June 24, 2009

How is my call shaping itself now that I am in school?

School has perhaps only made me more committed to the work I do on the anti racism commission. School has made me more keenly aware of just how stacked the deck is against people who do not fit a very narrow model of behavior.

Example: Overheard in the cafeteria between the admissions officer and a student. “We have someone from the Gulf Coast looking at the school today.” To which the student replied, “Great, that will really add to our diversity.” I don’t even know what to do with that. School is overwhelmingly white and middle class. I am really glad that John and Ellen introduced us to gin and tonics before we got there because we are pretty outclassed in the socializing department.

Altogether, I still feel called to the sacraments. I still feel called to facilitate radical welcome and communication between people. I summed this up for a fellow student the other day in this way, so I will just share that. We in the church are pretty guilty of having a relationship with God that happens 2/3 up the nave. Which in a decent sized church means you have to step on a lot of people in your reach for God. Jesus called us to have a relationship with God that is about 2 feet in front of us, placing another individual right at arms length. I really feel called to bring about that change in distance in people’s lives.

A very wise mentor said to me awhile back that I need to look at those places where I am most angry and most raw in order to find my ministry. And I am most angry in the way that we are so unintentional in our welcome to people. We say inclusive, but that is really, especially in the Bay Area a code word for gblt friendly. I am, but not at the expense of all the other people who make church.  

Why I am a Christian

I am a Christian for no other reason than one day, in an intellectual stupor, I realized that the breathing, the eating, the shitting, the birthing and the dying were the most important parts of life. And I realized that some dude not only already figured that out, but went on to lead a revolution to that effect 2000 years ago. An entire institution built up around that idea - an idea that is so dangerous to power that an institution was necessary to bottle it up and take away it's power. Ironically, the institution is the very means of preserving and protecting that dangerous truth so that people like me can keep discovering it anew.

Greeting and Hospitality

The very best reason to have your church members wear nametags is so that the ushers can remind people to wear then. When the response is, I don't have a nametag, you have identified a new member without the direct and rude question "Do you belong here?" name tags should also be quasi permanent so that peoples affiliations within the church can be printed as well. Then, while looking at nametags, new people also get a sense of what we are about.

Find the balance between Sunday is for Christians, for us, but strangers will always be present. First, respect that they are strangers. Assuming that someone who has never been to your house before will be perfectly comfortable and know where the bathroom and the knife drawer is, is silly. Don't expect that church is self explainatory. A handler, wrangler, guest services associate/host, call it what you will available for each new person or family that comes in. Take them around, offer them a primer on the particularities of your service. Remember, no one reads signs, thus they are very important.

Primers. A customary for the laity, can include basic catechumanate material FAQ's about the specific building and community, all sorts of things. Rather than reinventing a full service customary for each service, let your actual members worship rather than read. Some things are simply meant to be memorized. The more you read along in church the less you listen. Listening activates a totally different part of the brain. Listening in church is like practicing for life.

Cultural Relativism

It occurs to me that we taught cultural relativism to the first culture to truly experience globalism. Can we wonder, then, at the increasing fractionalism/factionalism rather than the "buy a world a coke" phenomenon we were hoping for?

Some ideas in search of a theme

What I learned this year.

Thematically, I need to make this work, Time is Money. Spent a lot of this year pretending that was the case. Time isn't money. It isn't a medium of exchange. It is, perhaps, the fluid in which our communion with God floats. So all of the things that we decide to commodotize into money are places where God has a much harder time being visible to us.

Some other ideas that might not relate
This year I set out to take whatever I thought I might need, time and money. This was a gift to me, because I was doing great deeds and deserved it. Ok, maybe not. But I ended up isolated in my little loft with a view of downtown san francisco and two bridges, which was a nice view, but ultimately lonely.

Blessing of Babel

Why is Babel a blessing, instead of a curse?

The tower of Babel was less about people trying to get TO God than it was about people trying to BE God. God, by definition is "not in the box", but it is too easy to box God up when we spend too much time with people like us. As soon as we limit God, we stop looking to God in our lives and we stop allowing for the inbreaking of God's kingdom. The gift of Babel is that we cannot forget about the incarnation of spirit in the world. We cannot reconcile the infinite expression of spirit with any one idea of God. Babel keeps us out of the box.

Babel is the the meeting place of Paul.

"For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness." (Romans 12:4-8)

"There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28)

We in the church are pretty guilty of having a relationship with God that happens 2/3 up the nave. Which in a decent sized church means you have to step on a lot of people in your reach for God. Jesus called us to have a relationship with God that is about 2 feet in front of us, placing another individual right at arms length. I really feel called to bring about that change in distance in people’s lives.