Rector’s Rambling – March 6, 2025
If you’ve ever worked in a restaurant, you know how stressful the restaurant industry can be. Sky-high anxiety, the manic flow of service, and personality clashes are typical. If you’ve seen the Hulu show The Bear, the writing and acting are accurate, according to those who have lived it. Beyond the kitchen, the writers also capture the reality of family systems wracked by unhealthy behaviors and emotions. One episode in the second season was painful to watch. As the family gathered for Christmas, everything fell apart. The trauma and conflict in that episode are unlike anything I’ve experienced in real life, and yet, just watching it made me feel incredibly anxious. By the end of the episode, I felt terrible and wanted it to stop. I realized that I internalized the onscreen anxiety as my own.
That experience is not the same as watching a thriller and feeling the excitement or watching a scary scene and being scared. Those aren’t positive experiences, per se, but they are exhilarating, which keeps us watching. That Christmas episode of The Bear was painful, and I realized at that point just how good the writing and acting in that show were. The show has won many awards in its three seasons, and Jamie Lee Curtis (the toxic matriarch) and that episode’s director each won Emmys for that specific episode. It is art, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s the kind of artwork that makes us feel good. Its power lay in its ability to draw in the audience through realism.
The emotions captured in that episode resonated with the best class I took in my three years of seminary. It was an elective taught by a priest who had left the parish to teach aspiring church leaders from his abundant pastoral wisdom. It was his last semester teaching after being elected as the bishop of Nebraska. His course was based on what he called “the single most important book of my ministry,” Edwin Friedman’s book, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue. In it, borrowing from and building on Murry Bowen’s work on families, Friedman lays out several connections between family emotional systems and their functioning and how that replicates in the “family” of the church. Some of his most important topics include dealing with emotional triangles, self-differentiation, and being a non-anxious presence. His follow-up book, Failure of Nerve, connected the dots from Generation to Generation for leaders, describing how they can stay healthy in and foster healthy church systems.
While Friedman’s writings focus on the individual within a system, and leaders in particular, it is also possible to view his concepts concerning systems and institutions. So, what does a self-differentiated and non-anxious church look like? And what does that even mean? Differentiation is not about standing alone, nor does it describe a leader who acts unilaterally. It assumes a healthy connection to others in the system, but a connection that does not become all-defining as the individual is absorbed into the system. Differentiation is an ongoing emotional process that allows for resistance to the tug and pull from external forces, keeps us in touch with values and goals, and helps individuals remain clear about their identity.
We can spend a lot of time trying to determine how the Church engages in differentiation with regard to the world around it. H. Richard Neihbur’s classic text, Christ and Culture, lays out several options, and scholars have built on that work over the last seventy-five years, and much of that work is theological. They all touch on the overlapping idea of differentiation through other words and concepts. In the end, a differentiated Church is very much connected to the world it inhabits but is not driven and shaped by everything happening in the world around it. The Church knows its role and its purpose, which is primarily to proclaim the Good News of God in Christ above and alongside everything else. When not differentiated, the church can its way as it is bumped and jostled along as history unfolds. That doesn’t mean the church isn’t shaped by its contemporary context. Re-shaping is unavoidable, although the differentiated church hopefully never loses its perspective or the Gospel lenses through which it views the world and its problems.
The Church’s ability to be appropriately self-differentiated from the world around it also allows it to be non-anxious. A non-anxious church responds to the world around it without being overly reactionary. That doesn’t mean the church doesn’t act or sit passively by, of course. The Church is often called upon to act and speak in service to the Gospel. I am reminded of a series of TV commercials years ago where someone is struggling in a pool or pond, possibly drowning, and the onlookers are putting together a plan on how best to help. Another character walks up, grabs the life ring and throws it to the person struggling to stay afloat. I can’t remember the product or service responsible for those commercials, but it highlights a similar reality for the church. Sometimes, we don’t just pray and discuss what’s going on in the world; there are times when the Church knows what it needs to do and does it.
Opening up news apps these days is like watching that Christmas episode of The Bear. From what I’m hearing, many of us share that experience of late. The chaos of the world around us has been so intense that it’s hard to keep up with what’s happening, let alone decide how to respond to it. It’s exhausting, in fact, as it creates anxiety, and we are pulled into shared feelings of trauma and conflict. It’s everywhere. When we internalize it and begin to feel and sense it, we need a place to put all those emotions and let go of some of them, lest they destroy us from the inside out.
At some point, as I studied Friedman, I learned that his concept of leadership, defined by healthy self-differentiation and being a non-anxious presence, is akin to being a lightning rod. Instead of holding onto all the anxiety and garbage in a system, the leader is so well grounded that the lightning passes through them into that grounding, where it dissipates without causing further damage. The leader can still deal with and respond to the energy and the garbage, but they aren’t destroyed by it. If we think of a healthy church system that is differentiated and non-anxious, it can provide a similar grounding, allowing all of us to let out our anxieties and fears before they destroy us. It doesn’t mean we forget what makes us anxious or walk away from the problems in the world. Instead, it allows us to take action and respond to what we face from a place of strength and resilience.
Anyone who knows churches and has spent much time in them knows they aren’t always non-anxious systems. Sometimes, they are the source of greater anxiety! And, if we’ve spent much time in the church, we know that it can be a place of comfort and inspiration for the trials we face. For example, the Church can remind us that God reigns over all that happens on this little planet of ours. That’s not a realization of truth to foster our checking out and “letting Jesus take the wheel,” but to remind us that the world has seen a lot of ups and downs, and God and God’s people have always been in the midst of it together. Dark days and days of bright light are both better, with God along for the ride. It also means that our problems are not just ours and are likely not new (in the historic/global sense). We have been this way before, as we say, and God certainly has been.
Staying grounded by staying connected to the Church is an excellent way to be as healthy as possible in trying times. Bringing our concerns to God in prayer, asking for the resources we need to respond to them, and then recognizing God’s action and presence around us will allow us to be more differentiated and non-anxious as individuals. Again, that doesn’t mean passive! Christ sends his followers out into the world to heal, drive our evil spirits, spread the Good News, and care for the most vulnerable in our midst. Jesus also demonstrated prayer as an essential process in preparing for anxious times. He often went away to pray right before “things got real.”
My dear ones, these are not days to try to tackle the weight of the world’s problems on our own. This is not a time to let ourselves get worn down and worn out by the volume and intensity of the headlines swirling around us. The Gospel mission we all share requires our prayerful participation as we work to transform the world around us, starting with ourselves. We’re in this together, as they say, and we’re in this with God – and always have been. As Friedman articulates, the world is hurt by a failure of nerve when we get buried under the anxieties of the day and the demands they place upon us. Instead of living with that kind of failure, we must learn to thrive in the abundance of God’s love and mercy. The Church is where we can find the space to meet God along the way and re-equip for the road ahead, wherever it may lead.
I hope Christ Church is just the sort of community to offer this for each of you because we know who and whose we are. It is a place of worship, prayer, and community, all of which can help us thrive and grow. We know that as earthly kingdoms rise and fall, the Kingdom of God is both the promise and the goal. God’s kingdom will always be our trajectory, guiding our hands and feet as it calls to our hearts. We can’t turn off the world the way we turn off a television show, but we can – we must – learn to hold fast to the grounding of God’s love for us and the whole world.
Tom+
O God of peace, who hast taught us that in returning and
rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be
our strength: By the might of thy Spirit lift us, we pray thee,
to thy presence, where we may be still and know that thou
art God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.