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Adventures in Postmodern Ministry: We are not Family

Posted on August 29, 2012 by megancastellan

Last Thursday, the diocese of Arizona had another educational summit for its clergy, this one on preaching.  These summits are a chance for all the clergy in the diocese, and sometimes lay leaders in the parish as well, to receive continuing education on various topics: children and youth ministry, spiritual direction, music and liturgy, etc.  (And also see our colleagues.  An added bonus of no small worth in a diocese as big as ours.)

Our presenter covered a lot of ground, but one of the points she touched on was that the meaning of language has shifted considerably in the past few decades.  Therefore, in her preaching classes, certain words are off-limits:  sin, grace, faith, hope, etc.  She dubbed these “Teflon words” because their meanings are so loaded and expansive that anything can be thrown at them with no effect, unless the preacher specifically defines them.
I agree with this Teflon concept.  Especially for folks who came of age in a post-Christendom world, there exists no one meaning for any of these theological terms.  Just as the pleasant concept of a unified theory of systematic theology has broken down into a multitude of varied voices singing in (one hopes) harmony, each of our nice theological terms now has a variety of meanings attached to it.  ‘Sin’ can mean what your mom says when you were 5, as well as what the crazy guy on the subway is yelling about as well as what Rick Santorum is currently pontificating about.  Plus, probably whatever the preacher on South Park says it means.
Which means a couple things:  #1, the average person is confused about theology and #2, preachers had better start defining their terms, unless they want their folks to be educated by the loudest voices in the room.  (Who are liable to be Rick Santorum, and South Park.)
And, #3. Due to this varied soup of influences, words have ceased to mean what you think they mean.  And perhaps, some words should only be used in the pulpit with the utmost caution.
To this latter list of Teflon words, might I add the word “family”?
I realize that I invite the shocked gasps of many throughout the church with this suggestion, as well as the writers of almost every parish profile I have ever read, but hear me out.
I understand that we would like the church to be a family.  But I also think that what we mean by this term is: “a group of people who support and love each other unconditionally, through good times and bad, richer or poorer, etc.”  It’s an aspirational goal;  it’s what we strive to be like.
Because many of us (most of us, maybe) do not come from families that operated like this.  Many of us came from families that did not manage to pull off the unconditional love concept, and who weren’t always so supportive of everything, all the time, always.  Families can, and do, split up.  Families can, and do, hurt each other and abuse each other, and store secrets for years and years.  Aspirational goals, and Hallmark cards, aside, the reality of ‘family’ as many of us know it is not really an experience that anyone would want to import into the church.  It’s not a life-giving metaphor; it’s covered with too much baggage.
Instead, why not be explicit with our aspirations?  If we want to be a community of people who support and love each other unconditionally, then why not say that?  Why not explain that this is, in fact, what Christian community is, and lay out exactly what our vision is?   And this has never been more important than now, when there are so many competing voices, clamoring to claim what is Christian and what is not.  What if we were to step forward and say, “Hey!  Shocking as it may sound, a Christian community is determined by its ability to love and accept the newcomer and stranger, not its ability to judge more harshly than anyone else in town.  Christian communities are built on love, not the skulls of the damned.”
Our ability to communicate the Gospel has never been more important, and it helps no one if we restrain ourselves to vague terms that are comforting shibboleths to us, but hopelessly baggage-laden to others.  We need to be clear, crystal-clear, even, and forthright with our vision for a redeemed creation: words and all!

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Rent, Transfigured

Posted on February 20, 2012 by megancastellan

In seminary preaching class, we had an assignment towards the end of term.  Thirty minutes before class, we were given a sealed envelope with a text in it, and a 3×5 card.

The assignment was to take the thirty minutes and come up with a 3-5 minute sermon based on the text given, and preach it in class.  (I’d like to see you try this, Top Chef people.)  The idea was that at some point in our lives, we would show up at church, all calm and happy, and be called upon to preach a sermon at the last minute.  Best to start practicing now.

My text was from Ezekiel, where the prophet addresses the people of Israel in the voice of God and says “I shall be your God, and you shall be my people.  And you shall be my people…” and something else happens in the verse, but all I could think of was Finding Nemo, and Dory speaking to the jellyfish:   “I shall call you Squishy, and you shall be my Squishy!”

Free association in the postmodern age can be tricky. And not without a sense of humor.

But, since the relationship between God and God’s people is, in fact, not unlike that between Dory and the jellyfish, it worked out.

This week, I read the texts (Elijah/Elisha and Transfiguration!) and all I could think of was that scene from Rent with the angry homeless lady yelling at Mark.

Now, this could have been because some friends of mine had been discussing it on Twitter earlier in the month.  Or it could be because God was messing with me.

Either way, each time I read Peter’s comment, and God’s comeback “This is my Son, the Beloved.  Listen to him!” I heard the Angry  Woman singing in my head.

If you know Rent, you understand the tension here.  Almost nothing in her scene is sermon-appropriate language.  But I couldn’t find another illustration.  Despite the fact that I was still really unclear why/how the Angry Homeless Woman was related to the Transfiguration,  I decided to take a stab at it.

Here’s what happened.

 

February 19, 2012

7 Epiphany (Transfiguration), Year B

Mark 9: 2-9

 

In the musical RENT, a sort of modern read on La Boheme set in New York’s East Village, early in the narrative, the main starving-artist characters are hanging around a vacant lot late at night, observing a homeless woman being harassed by some cops.  She hasn’t done anything wrong–they just want her to pull up her tent-city dwelling and head somewhere else for the night, when one of the ‘artists’ comes over with his handy-dandy video camera (This is all set in the late 1990s, so forgive the absence of cellphones).

Realizing he’s being caught on tape, the officer heads off, and Mark, with the camera, turns to the lady he’s just ‘rescued,’ clearly expecting to be gratefully thanked, when she  instead starts cursing at him.

 

What, exactly, she screams at him is not church-appropriate language, so I shall heavily paraphrase.

Basically, she asks him who in the world he thinks he is, she didn’t need to be rescued in the first place, and she doesn’t exist just so he can make a new movie, or feel better about himself.

 

She stomps away.

 

See, this woman, She wanted to be engaged with.

 

She wanted to be listened to, not just seen, not just treated like a problem, or even a heroine.  She wanted to be listened to.

 

Peter’s comment in the gospel today up on the mountain is a very human one.  Very understandable response.  He’s all confused, clearly,  one minute he was out for a nice lesuirely stroll with his friends– the next, there’s a cloud, there’s a light, there’s visions of long dead prophets appearing.  He’s having a bit of a day.

 

So he’s overcome.  He’s blown out of the water by what he’s experiencing.  And he seizes on the first thing that pops into his head which possibly has bypassed the filter between brain and mouth– I know none of you have ever done this.

 

He says– “lord!  It is good we are here!  Let us build three dwellings for you!  One for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah!”

 

He doesn’t want to build mansions here– what he wants to build is more like tiny houses– or tabernacles.  It’s a word in Greek that gets kicked around in the OT anytime the people of Israel are out wandering in the desert, and want to build a resting place for the Presence of God.  It denotes something like a dwelling place , or a tent.

So Peter wants to build homes for Jesus , Moses and Elijah.  He wants to keep them there.  He wants to freeze the moment.  The moment is so overwhelming, so wonderful and inspiring and awe-producing that he wants to freeze it and stay with it forever.

 

Leave Jesus and Moses and Elijah living up there on the mountain top forever like living museum pieces.  Frozen.  Waiting.  Perfect and beautiful and lovely.

 

But Peter doesn’t get to do that because this voice comes from the heavens, and God says, “This is my Son.  The Beloved.  LISTEN TO HIM.”

 

I’d imagine it must be a pretty awesome experience for God to tell you to shut it, essentially, and that’s what happens to Peter.

 

Peter gets told, not to honor the stillness and perfection of what he saw, but to listen.  To engage.  To risk shattering the perfection of the image, and head back down the mountain.

 

Peter, really, I’m guessing, and most of us too, would have loved to stay up on the untainted mountaintop with those booths and Jesus, just hanging out, and staring.  It would have been great.  The Christ, with Moses, the giver of the law, and Elijah, the chief of the prophets, and you, to sit and absorb their wisdom, forever and ever, and just relish their nearness and their transcendence and the bliss of it all.

 

Because there’s not much better than a mountaintop experience.  Those moments when we feel God’s presence so close, and everything sort of sharpens into clear focus, and we get it.  Those are great; those get us out of bed on the bad days, those keep us going, those little glimmers of light in the darkness.

 

But those are also few and far between.  Life is not a mountaintop.  We don’t get to live up there in a booth with Elijah.  We come back down the mountain.  We live in the valley, for the most part, where things are murkier and dimmer.  After this scene on the top, Jesus and the disciples head down the mountain, and they head straight for Jerusalem.

 

These glimpses of God, this transfiguration wasn’t so much so Peter and the others could feel good about their life choices in following Jesus, really, and it wasn’t to cement their faith for the trials ahead.   They’re still going to wimp out in a few weeks.

 

These flashes of God we experience give further shape to our relationship with God.  They illuminate our wrestling in the dark.  Like flashes of lightening in a dark room, they cast light over what we’re already doing.  Visions alone don’t make a relationship– engagement does.  Listening does.  Visions only help explain what you’re listening to.

 

What keeps you going down in the valleys, between those mountaintop flashes of clarity, is engagement with God.  Listening.  Peter, James, John, they believed in Jesus before they saw him transfigured. They had a relationship with him, following him, listening to him, before Moses and Elijah appeared.  They absorbed his words his wisdom, they watched how he lived in the world, how he treated people.  They will continue to do that in the days to come, as the church forms.

 

What forms the church is not so much the blissful surety of the Transfiguration– it’s the plodding engagement of the valley. It’s the listening.  The listening that is sometimes hard, sometimes easy.  The listening we are called to do every day of our lives as we embody Christ  in the world around us.

 

As we begin to walk the valley toward another Lent, may we hear the words of God speaking to each of us, and calling us onward.

 

Amen.

 

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Please please please let me tweet what I want

Posted on January 16, 2012 by megancastellan

In my (extremely) occasional series on Preaching With Milliennials, I came across an article on ENS the other day. The writer speaks of going to a conference on the use of new technology to communicate in the business world, in which the conference leader undertook the Herculean task of explaining Twitter.

(I find this impressive. I recall once in seminary, when a colleague at the Church Center sat down at lunch and asked me to explain YouTube, and then, once I explained the concept, what one would do with such a thing. It’s a bit like explaining a screwdriver. It only works if you first have a concept of screws and their infinite uses.)

Anyway, the writer commented that this ‘following’ on Twitter, by which a user clicks a button, and signs up to read all the messages another user sends out, seems extremely shallow to her. By contrast, Jesus demands from us a more dedicated, engaged sense of following. The article is here, for your reading pleasure.

It’s not a bad article. Her point is well taken. Following Jesus should be more than skin deep, requires commitment, etc. Yes, good, fine, okay.

But it hits me sideways that she made that point by the Twitter-is-shallow-and-who-possibly-understands-it? route. The minute I found her on that particular road, I myself signaled for the nearest exit, and departed the caravan, however valid her eventual point.

Please, please, PLEASE do not bad-mouth technology. Just please don’t do it. I understand it can be off-putting, I understand it can be alienating, but you need to understand that for many of us, technology, and its rapid development has been a constant in our lives. Learning to use it is a constant curve.
Further, it makes about as much sense to me and most people I talk to, to disparage the Internet, or Twitter, in their entirety as it does to disparage wheels. Or levers. Or mechanized printing. (“Know what I can’t stand, Phineas? Damned interchangeable parts!” “Won’t someone think of the children!”) These things are tools, to be used in helpful or non-helpful ways. If you want to blame something, blame operator error.

For example: Twitter!
Some facts: Twitter users tend to be younger, less wealthy, and much more ethnically diverse (within the US). For over half of Twitter users surveyed, they access the service via cell phone.  And, globally, only 33% of Twitter account holders live in the US. (Twitter’s short-burst form of communication, since it is harder to pinpoint by government censors, has been credited with facilitating the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, etc.  During the Iranian Green Uprising in the spring of 2009, the US State Dept asked Twitter to delay server maintenance so that the protestors could continue to communicate.)  Turns out, there is actually a lot going on here that is far from shallow.

For my money, Jesus would be having a blast on Twitter. (Though, to be fair, @JesusOfNaz316 already is.) Jesus didn’t hole up in a cave, waiting for people to come to him. Jesus wandered around, from town to town, preaching, teaching, and healing, as did every other traveling famous rabbi of the day. He did what he had to to get his message out there: commented on current events, used rudimentary amplification, you name it. The method of transmission wasn’t a concern, because if the story you’re telling is that important, then you’ll do whatever you have to so people can listen.

 

Oh.  And I’m on Twitter.  Right here.

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“When we arrive, sons and daughters…”

Posted on November 10, 2011 by megancastellan

The ordained are no strangers to projection.

A colleague once commented that the reason Episcopal clergy wear white albs is to provide clearer screens for our projection-happy parishioners.
There are classes and groups in seminary where serious-looking professors and guides talk to you about how projection works, why it happens, and most importantly, how you can avoid buying into it.  “Don’t become everything they see in you,” these well-meaning sages urge. “That way lies madness.”
It is good advice.  If you want a quick trip to an identity crisis, try to buy into every single word someone says about you, after you’ve spoken publicly.  In my experience, roughly 80% of what is said (being conservative here) isn’t about you at all.  It’s whatever they associate with you, or what you said, or the shoes you wore, or a sound they heard, or how they woke up feeling that day.
In recent weeks, I’ve been listening with great attention to what has been said about ‘young people these days’ both inside and outside of the church.  Now, as I am a youngish person myself, I have always heard a lot of this sort of talk. (I’m unclear as to why.  Maybe people think we have a club?  That I can carry the good word back and reason with the rest of my people?)
I’ve kept a bit of a list in my head, through the years of the ways we are defined by others–right now, there’s been an uptick in ‘young people’ talk, both inside and outside of the church.  Tons more things have gone on that list.  Church officials have amped up the effort to explain who these young people are, and pretty much everyone in society wants to explain why these young people are currently out in the streets of every major city in the country/world, and seem disinclined to leave.
Don’t be shocked, but that list in my head is overwhelmingly negative.  Young people don’t like religion, and have no faith; we are inept at social relationships–bad at community and responsibility, but addicted to the internet and social media at alarming rates.  We’re uneducated, yet drowning in debt, (because we’re bad with money!)  We’re lazy, selfish, and immature, choosing to stay in a perpetual state of adolescence rather than get careers and move out/leave grad school/Americorps/Teach for America.  We’re perpetually trapped in a web of media, consumption, and shallowness from which we shall never escape, because we are too blissed out on cell phones and privilege to know any better.
See?  Negative list!  (Also, somewhat contradictory.  But no matter.)
I should point out that with the exception of some truly enraging articles in the Washington Post and Slate.com, the people who have made off-handed remarks along these lines to me, know me.  And they like me. (The gentleman who told me that people under 35 only understood retributive justice and physical violence, because our brains hadn’t fully developed, also made a point every week to tell me how inspiring he found my sermons.)  These aren’t thoughtless or mean people by any stretch.
It’s not that they look at me and think, “My God, there stands the most spoiled narcissist ever conceived on this planet, and someone should immediately deprive her of all technology post-haste, lest the problem get worse. WHY IS SHE SPEAKING?!”
(At least, I sincerely hope not.  Otherwise, I’m going to get a serious complex.)  For almost everyone I’ve interacted with, after a few minutes of talking, their images of ‘Young Person’ soon give way to the reality…partially.
Problematically, though, many people also hold onto their image of this mythical ‘Young Person” who dwells out in the ether.  So, despite the fact that they can know, standing in front of them!  many awesome, hard-working, intelligent, (and broke, and jobless, and overeducated-for-today’s-economy) young people, this perception remains.  And it’s not helpful.
Driving back from diocesan convention a few weeks ago, I asked my students to make a list of their own.  I asked the them to make a list of songs that would define their generation for themselves.  To explain to someone else, in your own way, what you care about.  Define yourself.  We’ve been trading songs on Spotify ever since.  The results are fascinating. (If y’all want, I can ask them for permission to post a list.)
The #occupy movement is giving rise to a lot of things: a serious widespread conversation about our economic structure, a reconsideration about the unchecked power of our financial sector, and a lot of people learning how to be megaphones.
But I hope that something else that it’s enabling is a way for our generation to define itself, for us to start that process of putting aside others’ projections of us and voicing our own definitions.
Baby Boomers, ya’ll had Vietnam and Civil Rights for this.  The Greatest Generation (and I remain unconvinced that you didn’t give yourselves that name, btw), had World War II.  In each case, there was a transition between events happening to you, and events you actively caused and defined.  (Full disclosure: I’m not sure where Generation X’s event was.  Want to jump in on this one?  Or did you have your own, and I’m unclear on it?)
While we participated and lived through Columbine, 9/11, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, those were events defined, and triggered by others.
That was someone else’s list we got handed.
Here’s hoping we’re now building our own list.

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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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