Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Mark 7:1-30 - Do You Kiss Your Mother with Those Lips?

from http://www.servicioskoinonia.org/
cerezo/dibujosB/51ordinarioB22.jpg
This is a lightly edited version of a sermon delivered on August 30, 2015 at Allentown Presbyterian Church, Allentown, NJ. 

*****

Mark 7:1-30New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

‘This people honors me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
    teaching human precepts as doctrines.’
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Psalm 11: When The Foundations Are Destroyed


This is a lightly edited version of a sermon I delivered last year at the opening worship gathering for Koinonia, the fellowship for Princeton Theological Seminary's PhD students. From 2011-2015, I served as Chaplain for the Koinonia fellowship. I felt urged to post it today, because not much has changed in the last twelve months, and my words convict me more than ever.

*****

If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?

In the Lord I take refuge; how can you say to me,
    “Flee like a bird to the mountains;
for look, the wicked bend the bow,
    they have fitted their arrow to the string,
    to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart.
If the foundations are destroyed,
    what can the righteous do?”
The Lord is in his holy temple;
    the Lord’s throne is in heaven.
    His eyes behold, his gaze examines humankind.
The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked,
    and his soul hates the lover of violence.
On the wicked he will rain coals of fire and sulfur;
    a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup.
For the Lord is righteous;
he loves righteous deeds;
    the upright shall behold his face.

Saturday, August 8, 2015

God's Own Heart

Image found at:
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/
culture-mulcher/files/2010/09/my-son1.jpg
I have no regular pulpit, because I am not an ordained pastor. But I sometimes do preach. And today I had a sermon. This is what I would have preached on Sunday, August 9, 2015.

Friday, August 7, 2015

Insert Clever Title Here

I haven’t been posting often. Mostly because my writing attention has been going toward a dissertation (a book-length academic paper necessary to graduate from many PhD programs). But a post has been building up in me that begged to be written. I’ve learned to heed that voice. While writing this post, I also learned to kind of ignore it.

A few days ago, I read this article about yet another large PCUSA church leaving the denomination for the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians. I have reconciled myself to the fact that nearly 200 churches have left the PCUSA to join ECO. What bothers me is not that they are leaving, but rather a consistent and ongoing claim made by many (not all, but many) of those who are doing so. Here are a few quotes from the article and from the letter written by the Session explaining their decision. From the article:

“The majority of those in support of the split say the national denomination is no longer consistent with their beliefs, chief of which they say is that Jesus Christ is the one path to salvation and the Bible is God's authoritative word.”

Monday, April 6, 2015

Lent 2015 - The Cross and the Lynching Tree - Chapter 5 and Conclusion

NOTE: Throughout these blog posts, I will mostly be able to write through the narrow lens of my own experience. I am not well versed in critical theory, the study of race, or the discipline of history. Although I consider myself a practical theologian and a Christian, I would not say that I have the skill set of someone schooled in doctrinal, dogmatic or systematic theology or even ethics. I will probably stumble over ways of talking about what I am reading and my reactions to it. With these caveats, I would like to think that this is an appropriate place from which to engage this book. I would hope that this book would be read in churches and seminaries, classrooms and even homes, by people not well-versed in any of the disciplines I mentioned above. I am reading this book for the first time, and so my words, though I hope reflective and thoughtful, will be first time reactions. 
A general introduction to this blog series can be found here, and an index and schedule for the series can be found here.

*****

Yesterday was Easter Sunday, the yearly celebration that remains central for what it means to be a follower of Christ. Without the resurrection, there would be no Christianity. But the resurrection is inexplicable without the cross. Jesus rose from the dead, but not just from any death. 2000 years on from that event, it can be difficult for some Christians to imagine the paradoxical foolishness of a savior who was crucified (1 Corinthians 1-2). Some of us have become numb to the radical scandal of the cross.

Yesterday was also the first Sunday of the month, which meant that my church celebrated communion, the breaking of the bread. We read the story of the "Walk to Emmaus" (Luke 24). Two of Jesus’ disciples could not recognize the crucified and risen Christ in their midst. It was not until bread was broken that their eyes were opened. This breaking of the bread awoke their memory of a few days earlier, when Jesus had broken bread and said “do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22:19)

Throughout The Cross and the Lynching Tree, James Cone has been pulling to the forefront of our collective memories the broken bodies of black people, pointing to them in order to lead us to the cross. Throughout he has been defending the claim that our identities as followers of Christ are incomplete without wrestling with the history of slavery, segregation and lynching in the United States. The cross in our time cannot be understood apart from the suffering of black people.

Friday, April 3, 2015

Scheduling Update

Dear Readers,

I will, God-willing, finish my read-through of James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree next Monday. I will write about both Chapter 5 and the Conclusion. Thanks for your patience as I sort through some personal matters and a busy schedule. These last two sections of the book are very powerful and I want to do them justice.

-Marc

Monday, March 30, 2015

Scheduling Note - 03.30.2015

Dear faithful readers,

Today's regularly scheduled post has been postponed until later in the week. A weekend on retreat + a very sick toddler has pushed back my reading and writing. Thanks for sticking with me --

Marc

Monday, March 23, 2015

Lent 2015 - The Cross and the Lynching Tree - Chapter 4

NOTE: Throughout these blog posts, I will mostly be able to write through the narrow lens of my own experience. I am not well versed in critical theory, the study of race, or the discipline of history. Although I consider myself a practical theologian and a Christian, I would not say that I have the skill set of someone schooled in doctrinal, dogmatic or systematic theology or even ethics. I will probably stumble over ways of talking about what I am reading and my reactions to it. With these caveats, I would like to think that this is an appropriate place from which to engage this book. I would hope that this book would be read in churches and seminaries, classrooms and even homes, by people not well-versed in any of the disciplines I mentioned above. I am reading this book for the first time, and so my words, though I hope reflective and thoughtful, will be first time reactions. 
A general introduction to this blog series can be found here, and an index and schedule for the series can be found here.

*****

It is a miracle that black Americans still believe in Jesus Christ. "It was not easy for blacks to find a language to talk about Christianity publicly because the Jesus they embraced was also, at least in name, embraced by whites who lynched black people. Indeed, it was white slaveholders, segregationists, and lynchers who defined the content of the Christian gospel." (118) Racism has so damaged the image of Christ in our country that Langston Hughes could write:

Listen, Christ, 
You did alright in your day, I reckon—
But that day's gone now. 
They ghosted you up a swell story, too,
Called it Bible—
But it's dead now. 
The popes and the preachers've
Made too much money from it.
They've sold you to many

Kings, generals, robbers, and killers—
Even to the Tzar and the Cossacks,
Even to Rockefeller's Church,
Even to THE SATURDAY EVENING POST.
You ain't no good no more.
They've pawned you
Till you've done wore out. (116, quoted from Arnold Rampersad, Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1 pp. 252-53

When Hughes wrote this, he was shamed for blasphemy by both black and white church-going people. But perhaps we should not be discomfited so much by his "blasphemy" as by the sordid history which gave it birth, a history that has obscured the good news of Jesus Christ. Indeed, "Artists force us to see things we do not want to look at because they make us uncomfortable with ourselves and the world we have created." (117) 

Yet, James Cone argues in this fourth chapter, it is precisely the artistic imagination that also enabled black slaves, "Cut off from their African religious traditions...to carve out a religious meaning for their lives with white Christianity as the only resource to work with. They ignored white theology, which did not affirm their humanity, and went straight to stories in the Bible, interpreting them as stories of God siding with little people just like them. They identified God's liberation of the poor as the central message of the Bible, and they communicated this message in their songs and sermons [and, as this chapter affirms, poems and short stories]." (118)

This poetic imagination operates differently from "abstract reasoning" that encourages us to "think about the cross as a theological concept or as a magical talisman of salvation." (108) It involves "spiritual wrestling...enduring and confronting the reality of inexplicable suffering." (108) It is a paradoxical imagination, which holds together contradiction, as in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois (106). It holds together profound doubt and powerful faith, the cross and the resurrection, a dead Jewish man in Rome and black bodies swinging from trees—killed by the followers of that crucified savior.

It is this same poetic imagination  that must be employed in living into God's justice and reconciliation today. For those of us who claim to be God's people, we cannot move toward living into our identity of children of God, as Christians without the Holy Spirit's gift of this poetic imagination. It is something we must receive.

But because this imagination sees more clearly than abstract reasoning, it holds before us truths we would rather not see, and sings the grating songs of grief, lament and contrition we would rather not hear. We would rather not believe "the plain facts," as Du Bois presents them, that "The church aided and abetted the Negro slave trade...and the church today is the strongest seat of racial and color prejudice. If one hundred of the best and purest colored folk of the United States should seek to apply for membership in any white church in this land tomorrow, 999 out of every 1,000 ministers would lie to keep them out." (101, quoted from "The Church and the Negro, " Crisis 6, no. 6 [October 1913]). We would rather not consider that, one hundred years after these facts were presented, racism is alive and well and black people are still actively excluded. We want to believe we live in some "post-racial society," or that things are getting better. They aren't. Admitting this can open us to receive the gift of the Spirit's poetic imagination.

It can also help us to listen to that lively imagination as it ignites us to live out our Christian calling as ambassadors of reconciliation. "From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view [Greek: according to the flesh]; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view [according to the flesh], we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us." (2 Corinthians 5:16-19) Of course, none of this is known apart from the cross, "for the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them." (2 Corinthians 5:14-15) It is by looking to the cross that we can see the new creation. And Cone reminds us that our poetic imaginations see rightly when they look to the cross within our present, to those still dying, to Jesus in the lost, the least, the imprisoned, the oppressed, the dying (Matthew 25). Paul commends to the Corinthians a ministry that comes "through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger...in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything." (2 Corinthians 6:4-10) I can think of no better description of the black experience in the United States.

The miracle of the gospel is not only that black Americans still believe in Jesus Christ after "the obstacle" that is the "fault" of Christian ministry under white supremacy in the United States (2 Corinthians 6:3); but also that out of that damaged witness would emerge the vibrant witness of black poetry, story, sermon and song. As Cone has been claiming all along, it is incumbent upon those of us who call ourselves Christians in the United States to confront white supremacy with the truth of black experience, to challenge our racism with the power of the gospel, to listen to those who are witnessing to the gospel in our midst—the oppressed, marginalized, poor, of ill repute and dishonor—and to hear the voice of Christ in them; for without doing so, we will not be able to "explain the meaning of Christian identity" to a watching world. (xvii)

In this book, Cone writes, like Paul, "frankly," with a "wide open" heart (2 Corinthians 6:11). In this book, as uncomfortable as it might make those of us who cannot hear the poetic imagination yet, Cone is writing "with no restriction in [his] affection, but only in yours. In return—I speak as to children—open wide your hearts also." (2 Corinthians 6:12-13)

*****

NOTE: I encourage thoughtful, impassioned conversation in the comments below. I do not say, "civil," because I think this sometimes connotes "dispassionate." But I would ask that those who comment attempt to engage with thought and reflection. I do reserve the right to delete any comment that I consider harmful. The point is a passionate and meaningful conversation, which means, for me, neither stilted dialogue nor combative debate.

Monday, March 16, 2015

Lent 2015 - The Cross and the Lynching Tree - Chapter Three

NOTE: Throughout these blog posts, I will mostly be able to write through the narrow lens of my own experience. I am not well versed in critical theory, the study of race, or the discipline of history. Although I consider myself a practical theologian and a Christian, I would not say that I have the skill set of someone schooled in doctrinal, dogmatic or systematic theology or even ethics. I will probably stumble over ways of talking about what I am reading and my reactions to it. With these caveats, I would like to think that this is an appropriate place from which to engage this book. I would hope that this book would be read in churches and seminaries, classrooms and even homes, by people not well-versed in any of the disciplines I mentioned above. I am reading this book for the first time, and so my words, though I hope reflective and thoughtful, will be first time reactions. 
A general introduction to this blog series can be found here, and an index and schedule for the series can be found here.

*****

What does it mean to bear a cross? 

I spent this past week with my extended family in North Carolina. My eldest nephew has an arsenal of Nerf guns and loves to play Nerf wars. We shoot harmless styrofoam bullets at each other while running around my parents' large basement. He is over five feet tall and is solidly built. Despite my sister’s heroic efforts to get him to wear denim and a polo shirt, he also most often heads out of the house in black sweats and a black hoodie. He is 12. This is the same age as Tamir Rice. Until this year, our silly Nerf games and his fashion sense meant little to me. Now I’m doing everything to encourage him to wear jeans and a polo shirt and I don’t really want him to play Nerf outside (even though the weather was beautiful).

The reality that Tamir Rice could have been either of my nephews spurred me to begin making major changes to how I engage race. But that my thought was about my nephews and that I have never thought the same about myself demonstrates the difference in experience between those who benefit from white privilege and those who suffer from it.

Monday, March 9, 2015

Lent 2015 - The Cross and the Lynching Tree - Chapter 2


NOTE: Throughout these blog posts, I will mostly be able to write through the narrow lens of my own experience. I am not well versed in critical theory, the study of race, or the discipline of history. Although I consider myself a practical theologian and a Christian, I would not say that I have the skill set of someone schooled in doctrinal, dogmatic or systematic theology or even ethics. I will probably stumble over ways of talking about what I am reading and my reactions to it. With these caveats, I would like to think that this is an appropriate place from which to engage this book. I would hope that this book would be read in churches and seminaries, classrooms and even homes, by people not well-versed in any of the disciplines I mentioned above. I am reading this book for the first time, and so my words, though I hope reflective and thoughtful, will be first time reactions. 
A general introduction to this blog series can be found here, and an index and schedule for the series can be found here.

*****

Near the beginning of this second chapter, James Cone forcefully underlines the deep connections between crucifixion and lynching in a searing and convicting passage that must be quoted in full: 

"As Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence, many African Americans were innocent victims of white mobs, thirsting for blood in the name of God and in defense of segregation, white supremacy, and the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Both the cross and the lynching tree were symbols of terror, instruments of torture and execution, reserved primarily for slaves, criminals, and insurrectionists—the lowest of the low in society. Both Jesus and blacks were publicly humiliated, subjected to the utmost indignity and cruelty. They were stripped, in order to be deprived of dignity, then paraded, mocked and whipped, pierced, derided and spat upon, tortured for hours in the presence of jeering crowds for popular entertainment. In both cases, the purpose was to strike terror in the subject community. It was to let people know that the same thing would happen to them if they did not stay in their place." (31) 

He ends this litany with a quote from NT scholar Paula Frederickson, "The point of the exercise was not the death of the offender as such, but getting the attention of those watching. Crucifixion first and foremost is addressed to an audience." (31) Then he makes the crucial and convicting statement for this chapter: "The crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans in Jerusalem and the lynching of blacks by whites in the United States are so amazingly similar that one wonders what blocks the American Christian imagination from seeing the connection." (31, emphasis mine)

The implication of all of this is that, though lynching was a "public spectacle" with "an audience," the vast majority of people in the United States have turned a blind eye to its reality. Even worse, those of us who call ourselves Christians have failed to ignite our imaginations on behalf of those suffering, in prison, hungry, naked and poor—those in whose midst we find Jesus (Matthew 25). 

Monday, March 2, 2015

Lent 2015 - The Cross and the Lynching Tree - Chapter 1

NOTE: Throughout these blog posts, I will mostly be able to write through the narrow lens of my own experience. I am not well versed in critical theory, the study of race, or the discipline of history. Although I consider myself a practical theologian and a Christian, I would not say that I have the skill set of someone schooled in doctrinal, dogmatic or systematic theology or even ethics. I will probably stumble over ways of talking about what I am reading and my reactions to it. With these caveats, I would like to think that this is an appropriate place from which to engage this book. I would hope that this book would be read in churches and seminaries, classrooms and even homes, by people not well-versed in any of the disciplines I mentioned above. I am reading this book for the first time, and so my words, though I hope reflective and thoughtful, will be first time reactions. 

A general introduction to this blog series can be found here, and an index and schedule for the series can be found here.

*****

I have to admit that I'm struggling to write a blogpost about this first chapter. The main difficulty is that no words of mine could replace the experience of reading these stories of hope in the midst of lynching. And that is the point of this book. As Cone writes in the introduction:

"...my primary concern is to give voice to black victims, to let them and their families and communities speak to us, exploring the question: how did ordinary blacks, like my mother and father, survive the lynching atrocity and still keep together their families, their communities, and not lose their sanity? ... I believe that the cultural and religious resources in the black experience could help all Americans cope with the legacy of white supremacy and also deal more effectively with what is called the 'war on terror.' If white Americans could look at the terror they inflicted on their own black population—slavery, segregation, and lynching—then they might be able to understand what is coming at them from others. Black people know something about terror because we have been dealing with legal and extralegal white terror for several centuries." (xviii-xix)

Monday, February 23, 2015

Lent 2015 - The Cross and the Lynching Tree - Introduction

NOTE: Throughout these blog posts, I will mostly be able to write through the narrow lens of my own experience. I am not well versed in critical theory, the study of race, or the discipline of history. Although I consider myself a practical theologian and a Christian, I would not say that I have the skill set of someone schooled in doctrinal, dogmatic or systematic theology or even ethics. I will probably stumble over ways of talking about what I am reading and my reactions to it. With these caveats, I would like to think that this is an appropriate place from which to engage this book. I would hope that this book would be read in churches and seminaries, classrooms and even homes, by people not well-versed in any of the disciplines I mentioned above. I am reading this book for the first time, and so my words, though I hope reflective and thoughtful, will be first time reactions. 

A general introduction to this blog series can be found here, and an index and schedule for the series can be found here.

*****

Take a moment to read this NYtimes article and these responsive letters. Sit with them for awhile.

Okay. Now gauge your response. Are you shocked? Outraged? Numbed? Unsurprised? What emotions does this information evoke in you? Guilt? Anger? Sadness? Pity? In some ways, your response will be shaped by the extent to which the history of lynching in the United States has been taken up as a part of your own history.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

An Addendum to A Church Musician

An addendum of sorts to this post on identity. I discovered the following quotes from Wendell Berry the other day. It comforts me to know that one of my all time favorite writers doesn't obsess about writing. There's freedom in that. And I'm grateful.

From the Writer's Almanac blog:

He said: “I never felt like I had to write in order to be happy. It has given me great freedom as a writer.”

And: “I’ve known writers — I think it’s true also of other artists — who thought that you had to put your art before everything. But if you have a marriage and a family and a farm, you’re just going to find that you can’t always put your art first, and moreover that you shouldn’t. There are a number of things more important than your art. It’s wrong to favor it over your family, or over your place, or over your animals.”


Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Lenten Reflections 2015: Schedule and Index

For Lent 2015, I'm going to be reading through James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree. I invite you to join me, both to keep me accountable for actually doing this, and to reflect with me upon the experience. More information and a rationale for doing this can be found in the introductory post to this series. Below, you can find an index of all of the posts, which also acts as a schedule for reading. I will post a reflection upon the prior week's reading every Monday. So, if you're participating, please read the Introduction by Monday, February 23, Chapter 1 by March 2, etc. This index page will be updated with clickable links to each post after I publish them.

Lenten Reflection 2015: Introductory Post - posted on Tuesday, February 17
Introduction - Reflection posted on Monday, February 23
Chapter 1 - Reflection posted on Monday, March 2
Chapter 2 - Reflection posted on Monday, March 9
Chapter 3 - Reflection posted on Monday, March 16
Chapter 4 - Reflection posted on Monday, March 23
Chapter 5 - Reflection posted on Monday, March 30 - DELAYED
Chapter 5 and Conclusion - Reflection posted on Monday, April 6

Lenten Reflections 2015: Introductory Post

Lent is a complicated season. It's meant to be a time of spiritual preparation for the great celebration of Easter. As we head ever more into a social media age, it can become a badge of heightened spirituality—"look what I'm doing!!!" In some ways, I think this is contrary to its intent. The point of Lent, as I understand it, is not to prove how spiritual I am. It is, rather, to yearly strip away self in order to more clearly see the Living God, who not only died, but also rose and is out "on the loose," as a man named Donald Juel once put it. So, the point of Lent is not "Look at me," but "Where is Jesus?" The point—as Henri Nouwen and his cowriters, quoting Thomas Merton, put it in the book Compassion— the point is to "disappear from the world as an object of interest in order to be everywhere in it by hiddenness and compassion." [64] The point is to search for Christ, and one of the ways of doing this is by "disappearing" in order to be in solidarity with others, which is where, so often, we see Jesus [see Matthew 25:31-46].

So, why am I posting about Lent, then?

Monday, January 26, 2015

Jesus Sees Community - APC Sermon 01.25.2015



I said some words in front of some people this past Sunday. I think some of the words might be helpful. I wrote this sermon after some good conversations with my friend Wes and after reading through Eugene Peterson's Spiritual Theology Quintet. I point this out, while at the same time cautioning that the words and thoughts below are my own and not Wes's, nor Allentown Presbyterian Church's, and only sometimes Eugene Peterson's. 

Also, here's a link to the audio for the sermon, though the audio has some mistakes in it that I correct or nuance in the text and textual notes below. Thanks for reading/listening!

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

A Church Musician: On Music, Identity, Writing, and Drive

I cut my creative teeth on church music. I was reminded of this today when my mom directed my attention to this article and name-checked my piano teacher, Mrs. DeVries.