A Painful Sermon About Syria and Iraq

            This morning [here at Lawrence Park Community Church], you might expect me to say we should approach the current Syrian refugee crisis with generosity. But of course you have. I’m amazed at how much you have contributed to the United Church’s refugee relief fund this year—over 23,000 dollars last month alone. I don’t really need to dwell on that this morning.

            Or, perhaps you expect me to say that we should do all we can to treat the 25,000 refugees coming to Canada from Syria as if they were our brothers and sisters. The Bible tells us so: “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt." But no, I won't dwell on that this morning, though it is true. 

            In light of our New Testament reading from Matthew, you might expect me to say we should grant safe refuge to people that show up at our doorsteps just as the Egyptians showed Mary, Joseph and Jesus. But I won’t.

            What I really want to say is something that has been bothering me for a long time, something that leaves a pit in my stomach.

            What I want to say is this. We—that is our governments in the West, usually with the support of citizens like us—have done as much as anyone else in the world over the past 100 years (and much longer) to create today’s Syrian and world-wide refugee problems.

            To say so is not really controversial if you’re an academic, a historian, a journalist, or a well-informed citizen. But saying so is also very unpleasant, so we don’t hear this too often. But the facts (minus Jewish persecution, Ottoman Empires, crusades, Napoleonic adventures and British responses)—the facts go something like this:

            During World War 1, Western governments split the Middle East into three different spheres of influence—Russian, French, and British—without regard to tribal or religious realities on the ground, laying the groundwork for the irrational borders—including no Kurdish state—that still plague us today. ISIS lists this, for example, as one of the issues it is going to fix with its murder and mayhem.

            Before World War II, the West, and especially Britain, supported the rise of the Saudi monarchy. We have supported it through thick and thin since, especially since the discovery of oil there. But, in the words of the New York Times last week, "Born in massacre and blood, [Saudi Arabia] manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws." The article goes on to point out what everyone knows to be true, namely that, "Saudi Arabia has been the chief sponsor of radical Islamist ideology," and thus, "the birth-place of younger generations of jihadists." As I speak these words, Canada is sending Saudi Arabia billions in new armaments while fifty Saudi's await beheading, mostly for what we would consider minor acts of political defiance.

            In 1953, we—well at least Britain and the USA—overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran to install the Shah’s dictatorial regime, mostly because the democratic government wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil industry. The Shah, of course, was a dictatorial and repressive disaster, and that set the stage for Khomenei’s rebellion twenty-five years later. And we all know how that turned out.

            We have supported with aid—mostly military, Egypt’s last two repressive regimes, those of Mubarak and Sissi. We in the West are largely responsible for the rule of repressive dictators like Saddam Hussein and half a dozen other dictators in countries like Morocco, Syria, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Sudan, Tunisia—all in the interest, it was argued, of peace and stability and profits for us, never mind what it meant for the citizens of those countries.

            When the world rightfully helped Israel establish a State after World War 2, we did so without regard to the Palestinians the new State displaced, creating refugee camps in neighbouring countries that have sparked generations of hopelessness, anger and extremism. There are now five million Palestinians living in camps—and if you think the people living in those camps are going to be a force for peace given their lifelong experience of poverty, hopelessness, and political oppression, you might be wrong. In the meantime, we—including Canada--have mostly winked, and winked, and winked at Israel’s subsequent harsh treatment of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and their annexation of more and more of Palestinian territory.

            Many ISIS soldiers and commanders are former Saddam Hussein soldiers, all of them helpfully fired and left footloose and fancy free by the USA and its allies after the Iraq war. Western military action: bombing, missile strikes, drone attacks—have created scores of casualties and nearly unlimited animosity against the West. You get the picture. It’s as the prophet Hosea said of ancient Israel’s disastrous military adventures:  “you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind.”

            And here is the kicker. I don’t have any idea what we can do about it. Do you? I remember, as a child, taking apart a clunky child’s watch I received as a birthday gift. I removed  the back to see how it worked. I took out a little wheel to see how it fit. A spring fell out after it. I tried to put it back in but a little cog fell out. Within minutes all the watch’s workings lay on the table, and I could not put it together again. That’s our Middle East. We’ve tinkered with it and tried to fix it, we’ve hammered away at it and picked away at it and now there is no way we can put it back together again. Humpty Dumpty has had a great fall. And all the king’s drones and all the king’s bombs and all the king’s refugee visas cannot put Humpty together again.

            This tears me apart. There is no obvious, good, expert, wise way to fix this. Repentance might be a good place to start, but most political commentators have different ideas.

            Shall we keep on with the bombs and Special Forces on the ground? Or do we dare leave the spoils to ISIS? Stop meddling and let the Middle East find its own equilibrium without our forcing an answer on them they don’t want? Maybe training Kurdish militias help? Economic aid? Sanctions? A warm welcome for all the displaced among all the countries that have contributed to this mess?

            I don’t know. We do not know. There are no obvious answers. But this morning I will not be like the prophets Amos railed against, the prophets who said, “Peace, peace!” when there was no peace and no justice in all the land of Israel or Iraq or Syria or Libya or Sudan or Palestine or Lebanon or Yemen or wherever. I will not use our doing the right thing when it comes to refugees, here in Canada, as an excuse to ignore our complicity in creating this wave of refugees; I will not use my habit of wrapping up a sermon nice and neat and happy as an excuse for ignoring the fact that none of us has an inkling about what to do.

            What I can say is this. Once upon a time, as the story goes, a little baby fled to Egypt, and later back in Palestine grew up to be a prince of peace. It wasn’t easy. It eventually cost him his life. And now, no matter where everyone else in the world is headed off to, we, here, have decided to follow him. And the hard truth is that when it comes to the Middle East, peace in our time might cost us almost as much as it cost Jesus in his.

            Even though, for now, we don’t know what to do.

John Caputo's "Theology of Perhaps."

         I am reading a very difficult but wonderful book.

         The book is John D. Caputo’s The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps.

         The book is difficult because after finishing each paragraph, I have to read it over again. It takes a long time to get through a chapter, and time always feels like the one thing I don’t have enough of.

         The book is difficult—painfully so, sometimes—because it is about me for about 80% of my life, and I don’t like what I see there. I grew up with what Caputo calls the “militant logic of omnipotence, the imperial logic of onto-logic and theo-logic.” And so, from Caputo’s perspective, throughout my career I’ve written and spoken, “the theology of an agent-God, [that] requires ventriloquists, people, up to now invariably men, who authorize themselves to speak in the name of God.”

         Caputo is right. I used to be so sure, so quick to tell others, so on guard for the benchmarks of orthodoxy, so free and easy with my “Christian” perspective on everything from politics to education, so eager to write editorials in the imperative. It’s what church leaders do.

         Many events in my life eventually conspired to rock my certainty. I’ve written about some of them before: travel to places like Hiroshima, Rwanda after the genocide, and Haiti; and relationships with people from other races, ethnicities, and classes all telling the same stories about white privilege, structural racism, and the power of wealth for the few. I started reading widely outside of the pool of approved Christian scholars I was schooled in. Teaching the Heidelberg Catechism kept me asking myself, “really? How can anyone be so sure?”

         Caputo’s book is difficult. It isn’t that the vocabulary he uses is unfamiliar. I understand the common sense meaning of Caputo’s favourite words, words like, “insistence,” or “perhaps,” or “existence,” or “event,” or even “prayer.” It is just that how Caputo uses these words stretches the contexts I’m used to, or sometimes turns them upside down. Reading Caputo is like the experience I had this summer, as a speaker of basic Dutch, trying to understand the Afrikaans speakers of South Africa. I think I get it, I think I get it, but then I don’t.

         Caputo is also hard because he’s a prose poet, using literary tools like rhythm and assonance and repetition to make his words sing. Along the way, though, his words become more evocative than definitive (if definitive writing was ever really possible). 

         Ultimately, Caputo writes in a different paradigm while still using theological and philosophical language that’s half-familiar. It’s disorienting. Thomas Kuhn famously said (something like) communication across different paradigms is incommensurate—that is, that people working and living in two different scientific paradigms couldn’t understand each other. When I read Caputo I do so with ears and mind trained in one paradigm straining to understand with a heart that has landed in another. It takes patience.

         But reading Caputo is both difficult and wonderful. Wonderful because he says things that suddenly break through my fog and move me: “What we call in Christian Latin ‘religion’ may be thought of as offering hospitality to God . . . and then keeping our fingers crossed.” Or this quote that made we smile and ache both: “No one who reads the New Testament slowly would ever come up with a theory that associates God with ‘natural law,’ not when irregularity, interruption, and lawless miracle are the very occasion of the appearance of God.” Every page of Caputo is full of these opportunities to stop reading and meditate instead.

         His book is also wonderful—for me—because it is heuristic. His writing inspires new ideas for preaching, and for thinking about old problems—like the problem of evil, or the problem of using Greek philosophical categories to talk about God in the creeds. His book also inspires all sorts of flights of fancy that may or may not go anywhere. He reflects, for example, on how the church fathers—always suspicious of the flesh—wondered of what use teeth or sexual organs or digestive systems could be in heaven when surely we would not need such things anymore. That got me to thinking about Jesus’ saying that in heaven we will be like the angels who do not marry. Is there an alternative interpretation of these words that doesn’t cater to the church’s historic suspicion of the flesh? God, after all, actually created that flesh, according to the Genesis myth. Could it be that in heaven we're all friends with benefits with everyone? That we could love others with perfect agapic selflessness, erotic pleasure, in a companionable manner? In such a heaven, marriage might be an outmoded and unnecessary institution!  We could enjoy the heavenly banquet and then romp. Sure, these are silly theological meanderings—especially if you’re no longer sure about heaven—but these meanderings also suggest that theology can sometimes be a playground rather than a battlefield.

         Caputo has a serious program that constantly breaks out into laughter. He challenges me with refreshing ideas like the notion that God needs me (rather than just me needing God), or that using the language of substance and essence (rather than insistence) to speak of God is fundamentally wrongheaded. I’m searching for something in all this to build on, a bit worried that Caputo might be better at deconstruction than construction. In fact, he is. But once he’s done, there is something new there that whispers to me. If only I knew what it was.

         Caputo is a very difficult, but wonderful writer!

The Gospel According to the Blue Jays

(So I wrote this sermon for fun, during the Blue Jays American League Pennant series with Kansas. I got the idea from John Van Sloten, who did the same in Calgary--thanks. Naturally, I wore a Blue Jays uniform to church that day. Several people requested that I post it. So here it is!)

I wrote this sermon on Thursday (October 22), as I almost always do. However, since the theme of the sermon was, “The Gospel According to the Blue Jays,” I was at a bit of a loss as to how to proceed.

That Thursday, after all, the Blue Jays were merely behind in the series with Kansas, three games to two. I didn’t know—as I do now—whether they would win the last two games in Kansas City or lose one of them. I didn’t know, as I sat down to write, whether I would be writing about a World Series-bound team, or merely a runner-up for the American League pennant. (Of course, I know now.)

            As I was thinking about my conundrum, I came across a Facebook post that was all about Blue Jay faith. Listen:

             

I have seen a man come back from season ending injury to dominate in September. (Stroman)

I have seen a bringer of rain end a 22-year old playoff drought. (Anthopolous)

I have seen a .500 team fight back and win a championship. (The Jays)

I have seen two 11-game win streaks. (Jays again)

I have seen a 20-year-old rookie shut down some of the best. (Osuna)

I have seen two of baseball’s greatest talents pull on my jersey. (Price and Tulo)

I have seen the 7^th inning of game 5. (Bautista, mostly)

I have seen the bat flip that electrified a country. (Bautista, totally—let’s take a look at that, in fact)

I have see a team come back from a 3-1 deficit. Kansas City did it to us 30 years ago. A little payback is in order.

I have seen an incredible team play an exciting season and I am grateful to have experienced the 2015 Blue Jays.

And it’s not done yet!

Believe!

            So, as I sat there at my desk, on Thursday, I tried to believe. Bautista will come through again! Tulu shall keep hitting! I thought maybe I could make such belief the point of this sermon. Faith should be strong even when times are tough, you know? Believe enough in the Jays and that will make it so. The trouble was, I didn’t believe, whole-heartedly, at least. What if the Blue Jays didn’t win? What if I came to the pulpit with a sermon that insisted, “believe,” but that faith turned out to be totally misplaced? Does God award the pennant to whichever team has the most believing fans? Probably not.

            So as I sat at my desk I was a bit sad that I hadn’t chosen to write a sermon entitled, “The Gospel according to the Liberal Party of Canada.” By last Thursday I knew how that one turned out. I wouldn’t have needed any faith for a sermon on that theme.

            Anyway, this back and forth got me to thinking about being a sports fan—or, at least, what it is like for me.

            The truth is, I’m a bit of a fair-weather fan. Not because I don’t love baseball all the time, but because I can’t stand dramatic tension. Not in movies, not on TV, and certainly not in sports.

            So, for example, if there is a TV-show or movie where the guy is getting up the courage to kiss the girl, I have to leave the room. I can’t stand the tension of “maybe-yes,” and “maybe-no.” Or, if there is some dramatic irony that suggests the hero is going to do something stupid, like make his girl-friend mad, or miss meeting her for dinner—well then, I leave the room. I can’t stand the tension.

            Baseball is full of this sort of tension. I love watching a home run. I love watching the bust-out inning. I love a Tulowitzki-Goins-Smoak double-play. But I can’t stand to watch a game where Toronto is one run up and Osuna is pitching in the ninth. I turn it off. Too much tension.

            So when it comes to the Jays, I’m always on the knife-edge. I can’t stand it when they’re failing, or threaten to implode, so much so that I turn my back and try to ignore them.

            And living with this uncertainty, this ambiguity, this two-sidedness is really what faith is all about.

            Do you remember that Facebook post I read at the beginning of this sermon? It finished with one word, “believe.” It was almost as if the post was saying, “if you have enough faith, good things are going to happen. Just believe harder and the Jays will go all the way.” But that is exactly what faith isn’t. It isn’t a tool for getting what we want.

            Real belief, real faith recognizes that there are some things we cannot know with certainty. Faith recognizes that there are some umpires who will make lousy calls, that there are some days the bats will go cold, there are some days that pitching arms turn to rubber—and we can’t change that. Faith recognizes that life is lived on a knife-edge, where both good and bad things happen to people who may or may not deserve it.

            So faith—even large amounts of it—can’t make the Blue Jays winner, or Kansas City losers. But then, what’s the gospel according to the Blue Jays if it isn’t “have more faith if you want to win?”

            Well, I think I’d put it this way. Baseball is a spectator sport, mostly. There are only 25 guys—they are all guys—on the Blue Jays playoff roster, but 49,000 fans in the stadium, and millions more in TV and Internet Land. It’s a spectator sport.

            And, we can actually learn good things from watching this sport. We learn about teamwork, as in a double play; about sacrifice, as in a sacrifice bunt or fly. We learn from watching baseball, about leadership, about taking hiring risks, and about what it takes to succeed at something we love.

            And while we watch, we have fun. We cheer and laugh and groan and do the wave and jump in our seats and shout while, hopefully, not throwing beer cans on the field.  But it’s a spectator sport. And there is nothing wrong with that.

            On the other hand, life itself, a life of faith, is not a spectator sport. It is, rather, a long race, one for which the Apostle Paul says we need to train to succeed. He uses very strong language to describe the race of life: “So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disquailified.” Life is a race, full of any race’s uncertainties, something we train for, that we spend ourselves on, that we work hard at in order to win. Baseball is entertainment, but life is not a spectator sport.

            So what is it that we’re really training for? Well the Bible—and every religion, really—is absolutely clear on this. The game we play is love. The purpose of our lives is to love neighbours, fellow Jays fans, even Kansas city fans—but more to the point—the least, the last, the most needful in our society: our children and parents, our first nations and immigrants, our nannies and environment. Life is not a spectator sport—it consists of loving others whenever we can, whatever our job is. That’s real faith, lived on the knife-edge. We don’t know whether or not what we do for others will make them winners or not, but we do it because Jesus said this is what we do when we really live, rather than watch from the sielines.

            So the gospel according to this blue Jays fan, is this: believe, as the Jays poster says—but don’t believe by sitting in a recliner in order to be entertained. Believe to do, do the right thing, by way of your neighbours.  

            And don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying so to take the fun out of life. You see, the secret of the gospel according to this blue Jays fan, is that if you live like Christ and for your neighbor—well, it’s an adventure. It’s a blast. There’s no life like it! Even given the uncertainty.

            I wrote this sermon on Thursday night. I didn’t know how the Jays series would turn out. But in a way, that’s how it is with life. We’re all in the middle of the series, and we don’t know how it is going to turn out, humanly speaking. But unlike fans of the Jays, who can really make very little difference in the outcome of the Kansas City Toronto plays by believing, we can all make a huge difference for how our lives—and the lives of our neighbours—turn out. Because when it comes to Biblical faith, we’re not spectators, we’re in the game, however it turns out. We’re lovers.

A Preacher Explains Who Not to Vote For in (Every) Election

            I’m going to tell my readers something you probably didn’t know about me. Forty years ago, in 1975, while taking a year off college, I got on my bike and rode it over to city hall, where I took out nomination papers to run as an independent candidate in that year’s provincial election. I was just nineteen and I was upset. You see none of the parties were willing to support choice in education. I thought I’d run on that one issue, because at that time I believed that Ontario should support private parochial schools, as in British Columbia and Alberta, and as John Tory would in his ill-fated run for Ontario’s premiership a few years ago.

            In any case, back in 1975, I never filled those nomination papers out. I was too busy earning money for college and playing baseball with my friends to get the 100 or so signatures I needed. But since I was a resident of Premier Bill Davis’s riding, in Brampton, Ontario, the press kept an eye on such things. So, the day after I took the nomination papers home, local papers reported it. Next, my phone started ringing—mostly friends, former teachers, and members of my church. I found I liked the attention. I didn’t have a campaign staff, didn’t have money, and didn’t have a prayer running against Bill Davis. But, a bit narcissistically, I basked in the limelight anyway.

The Prime Ministerial Candidates.

            That wasn’t the end of my political dabbling. In 2003, when I was a magazine editor in West Michigan, I wrote an article musing about a possible run for the United States Congress. I was pretty well known in my district because of the magazine. I could have been a credible candidate for the Democratic Party. A couple of people emailed me to say it would be a great idea. Again, I liked that. But the party establishment didn’t bite, and it is just as well, because Republicans had been elected out of that congressional district for about 100 years anyway.

            Now, looking back on those two times I dipped my toe in political waters, with the perspective of many years and hopefully, by now, a little wisdom, I can admit that one of the things that motivated me to even think about running for office—at least a little—was the glare of publicity. I enjoyed my fifteen minutes—or less—of being the centre of attention.

            Now, I can’t speak for politicians in general. Perhaps it isn’t ambition, or ego, or fame that motivates most politicians. Perhaps the politicians we love best are motivated by ideals, by a deep and abiding concern for the common good, and by a desire to serve rather than be served. Some undoubtedly are.

            But what I really hope--and this is the main point I want to make--is that the same holds true for us, the voters. Do we decide our vote on the basis of “me, myself, and I?” Do we vote on the basis of our needs, our wants, and our ambitions—or do we choose to vote on some other, more idealistic basis?

            I find it interesting that almost all the media attention, almost all party promises, almost all campaign ads are about what I will get out of this election—more security, maybe; a job, or day care, or cheaper tuition, or a faster commute, or income splitting, or whatever.

            This trend of focussing campaigns on the voters’ narrowest interests really came into focus during the 1980 Presidential campaign that pitted Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter. Ronald Reagan famously asked the electorate, “are you better off now than four years ago?” But it is much the same here. In fact, this past August the Toronto Star asked voters that exact question in a front-page poll.

            People seem to take it for granted that most politicians run for selfish reasons, and that most people vote for selfish reasons. But ultimately, I think a politics rooted in “me, myself, and I” first is going to leave a lot of important issues in the dust--especially for people who want to mirror Jesus' priorities.

            There is a recent trilogy of books and movies that are actually a parable about the “me first,” and “am I better off than four years ago,” style of politics. It’s called The Hunger Games. The movies starred everyone’s favourite Oscar stumbler, Jennifer Lawrence.

            The novels are not high literature, and the movies, though fun, are not classics. Both made a lot of money. The author, Suzanne Collins, pictures a North American country called Panem divided into twelve zones. One zone, the Capital, is home to a society much like ours. It is rich. Its citizens luxuriate in the latest trends, and especially coming up with new and bizarre fashions. The population of the capital is preoccupied with violent stadium games—Ultimate Fighting to the death. And they love gorging on the best food, parties, beautiful homes, and 7-24 entertainment.

            In contrast to Capital, the rest of the districts in Panem exist to support the Capital’s health and wealth. The districts mine minerals and manufacture, grow crops and provide human fodder for capital. And they are sinkholes of poverty. Until, finally, Jennifer Lawrence’s character, Katniss, leads—not always willingly—the districts in an open revolt against the capital.

            The books and movies are an allegory.  Hunger Games is about how the few with power on earth tend to live for themselves, and how the many pay the price.

           

The Hunger Games says that when inequality and lack of fairness gets out of hand, whether within or between countries; when the accident of birth matters more than character or heart or hard work; when my games, pastimes, and entertainment mean more than the welfare of all—in such situations, there will eventually be hell to pay.

            In Psalm 85 the Psalmist—who is a refugee, in Babylon, because the Babylonians have destroyed Israel and sent its people to live in other parts of the empire—the Psalmist is dreaming of a new and better Israel. In his vision, he says that a perfect Israel—a perfect nation—would be a place where “Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet, where righteousness and peace will kiss each other”  (v. 10). An more colloquial  translation might put it that the best society is one where “justice and shalom embrace.”

            What would that look like? Well, in scripture, justice is always measured by how the alien—the foreigner, the refugee—how the alien within our gates or city is treated; by how the orphan and the widow—traditionally the poorest people in Israel—were cared for. And shalom was not only international peace, but a national culture where all debts were supposed to be forgiven every fifty years; where prosperity was not limited to a few; where the rich were required to leave enough in the fields after harvest to feed the poor.  In ancient Israel, justice and shalom embracing was a world where no one had to look out over his or her shoulder in fear, because everyone else was looking over their shoulder, for your best interests.

            Of course, as a parable, The Hunger Games is full of exaggeration to make its point. And unlike the world of Panem, we are also a democracy. And what it is going to take for us to steer clear of environmental apocalypse, even more minorities in jail than there are now, reconciliation between First Nations and the rest of us, between racial minorities and the rest of us; what it is going to take to avoid more terrorism and more military missions; what it is going to take beat climate change and beat poverty and homelessness . . . what it is going to take is citizens like us voting for the embrace of justice and shalom rather than just voting for the party that we think will leave us, personally, better off in four or five years.

            Look, I won’t want to tell anyone how to vote. God knows, all the parties think that it’s your pocket book that is most important to you. But we collectively have an ancient vision rooted in Psalm 85. When you vote, do so in the best interests of the neighbour that we are called by Jesus to love, rather than merely for your private interests. Don't Vote for yourself, but for your neighbor. It’s a radical idea at the root of almost every political ideology out there, from Marxism to Conservatism—and yet it is the one idea we hear far too little about in this election campaign. 

What Do We Make of Vestments?

            This post is about liturgical vestments. Here’s the background. Last week I “covenanted” with my congregation, Lawrence Park Community Church, to be their pastor. I’ve actually been doing that work for three years now, but it took that long to formalize my transfer from the Christian Reformed Church to the United Church of Canada.

            At the covenanting service, the Presbytery representatives—a Presbytery is a group of local churches—wore liturgical vestments—albs and stoles, both red and white.

            I didn’t. I wore a suit.

            It isn’t that I don’t have vestments. More precisely—I have an academic gown. It is forest green, the colour of my school, Wayne State University. It has three chevrons—stripes—on the sleeve signifying the fact that I have an earned doctorate. The stole is gold and grey, the colours of the Speech Communication department I graduated from.

            In the Presbyterian tradition, in particular, preachers used to wear their academic gowns in the pulpit. The practice spread to preachers who were not academics per se. These academic “Genevan” gowns were usually black. They represented a rejection of the Roman Catholic (and Eastern Orthodox) practice of wearing a variety of liturgical vestments.

            However, growing up I don’t recall ever seeing a minister wear liturgical gowns, Genevan or otherwise. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. That changed when, in seminary, I started attending Church of the Servant CRC in Grand Rapids. I was soon asked to do the children’s sermon each week. One Advent, the worship committee decided I should wear a simple alb with four very attractive, hand made stoles, each embroidered with a symbol that was to be that week’s children’s sermon subject. The kids—as I recall—loved the stoles, and I had one of those stoles for many years after, even though I never used it again, in worship. I outgrew the alb—laterally, that is—and never wore it after seminary.  

            But there were those Presbyterian representatives at my covenanting service, in red and white albs and stoles. What do I make of liturgical vestments now?

            We know, from the Old Testament, that the ancient Israelites wore very elaborate liturgical vestments. The New Testament, on the other hand, doesn’t mention liturgical vestments at all.

            The New Testament does mention the clothing of a few key figures, a few times. In Matthew 11, for example, Jesus says that John the Baptist, his cousin the wild-eyed prophet, did not wear soft robes like those who lived in royal palaces. Instead, we know from elsewhere that John the Baptist wore clothing made of camel’s hair, which is coarse, and was mostly used in his day as tent cloth. John the Baptist’s clothing was only a little less weird, even then, than the fact that he survived on a diet of locusts and wild honey.

            Ironically, Jesus did wear reasonably soft robes even though he didn’t live in a palace either. His robe was probably made of linen, and we learn in the Gospel of John that it didn’t have any seams. Even if not Herod quality, Jesus' robe would have been expensive and valuable, perhaps on par with a Brooks Brothers business suit now. At his crucifixion the Roman guards were so impressed by it that they decided to gamble each other for the right to own it, rather than cut it up to share.

            In the early church the first apostles, deacons and bishops did not wear vestments. The church was often persecuted, after all, so no one—even those in leadership positions—went out of his or her way to advertise who they were.

            However, at about the time that the Emperor Constantine made Christianity an official religion of the Roman Empire, early in the fourth century, things changed. Now it was quite an honour to be a priest or a bishop. And in short order church officials started wearing clothing—both in and out of church—that advertised their work and rank. But rather than wear vestments like those described in the Old Testament, these early Christian leaders especially modelled their vestments on the secular uniforms of the day. In particular, clergy adopted the fashions—special scarves or stoles, robes, hats and colors of the Roman civil service, army, and judiciary.

            However, as Roman secular fashion changed and evolved, clergy fashion lagged far behind. In fact, the basic alb, chasuble and stole worn by clergy today still harp back to the days of ancient Rome, while the rest of Italian fashion has changed quite a bit!

            Now, before anyone gets the wrong idea, I don’t intend, here, to argue that clergy should or should not wear vestments. For me it’s a personal decision.

            What interests me about the history of vestments is that clergy started wearing them—in imitation of the secular counterparts—in part to advertise their calling, their status, and soon, their wealth. The clergy adopted the clothing of the status quo to make the point that they had arrived. Choosing to wear vestments was, originally, a political act, an act that underlined that the church was now a power to contend with, and that its leaders were people of high status. They were members of one of the three medieval estates—the one that negotiated the relation between heaven and earth. Like the pope in Washington this week, clergy were not to be taken lightly.

            I wonder if that turn, that fundamental change in orientation among clergy was all good. It hardly seems coincidental that once the church no longer was itself persecuted, it soon started persecuting Christians who did not agree with Emperor Constantine and his allies. As soon as the church was legalized by the Roman Empire, Christians decided that pacifism—their historic practice—wasn’t going to work anymore, and so Christians were no longer excommunicated when they joined Rome’s legions. In short, when Constantine legalized the church, the church turned from being a counter cultural, alternative for living the good life into an absolutely status quo institution, one that was used by the Emperor, when convenient, to quash dissent, extend Roman power, and win the hearts of the people for Roman political ends. And the adoption, by clergy, of liturgical vestments whose design mirrored the clothing of ranking Romans was perhaps the most visible sign of these changes.

            Today, at least in the West, unless you are a ranking Catholic prelate, vestments are usually worn only in church. The status that Christianity had as one of Constantine’s levers of power has long dissipated. The pope may draw large crowds in America, but you can be sure that even among the Catholics most practice birth control anyway and can’t understand why women are excluded from ordination. Judging by all the many times the pope has pleaded and prayed for peace and economic fairness and the environment, he isn’t that influential in the secular realm either.

            So it is hard to imagine that wearing vestments in church or on the street—as with a clerical collar, perhaps—is much of a status thing. No, whatever positive value vestments have in the present has to be connected to the way in which they communicate the gospel today.

            I think back to when I was in seminary. Those stoles I wore for just a few weeks during Advent made them a talking point. After church, some of the kids would track me down for a closer look. Parents wanted to see and finger the stoles too. They were really cool. They connected with that day's worship. The arts are one of the best ways to bring fresh attention to the core message of the gospel.

            On the other hand, liturgical vestments that seem to put clergy in a different class, that suggest clergy have some sort of mystic authority—liturgical vestments that are a mish mash of impenetrable symbols and special colours that are rarely, if ever used to communicate the gospel in a fresh and interesting way—such use of liturgical garments seems off-putting to me. It allies the employees of the church as institution with our current cultural suspicion of all institutions. That probably isn’t a good thing. The early church’s use of secular dress before the Constantinian revolution seems wiser to me, and more in keeping with the historic Protestant emphasis on the priesthood of all believers.

            They say the clothes make the man—or woman. I don’t think that’s true in the case of clergy. It is, rather, a caring heart and behavior, as well as the ability to share the Christian story with a modicum of grace and conviction that make the pastor.