Why I’m Resolving To Say Hi To More People in The Grocery Store

Opportunities for connection present themselves every day, many days more than once. An acquaintance walking on the other side of the street; a co-worker at the opposite end of the frozen food aisle; a congregant walking, slowly, to the same place you’re hurriedly heading.

I’m in a rush. I’m not up for a conversation right now. I’m afraid they won’t recognize me and I’ll embarrass myself.

But these fleeting opportunities to make a connection, to share some positivity, even if just a smiling nod of the head, are worth the risk because they won’t come again. This moment right here is a rock for adding to the structure of human community. It has a particular shape and weight suited for just this moment. If I let it drop, it will stay there for good.

Us Is That (Even If We Don’t Know It)

Seth Godin wants leaders to ask, “Who Is Us?”

When our neighbors are asked who Us is, they will have an answer, and it may not be one that we like. But if we’re not backing up who we say We are with consistent actions, then we have no right to object.

Which is why complaints like this don’t hold a lot of water with me. If the things you’re doing lead people to describe you in ways that diverge from how you describe yourself, your self-description doesn’t get priority just because it’s yours. If people observe you to be mean and exclusive, you’re probably mean and exclusive.

Of course, we may like it too, the Us our neighbors say we are.

There’s a community of mostly agnostic ex-patriots in Baja, Mexico who call the Presbyterian Church (USA) “innovative” and “courageous” because a presbytery ordained one of these ex-pats as an “Evangelist” to their community, to grow in friendship with them and discern a common life together.

Us is that. Even if we don’t know it.

While serving my first church I met a man 20 years my senior who spoke to me with tears in his eyes about the cherished role our church had played in his family’s life. Were they church members? No. The children had attended our preschool 15 years earlier. Yet though they never attended a single worship service or church event, he knew who We were years after his kids were grown.

Us was that, though we didn’t know it.

The world knows who We are, even if we don’t.

Churches Have Time To Give

Douglas Rushkoff has a new piece up on Pacific Standard today. Here’s the money quote:

Looked at in terms of human value creation, the industrial economy appears to have been programmed to remove human beings from the value chain.

And this:

Once we’re no longer conflating the idea of “work” with that of “employment,” we are free to create value in ways unrecognized by the current growth-based market economy. We can teach, farm, feed, care for, and even entertain one another.

“Work” is more than “employment.” “Value” is a much better ideal to pursue than “growth.” That is as true for churches as it is for economies.

What if the question guiding our work, both as people and as congregations, is, “How do we add value to the community?” and not, “How do we get bigger and add more?”

Churches add value to their communities in some concrete ways and some abstract ways. They have public space for gatherings, which is valuable. They have leadership that, often, is among the most educated folks in town. Churches make things, like gardens and crafts and meals. All of these add value.

But so does time, which feels more abstract. Our neighbors are starved for time, not in the sense that they need more of it, but in the sense that they hunger to get more value–more connection, more joy, more impact–out of it. Churches create spaces where time is experienced differently. If our communities are not identifying our congregations as places that will give them time, we are missing an opportunity.

Make A Mess

This post is part of a series reflecting on Grounded, the new book by Diana Butler Bass. Read the other posts in the series here.

Again with this quote:

As we pay attention to rivers and seas, we might also discover God’s fluid presence with the water.

When I baptize people I make a mess. The chancel floor is wet even before any water has been lifted from the font, because I pour it in from as high a height as my right arm will allow. It cascades down and tumbles out. The front pew sitters should wear raincoats.

You can hear it, you can see it, and you know it’s water.

The baptized–infant and adult alike–end up dripping, because I want the water to be the story. I’m no respecter of baptismal garments. I’m not innovating with language, and I’m not inflecting my speech for earnestness or drama.

Hear the water. Watch the water. Feel the water.

This is what I’ve learned in church: you don’t need an ocean or a river to get hit with the presence of God in water.

A baptism in an ocean or a river, though? That’s something I want to do once before I’m done. Until then, I make rivers on the chancel.

Just When You Though It Was Safe To Go Back in The Water

This post is part of a series reflecting on Grounded, the new book by Diana Butler Bass. Read the other posts in the series here.

So here’s a provocative claim from Grounded:

As we pay attention to rivers and seas, we might also discover God’s fluid presence with the water.

Swimming off Coronado Beach in San Diego during the summer of 2009, I drifted too far from shore and struggled to make it back in. The tide got a bit nasty. Successive incoming waves tumbled me like a clothes dryer. Each time I surfaced for air, I was facing in a different direction and had to reorient myself to the shoreline. Exhausted, I gave myself over to the waves and let them toss me toward the beach. When my feet implausibly found the bottom and I could stand upright, a lifeguard with a small crowd ran at me with an expression that said, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

I didn’t get back in the water that day.

On a youth beach trip in 2012, I punched and head butted Orange County waves with a reckless crew of teenage boys. Then one of those waves picked me up and flung me to the ocean floor, where my elbows and face dug into the sand while my legs and feet followed the wave forward, bending my back to what I was sure was breaking (a Californian later enlightened me that I had been “crabbed”).

I didn’t get back in the water that day either.

Waiting for the return ferry from Santa Cruz Island in 2008, I donned some goggles and a snorkel and putted around the kelp beds next to the dock, marveling at the colorful fish. But I swam straight into the tangled kelp and had to thrash furiously for several seconds to free myself. Luckily no one saw.

God’s fluid presence is with the water.

“Fluid” contains so many things: a weighted pull, a mindless drift, a violent tossing. If God is with the waters, then the waters are not to be entered carelessly.

Why I Don’t Do Krista Tippet’s Not Doing Christmas

It’s a year old, but Krista Tippet’s blog post, “Why I Don’t Do Christmas,” is popping up on my Facebook feed this week. I’ve read it over a few times, and I can’t shake the negativity of it.

Tippet’s objections to Christmas are perfectly reasonable, laudable even. Obligatory gift giving feeds a commercial machine that is swallowing up all of our cultural meaning-making sensibilities, and the meaning of the Holy Day is badly distorted by sentimentality. Any one for whom the Christmas story is faith forming should resist those distortions in their own December celebrations.

But these aren’t new problems. Cultural voices at least as old as Dickens have bemoaned materialism at Christmas. We’ve all rolled our eyes at Christmas movies that celebrate the “spirit” of Christmas, whatever that is. I’ve spent my life opposing the cultural mangling of Jesus’ birth narrative and insisting on a near sectarian rehearsal of the REAL story, but this year it feels somehow different. This year, “I Don’t Do Christmas” is getting under my skin.

Not doing Christmas means pitting yourself against a cultural celebration, because, well, they’re not doing it right. That feels kinda judgy to me in a way that’s not super helpful in bridging the gap between people of faith and people of no faith, a gap that is widening every day. Planting our feet in a posture of opposition to joy feels like a mistake.

We can do Christmas–the presents, the singing, the pageants–as participants in a culture that badly needs rituals of celebration, what with the threat of climate change, mass shootings, and global terrorism. So many Western Christmas norms were distortions from the start, were borrowed from earlier non-Christian cultural conventions, that it seems petty to pee in the Christmas punch because our cultural contemporaries aren’t getting it right.

The Bible doesn’t even get it right. The gospel writer Luke sets his birth story against the backdrop of a census taken while a guy named Quirinius was governor of Syria, an assertion that historians and Biblical scholars alike have long noted doesn’t line up with the historical record.

Yet thoughtful people can live constructively in the space between the ideal and the reality. People of faith can mark the religious significance of Christ’s birth in our churches and homes while still attending ugly sweater parties. Religious integrity does not demand we not do Christmas.

Tippet’s antidote to all the things that gall her about the Yuletide is to do compassionate and substantive things with the season like donate clothing to homeless teenagers. Yes, more of that please. I hope she’ll reconsider not doing Christmas, though, so that more people might be persuaded to follow her lead.

In the end, we need more thoughtful, faithful people like Tippet at the Christmas party.

Monday Morning Quarterback

That thing where the seven year-old begs to go with you to the Christmas breakfast at church and then refuses to eat anything but mini cinnamon buns.

That thing where your colleague, the Head of Staff, crawls around on the sanctuary floor during the Children’s Time bleating like a sheep, unprompted.

That thing where a church member gives the seven year-old a paper bag full of cosmetics that belong to her young adult daughter, who now lives in Texas, and the seven-year old spends an hour organizing it all on her vanity as soon as she gets home.

That thing where several people ask you how your preparations for moving to Chicago are coming along and you have to acknowledge that you haven’t even bought your plane ticket yet.

That thing where the seven year-old, watching The Phantom Menace, puts two and two together and pegs Anakin as Darth Vader.

That thing where you buy your plane ticket to Chicago.

That thing where your struggle to think of a white elephant gift to take to the youth Christmas party is solved by finding the white elephant gift you brought home from last year’s party, the cookie-in-a-cast-iron-skillet that’s been sitting in your pantry for 12 months.

That thing where somebody steals the white elephant gift your brought. Win.

That thing where you’re playing Taboo with high schoolers and the clue is “bikini,” so you just say “pass” and throw the card on the floor.

That thing where you watch two episodes of “The Leftovers” before going to sleep.

God Made Dirt, And Dirt Don’t Hurt

This post is part of a series reflecting on Grounded, the new book by Diana Butler Bass. Read the other posts in the series here.

There’s a question in this book nagging at me. It stems from Butler Bass’s description of a baptism liturgy she experienced during an Easter Vigil. “For the first time I realized,” she writes, “That at the center of the liturgy was a confusing, confounding spiritual metaphor: that salvation meant washing away dirt.

“The metaphors of church [strike] with an angular force against the metaphors of the garden.”

Is our easy acceptance of “dirt” as a metaphor for sin and its attendant descriptors like “soiled” keeping people like me from finding God in the dirt?

When my brother Robby and I were kids he used to drive me to frustration with his ready declaration, after eating something he’d dropped on the floor, “God made dirt, and dirt don’t hurt.” It made me want to scream. Even as a kid such an attitude struck me as wrong-headed, even gross.

But what is this disgust with dirt about? More importantly, what is it doing? Here’s a critical observation from Grounded.

If ‘unclean’ and ‘being soiled’ become the dominant metaphors for sin, it is just a small step to the demonization of real dirt. If being dirty means we are an unclean people on an unclean land, dirt stands in the way of both holiness and dinner. Theologically, it can be difficult to experience soil as anything but a problem.”

What then? Do we purge our liturgies of dirt language? Um, no. “Dirty” and “clean” are metaphors, and metaphorical language has power for good and ill. If our loathing of dirt leads us to yawn at increasing soil erosion, we’re in serious long-term trouble. It would be a tragedy if our religious language contributed to such a calamity.

On the other hand, cleanliness may not actually be close to Godliness, but it does correlate, for one thing, to less disease.

Whose Afraid of The Big Bad Panentheist?

This post is part of a series reflecting on Grounded, the new book by Diana Butler Bass. Read the other posts in the series here.

The one foray into the weeds of theological discourse that Grounded allows takes us into the field of “pans,” namely pantheism and panentheism. The book is arguing for a more wholehearted appropriation of the latter of those two pans among the ranks of liberal Protestants.

Here’s how Bulter Bass spells out the distinction between the two pans:

Pantheists believe that God is everything, and everything is God . . . Panentheism is the idea that God is with or in all things.

Both of these terms earned spots on the theological no fly list I learned at my evangelical Christian college and in a subsequent Systematic Theology course I took at a bible college in Kansas City. They failed, I was taught, to appreciate the transcendence of God. Pantheism makes no distinction between the Creator and the creation (which is idolatry), and the distinction panentheism makes is too fine to withstand scrutiny. Too much rests on prepositions.

Grounded’s enthusiasm for panentheism as a compelling theological lens for our era proceeds from a place of ecological concern. We heirs of the Industrial Revolution have unleashed havoc on the earth’s soil, a sin that has flowed from a theological framework that allowed us to see the soil as a thing out of which to extract value.

Not only did that [Industrial] revolution move us away from the soil; it also turned the land into an object to be managed instead of a relationship to be experienced. Western religion, often afraid to lose the Creator-creation distinction, quickly baptized theologies that distanced God from the dirt and emphasized human lordship over the land.

Yep. I cut my teeth on those theologies. I wonder how much of my difficulty with finding God in the dirt stems from them.

Panentheism rests on solid theological footing. It places a great deal of weight on the relational nature of God as Trinity. “With,” “for,” and “in” are really important prepositions for talking about who God is and what God is doing. I’m not spooked by the panentheistic collapse of transcendance, because I don’t think immanence and transcendance are the opposites I was taught they are. It is God’s way to be with us–and, to Grounded’s point, with the soil–by way of being not-us, and to be bigger than us by being with us.

I Can’t Find God in The Dirt

This post is part of a series reflecting on Grounded, the new book by Diana Butler Bass. Read the other posts in the series here.

Four years ago my neighbor and I transformed a tiny patch of the courtyard we share in our condo complex into a two-tiered garden about 10 feet long and four feet wide. We filled it with good soil and planted tomatoes, tomatillos, beans, and some herbs. We created compost bins out of trash cans.

You wouldn’t believe the way things grew in there. It was more than we could use. It was an unqualified gardening success.

I say, it was a gardening success.

It’s still growing herbs, but the neighborhood cats have done a number (two) on the soil, and what started as a collaboration is now a one-woman project, as I progressively lost interest about half way through the second year. Now it is my neighbor’s garden.

I thought a lot about my gardening failure as I read “Dirt,” the second chapter of “Grounded.”Butler Bass is discovering God in her garden, in a dusty New Mexico chapel, and lots of other “dirty” places she used to detest. For the first time in her life, she’s finding life in soil, and “Grounded” is her attempt to describe that finding in theological terms.

She’s not alone in her finding, of course. She notes that gardens are proliferating on church grounds, on school campuses, even in abandoned urban lots. Farmer’s markets are everywhere. Community supported agriculture projects are easier than even to join. There is a growing consciousness in the culture of the mysteries hidden in the dirt.

My church has a farm plot on it now that a local nonprofit cultivates. Butler Bass writes about The Garden Church, and there’s also Farm Church (the founder of which I interviewed here). These churches are attracting people who are yearning to experience faith out-of-doors, in the dirt.

I tried to love the dirt, but I just couldn’t. I can theologize about the relationship between creation and composting, but I don’t, like, feel it, you know? The walls of a sanctuary don’t bother me one bit, and even before I sought those walls out my faith was being formed by other indoor spaces: college dorms, community centers, coffee shops. My experience of God has been disproportionately interior and urban. I have not found God in the dirt.

Maybe I was trying to hard. Maybe I lack the attention span. Maybe I’m too busy being a pastor and a spouse and a parent. Whatever it is, I’m disappointed about it, and “Grounded” is making me want to keep trying.