So I just got done with my post about Desmond Tutu’s comments (which are quite old, in fact; he’s been on this tack for years) when I did something I am drawn to do often: I searched out the people who thought he was dead wrong. No surprise here, they were easy to find. Many people were nice enough to think that as an Archbishop, Tutu had meant well, but that these days they didn’t “Know which bible he was reading.” Some called him a serpent. Others quoted scripture saying that in late times there will be many who lead you astray… do not be fooled. What stood out for me was a writing style I have seen many times in my little excursions into “the other side” of debates over religious law and what God thinks of what.

But first: read these little sections from a researcher in Norway about PowerPoint. (I’m trying to plan and help execute a teaching unit about how to use the software in a meaningful way.) Then (and this will be challenging, or wrong, maybe), I want us to think of the lectionary and how people are “taught” the Bible.

seminar.net – The Rhetoric of PowerPoint:

“PowerPoint is therefore not just an alternative method of teaching and giving presentations. For as culture critic Neil Postman (1985) states, any technology is also an ideology. And Microsoft’s presentation software is a technology which fundamentally changes our way of communicating and thereby of thinking – even without our being aware of the change.

• The software makes us think and speak in isolated blocks, instead of in coherent context, totalities, narratives or linear reasoning.

• Each block makes us think and speak in concise, discrete and hierarchizing sections and points.

• The software encourages us to use particular forms of visual material and defined formats and to use ready-made visual material and animations, even if they have no clear relevance to what is being said.

• The software invites ritual conformity of visual style.”

seminar.net – The Rhetoric of PowerPoint:

“In the third place, bullet points omit and suppress important lines of reasoning as to how something works and is interconnected.

When bullets in imperative form baldly command us to increase our share of the market by 25%, profits by 30% and introduce new products; the complex relationship between organization, market and customers remains understated and unexplained. Relationships of this nature are much better described through complete sentences with both subjects and verbs.

Tufte not surprisingly concurs. Instead of merely postulating briefly that we must introduce new products, he writes, we should rather say

who might do it and how, when, and where they might do it. Then several sentences together in a row, a narrative, could spell out the specific methods and processes by which the generic feel-good goals of mission statement might be achieved (Tufte 2003: 6).”

Don’t skip ahead, I’ve got lots to say on this.

Tutu: Discrimination Against Gay People Is Like Apartheid:

“I am deeply, deeply distressed that in the face of the most horrendous problems – we’ve got poverty, we’ve got conflict and war, we’ve got HIV/AIDS – and what do we concentrate on? We concentrate on what you are doing in bed.”

– Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town

This man is freakin’ genius. Newsweek had pretty good feature a while back on how even those in American evangelical settings who still have issues with homosexuality are waking up to the fact that, at the very least, they should prioritize people who are actively dying and suffering before we argue about our differing opinions about sexuality. In Africa, where there is open conflict between Muslim and Christian, a statement like this is risky and meaningful. Trying to focus on the things that are vital for people of all faiths keeps the dialogue open.

For me this reminds me of Matthew 15, where Jesus has to explain to Pharisees that the old ways of thinking about ritual cleanliness will be rejected. (Although I’m not sure if it is the old traditions or the Pharisees themselves that Jesus means to call “blind guides.”) Of course, as Roman and Jewish Christians came into more and more conflict, this debate between adherents of “The Law” of the Hebrew Bible versus the Gentiles would amplify. To me, it seems very clear that a lot of us in the world have gotten confused between faith and adherence to religious law. How can we instead allow our faith to keep us alert to the changing face of our earth, ourselves as a people, and our relationship with God?

Always interesting to see the diversity of the UCC’s call to social justice. I, of course, knew nothing about the School of the Americas. From my limited research, it seems like these were the fine folks who trained a vast number of folks in South America in military tactics. (Read: Death Squads.) I feel largely blind to most of the turmoil in South America. Considering the rise of Chavez, I think that blindness is epidemic in the US, and we have yet again allowed dialogue to atrophy to the point that extremism flourishes. *Sigh* It’s Monday.

Chicago pastor sentenced to 60 days in federal prison for SOA civil disobedience:

The Rev. Don Coleman, a UCC minister in Chicago, was sentenced to 60 days in federal prison on Jan. 29…

I’d be really interested to see what anyone else besides Sarah and I have to say about the recent media-gasm over the “New Atheists.” I’ve just finished reading Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation, and I won’t lie, it made me mad at points (that I’ll talk about later.) Mostly, I can’t stand his assertion that either people believe in the supremacy of the Bible as the literal word of God, in which case he thinks you’re wrong, or if you are still a self-identifying Christian who thinks that the Bible is just another text, you have misunderstood Christianity, and should go to your room and think about what you’ve done.

Other folks have said it better, but I’ll say, as far as I’m concerned: The Bible is a collection of texts written by faithful people in an attempt to collect and make sense of the best available information about the ever changing relationship between the people and their God. Yes, there are people who think that if you don’t believe that Jesus is your personal Lord and Savior, you’re going to a big place underground with lots of fire. For me, Christ provides a powerful historical and philosophical framework for understanding where humanity has been and where we’re going, but that certainly doesn’t limit the possibility of there being thousands of other routes to the same sort of clarity.

Surely, there has to be a reason for all of us to be so concerned with a framework that for Harris is damaging, obscene, and futile. Is the best scientific reasoning simply that we all haven’t had a chance to think about our faith, or we’re simply of a lower form of intellect? Statistically speaking, there’s got to be a reason we all find solace in the same acts of worship. Hey, bats are magnetic, so maybe there’s a perfectly good explanation for all of this.

“Letter to a Christian Nation” (Sam Harris)

So if you’re from a more hierarchically aerodynamic religious tradition (read: Catholic, and – until recently – Anglican/Episcopalian), this part gets a little strange. The United Church of Christ maintains its congregationalist roots by having the fundamental structure of the larger “Church” being any local church. Instead of a single, large organization leading many smaller organizations (Honcho -> Cardinal -> Bishop -> Local Clergy), the UCC’s local congregations are all autonomous… but not.

As far as I know, all congregations of the UCC are members of an association (just a collection of congregations led by the whole of the association’s clergy). Those associations are then part of a larger “conference” which then sends representatives to the UCC General Synod where we debate issues like “Is Jesus Christ our sovereign Lord?” for long periods of time. (Like lawmakers, when you see a proposal for something that seems simple or obvious it usually means there’s a hidden agenda… it’s in that last question, you just have to want it a bit. Anyway, that was a BIG issue.)

SO: I belong to The Church of the Redeemer of the New Haven Association of the Connecticut Conference of The United Church of Christ, If you want to get technical.

Now, I understand the UCC to be a bunch of churches and administration in conversation with each other, not a leadership telling the churches what to do, so the local church stays the real guts of the life of the (big ‘C’) Church. Except for:

In-Care Students.

The local church approves of the candidate (or may not), but then the Association governs the in-care process. That’s who you are “in-care” of. The Association accepts you into care, assigns an advisor for you from within its ranks, and has regular meetings with you to follow your process through divinity school, and eventually, ordination. Well, actually a committee, hilariously enough called The Committee on Ministry does all of that in the name of the Association, but hey, who’s counting.

Side note: The Association also is who shows up and installs or ordains your minister in a local church.

House cleaning: I’m going to try and stick to Thursdays for posts, the school year is getting a bit more hectic.

“A student in care of an Association is a member of the United Church of Christ who has been called by God and who, under the care of the member’s Association, is preparing for the ordained Christian ministry. “

– The United Church of Christ Manual on Ministry (Section 2, p. 1)

Right. Well, I suppose we had to get the generic boiler-plate stuff in here at the beginning. “Called by God…” I guess I just feel like meditating on this for a bit, because I don’t know of anything like what’s described in all of the generic definitions of the need to enter ministry. It’s always tempting to excuse myself by using scriptural literalism as the divining tool. Moses got a burning bush. The Apostles got Christ, the Resurrection, and, of course, their own tongues of flame to encourage them. For every other person since (as near as I can tell) we’ve had this remaining image of vocation. We’re all happy and post-renaissance now, so we use that word to describe our job (happily assuming that we all get to do what we’re “supposed to do” in life.) It used to be that only folks in ministry received a calling.

Some people (good-natured-ly enough) have thought to ask me if I actually heard a voice before I decided to pursue this path. To which I can only say:

Yeesh.

Not so much. Now, I have no idea how it’s been throughout the centuries, but from my limited polling on the question, 0% of ordained clergy that I know report hearing a literally understood “voice” before they enter service. This, I feel secure in saying, is a GOOD THING(TM).

Nonetheless, sometimes I really could use a serious talking-to. Part of this process that is so painful to me is that despite my intense desire to pursue this, I don’t feel any “holier” than I did last year. Sometimes, I feel worse. I feel even more confused by a God who seems to want to put me in place to enter the ministry while still having failed to fundamentally change my spirit and my mind from someone who experiences bouts of paralyzing uncertainty, fear, guilt, and shame, to someone that leverages those traits in others into love. I feel inadequate to the task – some sort of pretender. I feel like I’ve been taking a course on algebra, and now, arriving for the final exam, find that I’m expected to be conversant in late medieval poetry.

Here’s what I CAN say: My experience as a person haunted by all of the personal demons listed above breaks my heart with compassion for all of the others in such similar condition, and even more for the people victimized by the by-products of those demons. I’m so aware of my own healing wounds, with all their itching, scarring, binding together, that I quite simply sense a personal inertia to help others reach towards that healing for themselves. (Physics metaphors are big where I come from.) The sensation is somewhere in inertia though, the tug at your physical core when you turn a corner, go over a hill, stop suddenly in your car.

I DON’T have a blind certainty that I can help all those that ask me. I’m no “Solo Christo” guy. I think that there are many powerful trends in our modern world that hope to reach out and heal some of the emotional damage that we all do to each other. I know what works for me, and I’m committed to sharing that with anyone who will listen. I’m far from perfect, so I’m no example to be held up. Also, there’s a dangerous under-current under my previous paragraph: Will I NEED to help other people in order to feel good, successful in my mission, blessed? If so, I suspect I won’t last long.

Henri Nouwen talks a lot about all of these sorts of things in his book, The Wounded Healer, which, go figure, I just read on Wednesday. One of the most intriguing things I got out of it was this notion of personal loneliness. Nouwen essentially posits that there is a core of loneliness that is part of our humanity, no matter how many people we surround ourselves with, no matter how much we love our families or our spouses. One of its real dangers is the false belief that anyone or anything can be the cure or filling up of that loneliness. (Interesting and timely for the guy who’s getting married.) In fact, Nouwen suggests that ministers need to cultivate and leave that loneliness aching at our cores, so that it might help us to reach out even more in compassion to all those around us who ache just the same, but who might not yet know that there is good news. There is someone who doesn’t come to fill that emptiness, but who can enter it, know our growling fear, doubt, and dark loneliness, and quite possibly even talk to it. Suddenly we’re all hearing voices.

“The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society” (Henri Nouwen)

So, despite all the above multi-denominational stuff I posted about before, and the theoretical definition from J.E., what are the deacons to me at this point? The way I was convinced to join was with the tag line: “The Deacons are the committee charged with overseeing the spiritual life of the church.”

For me, that’s a big draw.

Now, you might notice that the above statement is pretty broad. You would be right. Because it’s a church, there’s not much that doesn’t fall under the spiritual life of the congregation. Sometimes it seems like the Trustees have it easy; they’re just in charge of the building and plant of the church. (anyone who’s ever had to manage a physical building just either laughed or gritted their teeth hard. It’s OK folks, now just imagine doing it by committee…) The deacons get all the things that happen in the church. That’s not true of course, but in several places it’s much more clearly defined. (Music, anyone?)

In our church, this has led to a little bit of responsibility bloat for our board of deacons. Since Christian hospitality aids the sense of spiritual communion, the organizing of any and all congregational soirées crept onto the radar. Obviously, the deacons have a call to assist the pastor and staff in the preparation, organization, and performance of worship. And… since bringing up new leaders in the church helps define the spiritual future for the congregation, the deacons are tasked with overseeing the In-Care candidates associated with The Church of the Redeemer.

Which, hopefully, will be me.

So… I have to leave the deacons.

Today a kid went looking for images for his “Travel Brochure” (a project we do as part of a humanities class in which kids learn everything they can about a country and make a mock brochure about it.) What he found was a good reason why you wouldn’t want to travel to his particular country: people literally starving to death. At 11, you don’t really have too much experience with this, and so he was actually kind of amazed that the emaciated bodies in front of him were actually live people. This realization of course led him to the slightly ridiculous notion that he should share the image he found – now bizarrely titled “this is cool.jpg” – with every other classmate’s file-share.

My first thought, of course, was: “Thanks again, Google safe-search!”

My second thought was that of course you want that image everywhere. Now, “this is cool.jpg” isn’t even beginning to be respectful and understanding to the subjects of said picture, and we had a good long talk about that, for sure. I just wonder if we’re really getting the message across to folks with the latest version of a product(RED) cell phone instead of getting into the heart of the problem, the real stuff that is wrong and WHY we want to fix it, instead of just finding new ways to assuage our guilt through the rampant materialism that’s part of the problem.

Sickness, hunger, and disease are uncomfortable for us, who have risen so comfortably above them; to stare them in the face makes us feel that we are looking at something we shouldn’t. Is it any wonder that we’ve proven so incapable of addressing these issues?

In my very early process of discovering my call, I focused on a theme of talking to power. I thought about how to confront and engage God in my life, whether through prayer, or nature, or other people (who were, more often than not, much smarter than I was.) An exhibit that touched this off was Gregory Colbert’s “Ashes and Snow”, which puts human subjects in close, almost worship-like relation to extremely strong forces of nature: elephants, whales, cheetahs.

The much harder side of that coin is talking to misfortune. How do you express yourself to someone who has lost limbs, family, home? How do you express the desire to be able to soothe a pain you (in most cases) have so little personal understanding of? How do we act as real witnesses for those boys starving in that picture my student found, instead of just detached observers clucking our tongues at the sadness of the whole scene?

The tragic thing is I don’t have a sincere answer yet, and I don’t think ordination will cover that particular chapter. I need more smart people to help me learn…

Some of you may know that I’ve spent the last year serving as a Deacon at my church. In some faith traditions – notably Catholic – Deacons are actually ordained in their own right, but not in the UCC. I’ve served as a member of a 12 person board of lay people. These folks are the first stop on the In-Care process, which I’ll talk about later, but I just like the history of the role.

Diakonos is roughly and WAY too literally translated (by people who actually read and speak Greek, not by me) as “person who waits on tables”. This makes me giggle… a lot. Most likely, anyone with some history of Communion in their past will probably jump to a more meaningful translation to me: “person who waits on THE table.” (One of the major responsibilities is to assist in the serving and preparation of communion.)

Anyway, it seems that the Early Church needed help with some of the daily business of worship and ministry, and so authorized a cadre of folks to do these tasks instead of having all of them done by the disciples, who had decided it wasn’t fitting for them to take time off from spreading the gospels to – wait for it – wait on tables. Acts 6. (It’s my understanding that daily worship did actually involve more than just the Holy Feast; there were a lot of full meals as well.)

So, the highly busy disciples found their first Deacon: Stephen. Which was swell for the church, because he went out and did wonders and spread the Gospel. He might have had mixed feelings, to say the least, because he was promptly arrested, allowed to make a really killer speech, and then stoned to death. Acts 7. Somehow, this wasn’t a deterrent for new recruits, and the job continues to this day.

Ordained Deacons in the Anglican and Catholic Communion are sometimes confusingly thought of as “priest-lite”. Anglicans had a stop along the way to ordaining women during which they would allow women into the diaconate, but not into the priest-hood. Interesting to note that this led to a massively female diaconate, and so it seems that a culture sprang up that if you were male, you would spend a brief period of time as a deacon, but would then move up to priest. The hold-out on ordaining women is interesting because deacons are only limited from:

• presiding at the eucharist – OK. That’s a big one.
• absolving sins – apparently this gets fudged a bit.
• pronouncing a blessing – same here.

Other than that, they wear their stole (sash) differently. Did they just think the ladies couldn’t pull off the over the neck look with the sash? The deacons MAY:

• Be witness at a marriage
• perform Baptism
• read the Gospel

Catholics don’t ordain women into the diaconate at all, but they do ordain married men, and will allow a current deacon to marry. Neat tidbit here? Even if the Pope were to show up, rules of the road state that if a deacon is present, HE reads the Gospel.

All of this is besides the point in the UCC; we’re just folks. In true congregationalist form, there isn’t a real set of rules that I can find about the role the diaconate plays in congregational life. I’m assuming our resident Jonathan Edwards scholar, Ken Minkema, pulled this quote and other info from his work:

“Deacons are to have a watchful eye on the state of the whole flock, to take notice of the circumstances of their bodies, to observe who are under straits and in necessities, that their necessities may be supplied. . . . Deacons are stewards in the household, that every one that is in necessity and is a proper object of charity may be relieved and may have his portion of meat in due season. . . The office of minister fitly answers to the office of the eye, that guides and directs the body; the office of a deacon seems well to answer the office of the hand in the natural body, that feeds it and helps its suffering members.”

In short, it’s a cool gig. I’ll talk more about what it means to me, and certainly how the deacons at my church have helped me and (hopefully) will continue to help me as I pursue my call.

Information about deacons at my church.

A neat wiki article on deacons in all traditions. (Fair warning, I love wiki’s. More fair warning: that doesn’t mean that I claim that they – or I – am actually right about anything.)

I’m hunting around for a UCC article on deacons.