label both

the enemy and the ignorant or sympathetic fellow-travelers who refrain from using the phrase. “Terrorism” should be the load-bearing term here, but the emotional freight is carried by “Islamic”. It is Muslims that terrify us with their senseless and unpredictable violence. And while there is some awareness of an extremist element to be distinguished from ordinary Islam – that is, “radical” Muslims – we can’t really tell the difference. The presence of “radical Islamic terrorism” makes us suspect and fear all Muslims – and therefore to suggest policies that treat all Muslims with suspicion or worse. In short, we refuse (or are incapable) to apply the most common-sense differentiation to strangers and outsiders that we insist upon for ourselves. For instance, when the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed, headlines did not scream “radical Christian terrorist.” When Centennial Olympic Park was bombed, commentators did not explore the whys and wherefores of radical Christian terrorists. When abortion clinics and medical personnel have been targeted, there has been no citizen or political outcry against radical Christian terrorism. We simply (and rightly) do not impugn our faith based on the perverse actions of a few.

“Radical,” like “Fundamentalist,” has an interesting, if largely negative arc. In the Eighteenth Century, radical meant basic, essential, foundational (from the Latin radix, meaning root). So for instance, in our Book of Order we have the “radical principles of church order” – i.e., the essentials of our polity. But over time the word has become increasingly pejorative, meaning extreme, subversive, or drastic. Radicals are those who challenge, subvert, and overthrow the established order; they are revolutionaries (another word that is positive if applied to our Founding Fathers, but roundly negative if referring to Bolsheviks or Iranian imams). Most of us are so heavily invested in the way things are that we encounter the radical as a grave threat to be resisted at all costs.

The problem for us is how do we talk about Jesus and the movement he inspired: was not Jesus a radical, a revolutionary, even a fundamentalist, in the best sense of those words? Jesus, after all, took on the central political and religious institution of his own Judaism and in an act of startling defiance, actually shut down the Temple for a time (leading directly to his rejection and crucifixion). He also confronted the pious laity of his day, the Pharisees, who believed that honoring God was an everyday way of life and not just a Sabbath obligation, fiercely challenging their commitment to holiness with the prophetic demands for justice. Jesus

insisted on recovering the Deuteronomic code that required care for the marginal: widows, orphans, and sojourners. He refused to allow social barriers to obstruct his ministry, bridging the enforced separation of women, Gentiles, and “sinners” (that is, those who were not scrupulously Torah-observant). Jesus denied the theology which made God Israel’s possession, and instead reminded Temple and people that they were called as servants of God. The early followers of Jesus across the empire charted a path that sometimes led to conflict with the powers-that-be, even enduring the charge of atheism for refusing to worship the gods of the polis.

I can’t help but think that we modern day Christians would be much more credible if we were much more radical. Much of the New Testament makes a distinction between the values of the world and the way of faith. Instead of propping up the status quo, we Christians might better incarnate the way of Jesus as an alternative to the way of the world. Perhaps “radical” cannot be rehabilitated as a description of who we are and who we aspire to be – but then we need another word.

As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. (Colossians 2:6-7)

Fritz

The Way of the World

Sat, 16 Jul 2016 03:54:04 GMT

“Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the

sword.”(Mt. 26:52)

Now that we must add Orlando to the roll call of horrific mass killings, two things are clear: (1) there will certainly be another, and another, and yet another; because (2) neither our leaders nor we the people have the moral fortitude or the spiritual vitality to chart a different course. We have heard it all before: immigrants are to blame; Muslims are to blame; the President is to blame. Indeed, in an especially perverse riff on the blame-the-victim game, it has been suggested that if some who were there at Pulse that night had been armed, the perpetrator would have killed far fewer before being killed himself. In other words, those poor Latino/a homosexuals were simply too ignorant to know that in the land of the free and the home of the brave going to a club requires a basic item of safety equipment: a gun. Go unarmed: become a victim, because “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good

guy with a gun.”

We are now in domestic arms race that has been steadily accelerating, especially with the proliferation of concealed carry permits (often granted without any hands-on training), all based on the dubious proposition that we are more safe with more weapons, and driven by the quest for profits. We are now by far the most heavily armed citizenry on the planet, and there is no end in sight. Are you going to the grocery store? Don’t forget your Glock. Are you going to the movies? Make sure to strap on your Ruger. Are you going to the ball game, the play, the concert? Don’t go without your Beretta. This may be the NRA’s fantasy America, but for most of us this is a nightmare. Surely it is not the America we want to live in, and yet we are apparently impotent to do anything different.

Again, in response to catastrophe, there is the entirely predictable rallying cry to ban “military-style” assault weapons and extend background checks. In a sane and responsible society, this would be common sense, easily accomplished. But this is not where we live. Second Amendment absolutists and the cowardice of elected officials have conspired to make even the most token regulations impossible. Slippery slope logicians argue perniciously that any distinction regarding the fire power of weapons or the destructive capability of ammunition is but a short step away from losing all our rights and succumbing to totalitarian government. Establishing more uniform and thorough background checks is, they say, a burden to free enterprise and an affront to constitutionally protected freedoms. Consider this: Evelyn Samples, Delores Coe, Bev Spangler, and Jay Hanson (all dangerous characters to be sure) had to submit to more thorough background checks to volunteer at C.A.S.A. than they would need to legally purchase a lethal weapon.

The various assault weapons ban proposals should be uncontroversial, but even proponents must recognize that such bans are really not much more than symbolic. Mass killings are shocking, but of the 8000 gun-related homicides last year, fewer than 2% were committed using a rifle, military style or otherwise. We Americans prefer to kill each other one or two at a time, up close and personal (and we turn weapons on ourselves at even more than the homicide rate). Such devastating encounters get slight notice in the news and rarely make the front page, but the bodies pile up. Many victims committed no greater crime than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In short, we will not be serious about gun violence in this country until we address the problem of handguns and the promiscuous dispensing of concealed carry permits.

Where is the Christian voice in all this? To be sure, the Bible has nothing to say directly about firearms ownership or use. Likewise, Jesus knew nothing of the Second Amendment. But there is much to ponder in our sacred story regarding killing and violence. We worship a God who has decided to redeem the world not by purging it of evil, but instead, by entering into the creation, suffering at the hands of evil, and submitting to death. We follow a Savior who is clear in his renunciation of self-defense: "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.” (Mt 5:38ff). We proclaim as Lord one who stopped the intervention of his friends: “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”(Mt. 26:52). We submit ourselves as disciples to the one whom we know to be the way, the truth, and the life; the one whose life and teaching were focused on peace, sacrifice, and restoration; who urged his followers to forgive 70 times 7, and even from the cross forgave those who wronged him. Can we who bear the name of Christ submit then to the pagan ideology of righteous violence? Can we continue under the illusion that we can be more safe by being more threatening? Do we honor the one who died for us when we abandon his way for the way of the world that can lead only to more carnage? Is Jesus Christ really Lord? Or is all this just pious nonsense when everyone knows that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun?”

It won’t be long before Orlando is eclipsed in the bright glare of yet another killing spree. Then the same old posturing and hand wringing will begin all over again. It is like endless reruns on some hellish TV station. The one thing we know for sure is that violence begets violence; on the other hand, we claim (on Sundays at least) that the way of peace is through the Cross. Choose this day whom you will serve.

Fritz

What is the Church?

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 23:29:34 GMT

"One joins the church - or more properly, one is joined to the church."

When we talk about “the church,” a certain amount of doublespeak is inevitable. We know that the church is the people, and yet “going to church” means going to a specific location. While we remind ourselves that the church is really about the relationships we have with one another, nevertheless the lion’s share of our energy and resources is spent on the preservation and improvement of the facility. What began as a generic gathering for some civic purpose (the Greek word is ecclesia) in the marketplace or some other public venue, and became specifically associated with Christian gatherings for worship, in public or in secret, has now become a place – 505 Powers Ferry Road, for instance.

In 1960, Paul Minear published a now classic study identifying 96 images of the church in the New Testament and exploring their range, implications, and interconnections. In his work, Minear lifted up the rich and varied way that early Christians talked about the church: minor images like ark, boat, bride of Christ, God’s planting, God’s building, and so on; and the dominant images – People of God, Fellowship in Faith, New Creation, and perhaps most important, Body of Christ. What becomes clear is that throughout the New Testament, early Christian thinking focused first on the gathered faithful, rather than the status of the individual. The benefits of Christ were not first of all “going to heaven,” but rather being incorporated into a larger whole like parts of a body. One joins the church – or more properly, one is joined to the church.

Early in the Twentieth Century the United Presbyterian Church of North America gave classic expression to the nature of church by

proposing six Great Ends (still enshrined in our Constitution). Refusing to reduce the Church to one thing, and focusing on what the Church does (as opposed to what it “is”) the UPCNA articulated the work of the Church as (1) the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind; (2) the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God; (3) the maintenance of divine worship; (4) the preservation of the truth; (5) the promotion of social righteousness; and (6) the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world. (More on the Great Ends at some later date).

As a leader in the church – and as the Teaching Elder for this congregation - I have come, over the years, to utilize five images that help me think about what we are and what we do. The church is, first of all, a family. It is intergenerational; it shares a common story and therefore a common identity; its gatherings are characterized by remembering the stories of the past and sharing a vision the future; it celebrates the accomplishments of its members and supports them in times of trial; and it is bound together by an allegiance which both transcends and rejoices in the differences among individuals. Secondly, the church is a sanctuary, a safe haven, a place where people may find security and comfort, care and support, when outside the storms rage; it is a place where members may freely share the burden of their deepest doubts and darkest fears; it is a place where members and non-members who are in need, spiritual and physical, can count on compassion and generous aid. Thirdly, the church is a light by

which insiders and outsiders are invited to see both the world as it is and as God intends. The church tells the truth in a world

darkened by half-truth, innuendo, and outright lies; by contrast with what is so prevalent, the church illumines a way of life whose focus is praise and worship of God, whose relationships are determined by love and justice, whose commitment is to forgiveness and reconciliation, whose attitude is gratitude, whose joy is in sharing the good news, and whose vision is peace. The church is, fourth, a storytelling center which educates by telling and retelling the stories of faith - beginning with Scripture, but also including

our Christian traditions, and more specifically our Presbyterian heritage - and, particularly in an adult context, exploring their meaning. We are a story-formed people offering a very peculiar story to anyone with ears to hear. Finally, the church is a gymnasium, a place where people may practice their faith with coaching and support and without the pressure of a performance, so that later they can act faithfully in the world. In the church people practice praying, so that in life they may become prayerful people, turning their attention always to God; in the church people practice generosity so that in the world they may respond to need with more than charity; in the church people practice offering bits of themselves so that one day they may offer themselves

completely as servants to God. Christians are in training; the church is their training center.

Our great challenge is to be the church in all its richness (and not just an interesting architectural production) at 505

Powers Ferry Road, and also to invite others to join us in this divine and joyful work.

Fritz

The Church Groaning and Growing

Sun, 15 May 2016 23:29:34 GMT

"We're not in Kansas anymore, but where is the Yellow Brick Road?"

Many of us remember the little children’s ditty (with hand motions): “Here is the church. Here is the steeple. Open the doors and see all the people.” It is a reminder of days gone by, when church membership and attendance were surging; when “if you build it, they will come” actually was true; when Sunday Schools were teeming with children and youth groups roamed the landscape; when American religiosity was at an all-time high. This was the time when “in God we trust” became our official national motto (replacing the unofficial “E pluribus unum”) and “under God” was inserted in our pledge. It was a time of rapidly expanding middle class, a time when the concern for respectability included which church you joined, and of course the baby boomers (like me) became the largest generation in American history. Looking back, we may call them “the good old days,” but it is surprising how short-lived those halcyon days really were. Soon enough the nation was racked with racial strife, divided by wars in Korea and Vietnam, obsessed with nuclear annihilation (that we ourselves had unleashed), and committed to a global holy war against the minions of godless communism. Churches were not immune to the controversy, dividing themselves along social and political fissures. Presbyterian membership nationwide peaked at 4.2 million members in 1966. John Knox peaked at about 800 members fifteen years later.

Although the address is the same, we find ourselves at a very different place than in 1958 when our first building was erected with 200 members on the roll. The houses that surround us were then typical middle-class dwellings; now they are rental properties or “starter” homes. Then Marietta was the city and Atlanta an excursion, but now highways and interstates speed people away from their neighborhoods for work, entertainment, and recreation. The so-called nuclear family has given way to single parent households and a bewildering array of other domestic arrangements (of which same-sex couples are only one small example). A teenager today has less chance of being raised by both biological parents in America than anywhere else in the world. Boomers have proven to be less institutionally religious than their parents, and Millennials (born in the 1980s and 90s), only slightly less numerous than the Boomers, have deep reservations about joining anything. As Paul Taylor of Pew Research (The Next America) summarizes, “Our political, social, and religious institutions are weaker, our middle class smaller, our cultural norms looser, our public debate coarser, our technologies faster, our immigrant-woven tapestry richer, and our racial, ethnic, religious, and gender identities more ambiguous. As a society, we’ve become more polarized and more tolerant— and no matter what we’re like today, we’re going to be different tomorrow. Change is the constant.”

Like Dorothy we can see that “we’re not in Kansas any more,” but there is no yellow brick road to take us to the Promised Land. On Sundays, when we open the doors at John Knox, we see empty seats – and we are not alone. Half the Presbyterian churches nationwide have fewer members than we do. Across the country and across denominations, decline in membership and participation is the common experience, a few prominent mega-churches notwithstanding. Indeed, the fastest growing segment of our society is now the “nones,” that is, those who have no specific religious preference.

Every church would like to grow – and needs to grow to survive. The problem is that there are no easy or even complex “solutions,” no magic wand, no universal prescription, no tried-and true program that can be applied to our circumstance. Some have suggested that the secret to church growth is racial, social, and economic homogeneity; “birds of a feather flock together,” they say. Others insist that the first step to growth must be to downplay any denominational ties. Others, more radical, suggest that it is more efficient to close old churches and open new ones than to try and reinvigorate existing churches.

Our Session is beginning to explore what might be done, some specific course of action, some better way of communicating, drawing upon the expertise of some outside our fellowship, which will address our empty seats without compromising our sense of mission. We are not looking for a silver bullet to solve our problems, but a way of telling our story which may be compelling and inviting to some. We don’t know where this exploration will take us, but I do have several convictions as we embark: (1) The future of JKPC is in God’s hands. The church will be here as long as God has work for us to do. This is not an excuse to do nothing; just the opposite, we are called to be responsive to the mission God sets before us. (2) The mission to which we are called will have something to do with where we are situated, that is, serving the neighborhoods around our location. Our mission field is close at hand. And (3) our invitation will be more about joining us in the work we have than about providing services and programs to meet individual needs. Our growth strategy will involve recruiting some who find meaning in sharing our work rather than attracting those who are interested in receiving some benefit from us. Ours cannot be a sales pitch but rather an opportunity to participate in something important.

Where we will end up in all of this is anybody’s guess. It will certainly not be like JKPC vintage 1958 (or ’68 or ’78), but it doesn’t have to be. In the meantime, have you invited anyone to church this Sunday?

Fritz

The Real World of Easter

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 23:29:34 GMT

"Easter proposes a world where life triumphs over death and love banishes all fear."

When I was a know-it-all twentysomething, my father would occasionally, in exasperation, say to me, "Wait until you get into the REAL world." His point was well taken: for eight years - four undergrad, and four seminary - I lived in a bubble, safely and comfortably provided for at my father's expense. I had the illusion of independence while being surrounded by the security of family and institutional support. My meals, my clothing, my housing, my car were all provided for me and were, I am ashamed to say now, too often taken for granted. Still, I would insist even now that the world I lived in then was not "unreal". As different as it was from my parents' world, it was nevertheless manifestly real. It was a world with responsibilities and obligations, challenges and pitfalls, joy and pain, confusion and clarity, rewards and accomplishments. It doesn't get any more real than that.

Easter is, among other things, about just such an alternative world - a world where death is not the final word, where people are not divided into haves and have-nots, predators and prey, victors and victims, where abundance and well-being have superseded the scramble for necessities. Easter - boldly or naively - proposes a world where life triumphs over death and love banishes all fear.

Of course, for many - even believers - this is little more than a fantasy utopia. In the real world, it is the powerful who win at the expense of the weak. In the real world, you must take care of yourself because no one else will. In the real world, evil lurks in the shadows waiting for any opportunity to victimize trusting souls. In the real world, life is hard and then you die.

The stories of that first Easter show that even the most devout are hardcore realists. The women went to the tomb that morning not to joyfully rejoice in resurrection (although they had frequently heard the promise from Jesus' own lips), but rather to dutifully attend to their last obligation. It was not life but death that claimed their imagination. When they reported to the men an alternative reality and an alternative explanation, their testimony was dismissed as an "idle tale" (you know how women are!). Two disciples leaving Jerusalem were so consumed by grief they could not even recognize the risen Christ who joined them on their homeward trek. And famously, Thomas would not accept the testimony of his closest friends, but instead demanded his own opportunity to see and touch. Today, the grandeur of Easter Sunday - the glorious music, the lilies, the Easter wardrobe - does not change the fact that on Monday we are right back in the "real" world with barely an interruption.

However, Easter continues to nag at our easy capitulation. What if it's true? What if dead men do not stay dead. What if the Easter world of God's promise is actually more real than this old world to which we have consigned ourselves? Easter cannot be reduced to Jesus' happy ending; it is rather the bold assertion that there is a different - and better - world available to us now. Christians do not pass through the looking glass, or walk through the wardrobe, or slide down the rabbit hole, but we do pass from cross to empty tomb. And there in the Easter world - the real world of God's promise - we embrace life in all its fullness, a way of life marked by gratitude, generosity, forgiveness and hope; a world where the needy are served, the despairing are consoled, the hungry fed, the broken restored, the lonely befriended. Which real world do you prefer?

Fritz