Gemstones and Lifelong Learners

Listening to Janice Catron lead the last Spring Bible Study session on the Revelation of John, which she calls a "letter," with reflections on the gemstones in Rev. 21:19-21,I went off on my own little rabbit-trail of my own. Henry Ward Beecher, brilliant and controversial preacher of the 19th Century (shown above with his own "mullet" taken from http://www.chi.gospelcom.net/) was said to have been drawn to beautiful jewels. He apparently talked his wealthy benefactors into loaning him beautiful precious gemstones (shown here in an image from euphoriagems) which he carried around in his pockets, and would take them out and admire them and show them around to others. He said, in reference to the Revelation image, that these stones were a foretaste of the good life God intends for God's people.

Now I am not particularly drawn to jewels, but I believe I understand what he was thinking and feeling. I'm more drawn to the depth of beauty of God's people as they grow and allow themselves to be transformed in lifelong learning. Each learner refracts the light of God's creative energies, and shines in infinite variety of colors with the fire of that energy.

So I encourage us all onward toward a summer of reflection and learning with the words of Philippians 1:14-16: "In everything you do, act without grumbling or arguing; prove yourselves innocent and straightforward, children of God beyond reproach, in the midst of a twisted and depraved generation--among which you shine like stars in the sky, while holding fast to the word of life."

What's God Got to Do with It--control and command management style

I'm continually confounded by church organizations that are run according to the old command and control management style. You know the style--it's pyramidal, with control starting from the top and moving down, preventing individual freedom and encouraging homogeneity, saying "no" more than "yes," and generally keeping the lid on creativity. Yes, I'm talking about mainline protestant churches and church organizations that shall remain unnamed in this post. How do you go about loosening them up, encouraging more openness, more transparency, more flat organizational accountabilities, more ability of the people who are doing the work having the authority to made decisions, including financial decisions about their areas. Shall we offer more training, more organization development consulting? I'm afraid these initiatives are doomed to failure.

The aha moment I had recently was that the problem is not practical or managerial but theological. We have created organizational structures to match our perception of God. Those who believe in an "omni" God (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, who is never changing, perfect and beyond passion, those are the ones who are stuck in an organization that mirrors that construction of God: Controlling, Punishing, rewarding, Demanding, Inaccessible--like the angry god in the picture above.

I think it takes a theological reformation to recognize that God might be primarily: Creative, Relational, Loving, Freeing/empowering, Vulnerable, Changing, Discernible, Transforming. Then we might be able to recognize the ability of an organization to organize itself around the gifts and passions of its people and to be a good steward of its capital resources for the sake of its people and of the environment.

It takes a nod to process and liberationist theology to move an organization forward into a future-thinking mode so that something creative can happen to open up a church or church agency to love and relationality.

My reading of Catherin Keller's new book, On the Mystery (Fortress, 2008) helped me to begin thinking about the connection between theology and management styles. What do you think?

Siblings Wrestling Over Homosexuality

Hearing Margaret Farley, the Grawemeyer Prize winner in religion, talk about sexual ethics, prompted me to ask her what she thinks has made homosexuality the key issue in denominational and cultural battles in the last 30 years. "Why this particular issue at this time?"

She gave her usual calm, clear but well qualified and nuanced response about the loosening of sexual norms in the sixties and early seventies, which led to some people being able to recognize and talk about the fact that they love someone of the same gender. That experience and the co-relative experience of those who have family and friends who are gay and learn to love and except them, led to a deep shaking of the foundations of sexual identity. This shaking, because it is so fundamental, has become extremely threatening to some who "pull the shades" on that topic and insist on holding on to and enforcing the old norms and moralities. This identity crisis makes dialogue about the topic very fraught with difficulties.

I appreciate that Farley's notion of identity crisis is much more generous and graceful than my thinking. I think my thoughts are similar, however, in that I recognize that the acceptance of homosexuality challenges traditional standards of male dominance in which the male is active and the female is passive (also part of Farley's analysis), and the assumption that a man engaged in sexual activity with another male makes one of them "passive," and thus threatening to male identity.

This helps fill out my image for what's happening in the mainline denominations, particularly my own PC(USA). It seems to me that one way of understanding the conflict over homosexuality is that we are having an ongoing fight between siblings, well known in family circles, in which the siblings have engaged in the battle for so long that they cannot imagine either stopping the fight or separating. The background for the two positions could be simplistically put that one side is holding on to traditional moralities due to the threat of gender identity crisis, and the other side is pushing for loosening the traditional moralities due to their experience with persons who are gay or lesbian.

The Biblical story of the sibling rivalry between Jacob and Esau is the model. They struggled within the womb (Gen. 25:22), they were born with Jacob refusing to let go of his brother's heel, and they spent their lives in a wrestling match. It is not accidental that Jacob dreamed of wresting the angel on the night before he met his brother again after many years (Gen 32:22ff).

It's not a pleasant image, and I'd be happy to replace it with a more hopeful story (although the last word on the Esau-Jacob match is that they cooperated in burying their father--Gen. 35:29).

Justice Love and the Grawemeyer Award

http://www.grawemeyer.org/religion/index.html

20 years ago, the Presbyterian Church (USA) considered a study on sexual ethics in which the criterion for good/bad, right/wrong was the concept of "justice love." The General Assembly, the denomination's highest governing body, turned it down--because it did not conform to conventional moral views of a majority of commissioners. I was mighty sorry that happened.

Thus it is with great pleasure that I let you know that Margaret Farley will be on campus this week to receive the Grawemeyer award in religion for her book on sexual ethics. See the link for more information.

Farley is a Roman Catholic, religious, Yale Scholar, well known to several of our faculty, and she takes a very carefully developed stance that justice is the basic issue in sexual ethics! Imagine that. And it is this very Presbyterian seminary that's giving her the award.

• Here's the basic information for you:
  Members of the LPTS community have the opportunity to meet Margaret Farley and hear her speak this Wednesday and Thursday. Margaret is the recipient of the 2008 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, for her book Just Love: A Framework for Sexual Ethics. Other distinguished guests will also be on campus to help celebrate Margaret’s receipt of this prestigious award, including Harold Attridge, Dean of Yale Divinity School, and Frank Oveis, former editor at Continuum (the publisher of Just Love). In addition, our own Kathryn Johnson is returning from Switzerland for the occasion. You should also plan to attend!
  
  Margaret Farley will be lecturing in the chapel at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, preaching in chapel at 10:10 a.m. on Thursday, and speaking in Frances Adeney’s class at 11:00 a.m. on Thursday (in 122 Schlegel—community members welcome).
  

If you've been hankering for a more complex and progressive perspective on sexual ethics, this is for you!

Patriotism and Discipleship--choices we have

Further reflection on the Jeremiah Wright flap, from a left-leaning democrat, but not about partisan politics. This is about how we parse our values of patriotism and Christian discipleship as church leaders and how our folks respond to our choices.

Hillary is quoted in the NYTimes this morning as saying: "Given all we have heard and seen, he (Wright) would not have been my pastor." She is further quoted as critiquing Obama: "While we don't have a choice when it comes to our relatives, we do have a choice when it comes to our pastors or our church."

The assumption in that last quote is a common one. Christianity is a voluntary activity. We make choices to join churches or leave churches or not go to church at all based on our private values and prejudices. One of our favorite prejudices leveraged against our churches and our pastors is patriotism. I've been reminded frequently as a pastor, and I'll be you have too, that we are not free to criticize our country or our president because that's mixing church and state.

I've always felt that I owe a higher allegiance to the God of Jesus Christ than I do to my country, and I'm a kind of American heretic because of it, I know. I am frankly shocked that Americans are criticizing Jeremiah Wright for mining the scriptures for God's priorities and using those scriptural insights to criticize the priorities of the government.

Hillary's comment also reminded me that prominent church members and community leaders are not above using their celebrity and their clout (and their contributions to the church) as a threat to domesticate the clergy. "If you say something I don't agree with, I'll leave this church and tell everyone why."

I personally believe Christians are called to a higher standard of behavior. Of course we are free to disagree with our pastors, but we're not free to reject the demands of the gospel to put God first!

Context in Preaching--Jeremiah Wright's critics

The seminary had a forum last week, organized by students, to talk about the flap caused by those who cherry-picked Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons for so called sensational clips and then tried to tie the Democratic candidate Obama to them. Our homiletics professor, Dr. Debra Mumford, pointed out that they not only took these clips out of context from the whole sermons and from their scriptural basis (Wright is a completely biblical preacher, by the way), but they also took him out of the context of preaching in a black church, out of the context of the black prophetic preaching tradition, and out of the context of black liberation theology. She also suggested that she could find nothing untrue in what was quoted by Wright--an important distinction!

I thought that the mostly white students in the crowd needed to think, as well, about how they approach public issues in their preaching in the context of mainline, European-American, middle-class congregations. Here is what I wrote in response.

In my 35 years of preaching to mostly middle and upper-middle class European American Presbyterians, I engaged in a very different kind of prophetic proclamation. I think Wright and I may use similar hermeneutic principles, but it did not look or sound anything like what he does. With my congregations, I listened carefully with ear and heart and mind to the culture and existential concerns of my congregation (as Wright did at Trinity UCC) and the historical situation in which we lived. Then I shaped the prophetic messages to work into their particular hearts and minds. I did not usually overtly challenge or criticize their compliance and collaboration with the dominant culture that oppressed others. The reason for that is that I had learned that they could not hear hope and gospel for themselves or for others if they closed their ears to the prophetic message. That’s similar to the mental processes we observe in commentators and news anchors and others who wont’ or can’t really hear Jeremiah Wright’s messages.

The other thing that I did in my congregations that is parallel to Wright—I let them know in as many ways as possible that I loved them, and helped them learn to trust me. After a while, they also became more open to my prophetic proclamation because it came in the context of trust and love. Each of us has to measure how long to let that trust build in a particular congregation before turning up the pressure in prophetic preaching.

With reading the context and building trust, over the years I learned to frame the gospel and the prophetic message in ways that would open their hearts and minds to the possibility of inner transformation for themselves and compassion and commitment to others, particularly to those on the margins. This was not always fruitful, but I kept at it. Frequently they thought I was “making them think” which is white folks’ way of struggling with these issues, and that was OK with them. They also knew, because I repeated it often, that they were not required to agree with me. As good Presbyterians they were required, instead, to come to grips with the scripture passages, listen to my proclamation, examine their own conscience, and arrive at their own conclusions. Thus I could do prophetic preaching that fit the time and place, in my own particular way.

It's all about the context!

Watching Clinton and Obama turning on each other in a kind of pit-bull fight to the end reminded me of Dr. Ken Goodpaster, Professor of Business Ethics at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul MN, with whom I worked doing ethics training for high school students, and who coined the term "teleopathy." The theologically trained might catch the roots of the words--it means "goal sickness." It is described in his new book Conscience and Corporate Culture, just out from Blackwell. (See a review at:

http://http://www.isfp.co.uk/businesspathways/issue32.html)

A leader afflicted with teleopathy gets so fixated on a goal, such as winning a presidential nomination, that ethics and values are lost in the battle. He says this fixation or addiction is accompanied by distancing from one's humanity, and a rationalization that loses touch with reality. What makes this pathology so insidious is that one can easily slip over the cliff from a healthy and effective striving for excellence, with its virtues of courage, determination and perseverance. When the goal becomes more important than the people and the systems with which we are working, we're in danger.

Church leaders need to be inoculated against the disease of teleopathy because we drink the water of divine vocation and work in stained-glass environments. When you're doing God's work, it's easy to get so zealous that being right and achieving our goals are more important than the Holy One whom we are supposed to be serving. The inoculations take different forms, but my favorite is a veil of humility that holds my own limitations in front of me, and a good dose of relativity to cast doubt that I've got the final and best take on the situation.

Holy Spirit, give me courage, determination and perseverance, without pathological fixation.