Maundy Thursday / April Fool’s
April 1, 2010
Isaac Everett: I’m trying to think of ways to combine Maundy Thursday with April Fool’s Day.
Eric Thompson: “And Peter said to him, ‘Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death!’” ought to about cover it.
Sunday Rituals
March 13, 2010
Usually when we talk about ritual in Transmission, we take it pretty seriously. We talk about it in a formal sense, as a performance that transforms someone or something from one state to another, as a space that creates community, as a moment where the usual boundaries can break down. It’s big and dramatic. It’s a wedding, a communion, a house blessing. It isn’t brushing your teeth. That, we like to say, is a habit and not a ritual.
And yet, I find myself thinking a lot these days about that habitual kind of “ritual.” The small and homely kind. Brushing your teeth, reading the paper, kissing someone good night and good morning. It seems to me that these things that we repeat – week by week, month by month, year by year – transform us too. They give shape and order to our lives. They make us into the people that we are becoming.
As the calendar rolled over to 2010, my brother and his girlfriend stayed with me for a couple of days. On Sunday morning over a leisurely breakfast, they pulled up their Sunday websites to share with me: PostSecret and the New York Times Weddings & Celebrations. As we looked over shoulders, the silence was punctuated by sighs, laughter, and the occasional groan. I was moved and surprised. My brother and his girlfriend are completely secular people, and yet their Sunday rituals still carry a sense of setting time aside for something special, sacred even. They bear witness to other people’s secrets. They share in other couples’ joy.
It made me think about my own habitual rituals. Are mine transforming me into a person of empathy, compassion, and joy? Do they shape me into the person that I would like to become? I’ve joined my brother and his girlfriend in reading secrets over Sunday breakfast, and added a dose of dance and poetry. Then I go to church, for the healing of the ritual and the shaping of the habit.
Prayer, Prophecy, Scripture
September 5, 2009
A few conservative bloggers and podcasters recently critiqued my podcast and book for not giving enough recognition to the Psalm’s role as prophecy; apparently the fact that I don’t immediately look for Jesus in the Psalms means I’m not interpreting them correctly.¬† The thing is, I’m not entirely convinced that the Book of Psalms does prophesy Jesus, or that they were originally meant to be prophecy at all.
This has gotten me thinking about the nature of the texts contained in the Bible. The question of whether the Bible is the “inerrant Word of God” is such a hangup issue for so many churches – it’s used as a litmus test to determine whether a believer is a “true Christian” or whether a teacher is a “false Prophet.” When the final version of the Torah was put together (probably shortly after the Babylonian Exile), did the redactors suspect it’d be used as scripture? Well, yeah, they probably did. When Paul wrote his letter to Philemon, did he suspect that it’d be read in churches thousands of years later and declared “the Word of the Lord, thanks be to God?” No, he probably didn’t.
In Jewish copies of the Bible, the books are clearly separated between Scripture (Torah), Prophecy (Nevi’im), and Writings (Ketuvim). In Christianity, the lines between the three are much, much more ambiguous, whether we’re talking about the Psalms or the writings of Paul. Since I’m much more familiar with the Psalms, I’ll focus on them.
Reforming or Conforming?
August 8, 2009
So a few years ago I wrote a rather passionate post about the emergent church. I still think it’s a rather good piece of writing:
http://www.transmissioning.org/2007/01/27/kimball-macarthur-and-me/
Well, it turns out two years later, Phil Johnson felt the need to refute me in his essay “Joyriding on the Downgrade at Breakneck Speed: The Dark Side of Diversity,” published in Reforming or Conforming?
Check out the link – I’m in footnote seven.¬† Although I disagree with his presuppositions, it’s a very interesting read and worth a few minutes of your time.
Kadosh, Sanctus, Holy, etc
July 4, 2009
One of the things I really love about mystical eucharistic theology is the idea that there is only one bread and one cup across all the world and throughout all time. The idea is that since each eucharist is mystically linked with the unique event of Christ’s death on the cross, every eucharist that has ever been celebrated (or ever will be celebrated) happens simultaneously. Mind-bending, huh?
I’m not sure that my own eucharistic theology is quite that high, but I am in love with the idea the eucharistic table is something bigger than the food that’s on it and the people sitting around it – that’s an act that unites us with all Christians everywhere and everytime.
This is one reason why so many liturgical traditions sing a sanctus as part of the liturgy, and why it’s important that it’s sung by the congregation and not just by the minister or choir. Isaiah had a vision of angles singing this song without ceasing, and so when the people sing it at communion they are singing along with the seraphim – when the minister says something like:
Therefore, with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify Your glorious name, evermore praising You and saying…
Or, at Transmission sometimes:
With strangers, neighbors, saviors, ravers, saints and angels, raise a song
As one with some whose work is done and others here or yet to come
This is what’s being referred to.
Angels aside, it is pretty amazing that this song has been song so often, so consistently, and in so many many ways throughout the millenia. Folks have never stopped singing it, but they’ve also never stopped coming up with new ways to sing it. Here’s a playlist of this song through the ages for your listening pleasure:
A sephardic cantor singing it in perhaps the oldest version of it I know:
[audio:1sanctus.mp3]
Deborah Van Dyke singing it as a meditative chant (kadosh):
[audio:2sanctus.mp3]
In Dulci Jubilo singing it as Ambrosian Chant (santus):
[audio:3sanctus.mp3]
Helen Shapiro singing as full-on gospel melodrama (kadosh – the Lord He reigns):
[audio:4sanctus.mp3]
The Psalters singing it as only they can (hosannah):
[audio:5sanctus.mp3]
Rachel Cole singing it as Christian pop (kadosh):
[audio:6sanctus.mp3]
Adom9 singing it as trance electronica (sanctus):
[audio:7sanctus.mp3]
All of the above are available on iTunes, so if any of them struck your fancy, go buy them!
Pentecost audioscape
May 31, 2009
Happy Pentecost, everyone!
A lot of churches have a tradition of reading scripture in a variety of languages on Pentecost, but the act of sitting and listening to something you can’t understand seems to be the exact opposite of the Pentecost story me. So this afternoon I cooked up a sound piece that tries to convey what it’s like to be listening to a cacophony and suddenly realize that you understand what’s being said.
[audio:pentecost.mp3]
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the Hebrew word ruach is the word for both “spirit,” “breath,” and “wind.” This is why in the beginning of Genesis, some Bibles say, “and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters” while others say “and a wind from God moved over the waters.” Personally, I prefer “and the breath of God moved over the waters.” Curiously, this synonym also exists in Greek – Pneuma could mean either spirit or breath, and even in English “spirit” comes from the same root as “respirate.”
So I encourage you to take a moment today to think about your breathing, how it’s constantly a part of you, how it connects you to your environment, and how natural it is. Use your breath to connect to the Spirit of God, that aspect of God which lives inside each of one of us.
A Renaming Ritual
May 30, 2009
I recently had the pleasure of attending a renaming ritual for a friend of mine, a transman who has only recently begun the process of switching gender identities (formerly Joy, currently James). Anyone who’s watched a friend grow into a transgender identity knows how difficult it is to switch to a new set of pronouns, a new name, etc, and even the most supportive of friends find long-held habits hard to break.
So, since ritual is probably the best tool in existence for creating transformation in a community, we decided that we needed to have a “renaming ritual” for him, officially giving the support of the community to him and adopting his new name and gender. (Note it’s likely to be confusing, but I’ll refer to Joy/James as “she” before the ritual and “he” after the ritual, since that’s the way in which the ritual was constructed.)
Like most Transmissions, this one was held in the home of friends with lots of home cooked food, but everyone in attendance had been instructed to come wearing clothes of the other gender. (As someone who is not into gender-bending myself, I found this part to be incredibly uncomfortable, which was probably the point.) We spend the first hour or so just hanging out, eating for, playing music, and enjoying each other’s company.
Over the course of this hour, each of us would take a turn putting a braid into Joy’s hair (she had hair down to her waist or so). Then, once her entire head was put into braids, we gathered everyone together and each one of us cut off the braid we had made and had the opportunity to say something privately to her, before her transformation. We were also given the choice of keeping the braid or donating it to locks of love. Once her hair had been shorn, all of us, including her, took of the clothes we’d come in and put on clothes of our “appropriate,” gender – it’s amazing how much more comfortable I was after I was allowed to wear boy clothes which, again, was probably the point.
At this point, Joy no longer dressed or looked like a girl, and hostess of the event introduced him to the crowd as James. It felt quite similar to the moment after a baptism when the preacher holds up a child and introduces him or her to the congregation, or at a wedding reception when the couple is introduced to the crowd as unit for the first time. We each had the opportunity to go to James, shake hands, and say whatever we wished, and the party continued.
This was not a Transmission event, but it felt very Transmission-ish in that was a home-brewed ritual focused on efficacy and built around a community. By the end of the ritual, I found it very easy to refer to this person I’d known for almost a decade by a new name, and he felt affirmed and supported in his journey. I spent much of the time thinking, “Wow, I wish I were still in Seminary so I could write a paper about this!”
It also led me to think about the fact that there are many important transitions in life for which we don’t have liturgies. At The Crossing, an emergent community in Boston, they recently laid hands on a community member about to undergo gender reassignment surgery, and she described it as one of the most moving worship experiences she’d had. Perhaps Transmission should make a project of collecting liturgies which will never be printed in a prayer book…
Transmission Elevator Pitch
May 16, 2009
So as I’ve been going around pitching my book, a lot of people are asking me about Transmission, the community which I love so much and which gets a lot of mention in the book. This has forced me to learn to explain what Transmission is a very short amount of time, to both Christian and secular audiences, and it’s surprisingly difficult!
This is what I’ve come up with:
Transmission is an emergent house church made up mostly of New Yorkers in their twenties and thirties. It attracts both the “churched,” many of whom have gone to seminary and now work for churches, as well as those who are attracted to Christian spirituality but do not feel fed (or comfortable) in traditional churches. Transmission is very interested in the relationship between worship and community, as well as the relationship between innovation and tradition, seeking to craft new ritual and liturgical exploration while remaining in continuity with the larger Christian tradition.
What do you think? Is this accurate? I’d love your feedback on it!
RICH AND POOR: Two Worlds or One Family? by J.Snodgrass
April 7, 2008
RICH AND POOR: TWO WORLDS OR ONE FAMILY
Presentation given by J.Snodgrass for the Marble Collegiate Church Young Adults 20s/30s
Every year, the gap between rich and poor gets wider. The title I was given for this presentation – “Rich and poor, two worlds…” reminded me that in economic terms we actually have three worlds on this Earth ‚Äì the first world, capitalism, the second world, communism, and the third world, “other,” which has become synonymous with whole nations of people living in abject poverty. The recent disaster in New Orleans was yet another reminder that, although America is a first-world country, there’s a third world in here, too, a small nation’s worth of people that our own government left behind and forgot once the first-class citizens had been rescued.
Every year the chasm gets wider, and every year I’m reminded of a story Jesus told in the Gospel according to Luke chapter sixteen, about an un-breach-able chasm.
Luke 16:19-26
“There was a rich man…dressed in purple and fine linen who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried.
In Hell, where he was being tormented, [the rich man] looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’
But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus [got nothing]; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’
So here we’ve got this rich man, dead, suffering, and what does he say to Abraham? ‘Send that boy down here, that poor boy that used to lie outside my gates, tell him to fetch me some water.’ Even dead, burning in Hell, this rich man has not learned his lesson. But the chasm cannot be traveled, even if Lazarus had wanted to. This rich man could have spared himself all that suffering, if he had bridged the chasm in life, but never had he reached out to invite this poor man to his table. The story continues…
BRING PEACE TO A WARRING WORLD, PART II by j.Snodgrass
March 20, 2008
PRESENTATION – BRING PEACE TO A WARRING WORLD, PART II
By j. Snodgrass
James 1:19-27
You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into…the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act– they will be blessed in their doing. If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God…is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
Unstained, undefiled by the world. It reminds me of a sleep-away-camp skit I saw once saw. A little girl held a clean, white sheet of paper. And someone stomped onto the stage, grabbed her piece of paper away and crumpled it. She picked it up and held it. Someone else walked across, took the sheet of paper, threw it to the ground and stomped on it. She smoothed it out and held it again, but it looked so different from what we’d seen at first. Finally, a third person stomped across the stage, grabbed the paper and ripped it, throwing both pieces to the ground. This time the girl did not pick it up. She just looked at us. A fourth person walked on, picked up the two pieces, smoothed them out, held the pieces together and handed it back to the girl.
Anybody ever wake up with a sheet of paper like that? Anybody ever look in the mirror and say ‘Jesus called me the light of the world, and today I’m gonna let it shine’? Anybody ever bring a sheet of paper like that onto the subway at rush-hour? When I was growing up, we moved around a lot. And I remember the first day of school in New Jersey, first day of school in Ohio, first day of school in Western New York…me and my clean sheet of paper. And then a few days later in the principal’s office, waiting for my parents to show up, because I’d been fighting again. But look what they did, I always tried to say. Look what they did to my clean sheet of paper.