God Cannot Become Present

Invocations have always puzzled me. I value prayer and I would hope that we all would “pray without ceasing” but invocations seem a bit off. Contributing to my unease with invocations is the idea that we give the impression that we “summon” God to the gathering. Maybe this is not what others feel is happening, but many invocations I have heard use phrases like, “we invite you into this place” and “be here, O God.” These prayers are not evil or “bad” they do however hold an implicit theology of where God is.

There is a story in the Bible where a prophet named Elijah is in a weird contest against different prophets of a different deity to rain down fire. These other prophets cut themselves and yell for a long time in order to “invoke” their god. After a while, Elijah jeers them and suggests… well just read how the Contemporary English Version tells it in 1 Kings 18:27:

At noon, Elijah began making fun of them. "Pray louder!" he said. "Baal must be a god. Maybe he's daydreaming or using the toilet or traveling somewhere. Or maybe he's asleep, and you have to wake him up.

This god never shows up. Elijah then prays that God would answer his request to light a fire and the fire is lit.

Elijah knew something that invocations fail to understand.

God cannot become present because God is never absent.

Examine our prayers and listen for the implicit theology. Is this person praying that God would “please, just be present”? Are we aware that God cannot become present - God is presence.

The Temptation to Eradicate Inefficiency in the Church

The allure of the Silicon Valley approach to life is that we can eradicate the inefficiencies of life, moving us to a friction-less society. They build apps and technologies that make things as efficient as possible. You don’t have to go to a bank to get cash to pay someone, just use the app to transfer money. There is no need to go to call an order in, just use the delivery service app. There is no need to answer the door, just look at your phone when the visitor presses the doorbell.

The inefficiency of the labyrinth walk, mirrors the inefficiency of Grace

The stereotype of the socially awkward computer person who would dream of a world where you don’t have to engage with people, but only a computer is not very fair to many computer people to bring us together. However, there is something to a world that values efficiency to such a high degree that we ought to consider why this is.

One can easily imagine that if the rest of our world places such a value on efficiency, it is not a wonder that we would desire the same for the Church.

In the Church the primary justification to work on efficiencies is a matter of being a good steward of resources. And of course the Church needs to be faithful stewards of resources given to the Church. These are noble efforts to be sure. However, being efficient runs directly into another value in the Church: Grace.

Grace is anything but efficient. God’s grace is prodigal. It is abundant. It overflows. It gluts the market, if you will. This amazing grace is not measured out in efficient doses. Grace is messy and gums up the wheels of the efficient.

The temptation to eradicate inefficiency in the Church is a temptation to limit grace.

Church people often say we want to become more understanding, more patient, more forgiving. The things you find inefficient in the Church you are opportunities to practice the very virtues we claim we want.

Communication is slow? Patience.

Too many meetings? Understanding.

Too much conflict? Forgiveness.

Being inefficient is not an excuse to neglect communication or a reason to remain opaque. Churches need to be clear in communication and as transparent as morally possible. Be careful of the temptation to eradicate inefficiency in the Church for we may unintentionally erase the inefficient Grace of God.

Theology as Fixer, Breaks the Church

Shelly Rambo writes the following in her book Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining and Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma:

The experience of trauma dismantles notions of theology as a fixer, a provider of solutions. A move to “fix” things may interfere rather than assist in the process of healing. Theologians who have learned from trauma theology emphasis the importance of accompaniment, truth telling and wound tending. Acts of witness and testimony acknowledge the reality of traumatic experiences that can never be fully brought to the surface of consciousness. This posture is not focused confidently on conveying theological or moral certainty. Instead, its confidence is in the healing power of giving witness to suffering.

I find this to be a helpful description of the tension within the in the UMC right now. The tension is not over one person or issue. The tension is rooted out of a collective trauma that the denomination has had and has inflicted. The different plans moving us forward, the different caucus groups and advocates, if they are anything, are different approaches to trauma.

Some believe that we can get past this trauma with a proper doctrine. Some believe if we remove certain teaching. Some give the subtle impression, that their plan or their position can “fix” the trouble we are in. In all these efforts to “fix” the problem we often discover, as Rambo says, that we interfere rather than aid healing. There is a feeling that if we could just “get past this current hurt” that we would come out on the other side with blue skies and smooth waters. That this one matter is albatross around our denominational neck and when freed from it we could “make disciples”.

So we try to fix it with theology, plans and positions. We send delegates to vote in the hopes that there will be a solution found in Minneapolis this May.

There was theology that was generated to “fix” the problem of slavery. Others created to "fix” the problem of female ordination. Still other theology to “fix” how we treat Native Americans, our international sisters and brothers, and even the ecological crisis. The truth is that the longer we approach “theology as a fixer” the longer we delay in healing these traumatic wounds.

I wonder if the UMC will discover in Minneapolis not a theology to “fix” us but a theology that take seriously wound tending, presence, truth telling, forgiveness and mercy? Frankly, these are not “fixes” but, again echoing Rambo, postures. These are not the ways we will solve our antagonisms, but rather are vessels to hold them.

Theology that “fixes” (Ironically) breaks the Church. Theology that tends to wounds, heals.