Op-Ed Contributor - Congregations Gone Wild - NYTimes.com

Haven't posted here for a month, I see, due to a variety of circumstances--vacation, Synod School, illness--so am easing back in with a link to a New York Times Op-Ed piece by a UCC pastor. Would be interested in your comments: Op-Ed Contributor - Congregations Gone Wild - NYTimes.com

From My Daily Reading

Lately I've been reading in The Message, Eugene Peterson's paraphrase of the Bible. Today I ran across this, Peterson's take on Romans 9:30-33, emphases in the original:

How can we sum this up? All those people who didn’t seem interested in what God was doing actually embraced what God was doing as he straightened out their lives. And Israel, who seemed so interested in reading and talking about what God was doing, missed it. How could them miss it? Because instead of trusting God, they took over. They were absorbed in what they themselves were doing. They were so absorbed in their “God projects” that they didn’t notice God right in front of them, like a huge rock in the middle of the road. And so they stumbled into him and went sprawling. Isaiah (again!) gives us the metaphor for pulling this together:
Careful! I’ve put a huge stone on the road to Mount Zion,
a stone you can’t get around.
But the stone is me! If you’re looking for me,
you’ll find me on the way, not in the way.

Vacation

I will be on vacation July 12-25 and at Synod School July 25-31. I may or may not post during Synod School.

Nouwen: More on the Elder Brother

Here I see how lost the elder son is. He has become a foreigner in his own home. True communion is gone. Every relationship is pervaded by the darkness. To be afraid or to show disdain, to suffer submission or to enforce control, to be an oppressor or to be a victim: these have become the choices for one outside of the light. Sins cannot be confessed, forgiveness cannot be received, the mutuality of love cannot exist. True communication has become impossible.

I know the pain of this predicament. In it, everything loses its spontaneity. Everything becomes suspect, self-conscious, calculated, and full of second-guessing. There is no longer any trust. Each little move calls for a countermove; each little remark begs for analysis; the smallest gesture has to be evaluated. This is the pathology of darkness.

Is there a way out? I don’t think there is—at least not on my side. It often seems that the more I try to disentangle myself from the darkness, the darker it becomes. I need light, but that light has to conquer my darkness, and that I cannot bring about myself. I cannot forgive myself. I cannot make myself feel loved. By myself I cannot leave the land of my anger. I cannot bring myself home nor can I create communion on my own. I can desire it, hope for it, wait for it, yes, pray for it. But my true freedom I cannot fabricate for myself. That must be given to me. I am lost. I must be found and brought home by the shepherd who goes out to me. - Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, p.82

The Case Against Marriage

Here's something to think about, from the June 21 issue of Newsweek:

Comments, anyone?

Weeds

I was out last week pulling weeds in the flowerbed under the tree and got to thinking, not for the first time, about how the Church can be more like a weed than a flower or a fruit tree.

Every time I try to get rid of the weeds I marvel at how resilient they are. Most of the time you don’t really pull them out by the roots; you break them off, and they’ll just happily regrow. They not only survive but thrive in conditions that would kill any plant you really want to grow. Can you imagine trying to get a tomato plant to grow out of a crack in the sidewalk? Yet I’ve seen crabgrass flourishing on a cement surface hot enough to fry an egg. The deadliest herbicide known, which is most familiar under the trade name Roundup, is supposed to leave any area where it’s sprayed totally devoid of plant life. But I’ve gone over an area with this nuclear option, watched the weeds wither and die, only to notice them coming back a few days or weeks later. Did some survive the onslaught? Did new seeds blow in? It really doesn’t matter, because the weeds won. They always do.

Well, the Church is like that in a lot of ways: not always pretty, but tough and resilient, popping up again and again in places where it was supposed to be dead or dying, reseeding itself in places where it was supposed to be stamped out, growing in places you would swear couldn’t support life. You can pull it up, root it out, spray it with Roundup and pave over it, but it will always come back. The gates of Hell haven’t got a chance. (Matthew 16:18)

I first met Avon Murray when I went to the first church I served as a pastor. Avon was about 90 at the time and had attended an agricultural college for a couple of years after graduating from high school, which was an unusual thing for farm boys from Missouri in the early part of the 20th century. He told me that on the first day of class he learned the definition a weed: a weed, he was told, is “a plant out of place.” Every gardener, every farmer, can testify to the appropriateness of that definition. If you plant corn and it comes up, that’s good. If you plant soybeans and corn sprouts up because some seed stayed in the ground over the winter, that's bad. That corn just became a weed, like the volunteer tomatoes in my pea patch.

Sometimes the Church, too, is “out of place,” not accidentally, but by design. When we challenge conventional wisdom, when we speak out against injustice, when we witness to the good news of Jesus in a world of fear and unbelief, we are often told to get back in our proper place. And it’s tempting to do just that. That’s when we need to remember that we don’t get to pick the place where we are supposed to grow. That’s up to God. We may find ourselves planted, as the Church so often has over the millennia, in a pretty inhospitable place. If so, that may well be where we need to be. Remember that plants produce fruit, but they also, over time, break down rocks. And that may be what we’re called to do, too.

Nouwen: the Underside of Virtue

The more I reflect on the elder son in me, the more I realize how deeply rooted this form of lostness really is and how hard it is to return home from there. Returning home from a lustful escapade seems so much easier than returning home from a cold anger that has rooted itself in the deepest corners of my being. My resentment is not something that can be easily distinguished and dealt with rationally.
It is far more pernicious: something that has attached itself to the underside of my virtue. - Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, p.75, my emphasis