MONDAY, JUNE 16, 2008In Matthew, Jesus is a complicated man. He is culturally Jewish, teaching in the synagogues. He observes the law. And yet, he has begun a new community, attracting crowds from urban and rural areas, challenging religious and government authority, but offering meaningful community to those who are "helpless and harassed, like sheep without a shepherd." Jesus is a new take on the old, claiming that a kingdom has come near, even if that kingdom looks radically different than expected.
If Matthew's Jesus is about anything, he is about giving those who search for community an experience of God that is both familiar and new at the same time. The encounter between the child Jesus and the Zorastrian wise men of Persia presents a possible foundation for Matthean evangelism through which today's gospel might be interpreted. We're not told what label to put on the wise men after their encounter with Jesus. We're not told that they abandoned Zorastrianism, after all it was their eastern religion that led them to Jesus. We're not led to believe that they became Jewish, or that they started a pre-Christian community. What we do know, is that they left praising God, and that they found in Jesus, another way to travel home.
Earlier this week, I took a trip to South Carolina, to my hometown of Bishopville. Bishopville is an impoverished rural village, about the size of Pittsboro, with a population of predominantly poor African-Americans, and working-class whites, with a dying agrarian economy, and an industrial network mortally wounded by off shoring. Lee County Central High School is a 95% African-American school. More than half of its students are on the free or reduced cost lunch program. White students attend Robert E. Lee Academy, a private school that emerged in the early 1970's. Its sole purpose is resistance to public school integration. This is my hometown.
My trip to Bishopville occurred on Tuesday, which is primary election day in South Carolina. My dad was seeking a 13th term in the South Carolina House of Representatives. I traveled down Highway 15 to Bishopville to offer support to my mom and dad, thinking that his highly contested re-election bid may be closer than in years past. To my surprise, my dad won re-election by a 16 point landslide.
The next morning, I had breakfast with my dad and the Bishopville town elders in the local Hardeez, where anyone with any influence or power gathers to do the hard work of governing. Inevitably, as folks talked about local politics, they began a discussion of religion too.
Just as the First Council of Nicaea tackled and refuted the religious controversy of Arianism (that is, the idea, that the Son is not co-equal nor co-eternal with the Father but rather a created being with divinely inspired powers), so this Hardeez council addressed the cutting edge controversy of the day. And what might this controversy be?
The new Methodist pastor in Bishopville has a Methodist pastor wife. She will pastor the large church in Camden. She will make $100,000 a year - twice as much as he does. She won't live in the Bishopville parsonage at all, and he will split his time between the Bishopville and Camden parsonages. For reasons obvious to all of us here, this is very controversial.
It's hard to believe sometimes that my community-of-origin and my adopted home of Chapel Hill lie on the same highway. It's true. If you follow Highway 15 south from Chapel Hill, eventually the road will become Main Street Bishopville. The infrastructure of the two towns, are connected, if only slightly; and the cultures are worlds apart.
Over the years, I've struggled to make sense of my home-state. I even toyed with the idea of returning there to “make a difference” in communities like the one from which I came.
It turns out, I'm not alone.
I read a study this week called “A New Generation of Southerners: Youth Organizing in the South." It said that a growing number of young adults (and I suspect the young at heart as well) find themselves torn between the decision to live in progressive, opportunity-rich hubs like Chapel Hill, and a guilt inspired yen to redeem the rural South. We yearn for, and often work for, what this author called a "New South"—a South exorcised of its slavery, oppression, defiance, and hostility to social change. Since the late nineteenth century, politicians, business leaders, and others have used the idea of the New South to to transform the Old South—with its entrenched poverty, conservative politics, exploited labor, racial segregation, and use of faith or rather, the language of faith, to keep minds closed and hearts from loving one another.
Young people and their allies to this day struggle against this Old South legacy. But they are also heirs to a legacy of bold resistance, strong cultural identities, community bonds, and place-based allegiances.
Across America, people are beginning to organize around "youth" as a unique political identity and a foundation for participating in a broader social justice movement. The South is no exception. Yet at the very moment in which a new cadre of leaders is urgently needed, the South's dismal public education system, its limited economic opportunities, and the entrenched poverty of the Black Belt, inner cities, Appalachia, and Rio Grande region have spurred an exodus of young people, especially Blacks, out of the South in search of better opportunities.
This study speaks to the contemporary experience of young adults in the south, but I dare say may baby boomers share this path.
I can't speak for my 20 and 30 something peers here at ECOTA. But I am a part of this mass exodus from the Old South. Chapel Hill is overflowing with folks like me - in search that new south. Where our children can learn tolerance and compassion, innocent of rigid, fear-based reductions of reality. Like the Israelites ran from Egypt, people from the deeper south come here seeking the Promised Land.
As we flee the Old South Ways, it’s really not surprising that so many of us also flee what we knew of God.
Most of us are well educated, young professionals, who have exposed themselves to world travel and cross-cultural immersion.
Religion tends not to be high on the list of priorities.-at least, not the religion of our parents.
But these adults don’t practice the religion of their parents.
Gone are the days when going to church was a virtue in-and-of itself. Today, the virtue is in not being a part of a formal institution. Research indicates that association with a denomination has less meaning today than every before. The virtue is in sharing relationships that plug them into something beyond themselves.
This thesis is echoed by Father Kirk Hadaway, Director of Research for the Episcopal Church. In an article on church attendance in America, Father Hadaway said, "If it's not uplifting, interesting, provoking ... it's perfectly acceptable in American society to not go [to church] anymore". "Churches that are providing a more uplifting worship experience and community are those that are growing. And those that do it well are not typical anymore."
However, just because many Americans (young and old alike) aren't attending church doesn't mean that they don't long for meaningful spirituality and community.
In January 2007, National Public Radio correspondent Judy Woodruff shined the media spotlight on this exodus from church in her piece entitled, "Experiencing Other Faiths to Find One's Own." This story features Gillian Siple, a Davidson college senior who describes herself as "spiritual." Siple spent the past year traveling and studying in Asia and Europe, immersing herself in religions other than her own.
Amid an abundance of information about religion easily available via the Internet and television, she says, "maybe the youth of today aren't sure if the way of their parents is perhaps the way that they want to follow, and I think that's wonderful."
With a small group of students, Siple, a religion major, lived in China, Thailand and India. She meditated in monasteries and ashrams, lived and studied among Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus — not your typical study-abroad program.
She remembers living at a meditation center in Thailand, wearing the traditional garb of a yogi. "I remember waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning and taking out my mat and I can remember just thinking, 'What if my friends saw me now? Would anyone recognize me? I am so far from the person and the life that I live back at Davidson right now. There's no remnant of that life on my body right now.'"
Even her faith began to fall away. She says that when she mediated, she felt an uncommon sense of peace. She wondered: Have I gone into this too deeply? Am I still a Christian, or am I becoming something else?
But back at Davidson College, she returned to the faith she knows best: Christianity. That faith is stronger now, she says. She attends prayer and fellowship meetings and heads an interfaith group on campus. She also meditates based on the teaching she learned in Thailand.
Siple calls herself a Christian pluralist, open to the possibility of the validity of other religious traditions.
After her tour of Asia, she spent a week at the Taize monastery in France, a place that attracts young people from around the world. In a Taize service, there is chanting and reading from scripture. But there are also long moments where more than 1,000 young adults sit quietly together in silence — not being told what to do.
"You do what you feel is right for your religious practice," Siple says. "I think that is what our generation is screaming for right now. People want not to be told what they should do, but to figure it out for themselves." It could be said that Gillian, like the Zorastian kings, met Jesus in Thailand and found a new way home.
To this point, I've been guessing that Chapel Hill is largely comprised of young adults like Gillian Siple. To be on the safe side, I did some research. According to Fizber.com, of the approximately 50,000 people in Chapel Hill, 30.4% consider themselves religious. The breakdown of this 30.4% is not surprising, 22% Protestant, 7% Methodist, 8% Baptist, 6% Roman Catholic, 2% Presbyterian, 2% Episcopalian. Interestingly enough, the Jewish population was listed as 0%, which we know isn't true. So much for statistics.
The point of all this is that ECOTA lives in the middle of the New South, surrounded by a community that is 70% "non religious" with young adults who are looking for community and spirituality, but may or may not be able to call themselves Christian (at least not in the way that our parents defined the word).
So to bring this reflection to a close, I searched for a quote from Presiding Bishop SHory, hoping that she might have offered a reflection or statement on the role of the Episcopal Church in our ever changing society. I didn't find such a quote, but to my delight, I found a number of more conservative voices in the Episcopal Church who were arguing that Bishop Katherine is not, in fact, a Christian.
Now, I've met Bishop Shory, and know this not to be true. However, given the needs of young adults in Chapel Hill, this label (intended to insult) could be a complement.
Our presiding bishop is a faithful follower of Jesus, the same Jesus who challenged conventional notions of religion, and yet utilized his culture and tradition to create community inclusive of all. Our Advocate community embodies Jesus’ witness.
The Advocate lives in the richness of the Anglican tradition, yet attracts persons of all faith backgrounds including persons ordained in the Methodist, UCC and Baptist traditions. There are lay people here from Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Latter Day Saints, Quaker, non-denominational, agnostic and atheist backgrounds.
We embrace the witness of scripture and tradition, but seek dialogue with our surrounding community through “Theology on Deck.” Our roots live deep within the soil of the past, but our branches stretch out to give safe haven to those to who have been rejected or wounded by the church.
When I moved to Chapel Hill in 2004, I was in recovery from divorce and five tumultuous years of parish ministry that took me to the brink of atheism. When I first came to ECOTA, I had difficulty calling myself a Christian. Here, I met my wife, and developed friendships that restored and nurtured my faith.
Like Gillian Sible and the Zorastian kings, I met Jesus here, in all of you, and found a new way home.
There are many in Chapel Hill who desire to integrate where they’ve been with where they are going. We are a community who offers this opportunity. We are a highway that runs out of the “Old South” into the new. As we discern the future of our community, foremost in our mind should be the journey of those who may hear of us, the experience of those who think church is the last thing that they need, and the yearning of those whose background may reveal Jesus to us in ways that we cannot yet anticipate. Amen
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