Archive | September, 2010

A word, please, about Mad Men

by on September 28, 2010

*For the  people who have not yet hopped on the Mad Men train but are contemplating it and to those who are behind on episodes:  Do not worry.  There is not a semblance of a spoiler anywhere in this post.  I promise.

As you may know, I’m rather obsessed with the AMC show Mad Men.  The writing is fantastic, the characters are multi-dimensional and real and complex, and the set design and clothing is DREAMY.  It is to this latter issue that I want to issue a soapbox-y statement.

Look:  I know the aesthetic vibe of this show is nothing short of fabulous.  I realize we all want to go out and buy retro yellow lamps and sleek charcoal grey couches.   I am aware how those crisp black and white graphics make our hearts flutter in the way they combine casual and brilliant elegance with a truly memorable punch.   I know, ladies, that the dresses are so unbelievable that you may have contemplated taking up sewing to make yourself one, and that you, like me, might be willing to chop off an appendage for Joan’s whistle necklace thing that is perfect, perfect, perfect with every dress she wears.  I know, men, that you admire the dapper suits and the way those men exude such dapper-y dapper-ness in the suits as they strut around the office.  I know many of us feel deflated when we walk down the street and see people schlepping around in t-shirts and ill-fitting jeans rather than looking tailored and fabulous and we bemoan that hardly any of us have to dress up anymore for, well, anything.  (The Journey guys have felt this so strongly that they have begun creating opportunities to “suit it up” as they are calling it.  One day they did this at work.  Their very casual, jeans-every-day work.  Just in search of the dapper-y feeling.)   I have absolutely zero problem with any of this.  In fact, I say, bring it on.  I will not tire of the 1960’s fashion and design influences for the foreseeable future.  And Lord knows as a society we could all stand to take it up a notch fashion-wise.

HOWEVER:  It would be a tragedy to the brilliance of the show if we did not remind ourselves regularly that the show is not about fashion or design.  Its intention is not to glamorize the 60’s and describe all the ways it was cooler than the 2010s.  (It should only take suffering through one scene in which blatantly racist and/or sexist comments are made to make us thank our lucky stars we’ve come so far.)  So let’s remind ourselves, please:  The entire show revolves around a character who is trapped in despair.  I mean, the opening credits have him FALLING THROUGH THE AIR.  I realize we are blinded by the dizzyingly pretty graphic posters on the sides of the buildings and the whole shebang in general that it is possible not to have noticed this very important fact, but  it is a Very  Important  Fact:  Don Draper is in free fall.  Out of control.  Inside the world of New York advertising in the 1960s.  As is much of the world around him.  As are much of the people around him.  He is a man falling from a skyscraper, people.

I say all of this because I keep hearing inklings that suggest people might be missing the point of the show.  For example, a week or so ago I overheard two people talking about the show, and how much they love it, and one of them said, “I know, it’s so fun!”

Fun?

Ok, honey, no.  Seeing the dresses is fun.  Being Betty Draper/Roger Sterling/Joan/Don Draper/pick-a-secretary is NOT fun.  It is a MESS.  The show is amazing because Matthew Weiner knows how to expose the truth of the mess and the reality of the mess and the complexity of the mess better than every other writer currently working in television.   SO DON’T MISS THE MESS.

That is all.

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Hope and History

by on September 27, 2010

This Monday morning, an excerpt of classic Moltmann theology for you:

“If one hopes for the sake of Christ in the future of God and the ultimate liberation of the world, he cannot passively wait for this future, and, like the apocalyptic believers, withdraw from the world.  Rather he must seek this future, strive for it, and already here be in correspondence to it in the active renewal of life and of the conditions of life, and therefore realize it already here according to the measure of possibilities.  Because this future is the future of one God, it is a unique and unifying future.  Because it brings eschatological liberation, it is the salvation of the whole enslaved creation.  The messianic future for which Christianity arouses hope is no special future for the church or for the soul alone.  It is an all-encompassing future.  As all-encompassing future, its power of hope is able to mediate faith to earthly needs and to lead it into real life.”

Discipleship, or the act of following Jesus so that your life can look more like his life, is the process of practicing the art of being “in correspondence” to the future of God.  Tall order, but a beautiful calling.

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Does the Church come through the salvation of the world?

by on September 20, 2010

One of the traits I love most about Moltmann’s work is that he has the unbelievable knack of turning a question on its head.  I tend to call these moments “WWF smackdown” moments, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere.  In reframing a question, Moltmann puts on his superhero cape and rescues us from the tangled mess of stuck theology and gently places us down in a clearing where everything once again makes sense. This morning’s WWF smackdown moment comes over the navel-gazing argument many theologians have had over how wonderfully supreme the Church is and how the Church will singlehandedly save the world. OK, so perhaps that’s exaggerating a bit…but some ecclesiology does tend to place the Church upon a pedestal that seems far too high in my opinion.  The pedestal becomes most obvious and most dangerous when the Church attempts to speak in a totalizing voice, as if only we are allowed to speak with finality about the universe.  In more benign forms, the Church (or more usually, the little “c” local church) lets the pedestal keep them from seeing their own brokenness, and that isn’t exactly following the cross, either.

Much of this debate begins at the question of the role of the Church in history.  Moltmann discusses in thef The Church in the Power of the Spirit his understanding of the Church’s place and role in history (both past and future) in light of the person of Jesus Christ.  Moltmann distinguishes from the onset that the church’s history is a Trinitarian history.  In being so, the church’s history is not abstract (Barth would, no doubt, concur here) but is grounded in the revelation of Christ, as well as the overarching work of God and the Spirit in and through the world.  The church participates in the ongoing movement of God, and therefore knowledge cannot be seen as fixed but as partaking in this divine movement.  (As I quoted last week, ours is a tradition in which it is impossible to rest.)  So here comes the WWF smackdown question.  Rather than trying to search history to find examples of how the Church has saved the world  (“Does the salvation of the world come through the church?”) Moltmann rather asks, “Does the church come through the salvation of the world?”

In my opinion, there is a “rightness” in asking how God’s work in the world actually beckons the church into its very existence.  We are BECKONED, you see, all of us, when we see the salvation of the world poking out from under all the rubble.  We are called.  But we cannot be so bold as to think we are the only ones who have received this special calling, or that we have received it in a higher form than anybody else.  (No totalizing ecclesiology, people.)

The church is to see itself as a vehicle for God’s mission for the world and as a proclaimer of God’s action within the world.  Moltmann writes, “If the church understands itself, with all its tasks and powers, in the Spirit and against the horizon of the Spirit’s history, then it also understands its particularity as one element in the power of the Spirit and has no need to maintain its special power and its special charges with absolute and self-destructive claims…We cannot therefore say what the church is in all circumstances and what it comprises in itself.  But we can tell where the church happens…The church is present wherever ‘the manifestation of the Spirit’ (1 Cor. 12:7) takes place” (64-65).

I also really love the shift from “what” church is to “where church is, don’t you?  Isn’t that a MUCH better question?  A less navel-gazing, we-are-so-important-and-nobody-else-can-do-what-we-do question?  The Church comes where the salvation of the world is taking place, and that can be- and often is- in the most unexpected locations.  No need to make every place look the same.  (Isn’t this the primary argument of post-colonialism?) Trust that the Church has come, is coming, and will come where God is working out the salvation of the world.  No need to own it or control it or domesticate it.  Just point, joyfully join in, and say “Amen.”

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Church as Adventure

by on September 13, 2010

I am in a The Church in the Power of the Spirit mood today, so here’s your Moltmann Monday excerpt, italics mine:

“In peaceful times the church could affirm itself by demonstrating the unbroken and unaltered continuance of its tradition and traditions.  People appealed to these things, trusting in the permanent element in time’s changes, and in what is repeatable in the accidents of history.  In times of unrest this is no longer convincing…Today we are living in a time of transition whose future we can as yet hardly perceive.  Many people are painfully conscious that what was valid once no longer holds good.  But what is going to be and what is capable of enduring we do not know…The tradition to which the church appeals, and which it proclaims whenever it calls itself Christ’s church and speaks in Christ’s name, is the tradition of the messianic liberation and eschatological renewal of the world.  It is impossible to rest on this tradition. It is a tradition that changes (humans) and from which they are born again.  It is like the following wind that drives us to new shores.  Anyone who enters into this messianic tradition accepts the adventure of the Spirit, the experience of liberation, the call to repentance, and common work for the coming kingdom.”                                           -p.2-3

I’d first like to point out that Moltmann wrote this in 1977, which merely proves my theory that we could have found ourselves less behind the proverbial 8-ball if we had listened a bit more closely to his ecclesiology back then.  Because I can bet those of you in positions of church leadership have had this conversation far more recently than that.  And it would have been helpful to have had Moltmann’s voice in that conversation reminding you that the whole idea of resting forevermore in some particularized tradition of the church is the silliest thing anybody could ever imagine.  It is antithetical to the very tradition that IS Christ’s church, which is renewal and rebirth and general messy upheaval.  So good luck with that.

I am not sure if we have been clear in communicating to people who are entering the communal life of the universal church that in doing so they are accepting adventure, liberation, repentance, and a shared commitment to common work for the Kingdom.  Today I’m particularly thinking about how I don’t think we have been clear on the first bit about adventure.  I wonder if this is why change and fluidity and open systems often prove so difficult to produce inside our churches.  I also wonder if this is why people expect the church to bring them comfort and stability and then feel jaded and discontented when it doesn’t.  (I feel despair in thinking about what happens when the church DOES bring only comfort and stability, too.)

It’s tricky (and at times tiring, honestly) to live inside a tradition that is most definitive about the fact that is continually in motion.  You can’t blame us for wanting to put some stakes down every now and again.  Maybe we should instead be mindful that the stakes we put down aren’t so deeply grounded that they keep us from proclaiming the tradition of messy, slow, clunky and (eventually, we pray) beautiful transformation.  It would be a shame to lose out on all that adventure.

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The Emergent Village Theological Conversation: A Brief History

by on September 2, 2010

This week, EV is hosting a synchroblog on our upcoming Theological Conversation.  There have been some great posts that have come out of our theme of “Creating Liberated Spaces in a Postcolonial World,” so be sure to check the bottom of the post for links.  Rather than discuss the idea of postcolonialism, I want to talk instead about the idea of the Theological Conversation itself, and particularly why this year is a groundbreaking year for us.

The EV Theological Conversation is my hands-down favorite event of every year.  And that was true even before last year’s event with Jurgen Moltmann.   Eleven-ish years ago, a group of people sat around and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could foster some conversation between the academic world of our seminaries and the practical pastoral lives of our churches?”  And out of that thought, the EVTC was born.  The first year, we hosted Nancey Murphy from Fuller and Dallas Willard in three days of conversation- no papers, no lectures, just two theologians and a roomful of pastors and Jesus followers talking about the questions we most long to discuss.  I distinctly remember sitting in a chair, listening to the delightful volley of ideas and thoughts bouncing around the room, and thinking, “This is the best idea anyone has ever had.”

And I still feel that way.  The academy and the church are two deep loves of my life, and to see them brought together in a way that brings so much LIFE and vitality to both places is a fantastic thing to experience.  Pastors return to their communities with ideas so loudly buzzing in their heads they might expect honey to come forth.  Theologians return to their offices and ivory towers with a renewed focus on the immediacy of the needs of the people their work is intended to help.  This is what a mutually-sustaining conversation does.  I beamed last year (as you can well imagine) when Professor Moltmann remarked to me something like, “I very much like the questions and energy that I am experiencing from your Emergent people.  I see much hope here for the future of the Church.”  And we left hope-filled as well, because he took time to share with us not only his theology but his life over three casual days of conversation together.

The EVTC is remarkable every year, but this year it is remarkable for another reason.  It is the first year we are hosting theologians who are not only male or not only white, or both.  And we should not underestimate what a significant and refreshing shift this will be.  As delighted as I have been in years past to tell fellow participants that we are hosting Stanley Hauerwas and Miroslav Volf and Walter Brueggemann and yes, Jurgen Moltmann, I am beaming every time I tell people that we are hosting Musa Dube, the rock star New Testament feminist scholar from Botswana, and Richard Twiss of the Lakota/Sioux tribe and a church practitioner and thinker extraordinaire, and Colin Greene, UK theologian who navigates the postcolonial landscape with the aplomb of Fred Astaire on a dance floor.  This is going to be a fantastic conversation, having these three in a room together along with pastors and Jesus followers from across the US, talking about ways to be free together.

The conversation of how to create liberated spaces together- how to live in community with one another by sharing power the way God has called us to share power- this is a question that is as important now as ever it has been.  It is critical for all of us as we live in a world where globalization continues and polarization nips at its heels.  To have the liberated space to participate in three days of deep conversation about these matters with three fantastic conversational partners is quite a gift.  And that’s not even counting the legendary, post-conference, into-the-night-at-the-local-pub conversations with Emergent Village friends from around the nation.

I hope you’ll come.  I hope you’ll support this landmark year with the gift of your presence and with the wisdom of your voice.

You can find out registration info here.

Other synchroblog participants:

– Annie Bullock at Marginal Theology marginaltheology.wordpress.com

– Julie Clawson at onehandclapping julieclawson.com

– Nelson Costa (in Portuguese) at www.nelsoncostajr.com

– Natanael Disla (in Spanish) at karmatarsis.wordpress.com

– Carol Howard Merritt at TribalChurch.org tribalchurch.org

– Dave Ingland at www.daveingland.com

– Mihee Kim-Kort at first day walking miheekimkort.com

– Crystal Lewis at Jesus Was A Heretic, Too. jesuswasaheretictoo.blogspot.com

– Katie Mulligan at The Adventures of Tiny Church tinychurchnj.blogspot.com

– Ann Pittman at anncpittman.blogspot.com

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