How Did I End Up in an Exhibit that Honors Luther's 95 Theses

This year marks the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses. In Wittenberg, Germany, there is a National Special Exhibit on “Luther! 95 People—95 Treasures” from May to November 2017. Organized by the Luther Heritage Sites Foundation of Saxony-Anhalt, the exhibit seeks to follow “the young Luther on his path to the Reformation and highlights the significance of his impact on people from the 16th century to the present day.”

Among the 95 people are Johann Sabastian Bach and Martin Luther King, Jr. The national exhibit received 4 million euros in funding from local and state sources.

How did I end up in this exhibit as I am not Lutheran and have never published anything on Luther or the 95 theses?

Thus, I was surprised when I received an email in April 2016 from Dr. Benjamin Hasselhorn, curator of the national exhibit, saying that he wanted to include me in the exhibit. He was interested in my work on the Occupy Movement, a movement which he regarded as “bringing together. . .the central tenets of Christian belief and the call for a more equitable and humane society.”

“What is the relationship between the Occupy Movement and Luther?” one may ask. Hasselhorn explained, the Occupy Movement was “the embodiment and representation of an idea that was similarly of great importance to Luther: that charity and love should stand firmly at the core of religion as opposed to an institution or the protection thereof.”

I still had doubts, for the Occupy Movement was a leaderless movement and no one single individual could represent the grassroots effort. Time magazine named “the protester” as Person of the Year in 2011, instead of choosing a particular individual.

I suggested to Dr. Hasselhorn the idea of having “the Occupiers” as one group of people to be included. I even thought of inviting friends who have participated in the Occupy Movement to send me pictures so that a slide show can be shown at the exhibit. 

But Dr. Hasselhorn explained that the exhibit wants to explore Luther’s legacy in a personal approach and it would be difficult to include the Occupy Movement as a whole as people participated in it had different orientations and faith traditions. He was interested in my approach to the Occupy Movement from a theological perspective.

With Joerg Rieger, I have written Occupy Religion: A Theology of the Multitude—the first theological reflection on the movement. I also provided comments and feedback for the editors of Theological Reflections on the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement, a continuation of the Occupy Central Movement 佔領中環in the fall of 2014. I am a pioneer of postcolonial theology and my theological reflection on the Occupy Movement is part of my overall work.

Dr. Hasselhorn asked me for an artefact to represent the Occupy Movement. I thought of a yellow umbrella that a friend from Hong Kong gave me as a gift. Protestors used umbrellas to protect themselves against the police’s use of teargas and pepper spray. When I sent Dr. Hasselhorn pictures of the umbrella, he said it would be perfect for the exhibit. It has the words: “A dreamer, but I’m not the only one” on it!

Since I was included in the exhibit, I began to think more about the legacy of Luther and Reformation. So when the editor of the Ecumenical Review invited me to contribute an essay to a special issue that marks the 500th anniversary, I said yes. My essay “Reformation Unfinished: Economy, Inclusivity, and Authority” appeared in Ecumenical Review 69.2 (July 2017).

Martin Luther lived during the emergence of early capitalism in Europe. Max Weber has written about the relationship between Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism. During the peasants’ revolt, Luther did not support the protesters and called upon the German nobility to suppress them. In our time, Luther possibly would not stay in the Occupy campsites and I don’t know if he would support the Occupiers. But he did support charity and provision for the poor. This is what the Lutherans call faith begetting charity.

Luther’s idea of priesthood of all believers was really radical in his time. He argued that the clergy and laity did not belong to two different estates. He surmised that there is really no difference between laymen and priests, princes and bishops, except that of office and work. He wrote, “We are all priests, as many of us as are Christians.”

But full inclusivity in the church still has a long road to go. Some denominations still do not allow the ordination of women and GLBTQ persons. The feminist movement has challenged the church to accept full equality and ministry of women. The full acceptance of GLBTQ persons has been a painful and tortuous journey, leading to separation and division in some denominations. As the mainline churches experience decline in membership, the emergent church movement has called for greater participation and leadership of lay people.

Luther emphasized the authority of the Bible over against the authority of the pope and the traditions. While the Bible has been used to support liberation movements, it has also been misused as a symbol of cultural superiority. A literal and fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible has reinforced conservative attitudes toward women and GLBTQ people.

Christian communities have to live out the vision of priesthood of all believers and develop models of interpreting scriptures and authority in participatory ways. The church needs to find new ways of being church. Do we need a new reformation? 

Church in the Round

St. John's Memorial Chapel

Sermon preached at St. John's Memorial Chapel, December 6, 2012

St. John’s Memorial Chapel at the Episcopal Divinity School was built in the nineteenth century. I asked historian David Sigenthaler what chapel and worship was like when he was a student at the school in the 1950s.

At that time the altar was set against the east wall, the faculty sat up in the chancel, and the students sat in the pews facing each other. Each would have an assigned seat and chapel during that time was compulsory. The design of sacred space mirrored the hierarchical setup of the community. In the 1960s when Christopher Durasingh and Ed Rodman were students, the pews were removed and replaced with chairs.

In 1992 when I joined the school, the altar was brought forward to the crossing and the ambo was placed on the west side near the entrance. The students sat facing each other.

To honor Brett Donham who renovated St. Paul’s at Brookline after the fire in 1976 and our presider Rev. Jeffrey Mello, the rector of St. Paul’s, we have created a worshipping space modeling after St. Paul’s in which the congregation and the choir sit surrounding the altar. Donham talked about the rationale of why he designed the church in such a way:

“The traditional forms of church buildings, with everyone facing in the same direction and with the ‘expert’; the intermediary or interpreter, on a raised stage addressing an audience is the antithesis of gathering in community.”

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Brookline, MA

Today many churches are recovering the early roots of Christianity. Donham continues, “In these places people gather in community to offer praise and thanksgiving, to reflect on scripture, to share stories about Jesus Christ and his impact on their lives, to share a commemorative meal, and through this to come into communion with Christ, and with one another. These are communal activities, with many players, several centers of action and movement, and require the ability to see one another and feel as a gathered body.”



We have shifted the feast days and celebrate today the feast of Macrina, theologian, teacher, and monastic. I would like to invite you to reflect for a moment on the image of the church in the round.

Several things in Macrina’s life lead me to think that she will be open to the church in the round. Her brothers Basil and Gregory of Nyssa were bishops and renowned theologians in Cappadocia in modern day Turkey. Macrina as their elder sister admonished them to lead a life of simplicity and not to depend on their knowledge and rhetorical skills, their wealth, and their high positions in church and society.

In the Life of St. Macrina, Gregory said Macrina persuaded her mother to give up all showy style of living and the services of domestics. She urged her mother to share the life of the maids and to treat all her slave girls and menials as if they were sisters and belonged to the same rank as herself.

During her life, Macrina embodied what Philippians said, “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus as my Lord” (3:8).  When we think of the church in the round, we imagine a more egalitarian model in which social status and hierarchal structure both in the church and society can be transgressed.

Most Holy Redeemer Church, San Francisco, CA
(Catholic)

 

Although we don’t have any writings from Macrina about the religious community she has formed, her brother Basil has written a Rule of Life, which preserved some of her ideals. The Rule of Life describes a community living together for worship, prayers, mutual help, exercise of virtue, and assisting others. Though the Rule prescribes obedience to the superior, it also exhorts the superior to reprove offenders with meekness and gentleness. In such a way, power within the community can be more shared and not restricted to the top.



The church in the round exists not for itself but for others. One of the hallmarks of the church in the round, as theologian Letty Russell has described in her book with the same title is hospitality to those on the margins. Macrina demonstrated her hospitality by feeding the hungry, providing for the needy, and taking care of young women. The two aspects of gathering for worship and sending out to service are inseparable.



Sometimes we are disheartened because we find the church more like the form of a triangle, in which power is concentrated at the top, instead of in the round. The church design and liturgy reinforce the separation between the clergy and the laity. Worship is often separated from ordinary life and from a sense of mission. It fails to give the sustenance that we need or meet the deepest longing we have for God.

In the season of Advent, a time of anticipation and expectation, let us renew our hope and work for a church in the round. One of my students Lucretia Mann brought to my attention an Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas, who has said that church is not an institution, but a way of being, that is deeply bound to the being of human, the being of the world, and the being of God.*


We can each bring something new to rejuvenate and enliven our community and way of being. We do not need to abolish the old church in order to create something new. We can redesign and reoccupy sacred space within traditional buildings so that we can experiment with different ways of being with God. In this semester, we have seen several creative expressions of using sacred space, particularly in the Eucharist led by Stephen Burns and Christopher Duraisingh. In the course of doing so, we experienced new centers and movements as people of God.

As a teacher of spirituality, I believe that external space also shapes and nurtures our internal space. The change of external space gives us a new sense of our own place in the world. It is no coincidence that many sacred traditions embrace the circle in their holiest sites, such as the prehistoric Stonehenge in England and the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, and in their religious imagination, such as the Tibetan Mandala (a sanskrit word meaning circle), the Native American dreamcatcher, and the labyrinth found in many cultures.

The reading from Sirach 51:13-22 talks about Ben Sira setting out on a journey to find Wisdom. Sometimes he is delighted for having found her and listened to her. Other times he spreads out his hands to heaven and laments his ignorance of her. The spiritual path is never straightforward, but winds back and forth, and sometimes we will get lost on our way.

The church in the round is also a process and not a perfect circle. Sometimes we move two steps forward and one step back. All we are asked to do is to transform the triangle or the rectangular form in our chapel to make it rounder each day to the glory of God. Amen.

 

* John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, NY:  St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 15.



Prophetic Activism Is Not Dead in the U.S.

In case you are wondering what progressive Christian communities are doing to promote justice in the United States and the world, the book Prophetic Activism is for you.

The author Helene Slessarev-Jamir is the Mildred M. Hutchinson Professor of Urban Studies at the Claremont School of Theology. She worked as a union and community organizer in Washington, D.C. and Chicago prior to graduate school. She is familiar with congregation-based community organizing and activism in support of worker justice and immigrant rights.

I came across this book when I searched in Amazon.com for a book that gives me a history of American churches’ involvement in social movements. This book does not so much tell me the past, but it provides a snapshot of the present.

The author notes that prophetic activism has arisen as a response to globalization of capital and production and the huge gap between the rich and the poor in wealthy countries and the deepening economic crises in poorer countries. This is in direct opposite to the Christian Right who gained national power by vilifying the welfare queens, urban black and Latino men, gays and lesbians, undocumented immigrants, and Muslims.

Prophetic activism is characterized by: 

• A commitment to nonviolent social change: influenced by Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha or active nonviolence and Martin Luther King Jr’s civil rights movement.
•  The incorporation of aspects of liberation theology, especially among the Catholics. 
• The openness to diverse spiritual practices and to working with people of other faith traditions. 
• The use of popular education and bottom-up organizing to bridge the gap between the marginalized and the privileged. 
• A concern for the well-being of the marginalized and for upholding basic human rights for all.

After elaborating on how prophetic activism is grounded in the Hebrew Bible and Jesus’ teachings, Slessarev-Jamir discusses five arenas of prophetic activism in the United States: congregational community organizing influenced by Latin American liberation theology, religious worker-justice work, immigrants rights (activism along the border with Mexico and the new sanctuary movement), religious peacemaking, and finally global justice.

As I am working on a book on the Occupy movement, I find the chapter on global justice particularly illuminating.

Slessarev-Jamir uses the examples of Bread for the Word, Witness for Peace, Jubilee 2000, ONE campaign against global poverty, Save Darfur and Invisible Children in this chapter. She provides the background of these organizations and interviews staff and workers to offer a rich narrative.

Last Monday we had a U2 Eucharist at our school and we were introduced to the ONE campaign. A student from Iowa brought a quilt for the altar made by the young people in her church depicting the vision for the ONE world and the presider wore a similar stole. It reminded us that congregations can be important sites for mobilizing for action and worship can unleash the power of prophetic activism.

The Occupy movement can be seen as a continuation of the global justice movement: the linkage of the local and the global, the use of the Internet and social networking sites, the creation of songs, symbols, and popular culture, the horizontal organization, and networking with religious communities (e.g. the use of church space for meetings after the tent-cities were raided).

The book gives us a lot of hope, knowing that activism is alive and many churches and organizations are heeding the call to prophetic justice. At a time when cynicism runs deep and many people have lost much faith in political and economic institutions, I hope the churches can continue to signal to the world that God’s people are not frozen. They are still at the frontline, fighting for a better world.

The book concludes: “prophetic activism greatly enriches religious life in America by creating meaningful opportunities for religious people to connect their spirituality to a variety of just causes.” Faith without action is dead, the liberation theologians have taught us.

Swedish Church and Society

I went to the baptism of Ingrid, the six-month girl of a friend of Dr. Ann-Cathrin Jarl and Rev. Cia Wadstein, this morning at St. Mark's Church in Stockholm. Ingrid was conceived by artificial insemination for her parents are a lesbian couple.

I have not been to a baptism of the Church of Sweden and when Cia said that she would be the celebrant I was glad to go along.

The church outside is very plain looking, but the inside is quite beautiful, in typical simple, artistic northern-European style. The pews are made of very fine carpentry and the kneeling stools are covered by wool. The altar is very simple, with a cross, candles, and vases with flowers.

I was surprised that each child has her/his own baptism ceremony, surrounded by relatives, friends, and loved ones. In the U.S. baptism is usually done in a group. The Church of Sweden has confirmation when the child grows up, similar to that of the Anglican Church.

The Church of Sweden is one of the progressive churches in Europe. In 1958 the Church approved the ordination of women and women were first ordained in 1960. Gay men and lesbians then demanded to be fully accepted in the church and sexual orientation has not become an issue for ordination.

When Bishop Eva Brunne was consecrated as the Bishop of Stockholm in 2009, her lesbian identity attracted much international attention. But it was not an issue in the Swedish church.

Sweden allowed for civic partnership of gay men and lesbians in the mid-1990s. When the constitution was changed to allow same-sex marriage in 2008, the church synod approved same-sex marriage to take place in churches in the same year.

After the baptism, Ann-Cathrin and Cia took me to see the old town of Stockholm. We passed by the Cathedral and I fondly remembered that my former dean at Harvard Divinity School Krister Stendahl was the Bishop of Stockholm from 1984-88. He had written a book on Paul's view on women in the 1950s and made a strong case for the equality of women and men.

Sweden is a democratic socialist country and the state provides a lot of services. Education is free and health care is very affordable. You need to pay a co-pay of $20 when you visit the doctor or check in the hospital, but after you have paid $150 for the year, everything is free!

Emma has multiple sclerosis and wanted to come to Ingrid's baptism. She has a personal assistant 7/24 provided by the government. The government also paid for her taxi to come from northern Uppsala to Stockholm, some 40 mins away.

Ingrid's birth-mother has a one-year maternity leave with paid, and the other mother has several months off. Educated and working mothers can thus afford to have 2-3 children.

Sweden has central heating for the city, and garbage is burnt to generate power. It has also a very good recycling system: food for compost, paper and plastic, and bottles.

I am very impressed by the ways the Swedes take care of the sick, old, and marginalized. It this a better society because people think more of the common good?

President Obama has been criticized as a "socialist" and for wanting to change USA into "Europe." Well, the system in Sweden is not bad, and Obama is far from being a socialist.

I asked my hosts why the Swedes have chosen for such a social order. Ann-Cathrin said the Swedes were literate for several hundred years. One had to learn to read the catechism in order to be baptized. Lutheran teachings also inform social morality and influence the social order.

For my Swedish friends, Americans hardly read newspapers and they are not educated by TV programs, which are full of advertisements. Ann-Cathrin called the Tea Party movement a stupidity movement.

Healthcare accounts for about 10% of the Swedish GNP, and the percentage in USA is much higher. Isn't it stupid not to have a public option? Why are Americans supporting the Tea Party, which wants to stop Obamacare. Is it really because of stupidity, I wonder.

Uppsala

The taxi driver drives a Saab. I saw the little ring about the aphabet A. So I have arrived in Sweden.

The ride from Stockholm airport to Uppsala took about half an hour, and everywhere was covered in snow. The whole country has been frozen since November, and the snow will not melt till May.

The Uppsala University is the oldest university in northern Europe, established in 1477. The Faculty of Theology was established since the beginning. Currently it has 14 faculty members and about 1,500 students, including majors and other students taking courses.

Even though it is called Theology, the Faculty of Theology also offers courses in religious studies. My host Professor Kajsa Ahlstrand teaches World Christianity and Interreligious Studies. She is a friend of my colleague Christopher Duraisingh and visits India often.

About 80% of Swedes belong to the Church of Sweden. The Uppsala Cathedral is a red brick huge building with twin towers. The Dean of the Cathedral is a woman. Out of the 14 bishops, 3 are female, including a lesbian, the Bishop of Stockholm.

Gay and lesbian couples can be married in the Church of Sweden, though some conservative bishops allow only a blessing after the civil marriage.

I asked Kajsa whether there is a schism over the issue of homosexuality within the Lutheran World Federation, just as that in the Anglican Communion. She said the polity of the LWF is quite different. First, the Lutheran church has not been an instrument of colonialization to the extent of the Anglican Church. Germany had a few colonies, but was not a huge empire, like those of the British and the French. Second, there is no equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Lutherans are more polycentric. Third, the LWF still has a lot of money and the African churches benefit from the fundings and do not want to separate from it.

In the afternoon I went to see the Cathedral. It has many side chapels and one devoted to Brigitta, the patron of Sweden and Europe. There is also a relatively new sculptor of Mary the mother of Jesus, as an adult woman dressed ina peasant long blue skirt. We often see Mary the young virgin. I was delighted to see Mary of my age. She looks human.

Archbishop Nathan Soderblom was buried in the Cathedral. Soderblom was a professor at Uppsala from 1901-1914 before he went on to become a bishop and archbishop. He was a churchman and a historian of religion. He was ahead of his time for insisting that students in theology should learn about other religious traditions.

I found out my book Chinese Women and Christianity, 1860-1927 is used as a textbook for undergraduates. It is quite expensive and does not have an eye-catching title. Yet, the students have quite good reviews of it.

This is my third time to Sweden. The first time was in Lund, where I delivered a lecture on Ecology and Christology almost 15 years ago. I was so surprised at the time to find so many Volvos on the road because Volvos are expensive cars. At Uppsala I saw Ford, Toyota, and other European cars. But the Volvos are very durable and they are still running after 25 years. I guess if you have half of the year icy and snowy, you really need a good reliable car.

I will not do much shopping here. The sale tax is 30-50 % and a pair of jeans costs more than US$200 and a T-shirt $50 at a boutique!

Tonight, I am going to have dinner with Kajsa and two of her friends from Oslo who flew here to hear my lecture tomorrow. My lecture better be good.