PeaceBang

Yet More On the Brown Bags

I knew that The Lively Tradition would have wise things to say about this issue.

Also, BoyInTheBands
is his usual honest and refreshing self, and his commenters make terrific points.

Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

Oh! Oh!
I almost forgot to tell you how much I enjoyed Assassination Vacation!!

Very interesting, very snarky, but not so much that you couldn’t tell how much Vowell truly loves American history.

When she referred to Robert Todd Lincoln as “Jinxy McDeath” (for reasons you’ll have to read the book to find out), I literally blew water out of my nose. In my hotel bed in Nashville.

Actually, Vowell’s book did make me reflect on the prevalence of that writing style: very snarky, very off-handedly confessional, very clever. Will these books age well, I wonder?

I’ve turned off the comments for the time being because I’m teaching a 3-hour class every day over the next ten days and I need to focus. Writing a blog helps me download distracting thoughts: reading, trying to make sense of and respond to comments on them does not. Don’t take it personally, I love ya anyway.

So, Is This About Anti-Oppression, Or Is This About School Spirit?

Here, I think we get to a very important element of the great Brown Bag debate. Andy, seminarian at Starr King, writes this post, full of anger and hurt about what I, an “apparent” UU Minister in the Northeast (Hi Andy, I’m Victoria Weinstein. I was ordained 10 years ago and I’ve served our congregations in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Massachusetts. No “apparent” about it) have written about a situation that occurred at SKSM.

Andy doesn’t explain how the term “brown bag lunch” is hurtful or racist when used in a campus context. Because it’s really not about that, is it? What Andy does is call me haughty and self-satisfied and then (I love this!) proceed to quote JESUS HIMSELF in an effort to smack down the Big Bad Bang. Along the way, of course, he calls me names and, um, insinuates that I’m a pig (”you shall not cast your pearls before swine.”).

Andy, knowing a good rhetorical flourish when he sees one, even copies my original ending asking for an AMEN.

And then… and I think I love this even more … someone comments that he’s AWESOME, speaking a “powerful language of love.” It sure is powerful. I’m definitely feeling the love out here on the East Coast.

The thing is, and I think this is really important and I’m going to try to say it in a sincere tone even — it always hurts when people outside your community hear about something you do within it and use their God-given freedom to interpret its meaning in a way that doesn’t square with your best impressions of yourself.

When I wrote that post, I wasn’t thinking about Starr King as a whole school. I was thinking, and writing about, one small group of people (or even an individual), who made what I think was a wildly illogical conclusion about a certain trio of words. But boy howdy, I sure am thinking about the school as a whole now.

I got cracked at by several critical commenters for telling the truth about blogs, which is that they’re not the ideal forum for in-depth conversations on important issues. What they’re best at, since I wasn’t clear enough, is trenchant commentary on various issues that pique the interest or get the goat of the individual blogger. As I watch this “conversation” deteriorate in the comments into “YOU don’t get it,” — “No, YOU don’t get it,” dynamics, I have to shrug and say, “Well, there you go. It was just a matter of time before someone pulled out the Gospel of Matthew and called me a pig, or a plank-eye.

(Rev. Sean is never like that, though, and he’s written a really informative opposing post here.)

I also think Fausto makes a nice contribution, weighing in at The Socinian. Don’t go there if you hated what I had to say: you’ll just hate him even more.

And I just caught up with Chalice Chick, who sadly says she’s not “qualified” to discuss the brown bag lunch controversy (why not? Because she’s “just” one of the active Unitarian Universalist laypeople to whom our seminarians hope to serve in ministry one day? Hey, CC? Whattup?), discusses it perfectly well right here.

I Was Dang Happy To Be There

The Festival of Homiletics was absolutely wonderful. I was beyond thrilled to get to hear William Willimon, Barbara Brown Taylor, Fred Craddock and James Forbes in person after intensely admiring them from a distance for so many years. Craddock and Taylor in particular totally inspired me. You know how you love someone’s writing so much, and you form a vision and an inner voice in your imagination that you associate with them? And it’s pretty idealized? Then when you see them in person you find that they’re a little less charismatic or a little less articulate or a little less completely inspiring and impressive than you had imagined?

Well, that didn’t happen at all at this conference. Barbara Brown Taylor is graciousness on toast — she embodies her own message in an entirely authentic, grounded, beautiful way, plus she’s freaking brilliant — and Fred Craddock was even better than anything I could have made up in my own head. It’s hard for me to believe that someone could be that much of a cornpone character without having it be a contrived, homey kind of act, but Fred Craddock is the real deal. He just happens to be Elmer Fudd meets Martin Luther King. It’s just who he is. He’s the kind of preacher that you hear is a national treasure and you think, “Oh yea, I bet… I bet he has an ego a mile wide under all that charm and talent and Christian wisdom.” And then you hear Craddock and you sit there all laughed out and also feeling like you just ate the most delicious spiritual meal, and also a little heartbroken — because he does all those things — and you think, “You know what? This man is a national treasure.” I’ve been listening to a recording his sermon about the hyperbolic nature of God (and of preaching) for days now. Again and again. I still laugh and cry.

James Forbes did this thing where he kind of acted like a charming, slightly befuddled old man and just as you were relaxed and in the palm of his hand and feeling all comfortable there, WHOMP, he got sharp as a tack, direct, organized, challenging, convicting. It was breathtaking. Like fun he’s a befuddled old man. We should all be so old and befuddled.

Willimon… well, I just have a big crush on William Willimon. I’ve loved his books for a long time, which read as though the author is a very cranky, very stern old guy. But it turns out that in person Willimon is a total wiseacre and also, in my opinion, a dreamboat. Don’t you think I’d be a good Southern bishop’s wife? Can someone arrange this?

If anyone can finally make a Trinitarian out of me, it is Willimon. “The Trinity moves !” He talked about how God changes people through preaching, and he had me at “The title of this lecture is a joke. I don’t know how God changes people through preaching.” He was, for me, the most quotable of the speakers. I’ll be cracking his jokes and telling his stories for years.
Here he is, Bishop Dreamboat:

The only disappointment of the conference — and it was a big one — was Brian McLaren’s worship and lecture. There were so many things wrong with it for me, I hardly know where to start, but let me just say that if that’s the big star of the Emergent Church movement, I’m a lot less interested in the Emergent Church movement than I was two weeks ago.

I hope that the Emergent Church movement has many tendrils, and that Brian McLaren and the group vivid are just one branch on the tree. Still, his presentation and worship felt to me slick, manipulative, intellectually insulting and just badly planned. For one thing, it’s painful when a major proponent of “plugged in” worship stands there with a clicker in his hand trying to get the lyrics to the next hymn on the screen and failing. THUMP. Talk about killing the momentum of a service. Also, I don’t want to see the preacher’s sermon outline on a movie screen while he’s preaching. Especially not when it’s full of typos. It’s distracting and for some strange reason, depressing.

I also don’t know what I’m supposed to get from a kid running the Mac standing up there in big sunglasses and a friar’s robe. I am guessing that it’s supposed to look hip and ancient at the same time, but to me it just looked like a Halloween costume. Like a mockery.

Music that is the aural equivalent of Thomas Kincaid, Painter of Light, is not my thing. I can think of no other way to describe some of the music we heard at the conference — some of it sounded to me like a teenaged girl’s journal set to random piano chords, and not in a good way. If we love Jesus, I don’t know why we have to whine about it and use breathy babydoll tones, that’s all I’m saying. I think this is a trend in Christian worship that I hope, dear Lord, will be a short one.

Also, I don’t feel that droning repetition of the same musical phrases necessarily brings us all to to a deep, meditative place. It just brings some of us to a deeply irritated place, especially when the vocals are nasally and flat. I love Taize and chanting, but this just felt like nerve-wracking, insistent repetition. Maybe some of the musical folk out there can explain why this sometimes feels so transcendent and sometimes feels like a punishment (”We are going to repeat this phrase SO MANY TIMES, you are GOING to have a spiritual experience! Whether you like it or NOT!”).

Okay, ’nuff said on music. It’s just that music is so important to me, and when it’s not done well I find that so very, very disappointing. McLaren told some good stories. But he also contradicted himself in a fairly significant way, and I went away feeling that there was a lot of style but not a lot of substance.

Way on the other end of the substance spectrum, Walter Bruegemann gave a dense, genius talk on prophetic ministry and frankly, I’m going to have to listen to it again before I can say anything about it beyond, “Man, that was powerful.” I’m still working through my notes and looking up all the Scripture passages that he cited, digging into his thesis and trying to understand it better. I got the tape so I can listen to it again.

Bishop Vashti McKenzie did a beautiful sermon on the last day, using a lot of call and response techniques and other classic A.M.E. methods, and to tell the truth I couldn’t so much enter into the ministry of what she was doing as sit back and admire how she was doing it. It wasn’t until later, when I had some distance from her mammoth energy and volume, that the emotional impact of her message hit me, which was like getting a good thing twice. “What are you willing to believe God FOR?”

Rev. Grace Imathiu gave us a fantastic closing sermon with one of those great African stories only someone who speaks the language can tell, but which you wish you could share with your own congregation, and we did a really cool Litany of Thanksgiving and Acclamation where we sang “Amen” in between phrases. I loved it. And we also sang the Lord’s Prayer, which I also loved.

And when we took Communion together, I have never before felt so much part of a community of disciples. Usually, I look around and wonder how everyone is doing in their individual relationship with God and Christ. This time I looked around and thought to myself, “Lord, what a mess we all are, just as pathetic as the original disciples. I am so damned happy to be here.”

I went away not exactly thinking I was the worst preacher that ever lived, but certainly convinced that I’ve been doing it all wrong every Sunday for the past decade. Which I think is probably a totally fine reaction to have after you’ve attended your first Festival of Homiletics.

The Onion: Not Funny, Just Very Sad

This is The Onion trying to be funny, but I found it incredibly sad.

Scott, remember when we saw the panda in DC together?

Brown Bag Lunch

So let me get this straight. Because of an old, racist practice of determining someone’s acceptable level of “whiteness” by using a brown bag, the folks at the Starr King School For the Ministry are now banishing the term “brown bag lunch” from their collective vocabulary?

Of course it makes no difference at all that the totally benign practice of bringing a brown bag lunch to a gathering has nothing whatsoever under heaven to do with the pernicious old use of brown bags… but you know, we’re fighting oppression here. So brown bags are out. I don’t know what I’ll use to take out Ermengarde’s poop now; maybe little plastic produce bags. But that’s not sustainable. So we’re in a bit of a bind now. How can I assure that when I ask the cat sitter to scoop Erm’s poops into the brown bags in the mud room, she won’t be offended or oppressed? It might stir up a bad association. It certainly will for me, thinking of students at Starr King, who have so many things to learn about ministry (none of which I heard mentioned in their latest YouTube testimonial, by the way) using up their precious brain cells remembering not to use the words “brown” and “bag” next to each other in a sentence.

The world is awfully full of oppression for those folks. I wonder if it’s got any grace at all in it? Without their help, I mean?

This reminds me of something the dishy Bishop William Willimon said at the Festival of Homiletics last week. He told the story of a woman who came to talk to him after a sermon — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she came to confront him after a sermon. She said, “Pastor, you told us today that Jesus said we must forgive our enemies seventy times seven. Do you mean to tell me that I’m supposed to forgive my husband who abused me and made my life a living hell for ten years?”

And Willimon clutched.
“Ah,” he said. And “Well, uh, they only give us twenty minutes for these things, you know… and of course we can’t cover all the exceptions… and spousal abuse is a terrible evil.”

The woman waited.

He continued. “But, well, that seventy times seven thing. That does seem to be the kind of thing that Jesus said.”

And the woman said, “Thank you. I just wanted to make sure.”

Willimon told this story and he said, “You see, I looked at this woman and I saw a victim. Jesus looked at this woman and he saw a disciple.”

Unitarian Universalists, do I hear an “amen?”

Prayers Out Of Prison

A woman from my congregation has been supporting a prisoner who is a participant in the College Behind Bars program. Volunteers from our congregation support four such prisoners, actually, through Partakers Prison Ministry. They visit, they write, they advocate, they go to amazing lengths to do what they can to help these folks succeed.

Anyway, this one woman’s sister is very ill with a rapidly-advancing cancer, and she received a card in the mail from the prisoner she supports, signed by 28 men, all with the most beautiful heartfelt expressions of love, hope and faith — and all speaking of the love of God or of Jesus Christ. We were both blown away by the beauty of it.

I thought, “This is the gospel. That convicted felons who have been dismissed by society know that they have something to give someone in pain, and that they feel empowered by God to give it. This is the gospel: that these men have faith that their prayers matter, that they can reach out to this sister no matter where they are, no matter who the world says they are.”

Sure, as a Unitarian Universalist, I could tell those men that they all have inherent worth and dignity and that they have minds of their own and consciences they can cultivate and radical freedom that the legal system can never take away. But somehow I just don’t think that’s ever going to be as impressive as the message that someone actually died for them as a means of communicating the same truth to their souls.

Do you know what I mean?

It’s one thing when I and my big mouth show up and say this to them. But when Jesus says it, and then suffers the whip and then the Cross to underscore that he really means it, I don’t think anyone is listening to my big mouth at that point.

Yea, I used to be offended by the idea that Jesus DIED FOR YOU, too. Not anymore. I don’t cotton to the atonement concept, that he died for our sins. But did he die for us? Yes: in the way that Bishop Oscar Romero died for us. In the way that Rabbi Akiva died for us. In the way that Viola Liuzzo and Katherine Vogel (Catherine Weygel) died for us. People who live out the integrity of God’s call in their lives knowing that doing so puts them in great danger could all be said to die “for us.”

As I get older and see how commonplace it is to give away one’s convictions for something easier, how easy it is to sell oneself out for a steady paycheck (an honest fear among most pastors I know), how typical it is to respond to threats of all kinds with violence and fear-mongering, I have more appreciation for those who give their lives away to prove that things can be different, deeper, and more God-filled. So it no longer bothers me to say that Jesus died for me. He said he would, and he also promised to be with us unto the end of time, and it just so happens that I believe him on both counts.

What UUs who refuse to truck in theology but try to do social justice work with oppressed communities don’t get is that they can orate all they want about inherent worth and dignity, but when they do, they’re just another person with another idea. And big deal. When you’re a member of an oppressed community, why should you listen to another person with another idea? But when you say, “I come in the name of God to tell you that you are a valuable human being worthy of receiving grace,” well, then you’re not just speaking for yourself, but making a faith claim about how the cosmos is ordered by a divine reality far greater than yourself. You’re not just sharing a personal opinion, you’re communicating something you deeply believe is an ontological reality that you feel called to help manifest in the world.

Now, I have good evidence that non-theists also deeply believe that the value of every human life is an ontological reality that they feel called to help manifest in the world, but the sacred stories they have to back it up are only somewhat as compelling as the Christian story. And the forms of prayer and worship they have to back it up… well, honey, they just can’t compare !

I have no argument with those who say that Christianity is a crime and an offense against humanity and they’d like to abolish it. They’re welcome to try. I’m interested to see how it goes. If there’s no real holiness and no real cosmic relevance to the Christian story, I’m sure it will go, and should go. Maybe that’s the future. But in the meantime, show me your new, godless forms of worship (or whatever you’d like to call it) and I’ll let you know if I can get aboard your ship. Given that most of the humans that ever walked this planet seemed pretty fond of regular worship of some God/s or another– and may even be genetically programmed to want and need worship — your new God-free society is going to have to offer something pretty spectacular by way of replacement. I don’t have much hope for it but as I say, I’m interested to see how it goes.

Meanwhile, I’m glad those prisoners have their Jesus.* As many wonderful volunteers as are out there in the world working with prisoners, it would take twenty times twenty that number to reach them in the way that Jesus reaches them.

*P.S. I’m also glad I have my Jesus. I forgot to say that.

You Can Give Me A Noogie Later

I got an “A” on my last paper.

There Goes The Neighborhood

I’m not sure what’s going on with the birds, but the air-conditioning unit in my bedroom has become a rowdy bird bar with constant drunken bird brawls. What are they fighting over, I’d like to know? And why do they have to wake me and my cat up doing it?

Ermengarde and I hear them going at it at 4AM, then 5 AM, then 6 AM, screaming their heads off and ripping at feathers and we look at each other, totally baffled. We feel like camp counselors who got a really bad cabin of campers. “You guys– just GO BACK TO SLEEP, willya?”

I feel like the “concierge” in Mel Brook’s movie “The Producers,” who, when Bialystock and Bloom try to get into the tenament apartment to see Franz Liebchen, sticks her head out the window and pronounces — in the thickest Brooklyn accent imaginable — “I’m the concierge. My husband used to be the concierge, but he’s dead. Now I’m the concierge.” And when the two gents ask to see Liebchen, she responds, “Oh, the Kraut? He’s up on the roof with his boids. He keeps boids. Dirty, disgusting, filthy, lice-ridden boids. You used to be able to sit on the stoop, like a poy-son. Not any more, no sir. Boids. You catch my drift?”

“We get it, we get your drift, madam,” responds Bialystock.
To which she says, “I’m not a madam! I’m a concierge!”

Those boids are making me crazy. Stupid old dinosaur heads. Someone should take the car keys from all of them, and ground them too for good measure.

Maybe The Devil Made Him Do It, But What’s Your Excuse, Lady?

Perhaps by now you’ve heard the story of the father who burned his 2-month old daughter in the hotel microwave? He claims that it was stress, but his supportive, loving wife says that it was Satan’s doing– that Satan was threatened by his efforts to become a minister or some such thing. She says that daddy LOVES his baby and would never hurt her. Well madam, don’t you get the Mother Of The Year Award?

“He’s the worst scum of the earth,” says the guy on this video, and there’s a refreshing clarity in that assessment, I’d say.

But of course, that would upset some UUs, who have this notion that “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” means that no matter what we do with our God-given freedom, we can never forfeit our essential and innate dignity.

Um, I’d say that microwaving your kid manages to do that pretty well, though. Of course this guy might be delusional and mentally ill, but what excuse can you make for the wife?

That was a rhetorical question, by the way. I’m really hoping no one writes in to talk about Dingbat Permissive Wife Syndrome or Pathologically Supportive Spouse Disease or anything like that. Because I’m sticking to my opinion that these two shouldn’t be trusted to take care of a schnauzer, let alone a child.

Poor, poor baby.

[I’m on my way to Nashville right now. This post was authored on 5/20/07 - PB]