TheyCallMePastorBryan

One of the things that I’ve been doing since joining Evergreen is helping by teaching about our yearly patron saint. Last year it was St. Francis. This year it’s Teresa of Avila. I thought I might cross post here with some of the stuff I’m sharing at church.

Teresa of Avila was born in the early 1500s in Spain, and from a fairly early age had a strong desire for a close relationship with God. Teresa is known primarily as a mystic and as a reformer.

She was part of a Carmelite monastery and became frustrated with what she saw as compromise within the monastery, namely she felt they had become too caught up in politics and material concerns. This eventually leads to Teresa getting permission to start her own monastery, which was known as a "discalced" Carmelite monastery. Discalced is a term that means without shoes. Like our last patron saint, St. Francis, Teresa saw living a life of simplicity as an important part of spiritual development.

Starting that monastery led to a series of monasteries, with Teresa advising them and being involved in Spiritual Direction through them. Later in life, Teresa was asked to put down her thoughts on spiritual development, which led to her most well known writing The Interior Castle. In it, Teresa describes the soul as a crystal or diamond, which is the castle. At the center of the castle is a sun that radiates energy, representing God. And within the castle was a series of mansions moving inwards. These seven castles represent stages of development.

Over the next seven months, we'll be exploring these mansions for our patron saint time.

In the mean time, here's a short bit of writing from Teresa that I think represents her take well.

This weekend I went to a cabin with a group of friends. Some I've known a long time, some I've recently met. It was a simple concept for a weekend: enjoy nature, enjoy friendship, get out of town. And it was a great weekend full of good conversations, fun, libations and food.

On Sunday we chose to do a little spiritual community exercise. There was some prayer, I read a parable, and then we shared how we're sensing God at work in our lives. What followed was one of the most meaningful spiritual experiences I've been a part of in a long time. A space opened up that was really sweet and created room for processing and in the middle of that processing what emerged for me was a chance for growth.

Recently, there was a situation where someone I went to seminary with was arrested on charges that, if true, are sickening. And it seems like every day I hear some news story about a pastor or church volunteer that was caught doing something really messed up. And it's easy for me to stay in this space of negativity, that somehow the church allows this sort of stuff to continue to happen. However the more I reflect on this, the more saddened I easily become.

I believe that the church community is to be that space where we're able to be upfront about and engage and shine light on our darkness that sometimes resides within us. But often a social force reverses this and it becomes a community where we end up hiding ourselves, never being able to name and bring to light the things inside us that need to be brought out.

Often, I feel people don't know how to handle my continuing interest in being part of a smaller church. However, I see great hope in smaller church communities - it can much more easily become a community where we are truly allowed to become open about what is happening within ourselves.

And this of course brings me back to this weekend. As I shared my story from the past year, of some healing and also some growth, it made me aware of how much there was within my soul that I was not allowing myself to acknowledge or attend to. But as my friends also shared what was happening in their lives, I was made aware of the presence of the Holy Spirit, drawing all of us into a place to reflect on the healing and wholeness God is offering us in Jesus Christ. I'm still not always sure how big I am on church, but I know that when I experience what I felt in my soul with my friends, well, that is church.

We finished our church time by praying the Lord's Prayer, which is always interesting because all of us have memorized slightly different versions. It ends with this beautiful, yet verging-on-disastrous sound, as we're all praying the same prayer and getting a little confused as we hear our differing words but knowing that we’re in unison in our intent..

Here's one of the more interesting parts to me and relevant to my last post:

Yesterday a friend on facebook posted an article about a semi notable Hollywood actress saying that she doesn't call herself a feminist and noted that she would see a lot of hating and trashing as a result of saying such a thing.

Certainly there will be those who will hate and trash this actress for not calling herself a feminist. Those who do will mostly do so from an ideological angle through which they can't understand why someone would not want to own their mantle. The worst cases of this will create an "other" out of those women who don't want to be associated with feminism. In ideology, the "other" serves as a means of strengthening the boundaries of a group, the "other" is either someone who stands in the way of the ideology or who actively enjoys some form of pleasure that the ideology has stigmatized.

My response to my friends post was to point out that yes, there would be some who would "hate and trash" because that's what happens with ideology.

There was however an interesting irony to this post, in that the source of the article was The Blaze (a website associated with Glen Beck). In the ideology of many who would read that site, feminists are an "other" serving to hold back a different ideology. And so the natural response from that ideology is to hate and trash those who are hating and trashing.

One of my current focuses of reflection has been the ways the internet serves to form our views of others. A great gift of the internet is how it creates space for subgroups. This can lead to a blooming in discussions where voices that might otherwise have had less prominence are given more space to flourish. The existence of groups like Stuff Christian Culture Likes (a recovery group for those decompressing from the abuse and absurdity that happens in much of fundamentalist Christianity) is a great accomplishment of the internet - those who might otherwise have been alienated and felt alone are able to find others who can share their experiences and help them process. In theology, the internet can provide for an inclusion of voices that might not have been heard otherwise. People are able to band together around shared interests in ways never before possible.

This creation of space for subgroups can however also lead to more fractured groups of people and the world. If we curate our feeds in such a way that we never encounter those with different experiences, worldviews and interests, we begin to assume that the views of our subgroup are much more wider spread than they may be in reality.

This effect of seeing our views as more wide spread than they really are carries with it a tendency to magnify our ideological nature. It serves as an amplifier in projecting both the offenses and derision of the "other." The disembodiment that internet engagement creates makes this easier to do, giving us a bit more courage to say things about people who we either don't have to look in the face or who we've never met.

So what do we do with this sort of information? One approach would be to attempt to do away with ideology. In my estimation this would be a useless endeavor - that ideology would be replaced with some other ideology under the guise of having freed ourselves from ideology.

I've read 3 different articles lately that I think all help us put together a bit of a picture of what is going on in Portland right now.

The first, Will Portland Always Be a Retirement Community for the Young?, was published a bit back on the NYTimes and discusses the cultural force for why young, educated people move to Portland even though it does not have a great job market. Of note are the draws to urban planning, the amenities, the "weirdness," and the cost of living. Fascinatingly, all of those things will continue to change as people are drawn for those reasons - regardless of employment, that draw will make amenities, and cost of living go up, and slowly domesticate some of the weirdness.

The influx of new young, educated people leads to the second article, Repacking Portlandia, discusses the wave of new buildings being built in inner Portland that will be coming up in the next 5 years, and makes the argument that many neighborhoods in Portland will be unrecognizable by the end of those 5 years. The argument offered for these tall apartment buildings? An argument that we need all this new housing to keep prices on rents from skyrocketing. While this is certainly true, I find myself a little mistrusting of this narrative when all of the buildings planned are being aimed at the upper class, luxury market. Regardless, these forces are at work.

In the third article, it discusses east Portland, The Forgotten Portland, much of the article discusses the lack or representation of east Portland (Portland beyond 82nd) within the Portland council and some of the history of why east Portland is different. But here's the part that I found most enlightening from the article:

Portland has a problem with inclusivity. Unlike every other state in the US except Texas, Oregon lacks inclusionary zoning laws, which benefit low-income and minority populations.

"Inclusionary zoning," says Vivian Satterfield, an advocate with OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon, "is a land-use policy that says that, for either homeownership or rentals, any time a new development is being built a certain percentage of those units have to be set aside for a diversity of options."

Inclusionary zoning was banned in Oregon in 1999, and without it the "invisible hand" of the market determines the costs of housing throughout the state.

Having been tagged by Dustin, I now do my due diligence in listing ten books that have stuck with me.

1. The Great Gatsby - I've read it over 10 times. The imagery, the setting, what's going on with the characters and the culture, all of this captivates me.

2. East of Eden - My favorite Steinbeck. The way that he uses the Cain and Abel story as not just a story that happened, but a story that continues to happen has stuck with me, and it's broadened my imagination for encountering scripture as well as just being a great novel.

3. The Road - My favorite of Cormac McCarthy's novels, there's a lot to reflect on in what it means to process one's role in life in a time of liminality.

4. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society - Here begins a run of theological/ecclesial books that have greatly shaped my views. Newbiggin is really kind of the granddaddy of the thoughts of anybody in the theological streams I travel in.

5. The Shaping of Things to Come - This book by Frost and Hirsch really opened up my eyes to thinking about questions of how church should look and having mission a central part of our ecclesial formation. It was a launching point for a lot of conversations.

6. Working the Angles - If someone were to just say "all you need to know to be a pastor is pray, read the bible and give spiritual direction," I'm pretty sure I'd immediately be annoyed. But somehow Eugene Peterson in his Eugene Peterson way makes this exact claim and it's really stuck with me on what it means to be spiritually rooted and engaged in any form of ministry.

7. The Orthodox Church - This book by Timothy Ware is an introduction to Eastern Orthodoxy and highlights some of the differences in thought between western and eastern Christianity, the book gave me a lot of new perspective for looking at theological issues.

8. The Prophetic Imagination - Walter Brueggemann's book describing the function of the prophets opened me to seeing the biblical prophets in a new light and saved me from cynicism about "the prophetic".

9. Love Wins - I know Rob Bell got a lot of hate for this book and I'll probably receive more messages from people asking me how I could even read it, but the basic premise of Love Wins - that the way we tell the story of God reflects something about what we believe about God has been a very important insight to me.

I find it depressing when folks project their ideals of the church onto the first couple centuries of its existence followed by claiming that 2nd or 3rd century it lost its way so much that it failed to represent what it initially was?

At least two movements with which I share sympathies look back at that time as a golden era followed by periods of time fully lacking in faithfulness (usually described as either accepting the official role as chaplain to culture or as moving away from a more charismatic orientation).

This is almost always a sort of projection that somehow there was a time of "pure" Christianity, rather than taking a more nuanced view that the church in its various incarnations has always been made up of saints and sinners, usually both at the same time.

Do we not see this same projection whenever we look at communities that seem to embody our ideals, but that we are not part of. In the same way that one ends up underwhelmed when joining that community because it's never the perfection of the ideals we have about it, I suspect we do a similar trick when looking back at the early church. In this way we would be just as underwhelmed were we to be a part of the church in its earliest days.

Taking a more nuanced approach however gives us neither the frame of reference of "this was the original plan" nor the rhetorical punch to attempt to spread our prescriptions for what ails us, yet I think there is a great need to highlight that throughout time the church in all its incarnations has had both moments of deep faithfulness and great failure.

An often used imagery for preachers in preaching during Holy Week is to look at the crowd on Palm Sunday greeting Jesus with shouts of "Hosanna!" and the crowds on Friday calling for his death and to use this to point out the fickleness of the human condition. While this is a great "that'll preach!" illustration, it tends not to be in any way rooted in what would have been the context in which it happens.

When Jesus is being hailed as a king by his fellow pilgrims on their way into Jerusalem, this would have been the folks from the north, in the area surrounding the Sea of Galilee. This is notable for a couple reasons. First, this area would be significantly different than Jerusalem because of both its political and in some ways theological experience. The Zealot movement, those who believed that to worship God meant to take back the kingdom by any violent force necessary, was rooted in this area. As well it was a strong area for the Pharisee approach to worship. While the Pharisees and Zealots would have been a strong contingent in the north, this would not have reflected nearly as much in Jerusalem.

While certainly the Pharisees and Zealots would have had influence in Jerusalem, there would have also been a much strong contingent of those who were much more comfortable being in cooperation with the Romans - namely the Sadducees. The Sadducees tended to be a little bit higher class and also were involved in the management of the temple. Without getting further into the highlights of this, my point is to show that there would have been more of a contingent for keeping the peace with the Romans within Jerusalem than there would have been in the area of the Sea of Galilee.

So when you see one group hailing Jesus as a political and militaristic deliverer and another group denouncing him and saying they have no king but Caesar, we are talking about a flip in a week that would be similar to a birther going from demanding to see President Obama's birth certificate to defending the President at a Tea Party rally in less than a week. Most likely, we are looking at two different crowds - the first being a primarily rural crowd that was more ready to overthrow the Romans and a primarily urban crowd that had a lot more stake in the Roman reaction to someone claiming to be King. This leads to the stronger likelihood that these crowds are not the same people but rather different groups. In either sense, both of these crowds miss something in the work of Jesus, but have some very divergent reactions in how they are handling Jesus' claims about himself.

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With Good Friday around the corner, I thought I'd share a write up for a prayer station that I'm putting together for Evergreen's service. Feel free to use any part of this that may be useful in your context.

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Bonhoeffer wrote about the God who is with us today as the God who has forsaken us in terms of our false expectations of deliverance from tribulation at the hands of evil forces. Bonhoeffer finds our God-forsaken God hanging on the cross identifying with the world in its plight. While filled with angst over the situation in which he found himself, Bonhoeffer also experienced inner resolve: we must not try to escape the problems of life and look to God to rescue us out of them. - Paul Louis Metzger

Then Jesus went with them to the olive grove called Gethsemane, and he said, “Sit here while I go over there to pray.” He took Peter and Zebedee’s two sons, James and John, and he became anguished and distressed. He told them, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”

He went on a little farther and bowed with his face to the ground, praying, “My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine." - Matthew 26:36-39

When Jesus prayed that his task be taken away from him, we see Jesus identify with us in our experience of feeling forsaken by God. We often want God to be some sort of handyman wielding cosmic duct tape, showing up to fix all of our problems.

Many times we are disappointed when God doesn't meet our expectations and solve our problems. In Jesus we see God experiencing this God-forsakenness with us.

On this table is a cup. Take a moment to write down an expectation that God is failing to meet, or something that you don't want to go through.

With Darren Aronofsky's Noah out in the theaters now, there have been many posts on social media and within blogs blasting it for not being the "biblical" story. I've even seen some blogs insinuating the movie is a gnostic plot to pull the wool over people's eyes and mislead them. Instead, perhaps Noah is a gift specifically because it is not the "biblical" version.

There is a very easy way to explain what Aronofsky is doing - a story telling method called "Midrash." Midrash is a means of adding details into a story to bring different angles of the story to light and to reflect on what the story has for us to learn.It has been a pretty common practice within Judaism, and can be explained in easier ways than needing to read gnosticism or whatever into the text. The genius of midrash is that it adds details so as to reflect on these themes which emerge within stories but are missed when we focus solely on the details. Midrash invites us to wrestle with the story, and to see it with new eyes.If the movie was to stick to solely what the text says, we would have a very short story and certainly not a feature film. One thing that we ought to be able to take from watching it is to reflect on the film - what struck you as different than how you'd understood the story before? Then go back and re-read the story and see if those themes exist. What we often learn is that we may have added our own angles into the story, so when we judge the film's "biblical faithfulness" we miss the chance to be reflective in what is actually a gift - a new angle to allow us to go back and re-examine the story.

Actually, the secret is that we pastors often engage in something akin to midrash when we preach. When we approach a text from a different angle, when we engage in a means of preaching similar to "you have heard it said, but I tell you ___" (think of those times when those of us preaching say "now here's how we'd usually approach this, but I want to ask a different question") we do something similar.

Recently, there's been a lot of political hay made over the idea that business people who would otherwise do business can refuse service on religious grounds, specifically refusing services to gay and lesbian couples.

Unless someone is consistently doing the same thing on all other issues of morality(previously divorced? one person a christian and the other not? etc), the choice to not provide services such as flowers or cakes to a couple due to their sexual orientation highlights an inconsistent politic.Contrast this approach with Jesus' teaching, specifically with carrying someone's pack two miles instead of one (in the same sort of politic, isn't this an endorsement of the Roman Empire?), or Jesus' fellowship with those considered to be sinners by the Pharisees. The logic of refusing service you otherwise provide without question to straight couples is the opposite of Romans 2 (the kindness of God leads you to repentance). Instead we go with a logic of exclusion, believing that exclusion will bring about repentance, the very opposite of that shown by Jesus' fellowship. The only place that I can think of in the New Testament where exclusion is encouraged is in the context of those calling themselves Christians but reveling in being the worst of sinners.