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Tying Knots

The bride wore a white dress with pearls, a veil and a big red nose. The groom had a rainbow wig, and instead of patent leather shoes, floppy brogues as big as boats which were coming apart at the toes. All around them a raucous band of clowns held forth on tubas and big bass drums.

"Do you, Gilbert, take Glenna to be your wife?"

"I sure do."

"Do you, Glenna, take this clown to be your husband?"

"I do," she smiled, and someone honked a horn.

About 70 clowns had gathered around a motel swimming pool as passersby stared in wonder. One little girl, wrapped in a towel and dripping on the green carpet, wanted to know if someone was putting her on. The preacher said a few words that she couldn’t quite catch, and then she got a signal that it was all in earnest.

A big cheer went up in the motel courtyard, drums thumped, and the great machinery of music ramped into choruses of "When You’re Smiling" and "When the Saints Go Marching In." To which the bride and groom danced, not waiting for any formal party. A few clowns even jumped into the pool to punctuate the song.

I’ve done a lot of questionable weddings for poorly matched couples with doubtful taste. Yet I look back on that wedding fondly. It may have been utterly pagan, but it was joyous, and Jesus was there.

To be honest, most weddings are pagan. Very rarely does a ceremony today put God front and center, and when it does, the guests mutter how impersonal it was. Weddings are, for the most part, unserious but highly expensive affairs far removed from the values of a church. Will Willimon speaks for many ministers when he says, "Happy events like weddings are among the most unhappy things we do."

Maybe that requires some explanation. But you would understand if you had come with me to a lakefront home awash in thousands of dollars’ worth of flowers, with a magnificent trellis that the hired man had just finished. BMWs and Land Rovers filled the driveway, and cases of Moët champagne were stacked by silver buckets of ice. More resplendent than the wedding party, and more dignified, caterers in starched white smocks arranged tables of meats, cheeses, fresh fruit and ice sculptures.

All was not well, however. The bride was over an hour late and the groom was plowed. He stewed outside the garage, fished in a cooler for another beer, and mused about her. "A princess in her Own mind," he said, among plenty else that was more colorful.

But she showed up before the guests gave up, a little unsteady on her stiletto heels, balancing herself with a bouquet, assuring everyone that the shrimp would wait. All the cautions raised by months of premarital counseling seemed to have melted in the hot sun. Everything had been paid for, so what else was there to do except get them married?

As the bride’s ten-year-old daughter processed glumly down the grassy aisle between the rented chairs, wearing a dress too small for her, a boom box played Axl Rose’s "Sweet Child o’ Mine." Then the bride herself appeared on the arm of her maid of honor--maybe not the traditional way to do it, but they made it down the aisle.

Pointlessly earnest, I did indeed speak of marriage as a holy and honorable estate, not to be entered into lightly. I reminded them that there would be hard days when love would be tested, when the vows they spoke could be kept only by God’s grace. "Please repeat after me," I told the groom. "‘I give you this ring …’"

"I give you this ring," he said uncertainly.

"‘As a sign of my vow …’"

"As a sign of my vow."

"‘And with all that I have …’ "

"And with all that I have … except my boat. She doesn’t get my boat!"

For just a moment, I think, the shrimp stopped thawing. The bride’s daughter froze. And in the stunned silence, the bride laughed as if her man had said something so characteristically asinine that now everyone knew just what she was marrying, to hell with us all.

But I figure weddings have always been a little pagan. Even at the wedding Jesus attended in Cana, the party mattered most of all. A crisis came when the wine ran out, and Jesus’ mother, Mary--you know, the sainted figure in blue--pressed him to do something about it. "Woman, my time has not yet come," he said. Really, did she think his first miracle should be something as worldly as helping the guests to get drunk? But he relented. And this typified much of his earthly ministry. He was willing to be used.

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine." And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come." His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you." Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, "Fill the jars with water." And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, "Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward." So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now." Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. (John 2:1-11)

From here the story goes into the riotous wee hours, as intrepid partyers dance under the stars and Yakob’s unmarried eldest daughter pairs off with a young widower. Guests marvel that their host isn’t putting out the cheap stuff now that they should be too drunk to notice. The host himself drinks in their joy. It is all very carnal, incarnational and scandalously sacramental.

Yes, sacramental. This is the Gospel of John, so of course we’re looking not just at a miracle but at a sign, something with a theological dimension. Jesus could have chosen any vessels, but he made use of those jars. Holding perhaps 180 gallons, when only a drop of water on the wrist was needed for purification, they would have sufficed for most of Israel. Significantly, they were empty. Sacramentally, Jesus filled them with wine. John’s theological point is obvious: his blood will make us pure.

And yet--this wasn’t blood, this was wine at a wedding, and once Jesus made it, there was no more water. No one rose, outraged, and demanded to know what had happened to it. The servants didn’t object, either. They all were just having a high old time, enjoying that endless supply of wine.

It’s one of Jesus’ most curious miracles, how he exchanged religious ritual for simple joy.

For the first time but not the last, Jesus had let himself be used. It would happen again with ten lepers, and again with a crowd of 5,000 who stayed for supper. People who thought they were getting something from him would come away transformed; their encounters would be intoxicating and purifying.

That’s part of pastoral ministry--the willingness to be used. Like Jesus, pastors have plenty of opportunities to meet people where they are and transform them. When parents want a child baptized, we could ask why. ("Why?" they would puzzle, "Why?") When two young people come asking for a ceremony, we could instead help them to think about why they want to have sex with no one else for the rest of their lives, and what God has to do with that. There’s a lot of potential in these routine pastoral encounters. But some days, about the most religious question I ask is, "Would you prefer the Trumpet Tune or the Mendelssohn?"

Jesus didn’t miss these opportunities, because he knew who he was. Despite the dizzying variety of things people said about him, he may have been more sure of himself than we are of ourselves. He was a Jew, a very devout Jew. His message was neither liberal nor conservative, but radical. And he knew that his God was certainly not to be confused with Baal or Mammon, this intoxicating, purifying God--a God of joy.

My friend David has done his share of weddings, always looking forward to one in particular. He’s a big bear of a guy, with a beard and a swarthy face, a useful disguise for someone so tender. No one has ever brought out more of its expressiveness than his daughter Miriam. As a little girl she told him that she wanted a big wedding and he should start saving. Later on she became such an exasperating free spirit that David was tempted to keep her bottled up at home.

"Your dates need to know one thing," he said. "I have a shotgun and a shovel."

"Yeah, they read that on the Internet, too," she said. "Look, Dad, make it easy on yourself. Don’t wait up for me."

By the time she was 19, Miriam had gone out with plenty of guys and given David ever more cause for anxiety, learning some hard lessons and not learning others. She wound up in rehab, where at last she found a tentative faith of her own.

Two days before Father’s Day, she made an unfortunate left-hand turn into oncoming traffic.

In a terrible irony, she lay at the very hospital where David had been a chaplain. Her injuries were so severe that after a while all they could do was turn off her life support and wait. David sat at her bedside, stroking her hand.

A few days later, a thousand mourners gathered for a funeral that was surprisingly joyous, more so than most weddings. For the better part of an hour, a band played praise songs, and we were encouraged to sing, even dance. Some mourners didn’t know what to make of it. David managed to give the eulogy--clothed and in his right mind, as the phrase goes, and at a stage of grief that others of us could only imagine. "Please don’t misunderstand," he said. "Our family is just stricken with grief. But we also want you to know how it’s possible for us to feel joy, too. I really have to tell you a story."

David told of his anguish at the hospital as he had stroked her hand. When Miriam had been a little girl, she had held onto him, and he had protected her. After all, what else does a father do? Their whole life together had pointed toward the answer, but David had not really let her go, for Miriam hadn’t met the right man. And now he would never give her to a husband.

Within him, or all around him, a voice spoke unmistakably. It said, You are so wrong. I have already taken her by the hand, and she will be my bride.

He knew that this was true.

So did his wife, when he told her about it. A wise woman, she knew what needed to be done for funeral arrangements.

"And that is why," said David, "Miriam is wearing her mother’s wedding dress."

Ever since hearing that story, I have thought about it before performing each wedding. The couples scarcely have any idea what they’re promising--to have and to hold for better or worse, for richer or poorer, through sickness and health, until they are parted by death-and really, who could understand those vows until living them all the way through? The best that the ceremony can do is hint at the depth of the water in those tall jars.

So here comes the bride, all dressed in white. She’s on the verge of a lifetime with a man who is still a boy, and she’s worried about whether her caterer has fully stocked the bar. Someone needs to take the water of the moment and turn it into wine. "Woman, what does this have to do with us?" Everything.

Above and Beyond (Lk. 24:44-53; Acts 1:1-11)

Just like that, Jesus is gone. He reappears just long enough to say goodbye. Like a wraith, like a dream, he leaves behind no children, no estate, no writings, no trace of himself except this feeling that his presence was real, that his absence is temporary. Christians have this uncanny feeling that he was just here. He must have just stepped out.

It’s a feeling of mixed joy and grief, of doubt and near certainty. The ascension marks the moment when we pass from Jesus time into our own. The stories say that he is taken up into heaven -- like Elijah -- and while we puzzle over the physics of how this happened, we have no trouble understanding it emotionally. We know too much about loss. Loved ones are suddenly taken from us, and the manner in which they go fills us with awe. It is an amazing, dreadful thing. Even though we know that they are going to "a better place," we cannot follow, and have a hard time imagining that we ever will. In the strange days afterward, we have to reconcile feeling bereft with receiving an inheritance.

So the stories about Jesus’ ascension are about a Christian attitude toward death. Take away the fantastic circumstances, and here is the hard reality: Jesus is gone. He rose not just from the dead, but right up and out of our world.

Yet we cannot take away the miraculous. Indeed, the miracle is the whole point: this ascension, a second Easter, confirms that he is going to heaven. His Jewish disciples see with their own eyes that he is not going to Sheol, the realm below, but to the abode of God. He is alive, so maybe their loved ones are alive; maybe death is not the end of us. As they stand on the earth, the disciples surely can think of others who were just here and might be back soon for those they love.

Luke tells two stories about the ascension. In the first, he says that Jesus walked with the disciples "as far as Bethany," where his friends Mary and Martha lived. According to the Gospel of John, Bethany was also where he raised Lazarus from the dead. So it was a significant place for him -- a good place for him to spend his last moments on earth.

Let’s read between the lines and imagine that he chose the place of his departure because he wanted to see Mary and Martha one last time. Perhaps they ran to meet him, threw their arms round him, shouted in amazement. Mary probably had no more tears to wet his feet. Perhaps he sat at their table and let Martha wait on him again. All the while, the wondering disciples who had traveled the few miles from Jerusalem saw why he had risen, why he had come back here. Read this way, the Gospel version of the ascension is a love story.

Luke’s second account of a departure site is in Acts. Here he doesn’t mention Bethany, but says that that Jesus ordered the disciples "not to leave Jerusalem" for Galilee right away, instructions that are different from those in other Gospels. At any rate, this version recalls the ascension of Elijah, and then surpasses it completely.

As Elijah waited for the whirlwind that would take him to heaven, his disciple Elisha asked for "a double portion of his spirit." Sure enough, when Elisha picked up Elijah’s mantle, that’s what he got -- a powerful dose of the Spirit. In similar fashion, Jesus promised his disciples that he would not leave them comfortless, but would give them the Spirit. He meant for them to have an inheritance. And when, in a manlier of speaking, they picked up his mantle, that’s what they got -- a double portion. The Spirit at Pentecost! We can still feel the force of it, whistling around our ears.

This, too, is a love story. A story of how love survives loss. We are not comfortless. We don’t worry too much about his absence, in part because his Spirit is so alive and present. He may have risen, but in another sense he remains on the ground. He has become his disciples. They have become him.

Carl VandeGiessen, in his horn-rimmed spectacles and red tennis shoes, remains vivid in my mind. Ten years ago he lost his wife, Ruth, after her long battle with Alzheimer’s. Carl had sat at her bedside every day, even in the long years when she hadn’t known him. "This is what I took my wedding vows for," he would tell me.

They had met in the Epworth League of the old Methodist Church, raised beagles together, traveled together and maintained the romance of their marriage. When she died during Holy Week, it seemed to unnerve his only daughter. I meant to console him when I said, "Carl, I’m sorry. It’s especially hard to lose her this time of year."

"Are you kidding?" he said. "This is the best time for my Ruthie. She’s with God now. That’s what this week is all about.

Now even Carl has gone -- walking confidently in his red shoes to a realm I can only imagine.

Even as the ascension leaves us here, in the modern world, ascension points beyond it. We know little about heaven -- not even, really, if it is up there -- but we have a lot of hope for our loved ones. We expect to see generations and generations of them, somewhere, in a time that is neither ancient nor modern. Before we were even born, Jesus changed the way we think about the dead. I would like to see Carl again someday, but this world is not the place to seek him, because he is not here. He is risen.

The Slow Death of the Two-State Solution

A viable two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is dying; perhaps it is already dead. This reality should prompt new theological and political analysis among Christians and others who yearn for justice, peace and security for Palestinians and Israelis.

The Negotiations Affairs Department of the PLO recently issued a policy analysis arguing that "Israel’s on-going colony construction and other unilateral measures in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are effectively preempting the possibility of a two-state solution of a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel" (at www.nad-plo.org/). If not reversed, these facts "will force Palestinian policy-makers to reevaluate the plausibility of a two-state solution." Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, in a December opinion piece in the New York Times, warned that the Israeli government, through its actions in the occupied territories, is preparing a "ghetto state" for the Palestinians, "surrounded by Israeli settlements, with no ability to defend itself, deprived of water resources and arable land, with an insignificant presence in Jerusalem and sovereign in name only."

Since Ariel Sharon became Israel’s prime minister in March 2001, the growth of existing Israeli settlements (what Palestinians prefer to call colonies) and the construction of new ones have skyrocketed. Satellite imaging identifies 24 new colonies in the West Bank, the expansion of 45 more, and the establishment of 113 new "outposts" -- that is, caravans placed on hilltops that are later developed into full-fledged colonies. The placement of new colonies and outposts is strategic and multifaceted. First, Jerusalem is being progressively encircled by rings of Israeli colonies which break up the contiguity of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and which separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.

Second, the "separation" wall (what Palestinians call the Apartheid Wall) is reconfiguring the geographical terrain: the wall, whose construction is most advanced in the northern West Bank, allows Israel to deepen the integration of its illegal West Bank settlements into Israel proper, thereby isolating Palestinian towns and villages from each other, solidifying control over water resources, and paving the way for future land confiscations by preventing farmers from reaching their farmland. The international media have often portrayed the wall as running along the Green Line separating Israel from the occupied territories. In fact, the wall cuts far into the West Bank; if the wall is completed along projected paths, it will mean the de facto annexation of at least 10 percent of the West Bank into Israel. (For more on the Apartheid Wall, see "Stop the Wall" at www.pengon.org/.)

These various developments leave Palestinian population centers separated from one another and will create various isolated "cantons" (what Palestinians, referring to South Africa under apartheid, call "Bantustans") within 35-40 percent of the West Bank: the canton of Bethlehem, for example, or of Ramallah, Nablus-Jenin, Hebron, etc. These cantons might be left disconnected, or perhaps they would be granted what Sharon recently dubbed "transportation contiguity" in the form of bridges or tunnels to connect them.

The Israeli settlement enterprise over the past decades has been about establishing a matrix of roads and settlements by which Israel can, directly or indirectly, control all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Journalist Amira Hass, writing in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in January, highlighted the military significance of the settlements and their road networks: "Israel’s decision-makers, who over the last 20 years have carefully planned the location of every Jewish settlement in the West Bank and every water pipe and electricity pylon, also knew how to plan a ramified network of roads that would become a key weapon against the Palestinians. If you are good children and accept the dictate of the settlements, you can use the roads. If you are bad children we will lock you into the tiny prisons that these roads so cleverly created." In the past decade these roads and settlements have made the prisons ever smaller and made exit from them ever more difficult.

Israeli colonial expansion, therefore, is putting the nails in the coffin of any plans for a viable two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Talk of "roadmaps" devised by the "Quartet" (United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia) for the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005 appear naïve at best and dangerous at worst. It is naïve because current Israeli colonial expansion is undermining the viability of a Palestinian state. It is dangerous, since Israel likely will offer to accept as a "painful compromise" a Palestinian "state" in the discontinguous 35-40 percent of the West Bank.

Palestinians assume that, following the U.S-led war against Iraq, tremendous international pressure will be brought to bear upon them to accept a "provisional" state in less than half of the West Bank with, at best, a vague timetable for any further Israeli withdrawals. The current Israeli leadership has made it clear that it does not believe that the roadmap will lead to a full withdrawal from the occupied territories. Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar, for example, observed in Ha’aretz that Israeli defense officials "regard the road map as mere ‘lip service’ and expect it to eventually be shelved together with all of the [Bush] administration’s previous plans for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict."

How should advocates for justice, peace and real security for Palestinians and Israelis respond to this emerging reality? First, we should free ourselves from the conceptual bind of seeing "statehood" (be it Palestinian or Israeli) as an end in itself. Various Christian bodies -- denominations, church-related organizations -- have called for an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip and for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. What is there to say, however, if Israeli colonial expansion has undermined a viable two-state solution?

Advocates for a just and lasting peace should not be ultimately concerned with whether or not a Palestinian state comes into being. After all, Israel (and the United States, and perhaps the European Union) might eagerly back the creation of a "provisional" state -- doomed to indefinite provisionality -- comprising discontiguous Bantustans. This would not bring justice and freedom for Palestinians, nor stability or security for either Palestinians or Israelis. Statehood, from a Christian perspective, is simply not an end in itself. What is a good in and of itself is the flourishing and the well-being of all who inhabit "Mandate Palestine" -- that is, present-day Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. If current realities have undermined a two-state solution, then those who care about the well-being and security of Palestinians and Israelis must dream of new ways for Palestinians and Israelis to be able to live side by side in justice, freedom and equality.

If a viable two-state solution is eclipsed, then Palestinians will need to struggle against an apartheid reality in the occupied territories and work for equal citizenship in a binational state, in which Palestinians and Israelis are equal citizens before the law, in all of’ Mandate Palestine. The vision of one binational state must not be dismissed out of hand by advocates of a just peace, even though many will find it difficult to move beyond the language of "two states" to which they have become wedded.

Advocating one binational state will be perceived as being against the state of Israel and thus as anti-Zionist. Support for a two-state solution has allowed many Christians to avoid a theological reckoning with Zionism, not resolving the question of whether the creation of a sovereign state which denies Palestinian refugees from 1948 the right to return to their homes and insists on maintaining a "Jewish demographic majority’ is a theological good. Some Christians, like those committed to dispensationalist readings of scripture, warmly embrace Zionism. If Zionism necessarily means the creation and preservation of a "Jewish demographic majority" at the expense of the rights and well-being of Palestinians, then advocacy for a binational state is indeed anti-Zionist. Other Zionisms, however, such as a "cultural Zionism" that looks for a revitalization of Jewish life in the land while not depending on sovereign and demographic control might emerge as possibilities compatible with a binational vision.

Perhaps the unexpected will occur and Israel will dismantle its colonies in the occupied territories, with a viable Palestinian state emerging next to Israel. If this happens, we will have cause for rejoicing. We must, however, soberly confront the possibility that the day of the two-state solution has already been eclipsed and start thinking through the consequent theological and advocacy implications.

Couples (Mark 10:2-16)

In a few weeks voters in six states will decide on state constitutional amendments that will bar same-sex marriage and any other legal recognition of same-sex couples. Most mainline denominations have come out against the amendments even though some of them do not allow same-sex couples to wed in their churches. Most evangelicals and Catholics support the amendments.

Both sides would do well to consider Jesus’ teaching -- not on marriage, but on divorce. In the Markan passage, the Pharisees were seeking to trap Jesus when they asked him, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" The setup reminds us of other situations in which people tried to trap Jesus -- on occasions when they demanded signs, inquired about taxes or debated resurrection.

Like those questions, the one on divorce had risks on either side. If Jesus approved of divorce he would appear unprophetic or, as John Calvin says, as "a panderer who lends countenance to human lust." But if he spoke against divorce he would risk death. (Herod had recently beheaded John the Baptist, the last prophet to have spoken out against his marriage to the ex-wife of his brother.)

The Pharisees asked Jesus about divorce not out of spiritual concern but because of political calculation. Today much of our debate about marriage comes from a similar hope to score political points. But regardless of the political dimensions, we can inform our discussion of marriage by watching Jesus respond.

As he did with other ensnaring questions, Jesus moved delicately between risky options. He asked the Pharisees to state the law -- divorce is legal -- and then took a sharp turn into a discussion of God’s intention for human relationship -- lifelong marriage. Note that Jesus took the question of divorce out of a legal context and moved it into the spiritual arena.

Our national debate about marriage would be richer if we asked just what it is that God intends for us in marriage. We would spend less time asking "who can many" and more time sharing "why we marry."

Jesus points to the story of Adam and Eve as a lesson in God’s intentions for marriage. Theirs is a Rorschach-test marriage. Do we see Adam and Eve as procreators of humanity, so that the intention of marriage is children? Or do we see them as complementary creations, representing the necessity of biological difference?

In my congregation we look to Adam and Eve’s Edenic partnership as a sign that God’s purpose was companionship. Adam and Eve were together because "it is not good that humans should be alone." We see the intention of marriage not as procreation or biological complementarity but as intimate companionship. The practical consequence of this view is that our congregation has been celebrating same-sex marriages for almost two decades.

Yet marriage does not exist only for companionship or procreation or complementarity. It has a cruciform shape, like other ascetical practices, and is a transformative experience for the two individuals. In marriage, God intends not only to alleviate human loneliness but to effect human salvation.

Like ascetical disciplines such as fasting or celibacy or poverty, marriage involves saying no to something in order to say yes to a higher good. Marriage is based on renunciation and reception: one says no to many possible partners in order to say yes to one. One renounces some behaviors in order to be drawn closer to God in covenant relationship.

We discover the cross in marriage just as a monastic discovers it in fasting or celibacy or poverty. In marriage we are naked not just physically, but spiritually and emotionally. Our spouse knows us completely, in all our brokenness. Fortunately, in marriage we also see and experience the other side of the cross -- the gifts of grace and mercy.

In 2000, my spouse Jay and I adopted a son. Tomas had a difficult time sleeping at night from age one through the whole next year. We tried everything we could think of until a sleep specialist said, "Buy a bed for his room, sleep next to the crib and be there when he wakes up."

As someone who loves his sleep, this year of 3 a.m. wakings slowly and persistently wore me down. By the end of the year my disposition was rotten. To be loved in spite of this, with my evident limits of patience, was an experience of profound grace. I was loved even when I felt broken, and in that I experienced God’s love.

When Jay and I were married, we knew that our union would be recognized only in our congregation. This leaves us and other same-sex couples in the unusual position of being the only couples in America wedded without the possibility of divorce. Pastorally, I know this can be messy. Theologically, all of us Christians must wonder why the only couples legally living under Jesus’ proscription against divorce are same-sex couples.

For my partner and me this means that we take our vows and our dependence on God’s grace seriously. It means trusting my partner enough to raise children without the protection of custody arrangements. We depend on God’s grace to forgive and for humility and maturity in our relationship. I am convinced, through my experience, that God is working to transform us through our marriage.

I don’t know how the political situation of same-sex marriage will be resolved. Perhaps amendments barring divorce will be next. What matters more than politics, however, is being faithful to God’s intentions for us in marriage. That intention is that we humans experience transformative companionship.

Material Things (Mark 10:17-31)

On the way out of my city I often pass a large self-storage center. Rows and rows of nondescript units are lined up like barracks at an army base. I often wonder what is inside those storage units: treasured heirlooms, vast collections of National Geographic, broken and tattered belongings that someone doesn’t want to give up?

I note the sign saying Self-Storage and wonder: How many selves do we lock up inside with those possessions?

Whether or not we rent a storage unit, we do tend to define ourselves by our belongings. The colonists revolted against the Stamp Act of the British Empire by boycotting British goods. This first major, coordinated protest against imperial rule in America not only turned the colonists into Americans, but also defined Americans by what they did or did not buy. To be American was to wear homespun clothes. Material consumption and possession have continued to be the means by which we define ourselves.

This is why Jesus’ words in Mark are like a "two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit." It’s always tempting to look away when Jesus speaks to us of wealth, convincing ourselves that the rich young ruler is someone else who makes more money than we do. In subtle ways we say to Jesus, "Surely not I, Teacher."

Jesus’ conversation with the rich young man presents two versions of the material life: the first is the young man’s life of wealth and status. This is the kind of material life our culture trains us to long for, whether we are the immigrant hoping for a better life or the uber-wealthy person trying to "make do" with a 20,000-square-foot house.

Jesus called the young ruler to a new kind of material life, a life given to serving the poor with the "materials" of tears, blood and sweat. Clearly, this life is not marked by the kinds of happiness used to sell goods. But we do honor Jesus’ call in our culture when we honor volunteers and all those who serve others.

Jesus was not calling the rich young man to an esoteric spiritualism, a gnostic abandonment of the physical world. Instead, he was calling him to move from one kind of materialism, the self-absorbed variety, to one that focuses on others’ needs, including their material needs.

Which materialism defines us? I’ve heard that most of us Americans, at nearly every income level, long for a 20 percent increase in income. "With just 20 percent more, life would be easy," we tell ourselves. But for most of us this is an unquenchable hunger.

Our consumption of goods would seem to be in direct conflict with a materialism of good works. In Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks describes how Americans resolve this conflict. His theory is that our culture was once split between the bourgeois and the bohemians. The bourgeois spent their money on obvious luxuries like boats and furs; bohemians created an alternative culture that disdained overt displays of wealth and instead embraced a romantic view of the common life.

Brooks maintains that contemporary Americans have created a hybrid -- they are bourgeois bohemians who spend extravagantly on everyday goods. The money once spent on boats and furs goes into granite countertops and professional gas ranges. People who would disdain furs as an immoral indulgence will spend thousands on a bathroom with a Zen-like quality or, as the New York Times recently reported, on garage makeovers.

In a previous house we redid our kitchen, following the Bobo wisdom that an expensive range would somehow transform my cooking. Now I am in another house, and back to cooking on a scratched and dented stove in a kitchen that the realtor described as "awaiting your personal touch" (code phrase for sledgehammer).

Though my current kitchen is a shadow of my former one, the food tastes the same or better, because now it’s shared with a family and with longtime friends.

The kind of materialism Jesus calls us to requires not the accumulation of goods, but an engagement with people, particularly people in need. Perhaps the first lesson for us as "rich young men" is to realize the empty promise of our consumption. The second is to follow Jesus in the abundant life of engagement.

While the lectionary matches Hebrews 4 to this reading, I find a closer connection to Philippians 2, where Paul speaks of Jesus as one who was equal with God but "emptied himself, taking the form of a slave." Can we hear Jesus speaking to us as the one who gave up his possessions? Jesus is the one who has already done what he asks us to do.

Life in a congregation trains us to focus on Jesus’ kind of materialism. When we baptize a child or visit the sick or serve food in a shelter, we are living and practicing a materialism of tears and blood and sweat. Following Jesus means embracing this new life.

This past year I was promoted to head of staff in my congregation and received an increase in compensation. But this change was not the defining event of the year. What will stick with me is my relationship with a young man in my congregation who was in jail awaiting trial for murder. My visits spent praying with him, reading Romans and helping him understand who he is and what he had done matter more than the possessions I have accumulated.

Jesus’ words can pierce our hearts; they may also encourage us to engage the materials that really matter: bodies and souls.

Hooked on War (Ps. 23; Jn. 10:11-18)

The navy shaped my grandfather’s life. He was a retired navy officer when he died, so we held his funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. We were greeted at the gates of Fort Myer by armed guards. As my family and I drove through the base, we noted the display of guns and armaments. Outside the chapel stood an honor guard.

After the family service, Taps played while my grandfather’s ashes were put into a horse-drawn casket and we were escorted through the cemetery -- the soldiers, the horse-drawn carriage, then the family. At the burial site an American flag was folded and presented to my grandmother, and the noise of a 21-gun salute made us jump.

The overwhelming power of our military and our government was on display -- not just the power to defeat an enemy, but the symbolic reminder of our military’s power. Even in a military funeral, we see how the military gives meaning even to death, shape even to destruction, and an idealistic aura to aggression.

For many years my congregation has struggled with its place and calling in a superpower nation. During the height of the cold-war confrontation with the Soviet Union, for example, we designated ourselves a "Just Peace" congregation. We were rejecting the military arms race and the logic of mutual assured destruction without declaring ourselves pacifists.

Now, in a different political environment, we are again grappling with the morality of American military power. Increasingly we are finding it necessary to understand how our faith affects our relationship to America, how our love of Jesus informs and even changes our love of America, and how God calls us to speak up for the powerless. Advocating for peace is requiring us to confront the seductive power of military might at a time when its allure becomes almost unbearable; dissent is seen as treason, discussion as a betrayal.

Now, in "real time" news, journalists encourage us to be embedded with the war effort. The sight of men and women from our own towns and congregations can make us instinctively support a war. The war itself is often presented with a certain glamour -- "smart" bombs, quick tanks, special ops -- while the media help us protect ourselves from gory reality. Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent and author of War Is a Force Which Unites Us, describes the seductive quality of martial power as a narcotic that can provoke in whole societies a self-righteous delirium.

Making sense of our mission and ministry in this time requires that we find some way to keep our heads clear of the narcotic of war. We must cultivate an alternative power, an alternative source of meaning. Good Shepherd Sunday may be the time to recall that we derive our identity not from the prestige of our country but from the presence of our Lord.

The gospel leads us to remember to whom we belong. "I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me." In moments of national crises, amidst the rally cry of war, we are to know that we belong to Jesus. The seductive voice of military might drowns out the call of Jesus; in countless conflicts this has occurred, and the church has become a source of sanctimonious propaganda.

Therefore, reciting the 23rd Psalm is both a reminder and a confession. It reminds us that Jesus is our only shepherd, the one whose voice we must heed, and that we must confess that often we listen to the call of wolves and lazy hirelings. By reciting the 23rd Psalm we ascribe to Jesus prerogatives that the state normally takes on for itself. It is not the state but the shepherd Jesus who is to provide for our health; the shepherd Jesus who ensures our security; the shepherd Jesus who protects us and provides for us.

It is to Jesus the shepherd that our ancestors in faith looked when they experienced anxiety, turmoil and oppression. The Heidelberg Catechism, my denomination’s FAQ on Christian life, captures this in its opening question:

"What is your only comfort, in life and in death?"

"That I belong -- body and soul, in life and in death -- not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ."

In my congregation we furnish the sanctuary with a window of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, but we do not have an. American flag there, because we seek our comfort in the Lord’s presence and not in the Pentagon’s power.

To be led by our shepherd Jesus does not mean we are naive about the reality of wolves and thickets and lazy hirelings who might endanger the sheep. It doesn’t mean we ignore the oppression of Kurdish and Shi’ite Iraqis. It doesn’t mean we overlook the threat to international peace posed by a nuclear North Korea. It doesn’t mean we ignore the immorality of preemptive wars. Instead, amid all the uncertainty of this life, amid all of the real and imagined dangers, our peace comes from the presence of our shepherd Jesus who "prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies.

It is by remembering that Jesus is my Good Shepherd that we can find the presence of mind to speak and witness and preach in a nation overtaken by the rhetoric and the narcotic of war.

A Father Grieves The Loss of a Child

About four years into my teaching profession, Doris gave birth to a beautiful baby boy who died before he had lived the whole of a day. God’s face has never looked the same to me since. Because of my Calvinism, God’s face had had the unmovable serenity of an absolute sovereign absolutely in control of absolutely everything. Every good thing, every bad thing, every triumph, every tragedy, from the fall of every sparrow to the ascent of every rocket, everything was under God’s silent, strange and secretive control. But I could not believe that God was in control of our child’s dying.

It was not as if I had found a forgotten Bible verse or saw a familiar one in a new light. It was more like something that happened to me when I was 15, hitchhiking through Georgia, waiting at the docks for a ride with a trucker. I heard a young white man curse an aging black man who had gotten in his way, cussed him out with God-rattling oaths; and what is more, he did it in front of the old man’s friends. I had never known a black person. I had never before seen racism in action. But when I heard its words and saw its face on that early morning in Atlanta, I knew for sure that racism was a terrible thing.

That’s how I knew for sure that God did not micromanage our baby’s death. I had been intellectually excited by John Calvin’s tough-minded belief that all things -- and he really meant all of them, including the ghastly and the horrible -- happen when and how and where they happen precisely as God decreed them to happen. A "horrific decree," Calvin conceded, but if it works out to God’s glory, who are we to complain? On the day that our baby boy died, I knew that I could never again believe that God had arranged for our tiny child to die before he had hardly begun to live, any more than I could believe that we would, one fine day when he would make it all plain, praise God that it had happened.

I learned that I do not have the right stuff for such hardboiled theology. I am no more able to believe that God micromanages the death of little children than I am able to believe that God was macromanaging Hitler’s Holocaust. With one morning’s wrenching intuition, I knew that my portrait of God would have to be repainted.

I was well aware that every day other people are suffering tragedies infinitely worse than Doris’s and mine. And I remembered that I had consoled people whose loss was much greater than ours with the comforting assurance that God knew best. But grief can be a self-centered thing; I had no tears for the wretched and the poor of the earth that day. I had tears only for Doris and myself.

We had spent a decade making love according to a schedule set by four different fertility clinics in three different countries. And finally, after one summer night’s lark on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan with no thought but love, Doris became a medically certified pregnant woman.

Six months along and doing fine, we thought -- with God answering our prayers it could be no other way but fine -- she suddenly one night began losing amniotic fluid. I called her doctor. ‘She’s going into labor," he said. "Get her to the hospital as fast as you can." And then he said he was sorry, but our baby was going to be badly malformed.

"How badly?"

"Very."

We fumbled silent and bewildered into the car. I told her. We cried. And we promised God and each other that we would love the child no matter how damaged she or he was. After Doris had been tucked in, I went to the waiting room to worry for a few hours. Suddenly, Doris’s doctor broke in and exulted: "Congratulations, Lew, you are the father of a perfect man-child." I told Doris the news. She was skeptical, but I went home and danced like a delirious David before the Lord.

Next day, just before noon, our pediatrician called: I had better come right down to the hospital. When I met him he told me that our miracle child was dead. Two mornings later, with a couple of friends at my side and our minister reading the ceremony, we buried him "in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection." Doris never got to see her child.

A pious neighbor comforted me by reminding me that "God was in control." I wanted to say to her, "Not this time." It seems to me that the privilege of being the delicate organisms we are in the kind of world we live in comes at a price. The price is that things can go wrong, badly wrong sometimes, which should come as no surprise.

The blossoming of every flecklike zygote into a humanoid embryo and an embryo into the astounding creature we call a baby is beset with so many threats along the way that any baby who gets delivered into the world as the pride and joy of its mother is nature’s most marvelous success story. Every healthy newborn child is a biological miracle; if we did not know that it actually happens every day, we would say that the very notion was a wild man’s fantasy.

Doris and I cried a lot, and we knew in our tears that God was with us, paying attention to us, shedding ten thousand tears for every one of ours. Neither of us had a moment’s inclination to give up on God, to quit believing in God or to quit trusting God. In fact, God never seemed more real to either of us. Never closer. Never more important. I could stop believing that God had micron-managed our tiny boy’s dying. But I could not stop trusting that God was still with us,

Four decades later, on the morning of September 11, Doris and I, with people all over the country, were stunned into silence by the sight of two airliners crashing into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. A gargantuan evil -- not a breakdown in physical nature this time, but an evil conceived and willed by human beings. Pure evil does not happen often. Most of the time, evil wears the mask of decency. But this time it wore no mask, and when we saw if, we spelled it with a capital E.

It is true that the purity of another’s evil does not make our own ways good. But this time, no matter how hard I tried to find one, I could locate no stain in our national behavior dark enough to temper the purity of this evil. What happened that terrible Tuesday was born in the evil intentions of evil men’s hearts. The evil of the thing only makes our question the more urgent: Where was God and what was God doing when this evil happened in front of our eyes?

Calvinists seek their answer in the eternal past when God charted the course of every human event. There, in eternity, God wrote the entire script for the whole human drama yet to come. God, not Osama bin Laden, was really in charge when the terrorists murdered all those innocent people. And they have a splendid hymn to comfort them:

God moves in a mysterious way

his wonders to perform.

He plants his footsteps in the. sea

and rides upon the storm.

His purposes will ripen fast,

unfolding every hour.

The bud may have a bitter taste,

but sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err

and scan his work in vain.

God is his own interpreter

and he will make it plain.

I do not want God to "make it plain." If God could show us that there was a good and necessary reason for such a bad thing to have happened, it must not have been a bad thing after all. And I cannot accommodate that thought. In fact, I have given up asking why such bad things happen. Instead, I look to the future and ask, When is God going to come and purge evil from God’s world? When will God come to make God’s original dream for the world come true?

For me, there was no mystery about where God was and what God was up to on the morning of September 11, 2001. God was right there doing what God always does in the presence of evil that is willed by humans -- fighting it, resisting it, battling it, trying God’s best to keep it from happening. This time evil won. God, we hope, will one day emerge triumphant over evil -- though, on the way to that glad day, God sometimes takes a beating.

The Barbaric 20th Century

Book Review:

Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. By Jonathan Glover: Yale University press, 464 pp.



War killed an average of over a hundred people an hour through the 20th century," writes Jonathan Glover. One can only wonder what the 21st century will bring. Glover, director of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King’s College in London, undertakes the momentous task of offering a moral history of the past century. According to Glover, it is the history of the failure of our humanity and the concurrent rise of barbarism. He charts the constant threat of barbarism and struggles to build up ethical defenses against it.

In writing any history of the recent past, factual error is a danger, as is distortion of perspective, oversimplification or faulty inference. The difficulties mount if one purports to write a moral history. How is the author to avoid moralizing, biased judgments or, perhaps worse, a simple reading of history as moral progress or moral decline?

Though Glover is aware of all of these dangers, he persists in his task. He believes that the moral reflection of those who have been spared the most horrendous events of the past century can be true only if it grapples with what others have suffered and done. Only in so engaging the past can we expand our moral imaginations and escape the confines of our limited social and moral experience. In the process, Glover suggests, we may also discover something about the structure of moral experience that emboldens us to struggle against forces of injustice.

Glover does not spare us the details of a century of untold blood and savagery, yet his main focus is on a reality that he believes lies beneath the horror -- the fading of the moral law. "The idea of a moral law external to us may never have had secure foundations, but, partly because of the decline of religion in the Western world, awareness of this is now widespread. Those of us who do not believe in a religious moral law should still be troubled by its fading."

Throughout most of Western history people have believed in some kind of moral order within which they made sense of their lives. Morality was justified religiously through the idea that human beings are created in the image of God, or rationally through such ideas as the notion that all humans have the capacity to know the good. These justifications are now lost to us, Glover contends.

Whether the phenomenon is called the death of God, the modern disenchantment of the world, the loss of a background of value or the failure of an ethical attitude toward nature, Western peoples’ sense of a moral order to which they can, may or must conform has diminished. Indeed, many consider the very idea tyrannical -- a denial of the individual’s right to free choice. The escape from a morally deep world was undertaken in part to celebrate freedom and to energize human creativity. Since classical moral realism -- the idea that moral values are rooted in objective reality and so have factlike status -- has vanished, we need other sources to direct human life and combat barbarism. This is the moral challenge that launches Glover’s book.

Glover contends that moral reflection must move in an empirical and psychological, rather than a rational and religious, direction. It must seek to reconstruct ethics around people’s revulsion toward violence and their consequent attempt to restrain violence. One must look close and hard, therefore, at what forms and deforms moral sensibilities.

Glover argues that three sensibilities restrain violence: sympathy, recognition of human dignity, and a sense of moral identity. People sense a moral bond with others and restrain their actions because of their sympathy with others’ suffering, their acknowledgment that others are due respect, and their belief that acts of violence toward others would destroy their own sense of self and community. Sympathy, dignity and moral identity are features of most of our lives most of the time, which is why the world is not normally torn apart by festivals of cruelty. Ethics can be reconstructed on the basis of these features of ordinary life, Glover believes, without recourse to disputed rational axioms or religious beliefs.

Glover is not alone in recognizing the loss of moral depth to life. Many have attempted to respond to the new situation. Indeed, the work of reconstruction has been tile central business of contemporary moral theorists. Some thinkers, especially conservative theologians and cultural critics, appeal to their specific faith or moral traditions. Moral reason and moral identity, they insist, are constituted exclusively by the traditions that shape us. The problem for any moral community is to form people with the virtues necessary to live rightly with others.

Other moral thinkers narrow morality to the simple demand for nonmaleficence and socially defined norms of justice. In this case, morality is reconstituted not in terms of virtues and a vision of the good life, but in terms of the minimal demands of justice necessary for some measure of social tranquillity. Still others try to work out a phenomenology of moral experience. They try to show that, at least with respect to human beings, life is permeated with a worth that evokes respect, dedication to enhance life and constraints that limit the wanton use of power. Glover moves between delineating a psychology of sympathy, dignity and moral identity and presenting detailed historical studies of the most heinous events of the past century. He shows what light a specific moral psychology throws on human events and also how those events sharpen awareness of the fragility of our moral condition.

It is notoriously hard to make goodness compelling, whereas the human imagination is gripped by stories of evil. Glover knows this and plays upon it, yet he still seeks to discern within the horror of the past century a glimmer of human dignity. Each of his studies -- of My Lai; Rwanda and tribalism; Stalin; the Nazis -- explores how the normal restraints on violence (rooted in sympathy, dignity and moral identity) were overwhelmed in certain situations. He provides a fascinating if troubling examination of how belief systems, physical distance from one’s "enemy, tribalism, humiliation and other social forces destroy normal psychological inhibitors to cruelty. The case studies offer insight into the terrible fragility of moral sensibility, the ways in which it can be manipulated and overwhelmed, and the thoroughness of that process.

One is left to wonder, and certainly Glover wonders, if any kernel of moral sensibility can remain in human beings amid such barbarous situations. The ethical question, in Christian terms, is to what extent moral awareness endures within human sinfulness. And further, what would it mean if we thought our moral sensibilities could be completely effaced? Clover’s empirical approach to ethics does not allow him to probe these kinds of questions in detail.

The moral history Glover presents is disturbing not only for what it relates but also for what it fails to relate. Even as he seeks grounds for reviving the moral imagination and provoking moral sensibilities, Glover pictures humanity in its most depraved forms. No mention is made of the past century’s great movements of liberation, or the worldwide women s movement, or struggles for freedom and human rights. Are these not also part of the moral history of the past century?

This point is especially consequential for Glover’s argument, since many of the resistance and liberation movements of the past century were inspired and championed by people with deep religious convictions. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu, Dorothy Day, the French Protestants who resisted fascism and protected Jews, Buddhist monks in Vietnam and many, many others were led by their religious convictions to fight for human dignity and human rights. It is necessary to remember acts of goodness if one is to provide a complete picture of moral motivation. Insofar as any history is a complex act of remembering, how and what is remembered is of utmost importance.

This is related to another concern about Glover’s ethical position. Can all forms of moral realism so easily be dismissed? To be sure, classical realism is lost to us, a development due in part to increased awareness of the extent to which the human mind and cultural forms are the irreducible prisms for any apprehension of reality. We do not see goodness in the world in the same way that we perceive natural phenomena like thunderstorms or Orion’s Belt on a chilly summer’s eve. But don’t the sensibilities that Glover points to -- sympathy, dignity and moral identity -- tell us something about the deeper texture of reality?

Recent debates about realism in ethics and about the array of basic goods that human flourishing requires make Clover’s portrait of the moral life seem thin. The issue is not so much that sensibilities are socially constructed but how they are morally cultivated. As many religious traditions testify, the ability to perceive and attend to others is part of being human, but too often it is stunted, deformed and misdirected. One must therefore work to cultivate moral awareness, sharpen the conscience, test and reform perceptions of self and others. Profound moral traditions have the means to tutor our sensibilities and transform conscience, and they do so in part through what is remembered, in part through what is believed, and in part through symbolic, ritual and textual resources that form the moral imagination.

Moral perception when it is correct is always about something. It purports to be about things and persons within a distinctly moral mode of being. Lurking throughout Glover’s book, then, is a question about human nature. What kinds of creatures are we, morally speaking? If recent discussions about realism are on the right track in confronting the fading of the moral law -- and I believe they are -- then the question of the depth of morality is more complex than Glover’s empirical psychology allows. For religious thinkers this is an especially pressing point. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus hold that morality is not only a human fabrication, even though our moral sensibilities are indeed fragile. There is still a case to be made for the insights of these traditions.

But whatever one’s criticisms of Glover’s Humanity, its aim is plainly and forthrightly humane. Given that aim, religious people face a choice. They may either put their moral convictions and energies in the service of our shared humanity on this fragile planet, or they may stress local identities and a sense of moral uniqueness, and in doing so with a clean conscience allow the horror to continue. Everyone must confront certain questions in the light of the recent past. What can we human beings learn from the violence of the past century? Can we escape the entrapments that foster and lead to violence? How do we preserve our humanity? How have our religious traditions fostered and continued to foster untold acts of barbarism?

Believers in every tradition need to articulate a historically honest, realistic and yet truly humanistic version of their convictions. That is the work ahead for those of us who have escaped the 20th century’s more horrendous forms of violence but who now find the forces of cruelty working within our own traditions.

Slave Wages (Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42)

In 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation marked the beginning of the end of slavery. The new air of freedom brought an unintoxicated euphoria. But a century later, freedom was redefined, this time as an absence of responsibility. The new air of license was inhaled and produced an intoxicated forgetfulness of anything that smacked of authoritarian inhibitions or paralyzing parameters.

"Good morning. What we have in mind is brealcfast in bed with 400,000." Who can forget Woodstock 1969? Writing for the Times Herald-Record, Elliot Tiber described the scene: "For four days, the site became a countercultural mini-nation in which minds were open, drugs were all but legal and love was ‘free."’

What a way to usher out a decade marked by three political assassinations and a bloody, protested war.

French movie actress Jeanne Moreau, a sex goddess for moviegoers in the 1960s, played sophisticated amoral heroines who could completely destroy the men who loved them. In a U.S. interview in the early ‘60s she told a reporter that she was free, completely free. "I am free to choose whose slave I will be."

Isn’t that what Paul was talking about when he wrote to the believers in Rome? "Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey -- whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?" Paul then breaks into a doxology of praise because those to whom he was writing had been set free from sin and had become slaves of righteousness.

Can slavery produce rich benefits for anyone but the slave owner? Paul says yes, if you choose the right one to whom you enslave yourself. Those who become slaves to God reap the benefit of holiness, the results of which are eternal life. That sounds weird enough to be considered otherworldly -- not something for the here and now. In reality, however, this here-and-now form of slavery yields the most fulfilling and purposeful form of life.

Paul’s writings are directed to relatively new believers in specific geographical locations. They were dealing with issues in their faith communities without the benefit of much church history or tradition to which they could refer. All of his epistles were composed in the context of an overarching cultural phenomenon: Pax Romana.

The Greco-Roman world was the setting for all the early churches Paul had been instrumental in starting. The power and dominion of Roman rule spread its tentacles into every nook and cranny of human existence. Beginning with god Caesar as lord of all, every area of life ultimately submitted itself to that rule: military, economic, cultural, philosophical, educational and familial.

In the Roman-dominated world, new believers may have had their spiritual status changed as it relates to new life in Christ, but their politics and culture did not get saved overnight. So when Paul reminds Roman believers they have been set free to become slaves of righteousness, he is reminding them of a much bigger story, one that can fuel their resistance to being sucked back into the old idolatries. Without those reminders they could become the victims of what Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat call "covenantal forgetfulness:

The Decalogue is prefaced by a reminder that Yahweh is the God who led Israel out of Egyptian bondage, precisely because forgetting this foundational story always results in breaking the commandments prohibiting idolatry. Deuteronomy insists that the central temptation of a life of security and abundance in the land will be that Israel will forget its story of liberation, will forget its liberating God and his healing word, and will embrace idols.

Walsh and Keesmaat say that in the letter to the believers at Colossae, Paul’s attack on the predominant philosophy of the day was animated by a similar concern -- to remember the story. They write, "His most potent weapon against the idolatrous worldview that threatens to tale the community’s imagination captive is precisely the retelling and remembering of the community’s founding story."

Postmodernists would ask why anyone would want to buy into the "big story" when there is no such thing as a metanarrative. But the freedom not to choose any story as superior to all others can become an enslaving state of mind -- one is doomed to aimless wandering among the altars of relativity and reductionism. Perhaps one of the reasons the church in the West is irrelevant to postmodernists is because of its own covenantal forgetfulness.

Christ followers in Africa, Asia and Latin America have no problem with the Christian metanarrative. The way they read the Bible leads to the marriage of word and deed, faith and action. Why do their churches look and act so different from churches in the West?

As churchpeople in the Southern Hemisphere are being set free to become slaves to righteousness, they are led to a set-apartness (holiness) forged through persecution, harassment, injustice and poverty. They have not forgotten the bigger story. They are willing to trade the wages of idolatry and sin for a life worth living in the here and now, which will crescendo into the everlasting nature of the redeemed life.

We are still free to choose whose slaves we will be. The Christian story holds the key to a covenantal memory that can point the way to true freedom.

Can Catholics Find Common Ground?

Book Review:

A People Adrift The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church In America. By Peter Steinfels. Simon & Schuster 392 pp.

 

"Today the Roman Catholic Church in the United States is on the verge of either an irreversible decline or a thoroughgoing transformation" is the topic sentence of Peter Steinfels’ extraordinarily valuable survey of the present state of America’s largest Christian community. The only caveat one might make on Steinfels’ stark prophecy Is that there may well be "thoroughgoing transformation" and "irreversible decline." This pessimistic conclusion can be derived from Steinfels’ own account of the ideological crosscurrents -- riptides might be a better metaphor -- roiling Catholic waters and leaving the "people adrift."

Steinfels divides Catholic opinion into four camps: ultraconservative (back to the Latin mass), moderate conservative (enthusiasts for John Paul II and his insistence on strict doctrinal conformity), liberals (who applaud the end of the siege mentality of the Counter-Reformation) and radicals (the Second Vatican Council was a "half-hearted" break with the past and John Paul II has stifled "the spirit of the Council"). Steinfels identifies himself with the liberals "with an admixture of the second, a touch of the fourth, and a whiff of the first." Each of the camps has visions of "thoroughgoing transformation" and each believes that some rival program has already led to crisis and, if fully implemented, would lead to irreversible decline if not the sort of broad-scale collapse of Catholicism seen in French Canada or contemporary Ireland.

For the ultraconservatives, Vatican II was a fundamental mistake that needs to be reversed at least back to Vatican I, if not Trent. At the far fringes of the ultra-conservatives there are those who have officially abandoned official Rome, all the way out to the "crazies" who have elected their own pope. Moderate conservatives insist that Vatican II may have changed the style of the church but not traditional doctrine or morality John Paul II, they say, has been correct to insist on the doctrinal authority of the Roman magisterium and on upholding controversial teachings like the ban on contraception stated in Paul VI’s 1988 encyclical Humanae Vitae. John Paul II’s admiring biographer, George Weigel, expressed the moderate conservative position in the very title of his recent book, Courage to Be Catholic. Transformation is to be accomplished not by the changes advocated by liberals and dissenting theologians, but by returning to the heroic disciplines of prayer and asceticism that are the true Catholic heritage.

Liberals believe that the conservative strategies for a return to the past ignore the present culture both outside and inside parish halls. The political, social and economic transformations of modernity require a positive, if critical, dialogue with the contemporary world -- that is the genuine "spirit of Vatican II." Inside the American church there is too much dissent from official Roman dicta to be ignored. In 1993 Steinfels undertook a survey of Catholic opinion on Humanae Vitae. Eight out of ten Catholics disagreed with the statement that "using artificial means of birth control is wrong." Nonreception of a variety of papal statements by Catholics in the pews is a crisis which cannot be solved by conservative reiteration of traditional doctrine.

Finally, there are the "radicals" who regard everything from Constantine’s acceptance of Christianity to the early church’s split with Judaism as perversion. The underlying theme of the radicals is antiauthoritarianism; a democratic church would effect needed change. The right fringe creates its own pope; the left fringe replaces a pope with a vote.

The problem with following any of the proposed agendas for transformation is that the result is likely to be some species of "decline." Conservatives are quick to spot heresy in the liberal and radical proposals. For conservatives only a thoroughgoing purge will restore "the true Church." Radicals often seem to have moved away from the larger historic church already. Steinfels reports the comment of a speaker at the 1993 Women-Church meeting who, though normally identifying herself as Catholic, declared, "The church I come from -- and I emphasize from -- is the Roman Catholic Church." A conservative purge or a radical abandonment would, it seems, create a diminished church. Whatever gains might be envisioned in holiness or revolutionary zeal, the "true" church would be a "saving remnant" of the present mixed bag of American Catholicism.

Finally there is danger of diminishment in the liberal agenda. Steinfels cautions that liberals should recognize that most of their causes have been embraced by liberal Protestants without notably improving their numbers or the impact of those communions in evangelizing the culture. It is the conservative Protestant churches which are growing and having the greatest public influence.

Steinfels was for many years the editor of the lay Catholic journal of opinion Commonweal, There is a slogan at the magazine: "It’s a big church!" and that is the spirit of his book. While clearly identifying himself within the liberal camp -- Commonweal’s long-term ideological stance -- he is at great pains to state and give credit where appropriate to the full spectrum of Catholic opinion. Symbolic of his approach is the framing of the book around the death of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and the Common Ground project which the cardinal initiated only three months before his death. Bernardin was acutely aware of the tensions within the American church. In announcing the Common Ground project, he asked, "Will the Catholic Church in the United States . . . [be] a church of promise . . . able to be a leavening force in our culture . . . or will it become a church on the defensive, torn by dissension?" In order to create dialogue, Bernardin called together a group of liberal and conservative opinion-makers and charged them to engage in dialogue about the shape of the church. With Bernardin’s death Common Ground lost a high-profile public sponsor and thus the sort of impact that he envisaged.

Not that the prospect for a genuine meeting of the many minds of contemporary Catholicism was good in the first place. The very idea of Common Ground was denounced from its initiation by hierarchical conservatives like Cardinal Bernard Law, who said that there are no legitimate disagreements to be resolved: Roma locuta est; causa finita est. On the other hand. Notre Dame’s Richard McBrien criticized Common Ground for failing to include radicals within the dialogue. Steinfels’s book could he seen as a casebook for revivifying a common-ground initiative.

All the ideological combatants share with Steinfels the notion that the American Catholic Church is in crisis. The most obvious source of crisis is the much publicized sex scandal involving predatory priests and episcopal cover-up. From 1988 to 1997, Steinfels was the senior religion editor of the New York Times. As Commonweal editor and then a Times reporter, he followed the problem of predatory priests from the high-profile trial of Father Gilbert Gauthé in 1985 through the bishops’ 1993 statement of principles, which urged prompt and decisive action in cooperation with civil authorities on all allegations of sexual abuse, to the resignation of Cardinal Law this year. His account of the scandal does not minimize the seriousness of the situation, but he underlines the fact that most of the cases predate 1993 and the large number of offenders so often cited reaches back 50 years. For Steinfels, the crisis is deeper and more pervasive than the sensational sex stories of recent date.

His reportorial career gives Steinfels a historical perspective on a whole variety of Catholic crises -- not to mention a fascinating ecumenical education reporting on Mormons, Buddhists, Christian Scientists and whomever. The point of his book is not to advance theological arguments. Rather, he focuses his narrative on Catholic institutions, hospitals, colleges and universities, social service agencies, schools, the parish. Not the least of the crises affecting all Catholic institutions is the precipitous decline in the numbers of priests and vowed religious. To cite just one statistic: between 1965 and 2002 the number of priests, nuns and religious brothers staffing Catholic schools dropped from 114,000 to 9,000. For many years the "Catholicity" of the various institutions was a matter of course and symbol. Obviously it was a Catholic hospital because it was full of sisters in white wimples. Even if you majored in physics at Savanarola University (one of Steinfels’s favorite places!), the fact that the father/ brother/sister professor was ubiquitous made the place at least appear Catholic. And then there were compulsory courses in scholastic theology, priests in the dorms and mass round the clock. No more.

Steinfels points to the multiple factors leading to the changes: Vatican II, rejection of Humanae Vitae, the election of John F. Kennedy, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, feminism. However one evaluates these factors, there has been a dissolution of the prior Catholic consensus and community. The "thick" Catholicism of the past has largely vanished.

The disappearance of priests and vowed religious at Catholic institutions has precipitated an attempt to establish an ideological base which would define Catholicity absent Its previous clerical custodians. The most publicized attempt to define an ideology is contained in John Paul II’s document Ex Corde Ecclesiae, an admonition to Catholic colleges and universities that "Catholic" must have a pervasive meaning within the institution. For John Paul II, the role of the Roman magisterium is authoritative in certifying genuine Catholic theology for Catholic institutions. Theologians are urged to receive a mandatum, a sort of certificate of authentic teaching, from the local bishop. It should come as no surprise that the mandatum has been viewed as a threat to academic freedom. Steinfels is critical of Ex Corde, but he is deeply concerned about the Catholic character of putative Catholic colleges. (As a recent sometime faculty member at Notre Dame and Georgetown. Steinfels speaks of Catholic higher education with an insider’s authority.)

There is no simple solution ab extra from a distant Roman magisterium. Not mandatum but mission is the answer for true Catholicity. But that is not simple either. Steinfels is properly critical of the two-paragraph, vapid mission statement tucked in the Catholic college catalogue. If there is to be a genuine sense of Catholicity at colleges or all the other Catholic Institutions, it will require a level of sophistication, explicitness, detail and practical application in everything from program to personnel that is largely missing today.

The attempt to discover an ideological mission, a defining characteristic of Catholicism, which will guide a church more and more in the hands of the nonordained gives special urgency to the conservative-liberal-radical splits. Although there have always been institutional and theological tensions within the Christian community from before Arianism to after Gallicanism, these controversies have largely been within the clerical guild. The emergence of the laity is the underlying theme for part two of Steinfels’s book. A chapter titled "Sex and the Female Church" has potency because of the lay concerns. Sexual morality -- e.g., the legitimacy of contraception -- is an issue for the married laity, not the celibate religious. As for "female": Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens remarked at the first session of Vatican II that "half the church" was missing. Counting noses, one could argue that in traditional decision-making for the Catholic Church most of the church, the laity, has been missing. The vehemence with which the conservative-to-radical contenders argue may be an unconscious reflection of a passion to capture the lay vote for a coming Catholic Church.

In these ideological quarrels about how Catholicism should institutionalize itself, Steinfels is a model of fairness while at the same time making it clear where he believes the proper direction lies. Not surprisingly, he often operates by offering three alternative pathways that could be pursued: conservative, liberal, radical. Thus on the matter of priests: conservative, retain celibacy and call for heroic holiness; liberal, remove required celibacy, eventually ordain women; radical, restudy the very idea of priesthood (a mature, natural leader, married or celibate, could be ordained only for presiding at weekly Eucharist). While opting for the liberal middle. Steinfels acknowledges the special demands for holiness advocated by conservatives, and the value of radical reevaluation of present structures.

I have suggested that A People Adrift constitutes an ideal casebook for dialogue toward a Catholic "common ground." I wish I could be optimistic that it would be so used. Thomas Hobbes was a skeptical commentator on religious matters. "For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick; which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part, cast up again without effect" (Leviathan, ch. XXXII). Steinfels gives Catholics -- and all concerned Christians -- lots to chew on, and in this case chewing might lead to health. Unfortunately, conservatives, liberals and radicals all too often insist that we swallow their prescriptions whole, eschewing the chewing that Steinfels’s book commends.