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Where I Ruminate on why a Blog is like Sourdough Starter: A Parable

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After about a month of blogging it has occurred to me that keeping a blog is like maintaining sourdough starter. Let me explain. Thirty years ago in our newlywed Maine days our friend Alison gave us a small batch of sourdough starter, which is a fermented batter of flour and water. This particular starter, Alison told us with reverence, was reputedly more than a hundred years old. The starter is used, in lieu of other yeast, to make sourdough bread.

Martha and I were young and countercultural and this sounded very cool, and it was kinda cool for a time, but there was a problem. You have to feed the starter! If you don’t feed the starter it gets funkier and sourer by the week and eventually turns dark brown and poisons your refrigerator (did I mention it takes up room there?)

You have to feed the starter every week. First you drain off the alcoholic liquid that has accumulated on the top (it’s called, appropriately enough, “hooch.”) Then you put in some flour for the living colony of organisms that is your starter to munch on.

So as time goes on the thing in the refrigerator grows, which is fine if you are a professional baker or an avid amateur that makes bread several times a week. But we were neither.

We made sourdough bread a couple times, and found the feeding to be a chore, but still somehow felt loyalty to this heirloom starter in the fridge, so it just took up residence there.

The starter wasn’t really useful to us anymore, but we had been feeding it for so long we were invested in its survival.

Finally, two things happened that led us to abandon the starter. First, we had a child, who actually really needed to be fed regularly, which took away some of the starter’s leverage. And, secondly, we each admitted to the other that we didn’t really like sourdough bread. “Those who have ears let them hear.”

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On Easter Day: A Hymn for Easter Sunday

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On Easter Day, on Easter Day
The angel rolled the stone away.
Let all good Christians sing and pray
On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, on Easter Day
A new creation came to stay
To take the sting of death away
On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, on Easter Day
Christ came among them, so they say,
And shared his story on the Way
On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, this Easter Day,
We come to worship, sing and pray,
And share his presence, come what may
On Easter Day.

Suggested tune: Victory (Palestrina)

©Richard L. Floyd, 2004

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Thoughts for Good Friday II

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Mary C. Boys, Professor of Practical Theology at Union Theological Seminary, wrote, “Like all symbols, the cross evokes more than one can explain. It condenses life and death into one symbol. It enfolds some of the deepest fears of humanity—vulnerability, betrayal, pain, forsakenness—and transfigures them into expressions of hope. When Christians proclaim the power of the cross, they are voicing their confidence that death is not the end, that the grip of evil has been broken, and that the powers and principalities who seem to control this world have been banished. When Christians proclaim the power of the cross, they are declaring, albeit often with tremulous voice, that at times one must simply endure suffering, that certain things in life must be borne. And they are declaring that in the passion of Jesus we find a model for our fidelity.The cross is a symbol Christians have been given to image their hope that God is with them even in pain and tragedy and ambiguity. It is a symbol of the longing to give themselves over to a project larger than their own self-interest, and of the faith that pouring out one’s life for the sake of another brings new life. It is a symbol that enables Christians to name the hard things of their lives, to express anguish rather than to repress it. . . .”With the very ambiguous history of the interpretation of the cross in mind Boys concludes, “Just as a church building that has been profaned by a violent or blasphemous deed needs rededication, so too, the symbol the church carries must be purified by its people’s repentance. Only then can the cross embody the power of reconciliation for which Jesus lived and died.” (Cross Currents, Spring 1994. . p 22-23)

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Thoughts for Good Friday I

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, “Either I determine the place in which I will find God, or I allow God to determine the place where he will be found. If it is I who say where God will be, I will always find there a God who in some way corresponds to me, is agreeable to me, fits in with my nature. But if it is God who says where He will be, then that will truly be a place which at first is not agreeable at all, which does not fit so well with me. That place is the cross of Christ.” (Meditating on the Word, p 44–45).

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Tom Wright Answers the Caricatures of the Cross

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One of my persistent vocations is answering the critics of the cross. See for example, my The Cross and Violence, Is the Word of the Cross Good News, or is it Bad News?, a paper I gave at last summer’s Craigville Colloquy on Cape Cod.

So I was gratified to find this piece by N.T Wright, Bishop of Durham, in Fulcrum, from 2007, The Cross and the Caricatures.

Here’s a sample:“We must of course grant that many Christians have spoken, in effect, of the angry God upstairs and the suffering Jesus placating him. Spoken? They’ve painted it: many a mediaeval altarpiece, many a devotional artwork, have sketched exactly that. And of course for some late mediaeval theologians this was the point of the Mass: God was angry, but by performing this propitiatory sacrifice once more, the priest could make it all right. And it was at least in part in reaction against this understanding of the Eucharist that the Reformers rightly insisted that what happened on the cross happened once for all. They did not invent, they merely adapted and relocated, the idea of the propitiation of God’s wrath through the death of Jesus.

We must of course acknowledge that many, alas, have since then offered more caricatures of the biblical doctrine. It is all too possible to take elements from the biblical witness and present them within a controlling narrative gleaned from somewhere else, like a child doing a follow-the-dots puzzle without paying attention to the numbers and producing a dog instead of a rabbit.This is what happens when people present over-simple stories with an angry God and a loving Jesus, with a God who demands blood and doesn’t much mind whose it is as long as it’s innocent. You’d have thought people would notice that this flies in the face of John’s and Paul’s deep-rooted theology of the love of the triune God: not ‘God was so angry with the world that he gave us his son’ but ‘God so loved the world that he gave us his son’.”

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Where I Ruminate on the Perils of a Palm Sunday Faith in a Good Friday World

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There is a kind of decaffeinated Christianity that wants to quickly slide by Good Friday and get right to Easter, as if Good Friday is a morbid and somewhat unfortunate episode that is dwelt upon only by the morbid and masochistic. Or to put it another way, we are tempted to have a Palm Sunday faith, a faith based on a misunderstanding of who Jesus is.

Like the crowd at the first Palm Sunday we are tempted to see Jesus not as he is, but as a projection of our own hopes and desires. We can do this in a number of ways. We can turn Jesus into the supporter of our personal goals, or the upholder of our national ambitions, or our politics, or other ways where he becomes who we want him to be instead of who he really is. “Palm Sunday faith” is when we want a Jesus without a cross so we can have a faith without a cross, a faith without challenge or sacrifice, a faith without testing or struggle. When we do that we turn God into a kind of talisman or lucky charm to bless our projects and our aspirations, when in fact the God of the Bible is a God with his own sovereign purposes.

The problem with a Palm Sunday faith is that we live in a Good Friday world.I believe that Christian faith is essentially a joyful enterprise, but it is a joyful enterprise that doesn’t turn or flinch from the hard truths of the world’s harsh brutalities. So Christian faith without a cross does not show God’s full power to deal with human sin and death. And a faith without a cross will be found feeble and wimpy when the chips are really down.

What do I mean when I say it is a Good Friday world? There is a certain heartbreaking aspect of living that comes to us all. Often we only see it from a distance, as in the war in Iraq, where we have seen pictures both of dead and injured civilians and dead servicemen and women. But to the families of those individuals that heartbreak has come “up close and personal.” And some heartbreak comes to every human life sooner or later.

It is not just in wartime that the powers of sin and death do their heartbreaking work. Which is why there is so much comfort for us in worshipping a God who himself “became a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

And that is exactly it. Our God knows the whole truth about human life. Knows not just the Sunday veneer and the masks of propriety but the dark and sad parts of it all. Knows that life is not a bowl of cherries. And this God not only knows the worst the world has to offer, but he has done something about it. His love is not sentimental love; it is holy love, a love that moves and acts to deal with love’s enemies.

A God who merely comforted the afflicted and bound up the wounded would not be a God who takes on the power of sin and death and evil. That is what the cross of Jesus is all about. God himself confronting human life at is very worst, at its most irredeemable, at a pitiful state execution, where the most powerful forces in the world humiliated and destroyed this humble innocent man.

He took it all on himself, the whole weight of the world’s hate and violence, its guilt and shame, all of it there on the hill at Golgotha. For us: you and me, and not just for us, but for everyone, across the ages. And not just for humans, but for himself, because his own holiness could not tolerate the world’s sin without atonement. And so he made it, not with the blood of rams at the temple, but making the sacrifice himself, spilling his own life out.

And why? Because that is what love does. By its very nature love spills itself out. In the letter to the Philippians Paul says that Jesus even gave up his own rightful claim to divinity, emptying himself, taking the form of a slave, for the cross was a slave’s death.And because of this humble obedience the Father has highly exalted him, and has given him God’s own name. Because “Lord” is the name Israel gave to their God, and to no one else.

But now Jesus is called “Lord.”When we call Jesus “Lord” and take the full measure of his love we will be moving toward a faith that can meet life’s darkest hours and toughest spots. A faith that is able to stand at the foot of the cross. And the world desperately needs people like that with faith like that: faith in Jesus, and in the power of his cross.

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“Jesus was not Crucified in a Cathedral between Two Candles”

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George Macleod, the founder of the Iona Community, once wrote,

“I simply argue that the cross be raised again at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap; at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek . . .  at the kind of place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where he died. And that is what he died about.”

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Confessing Christ

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The other place I blog is the Web Site of Confessing Christ. Here is A Brief history of Confessing Christ by Pastor Frederick R. Trost: “In August of 1993,a Convening Committee for Confessing Christ was on the phone, composed of pastors and teachers of the Church and a graduate student in American Church history.Might there be a way of gathering others in the United Church of Christ who love the Church and are devoted to its ministry, to talk about our “life together” for the sake of our mission as Christians and our commitment to social justice, liturgy, and pastoral care? From the beginning there was agreement on the necessity for solid, joyous, theological work in the Church, for Biblical study and conversation with our varied, rich, and living theological heritage in the United Church of Christ. We took as our theme the words of the First Article of the Barmen Declaration:

“Jesus Christ, as he is witnessed to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we must hear and which we ought to trust and obey in life and in death.”
From the beginning [that] summer and in our many conversations since, our purpose has been neither to “weep bitterly” over the Church (which would be theologically irresponsible) nor to pound upon others (which would be uncharitable), but to take our place alongside the publican to the temple, to acknowledge with those who have “confessed Christ” in every generation that we live, as the Reformers insisted, by grace alone, through faith, and that the prayer “Be merciful unto me, O Lord.” is meant to be found on the lips of the whole church. In the struggle for theological re-formation, as in all else, “there is none that is righteous, no, not one!” (Romans 3:10)
We’ve said the most important thing is to recommit ourselves to theological work that takes Scripture, ecumenical creeds, the confession and covenants upon which the United Church of Christ was founded (see the Preamble to the UCC Constitution),
  • with joyful seriousness,
  • not as a kind of hobby,
  • not with any desire to settle down in the sixteenth century

but to honor our baptism, to see how dialogue with one another and with those who believed before we were born, can reform the life of the Church for the sake of its vocation in the world.

There are times when we have to face the fragile state of our life together. We believe this is one of those times. There are moments when the question “What is truth?” won’t go away. This is one of those moments. There are hours when the ancient query “What think ye of Christ?” cannot be avoided. We believe this is one of those hours.

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“He Died Upon the Lonely Tree” A Passion Hymn

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“He Died Upon the Lonely Tree”
C. M.

He died upon the lonely tree
forsaken by his God.
And yet his death means all to me
and saves me by his blood.

The world will never know his worth,
the wise will never see,
But those forsaken, broken, bowed,
will recognize that tree.

And know that there God’s love does reign,
and conquers sin and death;
Thwarts hate and evil, comforts pain,
gives hope while there is breath.

The nations grasp at wealth and power,
while wars like tempests toss,
But finally in God’s good hour,
they’ll know him in his cross.

Then wars will cease and weapons fall,
and fear will melt away.
For Christ will be their all in all,
from day to endless day.

Suggested tune: Bangor

© 2001 Richard L. Floyd

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Gabriel Fackre on The Life Everlasting

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On Gabriel Fackre’s blog he has been doing a series on Hope. The most recent one is on The Life Everlasting. Here’s some of it:

“The ancient creeds—Nicene and Apostles—are really dramas in three acts—creation reconciliation, redemption, the acts being the sequential missions of the three Persons as the “economic Trinity,” albeit as immanent Trinity all are involved in every act as this is the drama of the one triune God. With biblical specificity in mind, the theatre metaphor can be transposed to that of literature and conceived as a narrative with 7 chapters. I have tried to do this in the various volumes of The Christian Story series as creation, fall, covenant, Christ, church, salvation consummation. Whatever the genre we are now at the end of the final act or chapter, the finis that fulfills the divine telos. Using the language of the Apostles Creed, we have to do with the bold Christian affirmation of “everlasting life.”

The portrayal in Scripture —yes through a glass darkly—of this final state is rich and varied. Sometimes it is described in cosmic terms as “a new heaven and a new earth.”(Rev.21:1) At other times it is visualized politically and socially as the Kingdom of God come to earth (Matt 6:10). And yet other times, the focus is on persons and their fulfillment. And in every case it is clear that the alienations that mark our fallen world of Now are overcome with a reconciliation of all the broken and separation parties to God’s purposes. Thus what God finally wills and achieves is the very reflection of who God is: an everlasting life together that mirrors the eternal Life Together.

At the very center of Things to Come is the Person through whom the triune God will make such possible.”