Paul and Me

So the elective week is over here at the ACTS D.Min. in preaching program. My elective was “Paul and a Macedonian Correspondence” which mean 1&2 Thessalonians and Philippians. It was a wonderful course with Dr. Audrey West. Many people don’t know that I have a hard time coming to terms with some of the words we attribute to Paul and some of his theology. While I respect and find powerful his conversion experience from Saul – who persecuted the early church, to Paul – who spread the gospel at great personal risk, I’ve historically found myself, well, not liking him.
Last week afforded me an opportunity to really get into these three letters of Paul. It was, as I named for the class my first day, mine and Paul’s last chance to get along! Well by the end of the week I think it’s safe to say that Paul and I are still a long way from being great buddies, yet were much closer to being good friends. There is a language and a depth of subversivness to Paul that I’d not know in prior courses. In fact one could claim that Paul was the original communication master mind and that he knew his particular audiences so well that he adapted his letters so that they would break through the barriers of a particular community only to use their own imagery to communicate the gospel to them. It was striking to watch and discover how Paul changed his genre and style to suit his particular audience and I started wondering what if we did the same in preaching? Could this be a way for the church to reach out to people regardless of their generation? Is the secret learning the generational code, so that we can communicate the Christian message to folks with little or no church experience and help them understand why the church is so important to have as part of your life? Could it be that one of the reasons why the mainline church in Canada has been declining in recent years is because we’ve refused to change our language to be inclusive of new generations and people? What would Paul have to say to us, what indeed?
Ultimately I want to look at how digital media can be used to bridge the communication gulf just as Paul used letter so many years ago. From Paul I’ve learned that simply using one form of digital media will not be the answer. In fact the answer isn’t in using 1 or 2 forms, but a multiplicity of genres that have been fine tuned to address particular issues with particular constituent communities. Perhaps, if we can figure this out, there is a way to share the Christian message that is deep in the richness of heritage and vital in the current reality we find ourselves in.

Worship at Trinity, United Church of Christ

This past Sunday I had the most amazing worship experience. Four other students and myself decided that we would make our way deep into the Chicago south side to attend a service at Trinity a congregation in the United Church of Christ tradition. We left at 10am.
Arriving at Trinity is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. We had a camera with us so it had to be checked in at the desk. As visitors we had to sign in as a group. We were escorted to our seats by one of the ushers, all of whom wore white shirts, gloves and black pants. There were plain clothed security guards all throughout the building with the ear pieces you usually see in movies with F.B.I or Secret Service agents. The church was packed.
This is an African-American congregation. Their vision is Unapologetically Black and Unapologetically Christian. The choir had about 140 members all dressed in traditional African clothing. There was a 9 or 10 piece worship band with multiple pianos, bass guitar, drums, organ and other instruments. The music was loud, not overpowering, yet loud. The energy was high and it never really let up. Did I mention this was at 11am?
We started with opening praise songs and stood on our feet singing and clapping away. It was a tremendously emotional time for everyone. We were welcomed as honoured guests and received lots of hugs during the passing of the piece. Actually their senior pastor said, “if you don’t like hugs you’re in the wrong church and there’s the door!” and I felt oddly at home thinking of folks in my congregation Lyn United. Then we read the lesson for the day together with everyone standing from their bulletin that is 24 pages long and professionally produced in house. Now it was 12noon.
We then had a presentation from the Drill Team that performed a series of pieces akin to stomp dancing. It was simply amazing to watch these young people. Then there was a very serious ceremony marking the transition of 9 girls into adulthood. They had been mentored for some time about how to be a responsible young African-American woman with all the rights and responsibilities of other women. It was quite something. Then it was time for the offering and as we sang and clapped buckets, yes buckets, were passed around and then there was a second offering for the Resurrection Fund. It was now 1pm.
Then we got to the sermon. I’ve only seen black preachers on television. I’ve heard about them. Read about them. I’ve experienced only one other, yet nothing prepared me for this experience. I have never seen a preacher and congregation interact with one another in such a profoundly relational, yet respectful way. He had us standing and clapping our agreement. He had us looking at one another and giving a word of encouragement. He had us finishing his sentences. He had the band playing while he sang some a short piece of his sermon like lyrics to a song. There were people shouting their encouragement “Go Preacher!” there were “Amen!” there were “yeah, yeah I got you!” and people smiling and crying. And through it all, other than during the sermon, there was always music – sometimes just instrumental other times hymns, other times choruses, other times just the choir – yet always music through the prayers and other parts of the service. We received the benediction after an altar call and people were invited to remain at the altar if they wanted to join the church. It was now 2:20pm.
I hope you’ve been paying attention. We started at 11am and finished at 2:20 and it only felt like an hour! We later were told that they have three services a Sunday with three different sermons. The times of the services are 6am 11am and 6pm. In total there are about 6,500 people in worship on an average Sunday. Attendance at the service I attended was around 2,600 people. They have their own book room, live internet ministry, production team, credit union bank, outreach program, 12 pastors and 80 programs that run weekly. Trinity is an experience all to itself. If you’re ever in Chicago you need to go to Trinity, even if you’re not African- American!

Praise In Spite Of

It’s an interesting moment in one’s life when you into contact with a religious tradition that looks like yours on the surface, yet as soon as you delve just a little deeper you begin to realize that while there is much in common, there is also much to learn.
Last week I had that experience when working on an Incarnational Translation. At one point a colleague of mine, who is African-American, commented that in her tradition there are two kinds of praise. There is praise because of and there is praise in spite of. Praise because of is rooted in the events of life for which we’d like to offer God our praise and thanksgiving. A family member recovers from a serious illness; a child does well in school in a troubled subject; a relationship that was broken is healed – all of these would be examples of times when you would praise because of. In essence your giving thanks to God for something that you perceive to be welcomed in your life, good for you, or someone you care about. This, I think, is a kind of praise that is common across religious traditions. Those of us who self-identify as Christians have no problem giving praise to God when things are going as we want them to. We don’t have a problem offering thanksgiving for getting something that we wanted. We have little afterthought for saying thank-you to God when our prayers are answered in the manner we’d hoped for. But what about other times, you know the ones when things don’t go our way or “bad” things happen to us or those we love and care about. What then? Are we as eager to give God our praise during those times? Or are we more likely to withhold our praise as if we can punish God or bring God around to our way of looking at the world if we don’t offer our praise.
In the African-American tradition there is an understanding that in those times you offer your praise in spite of the situation at hand. It goes something like this: even though my child died; my cupboard is bare; I got laid off; my child failed a subject; I’ve discovered I have cancer – in spite of all of that I will praise God and offer my thanksgiving. In other words even when it doesn’t seem to make sense I will offer my praise to God exactly because it doesn’t make any sense! Do you get it? It’s easy to give praise when everything is going your way, but when times are tough and you feel forgotten, ignored, mistreated, and/or harmed by God, that’s when offering praise is tough work. That’s when your praise matters because it would be easier to just walk away and yet, even in the midst of your situation, there is always (and yes I mean always) something to praise God about. It might simply be that your alive another day and yet for some folks that is a miracle in and of itself.
So as I sit here in my room I’m left to wonder about those times in my life when I’ve refused God my praise. I wonder who I really hurt. I wonder what was gained by those actions. I wonder if there isn’t a deep wisdom in the African-American tradition of praise in spite of and I wonder what my life would look like and what my church would look like if we were able to cultivate this kind of deep faith.

Jesus as Parable

Tuesday was our first "full" day of the program. We began with lecture and took time for opening worship that was simply amazing. The gospel reading was recited from memory. The organ music was like that of a recital even though it was contemporary music. During communion we partook to the melody of a classical guitarist. It was moving to be with a group such as this, a group that takes worship and preaching so seriously that it constitutes a fundamental portion of our being, to hear those voices raised in song and praise and prayer was an experience in and of itself.Yet, as wonderful and soul filling as that was, it pales in comparison to what happened in the afternoon. As we neared the end of a long day we were talking about parables. About how Jesus said nothing that wasn't in parables. The he did so in order that the disciples could understand and the others could not. The proverbial shoe fell when Dow said, "Jesus is the ultimate parable." That his whole life is a parable. The ridiculousness of his reception, the teachings, on the Mount, in the garden, in the court, on the cross, wrapped in cloth, in the angels and in the room. Jesus is the parable and when you understand the parables you begin to enter into an understanding of who Jesus really is and the radically subversive nature of what lies at the heart of each parable. It was/is an amazing thing for me to think of Jesus in this way. It is one thing that will change the way I preach and the way I understand the message of the Gospel.

Reflections on Narrative

I've arrived in Chicago and snaked my way through one of the world’s largest airports and a completely foreign city to a campus nestled in south side of the city in Hyde Park, one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Chicago. A historic place that, during the time of black immigration from the south and white flight, decided it would set down a code of principals that would reverse the ongoing trend of segregation in another form. It is here that I have come, along with 26 other preachers from LA to the Bronx of New York to Eastern Ontario to Germany. Here we have gathered to delve deeper into the act of preaching: how we do it; how people experience it; what we're doing; and how we can be better at it.One of our professors, Dow, who was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war, shared this story with us yesterday."I'd agreed to do a workshop in new models for church leadership and like so many other things in life had put it off and put it off until it was now Saturday and the workshop was one week away and I had to get it done. So I decided that I'd read the Chicago Tribune, go for a short run and then get down to the business at hand. When I opened the paper there was an article that said while there were only 20,000 civilian casualties during the first gulf war, the consequences of the destruction of infrastructure, of schools, hospitals, stores, and roads has meant that an additional 200,000 Iraqis have died. That's a number I can get my head around because I grew up in a city of 100,000. So two times my city had died. With that in mind I went for my run and as I went along I could hear this repetitive thump, thump, thump and a kind of music layered over it. As I continued I came upon a group of young military men out running and it was their feet I could hear and the cadence they were singing. Fist I recognized the tune: put another nickel in the nickelodeon. The words however were nothing I'd ever heard before. A cadence works like a kind of echo sung response where the person running alongside leads and the group responds. The song went: throw another hand grenade. Look at what a mess I've made. bodies, bodies, everywhere. Bodies, bodies, bodies. The second verse went: look at what a mess I've made; bodies piled up to the sky. bodies, bodies everywhere; bodies, bodies, bodies." They we were the two of us running on opposite sides of the streets." Dow went on, yet that is the essential crux of his story.What dawned on me was the irony of the two sides of that road. On the one side a group of young men who probably hadn't ever seen bodies piled up to the sky (or they wouldn't be singing about it) and on the other side an objector to just this kind of mass mindless violence that not only destroys the body - that corrupts the soul.Corrupting the soul - one could imagine that it’s something that only happens to soldiers and the people who send them on these missions with grand plans of solving all the world's problems through more violence. Yet what they are missing is that in the process they are not only destroying their souls, they are destroying the soul of whole nations. They are corrupting the very gift of creation that God has given to us."bodies, bodies pilled to the sky," when will we ever learn that, as a colleagues 8 year old said, "arguing and violence doesn't even work between my brother and me, so why do they [the world's leaders] think it will work between countries?" Why indeed.

Grief and Loss

Last night I watched The Cleaner a movie about a retired police office who cleans up crime scenes. In the film, Samuel L. Jackson does a clean up that unknowingly gets him into lots of trouble. A single parent, his daughter is doing a "research project" for school on her mom, who was murdered during a robbery. That's the background you need. At one pivotal point in the movie, father and daughter are having a particularly heated argument that Jackson believes is rooted in his daughter doing this project. She responds that it isn't the project, it isn't even a real school assignment - she's upset because "I'm starting to forget her [mother]!"
What a powerful scene. It actually brought tears to my eyes, not because it was particularly well acted or the cinematography was particularly good. It brought tears to my eyes because it reminded me of the first time I realized that I was forgetting my own mother.
It's a tough thing when your mother dies at a young age whether its sudden or from a long disease. Either way there is a void in your life the likes of which was previously unknown. I know, I've been there. It's a particularly horrifying moment when you realize that pieces of the memory you have of your mother is slipping away. The moment when you forget the kinds of things she used to say. The moment when you forget the kinds of cloths or jewelry she liked to wear. The moment when you forget the sound of her voice and the moment when even what she looked like seems more like an uncertain dream to be questioned than anything rooted in reality. I remember those moments. They threaten to tear your very soul in two. Questions like, "if I really loved her, how could I forget her?" come creeping into you world and suddenly not only are you questioning your memory of the one who brought you into the world, you're also questioning the validity of the relationship you thought you had. You grasp at straws, desperately searching your memory for any recollection of things that she did, her mannerisms, things she cooked (which the daughter also does in the film), things she'd say in a particular situation and any rituals that she might have had. You punish yourself for forgetting, even though its a human process, even though you knew, deep down in the recesses of your soul, that one day it would happen. And if you're not careful this guilt can and will take over your life.
What the daughter in The Cleaner doesn't realize and what I learned along the way, something they never tell you in bereavement groups or pastoral care classes, is that while your memory of specific minute details fails, what you do remember is the essence of the person.
You see I think that our human brains can't handle all the little details. Over time they get combined together or simply labeled as irrelevant and deleted like junk mail in our inboxes. What takes their place is a holistic memory, one that encapsulates all the little pieces into one seemingly little whole. If I push myself I can still remember what mom looked like, how she dressed, the things she felt were important, the things she would say, the expression on her face at certain moments, what she liked to cook and her mannerisms. Yet what most frequently and earnestly comes to mind when I think of her isn't those little details, but a memory of who she was. It's more of a feeling or an experience that a memory in the sense of a snap shot in time. I experience who she was and who she continues to be for me. I fell her love, understanding, strength, perseverance, and care. I know the strength of her personality and the depth of her compassion. These are far greater "memories" than the last meal she cooked or the last family gathering she could really participate in, or her last days in semi-lucid delirium in hospital. In stark contrast to those kinds of memories, these are the ones that really count. These are the ones that inform my being.
Yes, I forget. Yet the experience that has emerged is far greater than any one memory.