Rebuilding Bridges (Theology of Crisis)

 Rebuilding Bridges (Theology of Crisis)

Augustine, Simone Weil and me

Scriptures: 1 Samuel 3:1-11 and Ezra 3:10-13

          In the book of Samuel, we get to read about Samuel, the last Judge of Israel, who almost functions as a King. He is a bridge figure between two worlds, two ways of being Israel. The story of his life reflects the crisis of this transition.

Before Samuel, Israelite society was decentralized. According to the book of Judges the 12 tribes govern themselves—they were semi-autonomous, other than in times of crisis, when God sends a charismatic individual to unite the tribes and deal with the threat. Likewise, worship is done locally, and strange bands of prophets wander the land doing mighty and surprising deeds.

After Samuel his society is centralized. Like other nations the Israelites are ruled by a dynastic king. The government and temple are located in Jerusalem, and prophets largely cease their wandering and instead serve in the king’s court.

The book of Ezra tells of another crisis in the life of God’s people. They were freed from Exile in Babylon, and given funds to rebuild the temple. And they do. It is a glorious thing—the younger returners have dreamed of this day their whole lives. The aged returners have done so too, but they remember what once was.

The rebuilding of the temple is both a thing of joy, and a sorrowful event. Such a clamor, weeping and huzzahs intermingled. Shouts of, “Is this it? Shouldn’t it be better? Don’t you remember the good old days?” as well as, “Finally, what we’ve been waiting for! It is here, God will be present with us again; God’s glory among us!”

Imagine, in both of these times of crisis and transition, how folk had to re-think everything. Not only that, they had to live differently, imagine in new ways, and dream sacred dreams like never before! Times of crisis can be the most fruitful and faithful, because the only other option is failure.

 

St. Augustine—City of God

          Once the eyes of Rome fell upon the Christian faith, persecutions, be they led by Emperors or neighbors with pitchforks, began. The Faith hid and struggled and did what it could to survive. Then along came Emperor Constantine, who first made Christianity a legal religion within the Roman Empire, then the preferred religion of the Empire, and finally THE religion of the Empire.

This was a heady time for the Faith, going from outsider to insider, persecuted to persecutor, all in relatively short order. Such a reversal could only be ascribed to the Holy Spirit. “Could,” these Christians wondered, “this be the reign of God Jesus describes in those parables? Great reversals are surely a sign of resurrection and new life!”

 “Could,” they wondered within a generation of their acceptance and ascendancy, “the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of God be one in the same? Could the Kingdom be a literal kingdom, not an experience to be noticed and savored, a framing to help us discern the Spirit at work, but instead a particular government, a particular secular patron turned sacred? Being a good Roman Citizen and being a Citizen of the Kingdom of God are one in the same!” they concluded.

And then, in the year 410 of the Common Era, Rome itself, the heart of this new Kingdom of God, was sacked. “Oh no! If Rome fell, does that mean God has failed? What do we do now?”

After a decade and a half of reflection, Augustine, a Bishop in the hinterlands of the Empire, Hippo, North Africa, wrote a response. In a thick book titled The City of God he answered the question, “Did the Kingdom of God fail?” He unraveled what had become ungainly wound, the distinction between the City of Rome and the City of God, secular citizenship and being a Christian.

To this day City of God, written in response to such a crisis, informs not only Christian theology, but also political philosophy and theories of the mind. When you have to rethink everything from the root, every branch blooms afresh!

 

Simone Weil—The Need for Roots

          Another such crisis was that of Europe after the Second World War. Simone Weil, a French Christian Mystic, considered the crisis of confidence in her home country of France, as well as the continent as a whole. She noted how quickly France fell to the Nazis, and how German fell under the sway of fascism so easily. She felt those events were two sides of the same coin. Both were symptoms of a similar demoralization and lostness that pervaded Europe. If those were all symptoms, the disease was rootlessness. The bulk of the European continent had been uprooted from any semblance of tradition or family or nation or much of anything else. Industrialization and urbanization were the Petri dishes in which totalitarianism and demoralization grew.

          And this would have simply been an interesting assessment, save that Charles DeGaulle was working on a new constitution for France, and he asked Weil to not just diagnosis the disease, but also offer a cure. Weil threw herself into this project and offered the following:

Reinvigorate Local French Cultures—Part of why France failed to fight, Weil surmised, was that they were being told to fight for Parisian values, yet they were not Parisian; at the same time, they had been discouraged from identifying with their regional culture for so long they no longer identified with it either. For generations they had been encouraged to throw off their local culture, but were still looked down upon as parochial in their attempts at assimilation, and therefore they were left rootless. So, Weil saw the way forward to be a celebration of local French culture alongside the Parisian mainstream.

Choose to Decolonize Africa and Asia—To lose a colony is to be humiliated, to create more men pining and valorizing the past, to root themselves in domination and oppression. To free your own colonies is to be on the right-er side of history, to give your people something positive to celebrate now.

Create decentralized and contextual education—If factory work in cities creates alienated and broken men who won’t fight for their nation, or alternatively will be attracted to strong men, teach non-factory work. Teach, too, local cultures so every French-person has something to be proud of, be they in the center or at the periphery.

Decentralize manufacturing and give workers incentives to work—Again, if the majority rushing to one or two manufacturing hubs leaves the urban folk feeling squished and atomized and the rural folk feeling abandoned, shift how manufacturing operates. Sure, things might be a tish less efficient, but if that reinvigorates the spirit and pushes away fascist tendencies, it is worth it. For that matter, meaningful work gives people dignity and a sense of purpose, so prioritizing that over idleness, even when it is inefficient, is worthwhile.

Have fact checkers for everything—One of the horrifying things about totalitarianism that Weil noticed was how ruthlessly truth gets mugged. For that reason, France ought to fight against disinformation at every turn.

Redefine Patriotism as that which can be lost… a Politics of the Cross (like Theology of the Cross)—The lines between patriotism and nationalism were easily blurred and many of the finer details of a national life, not to mention the little people, can be easily lost in the shuffle. For that matter, so much of the totalitarian vision involves false nostalgia and promises of an impossible future. Part of a healthy patriotism is seeing the good that is actually present, and preserving it.

Redefine French Identity as a people for humanity—So much of nationalism is defining who a people are not. I am German not Polish, French not Spanish or Algerian. Weil flips that on its head, what if the French identity is defined by inclusion and solidarity with all people?

 

Pastor Chris—The Four D’s

          That brings us to our present crisis, the crisis of the North American Church. If the statisticians are right, the mainline tradition (denomination churches associated with the European Protestant tradition who have structures in place to weed out bad actors and hold people to account. I serve in the ELCA, a hub of the Mainline tradition.) will cease to exist in about a decade.

          I’m just one guy, certainly not a mystic like Weil or a Genius-Saint like Augustine, but I think I occasionally can see things clearly, and this is my assessment.

In the present crisis, the mainline tradition is failing because it is not grappling with the four Ds: Disestablishment, Decentralization, Demographic Shift, and most importantly, Disenchantment.

 

Disestablishment:

          When the Baltimore Colts were a team, or so I’ve heard, they were only allowed to play football after a certain time on Sunday, on order of the Archbishop of Baltimore. Then when Baltimore got a new team, the Baltimore Ravens, the Archbishop went to the owner of the team to schedule when the team could play on Sundays, and he was gently shown the door.

          As the above story illustrates, something has fundamentally shifted in how American society treats Christianity. While America has never had an official state religion, we have often informally acted in ways that centered the Christian faith. This is an insight Theologian Douglas John Hall has famously pointed out in his own country, Canada. There were once a host of cultural norms that assisted the church, and the church has grown to rely on them. In fact, often the Church returned the favor, teaching American cultural values instead of the gospel. As long as the Church was vaguely “nice” a bunch of social organizations would help it out.

          For a variety of reasons (Bowling Alone dynamics, the end of the Cold War and the rise of the War on Terror, etc.) that reality came to an end. Some in the Church are desperately trying to claw our way back into the halls of power, others despair. I would suggest the whole situation is an opportunity.

We can now reconsider all those formal and informal cultural connections and start again. The Church has been given an opportunity to rethink how we make partnerships. One of the places doing this sort of work, at least on a building use level, is Partners for Sacred Places in Philly. The Mainline needs to intentionally remake connections with new partners. We need to re-imagine our place in society and find where the Holy Spirit is already acting in our neighborhoods!

 

Decentralization:

          Once, or so I have been told, the world was centralized. Everyone received news from a single trusted newscaster, desks in schools all faced forward looking at a teacher, organizations were very hierarchical, a top-down kind of thing. The Church too functioned in this way, top down, facing forward in your pews, trusting the Pastor as the authority on the Faith. And this all worked quite swimmingly, at least for a time.

          Now everyone gets their news from information silos, classrooms are modular and virtual, and organizations are taught to value decentralized, democratic, “leaderless” leadership, as most clearly articulated by the book The Starfish and the Spider. And probably most noticeable, the internet has flattened the world.

          And the Church has changed, some. The ELCA constitution uplifts lay leadership and democratic principles in a way predecessor bodies did not. When Covid came around we managed to get most of our congregations onto the internet. But we’re still struggling with this.

I can’t help but think of a very confused Roman Catholic who attended my congregation for a time. He had discovered from some amalgamation of the “History” Channel and chat rooms on the internet that the difference between Protestants and Catholics was that Protestants acknowledged that the Apostle Paul was a werewolf (that was the thorn in his flesh). When I burst his bubble, he wasn’t fazed. He decided I was an authority figure who was hiding “the Truth.” Then he started attending an “Entrepreneurial” Church down the street where the Pastor agreed that mainline Churches often hide things from “the people.”

So, what do we do in a flat, leaderless, democratic, virtual, world? We harness it. We recognize that 12 disciples, inspired by the testimony of Mary and her crew, and empowered by the Holy Spirit, changed the world. “Oh no, we have small churches” can be transformed into “Wow, we have small teams of empowered people excited to be the Church in the world!”

Imagine if we took seriously the Church’s duty to equip and encourage lay folks! Imagine if we embraced holy experimentation, every congregation had a solid and sustainable internet ministry, and we met out in the world, becoming seeds thrown out into the world doing Kin(g)dom work!

 

Demographics:

The ELCA, and many Mainline denominations, identify as white and middle class. And there was a time when that seemed to serve us well. After the world wars European refugees poured into our country looking for Churches where they could belong and become American at a pace that was comfortable. In the heyday of the Mainline, middle-class jobs paid well and offered opportunities for women not to work. This meant congregations had access to funds and volunteer hours.

To be clear the above description was never that neat, just talk to old timers, especially the women and immigrants, or talk to non-white Lutherans, they have a whole different story to tell. But, granting the above story, it didn’t last.

On one hand, immigration from traditionally Lutheran countries tapered off. On the other, being middle class shifted. Those who think of themselves as Middle Class are now time poor, and financially poorer, than early generations, just read Reich, or Steve Bannon, for that matter. Hence new members aren’t beating down the doors, there are fewer volunteers, and donations are down.

          Luckily what is a “traditionally” Lutheran country has changed. Ethiopia has the second largest Lutheran population in the world, followed by Tanzania. For that matter, Guyana has a thriving Lutheran tradition, and if you’ve ever been to a Guyanese wedding, the first thing you notice is how racially diverse the country is. So, I tell folk, invite anyone who looks Guyanese to Church, because that’s a way of saying, invite everyone! Throw away those preconceived notions of what a Lutheran looks like!

For that matter, we need to take a hard look at what middle class practices of the past serve us well, and which don’t. And, the impoverishment of the Mainline should refocus us on poverty and point us to how Church is done by impoverished people!

 

Disenchantment:

          Finally, behind all the above there is a larger challenge we face, Disenchantment (this presentation has changed since the first time I gave it, and named only the 3Ds above, then I read Hunting Magic Eels and decided there is a 4^th D). Put baldly, maybe badly, the way the average American lives makes it hard to believe in God at all. Our habits and focuses point us to the material and secular things of this world. We have trained ourselves to notice the ball, but miss the gorilla.

          So, what to do? Reenchant the world! Encourage:
Holy Friendships—prayer partners and chancing sharing your faith with others.

The Romance of the Faith—passionate preaching, feeling as well as thinking, encouraging people to reflect on their own faith stories,

Practice Gratitude—reflect on the “roses and thorns” of your day, and give thanks for the roses,

Embracing Beauty—paint murals on churches, reflect on iconography, create new pretty singable music.

 

Conclusion:

          Times of transition and crisis are frightening but can also be times of faithful rethinking. When God’s people find fresh footing, they can do amazing things, they can move forward again.

Augustine’s rethink of the faith has created modes of thought both secular and sacred that still are helpful almost 1700 years later. It is astonishing that a Christian Mystic was so revered (or the crisis was so severe) that a secular government would ask for her advice. Finally, what I see as our own crisis as Church is frightening, but not insurmountable; we just have to faithfully think through where we are at, dream new dreams, and follow the Spirit’s leading.