Discipleship in a 4D World Session 5: Disenchantment and Conclusion—Esther

              In order to consider the finally of our 4 Ds, Disenchantment, we’ll take a look at one of the two book of the Bible that doesn’t mention God, the book of Esther. Like the Judges Bible Study, we’ll be reading through a whole lot of the book, luckily it is a little smaller book than Judges.

 

Chapter 1: The King puts away his wife and sets up an empire wide beauty pageant

              The first chapter of Esther sets up the situation, how would a Jewish woman become the Queen of Persia?

 

Esther 2:15-18—Esther becomes the new queen of Persia

15-Esther’s cousin, Mordecai, has become her adopted Father.

16-Just to place the narrative in time, King Ahasuerus is a Hebraization of King Xerxes.

 

Esther 2:19-23—A Plot!

20-Perhaps stating the obvious, but antisemitism, or at least anti-Judaism, is alive in the ancient world. There is a reason Esther isn’t advertising that she’s of the tribe.

21-As a rule, Eunuchs were trusted advisors because they can’t create their own dynasty, so they ought to be more loyal and less likely to plot and rebel.

23-Keep this archive in mind throughout the book, it is Chekhov’s gun on the mantle in scene 1.

 

Chapter 3: Enter Haman

At base chapter 3 sets up the tension between Haman, Xerxes’ right-hand man, and Mordecai. Haman requires that he be worshipped, Mordecai refuses. Haman finds out Mordecai won’t worship him because he’s a Jew. So Haman seeks to kill all Jews.

As we think about the disenchanted nature of Esther it is worth noting that humans like Haman are seeking god-like elevation, even in a book that never mentions God or gods!

 

Esther 4:9-17—Esther agrees to save her people

9-Hathach is functioning as the in-between between Mordecai and Esther at court.

11-As with Haman, note that there is a graven elevation of the Emperor.

13-Even as Queen, Esther isn’t safe. We can think back to chapter one, where Xerxes previous Queen was deposed rather quickly.

14-Mordecai has a faith that the Jewish people will be delivered. He also holds out hope that Esther’s elevation wasn’t happenstance, but instead happened for a reason!

16-Esther decides, she will risk it all!

 

Chapter 5: Esther butters up the Emperor, Haman prepares to lynch Mordecai

 

Esther 6:1-9—A saving coincidence

1-The Emperor’s sleepless night leads him back to the archives from chapter 2.

4-Haman’s is seeking Mordecai’s death.

6-Haman misunderstands as thinks that the Emperor is talking about himself.

9-What Haman desires for Haman is instead given to Mordecai, who Haman wishes to punish.

 

Chapter 7: Mordecai and Haman switch fortunes

Just as Mordecai receives the reward that Haman wishes for himself in chapter 6, in chapter 7 Haman receives the punishment he wishes to do to Mordecai.

 

Chapter 8: A grand reversal for all the Jews

Finally, just as Mordecai’s fortunes are reversed, so too all the Jews in the Empire, they receive good despite Haman’s desire to destroy them.

 

Esther 9:24-28—A summary, Purim explained

24-This is an etymological explanation of the name Purim; to put it into today’s vernacular, we call our holiday Dice, because Haman threw the die and failed.

28-Purim is celebrated in March.

 

Chapter 10: It was a Grand Triumph

 

My working definition of Disenchantment is to lose the habit of paying attention to the Holy.

 

What’s Esther have to do with Disenchantment?

-God is unnamed, save Purim itself, there are no religious rituals.

-There is, in the background, a sense of something fateful going on, I think this can help us think about cracks in our secular framework.

-It is worth noting that without worship secular things, in Esther especially secular authorities, become venerated. Haman’s conflict with Mordechai begins with Haman’s desire to be worshipped, and Esther’s interaction with her husband the Emperor is especially dangerous because the Emperor has been elevated to the status of a god.

 

3 ways to think about Disenchantment:

-There is a famous experiment, the selective attention test, where subjects are shown a video of people throwing a ball and are told to keep track of the ball. At the end of the video, the watchers are asked when the Gorilla walked through the room, and most people never saw the person in a gorilla mask walking through the video. So too our religious habits. If we keep our eyes on only secular things, we’ll miss God walking through the room. What we seek is what we see.

-Richard Beck argues the Reformation and the Enlightenment both focused our attention in a way that misses some of what God is up to in the world. The Reformation focuses us on Morality to the exclusion of the Mystical, and the Enlightenment focuses us on measurable things to the exclusion of their meaning. As I’ve written elsewhere, Beck is painting with the broadest of brushes.

-There was a time when people would regularly make pilgrimage to a small town in Wales where there was a well filled with eels. These eels were said to be the descendants of eels that interacted with a particular saint and were thus seen as having magical properties. These days, no one makes pilgrimage to see these magic eels. The enchantment of holy people and places has left us, in this disenchanted world, a world bereft of pilgrimages and saints. Because we don’t look for those things, we have lost them.

 

Examples of Enchantment:

-When we mark sacred time, we take sabbaths and celebrate festivals. When space is sacred, we celebrate the sacraments and travel to places important to the faith. When holy people are pointed out, we recognize those of the faith who have gone before us, namely saints.

-Liturgical church moves us through sacred time with a lectionary and liturgical calendar, the sacraments remind us that matter matters, and our sanctuaries are more likely to exhibit some form of beauty than our non-liturgical hyper-protestant siblings.

-The Contemplative tradition pushes us to notice the sacred in the everyday. Praying before decisions and reflecting on the highs and lows of a day before bed are both small practical examples of this deep tradition.

-Charismatic Christianity refuses to amputate the heart during worship. Both preaching and the reception of preaching tries to notice the romance of God’s story. Ideally the repeated cycle of faith in this tradition begins with receptivity—waiting for God to act, gratitude—recognizing when God acts and being thankful, and then finally testifying—telling people about the good thing that has taken place.

-The Celtic tradition also offers a window into an enchanted world. On one hand, there is the concept of Thin Places—locations that feel sacred in the different way than most places (the two times I’ve been particularly aware of thin places was at an 800 year old monastery turned youth retreat centre I worked at one year, as well as at the ruins of a Mosque/Church/Synagogue/Temple at Har Maggido). On the other hand there is sacred friendship—that there can be friendships that deepen our faith lives for our whole lives, opening up understandings of grace you might never experience otherwise.

 

Challenges:

-We do live in a modern/post-modern world. For every sacred habit we’ve formed, we’re also informed by dozens of secular ones. I would venture that the average Christian has their wills formed by advertisements more than by scripture and prayer. By and large questions of morality ethics and even beauty—once addressed within a religious context—have been offloaded to partisan silos that were never intended hold their heft, and it warps both faith and politics. Why ask our Sacred Loving Parent for assistance, when Amazon Prime will get us something that will fill that desire within 48 hours?

To be clear, I’m not pushing us into little Christian enclaves like Evangelicals did in the ‘90s, or encouraging us to put on blinders—but it is worth noting that the way we live our lives is not neutral for our ability to trust in God at all.

-If church is seen as solely about creating good people, and Matthew 13, Romans 7, and the Lutheran tradition are right that we continue to be Simul Justus et Peccator, Simultaneously Saint and Sinner, even as Christians, then Churches will be seen as failures. If the measure of a successful church is the number of angelic humans it produces, then people are right to leave the church!

-For that matter, if measurable results are the only way to interpret what is going on in a congregation—the cold hard facts of the Enlightenment—then Church becomes just another numbers game. Church is nothing more than its budget and its attendance figures. Once that secular frame envelopes a congregation, denomination, or the big C Church, any of the actual vitality that makes a church what it is, implodes.

 

Possibility:

-When we engage with the secular world—which in this day and age simply means the world, because we’re all caught up in its frame—the best witness we have is to name “The Ache.” That is, our task is an imaginative one, a speculative one, a what-if adventure. “What if there is a God?” “Imagine how the world would be different if abundance, not scarcity is God’s desire for the world!” “I wonder how I would live my life differently if I manna in the wilderness and a resurrected messiah were on offer.” The secular frame can feel like a straitjacket, giving the imagination room to say, “I wish” or “That would be nice” may be witness enough these days, even when just witnessing to ourselves!

-Two other parts of life that are in the Church’s wheelhouse are beauty and friendship. These are both things that don’t fit easily into the Enlightenment’s frame of reference, because they in fact are not things at all. They are gifts, gifts that are good unto themselves, and also point to deeper spiritual realities.

-Finally, I think it is worth naming the places where I’ve tried to re-enchant my congregation. We’ve shared inter-generational wisdom in a way that made the Biblical Sages speak afresh to our realities. We’ve went out of our way to have God Conversations with our neighbors, and since then we’ve used that same way of doing things to notice when we’re praying and when we’re inviting our neighbors. I think all of these actions create holy habits that widen our ability to trust in God and notice when God is at work in the world.

 

Perhaps we can hope for an Enchanting Church!

 

Conclusion:

              These 4Ds we’ve reflected on in these 5 sessions are all very real challenges to the Church. Hiding our heads in the sand and pretending they aren’t shaping our lives is an unfaithful posture in the world. Neither fighting against them or capitulating to them are good options. Instead we ought to be in conversation with them—as we ought to be with the zeitgeist of every age. We ought to engage with the 4Ds in light of scripture, and in so doing find where the Holy Spirit is pushing and pulling, transforming and tackling the spirit of this age.

              The faithful actions of Daniel—off in Babylon no cultural supports for his faith on offer—helps us re-imagine our Disestablished world, imagine afresh faithful ways to partner with our neighbors.

              The cyclical tribal life of Judges—trying to uphold the glory of God while dispersed—points us to our radically decentralized world, a world where a small nimble church can have outsized impacts.

              The book of Acts tells the story of Pentecost—the early church chasing the Holy Spirit as it is continually active among people and in places none of the Disciples would have dared to imagine—that story helps us to navigate demographic shifts, embracing an authentic diversity that looks like the neighborhoods in which congregations reside.

              The book of Esther, silent about the most present character in all of scripture, God—showcases how that absence is experienced, both by the faithful and those who seek to be affirmed as godlike themselves—helps us to name the ache of our disenchanted world, and by naming it allows us to turn around and become enchanted again.

              In short, the way forward is:

A Partnering, Nimble, Authentically Diverse, and Enchanted Church.

              We as Church need to try on a few new roles: partnership crafter, wave rider, sacred scientist, and soul shepherd.

Discipleship in a 4D World Session 4: Demographic Shift—Pentecost

 

Acts 2:1-21 The Redemption of Babel

Acts 2:1-6—The Spirit Acts of Pentecost

1-The day of Pentecost these folk have gathered together for, is the celebration of the giving of the first five books of Moses. That’s why people from all over the known world were gathered in Jerusalem.

3-There is a symbolism that sometimes gets missed when reading about the tongues of fire—they are a prophetic image: words, voices, mouths, set apart to speak of holy things. Think of Isaiah’s call, lips touched with sacred coals, or God putting words into Jeremiah’s mouth, or Ezekiel being told to “eat scroll!”

4-It is worth remembering that the Bible is multiple books, and therefore things that seem similar aren’t always the same. Case in point, this “speaking in tongues” is an act of human communication—the point is that people who speak different languages are all able to hear the good news, Jesus is Lord. This is different than the “speaking in tongues” Paul confronts in 1^st Corinthians, that was not human communication, but “angelic communication.” Some scholars name this as a pagan practice—think the oracle of Delphi—that’s why Paul disparages the practice. At Pentecost we see a widening of the sharing of the Gospel, in Corinth it was an act of non-communication/confused communication.

5-Again, Pentecost is a big festival, you have Jews coming to Jerusalem from all over. A good audience to tell “The Messiah came, Rome, in collusion with the Temple Authorities, killed him, and he rose from the dead vindicating his identity, and is still Lord!”

 

Acts 2:7-11—Hearing Good News in Your Vernacular

7-Maybe I’m showing my Wyoming/Dakotas roots here, but I hear “They’re Galileans” as the equivalent of “These are bumpkins!”

8-So, just repeating, Pentecost is about translation—communicating the Gospel to people who would otherwise not hear it. These days we have a lot of Christians who claim to be “Pentecostal” or “Apostolic” and read this chapter as justification for everything from semi-audible mumbles expressing the inexpressible to shouting nonsense words on account of peer pressure to fortune telling—that’s not what’s going on at Pentecost—again might be what’s going on at Corinth, but not Acts 2; Pentecost is about proclaiming “Jesus is Lord” in ways that a diversity of people understand.

10-It is worth noting that, while Judaism is not as a rule a proselytizing religion, there were still non-Jews who were attached to the faith. Non-Jews came to Judaism for a whole variety of reasons, everything from “marrying in” to embracing the logic of monotheism to admiring the ethics of the faith. So, when Proselytes are mentioned that’s probably who they’re talking about.

 

Acts 2:12-15—A variety of responses to the Holy Spirit

12-13-From the start of Luke’s Gospel (look at Mary compared with Zechariah, for example) it consistently describes people encountering God at work as Perplexed/Pondering, or Disbelieving.

15-I find this line intentionally funny, again these “bumpkins” can’t imagine a situation where someone would not be sober at 9am.

 

Acts 2:16-21—The Message

17-In the last days—at the point where God is intervening in history and we’re moving from one era to another era.

Sons/Daughters, Young/Old—all these dichotomies are ways of saying everyone! When God does a new thing, everyone will participate! No barriers to proclaiming what God is up to in the world! No barriers to the Holy Spirit and the good news “Jesus is Lord!”

19-20-This description echoes the plagues in Egypt—it is that kind of liberation we’re talking about!

Day of the Lord—Much like the phrase the last days, this is pointing to a time/the time when God is making all things right. By citing Joel, Peter/Luke is telling the crowd that Jesus’ life death and resurrection, as well as the proclamation of the Church, is how God is making all things new! A resurrected world to meet the resurrected Messiah!

 

My working definition of Demographic Shift—A significant change in a population structure over time.

 

What’s Acts have to do with Demographic Shift?

-A diversity of the Jewish diaspora is present in Jerusalem, is gathered in.

-Who constitutes the people doing God’s new thing, shifts. Everyone who calls upon the Lord is the new boundary marker.

-If we were to continue beyond chapter 2 of Acts and read the whole of Acts, a pattern emerges; the Church continually runs into the Holy Spirit working with “strange” people. The population structure of the people of God changed rather rapidly in the book of Acts.

 

3 Stories to think about Demographic Shift:

-Imagine a church, let’s call it St. Elsewhere, founded in the late 40s or early 50s. The founding Pastor looks through the newspaper every Friday for the notices of new residents. Every time a German sounding name pops up, he goes by and says hi to the new people. They flock to the church, pretty soon they invite their neighbors, both German and not. Next thing you know St. Elsewhere is a staple of the community—the demographics of the congregation and the demographics of the town overlap. Fast forward to 2010, the congregation hasn’t changed much demographically, it still has a German-American core and is mainly white. The surrounding city, however, is now 40% non-white. St. Elsewhere calls a new Pastor who stumbles upon an idea, evangelizing to the Guyanese population of the town will yield similar results to the founding Pastor’s evangelism to German Americans. The Guyanese people are incredibly diverse, their heritages running the gamut from European to African, Indigenous to Indian. As such, the congregation begins to look more like the neighborhood, and that diversity is attractive.

-Consider these demographic statistics:

1950-87% of Americans were European. 2010-64% were European.

1950-0.2% of Americans were Asian, in 2010-5% were Asian.

1950-5% of Americans were Latino, in 2010-16% were Latino.

-Or, moving from race to income, think about the shifting economic realities the church faces:

Between 1950 and 2010—10% of Americans have gone from being economically middle class to being economically lower class.

 

Challenges:

-Lutheranism can be seen as a Northern European immigrant club, instead of a dynamic faith tradition.

-Sometimes we as a church have a hard time discerning between the faithfulness of reflecting the neighborhood of which we are a part, and trying to be diverse because it is hip.

-Lutheranism tends to draw from the “Middle Class” who tend to have disposable time and money, but that’s shifted. This leads to scarcity of both volunteers and donations.

 

Possibility:

-Maybe a tightening of the belts will help us to become more creative.
For example: Lutheran Seminaries have looked at how non-Lutherans do their candidacy, having realized we were making some middle-upper class assumptions that were excluding poor people. For example, having to move 5 times in a 4-year period isn’t something everyone can afford to do, so poorer candidates drop out at a higher rate than middle class and rich ones do. Likewise, requiring a candidate to drop all other licensures to show a commitment to the candidacy process might have made sense at one point, but when candidates are being asked to find a second vocation after seminary, still being a licensed psychologist or keeping up with your CDL license would have been helpful.

-Maybe we’ll be able to see Lutheranism as a faith tradition, not an ethnic club. We have the promise of Grace and the challenge of the Theology of the Cross, that is more than enough for a faith to unpack, without functioning as an Elks club for Swedes or Danes.

-Alternatively, we can shift that ethnic club thing a few degrees, and expand out and celebrate the broad swatch of peoples who are found by Jesus through the Lutheran tradition. Crown a St. Lucia, certainly, also make pelican pendants on the day Lutheranism came to Guyana, hold an Octoberfest, and also do a big Churchwide fun run in November to honor Lutherans of Ethiopian heritage.

-As the last suggestion intimates, maybe we can start to notice how many Lutherans are coming to America, much like Northern Europeans did after the Second World War—Ethiopians, Tanzanians, Namibians, Malagasy, and Indonesians, all waiting to be invited, waiting to be welcomed just like we welcomed Lutherans 80 years ago.

So, even as Demographic Shift brings with it many challenges, I hope we can respond by becoming an authentically diverse church!

Discipleship in a 4D World Session 3: Decentralization—Judges

               So, first a confession, when I tried to teach this session, I went way overtime… which I should have known would happen, I tried to teach the whole book of Judges, and some of the book of Joshua, in under an hour.

 

The Book of Joshua—A Map of the Tribes

              I love reading Fantasy, and one of my favorite features of the genre are the cool maps in the front of the book. That is a good way to take the book of Joshua, a type of map of an idealized version of the conquest.

 

Joshua 4:1-7—Just feast on this imagery a bit, 12 tribes traveling together before the ark. This is the Utopia the author hopes for, a decentralized theocracy; the ideal that turns into a dystopia once the rubber hits the road, as the book of Judges demonstrates. But ideally—12 tribes, upholding God’s roving presence, founded and forged in crossing out of slavery. That’s some compelling stuff!

Joshua 12:7-24—Here is an idealized account of the 12 tribe’s conquest, almost a completed to-do list, Kings from Ba’al-gad to Mt. Halak.

 

Judges—A Tribal Confederation breaks down ever generation

              If Joshua is akin to Thomas More’s Utopia, then Judges is George Miller’s Mad Max. Any semblance of an ideal society is quickly scraped away, as the faults of a decentralized theocracy are on full display.

 

Judges 2:6-10—Joshua is buried and stability with it

6-The tribes are dispersed to go do their own thing.

10-As is the refrain from Judges to Kings to Ecclesiastes, from one generation to the next everything is lost. Inheritances never pass cleanly from one generation to the next.

Judges 2:11-15—Idolatry

11-Ba’al—Canaanite deity, “Lord” in some Canaanite languages, so Ba’al Peor would be the Lord of Peor, etc.

12-Astartes—a goddess—the local manifestation of Ishtar/Aphrodite.

14-The conquest doesn’t go so well, there are counter-attacks. The indigenous people didn’t much like having their kings killed and put on a list like groceries. These defeats are seen as reproof from God for the Tribes going over to other gods, forgetting the liberation from Egypt.

 

Judges 2:16-23—Judges restrain the people’s unfaithfulness

Just as God provided clothing for Adam and Eve when they were expelled from Eden, called Noah to build an ark to save his family from the flood, and provided the Passover as protection for the people’s first born down in Egypt, so too the people are given a way to continue on even in the face of their own ruptured relationships with their God. God provides charismatic leaders to guide them through challenges in the land.

16-Judges—Shophet, Charismatic Chief of Chiefs, unites the tribes and deals with trouble.

17-It is worth considering that when the people are dispersed throughout the land as they are, decentralized, it is harder for them to hold onto the ways of the previous generation. Traditions warp and break more easily without a center.

18-In some ways we have a replay of Egypt, the people are oppressed, they groan for help, and God sends a Moses figure.

 

A Chart of Judges:

Here is where my Bible Study went off the rails, I tried to review every judge, so I would suggest instead to review my chart here, and simply note that it doesn’t all go well, at best Judges are ambiguous figures. Often times, people read Samson as particularly heroic (the ancients explicitly paralleled him with Hercules), but my reading is that he is intentionally an example of how degraded Judgeship has become. The book of Judges isn’t a story of ongoing faithfulness, but instead the breaking down of decentralized theocracy, it isn’t a working way of governing people!

Judge	Disobedience	Consequence	Outcome
Othniel	Serve Ba’als & Asherahs.	Captured by King Cushan of Aram for 8 years	War, Tribes prevail, 40 years of peace
Ehud	“Evil in the sight of God”	Conquered by Moab, Amon, and Amalekites. 18 years under King Eglon of Moab	Ehud assassinates Eglon in his restroom, Moab crushed in the confusion, 80 years of peace.
Shamgar			Kill 600 Philistines, the Tribes are delivered
Deborah—both Prophet and Judge (Ja’el & Barak assisting)	“Did evil in the sight of God”	King Jabin of Canaan and General Sisera of The Gentile Fortress (raiding club) invade with massive chariots	The chariots caught in the mud, Sisera tent pegged, 40 years of rest.
Gideon (Reluctant Judge, his father worshipped Ba’al, he is also named Jeru-ba’al)	Did what is evil in the sight of the Lord	Midian and Amalekite raids on farms.	Destruction of Ba’als and Asherahs, Tribal infighting, killing generals, a campaign, he creates an idol out of plunder. No time of peace. His son, Abimelek, tries to create a Kingdom.
Tola	Abimelek’s bad reign		Judged 23 years
Jair			Judged 22 years
Jephthah (outsider, born out of wedlock, chased out of the country, makes a vow that leads to his daughter’s death)	Served Ba’als and Astartes and a plethora of other gods.  Ceased worshipping God!	Ammonites and Philistines control them for 18 years, subdue them out tribe by tribe… God tells them to ask their new gods for help!	Ammonites subdued. Jephtha rules as Judge for 6 years. Intertribal slaughter, 40,000 dead in “civil war”.
Ibzan (makes intertribal alliances using his 30 sons)	(after the slaughter)		Judged 7 years
Elon			Judged 10 years
Abdon (like Ibzan had many sons and donkeys to make alliances)			Judged 8 years
Samson (Special Child, Nazarite, Pursues Philistine Wife, sleeps with prostitutes, falls in lust with Delilah, etc.)	Did evil in the Lord’s sight, given into the hands of Philistines for 40 years	Samson bumbles into fighting Philistines, torches fields.	Blinded and shaven, still destroys temple of Dagon, Judges for 20 years.

 

The Rest of the Book:

New Idolatry and Tribal Dispute, much can be traced back to Gideon’s idol and his son Abimelek. Massive slaughter of Benjaminites.

 

Other Judges:

Eli (and almost his sons) and Samuel (and his sons).

 

My working definition of Decentralization—The Distribution of functions, power, and authority.

 

What’s Judges have to do with Decentralization?

-During this time period Israelite society was dispersed and governed on a tribal level.

-One of the consequences of decentralization is that truth and tradition are harder to pass along without a centralized authority.

-Theoretically this distribution of authority allows for God to be the sole authority. Hypothetically one of the ways a theocracy can work is that there simply are no earthly rulers, or they are so weak that no one pays them any mind.

 

3 Stories to think about Decentralization:

Walter Cronkite

              I hear tell there was a time when authority about current events was centralized. Everyone turned on the TV and listened to Walter Cronkite, and that settled matters. Not so now, now interpretation of current events and even what constitutes news, is diffuse, broken into pieces by 24 hour cable news, algorithms and media silos.

St. Paul and the Werewolf

              One Sunday a visitor to the congregation I was serving came up to me after worship and let me know he was an ex-Roman Catholic, because they were hiding things. After a few conversations over a couple of weeks, I found out 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 we got into extended conversation about this idea, and the actual historic divisions between Protestants and Catholics, he didn’t let go of this idea; instead he decided I, an ordained Protestant Pastor, didn’t really know the difference between Protestants and Catholics. For him, I was instead an authority figure hiding the truth.

Part of our decentralized, hyper-democratic society is that anything that looks like a centralized authority is automatically suspect. The slogan “Question Authority” becomes a highest ideal, even as it can at times be exercised without common sense.

 Flash mobs and Terrorist Cells

              Up until now my examples of Decentralization have been fairly negative, but the act of democratizing function, power, and authority can also be transformative, it can do big things—that is the central premise of The Starfish and the Spider. Two examples:

-Flash mobs are an amazing feat. By decentralizing the whole process of putting on a concert, a small group of people are able to give a whole performance without ever practicing together.

-Similarly, terrorist cells are small groups delegated all the function, power, and authority of making war, and they can do damage like you wouldn’t believe. Even if one branch of a terrorist organization is caught, it rarely does long term damage to the organization, because everyone has been empowered to make war.

 

The Elephant in the Room—The Internet:

              Probably the biggest example of decentralization we experienced on the day to day, is the internet. It has flattened the whole world, everything is interconnected, function, power, and authority can be spread out not just among a small group, but among millions, even billions, of people.

 

Challenges:

              I’m sure you can intuit some of the challenges decentralization brings to the church, but here are a few:

-As the Israelites found within one generation of entering the promised land, passing on the faith in a way that doesn’t get confused and involve werewolves is hard without centralized authority figures, leaders, or meeting place.

-In so far as the faith involves claims made by a religious authority, be that authority based on charismatic experience or theological education or lines of tradition, they are all suspect in a decentralized world. The watchword of most people that think about this is that any respect for the pastoral office, any religious sway that can be mustered, comes from pastoral authenticity, not pastoral authority. So, if you notice pastors in skinny jeans who say things like “I’m just being real with you” that’s the move from Pastoral Authority to Pastoral Authenticity.

-Cyberspace, the internet, social media, all of that—poses a grave challenge to the Christian faith, in so far as we are a faith that believes that material stuff matters, that Christianity is an embodied tradition, that God took on a body, took on flesh and blood—matter matters! As we all unfortunately found during the Covid years, a disembodied faith, a cyber faith, is quite malformed. There were neat things we got to try, virtual services, home Holy Week packets, Bible Studies on zoom, meetings on zoom, continuing education on zoom, zoom zoom zoom. But, even the Gnostics among us who notoriously denigrate bodily life, got tired of that disembodied form of decentralized church.

 

Possibilities:

-One of the founding stories of the Christian faith is that a small group of disciples shook the Roman Empire and beyond by dispersing and using the new technology of a codex (a bound book) to spread the Gospel. This is like a flash mob or a terrorist cell, decentralization having a transformative power. Why not again? Why isn’t there a space for a small group of Christians to use technology in a dispersed way to: re-evangelize our world, humble the Powers and Principalities of our era, and re-tune the Church to the Spirit’s calling today?

-Now, for decades we’ve bought into the church growth model of ministry, ultimately Church is about becoming bigger and bigger. There have been instances of pushback of course, the Slow Church movement, the Emergent Church, etc, but by and large those movements have been snatched up and misused to achieve the same goal as Church Growth—bigger is better. But there is a case to be made that small is attractive, that the drive for growth ultimately sours people to these churches (there is evidence that for every person entering Saddleback during its heyday there was another person leaving). In short, what if we’re supposed to be small, salt and light, not every ingredient of the soup, not the sun itself?

-What if the Church is the antithesis of Cyber-Gnosticism? As everything in our society pushes toward the anonymous and depersonalized (or the frighteningly hyper-personalization of AI), the Church as an awkward and weird third place. A place where people are authentically who they are, where you can only be so anonymous for so long, if you sit among a small group of people and worship for more than a week or two, they’re going to get to know you. Maybe that’s what we need in this world?

 

So, even as decentralization has its challenges, maybe we can hope that nimble small churches can navigate those challenges and tame some of those dynamics in order to proclaim the Gospel.

Discipleship in a 4D World Session 2: Disestablishment & the book of Daniel

 

Daniel 1:1-7—Temple and Palace captured

1-This is approximately 606BC. Jerusalem itself was eventually captured in 586BC. So these first captured people are examples/experiments/models for how to live under Babylonian rule.

2-Note both holy things and holy people are taken. If the way Judaism was lived at the time centered around Temple, Palace, People, two out of three of those are endangered and scooped up in the Exile.

Shinar-is another name for Babylon.

3-This brings things into a stark relief, that third thing, the palace, is also under threat, the royal court has been kidnapped!

4-Chaldeans-is another way to say Babylonians. It is worth noting what the Babylonians are doing, they are raising these Israelite royals in court as hostages.

7-Think for a second on the significance of receiving new names—they are being enculturated into Babylon. Even their names change in this new culture. Their names once all pointed to God with the endings -iah and -el… now they point toward Babylon

 

Daniel 1:8-17—Rejecting Defiling Foods

8-Daniel refuses to enculturate, at least when it comes to foodstuff. Most likely these foods have been offered to Idols as a routine part of making the meal. Additionally, some of the foods were likely not kosher.

17-And look, despite the young men’s choice not to fully assimilate into Babylonian culture, they excel. They excel in the Babylonian court without taking on the trappings of Babylon!

 

Daniel 1:18-21—The Best

21-It is worth noting these young men navigate being faithful through the governance of Babylon by four kings: Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Darius the Mede, and finally its capture by Cyrus of Persia. I would go so far as to suggest they survived four beasts and were ready for a humane ruler.

 

Daniel 3:13-18—Refusing to Worship Idols

14-So, the Babylonians were okay with the young men not eating food sacrificed to idols, but not worshipping idols… that was a bridge too far. It is worth reflecting on the level of inculturation Daniel and his crew were willing to compromise—new names, but not a new diet, and definitely not a new god.

18-And when they say that they are unwilling to compromise over worship of other gods, they are not saying this as a half measure, they mean it in full. They would rather become martyrs than forsake the sole worship of God.

 

Daniel 7:15-18—Daniel asks the heavenly attendants to interpret his dream

17-Beastly Kingdoms—I read Daniel’s 4 kings as being intratextual (and to be clear there are multiple strands of interpretive traditions, both Jewish and Christian, ancient and modern, that don’t do this), that is Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Darius the Mede, and Cyrus of Persia, the four kings who all make appearances in the book of Daniel, are beastly kings. We can, of course, look at beasts of our own day and see parallels, but hunting for beasts in every closet, claiming every evil leader on this earth to be some prophesied potentate—instead of just a present variation on a theme, it tiring and does not further the Christian witness.

18-A Holy Kingdom—And while Daniel and his crew have had to contend with these beastly kings, they can trust that God is the ultimate ruler of all. They have no authority that is not from above.

 

What’s this have to do with Disestablishment?

-God’s people are not in charge of the cultural and political forces of Babylon. So too, when church and society disconnect, the church has to grapple with a loss of power and control. The church must contend with being exiled from the center of culture.

-Like Daniel and Co. the Church must learn how to navigate faithfully from the bottom. The Church must re-learn how to ask permission, explain every act, be a stranger seeking a place.

-The exiles had to decide where to compromise, where to find atypical paths, and where to hold fast, come what may. The church too must ask those sorts of questions. What is simply a name change? What is the equivalent of trading fancy food for vegetables and water as long as we can keep up? What are idols that we shall never bow down to?

-Finally, it is worth noting that the beastly Kingdoms aren’t forever, but God’s Kingdom is. So too, levels of disestablishment will vary, different regimes and cultural practices will come and go, but God will hold us fast.

 

My working definition of Disestablishment—Church and Society aren’t mutually reinforcing.

 

3 Stories about Disestablishment:

-Augustine:

St. Augustine famously dealt with the shock of disestablishment in his weighty work “City of God.” You see, after Constantine’s conversion and the rapid spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, it, at times, became hard for Christians to distinguish between their Roman-ness and their Christianity. Then, when Rome fell, they wondered if that meant heaven fell too. St. Augustine did the hard work of distinguishing between the Church of his time and the Society/culture/country in which he found himself.

The Church of England:

              When I was over in England, I ended up worshipping with the good people of the United Reformed Church, instead of the Church of England. When I worshipped with the Anglicans it felt… off. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but then an Irishman explained it to me. He said that in his experience the Church of England tends to step more firmly on the England part of their identity, than the Church part. People who have never set foot in a congregation, don’t read the bible, never received a sacrament, will gladly tell you they are a member of the Church of England—because they are English. The Church is so established in England that, to non-Englishmen, it can feel like a culture-club instead of a congregation.

Football:

              There is an apocryphal story that Maryland was such a Catholic State that the Archbishop of Baltimore used to dictate when kick-off happened for the Baltimore Colts. Then, when Baltimore got a new team, the Ravens, the Archbishop went to the NFL to let them know the kick-off time, and it didn’t go so well. You see, in the period between when the Colts played in Baltimore and the Ravens became their team, the relationships between Church and Culture had shifted, the Catholic Church no longer held the power of being the Establishment.

 

Challenges:

              There are many challenges that the Church faces when we are not in lock-step with the society we’re in. For example:

We’re not society’s Heroes—So, during the Cold War, America was fighting Godless Communism… so those who were not Godless, the Churches, were good Americans.
Then, during the War on Terror, America was fighting religious extremists… so people of faith became suspicious Americans.

Special Privileges—While some religious folks will object, it seems pretty plain to most people that the Church has special privileges in our society, from tax status to connection with community organizations to geographic locations. As those things are reconsidered, and at times taken away, it can hurt, it can even feel like persecution.

We’re weird—Things that are outside the mainstream experience tend to be looked at askance. As fewer people experience the church, those things that we do, including traditional milestone events in life, will seem stranger and stranger to the average person. What once was commonplace will begin to seem downright weird!

 

Possibility:

Fear not, I will never leave you with challenges alone; this new reality, disestablishment, also offers possibility!

Partnerships with fresh eyes: When many of the connections between church and neighbors are built on cultural assumptions, the church can go on autopilot. Our disestablishment offers an opportunity to reconsider how we connect with the world around us, the possibility to start again! Why do we have boy scouts in our building, but not book clubs? NA and AA meet in our buildings, but not the local soccer team most of the NA folk are a member of; what’s the difference between the sobriety shared on the pitch versus a coffee and cigarette-soaked meeting room?

Minister in the Margins: If the church is no longer in the business of playing by society’s rules, if making good little Americans who have a patina of religion to their name, is no longer our game, if we are freed from the shackles of respectability, where can we minister? Where are the places we’ve felt the tug of the Spirit before, but shrugged it off in the name of getting with the program? Where would we find Christ if we allowed ourselves to look?

Distinguishing between Church and Christ: Our disestablishment may be the perfect time to return to Augustine’s City of God. We can begin the generation long process of sifting out what practices, beliefs, symbols, and vocations are a product of our culture, and which are of Christ. Then, when we have a sense of that, we can look again at the world as it is, and apply the things of God to God’s world in need. We can best address the needs of our culture, when we have at least a bit of distance from it.

Discipleship in a 4D World session 1: 1st Samuel 3:1-21

Discipleship in a 4D World session 1: 1st Samuel 3:1-21

              The story of Samuel is a story of transitions, the story of a person born into one world and buried in one totally changed.

 

Backstory:

              Samuel’s mother Hannah was a barren woman, spurned by her household on account of that condition. She called out to God and bargained: I’ll give you my son if I can get pregnant. And she does get pregnant.

              Eli was the head Priest at the temple in Shiloh at the time, who took in little Samuel and cares for him as a son. Eli’s biological sons are awful priests; they are steal the offering and abuse women. Yet the working assumption is that they’ll take over the Temple and care for the Ark of the Covenant. Eli has been told by a wandering holy man that his sons will not succeed him.

 

3:1-7—A Sleepless Night

1-Visions and Words are rare—Throughout the book of Samuel there is an ongoing sense that there was a vibrant religious and political world in the past, but it had petered out and is on its last legs. Imagine, there next to the Ark itself, no words or signs from God!

2-A dim sighted priest—Eli’s vision acts as a metaphor for his turning a blind eye on his son’s evil deeds, and the dimness of his generation.

3-Low light, the Ark, where God resides—Again, the dazzling light of God, the heavy presence of God, has almost gone out, has almost entirely left the temple. Whatever God had done in the past with these people, seems almost over. The place where God is bodily present is burning itself out.

4-“Hinanni”—"Here I am,” is a frequent mortal response to God/heaven/angels throughout scripture.

6-Eli doesn’t get it yet—This is a classic rule of three situation (3 Bears, Billy Goats Gruff, etc) establishing a pattern, in order to break it. Samuel and Eli don’t know it is God yet, but it will dawn on them! We get to watch as the tension rises and the plot thickens!

7-Raised in temple, sleeps next to the ark… doesn’t yet know the LORD—Again, this is pointing out how bankrupt and broken the relationship between God and God’s people is in Eli’s generation. It also reminds me of a saying, by Scottish poet and Macdonald, “Nothing is so deadening to the divine as an habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things.”

 

3:8-14—Oh, it’s a Message from God!

8-The rule of threes—And here we are, third times the charm, it dawns on Eli that Samuel isn’t being a bratty boy, but God, instead, is up to something.

11-Ear tingling, new thing!—And that new thing will be overwhelming to hear! An escape from the present predicament, folk shall again know the LORD!

13-Both the sin and failing to stop the sin—Eli’s house had committed not only sins of commission but also sins of omission. Eli should have stopped his sons from sinning, but did not, and in failing to act, doomed his family.

14-The end of the house of Eli—There is no way out. This is an end. Those who cared for God’s dwelling place, shall no longer do so. That family shall fall.

 

3:15-21—The New Judge/Priest, Samuel

15-If you thought it was a sleepless night before!—What a message for poor Samuel. If he was having a tough time sleeping, with God whispering in his ear, how much more, the anxiety of anticipation.

16-“My son” what pathos!—If little Samuel wasn’t already feeling the weight of the message God gave to him, guilt for being the bearer of bad news, he’s feeling it now. Eli states plainly their relationship,” you are like a son to me!”

18-Eli is resigned to this fall

20-A trustworthy prophet—Samuel, not the offspring of Eli, acts rightly and faithfully. He does not abuse or steal, instead he does what is right.

 

A Few Details of Note:

Visions were rare, even the religious do not know God

As I said before, here is a drumbeat of debased religion in this book. Eli’s sons are untrustworthy abusers. Eli doesn’t understand Hannah’s prayers; he can’t tell the difference between prayers and drunk utterances. Little Samuel, literally in the temple, does not know God. And one way to talk about such a situation is that they live in a secular frame. Because they don’t pay attention to God, God isn’t a reality in their life. If you don’t have a habit of listening to God, God speaking to you will be a terrifying proposition.

“To see what’s in front of your nose is a constant struggle.”—George Orwell

              There is a repeated insistence that it is hard to see, it is dark, the senses grow dim, and that is all punctured by a promising new thing—ears tingling. In the midst of massive societal changes, it is very hard to see what the heck is going on and nearly impossible to guess what things will look like on the other side. Israel’s reality before and after Samuel are so different from each other. Before Samuel 12 tribes worshipped at local shrines, and were cared for by bands of prophets and, only, when necessary, charismatic judges who would temporarily unite the tribes. After Samuel there was one kingdom, everything centered in Jerusalem—Temple, Court prophets, and King.

              As the above Orwell quote suggests, seeing the present aright, let alone having insights into the future and what comes next, is a great challenge. A King Saul, let alone a Davidic Dynasty, Jerusalem of all places the center of it all, the dissolution of local shrines… all the fixed realities of the previous generation are in flux.

 

1^st Samuel 3 and the 4Ds

              Back in 2015, I was the Counselor of the Raritan Cluster, and that meant I saw a slightly wider church than just my congregation, and it became clear to me that we are in one of those generational transition moments, like Samuel. At one point, I gathered the folk from my cluster together, we read these verses from 1^st Samuel, and I asked the group what aspects of ministry were, like the life of Israel in Samuel’s days, making both their ears tingle?  How is God uniquely at work today? How do we see the world as it is, not as we would imagine it to be? What are the challenges of ministry for us now?

By the end of the conversation, we’d come up with 3 things in front of our nose that we were pretty sure we saw: A greater cleaving of Church and Society, all aspects of life becoming more decentralized, and the demographics of our neighborhoods changing swiftly. Quite recently I added a 4^th dynamic to that list from a decade ago, most of our habits are secular, not sacred—we’ve become disenchanted as a people.

So, for these five Bible Studies, we’ll be looking at the 4Ds, Disestablishment, Decentralization, Demographic Shift, and Disenchantment. We’ll look and hopefully see what’s in front of our noses, we’ll listen and hear what makes our ears tingle.

 

Broad overview:

Disestablishment: Church and Society aren’t mutually reinforcing.

The thinker I focus on most to think through this reality is Douglas John Hall and his book: The End of Christendom and the Future of Christianity.

The piece of scripture we’ll look at to consider this aspect of discipleship is the book of Daniel, where God’s people are in a culture that in no ways supports their faith. The big question is: How are we faithful when it is hard and we are out of synch with the surrounding society?

              If the Church is to survive and thrive in a Disestablished society, it must learn how to partner with people and organizations that have missions that are similar to ours, we will have to become creative in forming alliances and doing the work God has called us to with and among unexpected peoples.

 

Decentralization: The Distribution of functions and power.

              The book that most helped me think about this dynamic in our society was The Spider and the Starfish by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom.

              The piece of scripture we’ll be reading to think about God working among a decentralized people will be the book of Judges. This book of the Bible follows a tribal model of being God’s people.

              If the Church is to be faithful in a decentralized world, we ought to embrace the good parts of being small, namely being nimble. We need to be able to act and react in a way that fits a wide variety of contexts.

 

Demographic Shift: A significant change in a population’s structure over time.

              The two books that I’ve read that influence how I think about shifting demographics are and William Strauss, Neil Howe’s Generations as well as Kenneth Gronbach’s Upside.

              The piece of scripture we’ll be looking at to think about God at work in the midst of a diversity of people is the Pentecost, as found in Acts 2. This is the beginning of the Holy Spirit widening what it means to be Church again and again—the whole of the book of Acts can be summed up as: the disciples figure they’ve expanded the church as far as it can go, they decide to take a breather, and then the Holy Spirit does something new just beyond the limits of their imagination, so they go and catch up.

              The Church needs to navigate the many demographic shifts in our world—racial and ethnic, financial and generational—and do so in a way that is not lip service, but instead an embrace of authentic diversity.

 

Disenchantment: To lose the habit of paying attention to the Holy.

The book that has most influenced my thought on disenchantment is Chasing Magic Eels by Richard Beck.

The book of Esther is one of only two books in the Bible that never mention God. As such, it is an excellent scripture to read to consider how the people of God can be faithful while navigating the world with secular lenses.

I believe Disenchantment is the greatest challenge of the Church. In order for faith to survive, as something more than a social curiosity or something that is one step removed from our actual experiences, we need to find way to notice God at work in the world and embrace and renew habits of enchantment.

 

Conclusion:

              So that’s what these remaining 4 bible studies will look like. We’ll start off in scripture, wrap our minds around one of the 4Ds, notice the challenges they bring to being followers of Jesus Christ, and then conclude with opportunities for renewal hiding in plain sight. In short, this Bible Study is a call for the Church to see the world as it is and change to meet those challenges. It is a call for us to become a Partnering, Nimble, Authentically Diverse, and Enchanted Church!