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Category Archives: Thoughts

Requiem in pax

Posted on October 5, 2011 by megancastellan

It’s fall in Flagstaff.  Or, more precisely, since I turned on the heat this morning, and snow (!) is forecast for tomorrow, it’s the beginning of winter.

And while that means nice stuff like pumpkin lattes, turning aspens, and my endless scarf collection, it also means, as I have learned from time in parish ministry, that people tend to die.

My mother has been a hospice nurse all my life, and so I grew up around death, and am not unfamiliar with its rhythms–people die around holidays, around days of importance to them, and around the changing of the seasons.  When I was first starting out in ministry, one of the weird ideas I had was that somehow, I would get more used to this rhythm of losing people.  (Then CPE happened, and that’s another story.)

Turns out, no one ever gets used to it.  Each loss is unique, and that’s just all there is.  In the past month, we’ve had two sudden deaths, which is tough on a community.  This time, however, it was one of those stalwart couples whom everyone knew, and who died within weeks of each other.

On Sunday, I got to celebrate all three services at Epiphany, and it’s our practice to dedicate the Eucharist to the recently deceased.  Usually, I don’t know the person who has died.  I haven’t been here that long, and frequently, the memorialized person is a relative of a parishioner.  This week, however, it was someone that I saw almost every week, sitting out in the congregation.

But using the ancient prayer for the dead (May their soul, and the souls of all the departed, rest in peace, and rise in glory), and then going into the eucharistic prayer language about how we “join with the saints and angels and all the heavenly chorus” was an interesting experience.  Because now I had named one of the heavenly chorus–like watching a sporting event on TV and realizing you know someone in the massive crowd.

We’ve held onto the communion of saints idea for centuries for this reason, I suppose.  It gives words to the idea that no one is really gone from our congregation–they just move positions a bit.

 

 

 

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Kids these days

Posted on September 20, 2011 by megancastellan

This week was Week Two of “What if Canterbury Got to Have Its Service in a Real, Live Church?” Experiment.  Each week, this has gotten to be a smoother process by an order of magnitude.  (Last week, in a process too long to go into, I discovered that three of my four on-hand Canterburians did not have driver’s licenses.  Kids!  All wild and crazy and lacking the ability to drive legally.)

But it never fails to amaze me how large the gap is between what the Average Congregational Episcopalian seem to expect a “college service” to look like, and what the Canterburians then deliver.  From the initial conversations I had with these A.C.Es prior to the start of the 5:30pm services, I gather that many expected experimental liturgy!  Wild rock music!  Possibly some extemporaneous praying!  But definitely drums of some kind.

Instead, the students would like a greater reliance on the Hymnal 1982, and the authorized hymnals.  (Point of reference: this group doesn’t like singing Spanish hymns in translation.)  They have a strict list of Rules For Music, from which I am forbidden from straying from (i.e. No folk Christian music  published between the years of 1960-1998, except as approved on a case-by-case basis. Nothing that would suggest that Jesus might be anyone’s boyfriend; nothing that mandates hand gestures, but if spontaneous movement arises, that is acceptable, (aka the Macarena Paradox) etc.)  They would greatly like a thurible (cheap ones can be ordered online from Mexico!) And I’m fairly certain that at some point, I’m going to end up with a handmade t-shirt that says “Rubrics are binding!” on it.  And I shall wear it with pride and glee.

And all of the above is the hardest pitch I ever make in larger church gatherings.  No one believes me.  The conventional wisdom of “Young people don’t like traditional music/liturgy.” just won’t budge.

…and there is some truth in that.  Or, more properly, some young people don’t like some liturgy done in some ways.  You can no more generalize about an entire couple of generations than you can about, say, all women.  Or all men.  At all time, everywhere.  Unless you’re a late 1990’s comedian.  (In which case, my guess is your calling is not to be a leader in the church.)

Really, they like church to be church.  And not church pretending to be anything else.  That is what they’ve signed up for.  (believe it or not.)  Because there are a ton of places to go and hear folky music, or rock music.  Or sit in an amphitheater and feel better about yourself.

There aren’t a whole lot of places to go and have a transcendent experience of the divine come near, connect with a tradition generations-upon-generations older than you, and be challenged to live a better life in community with those around you–some you like a lot, and some you would really ignore til the day you died.

Starbucks doesn’t quite cut it.

And remarkably, that’s what these students have signed up for, of their own free will, and cheerfully, too.  They’re not there because of a societal expectation that going to church is what makes you a good person, or keeps you in tight with the ‘right’ crowd.  Nope.  They’re there because they want to be.  Because they find something there that they are passionate about.

It’s the rest of us, maybe, who get freaked out by that.

 

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Love Wins!: In which I finish the book. Because I said i would!

Posted on August 25, 2011 by megancastellan

And I bet you thought this day would never come, huh?
So let us begin with the rest of Rob Bell’s opus.
Ch. 4 is entitled “Does God get what God wants?” (Spoiler: Yes!)

And remember when I said that my basic problem with the book was that Bell was unclear on who his audience was?
This is a prime example.
There is never a question, seriously, about what the answer to the question that begins the chapter. The reader knows who Bell is, what his basic tenets of faith are–so any half-bright reader will know that this is not a real question.
But Bell proceeds to act like it is. Which is all the more puzzling, because the chapter (like the entire book) is set up like a Hallmark card to Protestant evangelicals. It’s intended for no one else. And actually, anyone who’s not conversant in evangelical-speak will have a really hard time understanding what he’s talking about half the time.

So when he eventually gets around to suggesting that, in fact, God possibly gets what God wants, in the eventual reconciliation of all souls to himself, it’s not a big surprise. (Come on, guy! You’re a Fuller-trained pastor. OF COURSE you believe in a classical three-legged stool of omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence.)

What is more of a surprise, though, is that he doesn’t assert it outright. Never comes close to it, in fact.
He just points out that people have answered this question in a lot of different ways, and lots of really faithful Christians, through the years, have argued several different things, including:
1. Evil choices result in evil choices made to cover up the initial choices, thus causing a sort of addiction that’s nearly impossible to break, hence eternal damnation.
2. It is possible, through a lifetime of sin, to annihilate the divine image within you to the point where you become ‘post-human.’ (He leaves it there, but the implications of this give me a migraine. I really take issue with this suggestion.)
3. Second-chance people (here he cites Luther, Clement of Alexandria and Origen) who would argue that God’s love and action do not cease after this life, but continue acting even after death, such that all people are eventually transformed and reunited with God.

He basically ends it there. Look, he says, so many options! All of them so interesting! Oh look, something shiny over here in the next chapter!

What he does for the rest of the book, is expand the scope. So for the next chapter (‘Dying to Live’) we talk about various understandings of the cross, in really vague terms. And the next chapter, (‘There are Rocks Everywhere’) he hints at a cosmic Christ the same way he was hinting at a universal salvation before. Though, again, he never comes out and says it.
(Actually, I’m being a bit harsh. He does a pretty good job of pointing out that the Christ described in Colossians is not sectarian, and we should be mindful of that. This is as near as he comes to making a definitive statement on theology, and it’s taking the stance of ‘Everyone believes in Jesus, because Jesus saves the world. Even if people don’t call Jesus by his name, those silly, misguided Other-Religious-Folk!’)

But my frustration arises because I can’t help but wonder if he’s being slightly disingenuous. I honestly can’t tell. Earnestness is not a trait that comes naturally to me in normal conversation (I am a Millennial; sarcasm is my blessing and my curse.) and this book is extraordinarily earnest. So, I can’t tell if he honestly can’t make up his mind about what he truly believes, or if he is being so open-ended because he’s worried about what the results might be.

He speaks from such a privileged position within his movement; he has a large church, he has a huge following on the Internet, he’s recognized, he’s published, he has power with a great many people. And this book reads like he’s scared of what that power actually means.

One of the excellent points he raises towards the end of the book is that the good news of the gospel needs to be better than it has been presented as. Agreed! Wholeheartedly! And while I’m ecstatic that someone has raised this point, (along with the fact that the continued insistence on a God who would damn entire swaths of his creation to Hell because he was annoyed, tends to turn people off, rather than bring them to church), this scenario won’t change until it’s actually confronted. And for whatever reason, Rob Bell doesn’t do it.

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Why Jerry Falwell has ruined it for the rest of us

Posted on June 22, 2011 by megancastellan

So a few different things this week!
For the first time since June of 2006, I did not have to preach on Trinity Sunday. While I consider this a milestone reached in my career, it also means that I don’t have a sermon to post here.
And also, since I am at camp this week, there will a short break in my review of “Love Wins”, since I left my book at home.

In the meantime, I am here at camp, helping to train counselors. Which has started me thinking (again) about something that I get asked pretty regularly, along with “Aren’t you too young to be a priest?” and “Is the Nielsen television rating system ridiculously antiquated for today’s increase in Internet video streaming technology?” (Answers: no and yes).
About once every two weeks, I get asked some question, beginning with the phrase “so you’re a young person…[insert question here]?”.
It’s hard to explain. Evidently, the population under 35 years of age, is like a foreign land, not unlike the past. But it is important to the church to try to understand these Young People, to speak their language, to know their customs and their ways, and I feel myself to be an Ambassador from this unknown land.

To that end, I present the first in an occasional series entitled Megan’s Helpful Hints for Preaching and Teaching with Millennials.
To be clear, these should not be taken as absolute gospel. (Part of what amuses me about being asked to give voice to an ENTIRE GENERATION is that I am a priest. I am not a ‘normal’ young person.)
Neither should these be restricted to only useful for young people. In my experience, as the church, and our American society as a whole, undergoes this massive change, the way we speak to and about each other has changed. For this reason, the language and rhetoric we use in church needs to change. Or no one will understand what we mean anymore.

Hint #1. Assume extreme mistrust.
This is not personal. This is not to say that you are not a perfectly lovely, friendly person who is delightful to know and associate with.
But you need to assume that anyone you meet, under the age of 40, and very many other people besides, be they churched or unchurched, be they cradle Episcopalian or a walk-in from the Baptist church down the street Does. Not. Trust. You.

This is for a few reasons (and lest I give you a complex, none of these are your fault, strictly speaking). First off, this young person has grown up in an world where Watergate and Vietnam have always been. The government has never, ever been seen as truthful or trustworthy. These things have not existed in her/his world. Institutions lie, and her/his whole existence has been shaped in part by a barrage of advertisements, trying to sell them things on a continual basis. Ads and shifty advertising language have been coming at them since the moment of birth, another fact of life. Most unfortunately, in their mind, the church is an institution, in there with the government and corporations.

Also, the only voice of Christianity in this person’s lifetime has been the televangelists through the media. Millennials are media-saturated. While you cannot assume that they can tell you the story of the good Samaritan, you can assume that they have heard the phrase ‘being saved’ or ‘personal relationship with Jesus’. Or ‘going to hell’. The infamous purple Teletubby incident? Pat Robertson saying 9/11 was the fault of the feminists and the ACLU? They heard about that. In their lifetime, Christianity has earned for itself a reputation as hypocritical and hateful, with little countering public voice.

It may sound abstract– it’s not. It takes a serious psychological toll to hear that an all powerful, all knowing God wants you (and probably most people you know) to burn in hell because you don’t believe the right thing/do the right thing/live the right way/say the right words. Great news! The smartest, best power in the universe sees you for what you are, and wants to destroy you, because you are so bad.

This is the ‘gospel’ that televangelists have managed to communicate for the last 35 years. Consistently. On the radio, on television, on the street corner, on billboards, in the media, and in politics.

Think of it as a generation that has been spiritually abused, subtly and continually.
Millennials see you, the religious authority, and all they expect to hear is more of the same.
Either outright condemnation and a guilt trip, or hypocrisy.

So, the ball is in your court, which is unfair, but there you go. While, yes, you personally didn’t create the phenomenon of 1970s-1980s televangelism, and the rise of the Religious Right in America, you are still going to have to work three times as hard to convince a terrified population that you really won’t hurt them. You don’t hate gays, you don’t believe Obama is secretly the Antichrist, and you don’t believe that rock and roll is the devil’s music. Evolution is quite nice, and no one is going to hell.

There is no magic cure, or easy fix, but a big help is realizing how damaged a huge portion of the population is. So maybe we’re being called to be not so much a social club for the pampered, but a refugee shelter. There’s a lot more care required.

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Love Wins!: In which we go to Hell

Posted on June 15, 2011 by megancastellan

Chapter Three of ‘Love Wins’ is entitled Hell. Possibly, there could have been some funnier, catchier title, but Rob Bell was like, “No! On with the theologizing and the weird e.e. cummings-like layout!”
And so here we are. The crux of why so many people are angry at the book.
Bell starts by going through the Bible, and offering to show us every place in there where the term ‘hell’ appears.
This is three pages into the chapter. And this, dear blog-reader, is where the wheels come off of the wagon.
Because here is where I began to talk back, in an audibly angry and frustrated voice, to my book, causing my Esteemed Lutheran Colleague to question my sanity.
The correct answer to Rob Bell’s experiment would have been ‘No Times! The term ‘hell’ literally appears not once in the pages of the Bible! Fun Fact!’
(For one, it’s English. So….there you are. Bible–written in Hebrew, Greek, and smattering of Aramaic. Not English.)
But, it turns out that Rob Bell is not so good at a number of things, one of them being the exegesis of the Hebrew Bible.
So he does a really good job of explaining about the term ‘Gehenna’ from the gospels, which is translated as ‘hell’ in many English translations, and yet was literally a garbage dump in Jerusalem, literally burning day and night and featuring unfriendly dogs eating the garbage in an un-kosher like manner, while gnashing their teeth. (Sound familiar?)
Also pretty solid on ‘Hades’, and ‘Tartarus’ which aren’t quite ‘hell’–more like ‘Realm of the Dead’, since it comes over straight from Greek mythology.

But. BUT. When he takes a whack at the Old Testament, the wheels come off, the top caves in, it’s just a complete mess.
Observe.
“There isn’t an exact word or concept in the Hebrew scriptures for hell other than a few words that refer to death and the grave. One of them is the Hebrew word ‘Sheol’, a dark, mysterious, murky place people go when they die”(pg 64, 65)
Dude. Sheol is not a word for hell. Sheol means death, in a capital D sort of way. It’s not even clear that people go to Sheol after death, and here is why, and let me begin a new line for clarity.
THERE WAS NOT A BELIEF IN THE AFTERLIFE IN ANCIENT ISRAEL. THEY DID NOT HAVE ONE.
There wasn’t. Saying someone ‘was in Sheol’ is like telling a kid you sent their dog to the farm upstate. It’s a nicer, more polite way to refer to the fact that they are now dead.
Know who did have a well-developed belief in an afterlife? Egypt! Babylon! Rome! Greece! Assyria! Persia!
Pick a civilization that tramped through and conquered poor little Ancient Israel (Known affectionately as the Belgium of its time) , and I guarantee, they had a well-developed dualistic system of thought, complete with Soul, and Life after Death. It became a point of pride with the ancient Israelites of Old Testament-fame to hold on to their wacky, idiosyncratic beliefs in defiance of all their ever-conquering neighbors. Heno/mono-theism, and the resurrection at the last day. NOT AN ETERNAL, AFTERLIFE-HAVING SOUL.

I am sorry, Rob Bell, but it just isn’t there, despite your well-meaning (I hope) efforts to locate it. So, saying things like: “God is identified as the God of ‘Abraham, Isaac and Jacob'” who “were dead by the time this story takes place. Where exactly Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were at that time isn’t mentioned, but Moses is told that God is still their God”(pg. 66) just becomes a problem.

Right. Because they were dead. Everyone knew exactly where they were. They had been buried, and their ‘bones gathered to their ancestors’ as was the custom. The expectation was that they would rise with the rest of the righteous on the last day, but, in the meantime…. they were dead. So no one is really concerned with them. This life is what’s important. (They get cited here because the writer wants this God to be the definitive Israelite God, rather than to be confused with an Egyptian god. So this God is the god of the Israelite patriarchs, this God curses people with really unclean things (which wouldn’t have bothered Egyptians much, etc.)

This would be less important (aside from being sort of insulting to people who take the Old Testament seriously in context) but it comes up again, and undercuts his ultimate argument.

Ok, so his argument ends up being that while hell, biblically, isn’t so much an otherworldly place of eternal torment,as it is tied up in humanity’s inclination to reject our God-given gifts of love, grace, and care for one another, and commit atrocities, both big and small. And that God lets us have the consequences of this. Fine. I might quibble with part of this, but I’ll see where he takes the next chapter.

But then, he expands to looking at verses that ‘talk about judgment without talking about hell’, and we’re back to doing crazy things with the Old Testament.
He’s talking about Sodom and Gomorrah (because, he’s right, this is a text that people have used to explain why God likes people to burn) and he cites Ezekiel 16, where God will “restore the fortunes of Sodom and her daughters” (pg 84).
He reads this as God wanting not so much eternal judgement or punishment for anyone.

Ok, I have absolutely no problem with that conclusion….but here’s the problem I do have.

It’s a metaphor. Ezekiel is using a metaphor.

He’s talking to a nation which is being destroyed, as he writes and speaks, by the Babylonians, and being hauled off into exile. They are suffering in the here and now. So, you know, they’d be feeling like the mythic torched city of Sodom (which, so we’re clear, was destroyed for being inhospitable and a lack of charity. Period.) Ezekiel re-interprets his people’s own religious stories (like a good prophet/pastor!) and uses it to console them at their lowest point. So God will rebuild Sodom, the epitome of the desolate, destroyed city, and God will rebuild and restore Israel now, Babylon or no Babylon. It’s pretty powerful in context. And Bell manages to strip it out.

This is just one example; Bell proceeds to do this to a grand total of 16 Old Testament passages.
And look, it’s not that I disagree necessarily with his conclusion–I don’t. I agree, for the most part.

My problem is that it’s disrespectful.
It’s blatantly disrespectful, in a way that I’m about 100% sure that Rob Bell doesn’t mean to be, both to the people who have found God for generations upon generations through the words of the Tanakah, (this would include Jesus) and to the text itself. Which, lest you forget, we Christians also call part of our scriptures.

Because, when you get right down to it, proof-texting, which is what he’s doing, cares only about matching up words. It’s a mentality that says “Oh! These words in this verse here match with what my thesis is. I shall use it like a geometry theorem! Who cares about what it means? The words are what’s important!” And in so doing, strips the text of the people who wrote it, the people who they wrote it for, the history around it, the commentary around it, the verses around it—its entire texture and meaning.

If such a thing were possible, I would posit that proof texting was a subconscious attempt to separate the scriptures from the Spirit who inspired their writing. Or, at least an attempt to quiet its voice, and the voices of the people whom the Spirit has spoken through around and in the text.

People before us wrote these texts, copied them, argued over them, preached and taught them, and loved them into holiness. We have a duty to these people to take these texts seriously enough to study them in their completeness, and not abuse the words for our own service.

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