Space for Conversation

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

"We need less religion, less politics, and more culture," said the Rev. Mitri Raheb when I met with him in Bethlehem this summer. For just this reason, the college he founded is devoted to nurturing art, dance, music, theater, poetry, and the culinary arts. His objective is to develop the bonds of civil society in the West Bank so Palestinians can become a unified people without resorting to religious or political extremism.

I heard this idea expressed by a number of Palestinian leaders including a young man in Hebron who had organized a co-ed 5k run. Predictably, the co-ed run had provoked a clash between more traditional Palestinians and more modernizing Palestinians. The young man took this in stride as the cost of progress. His goal was to carve out a secular space for civic activity that could build the health of his people.

Do we need less religion, less politics, and more culture here in the United States? Would a resurgent or newly conceived common culture mitigate the intensity of our political and religious polarization? I will not pretend to have complete answers to these profound questions but I do have some themes I would like to explore.

Over-confidence in religious beliefs is often named as a major contributing factor to disputes that resist resolution. The corrective is said to be a healthy skepticism and doubt of any value or assertion that comes from a religious worldview. Unlike Palestine, the United States has a long history of a secular civic space and we cast the fantasy that religion has nothing to say in this space. The problem is; how does a religious person leave their religion behind when making moral decisions that shape our common life through politics?

Professor Jeff Stout, recently retired Professor of Religious Studies at Princeton University, puts it this way: "The line between church and state does not run through the heart of a believer." I agree with Jeff - one of my intellectual heroes - and would add, "If I call Jesus Lord, how can he be Lord of only one facet of my life? Mustn't I seek to follow him in every place I make decisions that effect my neighbor?"

My answer to those who counsel doubt and skepticism in religious belief is to wonder why religion should be the thing we doubt most of all. When we are honest, we admit that we do not live each day doubting the values and beliefs that make our day functional. We believe our car will run without knowing the first thing about engineering. Really what we need is to simply be upfront about our commitments, wherever they come from, and contribute them as a way of enriching the moral discussions that form our life together.

Some will object that politics is corrupt and selfish and I want religion to be pure and transcendent. My gentle reminder is that we follow a God who took on incarnate life and battled sin hand to hand to the point of a sordid and disgraceful death. Perhaps we need to follow him into the muck and the squalor for the sake of love of neighbor and God?

If you're interested in further discussion around this topic, I highly recommend that you join us on Sunday morning, October 28, for Parish Forum at 9:15 a.m. Chris Satullo will lead us in the first of a two-part series on Conversations Across Differences. See you in the parish hall!

Blessings,
Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Rector
Parish Forum - Sundays at 9:15 a.m. in the Parish Hall
Oct. 28: Conversations Across Differences
The common denominator in all of our communities is they are divided by differences of all kinds. How do you get people to discuss their differences and put their solutions into action? Our guest speaker at Parish Forum this week is Chris Satullo and he's an expert on the subject. Chris is the co-founder of the Penn Project of Civic Engagement and is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He will demonstrate how faith plays as important a part of breaking down barriers as anything else does. Join us for the first of this two-part series this Sunday at 9:15 a.m. in the Parish Hall.

Chris Satullo

Nov. 4: Conversations Across Differences, Part II
This week Chris Satullo continues his discussion on how faith can play a role in slicing through differences we face in our communities in part two of this important series. Today he’ll discuss strategies to start conversations, arrive at solutions, and put those solutions into action. We can save the world one small piece at a time. Your first lesson awaits you at Parish Forum.

Aesthetic, Ethical, or Religious?

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

I apologize in advance that this Rector’s Note is rooted in the writings of Soren Kierkegaard. On sabbatical in the library at Princeton Theological Seminary, I renewed my love for this Danish philosopher and spiritual writer. Kierkegaard observed that the spiritual life moves through three phases; the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. 

Episcopalians famously flock to the first and the second phase. The aesthetic phase is all about our enjoyment of beauty. Music, art, liturgy, poetry and literature all contribute to our immediate aesthetic experience of pleasure. Kierkegaard states - and I agree - that all of these experiences are good except when they are treated as ultimate goods in their own right. Pleasure in beauty serves its full function when it leads us to transcend ourselves toward God in praise and thanksgiving.

The ethical phase concerns ordering and shaping our lives toward right action. Many mainline Christians would identify with this phase. We want to live a good life and make good decisions and contribute to the common good. The odd problem with the ethical phase is that often we merely import our existing commitments and sprinkle the holy water of the church on them, rather than derive them from the teachings of Jesus. Liberal Christianity - which is practiced by the whole range of political stripes - goes even further and says that doubt prevents us from making any ethical claims based on our faith. More on this in my next note!

Finally, we have the religious phase. This is the phase where we orient our whole life toward relationship and ultimately union with God. Our preoccupation with self goes on the back burner and we seek God as our ultimate end. All else becomes secondary to the unmatched importance of our dependence on God. Through prayer, worship, sacrament, service, study, conversation, and contemplation we strive to accept God’s invitation to participate in God’s life. 

In my experience, this last phase is most difficult because we resist dependence and we resist submission. The gateway to God is trust and devotion to the God we know in Jesus through the Gospels. For many modern people this feels foolish and embarrassing. While I know those feelings, my life has only grown healthier and more honest, the more I put myself under the teachings of Jesus. When we embrace the religious path, we receive the aesthetic and the ethical again in a new way, with freedom, love, hope, and endurance to fuel our enjoyment and our ethical striving.

Blessings,
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Rector

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