I haven’t been getting as much reading done lately as I’d like — but that hasn’t stopped me from downloading more e-books, purchasing more paper books, and adding to my wishlist.

Recently completed:

Rob Bell’s Love Wins. I’m a little behind, I know. Nothing too shocking for those of us from a postmodern, progressive Christian location — but written in a kind and compassionate way that deeply provoked me toward ongoing dialogue and discussion with emerging postmodern evangelicals.
• Rachel Maddow’s Drift. Once again proving that I am a gigantic fanboy of Rachel’s. Intelligent, well-researched, challenging — one of the best examples of genuine political critique without being partisan that I’ve seen from contemporary media personalities of any stripe.
• Eric Weiner’s Man Seeks God. A memoir of one man’s search for the divine presence and how he reconciles his skeptical cynicism with a deep yearning for faith and purpose. I don’t like the spiritual buffet approach, however the author does indicate some of the exact problems with the approach as I have in his own commentary. Fairly light, easy reading.

Currently:

• Frank Rogers, Jr.’s Finding God in the Graffiti
• Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian

The Christian Holy Week — the last week of Lent that begins with Palm Sunday and ends on Easter — is the highest, holiest week of the year. It is an offense of contrasts. On Palm Sunday, Christians remember the jubilant crowds that gathered at the parade when Jesus entered Jerusalem for the final time at the Passover festival. Those crowds quickly turn against him, and their rallying cries turn into jeers and hatred that seals his death warrant.

Holy Week is packed. At its best, it illustrates the love of a God fully embracing the human condition. At its worst, it illustrates only the awful destruction, vices, and terror of humankind.

Palm Sunday is joyful. Monday through Wednesday are routine — relatively indifferent. Thursday has the peace of a comforting dinner, the warm embrace of family and friends. Friday and Saturday are terrifying, horrible days of fear. And on Easter morning, the triumph of new life returns.

After Holy Week, of course, we settle back into routine. The lilies from worship are distributed to the homebound, dinners are served and cleaned-up after, vacations wind down, and the focus shifts to the freedom and relaxation of summertime.

For a long time I felt the greatest theological attack on modern Christian faith and practice was the misplaced emphasis on the cross. An oversimplification I hear more often than I care to is the trite expression, “Without Good Friday there can be no Easter Sunday; Jesus had to die for the sins of the world.” There is truth in that statement, of course, but it’s the part before the semicolon.

Holy Week reminds me of the solemnity of all life — and that most of life is pretty routine. There are good days that quickly pass, and there are awful, dark nights of the soul that linger before new life can spring forth. Even after that new life takes hold, life returns to a state of routine indifference. God, through Jesus Christ, fully enters into and embraces this condition, modeling for us the type of selfless love, community, and justice that we ought to seek.

The solemnity of Holy Week is not confined to Good Friday. The beauty of the cross is not of a removed, child-abusing Divine Power that seeks to destroy that which has been created and called good. Jesus did not die for the sins of the world in order that the world might be saved from itself.

The solemnity of Holy Week exists within, beyond, before, and after all of those things. On the cross hung God in human flesh, continuing to model for us the way in which we should live: recognizing our self-centeredness, our self-interest, our desire for self-protection above all else, and recognizing that these things do nothing but murder and destroy.

Yet in the midst of these forces — these human forces, these broken forces, these unavoidable forces — we see that the cross does not have the final word. The final word comes as the cycle begins anew on Easter morning.

We recommit ourselves, we wonder at the miracle, and we once again become complacent and fall victim to our own dark forces. Through the unbelievable power of our ability to heal and be renewed, God shows us that life continues. Darkness never gets the last word.

I sweat the small stuff.

Little things get to me. Symmetry or asymmetry can ruin my hour. A carelessly destroyed pattern is mortally distracting. Aesthetic matters a great deal.

I claim the OCD label when others apply it to me with pride — even though I don’t feel disorderly. In fact, the times when people are using it against me as if a weapon, it is generally an observation to my response to disorder.

At last night’s church council meeting we were invited to make an observation about the person next to us and connect it to a Christ-like attribute. One person observed this aesthetic value about myself, and imagined that such concern must have been Christ-like. I was humbled and appreciative of this.

I contrast it to another conversation I had with a person about the awful clash of our choir’s robes during Advent and Lent. The robes themselves are a rather attractive hunter green, but the stole overlay during Advent and Lent is a royal purple. “Who cares, we’re not very fashionable,” this person said to me.

I think these things matter. Beauty matters. Distraction matters by its very nature. There are any number of distractions that cannot be controlled, inter alia, what a person brings as part of herself, the colloquial “baggage” of a person; the particular grouping of individuals into a collective momentary assembly or ongoing community; natural disaster.

When one is distracted in a program, event, activity, forum, assembly, or other gathered function, by something within the control of the host, that person is disrespected. That one is excluded from full participation. Their experience is tarnished. The host is subliminally communicating, “Good enough is good enough; the best is not good enough for you, let alone ourselves.”

My significant other allows me to rant about California traffic signs while we are driving. He thinks there are bigger issues about which to be concerned than inconsistent typefaces, spacing, crowding, amount of information, how and where directional arrows are placed, quality of materials, etc. In the grand expanse of life he is partly true: there are numerous other issues that, admittedly, have a greater direct impact on the social compact, human rights, government, or human relations. But I still maintain that the little details matter a great deal. Minutia is hardly minute.

During high school and college I worked for a major national retailer. During the closing shift we were responsible for “zoning,” the term for the retail activity where employees go across the sales floor and appropriately place merchandise in its spot on the shelf. I was frequently the last person complete with my zoning assignment, but consistently I was praised for the thoroughness of my zone. Meticulously I pulled every item forward on the shelf, not just the front facing item. I aimed to perfectly align the left edge of the item with the left edge of the shelf label. I frequently do my shopping in the early opening hours of stores — including that same chain — and to this day I am annoyed when it is apparent the previous evening’s crew didn’t care enough to even make a half-assed attempt of pulling the front line of items forward.

I think such attention to detail — such concern for things deemed to be too small to be of importance — is a Christ-like activity. Perhaps that person in the church council meeting last night was correct, adjusted for different times and lifestyles. I’m not sure if Jesus would walk through big box stores fussing about zoning, or if he would become visibly upset looking at a string of burned-out light fixtures, or if a lack of adequate and intuitive signage would cause him to ask to speak with managers, directors, or other decision-makers to lodge a complaint. But elevating the small to the big, making major that which is minor — these are examples I see of Jesus in the Gospels.

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving I ate an entire carton of powdered donut holes from Trader Joe’s. Once again today I ate an entire package of powdered mini donuts from 7 Eleven. Other than the decrease in quality, there is one thing made painfully apparent to me in this reality:

I’m addicted to excess.

Forget what the old adage taught: it is possible to have too much of a good thing. The law of diminishing returns makes this illustration in a philosophical sense, but I’m going to call it the proof of excess. It’s not a matter of the 99% vs. the 1%, global disparities, income inequality or anything like that. It’s a matter of living life in fear.

I’m pretty good at challenging that fear of scarcity when it comes to money, and pretty good when it comes to possessions. I like to consider myself a “moderated bon vivant,” recognizing that there is much to enjoy of finer things in life but also that such indulgences are just that — indulgences that I can choose to either participate in or go without.

I haven’t always been this way. When unloading my Christmas decorations this year I discovered I have no fewer than a dozen strings of Christmas lights. I know I purchased some of them on deep markdown, “for someday.” I’ve moved them from place to place, never opening some individual boxes, merely holding onto them for that “someday.”

During college there was a period of time I couldn’t muster the discipline to regularly wash my clothes. I never wore dirty clothing, instead when I ran out of clean underwear I would simply drop my entire paycheck on a shopping day at the outlet mall buying more underwear and clothing.

These donuts are simply illustrating that I have come a long way in self-awareness of life’s excess, yet I have a long way to go. Getting a single donut at the local donut shop rather than buying a bag of lower-quality donuts from the convenience store when I’m merely satisfying a sweet tooth craving would make much more sense. (And be more socially responsible at that!)

In food, in possessions, in money — avoiding excess is counter-cultural. It is a posture that rejects the prevailing consumeristic narrative and finds satisfaction in simple contentment. Now if only I can do that with donuts!

Yesterday was Black Friday — although there were at least two stores I saw on the news that opened up very late Thanksgiving evening, so the shopping line is being blurred. I’ve swung back and forth on the pendulum about shopping the day after Thanksgiving: for half of my life I wasn’t interested, then my interest was piqued, then I vehemently decried the event as an abomination of consumeristic whoredom, then you couldn’t pull me away from the stores.

This year I’m somewhere in the middle. My decision not to shop was made easier after I went through the flyers and couldn’t find anything that would stir me to wait on line for hours and push ahead in the human stampede at the strike of (fill-in-the-opening-time). Earlier this month my TV died and I replaced it then; the same TV was only $30 cheaper on early-morning discount. I’ll consider that $30 a “convenience fee” and didn’t lose a wink of sleep over paying it.

Even though I didn’t shop yesterday (and won’t today, though I do have a few things to pick up tomorrow for normal Sunday weekly shopping), I was still agitated by both sides of the consumeristic battle. I was mostly casting a values judgment on those who waited on line since nothing seemed to rise to the level of making purchases myself. I questioned those who pitched tents on store verandas and sidewalks, though a quick slide of the finger across the newspaper app on my iPad moved me onto something else just as quickly.

The side that stuck in my craw were those seemingly opposed to consumerism in all forms, including the Occupy Movement people, and numerous clergy and religious leaders. I recognize that I am one of those people, but perhaps that qualifies me further. I was annoyed by the Occupiers who chanted and jeered at shoppers. I was annoyed by prophetic preaching from all parts of the theological globe succeeding only in preaching to its own choir.

And then I came across Diana Butler Bass’ post on the day. I realized I am not alone. I appreciated the acknowledgement that consumer morality is a gray area, that the day capitalizes on a top-down rather than bottom-up greed, that life in 21st century western society takes on different forms and requires different equipment than 20th, 19th, or 18th century western societies. (Or 21st century society elsewhere in the world.)

On the morning of Black Friday, I watched a reporter interview two women at a mall, who had arrived early for the sales. He asked, “What are you going to buy?” The woman, clearly not a well-off person, responded: “Shoes.” He said, “Shoes? You’re not supposed to be buying shoes!” She said, “But I need shoes.” He pressed the issue, “Are you buying anything else?” “No,” she replied. “I just need new shoes.” Her companion was buying jeans. The reporter didn’t know what to say. How many people on Black Friday are like these two women?

I started this post with a personal reflection: my decision not to shop today was made easier because there was nothing on sale I needed. I looked around my home and everything was operating, functional and in its place. I looked at my weekly shopping list and compared it to the flyers; no items overlapped. I will be purchasing a new table and chairs in the next couple of weeks, and making a handful of Christmas gift purchases — but here, too, none of the items overlapped. I don’t need anything extra. What I do need isn’t available right now.

But as Diana Butler Bass eloquently identifies, what about those who do need things, right now, and the savings of waiting on line for doorbusters makes a huge difference in their financial management? Why are they getting lost in this culture war — one that supposedly fights for their best interests?

Has Black Friday gotten out of hand? Few will argue otherwise. Structural greed is oppressive and fuels our distinctly U.S. brand of hypercapitalism. Yet the solution is not pointing fingers, holding up signs and shouting at one another. As Diana writes: “We have become a coarser and less neighborly America, a culture where too far too many—including those who will spend their Christmas wad at high-end stores rather than Black Friday sales—are not working for the common good wherein all of us share in the benefits of living in a wealthy society.”

When I was completing my ministerial internship in New Zealand in 2010, my supervisor, friend and colleague the Rev. David Clark and I would discuss the state of Christianity in his country from his perspective. A Kiwi Presbyterian minister for the better part of four decades (he’ll positively punch me for phrasing it that way), he has watched as Christian practice, measured by church membership and participation, has quantitatively tanked in his country, following a trend through much of the English-speaking world.

Entering the ministry in the 1970′s, David recalls being optimistic about stemming the hemorrhage of departures. The church could once again be relevant in people’s lives by prophetically living into its own theologies of justice and shedding antiquated, pre-Enlightenment notions of the supernatural. Like many (most?) young ministers, he held a certain hope that was eventually tempered as those who would fear change gained a stranglehold on positions of leadership, in the seminary and in national offices.

A gay man, David was outed during tumultuous General Assemblies arguing over the value and role of LGBT persons in the church. His parish, my internship site, stood by him and maintained their position as a beacon of progressive Christianity in a denomination turning hard right. During the most recent General Assembly the denomination adopted a new, conservative confession of faith in a veiled effort to reclaim church teachings, and in so doing promote growth and relevance.

Perhaps the most telling attribute is this: the denomination and its parishes continue to lose members while St. Luke’s maintains and slowly increases its roll.

I thought of all of this as I read this article about a speech given by Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia Charles Chaput. “The America emerging in the next several decades is likely to be much less friendly to Christian faith than anything in our country’s past,” he said.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops meets Monday in Baltimore for its national meeting feeling under siege: from a broader culture moving toward accepting gay marriage; a White House they often condemn as hostile to Catholic teaching; and state legislatures that church leaders say are chipping away at religious liberty.

David frequently opined that he suspected the U.S. was following a similar path as New Zealand and much of western Europe in the decline in church participation. Whether I am plagued by the same young blind hopefulness or have a valid confidence is yet to be seen, but I don’t picture a faithless America anytime soon.

Will the statistics change, possibly “prove” a decline in church participation in the U.S.? I confidently say yes, and believe that they must. The measure of the church’s relevance and impact ought not be determined by how many people check a membership box or show up every Sunday morning at 10 a.m.

Steven Krueger, national director of Catholic Democrats, pointed to the agenda released ahead of this week’s meeting, which included no public discussion of poverty despite the state of the economy. In the 1980s, the bishops issued an influential pastoral letter on Catholic principles and the economy, which church leaders reaffirmed in statements and education programs over the next decade.

If the church feels it has lost relevance, if it feels that it is battling wars with society and its membership loss is a result of that, it has no one to blame but itself. While it battles those social wars, the real war continues to be fought by those far from the spotlight — small groups of committed Christians who seek justice, love mercy and walk humbly with their God.

Those small groups have far more relevance and influence in a secularized world than in an institution committed to self-preservation and survival.

The image is inspired by a quote frequently attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” Misattributed, its best citation is from a letter he wrote to his wife Deborah in 1757 after narrowly averting a shipwreck: “The bell ringing for church, we went thither immediately, and with hearts full of gratitude, returned sincere thanks to God for the mercies we had received: were I a Roman Catholic, perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint, but as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a light-house.”

After yesterday’s post (literally, almost right after) I decided to open up one of those unopened boxes sitting in a corner of my bedroom. One of them contained the cases to all of my CDs; the discs themselves sit in a folder amidst my media shelf, but apparently I had never purged the cases.

Without a doubt this certainly falls into the category of, “Stupid packrat tendency.” And so I pulled the box into my living room and set about opening up each case to make sure there was no disc inside and then making a pile for disposal.

Halfway through I had a brainstorm. What if, instead of getting rid of the cases, I double-checked that the discs were all ripped into my iTunes and I then got rid of the CDs altogether?* I don’t listen to them very much, and the music I do listen to is all digital files, so why am I keeping any of it?

And so began a project at simplification, at purging the excess of my life in response to the undeniable fact that I’m not using it. It, in this case, is not just the ridiculous box of empty CD cases, but also the two folders of the discs that belong with the cases. Their best chance at being used are being integrated within my digital collection, and I have more than enough hard drive space to accommodate them — and can free up physical room space in the process.

The only expenditure? Time. And ripping all these discs is taking up a lot of it. I’m less than a quarter of the way through the discs and already I’ve put in about five hours, give or take the time interrupting myself for nostalgia about the various discs. (It’s very apparent I quit buying CDs around 2003…)

But in the end life will be simpler. I’ll have one less box. I’ll have two less folders on my shelf. I’ll have a more accurate portrayal of my media library. And above all, I’ll be more likely to actually use it all.

*I am planning on donating the used CDs to some community organization, not selling them. It’s still probably illegal to rip them and get rid of them without destroying them, but it just seems like a waste to trash them altogether. No money is exchanging hands, so record execs, leave me alone!

I’m giving one of the reflections at our new Sunday evening service this week. I’ve been excited about this service since the interview process and hearing about the ideas church leadership had for the format; I’m particularly excited about having a space to use video in a way that is integral to the service, rather than distractive.

Our theme this week is abundance, a timely theme given the proximity to the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday in a little less than two weeks and the onslaught of Christmas merchandise in stores that only grows by the hour. Using the text of Mark 4:26-29, I’ll be using this TED talk from Graham Hill, punctuated with my own recent cross-country moving experience.

What I really like about Hill’s talk is his use of “the box” at the beginning. How many of us have that box? (Or, better chance, many of those boxes?)

In moving to the Bay Area I knew that I would have to downsize eventually. At present I am living in the largest apartment I’ve rented alone at about 800 square feet. This apartment doesn’t have much in the way of storage or closets, however, and so the items I chose to bring with me either had to be things I continually wanted out, or they had to be given serious consideration of their moving value. I pared down those boxes that have moved from Minnesota to Wisconsin to Illinois, back to Wisconsin and to Illinois again, and then finally back to Minnesota for final sorting in my parents’ garage to determine their value for the move to California.

In the end, I still have a couple of boxes that I need to purge — things that I moved to California that now continue to live in their boxes, only this time I can’t hide them in a closet and I see them every morning in the corner of my bedroom. I finally retrieved some items out of the top box, and realized that there are useful things in there I do want to keep. Other than move-in week, I haven’t touched the bottom boxes in four months.

The Christian faith idea, that God provides more than enough, is beyond easy to comprehend in our U.S. society. One needs only look at the concept of, let alone huge market for, mini-storage units. A critical look at the global disparity between the have’s and the have-not’s illustrates this point in shameful, poignant detail. Yet my effort here is not to cast shame or guilt; at the end of the day if I disposed of all my earthly possessions and sent the money to a worthy cause in, for example, rural India, I would find myself trapped in a place difficult, if not impossible, to adequately function within my own context and still not make any real, meaningful progress in bettering the lives of rural Indians.

The central question is not one of guilt, nor shame, nor even awareness. The question is about our relationship to our stuff, to the abundance with which we have been graced. How do we use it in a way that is a statement of our faith? How do we use our stuff to live the Gospel? How do we use things and love people instead of the other way around?

So about that update, then: I graduated in May with my master’s degree, and at the end of June moved to California to start a call in July as an associate minister of a church in the Bay Area. After loading all of my earthly possessions into shipping containers and another legendary Durge ‘n Bryan roadtrip to move myself here, I really haven’t had time to look back.

All transitions take a certain amount of energy and come with a particular feeling of excitement, anticipation, anxiety, fear, and loss. This transition is not the exception. I’m having a great time, but I’d be lying if I didn’t also recognize the difficult emotions as I immerse myself in a place with a different local culture, away from the support network I’ve relied upon, with a geography that still seems beautiful yet unfamiliar.

But the church is fantastic, and the people I’ve met have been warm and hospitable. First Congregational has a rich history, an engaged membership, and a solid foundation upon which to strengthen existing youth ministry and build a young adult ministry. The people here are excited for new ministry, I am excited for new ministry, and the energized intersection of that is contagious. This is a place that supports each other in taking faithful risk, and while it is not immune from problems, it is also very open and understanding with itself and does not have many of the issues facing mainline Protestant churches.

People ask me how things are going now that I’m a month into things here. This is my attempt at answering that question — still some vagueness, a growing understanding, feelings of displacement and adaptation, all encapsulated in a developed sense of excitement, adventure, and gratitude. Overall, I’d give it a gold star.

I broke the skis out yesterday and went around the neighborhood. How frequently can one engage in a little bit of urban exploration on skis? It’s a colossal amount of snow that has fallen, and it’s going to take a very long time for the city services to get things cleaned up. I’m impressed by the response thus far. A lot of people are putting in a lot of work to get things back to normal.

Of course the best part is the canceled classes, but what student wouldn’t think that?