For my Religion and American Culture course, I spent a lazy Sunday afternoon watching a four hour documentary on the Mormons. It came out on PBS some years ago, around 2008, I think. Anyway, the Mormons are awfully fascinating. To be clear: I think there are plenty of great Mormon people. In junior high my best friend was a devout Mormon.
But. There is a but, for me. With the lack of evidence for the historicity of the book of Mormon, the unorthodox theology of the Trinity (God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit are separate according to Mormonism), and the expansion of the cannon orthodox Christianity has known as closed for centuries... I have some problems with the Mormon faith.
That said, there is a lot milquetoast Methodists and other mainlines can learn from Mormons. For one, the Mormons see themselves as a thoroughly separate people. As John says, they love not the world, nor the things that are in the world. To the point Broadway makes a great musical about them. Too many mainlines are, like Kierkegaard complained of the Danish Lutherans, inoculated with just enough of the Christian virus to be immune to the searing fever of the gospel. But Mormons have a distinct identity in the faith. To be not an employee, not a brother or sister or mother or father, not a student, not even an American-- but a Christian first. That is what Jesus meant when he said give up everything and follow him.
Mormons also know persecution. Mormons living today have grandparents who were killed for the faith in Jackson County, not far from where I sit typing this. (I'm home this weekend.) And in Illinois. They know ridicule, know the stinging loneliness of being in the world, not of it. I think we Methodists have gotten too comfortable. When was the last time I was persecuted for my faith in Jesus Christ? (Actually, I have been lashed for my convictions in the church, not the world. But I'm no martyr, except occasionally in the worst, psychological sense.) What would it look like in today's society to be a martyr with the awesome intensity of Joseph Smith?
Well, doing missionary work is certainly one way. (I'm getting to that later.) Beating the gay and abortion issues to death achieves the goal of distinction from the world, while also making Jesus look wrathful and obnoxious. I'm not really sure how martyrdom can be achieved in America. I think it starts with adopting a Mormon consciousness of separation from the world and dogged determination to live out the faith.
One thing I love about Mormonism: no clergy! Yes, if I were born Mormon (I don't think any white clad hunks at my door could ever get me to convert; I think I'd end up Jewish first), I would not be contemplating professional ministry. Of course, as a woman I couldn't be in Mormon church leadership at all, but I digress.
There is something really cool about the church being run by laity. The pernicious cults of personality around a single charismatic pastor that dissolve the bonds of community, the abiding sense ministry is for the professionals... Mormons sidestep it all. The twelve disciples began as poor fishermen, but Jesus unleashed them for the sacred work of the kingdom. As surely as we are all member of the body of Christ, we all have a job to do. And when clergy start horning in on the laity's work, ceasing to equip them for ministry, the clergy are no longer fulfilling their jobs and the laity haven't gotten to, either.
And get this-- they go on missions! From age eighteen through twenty, every Mormon man has to go on a mission. Not with a bunch of pals on a bus to go do some good work in the day and play Sardines at night-- but they actually go together with one partner to spread the gospel to everyone they find. In the documentary a church leader wept softly, explaining how he was ready to give up the faith, but went on this mission and felt the Holy Spirit draw him in. I think that if the Methodist church did something like this, we'd have so many more young adults and win so many people to Christ. Young, bright people my age want to make a difference in the world, and they'll go anywhere they can to do that. Teach For America and the Peace Corps and the whole bit... and those are great organizations and certainly sincere Christians participate in them and do God's work there. But as Methodists we believe the church must make disciples for the transformation of the world (which can and should be done by laypeople employed in a variety of ministries.) But do we believe it? Do we commission our young men and women to go on a dangerous task, the greatest adventure they've ever known, to find their identity in the church's mission? By and large, no.
We milquetoast Methodists and other mainlines have a lot to learn from Mormons. Don't get me wrong; I like toast. Sometimes the world, wounded by the spear of Pharisaical zeal, needs some toast type Christians. But we have to ultimately be the salt of the earth, and the Mormons are doing a pretty good job.
Monday, September 30, 2013
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
You Owe Me
What thoughts I have of You tonight, God.
You protect me and You make giant waves
And wash people away. You owe me.
You make the tornados that suck
Up the people and move them to another dimension.
You lift every rock in the whole wide universe and throw them
At the people who try to hit me.
God, I see You playing video games in my room.
You're young, with shiny eyes like mine.
You have a little beard and You play the
Games without using controls
Because You can. Because You
Can fly without wings. You
Can use magic and make balls of fire and lightening.
God, You are powerful and I am a cell
Compared to you.
This is one of the most beautiful poems I've ever read. It was written anonymously by a ten year old boy dying of cancer and preserved in Miah Arnold's moving essay, "You Owe Me," about her work as a creative writing teacher in a juvenile cancer treatment center. It reminds me of the psalms. So arresting. I want it, I want it in a sermon someday.
"What use," I whispered, cried for no one in the world to hear, for no one but my soul, as though the words would rid it of the final burden of guilt, and I found myself a child agin, the years shed as a snake sheds its skin, and I was sanding over the awkward tangle of clothes and limbs. "What use, what use, what use..." and no one answered, not the body in the road, not the hawk in the sky or the beetle in the earth; no one answered.-- James Welch, Winter in the Blood
"The more he talked to the floor the more he nodded. It was a though the floor were talking back to him, grave words that kept him nodding gravely"-- James Welch, Winter in the Blood
"I at length became ambitious to find a family whose cabin had not been entered by a Methodist preacher... I traveled from settlement to settlement, but into every hovel I entered I learned that the Methodist missionary had been there before me"-- ca. 1800's Presbyterian missionary
"Nobody was out but crows and Methodist preachers"-- ca. 1800's popular saying
You protect me and You make giant waves
And wash people away. You owe me.
You make the tornados that suck
Up the people and move them to another dimension.
You lift every rock in the whole wide universe and throw them
At the people who try to hit me.
God, I see You playing video games in my room.
You're young, with shiny eyes like mine.
You have a little beard and You play the
Games without using controls
Because You can. Because You
Can fly without wings. You
Can use magic and make balls of fire and lightening.
God, You are powerful and I am a cell
Compared to you.
This is one of the most beautiful poems I've ever read. It was written anonymously by a ten year old boy dying of cancer and preserved in Miah Arnold's moving essay, "You Owe Me," about her work as a creative writing teacher in a juvenile cancer treatment center. It reminds me of the psalms. So arresting. I want it, I want it in a sermon someday.
"What use," I whispered, cried for no one in the world to hear, for no one but my soul, as though the words would rid it of the final burden of guilt, and I found myself a child agin, the years shed as a snake sheds its skin, and I was sanding over the awkward tangle of clothes and limbs. "What use, what use, what use..." and no one answered, not the body in the road, not the hawk in the sky or the beetle in the earth; no one answered.-- James Welch, Winter in the Blood
"The more he talked to the floor the more he nodded. It was a though the floor were talking back to him, grave words that kept him nodding gravely"-- James Welch, Winter in the Blood
"I at length became ambitious to find a family whose cabin had not been entered by a Methodist preacher... I traveled from settlement to settlement, but into every hovel I entered I learned that the Methodist missionary had been there before me"-- ca. 1800's Presbyterian missionary
"Nobody was out but crows and Methodist preachers"-- ca. 1800's popular saying
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Notable & Quotable
My new life goal is to start blogging lists of notable, quotable quotes I run across in my studies as an English and Philosophy and Religion major. I read so many great quotes and think, "Yeah! That'll preach!" Metaphorically and literally. But I never write them down or collect them in any organized way. That is changing now. Hopefully.
"In a corner, looking over our shoulders, was a statue of the crucified Savior, all bloody and beaten up. Charlene looked up and said, 'Look at that poor Indian. The pigs sure worked him over.' That was the closest I ever came to seeing Jesus," Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman
"He wore black like a cleric; he had the voice of a great dog," Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
"Conviction, caricature, callousness: the remainder of his sermon was a going back and forth among these"
"He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in upon him"
"He stepped back from the lectern and held his head, smiling. In his mind the earth was spinning and the stars rattled around in the heavens. The sun shone, and the moon. Smiling in a kind of transport, the Priest of the Sun stood silent for a time while the congregation waited to be dismissed. 'Good night,' he said, 'and get yours"
"There was such pain in the priest's eyes he could not bear to look into them. He was embarrassed, humiliated; he hated the priest for suffering so"
"Even at fifteen, in Idaho, I hadn't written from within my despair until after I was safely over it, and now, all the more so, the stories that mattered to me were the ones told-- selected, clarified-- in retrospect" Jonathan Frazen, "Farther Away"
"In the summer before he died, sitting with him on the patio while he smoked cigarettes, I couldn't keep my eyes off the hummingbirds around his house, and was saddened that he could, and while he was taking his heavily medicated afternoon naps, I was studying the birds of Ecuador for an upcoming trip, and I understood the difference between his unmanageable misery and my manageable discontent was that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not"
"How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult-- what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-delusion love appears to be-- if you are not! And yet one of the lessons of David's work (and for me, of being his friend) is that the difference between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of kind"
"As long as we have such complications, how dare we bored?"
"I like to play chess. I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That's sort of like living in a small town. It's a simpler game, but it's played to a higher level" Peter Hessler, "Dr. Don"
"In a corner, looking over our shoulders, was a statue of the crucified Savior, all bloody and beaten up. Charlene looked up and said, 'Look at that poor Indian. The pigs sure worked him over.' That was the closest I ever came to seeing Jesus," Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman
"He wore black like a cleric; he had the voice of a great dog," Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
"Conviction, caricature, callousness: the remainder of his sermon was a going back and forth among these"
"He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in upon him"
"He stepped back from the lectern and held his head, smiling. In his mind the earth was spinning and the stars rattled around in the heavens. The sun shone, and the moon. Smiling in a kind of transport, the Priest of the Sun stood silent for a time while the congregation waited to be dismissed. 'Good night,' he said, 'and get yours"
"There was such pain in the priest's eyes he could not bear to look into them. He was embarrassed, humiliated; he hated the priest for suffering so"
"Even at fifteen, in Idaho, I hadn't written from within my despair until after I was safely over it, and now, all the more so, the stories that mattered to me were the ones told-- selected, clarified-- in retrospect" Jonathan Frazen, "Farther Away"
"In the summer before he died, sitting with him on the patio while he smoked cigarettes, I couldn't keep my eyes off the hummingbirds around his house, and was saddened that he could, and while he was taking his heavily medicated afternoon naps, I was studying the birds of Ecuador for an upcoming trip, and I understood the difference between his unmanageable misery and my manageable discontent was that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not"
"How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult-- what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-delusion love appears to be-- if you are not! And yet one of the lessons of David's work (and for me, of being his friend) is that the difference between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of kind"
"As long as we have such complications, how dare we bored?"
"I like to play chess. I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That's sort of like living in a small town. It's a simpler game, but it's played to a higher level" Peter Hessler, "Dr. Don"
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Holy Confusion
It has been way too long since I have blogged. Over a month. I suppose I haven't been feeling very creative lately. It's been a number of things-- transitioning, classes, working on my freelance ghostwriting Bible guide (which I finally finished!). A big reason, though, is my growing realization I have less than a year left of childhood.
Really, I'm still a kid in so many ways. Yes, I'm old enough to drive and join the military and (gasp!) marry and be a mother. But I lost my room key on Sunday. I still like to watch junky TV and look at cute boys and eat ice cream right out of the container. And ten months from now, I'll probably be a pastor.
Are pastors allowed to find certain guys attractive? (For the record: tall, dark, handsome, facial hair.) Isn't that just being a fisher of men?
Sigh. I have a lot to think about.
If you asked me to tell you my "call story," I could give a number of defining events, important Bible verses, and nice things people have said to me. But no bush burnt before me. An angel did not touch my lips with hot coals. In short, I don't know if I'm supposed to go into the ministry. And I don't know how well it will work out. Jeremiah was called to ministry and nobody listened to him and he almost got killed.
I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I would hazard a guess lots of other people don't know what the hell they're doing, either. (Pardon my French. Oh, I guess pastors aren't supposed to say "hell" either unless they're talking about the place. So if you're Methodist-- never.)
There's that wonderful story about the walk to Emmaus at the end of Luke. Jesus joins two disciples walking to the village of Emmaus after Easter. They are thoroughly confused about Jesus, about the cross, about their place in it all. And Jesus comes to them, gently rebukes them for not believing, and shows them who he really is. But tellingly, "they were kept from recognizing him."
Why? Luke doesn't say. I wonder if that's the point.
One night, the summer before my freshman year of high school, I went for a run. (That was back when I exercised regularly!) I got back and, exhausted, sat before my open window, cool air rushing in, and began reading my Bible. I decided suddenly I wanted to read the entire Bible, one chapter per day, because surely everything about God I could learn from reading Bible if I tried hard enough. I don't regret that failed experiment, although it caused me a lot of heartache as I quickly discovered the vanity, the naiveté and hubris behind that plan. God brought me back, though. He always, always does.
And he gave me the gift now, five years later, of reading the entire Bible and even writing a book about it without going crazy or losing my faith.
I wonder if I am learning the same lesson again as I struggle to understand my calling. My calling is not really mine. It belongs first to God, and if God doesn't want to fully reveal that calling to me-- well, he's perfectly within his rights. Even if it annoys the living you-know-what out of me. My calling also belongs to the church universal, the body of Christ, to which I am giving my life by entering ordained ministry. I have had the church recognize in a number of beautiful but ultimately unremarkable ways a calling within me. Or, a better way of putting it: the church calls me to ministry by the power of the Holy Spirit.
I sense "graces and gifts for ministry," to use the Wesleyan jargon, in me. But I don't know for sure. I really don't know. Maybe I, like those poor confused disciples, am walking the right path with Jesus beside me, my traveling companions at my side, and am simply kept from recognizing, in certainty, this call.
Maybe God, who knows fully and yet loves en telois (John 13:2)-- to the end, to completion, as much as it possible to love, knows me well enough to do this to me. Certainty might become an idol for me, the way books and academics have been and are for me at certain points. Left in the dark, I have to trust my God and his church. I have to stop navel-gazing and get on my knees.
I suspect-- like I said before-- everyone feels some uncertainty. Maybe God leaves us in uncertain spots in direct proportion to our hunger for certainty. Then, like the disciples on their walk to Emmaus, we can feast on his bread of life.
Really, I'm still a kid in so many ways. Yes, I'm old enough to drive and join the military and (gasp!) marry and be a mother. But I lost my room key on Sunday. I still like to watch junky TV and look at cute boys and eat ice cream right out of the container. And ten months from now, I'll probably be a pastor.
Are pastors allowed to find certain guys attractive? (For the record: tall, dark, handsome, facial hair.) Isn't that just being a fisher of men?
Sigh. I have a lot to think about.
If you asked me to tell you my "call story," I could give a number of defining events, important Bible verses, and nice things people have said to me. But no bush burnt before me. An angel did not touch my lips with hot coals. In short, I don't know if I'm supposed to go into the ministry. And I don't know how well it will work out. Jeremiah was called to ministry and nobody listened to him and he almost got killed.
I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I would hazard a guess lots of other people don't know what the hell they're doing, either. (Pardon my French. Oh, I guess pastors aren't supposed to say "hell" either unless they're talking about the place. So if you're Methodist-- never.)
There's that wonderful story about the walk to Emmaus at the end of Luke. Jesus joins two disciples walking to the village of Emmaus after Easter. They are thoroughly confused about Jesus, about the cross, about their place in it all. And Jesus comes to them, gently rebukes them for not believing, and shows them who he really is. But tellingly, "they were kept from recognizing him."
Why? Luke doesn't say. I wonder if that's the point.
One night, the summer before my freshman year of high school, I went for a run. (That was back when I exercised regularly!) I got back and, exhausted, sat before my open window, cool air rushing in, and began reading my Bible. I decided suddenly I wanted to read the entire Bible, one chapter per day, because surely everything about God I could learn from reading Bible if I tried hard enough. I don't regret that failed experiment, although it caused me a lot of heartache as I quickly discovered the vanity, the naiveté and hubris behind that plan. God brought me back, though. He always, always does.
And he gave me the gift now, five years later, of reading the entire Bible and even writing a book about it without going crazy or losing my faith.
I wonder if I am learning the same lesson again as I struggle to understand my calling. My calling is not really mine. It belongs first to God, and if God doesn't want to fully reveal that calling to me-- well, he's perfectly within his rights. Even if it annoys the living you-know-what out of me. My calling also belongs to the church universal, the body of Christ, to which I am giving my life by entering ordained ministry. I have had the church recognize in a number of beautiful but ultimately unremarkable ways a calling within me. Or, a better way of putting it: the church calls me to ministry by the power of the Holy Spirit.
I sense "graces and gifts for ministry," to use the Wesleyan jargon, in me. But I don't know for sure. I really don't know. Maybe I, like those poor confused disciples, am walking the right path with Jesus beside me, my traveling companions at my side, and am simply kept from recognizing, in certainty, this call.
Maybe God, who knows fully and yet loves en telois (John 13:2)-- to the end, to completion, as much as it possible to love, knows me well enough to do this to me. Certainty might become an idol for me, the way books and academics have been and are for me at certain points. Left in the dark, I have to trust my God and his church. I have to stop navel-gazing and get on my knees.
I suspect-- like I said before-- everyone feels some uncertainty. Maybe God leaves us in uncertain spots in direct proportion to our hunger for certainty. Then, like the disciples on their walk to Emmaus, we can feast on his bread of life.