Getting Clear

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Over the past several Sundays we have collected your responses to our survey about how to clarify our call to engage within the three causes named below. We collected a total of 44 responses. At our next two forums we'll continue to explore these suggestions.

1. hunger
2. education
3. climate change

Under hunger there were several mentions of participating and increasing food access and distribution, childhood hunger - both during and outside of the school year, continuing SUPPER, and gardening. Where will these and other responses guide our hunger focus?

Under education people spoke of advocating for equitable and fair funding, literacy, and acknowledging racial disparities. How should we narrow our education focus?

Under climate change people named a variety of actions from the individual to the corporate, and from advocacy to education. Several just wanted to know where to begin with awareness and education. With so many options, what can we do well and faithfully together in our climate change focus?

For new focuses people named immigration and refugee services, voting rights, racial justice, the opioid crisis, and prison reform, among others. Which of these calls on our hearts is great enough to address as a community?

This Sunday, at parish forum, we begin to refine your suggestions. We'll continue the discussion at the March 31st parish forum, specifically looking at the role of advocacy and social justice in our work. We have active, fun, and creative programs designed for both days. 

These two forums will help us create a path into our future. This is your chance to be a part of that discussion, to feel and name the call of God on this parish. Please join us.

Blessings,
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Rector

Links:
Progress Report: 5 Years of Community Engagement

Clarify Our Community Engagement Causes!

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Five years ago, the congregation engaged a process called “Nominate Your Causes” to discover what our community engagement priorities should be at St. Martin’s. Through a process of polling the congregation and conversations at Parish Forum, we landed squarely on three top priorities which would direct our community engagement efforts:

1. hunger
2. education
3. climate change

Read more about our progress on each of these causes in our Progress Report: 5 Years of Community Engagement. 

For the next four Sundays, the Community Engagement Committee is asking you to help us Clarify our Causes. The committee is committed to grounding our work in priorities set by the parish community.
 
What specific areas under these broad umbrella priorities would you like us to address with programming, organizing, action, and funding? For example under climate change, you could specify “gas mileage standards,” or “eliminate fracking” or “alternative energy sources.”


On Sunday, March 3 and Sunday, March 10 we will distribute a quick survey in the worship bulletin for you to use to make your suggestions. This survey is also available online. We will collect your suggestions and bring them back to the parish for further discussion and refinement at the March 24 Parish Forum. The March 31st Parish Forum will continue our parish discussion about the role of advocacy and social justice in our work. We have active, fun, and creative programs designed for both days.


Please join us and be a part of visioning the future of community engagement at St. Martin’s.


Blessings,
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Rector



Links:
Progress Report: 5 Years of Community Engagement
Clarify our Causes survey

Associate Rector's Note: Sustained Advocacy Training

On Saturday October 13^th, we are sponsoring a Sustained Advocacy Training day here at St. Martin’s. Spearheaded by the Climate Action Team in partnership with Pennsylvania Interfaith Power & Light, this is an opportunity to learn how to become active in advocating for social justice issues. While this session is dedicated to climate change, the tips and teachings can be utilized for any issue that you feel strongly about but aren’t sure how to become involved in making a difference.

When we care about something deeply but feel unable to act, we can become despondent or depressed. Many people find that even small actions help them engage with the world in a more positive manner because they are acting rather than sitting by silently (or not so silently).

The last few weeks, our lectionary reading cycle has taken us on a journey through the book of James. As I reread the book, this verse stood out to me, “You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works,” (2:22). James is referencing the story of Abraham obeying God’s command to take his son Isaac up the mountain and sacrifice him.

What is the relationship between faith and works that James is referencing? The apostle Paul also addressed faith and works, but he did so in the context of obeying Jewish law. James is focusing on everyday interactions rather than the legal requirements of religious tradition.

If we go back to the verse above, I begin to wonder, does this mean that faith can only be complete when works happen? The integration of our faith with our actions is an essential step in our journey of faith. In the education world we would call this praxis. No matter how much time we spend talking, writing, thinking, about our faith, praxis is the key to truly learning. There is a Chinese proverb that I used to reference when I was working the in the experiential education field: “I hear, and I forget/I see, and I remember/I do, and I understand.” Maybe James would modify it to be, “I hear and I forget, I see, and I remember, I do and my faith is complete.”

The question I ask is: what does it take for us to act on our faith? What is the catalyst? For each and every one of us, it will be different. Perhaps it is day-to-day interactions that are the focal point, or perhaps there is a Chinook wind that sweeps in one day, pushing us forward into a new way of being. Regardless of what the catalyst may be James is teaching us that we must be intentional about living out our faith through our actions.

God calls us to create God’s kingdom here on this earth, in the here and the now. In what way do you see yourself advocating for this kingdom? Perhaps it is climate change or refugee resettlement or food access or education. 

This advocacy training is a wonderful opportunity to learn the tools to put your faith in action. I’ll be there on October 13^th. Join me!

Blessings,
The Rev. Anne Thatcher

Is Christianity Intellectually Respectable?

The following essay is the Rector indulging in a favorite topic. I fully acknowledge this may be entirely beside the point for many people. I write it knowing that our members are sometimes challenged by critical and skeptical remarks about their faith and would like to have more resources to answer.

During my three years of seminary, my nagging question was, “Is Christianity Intellectually Respectable?” Growing up, I learned that the highest calling was to be a ruthlessly skeptical intellectual who delights in tearing down the pretensions and falsehoods of tradition. Then, I had a conversion experience and returned to my Christian Faith during college. How would intellect and faith hang together in one soul? Seminary - an academic gathering of people of Faith - seemed like a good place to figure this out. 

The easiest answer to my question was to simply say that faith is a private feeling that is to be respected but not held to account by reason or other systems of understanding the world. This might be called the “live and let live” approach. Faith – however – is not only private. It is public. It relies on language, narrative, tradition, and practices that take up space in the world, make claims on behavior and can be shared between people. If it were purely private it would be impossible to communicate the Faith one person to another. 

Much has been written about the origins of the “live and let live” approach in Western Culture. In part, it comes from the fear that religious claims tend to be held as absolute and therefore lead inevitably to conflict and violence unless they are made private and relative. While based on the experience of religious warfare in Europe during the 17^th Century, this point of view strategically ignores the spiritual resources that support sobriety, humility, and non-violence within the Christian Faith.

 

The second answer to my question is embedded in the example above; i.e. ignore the full texture of the Faith and reduce it to a simple punch line, such as “Religion leads to violence.” I will call this the “reductionist approach” where we either dismiss Christianity in a brutal summation or make Christianity intellectually respectable by reducing it to another discipline of thought, which has wide appeal and public credibility. For example: “Faith is best explained by psychology.” Freud reduced thousands of years of religious development to the oceanic feeling we vaguely recall from our mother’s womb. Or we could use Marx; “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”

The problems with reductionism are many. At its best reductions are suggestive. Basically we are taking one disputed discipline and applying it to another disputed discipline as if one is totally sensible and the other is not. “All religions are the same” is another classic reduction. Once again, all the particularities of a tradition are brushed away as if they are disposable and the truth is somehow a separable reality underneath or outside the particulars. It is akin to saying that we can think without language, when, of course, we cannot. Language and thought are completely intertwined, as is the religious experience of God and the particular tradition in which you live your faith. It is also interesting to ask this: “When we make the judgment ‘All religions are the same,’ where am I standing?” From where do we gain that perspective that judges all religions? It is a little like climbing one mountain and saying, “All mountains are the same.”

What is fun for me, as an intellectual Christian, is to poke holes in these odd habits of thought which take delight in passing judgment on my beliefs without applying the same scrutiny to their own assumptions. Often, critics of Faith are poorly equipped to explain their own positions or how their perspective is also formed by a tradition as much as by some logical argument. The ‘new atheists’ often fall into this category. They parrot arguments that have existed since David Hume in the 17^th century as if they were freshly invented and never disputed.

 

Another great reduction that I hear frequently is “Science explains everything.” The notion seems to be that science has a privileged access to reality and that all forms of thought – poetry, literature, politics, and religion – can be described exhaustively by math, genetics, and physics. While I am huge fan of science and its results, this is a problematic overstatement for both scientific and philosophical reasons. (And I rarely hear actual scientists say it!) Put most simply, if genetics explains everything then chemistry must explain genetics and then we should give up on chemistry too because chemicals are made of atoms and physics explains that. So science itself has its own reduction ad absurdum problems!

Should we explain Jane Eyre through an equation? Will translating literature or religion into chemistry, physics, or genetics really shed more light or exhaust the well of meaning and treasure held in our culture and traditions? It certainly can shed light. My dispute is with any claim to be an exhaustive or total explanation.

The problem is that folks use ‘explain’ exhaustively and without nuance. Often the results contradict the scientific discipline of connecting conclusions to data. For example, much of what Darwin wrote is wonderful and true but there are real debates about natural selection, the notion that organisms adapt to gain comparative advantage so as to pass on their genetic material. Disputes in the science don’t seem to stop other folks from turning natural selection into a schema that explains all human behavior. As is often the case, the original insight gains a second life as a metaphor and enters the culture detached from the original argument and data.

 

So where does this leave us? 

Martin Smith famously said, “Your need for intellectual respectability is so important to you because it protects some idea you have about yourself. How does that self-concept give you value? What would it mean to let go of that egoistic notion? Would it feel like dying?”

The fact seems to be that we all live in an ocean of tradition. Our concepts, language, and practices are all mediated through tradition and culture. They limit what we can know and how we can know it. This is true for science and for poetry. The philosopher Otto Neurath used the metaphor of a boat. We all live in a boat. We like to tell ourselves that our ideas and perception are original and free, somehow floating outside of history, tradition, and language, but really we are in boat that was handed down to us. We also like to think we can rip up the whole boat at once and start over. In that case, we will drown. The best we can do is learn everything we can about our boat and tinker with it one board at a time.

What I learned about my boat is this; I can only live my life inside the narrative I have received. The good news is that the narrative is full of resources, contradictions, open-ended sentences, and mysteries that make life an adventure full of growth and opportunity. The narrative can expand and communicate with other religions and other disciplines too. What I learned is that my boat is partly made from my family history. My mother reacted to her Southern Baptist upbringing by moving as far as she could into liberal, intellectual theology. That was her liberating journey, but it did not need to be mine.

So, is Christianity Intellectually Respectable? I believe it is, because I can give an intelligible account of my faith that is accountable to public curiosity and humble about its own limitations. For me, this meant sacrificing the illusion that my intellect somehow transcends tradition. Spiritually, I needed to learn how to assent to, even submit to, my place within the flow of ideas and history. From this primary spiritual act of assent and submission, I have been richly blessed.

- The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Celebrating Success, Deepening Faith

One phrase stood out for me at POWER’s celebration of the passage of Issue 1. Bishop Royster, reflecting on what we had accomplished, said “Every phone number dialed, every door knocked was a prayer for the well-being of the city.” That helped me make faith-sense of the work we have done. It felt like one wrong number after another, but it resulted in making a real change in the city.

Councilman Goode spoke at the celebration about the campaign as an expression of his faith life. His family had been sharecroppers, he told us, and since that beginning he has wanted to lift all people out of grinding poverty. In 2000, he was (and still is) the youngest council-at-large representative on city council. He has worked toward raising the minimum wage from his first months in office. The arrest of a cousin on a drug charge deepened his resolve to improve living conditions. He told us when police informed him in 2005 they were arresting his cousin, he shut himself away for two weeks until he had framed a resolution about raising the minimum wage for city workers. He returned to council and introduced the bill without consulting any other council members. When the resolution passed unanimously he interpreted it as a sign he was doing God’s will. He first aligned with Acorn to support the effort, but they fell away. He has not felt so sustained and strengthened until POWER backed his work. It has been a faith journey for him, he said, as though he were just realizing it.

POWER has become a significant part of my faith journey also. Discovering and building relationships with people from many denominations and faiths has deepened and inspired my experience of worship. I have learned to address God, at least in spoken prayer, as Holy One or Creator God. God is One and is known to all participants in POWER. Also POWER worship tends to be joyous and responsive more than formal and reserved. Plus it is strongly incarnational. We did an exercise to discover our own strength by being invited by Bishop Royster – who is a very substantial man – to join together to physically move him from his chosen position. It took probably 15 of us to move him, showing the difficulty but also the possibility to make change. Coming to know people across so many boundaries enriches my life and my faith. POWER’s mode of operation is to help all its participants strengthen their leadership abilities. POWER staff and colleagues support and encourage us to take the next step, dare the next challenge. We learn community organizing as relationship building. Jarrett points out that God, by God’s own triune nature, is relational. We are imitators of God in POWER, although I’ve never heard anyone express it that way.

I hope all who joined in the campaign to pass Issue 1 had something of this experience. The next step is to achieve a full, fair funding formula for all public schools in the state. We will be partnering with other organizations, researching what other states have done, learning about how schools function now and how they can improve. I invite anyone interested in children and education to join us after SUPPER at St. Martin's on June 25 to talk about your POWER experience in the Voter Engagement Project and to hear what is happening next.

- The Rev. Carol Duncan

Read about the May 20, 2014 Ballot Question #1

Learn more about POWER's Education Funding plan

Catching Up with POWER

On October 9th, St. Martin's hosted three “house meetings” to explain the current priorities of POWER – Philadelphians Organized to Witness, Empower, and Rebuild. All POWER congregations are holding house meetings in October, most in members’ homes. We decided to make the gatherings easier by holding them after one of our wonderful SUPPERs.

We began by showing this video created by POWER to illustrate its analysis of the state of the city. That video can be seen on St. Martin’s website in case you missed it. However, the video throws out so many statistics in a rushed voice that it is hard to catch. Here is a recap.

A prevalent myth is that Philadelphia and PA are broke, forcing us to close schools and pay poverty wages. However, tax breaks for corporations operating in PA have more than tripled, from $850,000 in 2003 to $3,200,000,000 in 2013. In 2010, 73% of corporations paid no corporate income tax. A good example is Comcast. After spending $140,789 in lobbying efforts in Philadelphia, Comcast received $30,000,000 of property tax abatements over five years, in addition to $42,750,000 in state grants and assistance. In 2011, Comcast made $55,000,000,000 in profits.

At the Philadelphia Airport, where POWER concentrated its efforts all last year, US Airways paid $166,485 in lobbying efforts while its earnings jumped to $637 million in 2012. The CEO of US Airways received a 44 percent increase in compensation to $5.5 million last year. Meanwhile, more than 20% of US Airways staff at the airport reported going hungry within the last year. 75% had difficulty paying bills. 97% received no paid sick days. A significant number rely on food stamps.

The number of Philadelphians at or below the poverty line is 40%; a doubling in the last six years. Philadelphia has the highest level of severe poverty among the nation’s ten largest cities. Poverty-wage jobs often lack basic support structures like paid sick leave, time off, and health benefits. Among workers of color, the rate of poverty is twice as high. Even in the suburbs, poverty rates have grown by 40% in the last decade. For these reasons, creating jobs with a living wage is one of POWER’s two main concerns.

POWER's other main goal is improving public education. Lawmakers, lobbied by corporations, have consistently underfunded Pennsylvania’s schools. We are one of only three states that lack a fair funding formula. An article about this was written in The Atlantic, and can be read here or on St. Martin's Facebook page.  476 of 500 school districts in Pennsylvania were underfunded in 2006 even before Governor Corbett cut $1,000,000,000 from the education budget.  While education is reduced, the prison budget has doubled over the last decade. A good example is $400,000,000 for a new prison just outside the city.

Jim Wallace of Sojourners magazine asserts that public budgets are moral documents. We, the tax payers, are complicit in what these budgets say. The city owns the airport and all its public projects. The city allows subcontracted labor on city projects to be paid lower than the minimum wage without benefits.

POWER is working on a campaign to pass an initiative on the May ballot to correct this practice. POWER is also working to achieve a fair funding formula for our schools. Watch the video on the website. Help POWER accomplish its goals.

- The Rev. Carol Duncan