Bridging the Gap

I still remember my first and only preaching class from undergrad, it was a very big deal. The top three guys got to preach in Chapel, and being that it was a class that only allowed male students, it was very much a young buck show. I probably should have gotten an F in that class. I'm not much of a traditional preacher, and at the time I wasn't very good at public speaking, I actually burst into tears on my first go at it. There were guys that were polished preachers at that point, and I felt like I didn't belong in the same major as them, hell, even the same school.

Looking back, it's clearly a group of big fish sharing a small pond, and some of the guys that "won" are not involved in ministry at all now.

Delivering a sacred communication is an essential part of ministry, and I've had a lot of opportunities to give messages, so, I at least don't cry anymore. But it's still remarkable to me that the best lecture style talks are available online, and people state that they pick a church for the teaching. I'm also distressed that Church attendance is culturally mandated and oriented around a concert/lecture.

That is probably part of another post I should write, but I will never forget the main criteria of those sermons and that class. We were supposed to take the passage of the Bible, clearly explain and interpret it, and then "bridge the gap" from the Bible's world to our present day world, and then give application.

As a Chaplain, delivering sacred communication is the exception rather than the rule to my typical experiences and activities of ministry. I have to bridge an entirely different gap that professors never told me about.

Most of what I do involves shutting up and listening, and constantly fighting the inner urge to steam roll people with bible passages and "profound" thoughts. Platitudes do not ease suffering, nor are they heard by those who are in the midst of trials.

In the midst of the chaos of occasional crises and breakdowns, I also traffic with a lot of people from a lot of different faiths, and that's where pluralism gets awesome/interesting/weird/frustrating. I don't have a problem affirming the humanity of all people of all faiths, and from my own tradition, I believe that they are formed in the image of God, deserve dignity, respect and love, are sinners just like me, and spiritual beings with a spiritual need for kindness, redemption, and refreshment, particularly in the midst of suffering. One of the most powerful lessons of pastoral care comes from Ignatius Loyola, the ministry of consolation.

The main problem I have is that there are a lot of people who bypass the more sensible portions of their religious preference and default to superstition. And in the world of superstition, the man carrying the sacred text, a mere prop of identification for the superstitious, is looked on like a witch doctor, doing incantations and being present almost as a mascot. Half the work of an average chaplain is in restraining one's self from slapping these people.

There is a spectrum, with "witch doctor" on one end and "pleasant well-wisher" on the other. The work of pastoral care is not only caring about other people and being patiently present, but self-identifying yourself in the middle of the spectrum, and avoiding the many pigeon holes along the path. Bridging the gap of relevance to the real world, from peoples often ill-informed perception of "clergy".

And I guess it's interesting, that many people's sacred communication proficiency in the church leads them squarely into those pigeon holes.

Trust And Crisis

Trust is a peculiar thing. It's simultaneous the source of strength and greatest test to a relationship of any sort. It is not unique in it's simultaneous necessity and deceptively limited stature. Trust can be like a punctured innertube; one needs it to survive the ocean, and yet even at it's fullest capacity, it will run out before it's purpose is complete. Simply put, we cannot trust enough, and are far to untrustworthy for our own good.

Trust is the best/only/worst metaphor for our encounter of the sublime. Descartes rightly began with self-referential existentialism because nothing else is trustworthy enough to conclude in the absolute. And as we break through modernism into a liminal post-modernity, in many ways it is the end of trust as an absolute. Many things were once stylized as institutions, pillars of solid rock that could weather any storm of doubt. Sadly, these pillars are now mere sand and salt in the desert of the real.

Trust, ironically, is the answer the modernisms fact-anomaly. Relativism and perspective are no long ideologies to be fought against; this is no longer a culture war. If it is a culture war, both sides are untenably defenseless. It is rather, an amorphous culture habitat, and domination must be replaced by adaptation and synchronization. All that remains in the face of uncertainty is the banner of trust.

Both in faith and love, this holds up. As a younger man, somewhat disturbed by the divorce epidemic, I feared marriage; I asked a mentor of mine once, "How can you trust someone enough to marry them?" And the answer was not what I expected, and confirmed my fears. "You can't," he said. "All you can do is choose to trust, knowing that the person you marry will break your heart, and you will break yours. They will break your trust, and then you will need to forgive them, and restore that trust."

In faith, we trust in the sublime, and believe that as surely as we will break God's trust, his covenant love, He will be gracious, and forgive us. This is a scary hope have. Especially when you think about how hard it is to forgive someone that you love. Grace is hard for us, in either direction is must flow. I think that this experience, and meditation on the death and resurrection of Christ reveals a disturbing element of faith. While God's ways and God's grace are higher/greater/unfathomable than our sense of it, there is a shadow from His light in our earthly dwelling. Grace is a bloody, deathly, and altogether ghastly affair, even for the God of the Universe. God is wounded by us. God is disappointed in us. And his Grace is ridiculous in not only it's vastness, but the sum total of pain that God is willing to endure on our account, let alone on our behalf.

And the only possible response to all this is Awe. God is far greater than anything there could ever be. Images and senses and ideas are so plentyful and yet so impotent to reveal the vastness of what greatness truly is the essence of a God who forgives. Awe, shock, and aspiration. This is my starting point today. Perhaps that is what trust was intended to encompass.

First Line of a Novel

The squalid smokey room seemed strangely out of focus as the starlight through the window faded from view. The new days dawn brought unspoken potential and impending doom into Tony's sleepless eyes.

Bible Jim & The Doctrine of Hell

If you ever go to a festival, sporting event, large gathering of people or any public spectacle, you are sure to chance seeing him. If you went to a state college, he might have just showed up on your campus. If you talk about spiritual matters with other humans, I'm certain he is an archetype in the back of conversational mind.

Bible Jim, the soap-box preaching, sign-holding, megaphone brandishing westboro-esque figure is loathe to believers and non-believers alike as a symbol of all that is wrong in the spiritual landscape of America. He sounds bigotted and scary, and he seems more concerned with the doctrine of hell than the gospel. And I am reminded that some people believe that the doctrine of hell is actually a part of the gospel, and that fear, intimidation and threat of suffering are as valid tool as any to convert the heathen masses.

He is imperial christianity personified, which is really just medieval christianity with wheels and spikes. This version of faith, religion, etc, has little to do with the real Jesus. Jesus rightly reserved the doctrine of hell for his believers, his true followers were the ones who received this teaching. Jesus never threatened the sinner with condemnation. He did however, asure the saint of justice to be fulfilled. Hell is our confidence that God does not waver in his justice when he dispenses grace, and that blessing on earth is not in line with the superstition of St. Nicholas.

Whether you take it literally or analogously, the doctrine of hell is a fire under the ass of the Christian, in order to motivate urgent love to those around us. The conscience and the nature of reality, the sense of fairplay, as CS Lewis called it, that all humans have, and of course the Holy Spirit, these will convict a person into desiring change. The goodness that they see in Christ, the sense of goodness, rightness and newness, and the brokenhearted posture of receiving forgiveness will motivate us to follow God.

I'm no Rob Bell, and Hell is in the Bible to stay, but understanding it, teaching it, and appropriating it correctly will help us avoid needlessly offending both God and Man, with whom it is possible for us to find favor, just as Jesus did. It was Jesus' grace, forgiveness and revolutionary teachings about equality, his rebellious nature towards antiquated etablishments, these things are what upset people. Jesus opposed anyone who used the scriptures to bully the lowly.