The Margins

I was just talking to a good friend about the history of our church, and some of the reasons people have left our ministry over the years. There have been interpersonal conflicts, natural transitions (like marriage or geographic relocations), as well as I think what one blogger describes as “missional fatigue” (I can’t remember whose site pointed me to his post…).

It raises questions for me about how we, and communities like ours, are doing as a church when our environment ceases to be sustainable for people and they find themselves in a position of “just needing a break”.

I have a recurring dream that varies a bit each time but contains the essentials of shootings, gangs, and retaliation and my own personal endangerment by these things in my community. Not surprising, considering where we live, what we witness and hear about, and what we have cause to fear. When I have this dream, it usually goes on for a long time, and it is often what I wake up to in the morning. Last night was one of those nights.

Pregnancy is known for adding intensity and downright strangeness to a woman’s dream-life. As a vivid dreamer already, my pregnancy-heightened dreams can be so powerful that Doug can find himself trying to negotiate strange emotional waters with me that have nothing to do with him or reality, rather they are the leftovers from some troubling dream I had the night before.

And okay, I suppose I really should not read the L.A. Times homicide blog at night right before falling asleep…

All of this got me thinking this morning about how are we to take in things that rightly should grieve us? What should we do with news of suffering and oppression and injustice, be it in our immediate neighborhood or in far-off places? For many I know that the solution is to flip past the article or never visit the website–to remain unaware, unknowing. That is certainly a way of coping, and with the overwhelming amount of information at our disposal now, should we want it, it can hold great appeal. I heard once that women who watch Oprah experience a larger percentage of anxiety than those who do not. And I am one who would simply rather not know how many germs are in my kitchen sink…

That said, I have read a few things this week on grief, grieving, and mourning that have me thinking:

John Santic suggests (in Brueggemann’s company) that the loss of lament, the ability to grieve, is one of the greatest threats to our life of discipleship:

So why would the devil pick on our capacity to lament? I have learned to never underestimate his craftiness on matters of deceit. He did it (is doing it) because without lament we lack the capacity for true repentance and identification with the God who suffers. Without lament we are handicapped in our love and words like ‘compassion’ and ‘poverty of spirit’ carry little weight outside of their ability to be trite sentiment. The loss of lament stifles our capacity for justice and compassion and dismantles what was supposed to be a highly potent, world-changing, movement of Jesus followers into a religious system that worships idols of success, strength, and entertainment. The lack of lament is the ingredient the enemy needs to cement our hearts into a stoney numbness and nullify genuine, continuous, conversion.

Is it not often the voice of the prophet that calls us to grieve and mourn? I think of Eugene Cho and others who persisted in calling attention to the suffering of the Korean hostages in Afghanistan when many others were more interested in talking about Michael Vick. Or the writings of a few authors who have sought to raise the veil that covers fierce racial divisions in the North American church. The fact is we don’t like to face ugliness, especially when it indicts us and our comfort or lifestyle, and so we opt to ignore rather than confront and actually mourn what is sick, sinful, and unjust. And I think John (and Brueggemann) are right: as Christians, we lose our capacity to exercise genuine love and compassion when we fail in our willingness to grieve.

One of the assignments John Goldingay gave to us when we studied the Writings was to write a lament, using those examples from scripture as our guide. What an intensely powerful exercise that was, for me, for Doug, for our fellow classmates. When I think back on the top ten things I learned in seminary, learning to lament is probably one of them.

Going further back, I remember my own faith crisis in college when five kids were shot and killed in the few blocks surrounding our Christian college campus. These were kids who were neighbors, relatives and friends of the kids I worked with in that community, and my grief overwhelmed me. The only thing more overwhelming was my total disgust at my campus community’s ability to both ignore what had happened and go on with life as usual, or to only give attention to the killings in as much as their own immediate safety concerned them. Let’s be honest: we are not in the business of wanting to add pain or suffering, and if we can ignore or avoid, we will.

Someone might say to me, Erika, why read the homicide blog AT ALL, let alone when you are pregnant and already struggling to sleep? My best answer would be that I am called to be a person who knows how to lament, and the minute I stop being that person is the minute I lose something of what it means to follow a crucified God. And that is why it is important that I read and know the names of the brother and sister who were shot and killed at a birthday party a few blocks from here, and why it is right for me to cry for that family and to give up a night of sleep…

I went to the doctor on Friday of last week and was told to go home for yet another two-week period of bed-rest. When those two weeks are up, I will be at 36 1/2 weeks in my pregnancy and I can do whatever I want to trigger this baby’s birth! Once again, our friends here are laying their lives down for us to help us through this challenging time. There is honestly a sense of humiliation, of total humility, when your friend who is a pathologist comes over to change your baby’s diapers and sort your laundry. I marvel time and time again at how hard it is to allow, let alone ASK, those around you to wash your feet.

As frustrating as this whole thing feels most of the time, there are certainly joys in the midst of it all and causes for celebration, like the amazing Alaskan salmon we ate last night courtesy of our friend, Jen, whose house-mate Richard had just returned from an Alaskan fishing trip with his dad. The kids both devoured the meal, and Doug had salmon for dinner and breakfast this morning. Sometimes it is little things like this that help remind me of God’s extravagance with us; of his generosity and kindness to us throughout this journey.

On Friday, after the doctor’s appointment, we were scheduled to have the film crew from the Discovery Channel here at the apartment for the afternoon and evening. Doug did his part, but as I am unable to get around and clean, I had enlisted the help of a few friends who got our place looking great, just in time for the crew to arrive. Only they never did. Two of the other moms being filmed for the show ended up going into labor right at the time the crew was scheduled to arrive here, so I got a phone call saying we would have to reschedule.

As I looked around my scrubbed and shiny apartment, and spoke with the producer about re-scheduling, I thought to myself: they have no idea how many people it took to get our apartment ready for this today. Needless to say, when they come later this week, I doubt we will muster even half the effort. You hear the saying about raising kids, but I can also state that it took a village to clean our apartment!

Jordon Cooper has a great post on simplicity. A lot of people write on this topic, but I really appreciated his tone: one of humility and, well, simplicity in talking about what some of the basic issues are.

I resonated with his descriptions of his family’s home, and the adequacy of their space. Doug and I live in a two-bedroom apartment with our two (soon to be three) kids, and anyone with children and any imagination can guess that we have some challenges in the space arena. This is compounded by the fact that Doug is a musician/worship pastor (think large instruments, amps, and speakers), as well as a student, and I work from home. For us, the living room is also the family room, the library, the playroom and home office. And in a couple of weeks, our bedroom will need to become a nursery, study, recording studio–and master bedroom. We are a Real Simple/Oprah/every home decorating show on cable nightmare…

Lately, spending as much time as I do perched on my couch, I have given a lot of thought to what we really need to have, materially. How many toys? How many books? What and when is enough?

I have friends with enormous houses, and I really mean enormous. I think of them often enough when I am feeling especially cramped and crowded here. But what I realize, and Jordon’s post touches on this as well, is that they struggle with space and storage in many of the same ways I do. I think it really is like wedding planning: we are prone to fill however much space we are given.

UPDATE: After posting this, I meandered over to Scot McKnight’s blog for my daily visit and found his excellent post addressing a similar theme: “might need it someday…”

Just this week my sister and I were talking about some different authors and their approach to biblical interpretation. We discussed some books in particular that demonstrated what felt like two extremes: one, making definitive claims about God’s activity in a specific passage and its meaning for us (one could say a moralistic approach), and the other, leaving the story un-interpreted, so to speak, and simply presenting the narrative of what God has done in a particular time and place (what my sister observed as the dominant trend in post-modernity).

As a preacher, I thought about what kinds of choices we make in the pulpit that take us in one direction or the other. It was timely, then, to stumble across a recent post on Wesley on William Willimon’s blog last night that spoke to this issue. The entire lecture (delivered at Christ College, Cambridge) is completely worth reading (or listening to–podcasts are now available!–and if you have never heard Willimon preach I recommend you do so), but I quote here in part:

God is not an idea, an abstraction, a source of meaning, a wholly other, a general concept, or a technique to help us make it through the day; God is the One who presently, directly speaks, creates, intrudes, convicts, enlightens, demands, commands, passionately loves, continually transforms. Wesley’s biblical interpretation is a sort of anti-interpretation in which he assumes that God speaks through scripture, every word of it. Rather than assume that the task of the interpreter is to make the text more meaningful to sophisticated, modern people who drive Volvos, Wesley seems to assume that the task of the text is to make the interpreters’ lives more difficult.

He goes on to later describe listening to a collection of recent sermons preached by pastors under his supervision and care:

One sermon began well enough, the Second Sunday of Christmas, Luke 2, young Jesus putting the temple elders through their paces, abandoned by Mom and Dad. After reading the text, and noting Jesus’ amazing ability to stupefy professional scholars, the preacher then sailed off into a veritable shopping list of things we needed to do. We were told that we must resolve, in the coming year, to be more proficient in study of God’s word. We should strive to “increase in wisdom and in statue.” We ought to spend more time with our families (despite Jesus’ abandonment of his own family).

Note how quickly, how effortlessly, and predictably the preacher disposed of a story about Jesus and transformed it into a moralistic diatribe about us. Moving from a text that simply declares what Jesus did and, by implication, who Jesus is, the preacher moved to a moralistic rant on all the things that we need to do if we (lacking a living, active God) are to take charge of our lives and the world.

This is what Barth condemned as “religion,” defined in Romans as “a vigorous and extensive attempt to humanize the divine, to make it a practical ‘something’, for the benefit of those who cannot live with the Living God, and yet cannot live without God….”

Of course, most congregations that I know love such moralistic Deism. The subtext is always, You are gods unto yourselves. Through this insight, this set of principles, this well applied idea you can save yourselves by yourselves. Whether preached by an alleged theological conservative or would be liberal, we’re all Schliermachians now. Theology is reduced to anthropology because unlike Wesley, we’re obsessed with ourselves rather than God. God is humanity spoken in a resonate, upbeat voice backed up with power-point presentation.

Dr. Willimon is scheduled to teach a course in preaching for Fuller’s Doctor of Ministry program. I have already notified Doug that I will become a total nuisance while he is there, finding regular excuses to visit my husband at work and lurk outside of the classroom where Willimon is teaching.

Last week at the staff retreat at Mission Springs, one of the participants quipped: “If we heard an adult say that they are not GETTING fed in any other setting than the church, we’d consider them foolish (he used a stronger word).” If my adult children complained that they were not GETTING fed, I’d say “Learn to cook! Find out how to use a fork and knife! Grow up.”

Is part of the problem in the established church the very fact that we have tolerated this kind of thinking and excusing? How are we teaching believers to feed themselves? to move from consuming to generativity?

From Don Johnson (read his whole post and enjoy the accompanying picture!)

When Elliot, our angel for the first half of the day, arrived back at our house from playing with Mercy and Aaron at the park, he told me that the kids had done great but had witnessed something unfortunate. He said that while they were playing, the police had arrived and had gotten into a confrontation with some of the homeless people who “live” there. At one point, the officers ended up taking out their tasers and after a struggle, handcuffed one of the men and put him into their patrol car.

As Elliot was telling me about this, I noticed that both Mercy and Aaron had stopped playing and were watching me intently with wide eyes. I turned to Mercy and asked her if she saw the police get angry with the man and she nodded. Then after a moment she asked: “Why were they angry with the man?”

What do you tell your two year old about taser guns and police confrontations? How do you explain that these people were in trouble because they sleep in the park? How do you speak of all of it without locking in fear of those in either uniform?

Whenever we hear sirens, which is often, we always acknowledge them, saying: “They’re going to help the people.” When is a child old enough to see that the world is not always so black and white?

We have good friends here who are regularly in our home who used to sleep in that park. In fact, it is because they slept there that we met them; that they came to be involved in our church. When and how do we talk about that?

Kent Anderson posted some great thoughts this week on the temptation many of us struggle with which he calls “the arrogance of the present.” He comments on the ways that authors and speakers and leaders often speak to and about the church with a great amount of condemnation for how things have looked and been done up until now. He concludes that, for many, there is a perspective of “if only the church had been as enlightened as we clearly are now…”

His words resonated with me, and I considered the many times I have grown annoyed by certain authors’ tones that have seemed to me to carry so much arrogance and derision. I have also lost patience with many of my peers who seem to have so much time for critique and condemnation when it comes to the state of the church (leaving very little time for actual investment in relationships and service). It is not uncommon to hear the litanies of how the church doesn’t measure up to someone’s ideals and then to realize that the person doing the complaining has done little to get involved, build relationships or serve.

Being around Fuller so much the last five years, Doug and I have had the great privilege of meeting and learning from some incredible people who are offering significant critiques of the church, as well as laying out alternatives to the way things have always been done. And many of these folks do so with deep humility and generous spirits. I think of Dallas Willard who can write and say some of the most pointed critiques, and yet who never comes across as arrogant (to me, at least). Then there are others (and of course I will not name them) who simply ooze the superiority of the new.

One piece of my own formation as a minister that I see now as so crucial was the year and a half that I spent in Spokane, Washington, immediately after leaving Chicago. When I moved to Spokane, I immediately went to the local Covenant church which was located in the center of downtown. Within blocks of First Covenant were all of the other “First” churches; and lots of SRO hotels and homeless people and a fairly depressed community. The congregation was small, mostly elderly, and clearly a reflection of the radical demographic shifts of so many cities (a tide that is now reversing). I met a kindred spirit there, a Whitworth graduate who was serving as their youth ministry intern, and we spent the next year serving and talking and praying and debating in ministry together.

We had all of the passion and idealism of our age, voracious appetites for theology and the scriptures, education and exposure to every new church trend: and there we were, in this little church filled with some of the most gracious and faithful people I have ever known, this church that would quickly fail any test of coolness, and it was in that context that all of the great things we were reading and thinking and studying received a bit of much-needed humility.

And while I can still be fiercely idealistic and hard-headed and critical when I think and talk and write about the church, I truly believe that that little congregation in downtown Spokane gave me some perspective on who God uses and the surprising ways that God can choose to work (even among the most unlikely and unglamorous) that has never left me and for that I am grateful. When I think about peers in seminary who went through their education without having a church “home”, relying on seminary and random internship experiences alone for the bulk of their ministerial formation, I shudder. I think that some of the trends we see of seminary grads lasting so few years in vocational ministry perhaps reflect that formational “homelessness”. All of those new ideas from shiny books by shiny authors, mean very little when divorced from real contexts of congregations made up of real people in communities with real histories. And when things fizzle, it is natural for the enlightened seminarian to give up on those communities that “just don’t get it”.

We need to do a better job moving through change TOGETHER. Allowing the young to lead; permitting the prophetic voices in our midst to speak; embracing new vision and direction that can come at a cost. And we need to do this in an “appreciative inquiry” sort of way where the experiences and narratives of the past are recognized, honored and built upon, not simply discarded as uncool.

“Christian leaders seem to be reluctant to restate the terms of discipleship that Jesus laid out. What are the reasons for our reluctance? We are afraid that if we ask too much, people will stop coming to our churches…So we start with a low bar and try to entice people by increments of commitment, hoping that we can raise the bar imperceptibly to the ultimate destination of discipleship. In our post-Christan world, the common wisdom is to lure seekers to our message by helping them see the faith’s relevance life’s daily challenges. This usually means appealing to self-interest, felt need, personal fulfillment or a person’s search for happiness…If we start with a no-pain gospel, then it will only become disillusioning, for it will not deliver what was promised.”

Greg Ogden in Transforming Discipleship 

We have remarked on more than one occasion about how fertile things seem to be around our apartment, from plants that flower or grow excessively to hummingbirds who nest and lay eggs (and no need to comment on the Haubs themselves). So it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise yesterday morning when Doug awoke to a new inhabitant of our fish tank: one of our fish, a Molly who we had joked looked pregnant, gave birth to a little tiny fish (and likely others who did not make it through the night). Doug managed to catch the little guy and save him from his hungry tank-mates. After a bit of reading, we are now up-to-date on how to care for our newest charge.

And really, Doug doesn’t have enough to do right now as it is…he could really use some additional caregiving responsibilities