The Curious Protestantism of Rick Santorum

February 24, 2012 by richardlfloyd

The other night I watched the Republican Primary debate from Arizona and was struck by the incongruity of two Roman Catholics and a Mormon fighting to be the standard bearer for what has become the party of American conservative evangelicalism. Even a cursory knowledge of American history will remind you that one of the (nasty) features of American Protestantism right up to the late 20^th century was a virulent anti-Catholocism. And in the 19th century Mormons were run and burned out of town in Illinois (and elsewhere) by Protestant mobs. Well, if that particular form of bigotry has changed all for the good.

But the more I listen to Rick Santorum, the more Protestant he sounds, and perhaps this is his appeal to conservative Protestants. So I was pleased to find in today’s on-line New Yorker a knowledgeable exegesis of Rick Santorum’s remarks the other day about President Obama’s “theology.”

The article, called “Senator Santorum’s Planet,” is by James Wood. He writes, “If Rick Santorum is so staunch a Catholic, why does he often sound such a Protestant, not to say puritanical, note?” You can tell Wood has some pew-sitting in his past (he admits as much), and he clearly understands the subtle nuances of biblical and theological talk. He says,

“I know the theological weight of that word, “steward.” When I was a boy, my mother, in the grip of her Scottish evangelical Protestantism, used to chide me for my untidy bedroom, adding that, as a Christian, it was an example of “poor stewardship.” Everything is the Lord’s, and our brief role on earth is merely to husband it in a right way, a way that gives the Lord His due.”

Wood sees in Santorum an apocalyptical ascetism more obviously associated with Protestantism than Roman Catholicism and I think that is just right. Santorum may be a conservative Catholic, but his theology has heavy overtones that come not out othe native soil of his own faith, but from a particular brand of American evangelicalism. This is at the heart of his objection to the President’s “theology,” which he identifies with an extreme form of environmentalism that the President’s critics on the left must find confounding.

Wood concludes:

When Santorum says that we must be good stewards of the earth, there is religious zealotry behind the sweet words. He is proposing, in effect, that the earth is dispensable but that our souls are not; that we will all outlive the earth, whether in heaven or hell. The point is not that he is elevating man above the earth; it is that he is separating man and earth. If President Obama really does elevate earth over man (accepting Santorum’s absurd premise for a moment), then at least he believes in keeping man and earth together. Santorum’s brand of elevation involves severing man from man’s earthly existence, which is why it is coherent only within a theological eschatology (a theology of the last days). And he may well believe that man cannot actually destroy the earth through such violence as global warming, for the perfectly orthodox theological reason that the earth will come to an end (or be renewed) only when Christ comes again to judge the living and the dead. In other words, global warming can’t exist because it is not in God’s providential plan: the Lord will decide when the earth expires. This is Santorum’s “theology,” phony or otherwise.

The great irony in all this is that among the viable contenders in the coming election the only actual Protestant in the race is President Obama.

Do ministers work for the church?

February 9, 2012 by richardlfloyd

I have written before about my mixed feelings about the “professionalization” of the clergy. The relationship was once more like a marriage covenant than a job. Lately I notice more and more that the relationship between clergy and congregation is construed as a contractual one borrowed from the corporate world. And I also note with sadness that this model is at the heart of much clergy/congregation conflict when one or both parties feel aggrieved that the contract is not being properly carried out. A covenant has room for forbearance and forgiveness; a contract does not.

When I was ordained, the preacher (Dudne Breeze) admonished me to be a minister of the Word of God. He didn’t admonish me to be the CEO or the COO, or even to be a faithful employee of the congregation. My job I knew was not to make the congregation flourish but to make the Gospel real.

There were times in my ministry when I had to stand against the majority will of the congregation on behalf of the Gospel. This is no fun when you have come to love your congregation. Years ago I came across this great letter that P.T. Forsyth (1848-1921) wrote to his new congregation in Cheetham Hill, England.

He made it plain that although they had called him he had a prior and higher call. Can you imagine a beleaguered pastor saying something like this today to an angry board of trustees?

“You have called and I have answered gladly. But it is not your call that has made me a minister. I was a minister before any congregation called me. My election is of God. Paul speaks of ‘a faithful minister of the new covenant’ … The minister of this covenant, therefore, the minister of Christ, has his call, first, in the nature of God and God’s Truth; second, in the nature of man and man’s need. We have on one side the divine Gospel; we have on the other the cry of the human. His call is constituted both by the divine election and the requirements of human nature. Would that some who are sure of their election by God, were as sure of their election by man, and their fitness to adapt God’s truth to human nature. It is not therefore the invitation of any particular congregation that makes a man a minister. It is a call which on the human side proceeds from the needs rather than from the wishes of mankind, from the constitution of human nature as set forth in Christ, rather than from the appointment by any section or group of men. I am here, not to meet all your requisitions, but to serve all your needs in Jesus Christ. You have not conferred on me my office, and I am Christ’s servant more than yours, and yours for His sake. The minister is not the servant of the Church in the sense of any special community or organization. The old Latin theologians used to subscribe themselves V.D.M., Minister of the Word of God,—Minister not of the Church, but of that Christian human nature which our particular views and demands so often belie. A minister may, on occasion, never be so much of a minister as when he resists his congregation and differs from it.” (“The Pulpit and the Age”)

The church could user fewer employees and more ministers..

Confused? Interpreting Your Congregation’s Numbers

January 28, 2012 by richardlfloyd

One of the besetting sins of today’s American mainline church is a morbid preoccupation with the numbers; number of members (AKA “pledging units”) and number of dollars.

Such a preoccupation is understandable given the decline of these numbers over the past decades, but the result is the continuing demoralization of leaders and members, and a misreading of the real strengths and weaknesses of the congregation and its leaders.

I would not suggest that we do away with the bookkeeping, but I do suggest that we bring better interpretive tools to bear on the numbers. Numbers without interpretation can be just as dangerous for the church’s well-being as scripture texts without interpretation.

Here in New England we have many historic (often downtown) churches that hit their numerical high water mark in both members and dollars somewhere between the late 1950’s and mid 1960’s.

Those numbers without interpretation might lead one to believe that those times of plenty were a golden age of the church, and in the minds of many older members they were. But to use them as the template for what is normative makes everything that has followed appear to be failure.

A deeper look tells a more complicated story. There was a boom in church life in the years after World War Two. I call it a boom and not a revival, because it lacked many of the features of earlier religious awakenings, and that is part of the story of the subsequent decline.

It was a heady time of great optimism. America and its allies had won the war at great cost of people and treasure. There was an atmosphere of thanksgiving that the war was over. The returning troops settled down, got married and created the great “Baby Boom” of the late forties into the fifties.

But it was not all optimism. The new Cold War with the Soviet Union and the specter of a nuclear exchange put fear into the mix. And because the religiosity of America stood in stark contrast to the official atheism of the Soviets church-going seemed patriotic.

Many returning troops went to college on the GI bill and made their way into a rising middle class that fueled a housing boom.

These demographic and cultural factors grew churches. Many new churches were built, new additions were added, and Sunday Schools were bursting at the seams with the young boomers.

Although there was some robust theology in the academy (the Niebuhrs, Karl Barth, and Paul Tillich come to mind) that theology hadn’t made its way to the congregations. The life of the church was largely a pretty generic Culture Protestantism which identified itself with the American way of life. There were Catholic and Jewish versions of this identity as Will Herberg described in his important book of the time Protestant, Catholic, Jew.

This (necessarily) simplistic sketch sets the stage for what happened in the 1960’s. The Boomers grew up and out of the church. Their mostly inadequate Christian education had not prepared them for the profound cultural changes that took place during this time. The Civil Rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and the rise of the Boomer counter-culture all called into question the moral legitimacy of established authority, including the church.

The rise of neo-fundamentalism gave those looking for a more robust Christian experience an alternative place to go.

The mainline churches retained an important place in American life (and still do) but their numerical glory days were past and the decline continued as the older generation died off and the younger generation (numerically smaller than the Boomers) didn’t take their place. That accounts for the loss of members and partly for the loss of dollars.

When new members did come in they often had less money than the generation they were replacing and lacked the habits of good stewardship and commitment to institutions that their elders had had.

Regional demographics come into play as well. Areas losing population, the “Rust Belt” states, saw more rapid declines than growing states in the South and West.

Changes in the economy, in employment and investment markets, also come into play.

All this is to say that there are macroeconomic factors at work over which church leaders have little or no control that impact the numbers that appear in their annual reports. If they see declining pledge income during a recession with high unemployment (such as the one we are presently in) it doesn’t mean their leaders are incompetent (although they might be.)

Lay leaders faced with rising costs and diminishing income often panic, slashing vital programs, and blaming their ordained leadership for the bad numbers.

The preoccupation with the numbers often means other important features of congregational life are overlooked. A pastor may preach excellent sermons, foster a vital congregational group life, encourage faithful mission, oversee life-changing Christian education and still find herself under the gun for the continuing bad numbers. Good evangelism and church growth strategies are important for congregations, but the fact is that in many locations the demographic realities limit the number of prospective new members.

There can be no doubt that continued changes are in store. Some congregations will have to abandon historic buildings to be more efficient in their mission. Other congregations will join together in new configurations. Some will have to find graceful ways to live out their mission before dying. But most congregations will not be doing these things and will move along from year to year as best they can.

They will have to discover imaginative and creative approaches to their changing realities. But this is nothing new. The church has always had to adapt to the world in which it finds itself. And the myth of the prosperous church of 1958 needs de-mythologizing if we are to deal faithfully with our own time. Let us stop longing for the good old days that never were.

Because we don’t live in the past, we live now, and in the midst of all these challenges and obstacles it is easy to overlook how much faithful and energetic ministry still goes on every day in our congregations.

By all means keep an eye on the numbers. But be aware that a preoccupation with the numbers may obscure what God is up to in our life together. And that is hardly worthy of a faith that believes in resurrection.

Ruminations on the Perplexing Task of Ministry: Arnold Kenseth’s “Ordination”

January 23, 2012 by richardlfloyd

I have been ordained now nearly thirty-six years, and although I can rattle off a pretty coherent explanation of the meaning of ordination my own has never entirely lost a sense of mystery and wonder about it.

My daughter is presently in her final year of divinity school and about to present her ordination paper this week, and I think it was reading hers that got me ruminating on my own.

Being a minister of the church is a living conundrum, as Karl Barth describes it so well in his section on “the Task of Ministry”: “As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory. This is our perplexity. The rest of our task fades into insignificance in comparison’ (The Word of God and the Word of Man, p. 186).

Where prose fails to capture this paradox poetry frequently does better. I have often turned to the poetry of my friend Arnold Kenseth, who died in 2003, especially the collection of poems he entitled “Reflections of an Unprofitable Servant.” Here’s one of my favorites:

Ordination

I was anointed. A fire. Yes, I tell you.
An adazzle. His rare thump numbed me, awed
Me down to size and up to Him. Prayed, pawed
By the laying on of hands, myself anew
And aloft; I became lion to roar Him,
Eagle to lift Him, donkey to bear Him. I,
In that sunburst, languaged with seraphim,
Promised myself to be (Ha!) His emissary.

I did not, friends, manage much. True, I found
Fluency, but not roar. I have been sparrow;
And though jackass as most, I could not be least
Even for Him. He was scarlet and vast
And radiant and restful. He sang such sound
I heard the earth unloose itself from sorrow.

(Arnold Kenseth, Seasons and Sceneries, Windhover Press, 2002)

My Most Popular Blogposts of 2011

December 31, 2011 by richardlfloyd

This was a big year for my blog. First of all I changed the name from “Retired Pastor Ruminates” to “When I Survey . . .” This better describes the eclectic nature of this blog, and reflects my new belief that I am not retired but merely self-unemployed.

Most of my surveying takes place out the back porch (or back windows in cold weather) and I change the header picture to reflect what it is I see as I look out over the marsh behind my house.

This year I also purchased the domain name “richardlfloyd.com” and made the change from Blogger to WordPress with help from my antipodean friend Jason Goroncy who came to visit in June. Thanks Jason.

Alas, it took awhile for folks and search engines to find the new site and name and I fell off of most of the blogrolls I was on. The redirect to the new site only sends you to the home page, so it was harder for people to find specific posts from the past. Time will take care of this.

One of the highlights of the year was an eight-week series of guest blogs on hope I did for Darkwood Brew, which describes itself as “a renegade exploration of Christian faith for the modern world which blends ancient contemplative practices with cutting-edge interactive web technology, world-class music, arts, biblical scholarship, and special guests from around the globe via Skype.”) Some of these posts on hope were among the most popular of the year.

So here are the most popular posts of the year:

On the all-time list and among the most visited this year are my two cris de coeur on clergy burnout and abuse, The Ministry and its Discontents: Pastors in Peril, and Ten Highly Effective Strategies for Crushing your Pastor’s Morale.

Thanks for visiting and drop by again from time to time in 2012.

“Rejoice! Rejoice!” A Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent

December 8, 2011 by richardlfloyd

There is something beautiful and mysterious about Advent, but there is, at the same time, something unsettling, darkly anxious, almost threatening about it. The Advent mood is hard to put into words. It is often captured better by its hymns, which are often dark and brooding, sung in a minor key.

The scripture lessons for Advent set the tone with their continued prophetic calls for repentance, the dire warnings to “wait and watch,” the urgency of preparation for what is coming. We hear about those who are unprepared for God, tenants who are surprised by the sudden appearance of their long-absent landlord, sleepy bridesmaids waiting with their empty oil-lamps for the bridegroom to come.

In short, it’s an expectant season, a season of being primed and pumped, and there is a nervous edge to the waiting. Lauren Winner, in her charming book Girl Meets God says of Advent, “The waiting is meant to be a little anxious. I picture Jane Austen heroines. They never are quite sure that their intended will come.”

But the Advent mood undergoes a dramatic change today, on this Third Sunday of Advent. The lessons lose their menace and begin to dance a bit. Suddenly, the warnings turn into promises. We hear of deserts blossoming, the seas exulting, and the trees of the field clapping their hands, so that if there were one word to capture the new mood it would have to be joy!

Traditionally this Third Sunday of Advent is called Gaudete Sunday, from the Latin for joy, and it is a day for rejoicing.

But perhaps some of you don’t feel like rejoicing. Perhaps your own mood is more like the rest of Advent, darker, more anxious, somewhat unsettled, for any number of reasons, not least of which might be the state of the world.

The news of the world is always a distressed word, a word full of sadness and anger, a word tinged with fear and heavy with regret. Perhaps that is why the darker mood of the Advent season speaks to us at times more authentically than its more joyous mood. Because the news of the world in which we live is so often itself such a dark unsettled word.

Whether we recognize it or not we come to church to hear a counter-Word. We come burdened by our occupations and pre-occupations, weighed down by both the demands of daily living and the larger societal and global worries that clamor for our attention. We often think we have things pretty much figured out, but there are nagging areas of uncertainty about our fate and future.

We come perhaps unsure how reliable even the words we hear in church might be. The New Yorker last week had a cartoon in which a man is shaking hands with a minister at the door of a church. “Good sermon, Reverend,” he says, “but that God stuff is pretty far-fetched.”

Yes, it is. To the ears of the world the Good News often sounds like too-good-to be-true news. And a weekly hour’s religious interlude away from the world’s worries may not be enough to get us ready for rejoicing.

Nevertheless, on this Third Sunday in Advent we are admonished to rejoice. And in its wisdom the church has placed this rejoicing season in the midst of the heavier Advent mood, has placed today’s major key joyfulness amid the plaintive longing of the rest of the season, whose words are not words of hope and promise so much as words of warning, dire words that leave us judged.

And you can see the transition in today’s Old Testament lesson, which starts out in the usual Advent minor key in the first chapters.

But then listen to these words from Chapter three:
“Sing aloud, O daughter Zion;

“Shout, O Israel!
“Rejoice and exult with all your heart,

O daughter Jerusalem!

The Lord has taken away the judgments against you . . .

“The Lord your God is in your midst,

“He will rejoice over you with gladness

“He will renew you in his love;

“He will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival.”

So how does the story get from Chapter 1 to Chapter 3, from judgment to mercy; from wrath to tender forgiveness; from fear to rejoicing, from death to life?

The answer is that the God who comes to be our judge is the same God who comes to be our Savior. This is what holds the waiting and rejoicing moods of Advent together.

God has taken the sentence that we deserve and has taken it upon himself. In Christ our judgment has been removed and the enemy has been turned away at the gates. We can rejoice as prisoners who have received a stay of execution. The Good News is like a governor’s pardon that arrives by the last post.

Such a reprieve is cause for rejoicing. Those who would have been given over to death by the word of the law are now brought to life by the life-giving word of the Gospel. God turns our death into life, our shame into praise. No wonder St. Paul commands us to rejoice!

But the rejoicing is not just on our part. We are not the only ones rejoicing this Advent. God rejoices along with those whose sentence he has overturned. Even God sings,

Because God is a lover and invites us to love him in return. The Christian story is above all a love story. It is not about something called religion, but it is all about the love God has for us. God wants us for himself. He wants us as lovers. This is the God who heals and saves, the God who gives meaning and hope to the downcast and new life to the dead. This is God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and our Father, the God worth waiting for, and working for, and praying to and rejoicing with.

This is the God that our ancestors have worshipped in this building since 1853 and in two previous meetinghouses on this site going back to 1764. This is the God we pray will bring many to himself in this place in the years to come, so that in this place 150 years from now people, will hear the Good News of his love.

And so we rejoice and sing.

The Reverend Dr. Richard L. Floyd.
A sermon given at First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on
December 14, 2003.

Hope and the Spirit

November 11, 2011 by richardlfloyd

“The wind blows wherever it pleases,” Jesus once said to Nicodemus, “You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.” (John 3:8 NIV)

As I am writing this I look out the window and watch the last of the lovely New England leaves falling down in the face of a stiff wind along with the occasional batch of snow flurries. I cannot see the wind, but I can see the trees swaying from its power and the leaves coming down.

By analogy (and not a pristine one, I admit) we cannot see God’s Spirit, but we can (and do) see the effects of it in our lives and our world.

Both the Hebrew word and the Greek word for “spirit” also mean “wind” and “breath,” all very real but unseen. Like the wind God’s free activity is real but unseen. But unlike the wind, God’s activity is not impersonal.

It is a temptation to imagine the Spirit of God as impersonal, something like “the Force” in Star Wars, but that would be a misrepresentation of God, at least of the Christian God revealed in Jesus Christ.

If we stay with the wind analogy we can see that God’s Spirit acts on both us, and our world, in unseen but real ways from outside ourselves. So we cannot possess the Spirit of God, which presents a real problem for contemporary Americans because we are so very much into possessing.

We have even turned the word “spiritual” (a word that should be approached with great caution) into a human attribute, something we possess. But if we think of God’s Spirit as like the wind, the truly spiritual person would be the one not possessing some intrinsic attribute, but the one most open to being moved by the unseen but real activity of God.

We might call this openness to the unseen activity of God “faith.” If we project this openness into the future we might call it “hope.” And this is where I think that the Spirit is a resource for hope.

Going back to my first post on hope eight weeks ago I named a faithless attitude “functional atheism,” which refers to the belief that it all depends on us. I wrote that this attitude is even alive and well in the church. Of course, you can go too far in the other direction.

Which is what I like about imagining the Spirit’s activity to be “wind-like;” we are not pressed into a kind of determinism that robs us of our freedom. The opposite of “functional atheism” might be ideas of God that understand us to be mere marionettes that God moves around at will as if by strings. A God of holy love does not coerce us!

When I am hopeless about the future it is often because I am projecting the way things are (in myself, in my society, and in the world) into an imagined future that is more or less the same (or worse!)

But openness to God’s Spirit means that the future is not just the present projected into the future. The unseen but very real personal activity of the living God is working in us and around us to insure a far different future than we could ever imagine from looking at our present.

Faith is not just passively waiting for that future to appear, but to be actively working (as best we know how) for it to come about. This is why Christians pray, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Who knows where the fresh winds of God’s Spirit will be made manifest? That gives me hope.

(This is the eighth and final guest post I am blogging for an eight-week series called: “Hope-A Pessimist’s Guide” on Darkwood Brew, which describes itself as “a renegade exploration of Christian faith for the modern world which blends ancient contemplative practices with cutting-edge interactive web technology, world-class music, arts, biblical scholarship, and special guests from around the globe via Skype.”)

Beauty and Time

November 3, 2011 by richardlfloyd

Scott Russell Sanders tells a charming story about his daughter’s wedding. He is in the vestibule of the church with the wedding party. “Clumsy in my rented finery—patent leather shoes that are a size too small and starched shirt and stiff black tuxedo—I stand among these gorgeous women like a crow among doves. I realize that they are not gorgeous because they carry bouquets or wear silk dresses, but because the festival of marriage has slowed time down until any fool can see their glory.” (Hunting for Hope, p 140)

Time doesn’t really slow down, of course, but we all know what he means. New Testament Greek is better at this than English since it has two words for time. There is chronos, which is sequential time, “clock time” we might say, and kairos, which is special time, “the fullness of time.” Chronos is quantitative and kairos is qualitative.

Sanders’ perception of the beauty of the wedding party is a moment of kairos, and his image of time slowing down is wonderfully descriptive of how kairos feels.

It is also apt that Sanders links this imagined slowing down of time with beauty, because the New Testament Greek word for beautiful derives from the word for hour. To be beautiful was to be “in one’s hour.” Ripe fruit was considered beautiful, and a young person trying to appear older or an older person trying to appear younger was an offense against beauty,

Another place where time can seem to slow down is in worship, when the distance between time and eternity is collapsed, and we get a sense of being part of a great company of saints living and dead across the span of time and space: the “mystic sweet communion with those whose rest is won.”

These moments of kairos, whether at a marriage or at a church service or eating a ripe peach, are gifts of insight that help us make sense of the rest of our time, the quotidian chronos of living.

Christians have long imagined themselves as participants in God’s greater story, with its trajectory through time from Creation to Consummation. Along the way there are wonderful moments of kairos, such as the coming of Christ, described beautfully here in the first verse of Carl Daw’s Advent/Christmas hymn:

When God’s time had ripened,
Mary’s womb bore fruit,
scion of the Godhead,
sprung from Jesse’s root:
so the True Vine branches
from the lily’s stem,
the Rose without blemish
blooms in Bethlehem.

(This is the seventh guest post I am blogging for an eight-week series called: “Hope-A Pessimist’s Guide” on Darkwood Brew, which describes itself as “a renegade exploration of Christian faith for the modern world which blends ancient contemplative practices with cutting-edge interactive web technology, world-class music, arts, biblical scholarship, and special guests from around the globe via Skype.”)

‘Tis the gift to be simple

October 28, 2011 by richardlfloyd

Just down the road from my home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts is the Hancock Shaker Village, a living history museum on the site of a former Shaker community. It is a beautiful spot, with oft-photographed buildings such as this Round Stone Barn. Both my children worked there during their teen years, and my son was a costumed interpreter for a couple summers.

The Shakers who once lived here at Hancock were part of a 19^th Century utopian community. They practiced racial and gender equality, pacifism, celibacy (which was their undoing), and what they called “simplicity.” Simplicity meant placing a higher value on people’s spiritual life than on their possessions or achievements.

This attitude is beautifully expressed in their best-known song, “Simple Gifts,” written in 1848 by Shaker Elder Joseph and put to music by Joseph Brackett:

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain’d,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come ’round right.

The turning refers to movements in a dance, for the Shakers were known for their use of dance in worship.

The lyric begins ‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘this the gift to be free . . .” and there is a deep truth in these words. In a consumer society such as ours it becomes far too easy for us to derive our identities from our possessions. The irony is that in giving so much value to our possessions we let them possess us.

The Shakers put more emphasis on being than on having. One of their axioms was “hands to work, and hearts to God.”

They understood there was something deeply spiritual about simplicity. That less is sometimes more. That quality is more important than quantity.

Can we learn from the Shakers ways of living and acting in simplicity that are, in today’s jargon, sustainable? In this regard the Shakers were ahead of their time, in knowing how to live simply in ways that were kind to the planet and help to insure a hopeful future for it and it’s citizens.

(This is the sixth guest post I am blogging for an eight-week series called: “Hope-A Pessimist’s Guide” on Darkwood Brew, which describes itself as “a renegade exploration of Christian faith for the modern world which blends ancient contemplative practices with cutting-edge interactive web technology, world-class music, arts, biblical scholarship, and special guests from around the globe via Skype.”)

Is there room in our hope for justice?

October 21, 2011 by richardlfloyd

I try to imagine the prophet Amos at a fancy cocktail party. He would be that guy, who seeing your new Mercedes in the driveway, would be compelled to go into detail about global warming from greenhouse gases, then move on without a breath to discuss the appalling inequalities of wealth between the richest and the poorest.

As you try to escape his conversational grip to enjoy that first sip of your martini, he would remind you of how much grain goes into making spirits that could be used to feed the hungry.

Such imaginings are pure fancy, of course, since people like Amos, obsessed with justice and injustice, never get invited anywhere because they are too depressing to be around.

And his hard words seem even more dire when you realize that Amos’ warnings aren’t merely grumpy pronouncements, but were understood as the Word of God delivered by the prophet.

So listen to what God says about religious practices:

I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!

If we picture the twin pillars of Jesus’ summary of the law, love of God and love of neighbor, as the vertical dimension and the horizontal dimension, why is it that our conceptions of Christian hope are almost exclusively focused on the vertical?

How many of our questions about the future are about our individual relationship with God? “What happens to me after I die?” “Will I be saved?”

Do not passages such as this one from Amos remind us that God is very much concerned not only with what we might call our religion or spirituality, but also with justice and righteousness; not only about the health of the individual soul, but also about the health of the shared life in community?

And so our imaginings about Christian hope would be more biblical and faithful if they included a social dimension, as we think about both here and hereafter.

There is plenty of rich imaginative material in the Bible to work with. For example, in Revelation 21 the future in the end time is a city, a New Jerusalem, described like this:

Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

It is a vision of a community with God at the center, where God’s love has overcome all that afflicts our world including injustice. And one interesting feature of this new community is that there is no temple in it. That’s right, no need for religion, which apparently is God’s provisional strategy to get us from here to there.

So in the meantime, we need to ask ourselves as we imagine the future of our world, “Is there room in our hope for justice?”

(This is the fifth guest post I am blogging for an eight-week series called: “Hope-A Pessimist’s Guide” on Darkwood Brew, which describes itself as “a renegade exploration of Christian faith for the modern world which blends ancient contemplative practices with cutting-edge interactive web technology, world-class music, arts, biblical scholarship, and special guests from around the globe via Skype.”)

Photo: R.L. Floyd

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