First and Continuing Christmas

This Advent and Christmastide I have sought to again understand the Christmas story and its meaning. I've been struck by the contrast between insights I've gained through reading and insights gained in religious practice, and I've struggled to bring them together. For me, the problem is: “In modern tellings of a story that we know had ancient origins and meanings, how do we best relate the ancient and modern meanings?”

I've been reading The First Christmas by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. Like many scholars, Borg and Crossan focus on careful studies of biblical texts and surrounding historical materials to attempt to elucidate the meanings the texts may have had for the ancient authors and audiences. They argue that in the context of the Roman empire, these stories were designed to assert the primacy of Jesus as savior of the world through justice and peace. Jesus was thus placed in deliberate and revolutionary contrast to stories of the Roman emperor, who was cast as Son of God and savior of the world through violent (but in the mind of Rome, just) conquest. They make about as good a case as is possible with contemporary scholarship to elucidate the meaning that the Christmas story had for ancient Christians.

I then trooped off to church with modern Christians. On the last Sunday before Christmas, our parish put on the annual Christmas Pageant. In line with the practices of thousands of churches, the youth of the parish dressed in costume and told the Christmas story. Our telling culminated with two teenagers and a baby—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—center stage, surrounded by tiny prophets, angels, shepherds, and magi. At that dramatic moment I was profoundly struck by a sense of “This is it!”; that we as a community had just made our statement about the meaning of Christmas: “Witness the essence of God and God's love incarnate: people and a baby; love, creation, hope, and possibility, repeated every moment throughout the world.”

That interpretation of the Christmas story, if Borg and Crossan are right, is profoundly different from the interpretation intended by the authors of the Gospels and the earliest Christians. We've taken their story and mucked with it, yanked out parts, performed it, re-staged it, given it new political and social overtones. For example, because our parish uses teenagers for Mary and Joseph, I was also struck with a feeling of “Gee, we've just made an argument about how God enters the world, through unexpected and socially unacceptable means, teenage parents.” This feeling was immediately followed by the spirits of scholars pointing out that at the time of the Gospels, “teenaged” mothers were the socially acceptable norm. Bad intellectual! I was being anachronistic.

But isn't that the essence of religious practice at its best? True creative anachronism perhaps? These stories are dead if they aren't re-lived. At one level, it doesn't matter what the first Christians thought or didn't think about the Christmas story. The events they narrated are lost. Even Borg and Crossan, for all their scholarly knowledge, can only, at best, muster a reasonable approximation of what the meaning of the story may have been 2000 years ago. Borg and Crossan's book is valuable for how it can enlarge our understanding of an ancient story, but at the end of the day we have to continually make and remake these understandings. In our parish pageant, we did nothing more than the early Christians, we strongly declared what this story meant to us. This remaking is particularly powerful, as it was the natural expression of our community's present hopes and longings.

Nonetheless, I do think we need both our scholarly approximation of the ancient meaning of Christmas and our modern performances. In this time of continued conflict and war—a war cast by our own political leaders as a just means of achieving peace through violence—we may need to look again at another meaning of Christmas. As Borg and Crossan show, earlier understandings of Christmas are relevant to our own and can enlarge the transformative value of the narrative. Maybe our best hope is to marry our past and present, start with our powerful and basic community understanding and add to it. Perhaps next year our parish pageant should also put the peace that comes through love and justice at center stage along with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Our hope is for more than just an ideal family, but rather for a human family that idealizes peace and justice.

Practicing Episcopalian

Ralph Becker recently won the election to be the next Salt Lake City mayor. I'm pleased about this, as I voted for the guy. As the campaign finally ends, I've been pondering one of the common campaign themes. All the major and alternative newspapers all ran “guides to the candidates” that listed their positions on issues, as well as a host of other things including their religions. We had practicing Mormons, non-practicing Mormons, and then my man Ralph, who was repeatedly listed as a “Non-practicing Episcopalian.”

Now, I mean no criticism of Mr. Becker, his faith is his business, but that little phrase-”Non-practicing Episcopalian”-struck me as a bit odd. I suspect the press came up with it. If you have a “non-practicing Mormon” why not a “non-practicing Episcopalian”?

I wondered, though, does such an animal as a “non-practicing Episcopalian” exist?

At one level, the answer is yes. If what is meant by “non-practicing Episcopalian” is someone who was “raised Episcopalian” but no longer goes to church, then sure, you can be a non-practicing Episcopalian; more power to 'ya.

But is such a thing equivalent to a “Non-practicing Mormon”? I found the phrase odd when applied to Episcopalianism since, unlike Mormons or Jews (or any number of other religious groups), Episcopalians don't really have a common identity as a people. Mormons, for example, regardless of their practices (or even their actual family background), can point to or at least claim a strong common story of a people. Their story is rich with persecution, multiple journeys, and the final arrival in the promised land of what is now Utah. Mormons can claim this story whether or not they attend Sunday meetings, do their home teaching, or participate in other important liturgies. They have an identity as a people that, while integral to their overall religious identity, can be separated from religious practice.

Episcopalians, not so much.

The closest thing that we can grab to claim as a “story of a people” is that it was a bunch of Anglicans who arrived at Jamestown 400 years ago and that some Episcopalians stem from such Anglicans. Of course, we recently had to (rightly) seek reconciliation for the effects of that arrival on the Native Americans who were already here, so we don't really want to trot that particular narrative out as a matter of pride. Otherwise, perhaps one of the great things about Episcopalians is that while there are many who have a long family tradition of Episcopalianism, many others are more recent converts. We're a mixed bunch, together for a lot of different reasons.

So then, can you be a “non-practicing Episcopalian”? I'm convinced that a fundamental aspect, perhaps the most fundamental aspect, of being an Episcopalian is our practices – Holy Eucharist (Rite I or II, of course), coffee hour, Advent Wreaths, and the like. We aren't a particularly creedal faith; saying the Nicene Creed in church is not forced on anyone, and the joke is that the nice thing about being an Episcopalian is that no matter what you believe, you can find at least one other Episcopalian who believes it as well. There are no required statements of faith, no required clothing, no common sacrifices, and we certainly haven't been persecuted in droves for “being Episcopalian.” What really binds us together, more than anything else, is our common rituals, our services, our Book of Common Prayer. We may be there for lots of different reasons, and we certainly come from lots of different places, but we do share a common life composed fundamentally of common practices. We're made, and, through our practices, we are constantly remade, not born.

Chapel Dress

Can you wear Dockers™ to church? Jeans? Flip flops?

Recently, Robert Kirby of the Salt Lake Tribune published a blistering critique of an edict by an official in his church (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). The church official had laid down a dress code; one that went right to the level of discussing whether particular brands of menswear were appropriate for a church worship service. In a fit of gleeful self-righteousness not uncommon to non-Mormons in Utah, I wore my own khakis to church that day, only to see that we certainly had unspoken community standards regarding dress in our liturgical space. Any anthropologist worth his or her salt would have noticed the near complete homogeneity in clothing out in the pews.

The truth is there are good reasons that dress for church is a matter of significant debate. As any teenager can tell you, personal dress is a highly symbolic and socially charged form of communication. Furthermore, just like much of religious worship in our society today, it sits precisely at the juncture of the personal and communal.

Dress minimally conveys personal social status, ethnicity, and, despite the dominant trend towards all-casual-all-the-time, it still conveys how individuals perceive the event they are attending, their role in that event, and their relationship to the other participants. Dress is never simply personal expression. Moreover, collectively, dress will define how a community wants to be represented.

Add worship into the mix—a setting where a community describes itself and its relationship to its god or gods—and dress takes on an additional weight. Top it all off with the tension that exists between a culture that tells you to pursue your personal interest at all costs and religious organizations that remind us that we live in communities. There’s no wonder that you hear as much about “chapel dress” as you do about theology. Dress in church sits at the center of more than one negotiation between the individual and society.

I don’t see any reason to rail against this very important human form of symbolic communication. Rather, I tend to think that thoughtful consideration of dress in church is highly worthwhile. Are you taking the event seriously? What does it mean to you, and how do you want to convey that in your dress? Most importantly, what are you saying to the community you are joining for worship?

At the same time, due to the potential for dress to be exclusionary, a community needs to be extremely careful in how it maintains inclusiveness in its stated or unstated dress codes. Our challenge today is to create vibrant communities in a world of unprecedented, wonderful, and rich diversity; communities that are identifiable in all of our collective symbols, including dress, without being exclusionary. I think it is perfectly ok for a religious community to develop a collective understanding of proper dress, so long as this understanding is broadly inclusive of all ethnicities, socioeconomic groups, etc. It is particularly important that the community's standards fully include those who have done all they can to simply join the service. At the end, it is just important to say “We believe this is serious business, worthy of taking care in our most personal of communal symbols.” No more, and no less.

Response to Draft Anglican Covenant

The following is an excerpt, the meat really, of what I sent to the Office of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church per their request to respond to the Draft Anglican Covenant and at the request of the Bishop of my Diocese (Utah).

All human religions engage the tension between defining a community and excluding others. Jesus rejected this choice and welcomed sinners to his table. For me, Anglicanism offers hope of transcending the tension endemic to human religions by enabling a community unafraid of differences. Does the Draft Covenant bring us closer together? Does the Draft Anglican Covenant enhance or hinder my ability to live out my Baptismal Covenant; to seek and serve Christ in all persons and strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being? At first blush, I would have to say it does not; that the draft fundamentally, perhaps unintentionally, emphasizes comfortable-sounding words that provide for exclusionary processes. My initial reaction is to say, “Please start over with more communion, less exclusion.”

Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America

Pentecost, Anno Domini 2007

Blog Introduction

The creation of grounded, confident, open, inclusive, and empowered communities within a fractured, individualized, and globalized world is one of our greatest challenges. I firmly believe that our religious communities can be ways to achieve a common life. Moreover, I also believe that one of our most basic human practices is ritual, and that ritual (or liturgy, or church, or whatever you wish to call it) is a profound and constructive force in human life. As I explore these issues, this blog will cover the following areas:

1. Practical Ritual: Posts focusing on worship/liturgy/ritual (with a focus on the practice of worship in a particular place and community and emphasis on the communities I know best)

2. Church Theory/Church Practice: Anglican/Episcopalian Church Structure and Practice

This blog will be more free-flowing and open to comment than my other blog, Credo ut Intelligam (http://mtseddon.blogspot.com/). This particular blog will have minimal to no editing prior to posting, and be open for comment. Please keep comments polite and constructive or I will exercise editorial prerogative.