Precision, Truth, Humor, and Conviction :: Thank You, Stanley Hauerwas

It is no secret that among my favorite theologians Stanley Hauerwas stands tall.  My closest friends who have read Hauerwas’s “work” recognize how my theology has been influenced by his thought, his cantankerousness, his wit, and, most importantly, his love for the church.  I am not just a “fan” of Hauerwas.  I have done my best to read his writings carefully and mine from the riches found there those things which ring true and bring them to expression in an actual lived life–my own.  I have learned from Hauerwas that to be Christian we must undergo training that teaches us how to see, and we learn how to see through saying, or liturgy.  We are trained as we participate in the life of the people called “Church.”  There we are taught how to be God’s peace in the world through the power of the Holy Spirit, the telling of the story of Scripture, and the witness of the saints.

This week I have been reading A Cross-Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching.  The book is a collection of sermons written on various occasions.  Some are written for weddings or other special life-happenings, some for worship in local churches, and others for those gathered as part of the Divinity School at Duke University.  This morning this quote gave me pause:

We are well schooled as Christians.  We know that we are not to identify with Judas.  Yet we cannot help but think, thief though he was, Judas was right–the costly perfume should have been sold and the money given to the poor.  If we are honest we cannot resist the conclusion: Judas is appealing.

Moreover, if any conviction characterizes what it means to be Christian in our day, it is surely the presumption that we ought to be on the side of the poor.  No longer sure we know what it means to believe that Jesus is the Son of God, we at least take comfort that to be a Christian requires that we care about those less well off.  Of course that means for us–that is, for the moderately well off–to care for the poor usually extends no farther than our attempt to make the poor like us, that is, moderately well off.

Given the world in which we find ourselves, a world that thinks what Christians believe must make us doubtful allies in the struggle for justice, the Christian concern for the poor can win us some respect.  The cultural despisers of the church at least have to acknowledge that Christians do some good in spite of our reactionary convictions.  So it is good that we burn with a passion for justice.  The only problem with such a passion is that it can put us on Judas’s side.

-Stanley Hauerwas, “The Appeal of Judas”, A Sermon for Duke Divinity School, March 28, 2007 in A Cross-Shattered Church, 95

This strikes me as true.  For those of us that deeply burn for justice, our temptation is to sell out Jesus for a bag of silver.  Preaching Jesus as God’s Son, God’s peace in a violent world, who, in being hung on a cross brings an end to violence, an end to sacrifice, expresses the full measure of God’s grace, and there declares the forgiveness of sin, are peculiar truths in a world like ours.  It is much easier to say that we should be nice people with a concern for those who are monetarily less well off.

Hauerwas continues his sermon by reminding us that Jesus’s response to Judas is something we wish he would have never said, “You will always have the poor with you, but you will not have me.”  Hauerwas further raises excellent questions for the church, saying, “The church has glossed over Jesus’s response to Judas by not asking, ‘What if we did more than care for the poor?’ or, ‘What if we celebrated the poor?’”  He then follows by simply stating, “That such questions are not asked reflects a church that has forgotten that Christianity is determinatively the faith of the poor.”

Hauerwas’s reminder extends in two directions.  First, Hauerwas gazes across the span of church history and acknowledges the church’s buildings, liturgy, music and hymns, is a beauty for the poor.  In addition, “The literature of the church, her theology and philosophy, is distorted if it does not contribute to the common life determined by the worship of a Savior who was poor.”  This last quotation leads directly to Hauewas second point of emphasis–the Messiah Christians worship was poor.  Indeed, “The poor you will always have with you.”

I can only hope that my theology as it has been embodied among my peers and among the students I have mentored has reflected a celebration of those who are poor.  I also hope that I am not among those who are “no longer sure what it means to believe Jesus is the Son of God.”  I hope that my care for those that are poor is an extension of my belief that Jesus is who Scripture and the Church across time has proclaimed him to be.  

As I begin this day, that is my prayer.

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Technology and Community: A Parable

This past Saturday I was able to read Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier’s small work, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness.  What a delightful book.  In this book Vanier discusses his experiences working among the mentally disabled within the L’Arche communities.  Hauerwas outlines a politics of gentleness based on his reflections on the work of Vanier and L’Arche.  I was particularly interested in Hauerwas’ critique of liberal political theory as found in the work of Martha Nussbaum.  This interest began during a course I took at KU centered on John Rawls’ and his classic, A Theory of Justice.  Nussbaum is a philosophical heir of Rawls.  Hauerwas rightly argues that liberal political theory is unable to successfully account for persons who are mentally disabled.  Rawls, in TJ, concedes as much.  Hauerwas sees this as a major problem for liberal theories and argues that the church provides a compelling alternative.  Possessing the virtue of gentleness, the church is able to celebrate with and be blessed by those persons, the mentally disabled, that liberal social orders would “compassionately” disregard or eliminate.

This post is not so much a review of Living Gently, however.  I want to pass along a parable.  Hauerwas, in his chapter, “Finding God in Strange Places,” tells this story:

Once when I was at the University of Notre Dame we had an extraordinary snowstorm.  They get a lot of snow in South Bend because it’s on the wrong side of the lake–every time a wind blows across Lake Michigan, the moisture gets dumped on South Bend.  We were used to snow in the winter.  But this particular time, we got thirty-six inches in twelve hours.  It literally shut the city down.  We couldn’t do anything.  Now, when Notre Dame was first established, it was made up of ethnic Catholics who didn’t have any money.  So the students did most of the work on campus.  But as the students became better off and didn’t want to do any work, the university increasingly hired contractors.  However, this thirty-six-inch snow was so wet and heavy the workers couldn’t move it with their machinery.  So somebody thought it would be a good idea to ask the students to come out of the dorms and clean the sidewalks.  They announced over the student radio station, “Come to the student union and help us clean the sidewalks.”  Only they forgot the students would need shovels.  People started looking around and discovered there were only five snow shovels on all of Notre Dame’s campus.  We had used mechanical snow removers for so long, we couldn’t just go back to the old way.

I remember thinking, When technology replaces community, you ain’t got community to fall back on when you’re in a crisis.

This story can be critiqued.  Snow shovels are a form of technology.  But the question does loom, “What community practices do new forms of technology render impossible (or very difficult)?”

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Myers ::: Organic Community

The Spirit of organic community is grace, not law; “edit-ability,” not accountability…This is how a good author-editor relationship works: The author submits a rough draft.  The editor makes suggestions, even disagrees at times with the author.  The author considers the editor’s suggestions, and will often make adjustments.  The author and editor continue to go back and forth until the project is complete.  The entire process is one of give and take collaboration.When presented with the option, most people prefer an author-editor relationship…We want someone to confide in, pray with, and listen to us.  We do not hope for someone to keep a record and reconcile us to the rules.  We hope our friends will help us to be reconciled to life, to community, to ourselves, and to God.

-Joseph Myers, Organic Community: Creating a Place Where People Naturally Connect, 138-140.

The story Christians tell of God exposes the unwelcome fact that I am a sinner.  For without such a narrative the fact and nature of my sin cannot help but remain hidden in self-deception.  Only a narrative that helps me place myself as a creature of a gracious God can provide the skills to help me locate my sin as fundamentally infidelity and rebellion.  As a creature I have been created for loyalty–loyalty to the truth, to the love that moves the sun and the stars and yet is found on a cross–but I find myself serving any powers but the true one in the hopes of being my own lord…Christian tradition has at various times and places characterized this fundamental sin in quite different ways…I doubt, however, whether there is any one term sufficient to suggest the complex nature of our sin.  This is exactly why we see we need the set of stories we find in Scripture and displayed by the church to recognize our sin.  As narrative-determined creatures we must learn to locate our lives in God’s life if we are to have the means to face, as well as do something about, our infidelity and rebellion against our true creator.

Just to the extent I refuse to be faithful to God’s way, to live as part of God’s life, my life assumes the character of rebellion.  Our sin is not merely an error in overestimating our capacities.  Rather it is the active and willful attempt to overreach our powers.  It is the attempt to live sui generis, to live as if we are or can be the authors of our own stories.  Our sin is, thus, a challenge to God’s authorship and a denial that we are characters in the drama of the kingdom.

-Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics, 31

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