Seven whole days

Today is the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. I hope you are celebrating with gusto. Here’s a stunning offering: Healey Willan plays “Ye watchers and ye holy ones” and then improvises a postlude.

Yes, this is often an All Saints hymn. I couldn’t find good renditions of any Michaelmas favorites on youtube, or you’d have heard something else.

It has already appeared on Kendall Harmon’s blog, TitusOneNine. Those guys are uncanny at sniffing out controversies before they’re, well, controversial. The next big one is already brewing. Of course, I am speaking of the impending wedding of an 85-year-old first time bride to a man several years older. Predictably enough, this shocking wedding is to take place in an Episcopal Church. Figures. Surprisingly, the comments are NOT piling up over at T19. You’d think that place would be hopping mad right now.

You see, the argument most often made against same-sex marriage is that it is something other than the model of marriage as set forth in Genesis (where, one should note, there was no wedding ceremony). Natural law proponents will talk about marriages as existing only for the procreation of children. Here’s a news flash: people in their 80s will not be having children, at least not without divine intervention. Genesis does not say that Adam & Eve were not in their 80s. So why isn’t the right-wing fringe outraged at this? Why is this “non-biblical” wedding “wonderful”?

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I’m leading a workshop this morning for a Diocesan Resource Day in the Diocese of Massachusetts. The title of the workshop is “What would Jesus tweet? Social Media in Parish Ministry”. My plan is to prattle on for 20 minutes or so and then leave the rest of the hour for questions and conversation.

Here’s some of what I’ll be saying. Whether it’s more or less than this will depend upon my coffee consumption.

• Your congregation needs to engage with social media. In Massachusetts, there are three million Facebook users. That’s a big mission field.
• Your congregation needs to engage with social media. As our church continues to skew older, that problem is exacerbated by a pretty steadfast refusal — by and large — to change how we “do business.” Social media represent a pretty easy way to start to do things differently. I hope, frankly, that it’s the leak that bursts the dike and that the church’s mission and identity is revolutionized into becoming more like the year 250 than 1950.
• Your congregation needs to engage with social media. Did I mention that?
• Facebook is a good place to start. Don’t get too worked up about institutionalizing it, because the social media channels will probably be completely different in five years. (Remember Myspace? Meh.)
• Use social media to amplify in-person communities and to draw people into them. Facebook is not a substitute for in-person community, it’s a complement and a missionary tool.
• Use social media to build up the Body of Christ. Have fun! Teach! Share the Good News!
• Read more »

It’s always good to spice up headlines by combining nouns with the word “Gate”. Readers are instantly transported to the murky times of presidential cover-ups and “Deep Throat”. Besides Watergate, there’s Contra Gate, Travel Gate, and of course, Goose Gate. Wait, what? Well, I’ll have more to say about that last one soon enough. As an aside, as if we hadn’t already had an aside — making this a digression to a digression, which is a new one — you might like to check out this exhaustive list of -gate scandals.

I have doubly digressed. My point, now that I have arrived at one, is to note the strange controversy around “Stole Gate”. If you’ve missed the details, there is some hullabaloo around the choice of vestments Pope Benedict wore on his recent visit to Westminster Abbey. It turns out that clergy don’t just reach into the closet and grab the first thing they find. Especially not this pope. What looked like a slightly tacky stole that might have been on close-out in your local church goods supplier was actually a precious antique and a slap in the face of Anglicans. Maybe.

Understanding the subtleties of global diplomatic intrigue is way over my pay grade. Forget about grasping the nuances of papal messaging and attire. Don’t even start with the intricacies of papal head gear. But here’s what we know.

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Greatness is in the eye of the beholder. If, like me, you enjoy collecting religious kitsch, then you will find this list of the 20 great Jesus products amusing. Some people would rename this “The 20 worst Jesus paraphernalia products of all time.” So there you have it. Greatest? Worst? You decide.

From this list, I own only one product. “Answer me Jesus” saves lots of times in vestry meetings. Who needs complicated strategy planning sessions, when you can just turn over your pink velvet Jesus and get the answer? My office also contains the popular dashboard Jesus and the Jesus Action Figure. Who could object to that? If nothing else, Jesus was a man of action. To be sure, I would not want to own everything in the so-called top 20. Even my irreverent sense of humor has its limits.

My favorite, perhaps, is the LEGO Ark of the Covenant. What say you, dear reader? Do you collect such things? What’s your favorite?

For whatever reason, we’ve been encountering lots of seekers lately at the parish I serve. Often these folks are completely unchurched. Sometimes our seekers have some church experience, but almost never in the Episcopal Church. My first real conversations with people is usually by email. Maybe they write to us first, before they visit our church, to find out if it’s the kind of place they’d like to check out. Or perhaps the blinking cursor of an email message seems safer than the scary conversation in the after-church handshake line.

I love encounters with those who are seeking God. I love people who have been moved by life’s vagaries to seek out a faith community. I love the open questions and the fresh desire of seekers. But there’s a challenge for me. It’s hard to give someone a sense of what the Episcopal Church is all about by email. If they want to meet with me over a cup of coffee or stop by the office for a chat, it’s pretty easy. I wish I could point folks to a fantastic website where they could get a sense of the Episcopal Church. It does not seem to exist. Alas.

Yesterday, on Facebook, I asked the question of my friends. Several hundred friends, and no one had the answer. I pre-empted people by saying I would not entertain www.episcopalchurch.org as a candidate. It’s lousy for seekers. For church geek insiders, it’s fantastic. For people who want to know who is the Acting Deputy Program Officer of some random 815 office, it’s good. For those who want to find out where the Presiding Bishop or the President of the House of Deputies have appeared lately, you’re in luck. To get to know the Episcopal Church, you have to look elsewhere.

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This weekend, Christ Church (where I serve) is reading the whole Bible aloud. I’ll write more about that later tonight, but I wanted to post a link to the live web stream. As post this, we are moments away from the New Testament. It’s taken since Friday morning at 9 a.m. to read the Old Testament (some 57 hours). We expect to finish up at around 11 a.m. tomorrow with a celebration of Holy Eucharist.

Our reading this weekend, along with workshops on Saturday, is adapted from a program called Miqra, created in the Diocese of Kansas.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Tanzania. I arrived just as Ramadan was beginning, and I spent most of my time in predominantly Muslim areas. It was, for me, a wake up call. I’m not just talking about the 5:20 a.m. call to prayer that blasted through my hotel windows in Zanzibar.

While I’ve had the good fortune of a few friendships with Muslims in this country, it turns out that Ramadan is a whole different kind of celebration when you’re in a Muslim area. For those of you who knew this decades ago, you can nod pityingly if you like. Before I write about that, here are a couple of photos from a stunning set of photos on the Big Picture.

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Last spring I wrote a series of posts called “Episco-Upgrades“. Most of them explored various ideas to strengthen the Episcopal Church for its work of building God’s kingdom. I got lots of feedback on this series, both in the comments on the posts and by email. I’d say it ran about 65-35 positive. Those who objected sometimes focused on limits to my (admittedly half-baked) ideas. Fine.

What really surprised me, however, was the intensity of objection from what I’ll call the “General Convention establishment.” (I realize this makes me sound like Jack Iker, but please humor me.) Wow. There are some people in the Episcopal Church who really don’t want anything to change. They especially do not want anything to change if the something is connected to General Convention, church committees, legislative process, or programmatic staffing levels at HQ.

Last week I spent a couple of days with leaders in the Episcopal Church who are ready to move past our “stuck system” and to hit the reset button. These folks love the Episcopal Church. They are bishops, cardinal rectors, associate clergy, and rectors of small churches. They love Jesus and want the church to share the Good News and to be Jesus in the world. They mostly would agree that our church needs some serious rethinking if we’re going to do those things to which we’ve been called as a church.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about a cruciform USB hub. Well, today I’m sharing the next step in Electro-Jesus mojo. Yes, friends, it’s the cruciform power strip. It’s not only practical, ready to accomodate all shapes & sizes of transformers and cords, but it’s holy. Or at least it looks holy.

Check out the details here. If you get one of these and your stuff still doesn’t work, then I’m afraid you’re the problem.