Enchanted Community

BLOG 10/28/15. FORGET HALLOWEEN—I WANT TO CELEBRATE ALL SAINTS DAY.

There is probably no big celebration that shows our cultural mindlessness than Halloween. Actually, it is more of an occasion for our consumer culture to separate folk from their money than any kind of a meaningful observance. It gets the merchants warmed up for their commodification of Christmas, alas! Halloween’s genesis is a bit obscure. When the early medieval church was seeking to initiate its feast days, and at the same time trying to tune-in to the pagan cultures into which it was moving, they made All Saints/All Souls Day to be something of the counterpart of the harvest festival, but made it a time of remembrance of significant Christian persons at the same time (it’s all sort of foggy in historical perspective).

So the pagan culture came up with the night before All Saints as the time when the spirits of the dead came forth from their graves and roamed the earth, i.e., ghosts. That along with all of the demons, ghouls, witches, goblins, etc. This was their chance to make mischief before the church heralded the contribution of God’s unique people … something like that. It has become interesting and humorous at times—like Charlie  Brown sitting in the pumpkin patch.

I, however, being the contrarian that I am, refuse to observe Halloween. I want to reclaim All Saints Day. But that raises other questions: who are the true saints? According to the writings of New Testament apostle Paul, the answer is that all of God’s people are “called to be saints” (I Corinthians 1:2). All of those who embrace Jesus Christ as Lord are thereby called to be saints, or set apart for such a divine calling. A part of our misunderstanding comes from the Roman Catholic practice of naming only certain persons, who pass a set of criteria as the official saints of the church. In recent years we have seen them ‘beatify’ Mother Theresa of Calcutta, and Archbishop Oscar Romero, martyr of El Salvador. They are uniquely worthy of tribute I think, but the New Testament insists that they are no more saints than any of the rest of God’s people. In this century there have been probably more martyrs than in most of the church’s previous history. To be sure, I have kept an embossed copy of The Prayer of St. Francis (“Lord make me an instrument of thy peace”) in my Bible for , and reflect on it often. I love Francis and his passion for lepers, for nature, and so much more. But …

… my own cherished practice every year is to sit down with my prayer journal and to seek to recall all of the wonderful Christian people who have been instrumental in forming my Christian life as Christ’s disciples I keep coming up with more every year. Here were those whom I knew, or who significantly blessed and challenged me in my Christian walk. It would begin with my father, Virgil Henderson, who led me to faith and modeled it before me. It would certainly include my late wife Betty, who was my partner, my encourager, my intercessor for 58 years, and who probably kept me from self-destructing many times. The list also includes those who wrote those  books that  I have read and that formed the mind of Christ in me in unique ways (Herman Ridderbos, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Soren Kierkegaard, Roland Allen, Jessie Penn-Lewis, John Stott, and so many others–a weird assortment, but helpful at particular stages of my journey).

I want to come back to this on next Sunday in my next Blog, but for now I want to commend to you this practice of giving thanks for the saints whom you and I have known and have encountered in our own pilgrimage … “For all the saints, who from their labors rest … thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest.” (to be continued)

BLOG 10/26/15. THE LEGACY OF CHARLES E. FULLER

A week from today is the observance of (some of) the Christian church’s tradition of All Saints Day. I have been blessed for many years of using it to give thanks for the Christian folk who have been instrumental in my own Christian formation. One of those is Charles E. Fuller. Many today are quite aware of Fuller Theological Seminary, which has attained international status and has been marvelously fruitful over its history. At the same time, I find that very few are aware of Charles E. Fuller for whom it is named and who as the one instrumental in its founding. My vanishing generation may be the last to remember this remarkable man.

Charles Fuller was a businessman in California, who went to Bible school and ultimately became a Baptist minister. Along the way he founded a radio broadcast known as The Old Fashioned Revival Hour. Now, stop and take a moment to retrieve something of the cultural climate of those late 1930s. It was toward the end of the Dwight L. Moody-Billy Sunday era of popular ‘revival meetings’ which were gospel preaching events, often held in tents or pubic auditoriums. It was also the era when the theological ‘modernist-fundamentalist controversy’ was still very much in the air (what with the Scopes Trial, etc.).

All this said, here was Charles Fuller with a passion that people know Jesus Christ, and so he founded a radio broadcast (when radio was the media) produced in a studio in California, which became nationwide over the old Mutual Radio Network. But as he gained a following, and as World War II began, Charles E. Fuller had the foresight to move the Old Fashion Revival Hour to the large civic auditorium in Long Beach, California. He was an evangelist through-and-through. Stop think: those Southern California ports of San Diego, Long Beach, and Los Angeles were the point of embarkation for the tens of thousands of young men and women in our armed forces—a naval port from which our troops were being sent to what, at that time, was not at all a certain victory over a much better equipped and deployed Japanese navy and army. The possibility of death hung over that huge number of young adults, drafted out of their normal lives in our nation’s attempt to retrieve the security of our interests (not only in the far away places, but actually even the Pacific coast).

Fuller had a passion to see these young men and women know Jesus, and so to go to battle with a sustaining faith. He was modest and warm and simple in his presentation, but his invitations were fervent, sometimes emotional. Not only was he pleading with those soon to be employed service persons, but he was pleading with a radio audience to know and embrace Jesus. His preaching was accompanied by lively music, and by the reading of many letters of testimony by Fuller’s wife each week. They were a great testimony to the effectiveness

(Here is where my affection for him comes into the Blog. I was a spiritually hungry teen-ager whose local exposure to the faith was a fairly dismal Protestant church. So I became a devoted listener to the revival hour.) Untold thousands of service persons came to Christ. Charles E. Fuller became a rallying point for those of strong Christian and evangelical convictions. So after the war significant Christian leaders rallied around Fuller with the decision to establish a place to train gospel preachers and strong orthodox theologians, and hence the founding of Fuller Theological Seminary in the late 1940s. The first president was the renowned Harold John Ockenga, who was pastor of Park Street Church in Boston, who initially commuted to Pasadena as the seminary emerged. Fuller now is one of the most influential theological and missiological training schools in the world … though I have found many of its own current personnel don’t remember Charles E. Fuller. So on this All Saints 2015 observance I give my God thanks for Charles E. Fuller, and his passion for the message of God’s love for us in Christ.

BLOG 10/21/15. ‘ALIENS AND EXILES’ DWELLING IN A POLITICAL CONTEXT

These days the media almost overwhelm us with more political data, and evaluations, and prognostications than we really want, what with different factions vying for prominence. Actually this is nothing new. After all, the first generations of the church were lived in the context of the total domination of the Roman Empire. Christians were an outlawed cult, and frequently persecuted as the church witness to Jesus as God and Lord challenged Caesar’s claim to that title in the empire. It was in that context that Peter reminded the church that it was a holy nation living as ‘aliens and exiles’ within the hostile context of that empire. (It continues so in many places in the world today.)

Down through the centuries the church has often been co-opted by governments and empires, and has all too often forgotten that it is still a holy nation living as aliens and exiles in governments that demand loyalty, conformity, and so dangle ‘perks’ over the head of the church when it is loyal to whatever form the political reality is (empire, divine right of kings, republic, monarchy, tyranny, democracy, etc.). Sometimes these perks come in the form of tax-deductibility, or other enticing benefits for supporting the government. Then sometimes the government becomes tyrannical and seeks to exterminate the Christian community (we’re watching that especially in middle eastern nations today). In every historical period and in every different political context the church has to come to grips with its calling to be a community of light in the midst of the dominion of darkness, whatever form that darkness takes.

Thus is behooves Christian folk to stop once and a while and think through their calling to be a holy nation, to be a royal priesthood, to be aliens and exiles in the often confusing realities of their particular political setting. No nation is a ‘Christian nation.’ A nation may be significantly influenced by Christian folk in places of influence implementing moral and ethical standards that create a more humane and just society, . . . but that same polis can become hostile and obstructive if the Christian community becomes an effective opposition to its policies that are unjust, inhumane, destructive, and violate the church’s witness on behalf of peace. All too often the church succumbs to the demands of the empire and seeks to identify itself with the empire, or to co-opt the government for its own benefit. It is always complex and ambiguous.

In my own Presbyterian tradition there was that colorful and highly controversial moment in the 17^th century when the Roman Catholic king of England used his ‘divine right’ to seek to crush the emerging Protestant movement within the nation. He was totally unprincipled, horribly cruel, in his personal and public life, and it became intolerable. The Protestants then decided that enough was enough, and they organized an army, captured and beheaded King Charles and assumed the leadership of nation under the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. As one act of that brief period, there was called an assembly of all of the Protestant leaders to write up a unified confession of faith for all of the Christian entities. The assembly met at Westminster Abbey and wrote one of the historic creeds of the Christian church, called: The Westminster Confession of Faith. Chapter 25 of that confession holds a jewel that is the more understandable in the light of its historic setting, entitled: Of Civil Magistrate. It defines God’s good purpose (and limitations) for civil magistrate to bring peace, order, and justice to all of its citizens. It prohibits tyranny and misuse of government. (The British monarchy has never been the same since.)

As I read the news and pray for my own government in these colorful and controversial days, I look for what policies are being enacting that seek the welfare of all of its citizens? What policies are they instituting that promote peace and order and justice? After all, I am part of God’s holy nation. I am not primarily a citizen of these United States, but my priority is with the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ.

BLOG 10/18/15. AN ENCHANTED WORLD, LIKE IT OR NOT …

I was intrigued by the large number of visitors to my last blog: “It’s been lonely in the world since God died.” Even in a world that becomes increasingly secular, with no intellectual place for stuff like basing one’s life and morality on some notion of God or the afterlife, … there linger all of those unanswered longings for meaning, for acceptance, for hope. There is that meta-conscious sense that we are missing something. Exclusive humanism, or atheism, or agnosticism may be convenient escapes for a season but they don’t eliminate that sense that there is something (how to say it?) haunted about this present scene. One person describes such persons as: “Without hope, and without God in the world.”

I remember quite vividly two graduate students in physics with whom I had significant conversations many years ago. One of them, with an undergraduate degree from an elite Ivy League college, had a ‘bone in his teeth’ about Christians, and when he found out that I was one such, sitting over coffee with several of my companionable friends looking on, he took off on a diatribe against the whole Christian thing. When he stopped for a breath (my friends watching with fascination) I asked him if he had ever read the primary documents of the Christian faith? He was somewhat incredulous, and asked what they were. When I explained that even secular scholars accepted the four gospels of the New Testament as the primary sources if one was to understand what the Christian faith pertained to be (even if one did not believe a word of them). He was not even aware of them, and so certainly had not read them. I then asked him if he would ever make some dogmatic assertion in his doctoral dissertation without confirming footnotes into his sources? He admitted that he would not. So I quietly told him that it was difficult, then, for me to really have an intelligent conversation with him about the viability of the Christian position if he had never bothered to understand it’s own primary documents. He was chagrined, and I quietly proposed that he read up on them, and that I would love to continue the conversation with him. I never heard from him.

But another graduate student in physics (undergraduate from Amherst) at the same prestigious university was also a very aggressive agnostic, who took delight in making life miserable for professing Christians, but was also quite taken with one of his female colleagues in the same department, who was a professing Christian, and in spite of her rejection of his attempt to dissuade her of her Christian faith, had his full attention. Long story short, late one night I got a phone call asking if he could come to my home and talk with me. When he came I asked him the same question about his familiarity with the New Testament documents. He bit. I gave him a copy of the Bible and sent him on his way. Within a few weeks he came to me, thoroughly convinced of Jesus, was baptized and has had a long career as a physicist of profound Christian persuasion.

I relate all of this because there is that state of being, that meta-conscious border between physical reality and spiritual existence, where the border dissolves. There is discovered a spiritual self as the true reality (if that makes sense). It reminds one of the fascinating statement by the New Testament writer, that in Jesus Christ, the mystery hidden for the ages is now revealed. As has been said: “In meta-consciousness you shift effortlessly and spontaneously into a higher plane of being and state of awareness.” I am heralding Jesus as the door into a very healthy and enchanted life where we find our heart’s true home. If you never discovered this, It’s worth pursuing.

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BLOG 10/14/15. “IT’S BEEN LONELY IN THE WORLD SINCE GOD DIED!”

I can’t even retrieve the source of this whimsical bit of poetry, but it helps to explain why there is the phenomenon of the huge number of people, who regularly attend church services, and even join and participate in church institutions, who have no serious engagement with the life and teachings of Jesus, or intend to engage in a life of obedience as his disciples. Yet there they are in vast numbers. I can testify because I have inherited so many of them in my decades of pastoral experience.

I well remember being guest preacher in a neighboring Episcopal congregation and being approached by an appreciative parishioner at a coffee hour afterwards. When I asked about her engagement with Jesus Christ, her effusive response was: “O, Pastor Henderson, I haven’t believed in God for years, but I love the Episcopal Church and its ethos!” It was her connection with transcendence. Also my years of conducting a membership class for new members in which the message of Jesus Christ, and his terms of discipleship were the core and focus of the ten-week class, only to have these same persons come to the final session in which they state their own personal faith, and come up with something bland like: “I’ve always loved the church and believe that God is always near when I need him”—nothing to do with Jesus or his calling to be formed by his New Creation teachings.

Somewhere along the way, from probably the 19^th century and the modern era, a kind of endemic religious secularism has become the default position of our culture, and in too much of the church. There is a sense in which God and transcendence have become questionable. So, within the church are many folk who don’t operate from a presuppositional faith in Jesus. There has emerged what Dietrich Bonhoeffer termed: religious Christianity. Somehow the ghost of God lingers, and folk aren’t willing to outright deny his existence, but then they don’t want to forsake the church as somehow a lingering connection with transcendence.

There is the author who wrote: “I don’t even believe in God, … but I miss him.” There is a sense of emptiness that follows in the wake of the secularization of our culture. There is that lurking sense of something out there which haunts me, and us. So, just to cover one’s bases, and to make connection with some remnant of transcendence one adopts the excuse: “I am not religious, but I am spiritual.” One participates in church institutional life, perhaps quotes his/her rosary, and finds these meaningful in some indescribably way, but are not living faith in Jesus Christ.

Exclusive humanism, secularism, agnosticism, atheism, and some version of ‘spirituality’ are all faith positions in themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously. Of course the life of discipleship by which one’s behavior, one’s thinking, one’s relationships, and one’s whole life are formed by Jesus Christ and empowered by the God’s Spirit are also a huge  walk by faith, but are also based on a very clear sense that there is one God who has chosen to reveal himself powerfully in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This is unequivocally a faith-position, and it is this which is the foundation of the authentic Christian community. But this does not mean that there are not many who long for some connection with transcendence who will join and participate who have no dynamic personal connection with that faith, and so are that omni-present phenomenon of religious Christianity, i.e., participation without true faith.

When “God dies” it leaves a haunting emptiness, a disenchantment that consistent secularism in which God is excluded from all consideration is also an act of faith … which does not resolve the sense of haunted-ness and disenchantment which that faith position does not resolve. When one reads the New Testament gospels, one finds that Jesus consistently spoke to this hungering. “Come unto me and I will give you rest.”

BLOG 10/11/15. BEING A PEOPLE OF HOPE IN A CYNICAL CULTURE

We have watched, in the news of this past week, the chaos of the Republican Party as they have sought a speaker who eschewed bi-partisanship, and whose basic role would be to oppose anything in the platform the Democratic administration. This is not surprising. Our present culture has been described as all too cynical. It is easy to be negative in a cynical culture, and to demean anything that even attempts to find the positive solutions to human welfare, at home and abroad. Hope is brushed off to the margins and cynicism dominates.

The apostle, Paul, concludes his letter to the Roman Christians with a unique benediction: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may about in hope” (Romans 15:13). Commentator Gordon Fee remarked on the people who embody this hope: “As so confident in the future that they can pour themselves into the present with utter abandon, full of joy and peace, because nothing in the present can ultimately overwhelm them. Such people make the Christian faith a truly attractive alternative.”

Since the people of God in Jesus Christ, are to be those who live and operate as his New Creation people in the here and now, this text pertains in their workplace, in their homes, in their politics, in their neighborhoods, in their engagement with the cultural and social realities of daily life. Not much is accomplished by simply being against something. God’s people are not looking for escape from the social and humanitarian realities which stare us in the face every day. They are to be the children of the Light, people of hope. The psalmist says that those who seek God’s presence, and seek to be his faithful folk, leave behind them in desert places springs of water, pools in their footsteps. His people are not to be grim, judgmental, self-righteous religious figures, but rather those who are full of mirth and gladness.

I have a dear friend whose corporate title includes the description of her position as “strategic initiator,” which speaks to a better future. Don’t you love that? People who live their lives, perhaps ever so modestly, as those to whom others look for wisdom, for positive responses, for encouragement in doing what is good. The apostle could say with total modesty, that he encouraged others to be imitators of him, even as he was of Christ. He taught that in a believer’s daily existence there should be those fruits of God’s Spirit in him or her: love, joy peace, long-suffering, patience, etc.

Dear Lord, how we need such practitioners—not those claiming to be Christian who only want to go to heaven when they die, and certainly not those who make a career of finding things to judge and condemn, … but those who are people of hope living realistically with what are often frighteningly insoluble human and social dilemmas. Most of the worlds population live with such existential human hopelessness—which makes a people of hope even more like pools of water.

In my career as pastor in a very difficult blue-collar community, where economic existence was marginal, one of the sweet-spirited, gentle, quiet persons of hope was a self-trained auto mechanic (a “grease-monkey” as they were called). He and his wife had suffered a bitter tragedy in the difficult death of an infant child, and had found their refuge and strength in their trust in Jesus. In a Christian community composed of some very impressive, also some very ‘power-hungry’ individuals, … when the community was looking for wisdom they turned to this mechanic and his wife, who were modest and self-effacing to the core. Why? Because they were realistic people of hope. They were wise. Yes, there is much that is wrong with this broken world, but it is God’s people of hope who bring light into the darkness, whether in the mechanic’s garage, or in the Christian community, or in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. How we need hopeful “strategic initiators.”

“Such people make the Christian faith a truly attractive alternative” (Gordon Fee).

BLOG. 10/8/15. ‘UNBELIEF’ IS REALLY NOT A POSSIBILITY …

… at least not in the ordinary sense of that term. There is a brilliant Canadian philosopher who has written a very instructive work on this secular age, i.e., the one in which we live which is no longer wedded to the Christendom assumptions about God and the world, which previously prevailed. His thesis is that what prevails now is what he called exclusive humanism. The exclusive humanist rejects God from even his/her presuppositions about life and reality. We’re in this on our own. Or perhaps we could revert to the definition of secularism from an early twentieth century source: “The doctrine that morality should be based on regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life to the exclusion of all consideration drawn from belief in God or a future state” (George Holyoake).

That, of course is an option, but as our Canadian philosopher (Charles Taylor) describes it, it certainly does disenchant the world, and leaves a haunting vacancy. A poet (whom I cannot even track on Google) said in the mid-twentieth century: “It’s been lonely in the world since God died.” Or, as T. S. Eliot wrote in his Wasteland, the wasteland is not in some far off desert clime, but is sitting next to you on the commuter train.

Ah!  but exclusive humanism, or secularism, are also acts of faith. Atheism is also an act of faith, and one that is much more difficult to reconcile with the realities of life in this cosmos than is theism. Agnosticism is also an act of faith, and perhaps a more cowardly one in that it simply says that we cannot know, so why get all lathered up about religion.

Perhaps one of the most poignant descriptions of such ‘unbelief’ is Paul’s description of those “having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). Unbelief is a faith choice as much as is faith. It should mystify the exclusive humanist as to why the whole history of humankind has grappled in so many ways with the mysteries of this life and this world. To have been betrayed by some religious expression could and has turned many people bitter about its expressions. But one’s disillusioning experience of some religious doesn’t answer the ultimate sense of it all. In one sense, we are all like Walker Percy’s figure in Lost In the Cosmos seeking to make sense of it all. Everyone has some belief system, even a belief that there is not such belief system.

It is also no secret that there is a considerable population of exclusive humanists who inhabit church institutions, but who find the ‘spiritual’ ethos meaningful and somehow worth their involvement—but who have almost no conception of what it is that Jesus came to be and do that gives us light in this cosmic mystery. The apostle Paul, as a matter of fact, does indeed describe Jesus as the key to the mystery hidden for the ages but now revealed in Jesus’ coming as the revealer of God.

So we now have a population of thoe products of social networks, who go about fastened to their iPhones and oblivious to all that is beyond their personal welfare, and even indifferent to it. But when silence descends, and when one has time to reflect, … yes, the attempt to eliminate God and the revelation of God, and the glory of God evident is so many persons and situations and patterns … leaves in its wake that haunted world that Taylor speaks of. Yes, “it has been lonely in the world since God died” but that elimination of God is also a tragic act of faith in meaninglessness, hopelessness, and isolation. It is that very nightmarish condition that Jesus was continually speaking to. In this statement eludes you, try reading the New Testament accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus. You’re in for some surprises.

BLOG 10/4/15. RACISM, RECONCILIATION, AND HOSPITALITY

A couple of questions have come to me recently that elicit my engaging the whole theme of racism as an insistent one in our society, and especially for the church. One came from an older person wondering why our church was having a six-week encounter with the subject—wondering in all innocence what it had to do with the church. The other questioner was a dear, dear friend, and renowned black civil rights leader with whom I have ministered over many years. His question was how I became so ‘progressive’ having grown up in the segregated South?

This sort of inquiry has been back on our doorstep recently, what with the shooting inside the historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Racism is also not a southern phenomenon. It may be more overt in South what with its notorious history, and more clandestine in the North, but it is an everywhere reality. Prejudice in not new. In the early church, and through the centuries there has been that conflict between Jew and Gentile, and anti-Semitism is present right down into too much of our social discourse. It runs deep and is not easily expunged. Having grown up in a South in which everything was segregated, even though I have long since repented of it, there lurk deep in my sub-consciousness those attitudes and responses programmed there in my early life. This is a two-way street.

Racism is not resolved by political decrees, or progressive journalism. The Emancipation Proclamation eliminated the legality of slavery, …but it did not remove pathological racism. Historic tragedies such as the Ku Klux Klan exacerbated the existing racism for decades. Harry Truman’s eliminating segregation in the armed forces didn’t remove racism. Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights bill was a great step, but it didn’t terminate racism. The election of the gifted Barak Obama was an encouragement that we might have been making progress, but it only deepened the smoldering racist resentment of a visible segment of the electorate. Large church bodies have made impressive declarations on behalf of racial equality, but those were pretty much simply showpieces, window-dressing, and certainly did not change many hearts.

So let me come back of my own biographical pilgrimage and draw what I think to be a Biblically helpful proposal. I never had any serious one-on-one discourse with an adult black person until I was in my mid-twenties. I was ordained in 1954, the summer after the Brown-vs-the Board of Education declaration by the Supreme Court. I was in campus ministry at North Carolina State. Our Presbyterian students from the several colleges and universities in the state held an annual weekend conference. My first eye-opener was that there were almost no church-owned conference centers that allowed for integrated gatherings. When we found one (somewhat decrepit) I found myself bunking in a big dormitory room with black students from a couple of schools. Let me underscore that. That was the first time in my life I had ever had significant conversations with adult blacks, or been able to sit at table with them, or get into heartfelt discussions with them. It was there that my own racism became obvious to me. But don’t leave yet. Those of us who became thus ‘progressive’ were accused of all kinds of liberal-communistic tendencies and held suspect. In the intervening years I have found that the very most effective way to become ministers of reconciliation (to which all Christians are called) is in the ministry of hospitality, i.e., sitting across the table with each other, drinking coffee/beer with one another, having one another in each others’ homes. It is in such hospitable contexts that we, black and white brothers and sisters, can unburden ourselves to one another, can confess our sins and or racism to one another, and become authentically reconciled to one another in love. It will not happen in a study course or a pronouncement of some kind. Reconciliation that begins to heal our racism comes in our ministry to one another in the ministry of hospitality (frequently mentioned gift in the New Testament). It can be painful, and it can be slow, but I guarantee you . . . it is effective. Try it!

BLOG 10/1/15. APOLOGIES AND A GLIMPSE INTO THEMES TO COME

To my subscribers who have been so helpful in creating these blogs, I need to offer a brief word of explanation. I try to post two blogs per week, one on Sunday and one on Wednesday, since such regular posts are recommended by those who study these things. This week was a bit confused and interrupted by a security system with my blog site that I didn’t tune into, and so it got me into all kinds of complications. I think we’ve (my grandson and I) got this reconciled.

But it is also true that when I finally got access to my statistics, that the post of last Sunday obviously struck a chord with many of you and had a record number of visitors. This has to do with the secular-secular dualism that exists within the church, on one hand, and then has implications in the post-Christian culture of secular humanism on the other. I will be coming back to this regularly. It’s much on my mind. It is complicated by the fact that so much of the church’s ostensible worship is an escape from the existential realities of everyday life, rather than an equipping and energizing of God’s people to encounter it as the incarnations of God’s new humanity/kingdom knowledgeably and with Christ’s own passion.

When Jesus came, he inaugurated his Kingdom/New Creation, and that means that God’s age to come invaded (or maybe ‘backed into’) this present age. It is because of this that we pray: “Thy kingdom come/be coming, Thy will be done on earth as in heaven.” This is a here-and-now petition. It means that true worship must always be very ‘this worldly’ even though we know that there will ultimately be a consummation of it at the end of this age when God shall be all and in all. All too much of the church’s sense of the sacred focuses on “in the sweet by and by” rather than on being lights in the darkness in the realities of our personal and corporate lives—which darkness takes all kinds of subtle and malignant forms.

To be continued …

BLOG 9/27/15. THE ROLE OF THE LAITY, VIS-A-VIS CLERGY DOMINATION

It has been fascinating to watch the reports of Pope Francis’ visit to the United States, to see the obvious affection of so many for this unique figure. The populace obviously needs some hope and some good news, and the pope’s warmth and obvious touch with ordinary humans has been a gift in the midst of so much that is distressing in the news. But there’s an issue that lurks here that I want to speak to, and to hopefully speak to it constructively. I want to untangle the whole issue of the ministry of the laity in the church.

In one of Francis’ addresses in Philadelphia he stressed the urgency of the role of the laity in the church . . . but he did it in the context of all of those vested priests, and bishops, and seminarians. Therein lies something of a contradiction. Where in the New Testament documents is there any authorization for a sacralized class of persons who would control the church? Where? Where are there set apart persons, who alone could preside at the eucharist, or alone could baptize, or alone could hear confessions, or be the dominant figures in the church? Before Pope Francis, in Philadelphia today, would be hundreds of thousands of laity who would listen to him as though he was someone far more in touch with the divine than they. And that troubles me.

When he speaks of the necessity of the ministry of the laity in the church, what does he have in mind? Is he thinking of the role of the nuns (whom he commended) who serve but cannot be ordained to the priesthood? These would be, in my definition: church-ified laity, i.e., those who provided their skills keeping the inner workings of the church institutions going. . . . Or was he thinking in terms of the ministry of all the laity in their 24/7 incarnations in the midst of the human society/polis, what with all of its intracables and cultural challenges?

This is not a Roman Catholic problem alone. This is a point of confusion for a good part of the church. There is a clergy-seminary sub-culture that sees itself as the church’s elites, . . . something of a dominant segment of the church. French sociologist-theologian Jacques Ellul nailed this contradiction more than a half-century ago. He called the sacralization of a special class of people in the church to be one of the major ‘subversions’ of Christianity (the other being the sacralization of buildings as church sanctuaries—but that’s for another day). This exalting of a special clergy class surfaces frequently when those ostensible disciples of Jesus Christ will lament: “O, I’m just a layman.”

This issue surfaces periodically, but somehow the clergy domination relegates it again to relative obscurity. But ‘laity’ are the actual people of God, and by Peter’s own definition they are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and more (I Peter 2:9). Every believer in Jesus Christ is a priest, and has access to the God’s holy of holies through the sacrifice of Christ. No one is an ‘ordinary layman’ or someone inferior to some clergy-class of dominant ecclesiastical figures. So while I can appreciate the events and messages of Pope Francis’ visit, I have trouble with all of the vestments and accouterments of ostensible ecclesiastical authority visible in his public appearances. Pope John XXIII convened Vatican II, those decades ago, to allow “a fresh wind to blow through the church.” One of the contributions of that Vatican Council was the establishment of an office of the laity to be led by Sister Rosemary Goldie. For a season it looked hopeful, but then it disappeared in the Vatican bureaucracy. The World Council of Churches, likewise, periodically surfaces a priority on the ministry of the laity, but clergy domination seems to smother it. Every believer, no matter how humble, is one of God’s priests through Jesus, and God’s special person in his or her daily life, communicating the life and teachings of Jesus in flesh and blood. I’ll come back to this again. All God’s children are sacralized, and all are to be servants to one another, and to the world. We all are the very Body of Christ, the church, ordained at baptism.