Articles – Page 105 – Religion Online

Jewish Engagements with Christianity

Book Review: Christianity in Jewish Terms

Edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel and Michael A. Signer. (Westview).

A Christian who leads a Bible study for his teammates as well as pregame prayers with the New York Knicks recently raised hackles with his comments about Jews printed in the New York Times Magazine. "Jews are stubborn," he proclaimed to Times reporter Eric Konigsberg, adding, "Why did they persecute Jesus unless he knew something they didn’t want to accept?" Citing Matthew’s Gospel, Ward noted, "They had his blood on their hands."

Though this interchange was a small part of Konigsberg’s story, the words provoked an uproar from the league, the fans and the media, and it renewed a public conversation about Christian anti-Judaism. NBA commissioner David Stern condemned Ward’s religious views, asserting that "zealotry of all types is intolerant and divisive." Ward promptly apologized and agreed to open a dialogue with Yechiel Eckstein, president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Surely this is a story with a happy ending -- the sinner is brought to repentance and a dialogue will ensue which, presumably, will heal Ward of his zealotry.

Of course, the difficulty here is not only that Ward’s comments reflect a tradition of anti-Judaism that many Christians are trying to put behind them, but that Stern’s comments reflect the worst of liberalism’s policing of faith. In short, the real problem is not that Ward was too "zealous" but that his theology was corrupt. He is proof that despite recent changes in church teaching, the traditional stereotypes have not yet disappeared. Ward bothers liberals because he is too zealous; he bothers some of his fellow Christians because he reminds us of a past that we’d like to put behind us. However, the suggestion that we take our faith less seriously or believe it less strongly (à la Stern) only serves to trivialize both Christianity and Judaism. Rather, what we need, and perhaps what Ward will find in his dialogues with Eckstein, are opportunities for each tradition to engage and reevaluate the other while taking its own theological traditions seriously.

I recently taught a course in which we attempted just that. After examining the traditional Christian teaching of supersessionism -- that is, the belief that Christians have replaced the Jews as God’s chosen ones -- we surveyed some of the post-Holocaust Christian literature, from the groundbreaking Vatican II document Nostra Aetate to the many ecclesial statements and theological writings that have striven to revise Christian understandings of Judaism. We found that in the latter half of the 20th century Christian churches have proclaimed with near unanimity their rejection of supersessionism and their affirmation that God’s covenant with Israel has not been revoked.

The prospects for a new relationship between the church and Israel intrigued the students, for it seemed that we were entering a new era of dialogue and mutual recognition. So, to put the theory into practice, I invited a rabbi to come talk with the class. Expecting an enthusiastic affirmation of the new turn in Christian theology, we were surprised by the words of our guest. This Jewish teacher frankly saw no compelling reason for Jews to engage in dialogue with Christians. Yes, he said, we are happy that Christians no longer teach contempt for the synagogue, and yes, we are pleased with any efforts to end the persecution of Jews. But, he continued, it is not clear that Jews need an ongoing dialogue with or about Christians in the way that Christians seem to need to come to grips with Jews and Judaism.

While the students were a bit disappointed by this response, it was instructive and challenging to all of us. Was our Christian enthusiasm about a renewed relationship with Israel a one-sided affair? Was there, in fact, no reason for Jews to make similar gestures toward Christianity?

Responding to these kinds of questions, a group of Jewish rabbis and scholars issued a statement, "Dabru Emet" ("Speak Truth"), on the eve of Yom Kippur 2000. The statement, published in the New York Times and several other newspapers, was intended as "a thoughtful Jewish response" to the "dramatic and unprecedented shift" that has occurred in Jewish-Christian relations, not only through reformulation of Christian teachings but through explicit ecclesial statements of remorse on the part of both Catholics and Protestants. "Dabru Emet" offers a set of "brief statements about how Jews and Christians may relate to each other which include: "Jews and Christians worship the same God"; "Jews and Christians seek authority from the same book -- the Bible (what Jews call ‘Tanakh’ and Christians call the ‘Old Testament’)"; "Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon"; and "Jews and Christians must work together for justice and peace."

The hopeful work begun with "Dabru Emet" continues in Christianity in Jewish Terms. The editors of the volume, who are also signers of "Dabru Emet," believe that it is time for Jews "to acknowledge . . . recent changes in Christianity and to examine their implications for Jewish life in the Western world." The volume constitutes a milestone in Jewish-Christian dialogue and has set the agenda for future conversations.

Two central goals characterize the essays in this book. The first is to renew Jewish self-understanding through traditional rabbinic categories, and the second is to understand and interpret Christianity from within these categories. Together these goals serve to prevent any loss of identity to a homogenous "common ground," while they resist the tendency in public discourse, exemplified in the Charlie Ward episode, to seek harmony through the diluting of religious passion. In contrast, the methodology set forth by the editors opposes the relativizing of theological claims on the part of either dialogue partner. Only when we are clear about our own patterns of life and belief will we be empowered to embrace the other without fear that this will mean a loss of our traditions.

That this fear of being subsumed by Christianity lingers among Jews today is not surprising given that until recently "dialogue" with Christians, the wielders of cultural and political power, usually involved more polemic and proselytizing than understanding and cooperation. But the demise of Christian cultural power has changed the landscape for Jewish-Christian dialogue. It has effected a shift of attention among Christians from an infatuation with the dominion of "the nations" to a recovery of the significance of God’s people Israel. It has likewise produced a situation for the Jews in which they may engage Christians not as a political threat but as fellow travelers on the path of blessing.

The book is organized around a selection of theological loci that Jews and Christians hold in common: God, Scripture, Commandment, Israel, Worship, Suffering, Embodiment, Redemption, Sin and Repentance, and Image of God (the lack of a chapter devoted to Messiah and Eschatology is a puzzling omission, though the chapters on Embodiment and Redemption do touch on these issues). Each chapter consists of two essays by Jewish writers, who seek both to clarify Jewish teaching on a topic and to give a Jewish account of the corresponding Christian teaching. A Christian writer then responds to the previous essays by answering the questions, "Do I recognize my Christianity in what has been written?" and "What is the significance of Judaism for my understanding of Christianity?"

Many of the essayists seek common ground between Jews and Christians on the basis of our common enemies: a growing secularism that trivializes religion and a marketplace that turns religion into a commodity of personal preference. Given that these trends threaten Jews and Christians alike, we have reason to join forces as countercultures that seek not so much to remake the other in our image as simply to sustain our witness in a hostile environment. As David Novak puts it, "In this age of secularism both Christians and Jews must learn how to sing the song of the Lord God of Israel in the new exile (galut) in the strange land of contemporary society. Our relationship is therefore more than ‘interreligious’ in the usual sense of that term. For better or for worse, we have never really been without each other. And, now, we need each other in new and surprising ways."

Some writers in the volume, including Irving Greenberg, hope or even expect that Christians and Jews might be able to confront secularism and work toward the healing of creation with a united moral vision. The Jewish basis for this hope lies especially in the Noahide Laws, a set of seven laws binding upon all humanity that were, according to rabbinic tradition, given to Noah. Thus, a gentile who follows the Noahide Laws is considered righteous by Jews. According to David Novak, these laws form a kind of natural law within Judaism.

Yet, as Elliot Dorff points out, the apparent agreement on issues such as idolatry, killing innocent life, and sexual immorality belies deep interpretive differences, not only between but within religious traditions. "Even if other faiths prohibit those things, they may not interpret them the same way or give them the same degree of emphasis as Judaism does. For that matter, within and among Christian and Jewish denominations themselves, past and contemporary debates abound as to the scope of those prohibitions; so, for example, in our own time, homosexual sex has been hotly debated within many Christian and Jewish groups. Thus, contrary to Professor Novak’s claim, these prohibitions cannot constitute a strong and clear basis for interfaith -- or even intrafaith -- commonality."

I quote Dorff at length because his comments raise questions not only concerning Jewish and Christian ethics, but concerning the project of the volume as a whole. What sense can it make to seek dialogue or commonality between "Judaism" and "Christianity" when we are unable within each tradition to reach agreement on many central issues of faith and practice? Because of this ambiguity it is not always clear in each set of essays which Judaism is dialoguing with which Christianity (and with 32 contributors the ambiguity is only heightened!). Further complicating the matter is the perhaps overly ambitious agenda of the volume -- attempting not only to engage in Jewish-Christian dialogue from the perspective of Judaism, but, at the same time, to renew Jewish self-understanding and provide Christian responses.

Of course, all these issues are indeed interrelated, and we do, in fact, need to bring these voices together for reflection. But for the reader the volume lacks a sense of flow or unity because with each essay one has to determine not only how the Jewish writers are thinking of Christians and how the Christian writer is understanding Jews but what kind of Jew and what kind of Christian are being brought together in this particular chapter. This observation may not be so much a critique of the volume as it is a confession that these kinds of conversations are always messy and rarely produce anything like "consensus." What we might rather hope for, as Stanley Hauerwas suggests, are the discoveries of analogies between the traditions that might help Jews and Christians alike "survive in a world that is not constituted by the recognition much less the worship of our God." Or, to put it differently, what we are to look for in these dialogues is not a single voice or a unified witness but, as Lawrence Hoffman suggests, an exploration of the root metaphors that we share in common, such as covenant, paschal offering and saving blood.

One of the most significant essays in the volume, the concluding Christian reflection by George Lindbeck, helps us see precisely how the recognition of analogies and shared metaphors can in fact empower a community to live its own tradition more faithfully. He suggests that what is needed by Christians today is not only the rejection of supersessionism but also a reclaiming of the understanding of church as Israel. While this may seem paradoxical -- if the church is now Israel, doesn’t that imply that the Jews are not? -- Lindbeck believes that in fact there can and should be an appropriation of a shared identity with the Jews that refuses to be an expropriation or commandeering of Israel’s identity. The best way Christians can resist the "pervasive pluralistic consumerism destructive of all enduring traditions and communities . . . is the reappropriation without expropriation of the church’s roots in Israel and Israel’s scriptures. For this task, Christians need the help of the original proprietors, and both parties will find that both the distinctiveness and the depth of their respective roots in the shared sacred text are increased rather than diminished by their collaboration." Only as a people that understands itself to be elected for witness will the church (and synagogue) be able to withstand the pervasive voluntarism that would turn their communities into mere voluntary associations. At its best, Jewish-Christian dialogue will help each tradition interpret and embody its own witness to the God of Israel and the Abrahamic covenant.

Lindbeck’s distinction between appropriation and expropriation could have come in handy during the recent fracas over Johnny Hart’s B.C. comic strip. On Easter Sunday Hart’s comic depicted a menorah being extinguished candle by candle, frame by frame, as the seven last words of Jesus were recalled. In the final frame the menorah becomes a smoldering cross, and in a nearby cave (an empty tomb), bread and wine are set at a table with the words "Do this in remembrance of me." Some outraged Jewish readers took offense, assuming that the comic was meant to suggest Christianity’s extinguishing and replacing of Judaism. These readers interpreted the comic as a Christian "expropriation" of Israel’s identity and traditions. Hart, on the other hand, responded by denying any implication of a "replacement theology" in the strip. He explained, "I noticed one day that the center section of the menorah -- the sacred symbol of Judaism -- bore the shape of the cross. I wanted everyone to see the cross in the menorah. It was a revelation to me that tied God’s chosen people to their spiritual next of kin -- the disciples of the Risen Christ."

What Hart thought he was doing was what Lindbeck called "appropriation," the acknowledging of shared symbols and stories, even a shared identity as God’s people that does not extinguish the Jews but upholds them as partners in the covenant. Lindbeck’s linguistic clarification might have provided the two sides with the conceptual tools necessary to move the exchange in a more constructive direction.

What is needed still, as David Sandmel notes in the conclusion of the volume, is for the conversation and corresponding trust to filter down from the relatively small group of (largely academic) Jews and Christians to people in the pews. This is as true of Charlie Ward as it is of the rabbi who spoke to my class. "Traditional mistrust and misunderstanding are still very much alive within each community. As important as this pioneering theological exploration is -- and I believe it is very important -- expanding the circle of dialogue is equally important. This expansion will not be easy." What will be necessary is the patience to sustain conversations that may not produce agreement, indeed may exacerbate disagreement, but which will in the end, God willing, make us friends.

And let us not underestimate the importance of friendship, for, as Hauerwas notes in his essay, "God intends nothing less than to make us His friends and, therefore, friends with one another." Such friendship with each other may in fact be our best hope for tikkun olam -- the healing of the world. This volume, breaking new ground in its Jewish reappraisals of Christianity, contributes richly to this goal.

Information Technology in Congregations

Has the advent of the Internet and computer led congregations toward the "virtual technology church," undermining the face-to-face relationships that have long characterized congregational life? Two recent studies, one supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the other by the Indianapolis Center for Congregations, suggest not. The vast majority of congregations using and experimenting with computer technology and the Internet are not promoting aberrations of Christian or congregational life. Rather, they are using computer technologies to enhance and promote traditional ministries: worship, fellowship, pastoral care, education, mission and community outreach, evangelism and communications.

Congregations are using computer technology primarily in these areas: administration and finance, communications, learning labs, and multimedia presentations for worship and education.

•Administration and finance. Congregations have been using Congregational Management Software (CMS) since the early 1980s. A host of companies market CMS packages designed to aid churches in budgeting and accounting, tracking members and constituents, cataloging volunteer interests and gifts, recording attendance and scheduling activities. Thousands of congregations are functioning more efficiently and effectively because they use CMS technology.

We have worked with scores of churches that had, for instance, until recently kept a typewritten list of members in the church office, financial records in a software format on the volunteer treasurer’s home computer, and correspondence on the church secretary’s PC, with no effective way to share or integrate the information each cache contained. (And the person most often left in the dark was the pastor.) Any of the major CMS packages can help consolidate and integrate such information.

These databases can do much more than provide mailing labels for the church newsletter. One church, for example, keeps on its database significant dates in the lives of its members and families. This reminds the pastoral staff of important occasions that might be forgotten if left to faulty human memory. By tracking the date of the death of a spouse, for instance, CMS can remind pastors to call or to send a letter or card to the widow or widower on the anniversary of the loss. CMS is also widely used to track members’ financial stewardship, and the database provides an easy way to document members’ contributions at tax time.

Database and management software also assists churches as they engage in outreach and mission. A Missionary Baptist church in Indianapolis has for years been giving away thousands of pairs of shoes to children in need with the help of a network of retail stores that donate surplus inventory. But because the church had no effective way of tracking the names, addresses and circumstances of the children from year to year, families had to take the initiative to find the program. The church is now using a sophisticated database system, installed on laptop computers, to keep track of donors and recipients. It now can keep inventory information about the shoes, track information about each child in the program from year to year, and take the initiative in ministering to the families. The church is also considering ways to use this information to provide other ministries to these families.

•Communications. Desktop publishing has allowed churches to improve the quality and appearance of worship bulletins, newsletters, correspondence, flyers, posters, sermons and other educational or devotional materials. But the most important computer technology for congregational communications is e-mail and other Internet-related modes of communication. A whopping 91 percent of the respondents in the Pew report "Wired Churches and Wired Temples" said that e-mail has helped clergy and church members to promote fellowship and community-building communication and is used for such typical parish activities as sharing prayer concerns, coordinating committee meetings and providing spiritual advice and support.

When the pastor of a United Methodist church in Indianapolis asked during a worship service if anyone would be interested in receiving a weekly devotional e-mail, he was flooded with e-mail addresses from members who wanted to take part in the ministry. These members began to forward the devotions to their friends, neighbors and co-workers, launching an unexpected ministry that has grown into a significant outreach for the church. This ministry has opened many opportunities for witness, counseling and inviting people to take part in the church’s fellowship life.

The influence of e-mail on internal communications, particularly among church staff, is also significant. (Again, in the Pew study an overwhelming 97 percent of respondents from churches with "high access" to Internet communications said that e-mail "helped congregational staff and members stay in touch.")

A large Baptist church had seven staff members, all with computers and printers on their desks -- but each computer had its own modem and phone line, requiring each staff person to access his or her own personal America Online account to use e-mail. Because of schedules, the mixture of part-time and full-time staff, and the scattering of staff offices all over the vast church building, communication between and among staff was entirely ad hoc, ineffective and inefficient. Their computers were incompatible, and the staff members thought that they were incompatible with each other as well. When the church installed new computers connected to a local area network and to an Internet service provider, the staff was astonished at how much its internal communications improved. Moreover, the monthly fee to connect the church as a whole to the Internet was much less than the individual AOL accounts had been.

• Learning Labs. To our surprise, a quarter of the congregations that applied to the Indianapolis Center’s computer grants program wanted either to establish or to improve a learning lab. Many of them wanted to use the lab both as an outreach program for the surrounding community and as a tool for Christian education within the congregation. African-American churches that serve impoverished urban areas argue compellingly that many kids in their neighborhoods are left out of the "digital revolution" because they do not have home computers. Labs in these churches, available for after-school and other programs for youth, can help close this digital divide.

But many parishes and synagogues recognize that the digital divide is generational as well as economic. Some churches are establishing labs for senior citizens as well as for seniors in high school. It is not uncommon for a church computer lab to be used in the mornings by elderly people who are learning to e-mail their grandchildren and in the evenings by a youth group playing Bible software games. In one church’s computer lab, the youth group serves as the teachers and the senior citizens are the students. While worship issues often divide churches along generational lines, many congregations are finding ways for computer technology to bridge generational divides.

Parishes and churches that run parochial schools are working especially hard at using computer labs. One large Catholic parish in Indianapolis is designing a new library featuring a computer lab to serve both parish and school. The church envisions it as a place where young and old, parishioner and student are all engaged in the common task of growing in knowledge and in faith.

• Multimedia presentations for worship and education. This is the glitziest application of computer technology, one that even very traditional congregations are seeking to use. Software such as Powerpoint, coupled with projectors or large-screen televisions, are increasingly being used to replace worship bulletins, provide visual sermon outlines, display songs and music, and show illustrative video clips (now cataloged and available through several companies that provide video illustrations online). Similar multimedia applications -- assisted by ever-expanding numbers of software programs -- are being used more and more in congregational education programs. Awkward (and often outdated) pull-down maps for Sunday school classes, for example, are being replaced by software-generated images of the ancient Near East, whereby Bibles students can trace the missionary journeys of Paul or follow the exodus route of the Israelites. Classrooms of children can take part in an interactive encounter within Noah’s Ark, face down lions with Daniel, or take part in a host of other games that enhance biblical literacy. As one church in Indianapolis advertises, "This is not the church you grew up in!"

Presentation technology may be costly not only in money but in time, in energy and in the conflict it ignites in many churches. Yet most churches are motivated to use this technology not by its entertainment value but by its strategic effectiveness. One very traditional Baptist church in Indianapolis, for instance, decided that it was not effectively bringing the message of Christ to younger people and that its worship practices would need to be changed. The church’s decision to use multimedia technology in a new alternative worship service was driven not by the desire to appear relevant or up-to-date, but "to find the most effective ways of communicating the gospel." "Using these technologies was one way to do that," the pastor explained.

Though some of the splashier and more publicized experiments of the "wired church" attract the most attention and concern, most congregations that use computer technology are simply trying to make the ministries in which they are already engaged more effective, attractive and applicable to the lives of the people they serve, especially the young, for whom these technologies are as familiar a part of everyday life as using the telephone -- a mobile unit, that is. Whether or not churches will or should use computer technology is no longer the question. The real question is how congregations can best use these technologies to enhance their communities and missions.

Gen X Revisited

A statistic: only about 30 percent of people born between 1964 and 1978 -- that is, 30 percent of so-called Gen Xers -- belong to a church. Ubiquitous media reports say that’s not because we aren’t spiritually inclined. We are.

We’re seekers. We meditate. We go to Sufi dancing on Tuesday nights. We read books like Finding Your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up with Has Lost Its Meaning. But we’re famously hostile to institutions.

There’s no shortage of Gen Xers testifying to that anti-institutionalism. Tom Beaudoin, in his much ballyhooed book Virtual Faith, says Xers are "uncomfortable" with tradition, obsessed with personal experience to the point of being solipsistic, and suspicious of institutions, especially organized religion. Writing in First Things, Sarah Hinlicky contends that Xers believe in little and feel nothing but contempt for "anything that smacks of the Establishment." (Curiously, perhaps, those two Xers seem happily settled into pretty institutional Christian lives -- one as a budding Catholic theologian, the other a budding Lutheran minister.)

But if you meet some real, live Xers, you might find yourself wondering about that anti-institutional stuff. Geri Hampton, 29, didn’t set foot in a church until she was 22. Raised by "aging hippies," she saw just about every spiritual tradition but the church by the time she was in high school. "My parents hung out with a Jewish chavurah, got real serious into meditation, practiced Tai Chi, went to a sweatlodge, had a Hindu guru for a while." When Geri headed East to college, she wanted nothing to do with her parents’ "spiritual merry-go-round."

Then, her senior year, Geri’s roommate was diagnosed with leukemia. "That really put things in perspective quick," she says. "I began to think that there had to be something more than just school and dates and parties and drinking and me!" But Geri didn’t follow mom and dad’s example. "I have a great deal of respect for my parents," she says. "But their way just doesn’t make any sense to me. The minute something seems tough or loses its thrill, they just switch. That would be like changing jobs every eight months, or getting married 18 times."

So Geri began attending an American Baptist church. "My mother’s parents were Baptists, so even though I wasn’t raised in that tradition, I just felt like it was my tradition. I was baptized six months after I first heard a sermon, and, even though I haven’t always been thrilled with the church, I have stuck with it, and I will stick with it."

Geri probably isn’t alone. "When it comes to spirituality," says Michael Leach, head of Orbis Publishers, "young adults are connected to institutions, plain and simple." (To capitalize on that connection, Leach is developing a line of books written by Xers for Xers, including a series of devotionals by Therese Johnson Borchard and a book by Jeremy Langford on the Catholic experience.)

It’s difficult to trace that trend in numbers, says the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Colleen Carroll, currently at work on a book about Gen X religion. "This is not an area that lends itself to statistics," she says. But Carroll, whose book will "document and analyze a return to religious tradition in Gen X," says that both "traditional morality and traditional religious devotion are up" among Xers.

Some numbers are available to bolster Leach and Carroll’s claims. According to a 1999 study by pollster George Barna, "baby busters" (Barna looked at those born between 1965 and 1983) are more likely to attend church on a given Sunday than their parents -- 42 percent to 34 percent. In a given week, only 30 percent of baby boomers read the Bible, edged out by 36 percent of busters. And 80 percent of busters, in contrast to just 70 percent of boomers, pray.

That those practices are on the rise is no news. New York publishers are tripping over each other to turn out snappy prayerbooks. Christians increasingly speak of going to their spiritual director, as though it were as ordinary as going to the hair dresser.

Talk to the authors of those prayerbooks or the spiritual directors themselves, though, and they will tell you that their readiest clientele is under 35. Phyllis Tickle, author of a new breviary called Divine Hours, says that only in the last few years have many Christians begun to get the hang of spiritual disciplines and spiritual formation. "When one talks about the spiritual world as a landmass, a territory to be navigated, one is talking a very foreign kind of concept -- not foreign to those under 30, thank God for Xers -- but to those over.

Randy Reese, coauthor of Spiritual Mentoring: A Guide for Seeking and Giving Direction, says that when talking to folks over 35, he is careful to talk about "spiritual friendship" and "spiritual mentoring," not spiritual direction. "Younger adults are perfectly comfortable with spiritual direction, both the name and the practice. They are very receptive to it." But with baby boomers and seniors, Reese says, "you can encounter some resistance that just isn’t there" with Xers.

And those Xers are usually approaching spiritual direction and lectio divina within the context of church membership and worship -- not as salad-bar add-ons to their yoga and Sufi dancing. MaryLynne Camden, a spiritual director in Westchester County, New York, says that her directees over 40 "are often unchurched, just exploring, and this is their exploration of the year. But all of the Xers she directs "are committed members of a church community. It is a blessing to see. Direction can help a person pray even if she is not a member of a church, but it really makes the most sense as the saints conceived it -- as part of an organic, committed Christian life."

Not satisfied with recovering ancient prayer disciplines, Xers are also increasingly drawn to an even more outmoded concept: denomination. What could be deader than denominations? Who even remembers what the theological differences between Methodists and Presbyterians were, back in the days when folks argued over quaint issues such as sprinkling versus full immersion?

Harrington Bob, who leads the 20s-and-30s group at his Virginia church, says he sees a surge in "younger adults being really interested in the history of their given church, in wanting to know some of the theology behind it, what differentiates us Presbyterians from Lutherans or Methodists." It is refreshing to see, says Bob, after years where "cartoonists joked that the only thing that separated one church from another is which had a swimming pool or which had better day care. Of course, there is still a lot of that, but it is exciting to reclaim our denominational heritage."

Colleen Carroll has observed a return to "the traditions of a particular denomination." Xers, she says, continue to cross denominational lines: young believers who are serious about their faith often find that they have more in common with theologically orthodox folk in other denominations than with liberals in their own church. But at the same time they are attracted to "practices of personal piety that may be associated with a particular tradition or denomination." Young Catholics, she notes, are "getting into eucharistic devotion, wanting to pray the rosary. There’s not so much of an ecumenical feel." Xers’ parents, she says, may have rejected those practices as meaningless ritual, but "since we weren’t raised with it, the rosary isn’t rote for us."

So why the low membership figure of 30 percent? Why aren’t more Xers in church? Perhaps they are not so much wary of institutions themselves as wary of institutions that don’t do what they are supposed to do. Nathan Humphries, chaplain at the Washington Episcopal School in Bethesda, Maryland, and editor of Gathering the Next Generation : Essays on the Formation and Ministry of Gen-X Priests, puts it like this: "Many people will say I’m spiritual but not religious because their primary experience of Christian communities has been an experience of hypocrisy. Xers’ skin crawls when they meet boomers who water down the gospel and reduce it merely to a social justice message rather than integrating that message with the proclamation of Jesus Christ."

Often, says Humphries, "a seeker from my generation will go to a church expecting it to be a Christian church, and the first thing they get is the PR message: ‘Oh, well, we’re Christian, but it’s not all that important.’ That was a marketing strategy that got Boomers into the church, but it’s counter to what Xers want."

Carroll says that one piece of the media hype about Xers may be true: we were raised to distrust institutions. Like Humphries, Carroll sees that trait translating into a hatred of hypocrisy. "If you aren’t living it, don’t preach it," she says, "and if I’m preaching it, I’m going to live it." The flip side, then, of a distrust of institutions is a strong personal witness. "That is why young people take morality seriously," says Carroll. "If they are going to say something in church, they are going to live it, too."

If this analysis is correct, churches that want to lure Xers should give up their glitzy, poppy entertainment strategies and stick with the elements of tradition. Some Xers, of course, may like synthesizers and hymns that were written last week, but many Xers like what Geri Hampton calls "the comfort of something older. Even if you are new to the church, and these hymns aren’t familiar to you, you know the difference between something from the 19th century and something that sounds like elevator music."

Xers want the substance, not the packaging. If we want hip-hop, we can go to Tower Records, and if we want coffee bars, we can go to Starbucks.

Second, churches should question the conventional wisdom that people come back to church when they have kids. For good or for ill, Gen Xers marry later and have children later than their parents. Olivia Hunt, a seventh-generation Episcopalian, searched for a church for months before finding one she could stick with. She says she found that church activities for folks under 40 were geared toward families with kids. Hunt’s not looking for church to organize a singles’ bowling league -- just to recognize that for many folks, there’s a decade or more between graduating from college and having children. "Don’t make us wait till we’re 35 to come to church!"

Finally, churches can preach the gospel. Xers want their churches to be churches, not soup kitchens. People come to church, after all, looking for spiritual food -- they shouldn’t leave feeling like they have to go to an ashram to find it.

As Nathan Humphries says, churches that have catered to sociologists’ accounts of what Boomers want (comfort) and what they don’t want (doctrine) won’t ever get Xers into the pews. "The churches have said, ‘We’ll just water ourselves down until the other person feels comfortable says Humphries. "That’s the boomer idea of hospitality. But that’s not hospitality. It says that people are ashamed of what they are. An Xer sees that and says, ‘You’re watering it down. I guess you’re ashamed."’

After Divorce

Book Review:

Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. By Elizabeth Marquardt, 288 pp.

Elizabeth Marquardt’s book sat on my shelf for many weeks. I really wanted to read it. I had heard about her research and had been intrigued. Yet I kept avoiding actually opening the book. It does not take a shrink to tell me I was avoiding it because I didn’t want to take a look into this particular mirror.

My parents divorced when I was in grammar school, and I sometimes feel I have spent my adulthood defensively living out an alternative to gloomy predictions about the myriad ways divorce harms kids. I think I turned out just fine, thank you. And if you dare suggest that I am an overachiever because I am trying to make up for something I didn’t have in childhood, I will snap your head off before you get a sentence out.

Indeed, sometimes I feel so defensive abut my childhood that I find myself refusing to admit that my parents’ divorce had any impact on me whatsoever.

I hesitate to speak about how the divorce affected me for a variety of reasons. First, it seems like Oprahesque, therapeutic whining. I am well aware that I grew up with many advantages, and it seems ridiculous and ungrateful to natter on about my "broken home" when lots of folks had it a good deal worse. Second I have never wanted t talk to either of my parents about my occasional, fleeing insights into the ways their divorce shaped me; I prefer to maintain the polite fiction that was all was well, that everyone did the best he or she could, there is not place in our family story for blame or regret, let along repentance.

Finally, I bristle when someone tries to explain everything in my life – starting with my religious peregrinations – as a reaction to the divorce. I am so determined not to have my autobiography reduced to post-divorce acting-out that I often find myself at another absurd extreme, an extreme in which parent’s choices have no impact on their kids whatsoever, as extreme in which I am exactly the person I would have been had I been born to June and Ward Cleaver.

I know my defenses are ridiculous and false, not to mention prideful. When I can clear my head, when it is just god and me or my journal and me, I can admit the obvious: that yes, of course, even in the most amicable divorce, even when parents don’t turn their kids into chess pieces, even when divorce does not spell economic disaster for the custodial mom, even then divorce indelibly marks children.

When I finally sat down with Marquardt’s book I found that although I didn’t see myself in every page, an awful lot of what she had to say resonated. I even learned that my very defensiveness is typical of children whose parents have divorced.

Between Two Worlds is the fruit of a three-year Lilly Endowment-funded study, the Project on the Moral and Spiritual Lives of children of divorce, which Marquardt codirected with sociologist Norval Glenn of the University of Texas at Austin. Marquardt is interested principally not in the obvious damage that divorce inflicts on some kinds – those kids who never managed to graduate from high school, who get addicted to meth and who have unavoidable, debilitating emotional scars. Her focus is the sadness that lurks beneath the success of even the most highly functioning children of parents who divorced. (I realize the "children of parents who divorced" is a bit clunky, but I have always hated the phrase "children of divorce." I am the child of two people who, among other things, got divorced.) Marquardt’s point is that even kids who grow up to be "successful" suffer enduring consequences from their parents’ divorce.

Two-thirds of people who grew up with married parents "strongly agree" that "children were at the center of my family." Whereas only one-third of people whose parents divorced say the same.

Children with divorced parents are far more likely to be physically or sexually abused than children whos parents aren’t divorced. As adults they are far more likely to say that as children they felt physically unsafe.

If your parents are divorced, you are more likely, when asked about your ideas of home, to talk about your "stuff," your possessions. You might recall coming home after mom or dad moved out and finding a bunch of your stuff gone. Or you’ll talk about schlepping stuff back and forth from one parent’s house to the other. Or you’ll say you never really felt at home at one parent’s house because most of your stuff was at the other parents.

After living through a divorce, children are more likely to feel morally adrift, to become what Marquardt terms "moral forgers," people who both forge their "own values and beliefs" in the "intense heat" of their inner life and are forced to cut their own path "through the forest of contradictions between parents’ ways of living." Unlikely to receive strong moral instruction from parent – not because divorced people are immoral, but because divorced people are less likely to be able to agree upon and form their kids in a single, share vision of the world – kids with divorced parents tend to be less religious than people who grew up with married parents. Though people whose parents divorced "feel just as spiritual as people from intact families." They are less likely to think of institutional religion as "relevant. Yet, intriguingly, if your parents are divorced you might wind up more religious than your parents, because you tend to look toward a faith tradition for moral or spiritual guidance you did not get at home.

And finally, one quirky but telling finding: kids whose parents are divorced typically make a bigger deal out of their parents’ birthdays, especially thir mothers’ birthdays, that do kids whose parents are married. That seemingly small detail is incredibly revealing – it captures the ways that children that children whose parents are divorced have to assume adult responsibilities, even the role of pseudospouse, with their parents.

There’s something all-around sad about the picture of little Susie working had to remember her mom’s birthday, saying her whole allowance for weeks to buy her a pair of earrings and a cupcake, and then singing solo, though with great gusto, when presenting said cupcake to mom. Susie shouldn’t have to do all this herself – dad should be there to take charge of the celebration.

Contemporary America, says Marquardt, has embraced the myth of the "good divorce." While obviously an amicable divorce is preferable to an embittered one, even children of "good divorces" experience more stress, more loneliness and more confusion than children whose parents are married, and even children of "good divorces" are forced to become mature and independent far earlier in their childhood than other kids. "The stories of children of divorce," wites Marquardt, "show it is wrong and misleading to describe our experience as ‘good.’"

The point of Between Two Worlds is neither to heap guilt upon divorced people nor to insist that no one should ever get divorced. "Divorce is a vital option for ending very bad marriages," she writes. Rather, Marquardt says that we need to stop fooling ourselves about the toll divorce takes on kids. It may make divorcing parents feel better to insist that as long as they divorce without a protracted, ugly custody battle, the kids will be unscathed. That idea may soothe all of us who are complicit in a culture that generally condones divorce. But this self-deluding palaver about "good divorces" harms children. If Marquardt’s book is unlikely to single-handedly stem the tide of divorce, it will at least force us to be honest about the effects of divorce on kids – and knowing more about what children are living through, perhaps we can do more to help.

More than Enough

The vocation of the church is to celebrate the politics of love. That may sound curious. What does the gentle, touching gift of love have to do with the ugly, underhand machinations of politics?

Most people think of politics as a regrettable but necessary business. Necessary, because we live in a world of scarce resources, there are many of us, and our needs, interests and desires conflict. We need agreements as to the fair distribution of these limited goods, and an established authority to ensure the policing of those agreements. It is regrettable, because in the fight over these scarce resources, each of us fears being revealed as greedy, insecure, envious and deceitful.

Now imagine a different kind of politics. First, consider the things that really matter in this world. St. Paul lists them: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. There is no need for an unseemly scrap over the distribution of these things, because they are not in short supply. Yet I can have enormous sums of money, as many clothes, houses, cars and university degrees as I like, but if I don’t have the things St. Paul is talking about, the other things are no good to me. And if I have love, joy, peace and the like, it doesn’t matter how much I have of the other things. St. Paul’s world still involves politics -- but politics of a different kind. Instead of carving up a limited cake, politics becomes the shared discernment of the best use of God’s gifts. It is no longer a zero-sum game. My good no longer requires your loss, because the things we want are things that everyone can have.

Although we live in the richest society in the history of the world, we still assume that there is not enough. Not enough life, not enough food, not enough entertainment, not enough happiness. This keeps our economy going. The truth is the opposite. There is too much. We are overwhelmed, and our imaginations can’t take it all in. There is limitless beauty for us to wonder at. There is truth to explore -- not just the dimensions of science or the ponderings of philosophy but the depths of poetry and the testimony of history. There is goodness in the human spirit to admire -- in great explorers and mighty warriors, in the humble potter or the resourceful midwife. Yet there is also the temptation to steal, because we fear that there will not be "enough." We are generous when we trust that we’ll have enough; we are covetous and anxious because we have lost this trust.

One of the church’s great proclamations of abundance is marriage. All is focused on a single other -- but the truth is that, far from being not enough, that one person is more than enough. Just pause and wonder for a moment at the mystery of another person -- another mind, another imagination, another myriad of experiences, energies, enthusiasms and enjoyments. Could one ever exhaust that person? And to embody the truth that the good of one partner in the marriage can never be in conflict with the good of the other, we call them one flesh. The two persons become one body. What is good for the hand is good for the foot. What hurts the knee can never be good for the ear. They are one flesh, and the things that are good for them are things they each can have. This is the politics of love: not the calculation of how each partner can get a fair share out of life together in this world of scarcity, but the discernment of how the gifts they have been blessed with may be enjoyed for their mutual flourishing and the service of others.

This is what marriage gets down to. Not a zero-sum game, in which one person sacrifices his or her career, friends, creativity or deepest needs so that the other can be the hero, or the star, or never lose the argument. Instead, marriage is an adventure in which a new body can bring together what neither of two persons could have been apart. The only thing that might stop them would be the idea that they could somehow get there on their own. One other person is always more than enough, when you believe that that person will listen to you until you run out of things to say, when you trust that that person will wait for as long as it takes for you to understand why you are the way you are, when you realize that that person will always impute the best of motives to your actions, however clumsy you feel inside. You don’t need to grab the biggest piece of cake any more, because you are one body, and her eating it is as good as your eating it. You don’t have to have all the witty punch lines yourself any more, because it’s not a competition for attention that only one of you can win.

Marriages are as strong as our combined imaginations allow them to be. The key to the politics of love, the key to that limitless imagination that sees only abundance, that desires only the things that are not in short supply -- that key lies in worship. For it is God that stretches and trains our imaginations, God’s creation that trains us to look on the world with astonishment and wonder, and God’s limitless love for us that inspires us to imagine that we and others could begin to love like that.

Name that Fear (Luke 8:26-39)

Vacation time grips the imagination of Westerners. In Britain, it is now possible to buy an airline ticket on the Internet for a few pounds, then land in a European city for a "quick break’ boosted by the elixir of novelty and the thrill of just being able to do it. A different language, a different currency, a different climate and adventures await. And why not? The best way to understand your own culture is to live in another.

Gerasa, however, is hardly a favorite holiday destination -- in the first century or today. But in Luke’s Gospel it provides analogies, contrasts and perspectives on Israel. A man lives in dire straits; naked, among the dead. He recognizes Jesus, but sees him as a threat. Then Jesus asks him his name.

His name is Legion. This name is the key to the story. Everything begins to make sense when we allow the meaning of "legion" to dictate the shape of the story. It’s a story about Rome whose legions possessed Israel. Israel lived in internal exile. Why are there so many pigs, when Jews would have no use for pigs? Because pigs had one purpose only -- to feed the bands of Roman recruits. As always, exegetes obsessed by Jewish custom or eschatological expectation or charismatic gifts or psychological states may miss the highly political significance of what the Gospel writer is recording. This is a coded identification of Jesus the liberator.

The passage retells the story of Jesus’ ministry. He arrives at the "far country" -- far from his heavenly home. As he begins his ministry ("steps out on land") he meets with conflict straightaway. Those who confront him are exiles from their true home. They find themselves unclean -- defiled by death as Israel is defiled by gentile rule. And daily they have an impossible choice; confront Rome, and find that their shackles are fastened more tightly or that they are "driven into the wilds"; or allow the Romans to possess them, and lose their identity. Jesus faces the question of identity head on: "What is your name?" The man has lost his identity; he says, "My name is Rome."

Drastic action is needed. Jesus delivers the people. The transformation is terrifying. Less fascinated by the sane and clothed state of the man, the people are horrified by the costs and consequences of the salvation Jesus brings. Fancy living without pigs! It’s too scary. They ask Jesus to leave. The last scene of the story anticipates the last scene of the Gospel: just as later the disciples are "continually in the Temple, blessing God," so here the former demoniac proclaims throughout the city how much Jesus has done for him.

This is the kind of thing that happens when Jesus goes on holiday. The customs, adventures and challenges vary, but the holiday’s real significance is in the way it recasts what is taking place at home. Before arriving, Jesus calms a storm, thereby allaying fears that the land of the gentiles is a land of deathly abomination. When he returns from Gerasa, he heals two women whose place in the unity of Israel (the number 12 is repeated) is blocked by the impurity of blood and death. On the other side of the lake a great drama is played out that mirrors, parodies and mimics the drama being played out in Israel. I have pointed out the similarities. But there is one key difference. On the far side of the lake, in Gerasa, many die so that one man can be saved. On this side of the lake, in Jerusalem, it is the other way round; one man is to die so that many can be saved.

As a pastor, I am invited from time to time to come to a person’s home and hear stories about spirits, or demons, and to perform acts of cleansing or exorcism. I try always to go with an open mind. Looking back over these experiences, I sense a pattern. The people involved are often possessed by fear. The person of whom they are afraid is sometimes dead; sometimes it is their own self they fear; sometimes it is a person all too real, all too much alive and all too close -- who yet can’t be named. I see my role as listening to their fears until the point is reached when it is time for me to ask the equivalent of Jesus’ question, "What is your name?" Sometimes I ask, "What is the worst thing that could happen?" in an effort to elicit a name for the possessing fear. My role is to restore in the person a true sense of his or her own power, and to witness to and offer appropriately the power given to the church through baptism and Eucharist, scripture and prayer.

But sometimes I sense I am dealing with a person who has internalized the crisis of a family, community or society. For such a person, empowerment is not enough. A whole range of relationships, habits and contexts are sick. Personal healing is not the issue, for the person is exhibiting the ills of a whole society -- a whole world. The violent transformation of that world is portrayed in this story from Gerasa, the country beyond the sea: many die to save one. But the ultimate transformation takes place on this side of the sea, in Jerusalem: one dies to save many.

Dog Tale (Galatians 6:7-16)

We were at the lake, my daily walking spot. I had brought a friend who needed to talk. Her head was down as if she were searching for meaning, hope and traces of God’s ways in the ruts of the muddy path. My head was down too, in silent solidarity. We walked.

Suddenly I missed a familiar pitter-patter -- my dog was nowhere to be seen. I’d been deep in conversation and hadn’t missed her -- for how long? Ten -- 15 minutes? I looked behind and ahead on the trail. I looked around the fishing jetties, wondering if she was bothering the fishermen with her high energy and playful spirit. No sign.

Then I looked out into the lake. A bobbing golden head was gaining on the rigid form of a duck, My dog had never swum that far. How far could she go? Was she the best judge? My concentration wavered and my conversation partner looked up and saw the dog. Her tragedy seemed a little less significant as we watched my dog emerge from the water and shake herself dry over a fisherman. It was remarkable! She had swum across the whole lake! My heart burst with pride.

I boasted, but with no guilt, for it felt like the most unambiguous boast of my life. After all, it broke almost none of the subtle social taboos of the genre. Don’t boast about your children, because whether it’s nature or nurture, it’s a pretty straightforward way of giving yourself the credit. Don’t boast about your partner, because he or she is not there to make you look good. Don’t boast about your possessions or your achievements -- there’s bound to be a Freudian in the room who’ll point out that you are displacing your desire for something more significant in the way of bodily attributes or fulfilling relationships. If you want people to like you, develop ways of talking humorously about your shortcomings so that you don’t attract sympathy but build a supportive community.

Everyone knows all this. At least, when one comes across someone who doesn’t, the shrewd strategy is obvious. We don’t need to hear about your wacky holidays, new car, gifted toddler, or your proximity to putting perfection. That’s not the way it’s done. Be more subtle. If you want people to know you’re rich, don’t tell them: adorn yourself with clothes or jewelry that reveals your refined taste only on close inspection. If you want people to know you read, don’t tell them: show them your office or study and let them browse the bookshelves. If you want people to know you work hard, meet them for breakfast and make it clear that the morning is already half over for you.

These are the rules. This is how to boast. Break the rules and you look a fool -- big, brave, brainy or not. Keep the rules, and admiration may be yours. You will have immortal acclaim -- or some worthwhile customized version of it.

But why do you want it? Why do you want people to think you are beautiful or stylish, clever or funny or wise? These qualities are like the "tribute" that ancient kingdoms paid to a foreign power to stave off invasion. "Don’t hate me or reject me," we say, "don’t look at my soul -- look at my book collection, my medals, my conquests. You have to like me now, or at least admire me." Deep down, do any of us really believe that shorn of our hard-won attributes, our "tribute," we would, in our nakedness, be acceptable to or longed for by the yearning God?

Paul seeks no admiration from his peers. He offers no "tribute"; he does not enter the game of boasting -- subtle or unsubtle. There is only one thing people need to realize in getting to know Paul, and it is the most humiliating thing imaginable: Jesus died on a cross. It is not an achievement, quality or possession; it is not something beautiful or stylish; it is not even something about Paul himself at all. But it is all that Paul wants you to know about him. All that matters.

Fancy being free of that subtle game of image and admiration. Fancy leaving behind the deft play for advantage in every social interaction. Would that not be freedom? Would that life not be a "new creation"? Christ took up the least admirable, the most ugly, the least classy path to death, and thereby showed that he is unimpressed by any kind of boast, subtle or unsubtle. Fundamentally, we don’t need "tributes" when we have love. We boast only in the freedom that releases us from the culture of boasting. That culture of tribute, of boasting, of fear is what Paul means by "the world."

I look back on that moment with my dog as a small glimpse of Paul’s notion of boasting. For what I experienced was neither pride in my genes nor glory in my dog-handling (she had, after all, disobeyed by running and swimming away), but sheer exultation in the joy of being alive, in the thrill of water, and in affection for waggy dogs’ tails. I loved my dog, and I didn’t care who knew it. This is the joy of creation, and this was the swell of my boast.

But there is an even greater love, a greater pride, a greater boasting in the joy of the new creation, the joy that is founded on nothing in me at all, but is simply the naked love of God displayed on the cross. If my heart burst for the love of a dog, what will it do for the love of God?

Courage to Respond

If the creed is the point in the liturgy where the congregation learns to reason theologically, it is also the place where Christians learn the virtue of courage. Over and over again in the Gospels, when people are challenged to declare whether they believe, the issue is not whether they have enough knowledge or understanding, but whether they have the courage to face the consequences. When Peter claims, "Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you" (Mark 14:31), he sets himself up for the time of trial concluded by the twofold cockcrow. When the thief on the cross says, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom" (Luke 23:42), the moment is a decisive break with the values of the other thief, and a definitive statement of faith in the face of death -- not just his own, but Jesus’ too. So the question the members of the congregation ask themselves when they are invited to stand and confess their faith is, "Do I dare to say the creed?"

Then faith turns to hope. The needs of the people are not identical to the needs they were aware of when they came to worship, but have been altered in four important ways by what has happened in the service. First, they have confessed their sins before God and in doing so have learned the difference between pain and sin. Confession has stripped away the sins of greed, of selfishness, of laziness, of lust, envy and pride -- but has left behind a great catalog of pain for which there is no one to blame. This is the stuff of intercession. Learning the difference between pain and sin teaches Christians compassion -- that quality that recognizes in others a common experience of need and pain.

Second, the members of the congregation have received absolution for their sins, and in doing so have begun to distinguish between healing and forgiveness. Forgiveness removes the weight of blame and punishment and fear from the sinner; while healing names those aspects and consequences of sin that take longer to repair, and names those dimensions of creation’s fallenness that inhibit the well-being of the community of believers. Reconciliation with God is something that only God can offer, and it is appropriately situated at the beginning of the service. But the process of repair, restoration, relocation and eventual flourishing in community is something in which a whole range of people may participate -- friends, family, medical staff, legal officers, professional caregivers, fellow disciples, teachers and colleagues.

Third, the people have heard the proclamation of the gospel in scripture and sermon and have begun to separate suffering from evil. Just as not all pain is sin, so not all suffering is evil. The plea for God’s mercy is a longing that God will intervene to end suffering. But the plea for God’s justice is slightly different: it is a longing that God will intervene to overturn evil and oppression. The whole of the liturgy embodies a process by which God addresses, transforms, outnarrates and overturns evil. The intercessions are the moment when the congregation brings to God particular and general instances of suffering, not unaware of his justice but seeking his mercy.

Fourth, those coming to intercession have paused to discern God’s voice in the sermon and in the life and witness of their fellow worshipers. As they listen, they note a difference between what they need and what they want. Lanza del Vasto, the Italian follower of Gandhi, taught his followers, "Strive to be what only you can be. Strive to want what everyone can have." In similar spirit, through regular intercession a congregation discovers that the things its people need are things that everyone can have. The things they desire, by contrast, are things that they may choose to keep to themselves. It is here, in intercession, that God’s voice educates those desires.

The intercessions not only educate the church’s desire and constitute its humble offering but also shape the congregation in particular virtues. Three stand out. The first is patience. The practice of repeated intercession, of relentless knocking on heaven’s door, teaches Christians that God’s time is different from their own. In God’s time, all bad things come to an end. In God’s time, there will be no more tears. In God’s time, there will be no more death, no more mourning, no more pain. God has prepared things that they cannot yet understand and do not yet see. "But we do see Jesus" (Heb. 2:9), and this vision characterizes the hope and the patience that Christians discover through regular intercession.

The second virtue is persistence. As members of a congregation look back over years of weekly pleadings, they can see that change did come in South Africa, peace did come in Ireland, and peace must somehow come in Palestine/Israel. Persistence does not imply that as Christians repeatedly offer intercession they get better at it and thus become more "effective.’ Rather, persistence makes the church shape its life around the pain, suffering and need of the world.

Persistence changes the shape of the church. It is not so much that "you will always have the poor with you" (Mark 14:7), but that through intercession, even if not through daily experience, you will always be with the poor. This solidarity in the end redefines what the church means when it says "poor," for the prayers of the church, and the actions that make those intercessions informed prayers, challenge the isolation that is generally inherent in poverty.

The third virtue is prudence. The story is told of a church whose members were appalled when a nightclub opened up next door, bringing with it a variety of attitudes and habits that collided with their practices and convictions. Concerns about the nightclub environment were raised in the intercessions; hostility was dressed up as pious prayer. One night the nightclub burned down. The owner wanted to prosecute the church, for he knew that members had prayed for just such a turn of events. But they denied any involvement and said he should claim the fire as an "act of God" -- which was not their responsibility. It is often said that there is only one thing worse than not getting what you want. In this case, the congregation came close to getting what members prayed for. They needed to learn how to let wisdom shape their prayers.

Prudence emerges as the members of the congregation learn to request only what they can cope with receiving. It helps Christians to see the difference between what God can do and what they believe it is in the character of God to do. If patience teaches Christians about how God works in time, and perseverance shapes Christians to pray more informed prayers and so get to know the people and places they are praying for, prudence encourages Christians to pray better prayers, prayers that more accord with the way God works in the world.

The result of these prayers should be a people at peace. The sharing of peace, together with the intercessions that precede it and the offering of gifts that follows, is a celebration of the right ordering of creation in preparation for participation in the heavenly banquet. The peace between members of the congregation and one another, between them and strangers, between them and enemies, and between them and the whole creation is an emblem of the overarching peace between God and God’s people, brought about in Christ. This is God’s gift to the church and, through the church, to the world, embodied at this moment in the liturgy.

Sent Out

The last stage of the worship liturgy clothes the congregation in the practices of faith so that its members make the whole world a Eucharist. Making the whole world a Eucharist means bringing all the practices of worship into a regular pattern of discipleship. It means extending God’s invitation to all, bringing all to repentance and joining in creation’s praise. It means proclaiming the truth of God through the history of the world and the dynamics of the universe and sharing discernment within the silence of God. It means articulating human need and enabling reconciliation. It means restoring a good relationship between humanity and its ecological home, stirring the heart, setting about work in a spirit of thanksgiving, discovering power under the authority of the Spirit, confronting evil with confidence in the sovereignty of God and sharing in the generous economy of God so that nothing is wasted. Thus all the practices of worship become the habits of discipleship.

The great mystery of contemporary liturgy is that one practice is often excluded: the washing of feet. If God’s people do not embrace the whole of what worship involves, they are in no position to complain that they have not been given everything they need.

Washing feet enacts the incarnation, ministry and passion of Jesus. When Jesus gets down from his seat at the table (heaven), he takes off his outer robe (the trappings of divinity), clothes himself in a towel (humanity), ministers, teaches, prophesies, commands, discusses and confronts, and only then exchanges his incarnational towel for a divine robe and returns to his place at the heavenly table. Christians may perceive the significance of sacrifice in this moment: Jesus relinquishes the limitless range of options open to him and chooses a single path. It is more about Bethlehem than Calvary. Sacrifice is the consequence of following a call; it is an accounting for the roads not taken. Sacrifice is still an integral part of the Christian life, but it is not a pyre on which a first-born creature burns to appease an angry potentate. It is a sober estimate of the personal and corporate cost of following a distinct path and leaving the rest to God.

Washing feet brings together the water of baptism with the Eucharist meal. Not only does Jesus use water and suggest that washing one part of the body is tantamount to washing the whole; he also makes such a washing essential to being part of the community. As Jesus says, ‘One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean." And all this takes place "during supper."

When they wash each other’s feet, Christians embody the ministry of Christ in a concrete act of humble service. This act is inherently socially subversive, not so much in being deliberately confrontational but in its playful turning of the world upside-down. Here disciples discover that there is no fundamental hierarchy but simply a call to all Christians to attend to the most intimate, least attractive and most shameful gestures of mutual care. Footwashing is a model of interdependent community -- subversive, playful, imaginative, physically (but not sexually) intimate, and faithful.

If "making the whole world a Eucharist" is too vague a commission, the place to start is by washing feet. Washing feet means human touch, and it challenges us to trust the encounters that gentle touch may provoke. It means refusing to fear taboos, daring to accompany shunned people, being willing to help people engage parts of themselves they would rather ignore. It means never seeing another person as beneath oneself, since he or she is never lower than Christ. As Archbishop Oscar Romero said, "Our task is to put feet on the gospel": this task is never more appropriately performed than in washing feet.

In one congregation there was an elderly retired minister who had not been seen for a few days. The senior pastor called to see him and found that the old man’s bowels had given way, and there were discarded clothes and the results of diarrhea all over the house. The pastor considered who was to blame, who should take responsibility and how the man’s dignity could be rescued. Then he admitted to himself that his careful professional distance was an avoidance of his simple vocation. He got down on his knees, took soap and a towel and began to clean the apartment, the clothes and finally the old man himself.

Two other activities summarize the worship liturgy. A pastor’s blessing underlines all that’s happened in this encounter with God; the pastor’s "sending out" of worshipers expresses all that remains to be done. Blessing alludes to themes of creation and goodness; dismissal, to themes of transformation and vocation.

One church had a photograph of a golden retriever near the entrance. The photograph reminded the congregation that, like a puppy, it always discovered and rediscovered its mission in going out of the church and coming back. The dog’s owner throws a stick or a ball into a lake, then both owner and dog experience delight in the adventures the dog has as it retrieves the item. God too throws something out from the gathered assembly, away into the neighborhood and wider world. Along with the members of the congregation, God enjoys the process by which the gift of word or gesture returns at the next Eucharist, with surprises and discoveries and insights attached to it.

This is the goal of mission: not only will the whole world be brought to worship God, be his friends and eat with him, but in the meantime the discoveries and surprises of mission and ministry will enrich the church so it can enjoy and use the gifts God has given it. Being sent out is about creating a virtuous circle of mission, practice, discovery, reflection, worship and renewed mission.

The mission statement of the church is to make the world a Eucharist. So faithful service means practices that look like worship -- those that gather people and form them as one body, that reconcile and open lives to repentance and forgiveness, that proclaim truth and reveal God’s story, that embrace need and unleash gifts, that express thanks and are open to the Holy Spirit, that share food and wash feet. These are the practices of God’s reign. All are embodied in worship.

The Jericho Affair

Imagine that congress has set up a committee to report on the disquieting events on the Jerusalem-Jericho road and their aftermath. Here are some excerpts from its findings.

"The Inquiry is satisfied that the priest acted in a thoroughly professional manner. We are aware that he is a man of high profile in Jerusalem society, and that his first priority is to conduct his temple duties in a proper manner. Get-ting involved in self-indulgent gestures of solidarity is not recommended: such projects are invariably underresourced, non-strategic and open to media misinterpretation. Moreover, such involvement can have dangerous implications: if the wounded man had been found dead, the priest would have made himself unclean and thus been invalidated from conducting his core task for several days. On the other hand, the half-dead man could have been bait in a trap: the robbers might have been lurking nearby We judge that the priest correctly valued his own security to be more significant than a pointless gesture. The committee is well aware that priests seldom take their full-leave entitlement, and we are impressed by this priest’s ability to disengage from his role while journeying for a few days’ well-earned break in Jericho. In a busy world, this priest is surely an example to his people of prioritizing and looking after one’s own needs.

"The Inquiry is similarly satisfied that the Levite did all that could have been expected of him. He showed commendable humility in following the example of his superior, the priest, and keeping to the policy of nonintervention in circumstances of profound emotional manipulation. It is understood that, unlike the priest, he probably had no pack animal at hand, and therefore could have given little practical help to the wounded man. Meanwhile, the Levite was subject to the same dangers that applied to the priest. All the best health and safety advice points to supporting the actions of the priest and Levite. Theirs is a model of interagency collaborative thinking.

"Turning to the actions of the third party, the Inquiry became suspicious on a number of grounds. First, the man should have shown the same humility as the Levite and followed the example of the priest. We quickly realized we were dealing here with a person who felt society’s norms could be flouted at will. Second, on the most generous reading, the man showed an unprofessional attitude by allowing his emotions to sway his judgment. Early signs were that he was not local to Jericho, and became embroiled in matters that had nothing to do with him.

"Third, the man seems to have developed a rather exalted understanding of his ill-advised intervention, By binding wounds and pouring on oil and wine he seems to have been carrying out a highly provocative sequence of actions. After all, he seems not to come from a people that treats the writings of the prophet Hosea with due reverence, but he nonetheless has chosen this moment to perform a symbolic version of the actions of God toward Israel as depicted in the sixth chapter. We take him to be some kind of a prankster, because his use of oil and wine seems to be a spoof of the actions of the priest in worship at the temple. This is not an appropriate context in which to make a legitimate criticism of temple practice.

"Fourth, the Inquiry was alarmed at the man’s behavior in parading the half-dead man into Jericho on an animal, We could draw only two possible conclusions from this. Either this was some kind of effort to show off a misguided gesture before the townspeople, in some puffed-up maneuver designed to shame them, or -- and we suspect the latter – it was a foreigner’s attempt to humiliate the townspeople by displaying one of their number in a degraded condition. Local speculation had it that the man had carried out the beating himself, and was displaying the victim in an effort to intimidate the townspeople through a shameless feat of bravado.

"Fifth, the fact that the wounded man was left in the hands of an innkeeper appears to prove our suspicions. The Inquiry is aware of’ the low repute of such people in the region. Clearly, the intention was to humiliate the wounded man further by leaving him impossible debts at the hand of a merciless innkeeper.

"It has come to our attention that the man who performed this regrettable series of actions was a Samaritan. It is likely that he was a criminal who assaulted a Jew, paraded him through a town and left him with crippling debts.

"Another, more charitable interpretation, suggested to us by a rather excitable lawyer, is that the Samaritan came down from above, had compassion, raised a man up, rescued him at great personal cost, suffered as his servant, paid a debt when the man had no resources of his own and promised to return and address any outstanding problems. The lawyer called this pattern ‘Christlike.’ We reject this interpretation as a totally unsustainable model of social involvement.

"We conclude that the Samaritan was either a dangerous criminal or a naïve fool. If everyone followed his example, we would all soon be half-dead and at the mercy of robbers. The only appropriate model of engagement with issues of social deprivation is that of the priest and Levite, who acted with dignity and forbearance. We honor people of their caliber who establish careful codes of conduct, respect the privacy of the individual, follow health and safety legislation to the letter, and do not take on tasks that conflict with their roles. They make society what it is today."