Transmission on July 16 - the Empire and the Church
July 14, 2008
Hey, Transmissioners -
This Wednesday, July 16, 7pm, we’ll be gathering at Bowie and George’s new apartment for a ritual focused on what it means to be both a Christian and a citizen of an empire, looking at our current context through the lens of historical relationships between Empires and the Church. Featuring fancy sandwiches and deviled eggs by Isaac, Bible history by John, church history by Bowie, and a ritual by all of us, this one will be both educational and transformative. Hope you can make it!
The Separation of Church and Field
July 10, 2008
We hear a lot of about the separation of Church and State. In the Biblical age of Israelite monarchy, there was no such distinction, and yet there’s a constant tension between church and field - between the Temple and the Wilderness. Naturally, the histories in the Hebrew Scripture were written from the Temple-State point-of-view, and yet the prophets and the Gospels offer another side of the story.
The first thing we see in the original Gospel, according to Mark…
John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance…And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to [be] baptized by him in the river Jordan…Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. (Mark 1:4-6)
I recently heard a very good sermon about how CLEAN John always looks in artwork. And yet here we’ve got him, wearing the hair of the smelliest animal that lives, eating bugs, and his beard and hair and smeared with honey. It’s really something of a miracle in the story – people are going out to SEE this guy! And to hear him shout insults at them. Townspeople, and from the big city-dwellers, are coming out to the wilderness - YES, we’ll repent, just PLEASE get your filthy self into that water!
And then Jesus shows up…
And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. (Mark 1:11-12)
So now JESUS runs off into the wilderness. For forty days, he gets baked by the sun, hassled by the Satan – who knows? Maybe he found John’s stash of bugs and honey. We might read this now and think, ‘Oh, I guess that’s when Jesus sat back and watched Lawrence of Arabia…the extended version…’ but to first century Judean audiences, people brought up on the tales and traditions of the Hebrew Scriptures, hearing the word ‘Wilderness’ was like doing a Google-search for…I don’t know, ‘car,’ or ‘house’ – this was an iconic word that brought up ALL KINDS of cultural memories. To give a sense of it, the word ‘Wilderness’ appears 27 times in Exodus, 48 times in the book of Numbers – these were a people whose cultural identity was forged in the wilderness. Even the word Hebrew, coming from ‘Habiru,’ meaning ‘outsider,’ suggests a people from the fringes on society.
Jesus for President Tour this Saturday
June 24, 2008
Hey, friends!
This Saturday, one of my personal idols, Shane Claiborne, is doing a book tour and rally at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church (7 West 55th St), at 7pm. I’ve read the book and it’s quite good, challenging what following Jesus means in an era when just about every politician, corporation, and military is claiming to have God on its side. This is definitely and event worth attending.
From the press release:
Claiborne, Haw and his wife Cassie and dog Lucy, along with two other friends, will be sharing ideas and inspiring other to re-imagine politics. They’ll be traveling in a bus running on used vegetable oil. The tour will feature teaching from both authors as well as storytelling, art, music, and worship that provokes the political imagination. Each city will also include special guest musicians and performers.
You can check out the website here: http://www.jesusforpresident.org/ Give me a ring if you want to go with me!
Oh, and don’t forget to keep July 2nd saved for our next Transmission!
Virus come and gone
June 24, 2008
Some of you might have noticed that the site disappeared for a little while and now it’s back but looking different. Thanks to Sarah, we realized that a virus had infected our server and trashed our site! It took a lot of work (and hours of sifting through two years of accumulated HTML by hand), but we managed to get every trace of it removed, and both Google and StopBadWare have declared our site to be virus-free. Still, if you don’t have virus protection, you should definitely get some to prevent anything similar from happening to you. Thanks for being patient with us!
Folks should watch this! It does a great job of looking at the systemic problems that arise from materialism and consumerism, and it reminds me why I have so much respect for Quakers, Amish, and Monastics. As Christians, we really need to consider the lilies of the field more often.
Thanks to Allen for sending this to me.
Christianity Lite!
May 22, 2008
This is cute…
Transmission this week! and lots of news!
May 18, 2008
It’s that time again! We welcome back Bowie who is freshly arrived from her recent wedding/vacation/pilgrimage to India. She’ll be celebrating her return to Transmission by leading us in our ritual, and she had this to say about it:
the ritual will be planned around St. Thomas, who brought Christianity to India in 52 AD. George and I visited the place where he landed and the Pontifical Shrine and hospital that have been built there. We will also talk about the two main stories about Thomas in the Gospel of John - 14:5-6 and 20:24-29 (the story that got him dubbed “Doubting Thomas”). I like the idea of “doubting, yet doing” and of “not knowing the way”…
Transmission will be Wednesday, 7pm, at Bowie’s place. If you get lost, feel free to call me. I’ll be cooking.
We’ll also have four pieces of business to discuss:
- Our beloved Katherine has moved to Chicago to be with her family, which means that we need someone else to step up and replace her as co-facilitator. I think it’s really important to have two people putting Transmission in the front of their brainspace, not only because it’s a lot of work but also because a community shouldn’t become centralized around one person.
- Starlight Ministries, another church-ish group that has a peculiar calling to sex worker ministry, wants to sponsor a program with us this summer called Exotic Dancer, MBA, which basically gives basic business and personal finance education to people in the sex industry. It’s very important work, and I think it’s exactly the sort of thing we should be involved with. You can read about it here: http://starlight-ministries.org/wp_blog_1/
- Mabel and Paul want to organize a trip to the Creation museum in Kentucky in August, which I think could be a great time. Note that this is *not* an endorsement of creationism…
- We’re meeting this Tuesday, 2pm with Intercession to discuss the possibility of inhabiting their currently vacant rectory, which would be a big move for Transmission. Anyway who wants to come and meet them, see the space, and be a part of our initial conversation should totally come, just let me know.
Congrats to Bishop Bob Rimbo
May 18, 2008
The New York Synod of the Lutheran Church elected a new Bishop this weekend, and I was lucky enough to get to be part of the voting process. There were a bunch of great candidates, and in the end the winner only won by four votes: 236 to 232. I can only imagine that it must be tremendously humbling way to begin a term as Bishop.
I have high hopes for this guy. He mentioned the emerging church in some of his introductory remarks and seems hip to a lot of emerging concepts. He also seems open to new models of ministry and expressions of church, so I’m hoping we might be able to count on some support from the Lutherans as we continue to evolve as a community.
Like many mainline denominations, the Lutherans are facing a severe drop in attendance and many of the churches in NYC are failing. Many of the candidates for bishop talked about closing churches and consolidating congregations, which means that the Synod might have some extra real estate on its hands, and there are LOTS of ways I could imagine Transmission putting those to use…
Chris Hedges at Union Theological Seminary
April 29, 2008
As you’ve no doubt noticed, there’s no Transmission this week because there are five Wednesdays this month. In lieu of a standard Transmission, therefore, I’d like to invite you to come hear Christ Hedges to a reading from his new book, which is about the recent prominence of Atheist discourse. I think this guy is definitely worth listening to - his previous book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, was a very smart and critical look at the culture of conservative Christianity, and I’m very interested to hear what we has to say about the New Atheism.
Chris Hedges will be reading from and discussing his most recent book “I Don’t Believe in Atheists.” In this book Hedges responds to contemporary prominent athiests Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, arguing for the importance of faith in our world and challenging a form of athiesm that can be as intolerant and bigoted as religious fundamentalism. He offers an important voice for progressive Christians today. You can learn more about Hedges on the Union website here: http://www.utsnyc.edu/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=992&srcid=256 or on posters around campus.
See you at 7 p.m. Wednesday evening! Oh… and there will be cookies :)
Bill Moyers and Jeremiah Wright
April 26, 2008
These are worth watching. Catch the whole show on PBS if you can!
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