God's Heart and Jubilee: Living the Life that Trusts God

Sermon preached at St. Francis House, January 24, 2016. Read the scriptures appointed for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany here. Listen here! Read last Sunday's sermon here.  

A group of St. Francis House folks had just finished a Taizé service with several hundred others at a large church in Austin, over Spring Break. It was the first of two days we would spend together in prayer, small groups, and friendship, all on the heels of the week prior, spent alongside organizations locally addressing challenges of homelessness, immigration, and incarceration in South Texas. The theme that week was reconciliation. The service was beautiful; we were all glad to have finally arrived, and with the first service behind us, people were now mingling in the way of lost friends rediscovered. 

Unexpectedly, I found myself in conversation with one of the brothers, Emile. He vaguely remembered our group from the year before at Pine Ridge, but that we had traveled down from the tundra of Wisconsin this year, to Texas, clearly left an impression. Later, our pilgrim crew would cash in our newfound celebrity status for unlimited selfies with the brothers. But just then, with this unexpected one on one time, I chose instead to ask Emile about the large cross icon that inevitably appears on retreats with the Taizé community, both at their home in France and when they make pilgrimage elsewhere. Always on Fridays, they drag it out. Always with the invitation to break from the usual service, each of us in our turn having the opportunity to kneel with others and kiss, touch, or simply rest our heads on the cross. What was the point, the intention? I asked. How did this beautiful practice come to be?

“Well,” Emile said, “some Russian Christians, friends of our community, were facing persecution. They sent us this icon and asked us to remember them in our prayers on Fridays. Truthfully, the whole thing felt a little clumsy at first; we weren’t at all sure how visitors would receive it or that it was even a good idea. But we wanted to honor our friends, at least once. We did it on a Friday and it worked, and we still remember our sisters and brothers on Fridays.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s beautiful. But y’all never say that. I would never have guessed. In fact, my own guesses were nowhere close to the truth, mostly because the people it turns out it’s about are never in the room. That’s amazing.”

Brother Emile was unimpressed by my amazement. He shrugged, then nodded in simple agreement. “Sometimes, it’s good to know," he said.

Tonight, I’ve got a little something for you to file under, “Sometimes, it’s good to know.” It’s something that came up at Bible Study on Wednesday: it has to do with this strange phrase at the center of the scroll Jesus unrolls in the gospel lesson tonight. Jesus is reading and preaching for the first time in his hometown, and his sermon is short. In fact, the whole of his sermon is to point to the passage he’s just finished reading and say, “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” That is, “I, in my speaking, make this complete. The end.”(1) And the strange phrase at the center of the thing Jesus says he’s completing is that he’s proclaiming “the year of the Lord’s favor.” But what is that? Where did it come from? Or is it just a fancy way of using words to express a general sense of kindness? 

The thing it’s good to know is that the year of the Lord’s favor is a phrase with a history for the people of Israel. The phrase refers to the year of Jubilee. The Jubilee was the year in Hebrew Scripture, occurring after seven sets of seven years - every fifty years - in which debts were forgiven, slaves freed, and property rights reset. Physical forgiveness of debts. If you had lost your future to a string of bad decisions, today it would be returned to you. If you had cost someone you loved their livelihood by the choices you’d made, today they would be restored. If you had cheated your neighbor and not gotten caught, this day of Jubilee would come as a reminder and judgment that illicit gains could only take you so far. 

It’s important to note that scholars aren’t at all sure Israel ever actually observed the Jubilee; only that Scripture records God telling Israel to observe the Jubilee. So Jubilee isn’t so much an insight into Israel as an insight into the God of Israel. Jubilee reveals God’s heart and desire for God’s people and their common life together. In God’s desire, there is forgiveness of heavy debts. In God’s desire, there is mercy for stupid choices and bad luck alike. In God’s desire, there is an open-handed posture to which God’s people are invited, one that models that all things come from God and that these things are not our own. In God’s desire, most of all, there is a deep trust of God. Because the people trust God, the people can give back even the things the law says they’d won. Because God’s people belong to God, they learn that they belong to one another. It is into this celebration, this self-revelation of God — bizarre to us and to them - that Jesus enters and self-identifies. Jesus is perpetual, embodied Jubilee. “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Sometimes, it’s good to know.

There are lots of places in the Christian life where love of God and love of neighbor connect, overlap, and intersect; this is an important one of those times. Jesus shows us how relative categories like status, success, possessions, and positions make it hard to remember to trust; make it hard to be honest about our need of God and our neighbors. But to forget our need of God and our neighbor is to forget what it is to be made in the image of God; it is to forget both who we are and the abundant life to which God calls us. It is easy to forget. We gather to remember. And we bind our other days throughout the week with daily prayer to heal our memory and make it holy. In Jubilee, God keeps resetting the score because God wants each of us to reimagine the game we are living as one of being held by, rooted in, and made to share the love God makes known to us in Jesus.

All of this means that when we hear Jesus say he is bringing good news to the poor, we know that we will be called to do likewise, to go out and proclaim, but also that we are being called to give back those things we have taken at the expense of our sisters and brothers in order to keep from trusting God. After all, we worship, we follow, the God who gives us new bread each day, but just enough for the day, who invites us, each morning, to trust God all over again. Likewise, we may join Jesus in proclaiming release to the captives on Monday and by Tuesday discover and confess that the captives he freed were our captives. Somedays we will proclaim sight to the blind; on other days, it will be our own blindness that he touches and heals. However humbling, this healing and trust is Good News; it's part of Jubilee, too.

On Tuesday, February 9th, St. Francis House will be one of eighteen faith-based student organizations at UW coming together to talk openly about race and faith. As we gather, we will be remembering our need of God and one another. That day will certainly touch blind parts of us. I pray it will also be a day for renewing trusts and the beginning of healing. I hope you will come. The next day, Ash Wednesday, is the beginning of the holy season of Lent, and we’ll gather that night at St. Francis House for prayer, joined by sisters and brothers from other traditions. As we consider our relationship to God and our neighbors that night, we will be asking God to show us more of what Jubilee requires of us. 

Jubilee that is humbling, healing, and involves our self-emptying can be scary (remember, Israel may or may not have ever done it), but Jesus calls himself the Jubilee, and so we know this is where we’ll go. We remember that, in Jubilee, God resets the score because God wants each of us to reimagine the game we are living as one of being held by, rooted in, and made to share the love God has made known to us in Jesus.

As a prayer then, to end, I want to share these words from a favorite hymn (2):

There's a wideness in God's mercy

like the wideness of the sea;

there's a kindness in his justice,

which is more than liberty.

There is welcome for the sinner,

and more graces for the good;

there is mercy with the Savior; 

there is healing in his blood.

_____

(1) In truth, the text leads us to believe Jesus went on to say other things - that his sermon wasn't this short - but it makes Episcopalians happy to believe that short sermons are biblical, and we don't get any hints in the text as to what the unabridged version might have been.

(2) Hymn text by Frederick Willian Faber, 1814-1863, appearing in The Hymnal 1982, hymns 469 and 470. I like 469 better. Calvin Hampton forever!

The New Wine Is Better (Drinking in the Uncertainty of New Creation)

A homily preached on these lessons, February 17, 2016, at St. Francis House.
Listen here!

First things first: I am not the guy your waiter brings the wine to for inspection at the fancy dinner; I’m not the one to waft and swirl the full glass with its dark-red, purple hues and report that this particular vintage “delivers complex varietal flavors of cherries and blackberries, with a promise of herbs.” So I can’t speak to the steward’s assessment that the miracle wine at Cana of Galilee is qualitatively better than the wine that came before it that night. You’ve already impressed me when the bottle price hits double-digits. I’m betting most of you, dear college students, feel me. Not finding myself in a position to challenge the steward, I accept his verdict without protest and proceed to posit to you tonight that the wine’s being better - that the wine is good wine - is as significant to the miracle as the discovery that there’s new wine in the jars at all.

I should start by confessing that, for most of my life, the detail of the wine’s quality has largely struck me as beside the point of the story, save for the obvious that, if Jesus was going to go to the trouble of turning water to wine, of course it would be good. I largely followed Mary on this count, sharing her concern that running out of wine would have been an embarrassment to the bridegroom. Good wine or bad, at least now there’s enough. There’s enough to cover up for the bridegroom who didn’t plan well - after all, hadn’t the bride warned him that certain individuals of his family could really throw them back? Or maybe, as the bridegroom realized they were down to the dregs, he began to wonder if his dad hadn’t been right after all, that if he had applied for that corporate position and forgone a career in nonprofits, he would have had more than enough to fund this tenuous open bar. Maybe he got himself caught in the place that is familiar to us, somewhere between satisfying social conventions and putting on airs. Money, status, proving one’s worth - I’m sure you can add to the reasons folks worry that they might not have enough for the party. Might not be enough for the party. Never mind that deep down he knows what you and I know, too, that being a good spouse, father, mother, sister, brother, friend entails more than picking up a tab. 

In any case, the bridegroom is surprised and more than a little relieved when the steward shows up with something other than the not new to him news that he’s been found out for a fraud who didn’t have enough.

As the two men talk, Mary and Jesus watch on from the sidelines. When Mary notices the dread fall off the groom’s face, her shoulders relax, too, and she sneaks a smile up at Jesus. “Thanks.” Jesus, though, continues to watch the steward, the groom, and their exchange with interest. Noticing this, Mary looks up and, as the conversation goes on - as the steward grows more animated and begins to point to the glass with amazement - Mary grows worried. “Oh no.” She looks up to Jesus. “What in God’s name have you done?” Jesus gives a smile of his own and rolls his eyes up to the sky before walking away. “Aw, Mom,” he whispers, “we’re just getting started.”

The miracle of the miracle is not that there’s enough to keep drinking. It’s not enough that there’s enough. This is where the quality - the good wine - comes in. As the steward explains, the tradition of the lesser wine is in part a function of not wasting good wine on drunks, and exactly because it was a function of not wasting good wine on drunks, it is also a signal that the party is, for all intents and purposes, already over. 

We know these cues; we need these cues; and the world is full of these cues. Because one minute you’re sitting at your table waiting for wedding cake and the next minute what had moments ago been a respectable party is now a mosh pit of people in various states of clothed-ness. Because parties don’t adjourn so much as devolve. Nothing wrong with that, but grandma hasn’t come for that. We need cues. Growing up, it was my dad, subconsciously rattling his keys in the doorway to signal he was ready to go. In Beethoven’s day, it was the exaggerated trill that signaled to the orchestra the cadenza was over. I have a friend who, when she’s ready for the party she’s hosting to be over, simply leaves the table and starts to shower. Cues. Lesser wine was a social cue to the respectable types that the party was over.

“What have you done?” Mary whispers. What Jesus has done is thrown social convention a curveball and injected a healthy dose of uncertainty into the partygoers. No one knows what to expect. You don’t have to know where the miracle of where the new wine came from - like the water boys did - to know you don’t know what’s coming next. It’s not that there’s enough to end with dignity; the new gift in their midst has called into question the ending itself. 

As the wobbly attendants pause to drink it all in, the wine in their glasses begins to speak the old stories of surprises by which God had challenged the certainty and imagination of God’s people in generations past, other miracles of non-endings: the laughter of Sarah betraying her fear and disbelief as God announced the promise of new life; the trembling of Joseph’s brothers as they stood before the brother they’d left for dead, receiving through tears the forgiveness that came with Joseph’s conviction that what they had meant for evil God had worked for good, that this was not the end; the waters parting before a terrified Moses, the invitation to walk through the sea. All of these are there, in the cup. They look up from their glasses as if back called home.

And, of course, in John’s gospel, this wedding marks the beginning of a return to the surprises of God that challenge our certainty: there will be the woman caught in adultery, the certainty of sin, Jesus’ protection of the woman from those who would condemn her, and the unexpected forgiveness that will leave her awash with new life and her condemners dismayed; there will be Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, the certainty of death, the scorn of the people, the unforgettable words, “I am resurrection and I am life,” saith the Lord. And with them, words that make the new wine sweeter, “Lazarus, come out!” 

Over and again, Christians find ourselves unable to name the end, because we believe the mischievous wedding crasher who wrecked social conventions that night is himself the Beginning and the End, calling us all up and into the story of God.

Desmond Tutu says it this way: “The Christian faith is hopelessly optimistic because it is based on the faith of a guy who died on a Friday and everybody said it was utterly and completely hopeless – ignominious – defeat. And on Sunday, He rose.” 

Where are you certain about the end? Lots of folks this week certain about the end of the Anglican Communion, with plenty of corresponding certainties about the end of where and in whom God will act. More of us, like the groom, are certain that we don’t have enough in ourselves for the things that matter most. Like Mary, we pray for a little extra help, though, like the groom, we may be content simply to receive the little extra that will get us off stage before we get caught. Dare we pray for God to act and lead in ways that both keep us on stage and open up the story beyond our ability to predict it? After all, in the end, it’s not our party. It’s God’s party. Happily, if incredibly, you and I are on God’s guest list.

To receive the new wine at God’s party is to lose our control; is to lose the certainty of the world’s old cues; is to drink from the unpredictable cup Christ calls forgiveness; is to go into places skunked with sin and death and other signs that the party is over and stand expectant of the presence of God. 

For “[t]he Christian faith is hopelessly optimistic because it is based on the faith of a guy who died on a Friday and everybody said it was utterly and completely hopeless – ignominious – defeat. And on Sunday, He rose.”

Amen.

Luke, Lemons, and Grocery Stores: The Beginning of the Spontaneous Singing Revolution

Sermon preached on Advent 2 at St. Francis House. You can find the Sunday's lessons here. 

A friend of mine, at the church Bek and I attended in grad school, one time confessed his great dream for the Church and for Christians. His dream was that Christians would make the world brighter and truer by regularly breaking into spontaneous songs. Spice things up à la Julie Andrews. When pressed for details, my friend described an imagined scenario in which he was shopping in the produce aisle at a neighborhood grocery store and, unexpectedly, as he lifted up the perfectly selected lemon (not too soft, not too firm), he burst into song, extolling the lemon’s virtues. But that’s not all. In this scenario, having noticed this singing man with his lemon, other shoppers would look up and begin to sing, too - harmonizing their accompaniment. In this friend’s dream, people would learn to sing together and follow the cues of each other’s joy. Like every cheesy Disney musical come to life. 

Interesting question: if you did this, if you lived by the rules of musicals, taking your cues from Disney throughout an ordinary week, stopping to sing at moments that gave you joy or perplexed you or broke your heart or filled you with rage or spilled over with laughter - or if you joined in with others where you saw them doing the same - where in your life would you sing?

My friend thought that Christians were in a unique position to introduce the spontaneous singing movement to the world because Christians have been given the psalms. He often wondered why people who have been given the psalms did not sing more often! How is it, he wondered, that people encounter these Scriptures without having their relationships - of all kinds, but not least with God - more obviously shaped by them? But it happens. For example, it is understandable, but still strange, that people who read the psalms every week are nevertheless reluctant to voice their honest anger and disappointment to God. The psalms are our permission to find such a voice! They are also our permission to sing.

Part of the problem, or challenge, is that Scripture now comes in a book. Once upon a time, the Bible was a collection of scrolls. That the Bible is now a book means that, most of the time, people do to it what they do to other books - read it silently - as opposed to speaking, hearing, or singing it. Interestingly, reading books silently is not what people have always and everywhere done with books. Augustine of Hippo, 4th century bishop of the early church, once wrote this about his beloved mentor, Ambrose: 

"When he read," said Augustine, "his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.”

Alberto Manguel elaborates: “Eyes scanning the page, tongue held still: that is exactly how I would describe a reader today, sitting with a book in a cafe across from the Church of St. Ambrose in Milan, reading, perhaps, Saint Augustine's Confessions. Like Ambrose, the reader has become deaf and blind to the world, to the passing crowds, to the chalky flesh-colored facades of the buildings. Nobody seems to notice a concentrating reader: withdrawn, intent, the reader becomes commonplace.

“To Augustine, however, such reading manners seemed sufficiently strange for him to note them in his Confessions. The implication is that this method of reading, this silent perusing of the page, was in his time something out of the ordinary, and that normal reading was performed out loud. Even though instances of silent reading can be traced to earlier dates, not until the tenth century does this manner of reading become usual in the West.”

Aside from making interesting trivia, Augustine’s observations about silent reading tell us that, very likely, no part of Scripture was written to be read that way. Again: the psalms are a whole book meant entirely for singing. And the psalms aren’t even close to the only songs in Scripture. There are close to two-hundred songs altogether, three of which occur in the first two chapters of Luke, surrounding the occasion of Jesus’ birth, making Luke’s gospel the gospel most likely to become a Broadway show in our lifetime. 

The first song belongs to Mary; it is her response to Elizabeth, when Elizabeth blesses Mary for believing the promise of God. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” it begins, “and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” The second song belongs to Zechariah, John the Baptist’s daddy. It’s the canticle we read today, and it’s the work we see John doing in the gospel lesson. Halfway through this second song, Zechariah spells out his son’s vocation as the forerunner of the Messiah: 

“And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;

    for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,

to give knowledge of salvation to his people

   by the forgiveness of their sins.”

The third song is the most commonly known for those who regularly pray Compline or the Daily Office. It’s the Song of Simeon. Simeon sings his song in the moment Mary presents her son and puts him in the old man’s arms:

Lord, you now have set your servant free *

    to go in peace as you have promised;

For these eyes of mine have seen the Savior, *

    whom you have prepared for all the world to see;

A Light to enlighten the nations, *

    and the glory of your people Israel. 

That’s the case, if you want to make it, for renaming Luke’s gospel “Luke, the Musical.” Three songs in two chapters. None of the songs are original, not completely. Mary learned her song from Hannah, who sang something very like it years before her in 1 Samuel. Zechariah took his opening line from the psalms. Simeon borrowed liberally from the scroll of Isaiah. All the great jazz artists do this: lifting phrases played before them, finding the life in them and then, in their turn, giving the phrases new life. For Mary, Zechariah, and Simeon, the songs that they sing are responses, harmonies, movements toward the song God sings to them. And Christ is the song God sings to them. 

Christ sings to you, too. To me. And while a lot of faith happens in our heads, faith finds roots and branches and buds of fruit when we stop reading in silence; when we risk vocal vibrations and raise melodies - both metaphorical and musical - up from our lips. 

When singing Sunday hymns is as much about listening to your neighbor’s voice as it is about singing from your own, holy music is made. When friends get together and share with each other the stories of God at work in their lives, holy music is made. When one friend seeks out another with a heavy burden and says, “I love you too much to let you carry that weight by yourself,” holy music is made. Every time you shout back - with enthusiasm! - “Therefore, let us keep the feast! Alleluia!” that’s singing holy music. When a white person shares her broken heart at the death of a black man with her mostly white community of faith - not on Facebook - and stands up and says “this person was important to me,” that’s the tune of holy music. In the hard tears and embrace of forgiveness sought and received, you sing the holy music. When an image of Scripture comes to you, finds you, grabs you, and gives you the courage to reach out to a stranger in love, you take your place in the chorus of the love song that moves the sun and the stars. 

It’s funny, you can read to yourself and by yourself, even when you are surrounded by others. And you can also sing by yourself, but you cannot sing to yourself, that is, silently. That’s thinking, not singing. To sing is to risk the possibility of sharing; the vulnerability of being heard. And only when we take that risk can we accompany one another.

Friends - like Mary, Zechariah, and Simeon - we were made to sing. You don’t have to be original; you may only sometimes be the melody. The only thing I can promise you for sure is that you will not sing alone. God’s song has split the silence. The first risk goes to God, where there is no fear but love.

Interesting question: if you were to follow, acting out your trust of the Song, taking your cues from our Savior throughout an ordinary week, stopping to sing at - or otherwise publicly tend to - moments that gave you joy or perplexed you or broke your heart or filled you with rage or spilled over with laughter - or if you joined in with others where you saw them doing the same - where in your life would you sing?

The Unexpected Green Leaf: Advent Practices for 2 or More to Share

"A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit." Isaiah 11:1

A stump with an unexpected shoot - an inexplicable green leaf - frames and centers the season of Advent. Before we see the leaf, the stump names our hopelessness, our knowing better than to look for life in places that have been purged of life. There are many places in which it is easy to believe that growth is not possible. We encounter people and places and situations (incarceration, climate change, Syria, the neighbor who won't shovel the walk, ourselves). It can even become easy to go to church forgetting that the promise is always deeper, always wider. Not just a solemn act of obligation performed, but an expectation of encounter that leaves a mark. But then we see the unexpected green leaf.

One form of the Prayers of the People in the Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer includes the following bidding: "I ask your prayers for all who seek God, or a deeper knowledge of him." As a child, I found this bidding perplexing, because I assumed that we all would pray for deeper knowledge. At what point do we grow content? Or resigned? Or defeated? At what point do we forget the child's earnest petition, "More, please." Advent allows us to speak the world's dead and daunting spots honestly, still we dare not forget the green leaf, which is the emergence of Christ, the Good News that God is for us and with us; that God's heart is for our flourishing. The waters that flow from the crystal stream are moving.

One way we are remembering the green leaf of Advent at St. Francis House this year is by the commitment to engage one another and others who are important to us in weekly conversation around the following questions. We hope the practice will help us lean into the expectation of God's movement and growth - in the world around us, our faith community, and ourselves. We share the practice questions here for those who would like to learn this leaning with us, and because God has made us each and all for joy.

Happy Advent!

Peace.

J

A Thanksgiving Prayer

(From the Book of Common Prayer, p 836)

Abraham, Sarah, and the Trinity (A Tree at the Heart of St. Francis House)

The icon of the Holy Trinity (above) hangs on the west wall of the St. Francis House chapel and is an anonymous gift of friends of St. Francis House, given in honor of Fr. White, Bishop Hallock and his son, Peter, and Mrs. Yvonne Otto, longtime housemother at St. Francis House. The icon will be dedicated as part of the community's 100th anniversary celebration, on the weekend of April 23rd.

The beautiful new icon in the St. Francis House chapel tells the story of Abraham, Sarah, and the three visitors they welcomed in their home under the oaks of Mamre (Gen 18). The icon-writing tradition is notoriously reluctant to visually depict the persons of the Trinity together, but the tradition finds a lone exception in depicting this visit to Abraham and Sarah. 

Just after he hung the icon in the chapel, the iconographer - Drazen - explained what he considered to be the key features of the icon. He started with Christ, the central of the three figures. The meal of the three individuals at the table prefigures the Eucharist that, weekly, the icon will oversee in the chapel. Drazen moved from Christ directly to the napkins. "The napkins?" I asked. "Yes!" he said, with a broad smile. Drazen explained that, in Middle-Eastern culture, to eat with neatly folded napkins in one's lap is to express dissatisfaction with the hospitality one has been offered. To keep too neat a napkin is an indication that one will not come to a given home again. The napkins in the figures' laps are emphatically not neat. The hospitality has been gladly accepted, Drazen explained, and the figures express their intention to continually visit the home. This is both a profession that "Christ will come again" and a communication of what happens in the Eucharist, as God gives God's people the food - God's own self - that we need. Finally, it is noteworthy that in many icons of the Trinity, Abraham and Sarah appear off to the side or not at all. Here, in keeping with the scriptural account, they are serving at the table. In their service, they have taken their place in a circle of friendship with God; it is a circle that the viewer completes, as one who stands on the fourth side of the table.

The story of Abraham, Sarah, and the Trinity carries a special significance for the faith community at St. Francis House today. Everywhere in the House, you will find pictures and metal sculptures of trees, recalling this story in which the welcome of the stranger became an occasion for encounter with God. It is a story that lifts up the baptismal promise to "seek and serve Christ in all persons," and which well fits a community whose doors are continually open to the thousands of students, faculty, and staff, to whom we daily extend our hospitality and for whom we gladly open our lives.

On Going To Church Because We Have To (When Shame Drives the Church and How To Pull Over)

I came across this article, entitled WE CAN’T DO GOLD STAR CHRISTIANITY ANYMORE – CLINGING TO THE WRONG TRAPPINGS, via a good friend and colleague. Notwithstanding the author's gratuitous use of caps-lock urgency - Good Lord, deliver us! - the article helpfully engages in the kind of honest and thoughtful struggle that will accompany fruitful movement toward a flourishing future for members of the Body of Christ. 

Especially useful is the article's invitation for local faith communities to charitably enter into the changing social and cultural expectations faced by young families today. These expectations explain in part - the author suggests - why time honored incentive structures, like gold stars for perfect attendance, no longer get the job done. The article then goes on to offer good questions for rediscovering just what "the job" is.

Because all of the above is good and needed and forward leaning, I hesitate to make the observation the article doesn't make. I suspect the article doesn't make the observation because the author wants to keep the conversation constructive and positive. I do, too, but I think the observation still needs naming: if we accept the author's thesis that gold star Christianity isn't working in 2015, and if that acknowledgment leads us to ask good questions about what "the job" is, we must also evaluate and consider the extent to which "the job" was successfully accomplished in the past. The author largely gives the past a free pass on this score, seemingly content to accept that another name for doing the job well in the past was the production of attendance numbers higher than those today's churches currently enjoy. 

But what if numbers don't always capture the extent to which a given job was achieved? After all, Willow Creek famously "repented" when a self-initiated study revealed that, despite ever-growing numbers of attendees, underlying goals of discipleship and Christian formation were not being realized. If it is possible for Willow Creek to produce things other that what they set out to produce, what about the Gold Star system?

The friend who shared the Gold Star article did so alongside his own reflection, as a gold star child:

As a kid, I collected "Gold Stars" for Sunday School attendance. There were charts in every room with students' names and strings of stars beside each name. I remember the year I got sick in December and had to stay home on a Sunday w/a fever. I cried because I wasn't going to get my perfect attendance award... I asked my mom if Jesus would still love me. She assured me that he would.

It's not revelatory to say my friend is not alone in this experience. As a parish priest, I regularly ran into parishioners - grown adults - in the grocery store that served our shared small town. Often, my attempt at a friendly, "Hey friend! How are you doing?" was lamely met with, "I'm sorry I wasn't there Sunday. Something came up. I'll be there on Sunday. I promise." Time and again, shame and shame's patterns supplanted opportunities for furthering the kind of relationship God intended for us both. 

By contrast, a student recently told me that he was learning to trust God's love for him as the foundation of his identity. I asked him how his life was different because of that trust. He thought a moment before saying, "I wouldn't still be with this community. I've been so inconsistent. Even though this is a place of joy and life for me, I would have shamed myself away from ever coming back. I would have walked away from a place where I actually experience God's love and new life in Christ."

While it is no doubt an overstatement to say that the church built a 20th century empire from the bricks of shame and should, it is hard to say by how much. Where congregations and preachers have appealed to shame and fear to bolster participation, we cannot completely lament the decline of more robust numbers in Christian communities. To push the point, and writing as a fellow gold cross / perfect attendance recipient, it is not just that gold star Christianity isn't working in 2015, it is that the church may need to repent of some of the methods that produced the "successful" numbers she enjoyed in the past. After all, my friend did not cry because he was missing a Sunday school class that he loved (though he may have loved it); my friend cried because to not attend Sunday school opened the question of whether he was loved by God. 

Of course, the last thing I want to do is shame the church for invoking shame-based methodologies. It is a miracle for which I thank God that fruit of joy and love, forgiveness and mercy, have been conveyed and felt in every age of the church. Indeed, I owe the even ability to make this critique to the faith communities in which I was formed, and for which I remain deeply grateful. It is out of that gratitude, and with deep love, that I raise the issue of shame - both spoken and silent - in congregational life, in the hope that doing so can break the ice for fruitful and creative spaces in our common lives for healing toward flourishing in the Gospel. I pray this post can open such a space.

In his book The Soul of Shame, Curt Thompson writes 

I need the community in order for my mind to be integrated, and with a more integrated mind I will be more able to work toward a more integrated community, which reinforces the cycle. Shame both actively dismantles and further prohibits this process of integration, leading to disconnection between mental processes within an individual's mind as well as between individual members within a community.

If Dr. Thompson is correct in the above - and his is hardly a novel presentation of shame and its effects - churches that find evangelism, for example, difficult should consider that the difficulty isn't wholly about introversion and class (though for sure those count, too), but that shame - inherited and passed along through generations - is surely also at play, insofar as symptomatic isolation and disintegration - enemies of community - go unnamed and untended. Put positively, I do not think it is an accident that the Most Rt. Rev. Michael Curry took as the theme of his inaugural sermon, "Don't worry, be happy." In doing so, he was not channeling a hippy vibe so much as giving what is in many places a dying church permission to put down her shames by appeal to - and lifting up of - the resurrection of Jesus Christ - the victory that shame would be glad to have us forget.

In addition to the family, just trying (often unsuccessfully) to show up on Sunday, shame is at play 1) in the lay person who can't get the new blood fired up about old positions and so faces the reality that she will be the last at the helm of a much beloved and generations-old ministry, 2) in the vestry that would rather stomach the fiscal hit quietly than go out to the assembly on Sunday and name the need - one more time - and ask for help, 3) in the cleric who, after years of pouring out her heart and soul, can't seem to budge the overall numbers, even she has come to suspect that what the congregation really means by "church growth" is helping existing members get the rest of their families to church with them on Sundays - all the while self-aware that its the burden of her salary on the congregations that keeps her from out and out refusing that impossible and life-less expectation, and 3) in bishops who, in the face of declining numbers, congregations, and staffs, sometimes feel responsible for culture realities they cannot change, while fighting reactionary temptations to continually justify the existence of their offices.

I surprised a parishioner one day when I told her that others in the faith community thought she was doing a particular weekly job (with which she secretly wanted to be done) because she wanted to being do it - because it gave her joy. When I said this, she couldn't hide her disgust. "Why would the others think that?" she asked. This parishioner felt the shame of being trapped and wanting to walk away. 

I suspect that folks in lay and clergy ranks - on vestries and even bishops - all find themselves thinking to themselves from time to time - about the assumption others have that they want to be doing what they are doing in a given moment - "Why would the others think that?" When we feel trapped, we project our shame at feeling trapped by something that we are supposed to want onto others in belittling ways, usually ways that end in some variation (singular or corporate) of

• I am not good enough / cannot do enough.
• I am not enough.
• There is something wrong with me.
• I am bad.
• I don't matter.

At the heart of all of these shames is the forgetting of what Michael Curry would have us remember: that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. It's the answer to the "Why would the others think that?" So Karl Barth said, "Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God," and Wendell Berry invites us by our laughter to "practice resurrection." If there is a constant in the many types and forms of practical atheism rampant among Christians today, it is undoubtedly the shame that presents itself as bigger than the God of our risen Savior.

Where/when does your congregation most laugh? 

What ways has your faith community found to effectively name and relieve long-standing and secretive shames? 

This post is the beginning of an exploration and - most importantly - a conversation. Where might this conversation go next, in ways that would most flourish your family, community, and yourself, in relationship with the living God and one another?