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Care and Keeping of the Snark

Posted on March 15, 2013 by megancastellan

Someone asked me on Twitter yesterday what the virtue of snark was. I’m not sure what the basis of this question was–there’s been a great amount to snark at recently: the Oscars, the papal election, Lent Madness, and ever-present politics. And just to read Twitter or any Internet outlet is to immerse yourself in the waters of Snark.

But I’ve been pondering the role of snark as of late, and here’s what I’ve come up with. (Expanded greatly from 140 characters.)

Snark: (def) the art of mocking the powerful, the strong, the mighty, and Ideally, also any institution with power, of which you are associated, or a member.

Snark, like the Magnificat, can cast down the mighty and lift up the lowly. It is a way of calling to account something or some one which is acting hypocritically and out of step with its authentic self.

True snark, good snark, always comes from a place of love. Snark is not cynical. Because it’s tough to work up a head of steam to mock something you don’t care about.

And snark never punches down. To wit: people who practice good snark always either mock things they themselves do, or are, or things imbued with more power than they. (Herein lies the distinction between plain denigrating and snarking. And I do think there is a distinction.)

And I have this theory that the current prevalence of snarkiness comes from two places:

1. Snark is a filter. When you can make a joke about something, you are communicating that a.) you understand it on a deeper-than-superficial level and b.) you understand that the phenomenon cannot be taken just at face value.
This is why I agree with those (like genius smart-person Meredith Gould) who say that snark is a generational marker. For those of us who have grown up on the Information Superhighway, information overload is a way of life. You grow up in a world where you are plugged in to every event, every moment of every day. Not only does your phone tell you instantaneously every move Kim Kardashian makes, you also get to know what every news analyst thinks about said development. Brave New World, folks.
So to filter out what to take at face value, what to trust, and what you can’t trust (I.e., most things) snark has become a fall back. It’s a shibboleth, a password indicating that we recognize that we’re watching a performance, an agenda of some sort. So the primary targets of snark are those who somehow aren’t being authentic– the powerful of all stripes: celebrities, politicians, the news, poseurs….and in many cases, the Church. (We should work on this. Separate blog post.)
So for this reason, young people today are highly snarky. Not out of disrespect, but because it helps filter the world.

2. But also, snark creates intellectual distance. I said before that I don’t think snark is cynical, for the most part. Call me crazy (I’ll wait….) but snark actually forestalls cynicism. YES! It’s true.
I shall give an example:
This year, the Oscars made some confounding directorial decisions (hiring Seth McFarland to host was but one of their many missteps). At one point, Quentin Tarantino won an Oscar for Best Screenplay for “Django Unchained.” Which: awesome! I really liked that movie, and the script was brilliant. I could write a dozen treatises on race relations in that movie, and his use of soundtrack alone.
But they played him off to what song?

“Tara’s Theme,” from Gone with the Wind.

Jesus God.

Now, I could take to this here blog, and write a thesis on race relations in Hollywood, and the travesty behind the making of GWTW, and how it simultaneously was a step forward and like, 3 back for Black Hollywood, and how Hattie McDaniels wasn’t even allowed to attend the premiere, and she couldn’t even write her own Oscar acceptance speech, and how that movie came to crystalize EVERYTHING that we believe, falsely, the antebellum slavery experience to be, which is why, in part, movies like Django are so needed, and so controversial when they do come out, and really, did they REALLY want to dredge all of that up again and undermine his award with a song clip in a mere 30 seconds, and MAKE MY HEAD EXPLODE WITH IRONY?!?!.

But then, I’d sound like a ranting lunatic.
So I posted something VERY snarky on Twitter. (And man, did it ever get retweeted.)

You can’t fight all the battles, with a serious memo and letter to the editor. You cannot lead a marching protest every single time some company doesn’t live up to their promises. You can’t call out all the craziness, or the irony, or the hypocrisy, and it piles up and piles up, especially right now. You can’t. It will suck all the fire out of you, and you will end up rocking gently back and forth in the corner, singing “I’m a Little Teapot.”

In order to fight some of the battles, and fight them well, you have to learn to preserve your fire, and your drive, and to do that, you have to keep some distance. Make some jokes. Mock

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The gospel according to Nike

Posted on February 20, 2013 by megancastellan

In the these two weeks, I will have gone all over the state of Arizona, on the never-ending Begging Tour of 2013 (theme: “Don’t let college students be homeless!”)
Sunday, I was in Prescott, where I’ve been before, many times. St Luke’s is a lovely parish, gorgeous campus, right by the airport. This prompted my board president to offer to buzz the church in his plane, and drop brochures from 5,000 feet. (“It would be different!”)

Here’s what I said.

Note: some of this was partially inspired by what Nouwen wrote on the use of power, but I went in a different direction, and spun it very differently– at least differently from the way I’ve heard Nouwen’s on Christian Leadership interpreted.

Rev. Megan L. Castellan
February 17, 2013
Lent 1, Year C
Luke 4:1-13

Nike is very good at marketing. These ads that Nike makes, they are iconic. Usually a close up on the athete’s face with their voice playing in the background, talking about their triumph over adversity, and their achievement of some great sports goal. And it works because Nike is good at picking the best athletes of their day: people like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Mark McGuire. We get to watch these ads and think about how perfect and magical these people are, and thus, how probably Nike products helped make them that way, so we should probably buy Nike things. These are really effective ads.

Or they are, right up until the athlete in question gets caught doing something that they shouldn’t, and the ad becomes really uncomfortable to watch. Like Lance Armstrong–whose Nike ad had him talking about how the only ‘thing’ he was on was his bike! And lots of hard work! And that’s why he was the best! Til of course, it turned out that he was on a heck of a lot more than that.

Or, this week, when Oscar Pistorius, the South African runner, who was arrested for murder after shooting his girlfriend. His Nike VoiceOver included him saying “I’m a bullet in a loaded gun.” Whoops.

The thing that make these ads so powerful is the same thing that makes them so problematic–each of them constructs a single arc out of the superstar athlete’s life. They struggle, they overcome, they win, and all through lots of determination and will (and really super-expensive running shoes), but it’s all them. It’s all Lance Armstrong, and it’s all Michael Jordan, or it’s all Tiger Woods. There’s no mention of anyone else coaching, or any teammates, or a random caddy. It’s all about them.

What an extraordinary amount of power for one person to have.

No wonder they keep falling short of what we expect them to be.

Power is a difficult thing for us humans to deal with– those of us who have a little and those of us who have a lot. And all of us have some power. You get up in the morning, you decide to get out of bed– that’s power. You decide what to eat for breakfast, or not to eat breakfast at all– power again. Anytime you make a decision, you’re exercising some amount of power. Now, sometimes, the spectrum of the decision is wider than at other times; when I leave here this afternoon, and I decide where to eat lunch, I will decide between local restaurants, and not decide to fly to California. My power does not extend that far. But for some, it does.

And power is complicated, because these decisions we make come with consequences. They ripple out, Iike throwing a rock into a pond, in ways big and small. So the power we wield is never just affecting us; it always affects the people around us too.

And that’s what makes power difficult and oh so tempting. You can use the power you have to just make your life easier, better, less complicated. If you’re a world-famous cyclist, yes, you can take performance enhancing drugs and win all the races, and avoid the shame of losing. But that decision, each decision will affect more people than just yourself, all the coaches, the other competitors, the people who looked up to you, the charities. When Lance Armstrong fell, it nearly killed his cancer charity too. And see, we forget all that, when we get tempted by the dark side of power. All we see are the benefits to ourselves.

That’s what the devil is on about when he’s tempting Jesus in the wilderness. The devil shows up as Jesus is fasting out in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights, which is biblespeak for “he was out there a good long while”. So poor Jesus is in quite a state by the time the devil shows up.

In succession, the devil gives Jesus three very tempting opportunities to use his considerable power. First, he asks him to magic up some food for himself. Failing that, he wants Jesus to worship the devil and thus get all the glory and authority over all the nations for himself. When that doesn’t work, he suggests that Jesus throw himself off of the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, and make God send his angels to catch him.

Jesus doesn’t give in to any of these. But what’s notable about these temptations of the devil is that they’re all about the use of power. They’re all about choice.

Jesus will do miracles multiplying bread– this is something he has no objection to doing, but he won’t do it here, even though he’s hungry, because it’s for himself alone. It’s using his power to fulfill his own needs alone.

He’s clearly fine with crowds listening to him preach and coming to him for healing and waving palms for him, that’s something we see from him later on– but again, he won’t accept glory and honor here, because it would be for himself alone.

And we will even see him walk on water later, rather than climb into the boat with the disciples. But here, he doesn’t elect to jump off the temple, because it would be choosing to use who he was, all his power, for its own sake.

In each case, when the devil asks Jesus to make a choice to use the power he has for himself, Jesus says no. Jesus chooses to use his power differently, radically differently. He could have, but he didn’t.

At every point in his life, Jesus chose to use his power not for himself, but he chose to use his power for others. And in fact, right after he leaves the wilderness, Jesus heads to Nazareth and announces just how he intends to lead his life. “The Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, sight to the blind, release to the captives, to declare the day of the Lord’s favor.”

For the rest of his life, Jesus would use all the power he had only, ONLY, in the service of others, and not for his own needs alone.

And so God calls us. Because we all have power too. And we are all called to use it– did you notice that at no point during that Scriptural shouting match in the desert did Jesus just say to Satan “well, I just can’t do that.” We all have power, to some degree. The question is, how will we use it?

What choices will we make? Will we make choices guided primarily by our own needs, by what serves us best, unconcerned about what the consequences are for others? But from the Garden of Eden on, making choices based on selfishness has never ended well.

Or will we follow Jesus’s example, and use our power to serve others, and build them up? Will we be mindful of how the choice we make today ripples out and affects those who surround us and those who come after us?

God has enabled each one of us with gifts and talents and then God has empowered us with the power to choose. We can choose what we do with what we have been so freely given.
Will we be tempted to live for ourselves alone, even when we know the destruction that ultimately causes?

Or will we follow in the path of Jesus, and try to use what we have, every choice we make, to the glory of God and for the good of God’s creation?

This power is ours. The choice is ours. God gives it to us. The only question is, what will we do with it?

Amen.

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Day of the Dirt!

Posted on February 13, 2013 by megancastellan

Fine, visual learners/people who read! Behold your cries and comments have come unto me.
Also I have an hour to kill before the next Ash Wednesday service, and there is not much to do in Show Low. (Motto: “Yes, that is our real name, why do you ask?”)

Here is my homily for today.
More to come on Adventure in Show Low.

Rev. Megan L Castellan
February 13, 2013
Ash Wednesday
Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

In my first call, part of my job was to be the chaplain to the preschool that was affiliated with our church. This was, by and large, a fun job. I told bible stories in weekly chapel, I led prayers at the Christmas concert and at ‘graduation’ and, generally speaking, the 3-4 year olds were theologically satisfied so long as I waved my hands around a lot, had good props, and was available for hugs when needed.
Until Ash Wednesday.
Ash Wednesday was tricky.
It’s one thing to talk to full grown adults about the need for humility,and repentance, and to mark ashes on their foreheads. I’m even okay now with being told that I myself am dust, and to dust I will one day return.
But a four year old? How do you connect a the shining face of a child to repentance and mortality? I couldn’t quite get my arms around it.

So when I gave the children the ashes, I explained that this was a complicated day, but mainly this was a day about dirt. The stuff that we’re all made of, large or small, rich or poor, boy or girl, white or black, no matter who you are. This is the day that we remember the basic truth–we’re all made of the same stuff. And it is dirt.

They liked that. Toddlers love nothing more than an excuse to get dirty.

But the more I thought about it, the more it grew on me.

Today is about dirt. Ash Wednesday is about recalling dust– the down and dirty basics.
This is about coming back to the essential, rock bottom, core truths about ourselves, about God, and taking a good long look at them. Those things that remain, when everything ephemeral passes away.

Our lives, our relationship with our creator. Our relationships with those around us, and with the rest of the creation that God has made.

Ash Wednesday is when we kneel and consider the stark ground of our being. The dust, if you will. upon which every other part of our lives as Christians is based.

And so, doing this, there are two things that stand out to me.

First of all: we are but dust. We humans are but dust. And the reality of our fallen ness, our dirtiness is evident around us. Lest we get too excited or too proud of ourselves,all we have to do is look around, listen to the news, and we are confronted again with our propensity to fail. Our willingness to fall short. Our fallible, frail nature, and the inescable fact that we are mortal. We are dust. And at some point, each of us messes up, and ultimately, each of us returns to dust.

And second:: we are but dust. Miraculously, God has made us out of Dust! And God looked at us, little dirt creatures that we are, and declared us good. Not just tolerable, but so good that God decided that the Creator of the stars of night wanted to become a little dirt creature himself.

We are but dust. we are beloved down to our dust. We are forgiven down to our dust. And we are created, and redeemed, and sustained by that divine love and grace, though we are but dust.

May that basic knowledge, as basic and as fundamental as the ground beneath our feet, may that certainty sustain us through these next 40 days of Lent, and empower us to serve the world God came to save.

Amen.

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The trials of transfiguration

Posted on February 13, 2013 by megancastellan

I have actually been preaching these last few weeks. I haven’t been posting the sermons on the blog, because I have doubted the amount of sermons that folks actually read.
Sermons are oral/aural events more than anything else. (At least, this is what I keep telling myself as I wave my hands all around and hope I don’t look like I’m suffering a spasm.)

This month, I’m on the Great Preaching Tour of 2013 to talk about Canterbury’s fundraising drive to buy a home. The students accompany me, and my trusty board president, who enjoys asking people to give money. (Fellow clergy, I am working out the cloning technology for him. Stay tuned.)
We started out in Sedona, and last week took us to Tucson. Where I got snowed in. In Arizona, this is a thing that happens when you live atop a mountain. It may be pleasantly warm in the low desert, but it is dumping snow higher up, and the roads are closed anyway.

Despite my weather difficulties, the sermon and the fundraising went very well. People who like young people are, in fact, my favorite sort of people in the world.

Here is what I said.

Luke 9:28-43

Westboro Baptist Church has become a cautionary tale nowadays–a hissing and a byword among nations. If you want to give an example of the worst hypocrisy, the worst example of hatred masquerading as religious piety, then that teeny church out in Kansas is it. After all, the members of that church spend their time not praying, or worshipping, or serving the poor, but going from event to event, protesting. They show up at military funerals, at any well-publicized funeral really, and hold signs, and loudly insist that this is God’s angry wrath punishing America for being so very, very sinful. That is their job–that’s what Westboro Baptist does. Most irritatingly and disturbingly, and unfortunately, effectively.

So it was shocking this week to read that the granddaughter of the pastor, Megan Phelps-Roper, had up and left the church, moved to New York City, and was now re-thinking the theology she was raised with. In the interview, she said she still believed in God, she still went to church (a liberal Presbyterian one in Brooklyn) but everything felt different–life had started over.

Her process of leaving had started in an email interview conducted with an Israeli journalist, who pushed her a bit on this hateful God she was describing, who killed children as punishment, and sent everyone to hell. “What would Jesus say about that? Wasn’t Jesus the person who said not to cast stones?” He asked. The question stuck in her brain, and that started the snowball rolling::-she couldn’t bring herself to hold the angry signs anymore, couldn’t yell at people at the protests, and a few months later, she left.

One little push, one little nudge, and suddenly, this young woman was beginning to transform. She was beginning the slow, awkward process of meeting God, and becoming the person that God had intended all along.

For most of us, this transfiguration process, this process of growing into the fullness of who God has made us to be, is a life-long endeavor. We stumble through it in fits and starts, we do great for a while, then plateau for a couple decades or so. It’s a process. It’s a journey, for us– the more we grow into our createdness, the more clearly we can hear God’s call to us. And on and on it goes. Grow a bit, hear God a bit more clearly.

Jesus, though. Jesus skips all that stuff. (As is typical, for he is Jesus.)
With Jesus, he’s been on somewhat of a roll this last chapter or so of Luke. He’s been going around Galilee, he’s healed, he’s taught, he’s preached. He’s tried to convey at least some of his message to his disciples, with varying degrees of success.

And most recently, Peter has acclaimed him as the Christ, the Son of God–so some of this is sinking in. Now, Jesus knows what’s going to happen next– the direct result of being the Son of God, and the Messiah is death, and resurrection, but not before the death part.
So Jesus is about to embark on the hardest, the very hardest part of his earthly ministry.
And up the mountain he goes.
He takes Peter, James and John with him, and treks up the mountain, and once there, he experiences sort of the culmination of his earthly ministry. The confirmation of who he is, and what he is supposed to do on this earth.
Moses and Elijah appear–the embodiment of the Jewish law–Moses, and all the Prophets–Elijah. And these two luminaries speak to Jesus, because if you’re the Messiah, what are you but the culmination of the Law and the Prophets? This is some great validation right here.
Then the capper– from heaven, God’s voice appearing, and thundering from the clouds— this is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.

This is my Child, the Beloved.

It’s a risky thing to crawl inside the mind of Jesus Christ, but my guess would be that for anyone, Jesus included, hearing those words directed at you! from the Creator would be a powerfully life-affirming thing. Something you would strain your whole life to hear, like a plant growing up towards the sun. Irrefutable confirmation that you are whole, valued, valuable, worthy and known. Down to your bones.
This is powerful stuff. The strength of this experience would give Jesus strength to “turn his face towards Jerusalem” and face the remainder of his ministry on earth. As a beloved child of God, what more reassurance did he need?

Us, well, …we live in a world that’s largely without booming voices from heaven. For us, our journeys towards figuring out who God created us to do and be doesn’t end in flashes of illumination and thundering voices. Our journeys toward transfiguration are lifelong. They double back on themselves, they twist and turn. We figure something out just to get confused all over again. A lot of the time, we don’t know if we’re headed in the right direction.

We stumble towards God, as God calls us, and we stumble towards self-knowledge, but so frequently, as with Jesus, those two things are intertwined. When Jesus figured out who he was, and what he was supposed to do, God became a lot easier to hear. And the more we grow into the truth and beauty of who God made us to be, the easier it becomes to hear God’s affirming words of love for us, and for the world around us.

A lot of the time, we have to rely on those around us, those who play the roles of Peter, James and John in our lives, to help us navigate. To tell us when we’re headed up the mountain, and when we’re headed down. To reflect back to us the shining light of God’s love.

In my work as a college chaplain– this is one of my main jobs: to form communities of disciples who can support each other and reflect to each other the light of Christ. Because when do you need more a trsnsfiguring, supportive community than those first years of young adulthood?

But though our paths may take longer to get there, they still have the same result as Jesus’s did. For each of us, even though the journey is confusing and the loving voice is hard to hear, the path of our spiritual life arcs towards a mountaintop where we arrive fully as God made us, entirely human, and completely reflecting the shining image of God. A place where God greets our arrival with joy, and we can hear the words God has been saying this whole time: You are my beloved Child– with you I am well-pleased.

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Because we can’t all be Coach K

Posted on January 27, 2013 by megancastellan

Lent will soon be upon us, and with it, the start of everyone’s favorite dip-into-hardcore-game-theory: Lent Madness!

Yes, it’s that magical time of year when we assemble brackets, make our picks, and then trash-talk our way through Holy Women, Holy Men: the Saints of the Episcopal Church (though, to be fair, some of us trash-talk that volume year round.  But then again, we are professionals.)
This year, Lent Madness promises to be more exciting than ever.
For one thing, NAU Canterbury is hosting our very own Lent Madness Pool of Greatness.*
That’s right.  For those of you who have been wondering how you can deepen your Lenten devotion while taking concrete action to better the world and extend your church’s ministry to young adults, I have made a way!
The way it works is simple:
–Fill out a bracket with your picks and send it to me by 11:59pm February 12 (Shrove Tuesday).  Sending a picture is fine, so long as it’s legible.
–Include a pledge with your bracket–some amount of money for every pick that you get wrong. (i.e. “For every pick I miss, I pledge 50 cents to NAU Canterbury”)
–Vote in Lent Madness, and follow along with your trusty bracket.
–When we get to Easter, I’ll compare brackets, and whoever gets the most picks right, will win the Award of Greatness.  (Which has yet to be determined, but will most likely be a mug.)
–Also, you send me the results of your pledge.
–Everyone can rest satisfied in the knowledge that they have made the world a better place through some light gambling on the Saints of God.  And who doesn’t want that?
The other thing that will make Lent Madness a thrill-a-minute roller coaster this year is that I have the honor of being a Celebrity Blogger.  So if you enjoy my writing on various and sundry topics here, imagine how much you will enjoy reading my biographies of saints!  And, better yet, the other Celebrity Bloggers are even better at this than I am, with more wit, sarcasm and knowledge than I could ever hope to achieve. There is even a running color commentary on YouTube this year.  (Because, let’s face it, color commentary is the best part of all sports programming.)
So no matter what, you should play along at http://www.lentmadness.org.  It promises to be fun, enlightening and redemptive of those of us who may not fully appreciate the glories of whatever-else-involves-brackets this time of the year.
*Title refers to this commercial from the 1990s.  I keep hoping this will happen now that I’m a Celebrity Blogger.  So far, no limos.
**This is like the Pit of Despair, only filled with Greatness instead.

 

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