the church geek

I may be a church geek, but this weekend proved that I’m no tech geek. I attempted to upgrade Word Press on Friday and everything crashed on me. I thought for sure I’d lost all my posts over the last nine months.

Well, we’re back after some help from my good friend Mark (who also happens to be the host of my site). It’s going to take a little while for me to get my old blog design back in order, but I guess maybe that means it’s time for a bit of an update.

May not get to it though until later in August as we are getting ready for vacation and will be heading out of town for a week of R&R on Wednesday.

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The Presbyterian Layman posts an article today about the response that the paper on the Trinity has received during and since its reception at this year’s General Assembly. The article features a number of reflective comments from one of the primary authors of the paper, Charles Wiley, a staff member of the PC (USA)’s Office of Theology and Worship.

I thought the article was pretty decent and fair minded until I got to the next to the last sentence which says “Asked if he considered himself an evangelical, Wiley, a former staff member for Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, said he wouldn’t use that word to describe himself.”

The only reason, I can think of, for a sentence such as this to appear in the article is to discredit everything else that gets said before it. The average reader of the Layman (whose target audience is the far-right of the church) is likely to think to themselves, “Oh, he’s not an evangelical. That figures!” and dismiss everything else that Wiley has said up to that point.

Ironically, the article concludes with, “Wiley listed another problem. The reaction against the Trinity paper “does show the difficulty of doing intimate theological work at the General Assembly in a time of distrust.”"

Perhaps if efforts to pigeonhole folks, like this one by the Layman, were put to a halt then maybe Wiley and others could get on with the business of doing theological work in a climate of trust.

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Our denomination like other mainline denominations is operating in crisis mode. Last year’s membership loss in the PC (USA) was close to 40,000 people. A few months ago our national offices in Louisville were downsized with 75 employees losing their jobs.

Part of the problem is that conservatives and liberals have been wrangling for control for decades. We’ve been fighting over many issues including homosexuality and abortion. The fighting has tired us out and as a church we’ve lost focus on our mission.

On the local level, things are not much better; once thriving churches struggle to keep their doors open. Biblical literacy among members is at an all time low. Many are not sure what it means to be Christian, much less a Presbyterian.

In their struggle to survive, churches have focused inward. They have forgotten about reaching out with the gospel in mission and evangelism. Our own church here has not been immune to some of these issues and concerns.

Psalm 80 is a Psalm of Lament that gives voice to the lament of a community. It gives expression to the grief of the community of God’s people. In the midst of crisis comes its cry repeated three times: “Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.”

In its time, this psalm gave expression to the grief and lament of the nation of Israel. As with many of the Psalms, we don’t know the exact historical situation surrounding this one. But many scholars think it was written after Israel’s northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians.

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Right now I’m in the midst of Douglas Brinkley’s book The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Brinkley, Professor of History at Tulane University (in New Orleans), has chronicled the first week of events surrounding the storm and has done a remarkable job with interviews and research for this fascinating book.

In the first two chapters I’ve read so far, Brinkley squarely places the blame on Mayor Ray Nagin for the catastrophic nature of events that unfolded on the mostly poor who were left behind in the city. For a number of reasons, Nagin was far too late in issuing a mandatory evacuation (even though it was the only mandatory evacuation ever issued in the history of the city.) More telling was the city’s failure to actually enforce a mandatory evacuation as well as to provide any reasonable means to evacuate both the poor and/or the elderly.

I can certainly see Brinkley’s point, but what I don’t understand is this: If that’s the case then how on earth did Ray Nagin manage to get re-elected earlier this summer? It just doesn’t make an ounce of sense to me. Someone must have been able to hoodwink those who voted for Nagin into believing that FEMA and the federal government were solely to blame for what happened.

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The book “Night” by Elie Weisel is an autobiographical novel, depicting some of the horrors experienced by Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust. One story in the book is of two men and a young child hung at the gallows by the SS.

As Weisel tells it, the only thing that made the child guilty was being the servant of a man involved in a plot to blow up an electric power station. Both the man and the child refuse to identify others involved in the plot. The man is sent away and the child is condemned to death.

On the day the three were hung, the 2 men died quickly, but because the boy weighed so lightly, he struggled for his life for over a half-hour. The other prisoners were forced by the SS to march past the three hanging victims. Weisel writes:

Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
“Where is God now?”
And I heard a voice within me answer him:
“Where is he? Here he is – He is hanging on this gallows…”

With this story, Weisel identifies deeply with the cry of Psalm 22. The horror of the holocaust certainly plums the depths of the psalmist’s cry.

Psalm 22 is an important psalm because it helps us identify with the absolute worst of human experience. It and other psalms like it are called Psalms of lament. The most basic definition for the word lament comes from The Compact Oxford English Dictionary which defines lament as “a passionate expression of grief.”

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A local Christian cable television station had me in their studio on Monday for the taping of a show they call “Getting to Know You.” It is a half hour show in which they interview various pastors in the community.

I hadn’t actually watched an episode of the show prior to my scheduled taping, so I didn’t know exactly what I was getting into. I also wasn’t given a list of questions prior to the interview, so it was pretty free from.

In the process I discovered a few things:

1. I’m not good at talking in TV sound bites. In fact in reflecting on my experience, I think I felt a bit like John Kerry must have felt during his failed presidential bid: my answers to questions were far too nuanced for a TV audience, and my gracious host, to track with me.

2. At the same time I felt a little bit like George Bush with his lack of comfortability and incoherence in speech before the TV camera. Especially at the beginning as I was struggling to get comfortable with the lights shinning in my eyes and remembering to look at the camera instead of the host, I noticed far too many “uhs, umhs, uhs,” as I was talking.

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Today, we continue our trek through the psalms in our summer sermon series with a stop at Psalm 84. This psalm is a story of coming home. It describes the beauty and joy of arriving at one’s true home, but it is also a meditation on the journey one takes when traveling home.

This psalm is one of a handful classified as a Song of Zion. Pilgrims probably sang it together as they made their way up to worship God at the temple in Jerusalem. The song captures the joy of those making their pilgrimage to the temple expecting to meet the presence of God.

A pilgrimage begins with a desire or longing.
In verse 1 & 2, the psalmist longs to see and to be in the temple in Jerusalem. Such a longing may have been created by a past experience with God’s presence in the temple, which she desires to experience again. Or perhaps it was created by hearing the experience of others who had encountered God’s presence in the temple.

The Hebrew’s believed that God’s presence dwelt among them in the temple at Jerusalem. The temple was the place where God hung out with his people. It was where God’s presence was made known.

But as Christians, we don’t as closely associate our buildings as sacred places where God’s presence dwells. Instead, we believe that God in Jesus Christ came to dwell among us and the Holy Spirit now dwells within us so we can personally experience God’s presence.

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In May 1934, a group of German church leaders and theologians gathered in Barmen, Germany because their beloved churches were in crisis. Over a year earlier, Hitler had taken total control of Germany placing full control of the German government in the hands of the Nazis.

To gain power, Hitler exploited the German nationalism which had not dampened following the country’s defeat in World War I and its humiliation on the international stage. The Treaty of Versailles which required payment of war reparations far beyond what Germany could ever afford fanned the flames of German nationalism into a roaring fire.

In German churches, the predominate theology of the time was optimistic about the progress of history and the benefits that European culture was bringing to the world. It also easily bought into the claims of German Nationalism. Wanting to support Hitler, many influential church leaders joined “The Faith Movement of German Christians.”

These “German Christians” aligned themselves with the Nazi Party and worked to gain strategic positions to take over their denominations. They hoped to align all German protestant churches with the nationalistic ideals of the Nazis.

There were some churches that resisted, though they were few. Led by theologian Karl Barth and assisted by Deitrich Bonhoeffer, church leaders against the “German Christians” met in Barmen Germany in May of 1934 to craft the “Theological Declaration of Barmen.”

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Here are some interesting thoughts on listening to a sermon. I especially like thought number 9. I would also encourage those in my congregation to refrain from exercising number 9.5….

Faith and Theology: 9.5 theses on listening to preaching

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