Articles – Page 287 – Religion Online

Making Christians in a Secular World

Though I could not have known it at the time, a momentous event in my faith journey occurred on a Sunday evening in 1963 in Greenville, South Carolina, when, in defiance of the state’s archaic Blue Laws, the Fox Theater opened on Sunday. Seven of us -- regular attenders at the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Buncombe Street Church -- made a pact to enter the front door of the church, be seen, then quietly slip out the back door and join John Wayne at the Fox.

Only lately have I come to see how that evening symbolizes a watershed in the history of Christianity in the United States. On that night, Greenville, South Carolina -- the last pocket of resistance to secularity in the Western world -- gave in and served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church. If Christians were going to be made in Greenville, then the church must do it alone.

There would be no more free passes for the church, no more free rides. The Fox Theater went head-to-head with the church to see who would provide ultimate values for the young. That night in 1963, the Fox Theater won the opening skirmish.

In taking me to church, my parents were affirming everything that was American. Church was, in a sense, the only show in town. Everybody else was doing it. Church, home and state formed a vast consortium working together to instill Christian values. People grew up Christian, simply by growing up American.

All that ended the night that the Fox Theater opened on Sunday.

While my parents or their forebears assumed that the culture would help prop up the church, almost no one believes that today. Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Catholics -- everyone knows that something has changed. Jerry Falwell may still believe that electing a few senators, passing new laws and restoring Father Knows Best to television would allow us to relax again and let the culture do our work for us, but most of us know better. It is not "our" world -- if it ever was.

My former neighbor across the parking lot, the rabbi, helped me understand this dynamic. One day over coffee he remarked, "It’s tough to be a Jew in Greenville."

I granted him that. If I were Jewish, I wouldn’t sleep well either with Bob Jones running around loose. He continued: "We are forever telling our young, ‘That’s fine for everyone else, but it’s not fine for you. You are special. You are different. You are a Jew. We have different values, a different story."’

I suddenly realized that I had heard very much that same concern expressed in a young couples’ class at Northside Church in Bible-Belt Greenville. "Such language is fine for everybody else but not for you," couples would tell their children. "You are special. You are Christian. We want other things out of life than the Joneses want. We have different opinions. We are Christian."

Once again, it seems, the church must learn the peculiarity of being Christian from the synagogue, which has long appreciated the peculiarity of being Jewish. My neighbor the rabbi served a faith community that never had any illusions about its stance in the world: if its children were to grow up Jews, they would do so as strangers in a strange land. They would not be born Jews; the synagogue would have to make them that way.

I believe that the day is coming, has already come, when the church must again take seriously the task of making Christians -- of intentionally forming a peculiar people.

And why not? After all, we were in the same educational business -- the business of "bringing forth" self-contained, individual, self-discovered identities. Like American society as a whole, the church assumed that its task was to help individuals become ever more assertive and expressive of their wants, desires and rights. The church’s predominant view of humanity seemed to be that people are bundles of desires waiting to be expressed.

But everybody else had the same view. So who needs the church to tell me that my identity is in me, that my life’s significance lies hidden in the recesses of my ego, and that life is a long process of learning more and more about me? Increasing numbers of people have come to see that such views are not only shallow and unworkable, but also unchristian.

The gospel is a story about something that has happened to us -- something that has come to us extra nos, from the outside. This story is, in the words of the Reformers, an externum verbum, an external word. It claims that by rooting around in our own egos or by reflecting upon our life experiences as men or women, whites or blacks, we really won’t discover much that is worth knowing, unless we know this Jew from Nazareth who is the way, the truth and the life, and are part of a people who follow him. It is only by listening to this story and allowing ii to have its way with us that we learn anything worth knowing. As Augustine said, when we look at our lives without Christ, they look like a chicken yard full of tracks in the mud going this way and that. But in the light of his life, our lives take on meaning, pattern, direction.

Thus George Lindbeck reminds us that being Christian (or, for that matter, being anything more than merely me) is much like learning a language. We learn certain words, grammar and syntax that enable us to say certain things and not say others. The enculturation that this language provides gives us a new perspective on life and forms us into a particular person. So the first task of the church is formation rather than education -- not to bring out, but to bring to. The task of Christian educators is not to develop an individual’s potential (as if the world were not already developing all sorts of potentials in us), but rather to induct us into the faith community, to give us the skills, insights, words, stories and rituals that we need to live this faith in a world that neither knows nor follows the One who is truth.

Few books have been a greater hindrance to an accurate assessment of the church than H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture. Relying on Ernst Troeltsch’s typology of world-affirming "church" contrasted with world-denying "sect," Niebuhr developed a theology that acted as if these were the church’s only options. He taught us to be suspicious of any church that became too concerned about its identity as being incipiently "sectarian" -- world-denying.

Yet the church is not rejecting the world when it says that Jesus Christ is Lord. Rather, it is serving the world by attempting to tell and to show the world what the world cannot otherwise know. And the church is not rejecting the world when it becomes intentional about developing the lifestyle, values and insights that enable its young to live nonviolently. Rather it is attending to the necessary formation of Christians who can be in the world without being seduced by its wisdom.

I have never encountered a mainline, liberal congregation that did not view itself as fitting Niebuhr’ s "Christ transforming culture" model. That mainline liberal Protestantism can look at itself, then look at American culture and still presume that we are making our culture more Christian is either conceit or deceit. Jerry Falwell is the last gasp of the transformationist mentality; the Christ-culture typology is inadequate -- a too simple reading of the church’s situation today.

A culture is a people’s acquired understanding of life. Through enculturation and socialization, people acquire a particular culture and are able to sustain it within the wider society. The Christian faith is a way of life together, membership within a people, discipleship. Acceptance or rejection of this faith is a Yes or No to the enculturation of the church.

Formation and socialization are not optional matters for human beings; a person must have some culture. The question is not, Will some community have its way with us? -- for some community inevitably will. The question is, Will the community that forms us and identifies us be true or false?

In an allegedly pluralistic society, the predominant culture is more concerned with openness than identity. Thus a person’s biological family becomes extremely important, since the family is the only unit left in our society that takes identity seriously. If the biological family fails -- as many now do -- then the developing person is left at the mercy of other subcultures: the imperialistic "peer group." Or culture becomes a matter of ethnicity, gender or social class.

We are historical beings who not only make history but are also made by history. We are products of the interactions of others -- more than we like to admit. We Americans enjoy thinking of ourselves as independent, free shapers of our own destiny. Such evangelical slogans as "I made my decision for Christ" or "I have decided to follow Jesus" imply that it is my decision, my heroic act of will that is at the heart of my relationship to Christ, rather than my formation by the Body of Christ.

Decisions are fine. But decisions that are not reinforced and reformed by the community tend to be short-lived. A Christianity without Christian formation is no match for the powerful social forces at work within our society.

Of course, we must make decisions for or against this faith. God has no grandchildren; this faith cannot be inherited. As Tertullian said, Christians are made, not born. The Christian community makes it possible for a person to walk this path for the rest of life, but it cannot guarantee that those who put their hand to the plow will not look back.

We know that before the fourth century the church at Rome insisted on a long period of instruction and examination by the community before an individual was admitted to baptism. The new convert was allowed to experience the Christian lifestyle under the care of the community. The church knew that it could not survive as the church without careful attentiveness to how it made disciples. Enculturation was an integral part of conversion -- a long process of "detoxification" in which the church helped the catechumen critically to examine classical culture and gradually to extricate his or her life from it.

What the church has done instinctively, we must now do intentionally. We must be serious about the task of Christian formation. Our youth must come to see themselves in a sort of master-apprentice relationship with older Christians, in which the young look over the shoulders of those who are attempting to be Christian in today’s world. Christian education should provide opportunities for developing believers to model their lives upon those of developed believers. It should also encourage all Christians to realize that we have the sacred responsibility to fashion our lives and thoughts upon distinctively Christian convictions. Christian development is best understood, not as the ordered pr₉gression through various "stages of faith" (as in the work of James Fowler) or as instantaneous, momentous conversion (as in American evangelicalism) or as articulate self-expression (as in American liberalism) , but rather as apprenticeship in the art of discipleship. Being Christian is more like learning to paint or to dance than it is like having a personal experience or finding out something about oneself. It takes time, skill and the wise guidance of a mentor. Discipleship implies discipline -- forming one’s life in congruence with the desires and directives of the Master.

Many of us have been acculturated to think of religious experience as something that is deeply personal and intensely private -- something we discover or uncover. I am arguing that such understanding distorts how we become believers and perverts the fundamental nature of the Christian faith. Becoming a Christian more likely means becoming incorporated into the Christian faith, made members of a body. Any theory of Christian education, any strategy for the formation of new Christians, must begin with ecclesiology -- reflection upon what the church is and how it survives.

For too long North American Christians have assumed that questions of church formation and survival were unimportant because our whole society was, if not like the church, at least a helpful prop for the church. That assumption finally rolled over and died when the Fox Theater opened on Sunday.

When one asks people how they became Christians, one is often impressed by how unspectacular and mundane is the process of formation: an admired Sunday school teacher; the habit of being brought to church by parents; a pastor who was attentive during a particularly difficult time in life; the desire for fellowship with others, which blossomed into a community of faith. Therefore, the church must be attentive to the myriad of seemingly little things that it does to make people feel a part of a community -- the daily, unspectacular acts of caring and living together: the hospital visit, the covered-dish supper, the birthday card, the hour spent preparing food at the church’s soup kitchen.

A stark reality for many liberal, mainline churches is that there is no way to form people into a body if it has no boundaries, no integrity of its own. We must define our beliefs and attitudes. No one ever lived or died for "pluralism."

One reason why formation has been deemed unimportant by many churches is that we have assumed that our community is roughly continuous with the society as a whole. We live in a society in which individualism is valued over community, and personal autonomy and freedom mean more than truth. Thus the chief American virtues are tolerance and affirmation -- virtues that the liberal church has absorbed to its peril.

Formation implies the existence of an intentional, visible community made up of people who are willing to pay the price of community. Anyone who has tried to form a closely knit, truly caring, identifiable community knows the risk and the difficulty of such endeavor. It is much easier to be another voluntary organization of open-minded people than to be the Body of Christ in which members assume responsibility for one another’s faith and morals.

In the average parish church, I believe that all the resources and people exist to form Christians. What is needed is an honest admission of our changed status. The Fox Theater is open on Sunday. The church must now compete, in an open market, with other claimants for the truth. Any church that allows itself to be pushed to the periphery of the struggle, waiting, hat-in-hand, for some socially approved function to perform, unsure of its purpose and lacking confidence in its mission, will perish. In our new situation, we North American Christians have the opportunity to learn again that the church is the place where Christians are formed.

Community & Computers: Babel, Bytes & Bits

A couple of years ago, my mother received a birthday card inscribed "With Love, Tom." Because it was her 78th birthday, she didn’t take too kindly to receiving a birthday card from anyone, much less, someone who addressed her with such familiarity. Besides, she couldn’t think of anyone named Tom who knew her well enough to send her a card. She called her friends. "Do I know anyone named Tom?" she asked. Perhaps it was a joke, someone trying to be cute.

When she asked me who this mysterious Tom might be, I broke into laughter and told her that it was undoubtedly a card from her minister. The church had recently purchased a new computer. Someone probably thought it would be nice to set up a file of everyone’s birthdays. The computer had called up her name, thus the birthday card from Tom.

My mother was not amused. She preferred to have her pastors refer to themselves by something more formal than first names. "That’s Dr. Smith to me, thank you."

The church had been told that its new computer would "personalize" the church’s relationship with its 2,000 members. Now, everyone enrolled can receive a "personal" birthday card from the pastor and a quarterly "personal" financial statement from the treasurer:

Dear Sarah:

According to our records, Sarah, your giving to your annual pledge is $156.52 in arrears, Sarah. Now Sarah, we know that you want to keep your giving current, Sarah. So Sarah, how about going to your checkbook right now and write the church a check, Sarah? Thanks, Sarah, for taking the time to . . .

My mother knew better. She could tell a phony expression of concern when she saw one. The "personal" birthday card backfired.

At a recent conference at Duke University on "Science, Faith and Technology," we pondered the computer’s significance to our quest for community. J. David Bolter, author of the widely praised Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (University of North Carolina Press, 1984) , noted that computers are not morally neutral. Our technology is a tool, yes, but all tools allow the user to do certain things and not others. The tool, in a sense, encourages the user to undertake some tasks and exclude others. Some people have bought the notion that our tools are morally neutral; they argue, for example, that the hydrogen bomb is neither "good" nor "bad." It is rather a tool which we put to either good or bad use. Bolter is interested in the ways in which the computer, by the way it works with data, influences our perception of and interaction with the world.

"I believe that we get the technology we deserve," commented Duke professor Stanley Hauerwas. "The American people deserve Ronald Reagan as a valid expression of who they are. Likewise, we deserve our bombs and our computers as extensions of ourselves. It isn’t an issue of bad people corrupting innocent machines; the machines mirror ourselves. We want efficiency more than we want community. Now we’ve got it."

I remember a man in my last parish who explained his marriage problems by referring to his job as a computer programmer. "I work all day with computers. They don’t talk back. They always do what they’re told. They don’t forget or make mistakes. So, when I come home to my wife, I can’t stand it." I suggested that he and his computer made a great couple.

When we left for our summer vacation, I went to Bailey Bank to withdraw $100 for our trip. My withdrawal was to be for $100 because that was all the money we had in our account. But when the teller shouted over to the manager, "Guess where the preacher’s going for his vacation?" the manager came over and assured me, "You can’t get from here to Greenville for $100. Let’s just make that check for $200 and you can pay the rest back when you get paid next month." I left with $200 and an uneasy conscience.

Miss Helena Pitts told me that during the Depression when times were hard, she had to use her family’s silver tea service as collateral on a loan. Even though the silver was kept in Mr. Bailey’s vault, they always allowed her to take it out if she was having a party -- as long as she brought it back sometime the next week.

The bank that keeps my money today doesn’t know me from Adam, and if I forget my card or my number, then even if I had a million dollars in that bank I wouldn’t see a dime of it. My bank has numbers so it doesn’t have to remember my face. Now it takes me only a few minutes to make a transaction. There is no backslapping, no coffee cake -- and no trust. I don’t have to trust the tellers and they don’t have to trust me. The computer has given the bank and me fairness, accuracy and efficiency -- but no community.

So Pastor Hubert Beck, Lutheran campus minister at Duke, noted, "Every advance in technology increases time, decreases space and destroys community." We have created the machines we deserve. Before long, experts tell us, we will not have to go to the office or school, the bar or the church for our community. We can stay home at our terminal, punching the keys and watching the screen, and we will not need anybody. We will now be members of the "computer community."

If I see one more article extolling the virtues of computers for churches or telling us how the computer can help us organize our sermons, I’ll blow a circuit.

When a society has absolutely nothing to hold it together, it settles for fairness and accuracy rather than community. There is more talk about justice and less talk about togetherness. Our technology is at last giving us what we’ve always wanted -- nameless, faceless, isolated individuals living by bureaucratic rules, entitlements and balanced self-interest. I can no longer expect you to know me, much less trust me. Now it’s enough for you simply to be fair, to treat me as equal to all the other numbers in your data bank.

Computers didn’t create this world; we created the computers to match the world we already had.

Walter Brueggemann’s book Genesis, in citing the biblical chapter 11:1-9, suggests that the story of the Tower of Babel describes humanity’s attempt to organize itself around an instrument of its own creation. The tower and the city are misguided attempts to achieve unity on human terms rather than on God’s terms. Since our earliest technological achievements, the story suggests, we have been trying to attain a spurious oneness derived from human self-sufficiency and autonomy. It didn’t work then, and it doesn’t work now. True community is described in Acts 2, when the holy wind blew through our dry desert and God called us together, not by means of a new communications technology but by tongues of fire. The Spirit descended, creating a community so new, so utterly beyond human capabilities, that the world figured the group was drunk.

We call it church.

Taking Confirmation Out of the Classroom

As I met with the Christian education committee that evening, I could not hide my displeasure at the thought of spending three long months of Thursday afternoons trapped with a group of unwilling teen-agers in our annual confirmation class. Despite my earnest efforts to make sessions on the sacraments, church history, the Bible, ethics and beliefs interesting, the last thing on earth these youth wanted was to be put through two more hours of school every Thursday during Lent. I couldn’t blame them. For me and them, Lent is the season of bearing the cross of confirmation class.

I couldn’t help recalling an Episcopal friend of mine saying, "Confirmation is a second-rate junior high commencement ceremony after we have marched the kids through a series of boring classes and then laying-on-of-hands to graduate them out of the church."

"Can’t we come up with something better?" I wondered aloud to the committee.

"One can’t devise appropriate educational methods." commented one laywoman who teaches youngsters for a living, "until one has first defined what it is that one wants to teach. What is the ‘end product’ of this confirmation? What do you hope to accomplish?"

I responded with a thought off the top of my head. "All I want is a group of youth who may one day grow up to resemble John Black." (A true "patriarch" of our congregation, Black is every member’s idea of how a Christian ought to look.)

"That’s it!" she said. "All we want is a dozen youth who, in their beliefs and lives, come to look like our best Christians."

"Now how on earth do we go about doing that?" asked another.

We put our heads together and created a confirmation method that might meet our goal. We agreed on a number of points:

1. The goal of confirmation is discipleship: training people to resemble more closely, in their lifestyle, beliefs and values, disciples of Jesus.

2. We want our young people, instead of knowing more about Christ, to know and follow Christ. Therefore, confirmation must require more than the elementary mastery of a few facts about Jesus, church history, the Bible, etc. Confirmation class should do nothing less than equip young Christians to be disciples.

3. Christianity is much more than a "head trip"; it is a way of life together. The total person is engaged in it. Education for this life must therefore be experiential and personal, suggesting that confirmation doesn’t end our growth as Christians. Our youth are already Christians. They are not ignorant of the faith; they have already been trying to live as Christians. Confirmation continues and strengthens Christian growth already begun.

4. Most of us became Christians by looking over someone else’s shoulders, emulating some admired older Christian, taking up a way of life that was made real and accessible through the witness of someone else. So, while books, films and lectures could be used in confirmation class, they should only supplement the main task of putting young Christians in close proximity with older Christians -- "mentors" who invite these younger Christians to look over their shoulders as they both attempt to live as Christians.

At the set-up meeting during the first week of Lent, the youth met their guides, and the Journey (as we called it) began. To each pair we gave a list of learning activities which had been devised by the committee. We told them to proceed at their own pace, and to follow their own interests. The activities could be completed in a few weeks or three months.

Among the 15 activities were:

Read the Gospel of Luke together. As each of you reads at home, note the passages you find interesting, confusing or inspiring. Every two weeks, get together to discuss what you have read.

Attend Sunday services together for the next three months. After each service, discuss your reactions, questions and impressions.

Get a copy of our church’s budget. Find out where our money goes. Discuss how each of you decides to make a financial commitment to the church.

Attend together any of our church board meetings during the next three months. Decide what congregational board or committee you would like to be on at the end of the confirmation process.

In your own words, explain "why I like being a United Methodist Christian." Discuss two aspects of our church about which you would like to know more. Ask our pastor or church librarian to help you find this information.

Attend together a funeral and a wedding at our church. After the service, discuss where God was at this service, and why the church is involved in these services.

Spend at least 15 hours volunteering at Greenville-Urban Ministries, or one of the other service agencies which our church helps to support. Why is the church involved here?

Actually, I did far more work during the process than I would have if I had simply conducted classes. I kept checking with the teams on how things were progressing. One young person dropped out of the process. A number of guides needed frequent encouragement and advice. At the end of Lent, I met with each confirmand for an hour to discuss what she learned and what she still needed to know. On Holy Saturday, the Saturday preceding Easter, all guides and confirmands met at the church for a late-night vigil. They viewed a movie on the church and then held a prayer service in the sanctuary. At dawn on Easter, they participated in another service, followed by breakfast.

At the 11 A.M. worship service, each guide introduced his or her confirmand before the congregation and described one thing that this young disciple was bringing to the church -- some aspect of personality or talent. Then each confirmand thanked the congregation for one gift -- perhaps a church school teacher, a helpful sermon or the church basketball team -- that had helped her grow as a disciple. Each confirmand’s guide, parents and I laid hands on the young person as I pronounced, "Jane, remember your baptism and be thankful." "John, remember . . .

After using the new process for another year, we were convinced that it achieved our intended results. The church needs to realize that one of its greatest resources is its ability to bring generations of disciples together. Confirmation should give youth an opportunity to confirm their developing faith, but perhaps more important, it should provide the church the opportunity to confirm the developing young Christian -- to say, "You are one of us already. God has plans for your life. We want to take time with you to give you the skills, insights and experiences you need to be faithful."

Part of the beauty of this approach is its suitability for people at any age, at any stage of their faith journey. It suits the half-willing 12-year-old or the earnest 19-year-old. It can be done with one candidate or a hundred. It moves us from the inappropriate classroom model to a master-apprentice one. Its activities can be devised to suit the particular characteristics and mission of each congregation.

Recent studies suggest that most mainline Protestant churches have become the last stop for youth on their way out of church. We are doing a poor job of retaining our young. Of course, the sources of the problem are many. Yet I believe that a renewed engagement with our young people, through a new look at the purpose and method of confirmation, can be a big part of the solution to a pressing problem.

Heard About the Pastor Who…? Gossip as an Ethical Activity

Not long ago I was with a group of clergy discussing a mutual acquaintance of ours who serves a large midwestern church. "I heard that his wife is suing him for divorce," interjected one person. "Really?" I said, my countenance brightening at the prospect of a juicy piece of information about someone who serves a church larger than mine. "Tell me more. I’m all ears."

"Let’s not descend to the level of gossip," said another person in an offended tone. "Can’t we skip the smut?"

"It’s not gossip. It’s called pertinent professional information," said I.

It is called gossip and I was caught red-handed in the act -- or at least in the act of wanting to hear more. Most of us take a dim view of gossip. We like to think of ourselves as above it. But is there a vast difference between the information offered in People magazine and the columns in the New York Times that inform readers using sources "at a high level"? A vast industry churns out anecdote, rumor and celebrity scandal for voracious millions ("Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," "Entertainment Tonight") What vacuum does this outbreak of gossip fill in our public discourse? Sally Quinn theorized in the Washington Post that after the Nixon resignation, "We were hooked on the heroin of the Watergate scandal and now we needed the methadone of gossip." Balzac said that every day in Paris a paper with 100,000 subscribers was produced yet never printed. He was referring to the amazing daily round of gossip.

Let’s face it, most of us enjoy talking about other people. To quote the great theologian Oscar Wilde, "If you can’t say something good about someone, come over here and sit next to me." The right to gossip about the famous and the powerful -- be they a Hollywood star who sniffs cocaine or a big church pastor who cheated on his marriage -- may be the stiff price our egalitarian society extracts from those who rise to the top of the heap. Few of us can resist the lure of the tidbit concerning the ugly spectacle at the motel during the last meeting of the synod’s finance committee. And I would be deeply suspicious of those who condemn such gossip if they also claimed that they never succumbed to a furtive glance at the National Enquirer while standing in line at the supermarket.

Gossip has its seamier side, to be sure. When we are talking about other people (or condemning those who talk about other people) , the situation is replete with opportunities for self-deception. Yet while slander is destructive, not all gossip is slanderous. When Ralph Abernathy said that Martin Luther King, Jr., was unfaithful to his marriage vows, was this slander or a truthful depiction of one aspect of a life? When Abernathy implied that King’s extra-marital activities were the result of his spouse’s inadequacy, then, in my opinion, he fell into slander. Presumably, the committee from the United Church of Christ that called on Abernathy to "repent" of his authorship of the King autobiography felt that King’s personal life was so uninteresting, or that such a neat separation could be made between personal morality and public ethics, that Abernathy could have only destructive motives for his revelation.

Yet I would like to join with Patricia Meyer Spacks, author of Gossip, in contending that talking about the personal lives of others need not be wholly immoral. Gossip can be the moral casuistry of everyday life. Spacks says that gossip, at its best, is a means whereby we attempt to figure out who we are and how we ought to live. In other words, my talk about others is not always an attempt to build them up or tear them down but rather, to make sense out of myself. After all, if John Denver could sing love songs to his beloved wife and then divorce her in a nasty marital squabble, imagine what a person like me could do -- provided I had as much money as Denver.

In the parish, among fellow Christians, gossip seems particularly destructive. Yet even in church, gossip may be more moral than it first appears. As Spacks notes, the word "gossip" derives from the older godsip -- a contraction of the words "God" and "sibling." Gossip must have been that privileged conversation among the family, the siblings, probably about someone in the family who was absent. The abuse of that privilege was undoubtedly the beginnings of the negative connotations of gossip. But the abuse of the practice does not negate the importance of gossip as a means whereby those who are relatives by the grace of God (the baptized) know better, for better or worse, to what sort of folk they are now related.

Spacks contends that gossip is particularly important for subordinated groups. She speculates that one reason gossip became associated with the conversation of women was that early usages of the word referred to the speech of women who attended at childbirth. To be present at so intimate an occasion was to be privy to some very personal information. Male envy at being excluded from the mystery of childbirth may have contributed to the negative assessments of the speech of those who were present. At any rate gossip is often an alternative mode of discourse, a rhetoric of inquiry, an invasion and a possible subversion of the domain of the powerful and privileged. It strikes us as morally interesting, for example, that a person can be at the helm of a great nation and still be powerless to make his own children behave. Through gossip, power is defeated. Gossip need not be malicious, but it is usually at least incipiently aggressive (and can therefore lead to great hurt).

Gossip also can be a primary means of building and sustaining communities. Community cannot emerge without intimacy, and gossip enables people to explore the lives of others. Shared intimacy leads to bonding, not only by linking those who share through gossip but also by linking us to the life of the one who is being gossiped about. After all, if a person can be at the helm of a great nation and still have problems with his own children, I am more like Ronald Reagan than I want to admit.

More than simple bonding may occur in gossip. In a heterogeneous society where fame is so fleeting and class is defined by money rather than intelligence or bloodline, gossip is sort of a navigational aid; it gives us a fix on our moral location. Gossip is a mode of knowing and therefore is intimately related to the birth of the novel, which is also a means of providing unifying, explanatory structures for life’s events. Gossip in the form of the novel enlarges our grasp of someone else’s experience and thereby increases our understanding of ourselves.

Admittedly, the bonding and the information provided by gossip may be at the low end of the ladder of moral inquiry. But it may at least be at the beginning. We are desperate for information about other people, particularly the private information beneath their public façade, because we want to know more about ourselves. Why is such desire considered to be an illegitimate form of prying? For one thing, gossip may be a deadly means of self-deception, arbitrary and mean. I welcome news of the sins of others because it makes my sins appear more normal. Misery loves company. Have we not all encountered that overly zealous moral crusader who pounces on the sins of others (particularly their sexual or financial ones) only to be exposed as a perpetrator of the very same sins?

Despite the possibilities for self-deception in our talk about other people, morality is dependent upon such talk. Many of us find the more refined gossip of the novel a greater help in seeing our lives accurately than the work of academic ethicists. Modern ethics has-sought to rise above the mundane level of everyday discourse in the pursuit of the universal and the objective, the great overarching principles whereby ethical decisions can be made. And what ethicist would want to be labeled as a gossip? Yet there may be some truth to the claim that Ann Landers is about as helpful in teaching me to live well as Stanley Hauerwas. Ethical reflection is dependent upon a range of ordinary and specific examples. I need to see morality lived out in real people’s lives and the results of decision as they are mirrored in the lives of people like me.

I recall asking a friend of mine -- a nationally renowned Christian activist -- why he was leaving his busy and important projects for a sabbatical. He told me -- at an undisclosable location in Des Moines -- that he had worked with King in the final days. So many people were pulling at King, he recalled, so many causes were demanding his attention that he was exhausted, incoherent and personally, ethically confused. "If that could happen to a great Christian like Martin," said my friend, "just imagine what that sort of stress could do to a person like me."

Imagine indeed. My friend did not know that his offhand comments about King’s personal life were new information to me. But they were also more than idle gossip. They provoked deep, personal reflection. We were talking, as it turned out, not so much about King as about ourselves.

In church, gossip may be particularly important in what Reinhold Niebuhr called that never-ending task of "the increase of the love of God and neighbor." Many times as a pastor I have taken pastoral initiative with people, knocking on their front door and saying. "Joe, Joan, I hear you’re having some marital problems." Sometimes they would say "Oh, we see that the church rumor mill has been hard at work" -- congregational gossip making its nasty intrusion into their personal lives. "Call it gossip if you will," I would counter, "but I heard this as the genuine concern of some fellow Christians who care about you and are not sure how to show their care." More often than not, the information was accurate and the couple was grateful that we had made their troubles our own. Christians are members of a family, siblings by virtue of baptism who pledge to make their stories available to one another out of conviction that they become better people in the process. In baptism I "go public" with my life, offering it to the familial scrutiny of others, taking responsibility for the lives of others.

Indeed, I’ve decided that one of the greatest and most indefensible burdens pastors bear is knowing so many secrets about their parishioners. Why should the pastor be expected to be the sole repository of other people’s pain? We need to re-examine the whole notion of privacy and confidentiality in ministry. One can understand why a physician or a mental health worker ought to practice confidentiality. After all, it is a risky business to tell our deep secrets to perfect strangers. But that is not our situation in the church. We are busy creating a community of trust. In a church, as in a marriage, we aspire to be the sort of people who know a great deal of very personal information about one another without using that information to destroy one another. Indeed, one of the primary goals of pastoral care ought to be encouraging private pain to "go public" as soon as possible. That does not mean that I will divulge something a parishioner has said to me in confidence. It does mean that I help the troubled individual to see that the main resource for pastoral care in the church is the whole church.

A woman admits to me that her adult son is an alcoholic. She tells me not to tell anyone in the church because "I know how they would look down on me." I have two problems with her request. First, two-thirds of the congregation already know her son is an alcoholic. A congregation that doesn’t know intimate information about one another isn’t much of a church. Second, the dozen or so members of the church who are parents of alcoholic children could be her primary path to care. As her pastor, I must help her to see that her deep, unmentionable secret is in the eyes of faith a church problem, an invitation to renew her baptism and possibly that of her son as well by allowing her brothers and sisters in Christ to minister to their need. If she can do that, then she may enable her brothers and sisters in Christ to claim their baptismal commission to be siblings in Christ and priests to one another rather than detached strangers or consumers of individual therapy.

Perhaps we ought to encourage our pastors not to think of themselves as "above" such mundane conversations as gossip or as prohibitors of gossip, but rather as those who help us to gossip well in the congregation. For example, old gossip is uninteresting because it is old information. Who wants to be told a secret that everyone already knows? Old gossip may also be immoral, a means of locking another person in the past, tying a person to a past sin in a way that is anything but Christian. Thirty years ago a leader of a church I once served was caught misappropriating funds at a bank. He was convicted and served time in prison. I knew about his past as did everyone in the congregation, but it was never mentioned. Indeed, if someone had dredged up that part of his past, I am sure that person would have been told, "That’s all over now." Forgiveness means, in great part, that the forgiven sin is no longer the subject of continued conversation.

It is often difficult to decide what constitutes malicious gossip in a society that handles its lack of cohesive bonds by exaggerating its notions of individual privacy. Pastors can help people learn how to know secrets about others without using those secrets to destroy them.

Our society makes strangers of us all, gives us the right to privacy without giving us anything to do with it and unjustly separates private and public ethics. The gossip of the church family, however, the talk of siblings by baptism, is sanctified. Gossip, as a church activity without malice, may well be, at its best, the moral casuistry of ordinary people, a primary means of congregational bonding, a source of utterly essential moral data about ourselves, an everyday means of investigating communally what it means to be baptized.

When Richard Nixon’s henchmen were being justly excoriated for their political "dirty tricks," which included spreading malicious gossip, Senator Russell Long of Louisiana recalled the dirtiest campaign against him. "My opponent said some nasty, unverified, undignified, disgusting things about me," said Long. "Worst of all, much of what he said was true."

Lottery Losers

A few years ago Alverta Handel, a housekeeper from Portage, was said to be the happiest person in Pennsylvania. She beat 9.6-million-to-one odds and won an $8.2 million share of the record-breaking $115 million lotto jackpot. The biggest winner was said to be the Pennsylvania state treasury, which netted $593 million from ticket sales.

Lotteries have become a $16 billion bonanza for financially pressed states. From Maine to California, legislators have laid aside worries about the wages of sin and have embraced a tax that millions happily stand in line to pay each day. Twenty-five years ago, not one state permitted a lottery. New Hampshire broke the ice in 1964, followed by New York in 1967 and New Jersey in 1970. Now 29 states have legalized lotteries. Polls show that public approval of lotteries grew from 48 percent in 1964 to 72 percent in 1982. Per capita sales in lottery states rose from $10 in 1975 to $100 in 1988. Massachusetts residents lead the way in per capita gambling in lotteries, spending $235 in 1988, followed by Connecticut residents ($162) , New Jersey residents ($155) and Handel’s fellow Pennsylvanians ($121) Lotteries are now the leading form of commercial gambling.

It seems as if everyone wins in the lottery. Last year 48 cents of every dollar bet on the lotteries went for prizes. Another 15 cents covered sales, promotion and administration. That left 37 percent for state government. Of the $16 billion spent by the public on lotteries, about $6 billion was retained by the states as revenue, exceeding the income from state liquor stores and state-run hospitals. According to state officials where lotteries are legal, that 37 percent is a free lunch, a "painless tax" which people gladly pay.

Oregon, gorged on the proceeds from lotteries, is planning to encourage state-run betting on professional football, with the proceeds supporting intercollegiate athletics. The day may come when gambling is the major source of income for state government.

Those who question the wisdom or the morality of such revenue are chided by people like economist Dick Netzer as paternalistic. According to Netzer, "criticism of legal gambling smacks of nannying ordinary working and retired folks: We the affluent, who would not dream of playing numbers whether legal or illegal, long shots on the races or for jackpots at slot machines, don’t want you, the unwashed, to enjoy your simple pleasures." Are those who criticize lotteries only simpering nannies or affluent hypocrites who want to restrain the enjoyments of the less affluent?

Two Duke University economists, Charles Clotfelter and Philip Cook, authors of Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America, offer conclusive evidence that lotteries are not an easy way to make everyone a winner but rather a heavy tax which hits hardest those who can ill afford to pay. According to Clotfelter’s study of the Maryland lottery, people earning less than $10,000 buy more tickets than any other income group. Even in states like California, where it is claimed that rich and poor spend roughly the same amount on tickets, those at the lower end of the income scale spend a far higher percentage of their incomes on the lottery.

Proponents of lotteries invariably tie them to some worthy state need such as education. Kansas uses lottery proceeds to finance technical assistance to small businesses. More typically, the lottery money goes into the general state revenue where it is unclear whom the money benefits. Bill Honig, California public school superintendent, complains, "For every $5 the lottery gives to the schools, the state takes away $4."

Though legislatures push lotteries as a supplement for educational funds, often those lottery revenues end up being used as a substitute for other funds, with no additional money going to education. The public is duped into thinking that future tax increases are unnecessary. An additional problem in relying on lotteries for revenue is that they are a volatile form of taxation, vulnerable to changes in the economy.

When voters in Florida were approving a lottery, a survey found that the majority believed the lottery was going to pay the major portion of the state budget for education. In reality, the lottery paid only about 6 percent of education expenditures.

In 1986 lotteries accounted for an average of only 3.3 percent of the total revenue raised by lottery states -- far below the amount raised by income and sales taxes. In most of those states, say Clotfelter and Cook, "the amount raised by the lottery was less than what could have been raised by a 1-cent increase in the state’s sales tax."

The morality of such pseudo-taxation is even more suspect when one moves beyond economic analysis. Lottery advertising has been refined to a $156 million art. "All you need is a dollar and a dream," say the ads. Through high-pressure advertising and the prominent display of people like 9.6 million-to-one winner Handel, state lottery managers are altering our society’s values. A woman runs through her office shouting that she has just won the lottery and is quitting her job. An elegantly dressed couple dances aboard a yacht while a song proclaims, "I got two chances at a buck a pair, and by 7:05 I was a millionaire."

Such marketing devices are among the most questionable aspects of the lottery. Directors of state lotteries now see themselves not as public servants, but as corporate managers of a billion-dollar industry who should do everything possible to maximize lottery revenue.

Lottery agencies appoint "brand managers" to oversee product development and employ "psychometric" market segmentation classifications to plan their campaigns. Lotteries spend a higher percentage of their sales on advertising than the average corporation. Last year. California spent $35 million advertising its lottery, followed by New York with an advertising budget of $15.7 million. Clotfelter and Cook found that in seven major lottery markets, three-quarters of the advertising time purchased by state government was for selling the state’s lotteries. The government is pushing the consumption of a specific product which is monopolized by the state and whose only public virtue is that it generates some revenue for state government. Other products like beer or cigarettes also fit this description, but are not promoted by the government. In the 18 states which hold liquor monopolies, no effort is made to increase sales, even though increased liquor sales would lead to increased state revenue.

Rather than push gambling, states would do better to use their resources to warn about the potential hazards of gambling in the same way that states have assumed responsibility for warning their citizens about smoking, drinking and drug abuse.

Moreover, lottery ads are often misleading. Although a few states dare to publish the odds of winning a prize, radio and television ads almost never give the odds of winning the jackpot. The federal government requires private sweepstakes to provide more information about prizes and probabilities than do most lotteries. Of the 42 advertisements Coltfelter and Cook examined that depicted lottery players, more than 70 percent depicted a happy winner. Two states used humorous scenes to ridicule people who were pessimistic about the chances for winning. In a Michigan ad, a man stands at the lottery counter and complains that he has a better chance of being struck by lightning than winning the lottery. Zap! A lightning bolt leaves his hair singed. "One ticket, please," he responds.

Nearly all lottery ads heavily promote materialistic values, stressing the enormous size of the jackpot and the rewards of a lifestyle without work or effort. Through advertisements, backed up by the clout and the authority of state government, Americans are being told that they can escape the dreariness of work through gambling. The desire to gamble is not simply being accommodated by the government (an argument dear to lottery proponents) ; rather, the desire to gamble is being stimulated by the government.

A survey of Southern California high school students found that the percentage who participate in gambling in any form rose by 40 percent after the California lottery was introduced in 1985. They have obviously gotten the message of the lottery ads in their state. If the government says it’s OK, then it’s OK.

Clotfelter and Cook say that the lottery is "a risky experiment to determine whether a system that allocates rewards on the basis of luck will undermine a parallel system that allocates. . . on the basis of effort and skill." In short, lotteries may undercut the ethic of work and achievement, replacing it with an ethic of luck. The lottery craze is evidence of the government’s abdicating responsibility for the care and well-being of people; it is an assault upon the poor and the uninformed by governments that are being irresponsibly financed. It is, therefore, a movement that deserves to be opposed by churches and those who care about the future of our people.

Communion as a Culinary Art

Recently Aidan Kavanagh, O.S.B., professor of liturgy at Yale divinity school and sometime gourmand, commented that “the church will not recover the Eucharist as its central act of worship until we recover our ability to eat well.” As one who is in a continual lovers quarrel with my own Methodist liturgical tradition, I think I know what Kavanagh is referring to. Having been nurtured on a lifetime of Methodist teetotaling, Welch’s-grape-juice holy communions, having gone to the Lord’s table only to find a meager repast of stamped wafers, compressed cubes or dried pellets, I know what it is to hunger and thirst and yet be sent away empty. Unfortunately, too many holy communions are more expressions of holy hygiene (with their disposable, individual, antiseptic plastic cups) and sanctified sobriety (with their lock-step directions from officious ushers and nervous ministers) than of the worship of God. We invite people to come to the Bridegroom’s feast and then treat them to a weight-watcher’s fast!

How will we eat and drink with Jesus until we recover our ability to eat and enjoy not only the Lord’s Supper but all other meals as well? That question is confronted in Robert F. Capon’s delightful Supper of the Lamb (Doubleday, 1969). Between outrageous directions for such culinary concoctions as tripe Nicoise, Cuban bread, sweet martini, and just plain pot roast, Capon reflects upon the divine gifts of food and drink and humanity’s divinely given commission to eat, drink and be merry. There is not much wrong with us, Capon would argue, that can’t be cured by a sniff of roast lamb or a stint in the kitchen baking bread. And if these two culinary delights don’t coax us into ecstasy, we are probably too far gone in body and soul for resuscitation by any means.

One of the greatest challenges to the Christian faith in recent years may well be the widespread notion that food is a necessary evil, an invitation to addiction, a source of carnal lust that must be curbed at all costs. Dr. Atkins, Dr. Stillman and their colleagues, with their all-meat, all-rice, all-water, all-pills ventures in masochism, are subverting our God-given inheritance. A new religion has arisen in our midst -- the cult of the diet, with its shopping-center temples masquerading as “health spas” and “reducing salons,” where devotees abuse themselves for the goddess of leanness and shapeliness. Have you talked with a member of Weight Watchers lately? An examination of Weight Watchers’ ritualistic weighing and preparing of food, the detailed rubrics for eating, the confessions of sin while standing on the bathroom scales, and the testimonies of salvation at weekly meetings, suggests that we may have a new religion on our hands.

In close competition with the dietists for our religious affections are the health-food sects with their cult of wheat germ, yogurt and “organic foods” (show me a digestible food that is not “organic”). I for one am not happy eating sprouts of any kind, nor am I happy paying for “organically grown” food (i.e., grown in manure rather than fertilizer) double what the same item costs in my neighborhood supermarket. Anyway, why are all the people who work in my local health food store so unhealthy looking if their “natural” condiments are able to produce such dramatic results? As Nietzsche said to certain Christians, “You will have to look more redeemed if I am to believe in your redeemer.”

As a Christian, I am compelled to take seriously the fact that, when Jesus came to the end of his earthly ministry, when he gathered in the Upper Room and tried to show that dozen half-hearted, half-understanding disciples what it had all been about, he showed them in a meal. “Eat this bread; it is my body,” he said. “Drink this wine; it is my blood.” That was all he needed to say. It was all still a mystery, but it was a mystery which they now, in the eating and drinking, became part of. Nobody knew what redemption, grace, reconciliation or salvation meant. Everybody knew what it meant to eat. Precisely.

Now that we have spent much time arguing over what Jesus said, believed, taught and meant, and who Jesus was, let us now get back to basics and talk about the significance of how Jesus ate. Perhaps Luke tells it best: scandalous meals with Pharisees and tax collectors, table talk with sinners and saints, feeding the 5,000, a final meal with disciples who did not understand, a resurrection meal with disciples who were beginning to see the light. The Pharisees’ charge that Jesus was a “wine drinker and glutton who eats with tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 7:34) is well documented. And who can forget the stories about meals: the Great Banquet at which the outsiders become insiders, the big bash which the father threw for the prodigal son when he returned home?

And as for the church, the miracle of Pentecost was not so much that people could speak in strange tongues as that diverse people of many races and nations could sit down and eat together (Acts 2:42). The first charge against which the Christians had to defend themselves was not that their theology was bad but that they were drunk (Acts 2:13). They were drunk -- but not with wine. They were drunk with the dizzying vision of what happens to people who feed together at the Lord’s table. In fact, as Paul told that contentious crowd at First Church, Corinth, the mark of a real church is when all of you strangers can eat and drink together as members of the Body of Christ (I Cor. 11:27 f.).

I detect a subtle Manichaeistic dualism in our insipid, dietetic meals -- sacred and secular. Jesus, good Jew that he was, did not just save the soul; he also healed, touched and fed the body as well. For the ancient Jew, every meal was full of deep significance. The Lord’s Supper, so scandalously earthly and corporeal, is good Jewish ballast to offset some of our Christian pneumatological and eschatological excesses. It reminds us that we survive only because of the gifts of a gracious God. It reminds us that we live and grow only because of the creation of gracious farmers, bakers, farm workers and others whom we so easily take for granted. If Jesus could have said it, he wouldn’t have served it to us as bread and wine. And if we could feed on that, we wouldn’t be debating what true “Eucharist” means.

III

Wafers and pellets that look more like fish food than bread of the world will not do. Grape juice with too much water and too little spirit will not do. What is more basic and symbolic than bread? What is more joyous and sad than wine? And yet, bread and wine, like all human creations, are ambiguous gifts. In a world where one-third of humanity is starving or close to starving, do we Americans need to be reminded of the demonic nature of selfish, egocentric gluttony? (Christians have an age-old answer for the sin of overconsumption, and it is called fasting.) And do we pastors, who so frequently encounter the human ravages of alcohol, need to be lectured on the evils of drink in a lonely and desecrated world?

Against my own abstaining Methodist forebears I would argue (and I think John Wesley would back me up on this) that wine is necessary at the Lord’s Supper not only because it is obviously related to the full range of biblical imagery of the “fruit of the vine” and the “spirit” but also because it is a symbol of humanity’s creative and demonic potential. We sometimes use God’s gifts in a way that makes them humanity’s curses. What is more blessed than fine wine at a good meal? What is more destructive than addiction and Dionysian submission to wine when it is used in inhumane, unredeemed ways? For the Christian, all foods are good and clean, not only because they are gifts of God but also because these ambiguous human creations have meaning only under the name and blessing of Christ.

Away with these docetic diets and natural-food fetishes! Before we Big-Mac and TV-dinner ourselves to death, give us bread: large, hearty loaves of it that taste like “the bread of life.” Give us wine: dark, blood-red cups of it so that our sagging hearts are gladdened and the gospel feast can continue. Only as Christians are nourished, sustained, kneaded and fermented will we be able to rise to the needs of a hungry world whose spiritual and physical hungers require something more than fried chicken from the Colonel.

We may have to start teaching cooking classes in our seminaries. Only as we ministers rediscover the joy of inviting people to a bountiful table which we have helped prepare will we be able truly to invite people to the Feast which Christ prepares. Isaiah cried to the poor, “Come and be filled.” Jesus gave the invitation to “feed on me” and then the command to “feed my lambs.” We are still awaiting an ecclesiastical Julia Child who can set the Lord’s table in proper fashion and with a eucharistic “Bon appétit” invite God’s hungry people to come and be filled.

The Cup of Death (I Cor. 10 : 16a)

The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ. [I Cor. 10:16a].

THEY HAD ASKED him before; they would ask him again. “Grant us to sit,” said the sons of Zebedee, “one at your right hand and one at your left hand, in your glory” (Mark 10:37). Surely this was not too much to ask. After all, they had “left everything and followed him” (Luke 5:11).

“Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?” Jesus asks. Then, as they gathered around the table in the Upper Room, with the cross only a few hours away, there was the “cup” before him, the blood of his death. The disciples looked for glory; Jesus led them toward death. And so Thomas à Kempis says:

Jesus now hath many lovers of His celestial kingdom:

but few bearers of His Cross.

He bath many who are desirous of consolations:

but few of tribulation.

He findeth many companions of His table:

but few of His abstinence.

All desire to rejoice with Him:

Few wish to endure anything for Him.

Many follow Jesus to the breaking of bread:

but few to the drinking of the cup of His Passion.

Many reverence His miracles:

few follow the shame of His Cross.

[The Imitation of Christ]

We are like that. We have signed on for the glory of it all, not the humiliation. We want healing, comfort, reward, success. Like me, the folk at First Church, Corinth, had signed on with Jesus for the glory of it all. They expected to eat the heavenly food and live forever, to achieve power; glory, exotic gifts of the Spirit. But Paul takes them back to the Upper Room, back to the dark night of the cross. He reminds them that it was “on the night when he was betrayed” that the Lord took bread. On the night he was forsaken by God, defeated by Caesar and humiliated by his friends, he took the cup in hand. “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (I Cor. 11:23, 26).

Paul countered the Corinthians’ Risen-Christ triumphalism by referring them to the historical Jesus and to the cross. The real Jesus was rejected, says Paul. His obedience to God ended upon a cross. Why should the Corinthians expect some magical bypassing of this scandal? Paul counters their self-serving religion by reminding them of the selflessness of Christ. He preached to them not about healing, immorality, rewards, church growth, exotic spiritual gifts, the things that so infatuated them. “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (I Cor. 2:2).

On Maundy Thursday as we take up the cup, we too proclaim that the cross is not optional equipment for Christians. The way of faithfulness invariably leads to Calvary. If we would follow this Lord, we must go his way, not ours. Evil must be confronted rather than masked by grinning platitudes. Injustice, oppression, famine, the everyday big and little cruelties which we inflict upon others must be fought.

Our Lord confronted evil on its own turf. He yoked himself in solidarity with this whole, suffering, sinful mass of dying humanity. He “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant . . . he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:7-8).

We, like the Corinthians before us, seek to fill ourselves, cure our aches and pains, live forever. Too often, American evangelical Christianity presents the good news of Christ as the solution to all human problems, the fulfillment of all wants, and a good way to make basically good people even better.

The cross suggests that this good news is the beginning of problems we would gladly have avoided, the turning away from the quest for self-fulfillment, the ultimate mocking of our claims for goodness. The principalities and powers tremble only before the cross. Nothing less than death will do -- painful, full-scale conversion, letting go, turning from ourselves and toward God.

This meal is not some magical mystery medicine we take to exempt ourselves from the hard facts of life in this world. It is a way of confronting those hard facts. No prayers of a TV evangelist, no prayer cloth from Arizona, no holy oil or water, no holy food, no technique for self-betterment, no sincere social program exempts us from this death.

But at the table, with cup in hand, even our most painful times are redeemed because this Savior saves through suffering. Without the cross, our faith wouldn’t be a comfort to anybody. What would you say to the terminal cancer victim? The mother of a starving child in an Ethiopian desert? The 80-year-old resident of a shoddy nursing home? “Smile, God Loves You!”

No, you can say that our God has been there before. Wherever a cross is raised in the world, our God is there with the crucified. Our God does not flinch in the face of evil. In a hurting world where injustice still sends the good ones to the cross, we do have something to preach. We, like Paul before us, boldly lift the cup and daringly preach Christ and him crucified. If we would follow this Lord, we must follow him down this narrow way of Passion.

The cup had been poured for communion. I stood behind the Lord’s table with my arms outstretched to pray the Prayer of Thanksgiving. “Look, Mommie,” one of our younger members exclaimed. “He’s trying to look like Jesus on the cross.”

It’s not a bad thing to say about a Christian.

Drawing All to Himself (John 12:32)

“…I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.” (John 12:32)

The latest ruckus to hit the house of God here at 435 Summit Drive was precipitated (as was the previous one) by the pastor. All I did was to suggest to an amateur woodcarver in the congregation that it would be nice if he turned his talents toward the carving of a processional cross for our church.

I had in mind something simple, modern and clean, something congruent with Northside Church’s minimalist architecture, something light enough for a white-robed adolescent to carry on Sundays. What we got on the first Sunday of Lent was a dramatic sort of cross, heavy, complete with a realistic, bleeding corpus, a hanging, crucified Christ, blood and everything.

Some managed to like it because a nice person had made it. Some liked it because they appreciated the intricate carving. But many were upset because it was “more Catholic than Methodist,” “gory and depressing,” or didn’t “go with our colors.”

What is a modern, progressive, slightly liberal, well-budgeted Methodist church to do with a bloody cross these days?

A few Lenten seasons ago, my friend Ed Covert put up three crosses draped in black on the front lawn of St. Stephen’s Episcopal and received a dozen calls complaining that the crosses made the neighborhood look bad. Christ’s or humanity’s suffering, it seems, is something unpleasant that happens to other people, more annoying than ennobling, something to be eradicated by the latest wonder drug or meditative technique.

John’s Gospel puts forth a rather baffling theory of atonement. We find, in a brief lapse of Johannine theological acuity, a view of the cross which seems more Abelardian than Johannine, more exemplarist than orthodox: even as Moses lifted up the serpent in order to heal wandering Israel, so the sight of the Son of God on the cross brings humanity to rebirth, repentance and eternal life (John 3 :14-15). Intellectually speaking, it’s not a very satisfying view of the atonement. How can such power be ascribed to the mere sight of the cross?

The truth is, all theories of the atonement are ultimately inadequate, particularly from an intellectual point of view. The relationship of the cross to our salvation, the connection between the suffering of Christ and human suffering, the need for God to become physically entangled in the world’s evil and pain -- this is too great a mystery for intellectual comprehension.

So perhaps John’s Gospel has it right. As Jesus is lifted up, high up on this bloody cross, he does draw all to himself (John 12:32).

We human beings live by the pleasure principle. We can do no more than avoid pain, whatever its source -- other people, finitude, failure, risk, truth. We are all practical hedonists to the core, asking no more of ourselves than that we have a nice day. So what can we understand, intellectually speaking, of a twisted body hanging from a cross?

It is not by understanding that we are saved. As Barth says, “Here is a truth we cannot understand -- we can only stand under this truth.” Here is a Savior who came among us “with loud cries and tears” (Heb. 5:7), a Messiah who, “although he was a Son, learned obedience through what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8). John’s Gospel implies that the cross is not to be understood; it is simply to be seen. It is to be lifted up high, forced upon our myopic view of the world, placarded before any procession which attempts to move toward God (Gal. 3:1).

There are those who see. Francis Bernadone wanders into a church in Assisi, stands under the crucifix over the high altar, looks upon that body impaled, cadaver-like, before him -- stark, simple, demanding -- thinks he hears it speak, and feels his very soul pierced by the force of it all. The German Mathias Grünewald paints it with such gangrenous intensity that even a philosopher of abstractions like Tillich could say that the Christ in agony on the Isenheim altar was the most religious picture he had ever seen. And in a Mexican cathedral the cross is lifted up over a sea of beleaguered brown faces and a thousand peasant knees strike the floor like thunder.

Alas, we would strip the body off the cross, embalm it and cover it with cosmetics, render the cross in bronze, polish it, make it triumphant and clean. Let the atonement be a dollars-and-cents substitutionary transaction between an aloof, righteous judge of a God and sinful humanity or else a mythical Christus Victor military coup. We can understand that.

But then, down the carpeted aisle of my modern sanctuary, before a pulpit where the gospel is made intellectually digestible in once-a-week doses, a cross is brought in by a groaning crucifer. It is a crucifix, a visible believable body on a cross, the work of a layman’s hands, a layman who, despite what I have told him, sheds a tear and continues to be stupefied that God’s love should be made so explicit, continues to be drawn to the simple truth that “Jesus did it all for me.

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