(Ir)religiosity

Below is the manuscript — more or less, I tend to deviate quite a bit — of the sermon I will be preaching this morning, Transfiguration Sunday, at Quincy Community UMC.  It is based on the gospel text for this week (Luke 9:28-43).

In 1993, Greg Mortensen attempted to climb K2, the second highest mountain in the world.  For Greg, the way up was literally the way up the mountain, to the summit.  But Greg never made it to the top of K2.  There were problems with his crew and on the way back down the mountain Greg was separated from the rest of the group and wandered into a remote village in Pakistan called Korphe.  The people of the village cared for Greg and after spending time with them, Greg realized that the village had no school and no system of education for the children.  Once he returned to the States Greg decided to raise enough money to build a school for the children of Korphe.  This endeavor eventually grew into the Central Asia Institute, a non-profit organization which builds schools for remote villages in north-eastern Pakistan.  Greg recounts his journey in the best-selling book Three Cups of Tea which the Sunday School class has been reading over the past several months.  But these schools are only being built because Greg wasn’t able to reach the top of the mountain.  Three Cups of Tea was written because, in a sense, Greg failed.  Or did he succeed?  It seems that in the end Greg discovered that the way up, the real way up, was the way down — down into the village in Pakistan, down into a world were children had no access to education.  Down into the problems of the world where he could make a difference.

The way up is down.

We see a similar story in our text today.  In Luke’s gospel, Jesus takes three of his disciples — Peter, James, and John — to the top of a mountain to pray.  Now, I doubt that this mountain was as massive as K2 but it was high enough that Jesus felt he could be alone to pray.  This is something that Jesus does many times.  According to the Scriptures, Jesus would go alone, or sometimes with a few disciples, to a mountain or some other secluded place, to pray and mediate often.

But this time it was different, at least that is Luke’s version of the story.  According to Luke, while he is praying Jesus’ face begins to glow and his clothes begin to dazzle.  Then, suddenly, Moses and the prophet Elijah appear next to Jesus and Luke tells us that they begin to talk to Jesus about what he is to “accomplish in Jerusalem,” an obvious reference to Jesus’ passion and crucifixion.

Now, we have all been to the movies with all the new special effects, so let’s image what this scene might look like.  Jesus is on a mountain, his face and clothes are dazzling, and Moses and Elijah appear and start talking to him about his future trip to Jerusalem, the capital city.  Not exactly a calm, still event, right?  It seems to be pretty spectacular.  I mean, Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson could probably do quite a bit with that on the big screen and I imagine it would be pretty true to the story, at least that seems to be Luke’s version of the story.  But where are the disciples during all this?  Luke tells us that they are so weighed down with sleep that they can barely stay awake!  Really?  Barely stay awake?  How could they miss this?  Moses, one the great heroes of their history who led their ancestors out of slavery in Egypt, has just appeared and Elijah, one of the great prophets is with him.  I mean, these are famous people that Peter, James, and John would have heard about growing up.  And to top it all off Jesus’ clothes are dazzling.  But yet the disciples can barely stay awake.  I mean, imagine it — what would it be like if Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy suddenly appeared right now, right here in this church?  And what if Pastor Susan’s clothes started dazzling?  I think most of us would be wide awake.  But Luke tells us the disciples can barely stay awake.  In fact, they don’t even say anything until it is time to go back down the mountain and then Peter says something like, “Oh, but this is such a great experience, let’s stay.  And we’ll build a church here, in fact, we’ll build three churches, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  It’s almost like Peter has woke up and realized what’s going on and he doesn’t want the experience to end.  We all know what that’s like don’t we?  Have you ever been part of an experience that you didn’t want to end?  Something that you wanted to prolong as long as you could?  Almost as soon as Peter says this a cloud appears and a voice says, “This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him!”  And then, just as fast as they appeared, Moses and Elijah are gone and Jesus heads back down the mountain.

For Jesus, the way up is down. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeremy Bouma liveblogged the Poets, Prophets, and Preachers conference that took place in Grand Rapids over the last several days.

I was reading over his coverage of Tuesday’s events was immediately struck by this line from the Pete Rollins session (I don’t know if he is paraphrasing or if it is a direct quote):

The question is not is Christianity true, but what does it mean when it claims to be true.

The traditional assumption, of course, is that Christianity claims to be true in the same way that biology might claim to be true (at least that is what seems to have been discussed at the conference).  This is part of my beef with calling theology a “science.” It reduces meaning to the realm of empiricism and rationalism.  Theology is reduced to a fleeting pursuit of objectivity, which often claims to posses The Univocal Understanding of how the world works.  But what if it’s not so much about the world itself and how it works but rather how one should be in the world and how the community should embody an alternative to the world’s dominant narrative (of violence, domination, etc)?

That’s one way of approaching it.  But of course it’s not the only one.

However we might choose to answer it, I think framing the question in this way gets us a little closer to where we need to be.

How might you answer that question?  What does Christianity, or any religion for that matter, mean when it claims to be true?

I ran across this quote during some reading the other night.  I think it describes quiet well the shift we are currently experiencing into a new reformation and emergence. It also raises some interesting questions about our willingness to remain open to perpetual change beyond what makes us comfortable.

“I am…suggesting considerations that may induce us to regard all Models in the right way, respecting all and idolizing none.  We are all, very properly, familiar with the idea the in every age the human mind is deeply influenced by the accepted Model of the universe.  But there is a two-way traffic, the Model is also influenced by the prevailing temper of mind.  We must recognize that what has been called “a taste in universes” is not only pardonable but inevitable.  We can no longer dismiss the change of Models as a simple progress from error to truth.  No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and no one is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known at a given period, and each succeeded in getting in a great many.  But also, no less surely, each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost a much as it reflect the state of that age’s knowledge.  Hardly any battery of new facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity; hardly any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical.”

I love it.  We must always embrace the new Model as it is brought into existence.  Of course that is easy to do that ex post facto, and after the time of real rethinking and revolution has already taken place.  It’s harder and more painful during the extended time of transition, a time that I think we are living in right now, because it involves a resistance against the dominant mode of thinking, and the normal Model of viewing the world.

But it also raises another point and one that I think many of us who embrace the current shift should always remind ourselves of.  Our Model, be it postmodern, or emergent, or whatever, affects us more than we realize.  So here’s the thing — we need to remember that the Model itself is not the Truth, only one messenger of truth among many.  And when another messenger presents itself, we should be open to its proclamation.  I guess what I’m saying — and I feel like this has been coming out in a lot of my writing lately — is that we have to be chastened to a certain extent.  Even in our passion to deconstruct past Models and usher in the new, we have to retain a deep sense of epistemological humility lest we repeat the mistakes of the past.  Even if that means at some point disagreeing with and highlighting a divergence from that Model which we hold so dear.  That Model cannot be allowed to crust over into dogma or used to create stasis in our understanding.  In that sense we must always be emerging.

Because truth and the movement of the Spirit will always be bigger and more robust than our Models, even the most attractive and useful among them.

Back to the quote.  I think what surprised me the most about it was the author, someone who normally doesn’t write things in this vein whose writings I have always thought to be in a different vein, which undoubtedly reveals my own myopia.  Just goes to show that we you try to pigeon-hole someone they will more often than not surprise you.

I’m blatantly stealing this idea from someone else, but this was just too cool to pass up.

From Andrew Sullivan, writing on the meaning of the incarnation:

I don’t think it’s possible for a reasoning Christian to take all the contradictory facts, myths and symbols of the various Christmas narratives as literally true. In fact, one test of how serious a Christian is, to my mind, is whether she does or not.

The point [of the incarnation] was merely to be with us; and by being with us, to show us better how to be human, how better to embrace our lives by accepting the divine around us and inside us. By letting go, we become. By giving up, we gain. And we learn how to live – now, which is the only time that matters.

That, is pretty cool.