The Issue of Tithing

A recent Wall Street Journal article, The Backlash against Tithing, discusses how many churches are abandoning the idea of tithing, including conservative congregations. I’ve been intrigued by the question of tithing as I’ve been slowly working my way out of debt and toward a tithing practice at my church. It is a good subject for reflection as we enter the biggest holiday shopping season of the year.

Many churches look to the Bible as requiring tithing. Citing Jacob in Genesis “and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar shall be God’s house; and of all that you give me I will surely give one-tenth to you” (Genesis 28:21) these congregations insist that giving 10% of their income to the church is a biblically scripted requirement. In Mormon congregation’s members are bared from entering church if they don’t tithe and many conservative mega churches offer financial planning to help members learn how to manage their finances and tithe at the same time.

Yet, as the Wall Street Journal article points out, the idea of tithing is being challenged. In such unlikely places as the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C professor Andreas Kostenberger argues in his New Testament class that “if you add up all taxes paid by the ancient Israelites, they exceed 10%, and that in the New Testament there's no percentage rule.”

I think biblically-literal interpretation of scripture (whether for or against tithing), miss the point. I have been persuaded about the importance of tithing not because the Bible requires it of us, but because it is a way of participating in the world; it is a way of saying our humanity counts.

The best article I’ve read on tithing comes from Rebecca Ann Parker’s book, Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now. In her chapter, “What Shall We Do with All this Beauty,” she connects honoring the Sabbath and tithing as the best practices in a global capitalist marketplace for spiritual deepening.

She argues that in a culture where global consumerism increasingly defines who we are, we need to find ways of being human that aren’t tied up with buying and selling goods. Without concrete practices that affirm our humanity we “lose our awareness that we have intimate and meaningful relationships with one another, that we are connected to and dependent upon the earth, that we have interests that transcend our personal lives.”

The spiritual practice of observing the Sabbath asks us to stop participating for one day in the ways that the dominant culture has determined for us. This is not simply about our own personal need for renewal but an understanding that we can not really comprehend injustice and be agents of change if we aren’t taking time to let ourselves feel the implications of injustice in the world. Similarly and connectedly, Parker argues that we should tithe not only because it helps sustain the causes we care about but it is a way of honoring our role as participants in creation, as stewards of the earth. As one congregational member claims, “to tithe is to tell the truth about who I am. . . I am a person who has something to give. I am a person who has received abundantly from life. I am a person whose presence matters in the world, and I am a person whose life has meaning because I am connected to and care about many things larger than myself. If I did not tithe, I would lose track of these truths about who I am.”

Transgender Day of Remembrance

Today, November 20th, is set aside throughout the world for people to pay respect to those needlessly killed by transgender hate crimes and to call attention to the threat of violence faced by gender variant people. Of all groups targeted for hate crimes, crimes against transgender people are often the most violent, most underreported, and thus most often ignored by law enforcement and our communities.

Numerous cases of transgender deaths due to hate crimes have been reported this year. People like Kaia Ladell Baker from Nashville Tennessee was killed as a result of blunt force to the head and Erica Keel of Philadelphia was killed in March by a car that repeatedly struck her. In many cases, crimes like these go unsolved for years.

Sometimes deaths like Victoria Arellano who died in July of HIV/AIDS in San Pedro California happened because of neglect. She and many in similar predicamentes died after being denied treatment in HIV/AIDS clinics because she was transgender.

In popular culture the common perception of transgender people is of a white male-to-female transgender person with the financial means to afford expensive operations. The reality is that most of the hate crime violence against trans people is perpetuated against sex workers, cross dressers, immigrants, people of color and the homeless. These are the most vulnerable in our communities and hate crime legislation is desperately needed to begin to bring attention and justice to their situation.

For the 9th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance I was fortunate to work with two extraordinary transgender pastors, Rev. Dr. Erin Swenson from Atlanta and Rev. Drew Phoenix from Baltimore to create videos to commemorate the day. Please watch Drew Phoenix, pastor of St. John’s United Methodist Church in Baltimore, MD and Presbyterian minister Rev. Erin Swenson.

Outsourced Connectivity

You know that feeling of juggling too much to the point that everything begins to unravel? I had one of those days this past weekend. I left a bag of books on the train in Boston, my luggage didn't arrive when I got to the airport, I almost lost my plane ticket, and I left a scarf on the plane. This sort of thing has happened before--just like an overloaded circuit, I had a meltdown.

Others have car wrecks, get sick or worse, but when I suffer from the deadly combination of too much information streaming in, too many demands, and too little sleep I forget things. It's a rather scary place to be and clearly part of the modern condition.

So, while in the midst of this predicament last week, I read an article about Tim Ferris’s new book The 4 Hour Week that made me think maybe I had found a way to address my situation. Ferris argues we can get our work life under control by drastically cutting down our availability to others. Ferris has been making waves in the business world by proposing the radical idea that we need to be "less connected." He doesn't read the newspaper, he has cancelled all his RSS feeds, and he even has outsourced his dating service.

He manages all this and keeps a lucrative business in operation by relying on others to deal with his e-mail traffic-- mostly by hiring highly-skilled, low-wage workers that you can find in places like India and Bangladesh. He isn’t actually interested in transforming how we think about technology; rather his is a model of globalizing the responses to technology so that people like him (lucrative executives) can enjoy more time for themselves. This model has picked up a following by the same class of people who dream of making massive amounts of money while young and then retiring early to a life of leisure. Ferris simply makes the fantasy better by showing how you can have it all right now.

For the progressive minded among us, Ferris’s model, with its blatant exploitation of others, is pretty hard to swallow. However, I would suggest that there is an uncomfortable resonance between Ferris’s model and that of the “simplicity movement” often touted by the spiritual left. Similar too Ferris, the simplicity movement speaks to a need to radically rethink our addiction to 24 hour accessibility which keeps us overly stimulated while depriving us of a rich spiritual life essential to developing our humanity. Yet, while this model is based on checking out of the high stress work world rather than hiring others to take care of our needs, the problem still remains that we can’t really think about “downsizing” our lives if we aren’t in a position of economic privilege in the first place. You can’t simplify if you are trying to make enough money to put your kids through school or if you have a chronic health care condition, or if you have to rely on food banks to get through the week.

This said, economic disparities don’t diminish the problem of our being overextended and overly available, they just require us to look at the issue differently. Without a real model of community, “being connected” becomes just another commodity in a capitalist system. The problem isn’t being connected; it’s the nature of the connection. We might ask instead: What is the quality of our connectedness and how wide is its range? Is our ability to be in touch in a moments notice actually shielding us from the deep connections that come from being in community with those different than ourselves?

ENDA victory in the House

Last night the Employment Non Discrimination Bill (H.R. 3685) passed in the house with 235 members voting in favor and 184 opposed.

This was a difficult vote in many ways. The House leadership made the calculation that the only way the bill would pass was if gender identity and expression were stripped from it. They felt that a victory in the House was essential in order for an inclusive bill to have a chance in the next few years. If the bill had gone down in defeat or had been pulled from the floor it would make it nearly impossible for it to come up again in the next couple of years and our efforts would be set back at least 10 years. By giving members of Congress the "good feeling" that they had moved civil rights in this country one step forward, it will be easier to convince them of the importance of including the whole LGBT community in the near future when we have a new President who may sign it into law.

This calculation has caused friction within the LGBT community and there is an enormous amount of healing that now needs to occur.

Still, as we move forward and try to figure out the best strategies toward getting a fully inclusive ENDA to the desk of a President who will sign it, we also need to stop for a moment and reflect on the historic nature of this victory. It has been nearly 30 years of massive education on the part of LGBT groups around the country that has gotten us this far. We now have to roll up our sleaves and start doing the same level of education on transgender issues.

Even though this victory is bittersweet the win is still enormous. It signals to the public that gay and lesbian people ought to have basic civil rights protections and not to be fired or live in fear of being fired simply because they are gay.

To follow the live blog from the debate in the House go to HRC's Back Story.

Can I Get a Witness?

“Can I get a Witness” expresses God’s presence in the shared lives of marginalized people and dates back at least as far as Nannie Helen Burroughs, the early twentieth century African American educator and proto-feminist reformer in the Baptist church. As we memorized the spirit of the dead in my Church’s All Souls Day ritual this past Sunday, I thought about Burroughs and her circle of Baptist Church ladies calling for a witness as they shared their stories of suffering and liberation. Burroughs’ spirit lived on in Atlanta Georgia this past weekend and I was privileged to witness its power at the 2007 Covenant Network of Presbyterians Conference in Atlanta.

The Covenant Network, made up of clergy and lay leaders in the Presbyterian Church USA, proclaims a vision for an inclusive Presbyterian Church embodied in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. I must confess that in the past when I’ve imagined somewhat stogy, somewhat aloof Mainline Christians, I’ve thought first of Presbyterians. Yet, if this weekend’s conference is any indication of how the spirit is moving in the Presbyterian Church USA, such stereotypes will soon be obliterated from our collective consciousness. I have rarely seen a group of people so committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ and so thoughtful in their witness to his presence among us, than I did in the company of this group.

The Covenant Network has been working for change in the Presbyterian Church for 10 years and while they have suffered defeat they exude a spirit of hopeful promise not built on pie in the sky fanaticizing but grounded in faithful listening to the pain of so many Presbyterians who have been deeply harmed by the Church. By bearing witness to one another’s stories—stories such as Rev. Andy Cullen’s, a conservative Evangelical Presbyterian pastor who changed his mind about LGBT people and lost his parish as a consequence; or Ann Speer, a lifelong Presbyterian who was shunned by her Church community when she told members her son was gay—they have discovered in themselves a transformational love that is infectious and life giving and rings of Jesus’ spirit.

A Justice Call for a Religious Rebirth

And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
To escape writing of the worst thing of all—
Not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
But the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
So that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
Mere emblems of the desecration of ourselves?
----Adrienne Rich

Faith is a powerful language that at once offers solace and challenges us to fundamentally change who we are. Rich in these lines does not speak in a religious voice, yet her yearning for a passionate desire for freedom is no less profound than the desire to be born again. The same desire for personal transformation is what draws many of us wishfully to churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples.

Faith speaks to the spiritual needs of the individual but it also draws the individual into the needs of the whole community. If we are ever going to learn to live differently we need to see how desire for personal transformation goes hand-in-hand with our social justice work, with our embrace of the neighbor. What is required is a deep and total transformation and it needs to happen by connecting our advocacy for social justice directly, passionately, and personally with our spiritual need to be reborn in the service of God—however we define God.

Images of personal rebirth capture the imagination and the yearning of the soul much more effectively than language stressing mere tolerance. Yet it is the language of tolerance that dominates our liberal congregations and much of our interfaith work. Toleration built on a model of accommodation is easy for us because it doesn’t ask us to change but only to bring others into our already comfortable, safe world. We might buy free trade coffee in our fellowship halls or put Save Darfur signs in front of our congregations but what have we risked?

On the other hand, Christian radical right speak has so hijacked our imagination about personal conversion that it is nearly impossible to think of religious transformation outside a narrow, repressive, life-destroying preoccupation with discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, and those who are not Christian.

Yet when we look at a situation in which the richest 1% of adults in the world owns 40% of the planet’s wealth, when the effects of global warming are waging daily havoc on our environment, when the threat of terrorism is only matched by the shameful propaganda of fear based on those threats it becomes clear pretty quickly that tepid toleration isn’t enough.

As a people we need stories of personal transformation. Secular one’s are valuable but richest are the sacred texts, whether the Jewish Prophets, Siddhartha, Jesus, Mohammed, or others. It matters less in whose name we claim our spiritual rebirth but that we claim it as the foundation for a richer, deeper, more personal connection to our work for social justice.

We can see this fundamental transformation in communities all around us. It exists in congregations like the United Methodist Church in Baltimore Maryland whose members embraced Rev. Drew Phoenix as their pastor when he transitioned from female to male and has now covenanted to stay with him despite excessive media attention, a heavy financial burden, and the stigmatization of others in the larger community. When congregations like this one truly wrestle with LGBT equality their sense of who they are as a religious body changes.

We also see real transformation happen in interfaith movements like the New Sanctuary Movement where congregations consciously choose to support and sometimes house illegal immigrants at considerable risk their own security and the security of the congregation.

Our sacred texts don’t ask us to tolerate each other but to embrace one another. Jesus said “Love your neighbor as yourself” not try to get along with your neighbor. The Tibetan Buddhist teaching of tonglen, or exchanging oneself for others, works by consciously breaking down the difference between self and other. This is a radical freedom and it’s not easy.

The Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years in order to trust in God, to love freedom enough that they could learn to purge themselves from their oppression in Egypt—oppression defined by an occupying power that imposed a physical and spiritual regime not their own. Those of us on the religious left are in the wilderness right now. We want change but we’re hoping it will come if we write a check or volunteer occasionally in a soup kitchen. Incremental engagement like this is important but real change will only come when we risk who we are--when our personal transformation drives our connection to others. We need religious fervor to carry us there.

Dreaming of a common language beyond platitudes.

Surely at a time when religious fundamentalism in its varied expressions is polarizing nation from nation and people from people, finding a common language for people of faith would be a priority. But how to do that is no easy feat.

On this topic I was intrigued when in a recent edition of On Faith , panelists wrote in on the Dalai Lama’s pronouncement that “All major religious traditions carry basically the same message: That is love, compassion and forgiveness.” While there were a few, most notably the Muslim scholar Sulayman Nyang, who expanded on how the Dalai Lama’s words spoke across religious traditions, most writers dissected the statement to show its limitations.

Susan Thistlethwaite pointed out how when not connected to a social justice context of non-violence the concepts of love, compassion and forgiveness can be as corrupting as they are liberating. She argues, for example, that women are often counseled by religious leaders to forgive their batterers and stay in violent situations for the sake of a misguided interpretation of the Christian doctrine of forgiveness.

Other panelists speak to the real damage done by religion. As Hindu Chaplain Rajan Zed pithily explains: “there are some more things in common in religions: misapplying holy scriptures through selective study and decoding, seeing ourselves as God’s charge d’affaires, claiming to be the lone owner of the truth and all the roads to salvation, positioning the ideal portrayal of one’s own religion with the apparently defective truth of other religions, etc.”

Others challenged the value of lumping together these sentiments and showed the ways varied religious traditions respond differently to concepts like love, forgiveness and compassion.

I agree with many of the panelist; without a context these words are little more than platitudes. Nonetheless, I see the Dalai Lama as an international pastoral voice attempting to articulate a dream shared by many for a common language, to borrow a phrase from the poet Adrienne Rich. Many of us are searching for the principles of love, compassion, and forgiveness in our own religious traditions while simultaneously seeking out ways to connect with similar shared values across cultures and faiths. Think of the new Coexist bumper sticker and tee shirt that are popping up everywhere. The Dalai Lama is speaking directly to this longing.

I know sometimes when I throw together a litany of “good faith values” like love, compassion, and forgiveness—or add in a few others such as hospitality and care for the neighbor—my list can sound shallow and easily exploited for unintended uses.

Yet, it still speaks to a longing for connection. When Rodney King famously stated, "Why can't we all get along," his words became easily mocked as naive and were turned quickly into cliche. Nonetheless, they also spoke to a deep seated pain and longing; they made vulnerable a desire for connection and understanding, a desire in and of itself worth nourishing. Words like "love, compassion and forgiveness" figure the same way and, for all their vague and seeming insipidness, they still speak to a deep human need for connection. Something that we can ill afford to ignore.