Changing the World

Immature religion creates people who know what they are against,

but they have a very poor sense of what they are for.

They are against sin, always as they narrowly define it;

but they are seldom for love, or anything other than the status quo

where they think they are in control.

-Richard Rohr, Daily Meditation 8-31-16

I suppose I could spend almost all my blogs on just sort of re-hashing and commenting on Fr. Richard Rohr's daily meditations, but in the name of some illusory concept of creativity and originality, I don't.  There are times though, when it almost seems like these devotions do a better job of saying what I'm thinking than I could possibly do myself.  This is, I believe, an action of the Holy Spirit, helping me along the way, and it is why I have been able to faithfully stick with the discipline of these daily devotionals for over three years (it might have something to do with smartphones too, but that doesn't sound quite as spiritually enlightened).

I have been wrestling lately with what exactly are the "selling points" of Church.  Why is it that some people attend church faithfully, while increasingly large numbers do not?  What is it that brings people back week after week?  But more importantly perhaps than what it is, what SHOULD it be?

As a Pastor I am concerned with church growth.  Growth in terms of the congregation's size and vitality, but also (perhaps more importantly) the growth in spiritual maturity of the people in the congregation.  I believe that the two things are intimately related.  The copious research of church pollsters tells us this: churches that follow a vision that moves them towards being for something are much more attractive to those who are currently outside the church than a church that is mainly focused on being against something and spends most of it's time policing holiness within itself.

There is nothing quite so soul sucking as constantly arguing about preferences and trying to keep everyone happy (personal experience).  Dealing with tragedy, for instance, will take every ounce of peace and hope that you have, it will stretch your ability to love and hold onto faith, but at the end of it, you will see clearly how God moves and you will feel the presence of the Spirit. You will leave more mature than you entered.  Inward squabbles and battles for the control of the status quo quickly stagnate and leave you stuck in the mire.

I was telling a friend in my congregation, who is concerned about the numerical sort of growth, that there really is no shortcut to real and sustainable growth.  It involves the people who come to our church becoming evangelists, by which I mean those who share the good news with others.  The good news of the Gospel to be sure, but specifically how that Good News is played out in the context of the community of the Church.

I feel that, in order to reach the un-churched, we cannot and should not start with a theological proposition or propositions, we need to start with a personal connection.  Shouting about heaven and hell, running down a litany of sins and bad behavior, just are not going to get you very far with the postmodern soul.  In fact, judging from the Gospel accounts, that is not what Jesus did anyway, and, as I say so often, we are supposed to be following his lead.

So what did Jesus do?  Well he showed people first hand what it looks like to live in a proper and loving relationship with God.  There wasn't a lot of groveling or complicated rituals (as human religions including Christianity tend to invent). There was open and honest communication, a willingness to always listen for and follow "the will of God," and an outward growth of compassion for those who are suffering and oppressed.  There were times when what Jesus appears to want, is not what Jesus gets: all those times he's trying to get away for some quiet time and crowds keep following him, oh and of course that whole crucifixion thing, can't say that was big on his list of favorite days.

He rather insistently teaches them that the Kingdom of Heaven is not really like the idea they have cooked up in their head.  He, time and time again, insists that the world ("the normal system of illusions" -Rohr) will not know or recognize the truth that he is providing as a foundation, and indeed his way will seem backwards and upside down to the self/ego oriented mode of being in which the mass of humanity is utterly trapped.

It is the job of the church and the work of evangelism to present a way out of the trap.  But mostly what we do is just redecorate the trap.  We trade in one egocentric mindset for another.  Rather than being conformed to Christ, we attempt to adapt the Church (the Body of Christ) to the ways of the world, and it does not work, as Gomer Pyle said, "Surprise, surprise, surprise."

We are to be salt and light and leaven, in other words, we are supposed to be the different part of the mixture that does something important.  The thing is though we need to understand and keep clearly in mind that our purpose as such is not to condemn the "world," but to participate in the Christ-like activity of redeeming it.  How does that look?  What are the steps?  Well, it's not simple in the least and anyone who tells you that it is is probably selling you snake oil.  The complicated nature of the task of redeeming the world is not a job for one person, even a remarkable person.  Jesus started it, and he has called us and sent us to continue to work on it.  That's why I go to church.

The Sit Heard Round the World

Once upon a time a group of British colonists decided they had had enough of the King of England and his taxes.  The decision was by no means unanimous, but once a revolution gets rolling it takes on a life of its own.  In the early going discontent was expressed through public acts of protest like throwing tea into the Boston Harbor.  The Crown was not so fond of this sort of behavior and so they responded with punitive measures, which became known as the "intolerable acts," and things got more heated from there.
Eventually King George III learned that fighting wars across oceans is really expensive and decided to accept the defeat that saw the sun begin to set on the great and glorious British Empire.  Hey, wow, the little guy won against the big, bad British Empire.  They wrote up a Constitution and dedicated themselves to some noble truths about freedom and equality and such.  They, somewhat naively, thought that would be that.
They ratified their Constitution on September 17, 1787.  Seven Articles of fairly concisely stated structural principles for a democratic republic. In December of 1791 that basic document was amended with ten further principles known as the Bill of Rights.  That's less than five year later if you're a numbers type.  The first of those amendments went like this:

Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That is as close to a sacred edict as you are going to get in our world, and it is a good thing to have written into your legal code.  But it is also going to be a hard thing to live up to, because sometimes people are going to want to say things that Congress and maybe the nation as a whole aren't going to love to hear.  They may also say things that aren't particularly well thought out.  They may lead with their emotions and not with their clearest thinking (I do that here sometimes).  But it is as close to a core principle of our nation that people are free to worship as they choose and to say what they want.
At times there have been limits set on those things, like obscenity laws and the Espionage and Sedition acts of 1917 and 1918 respectively.  Most of the time, our legal process has found that free speech and freedom of religion are worthy enough causes to justify the discomfort that their exercise sometimes causes.  In other words, it is a worthwhile value to allow people to say what they want, even if that something is offensive.  We allow the Klu Klux Klan to have rallies, we allow Neo-Nazis to fly swastika flags, we tolerate lots of things we collectively don't like very much because we value the freedom envisioned by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Enter one Colin Kaepernick, quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers.  At a preseason football game, Mr. Kaepernick decided not to stand up for the National Anthem.  He planned it ahead of time and issued a statement concerning his purpose for not standing:

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag or a country that oppresses black people and people of color.  To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish of me to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.

I am not going to defend, refute or otherwise comment on Mr. Kaepernick's reasoning.  I am going to absolutely defend his right to plant his tookus on the bench during the National Anthem or the Pledge of Allegiance or any other time he wants, for whatever reason he wants.  He was not disrupting a military funeral or even creating much of a scene.  He was not inciting violence, or calling for the assassination of an elected official or committing a treasonous act.  In fact, if no one had asked him about and put it on the TV, if it wasn't for social media, would anyone really have even noticed?
You can be upset about what Kaepernick did, apparently a lot of people are, but most of them seem to be using some sort of patriotic line of reasoning, or stating that he's disrespecting those who have suffered and died for our nation.
I would say, to the contrary, that he was actually honoring those who serve our country and "defend our freedom," to use the old saw, by exercising that very freedom.  He did not break any laws, or do something publicly offensive, he simply sat.  He used the position of visibility that our obsession with sports has given him to make a statement about something he feels is wrong with our society.  If you disagree with what he said, fine, but please America, let's be proud that he is allowed to say it and sit it.

Seeking Balance

In case you can't tell, I really want this election to be over already.  I'm just tired, and feeling increasingly as though we are lurching towards one of the dystopian futures I used to read so much about in Orwell, Bradbury and Vonnegut. So, I'm picking very carefully what I really want to spend my time on vis-a-vis politics and such.  I was grabbed this morning by this article.  I was interested because it points out a rather glaring flaw in the rhetoric, not only of Clinton and Trump, but of most politicians.  I was also interested because the same flawed mentality exists in the Church: we want it to be like it was in 1950.
I'll admit, having a tenuous relationship with money, I don't find myself reading Fortune or magazines of that ilk very often.  There usually has to be some sort of cross over appeal.  I have heard the promises of jobs, jobs and more jobs from politicians for most of my life, but I have also observed the reality that technology fundamentally alters the economy in which those jobs must exist. The article points out that the industrial revolution shifted the economy away from agricultural production, which was 60% of the population in 1820, to barely 2% today.  I might join Wendell Berry in theorizing that one possible solution to our ills would be to try and reverse that trend somewhat, but outside of backyard gardening I don't have much of a hammer to swing on that project.  The idea that we could go back to the sort of labor intensive forms of manufacturing is a pipe dream that relies on the willingness of many Americans to long for the days (even though we didn't actually live in them) when the traditional nuclear family was king, Dad worked a solid, blue collar job, Mom stayed home baking bread and doing laundry, most families had one car at most and the house was a modest but solidly built piece of the American dream.
The stories of the factories, mines and mills closing is the tragedy of the second half of the twentieth century (I mean aside from the more or less constant warfare).  It is easy to lament the fact that two incomes are mostly compulsory to make it into the middle class, it is easy to grieve over the fact that wages have not kept pace with inflation and that, for the first time in a long time, children's economic prospects don't equal or exceed those of their parents.
Is the American dream dying?
Or is it just changing?
The world just isn't the same as it used to be.  There are lots of jobs, but not all jobs actually comprise making an actual living, which is really what the dream of 1950 is all about. Then a high school graduate could go work for GM or RCA, work their way up the pay scale and maybe even into management.  They had Unions to watch out for their interests, the world was set up in a way that allowed them to honestly, through hard work and persistence, get ahead.
In the church, we coincidentally long for the same era.  Because then we were the shot callers.  People went to church, people participated in church, no one ever questioned whether church was relevant or expected it to do much except talk about how sin was bad and God was good and give everyone an excuse to wear their Sunday best. Yeah, we may have gotten a little complacent in that model, and it probably is not any more likely to make a comeback than the manual assembly line.
Now we scratch for the spare time of the much smaller number of people who are even still inclined to want to sample our wares.  In our better moments, we have made peace with the idea that we are now in the service industry.  Our best function now is not producing entertainment or any sort of product, it is simply serving, helping, forming people who are a blessing to their communities.
It's important work, but it is small and slow, and it doesn't always bring in the numbers.  People still want to try and make churches into assembly lines, but Jesus didn't give us much of a model for doing that, he did however talk a bit about farming and shepherding, you know, pre-industrial imagery (way pre-industrial).
Just as many of the new generation is turning an interest to things like sustainable agriculture and responsible stewardship, by reaching back to the old agricultural practices, the church probably needs to forget it's brief and somewhat unfortunate hour of cultural and political hegemony and get back to following Jesus one step at a time.

Safe Home

It's the first day back to normal life after the trip.  The weekend was too hectic to be called normal.  I had to write a sermon and participate in funeral/memorial services for a lady who had passed back before we left.  Certainly not a trial, but it left me with little time to think or process the re-entry phase.  I'm still in that phase where I notice all the small comforts that you so easily take for granted, like my own shower, the ability to actually cook a meal, a familiar bed and the simple pleasure of just sitting in front of the normal TV shows to which you are accustomed.
It is such a great privilege to be able to travel as widely as we do in these days.  The old things that you encounter in Europe remind you of the rather remarkable place you occupy in the history of humanity.  This mobility that we have is such a very new thing.  People that left Ireland for the United States in the last century, left with the knowledge that they would probably not be able to return easily.  Before the age of flight, visiting across the ocean was an extreme luxury, perhaps even a once in a lifetime sort of thing. This helps me to understand the mythology that has sprung up among the descendants of immigrants about Ireland and Scotland.  You could tell that much of the tourist industry caters to the longing that Americans have for roots in those places.  Little books about the clans, magnets with family names, at Stirling Castle, there was little place set up where you could have them look up your family name and trace it back to see if you had ancestors connected to a place.
I'm still puzzling over why this seems to be such a fascination for some.  I guess it is that feeling that you get at Glen Coe, or at the Cliffs of Moher, that there is something sort of mystical about the place.  However, there is something mystical about the Grand Canyon, or the Shenandoah, or the Smoky Mountains too.  Natural beauty can't be all there is to it.  There has to be something else, maybe it's the desire to feel like there's a bit more to your story than just the relatively short time you happen to be alive.  For those of us who are mostly of the Gaelic persuasion, the United Kingdom is the geographical resource to tap into that feeling.
It's easy to get misty and idealistic about those places, but here's some things I noticed about the UK that seemed pretty familiar:

1. Traffic still sucks, even on the other side of the road.
2. Most of the really attractive/interesting places get crowded in a hurry.
3. Immigrants do a lot of the service jobs (they're from Eastern Europe instead of Mexico).
4. There is nothing particularly romantic about everyday life, if you take off your tourist glasses for a second.

Don't get me wrong, traveling is great, but it is a process, and it is a learning experience.  If you don't notice things and you don't come home with some different awareness, what did you go for in the first place?  It really is good to be home, not because the trip was bad, but because home is the foundation from which you launch and, wherever you go, home is the place you ultimately want to return.

The more exotic your destination, I suspect, the more you will learn about where and what you left behind.  The longer your journey the sweeter your return.  The more differences you find, the more you will appreciate your familiar place.

The Irish will tell you when you leave, "Safe Home."  Get where you're going, and get back to where you came from, maybe not the same as you left, but safe and sound, that is the point of the journey.

Making Do

It seemed like a pretty simple thing: take the bus from the airport to our hotel in Dublin.  As it turned out, not so much, because the carefully researched and printed directions failed to mention that there was not exactly a bus stop named Santry Avenue.  There was a Santry Close, but that was not the right stop, it took four buses and one bus driver who finally had pity on a couple of Americans and told us where to get off (in the nicest sense of the word).  We finally got to our hotel, a Travelodge, which is the UK equivalent of a Super 8 or a Motel 6, easily the lowest point of our accommodations during the trip.
As it turns out, Ballymun, the area where we are staying in Dublin, is not exactly the center of the action, or even spitting distance from the action.  After driving from Cork, visiting Blarney Castle en route and navigating our way around Dublin to drop off the rental car, we were more or less happy to just crash into our room, except for the fact that coffee and a chocolate muffin at Blarney was about the entire extent of our nutritional intake for the day, so we needed food.  It was either another bus, or get a pizza across the street.  We took the pizza option.
Fortunately there was also a grocery store, so we got pizza to go and a bottle of red wine (screw cap of course).  As it turns out, this is not a bad plan.  While it may not exactly be the best dining experience of our trip, it certainly isn't the worst meal I've ever had.  Not only that, but the pizza was buy one get one free (they do that in Ireland too).  The wine was actually a pretty nice Chilean red blend (Michele and I are both fans of red blends).
The hotel has an airport shuttle, which de-stresses our departure.  The bus to the center of Dublin runs pretty much directly from our hotel to the middle of the action (and back), so we're planning to hit the Book of Kells early in the AM and spend pretty much the whole day as vagrants in Dublin, which is sort of like re-enacting Ulysses (from what I've heard, I've never really managed to make it through that whole book).
Travel can be hard, but as I learned on the Camino, "sooner or later it will be evening."  Not knowing where you're going, or how you are going to get there is a trying experience.  In hindsight, that was actually one of the blessings of the Camino, you could always walk.  Trains, planes and buses tend to make things more complicated and stressful, but at the end of the day, you find some food (and hopefully also wine) and you rest up for another day.
Peace and good night, or as the Irish say, "safe home."

The Cliffs of Moher

You've seen them before, in pictures, on postcards, they are stunning and really an amazing thing: the Cliffs of Moher, Aillte an Mhothair, in Irish. Pictures actually don't quite do them justice, but I've got a few to show you, just because: 

Because it's not all the scenery in the distance you know.  Sometimes you have to look down.

 Which can be just a bit scary, but worth it.

 The thing is though, all of these pictures are taken at least two kilometers from the visitor's area where you park.  If you want to get out to this lonely watchtower, you have to commit to a pretty solid two hour walk, more if you stop to take pictures and such like we did.

We started out on a kind of blustery Irish morning, it was kind of spitting rain, but as I noted in Scotland, that is sort of par for the course.  The visitor's center was already starting to get busy, and Michele wisely decided to stop and buy a nice knit Ireland cap.  After a stop in the loo, we pretty much went straight out to the cliffs, bypassing the castle tower and other tourist claptrap.  I wanted to walk, after flying and driving for the better part of yesterday, I needed boots on the ground.  I wasn't altogether sure that Michele was going to be up for what I could tell was going to be quite a hike, with a bit of up and down and unsure footing, especially given that it was cold by most people's standards.  We put on our Irish gear and headed up and out along the ridge of the Cliffs of Moher, and we walked, we passed people speaking all sorts of languages, we walked through wind that would just about blow you over, we took lots of pictures, and after about an hour and half, we reached that lonely, crumbling watchtower that stands guard over the Cliffs of Moher.  Then we turned and walked back.

As we came over the crest of the last ridge we noticed that something had changed: the sun came out, and with it so had about eight million visitors (hyberbole), more tour buses than I could count.  We basically had to wait in line down the narrow trail from the furthest observation point within the actual visitors area.  I thought, "thank God for the Irish rain," because otherwise it probably would have been that mobbed all day.  As it turns out, this is the way of things, if it's really amazing and beautiful, you're probably not the only one who wants to see it.  We found this to be the case with the castles of Scotland and now with the Irish coast.

Tourism lesson: walk a little farther and don't be afraid of a little rain.  Actually I guess that's probably true in most of life, you're welcome.

Roundabouts

One of the things that I have been worried about, in some cases rightly, on this trip is getting from one place to another.  Of particular concern is the fact that, here in the UK, they drive on the other side of the road from what I am accustomed.  While in Scotland, I was a passenger trying to pay attention and get a feel for how it is to have the steering wheel on the right and drive on the left hand side of the road.  Now that we have made the trip across the middle of Ireland, with me driving, I have a few observations.
First, the biggest problem with such a shift is not really anything that major, it is just a sort of discomfort.  A moment of panic when you make a turn, trying to overcome a conditioned response to slide into the right lane.  The basic issue of having right turns be like left turns in the US and vice versa.  The sort of odd feeling on big roads that you should be keeping right and passing left instead of elsewhere, and also the fact that I generally sight the line from the opposite side of the car, so my eyes kind of drift the wrong way and the car tends to as well.  On the M6 today, I kept getting that buzzy warning from the rumble strips down the edge line of the road, and on the smaller roads I was making Michele really nervous that I was going to send us into the ditch.
And of course, there are the roundabouts, the way that the UK handles many of it's intersections.  After nearly a week of riding shotgun with our friends from Scotland, I was still a little unsure about how to manage roundabouts.  I had gotten a pretty good feel for the entrance to roundabouts, but I was still a little fuzzy on where to get out.  Especially in busy traffic, especially, as was the case coming into Galway today that the GPS (or SAT-NAV as they call it here) was just slightly less than truly descriptive of what I was about to need to do.
It's such small stuff, but it amounts to a fairly significant increase in the stress level of getting from one place to another.  Driving has become so automatic for me after almost 25 years that this feels sort of like trying to write left handed.
Travel does this to you, it shifts you out of your comfortable habits and puts you on your heels.  This is actually it's most valuable benefit.  As a general rule, people who travel a great deal have broader perspectives on the world.  Even if it's only for a little while, they get to know what it's like to be a stranger and an alien in  a foreign land.
The bible tries to teach us this lesson, but sometimes we need reinforcement.  Deuteronomy 10: 19: "You are to love those who are foreigners, because you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt." (NIV)  In our treatment of people from other lands and other cultures it seems the quality of mercy is not strained.  It is helpful to be in a place where your accent is the odd one.  Where you are the one who doesn't really belong.  Then, at least, you know what it feels like to have everything switched around on you.