From Walls to Tables

I’m Hungry!

“Grangou! Grangou!” shouted the children who stood outside the wall trying to get our attention. “Grangou” means hungry In Haitian Creole. It was May 1997 when my family and I sat at an outside table at La Jacmelienne Beach Hotel in Jacmel, Haiti. We were having a light lunch, a luxury in Haiti, of a simple chicken sandwich. When I say “simple” I am not referring to the no small effort it took to just get this food in front of us by the staff at the hotel. René Préval was in his second year as the President of Haiti and would serve a full term. Haiti had previously had ten – that’s right, 10 – presidents in the eleven years since the corrupt and ruthless Baby Doc Jean-Claude Duvalier had been overthrown in 1986. Though progress is hard to measure in Haiti, Préval was a good president. He was so good that the US Peace Corps had renewed their presence in Haiti in 1996 after a period of much instability.

It was the Peace Corps’ renewed presence that took us to Haiti to see our son, who had been sent there as a new volunteer in 1996. (the Peace Corps would again suspend their presence in Haiti in 2005). As we sat there and ate our meal, Haitian children were gathered outside the wall and were peering in on us. They shouted, “grangou!” It troubled us. Here we were a family of well-fed Americans (except for my son who had lost a significant weight from his time in Haiti) enjoying a luxury while hungry Haitian children begged outside the wall.

God is Not Pleased

The scene reminded me of the story Jesus tells in the 16th chapter of the Gospel of Luke. We hear of an extraordinarily rich man who dressed in fine clothes and dined scrumptiously every day. Outside his gate lay a poor man, Lazarus by name, who longed for just for a crumb to somehow fall from the rich man’s table. His malnutrition caused sores to break out on his emaciated body. Dogs would come and lick his sores. Lazarus died, and the rich man eventually died too. No matter how wealthy and cushy a lifestyle one enjoys, the death rate is always one death per person.

What follows in the story is shocking. Lazarus is in the bosom of Father Abraham, and the rich guy is in Hades being tortured by the flames. The language of this role reversal is rich and colorful, but the point of Jesus’ story is that God is not pleased at the complete lack of the rich man’s ability to acknowledge the humanity of the poor outside his gate. It is the ultimate picture of tone-deafness in the rich and privileged to the plight of the planet’s underdogs.

The most marginalized people on the planet live in Haiti, suffering from the effects of extreme poverty. Stuck in this cycle and trying to survive on 50 cents a day they can’t afford clean water and go to bed hungry with shame for not being able to send their kids to school. Even worse, extreme poverty has resulted in over a million orphaned children in Haiti and created opportunity for child traffickers, as well as thousands dying annually from preventable diseases. Just a 90-minute flight from America’s abundance, this is a scandal of our shared humanity. God is not pleased.   

The Walls of America

As a follower of Jesus, I am troubled by the gates that separate the powerful and privileged and seem to immune them from the ills of humanity. During these last six months of the COVID-19 pandemic in this country, we have experienced a great wall that separates those who can work from home and the front line workers who are necessarily at risk everyday – those in health care, grocery store clerks, meatpackers, and many others. God cannot be pleased at this disparity. There is the great wall that separates the global north from the global south in terms of who is the perpetrator of climate change and those who suffer the most from its consequences. There is the great wall that separates those who can afford to have home tutors for their children from those parents who have to work and have small children who must fend for themselves with remote learning. There is the great wall that blocks black people from protection from police and a fair criminal justice system that others seem to take for granted. There is the ideological wall that separates peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors from often armed right-wing counter-protestors. And there is this great wall that distinguishes folks on what some economists call the K-shaped recovery curve. For the rich and those who have investments, the curve is upward. For the workers, desperate small business owners, and the millions of unemployed and facing evictions, the curve is steeply downward. And in the richest country in the world, there are those who have access to health care and those who do not. God cannot be pleased.

A Shocking Affront

Two weeks ago, there was a live re-enactment of the scene in Luke 16. In the midst of a global pandemic and defying CDC guidelines of social distancing and wearing facemasks, fifteen hundred people gathered on the south lawn of the White House to cheer a political party and its leader declaring itself to be the party of God. For every person who has spent the last six months playing by the rules, staying at home, wearing masks when in public, for every frontline worker who does not know whether the person closest to her is negative or positive for COVID, for every family that has canceled a wedding or a vacation or reunion, for every grandparent who has stayed isolated and has not been able to hug his grandchildren, for every congregation that has cancelled in-person worship, and for the over 190,000 Americans who have died while leadership downplayed the lethality of the virus, this gathering inside the walls that surround the White House was an affront, a travesty. God could not have been pleased.

Jesus Came to Tear Down Walls

Jesus came to tear down the walls that divide rich and poor, male and female, Jew and Greek, gay and straight, black and white, and those who are in and those considered out. As Ephesians 2:14 says, he “has broken down the dividing wall...” Of course, it took the religious elite and the political leaders of the day to have Jesus taken outside the walls of the Holy City, to have him crucified on a garbage heap and for God to raise him from the dead on Easter to finally tear down the wall. Mark’s Gospel is explicit when Jesus breathes his last and the curtain of the temple is torn in two from “top to bottom” (Mark 15:18).

The church that gathers in the name of the risen Jesus is an anti-wall community. It is a community that gathers rather than separates. The genesis of how this Jesus community is to gather and to what it is to witness happened on the night in which Jesus was betrayed when he placed bread in the hands and wine on the lips of all those gathered, including Peter and Judas, and said, “This is my body given for you. This is my blood shed for you.” With that inaugural meal came the promise that the risen Jesus would eat and drink again with us and the instruction from the apostle, Paul, that when we eat and drink the meal we proclaim the Lord’s death and resurrection until he comes again. Jesus’ ministry of the inbreaking of the Reign of God from the feeding of the multitude to his eating with outcasts and sinners bear witness to Isaiah’s poetic portrait of the outcome to which the love, mercy, and grace of God is taking us all:

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast… (Is. 25:6)

It is more than a feast of great food and drink. It is also a celebration of God tearing down and taking away the shrouds and sheets over all peoples, the swallowing up of death, the wiping away of all tears, and the end of disgrace for many. With the possible exception of Revelation 21 and the imagery of God coming to dwell with God’s people there is no greater visual portrait of what it means to say that love and life finally win.

The Common Table

In Decatur, Georgia a new congregation is being birthed out of the death of one of the many traditional ELCA congregations who have met a similar fate because of the stubborn walls of resistance to change and innovation and an unwillingness to meet this era. This new congregation has had to have a sense of humor because it was supposed to have launched with a lot of hoopla on Easter Sunday, April 12th, one month into the stay-at-home orders.

My wife, Harriet, and I are blessed to be a part of this new congregation. It is a congregation informed and shaped by Lutheran theology, but we are not attentive to the trappings of institutional religion. Seeing ourselves as a movement, we also do not spend a lot of time on dogma or doctrine. Our focus is the table – the gathering of all peoples around tables. We call ourselves the Common Table.

In a society fractured by inequity, suffering, and intolerance we all face a choice: to live for our own good or for the common good. Embodying the unshakeable hope and unrelenting grace of the risen Jesus, the Common Table works for justice and equity for those marginalized by society and declares that it has a seat at the table for everyone. As we fight for justice, love all people, journey together, and dream fearlessly in the name of the crucified and risen one, we will replace walls with tables. We do hope God is pleased.   

In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,

Being Saved from Malignant Christianity

How Did We Get Here?

How did we get here? Here being the spectacle last Monday of the President of the United States standing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church holding up a bible just a one-minute walk from what is now known as Black Lives Plaza NW. The prelude to the spectacle was a Law & Order speech, threatening military intervention against the nationwide protestors if mayors and governors don’t get their suppression-of-the-1st-Amendment acts together. Then the spectacle was abetted when a cadre on horse and in riot gear gassed, battered, and moved mainly peaceful protestors from the area. So, just how did we get here? To partly answer that question, I need to do some personal and historical work. I’ll be as brief as I can.

A Tale of Two Stories

On December 24, 1978 my wife and I sat holding our two small children before candlelight around our Christmas tree in our home in the Niavaran section of Tehran. Outside in the street was mayhem as military forces battled revolutionaries in a struggle that would lead to the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and give way to a new Islamic Republic led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As the violence raged, we sang Christmas carols in hope that our voices would dampen the sounds in the street.

As we held our children, two stories were being told. There was the tired old story being told in the street – a story driven by the human quest for power and dominance. It is a story as old as Cain killing his brother Abel and lives on in every place and time through formal armed conflict and in our daily lives of conflict, whether at the office, with a member of the family, or with police in riot gear in the streets. As a country whose history is steeped in war and multiple forms of conflict, we Americans know this story all too well.

The second story being told was in the words of the carols we sang. Pay attention to this verse:

Hail the heav’n born Prince of peace! Hail the Sun of Righteousness!

Light and life to all he brings, ris’n with healing in his wings.

Mild he lays his glory by, born that we no more may die,

born to raise each child of earth, born to give us second birth.

Hark! The herald angels sing, “Glory to the newborn king!”

This counter-story speaks of a God of infinite grace who comes to us not as a tyrant, bully or bearing arms but as a defenseless baby declaring amnesty to a world trapped in the consequences of our sin and participation in evil. The hymnwriter Charles Wesley stood on this side of the empty tomb and chose to already declare in a Christmas carol a crucified Jesus risen with “healing.”  The words of this carol express a gospel which brings life and light to ALL, raises up each child of earth, and makes it possible for us to experience a second birth – a do over – as people in the world. Maybe we would get it right this time.

These two stories are completely different in the worldview they present and the allegiances of each story’s followers. They both cannot be true. One cannot embrace both stories. Allegiance to one story puts you at odds with the other.

The Jesus Movement is Born

When the women first ran from the empty tomb preaching the first sermon, “Jesus is risen,” and when the Spirit would birth the Jesus movement that became the church, the early followers knew the distinction between the two stories. They knew that they were in the world but not of it. When they gathered, they confessed that the crucified and risen Jesus was Lord and not Caesar. They lived by radically different norms than the society around them and in which they still had to daily participate. When they gathered for worship, the celebration of the Eucharist was crucial for forging their identity and calling as people who not only bear witness to the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus but also to the eschatological promises the meal represents - “a foretaste of the feast to come.” The most prevalent biblical image of the outcome of the human story is that of a banquet – an all-inclusive party – in which God wipes away every tear, ends suffering and death, and swallows up everything that would divide us, demean us, or crush us. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the down payment of that promise and the Eucharist is liturgically participating in it as if the future is already here.

We know the church was eventually persecuted and endured terrorizing brutalization because of its unwillingness to declare Caesar as Lord and his empire as God-ordained. Living out of its story, the church continued to hold to the words of one of its earliest hymns:

Let the same mind be among you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself… and humbled himself…   (Philippians 2:5-8)

The Movement Gets Sick

I know something about malignancy. Were it not for a drug I take every night, I would be dead from an incurable form of leukemia. When I sat in my hematologist’s office for my first consultation after a bone marrow biopsy confirmed the malignancy, she told me I probably had had the disease for quite a while before a routine annual physical detected something wrong in my bloodwork. Two things are instructive here: 1) The disease formed in my bone marrow where blood cells are produced and where healthy cells became malignant. 2) I had the disease without knowing it. So, I lived with a lethal disease originating in the very core of my body and did not even know it.

In the early 4th Century, the bone marrow of Christianity began to get sick. In a dramatic development in the relationship of the Roman Empire to the Jesus movement, Emperor Constantine, wanting the Christian God’s assistance in battle along the empire’s perimeter, made a deal that would soon result in his mandating Christianity as the official religion of the empire. In quick order the two distinct irreconcilable stories became one. As we fast forward through western European history, the marriage resulted in the formation of the Holy Roman Empire. Bishops and secular leaders became interchangeable in their leadership of the agenda of the empire. Constantine presided over the Council at Nicaea. Bishops led armies into battle. “Onward Christian Soldiers!”

Instead of Christianity providing an alternative story out of which to live in contrast to any worldly form of power and dominance, it became a prop for the empire’s agenda. Likewise, the empire’s support of the church gave it power, a power that corrupted. The malignant church of the empire meant spiritual support for conquering and subjugating the “infidel” beyond its borders. It meant occupying, dominating, and exploiting “the other.” The agenda was carried out with the assurance that the empire’s will was the will of God. It was “us,” the superior, versus “them.”  

American Malignant Christianity

The Reformation launched in the 16th century was directed at much of the corruption within the church and eventually led to widespread reformation and counter-reformations. But as with empire Christianity, the fuel for the Reformation movement was often as much nationalism as theology. When Europeans came to America to settle, they carried the malignancy.

The conflation of an empire-formed Christianity with the sense of cosmic specialness (i.e. Manifest Destiny) held by white Americans has resulted in a deadly malignancy. It was malignant Christianity that sanctioned the genocide of native peoples, the slave trade and America’s deep sin of slavery, the deprivation of rights to women, the resistance to civil rights movements, forms of hatred and exclusion towards members of the LGBTQIA community and the Law and Order agenda. It is malignant Christianity that justifies the United States having the highest incarceration rate in the world. With 4.4% of the world’s population, the U.S. has 22% of the world’s incarcerated, with blacks having an imprisonment rate at five times that of whites.

It is also malignant Christianity that justifies our God-loving country hanging onto the death penalty, a distinction shared only with Belarus in the modern western world. It is malignant Christianity that justifies incoming travel bans against certain peoples, building a wall at our southern border, and separating immigrant children from their parents at the border. Moreover, it is malignant Christianity that is complicit in America being the most violent country in the world in terms of gun violence and gun ownership. It was just two years ago at the NRA prayer breakfast in Dallas where a keynoter wore a shirt proclaiming, “Jesus loves me and my guns” and declaring that owning an assault rifle was a God-given right.    

The hold that American Malignant Christianity has on our culture is akin to the knee that pressed down on George Floyd’s neck for almost 9 minutes. And if you think my portrait of American malignant Christianity is just hyperbole, talk to any pastor who has initiated a discussion in a God-fearing and Bible-believing church about moving the American flag out of the sanctuary. There is a reason in this turbulent season the President of the United States thought a photo of him holding a Bible would be a good idea.

Being Saved

In the 3rd chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus is visited at night by a leader of the Jewish council. His name is Nicodemus, and he is struggling to spiritually understand what Jesus is doing and saying. Jesus speaks to him about being born again. (Or being born anew or born from above. The Greek word used by Jesus can be translated multiple ways.) Malignant Christianity has taken this exchange and turned it into a form of individual salvation, even defining what one must do to make a deal with God that ensures entrance into heaven after death. Jesus was concerned with something else, the repentance of God’s people. The “you” who must be born again in the Greek text is plural. It is “you,” collective people of God. “You” must recover your identity and calling. That will take an entire rebirth. You are the ones chosen to be light to the world, showing the world how we all live on this planet in love and goodness with one another. It is through you whom all the people of the world are to be blessed. For God so loved the world that God sent the only son to save it. God did not send the son to condemn it. God did not send the son to make a deal. God sent the son to bring life and healing for all. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; we are all one in Christ Jesus. All means ALL.

Being saved means we repent from all the ways that we have tried to convince ourselves that God has aligned with our agenda and schemes and instead we align ourselves with God’s, which is to bring healing and wholeness to all the world. We must resist all forms of Malignant Christianity with treatment. Just as my nightly regimen of Imatinib shuts off my malignant cells’ ability to emit an enzyme to reproduces more malignancy, our treatment against the sickness of Malignant Christianity is Jesus – what Jesus did for us, and more importantly what he did to us. He changed everything, and we must too.

We must resist by speaking the truth. If the last two weeks have shown us anything, there is a spirit blowing through this nation. Young and old and black and white are being summoned to a movement. The church that bears witness to the crucified and risen Lord has something to say. Preachers out there, speak the truth. Do not be partisan but do be political. Jesus was political. Look at his own declared agenda. Look at his speeches. Look at those with whom he dined and embraced. Look at the systems of injustice to which he spoke “woes.” Jesus was a protestor. His Sermon on the Mount announced a change of affairs. His entry into Jerusalem was a protest march. He attack on the temple was a demonstration. He took sides with the poor, the powerless, and the disenfranchised. He spoke truth to power. He was lynched by both the government and the religious people, but God raised him up. He rose again because love and life for all people finally win.

What is it that God requires of us? To do justice, and love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God (Micah 6:8).

In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,

We Must Persist

We Must Persist

The most marginalized people in the Western Hemisphere live in Haiti, suffering from the effects of extreme poverty. With tenacity and resiliency, The Haitian Timoun Foundation is devoted to the people of Haiti to bring about a just future with life-changing impact; yet, the COVID-19 pandemic brings significant challenges.

On Monday of this week, Bryan Stevenson gave the commencement address to the new graduates of the Emory University School of Law. Stevenson is a Harvard-educated lawyer who chose to dedicate his life to addressing the structural injustices in our country, particularly in the criminal justice system. He is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (Montgomery, Alabama), the author of the bestseller, Just Mercy, and is the focus of the late 2019 movie release by the same name. In his address, Stevenson lifted up four imperatives for fighting for justice, imperatives that I find to be immediately transferable in our fight for justice and life for all people in Haiti.

1) The Power of proximity.

HTF was first imagined out of a 1997 trip to Haiti in which I both fell in love with the Haitian people and culture and at the same time was powerfully impacted by the ravaging effects of poverty and injustice. I was convicted deep down in the core of my bones. This was “not right.” You can read about Haiti in a book and see occasional newspaper articles, but it is not the same as being there. Over the years, HTF has garnered strong support from people and covenant communities because of a practice of frequent immersion trips in which we enter the lives of those we serve. Unfortunately, for almost two years those trips have abated. First there was widespread unrest and then the onset of COVID-19. In this time of distancing, HTF must figure out how to still capture the power of proximity. We pray that regular exposure to these messages might enable you, the reader, to be proximate, even if you are physically not.

2) Stay hopeful.

The real enemy of justice is hopelessness. I remember a 2008 conversation in Mirebalais with Gauthier Dieudonne, the director of the CLM project at the time the initial pilot projects were ending. He spoke of the hopelessness among Haiti’s ultra-poor women. To look into their eyes is to see the absence of life. CLM and the overall work of HTF are built on hope. Hope empowers us to believe in what we cannot yet see. It compels us to stand up and speak for what is possible. Daily we are reminded that we have seen what is possible, and we continue to believe with a hope that will not quit. We invite you to continue to hope with us.

3) Change some of the narratives we have inherited.

In 2009 on an immersion trip, a first-time participant was appalled at the mountains of trash, filth clogging waterways, and the shocking sites of poverty in Port-au-Prince. It happens. His first response was to blame the Haitians. They do not care. They really are animals. It is a view shared by many, including our current U.S. president. As the week unfolded, he began to learn Haitian history - its history of inhumane slavery, the narrative of extreme complicity of the U.S. in inflicting repeated harm on Haiti, and the U.S. propping up brutal dictatorships and exploiting Haiti. Being confronted with a different narrative and with his own experience of amazingly resourceful Haitians who are part of the HTF family resulted in a conversion experience. This person became one of HTF’s most vocal advocates, strongest financial supporter, and among the first to go to Haiti to assist with relief efforts after the devastating 2010 earthquake. A narrative that we can change right now is the notion that COVID-19 has rendered us helpless. Not true! If you have been keeping abreast of HTF’s activities in Haiti you know of our tenaciousness, resiliency, and capacity to pivot to initiatives of immediate impact.

4) Willing to do uncomfortable things.

In this global pandemic it is easy to retreat in fear and self-preservation. In a nation in which “Looking after Number One” has raised individualism to perhaps our highest value, we must continue to beat the drum for justice in Haiti. If not us, then who? No justice ever happened without the will to stand up and stand with the most marginalized, even when it is not popular or comfortable. The temptation we all face is to be so overwhelmed by the sea of pain and economic suffering right now in the U.S. that we can no longer see or care about our brothers and sisters in Haiti. May it not be so!

There is much work to do. Please help us persist.  Donate at www.htflive.org.

That all might have life!

 Rick Barger

 Founder

Will Our Faith Save Us?

America Opening Back Up

A week from today the national social distancing initiative from the White House ends. Some states, like mine, have already begun to open. Others soon will be easing restrictions. Because the hastiness to begin opening is economically and politically driven, health care gurus are aghast. Yet, there are loud voices declaring, “We’ve got to get this country opened up again. America was not built be to shut down.” And, “Americans are very resilient people. We are ready to bounce back, and when we do, it will be breathtaking! The greatest and strongest economy ever!”

So, are we all ready to bounce back? Those of you who live in my state, Georgia, are you ready to hustle over to LA Fitness and get back to normal? Anyone? Buehler?

Questions

A few weeks ago, when social distancing and stay-at-home directives began throughout the country, I had a conversation with a colleague who asked about a study done on Abiding Hope Church in Littleton Colorado in the period following the Columbine High Schools shootings. (More on that report later in this blog.) This colleague is among the most gifted and respected pastoral leaders in the ELCA. The reason for his inquiry and the subject of our conversation was out of concern for the resilience of our congregational and church leaders on the front line of ministry. It has now been over a month since we had that conversation, and the carnage of this microscopic COVID-19 terrorist continues to dramatically spread. The daily reports not only tell us that the USA leads the world in deaths; they also remind us that we are way behind other developed countries in testing and contact tracing, things health experts tell us are necessary to even begin to think about loosening stay-at-home orders. The escalating daily toll is such that by this time next week, it is conceivable that we could be approaching 1 million reported cases and 50,000 deaths. At the same time, another Great Depression could be on the horizon if something is not done to restart America’s economic engines and get people back to work and buying things.

That America is beginning to open again does not mean that people are not wary and deeply concerned. I will not speculate on your challenges and fears, but I will share mine and believe there will be some resonance with you. These are in the form of questions:

Despite what the politicians are saying should we not continue the shelter-in-place? Will I get the virus? It is highly contagious and can attack in stealth from those who have no symptoms. If I get sick, will I die? I am in the at-risk category. Will our life savings go down the tubes? What about our friends and their economic health? People are losing their jobs. What about my family and friends in Haiti? What about our little church? Can it survive with reduced giving? How long will this last? When will I be able to hug my children and grandchildren? When will I be able to work out at the Emory outdoor pool complex? When will I be able to go fishing again? When can we travel again? My grand niece’s grand wedding at the end of May has already been reduced to a private ceremony of a handful of people; what about a destination wedding at which I am the officiant on the coast of North Carolina in July? What about the promised trips we have planned with two grandsons? What about rescheduling the family trip to the UK that had to be cancelled? What about the planned trip to the beach with my lifelong college buddies? When will my beloved Wolfpack take the field again?

Resilience by Definition

Resilience means the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. It suggests a degree of toughness and grit. When describing the elasticity of an object, resilience means the ability to bounce back or spring back into shape.

Does anybody believe that we will quickly bounce back? There will be some that do, and God bless them. But for me, you absolutely cannot have the deaths that we have had, the profound grief and troubling questions triggered by each death, the trauma experienced by families and health care workers, the devastation in nursing homes, the massive economic losses and peril of many, and the politically-motivated finger-pointing and scapegoating and expect to have a quick bounce back. Perhaps most importantly, if this microscopic terrorist is left to roam without a vaccine, I simply do not see how we can quickly bounce back. The virus does not respond to pep talks and hyperbolic rhetoric.

The Abiding Hope Study

The congregation I once served in Littleton, Colorado was a “ground zero” congregation with the April 20, 1999 shootings at Columbine High School. At the time, it was the worst school shooting in American history. And to be clear, in no way am I even trying to remotely suggest that the current national carnage and “Columbine” are somehow peer events. When Johns Hopkins University reports some 27,000 deaths over the last two weeks, that is the equivalent of 1,800 Columbines. But death is death, grief is grief, and shock is shock; so, the study done of Abiding Hope is instructive.

Within a few weeks after the shootings, experts from Lutheran Disaster Response gathered ground zero congregational care givers for an all-day retreat. They began their equipping of us for the landscape that would lie ahead by saying, “In two years, none of you will be here.” They went on to say that with every community disaster, especially one as shocking as a high school shooting, congregations implode, and their pastors and other ministers move to new pastures. The profound grief, the sea of need, the daily amplification in the media, the incriminations and misdirected anger, the lawsuits, the theological questions,  other powerful dynamics associated with communal and individual grief, and the inability to escape the non-stop fallout inflict great stress on congregations and their ministers. In Littleton, the prognostication of the experts turned out to be true. Congregations imploded. Staffs left. Some still suffer from PTSD.

It was not true for Abiding Hope. The congregation deeply grieved and still holds countless stories of the individual toll it took on its members, but it also thrived. Some would argue that it was resilient, but I prefer today to say that it had the capacity to weather extreme adversity. The vitality of Abiding Hope after the shootings drew such attention from many places that think-tanks and doctoral students from different locales wanted to study the congregation. One study conducted five years later (see A New and Right Spirit, pg. 35) concluded that Abiding Hope weathered and thrived not because of it had a unique “emotional health” per se but rather because of “theological health.” The theology embedded in the congregation was a result of intentional congregational cultural architecture. It was a culture developed whereby the congregation’s members were found to be deeply grasped by the gospel of God’s crucified Messiah, Jesus, who would not stay dead because he loves us. Efforts over the years to shape and form the congregation through liturgy, congregational practices, and even the actual architectural construction of the worship space, forged the congregation into a worldview seen through the lens of the empty tomb.

The Abiding Hope form of resilience was not a quick fix. The 21st anniversary of the shootings were last week, and I still weep. My wife knows that the days surrounding the anniversary have always been difficult for me, as it also is with her. We, who shared the Columbine experience together, communicate with each other. Even as I write these words, my eyes are moist. But my eyes are also moist because the theology of the cross tells us that Jesus too took a bullet in the halls of Columbine on that day, that Jesus has joined in our own suffering and alienation and has risen beyond it. My eyes are moist because I believe in the astonishing promises of God wrought by the resurrection. Not only do love and life finally win but also Jesus has me in his grip right now. Because the tomb is empty, we weather adversity because of a lifelong orientation of courage and vision where we “fight the good fight and finish the race” (2 Timothy 4:7). What was it that Paul once wrote? “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us…” (Romans 5:3-4a)

Bounce Back to What?

In Luke’s Gospel, ten lepers approach him and cry for mercy (Luke 17:11-19). Lepers suffered from a grossly disfiguring skin disease with the added pain of being isolated in leper colonies and losing all sense of their human dignity. So, when they cry out to Jesus, they need more than just a dermatologist. They need restoration and deep healing from the physical and emotional toll being a leper. In this encounter, Jesus keeps good social distancing and directs them to go show themselves to the priests. It was the priests and not the Mayo Clinic who determined if one was clean. The story says that while they were on their way, they were indeed miraculously cleansed. But only one of them, a Samaritan, decides to not go to the priest but rather to return, gripped by profound gratitude and shouting hallelujahs at Jesus’ feet. This prompts Jesus to ask a rhetorical question about the whereabouts of the other nine. The story ends with Jesus declaring to this one cleansed person, “Get up and go your way, your faith has made you well.” The word for “made well” is a from the Greek, sōdszō, which is often translated “has saved.” Its form is in the perfect, active, indicative mood, which means that the being made well or saved is an accomplished fact.

This pronouncement Jesus made raises a question: saved from what? From what was this one cleansed leper saved? Were not all ten cleansed? The answer partly lies in the whereabouts of the nine. They are hustling down to see the priests – to offer up the same old sacrifices and go through the same worn out rituals so that they can bounce back to their business-as-usual lives just as before. Obviously, Jesus saw something in the one that was more than just his dermatological cure. Perhaps he saw that the one cleansed giving thanks also bore the marks of some good cardiology and ophthalmology work – a new heart and new eyes. Maybe Jesus is commending him for his faith saving him from going back to business-as-usual because he has been impacted by the living Messiah. “Go,” Jesus says to him. But, go where?

Where do we go when we emerge from the present state of things? Back to business-as-usual? Or will this eye-opening and heart-rending experience of seeing how COVID-19 has exposed the severe brokenness of the American “system” send us to new places? Will the good lessons learned from doing church differently in these days send us to imagining new ways of being church? I pray that our faith – our faith in the gospel of the risen Messiah – will give us the capacity to endure and to be of good courage during these days. I pray that this adversity has been such a great teacher that we emerge so differently that Jesus can say to us, “Your faith has saved you.”   

In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,

The Necessary and Possible Church - Part 2

All in This Together

Could the circumstances in which we begin “The Great Three Days” in the life of the church be more ominous?  A microscopic organism that is about one thousandth of an inch in size has brought the planet to its knees.  As such, there is one saying that is perfectly true.  We are all in this together.  As the hourly reports of rising infections, deaths, and the heart-wrenching stories of people – not just statistics – come at us, we realize that the microscopic terrorist has no conscience or boundaries.  It will attack persons of any gender, age, social location, nationality, or ethnicity; and, as with everything else, the poor and marginalized are the most vulnerable. 

Multiple times a day, I stop and pray for the health workers, grocery store clerks, mail deliverers, and others engaging in essential activities, as well as those in political leadership of both parties.  But at night when I put my head on my pillow, I pray this very familiar prayer that I personalize:

Dear Lord, to whom my heart is open, who knows my desires, and from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of my heart that I might perfectly love you…

And then I go through a familiar recitation of all the things from which I ask to be cleansed – my outrage and anger at the politicization of this pandemic, the lack of our health system and workers having what they need, and the blaming and scapegoating by people who should be leading us.  I ask that my heart be cleansed from fear I feel for those I love, for my family, for the fragile and elderly in our little church, for our country and especially the poor in Haiti, who are exposed and vulnerable like no other.  And then I move to the whole purpose of being cleansed from such thoughts and feelings: that I might perfectly love you…  Lord, let my anger, outrage, and fear be transformed into love for you – a love that translates into a love and compassion for all people in these historic days.

The Necessary Church

In my blog two weeks ago, I began to address The Necessary and Possible Church by first attending to the possible church.  It was New Testament scholar par excellence, Mark Allan Powell, who took the seemingly conflicting biblical positions of the whereabouts of Jesus and proffered the following:  The presence of Jesus makes the church possible.  The absence of Jesus makes the church necessary.

We need a story bigger than our politics, grander than our heroic relief efforts, and more powerful than the fear and uncertainty that have grasped all of us.  It is precisely the church – yes, that frequently-criticized church, and often rightly so – who is the steward of such a story.  It is a story that transcends the present day and yet lives in this day so that we might be grasped by its light and hope and have the courage to be light and hope ourselves in a time we are clearly at the mercy of things beyond our control.  It is about a crucified messiah who would not stay dead because he loves us.  For this reason, God’s stubborn love for all of us, God gave the world the church.

It does not take a whole lot of imagination to draw parallels that expose the human condition between the night in which Jesus was betrayed and living in a pandemic where the experts are telling us to “Get ready for Pearl Harbor.”  Each carry more than enough dysfunction and evil mischief among political and religious leaders. And if we look closely enough today, we might recognize the same evil, fear, and self-preservation that drove those closest to Jesus to betray, deny, and abandon him.  Little wonder that the story the necessary church tells was very early labeled “foolishness.” It has the audacity to proclaim that God’s tenacious love for the whole cosmos is infinitely bigger than our human willfulness, rebellion, and even death itself.     

The Triumph of God

On Sunday the church proclaims, Christ is risen, alleluia!  It is to proclaim the triumph of God over everything that would fragment us, cheapen us, or crush us.  The future is in the hands of the One who raised Jesus from the dead. COVID-19 and what it has done to our lives, to the economy, and what it has exposed in our inadequate political and health care systems will not have the final word.  God and God’s love and the life that God gives again and again and again will. 

To be clear, Easter is not a one-shot deal where a tragedy in ancient Palestine – rejecting and crucifying God’s Messiah – happens to have a happy ending.  It’s not a feel-good story that has become an annual springtime ritual to be celebrated and then forgotten until next year.  Though there is a lot of feel-good emotions attached with the celebration of Easter, the proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection and its implications is an objective word that comes at us no matter how we feel.  Whether we are confused, angry, doubting, depressed, fearful, or grieving, Easter yet comes to us as an unconditional promise by a God who will not quit on us.   

A Gospel of Resilience

When Jesus’ followers encountered the risen Jesus and the Holy Spirit opened to them its meaning (cf. Acts 2), they were forced to re-imagine their lives and the future to which they were called.  In one sense, nothing had really changed after Jesus was raised.  The human predicament persists.  There is no quick fix for all that is wrong, unfair, and unpredictable. Yet, everything has changed because we now know the outcome.  Biblical poets give us astonishing images of how things will ultimately turn out – i.e. Isaiah 25 and Revelation 21.  God gathers up all people – and all means ALL.  Tears are wiped away from every eye.  Death and everything else that would crush are swallowed up and are “no more.”  We all feast on real food and well-aged wines. 

Adversity does not build character.  It reveals it.  We are transformed through pain.  Resiliency, then, is the ability to carry on amid adversity.  It is the character that calls us to be our best selves when the world is falling apart and there are cacophonies of blaming, fear, and self-protection.   It is the character that reveals us to be hopeful and find everyday meaning and purpose in a world gripped by the ramifications of this global pandemic.  It is a character that can see what the world cannot see, dream for what the world cannot dream and work for what the world is unwilling to work because it has been forged by a delight in the fact that God has raised Jesus from the dead.

Communities of Anticipation

Not only is the church necessary during these days, its defining ritual in a meal of bread and wine is also.  The wonders of cyber-technology enable us to celebrate this meal together even while under stay-at-home directives.  It is in this meal that we eat and drink the cry of the church from the very beginning:

Christ has died!  Christ is risen!  Christ will come again!

In this meal we submit ourselves to both the night of betrayal and to the promised future.  It was the late great theologian Walter Bouman who taught that the bread we break and the wine we drink are relics from the future.  We know how the story ends.  We know that there is no station so dark, no news so fearful, no station in life so devoid of hope that God has not already entered into it, changed it and opened up to us God’s future of love and life that win in the end. 

No matter where you are or the circumstances in which you find yourselves, the saying of the psalmist (Psalm 118) calls us to resurrection lives today – right here and right now!

This is the day the Lord has made!

Let us rejoice and be glad in it!

In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,

A Case for Virtual Communion

While we are experiencing stay-at-home directives and the church cannot physically gather, here is a voice that greatly adds to the conversation about virtual communion.  It is informed by biblical hope, the Lutheran confessions, and contextual relevance.  Doug Hill is the lead pastor at Abiding Hope Church in Littleton, Colorado.  He earned his MDiv at Trinity Lutheran Seminary (Columbus, Ohio) and his DMin at San Francisco Theological Seminary (San Anselmo, California). He leads The Anchor Church movement for the purpose of revitalizing congregations. He will soon have a book released by Fortress Press on intentional cultural architecture.

A Historic Time

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is a truly historic time for our world, our nation, and our church. The global pandemic of COVID-19 calls for all of us to stay home not only for self-protection, but in the name of love toward neighbor. Because we as a church support doing what is best for the common good, our denomination along with many others have called for congregations not to hold gatherings in person, including worship. This has necessarily led to the creation of online resources for worship, small group gatherings, at-home confirmation curricula, and more.

Whether to Engage in Virtual Communion

The streaming of worship has generated a conversation regarding whether to engage in virtual communion or to abstain from communion until the time when the church can gather again in person. I have read several documents from bishops’ offices and seminaries making cases on both sides of the question. As someone who is choosing to conduct virtual communion as part of our online worship experience, I have been troubled by much of what I’ve read. I believe that we need to be respectful and loving to one another as we engage in this discussion and so forgive me if anything I write crosses the line as I am very passionate about this topic.

Contra-Arguments are Troublesome

Many of the documents I’ve read do not even come close to representing the meaning, significance, purpose, or practice of virtual communion. I feel personally misunderstood and misrepresented by the innuendos presented by some that conducting virtual communion will degrade the meaning of the Eucharist. Such an argument utilizes a fallacious slippery-slope logic based in fear. Do we really believe that when this pandemic is over, everyone participating in online worship will stop attending churches and instead choose to have communion alone at home? The very reason that people are participating in online worship and virtual communion is to feel a sense of connection to their faith community through this time of forced isolation. 

What is the Church?

Article VII of the Augsburg Confessions, a core foundational document for Lutherans, states that the Christian church is where the Gospel is preached in its purity and the sacraments are administered according to the Gospel. What makes us church is the proclamation of the word AND the administration of the sacraments. Both are necessary! This means that WITHOUT the proclamation of the Word AND/OR the administration of the sacraments, we are not Church! 

The ELCA came to recognize that it was theologically flawed for American congregations only to conduct communion a few times a year (which is how I grew up in a large congregation in Pennsylvania) and so over the past thirty or so years, the ELCA has called for weekly Eucharist. If the reasoning about the sufficiency of grace through the proclaimed Word alone is valid, as some are attesting, then there would have been no need for such an emphatic emphasis within the ELCA.

Jesus and the Efficacy of the Meal

 If grace is sufficient without the meal, then why did Jesus institute it? Why not just preach and sing for worship? Because there’s something the meal does that nothing else can do as well. The meal joins us as One and points us toward a day when all will be included, tears will be wiped from all faces, death will be swallowed up, and we will be drawn into the new creation (see Isaiah 25:6-10a and Revelation 21:4). It’s the meal that draws us into lives of prolepsis in which the promised future is lived fully today. We are to live the eschatological feast (Oneness with God, humanity, and Creation) in all that we are and do.

Virtual Communion Live

When our congregation engages in virtual worship, the attendees are free to comment in real time. They greet one another, offer comments on the scripture, liturgy, music, sermon, offer prayers for one another, share peace with one another, and finally commune together. All of this occurs through the blessing of technology. It IS community. It’s not fake. It’s not a show or performance. It IS the assembly of God’s people.

Don’t we believe that the meal transcends time and space so that when we participate in the Eucharist, we are participating in the eschatological feast with all of God’s people across the globe past, present, and future? That’s what Dr. Walter Bouman taught us in systematic theology at Trinity Lutheran Seminary. If that’s true, then it transcends the space between computer screens, kitchens, and family rooms. And I believe, even transcends the time between the recording of the service and when someone receives it. 

The Confusion with Home Communion

Furthermore, some of the documents I’ve read advocate for us taking “home communion” to the sick or dying. Here in Colorado, even though churches have been deemed to be “essential,” we are not permitted to enter nursing homes, hospitals, or hospice centers during this crisis. We are forced to pray with people via Zoom or phone. We cannot deliver “home communion.” It’s forbidden.

A Great Time to be the Church

This is a great time to be the church, to stand as witness to a suffering God not in some palace light years away, but right here, right now. This is the witness of the Eucharist assuring us that regardless of what we might be facing, we are one with God, one another, and all of Creation. That IS the Gospel. May all be filled with hope and trust in this very good news!

With abiding hope,

Pastor Doug Hill