He left that place and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. 2On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! 3Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. 4Then Jesus said to them, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” 5And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. 6And he was amazed at their unbelief.
Then he went about among the villages teaching. 7He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. 8He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; 9but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. 10He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. 11If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” 12So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. 13They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them. (Mark 6)
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I was not aware, until I read James Marcus’ recent biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Glad To the Brink of Fear), that he left the ministry because he could no longer in good conscience preside at the Lord’s Supper. In June of 1832 he asked the proprieters of Second Church to be excused from administering the meal, continuing all his other pastoral duties.
By September 9th the leadership was still debating the request, and he preached a “lengthy, logical, and rather scholarly debunking of the Lord’s Supper as a spiritual necessity” (81). The leadership continued their debate, allowing Emerson to preach one last sermon on October 21st, and then they fired him.
Emerson is know for many things, especially as a first man of American letters and leader of the Transcendentalist movement, but I find this less-reported reason for his departure from the ministry intriguing and instructive. It begs the question, What are our breaking points, especially in remaining faithful to ourselves, embedded as we are in patterns and institutions and habits? How much are we willing to be a prophet to ourselves?
Emerson was strangely attractive and repellant all at the same time to his congregation. He preached to a packed house the day he preached against the Lord’s Supper. Ostensibly, all those attending weren’t planning on abandoning the supper—they just wanted in on the curiosity and controversy.
By the time he was truly articulating his new position, it was down the road at Harvard where he gave his “Divinity School Address” that was, though now famous among his essays, delivered to a group of… six. Marcus comments, “Waldo’s clarion cry, his insertion of the ecstaic self into American religion, was hardly heard by anybody. Even the printed version was limited to a small number of copies” (86).1
So numbers and influence was not his focus. Instead, Waldo aimed to “convert life into truth.” That’s a definition of the prophetic if ever there was one.
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If I have a breaking point, some part of pastoral ministry that I cannot perform as pantomime, the Lord’s Supper is not it. Quite to the contrary, I have found that meal, the center of weekly worship, a tether, an anchor, a life-preserver. Sometimes when nothing else draws me to worship, it is still the promise of Christ’s presence in a shared meal that compels me to show up.
But I do empathize with Emerson’s struggle, inasmuch as personal integrity and faithfulness do not always align with the required functions of an office. I imagine some of the ways I move as pastor, some of the choices I make to either do or not do, may appear equally problematic or pugnacious. In fact, there have at times been commitments I’ve made that made me wonder, like Emerson, if I could stay. To date, I’ve had the fortuitous situation of serving a congregation supportive of such explorings.
Such wanderings from traditional pastoral roles does leave me wrestling with Scripture, especially a passage like the one above from Mark which is the sermon text for Sunday. In the first half, Jesus laments rather bluntly his own home town’s failure to honor him as a prophet. In the second half, he gives practical instructions to his disciples on how they should be equipped for the challenges of itinerant ministry proclaiming the kin-dom of God.
I’m working my way through another book these days, Aaron Stauffer’s Listening to the Spirit: The Radical Social Gospel, Sacred Value, and Broad-based Community Organizing. Early in the book he asserts “Christians and people of faith are often without clear responses for why it is important for them to bring their fundamental faith commitments to democratic politics.”
I believe we stand at a crucial moment in history, with much at stake for our shared future. Broad-based community organizing may be one of the few effective means by which progressives of faith stand a chance in resisting the wholesale dismantling of our democracy by the far right. Currently, we are not as organized as we could or should be, and the situation is dire.
Into this space, the combo lesson in this gospel, pointing out as it does how hard it is for progressives to self-organize because we often do not honor our own, combined with a call to equip faith leaders with the right tools (in BBCO that includes lots of relational meetings and listening campaigns), is a prophetic word to hear, a difficult word to digest, at least in part because in our current moment anything begun now may be too little too late.
Stauffer argues that BBCOs are counterpublics and as such offer critical counter-point exercising particular power relationship to the political and economic landscape. He sees an opportunity, one seldom exercised by most moderate and liberal churches: “Christians can graft their democratic organizing into a long tradition of radical social gospelers whose politics of sacred value led them to the heart of radical and progressive political and economic movements.”
To point back to Emerson, this would have been in his day the influential abolitionist movement of which he became a part.
Gary Dorrien, perhaps the premier historian of liberal Christianity, says this: “Christianity has a social-ethical mission to transform the structures of society in the direction of social justice.”2
How does one go about doing this? And how is the prophet’s voice, and the disciples’ practice, related to such transformation?
That is the question, isn’t it? But I would note, most congregations hearing Jesus’ instructions for the disciples will have trouble translating them into any. practical guiding medium for implementation, even if taken entirely at face value. The disciples are sent out to stay as guest in homes, taking not even a suitcase, and they are apparently empowered to cast out spirit, cure the sick, and teach.
Toward what end? What is this traveling healing and teaching work supposed to do? I would argue quite simply that it’s aim—even if the gospel itself does not yet adopt such “social gospel” language—was the transformation of the structures of society in the direction of social justice.
What this invites us to consider today is as radical a reframing of what we should believe, and what we should do, as the transcendentalist reframing Emerson engaged in his day. The outcomes will not be the same, but the radicality of the approach will be.
We can ask ourselves: is what we’ve been doing, and what we are currently doing, working? Are Christians grafting their democratic work and social justice organizing? Are the normative habits we think are “church-work” aimed toward social justice? If not, why are we still doing them?
If imagining new practices and modes of church is difficult, so be it. It was no easier for Emerson, who had to sit for long seasons with his thoughts before they coalesced into what became an entirely new idiom for American religiosity. It is no easier for broad-based community organizing, which has always relied on lots and lots of relational meetings and listening campaigns in order to build the power necessary for collective action. No different, it seems, than the two-by-two model Jesus enacted with the disciples, who did not broadcast their teachings over large social media networks but went from town to town, house to house, person to person, and just-so embodied a movement.
And even if the present political moment presents as a crisis (it is) and the present environmental moment an existential crisis (it is) nevertheless, we can keep in mind one of the mantra’s of another great community organizer, adrienne maree brown, who says, “There is always enough time for the right work…”
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I include an additional paragraph from Marcus because it’s instructive: “I doubt that Waldo was concerned, though. Questions of scale mattered very little if you envisioned the entire universe as a vast flux, its energies pouring in and out of the brain. A tiny, perspiring audience would upload his words to the Over-Soul—that Emersonian cloud of consciousness, shared by every single human being—as rapidly as a gigantic throng. ‘The ocean is a large drop; a drop is a small ocean.’ He was nothing if not patient.”
Two of Tulsa's Lutheran congregations, First and Fellowship are members of ACTION Tulsa, which is a broad based community organizing group. https://www.actiontulsa.org/ It in turn belongs to Industrial Areas Foundation. The IAF model, which ACTION follows, incorporates relational meetings and story telling. I've seen the impact that story telling can have in a variety of settings.