#will willimon

It is Sunday! In a little while I will be in worship with sisters and brothers, who I don’t yet know, in a beautiful Catholic Church near where I am staying here in Holland.

When you are a theologian who spends all your time in the Text, in the confessions and beliefs of the Christian faith, every day can be filled with learning and deepening of the knowledge of your faith. However, that could never compensate for the kind of growth that comes from simply being with others in community - the mystery of the Trinity is that we are made for one another. Our truest identity, our deepest meaning, is not something that comes only from our heads, it is ignited in our hearts and finds full expression through the work of our hands. We are people, and God’s work with us, and in us, is with us as whole people, connected to other whole people.

This kind of work is slow. It is slow and messy because people are not all the same. That is the gift of course. We are not robots that get taken in for a firmware update. No, we are people whose lives are shaped through joy, pain, and even ‘ordinary-ness’. The longest season in the Christian liturgical calendar is called ‘ordinary time’. It stretches from Ascension Sunday to the start of Advent (about 22 weeks if I remember well). That is where most of the Christian life is lived, in ordinary time, among ordinary people, with ordinary experiences. I don’t think many of us like living there, it is just too ordinary. We want drama, excitement, pleasure, novelty. I think that is one of the reasons why churches with great worship and drama teams, and entertaining preachers, draw such crowds. But sadly we cannot live there.

Tomorrow we return to our work, to our waiting, to our ‘dailyness’. Amazingly the sermon I listened to early this morning by Bishop Will Willimon that was preached at a Duke Chapel reminds us that God is active in ordinary time. He remarks that God is patient. That is where and how God works, in time. Often God’s work is slower than we expect, out of step with our expectation for the instant miracle, the sudden flash of brilliance, the unexpected solution.

I think this is true, it is true because God is working with people, ordinary people in ordinary time. The miracles of whole bodied people, free from suffering and pain, takes care and commitment. In ordinary time it takes commitment to a better diet and some exercise, to limiting our intake of alcohol and sugars and all the other bad things we consume. In our relationships it takes commitment to service of those who we love and live amongst. It takes a willingness to compromise, to see the side of the other, to look at things from their perspective and give a little, perhaps even take on a little. God is busy working with people, and that is a slow and deliberate task that takes time.

By: Stanley Hauerwas, Will Willimon

  Summary:  Produced from the collaborative efforts of Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, Resident Aliens emerges as an interesting treatise on what it means to be a Christian in America.  Trying to, some would say, “deconstruct” the incestuous relationship that Christianity often shares with American nationalism, this tandem of authors ferociously draws a clear line between a Christianity found in the worship of a nonviolent Christ crucified at the hands of the Empire and a nation that too often finds itself entangled in cycles of violence both at home and abroad.

  The Toast:   “A curmudgeonly book of good questions.”  Anyone who has picked up a book and flipped to the back cover has noticed a set of quotes praising the good work of the authors—the above quote is my contribution.  Anyone familiar with Stanley Hauerwas already knows that he shares in Alasdair MacIntyre’s discontent with the frivolities of our modern, liberal institutions and the ways they have influenced the Church.  The image of a Hauerwas as the disgruntled Barthian we’ve all come to love/despise—there is not middle ground—seems to be the trademark of his career, and apparently, his staunch opposition to the American status quo starts early in his work, as this book, published in 1989, indicates. (I know very little about Will Willimon, so, in fairness to the authors, I will restrict my comments to Stanley Hauerwas).

  While I differ with many of the conclusions that Hauerwas and Willimon draw, I agree with the ways they frame the conversation about what it means to be Christian in America.  While the authors do not explicitly attempt to find the paradox of a Church whose identity is constituted by the ways it empties itself, when played out, a thorough consideration of Resident Aliens cannot avoid many of these rightfully paradoxical implications.  The goodness of Resident Aliens is this: through language accessible to evangelical Christians, Hauerwas and Willimon challenge the assumptions many (evangelical) Christians make in the ways they view their relationship to Christianity, nation, and violence.  The bad in Resident Aliens is this: by employing MacIntyre’s Aristotelian scheme, Resident Aliens confines itself to a philosophical language that, by utilizing a teleological lens, better communicates what it means to be a self-enclosed, determined entity (thus the colonial analogy) rather than a self-emptying, prophetic community of freedom and nonviolence.  In non-nerdy speech, I’m trying to say that I think the ways Hauerwas and Willimon want to talk about what it means to be a Christian in America do not match up with the language they use.

  The Looks: 4/5.  (So horrible it’s beautiful.)

  The Ideas: 4/5

  The Words: 3/5

  Overall: 11/15

  Recommendation:  While this book can wax philosophical, its heart and roots are planted in the congregation.  I recommend this book for any layperson trying to engage their faith beyond the typical Fox News national religion.

  Favorite Quote:  “Our grandest illusions about ourselves led to the greatest horrors of our history: We killed the native Americans, we bombed the North Vietnamese for the very best of American reasons.  That does not mean that those who served were dishonorable, but it does say that they heroically did their duty for a dishonorable war.  Honorable people can be used dishonorably.  It happens all the time.  Until our society knows how to admit that, it has no chance of being truthful.”

  —Toast Master:  Nathan Fox-Helser

Will Willimon weighs in on how celebrating Christmas flies in the face of the values of Ayn Rand:

I’m amazed that these politicians promote Rand’s philosophy without concern for her atheism. But more amazing is the grand celebration we Christians are about to witness. Christmas, the nativity of Jesus Christ, is an eloquent rebuke to Rand and her contemporary devotees, because Christmas is God’s grand revelation of who God really is. The incarnation, as Luke tells the story, occurred among those on the bottom. Poor shepherds working the night shift were first to get the news that a poor, unwed Jewish woman was bearing Emmanuel into the world. Old people once made silent -- Simeon and Anna -- were the first to sing. These social leeches, as Rand regards them, were the first to be told by God of “God with us”. The rich and powerful, Rand’s chosen few, resisted Jesus from the day of his birth. And Christians believe that strange story is the whole truth about God. Jesus Christ -- a poor, vulnerable baby whose family (according to Matthew) was forced to immigrate to Egypt, who cast his lots among the homeless, the hungry, the jobless and the poor -- is God among us.|source:Call & Response, HT:Dustin Bagby