CLIMBING THE WALLS

I was amazed, though probably shouldn’t have been, upon learning that a candidate for ordination in one of the major historic mainline churches today is required to answer the following question: “What is your understanding of racism and Euro-American privilege”?

What this has to do with the gospel is not immediately apparent. Neither racism nor Euro-American privilege fit into biblical or Christian categories. In fact, as I hope to establish, they’re alien to the gospel. The reason is that they come mostly from secular academia and are intended for purposes incompatible with the Christian witness.

One can see this incompatibility in the implicit rejection of at least two of Judeo-Christian tradition’s most foundational tenets: the belief in heaven and the doctrine of Original Sin.

Continue reading “Playing with Fire”

I was settling into the pew with apprehension. The guest preacher for the day was someone who a few years back had indignantly critiqued an ecumenical service my colleagues and I had held after the shooting of five police officers in Dallas, a service intended to honor their sacrifice and mourn their tragic deaths.

The preacher and his wife, both vocal supporters of the civil rights movement, complained that the service failed to account for the problem blacks have with law enforcement. This was, be it noted, at the height of the Black Lives Matter controversy.

That this issue was unrelated to the purpose of the service was, apparently, beside the point.

Continue reading “Glory Days Redux”

T.S. Eliot famously made the point, though he was hardly the first. One could go back to the New Testament reference to the “body of Christ,” Paul’s metaphor for the church.

Like the human body, the church has a head, hands, and all the other varied parts that together enable it to function as it should. There are those called to preach, some to evangelize, others to care for the poor and needy, and still others tasked with whatever the community requires, no matter how seemingly insignificant.

No one role is considered more important than another. Each must work together for the church to succeed in its godly mission. The sum, in other words, is greater than its constituent parts.

Everyone must accept his or her role. If the hand tries to be the head, problems arise. God has assigned to each of us specific gifts at birth. Using them to accord with God’s will is perhaps life’s greatest undertaking.

Continue reading “Luxury Beliefs”

I hate to say it, but if I want banal political or social analysis, I know I can always count on the clergy.

Our local newspaper is often a good source. It runs the occasional guest column where local clergy comment on whatever they choose. I’ve even written a couple myself.

Generally, what’s remarkable about these offerings is how utterly predicable they are. Without a hint of irony, they almost always betray conventional wisdom (which, by definition, is noncontroversial) while simultaneously aiming to be provocative and countercultural. Most articles fall safely within the parameters of socially accepted political correctness.

Most recently, a local pastor wrote of the time she was foreman of a jury asked to adjudicate the guilt or innocence of a young black man indicted on a variety of counts. She points to how easy it is to judge another, especially a stranger, based on little more than superficial evidence and observation.  

Continue reading “In the Clerisy but Not of It”

My father used to love reading the newspaper. Every day, in fact, he’d read all three New York dailies, cover-to-cover.

He especially got a kick out of the letters-to-the-editor. He’d chuckle at all the hysterical, over-the-top outrage frequently fomented in its pages. So I’m not sure what he’d think about my own letter-to-the-editor a few weeks ago in the Cape Cod Chronicle.

In it, I commented on the fact that the week before the paper had published a detailed map showing the exact path of the tornado that first touched down in Harwich Center. Since I’d worked there for over a decade, I was curious.

Naturally enough, to orient myself, I looked for the First Congregational Church, only to discover it wasn’t there. The high school was identified, as was Brooks Park. Yet the church, arguably the most recognizable and historic landmark in town, had effectively been scrubbed out of existence.  

Continue reading “The Caboose at the End of the Cultural Train?”

Let’s face it, kids can be cruel. And no more so for me than during roll call one day in elementary school. Specifically, the teacher asked us to give out our full names – middle names included.

You see, I hated my middle name and guarded it jealously. It sounded old-fashioned and corny. I still remember the teasing from my classmates, both boys and girls.

So now, as I begin my very first sermon ever in a Methodist church, I’m obliged to reveal that name…Calvin.

Worse still, I’m named after my great-grandfather, The Rev. Thomas Calvin Leinbach, himself a preacher in the Calvinist tradition, in this case the German Reformed Church (now part of the United Church of Christ – my denomination).

Continue reading “A Hidden Longing for Home”

Every time I get a haircut the conversation invariably turns to theology. That’s because my barber knows I’m a retired pastor and, though not a church-goer, she’s more than a little curious about the whole Christianity thing.

The last time I was there she touched on the subject of judgment. We’re not supposed to judge, right? She walked right into a buzz saw on that one.

I explained that love is indeed the basis for Christianity, but that love hardly eliminates the need for judgment. In fact, just the opposite.  

If you fall in love, you’re not free to do whatever you please – or shouldn’t be. That’s because relationships make demands on us, just as being part of a family, a neighborhood, or even being a citizen does. If you truly love, you make every effort to ensure your behavior honors and respects the other. And this will require considerable disciple and sacrifice.

Continue reading “God-Talk in the Barber’s Chair”

The Oxford Dictionary defines an abstraction as “a general idea not based on any particular real person, thing or situation.” It is “the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events,” as “something which exists only as an idea.”

We live in a world of abstraction. Modernity, effectively begun with the Enlightenment, took thoughts and ideas distilled over vast periods of time – that is, traditions, social norms, cultural institutions, philosophy, literature, law, and religion – and abstracted them into free-floating, standalone concepts torn from the real-life communities that birthed them. They became orphans.

Concepts such as progress, freedom, autonomy, emancipation, pluralism, tolerance, openness, equality, and human rights, to name but a few, were cut off from their roots, i.e. Western tradition and its associated virtues and duties. These newly abstracted concepts then took on a preeminent role as sacred aims, alone capable of paving the way to a new, felicitous future.

Continue reading “And Another Thing…”

My parents were totally sold on college. From the earliest age I repeatedly heard how important it was to get into a good school. I remember the trips we would take every fall to attend football games at Amherst College (my father’s alma mater). It seemed magical somehow. The place had a certain mystique – austere and even noble – steeped as it was in tradition and the disciplined, hard-won pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and truth.

Today, that luster is mostly gone, at least for me. I recently exchanged a few text messages with my oldest brother who also attended Amherst, much to my father’s delight. Yet our texts dealt mostly with the lunacy that’s overtaken the school and higher education in general, especially among elite institutions.

The issue at hand was a 36-page brochure, a true testament to strident political correctness, the “Amherst Common Language Guide,” created by the Orwellian-sounding Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

Continue reading “Banned from Middlebury”

Virtually no one today would deny that the Roman Catholic Church at the time of the Protestant Reformation was in need of reform. And that includes modern-day Catholics.

It is well known that the church had become overly involved in worldly matters, perhaps especially in politics. Bishops and archbishops served as princes and other such positions of power. They held vast amounts of wealth and owned large tracts of land. Their worldly power was considerable.

Not only that, a system of indulgences had developed where the faithful were urged to give money to the church in order to secure a fortuitous slot in heaven. To be crass about it, you literally could buy yourself out of Purgatory and straight into heaven.

Indeed, there were other issues, many theological in nature, far too extensive to detail here. But suffice it to say, there was considerable discontent within and without the church.

Continue reading “My Beef with the Reformation”