Monthly Archives: November 2010

General Introduction
- Where’s Michial teach again?
- Stuck in the middle with the soulless Calvinists
- The plan for November

Talking Back, Not Bach
- One hand in the hornet’s nest
- Forgive us, please
- David and Michial hate each other

What Is Emotion, Anyway?
- Good feelings and a warm heart
- The Presence of God^TM
- Biological emotion
- Talkin’ bipolar
- That’s when it hit me: That luv is a verb!
- Emotion as orientation of affection

Calvinism and Emotions
- Why are we so suspicious?
- Calvinist intellectualism
- St. Augustine’s distrust of emotions
- Where the big T fits in
- A New Kind of Schleiermacherian Emotionalism
- Engaging emotion with the Pietists
- Head knowledge and heart knowledge
- Let’s talk Being instead of heart
- Where the Neo-Orthodox get it right
- On desire, in German
- The Calvinist worship service and the redirection of affection
- But who are we to judge?
- And here come the negative emotions!

Emotion in the Psalms
- Psalm 22 and Christ on the cross
- Moving from lowliness to glory
- How much did Christ have in mind?
- How “As the Deer” got it wrong
- The Psalm of Asaph
- From emotion to understanding to emotion

Jesus Is My Boyfriend
- The strange sexual hang-ups of “In the Secret”
- Ah, but we digress: the Song of Solomon
- Parental advisory

Public and Private Worship
- Jesus is my personal boyfriend (in the Middle Ages, anyway)
- Feelin’ Icky (The Book of Margery Kempe Song)
- Are Americans uncomfortable with corporate worship?
- Leaving on the emotion
- Is a Manwich a meal or an hors d’oeuvre?

Closing Thoughts
- Yeah…we don’t like music
- We’re not terribly cuddly
- Eeyore and Tigger
- Worship beyond music
- Waiting for the end of the prayer

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. New York: Penguin, 1961.

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: A Selection. Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1994.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960.

Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. New York: Penguin, 1985.

Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Harcourt, 1995.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Ed. Richard Crouter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Wetmore, Robert D. Worship the Way It Was Meant to Be: 15 Biblical Principles for Knowing and Loving God. Camp Hill, Penn.: Christian Publications, 2003.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament to signal the coming of day and the passing of night, and let their courses be set until the end of the age.”

And the American government did scoff and say, “No, God, we think that twice a year, we should tell YOU when the sun rises and sets.  In fact, just to show our supreme power, we hereby declare that as the Fall hits its stride, the sun shall set one hour earlier.  Just to show you who’s boss, God.”

And God’s wrath did burn.

I figured our discussion on last week’s podcast, in which we proclaimed that the most important part of a hymn or worship song is the doctrinal content and that emotional expression can be misleading and dangerous, would raise some controversy. And so it has. There’s a raging debate going on in the comments section for the show notes, and even our friends at CWC: The Radio Show seem to have taken offense at our assertions.

Since I’m the one who came down most strongly on this point, I’ve taken it upon myself to further explain my reasoning. It should go without saying that what I write in this post does not necessarily reflect the opinions of either David or Nathan; obviously, they are free to disagree with me or to add to what I’m saying.

The CWC folks pointed to my stance for doctrine and against emotion as evidence of the difference between Calvinism and Pietism, the tradition to which the three of them all more or less belong. (Bethel University is itself a Pietist institution.) They are correct. My two major theological and philosophical influences are Calvinism and Existentialism. Combine these two, and you have a person who doesn’t particularly trust emotional responses. I will admit my bias.

But it’s not as though I’m unemotional or that I don’t listen to music that moves me. Absolutely I do. That’s why it’s important to differentiate between private responses to art (even private worship of God) and corporate worship. It’s the latter for which I demand doctrinal rather than emotional content. As I mentioned in the show itself, my views on the subject are heavily influenced by Robert Wetmore’s book Worship the Way It Was Meant to Be. It turns out that this book is rather drastically out of print, and used copies are expensive, so I’ll try to quote it enough here for our readers to get a good idea of what it says.

Wetmore’s thesis—and I agree with him—is that “The cross of Jesus Christ is at the heart of all worship.” He is therefore irked that “fewer and fewer churches sing hymns and choruses that mention Him” and that “The hymns and choruses they do sing seldom glory in His cross.” Without that doctrinal content, all we’re left with is “sentimental drivel.”

Wetmore himself is too generous to call out specific hymns and praise choruses for being empty—though he certainly had a good time doing just that in the class I took on the subject—so I’ll give two examples, both of which I mentioned in the show itself. First we have “In the Secret,” also known as “I Want to Know You,” first popularized by the rock worship band Sonicflood when I was in high school:

In the secret
In the quiet place
In the stillness you are there
In the secret
In the quiet hour I wait only for you
‘Cos I want to know you more

I want to know you
I want to hear your voice
I want to know you more
I want to touch you
I want to see your face
I want to know you more

I am reaching for the highest goals
That I might receive the prize
Pressing onward
Pressing every hindrance aside
Out of my way
‘Cos I want to know you more

Joe Futral points out in the comments section that he “can find nothing theologically suspect” in the song. Of course he can’t—there’s no theology at all. Christ’s name isn’t even mentioned, let alone His cross. If they played this song on a Top 40 station instead of a Christian station, you’d think it was about having sex in a garden, not about a religious experience. As an expression of Christian worship, “In the Secret” falls flat—it is so vague that it could just as easily be sung in a mosque or a temple.

Lest I give the impression that I’m just against contemporary worship, let’s take a look at the classic hymn “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”:

Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee,
God of glory, Lord of love;
Hearts unfold like flow’rs before Thee,
Hail Thee as the sun above.
Melt the clouds of sin and sadness,
Drive the dark of doubt away;
Giver of immortal gladness,
Fill us with the light of day!

If this hymn lacks the borderline-sexual content of “In the Secret,” it doesn’t replace it with much specific praise of God. All in all, this may as well refer to the pagan gods Beethoven was probably thinking of when he wrote the music.

These aren’t terrible songs, I suppose. (At least “Joyful, Joyful” isn’t; “In the Secret” grosses me out.) If someone wants to sing them in his or her car, pray, and convene with God, that’s just fine with me. But they’re misused in corporate worship because of their nearly total lack of doctrinal content.

My evidence for the centrality of doctrine in worship comes from Colossians 3:16: “Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” The word teaching likely speaks for itself; admonishing in this case seems to be a translation of the Greek word noutheteo, which also suggests instruction in the right way of living. (I will confess here that I don’t speak a word of Greek and am relying on Wetmore and his sources; if Nathan or someone else who knows the language wishes to correct me, I will accept it gratefully.)

If I may draw what may well be a shaky analogy, I’m going to suggest that emotional vs. doctrinal worship may fall down on the same lines as speaking in tongues and prophesying, which St. Paul discusses in 1 Corinthians 14. Speaking in tongues is great, says Paul, but the problem is that it is entirely interior: “One who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God; for no one understands, but in his spirit he speaks mysteries” (14:2). Likewise, the primarily emotional song can speak only to an individual–and does so in a mysterious way, as I’m sure we can all agree.

But Paul has a better way, as he usually does: “But one who prophesies speaks to men for edification and exhortation and consolation” (14:3). That word edify is key here. Joe asks, “Would not people need to be edified emotionally as much as intellectually?” According to Wetmore, anyway, the answer is no; otherwise, you wouldn’t need someone to interpet the gift of tongues in order to make it edifying:

Notice that Paul said edification can occur only when the mind is instructed. An electric thrill may run through the congregation as everyone begins to speak in tongues, but this thrill is not edification. People are edified only when words are spoken to their minds, so that they can think about these words and be transformed by them.

Now, one objection to this assertion is that the New Testament says in several places that we should worship both in “spirit” and in “truth” (or “understanding”). People who make this objection suggest that spirit means emotion and truth means doctrine. I’m going to suggest it’s far more likely that spirit refers to the Holy Spirit, who doesn’t seem in the New Testament to manifest Itself primarily through stirring up emotions. Indeed, we are all promised the Holy Spirit upon accepting Christ (or whatever phrase your confession prefers). As Wetmore points out,

In a worship service, the Spirit of God is uniquely working with each individual believer, and we cannot see what He is doing. He may be giving one believer an experience of emotional exultation while bringing grief into the heart of another. All we can see are the results of what He does, but while He is doing it, His work remains a mystery.

To worship in the Spirit means not having an experience of passion through the music—frankly, Bruce Springsteen’s “Rosalita” carries me to far greater heights of “spiritual” ecstasy than any worship song I’ve ever heard—but our worshipping in the fruits of the Spirit delineated in Galatians: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Of these nine, only joy even sounds like an emotion, and I’ve always understood it to mean a stubborn joy that perseveres no matter the emotion of the moment. (In the New Testament, by the way, peace almost always refers to an interpersonal peace rather than the calmness we typically use the word to mean these days.)

Likewise, when Paul says in Ephesians 5:18-19 that we should “not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord,” I don’t think he’s promoting a deep emotional experience—he’s telling us to live with the fruits of the Spirit. How could we speak to one another in songs composed mostly of emotion, which is, after all, an individual and individualizing experience?

Another objection—this one was raised by both Chris Gehrz and Joe Futral—is that the Psalms are full of emotions rather than doctrinal content. They do display emotions; so does “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” Nathan points out one difference between the Psalms and “In the Secret” in the comment section—the Psalms give specific historical detail—but that’s not the only difference.

The modern worship song is a romance song with God, and since modern American romance is typically shallow and based on emotion, so are our worship songs. Wetmore contrasts this attitude with that of the Psalmists:

The psalmists, on the other hand, praised God for specific characteristics. God is righteous, just, kind, loving, wise, powerful, good, avenging, protecting, and compassionate. They also praised Him for what God had done. In so doing, they moved the focus away from how they felt to who God is and what He has done.

So even at their most emotional, the Psalms are not primarily about emotion—they’re about who God is and what God has done and will do for the Psalmist. In the end, I think we should follow the model of the Psalms as read through the theology of Paul: Emotion is fine if you’d like to have it, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient, and a proper song (or perhaps set of songs, if your congregation is attached to “Jesus is my Boyfriend” songs like “In the Secret”) needs to make actual and specific statements about our actual and specific God.

One other thing I wanted to say in the podcast but didn’t–though I did hint at it when answering Grubbsy’s first question–is that it’s a big mistake to consider only the music portion of a church service as worship. You’ll hear a music minister say this sometimes: “First we’ll worship, then we’ll pray and hear the sermon.” In fact, everything about a service–the music, the prayer, the sermon, even the “Big Howdy” where everyone shakes hands (or hugs, if you’re a Baptist)–is worship. Indeed, our entire lives are to be acts of worship, as St. Paul makes clear in Romans 12.

I hope I’ve made the evidence for my argument at least a little clearer. As we all agreed in the podcast, these issues are important, but they are not worth splitting a church over—they’re not even worth having an uncivil argument over. I doubt I’ve convinced many people who love “Trading My Sorrows” that they need to incorporate more doctrine into their worship music—but I hope I’ve at least demonstrated that my side has a point.

• Teka Childress interviews four writers on distributionism as a follow-up to last week’s introduction.
• Christ the Center talks politics with civility and intelligence.
• CCEL offers a selection of historic Christian texts (in English translation) on divine providence and free will.
• dr. b theorizes the five stages of grading.
• John Totten muses on evil, American theology, and Nicholas Cage.
• Joe Carter argues that there never was any such thing  as the Tea Party.
• Glenn Greenwald notes that the U.S. government has particularly selective memories about “the past.”
• Willy Wonka has this to say to the DNC:
  

Every now and then, I come across an author whose work is radically different from what I’ve always thought. Whether the fault of the misunderstanding lies with my teachers or with myself I cannot tell, but it exists nevertheless, and an actual reading of the work shatters my misconceptions. I had this experience, for example, when reading Nietzsche for the first time: He is by no means the nihilist he is often made out to be; he doesn’t have an anti-Semitic bone in his body, and if his philosophy is destructive, it is a creative destruction that seeks to tear down only to build a new edifice.

I had the same experience a few weeks ago when reading Epicurus–who, I must say, I’d heard little about other than the term “Epicurean,” which is usually applied to an “eat, drink, and be merry” philosophy of hedonism. As is so often the case, our middlebrow slang gets it just right enough to be more distressingly wrong.

Epicurus himself is really more about virtue than about pleasure–the difference between his time and our own, however, is that the two were for him intimately connected. Like Aristotle, Epicurus views pleasure as the highest virtue, which is a hard thing for people in Christian and post-Christian cultures to understand. But for the Greeks, pleasure is in itself a good, “the first and natural good,” and all other goods must be judged in accordance with pleasure (129a). It’s because of his focus on pleasure that Epicurus is popularly considered an abject hedonist—a reputation that apparently existed in his own day (he mentions it in 131b).

But Epicurus ethic is not one of all-out hedonism, and if he advocates the quest for pleasure, it’s in a rather measured way:

Every pleasure is a good since it has a nature akin to ours; nevertheless, not every pleasure is to be chosen. Just so, every pain is an evil, yet not every pain is of a nature to be avoided on all occasions. By measuring and by looking at advantages and disadvantages, it is proper to decide all these things. (129b-130a)

He’s really advocating a kind of individual utilitarianism here—one must weigh out the greatest benefit to oneself and accept it, even if it means undergoing pain or forsaking pleasure momentarily. Pleasure is still the end goal, but you can’t attain pleasure by merely chasing after it every chance you get.

Indeed, Epicurus seems to suggest a kind of “aesthetic asceticism”—we should live as simply and quietly as we can, gaining pleasure from the small things instead of grabbing everything that comes our way. The reason, of course, is practical: We will be happier this way. As he puts it elsewhere: “Those desires that do not bring pain if they are not satisfied are not necessary; and they are easily thrust aside whenever to satisfy them appears difficult or likely to cause injury” (“Principal Doctrines”148). Again, this is a long way from abject hedonism.

I do not mean to suggest that Epicureanism is in any way compatible with the Christian life. Indeed, Epicurus’ philosophy anticipates nothing so much as the rationalism and scientism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; he holds to strikingly modern views of the natural world, including atomism and an early version of Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria, and the gods in which he apparently believes are far removed from human life. His argument for polytheistic deism is strange but elegant: “That which is blessed and immortal is not troubled itself, nor does it cause trouble to another. As a result, it is not affected by anger or favor, for these belong to weakness” (“Principal Doctrines” 139). Thus, the gods must be perfect and immovable. It’s very Aristotelian in the sense of the Unmoved Mover of the Metaphysics.

Science is mankind’s savior, says Epicurus, and is necessary for living the good life because

It is not possible for one to rid himself of his fears about the most important things if he does not understand the nature of the universe but dreads some of the things he has learned in the myths. Therefore, it is not possible to gain unmixed happiness without natural science. (143)

Science has value because it and it alone can rid society of harmful superstitions. Both what we moderns call philosophy and what we call science function to reduce the fear of death; in this sense philosophy is, as the old cliché puts it, “learning how to die.”

Much of the “Letter to Menoeceus” is concerned with death, and its on this topic that Epicurus deserves to be called a stoic. Indeed, he instructs his pupil to “Accustom yourself to the belief that death is of no concern to us, since all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death” (124b). I’m not sure this follows, though—aren’t we concerned with more than mere sensation? Isn’t the problem with death that it’s a cessation of existence, and isn’t that something worth taking seriously?

Indeed, Epicurus seems to treat death as a thing in itself, as opposed to the cessation of all things. He treats it as the polar opposite of human consciousness: “while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist” (125). But I’m not convinced that’s an appropriate way to think about death—it’s nothingness, a black hole that sucks all life into it.

I do like one thing he says, though, and it fits in nicely with what Martin Heidegger calls “being-towards-death”: “Remember that the future is neither ours nor wholly not ours, so that we may neither count on it as sure to come nor abandon hope of it as certain not to be” (127a). This is sound advice, to be sure, even for Christians, who historically opposed Epicurus’ Roman disciples, causing the philosophy to go underground until the eighteenth century.

At any rate, Epicurus is worth a reading for at least two reasons. First, he is an excellent writer and a lot of fun to read. If you’ve ever slogged through Aristotle or the later Plato, you will appreciate a Greek philosopher who is relatively breezy. Second, whether the influence is acknowledged or not, he is a major forerunner of the nü atheism and a great deal of help in understanding the underlying assumptions of that movement.

In last week’s episode (number 31) of the podcast, one of our discussions related to doctrine and dogma had to do with the category of heresy, one that Michial and I disagreed on (as we did, if I remember right, in last year’s follow-up episode on Emergent and the New Calvinism).  As I remember both discussions, Michial’s working definition of heresy is that which stands against the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, while my own definition was that which, if taught to a generations of Christians, would result in something other than the Christian church.  (Michial, if I’m getting this wrong, do comment and set it right.)

Michial’s criticism of my definition is a valid one: if the definition of heresy is an open, functional one, that leaves the door open for just about anything to become heresy, the only barrier barring anything from the category being the capacity of a heretic detector to imagine a disastrous future.  And Michial is right to imagine (even if we didn’t dedicate the time during the podcast to say so) that heretic detectors tend to have lively imaginations.  I readily grant that my own definition has that real danger, and people should listen to Michial.  That said, I do want to attempt a positive case for thinking and writing about heresy precisely in those dangerous terms.

My functional definition stems from a hunch (and some history behind the hunch) that heretics have continued their innovative work (note that I did not call it creative) in the centuries since the Council of Constantinople (where, confusingly, the Nicene Creed took its final form). Those creeds were written at a time when homoousia and homoiousia were the central theological questions of the moment (in the case of the Nicene Creed), and although I can readily sign on to the former against the latter, I don’t know that our own generation’s teachings that stand the greatest threat to the core of Christian confession take their force to claims of similar natures rather than unitary nature.  If folks whose “new” teachings draw their force from that Aristotelian distinction do crop up, the creeds will be handy for countering them.  But those teachings that most threaten to turn the worship of Jesus Christ into civil religion, amorphous “spirituality,” or something else in our generation, at least as far as I can tell, draw their influences and their persuasive force from other places.

In other words, although one could stretch the Greek text of the Nicene Creed to counter such latter-day teachings as extreme forms of Italian humanism or blood and soil nationalism, I’d prefer to have texts contemporary to those phenomena (like the Barmen Declaration) address their particular character and engage the important question of whether their content and form threaten the particular faithfulness of those traditions that worship Jesus Christ.  Such texts, like the ancient creeds, should draw their force from the text of Scripture even as their vocabularies create new content with new ideas, and I imagine that, in order to do any work, they’d have to take on some sort of Magisterial authority for the sake of good Christian teaching.  Again, to grant Michial’s objection, to open up such possibilities is terribly dangerous.  To add to his objection, I’ll grant that such a move will mean that identification of heresy, for any given generation, necessarily continues to be the historically contingent (and thus even more dangerous) process that it was for those fourth-century Bishops.  That said, the alternatives seem to be refusal to pronounce on doctrine at all and trying to make another generation’s response to another generation’s problems fit our own problems in our own moment.  Since neither of those seems adequate to the genuinely human and historical and contingent life of the faithful in the saeculum, I’m inclined to lean towards the dangerous but potentially powerful authority of Christians in this or that generation to bind and loose with authority.

Such is not to say that the historical creeds have no place in Christian worship; if anything, I wish that my evangelical brethren and sostren did more things to declare our solidarity with those generations that came before us.  My call is not for an abolition of creeds (my apologies to my Stone-Campbell friends on this one) but to assign those historical creeds communal rather than judicial functions.  I would call on Christians both to honor and adhere to the historic creeds and to engage particular contemporary teachers, not abandon one to do the other.

I have to laugh as I realize that my journey with Michial through some of the big texts of existentialism in the last couple of years has led me to articulate what I take to be an existentialist argument against our resident existentialist.  That said, as someone who adheres to believers’ baptism and a conception of Church that does holds faithfulness to Christ as revealed in the Scriptures to be every generation’s burden, I am inclined to conclude that a definition of heresy that sets the boundaries in the fourth century simply does not grant enough importance to the continuous and crucial task of discernment.  I look forward to seeing Michial’s and anyone else’s responses.

General Introduction
- How did we spend Halloween?
- Mad Dog Gilmour is on the prowl
- What’s on the blog?
- Listener feedback

Let’s Talk Churches
- The praise-band “worship” model
- Eastern Orthodoxy
- The vast number of churches in Omaha
- The acapella Church of Christ
- Small ensembles
- Sacred harp singing
- Casting Crowns fail
- Spanish-language congregations
- The deaf choir

Hebrew Sacred Music
- The Rabbinic tradition and the Psalms
- Nearly lost words
- Surviving Samaritans

New Testament Worship
- What the Bible says
- The Christian life as opera
- Songs as teaching aid
- Greco-Roman hymns
- The Ballad of Jesus

The History of Hymnody in Five Moments
- Martin Luther’s one-bar blues
- Fanny Crosby’s sixteen hymnals
- The Jesus Movement, man
- Cædmon’s call
- The oldest non-Psalmic hymn

Doctrinal Content in Church Music
- Get ready to hear us yell
- Changing the words of the hymns
- Why music is so individualizing and communitarian
- The red hymnal vs. the blue hymnal
- How rock ‘n’ roll can get in the way
- Charles Wesley’s insufficient specificity
- The Voice of the Ugly Calvinist
- How doctrinal are choruses?
- Manwich, manwich, we adore you
- And now we will complain about praise choruses
- A Calvinist argument and an existentialist argument (that doesn’t come from Michial!)
- The place for emotional language

A New Kind of Service
- Arguments for and against contemporary worship services
- Does contemporary worship even sound like pop music?
- Our argument about Third Eye Blind
- The seriously anti-rock people
- Nineteenth-century circus music
- An ex-cathedra pronouncement
- Standing in a long line

The Rock-Concert Worship Service
- Why Michial attends a PCUSA church
- The guitar solo monitor move
- Liberal theology, conservative music
- Do rock services make you rude?
- Karaoke church music
- Let’s get our worship on!

Closing Thoughts
- Be ready to hear reasons from the other side
- Wait before you fight
- Develop some empathy, for crying out loud

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Ed. Judith McClure and Roger Collins. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Callimachus. Hymns, Epigrams, Select Fragments. Trans. Stanley Lombardo and Diane Rayor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.

The Homeric Hymns. Trans. Susan C. Shelmerdine. Newburyport, Mass.: Focus, 1995.

Norris, Kathleen. The Cloister Walk. New York: Riverhead, 1996.

Wetmore, Robert D. Worship the Way It Was Meant to Be: 15 Biblical Principles for Knowing and Loving God. Camp Hill, Penn.: Christian Publications, 2003.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 1 November 2010 (All Saints’ Day, Year C)

Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18 and Psalm 149 •Ephesians 1:11-23 •Luke 6:20-31

I know that usually the weekly lectionary post (when I manage to write one in a given week) is a preview of the next Sunday’s texts.  This week, because Monday is such an important and too often a forgotten day in the Church calendar, I decided to change things up.

If my own congregation were capable of being shocked by what I say when I address the congregation, they might have been displeased that I “went Catholic” in my communion meditation on October 31 of this year.  (That said, my communion meditations are so often rooted in Church history that they aren’t shocked any more.)  Ours is one of those congregations that’s fashionable these days as the target of mockery from folks who see it as an opportunity for candy-based evangelism: because we’re situated in a neighborhood that’s got a higher-than-average crime rate, we started a number of years ago to offer a “fall festival” every Halloween night as an alternative to trick-or-treating, and although I wasn’t able to go this year (I was in the emergency room with my son, who was wracked with strep-induced abdominal pains), in the years I’ve attended and helped out, the folks from the neighborhood easily outnumber our own congregants.  But important for this reflection is that we tap-dance around the word “Halloween” with the best of ‘em.

Ours, of course, is not the only congregation which has problems with that strange word.  Whether the word is too Catholic for comfort or whether churches are trying to avoid the associations with sorcery, Satanism, and other such idiocies, many stay away from the name of All Hallows’ Evening even as they prepare for the annual cultural assault on any retailers who refuse to name their December retail extravaganza after the Christ-Mass.  We American Christians have strange relationships with the ecclesial contractions we brought over with us from the Old Country, and I honestly can’t fault too many people, estranged as we are from so much human history, for these little bits of ignorance.

What does disturb me is the simultaneous rejection of things like All Saints’ Day on the parts of many American Christians (my own congregation included) and embrace of civic holy days like Memorial Day.  Yesterday my congregation’s sermon text was an unattached run of verses from the epistle of James, something entirely unrelated to All Saints’, and I imagine that most non-denominational Christian Churches in America treated yesterday as Any Old Sunday.  But I’d put dollars down that, when the end of May comes around, the song service, the sermon, and perhaps even (and as someone who holds up Christ’s table as central to Christian life I shudder at this) the communion meditation will take on the character of a special day, a holy day around which Sunday worship must revolve.  While I have nothing against America’s ignoring the day after Halloween (which is just about all that All Saints’ has become except in certain Christian circles) and elevating a day celebrating those in the employ of the government’s department of war, I do think that such a strange pairing of rejection and celebration means that our own piety (and I know full well that I’m an American Christian, so please don’t take this as any sort of declaration of independence on my part) has become far more secularized than we’d like to admit.

Today’s Ephesians text, if we choose to celebrate at least by reading, reminds us that our membership is an anatomical metaphor, that as Christians we are parts of the body of Christ, constituted on earth wherever and whenever the faithful gather.  Those among us who have fallen deserve our thoughts on this day not because their “sacrifice” has earned our “freedom” (we Christians avoid that sort of idolatry, confessing that there is One who has died to give us true liberty) but because they remain part of that body, subsumed into what Hebrews calls the cloud of witnesses but nonetheless making us who remain sad because we will no longer gather with them around the table of Christ until this world and its order have been renewed and completed in the age to come.  They are not “heroes,” much less “sacrifices,” but they are martyrs, those whose witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ has been closed by death even as our moments for faithfulness and apostasy lie open before us.  In the economy of Church within Empire, their memory reminds us that in the company of kings and powers that pass from this world, the Church of Jesus Christ will prevail against the Gates of Hades and welcomes all who will come in to become part of the ongoing tale of the faithful.

Next week I’ll return to a reflection on the coming Sunday’s texts.  For now, may the love of Christ enlarge our imaginations beyond the borders that Caesar draws on our maps and on our hearts.