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Two things. One, I’d like to call your attention to a very enlightening post in Scientific American (Parental rejection of gay teens worsens health: Scientific American Blog) about the how parental rejection of gay teens can adversely affect their health (“eight times more likely to have attempted suicide than those whose families accepted them…. nearly six times as likely to report depression, three times as likely to use drugs and three times as likely to have unprotected sex.”) It’s a sobering reminder of just how important it is for our congregations to offer Our Whole Lives and provide a safe environment for youth who are dealing with questions about their sexual identity. Two, I’m trying out a new tool on WordPress that allows me to post a link to something interesting I’ve found on the web using a “Press This” bookmarklet on my Firefox tool bar. I like it better than some of the other options (using the “Quick Post” feature on my WordPress dashboard, or the “Daily Blog Posting” option on delicious). Now when I run across something that’s really worth sharing, I can both bookmark it on delicious and post a quick note about it here.
We’ve had the instructions for making a family chalice for over a year now. And we’ve even had all of the necessary materials on hand (flower pot, tissue paper, white glue, spray-on shellac). But it took being pretty much snowed in with sub-zero temperatures for us to get around to it. One of the things you do with a family chalice is paste words on it that are important to everyone in the family. When we asked Henry David what words he wanted, he said we should put in the name of our church. We go to Unity Unitarian in Saint Paul regularly, but we have gone to Faith Mennonite in Minneapolis, too. So we put in both “unity” and “faith.” A couple of the the other words are ones that Julia and I have prioritized as family values: “peace” and “joy.” And of course “family” and “love” round out the set. When it comes to being a Unitarian Universalist family, making a family chalice together is pretty high on the list of things to do!
One of the things to do when you’re serious about blogging is to read other blogs to see how it’s done. There was a time about a year and a half ago when I was reading about 15 to 20 blogs a day, and not just blogs written by Unitarian Universalists. I was reading a fair number of tech blogs as well as a sampling of some well-known Christian bloggers. Two of my favorites in the later group were Ben Arment (whose blog “History in the Making” can be found at www.benarment.com) and Andrew Jones (aka Tall Skinny Kiwi at tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com). Aside from their evangelical fervor (for both blogging and Jesus), I appreciated how each one kept their respective blogs fresh with a mixture of personal and professional information. Arment, a church planter, has some lovely posts about his family (like dancing in the living room with his young son, or spotting from the inside of a Starbucks his wife strolling along with their children). Jones is a globe-trotting apostle for the emerging church movement, and his posts are liberally illustrated with photos from his travels. So in spite of any theological differences I might have with these two, I thoroughly respect them as bloggers. And, of course, part of me wanted to emulate them.
However, this blog is really mostly about my work as the Lifespan Program Director of the Prairie Star District. In fact, there’s a link to it from the from home page of the PSD website (www.psduua.org). This means that even though it’s a personal blog (I started it on my own), I feel an obligation to blog primarily about my work as a program consultant co-employed with the Unitarian Universalist Association. But I still feel it’s important to have some personal information here, as well as a photo or two of the family (see my last post “Henry the Redhead Reindeer). So…a bit of a dilemma. Do I post more often with a lot of personal stuff mixed in with the professional? Or do I keep posting at the current rate of one or two a week and stick to the strictly professional? What’s a blogger to do?
Well, I think I’ve found a solution. Enter the microblogging service Twitter. In case you haven’t heard about it, what Twitter does is allow you to send out 140 character posts (know as “tweets”) to whoever happens to care about what it is you’re doing. I’ve avoided the service until now because it seemed like a colossal waste of time. But then I realize that I could use my WordPress RSS feed widget to post tweets on my blog. Which is exactly what I did. So if you scroll down below my Flickr badge, you’ll see this:
That’s my “Tweets” feed, which I plan to use primarily for keeping you up to date with where I am and what I’m doing. Not that anyone really cares too much. But I do enjoy sending little updates when I’m traveling (like “Just checked into the Microtel in Ames, IA.” or “Having lunch with Sherry Warren, Prairie Star’s youth and young adult specialist.”), and while this information may not be inportant enough for a full post on Phil’s Little Blog on the Prairie, it might be of interest as an ongoing log of what I’m doing for work. And there’s the personal element, too. I twittered yesterday about eating lutefisk at Pearson’s in Edina, MN. Apparently that is news because my colleague, PSD District Exec Nancy Heege, posted something about it on her blog Nancy’s Views of the Landscape. So I think Twitter will give me the opportunity to add a little bit more of the personal as well as some posts about my travels. That, along with the Flickr badge, will allow me to update more often and add more photos without a full-fledged blog post. Who cares? Who knows. At least it gives me something to do when I’m on the road!
P.S. If you are interested in following my tweets directly from Twitter, you can find me at twitter.com/psdlund. Oh, and I’ve found that I can use Twitter to update the status on my Facebook page as well. Neat, huh? Finally, if you really want the full scoop on Pearson’s and lutefisk, check out this article from the New York Times: Forget Eggnog; Bring the Lye-Cured Cod.
Okay, so I’m testing a few new things out on my blog. This particular test has to do with photos. I haven’t posted any in a while because: 1. I selected a nonfunctional program to “Always Use This Program for Downloading Photos” on my computer–so whenever I plug my camera in, I have to go through a bunch of steps to download even a single photo. And 2. I haven’t been taking a lot of pictures lately because it’s such a hassle to download them (see 1). However, I’ve installed an Eye-fi card in my Canon which downloads photos wirelessly and automatically posts them on my Flickr account. Now this particular photo of Henry David wasn’t downloaded via Eye-fi. I’m putting it up as a test for another reason. See, in the past when I’ve blogged directly from my Flickr account, the photos have been categorized as “Uncategorized” by default. But I just figured out how to change my default setting to “Photoblog,” which is what I consider these Flickr posts to be. So hopefully I’ll have more photos to share from my travels around Prairie Star. In the meantime, enjoy this one of Henry David that I took last week when we were in Vancouver. Oh, and those other things I’m testing? More on that later. (By the way, this is a re-post. I didn’t like the original layout, so I change it.)
For the past few days I’ve been in Vancouver, British Columbia with the family. We’re visiting my wife’s sister and her family, something we like to do around the holidays. I have to confess that we didn’t make it to church this morning (it snowed here last night, so Julia and her sister, Christine, decided to take the children, Henry and Lyra, out for some sledding while the sledding was good!). For my part, I stayed at home to work on a new presentation called “Congregational Designations: Options for the Future.” I’m still using the same free service called SlideShare, but this time I’ve added an audio track, creating something the SlideShare folks call a “slidecast.” I’ve embedded it below in case you want to check out the content (how we designate the small, unaffiliated groups meeting within Prairie Star), or the technology (it involves uploading a slide presentation to SlideShare, uploading an audio track elsewhere, then syncing the two). Just press the green button and enjoy. The audio is a little low, by the way, so you may need to use headphones. Let me know what you think!
For another take on these small, unaffiliated groups, check out this post from Scott Wells’ blog Boy in the Bands.
Continuing with a recap of my post-Black Friday at Church small group session exploring the “real” Christmas story. As I noted, the Christmas narratives in Matthew and Luke try to explain when (and how) God actually entered into Jesus–at the time of his conception. Paul said it was after the resurrection. Mark said it was at Jesus’ baptism. And John said there never was a time when God was not in Jesus. By explaining when God entered into Jesus, all of these writers were trying to explain how we have met God in this life of Jesus.
Unitarians and Universalists have had slightly different approaches to Jesus. For a long time, Jesus was primarily a great moral teach for Unitarians. For Universalists, Jesus was the premier example of God’s love. In both cases, there was not a lot of emphasis of Jesus being the actually Son of God. Rather, Jesus was a model of what we all might achieve as human beings. So, the question for UUs isn’t whether or not the Christmas story (as told in Matthew and Luke) is true or not (since it really doesn’t matter for our interpretations of who Jesus was). The question is, What do we do with this myth? How does it help us come to a deeper understanding of who we believe Jesus was, and what Jesus means to us today?
It’s interesting to note that it’s not unusual for exceptional figures in history to have a mythic birth narrative. (Or, if not a mythic birth narrative, then at least some heroic stories from childhood–think George Washington and the cherry tree.) One of my favorite mythic birth narrative is about the Buddha. Here’s how it goes:
About ten months after her dream of a white elephant and the revelation that she would give birth to a great leader, Queen Maya went to the king and, according to custom, requested that she return to her father’s house for the birth. The king agreed and sent soldiers ahead to clear the road and arranged a guard for the queen as she was carried in a decorated palanquin (a covered seat carried on poles held parallel to the ground on the shoulders of two or four people). The queen set off in a long procession of soldiers and retainers, headed for the capital of her father’s kingdom.
On the way the pageant passed a garden called Lumbini Park near the kingdom of Nepal, at the foot of the Himalayan Mountains. The queen was attracted by the beauty of the park, which was adorned with sala trees and scented flowers, birds and bees. The queen ordered the bearers to stop to rest for a while. While she rested beneath a sala trees she began her labor, giving birth to a baby boy. It was a day of a full moon in 623 B.C., a day now celebrated as Vesak, the festival of the triple event of Buddha’s birth.
According to the traditions surrounding the birth, the baby boy immediately began to walk, taking seven steps. At each point where his feet touched the ground, a lotus flower appeared. Then, at the seventh step, he stopped and pronounced:
I am chief of the world,
Eldest am I in the world,
Foremost am I in the world.
This is the last birth.
There is now no more coming to be.
Queen Maha Maya immediately returned to Kapilavatthu. When the king learned of this he was overjoyed, and as the news spread, the kingdom was full of rejoicing.
So in some ways, the Christmas story accentuates that Jesus was an exceptional figure in history, something that neither the Unitarians nor Universalists would disagree with. Exceptional, but not unique. Jesus never claimed any status for himself that he didn’t offer to his followers as well. And UUs believe that all humans are born not only with inherent worth and dignity, but with infinite potential. William Ellery Channing taught that we have a seed planted in us at birth, a divine seed given by God that if we would just cultivate it, it would grow and flourish and we could accomplish and experience extraordinary things.
The Christmas story was designed to show that God was in Jesus from conception. Our tradition tells us that if that were true, then God would be in all of us at our conception. So the Christmas story is in some ways everyone’s story.
If you want to read more about the “real” story of Christmas, check out The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth, by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan.
One of the reasons last week’s Black Friday at Church event was such a powerful experience was the opportunity for individuals to gather in small groups after the worship service for discussion, information, and meditation. The groups were led by members of Unity Church-Unitarian, including myself. The most popular was “Wealth of Things vs. Wealth of Spirit,” led by Bill Doherty and Elizabeth Shippee, a valued elder of the church. I led a group called “The ‘Real’ Christmas Story Explored.” Other groups included “A Christmas Promise,” led by Katy Taylor, where individuals were encouraged to “make a promise that will create more meaning in the Advent and Christmas season for yourself, your church, or your community.” Becca Pournoor, former DRE at Unity, led a session called “The Season in Poetry and Prose,” and a group of adults and youth helped children ages four to ten with some hands-on activities that explored the themes of Advent and Christmas. All in all, was a very multigenerational event. (You can read more about the event at my colleague Nancy Heege’s blog, Nancy’s Views of the Landscape.)
Courtesy of Freefoto.com
At any rate, I thought I’d do a little rundown of what we covered in my small group. There were about 20 people who showed up to explore the “real” Christmas story. Since the title and the description were assigned to me by the Black Friday Planning Group, I decided to keep it fairly simple by giving my perspective on what I thought the Christmas story accomplishes in the Bible. I said there were basically two things the story does. One, it does some damage control around the issue of Jesus’ paternity. If we had a copy of his birth certificate, it would probably say “father unknown.” This is a pretty incontrovertable fact, given evidence in Mark 6:3 that Jesus was considered “illegitimate” in his hometown: “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary…?” According to Austin Cline (and many other sources) “To call Jesus the ’son of Mary’ in this fashion is tantamount to saying ‘this guy has no real father, he’s a bastard.’” And since this appears in the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the Gospels to be composed (c. 70 CE), it represents an inconvenient truth that other Gospel writers had to address. Indeed, Luke and Matthew change the wording of this text to “son of Joseph.” And they both felt compelled to add an impressive series of “begats” to their Christmas narratives to drive the point home.
Which leads me to the second thing the Christmas story does in the Bible. According to Bishop John Shelby Spong in his book The Sins of Scripture, both Matthew and Luke use their Christmas narratives to answer the question, “How did God get into Jesus?” The original point of entry was at the resurrection as far as Paul was concerned. “God simply declared Jesus to be the Son of God at the time of the resurrection by the action of the spirit, said Paul when he wrote his epistle to the Romans [c. 60 CE].” Spong goes on to say that “Mark explains it with his baptism story.” He “tells the story of the heavens opening, the Spirit descending on Jesus, and the heavenly voice off-stage saying: ‘Thou are my beloved son!’” (And remember, Mark was written somewhere around 70 CE.)
“Matthew changed the timing,” says Spong. “The declaration that Jesus was the Son of God came from and unnamed angel in a dream to Joseph. It was still mediated by the action of the Holy Spirit, but it now took place at the moment of conception.” The Gospel of Matthew, by the way, was composed c. 80 CE. Spong continues: “Luke repeats the miraculous birth story, but he makes it more specific. The angel is Gabriel and communicates to Mary in real time. The child she will bear will be called ‘The Son of God.’” That gets written c. 85 CE. (John continues to move the event horizon back in time–all the way to the beginning: “When John wrote the Fourth Gospel [c. 100 CE], he decided that there was never a time when God was not in Christ.”)
So. What does this have to with how Unitiarian Universalists approach the Christmas story? I’ll save that for another post.
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