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The Light of Christ…Run Away!!!

Posted on April 11, 2012 by megancastellan

This past Saturday, like last year, my Canterbury group inflicted our liturgical whims upon our Lutheran compatriots and joined together for an Easter Vigil.
Being college ministries, we got to hold our vigil at a respectably late hour of darkness: 10pm.

(and look: While I realize that it is TECHNICALLY appropriate to hold a vigil at any time after sundown, really, if you can’t see stars and there are still birds singing, then it doesn’t count as nighttime. Y’all are worse than toddlers in your fear of darkness.)

It looked to be a good Vigil. We had twice as many show up as last year, and no one panicked over the incense smoke. I ran to our local Episcopal church right as their service ended, and stole borrowed their thurible. I even showed a novice Lutheran the esoteric workings of church incense. (Grind it up. Never burn anything other than pure resin incense & charcoal. Don’t hit passers-by in the face with hot thurible, etc.). Our new Easter fire lit in the nearby Weber grill with ease, and there was no wind.

Everything was going smoothly.

So we started the service. Outside, in the parking lot, I lit the mini- Paschal candle from the new fire, declared it the light of Christ and led everyone inside. I was nearly done with exulting in th Exsultet, when there was banging on the front door.

I ignored it. Because I was rejoicing, and singing to the marvelous and holy flame standing near me.

Then there was more banging, this time on all the doors of the building at once. And I noticed that there were flashing lighting coming in the windows.

Oops.

I kept on singing. Because I was going to FINISH singing the praise of this great light if it damn near killed me, and since this is the night when wickedness is put to flight and sin is washed away, the surely it could work on annoying people who INTERRUPTED MY CHANTING ?!?!?

Meanwhile, Fritz walked on back to figure out what the banging was all about, while I attempted to restore harmony and balance to the cosmos through the power of an-increasingly-intensely-chanted-Exsultet. Finally, I was done, and finally, the banging stopped, and the flashing lights went away.

As I moved to sit down, Fritz leaned over and explained.

It seems that someone passing from the road (a good 100 yards away) had seen us light our new fire, and called the cops. The cops, not being hip to liturgics, had come in force: the campus police, the city police, and two fire engines.

They were not dissuaded by the fact that our New Fire was contained in a grill (off the ground), had been snuffed out at this point, and was sitting in a massive parking lot in which there were no cars. They made a student walk out and dump water on it while they watched, and told him if he ever lit a fire like that again, we’d all be fined.

(It’s been pointed out to me that this could have happened because there had been a red flag warning of fire danger two days before, and that we might have required a permit to light a fire (in a grill?) all of which might be true. For all I’ve been talking about the snowpack being low and fire season starting early this year, I am a Eastern Elitist at heart, and I do not know from the mountainous high desert, really, at all.)

But practicalities aside, how telling is it that a small band of believers gathers in the middle of the night, lights the Light of Christ.,..and the authorities immediately come and tell them to douse it? Douse it! It’s too dangerous!

I don’t know how many Easter celebrations I’ve been to that pose a such a threat to the status quo– where people truly, deeply invested in the Way Things Are would be uncomfortable. But resurrection itself is uncomfortable. It inspires fear, terror, the sort of thing that makes you run away in a panic and not say anything to anyone. It doesn’t let you remain as you are. And that’s uncomfortable, generally.

The language of the Exsultet itself is language of action and change. We are reconciled to God. Pride and hatred are cast out, wickedness driven out,, peace and concord are restored. Joy is given to those who mourn. Death and hell are vanquished, Earth and heaven are joined. God saves God’s people, because that’s what God does. All sorts of tumult.

This isn’t “stay as you are” language. This isnt “warm Fuzzy” language. This isn’t language even about God giving us lots of stuff one day when we die, so hooray, something to look forward to! This is God restoring us on this night, God working to right what is going wrong in this moment, through the redemptive power of Christ in the world.

This sort of language, to live this out, this would get you in trouble with some people. There is quite a lot invested in keeping pride and hatred around these days, (We do have a presidential election to think about, after all.) That one alone might get you stuck in some catacombs, to say nothing of the investment we have in our suffering, and all our varied versions of hell. Pretty tumultuous, scary stuff, to give all that up, even for God. Even for those of us who have been at this Christian thing for a while.

I’ve decided I liked the cops showing up to the Vigil. I have a hunch that this is what post-Christendom church may look like: communities so on fire with the Spirit that the world becomes suspicious, and people that embody the resurrection life and transform the world around them, provoking confusion and panic.

May we all have the courage to live a complete resurrection: complete with tumult, earthquakes, and light in unexpected places.

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I got agency, you got agency, all God’s children got agency

Posted on March 26, 2012 by megancastellan

Or: Moral Agency!  It’s something for everyone

It’s possible that you’ve noticed in the news that there’s been a kerfuffle over contraception recently.  This was prompted by the Obama administration’s decison to ask all employers to provide birth control coverage as preventative care, and free of charge.
The Roman Catholic church hierachy has argued loudly that to require a church-affiliated organization to do this, even if they employ a workforce comprised of people who don’t share their religion, would infringe on the employer’s religious liberty.  So they protested mightily and have refused to comply.  For the first time in memory, the conference of bishops sent a pastoral letter to all parishes concerning this issue, and required it to be read in Sunday mass.  That’s how big a deal the bishops made this. (They didn’t send letters during the run up to Iraq I or II or SB 1070 in Arizona, by the way.  Just this. That seamless garment of life appears to be shrinking.)
Now, I’m going to set aside the question of religious freedom for the moment.  That’s another post.  What I’m concerned with is the theology around the status of women towards which this slouches.
The Roman teaching on birth control is straightforward– don’t use it.  Ta-da!  It’s been that way since Humanae Vitae in 1968.  It’s not a surprise to anyone at this point.
So what the bishops could have done in response to the HHS ruling is to turn to their employees and say, “Ok, female employees!  We would like to remind you to please not use birth control.  We are not fans.  We direct you to Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI which is a smashing good read, despite being long and in Church Latin. We’ve been talking to you about this for well night FIFTY YEARS, so you know?  You should have gotten the message by now, and there’s no reason, really, why this should be an issue for us.
You are, after all, humans with full moral agency, created in the image of God.
We trust you to make the right decision with God’s and our, continued guidance and help.  And if you don’t do what we are asking, well, y’all are grown-ups so we trust you have a good reason.”
This, they did not do.
Instead, there was a unilateral freak-out, giving the impression that women couldn’t be allowed anywhere near birth control because Good Lord, what would we do with it?!?  (Actually, in this instance, the runaway id that is Rush Limbaugh gave a pretty good idea of what some people thought would happen.  I’m still trying to scrub my brain.)
So here’s what we need to ascertain.  The dividing line seems to be this:
Women are either full humans, with moral agency, trusted to make moral decisions, or we aren’t.
In theological terms, to what extent are women created in the image of God?
The Genesis 1 account is clear, happily. (Ok, it’s clear-ish*.  But it’s the Bible, and I take wins where I can get them.)
Genesis 1:27 “And So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. “
Anyway.
It’s at the Fall, and the description thereof, where advocates of complementarianism start building their case.  It is in Genesis 3 that we have the text of God saying that the woman will lust after her husband, and he will rule over her.  But, first of all, everything about Genesis in this section points to this being a description of what already was.  Snakes were sneaky and to be avoided.  Childbirth was dangerous and painful.
But even if you made the text prescriptive, following this logic, these are consequences of sin.  They are bad things!  Do you want to continue to sin, and enshrine the consequences in your policy and practices? (Does that equally make epidurals evil?). That would continue the cycle of sin, and how is that good?
More important, I think, is the continuing biblical witness to God’s interaction and seeking out of women who seem to not lack agency in the least.
There’s Hagar, whom God saves in the desert, and is the first biblical character to give God a name.  Naming is an act of power, and even ownership, and Hagar does it.
Then there’s Rahab, who spies on her people for Joshua and the Israelites, Tamar, who figures out a way to get what is due her as the daughter-in-law from her reluctant father-in-law, even though it means seducing him as a prostitute.  There’s Judith, who murders an enemy general via a stake through the head.  There’s Esther, who hides her identity, becomes Queen of Persia, and orchestrates a small palace coup.
  This is not mentioning the Gospel women, who hung out with Jesus, and basically bankrolled him, cared for him, and kept calm and carried on when the male disciples had panicked and run away.  Mary, Jesus’s mother, Mary and Martha of Bethany, and Mary Magdalene were essential to Jesus’ mission and community.  Without Mary Magdalene, we possibly wouldn’t have our Resurrection accounts– in the Eastern church, she is called the Apostle to the Apostles.  (Possibly not coincidently, in the Western church, she’s still called a whore.)

Interestingly, these women all seemed to be able to decide what the right thing to do was.  They didn’t lack the ability to communicate with God. Thei
r sense of the holy wasn’t mediated through anyone else, and they weren’t silent servants of someone else’s plan. They worked in the world alongside God, just as fully participants in the larger scheme of things as anyone else.
But look. It comes down to this: either every human is a full participant, or no one is, and somehow the cross and Incarnation were ineffective in the complete redemption of the world.
Either the cross and the Incarnation were complete, or they weren’t.
And if I am somehow incompletely redeemed due to my gender, because I am still in need of extra mediation when it comes to my relationship with God, then this is a problem.  At the very least, it reflects poorly on God, that God should leave 51% of God’s humanity  incompletely redeemed, and in impaired communion with God.  (I’m Episcopalian; I know from impaired communion!)
When people quote those texts in Ephesians and Timothy which maintains that women should remain silent in church, but ask their husbands at home, because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church, then what else does this describe but a sort of incomplete redemption, impaired communion, between us and God?
And this can’t be, if we believe the complete biblical witness, the witness of the communion of saints, and the promise of the Incarnation.
God redeems all of us.  God uses all of us.  God trusts all of us to work in God’s world.
And if we’d start trusting each other a bit more, then maybe we could get on with it already.
*I said it was clear-ish because the Hebrew translated ‘humankind’ here is a gender-neutral term for person.  It’s not plural, and it literally means ‘the mud guy’. The words for the people in the Garden don’t get gendered strictly speaking until after the Fall in Genesis 3.  Cool, right?

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Future Present Church

Posted on March 5, 2012 by megancastellan

First, a story.
Last week, a retired priest came into the office I share with several other people. He had come out of a meeting, and upon seeing me, typing at my computer, he guestured broadly, and declared, “And here sits Megan, a future priest of the church!”
Without thinking, I responded, “Well, I’m here now.”

Silence fell in the office. He was flustered, and tried to cover.
“Ah, of course you are! A future and PRESENT priest of the church!”

The proposed budget for 2013-2016 for DFMS* was released March 1. It will be voted on at General Convention in July, so nothing is official yet. And you can download it here.

Some preliminaries: staffing was increased by $1.4million dollars, over the next 3 years.

Funding for Hispanic/Latino ministries was cut, as was funding to dioceses with large Native populations and ministries. Funding was also cut to historic African-American colleges (yes! We have several Historic Black Episcopal colleges. Which now have less funding.)

Seminarian grants were zeroed out entirely, as was the line item funding the General Ordination Exams. (Which will conceivably run into some canonical issues. We aren’t Free Will Baptists, folks. We have rules.)

And funding for all Formation: youth, adult, young adult, and college ministry went from over $3 million to about $286,000 over three years. That’s a 90% cut in funding for the young people. (Good numbers breakdown here, for those of us who are scared of spreadsheets.)

No more Episcopal Youth Event, no more Youth Presence at General Convention, no more Young Adult Festival at General Convention, no more funding help for provincial conferences for youth and young adults, no more PLSE program to encourage young people to consider ordained ministry, nope nada.

The given rationale is that this sort of ministry is best done by local dioceses and parishes.

And I would be peachy-keen with said rationale, if I had widespread experience of that actually occurring.

Instead, in my experience, the dioceses, not to mention parishes, are not really any more flush with cash than DFMS is. And my experience is that while they mean well, when push comes to shove, and they face a tight budget, they do precisely what the Executive Committee just did, and they slash funding for anyone under 45.

Dioceses can, when they have their act together, come up with some good ministry for teh youthes. So can parishes.

But, and this is important, so pay attention. THEY CANNOT DO IT ALONE.

COD is right; you cannot dump an unfunded mandate on unprepared and unfunded people and expect them to do it. That is both unfair and, actually, unChristian. It is a setup to fail. It is, for lack of a better word, tea-partying in the Church.

You actually want to empower the grassroots, to devolve ministry to locals who are in touch with their context? Then you have to empower them for real. Educate them, make sure they have the funding. Put them in touch with a network of resources to help them succeed. Put them in a community to support them.

Because youth work, young adult work, work with college students is too important to fail. It gets said all the time, but these people aren’t the future of the church, they are its present, and its hope. To fail so spectacularly to invest in them is to fail at the sure and certain hope to which God calls us.

I feel like I have been saying this at least twice a week since my ordination, but here it is again.

When programs like this are cut, you lose the next generation of leaders, both ordained and lay. We are beginning to see this now, as the Boomers begin to retire. The second-career clergy are many, and they are wonderful, but we are losing the clergy who are able to put in 30-40 years of continuous experience into the church. We lost them once because of massive cuts to funding like this in the 1960s, and now we’re doing it again.

When I was a teenager, I left the church because there was no youth program (among other reasons). But I am a priest now, because of college ministry. I am a priest because the church made an effort to help me discern and decided I was important, and invested in me.

If this church wants young people, like the constant refrain says, then step up.

Investment time.

*DFMS: the official registered name for The Episcopal Church’s non-profit– Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society. It keeps me from writing TEC all the time, and is less jingoistic than saying “National Church”, when we include several other countries (Haiti, Ecuador, etc) and much of Western Europe.

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So sorry, Mickey

Posted on March 5, 2012 by megancastellan

I don’t have much to say regarding this sermon. I wrote it, I preached it, no one threw anything. I consider that a win.

Later this week, I hope to have something up regarding the proposed budget for The Episcopal Church. In the meantime, you should read this.. (Actually, read everything he’s written. He’s a smart guy, and I still owe him for patching up my small, international incident with the Russian Orthodox when I worked in the Ecumenical office.)

Anyway: sermon. Here!

March 4, 2012
Lent 2, Year B
Psalm 22: 23-30 (whole psalm)

Disney World, Disney Land, has some of the strictest rules regarding their workers and performers of any workplace in America. Up until this year, men could not have facial hair of any kind– and now, only neatly trimmed mustaches. Women may not wear obvious earrings, or obvious makeup, or nailpolish at all. Employees may not ever point; they may only guesture with two fingers or the entire hand. Characters may not speak at all, and they must not ever appear outside their designated ‘land.’

Above all, no one should ever do anything to ever disabuse any visitor that this is, indeed, the happiest place on Earth, inhabited by giant friendly Mice.

The illusion is always complete; the employees are even called cast members, and being with the public is called “being on stage”.

And it works– Disney is crazy-successful.

Lots of people really like to travel to Florida and California and have a wonderful, magical, paid-to-be perfect experience.

But, as great as Disney is, it’s not what you might call authentic. Granted, the giant mouse wearing clothes gives that away, as does the singing lions, but so does the relentless cheeriness.

Humans are never that happy all the time. We are not. And despite the refrain of “God is good, all the time,” neither are Christians.

Once you have gotten over your shock, I direct you to the psalms.

If you have ever experienced an emotion in your life, behold! It is in the psalms.

Have you been happy? Psalm 150: which details all the many and sundry ways you can praise the Lord– on the harp, on the timbrel and lyre, each verse staring with Praise him!”

Feeling angry and vengeful? Psalm 109: in return for my love, they accuse me. May his children be orphans! May his wife be a widow– may creditors seize all he has!

Even th bargaining stage of grief is covered! Psalm 88: do you work wonders for the dead? Will the dust praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the the grave, or loving kindness praised in Sheol?

Essentially, every human emotion is expressed in the psalms. For every feeling you have that you can’t find good God-words for, there’s a psalm. A record of someone’s dialogue with God that you can listen in on and steal if needed.

And today’s is a good example.

You might not have realized it, but this is Psalm 22. That psalm we will get a lot of use out of in about a month or so, come Holy Week.

It starts out with a full lament– the one that should sound familiar, the one that Jesus echoed on the cross. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? ”

From there, the writer laments the many afflictions that have befallen him, crossing into tortures. Wild dogs of Bashan surround me, i can count all my bones, my mouth is dried up like a potsherd.

No only is this person feeling abandoned by God, he or she is suffering physical and emotional agony as well. This is as low, as awful as you can get. No Disney castle to be seen.

But it is authentic.
Who among us as not had at least one moment of feeling alone, and abandoned? Who among us has not had a moment of feeling fury, anger, jealousy, or any of those less- than pristine emotions that fuel our humanity?

The psalms give voice to all of that– not just our pretty emotions, our nice feelings, and everything “proper and correct.”. They talk about the human experience when it comes to a relationship with God. Sometimes we get angry at God. Sometimes we get jealous of God’s seeming favor towards someone we are sure is a horrible person. Sometimes, in our pain, we want to call for God’s wrath upon the heads of our enemies. Sometimes,we’re convinced God has left us for dead.

All of this is a part of being a person of faith. A person of faith, now– we get into big, big trouble whenever we confuse our human, messed up impulses with God’s. [Just because I think it is a great idea to smash babies doesn’t mean God does.]

But see where the writer of Psalm 22 ends up. After the lamenting, after a bit of bargaining too, the writer ends with the song of praise we heard today. My praise is of him in the great assembly.

And not because of obligation, or duty. Not out of empty routine, or because it’s what’s expected, but because this is the God who hears the cry of the poor. This is the God who has listened to everything that has come previous, and answered. This God isn’t scornful of the painful emotions of abandonment or agony, this God doesn’t expect Disney-fied worshippers– this God wants to hear it all from his people. The good, the bad, the indifferent. And God doesn’t hide his face from any of it.
That’s the sort of God we have here in the Psalms– that’s the sort of God Jesus shows us in his life, and especially on the cross. Not a God to hide from, or pretend towards, but a God who wants to hear everything we deal with.

So, thanks be to God, who has lovingly made us as human beings, not cartoon characters, and expects nothing less from us.

Amen.

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I know you are, but what am I?

Posted on March 2, 2012 by megancastellan

On Wednesdays, my plucky Canterburians join with the Lutherans for a joint evening of discussion, fellowship, and food.  This semester, we’re discussing ‘Modern Saints:” people who have applied their Christian faith in very tangible ways in the not-so distant past (Archbp. Oscar Romero and the martyrs of El Salvador, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Edith Stein, the Berrigans, Archbp. Desmond Tutu and the leaders of South Africa, etc.)

I noticed something in the past few weeks, and it’s the same phenomenon I’ve noticed in every community I’ve ever served: rural or urban, Virginia or Arizona, young or old.
As the students described it, the problem was that ‘Christians’ had taken over everything.  These Christians they described were against gay marriage and civil unions, didn’t like people of other faiths, and also were not fans of contraception, or really women at all, as we had seen in recent weeks.  And this was pretty much why we should keep Christians out of politics.
This is not just a ‘kids these days!’ thing.  I have never served or attended a parish where I have ever heard a majority of the parishioners declare themselves Christian.  (“Christian” borders on an Other-ing term in the Episcopal Church; we are Episcopalian before we are anything.)
In some ways, it’s hard to argue with this.  When several of the candidates for presidents are claiming to speak for the entire Christian faith, it’s difficult not to take them at their word, when there’s no clear voice calling them on it.
But at the same time, those students speaking so articulately of their frustration with modern politics?  They are Christian too!  Those people who fill the pews in every church I’ve ever served?  Also Christians!  (And not the Satan-possessed kind, either.  Sorry, Rick Santorum.)
And if we’re all Christians, and we don’t agree with all that’s being done in the name of Christianity, then…we should probably, possibly, look at this, yes?  Because either there is a small group of zealots doing some crazy stuff in the hijacked name of our Lord and Savior with our tacit permission, or many of us have simultaneously decided to be open, tolerant, loving people on our own, in total opposition to this, the Gospel of Smiting (and two thousand years of received tradition, but who’s counting?)
See, this is what I think.
This is a theology problem as much as it is a PR problem.  The PR problem gets talked about all the time–how we need to reclaim the airwaves, use these here interwebz, LOLcats, we can haz Emerging!Churches, etc.  These things are absolutely true.  Mainline Protestatism lost the past few decades to the fundamentalist evangelicals the moment that first guy bought a new-fangled TV station for cheap in the early 1970s.
But it’s a theology problem too.  We’ve all heard the carefully-crafted theology around fundamentalist beliefs.  In fact, most people today know that theology so well that they can’t tell that not all Christians believe it.  Ask the average person walking down the street about where people go after they die, and they will probably spout something about the saved believers in heaven and the damned in hell and St. Peter at the gate.  Now, ask them about what might be involved in eventual universal redemption, and note their look of confusion and panic.
And that’s our fault.  There’s no answering, well-publicized and widely-taught cohesive theology to the really loud stuff.  (Unless you read Miroslav Volf, or Moltmann, AS YOU SHOULD, but I accept that not everyone has that sort of time.  Also, that stuff is sort of systemic, and not issue-based.)
So here’s my plan:  I am starting a Theology For the Rest of Us series here on the blog.  ::Sound of trumpets!::  It shall be theology that attempts to explain why progressive Christians believe the things we do.  Like: women as full moral agents!  Marriage as something other than Procreation-Station!  Stewardship and care of the earth!  And all other topics as may be assigned.
We, in the wider church, need to become better at talking about our faith in concrete, logical terms, in order to give an “accounting for the hope that is in us”, as the Bible, and my preaching prof both say.
“So, Come!  Let us reason together!”

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