Rogue Reverend

Preach Christ, a sermon

A couple of weeks ago, I was stressing about this sermon, wondering what to preach on next, and walking around the track. I heard a word. Don’t think I’m crazy, but it just came to me, in the voice of my preaching professor, Robert L. Smith. “Preach Christ.”

Preach Christ? What does that mean?

I have to tell you a little about Dr. Smith. He’s a large black man, a preacher who hoops (which means that he gets a certain cadence to his voice, a sing-song-like rhythm), who sings amazing songs at the end of sermons. His voice is deep, like James Earl Jones.

And he said, “Preach Christ.”

Preach Christ? What does that mean?

I heard his voice. “It means Christ crucified.” Christ crucified? What is that? Why does that matter? “Because it’s Christ resurrected.” Ah, the resurrection. Now what difference does that make? And then I hear Dr. Smith. “It means Christ is alive.”

So, today, I’m going to preach Christ. More »

It Was All Saints’ Day

Yesterday, November 1, was All Saints’ Day. We celebrated at Richmond Mennonite Fellowship by bringing a memento of one of our Saints to the service.

The sermon was rather different (surprise, surprise!), and I quoted from one Ted talk by Sir Ken Robinson, starting at minute 15.09. Robinson tells the story of Gillian Lynne, a choreographer whose grade school teachers (in the 1930’s) thought that she had a learning disorder. Gillian’s mother took her to a doctor, who listened to the symptoms, and asked Mrs. Lynne to talk with him privately. Instead of talking, they turned to watch Gillian, who got up to dance to a radio that was on in the room.

“Gillian isn’t sick,” the doctor said, “she’s a dancer.” Gillian’s mother took her to dance class, where Gillian proclaims, “We walked into this room and it was full of people like me. People who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think.”

I believe the church should be like the doctor: noticing. And like the mother: fostering passion.

Then we listened to 5 minutes of another Ted talk. Eve Ensler spoke on happiness. Go to minute 15:41. Really. Go listen. I’ll wait.

Eve says that the Vagina Monologues “has taught me this really simple thing, which is that happiness exists in action, it exists in telling the truth and saying what your truth is, and it exists in giving away what you want the most.”

We have to work to identify our passion, the thing we want the most, that we have to give away.

We then talked about our saints. sharing our mementos, and thinking about them, “What was the thing they gave away?”

I talked about my saint, Barbara Watts, during this time. The memento I shared was a hymnal from Southside Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and hymn number 398, “In the Garden.” Barbara sang this favorite hymn at my ordination.

The refrain is, “And he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own; and the joy we share, as we tary there, none other have ever known.” Sure, it’s bad theology, but it’s one of my favorites.

Barbara’s gift, her passion, was attention. She paid attention to all the people she loved in such a complete way: cards, letters, calls. Remembrances, birthday wishes, gifts, Barbara paid attention. I’m so grateful for her model in my love, and for being the object of some of that love.

After sharing our saints, without a dry eye in sight, we shared communion. We communed with our saints who are gone, but also with those who will someday consider us saints. What would be the passion they would see?

Jesus took the wine and the bread, very common elements, and made them holy. The saints in our lives, who were very human, shed the light of sacredness in our lives. How would we do the same in others’ lives?

If I Were the Architect of the Church. A sermon.

This sermon was inspired by a spoken word poem at Ted.com, called Rives Controls the Internet. The sermon, which was done at a rapid pace like spoken word, was followed by communion where the communicants took the phrase, “If I were the architect of the Church” and said how they would make it theirs.

If I were the architect of the new Church, not the old church, we’d have no tired old Sunday school and Training Union and Wednesday night suppers and Stewardship Sundays and Deacons meetings and church councils and capital campaigns and mission trips,

But it’s new church, with love and care and hope and more love and care and hope and then a little more love and care and hope mixed in. The only thing I’d take from the old model is worship and a lot of fried chicken.

If I were the architect of the new Church, no one would get God wrong. In fact, Church wouldn’t tell about God. You would instead tell the Church about the kind of God you serve. And your God would overlap with my God, in some very lovely ways, but it would be okay if your God was different from my God.

If I were the architect of the new Church, the Pastor would no longer be the holder of secrets. You’d never keep to yourself that you’re going to lose your house, that you’d had an abortion, that you’re going through a rough patch in your marriage, that you’re gay, that you’ve lost your job, that you’re waiting on test results, that you’re sad, or lonely. The pastor’s job would be to help you share your secrets. Because the pastor knows that you’re not the only person going through what you’re going through.

If I were the architect of the church, you would know that the balance in your checking account doesn’t determine your worth as a human being.

If I were the architect of the new Church, the budget would read so differently. We’d pay for salaries and space, then we’d have a budget line where everybody wrote about all the wonderful things they were doing with their money so that we would know that our church was making a difference in the world. One person would be feeding the hungry, one person would be digging water wells, one person would be buying cows, and another fixing the ozone layer. Our missions budget would be through the roof, but it would be through your roof, not ours, because it would come out of your budget, not ours, and we’d be changing the world through our actions.

If I were the architect of the church, we wouldn’t mess up our children. We would understand that our kids are going to grow up with some gaps, but as a community, we would help fill those gaps. And when our children became different than us, we’d get to see how great they are, through the eyes of the community, because communities see better than individuals. And when our children grew up and turned back to us, saying, “You messed me up!” we’d smile, know that they needed to say it, apologize, because they need to hear it, and offer ourselves compassion. And we’d extend compassion to our kids.

If I were the architect of the church, we wouldn’t have marketing campaigns, we wouldn’t target people, we wouldn’t need to pay for advertising. There’d be no us and them.

If I were the architect of the new Church, you’d be the expert on theology, on life, and on God.

Oh! Wait!

You already are! But that’s just it, isn’t it? I’m not the architect of the church. You are!

Passion with Compassion. A Sermon

Mark 10:2-16

78.
Nothing is softer
or more yielding
than water.
Yet, given time,
it can erode even the hardest stone.
That’s how the weak
can defeat the strong,
and the supple
can win out over the stiff.
Everybody knows it.
So why don’t we apply it to our own lives?

Lao Tzu used to say:
“Take on people’s problems,
and you can be their leader.
Deal with the world’s problems,
and you’ll be a Master.”
Sometimes the truth makes no sense.

~Tao Te Ching, translated by Ron Hogan

As you’ll (no doubt) remember, we started a few weeks ago with the idea that the job of the church is to ONLY NOTICE, to notice pain, sorrow and joy in people and to be WITNESSES to that. Then last week, we talked about the radical restructuring of many aspects of our culture, all based in this concept of open source, and the implications of open source on religion is just stunning. First, it’s a move towards decentralization and away from hierarchies. Second, it is open for anyone to create and innovate and share, if they want to which means it’s more inclusive, less dogmatic. Third, we share in the capitalization of it, but we don’t gain monetarily like we would if we capitalize it, we probably let go of property. Fourth, we have no control over it, and we give up the illusion of control, too. And fifth, we do our part and let the spirit go from there.

I’ve been mostly struck with the role of the church in society, if church is indeed open source, and if indeed, these changes are on the horizon. And, truth be told, I’ve been thinking about the role of clergy, too. If there is this radical decentralization, and this real sense of inclusion, what do pastors do? And if we let go of property, do we really need pastors, if they’re not going to be the executive directors of non-profit organizations?

So let me just tell you. I have come upon the reason for the church this week, and it’s two-fold. The first reason for the church? To foster passion. And what’s our church’s theological word for passion? It’s calling.

I tweeted a question, “What would it mean if the church’s job was to foster passion. One minister friend texted back, “we’d better become a lot more tolerant of mistakes!” And in this new vision of church, we’ve covered that! We are more tolerant, even celebrating our differences. More »

The Wikingdom of God (a sermon)

Tao Te Ching

~translated (or perpetrated) by Ron Hogan

If you toss compliments around freely,
people will waste your time
trying to impress you.
If you give things too much value,
you’re going to get ripped off.
If you try to please people,
you’ll just make them pissed.

The Master leads
by clearing the crap
out of people’s heads
and opening their hearts.
He lowers their aspirations
and makes them suck in their guts.

He shows you how to forget
what you know and what you want,
so nobody can push you around.
If you think you’ve got the answers,
he’ll mess with your head.

Stop doing stuff all the time,
and watch what happens.

Mark 9:30-37

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been listening to a lot of TED talks, Technology, Entertainment and Design, these 18 minute (or so) talks about interesting things. My favorite for a while has been about the economics of open source.

But before I tell you about the talk, I thought I’d better explain open source:

From Wikipedia: “Open source is an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software, offering practical accessibility to a software’s source code.” In other words, software code is provided to any developer to modify or write code off of, not for money, but generally just for good will. Then the software is generally offered to the world free.

Microsoft Office is not open source. In fact, they work really hard to NOT be open source. They pay developers to write their software, they hire those people, pay benefits, taxes, insurance, vacation time, all that stuff. Open Office, an open source product similar to Microsoft Office (which, by the way, works with Microsoft Office) is worked on by non-employees, bugs are fixed by a person here or there, most people just like the idea that they are working on something meaningful, and the product is free. There are other examples of open source: Wikipedia, for example. Or music sites where you can download music for free. Google books is another example of open source. You see where this is leading? And now there’s open source movement in politics, business, ethics, media, education, the arts. What’s an example of Open Source art? Collage, of course.

Now on to the Ted talk: Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. In his Ted talk, he talks about the new open source economics.

Yochai posits first that we have had an information economy for a hundred and fifty years, since the newspaper first made its rounds. But to receive technology, you had to have an influx of capital, then the paper was printed, then paid for. He says, “Those who were producing information had to have a way of raising money to pay,” meaning they were market based.

Then another thing happened. Benkler continues:

Around June 2002, the world of supercomputers had a bombshell. The Japanese had for the first time created the fastest supercomputer — the NEC Earth Simulator… IBM Gene Blue has just edged ahead of the NEC Earth Simulator. All of this completely ignores the fact that throughout this period, there’s another supercomputer running in the world — SETI@Home — four and a half million users around the world, contributing their leftover computer cycles, whenever their computer isn’t working, by running a screen saver, and together sharing their resources to create a massive supercomputer that NASA harnesses to analyze the data coming from radio telescopes.

Benkler interprets this:

What this picture suggests to us is that we’ve got a radical change in the way information production and exchange is capitalized. Not that it’s become less capital intensive that there’s less money that’s required—but that the ownership of this capital, the way the capitalization happens, is radically distributed.

It’s open source!

Benkler goes on:

The story that most people know is the story of free or open-source software. This is market share of Apache Web server — one of the critical applications in Web-based communications. In 1995, two groups of people said, “Wow, this is really important, the Web! We need a much better Web server!” One was a motley collection of volunteers who just decided, you know, we really need this, we should write one, and what are we going to do with what — well, we’re gonna share it! And other people will be able to develop it. The other was Microsoft.

Now, if I told you that 10 years later, the motley crew of people who didn’t control anything that they produced acquired 20 percent of the market and was the red line, it would be amazing! Right? But in fact, of course, the story is it’s the 70 percent, including the major e-commerce site — 70 percent of a critical application on which web based communications and applications work is produced in this form in direct competition with Microsoft, not in a side issue — in a central strategic decision to try to capture a component of the net.

Benkler finishes here:

So essentially what we’re seeing is the emergence of a fourth transactional framework. It used to be that there were two primary dimensions along which you could divide things. They could be market based, or non-market based; they could be decentralized, or centralized. The price system was a market-based and decentralized system. If things worked better because you actually had somebody organizing them, you had firms if you wanted to be in the market — or you had governments or sometimes larger non-profits in the non-market. It was too expensive to have decentralized social production, to have decentralized action in society — that was not about society itself. It was in fact economic.

But what we’re seeing now is the emergence of this fourth system of social sharing and exchange. Not that it’s the first time that we do nice things to each other, or for each other, as social beings. We do it all the time. It’s that it’s the first time that it’s having major economic impact. What characterizes them is decentralized authority. You don’t have to ask permission, as you do in a property-based system. May I do this? It’s open for anyone to create and innovate and share, if they want to, by themselves or with others, because property is one mechanism of coordination. But it’s not the only one.

This is where it starts, “You have a belief: stuff will flow out of connected human beings.”

What if the Kingdom of God is Open Source?

Oh, my God, I think my head might implode.

What would it mean, if the Kingdom of God is actually the Wikingdom of God?

If the Kingdom of God, the manifestation of the Church in THIS age is actually the Wiki-ngdom of God, what changes? How do we reframe it?

First, it’s a radical departure from hierarchies. Decentralization is key. (Could this mean no denominations?)

Second, it is open for anyone to create and innovate and share, if they want to. (Could this mean that we’d be more inclusive, less dogmatic?)

Third, we share in the capitalization of it. We fund it. But we don’t gain monetarily like we would if we were to capitalize it. (Could this mean that we let go of property?)

Fourth, we have no control over it. (and we give up the illusion of control, too)

Fifth, we do our part and let the Spirit go from there.

The biggest argument to me about the nature of who Jesus was is this: he came to turn the world upside down. The world’s understanding of how things work and how things are, and how things are best.

And his disciples, walking with him, were dolt-ish about the whole thing.

I can just envision this scene. The disciples are chatting together, and Jesus walks up and they all get quiet. “Whatcha’ talking about?” Jesus asks. “Nuthin.” The disciples shift nervously. Finally, they confess, “We’re drawing straws for who is going to be first in heaven.”

He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

The Kingdom is not what we suppose.