Monthly Archives: February 2007

Possibilities for Post-Christian Worship, pt. 5

Fifth in a series. Bibliography will be included with the final post. Back to the first post in this series.

(D) Post-Christian preaching?

The centrality the act of preaching, of the sermon, characterizes nearly all post-Christian common worship. Of course, I acknowledge that not all post-Christian congregations will include sermons in their worship services; in particular, post-Christian congregations within the Quaker tradition of the unprogrammed meeting will not have sermons per se. However, a key characteristic of the post-Christian congregation is that is has been shaped by the Christian notion of the importance of the Word and the service of the Word; and the post-Christian congregation is trying to figure out what the significance of the “word” means when is when there is no longer consensus on the divinity of that “word.”

(Parentehtically, I also acknowledge that many post-Christians will find continued importance and relevance in the Service of the Table, i.e. communion or eucharist. However, as someone who has been deeply influenced by Quaker thinking, I won’t participate in or officiate at standard communion rituals, so I feel utterly unqualified to speak about the possibility of post-Christian service of the table.)

As an exoteric, easily accessible ritual, it is easy to argue that preaching deserves to remain at the center of post-Christian worship. We might well ask, then: What differentiates post-Christian preaching from other preaching in liberal Christian traditions, where preaching is also the central act of worship? In order to answer this question, I will look specifically at Unitarian Universalist traditions, although most of what I have to say will also apply to other post-Christian groups.

We Unitarian Universalists often characterize ourselves by our insistence on the use of reason in religion. But we mean reason in a very specific way; not, for example, the kind of reason that results in technological progress. I would suggest that preaching in our tradition aims to lead us to meditative thought as a means to redemption; in distinction to Christian traditions where thinking alone is inadequate.

Let me be more specific about what I mean by meditative thought. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1999), in his essay “Thinking as Redemption: Plotinus between Plato and Augustine,” tells how in nineteenth century theology “the concept of gnosis meant the false doctrine that man [sic] can bring about his salvation from mortality and fallenness by means of his own striving for knowledge and elevation to divine truths.” (p. 79) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1838/1961) intended this kind of meditative thinking and speaking when, at the end of “The Divinity School Address,” he spoke of the virtues of preaching, exhorting his listeners to a certain kind of preaching:

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Adventures in local food

It’s hard to eat local food in the winter here in New England — only one or two growers are as adept as Four Seasons Farm at growing vegetables year-round in our climate. So unless you live near Four Seasons Farm (which we don’t), if you want to eat local food in the winter you have to figure out how to store it yourself.

That can be difficult for those of us who are apartment dwellers. Without a basement we can’t have a root cellar, of course. This year, Carol and I bought some extra local apples and carrots to store in the bottom of the refrigerator, but those were gone by Thanksgiving. We bought half a dozen extra Butternut squash and some pumpkins, but the ones that were left by Christmas time had begun to spoil and we had to throw them out. But this fall I also got a Hubbard squash at Verrill Farm in Concord. The blue-green rind of Hubbards is so thick they keep well for months, even at room temperature. We decided to cook ours yesterday.

A Hubbard squash is big, typically weighing five to twenty pounds. They can be tough to peel. The way I usually open up a Hubbard squash is to whack it with a hatchet. Then I chop it into manageable chunks, which we cook (rind and all) until the orange part is soft and you can scoop it off the rind with a spoon. But when you hit that Hubbard with a hatchet, little chunks of squash rind fly everywhere: in your face, off the walls, down the hallway. It’s a mess.

This year I had a better idea. I held an axe on the ground with the sharp edge pointing up, and Carol dropped the Hubbard onto the axe. The squash split open, but without little pieces flying everywhere. We did that a couple more times to break up the pieces. Then I attacked those smaller pieces with a chopping knife (think “Samurai chef!”) until they were small enough to cook: whack! whack! whack! whack! It was very satisfying.

Now we have several pounds of cooked Hubbard squash in the freezer. Sure, we could have gone to the supermarket and gotten little boxes of the same stuff. It wouldn’t have tasted nearly as good, it would have used gallons of Diesel fuel to truck it here, and I wouldn’t have gotten out all my aggressions (whack!).

Next year, I’m going to get three Hubbards.

Sustainability network

Carol organized a great first meeting of a sustainability network for the South Coast region of Massachusetts. She asked me to facilitate the first meeting — group facilitation is one of two things that I actually know how to do reasonably well, so I said I would. I thought maybe twenty people would show up (I would have been happy with ten), but more than forty people came.

One of the best ways to keep a network networked is through a Web site. Since the one other thing I know how to do reasonably well is make a small Web site, I said I’d whip together a quickie site for the group. Which I just finished, and if you live in the area, you should go check it out: link.