What Progress on Earth Day 2021? Get Real.

On the Today Show I saw Weather Broadcaster Al do a little dance jig on a lawn as he was on location for Earth Day with a litter grabber tool in his hand and in the background many others picking up trash. It was clean up project time. Every year it seems so many places, municipalities and organizations sponsor litter patrols, while the earth burns. 

We like to say we “celebrate” Earth Day every April 22 but we are ahead of ourselves. We should not be celebrating as if something has been accomplished. Ok, you say, “but we can celebrate progress can’t we, shouldn’t we, not least because it engenders more action?” Well, yes, but I would lead you to “Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World,” (PBS.org) wherein she forthrightly challenges our world’s significant political leaders for chronicling their political action “progress” on reducing carbon emissions while matter-of-factly not reaching or accomplishing the specifically stated goal of not increasing the global average temperature more than 1.5 degrees centigrade over pre-industrial era temperatures. “Progress over Perfection” is a laudable maxim for most pursuits but in this challenge of warming that we have it is not something to hold up as an acceptable report. 

What Thunberg interestingly points to regarding “progress” against this challenging goal is this past year’s global response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. What can happen and did happen when billions in dollars and total multi-disciplinary attention in research, development, education and delivery of a solution to the virus’s devastating effects was given on a global scale: multiple vaccines developed and massive public-health measures instituted to slow down and stop the virus’s death march. Why do we not do the same with reducing carbon emissions? Why indeed.

I like to say that no matter how bad the numbers, numbers are our friends. They tell the truth. We cannot succeed if we deny the numbers or fake the numbers to fit our politics or popularity. Right now we sit at carbon dioxide emissions bringing us to a 2.5 – 3.0 degrees C average increase in temperature by 2100. That number is catastrophic for our ecologies. We cannot claim “progress” as success if “progress” means environmental collapse. It needs to be 1.5 degrees or nothing. 

What will it take to get us there? Political will, financial investment, personal commitment and shared sacrifice. 

Right now, this month of our 51st Earth Day, we must start with being real about “progress.” As Thunberg notes: “don’t listen to me, listen to the science.”

Oh my, do we hear?

Easter Morning 2021: Needing Liberation, Not Inspiration

The sermon at the Easter Day outdoor worship I attended came close to naming the truth of what gospel actually is, but then retreated. Recognizing the fear and exhilaration of the Resurrection witnessed in Mark 16:1-8, instead of saying that the fear is real and defeated, destroyed by the exhilaration (the unpreached God is swallowed whole by the preached God, to use Martin Luther’s way of describing God’s knowing of us and our knowing of God), the pastor told us we live with the fear, it is not cast out albeit it is engaged. We live with the tension of knowing fear and experiencing joy…..and thus, though the preacher did not articulate the result to be a wished-for freedom (for who actually tries to point to a pie-in-the-sky bye and bye? Not many thankfully) the preacher still ended up there: we were given only hope for a liberation now instead of actually being liberated right then and there on a Sunday morning after the Easter baskets and before the Easter Dinner. 

But… good in this Easter sermon was a quote from Jurgen Moltmann: something relaying that resurrection is not an appreciation for or a believing in a fact but rather a participation in life. Also good, a poem segment by Walt Whitman about our life being the next verse to be written. 

It is very good to turn the Easter message away from a gift of the afterlife toward, instead, the gift of this life and how we participate in God’s life, resurrection, in the living and giving of justice and love in and through our daily lives. 

True enough, and good enough, almost. 

Almost good enough. 

My friend Jill posted on social media on Easter Day wondering just how those living with the grief of lives dead, like her 20 year-old son now gone 8 years, are not simply to live in a wish for a resurrection that somebody else knows but we do not know. In the preaching I heard Easter Day, if Jill were there to hear it, she would have been encouraged to live her life striving to fulfill a completed justice that someday she will know completely but does not know now and her job,  our job, if you will, today, is to stay the faithful course (which usually means stay positive, loving, giving, believing in God even as we hedge our bets that any of this God thing is real at all). We sat, in this Easter morning Service, on the pavement of the parking lot outside on the church campus, facing the Sanctuary building. We sat on the outside looking in. It was a metaphor for me on where I was placed upon hearing this pastor’s proclamation: on the outside of complete joy, looking at what someday will be ours, and told that this is our existential truth (my words) that we are to endure if not also embrace.

Here is the truth (may I be so bold): we do not now see and feel resurrection.  The last thing we need to do is constantly attempt death-defying and death-denying antics to convince ourselves, and others, that we do. All the church-talk about being blessed (seeing the good, receiving the good) as the method of choice to banish the darkness falls short. Those who speak it know it’s short-comings even as they converse but it is a testimony, it seems to me, in their own hearts to say it (“blessed!”) and so it continues. 

I have no problem with recognizing the good and reveling in it. I wish, in fact, I could do more of that (as you are likely to also wish I would as you are furthered depressed by my inability to look the other way and just get on with it: either in epicurean delight or stoic demand!). But please don’t tell me this good is a sign of God. Not when I also see and feel the opposite and, if God be omnipotent (an attribute one cannot redefine away as much as we try to justify God and blame ourselves or some Devil for the evil and suffering we experience) for which, then, God is responsible. 

The early disciple of Jesus named Paul writes correctly, I think, that the good news of and from God comes by hearing (Romans letter, chapter 10). This hearing is literal and excludes other senses, including vision (seeing) and emotions (feeling). What this tells us is that there is indeed a way to know God’s goodness even as we flee (and rightly so, but we try to talk ourselves out of it because, well, we aren’t supposed to be afraid of God!) God’s destroying power. Luther called it, as I referenced earlier, knowing and encountering the “preached God” (note the audibleness of it all) even as we run from the “unpreached God” (the majestic divinity who simply acts with impunity and cannot do otherwise). I cannot see or feel God but I can hear God and that word that I hear, “I forgive you and I love you, by my virtue, not yours,” is not only all that I have but also all that I need. So, Luther radically points out, God battles God, not some other supernatural power, and ends victorious. The preached God, revealed audibly, even and perhaps especially now because there just is no seeing Jesus these days, swallows up and eats for lunch the unpreached God, no thanks to us. It is important to remember we are not inventing a second God here. Both unpreached and preached are one God. It is just that God cannot help being less than God unpreached in very much the same way we cannot help being human. But God can help being more than unpreached. God can be preached, the naked God (unpreached: raw, poisonous in majestic glory) clothed (preached: cooked, nutritious in humbled infamy) now and forever in Jesus Christ. 

So, don’t try to talk yourselves into seeing and feeling blessed when it is not there. And don’t deliver Easter sermons that rightly acknowledge the tension of knowing a curse while the world parties on but do not deliver a word that resurrects now. Instead, curse the darkness of the unpreached God with the blessing of Christ (not the blessings of Christ!). 

Job’s wife told him to curse God and die. He did not. He cursed God and lived. How can such a thing happen? Job got the whirlwind word that changed his life. He received, against all odds and the majestic, all powerful (unpreached) God, the word (preached) that saved him no thanks to him. Blessed there, he lived. 

A year ago I penned this poem and as part of my commemoration today of Bonhoeffer's I share it again. 

April 9, 2020

On the 75th Anniversary of the Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

As I lay in bed early today

Before dawn I could hear the birds

Start their singing.

“This is the end. But for me, the beginning.”

It was dawn that he died. 

He knew so well the earthsong

And there was never more than that.

He knew so well the God of all creation and there was never

Less than that.

This milestone of his death’s observation falls on commandment Thursday where the feast of

 

inclusion and liberation is spread and the towel and water applied to transform a life, our life,

 

into one of freedom from self and freedom for others.

Bonhoeffer finally ended up calling Jesus “a man for others.”

After April 9, 1945’s morning hanging there was no grave marker constructed but it simply

Should say that.

And after his death on that day the birds went on singing.

I hear them today. I hear them.

They were the song of world and God that cannot be silenced no matter death.

Thank you, O God, for this life that died that April day and that lives forever in you.

Thank you, O God, for this day’s dawn and your song that sings in the trees outside my window

And in my heart.

 

Ashes on A Wednesday, Confessing what is Real

I did a little exercise on this Ash Wednesday that I thought I would share. I took Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay “Guilt, Justification, Renewal” from Ethics (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 6, part of the manuscripts he intended to use to refine and publish as a full book, Ethics, but which was left unfinished because of his execution by the Nazi Regime in April 1945) and wrote down only the first sentence from each paragraph of that large manuscript. Thus compiled, and realizing that each sentence is only the lead in lengthy sections (and if you want to dive deeper I invite you there), I used the aggregate for my confession, and a hearing of a word of forgiveness not of my own making or machinations, today. I invite you along. 

Here we go.

“The issue is the process by which Christ takes form among us.”

“There is only one way to turn back, and that is acknowledgement of guilt toward Christ.”

“The place where this acknowledgement of guilt becomes real is the church.”

“The church is today the community of people who, grasped by the power of Christ’s grace, acknowledge, confess, and take upon themselves not only their personal sins, but also the Western world’s falling away from Jesus Christ as guilt toward Jesus Christ.”

“That there are people whose knowledge of this falling away from Jesus Christ is kept fresh – not only by finding it in others but also by confessing it in themselves – is a sign of the living presence of Christ.”

“With this confession the whole guilt of the world falls on the church, on Christians, and because there it is confessed and not denied, the possibility of forgiveness is opened.”

“First of all, the quite personal sin of each individual is acknowledged here as a source of poison for the community”

“The church confesses that is has not professed openly and clearly enough its message of the one God, revealed for all times in Jesus Christ and tolerating no other gods besides.”

“The church confesses that is has misused the name of Christ by being ashamed of it before the world and by not resisting strongly enough the misuse of that name for evil ends.”

“The church confesses it is guilty of the loss of holidays, for the barrenness of its public worship, for the contempt of Sunday rest.”

“The church confesses that it is guilty of the breakdown of parental authority.”

“The church confesses that it has witnessed the arbitrary use of brutal force, the suffering in body and soul of countless innocent people, that it has witnessed oppression, hatred, and murder without raising its voice for the victims and without finding ways of rushing to help them.”

“The church confesses that is has not found any guiding or helpful word to say in the midst of the dissolution of all order in the relationships of the sexes to each other.”

“The church confesses that is has looked on silently as the poor were exploited and robbed, while the strong were enriched and corrupted.”

“The church confesses its guilt toward the countless people whose lives have been destroyed by slander, denunciation and defamation.”

“The church confesses that is has coveted  security, tranquility, peace, property and honor to which it has no claim, and therefore has not bridled human covetousness, but promoted it.”

“The church confesses itself guilty of violating all of the Ten Commandments.”

“Is this going too far?”

“In confessing its guilt the church does not release people from their personal confession of guilt, but calls everyone into a community of confession.”

“The church and the individual, convicted in their guilt, are justified by the one who takes on and forgives all human guilt, namely, Jesus Christ”

“The justification of the West, which has fallen away from Christ, lies only in God’s justification of the church, leading it into full confession of guilt and into the form of the cross.”

“Are expressions such as ‘justification and renewal of the West’ impermissible hyperbole, since obviously the whole West can never be justified and renewed by faith in Jesus Christ?”

“The nations bear the heritage of their guilt.”

“The ‘justification and renewal’ of the West can therefore only happen in the restoration of justice, order and peace in one way or another and then by the ‘forgiveness’ of past guilt.”

 

How God is Good for Nothing….and the Church’s Job is to Tell This Like it Is.

 

God is good for nothing, not only in the sense that God provides precisely the salvation we don’t want or think we need (e.g. when we are drowning we don’t want a lifeguard who will simply swim out to join us in the going down) but also in the sense that whatever good is brought or given is done so on the basis of God’s decision and not our merit or demerit.

 The truth of the matter is that we spend inordinate time and energy looking for and claiming signs of divine presence that would and will empower us to great progress and purpose. “Where is God that I might believe in Him?” we might say. “Wise Men Still Seek Him,” so goes the seasonal slogan. Church is seen as the revelation of the Hidden God – a signpost to help us figure out and find God. We want God to be good for something – to help us get the safety and security we want and name and to do that on the basis of what inputs we provide – be that belief or behavior. But God, it turns out, is good for nothing. God not only disregards our definition of safety, security and success but also disenfranchises our ability to merit attention or eternity.

 God: how utterly worthless! But how too so utterly wonderful!

 We know precisely what we are doing when we crucify God. We are getting rid of the one who doesn’t help us gain our game and we are getting rid of the one who says our game is worthless.

“I’m worthless? No, dear God, you are worthless!” And the nail is pierced into God’s hands and feet!

 So how does this worthlessness become wonderful? God’s grit. Call it resurrection from the dead. God would and does not take no for an answer.

 Is it possible for us to know this? Is it possible for us to live in the “wonderful” instead of the “worthlessness? Only if God does all and we do nothing. And we know it.  Only if there is a death and resurrection that is our death and resurrection daily because of God. And because it is in Christ Jesus where God is revealed as most supremely and utterly worthless (Good for Nothing), only in Christ Jesus.

And how would we come to know this? How does God do all and we do nothing and that is most wonderful? The Church.

 The Church’s job is to deliver who God is and what God does and not to direct us or set us on some path to figure out or realize or find our salvation. The Church does not reveal the hidden God, have special powers to show us where God hides and gives us special mechanisms, spiritual practices, to get to that hidden God. Rather, the Church hides the revealed God – not “hides” in the sense that it tries to sequester or remove from access, but in the sense of “sub contrario,” (under the form of the opposite), in the sense that you just can’t expect it there because its just so plain and simple and, frankly, literally, elemental. In the elements of larynx/voice and water and bread/wine God is revealed, accessible to all, not hiding for us to find, available without us earning a thing.  God hides sub contrario (again, under the form of the opposite) not in order to not be found but in order to be displayed and delivered in the only place where humanity actually is, so to be then also the only place where humanity can actually access, connect, know the divine (human beings like to think they can get out of their own skin, be something else. We cannot. God knows, literally, and so brings us gospel in the only place possible – in our own skin, in the flesh and blood (call it incarnation) and in the elements (call it, then, word and sacrament).

 To say church “hides the revealed God” means then that the church “holds” or “delivers” or “is the vehicle for the transmission of” God who is on display for all to know and see and live with now.

 You just can’t get this kind of good news anywhere else! Where else can you find somebody telling you that your lousy attempts at making good, call it pride, and your empty space of feeling bad, call it despair, are actually not changed by circumstances or effort (from the inside out) but rather transformed by love from the outside in (in other words – God is good for  nothing in the sense that what you thought was salvation – you surviving by God – is not salvation at all. Salvation is God surviving by you). And where else can you find that all of this happens without your merit or effort but simply because you exist (in other words God is good for nothing in the sense that you need not bring a thing to the table, nothing, to be a part of it all).

 You just can’t find this kind of good news anyplace else but Church.

 You can find people talking about this, and speculating about God and the meaning of life, anywhere. From pool hall to poolside, hill and dale.

 But its only Church who does the actual deed of delivering God in direct form and in person.

Church is not here to help you figure out God. Church is here to turn God out on you who figures you out. And gives you life, no questions asked. Church is here to bring God who is good for nothing. And that is everything.

That Tampa Pastor is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

On how the secular is sacred and the sacred is secular

We like to say the mission of God is to bless and heal the world. We like to say that the church doesn’t have a mission but God does, and church is doing God’s mission. All well and good, but still there is the danger of boundaries being established or maintained between the sacred and the secular.

The church has nothing to bring to the world that isn’t already here. We don’t “bring Christ” and we don’t even “live as Christ” in the world. What I mean is that the real world, to be worldly, is to be pure gospel, pure unconditional love, pure powerlessness, pure, as Steven Paulson would say, outlaw. Gospel, and thus church, is simply living the truth of the world: unconditional grace, not conditional law. Thus the need all the more today for Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “non-religious interpretation” of dogma: sin, redemption, Holy Spirit, eschaton, Christ, creation, God and how all of that is an expression of the real world, not a superimposed religiosity that attempts to get the world to not be itself.

There is a sense I get in a lot of Christian preaching that the church, through the voice or mouthpiece of the preacher, is in the business of teaching the world a lesson. There is a certain privileged position that is assumed, a telling of a story that the listener is supposed to come to see, appreciate and appropriate.  There is a world that the world doesn’t see and doesn’t’ get and needs to step into in order to be real and live truth.

Shame on us if this is how we the church see ourselves, this being distinct from the world, and how we see preaching as explaining a new construction project people must engage.

In the same way Jesus did not come to establish a new religion, the church does not come to establish a new way of living in the world. Jesus destroyed religion so that the real world could thrive. We do the same. We are and do Jesus – the outlaw.

So, to be precise about to whom the church’s proclamation goes: it is to the religious, not the non-religious. Well, that’s saying it with a bit of a blunt instrument, because the proclamation actually is for all, but for the sake of this discussion, I will go with the proclamation going to the religious. Take a look at Luke 15’s Waiting Father (popularly knows as the Prodigal Son) parable as a story told to the Elder Brothers that we are. If the church is in the business of teaching anybody a lesson it would be to teach the church a lesson in how to be secular, “worldly,” human. The church really does, if it’s doing its job, preach to the choir!

But church leaders cannot blame the church members for seeing church as a refuge from the world, a construct of a world sacred to go to when the secular is just too hard to handle. Leaders, preachers, have only ourselves to blame. We have failed to tell the story of Jesus as the deconstruction of religion and instead of giving the dynamics of sin, creation, Spirit, redemption and all a non-religious interpretation we have used them to try to gain agency with God, something that removes us from our humanity and world.

In today’s church, the church is not God’s gift to the world.

The world is God’s gift to the church.

The whole separation of sacred and secular is baldly displayed in the Tampa, Florida Pastor who blindly tells his people that to have faith in God means to defy public safety and health anti-viral standards and to come together for worship services in order to defy the world that is trying to destroy the church. What planet does that pastor live on? Shame on him for in the name of God leading his people to danger and death in the name of religion that has agency with God to live outside of the world, to invoke the supernatural over the natural.

Viruses are of the world. The world is of God. Viruses are of God. God is not going to stop being God and stop viruses from being viruses simply because we think we are privileged spiritual beings.

Jesus renews the world, gives it it’s life back again, by saving it from religion. The church is to live and tell that story, not become the story itself. Jesus does not renew the church. The sooner the church can get over itself as some sacred space that the secular must see and do, the sooner the death and resurrection of Jesus will have its way with us and the secular will be sacred.

Let’s Just Get Rid of Jesus. Good Luck. Welcome to Lent.

Do not, please, have remorse for killing Jesus unless you have remorse for refusing God’s absolute and complete forgiveness for every person for all time, forever, where all receive the same eternal benefits of life with God simply because God decides this is to be so.

Do not feel remorse because you think its proper etiquette to feel bad for innocent blood shed and thus yourself are able to keep your distance, untouched.

Be honest instead. You don’t feel bad. You feel vindicated. Jesus got what he deserved! Of course we need to kill the one who simply let’s everybody off the hook! It’s not only unfair to do that, its dangerous! It’s not only unlawful, it’s reckless. Jesus is an outlaw!

There is a thing in the Christian tradition called the “adoration of the cross.” It is possible to do that, but beware you are not using it to your glory. You can’t adore it without first, or simultaneously, hating it. In fact, it might be better to drop our whole adoration of the cross and realize the cross adores us: kills us and raises us up.

Jesus! You forgive too much!

For Christians: you forgive the rotten and the unbelieving too much!

For Non-Christians: you forgive us when we don’t even need your forgiveness!

For Both: get rid of Jesus!

For Christians: give me law, not gospel!

For Non-Christians: give me gospel, not law!

For Both: let me be me!

To put a 16^th century reformation theology light on it:

For Christians trying to control our wild nature: nomianism and Melancthon

For Christians trying to control God’s wild nature: anti-nomianism and Agricola

To put a 1^st century biblical theology light on it:

For Religious (Pharisees and Sadducees) : Jesus, you forgive the rotten too much!

For Non-Religious (Pilate): Jesus, you forgive me too much! (“Don’t you see that I have power over you?!!”)

Both want to dismiss Jesus. Both want to kill Jesus.

Jesus is a loose cannon! He must be contained! He isn’t just a pest, he is dangerous.

Religious: the rabble will rise!

Non-Religious:  we are usurped!

Jesus is offensive to both.

Religious: Others don’t deserve forgiveness from you Jesus!

Non-Religious: I don’t need forgiveness from you Jesus!

 Well, and then there is this: Jesus raised from the dead! We simply could not get rid of him! He lives, and he remains offensive!

This is why I am suspicious of any who say they love God without first saying they hate God. And why I believe you cannot adore the cross without first despising it. All at the same time.

We are about to head into the 40 day period that Christians call Lent: a time to focus on the life and death of Jesus with particular attention to the cross and the killing of Jesus. Hmmmmm. Perhaps we can see it is our story of being rid of him. And how he simply will not let us go.