Children's Ministry Moment for MLK

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As the kids lined up at the Communion table, I introduced our Children's Ministry Moment to the congregation:

"I believe how we tell history, especially to children, is important. This weekend, as we celebrate our nation's hero, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it may be tempting to condense the breadth of his life and work to the famous words, "I have a dream." But when we reduce this great man to a dreamer, we neglect to remember all he did and said for the here and now.  We forget what he challenged not just the nation but the Church to be and do.  Today we'll share part of his Letter from Birmingham Jail -- words that are difficult to hear, but that I hope we will hear with an open mind and a ready spirit."

Then the children presented this speech I adapted from The Year They Walked by Beatrice Siegel and Letter from Birmingham Jail by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I've shortened just a few sentences from MLK's excerpts; mainly the punctuation has been simplified for the children's ease of reading (fewer quotation marks and no ellipses). In our preparations the previous week, we talked about any vocabulary that was unfamiliar to them and they tackled it all with grace and persistence.

R: As a young minister, Reverend King was patient and cared for the needs of his church. His deep passion for social issues had not yet been tapped, but he knew some things for certain.

A: He wanted freedom and justice for all African-Americans.

M: He also knew that violence was not an answer to their problems.  Violence was not the way of God.

L: But Reverend King’s nonviolence was not passive.  He was patient, but also persistent.  He did not believe in waiting for justice and equality to come in their own time.

I: Some ministers and rabbis said they believed in justice and equality, too, but that Reverend King was going about it the wrong way.  They wanted to wait until a more “convenient” time.  Reverend King wrote a letter to them from jail.

M: You spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergy would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist.  But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist.

L: Was not Jesus an extremist in love? “Love your enemies.  Bless them that curse you.  Pray for them that despitefully use you.”

A: Was not Amos an extremist for justice? “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I: So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be.  Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love?  Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?

R: There was a time when the church was very powerful.  Early Christians suffered and sacrificed for what they believed.  The power structure convicted them for being “disturbers of the peace.”  But they went on with the conviction that they had to obey God.  They were small in number but big in commitment.

L: Things are different now.  The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound.  It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo.

M: Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s often vocal sanction of things as they are.

I: If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for [this] century.  I meet young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust.

A: I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour.

The Cost of Grace

by Hilary Rhodes, contributor

Today, I’d like to expand on Kim’s last post about “deceptive Christian tippers,” and to do so through the lens of my current muse: Dietrich Bonhoeffer.


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Bonhoeffer, as you may know, was a German Lutheran pastor who died a martyr – he was hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp in April 1945, days before it was liberated by the Allies – for his single-minded, incredibly courageous, uncompromising efforts to resist Hitler and the Nazis. Thus, his writings (Cost of Discipleship, Christ the Center, Ethics, and more) are uniquely positioned to speak to us on the true role of a Christian in the savage twentieth and twenty-first centuries, our call to social activism, and how – in his case – to reconcile it with the bluntly pacifist message of Jesus, who famously instructs us to turn the other cheek and not resist an evil man.

CHEAP GRACE

As I read Kim’s post about Christian diners who leave come-to-Jesus tracts for their restaurant servers in place of cash tips, it occurred to me that this was a great way to explore Bonhoeffer’s conceptions of “cheap” and “costly” grace, almost literally. The diners may feel that by leaving an instruction manual on how to obtain “eternal life,” they are doing their waiter or waitress a much greater and lasting service than if they’d merely left them a temporal, worldly gift of money. But the questions raised are twofold:

1) How can this anonymous, tight-fisted, downright pharisaical method of drive-by evangelism possibly communicate the life-changing, radical, and completely counterculture nature of the Gospels?

2) In fact, can there be any benefit to it besides the fact that it makes the diner feel as if they’ve “done their part”? Or is it just a low-risk, cop-out, “don’t look at me” method of proselytizing that indeed sets the public perception of Christianity back still further?

Bonhoeffer would characterize it as the latter. In The Cost of Discipleship, which I am currently reading, he opens with an admonishment to the Christian community to take a hard-eyed look at their methods of preaching, and judge whether this leads people to the actual Word of God, or is intended instead to protect the “look but don’t touch” insular country-club nature of many churches. He then examines his own Protestant heritage, and how Martin Luther kicked off the sixteenth-century Reformation with the radical idea that not good works but rather grace alone is sufficient to redeem an individual.

There’s many a theological discussion to be had about Luther and his message, not least his rabid anti-Semitism. But Bonhoeffer’s focus for exploration – and mine – is how the concept of grace, and its function in Christian life, has become grossly misunderstood and devalued. Luther’s proposition that God alone confers salvation has led, as Bonhoeffer points out, to a sense among many contemporary Christians that they can live a life identical to their secular counterparts in nearly every respect. Save for going to church on Sundays, certain taboos in vocabulary, and, yes, leaving evangelical tracts in place of tips, they can live essentially as they did before, confident that grace has been put to work to wipe out the rest of their transgressions. It becomes “the justification of sin, rather than the justification of the sinner in the world.”

Bonhoeffer calls this “cheap grace,” and characterizes it as the greatest threat, bar none, to a real, vital Christian calling in this day and age. When Christianity is lax, lazy, and easy, when it demands nothing from us and is palatable to the suburban everyman leery of scary words like “sacrifice” and “suffering,” it completely loses the radical quality on which it was founded. It becomes Christianity without Christ.

So what’s the answer? How can we maintain a distinctively Christian identity? Or will this build the exclusionary walls even higher, if Christianity has an entrance exam harder than Harvard’s?

COSTLY GRACE

The commandments of Jesus are deceptively simple. “Sell all you have, give to the poor, and come, follow Me.” When asked how to obtain eternal life, he doesn’t break out a phonebook-sized manual of rules and regulations. He merely affirms the Commandments first given to Charlton Heston Moses: Don’t kill. Don’t steal. Don’t commit adultery. Honor your father and mother. Love God with all your heart, soul, body, and mind. And love your neighbor as you love yourself.

I’ve written several entries at my own blog dealing with the nature of these commandments, and how we (present company no exception) so often fail at putting them into practice in daily life. But the other thing to keep in mind is that Jesus is always, uncompromisingly, and brutally honest about what the cost of discipleship entails. When He calls you, you can’t stop to bury your father or say goodbye to your loved ones. You can’t set your terms and then follow. You can’t follow when the stock market’s doing well. You drop everything, and follow. Period.

This is also the hardest thing we can ever do. Bonhoeffer puts it just as frighteningly: “When Christ calls a man, he calls him to come and die.”

Because in fact, we do die. Maybe not in actual martyrdom, as Bonhoeffer did, but in everything we were before, our old habits and neurotic fixations and judgments and beliefs and cop-outs. We burn away. We do sell everything, whether physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, or otherwise. And in stripping ourselves of these worldly accoutrements, we are thrown into a new life where we are forced to rely completely on the Divine Mercy.

And in so doing, we don’t give up everything and get nothing for our trouble. We receive the Pearl of Great Price. We receive, in this utterly necessary, transcendent sacrifice, the gift of costly grace. Our life is no longer our own, and has been bought on a heavenly account we can never pay back – and don’t have to. That story has already been told. The story of how love overcomes evil, the truth of all human reality. The power of death, and our own death, has been broken forever.

It’s done. It’s been done for a while. On a beautiful spring morning almost two thousand years ago, two women in Jerusalem met a man they thought was the gardener. And it ended.

It’s not about blood and guts. It never was.

Hollywood’s never figured that out.

THE CROSS

Like many Christians, I like to wear a cross necklace. It’s another easy and low-risk way of displaying religious conviction – that is, when it isn’t just a throwaway fashion statement. But for Bonhoeffer, it’s a reminder of nothing more or less than our own absolute commitment to follow Jesus’ path, even unto its uttermost end.

We each have our own crosses to bear. Starting out on a spiritual journey will, I promise, show yours to you pretty darn quick. And it’s a scary proposition. It explicitly includes suffering, and that death I mentioned above. So why would we, as creatures who are naturally averse to pain, choose to do that to ourselves?

What if our cross to carry was to humbly accept the unconditional love and mercy of God, for ourselves and for everyone we meet? To yield ourselves into the arms of a Divine who is so deeply in love with us that He did not consider the life of His Son too high a price to pay for our redemption?

Does that sound so terrible? So dangerous, so exclusionary? So self-righteous, so bloodstained, so many of the adjectives that are (sadly, and truly) used to characterize the exploits of many people who have called themselves Christian throughout the centuries?

For Bonhoeffer, this was the ultimate core of his call to resist the Nazis. He understood that Jesus was not preaching a message of passive acceptance, the life of cheap grace, to sit back and let the most evil dictator of the twentieth century – perhaps in all of history – seize control of his beloved home country.

To turn the other cheek didn’t mean to become collaborators, either active or complicit. What it was, was a call not to fight the Nazis on their terms. They wouldn’t be brought down by Bonhoeffer and his fellows becoming them.

Because the Sermon on the Mount, possibly the most gloriously counter-intuitive message in all of human history, is a call to action. To demonstrate, to create, to live the Kingdom of Heaven, and the perfect love of God. Here. Now. Forever.


Hilary Rhodes has recently launched her own blog at Woman at the Well, where she ruminates on issues of social justice, courageous faith, the creative life, and more. Although Sarah Lawrence College is regularly cited as one of the least religious schools in America, it was there that she rediscovered, and fell in love with, her lost childhood faith – except on a hundred orders of magnitude more, in depths of experience and mercy that she never, ever thought were possible. For more on that, keep tabs on WATW.

Clinging to Hatred

I just read a really well-written post about hatred at the blog Christian Girl at College. It is particularly poignant in light of the complicated response to the death of Bin Laden.

Click here to read Midwesterndiva's thought-provoking post.


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And here is the response I wrote to her post and the subsequent comments, an interesting discussion on judgment and righteous anger/hatred:

At the risk of proof-texting and skipping around Bible verses in a way that does justice to none of them, this conversation reminds me of the warning against hypocrisy in Matthew 7:5 and Luke 6:42 - taking the plank out of one's own eyes before attempting to remove the speck in someone else's.

When we are called to hate evil, we are called to hate the evil in our own hearts and at our own hands just as much as we hate evil elsewhere. There is too high a price for assigning a point system based on human understanding of which acts are more evil and thus which people are more evil.

If we justify our hatred of people who have murdered and terrorized, perhaps we are not as different as we think from those who justified their hatred of the people they then murdered and terrorized. This frightens me, yes, and it is difficult to look at my own life and realize that even if I have never killed another person, I have certainly been angry with others and perhaps unjustly so. The best I can do is to reconcile that in myself and strive to live out the love I have unduly received.

From the Mouths of Babes

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At an afterschool program in a rough Yonkers neighborhood, the children typically spent their free time outdoors in the parking lot on fair-weathered afternoons.

One day, two students picked leaves and grass and the odd flower from an incongruous bit of green encroaching on the disrupted pavement around a rotted out stump. One young girl took my arm and pointed to the stone wall topped with iron bars and railings, which enclosed their unequipped playground.

"Do you know why that's there?" she said; "Somebody was shot. They died." Then, without further explanation, she took some more grass back to her makeshift garden on the greenless end of the parking lot.

The children were not oblivious to the world beyond the protective fence, nor were they unaware of what was lacking in the small lot where they played.

They sought earth-space. They longed for an environment that could sustain life; sustain peace.

Ten Rules of Peace

Peace activist Father John Dear has been arrested 75 times in acts of civil disobedience, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu has nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.




Ten Rules of Peace
according to Fr. John Dear, based upon the work of Henri Nouwen

1. Peace-making starts with prayer. Let Jesus disarm your heart.

2. Peace-making requires resistance to war and violence.

3. Peace-making creates community.

4. Peace-making requires serving the poor and marginalized.

5. Peace-making means accepting weakness.

6. Peace-making requires nonviolence.

7. Peace-making demands social justice.

8. Peace-making makes connections.

9. Peace-making leads to gratitude.

10. Peace-makers follow a nonviolent peace-making Jesus. Jesus was not passive.


Fr. John Dear is an excellent speaker and author who spoke at Drew last semester. Check out his website at FatherJohnDear.org and his autobiography entitled A Persistent Peace, among his other works.

Thoughtful, Authentic, Nonviolent Evangelism

A continuation from the previous post, The Gospel is Not a Weapon, this is further discussion on how to approach sharing one's beliefs with thoughtfulness, authenticity, and nonviolence.

As I stated then, I write this from one Christian's perspective, but if you see anything that rings true in other traditions, I hope that you will take it with you.

Be honest about where your faith, religion, or worldview falls short or where you think it could fall short.

Some seem to be afraid that admitting any imperfection, mistake, or unanswered matter on behalf of their belief system is akin to admitting an inadequacy on the part of the divine. Consider carefully where the two are differentiated. In Christianity, for example, let God be God; if I were to serve my religion before God, I would be committing idolatry. But it does not blemish the reputation of God to profess that God is capable of so much more good than a religious community is, or to clarify that religious people are far from perfect even if they believe in a perfect divine. Nor does it discredit or devalue a religion.

I knew a family who believed in keeping a vegan diet with great conviction and openly advocated it to others. When a mutual friend first became a vegan and was not feeling well, however, they gave her supplementary B-vitamins without telling her what they were. They never explained to her that there was anything her new diet may lack or even what foods she would need to emphasize to get the nutrition she needed. I'm not against veganism or vegetarianism, and though I do not specifically follow these diets there is much in them which better informs my nutrition. But I do take issue with false witness; knowingly failing to be openly honest with this woman was a risk to her health and wellbeing. That simply is not just.


Consider context. Be willing to approach people in different ways, respecting their own experiences and understandings.

A personal testimony may speak volumes to one person, while quietly living out your faith may be all it takes to pique someone else's interest.

I once led a youth group meeting on peer pressure. I wrote down a whole slew of activities, one per slip of paper; these ranged from fairly obvious offenses to morality or self-care (cheat on a test; take prescription drugs that weren't prescribed for you) to the most benign of hobbies (ride a rollercoaster; read a book). I gave the youth the direction to work together to answer this question for each item: "Would you tell a friend to do this?" and to place it beneath one of the signs on each wall of the room: "Yes," "No," "Maybe" (i.e. depends on the situation) and "Don't Know" (i.e. group is not familiar enough with the activity or can't reach a consensus, like a hung jury).

As they worked, it became clear that this exercise was less about whether a particular activity was good or bad and more about whether it was something they would recommend for someone else and under what circumstances. If they had trouble, they could reverse the question to consider: "Would I want someone to tell me to do this?"

They found that even telling a friend to "read a book" - what might seem like the right answer of "something Mom and Dad would want me to say" - actually depended on the book, depended on the friend, depended on the friendship. They knew that they interacted with different people in different ways. In a dualist system with only the option of whether the activity was good or bad, they may have stuck it in the good and wholesome pile and moved on. But they were allowed to consider context; they were even allowed not to know. After some deliberation that bad boy got slapped onto the "Maybe" wall, right up there with "ride a rollercoaster."


Be willing to be honest about your own mistakes and difficulties, past and present, and to discuss issues that often go unspoken or against the grain of public opinion.

What does your faith do for you? How does it change or sustain you? Why does it make any difference to you at all? It is one thing to describe a jailbird conversion - "I did those things then; I follow the law now." That may be very significant and perhaps a powerful crux of your story. But it is another thing to share how you are being shaped, transformed and renewed in everyday life. Consider the effect of your beliefs on aspects of your life that are not neccessarily condemned by society, or are even encouraged and justified in your culture. If you hope to explain why your religion is different from others, you're not going to accomplish much in discussing how its tenets forbid murder and stealing. So does the U.S. government.

That youth group meeting on peer pressure I mentioned? One item was "ride in a car without enough seatbelts for everyone inside," something in the strange position of not being advisable but being widely practiced and socially acceptable. Our discussion on this made an impression on one teen in particular. The next time she was carpooling to a church event, she got someone else to give her a ride rather than get into a crowded vehicle. It was about more than the legality of a seatbelt issue or saying "this is a rule that I follow because I am law-abiding." It was about the consideration of the lives of all of the people traveling that day, a statement that she valued her life and the lives of her family and friends. It's about understanding that "consequences" are not mere punishments for doing something bad, but also the results of actions.

Of course we do things that social consensus considers all right or "just part of being human"; we make mistakes and errors in judgment. But if we don't discuss those that we see cause not to do, especially those that society would be willing to forgive us, then we conspire in creating the illusion that those consequences (results) do not exist - until they happen, and we suffer for it. But sometimes it takes re-evaluating one's own practices and habits to get to the core of belief and avoid hypocrisy.

For another example, I offered my own experience of prejudice toward another person and what it means to me that my faith should not only hold me accountable for that but provide a glimpse of a better model. You can read about it here.

The Gospel is Not a Weapon

In November, a pastor named Jim Swilley came out to his congregation; in an interview with CNN, he discussed his church and family, as well as the misuse and abuse of scripture.

View the video below, and please excuse the general incompetence of the interviewer.




I regret that the interviewer really didn't allow Swilley more time to speak to the issue (near the end of the interview as it were), but I appreciate that Swilley's words echo the message of this clip from the film "Saved," a great illustration of the matter at-hand:




(Thank you to D. for reminding me of this scene!)


It saddens me when any faith of peace is manipulated or misrepresented to do harm in any form. But instead of continuing to rehash the ways in which scripture has been used as a weapon, I'd like to share something else.

I've recently written about my take on syncretism, religious diversity, and upholding one's right to belief. But with that, I believe in the right to share one's beliefs. I think a leave-it-alone, don't-ask-don't-tell approach in which everyone is expected to keep their business to themselves can put us in a vacuum.

So here are a few of my own tips for sharing one's beliefs; and while I write them from one Christian's perspective, I hope that if you see anything that rings true in other traditions, you will say so or take it with you. I will list them now and expand upon them later for the sake of readability.


Thoughtful, Authentic, Nonviolent Evangelism

-Be honest about where your religion or worldview falls short or where you think it could fall short. A religion with limitation does not necessarily indicate a God with limitation.

-Consider context. Be willing to approach people in different ways, respecting their own experiences and understandings.

-Be willing to be honest about your own mistakes and difficulties, past and present, and to discuss issues that often go unspoken or against the grain of public opinion.


I will illustrate these points in the future and hope to add to the list. If you'd like to make further suggestions, you're welcome to email me!

The Spider Prey Paradigm Shift

As a kid, I was immensely allergic to mosquito bites. The Hives of Wrath reached the point that my mother was once wrongly suspected of abusing me.



Suffice it to say that I grew up loathing them. For a kid in a family of campers, mosquitoes were the Enemy. This massive monstrosity in Manitoba no doubt would have sent me into hysterics:



In my mind, a flyswatter was actually a mosquito-squisher. It was justification to me that the world hated them as much as I did. Or more - because, despite how much I despised them, I was rarely able to kill them myself.

During my teenaged years, when my skeeter-hunting skills (e.g. height, eyesight, and reflexes) should have been at their peak, I once enlisted my grandmother to take down a mosquito in the bathroom because I couldn't bring myself to bare my flesh in the shower knowing that that sucker was out there.

Even then the irony of that scene did not escape me.



Just the same, it was her attack model that I attempted to replicate years later. One fateful day, I was alone in my apartment and a sizeable mosquito happened along, hovering near the ceiling.

I knew it was only a matter of time. It was either me or that mosquito - and I wasn't keen on letting it be me.

I put on my big girl panties and wielded a rolled-up magazine, dreading what I would have to do as soon as it flew within reach. I tried in vain to talk myself into a murderous rage. That blood-sucking beast was going down. I had to believe it. I took a breath and raised my weapon.

Suddenly, a stealthy spider that must have been waiting in its super-secret Spider Cave in the corner of the ceiling launched outward and snatched the mosquito mid-air.

One wrestling mass, together they plummeted down to the ledge below, where I had an art print and some handouts I'd recently received.



I don't usually keep crucifixes or images of Christ on the cross - I think this may be the only one I've ever had, certainly the only one I've ever placed somewhere readily visible. And now it was serving as the backdrop to the scene unfolding before me.



Once it ascended to the center of Jesus' body, the spider turned the mosquito corpse over and over to embalm it and secure it there.



Of course I could appreciate the natural, biological drive for a spider to kill a mosquito, and I don't hold it responsible for any malicious act.

But you've got to admit that this spider looks vaguely villainous:



And it could have carried off its kill anywhere. Really, it could have. But instead, it had an acute sense of biblical irony.



I learned at an early age that "spiders are the farmer's friend" and that we were to permit them to live in our home, or else release them to the wild. I was a really big fan of spiders when I made the connection that they killed mosquitoes (see above illustration of childhood), and by college I was nominated resident Spider Liberator.

But this experience was by no means a matter of sympathizing with the poor little once-living creature that served as another living creature's food and sustenance. That lesson is a story for another day.

Rather, I was filled with a bizarre and personally unprecedented reverence for the mosquito as an innocent.

Yes, I understood that its death served a delicious purpose for the spider that was brazen enough to catch it mid-air. (P.S., I'd never seen one do that before, but I guess it beats the presumably painstaking process of web-weaving.) But witnessing this entire interaction - and remembering what I had set out to do - rendered me stunned.

Perhaps not for the first time, but the first with such impact, I realized the power I held as a human; realized my inability to comprehend the consequences of the actions I was physically capable of doing. I remembered that the people who actively killed Jesus were people nonetheless; that the people who actively do any harm are people nonethless. I envisioned countless victims of violence in cases in which the offenders had somehow justified their actions: genocide, hate crimes, revenge, retributive human justice.

This experience did not mysteriously transform me into a perfectly harmless being incapable of inflicting pain or making errors in judgment. But something happened that day that forever altered my perspective on the human impulse to judge, to speculate, to assign value, to take fate into one's own hands.

And I just can't erase the image from my mind - a creature whose species has only caused me discomfort and taken my very blood from my veins, hanging lifelessly on a cross alongside the savior of my soul.