Some Election Year Resolutions

Below is my column from today's edition of the Grand Haven Tribune. It is also online at their website here.

As we approach New Year’s Eve tonight, many people will commit themselves to new resolutions, commitments they have made to change something about their lives for the better.

This New Year brings, I believe, one of the most significant presidential elections our country has ever faced. Furthermore, the elections in the United States legislature in the fall of 2020 will have a significant impact on the presidency of whoever wins in November. So, I’d like to make some suggestions for resolutions in this presidential election year, commitments I hope all of us can make as our country decides which way forward we want to go.

First, pay attention to facts and reject outrageous claims. While a politician’s loose relationship to the truth is hardly a new idea, it has advanced significantly over the past several years. And I’m not just speaking about our current president and his nearly 16,000 false or misleading claims since he took office. In December, Presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren made bold claims about fellow candidate, Mayor Pete Buttiegieg, and his being beholden to billionaires because of a fundraiser held in a wine cave. An opinion piece in The Washington Post clarified the actual nature and content of the event, the piece written by one of the attendees. But still, there is the tendency of candidates on all sides of the political spectrum to distract from policy with wild suggestions and theories which demean their fellow candidates. Don’t play into it.

Second, try to listen more carefully to those with whom you disagree. And I don’t mean listen so that you are ready to respond and prove them wrong. Rather, listen until you understand their perspective and point of view well enough to argue it yourself. The fact that so many people were shocked by the election of Donald Trump underscores how little broad segments of the population actually listened to the concerns and perspective of those who voted Trump into office. Maligning or mocking his supporters now will do nothing to advance your own cause. Seeking to understand—and, dare I say, empathize with—the supporters of your political opponent, however, can help you see the broader picture.

Third, reject attempts to scapegoat. This is, once again, an approach that all sides of the political spectrum have employed. We’ve seen it most heinously these past years in the scapegoating of immigrants when it comes to questions of violent crime and the economy (even though study after study has shown immigrants are far less likely to commit violent crimes and are actually a driving force in making the economy better). Democrats have also used the scapegoat method when they have failed to mount a persuasive campaign. Look to the actual reasons for the problems you identify instead of the easy group or person to blame. (See the first resolution on focusing on facts to help with this).

Fourth, and most importantly, show up and vote. If I was in charge of Facebook or Twitter, I would make it a rule that if you were eligible to vote and sat out the election, you have lost all rights to complain in social media about the state of our country. Data from Statista indicates that for the most recent national election, we rank eleventh behind other countries, with just over 55% of people participating in the 2016 Presidential Election. By contrast, 87.2% participated in the last election in Belgium. Along with this resolution, I would encourage every American to stand up to attempts by any power to make it more difficult for a citizen to vote. Everyone’s voice should be counted. 

As a Christian priest, I’d also like to make a suggestion to those who, like me, follow Jesus as their Lord. Remember what Jesus taught us, everything in the law and the prophets rests on love of God and love of neighbor. Ask yourself constantly during this election year if the way you are behaving, the political opinions you are staking out, and the words which come out of your mouth are advancing love of God and love of neighbor. If not, you may be falling into the trap of self-righteousness—and our Lord had very little patience for the self-righteous.

The American experiment has made much about this country great—but we have also several times throughout history missed our guiding principles and gone down paths which were dark, hate-filled, and contrary to the ideals of liberty and justice for all people. If the American voter will seek to be committed to principles of robust and respectful engagement with the election cycle, maybe our candidates can be encouraged as well. If they will not, then start asking if there is someone else you should support who can actually carry our country forward into a future that is free, fair, and just for every person. 

The difficulty of truly seeing Jesus in Advent

Below is my column in today's edition of the Grand Haven Tribune, also online here.

This past Sunday evening, our church hosted an ecumenical offering of “Advent Lessons & Carols.” I was blessed by the area pastors who joined in reading Scripture, the sense of unity as Christians from a variety of denominations gathered together for song and reflection. And the music, offered by Diane Penning alongside of our own music ministry, was transformative.

One song in particular struck me as deeply meaningful. It is “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” published in 1934 by Robert MacGimsey. Though he was not a black composer, MacGimsey spent much of his early years in Louisiana around the African-American community and he wrote the song in the style of an African-American spiritual. One of the greatest renditions is the one offered by Mahalia Jackson (you can easily find it on YouTube), but Diane’s offering was also tremendously powerful.

If you’ve never heard the song, it centers around the sadness and feeling of penitence that we did not recognize the Christ child when he came. In the third stanza, the singer mourns, “Just seem like we can’t do right, look how we treated you. But please, sir, forgive us, Lord – We didn’t know ’twas you.”

As Diane sang, I was reminded how this truth is one of the fundamental teachings of the Advent season, as Christians prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ in Bethlehem. The religious and powerful in the first century didn’t see that it was God incarnate in that small baby crying in the stable next to the inn. The religious and the powerful didn’t see that it was God incarnate in the itinerant carpenter’s son turned preacher from Nazareth. In fact, the religious and the powerful found the way he challenged accepted beliefs and practices, found the very people he spent time with, so unsettling that they conspired to torture and kill him.

If we remember this truth, every single one of us will hopefully take a moment in this season to pause and reflect. Because missing the coming of Christ in the child Jesus was not just an historical accident. It is something Jesus himself warned that religious people would continue to do. At the last judgment, when the Lord sends the accursed to eternal fire, he is very clear about why, “Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’” (Matthew 25:44–45)

Jesus is saying that when we see someone who is hungry or thirsty, we are seeing Christ himself. When we see someone naked or sick, we are seeing Christ himself. And, even more troubling perhaps for American Christians who like their Jesus respectable, when we see someone in prison, we are seeing Christ himself. And when we see someone who is a stranger – the Greek word being xenos, literally meaning foreigner and the same word from which we get xenophobia – we are seeing Christ himself. What we do for someone in any of these situations is an action done to our Lord Christ.

When we wrestle honestly with this verse, we will have to acknowledge that there are many times Christ has come to us and, like the singer in the song, “We didn’t know it was you.”

Everett Patterson’s picture,
called “Jose y Maria,”
reimagines the Holy Family
in contemporary times.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite Advent images, by comic-book artist Everett Patterson called “Jose y Maria.” In it, the artist reimagines the Holy Family in contemporary times. Joseph has an autoworkers shirt on with the name “José” on it and is trying to find change to make a call as he looks for lodging. A pregnant Mary is wearing a sweatshirt for “Nazareth High School” and sits on a broken horse ride outside the convenience store. The rain pours down upon them and they both look worried and unsure of what is coming next.

They also look tremendously easy to ignore.

Advent is a beautiful time of the year, a time of traditions and a growing sense of joy. It’s a time when people are often moved to give generously of their time and treasure to those who are in need. I’d encourage you, though, during this season to take it one step further. Spend some time in self-examination and ask where you may be blind to the presence of Jesus in this world.

Who is the hungry person whose causes you to avert your eyes? Who is the person struggling with serious health issues while our country fails to create meaningful change in a broken health care system? Who is the person in prison, wishing someone cared and that they didn’t just feel like they had been warehoused by society and forgetting? Who is the immigrant, living in constant fear because the only choice was a dangerous journey to live undocumented in America or certain poverty or even death back home?

Maybe you have trouble seeing Jesus in that liberal priest who writes those columns that annoy you. I know I’m broken and can be mistaken, but can you see that I’m trying?

I know I sometimes have trouble seeing Jesus in people with whom I disagree, but I try to let God’s grace continue to challenge me in that area. Maybe you can, too?

Each person, no matter what, carries inherent dignity and worth with the image of God pressed into their very soul. And each person you meet this Advent season is an opportunity for you to see Jesus in a new way, and find yourself changed in the process.

Support for faith-based responses to mass incarceration

Below is my column in the November 6 edition of the Grand Haven Tribune. You can see it on the Tribune's website online here.

There are 2.2 million people in our country’s nations and jails – a 500 percent increase over the past 40 years. We incarcerate a greater proportion of our own citizens than any other nation in the world. Just behind us are El Salvador, Rwanda and Russia. The amount of people incarcerated in Michigan alone is about the same as the entire prison population in Canada.

The reasons behind the increase in mass incarceration in our country have been well documented. The “War on Drugs” of the 1980s turned substance abuse problems into a criminal issue – meaning we went from a little less than 41,000 people in prison for drug-related offenses in 1980 to nearly 453,000 in 2017. The National Resource Council has also reported that nearly half of the growth in state prison populations was due to an increase in time served for offensives, the results of harsher mandatory sentencing laws and the reduction of releasing people on parole.

These mass incarceration rates have had a devastating effect on minority communities. According to the Sentencing Project, “Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men, and Hispanic men are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated as non-Hispanic white men.”

Michigan Radio is in the midst of a series called “Life on the Inside,” exploring what life is like in prisons in our state. At the beginning of the series, they spoke with historian Heather Ann Thomson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book about the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971, “Blood in the Water.” Thompson noted that our society lacks clarity on the purpose of prisons. One view is that the goal of prisons is to rehabilitate people, to enable them to return to society as law-abiding and contributing citizens. Another view, however, is that the purpose of prisons is punishment, the way in which the state enacts vengeance upon those who have transgressed our laws.

This same confusion of purpose exists in Christianity. A recent poll commissioned by Prison Fellowship found that 88 percent of practicing Christians believed the primary goal of the justice system should be “restoration for all involved: the victim, the community and the person responsible for the crime.” However, in that same poll, 53 percent believed that it is important to make an example out of someone for certain crimes, even if that means punishing them more harshly than the crime deserves.

Jesus told those who follow him that whatever they do for those in prison, they do for Jesus himself. That is why Christians in the 18th century, particularly evangelicals and Quakers, worked so hard to change the prison system that existed in that time. Many Christian leaders in our own time have called for prison reform – not only to deal with the racial disparities in rates of incarceration, but also reform to the methods used in our prisons. The United Nation guidelines say that keeping an individual in solitary confinement for more than 15 days is a form of church. Our country holds more than 80,000 people in solitary confinement, sometimes even for years or decades.

One of the most meaningful organizations I have worked with in our area is Humanity for Prisoners (HfP). Formed in 2001, when Doug Tjapkes sought to help the wrongfully convicted Maurice Carter, the organization has received nearly 8,000 requests for assistance in 2019 alone. HfP focuses on personalized problem-solving services for those who are incarcerated. They have been on the forefront of prison reform issues in our own state, calling out inhumane practices and connecting people who have often suffered horrible abuse with professionals who can help them.

But they do small things, as well. They help those who are incarcerated find and communicate with their families. They help inmates find medical treatment and, at times, appropriate hospice treatment. They do significant advocacy for prisoners with disabilities or other impairments. They help people meet with the parole board. This agency is quite literally the hands and feet of Jesus to those who are incarcerated.

I served on the board of the organization for several years, including as treasurer, and the most meaningful thing I saw over and over again was prisoners contributing their own hard-won funds to the work of HfP. They know the difference this organization makes.

One of the most beautiful things about HfP is that they support people because they are people, because they recognize the dignity and humanity which each person has, no matter how broken their life has become. That’s not like other faith-based organizations, which often only help people of their own faith. For example, in 2006, a federal judge revoked taxpayer funding to the above-noted Prison Fellowship because they offered evangelical participants better housing, food and activities with nothing similar offered to those who were not religious.

It is essential for more Christians to learn about the moral stain that mass incarceration is upon our country. We need more Christians who are willing to stand up and be advocates for those who are incarcerated – seeking a system that is not purely punitive, but one that is restorative, one that helps people rediscover the image of God upon their soul. Learn. Advocate. Speak up.

And support the work of organizations like Humanity for Prisoners. They are doing the work of Jesus day in and day out. And, if you want to change the lives of those who are incarcerated for the better, a good start is helping them rediscover and claim their own humanity.

About the writer: The Rev. Dr. Jared C. Cramer, Tribune community columnist, serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven. Information about his parish can be found at www.sjegh.com.

New Proposal Would Devastate Mental Health in Michigan

Below is my column for the October 2 edition of the Grand Haven Tribune, published on their website online here.

When my wife was working on her graduate degree in counseling, I remember talking with her just a few weeks into her first semester and saying, “You are already way ahead of the small amount of pastoral counseling I learned in seminary.” Now, several years into her private practice, she makes a profound impact upon the lives of numerous people every day—particularly young people. She’s a Rockstar. And I am very aware as a pastor to refer people out to trained mental health professionals when what they need goes beyond what I, as a priest, can offer.

I say this at the outset to be clear that my own household has skin in the game, that we have a vested interest in a proposal currently working its way through the State of Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA). The essence of the proposed change is that it would remove the ability of Licensed Professional Counselors (LPCs) to diagnose clients or use the techniques of psychotherapy. The result of that is that no one visiting an LPC would be able to be reimbursed by their insurance company—as diagnosis is a requirement for insurance reimbursement. Furthermore, by not being able to diagnose or use the techniques of psychotherapy, LPCs would be put in breach of their own ethical guidelines.

According to LARA’s statement on these proposed changes, they believe the issue is that current statutory law does not actually give LPCs the ability to diagnose and use psychotherapy techniques and previous attempts to update the law to do so have failed in the State of Michigan legislature. State House Rep. Aaron Miller (R - District 59) has introduced a bill, HB 4325, which would preserve the scope of the LPC profession and how they operate, solving the statutory issue so that LARA’s concerns with statutory limitations can be resolved. This should be an easy area of bipartisan cooperation.

It is essential that HB 4325 pass and is signed into law as soon as possible. James Blundo, the executive director of the Michigan Mental Health Counselors Association believes that if the scope of practice for LPCs is limited, it would impact 10,000 counselors in our state and leave up to 150,000 clients without access to mental health services. As Blundo noted in an interview with Detroit Fox 2, “We work in hospitals and state government and private practice. All of that would come to a halt. There are going to be a lot of people who will be without a therapist and some of them are in crisis.”

While I appreciate LARA’s concerns about the statutory issues that relate to the scope of practice for LPCs, the way to solve this issue is not to adopt a rule change that explicitly eliminates a profession from the mental health field. No one has claimed that LPCs are not qualified to provide excellent mental health care. No lawsuits—that I know of—have been filed arguing that their practice is outside the bounds of Michigan Statute. For an agency to hold 10,000 counselors and 150,000 clients hostage in order to force the legislature to pass this law is a dangerous move, one that could have profound repercussions upon those struggling with mental health issues. Sarah Lewakowski, executive director of Mosaic Counseling, a nonprofit agency serving Ottawa County, stated, “Approximately one third of the therapists on our panel are LPCs and LLPCs. I cannot imagine the clients that we refer to them not being able to receive the therapy that they desperately need. Many are suicidal. Many are children. The fact that the solution to this issue has come to this is reckless and inhumane. Surely, our political leaders can come up with an alternate resolution that does not displace thousands from the mental health care that they deserve and need.”

A public hearing on this proposed rule change is scheduled for October 4 in Lansing. It will be at 9 am at the G. Mennen Williams Building Auditorium, 525 W. Ottawa Street, Lansing, MI 4889. It is essential that citizens show up at that hearing and demand a delay in the rule change so that legislators can come up with an appropriate statutory remedy. There is no benefit to taking away access to mental health when we already have a shortage of mental healthcare providers in this state.

It is also essential that citizens contact their State Representative and State Senator to urge a swift passage of HB 4325 as well, so that mental health care will never again be held hostage by a regulatory agency in our State.

The Rev. Dr. Jared C. Cramer, Tribune community columnist, serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven. Information about his parish can be found at www.sjegh.com.

Our Cruel Immigration System

Below is my column from the August 15 edition of the Grand Haven Tribune, available on their website online here.

The cruelty was the point.

Last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided seven plants, owned by five companies in six different cities, rounding up nearly 700 workers they believe were undocumented immigrants. What captured the attention of our country, though, were the images of children crying, not knowing where their parents were or what had happened to them.

Anyone who could use a calendar would know that these raids were planned on the first day of school in Mississippi, when kids were going back to class with excitement to meet new friends and learn new things. However, doing this raid on the first day of school to emotionally traumatize families and further discourage illegal immigration was precisely the goal. To wit, the cruelty was the point.

Our President has already been clear that he views practices like family separation as a deterrent to undocumented immigration—the immense emotional pain is precisely the point. The Acting Director of ICE, Matthew Albence, defended his agency’s raids, saying, “The parents or the individuals that are breaking the law are ultimately the ones that are responsible for placing their children in this situation.”

Wrong, Director Albence. Your choice, and the choice of your administration, to enforce our broken immigration laws in this way is what placed children in this situation.

First off, let’s be clear, illegal immigration is a crime—but it’s either a civil violation or a misdemeanor, depending on the circumstances. Even the higher-level crime of misdemeanor is not a serious crime in our country’s statutes. It is on the same level as public intoxication, vandalism, or shoplifting. To respond to a crime like a misdemeanor by taking a child’s parents away is cruel and unusual punishment.

Interestingly enough, hiring an undocumented immigrant is a felony—a much more serious crime. However, to date, no one from any of the companies raided has been charged with a felony. None of them have had their children taken away. In the past year, more than 120,000 people have been prosecuted for illegal entry into our country. How many employers were prosecuted? Eleven. How many were sentenced to prison time? Three.

Let’s be clear. Our entire enforcement of immigration law is predicated upon punishing those who have no power—they are easy targets. Those who benefit from undocumented labor—and often taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of the undocumented—are rarely held to account. And so those who commit misdemeanors are carted off to jail while their children come home crying to empty houses while those who commit felonies not only don’t face any significant penalty but continue to profit from our broken immigration system and the way it enables the oppression of those who are desperate for a better life for their kids and their families.

This is why the United Food and Commercial Workers union which represents workers at plants which were raided has condemned the raids. Rather than fixing our immigration system so that it is easier for those who are looking for jobs to safely and legally come to our country, our current administration has increased the failures (yes, the failures) of the Obama administration when it comes to addressing issues with immigration law. One of the few penalties any of these plants has seen actually was a $3.75 million dollar settlement between Koch Foods and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The issue wasn’t the hiring of undocumented workers, but was charges of sexual harassment, racial and national origin discrimination, sexual comments and touching of Hispanic workers, and retaliation against Hispanic workers who spoke up.

Our current immigration system is cruelly and brutally hurting our fellow human beings, people who—just like many of us—are trying to build a better life. People who have fled violence and poverty in the hope of their kids growing up hungry and not winding up dead in the street—choices I hope no person ever has to make. Increasing the failed deportation policies of the Obama administration, and making it even worse through practices of family separation, is not the answer to this moral stain upon our country.

The answer is to finally have an entirely reworked immigration system where people can safely and legally come to our country and do what immigrants have always done—make America a better place to life. And the answer is to hold to account those companies, governmental agencies, and other societal powers which continue to oppress and dehumanize immigrants.

The Rev. Dr. Jared C. Cramer, Tribune community columnist, serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven. Information about his parish can be found at www.sjegh.com.

What Makes America Great

Below is my column for the July 3 issue of the Grand Haven Tribune, available at their website online here. 

Tomorrow, people across our country will gather to celebrate Independence Day. Or, as my step-father who lives in England calls it, Treason Day.

One must have some bit of a sense of humor about these things, when maintaining family connections across the pond.

A meaningful activity on this holiday is to reflect upon the Declaration of Independence that was adopted by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. This declaration was, of course, our declaration of war with the Kingdom of Great Britain, but it was also much more than that. It was our declaration of our sense of identity as a new nation, the values which drew us together and impelled us to pursue the path to freedom for those thirteen original states.

The document is not perfect, of course. In many ways, that is because the framers did not believe in the true extent of their words. The most obvious example is the beloved clause near the beginning, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It was not until another 87 years and a civil war that resulted in 620,000 dead American soldiers—nearly 2% of the total population of the country at the time—that most African-Americans gained the rights that were inalienably theirs. It took another 100 years after that, years of violence and protest and oppression, before those rights were fully recognized and enforced. And even now, as we have seen the resurgence of white supremacy and the continued systematic oppression of African-American people, you cannot say that a black person has the same access to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness that a white person does.

Similarly, those first words did not apply to women for the majority of the life of our country. It wasn’t until the passage of the 19th Amendment to the constitution in 1920 that women were given the right to vote. Many people assume that is when women were given the equal rights enshrined in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence—but that is not the case. The Equal Pay Act, aimed at ending wage disparity based on sex, was not passed until 1963—and the ideals of that law are still to be realized in our society. It wasn’t until 1972 that the first version of Title IX passed, guaranteeing equal access to education. It wasn’t until 1991 that our Title VII protections were changed to enable women to sue and collect compensatory and punitive damages for sexual harassment. I mean, it wasn’t until 2010 that employers were required to give women time to breastfeed an infant. The law that changed that? The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

We clearly have been on a long journey when it comes to women having equal rights in our country. And we are still not there.

Indeed, our country has still been unable to successfully pass the Equal Rights Amendment, first drafted in 1921 and approved by the legislature in 1972—sent on to the states for ratification. As advocates argue, this proposed amendment is “designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex; it seeks to end the legal distinctions between men and women in terms of divorce, property, employment, and other matters.” However, the deadline for ratification passed in 1979 and as recently as this very year, 2019, legislators have been unable to pass a bill that remove the ratification deadline and enable the amendment to move forward to full ratification and inclusion in the Bill of Rights. That’s correct—we are nearly one hundred years after the drafting of this amendment and we still have been unable, as a country, to state unequivocally in the Bill of Rights of our Constitution that all American citizens, regardless of sex, should have equal legal rights.

Let’s not forget as well that gay and lesbian Americans did not have a right to the pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness through being able to marry the person they loved until June 26, 2015. And even that expanded understanding of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence—and understanding which has the support of two-thirds of all Americans—continues to be under fire in some quarters.

And right now an entire system of immigration enforcement is at work that is predicated upon the concept that those who unlawfully enter are country have absolutely no rights, a system which is creating tremendous human rights abuses that are a stain upon our nation.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that tomorrow is a day worth celebrating. It is a day to celebrate what truly makes America a great nation. But what makes America great is not hearkening to the success of the Declaration of Independence. It’s not looking back to any day in the past when our country was right.

What makes America great, what makes the Declaration of Independence great, is the persistence of the American people in insisting that we live up to the dream imagined in that stunning piece of prose. What makes us great are the people who fought tirelessly to expand freedom to more people, to get us closer to a place where our society—and our laws—insist that every single human being—no matter your race or language, no matter your sex or gender, no matter who you love, no matter your citizenship status—does indeed have inalienable rights, the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The day we get back to work on that goal… that will be the day our country gets back on the path to American greatness.

The Rev. Dr. Jared C. Cramer, Tribune community columnist, serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven. Information about his parish can be found at www.sjegh.com.

The Resistance of the Holy City

Given the increasingly disturbing news about what our sisters and brothers in Latin America are facing at our borders right now, I have come back to and am reposting the text of my sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, just a few weeks ago. The video of the sermon is also available online.

A Reading from the Revelation to John (21:10, 22-22:5) 

In the spirit the angel carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day-- and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life. Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

In moments of grief or pain, there are some scriptural texts that always seem to come to mind. Texts from the Bible, for example, that you hear most often at funerals. This is why people love the 23rd Psalm with its image of a shepherd who leads us even when we are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Or Isaiah 25, where we hear the promise that, in the end, God will prepare a feast for all people and destroy death forever, wiping the tears from all faces. In John's Gospel, there is the story of Jesus telling a grieving Martha who is struggling with the death of her brother Lazarus that he—Jesus—is the resurrection and the life. And in the Revelation to John, we see promises of our eternal home where we are reunited with those who have gone before, where the God who sometimes seems distant or hard-to-find dwells right here in the midst of us. These are powerful and comforting texts.

And though it is true that the Revelation to John, with its hopeful vision of the end of our existence, is indeed a comforting text when you are struggling with the painful reality of death, the truth is that this book was written to be a very different sort of comfort in the late first century. For a long time, people thought this book was written to comfort Christians who were suffering under the despotic reign of Emperor Domitian. In this line of thinking, the book of Revelation was written to give hope to Christians who were being imprisoned and killed because of their beliefs. It envisioned a picture of an empire-wide persecution of the Christian faith.

But modern scholarship would actually urge us to tone down that understanding of the first century, this idea of widespread persecution of Christians at that time. Because, truth be told, there simply is not any strong evidence of any empire-wide persecution which singled out Christians for imprisonment in the late first century. Don't get me wrong, there were indeed martyrs in this time and place. There was persecution. There were Christians who died because of their belief in Jesus Christ. But these were exceptions in the imperial life. They were not the norm. Persecution, when it occurred, was sporadic and limited to specific localities under Domitian’s reign.

Modern scholars, instead, believe that this book was written in the context of a significant conflict among Christians themselves in Asia minor. The key question in the book of Revelation is whether you participate and remain complicit in the Empire of Rome, symbolized by Babylon in Revelation, or whether you resist imperial power. Because there were Christians who did not view the Empire as a dangerous force, one that advanced the aims of darkness and the devil. For these Christians it didn't matter if you sacrificed incense to the image of the Emperor or called him Lord, you could do all of that still believe that Jesus was the supreme Lord.

The book of Revelation was written as a polemic against that view, insisting throughout that you cannot call Jesus and Caesar Lord at the same time. There can be only one Lord. Those Christians who thought that you could compromise with the Empire are criticized in Revelation for being lukewarm in their faith, for not fully committed to the new reality which has been brought about by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And it may be easy for us in the 21st century to look back 2,000 years at all of this and find it somewhat interesting, but probably foreign to our existence. But that is, I think, a misunderstanding a well. Because I think Revelation raises some very interesting questions for Christians today, particularly those of us who live in the United States. Because there are significant arguments to be made that the power of United States in our own time far surpasses whatever power Rome had at the height of its imperial rule. We don't talk about the American Empire, generally, but if you look at the amount of territory which is under the control of our country, if you consider how many armed forces we have stationed in continents and countries all over the world, and if you think how other countries respond to what our country does or doesn't do… (when the United States sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, right?) If you think of all of this, it becomes clear pretty quickly that the United States is a country that wields significant power in this world, almost an imperial level of power, perhaps.

And so I think that when we read the book of Revelation we must ask ourselves some very hard questions about our allegiances, our citizenship, and our patriotism. We must ask ourselves whether our citizenship and patriotism has ever crossed a line somewhere or sometime, whether our love for our country has ever risen above our love for the risen Christ—and the Body of Christ for whom he died

Today’s reading from the 21st chapter of Revelation helps frame this question in a very helpful way, I think. Because one of the most significant realities of the Roman Empire was that the whole world existed in two separate groups. There were Roman citizens who were treated a very specific way and there was everyone else. Paul even took advantage of this when he was arrested and brought before the courts, saying, “Hey, I’m a Roman citizen. You can’t do this to me!” By the late first century, the early Christian church, though, was a tremendously mixed community. The church began as a sect within Judaism but quickly grew to include Gentiles. The church included those who were rich and those who were poor, those who were slave and those who were free, and people from many nations and ethnicities and citizenships. And in the Christian church all of those people were placed on equal footing around the Eucharistic table.

The problem with getting very comfortable with the Empire in the late first century was that not everyone could do that. Members of the church who were Roman citizens could indeed enjoy their much greater freedom, but they could only do that while also acknowledging that other people—other people right in their church—did not have the freedom they had. And that is why the author of Revelation urges resistance instead of complicity, insisting that the power of the Empire is always a diabolical power precisely because of the way that the Empire (no matter the era in which it exists) seeks to carve up and divide humanity so that the power of the Empire may grow, so that the wealth of the State may increase. And that power is absolutely contrary to the power of love which raised Jesus from the dead, the power that seeks to reconcile a divided humanity.

And so, when John of Patmos sees the New Jerusalem in today’s epistle reading, he says, “The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.” In saying this, what he is doing is painting a picture which is a stark contrast to the picture of Rome—the other city where, supposedly, the other nations will come, but only in order to be subservient to the power of the State.

No, the power of the New Jerusalem is very different, and the nations don’t come to be slaves, they come to be set free. The only thing kept out of this city, according to John, is that which refuses to be made clean by the blood of the slain Lamb and to those who practice abomination—which defined in Revelation as those were willing to sacrifice much at the altar of the state, no matter the cost to their fellow Christians. That is the abomination.

And you and I, we live in a world which is also divided into two groups, those are American citizens and to those who are not. And I think we are meant to feel uncomfortable when we read this text. We should feel uncomfortable at the reality that some of our sisters and brothers in Christ have markedly different freedoms than we have—and not only our sisters and brothers in other countries of the world, but our sisters and brothers right here in the United States who don’t have all the same benefits we have because they are not citizens of the State.

I talked a couple weeks ago when I was preaching on Revelation about how sometimes we are willing to sacrifice relationships with friends and fellow Christians at the altar of our preferred political party, that we will angrily insist that our party is right—right no matter what—even if it burns a friendship to the ground, and how that is a form of idolatry to the State.

But there are all kinds of idolatry out there, all kinds of ways of sacrificing to the State at the expense of your fellow Christian. And if we truly believe that the vision of the end of human existence described in Revelation 21 is a city that quite literally leaves its doors open all the time, that in the end of human existence there are no checkpoints, but everyone is welcome to come in, everyone is treated as a person, then we have to ask whether or not those of us who are citizens are complicit in another sacrifice, one that is willing two let the State place the personhood and humanity of our fellow Christians to the side, one that that refuses to allow the gates to be open but insists they must be closed, one that that sends people back to countries filled with poverty and violence and a death, all in the name of keeping us supposedly more secure and wealthy.

Because, God forbid we lose our jobs or our comfort.

There are all kinds of sacrifices the State invites us to make every single day to the power of our empire. And there is cost which is mammoth.

Because, believe it or not, the Revelation to John was written not to comfort people like you and me. The Revelation to John was written to comfort people who don't have the right citizenship, people who have been told they do not have the same rights for reasons that were very legitimate and legal in Rome. The Revelation to John was written, instead, to provoke those who do have power, to provoke those who are comfortable, to say that if you are comfortable you are complicit. To provoke people like you and me, and to force us to ask, “At what cost does our desire power and comfort come?” Revelation invites us to ask which citizenship matters most to us, citizenship in this country or citizenship in the new Jerusalem that Jesus Christ is trying to bring about… the new Jerusalem that the State killed Jesus for trying to bring about.

And Revelation urges us to resist the Empire anytime the Empire seeks to oppress or exclude any person, particularly people who stand at the closed gates of our own country, people who have been washed in the blood of the Lamb, people who are wondering why… wondering why their sisters and brothers who live on the other side of those gates have not spoken up and demanded change. Amen.

D-Day reflections, both inspired and unsettled

Below is my column in today's edition of the Grand Haven Tribune.

Tomorrow, June 6, is the 75th anniversary of D-Day — the largest seaborne invasion in history when Allied forces landed on the beach of Normandy during World War II. Together with British and Canadian troops, the invasion covered 50 miles of the French shoreline.

This operation was the beginning of the liberation of France from the control of the Nazi regime, and is generally seen when the tide of the war turned toward the eventual Allied victory on the Western Front.

The leaders of the Allied forces knew that the invasion would come at tremendous cost of human life. As the American troops prepared, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower told them, “The eyes of the world are upon you. You will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny.”

By the end of the day, 2,501 American soldiers had been killed in action. It is estimated that 4,414 in total died that day.

As the sun went down on June 6, it was not clear that victory was coming. The Allied forces had not achieved any of their primary goals. The beach landings had been tremendously deadly, with ramps dropping men into chest-deep water in places, resulting in their drowning when the weight of their equipment carried them down. Many of those who did make it off the ramps were quickly killed by German forces. It wasn’t until June 12 that the five beachheads were finally connected, and the Allies secured the front.

I remember watching accounts of this invasion in the film “Saving Private Ryan,” when I was a student at Grand Haven High School. It was the first time I had seen a war movie that truly sought to capture the carnage and horror of battle. Later, I watched the 2001 miniseries “Band of Brothers,” and was likewise struck by the massive loss of life on that day, the tremendous courage of young men climbing into cold water and heading in the direction of machine-gun fire, knowing their sacrifice was essential to victory over the Nazi regime.

Like many in my generation who grew up in an age after the draft, in a time where there was no massive conflict on the scale of the world wars which called so many to battle, I didn’t serve in the armed forces. My focus in my younger years was on studying to serve in ministry in the church. But I’ve always felt a twinge of guilt over the sense that I did not do my part like some of my friends and my peers who serve.

As I studied theology and Scripture throughout undergraduate and graduate school, my own views on war shifted and developed. In my upbringing, war was a necessary part of our world — something essential to defend the innocent against the violent and aggressor nations. I remember arguing with some theology professors when our country was preparing for the second Iraq war in 2003. They articulated the perspective of Christian non-violence, but I could not understand how that view squared with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Throughout the prophetic literature, those who stand idly by while the innocent are oppressed and killed are condemned for a lack of faithfulness. How could we, as a country, stand by while atrocities were happening in Iraq?

Of course, as the conflict in Iraq persisted into one of the longest-running conflicts in our nation’s history, I began to question my initial views. Particularly as civilian deaths continued to rise, my Christianity begin poking at my conscience, wondering if we truly were protecting the innocent — or complicit in killing them. As of right now, it is estimated by the Iraq Body Count Project that nearly 200,000 civilians have died in that war — but that organization’s methodology is often criticized by scholars for likely underestimating.

For a time, I moved to the viewpoint of Christian non-violence, particularly as I was convinced by the arguments of scholars like John Howard Yoder, Will Willimon and Stanley Hauwerwas. But I never fully was convinced of this position because it seemed only tenable when Christianity is a small minority within the State. In my first years of priestly ministry, I served in the Washington, D.C., area at Historic Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia. I became friends with parishioners who served in the Pentagon. My overly academic views on war and violence began to clash with my experience of faithful Christians doing their best to protect their country.

When I’m honest, I’m not sure where I stand on all these questions now. However, as I look back on the carnage of D-Day, I cannot help but be inspired by these young men, many of whom were certainly motivated by Jesus’ words in John 15:13, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” I do believe that our world would be a darker and scarier place were the advance of fascism through the Axis powers not stopped — and I doubt anything other than violent resistance could have stopped that kind of power.

But I remain unsettled. I remain unsettled because, though there will be several commemorations and memorials of this 75th anniversary tomorrow, there remains massively insufficient passion when it comes to the question of caring for veterans in our country. The most recent “point in time” count found there were nearly 40,000 veterans who are homeless. Nearly one-third of all veterans who served since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have at least one service-connected disability. Our care for those who have served is woefully inadequate — and it is a problem that has plagued our country since the Revolution.

And I am unsettled because it seems those in power are willing to send our brave young women and men to die for causes that are questionable —even from the perspective of a Christian just war theorist. There is a carelessness to civilian casualties that should feel obscene to any human — let alone any Christian. And this is not a partisan issue — both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have an ugly track record with the use of military force. In recent times, the attacks upon brave LGBT Americans who put their lives on the line to defend our country have been particularly heinous.

Mostly, though, I am unsettled because 75 years after D-Day, fascist ideologies are once again on the rise throughout the world and right in our own country. Racial violence from white supremacists has seen a disturbing increase. Alarmingly large percentages of people seem to be adopting clearly neo-fascist views on questions like ultra-nationalism, xenophobia and opposition to immigration. An insistence upon supporting the State — no matter what — is increasingly the marker for those in power.

So, I honor those brave men who climbed onto the beaches of Normandy for the cause of freedom, hoping their certain sacrifices could overcome the evil that threatened to envelop Europe and the world. But I think we must also be alert — because there are always forces willing to use the story of veterans to advance interests that are contrary to the foundations of our county. And we must be willing, like those soldiers 75 years ago, to stand up and resist the totalitarian and fascist tendencies in our own world right now, even in our own country.

New anti-abortion laws are contrary to the sanctity of life

Below is my column in today's issue of the Grand Haven Tribune.

Last week, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law a near-total ban on abortion. Under Alabama’s new law, abortion will be a felony punishable by life or 10-99 years in prison. The only exceptions in the law are if the life of the woman is at stake or if there were circumstances that would already result in the death of the unborn child. There are no exceptions for sexual assault or incest.

The resistance to these exceptions rested upon the arguments of the bill’s proponents that the personhood of the unborn child is paramount.

Not to be left behind, the GOP-led Legislature of our own state has passed legislation that criminalizes an abortion procedure performed in the second trimester called dilation and evacuation. Democrats fought against this legislation because this procedure is often the safest option for women who are faced with this tremendously difficult situation. This legislation also provides no exceptions for rape or incest. Our own governor will likely veto the bill (if she hasn’t already by the time this column is published).

What we are seeing in these legislations is the increasing success of the so-called Right to Life movement, a movement which claims to be predicated upon Christian teaching about the sanctity of life. However, this legislation — and much of the Right to Life movement — rests upon modern political and philosophical arguments and not upon the actual biblical witness.

I want to be clear; abortion is a massively tragic choice that women face. My own denomination, The Episcopal Church, spoke clearly in a 1994 resolution that “all human life is sacred from its inception until death.” The resolution continued with two important points. First, it was clear that abortion should only be used in extreme situations and certainly not as a means of birth control. At the same time, the resolution was clear that legislation will not address the root cause of abortions. Our church expressed “its unequivocal opposition to any legislative, executive or judicial action on the part of local, state or national governments that abridges the right of a woman to reach an informed decision about the termination of pregnancy or that would limit the access of a woman to safe means of acting on her decision.”

This position rests upon an acknowledgement that the biblical witness on the question of abortion acknowledges the nuance of personhood and the sanctity of life. Those who claim that a fetus is the equivalent to a human being from a moral and ethical standpoint cannot make that claim based upon Scripture. Exodus 21:22–25 is clear that if violence causes a miscarriage, the penalty is different than if you murder someone. Numbers 5:11–31 describes a ritual a woman must go through if she is accused of adultery, where the priest gives her something called “the water of bitterness.” If she has indeed committed adultery, the water will “make your uterus drop, your womb discharge.”

Both of these texts absolutely reflect the patriarchy of the time (in the Exodus text, the husband determines the punishment for the loss of the fetus, and there is not any corresponding violent ritual a for a man accused of adultery). Thankfully, given the fulfillment of the law through Jesus Christ, we are no longer bound by these commandments. Instead, Jesus told us that love of God and love of neighbor is the principle upon which all laws must rest.

So, the question for the Christian is what does love of God and love of neighbor require? What does a true respect for the sanctity of life require?

First, it requires respecting the sanctity and personhood of the life of a woman. That means that when a woman is faced with tragic and difficult circumstances, the church should support her and help her make her own informed decision about what is best. And then, after she makes that decision, the church should walk alongside of her.

The church should also advocate vigorously for maternal health care and for social programs that help women and small children. The continued GOP attempts to dismantle programs that help women in poverty who make the brave choice to bear children — alongside the legislation on abortion currently being passed — is an evil hypocrisy.

Though abortion rates have declined for years, research by the Guttmacher Institute indicates that nearly one-in-four women will have an abortion by the age of 45. That means it is likely that there are many women sitting in the pews of churches right here in Grand Haven who have been told over and over again that they are murderers. This is not only contrary to scripture — which nowhere refers to abortion as murder — but it is a cruel and evil message to send to women who are hurting. It does not respect their sanctity.

The second thing a Christian should do is advocate for policies that reduce the number of abortions in society. We must be clear, countries with the most restrictive laws on abortion also have the highest rates of abortion. A 2016 analysis found in the Lancet found that the average abortion rate in countries where abortion is illegal is 3.7 percent — but it is 3.4 percent in countries where abortion is legal. Furthermore, when there are highly restrictive abortion laws, women are also far more likely to have serious health problems and die as a result of an abortion.

However, comprehensive sex education reduces teen pregnancy rates (and the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases) far more than religiously based abstinence-only education. Providing free birth control also results in far fewer abortions. A Contraceptive C.H.O.I.C.E. project in St. Louis gave women free contraceptive counseling and the contraception of their choice and the average annual abortion rate was 0.97 percent — compared with the 4.2 percent rate of sexually active teens. This reality also makes GOP and conservative Christian attempts to limit access to contraception massively hypocritical.

It is time for Christians to refuse to support anti-abortion legislation that results in danger to women. It is time for Christians to insist that our faith requires us to demand instead better access to health care for all women, stronger social programs for those who struggle. And it is time for Christians to repent of language that has cruelly and painfully wounded the hearts of women who have been faced with this tragic reality. A true value of the sanctity of all life — including the lives of women — demands no less.

The Rev. Dr. Jared C. Cramer, Tribune community columnist, serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven. Information about his parish can be found at www.sjegh.com. 

Looking for light in the dark places of the Church

My column in today's issue of the Grand Haven Tribune. 

These are dark days for American Christianity.

The divisions in our country that are painfully evident are also manifest in our congregations. Of course, churches have always found themselves divided among more conservative and more progressive approaches. But the divide seems to be so much deeper these days. In conversations with my colleagues, I know that we have all found it difficult at times to hold together communities where the political and social forces at our time seem to be pulling people further and further apart.

Beyond the struggle within the church, though, it is also outside. With larger and larger segments of the American population no longer attending church, and belief in God decreasing, the increasing polarization of our country has increasingly impacted the way people view church. As those without faith watch American Christians continue to support policies that are anti-LGBT and anti-immigrant, policies that hurt the poor that Jesus told us to care for, their distaste for Christianity only seems to increase.

I try to spend time letting non-Christians know that not all Christians agree on these questions. Though the religious right sought to craft a narrative of what Christian politics looks like, Christians are actually much more diverse than the media would let you know. Indeed, the most recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that white evangelicals are the only major religious group where a majority support President Trump. (Interestingly, Trump has the highest poll ratings among evangelicals who don’t actually go to church.)

For many Christians, these next few weeks mark some of the holiest of the year. As Lent draws to a close, Holy Week will begin on Palm Sunday, April 14. During this week, Christians will walk with Jesus to Jerusalem. We will remember his last supper with his disciples on Holy Thursday. We will commemorate his death on Good Friday. We will wait in prayer on Holy Saturday until we celebrate his glorious resurrection on Easter Sunday.

As we journey through these days, it’s probably worth remembering that Jesus was not killed by non-religious people, by those who didn’t believe in God. Rather, Jesus was killed by the drawing together of the fears of the religious with the anxieties of the State. Jesus was killed because his massively inappropriate love offended the religious.

Jesus had a distasteful tendency to eat with tax collectors and prostitutes. He castigated moralists who had strict views of purity laws, views that led them to be cruel to those who ran afoul of their beliefs. And while he did not come to overthrow the Roman government — much to the dismay of some of his followers — the government took the fears of the religious seriously enough to put him to death.

And yet, as we walk through this story during the coming Holy Week, we will also be greeted anew with a love that overcomes death and the grave. At the empty tomb, we will discover the emptiness of our own narrow understandings of what God can and cannot do. We will see love embrace those who sought to kill God’s own son. We will see love embrace even us, in our fear and anger, inviting us to relax our grip on our own perspectives and instead to let ourselves be loved. And letting ourselves be loved, we will perhaps learn anew what love actually requires.

Jesus said the world would know the people who follow him by their love. I find it unsurprising — and heartbreaking — that a certain picture of Christianity, one that is devoid of love and only knows how to demand its own way, continues to play across the media. I wish religious leaders didn’t bless some of the morally abject policies of the current administration — putting migrant children in cages, slashing assistance to the poor, enabling rampant corruption, to name a few. Because that’s not the Christianity I know. That’s not the Jesus I know.

If you’re sitting there, watching this all play out in the news and on social media, and saying this is precisely why you don’t want to bother with church or organized religion, I want you to know that there are a lot of Christians who don’t believe this is what Jesus calls us to. Jesus calls us to live lives of profound sacrificial love.

And I want you to know during this Holy Week, I’m trying to learn that love better, too. I’m trying to learn from the Good Teacher how to love even those I might imagine as my enemies, even if red hats and old southern flags make me flinch.

Because all of us, including this liberal priest, need to learn how to love better. Sure, we need to stand up for what God’s love and justice demands, but we need to do that like Jesus, not like the mob that clamored for his death.

These are pretty dark days for Christianity, but the light of resurrection glimmers on the horizon. The invitation to love — and live — anew is extended to every Christian. We can change the story told about the church. We just have to be willing to repent.

The Rev. Dr. Jared C. Cramer, Tribune community columnist, serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven. Information about his parish, including their Holy Week services, can be found at www.sjegh.com.

Facing God Together – Thoughts on Orientation in Liturgical Prayer

Before I begin, I need to make something very clear. Because I'm going to say some things about the priest celebrating ad orientem (facing east or, more accurately, facing the same direction of the people), but I don't want people to misunderstand how my views on this question impact my own approach as a priest in the parish. 

The church where I am currently honored to serve as rector is a church where the altar is pulled away from the wall. The custom in this congregation for quite some time is for the priest to face the people during the Great Thanksgiving. That is, the priest stands behind the altar facing the people as all pray together for Christ to become present with us once more through the Blessed Sacrament.

I think it is important to be clear that I find it tremendously unlikely that at any point in my priesthood, including in my current cure, I would ever “fight the battle” to put the altar back against the wall. Indeed, when altars were pulled out from the wall it was all too often done in a violent act, without a deep engagement with the people of God. It was the will of the priest, trained in the ideals of the Liturgical Movement, which reigned supreme. People were told that this was the way things should be. 

Thankfully, our General Convention has apologized for the way in which we handled putting the ideals of the Liturgical Movement into practice in the Episcopal Church, specifically in the way that authorizing the 1979 Book of Common Prayer created some wounds among those who had loved the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. 

I don’t believe battles should be fought in churches over questions like altars and fonts (at least, if battles can be avoided). These should be great places of uniting with one another—not contests of wills. 

(As an aside, I have often found it fascinating that clergy fought for pulling altars away from walls—something that  is required nowhere in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer—and  yet, by and large, did not fight equally hard for the creation of full immersion baptismal fonts—something that is explicitly the preference of the prayer book. I think it says something about what priests value that they fought over where they stood during Holy Eucharist but did not fight over the how to celebrate the sacrament of initiation for all Christians… but I digress.)

If I ever served in a church that did decide to change the location of the altar or the custom of which direction the priest faced during the celebration of Holy Eucharist, it would be a change that the community made together after prayer, study, and conversation. 

Because who I am as a priest rests not only upon the broader church which ordained me into this but upon the people of God who I am called to serve in my current cure. Any authority I have derives from their gracious gift of choosing me to be their presider. 

People like to think of the mid-to-late 20th century, particularly the 60s and 70s, as the great decades when our church threw off the bonds of clericalism and that finally priest and people were placed on the same level. With a decade of priestly ministry under my belt, one-third of the way through my career, I am increasingly doubtful that this actually happened.

Sure, priests stopped being called father—because it was only father then—and instead chose to be called by their first name. Altars were pulled away from the wall and the laity were invited to participate fully in so many aspects of Holy Eucharist. But these things did not end clericalism, they just sent it into more subtle and unseen places.

After all, I have known priests who bristle at being called father or mother and yet still exercise their ministry in profoundly clerical ways (like, for example, insisting people call them by their first name when a parishioner or colleague might have a piety that prefers titles). There are several ways in which priests who don’t wear clericals and insist on their first name can still allow their own opinions and preferences to run roughshod over the gathered community. There are plenty of priests who don’t wear clericals and eschew titles but who also feel very confident placing their own personal beliefs ahead the decisions of the broader church when it comes to issues like communion without baptism. 

So, let’s be clear. Clericalism will likely always be one of the besetting sins of the Christian church. Where you place the altar and where the priest stands and who the priest faces… None of this will actually fix clericalism. Clericalism is best addressed through good formation, modeling of healthy ministry by bishops and those in authority, and priests being serious about saying their prayers and becoming more like Jesus.

And yet, I do increasingly have a desire to say a few words about where we place the altar, where the priest stands, and the direction the priest faces. I do want to say a few words about the ancient tradition of celebrating Holy Eucharist with the priest facing the same direction as the gathered community, all gathered together in front of the altar of God.

One of the reasons I want to say a few words about this because of a change in my own parish that happened last year. Through generous gift from a family in the church (and then several other families were inspired likewise to contribute‚, we renovated what had been an old narthex and turned it into a small chapel for the saying of the Daily Office and the celebrating of weekday Eucharist. We call it the All Souls’ Chapel because of the columbarium which now rests within the walls and of the commitment that we have in that space to pray for all the faithful departed.

Because it is a very small space, the altar stands against the wall. It is a beautiful small granite altar, one that was originally in the chapel of the cathedral of our diocese, before we sold the cathedral to a mega church. It had spent some time in the garage of a former member of the cathedral and then made its way to our church because of a gift from our parish administrator that was matched by a generous gift from our previous bishop. 

When I say the words of the Great Thanksgiving at our weekday celebrations of Holy Eucharist, I stand in front of the altar with the people only a few feet behind me, all standing in front of the single row of chairs.

The first time I celebrated Eucharist in this new space, I got a little verklempt. I was overcome with this sense of the people of God standing behind me, supporting me as I sought to preside faithfully over this holy prayer. When they said the words that are assigned to them in the Great Thanksgiving, it was as though I could feel those words pushing against my back, holding me up, enabling me to stand. I felt more one with them than I have ever felt celebrating facing them.

I often feel like so many of the debates over the question of which direction the priest faces during Holy Communion entirely miss the point. 

In the early church, the question was not whether or not the priest faced to the people or the people faced the priest. In the early church, what was essential was that you prayed facing east, looking expectantly for Christ to come again. In the early church, all those gathered—priest and people—faced the same direction. (In what follows, I’m going to try to summarize some of the masterful work of Uwe Michael Lang—you can read his essay on this question online here, or better yet, buy the book.)

The practice of facing east was based upon the ancient custom of Jews in the diaspora who would always face Jerusalem when they prayed. For most Jews in the diaspora, Jerusalem was to their east and so that is the direction they would face. The Hebrew word for east is mizrah, and ancient synagogues in Europe and the Mediterranean were built with an orientation to mizrah, to east. The mizrachrefers to the wall of the synagogue that faces east, the place where the rabbi nad other lieaders would sit. Even when the temple was destroyed and the glory of God, the shekinahhad departed from the Holy of Holies, Jews continued to turn toward Jerusalem, hoping for the Messiah who would come and gather up God’s people.

And so early Christians faced east, first because it was for many of them the direction toward Jerusalem, but then also because of their belief that Christ would come again in the east, the direction of the rising son. Early Christians faced east when they prayed in longing expectation for Christ’s return believing with all your heart that Jesus did not leave us alone and that he would come upon the clouds finally to make this world right through God's love. And in Holy Eucharist, facing east, Christ then would indeed come to us again in simple bread and wine, reassuring us that Christ was present with us in this holy sacrament even while we yearn for his return at the end of time.

As Louis Bouyer notes in Liturgy and Architecture, the oldest Syrian churches from the fourth century were built with the apse facing east, with the altar paced either directly in front of the east wall or slightly forward from it. There was a bema, a raised platform in the middle that was adapted from synagogue worship and from which the readings would be done and the prayers offered. Then, the bishop and the clergy would move eastward to the altar for the liturgy of Eucharist, with the people and celebrant all facing east, all facing the altar together. 

The debate about facing east during prayers in the early church usually comes from early Roman basilicas, where the entrance was oriented toward the east and the altar was in the west (which means that in those churches, for the priest to face east also meant the priest faced the people, who were then facing west). Bouyer suggested that in those churches all would instead face the open doors at the east, with the rising sun coming in, during the Eucharistic prayer. Others doubt this, because it seems unlikely that the people would turn their backs to the altar. In Liturgie und Kirchenbau, Klaus Gamber suggested that the people stood on either side of the altar and so when they faced east with the priest, the altar would have been to their side. Others find this hypothesis likewise unlikely. In the end, we simply do not know for sure and there are good arguments on all sides (no pun intended!).

During the first millennium of Christianity, before the divisions between east and west, all Christians faced east together during prayer. It was not until modern times that the idea arose, first in Roman churches, that the priest and the people should instead face each other. Still, to this day, the vast majority of eastern churches have the priest and people face the same direction during the Eucharistic prayer. The only exceptions are those churches that have been influenced by the Roman rite and culture. 

And though the Liturgical Movement and the Second Vatican Council which came out of that movement believed that having the priest and people face each other during the Eucharistic prayer, that assumption is now increasingly called into question by scholars in the Roman tradition and outside the Roman tradition. It is also important to note that the Second Vatican Council actually did not require celebration facing the people, as is commonly assumed. Our own 1979 prayer book, which is considered by many to be one of the pinnacles of the Liturgical Movement assumes a celebration that is done with the priest facing the altar—and not necessarily the people—for the Great Thanksgiving (see the rubric on page 361 after the sursum corda, which says "Then, facing the Holy Table, the Celebrant proceeds.")

Lang, who I cited earlier, has argued strenuously that the tradition of all facing the same direction is one that should not have been discarded so quickly. Rather, it should be recovered in contemporary liturgy. He quotes Christoph Schönborn who talks about how signs and gestures and movement are all essential for "incarnating the faith." He then gots on to argue that "the constant face-to-face position of priest and people expresses a symbolism of its own and suggests a closed circle." Even the Protestant sociologist of religion, Peter Berger, notes that when the liturgy is celebrated with the priest and people facing each other, "this new position makes wonderfully clear that the sacred being that is worshipped exists not outside the gathered community but rather inside it. It is a powerful symbolic reversal." 

I know that this reversal cuts to the heart of what some liturgists and clergy longed for in the second-half of the twentieth century—a sense of a God who was truly present within us. But I do wonder if much of what occupied our attention as Christians in the twentieth-century helped foster a perception of God within us to the extent that we worshipped what we liked and lost our sense of the presence of God outside the community, outside the walls of our churches, inviting into a transcendent reality that will always be more than what we can confect in the closed circle of congregational worship.

Furthermore, scholars, clergy, and laity alike have all increasingly noticed that the priest and people facing each other has had an unintended side-effect. Though the goal was for the liturgy to become more communal and less hierarchical, the opposite happened. Whereas the focus point had been the altar and the transcendent God beyond that altar who meets us in the sacrament, by shifting the priest to that position on the other side of the altar, the priest now becomes the focal point. 

This is particularly ironic for Anglicans, who have not generally held to the Roman understanding of the priest acting en persona Christi, standing in for Christ as the host of the meal at the table. For us to have the priest in that position is to import some very significant ideas about Eucharist and the priesthood that have not been core to our own theology in the same way that they have for the Roman church. 

The priest now as the host of the meal, faces the congregation across the altar. This means that the priest no longer blends as easily into the grand liturgical action. Now the priest's facial expressions, where one sets one's attention through the eyes, the choice of manual actions with the hands, all of this is on display for the people of God—even though none of this should be the focal point of the liturgy. 

It is in this context that an approach to presiding has developed where the personality of the priest can entirely overcome the liturgy in ways that are both unhelpful and contrary to our understanding of the true goals of Christian worship. As the great Hans Urs von Balthasar argues,

An element lacking in good taste has crept into the liturgy since the (falsely interpreted) Council, namely, the joviality and familiarity of the celebrant with the congregation. People come, however, for prayer and not for a cozy encounter. Oddly enough, because of this misinterpretation, one gets the impression that post-conciliar liturgy has become more clerical than it was in the days when the priest functioned as mere servant of the mystery being celebrated. Before and after the liturgy, personal contact is entirely in place, but during the celebration everyone's attention should be directed to the one Lord.

Thus, celebrating facing the people can often be done in a way that more resembles watching a cooking show than it does the sacred prayers of the faithful gathered around the table.

Even such a noted Anglican luminary as Louis Weil argued in a lecture I attended that celebration facing the people only makes sense if the entire liturgical space is redesigned so the people truly are gathered around the altar. That is, in architectural spaces that have the altar in the center of the space with the congregation gathered around it. If your liturgical space remains the gothic arrangement of long nave, followed by chancel, and then altar, then Weil said one would be better off remaining with an eastward style of celebrating so as to avoid the priest becoming the center point of the liturgy.

Now, like I said when I started, though I hold these views quite seriously, I would never fight this battle in a congregational context. Other clergy who agree with me on the importance of the priest and the people all facing the same direction may disagree with my choice here—and I wish them well in their work. At this point in my ministry, my attention as a priest is occupied with other matters that I think are more important to our congregation's attention—seeking to articulate a welcome that makes the church more diverse, getting people to stop calling Republicans or Democrats evil, encouraging people that devoting time to spirituality is well worth the effort, etc.

However, I will keep talking about this, because I do think it is a conversation worth having in the church. And someday, who knows, my own community here in Grand Haven—or some other community I serve in the future—may raise their hand and suggest we reconsider the orientation of our prayer and our liturgical space. I look forward to leading this conversation at that time, exploring together, as priest and people, how the direction we face in the liturgy has in impact upon the way we understand God, ourselves, and our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.

In the meantime, I will continue to celebrate facing the people on Sundays—but I will also do it knowing that I must be very careful and very intentional in ensuring that the focus point is not me, that every liturgical choice and action should draw the attention of the people to the Christ who becomes present for us once more upon the altar, and not upon the presider who lead's the people's prayers asking God to make it so. 

Confessions from the Church on Ash Wednesday

My column in today's issue of the Grand Haven Tribune.

“You have something on your forehead.”

Today, Christians around the world will likely have someone come up to them at some point and say just that, noticing the dark smudge on a forehead. The reason, of course, is because today is Ash Wednesday — the day that marks the beginning of the season of Lent.

Many Christians — and many preachers for that matter! — have noticed the odd incongruity of the practices surrounding Ash Wednesday. In many churches, the Gospel reading includes Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 6: “And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret.” Then, we all come up to the altar rail to have our faces disfigured by a smudged ashen cross — proclaiming to the world that we are fasting.

And let’s be clear, if the ashes any Christian receives upon their forehead are worn as a symbol of pride in their piety, they should indeed wash those ashes off straightaway rather than fall victim to the sins of pride and self-righteousness. However, if the ashes upon your head make you look a bit silly, if they make others inquire after your spiritual life curiously, if they provoke within the wearer the willingness to say openly and honestly, “I wear these ashes because I am a sinner and, through God’s love, I’m trying to do better” — well, then I think the ashes might indeed serve a deep and important purpose.

Because far too often the church pretends to be a place where everyone has it all put together. Rarely do individual Christians stand up and repent of their sins. Even more rarely does the church as a corporate body stand up and repent of her sins.

It reminds me of a story Donald Miller told in his book, “Blue Like Jazz,” when the Christians in his group set up a confession booth in the midst of a gloriously hedonistic university festival. Revelers would giggle and go inside, only to have the Christians present confess to the revelers the sins of the church and to ask their forgiveness. People would leave struck and confused, completely unused to hearing religious people say they have been wrong, and to say so in specific ways.

I participated in something similar a few years ago at the Grand Rapids Pride festival. I attended with a group of other Christians who wore T-shirts proclaiming, “I’m sorry.” We were there as a public witness, a public apology for the way the church has harmed and demeaned LGBTQ people — those with faith and those without faith.

Some people looked strangely at the priest wearing a T-shirt saying “I’m sorry,” thinking it must be a trick. But many people came up with tears in their eyes and said, “Thank you. I’ve been in such pain from being kicked out of my church, or told I’m disordered, or being told my love for my partner is a sin.” I gave each of those people a hug, telling them the church had gotten this wrong for a long time, and I wanted them to know that I apologized on behalf of the church. I apologized for my own failures in this area, when my own thinking was more rigid and narrow.

This is the sort of thing I think ashes are about on Ash Wednesday. The ashes Christians wear are not a symbol of our deep spirituality — or at least they shouldn’t be. The ashes are a public apology for the sins we have committed, the times we have failed to make manifest the love of God to our neighbors, to our enemies, to the world itself.

And I do believe the church has much to repent. We need to repent of our treatment of LGBTQ persons, treatment that has caused countless suicides and resulted in innumerable shattered faith relationships. But there is more.

We need to repent of our preference for those who look and think like us, resulting in Sunday being the most segregated time of the week.

We need to repent of our complicity in economic systems that rely upon people making starving wages so that we can have cheaper products and more comfort at home.

We need to repent of being more concerned with keeping a specific institution running than with being the bodily presence of God’s love on earth.

We need to repent of enabling leaders in the church to abuse and harass, and of not being willing to do the hard work of supporting processes that keep the vulnerable safe from the powerful and predators.

We need to repent of our silencing of the voices of women, of how long they have been kept out of places of authority, and how the loss of their voices among the clergy has diminished the whole body of Christ.

We need to repent of approaching the tragedy of abortion with language that has made untold women feel they are murderers, instead of people who were often faced with equally horrible choices and who needed a loving support while they made those choices.

We have much to repent. That’s what those ashes mean to me.

You might see me out on the street today, wearing my strange priest clothes, a funny hat and a big cloak, offering “Ashes to Go.” I do this so that people can be invited into this season whether or not they can attend a service, whether or not they have a church home. But I do this as well because, at the end of every rite, after I’ve imposed ashes and we’ve prayed together, I ask the person who stopped to “Go in peace, and pray for me, a sinner.”

I stand on the street because I need your prayers as I seek to be more faithful to God’s love in my own life.

The church often needs your forgiveness as much as you need God’s. This is what Lent is truly all about. God’s love is waiting for all of us in this Holy Season, but we must have the courage to turn to God and say, “I’ve done wrong. We’ve done wrong. And we are ready to change.”

The Rev. Dr. Jared C. Cramer, Tribune community columnist, serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven. Information about his parish can be found at www.sjegh.com.