Saint Ann's Blog

2009-11-17T14:58:00.001-05:00

Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 18
November 15, 2009
Saint Ann’s Church, Old Lyme CT
Daniel 12:1-3; Psalm 16; Hebrews 10:11-25; Mark 13:1-8

SERMON:
We’re closing in on the end of the church year. One Sunday remains after today—next Sunday is the last Sunday after Pentecost, and then, on Sunday, November 29th, we will move into Advent, the great season of preparation for our wonderful celebrations of Christmas—The Incarnation—and the beginning of a new church year.

The passages assigned for this week and next begin to move away from the focus we’ve been working with since way back last spring—our focus has been on the mission and ministry of the church-us--as the body of Christ at work in the world doing all those things which Jesus would be doing were he here in the flesh as well as the Spirit. We are the body of Christ.

For the last six months, our readings from scripture have attempted to encourage and cajole us to be the children of God in an immeasurably difficult world. Now, with the coming of Advent and our celebrations for the incarnation, our vision will be lifted slightly, our horizons will be widened and expanded. We have been focusing on the world and this age. Now we begin to focus on the kingdom of God and eternity. That’s a major shift.

The Church does not ask us to make a radical shift. The organizers of the lectionary are too wise to expect or insist that we do that. Our eyes and expectations are raised this week with Mark’s account of Jesus preparations of his dearest disciples for the difficult times to come as the world adjusts to the presence of God’s community, the church, in its midst.

In times of change, Jesus tells his disciples you can expect trials and tribulations, upheaval and difficulty. Events will take on a different significance than would have been the case in ordinary times. Solid ground will feel slippery under foot, that which was perceived with clarity will seem to be obscured and clouded.

“Do not despair,” says Jesus, this is what you must expect in times of change. When you hear rumors and speculations, do not be alarmed. All this must take place before the new replaces the old.

This advice, given to his beloved disciples in a time of great change, is good advice for us in this time of transition and renewal which we are moving though as we seek a new rector to pilot the ship of the church over the shoals.

It is with calm expectation that the church is encouraged to await the changes to come. Hope is our hallmark. We live in tranquility and with peace. This is our character and temperament. It is the manner in which we order our lives together as we prepare, as we wait in expectation with hope.

Jesus felt it necessary to warn his disciples that false prophets would rise up in the community, false prophets who would take advantage of the upset of the moment to lead the community down wrong paths. We too must be careful not to allow ourselves to be led astray by those who might try to take advantage of the anxiety and disquiet we experience in a time of transition. Just because we are encouraged to live lives of hope and anticipation (Advent themes) doesn’t mean we have to be stupid and inactive.

Olivia Judson writes a column for the New York Times’ website. She lives in London. She’s a scientist—genes, I think, but I don’t know for sure. I’m unscientific. When I hear the word, “jeans,” I think about Levi’s or Wranglers, not RNA or DNA. In a recent column, she wrote about the recent research that been done to understand better the changes that ripple through communities. The research has begun to show that it’s not just the flu and chicken pox that can be spread from person to person.

“Studies have found,” writes Olivia Johnson, “that one person’s change in behavior ripples through his or her friends, family, and acquaintances. If one of your friends becomes happy for example, you’re more likely to become happy too.”

Behavior and attitude is catching. Mark knew that two thousand years ago when he wrote the Gospel. “Then Jesus began to say to them, ‘Beware that no one leads you astray.” There’s our warning, and our response is confidence and hope and clarity of thinking and abiding faith that God is working on our behalf. We can be confident in God’s hopes for us, and not allow ourselves to be lead astray

Dwight L. Moody was one of the first of the great popular American evangelists. He lived just up the road, up in Northampton, Massachusetts. The Northfield School for Girls and the Mount Hermon Academy for boys were two of his many, many projects. Dwight Moody was a remarkable preacher. He was the Billy Graham of his age, and, in fact, Billy Graham patterned his ministry on Moody’s. He inspired hundreds of thousands, perhaps million of people over the time he was active and that was in the middle of nineteenth century, long before mass media and monstrous stadiums.

Moody’s great gift was his ability to turn an ordinary event into a teaching about faith—a parable. One day, Moody read a story in the newspaper about a shipwreck off the port of Cleveland, Ohio. He took the bare facts of that story and turned it into one of that earlier century’s great sermon illustrations.

“On a dark and stormy night, when the waves rolled like mountains and not a star was to be seen, a boat, rocking and plunging, neared the Cleveland harbor. ‘Are you sure this is Cleveland?’ asked the captain, seeing only one light from the lighthouse. ‘Quite sure, sir,’ replied the pilot.
“’Where are the lower lights?’
(Those would have been the lights of the houses and stores along the shore.)
“’Gone out sir.’
“’Can you make the harbor?’
“We must or perish, sir.
“With a strong hand and a brave heart the old pilot turned the wheel. But, alas, in the darkness he missed the channel and with a crash upon the rocks the boat was shivered and many a life lost in a watery grave.”

Now Moody makes his point!

“Brothers and sisters, the Master will take care of the great lighthouse; let us keep the lower lights burning!”

Philip Paul Bliss, author of many, many gospel and evangelical hymns (but none in the Episcopal collection—perhaps, not our style) was moved to write a hymn when he heard Moody’s sermon. A couple of verses go like this:

Brightly beams our Father’s mercy
From his lighthouse evermore;
But to us He gives the keeping
Of the lights along the shore.

Let the lower light be burning!
Send a gleam across the wave;
Some poor fainting, struggling seaman
You may rescue, you may save.

A wonderful echo from a different age: it’s what people mean when they say, “We ought to sing the old hymns more often.”

During a time of transition—we must keep the lower lights burning. God will take care of the lighthouse. We must not allow ourselves to be led astray, and we must anticipate with joy our future with God’s in faith and with hope.

Keep the lower lights burning!

The Rev. John T. Talbott

2009-11-11T11:12:00.000-05:00

More than Enough
Janie Donohue
November 8, 2009

Ahab was a king of Israel who married a woman named Jezebel. Jezebel did not worship the God of Israel. Jezebel worshipped Baal and Ahab was happy to join her, insisting that all of his subjects follow suit. Baal was thought to bring storms to the land in the rainy season, after which the ground got progressively dryer, and eventually all vegetation died. Ahab worshipped and offered sacrifices to Baal in order to insure the timely arrival of the annual rains. Several times what he sacrificed were his own children. In exchange Baal provided enough rain to get Ahab and his people through the annual drought. Anyone with foresight and common sense would be able to store away enough provisions during the wet to get them and their families through the dry--provided they stuck to their budgets.

In today’s Old Testament reading, the prophet Elijah has informed king Ahab that Baal has no power over rain or drought, over life or death. Rather, it is the God of Israel who controls these things. To illustrate this Elijah declares in the name of the God of Israel, a three year drought.
During that drought, God sends Elijah to a town called Zarephath where he tells him that a widow will feed him.

When he arrives in town he sees the widow gathering sticks and calls to her. “Bring me a little water so I may drink.” As she is on her way with the now quite precious water, he calls to her again asking for her to give him bread. She announces to him that she has no bread and only a bit of meal in a jar and a very small jug of oil. The people had planned for one season of drought as always. But this time, the drought continued and there just was no more meal. She would have loved to feed him. Under different circumstances. The new plan she tells him is to take the sticks she has gathered, go home, prepare the meal into a cake, give some to her son and then die with him of starvation. So no I can’t give you bread. I am sorry. There just isn’t any more grain.

Elijah, speaks not to her circumstance but to her heart. He is not condescending or rude. “Do not be afraid,” he says, “go ahead and continue with your plan. But first, make a little cake and bring it to me. Then make something for yourself and your son.” He tells her that God has promised that her jar will never be empty and her oil will not run out.

At that moment she had a choice. To suffer her family’s last supper in silence or to move through her fear in faith.

For some reason, she decided to trust him. The story does not tell us why, what she saw or what changed. We only know that she went home and did as Elijah said. She made him a cake and then her son and her self, and saw that there was more meal. And there was oil. She fed her entire household. Still...enough. More than enough. And so she made more the next morning. And then again. There was meal and oil and there did not seem to be an end to enough. The grain did not fill a barn. A silo was not miraculously filled. It was a simple bowl, in the cupboard of a simple family, that was simply never empty.

Each time she fed her visitor, it made no meaningful dent in her resources. Nothing about how she lived really changed. Knowing that she and her family would not go hungry as she had feared. Well that knowledge changed everything.

I believe that the members of Saint Ann’s stand at a crossroad similar to the one that the widow stood in that day. It is stewardship season. You got the mailing, and the card. We have been invited to give. Sacrificially. We are told that God will provide and that we will always have enough. More than enough. But in some ways all we can see is our budget. We rationed our resources for the annual dry season, never anticipating an economic crisis. Never considering that we might lose our rector. Underestimating the real challenges of inviting and incorporating new families into our faith community. Three big things. Three years of drought. For which we did not plan.

And now, we say, there is no money. We would love to reach out, but present circumstances have made us individually and corporately unable to make such sacrifices. We feel that we do not have enough resources to invest boldly in our future and yet, if we do not grow many of us fear, that Saint Ann’s will gradually, eventually, tragically die. Some of us have resigned ourselves to this eventuality, hoping to make the best of things and enjoy the fellowship as it is, until it isn’t. Others grieve the potential, gradual diminution of this vibrant community, simultaneously decrying our powerlessness to halt her deterioration. And there are widows in the house. Many here have begun the process of shaping the cakes for the future, unsure if they themselves will eat at the end of the day. But stepping out in faith and hoping against hope that the promises are true.

Doubtless there were other widows, laborers and leaders who played out the widow’s initial plan. This widow, lowly, bereft, we only know about her because she stood at that point of disillusionment and resignation and turned. She decided to let go of her fear and trust. She turned around. The word repent means to turn around.

Whether or not you need to turn around is really based on which direction you are facing. And only you and God know the answer to that. What are you saying with your words and your wallet about what kind of community this is and what kind of God you worship.

(MOVE TO LECTERN)

Last week Jack Spaeth spoke at our Griswold forum about the power of increasingly sacrificial giving in his life. He was clearly living in the liberation of a perpetually full jar and jug. We asked him how we might help people get it about giving. His answer was simple: Get people who give to tell their stories.

I have moved over here because there is a particular authority and responsibility that a preacher carries into the pulpit. An obligation to rightly handle the word, carefully preaching the Gospel. I am standing over here now (with Nancy’s permission) to tell a bit of my story in my own voice.

When I was 16 I fell in love with Jesus. I understood from the Bible that God asked not merely a tithe from me, but for a 100% investment. I would get a babysitting job and place the $20 in the plate, only to get a call that afternoon from a parent with a $40 need. I was diggin this new God math.

When I was 19 I took a year off from college to try to discern God’s will for me. I was led in prayer to the conclusion that I was called to attend a church in the city of Pittsburgh, about an hour from my home. I had no money and I didn’t have a car. But I was convinced this was from God.

The next day a family friend and Amway salesman asked if he could come to the house to meet with me. He said he had a proposition for me. After exchanging pleasantries I launched into my myriad objections to pyramid marketing schemes. Taken aback he said that the reason he had come over was to tell me that his daughter was spending the year abroad and he was concerned about her car sitting in the garage. He wondered if I would be willing to drive it for a year. Not only did God provide a car but it just so happened to be the car I had always wanted, a yellow Volkswagen bug.

In grad school in the early 90s, I felt led in prayer to imagine my heart’s desire for a place to live. it was hard to let myself imagine things I could not afford. I imagined a farm with rolling hills, out in the country with some woods. Two days later I overheard a professor saying to someone, “We have taken this position in Atlanta and need to go fairly quickly. But we won’t be able to sell the farm that fast and need someone to stay there and feed the horses until next summer. Do you know anyone who might be able to do that? That’s my house! I said.

When I was in graduate school, Yale was hosting a special gathering of women African theologians. Their primary agenda was to discuss the AIDS crisis in Africa. Since talk of sex was taboo in most of their worlds, there was no opportunity to educate. The upshot of the conference was that these women would create a kind of underground sex education railroad. I had two hundred dollars in my checking account... which I gave them. The very next day I was informed that I was one of two students who had been admitted for transfer into the Institute for Sacred Music and the Arts, an admission that included a full scholarship. Two hundred for twenty thousand. Still diggin the new math.

There are many more stories where that came from and I love to talk about God’s love and faithfulness. Even today. Last week we got a bill from the Hospital. Paltry compared with the bizillion dollars of care my family received over the past two months, but $600 none the less. 600 that were not in the budget. Two months ago I was in a minor fender bender when a truck hit me from behind. Last week the other party’s insurance company called to settle the claim for my pain and inconvenience. He asked if $670 would be sufficient. A check is already in the mail. Enough and more than enough.

Over and over. Out of the blue. Furniture. Instruments. Housing. Food. Unsolicited. Unmerited gifts out of God’s abundant economy. Many times on the heels of scary giving. Often simply God’s generous hand. Each time provision arrives I feel like God is saying, “Yes. This is the path. Stay the course. Open your hands. What’s yours is mine. And what’s mine is yours.”
(No mystery whose the winner in that deal.)

There is a passage that is often translated “God loves the cheerful giver.” Most Biblical scholars contend that a truer translation would be God loves the hilarious giver. I wonder if that is how the widow felt. Wait, watch this. Look. I made a loaf, and look, more meal and oil. Wait. Watch, I’ll do it again. Isn’t that crazy. As you can probably guess I have come to give in this way and find it thrilling. And God has not only provided for my needs, but has heard and treasured the desires of my heart.

That’s it. A peek into my cupboard. It does’t look like much, but I assure you, it is certainly more than enough for me.

What does it profit you to gain the whole world and forfeit your life?

2006-09-19T11:16:00.000-04:00

What does it profit you to gain the whole world and forfeit your life? Indeed, what can you give in return for your life?

If you take nothing else away with you this morning, remember these questions. Jesus asked them without offering an answer of his own. Mark recorded them without providing any guiding commentary either. For, in truth, they are questions that have no adequate answer. Once posed, they hang in the air. They drift in the imagination. And they are pertinent to everything you do in all the time you are given to live. Nothing happens that they do not address. These questions should be recited each morning and evening and in the face of every anxiety you may suffer. They can change your life. Don’t leave without them. Don’t leave them unattended because you are so busy from sun up to sun down trying, indeed, to gain the world.

Scripture is rarely obvious in conveying its message – a point that seems painfully lost for many people these days. Its texts require patience to understand, and they can be rightly interpreted only by means of repeated reflection. This is how we engage our lives with God, and only this engagement allows us to see the revelation God has set before us. Allow me, then, a short exercise in reflection that may offer some additional illumination to just these verses.

This past Monday, about mid-morning, the members of the Lyra Choir from Russia arrived, which set in motion a number of preparations. They moved their concert wear into the downstairs vesting room and asked about the availability of an iron. After acquainting themselves with this worship space, their leader, Sergei Tupitsyn, and I reviewed the liturgy for the evening. It was a fairly routine conversation: where would the choir sit, where would the clergy be, how would we walk in and walk out, what prayers would be said, when would the anthems be sung. When we were finished, I escorted the group to one of the houses where they would be staying, picked up groceries for their meals, ordered food for their dinner that night, and helped an extraordinarily dedicated parishioner prepare a reception. This is life. Whether we like it or not, it requires attention to a host of relatively mundane tasks.

Just before the service, the choir gathered on the front steps as the church filled. With the ringing of the bells, we started one more service of worship here. It’s been done many times on many occasions. Each of us has been here for some of them. It was a Monday night, a school night. Students had homework. The road was thick with traffic. People were going here and there, busy about many things.

The liturgy began with two anthems: the first a subdued Gregorian chant, the second, a robust expression of unbridled praise. As I was sitting off to the side, with six strangers commanding the center of the chancel – foreigners who knew very little English and knew much less about any of us – it began to dawn on me that, beyond all the planning, the many communications sent back and forth, and all the simple expectations by which we casually frame such events, when the music started, their voices announced something greater and utterly transcendent. Six singers filled every inch of this church with song, which is distinctly the sound of our humanity. Nothing else discloses us with such clarity. Their voices rang out as if drawn from the depths of the world’s soul. The music felt that immense. And the only way we as listeners could appropriately answer their song was by offering a matching silence, equally profound, the other side of our humanity.

When they finished their anthems, no one moved, as if our stillness could prolong the moment into timelessness. In that quiet, reverence was defined – the experience of knowing that you are immersed in beauty in the exact moment it is accomplished. We had gathered to remember the horror of terror and destruction, a day all too real five years ago when everything and thousands fell to nothing. And, in return, they, who could not share the memories as we do, offered something very like the voice of God calling form from out of chaos. To which the only reply from us, collectively, was a visceral sigh, acknowledging not just talent, but such goodness that it surpasses every threat and imposition of evil. This, they sang, is life – this brilliant and amazing concoction, of persons joined in prayer and song, in remembrance and praise, stopping in time to be together, stepping out of the many mundane pursuits that so occupy us in order to realize the splendor that accompanies us as close as our own breathing… What does it profit us to gain the whole world, but lose this? What, of all we buy and build and stash away, can we give that approximates a return of equal value for the inherent grace of this specific time given and shared?

The service that night was filmed, for which I am grateful. When I watched the tape, however, the effect was not the same. It was enjoyable. The singing was impressive. The camera caught a lot that I did not see. But, in translation, the service ceased to be beautiful in the same way. It had been transformed into a report, a record of an event. It could be viewed a hundred times, examined and critiqued from the safe distance of not being caught up within the experience. What had been an engagement had become a product, and the difference was striking. For the heart of beauty is not what is staged but what is lived, what surprises us, what, although remembered, is never replicable. It is the ability to see the depth of the eternal in the faces and voices of others whose own presence is fleeting, and, because of precisely that moment, to feel immensely blessed – not with goods, but, infinitely greater, with the good.

In our culture, we are inundated with products and reproductions. Paintings are rendered en masse in posters. Concerts mean less when recordings are readily available. It is possible to be immersed in a passing flood of stimuli, increasingly at our fingertips. The remote control is a perfect symbol for our times. We are able to sit and view almost anything in the world from the safe and comfortable remove of a chair or sofa, and as soon as we tire of one perspective, we can click to another, never moving, never taxing ourselves, never revealing anything about ourselves to others. We can consume our time as mere spectators, aloof and untouched by what we see. We may find things interesting or awful, thrilling or appalling. But viewing the world from at this digital distance, the experience of deep beauty eludes us. Gaining many things, we lose our lives. When, in contrast, if we lose ourselves in the real presence of others, we may find that what they offer us is our own lives made richer in return.

When our Scriptures speak of the Sabbath and of God’s command that we honor this time, the day is not meant to be an imposition to be greeted with grumbling or complaint. Nor is it merely a time for relaxation in the form of indulgence, letting the dust of the week settle while sipping coffee or sitting at the beach. Though we tend to make it both. The Sabbath is our opportunity to experience beauty, in the glory of God and the grace of community, shaped by mercy, hope, forgiveness, and love. It’s easy to miss these things, to hear without listening, to attend without being present. The liturgy can become just the rote repetition of familiar words made hollow. We can follow the movements like lemmings that run mindlessly and unaware into the ocean. We have the capacity to make anything dull, which may be as good a definition of sin as you’ll ever find. But all our appointed liturgical actions are intended to elicit the beauty of our lives, the very beauty that is often buried by an avalanche of other preoccupations – not just the beauty of attractiveness or prettiness, but the infinite loveliness of realizing, suddenly, how entwined we are, one with another, and all before God. Honoring the Sabbath is eagerly seeking this magnificent, astonishing engagement.

After the service on Monday, Sergei ran up to me and excitedly stated that the choir had never sung better. The stunning silence of the congregation, he said, our prayerfulness, had led them to sing from the inner recesses of their hearts. More than admiration, our reverence was our gift to them.

In the same way, isn’t this what the Sabbath is all about too, offering in our lives – of our lives – a silence, formed of awe and profound gratitude, before God and with one another, such that all the rest of our work and activities are clarified and we may find that our own singing has been made more beautiful too. This devotion, I think, is something of the return we can give... for the time we are granted.

As exceptions they announce extraordinary moments

2006-09-11T10:28:00.000-04:00

My grandmother immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands when she was a young girl. Her parents left the northern region of Friesland and settled in southern Minnesota. For the time, it was a huge move and an enormous transition. In more ways than we can imagine today, with more depth of meaning, they left an Old World behind them, in order to begin life again in a strange but promising New World. My great grandparents took almost nothing with them, no remnants of a former time: no photographs, no treasured books, no heirlooms to pass on. In their minds, everything meaningful was strictly ahead of them. They even left their language at the docks. No Dutch was spoken on the farm. It too had lost its use. English was the language of the future.

For nearly all my years growing up, my grandmother lived within our household. It never occurred to us that we were anything but Americans, pure and simple. There was never any talk about former ways or different customs or far away places. All the stories we heard were strictly Midwestern, and all our connections, whether relatives or friends, were contained within the radius of a few hundred miles. This was the entire world to us – with one exception.

For every once in a while, suddenly and surprisingly, my grandmother would utter a word in her native tongue – just a word, not a sentence, not a phrase, just a word. And she would utter it almost as if muttering, under her breath. She wouldn’t speak or declare or offer a pronouncement in Dutch. These were words that just seemed to slip out. And once out, they were never translated for us. We didn’t need translation. We somehow knew already what they meant. We could feel their sense. Just as we knew that whatever the word meant, any translation would be inadequate. We could intuit that no other word, in any language, was substitutable for what she had expressed.

This was our only and infrequent indication that there was more to our past than was generally acknowledged, and we found these moments intriguing. It was also clear to us that we had touched upon something grave or deep – something sui generis, all of its own, which was impressed on us by my grandmother’s recourse to a language that had been retired decades before. When these words arose, we learned to pay attention, because if our common vocabulary wasn’t up to the task, then the circumstances weren’t common either.

In the Gospel according to Mark there are three stories in which Jesus’ words were recorded not in Greek but in his own language, Aramaic, one instance we have heard this morning. In doing so, Mark left no clue as to why he made these choices. In any number of places, Jesus’ original tongue could have been similarly quoted. So it is logical to surmise that these three occurrences are exceptional cases and that as exceptions they announce extraordinary moments, disclosures somehow outside the ordinary sense of things. The implication may be that we should pay special attention, because something outside the usual is at stake, something grave or deep.

The most memorable of the utterances that Mark set down in Aramaic is the cry that Jesus let out at his crucifixion, when it had become brutally clear that he had been utterly abandoned. , “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.” My God, why have you forsaken me? It’s a statement of wrenching gravity, for it thrusts before us the depths of human despair. This is precisely what we presume God would never do. Even if all else fails, God is supposed to be sure. God is supposed to save. God is supposed to smooth out all the rough edges and offer gracious consolation. So it is supposed. But Mark makes sure that in this moment the tremendous cost of being human is fully plumbed. Jesus’ exclamation holds true for all of us. This cry might be ours. It fits our mouths. It sometimes fits the stubborn realities of our world: in the streets of Baghdad, in the refugee camps of Darfur, amid the shanties of the Bateys in the Dominican Republic. It will fit the obstinate eventuality of our death. And here God surprises us with stark honesty, giving voice himself to the far edge of human life.

It is a cry that is matched, however, by a contrasting summons, made in an earlier story, in the first statement left by Mark in Jesus’ own language. Jesus comes to the home of Jairus. When he arrives there, all the household is gathered, crying because Jairus’ young daughter has died. Death seems especially cruel when it strikes children; it seems particularly immune to consolation. Yet it is in this moment of intense grief that Jesus, behind closed doors, gently says, “Talitha cumi.” “Little girl, I say to you arise.” This was Mark’s announcement of our opposite edge, delivered by God in person, in the depth of a native tongue. Jesus declared the promise that our lives are met, not lastly by death, but first and ultimately in this divine beckoning: rise up. At the far edge of our humanity, beyond the scope of our own language, beyond proof, beyond the possibility that this can become mere assumption or common belief, this is God’s word to us: arise. This is the mysterious exaltation, in which we may trust. God surprises us, by giving us ourselves, completely, both first and abidingly.

The third Aramaic quotation of Jesus lies between these other two, and it declares a freedom that lies between as well – it speaks not of the edges of life but about the freedom by which we can live in the midst of it. A man was brought to Jesus who for the entirety of his life had been both deaf and mute. Unable to hear, unable to speak, he was closed off and shut down from the world. Taking hold of him, Jesus sighed. It is a moment of compelling resignation. This too exemplifies us. We are so often like this man, trapped, stopped up. We can’t find the words that work. We often don’t know how to understand what we face. We live muddled and bound up, in a hundred different ways, small and great. But in this very moment the word of Jesus resounds, “Ephphatha:” “be opened,” he said. How dazzling this is if we truly hear it: be open. Look, speak, listen, discover and explore, don’t be afraid. It’s a magnificent imperative. This is the way to live, he said. God gives us this immense possibility. Be unstuck.

We tend to miss the magnitude of this command. We dismiss the message as blithely as we deny the miracle – an empty fable in our educated times, say the enlightened. Yet here is the strange irony – in so doing, we do not hear the actual story nor do we have words by which we can engage it. In rejection, the story renders us deaf and mute – when this need not be. From now and always, Jesus said, pay attention. Be aware. Absorb the world. Make this your habit, be ceaselessly, unabashedly, open. This is the very heart of the Christian message, this courage and this excitement.

What really counts in life? Over the course of years, in many ways both direct and indirect, my grandmother asked this question of her grandchildren. And we listened to her – she was, after all, more than seventy years ahead of us on the path. What really counts? Nothing but the present tense? Securing some vague notion of happiness, borrowed wholesale, from one moment to the next? In the words of the Prayer Book, being so immersed in things temporal and material that there is no room, no time, and no language left for things eternal and spiritual? Mark’s answer might better be framed in this way. What really counts is learning how to live as close as you can to these words: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani – bearing the question that discloses our soul. Talitha cumi – trusting that the life that God gives is the life that God will eternally lift up. And Ephphatha, moving always toward this marvelous imperative invitation.

Be open, says God, in words that erupt from the core of his being, words so fitting that they are untranslatable. Be open all the way down to the real anguish of betrayal, all the way up to the redeeming of God. For our purpose as persons, as Christians, as the communion of the Church, is not to press upon the world a tight and constraining order, clamping down and binding up. It is rather to live in such a way that others look on us and are astounded by glimpsing a deep and uncommon heritage, an inheritance of faith that can be seen in the constancy of our compassion and the resilience of our joy. It is to act with such love that others may say with amazement as they said of Jesus, look, they do everything well; they even make the deaf to hear and the mute to speak. Ephphatha – no translation needed. It’s meaning and profundity is simply evident.

Faith, in Christian terms, isn't fundamentally about us

2006-09-07T15:34:00.000-04:00

After beginning with a short salutation, the first Epistle of Peter proceeds with an opening statement, which, in its original Greek, is only one sentence. It’s difficult to render this grammatical form verbally, but it’s very important that all of what was written is understood to be one, single thought, contained as it is between an initial capital letter and, finally, a concluding period. Allow me to read it in full.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! -- By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. -- In which you rejoice, though now for a little while you may have to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold, which, though perishable is tested by fire, may redound to praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. -- Without having seen him, you love him; though you do not now see him you believe in him and rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy. -- As the outcome of your faith you obtain the salvation of your souls. -- The prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired about this salvation; they inquired what person or time was indicated by the spirit of Christ within them when predicting the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glory. -- It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves, but you, in the things which have now been announced to you by those who preached the Good News to you through the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.”

Nine verses, one sentence. One thought. One single, but comprehensive proclamation. This, according to Peter, is the short version of Christianity, the first and smallest of steps in. How much of it do you remember? It’s the briefest of thumbnail sketches.

At the risk of doing some damage to its evident beauty and power, let me put this into more mundane language, something more like our own vernacular. Here is the same sentence again.

It is possible for us to give thanks to God because, by his own grace, shown in Jesus Christ, we have been afforded eternal life, which we may realize, in part, in our lives even now, just as we yearn for its full disclosure at a time that is yet to come. -- This promise does not erase the problems of the world nor does it resolve the difficulties we personally suffer. -- Faith does not protect us from trouble or guarantee us any prosperity; but it reveals how it is that love endures and goodness perseveres, through all things, even death. -- Seeing this in Jesus, in the testimony of the Scriptures, we have every reason to rejoice and to be glad in all of life, and this indomitable joy is what salvation means. -- This is not a dream or a fantasy, a wish that floats about without foundation. -- It has been a revelation slowly wrung out of the experience of generations. -- Its richness is mirrored by the costs incurred by all those who waited upon God, who looked for relief and redemption, who prayed for the advent of a Savior. -- Often, they searched in vain or looked in the wrong direction for precisely the wrong solution. -- Their missteps are our gift. -- They didn’t gain anything for themselves; they provided everything for us. -- From them, we have learned how we can say that Jesus is God’s Messiah, how, in him, all of the brokenness of history is not left strewn and scattered, but comes to fruition. -- Because of their witness, it is possible, too, for us to fold our own lives into this completeness – for God’s intentions are definite and his actions are specific. -- Having come to us as an individual within the world, we may trust that we, as individuals, are no less included within his mercy and his fervent compassion. -- This is a love of such magnificence, so marvelously extended to us, that even the angels yearn, too, for this kind of communion and intimacy.

One sentence. One beginning thought. What is striking about Peter’s sentence is its vast difference from what many take Christianity to be today. As far as I know, his simple statement doesn’t appear any T-shirts, and it certainly wouldn’t fit on a bumper sticker. It’s not reducible to a motto. Somehow, the proclamation, “My boss is a Jewish carpenter,” just doesn’t have the same impact or meaning.

For a while, the code letters WWJD were all the fashion: Christianity in an acronym – “what would Jesus do.” But, the more closely you read Peter’s text, the more it becomes clear that WWJD isn’t really an issue at all. It can’t be found anywhere, neither in Peter’s words nor, however vaguely, between the lines.

This week several stories ran about a Christian web site on which people could post anonymous but public confessions. It’s great reading for the prurient. In a coinciding interview, the founding minister explained the site by noting that confession is the first necessary step if you want to be successful in life. Wealth, he said, follows truth. But Peter didn’t say this either, neither directly nor indirectly. Nor did he suggest that along with faith comes a two stall garage and the cars to fill it, or great kids who will be accepted into the best colleges, or the house of one’s dreams, or the luck of the draw in a local poker game. In actuality, if you read his testimony a hundred times, you will still be unable to find any claim that God’s promise will make your life better materially. Faith is not a way to manipulate God into being advantageously on your side, suddenly bestowing extra benefits, no matter how many ingenious slogans are generated and slick marketing campaigns are conducted advocating exactly this. In spite of the popular talk in the American church, there is no quid pro quo in religion. God offers no prizes and grants no rewards, and faithfulness doesn’t lead to divine favors. Such talk is mercenary and grossly petty. I call it evangelical profanity, because it sullies what is holy.

If we listen closely to the text, faith, in Christian terms, isn’t fundamentally about us or about our condition or our particular circumstances. It isn’t even, primarily, about our faith. It is God who is faithful – who is faithful to us – and thus the worship of the church is rather, and far differently, our celebration of our inclusion in a love so broad that all the time of history is required to bring it to light. It is possible for us to perceive our own lives, not within the limited scope of the years we are given, but, more profoundly, as absolutely intrinsic to God’s eternal kingdom and infinite goodness. It is not (as many fervently declare) that God is for us and, therefore, must be against those others against whom we struggle. The truth that we are invited to see, with ever greater perspicuity, works in the opposite direction. It is that our lives are our participation in the glory of God, a glory that stretches from alpha to omega, that connects us, then, deeply, with all that was and all that will be, and that, as we profess each Sunday, in the fullness of time God will gather all the world together in reconciliation and wholeness.

This is all a long preface to understanding Paul’s concluding words from his letter to the Ephesians, which we have heard this morning. They make the same claim, and it is extraordinarily timely. “We are not contending against other human beings,” he stated. We are not contending against other human beings! Religion is not morality or politics writ large – especially when we are instructed to love even our enemies. The true foe is greater than any instance of evil or injustice. And here even Paul, the brilliant rhetorician, struggles for words. The battle is not with us, reduced to stupid debates about who’s in and who’s out. The battle is God’s alone, against “the powers and principalities and the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places,” against the deep shadow side of our world that beguiles us. And our calling, then, in the light of God’s own victory in Christ, is not to further divide an already fractious world with misguided attempts to determine who has been saved and who has not. Paul gives us a very different mission. It is, primarily, to stand fast, to live in the integrity of God’s assurance. “Let the shoes on your feet be the gospel of peace,” he said. In our present time, amid all the inflammatory words thrown about, aren’t these more important than all the rest: “Let the shoes on your feet be the gospel of peace!” Don’t be tempted into thinking that the fight is yours, Paul warns. The fight is already won, good news to which we are privileged to be witnesses, as people who may already live clothed in the grace that is God’s.

The drive of our world now seems to be an intensely restless desire for division and polarization, accomplished most severely in the name of religion. But this is not our message in any manner. Ours is, rather, to touch the truth of eternity within the time of our own lives, an eternity that gathers and redeems and loses nothing of all that was or is or will be. If we are to speak boldly, this is the only boldness with which we may speak.

Who am I to you?

2006-08-31T12:01:00.000-04:00

Periodically, in order to get a quick dose of news in the morning, I will turn on the Today show, which, with millions of daily viewers, has been the envy of television executives for years. It’s a strange mix of spots, which offers a uniquely American perspective – not only on the events it reports but, also, on how modern life itself can be understood. In their well-established format, hard news stories are followed by softer, common interest spots, and these, in turn, are complemented by various contests, demonstrations, and musical performances. What starts in earnest, two hours later, culminates in pleasantries. A diplomat might be interviewed about the latest tragedies of war, or a series of reporters might offer wrenching news of human disaster, but soon enough, before a half hour is finished, this is conveniently tempered by a pastiche of movie reviews, food tasting, product placement, celebrity gossip, personal makeovers, and fashion tips. All of this, then, is tied together by a personable team of hosts who casually banter among themselves and, at regular intervals, thrill the crowd gathered outside by engaging them in friendly chatter. It’s like a visit to a television mall, where viewers can saunter from store to store, popping in and stepping back out with ease, window-shopping – always with the implicit promise that, amid all that is offered, there will be plenty that is enticing and delightful. The harshness of life morphs into the ease of lifestyle. News shifts to entertainment. Even the strife of war is, eventually, soothed, perhaps by a guided tour through the great new gadgets for back to school shoppers. Horatio Alger is alive and well, dressed in the contemporary garb of a thousand possible diversions from the travails that others suffer.

Periodically, added to this, are surprises that come from the people who wait at Rockefeller Center, eager for a few moments of television fame. They stand for hours, ready for that passing instant when they can wave and cheer, or, if they are lucky, announce a birthday or send a message to friends back home. And sometimes, this tightly framed moment is used to do something dramatic, like offer a marriage proposal. In the imagination, this can be the perfect stage. The hosts are amiable, the crowd is giddy, everyone loves a wedding, and all the nation can share in an exciting burst of happiness. What could be better?.. Unless, of course, the proposal is not gladly received, and the invitation is refused. Then, what could be worse?

Several months ago, a young woman stood shocked and unprepared, and after several halting seconds, which seemed like an eternity, she managed to answer her friend’s question, “Will you marry me?” with only these painful words: “I don’t think so.”

It was excruciating to watch, not only because a very intimate interchange had gone so badly, but, all the more so, because a dreadful sense of seriousness had been interjected into a spot that was supposed to be sheer fun and joy. A refusal was inconceivable. This was New York. This was national television. This was Katie Couric with a microphone and a smile. This was supposed to be a fairy tale come true. But the only person who could answer was the one who had the gall to interrupt the dream, because, even under the sway of lights and cameras and media stars, a greater, sterner reality had to be recalled. This was about her life. This profoundly involved her actual future. The question posed had no effect on any others there. The hosts, the crowd, the viewers might have been able to swoon for a minute, until a commercial break gave them something else to think about. But for this young woman what was at issue was literally everything about her. And she had the integrity to know this and the courage to respond from the depth of that reality. When everyone thought she would be swept away, she firmly planted her feet. The resulting silence was terrible. The hosts were stymied. The director quickly cut away to an ad for delectable, frozen diet foods, which offered maximum decadence with minimum guilt. But the sting could not be erased – because it, above all else, revealed what was true and lasting and uncomfortable in its singular genuineness. It was awful, but it was, exactly in this hurt, a powerful reminder about what is wonderful when our words reflect our lives, when, by them, we know that everything is at stake.

The incident we have heard this morning from John’s Gospel bears similar import. It comes at the conclusion of a long series of events, wherein, initially Jesus attracts a large number of followers. Crowds pursue him because they believe he will make their lives easier. He will provide them what they need and what they want. He had showed that he could feed five thousand; he could therefore grant them anything else, whatever they dreamed.

But soon enough, he disappointed the crowds, for what he told them was that he himself was God’s promise – it was not what he could miraculously supply, goods that he brought or personal gain that he bestowed. He himself, and only he, was the fulfillment of the covenant. He was the manifestation of God’s intimacy with his creation, a sign of love that, in the cold light of day, to those who chased after him, suddenly looked a lot more like sacrifice than reward. And at this, the crowds fled. They were more inclined to find a different means to their dreams than to try to see how God was actually God in his compassion with their struggles.

Watching this, Jesus then turned to the twelve who he had chosen, and he asked a stinging question, made sharper by his own despair. It is a question of probing seriousness. “And what about you,” he asked, “Do you also wish to go away?” It is a proposal of sorts, an investigation of commitment. The fairy tales had been disposed of. All the fantasies that trailed behind Jesus had been eliminated. He had deflated them all. He stood alone, being himself, alone, the gift of God, and he wondered then whether this was enough for them, whether his closest disciples would choose this reality.

It was a point of great decision, that allowed no drift, no diversion, no blithe smile or shrug of ambiguity. In this question, everything was at stake. And Peter’s response returned unwaveringly. He met this inquiry with matching directness. “Lord,” he said, “To whom then shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” It was a deeply human response, which, in just a few words, disclosed all the complexity that commitment involves. There was no waffling in his reply, but there was no boastfulness either. He was certain about his connection to Jesus, but he had no sense of its ultimate consequences. There was no magic conferred, no advantage gained in this. The tone of Peter’s answer almost sounds like resignation, rather than boisterous gladness. Yet he acknowledged what was pertinent, which is that in Jesus he saw God being God. He saw the integrity of this and its absolute genuineness. It was the one true thing that trumped all else. So he stayed.

Hearing this story, Jesus’ question is also turned toward us, and it is timely, for the great impetus of our culture is to make faithfulness and religion a matter of dreams and desires, a realm where anyone’s opinion about God has just as much legitimacy as anyone else’s. Different paths are different paths, but everyone is walking: so it is said. Each is as good as the other. One dreams, another imagines, and so we spin religious fantasies that seem good and fitting and helpful. It would be so nice, some contend, if only we all learned to play along and allowed God to be all things to all people, and thus a personal convenience and, like so much else, a pleasant diversion when you have the spare time.

But the question posed is direct and scandalously personal. “Who am I to you?” Jesus asks, “and, touching the reality of God, seeing fulfillment actually standing before you, do you also wish to go away?” Play is so much easier than decision. But is it true and does it endure?

In our lives we are free to choose what we believe, but this does not necessarily mean that we are free to choose whatever we want, however it seems to fit, randomly picking up this and discarding that, treating religion as a vast wardrobe of clothes that come in and go out of fashion. For then God is just a costume – and is not God. Which makes everything false.

The freedom that is true is the opportunity to plant one’s feet, not triumphantly, but, recognizing the singular vulnerability of the questioner, to reply with humility and an honesty that encompasses your whole life. “Look at me,” said Jesus. “Now… do you wish to go away.” This isn’t fanciful. It’s the inquiry of one person standing before us… and, as such, it’s everything, with awful, wonderful consequence. And what words, then, in reply, reflect your life?

The lining of the world

2006-08-23T11:04:00.000-04:00

As he was approaching his eightieth year, the poet Czeslaw Milosz sat down at his desk and wrote this line: “When I die, I will see the lining of the world.” It’s a beautiful thought and such a lovely hope, that beneath all the noise and scattered intentions of human events there remains the unshaken assurance of a lasting consummation, so subtly expressed as “the lining of the world.”

In the span of his life, Milosz had witnessed much. Born in Poland, he endured the Nazi occupation and was one of the few who survived the brutal suppression of the revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto. He watched as many of his young friends and colleagues were marched away, or beaten or summarily shot. After the war, he joined the ranks of the millions of displaced. Central Europe was shattered, so he moved first to France and then, after several years, to California. And he spent his time, thereafter, examining the world with words, mining its riches with his eyes and his pen, marking its wonders, its mysteries and tragedies. The measure he took was rarely expressed in sweeps of vast generalities and themes. He chose, rather, to look intently at what was right at hand. This always proved enough, whatever it was, to invite his careful exploration and then his poetic caress. He lived, thus, in such a way that he these words would have meaning and integrity: “--- When I die, I will see the lining of the world.”

This single line continued into a full verse, and Milosz added these expectations:
[I will see then] the other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add up,
And whatever was incomprehensible will be comprehended.

Imagine believing that the world has such wholeness and that, ultimately, that completeness will be given us to see and appreciate. It’s an old world vision, evocative of a far country and a distant time, before cell phones and multimedia and the disparate chatter of our present age, when life was not so much about pleasure but destiny, when people yearned not so much for adventure but for fulfillment.

But we should make no mistake, Milosz was a modern man too. He was well aware of the disenchantment that has often come alongside our progress, how it has become increasingly difficult in the profusion of global diversity to perceive something more than randomness or envision a single purpose that literally holds everything together. His first verse, so compelling, was matched by a second opposite verse, equally unflinching. But this one, in stoic resignation, set forth a flurry of spiraling questions:
--- And if there is no lining to the world? [he wondered]
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on a branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
What then? What if there is no more to life than just exactly what we see, with nothing lying hidden, waiting beneath: no definite form, no hope for resolution, no conclusion that reconciles all things, but only the constant passing away of happenstance, within which we tumble about, for better or worse? Is this, in truth, all there is? It’s a view that is fast becoming the general assumption of our current century, ranging from the fleeting mottos of pop culture to the hardened axioms of evolutionary psychology. Carpe diem.

Milosz, however, answered his own questions with an equally immediate third and final verse. He answered with neither the certainty of his first verse, nor the resignation of the second, but, splitting the difference between both possibilities, he suggested that we live always somewhere in-between. We live in-between glorious promise and simple acquiescence to the passing of time. And being thus situated, our central role in life, he claimed, is to see what is blithely taken as profane with eyes that can imagine all the world to be sacred. This is his conclusion:
[Even if there is no lining to the world] there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out…

Our unique responsibility as human beings is this blessed task, to lend wisdom to the world, naming what we see, lifting it up for observation, and hallowing every small thing as intrinsic to God’s kingdom, which, waiting fruition, is still being revealed in part every day, in thrush and mountain, moon and stars. Wisdom ties together and makes whole, and this capacity has been given to us, to look at all that happens and, with confidence, to envision all the variation and contradiction subsumed within God’s redemption. This work isn’t fanciful; it’s imperative. It’s necessary to soul and life. It’s the work by which we are both human and humane. It’s our participation in the image of God.

Each of the readings we have heard this morning asks of us this diligence. The writer of Proverbs urges that we move beyond simplicity, by which he meant our merely falling in line with the base commerce of the world, the endless ebb and flow of bickering and trading that naturally fills so much of our time. Paul warns against the foolishness of life that never achieves any depth, when everything is flattened by personal indulgence, in pursuits that have no lasting effect. His instructions, that we sing hymns and give thanks from the heart, prompt us to continually draw out something enduring, something of the eternal in all our interactions. And Jesus draws this all the closer, declaring that God’s kingdom is not an infinite abstraction. It is, rather, his complete devotion given to each and all persons, in himself, broken and divided, so that we may be reconciled.

Such wisdom is not cleverness or ingenuity or even, as we so esteem it today, sheer intellect. It is intimacy without borders, our positioning of ourselves between the hope of heaven and the great array of our experiences with such trust and insight that God’s glory may be made evident in us, by our own manifestation of God’s gathering together of all the world’s disparate fragments.

Wisdom is a rare commodity today. The world news shows daily how we have been caught up once more in the fractious hostilities of competing ideologies. And in ways small and great, we have learned to be more intent on expediency than patience; we are more inclined to be pragmatic than prayerful.

Nonetheless, we, the church, meet. We gather together, not merely by happenstance, but, explicitly, as a communion, as people bound sacramentally, across every real and imaginable divide. We give voice here to such faith that strangers should be welcomed and even enemies should be loved. We offer common prayer. We share a common cup. This worship is the exercise of wisdom, in a world that desperately needs this witness. This may seem mundane – one more habit among many, one more obligation, one more Sunday morning spent – but in truth, what we do and say and attest to here is both radical and profound… For we touch upon the lining of the world, and as Czeslaw Milosz so eloquently understood, this wisdom colors everything with eternal meaning.

All you need is a dollar and a dream

2006-08-23T10:23:00.000-04:00

The New York State Lottery used to run a series of radio ads, all of which ended with a voiceover that casually suggested that life might just be this easy: “All you need,” we were encouraged, “is a dollar and a dream.”

It’s a masterful line, one that could make anyone imagine for a moment that winning is within reach of everyone. Who doesn’t have a dollar? Who doesn’t have a dream?

The nasty little problem with this, however, is that the relationship between money and dreams is a lot more complicated than we usually suppose. When we buy the ticket, the dream is hitting the jackpot, spending a dollar to get several million more. But after the pro forma photographs are taken, when winners stand, a bit stupefied, holding an oversized check, a huge project of translation then begins. Checks are meant to be cashed, and all that fresh, crisp currency is soon enough put to use acquiring all the other things that our dreams include – houses and cars and boats and trips, a great stream of toys, and perhaps, best of all, the sudden attentions of a really dreamy person who, before, showed no interest whatsoever. It sounds so simple.

What several decades of statistics reveal, though, is that for the large majority of winners, their winnings don’t buy them their dreams. In actuality, what they obtain is not fulfillment, but stuff – mountains of it – and with this, unexpected headaches, recurrent problems, surprising debt, and a predictable entourage of connivers looking for crafty ways to get a sizable portion of the jackpot for themselves. For some winners, life’s hassles don’t change much. The scales just adjust. For others, what they find they have won looks much more like a very real nightmare.

This gives us reason to pause. Most of our dreams come and go without ever being tested. We simply enjoy them, without seriously scrutinizing their legitimacy. That’s what makes them so pleasant. We don’t stop midway, to carefully draw out all their consequences or match them up, point by point, with the many details of our lives. We spin them freely and loosely. They float about in our minds, never really tempered by what their realization would mean. And in those cases when they do indeed come true, often, what we experience ceases to look like what we dreamt at all. Our dreams made real can seem as mundane and entangling as the rest of life, much to our chagrin.

The whole book of Deuteronomy is a treatise on precisely this issue. After forty years wandering through the Sinai desert, the people of Israel are on the verge of realizing their most central dream. They are about to cross the Jordan river into the promised land. They themselves are about to become the fulfillment of the covenant that God had made, many generations before, to Abraham. And at this historic moment, as they lean intently forward, Moses forces them all to pause, and he delivers a lengthy sermon, 33 chapters, which is his own emphatic warning that what they will gain, in wonderful riches, may well, still, disappoint their expectations. What they had long dreamt, spinning fantasies while trudging through the inhospitable wilderness, may not, in reality, seem so dreamy. The land may fall short of their hopes, and if they are not assiduously mindful of this, Moses said, all their joy may collapse into the same old daily routine of anxiety, desire, greed and violence. Wanting more, wanting better, wanting all that they can imagine and imagining that this is what they deserve: this form of dreaming, he says, leads only to grumbling, dissent, struggle and bitterness.

Foreseeing this, at the most critical time, as the people of Israel are salivating at the prospects before them, Moses tries valiantly to turn them around to see something more impressive and foundational. What is more important is not what lies ahead, he declares, it is what lies behind, in what they have actually experienced and lived. The fulfillment of their dream is not primary. What takes precedence is the care that they, in fact, received all throughout the time of their wandering. God was not absent then. Having no food, God provided manna. Finding no water, God produced water from solid rock. Now, as they are poised to enter a land of springs and fountains, of milk and honey, Moses cautions that, having much, they will be at risk of forgetting what they had been given all along, and, having much, they will dream, then, all the more, only of having more. They will forget how they had been sustained, and, awash in affluence, they will slip into the habit of continuously pining for whatever yet remains unacquired. Such forgetfulness imposes a sense of scarcity even when we are inundated with goods – with all the stuff that, in our dreams, we presume will make us secure and happy. Against this, Moses instructs that hope means nothing apart from memory, that gratitude accomplishes more than desire, and, most significantly, that it is more important to pray than it is to dream – for prayer works completely oppositely.

Prayer is essentially the exercise of acute remembrance. As such, it is the way we may repeatedly discover how God has provided what we have needed well before and well beyond our asking. It is the way we learn that thanksgiving waits for nothing and requires no excuse. If we look at where we are and where we have been – if we look intently enough and are not immediately diverted by the restless press of ever-spawning new wishes – we may see that, in a scope beyond words, God’s grace precedes our every request for what we imagine we still lack. Prayer opens reality in its fullness, God’s infinite generosity, by which, then, we may claim in our own lives, at all times, the legitimacy of satisfaction, of trust, of confidence, satiation, and peace.

As the people of Israel were tipping on the edge of unprecedented prosperity, Moses redirected their sights. He knew that if they forgot God’s faithfulness to them in the wilderness, then achieving the promised land would serve only to fan the flames of wanting more and unleash ambitions, greed, corruption, and attempted conquest without end. And, as much of the rest of the Old Testament attests, Moses was not particularly successful. Soon enough, what Israel received wasn’t enough, and endless battles followed, chronicled in the books of Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and all the prophets. Today, at this very moment, in Lebanon and Israel, these ancient dreams among ancient people continue to inflict new wounds, in a conflict that seems as intractable as God is eternal, in hatred and violence that, after thousands of years, still has no apparent solution.

Deuteronomy is a sermon that must be regularly preached.

We should listen to Moses’ address, intently, and strive then to confirm among ourselves that, indeed, praying is more important than dreaming... Now I am deeply aware that this sounds like a typically religious admonition, utterly predictable and entirely too pious for progressive, enlightened, educated, professional, protestant Episcopalians in the modern world. But this is because we are saddled with a terribly erroneous vision of what prayer is and does. We have warped it into the idea that it is our way of twisting God’s arm and, thus, enlisting God’s supernatural power on behalf of the dreams we voice. This, however, is only a supreme form of idolatry, the remaking God in our own image – when prayer should be the disciplined work of realizing that we don’t need our dreams to be happy or fulfilled, if we but pause to see how thoroughly we have already been gifted, even in what seems to be wilderness to us.

How much do you dream? How much do you pray? What do we gain by dreaming? What can prayer accomplish? Our world is intensely driven. Dreams abound, with hard edges, pushing us toward dubious promise while instilling clear anxiety. It may be that what we need most is the capacity to look in the opposite direction, not forward and away but back and in, in order to grasp hold of what is real and sure and marvelous, that, miraculously, without our demanding it, has been given – more than we can calculate. This is the first manner of the presence of God. And when we understand this, which is true peace, to the point where we can live it and model it, then, as Christians, we will be the catalyst that powerfully contributes the possibility of liberation from the vast problems of the world.

Not to dream but to pray.

They have methodically discovered the souls of one another, which, once disclosed, shows where love lies

2006-08-08T10:27:00.000-04:00

Over the course of some years in ministry, I have had many occasions to speak with couples as they prepare for marriage. It provides me the opportunity to ask, in many different ways and modes, why they would want to do such a thing. And I can report that the overwhelming response I have received has been some measure of the attraction that each sees in the other. They share the same interests and hobbies, they say. They feel that they have the same goals. Amid the churning circles of social engagements and evenings spent clubbing, meeting and greeting, sizing up and figuring out, someone appears who, serendipitously, seems broadly compatible. She’s beautiful. He’s dependable. They both love the water. So it goes, back and forth, weaving a narrative of lovely coincidence and convenience.

There are, of course, exceptions to this chorus. But, more often, it is extraordinarily difficult to get couples to talk directly about one another. They talk, instead, about what they are pursuing, the style of life that they hope to have, the plans they have made for work and play, the ideas they have for what would make them happy. Only rarely, very rarely, do they drop all these intervening matters in order to look yearningly at one another, to declare that, in fact, none of these issues are primary, because it is their love for each other that alone is important – a pronouncement against which all else pales.

I must admit that I can’t blame anyone for this. In the reality of our present time, even after several years cohabitating, it is certainly possible for couples not to know one another. We are not a culture inclined toward personal reflection or the expression of intimacy. Life is doing things, getting things, adventuring. How could we reasonably expect, then, that couples in their prime years of conquest should be any different. They are openly enamored of one another…
But love is harder to find, usually buried beneath multiple layers of ulterior hopes.

Marriage a scandalous thing, and it’s time that we break it from the leaden shackles of its legal and institutional conformity. We have long lost the sense that marriage is really ludicrous. We have made it mundane. Yet if you listen with even half an ear to the vows, it is clear that its promises are outrageous and they are impossible to guarantee. For better or worse, for richer for poorer: if weddings weren’t so awash in sentimentality, they would be offensive, because no one who stands and repeats these words can know what they will demand. For the past several years, furious debates have been raging about gender and marriage. But, if we were at all attentive to what is actually said in this service, between any two persons, this central scandal is far more legitimately controversial. Why do we sanction marriage at all? Why do we trust that we can make such promises sincerely?

We do because there are some who, in time, generally after thirty or forty or fifty years, obtain the capacity to show what marital love truly is. They can look at one another and mark with breathtaking immediacy how all the other details of their lives may be nice or interesting, but their devotion is reserved purely for the spouse they love. They may have enjoyed much or suffered much. They may have had years of delirious happiness or long stretches when they struggled with suspicion or bewilderment or alienation. But in and through these experiences they have methodically discovered the souls of one another, which, once disclosed, shows where love lies. By the look in their eyes, by the touch of their hands, by a few words that need no explaining they can say, “I have realized that it is you that I love. It is you – without qualification, without any other accompaniments. You are my life.”

And, in them, no one doubts that this is true; in them, every word of the vows of marriage is vindicated. And we are humbled by the experience of seeing such adoration.

If we are to understand the reading we have heard this morning from John’s Gospel, it is helpful to see how it works along very similar lines.

The crowds are scurrying after Jesus, and he tells them that he knows they are following him principally for what they expect to receive: free bread, more than enough, party favors, any number of desirable benefits. This is, after all, what God as God is supposed to do. Without constraints himself, he is supposed to break down the constraints we suffer – if we plead sincerely enough. It’s a presumption modeled very effectively in the phenomenon of today’s megachurches, that, following suit, promise whatever you’d like: light shows, stacks of donuts, hymns sung to your favorite rock tunes, a liturgy that feels like shopping, a church built to look like a mall. The key is to be attractive in a plethora of ways, and, thus, having provided the extravaganza, a way might be found to mention that God is in some way relevant to all the excitement.

But God, says Jesus, does not seek a relation built on this kind of exchange (Thanks for all the stuff!) His desire is more intimate.

The people then ask Jesus for some other sign by which he can prove that he fairly represents God. If God’s not going to provide bread, maybe he can do something more remarkable, something miraculous and incredible – something that outdoes what God did through Moses. And this, too, is still the refrain of many today, both within the church and from outside. God must be fabulous, evident in supernatural intervention. And living into this expectation some people loudly attest here and there: “Look at this! Look what God did!” While others claim with sadness and, sometimes, derision, “I’m looking for anything and finding nothing.”

What Jesus asks, however, is much more direct and daring: “Don’t look to me,” he said. “Look at me. Look at me because I am myself the word by which God says irrevocably, ‘It is you that I love.’ My life is in your hands, and your life is my whole passion.”

Jesus is God’s most intimate adoration of us, the word that came only after generations of struggle, for better and for worse, for richer for poorer. And in him, every word of covenant is vindicated, and the soul of God is revealed.

This remains the hardest and rarest of discoveries, especially in an age not inclined to reflection, when we can easily blather on that God must be infinite, and therefore, he must be more removed than close. But Christian faith is scandalous too; not because it is irrational, believing something for which there is no evidence, but because it dares to see how God himself is deeply present to us in his own infinite faith. Well below the surface play of our wants and desires, well below the lists of all possible attractions, well below the fractures and wounds of our own unfaithfulness, the unfaithfulness that erupts in the brutality of war and the ravages of suspicion, God pleads that we search through our own blindness to see just him. God is not just a third party provider. Our challenge is to realize the intensity of his closeness – in all the glory of nature, in the stubbornness of his reconciliation, in the beauty of his Son, who stood among and before us – so that a similar cry of adoration might come from our hearts. And we might say in return, with absolute truth, that we do indeed find our lives in God.

And finding our lives in God, no one, seeing us, will doubt that this is so.

This is the invitation of the Gospel.

This is the stuff of myths and fables. . .

2006-07-31T12:38:00.000-04:00

It’s easy to hear a reading like that just read from the Gospel without hearing it at all, for it sounds like a thousand others. In fact, it seems to have exactly the same form as many of the most popular stories we tell in endless variation. Somewhere, somehow, someone is under threat, and suddenly, miraculously, by virtue of supernatural strength, a single individual manages to save the day. And by spontaneous expansion, it is then suggested that this relief of rescue extends to the whole world.

This is the stuff of myths and fables, of suspense novels and thrillers, and, increasingly, of comic book characters that explode with new life on movie screens, appearing simultaneously on children’s lunch boxes, in fast food value meals, and on highly marketed shirts, sheets, shoes, and so on. We love heroes, perhaps because we quietly know that none of us is immune from falling victim to something. Life has inherent risks. Yet a wonderful assurance is made available to us when we can drape ourselves in repeated accounts of the triumph of good over evil, even against all odds. Walking on water may have lost much of its original fascination, along with sandals, robes, and ancient rowboats. But vivid stories of men in tights and capes, scaling buildings, thwarting the scheming of technological geniuses are still being produced at the cost of tens of millions of dollars, and they earn hundreds of millions in return. Impending catastrophe and stunning deliverance: we feast on such tales.

Pick up almost any commentary on Mark’s text, and the explanation given for what was read this morning will announce the same theme. After the feeding of the five thousand, at nightfall, the disciples head out by boat across the Sea of Galilee. Jesus remains behind, alone, to pray. His prayer, however, is interrupted because, somehow, mysteriously, by the magic of extraordinary vision, very late into the night, he spies his disciples struggling against surging waters. It’s a terrific telephone booth moment, when, immediately, Jesus determines that this is now no longer the time for contemplation. No. What is required of him is action. So without pause, he heads out, stepping above the waves, neither sinking nor swimming. And, entering the boat, the storm is stilled. The disciple’s rescue is accomplished – impressively. And we, in turn, receiving this report, may thrill to the idea that this action, done on behalf of such a motley bunch of fisherman, would surely apply, then, to us no less. So it has often been said. Is this what you heard?

The problem with this interpretation is that it ignores the most intriguing line in the story. The disciples are in trouble. Jesus rushes to the scene. We expect, then, that he’d arrive and, in arriving, set everything right. But this is not what Mark tells us. For we are told that Jesus intended to “walk right on by.” To where, no one knows. Why, it isn’t explained. But Mark leaves us with this enigmatic, very odd, and humorous image. The hero misses the mark. Like a horse with blinders, Jesus seems to have wished only to amble aimlessly ahead, oblivious to the commotion in the boat – walking like Forrest Gump’s senseless running, anywhere and nowhere. It’s only the cries of the disciples that change his course. They scream, thinking he’s a ghost, adding fright to their fear. Their terror breaks through his seeming stupor, and this alone causes him to turn to calm them. Mark’s narration here is too strange to be ignored. Jesus meant to merely pass by the boat. This comment is too bizarre to dismiss.

I had a few minutes earlier in the week to talk with John Talbott about the reading, and I raised this question with him. I must credit him with a brilliant reply. For he suggested that the purpose of this line might be to inform us that the disciples didn’t actually need rescue – at least not in the sense that we tend to assume. They didn’t need the superhero. They didn’t need the miracle. They didn’t need Jesus to intervene, abnormally, on their behalf. Walking by would have been a way to signify that, in a much more fundamental way, Jesus knew they would be alright, and they, in turn, could have realized this from his passing without stopping. No magic was necessary, regardless of the severity of the storm -- for there is a trust that exceeds all the reaches of fear, a trust so deep that we may see that our very lives are the expression of God’s own faithfulness. Come high water or hell, we are not imperiled. This is what prayer reveals and establishes with us. But it’s a trust that, in the midst of our struggles, easily becomes occluded, and a promise from God that is often hidden under multiple layers of our own confusion, dismay, and anxiety.

It is important to remember that the whole Gospel of Mark is an act of subversion. It serves to undermine many of the firmest assumptions we make about God. In story after story, Mark tells us exactly what we expect to hear. He fashions an image of God that meets all our usual notions. And then, abruptly, again and again, he pulls the rug from under our feet. We think of glory as exaltation; Jesus declares that it’s servanthood. We look to God for the healing of illness; when asked, Jesus offers forgiveness of sins. We’d like God to be strong enough to save us from every crisis, -- from time to time we’d like some supernatural assistance; Mark tells us that Jesus was believed to be God only when a Roman centurion watched him die. Thus, if we are to hear what was read today, we should think of this story as Jesus’ wholesale rejection of the hero motif and the division upon which it depends. God’s function is not to rescue us from our ills. This perspective misconstrues everything. God’s presence and communion work in a altogether different manner.

Saint Paul probably came as a close as anyone to truly understanding God, and he closed his letter to the Philippians with a startling confession. He wrote that knowing God in Christ Jesus meant that he also knew an unusual comprehensiveness. He knew, he said, “how to be abased and how to abound. In any and all circumstances,” he declared, he had learned the secret of “facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want.” He could contend with all things, endure all things, hope all things. He could rejoice alway – at all times, in all directions.

How different this is from continuously see-sawing between opposite poles, dividing one’s life between trouble and solution, between curse and blessing. When God is taken to be a form of hero, even supremely so, he is, nonetheless, relegated to a far and insignificant distance, until, in the critical instant, suddenly, we are pressed by danger and cry for help. We beckon God, then, to do our will, to succeed on our behalf, to keep us safe, to defeat our enemies, to fight on our side, to contribute to our prosperity. Yet in the general course of time, we can feel removed from just such need. We are proud to be self-sufficient. We stand and succeed on our own. We have enough resources. We are well educated. In our context, we rely on ourselves quite easily, confident in our independence. As Americans, we are already triumphant, owning and consuming a hugely disproportionate portion of the world’s goods, wielding an equivalently imbalanced influence. As suburbanites, we live secure and safe, more worried about status than falling victim to random violence, naturally assured that even if difficulties arise, we will have recourse to a great array of services, by which we will be sustained and supported. We don’t much need heroics. And God often becomes, then, in our minds and hearts, no more than a pleasant accoutrement, sometimes acknowledged, but dwarfed by the general drift of our own pursuits – unless, perchance, disaster happens.

When Jesus intended to pass by his disciples he meant to do more than quiet their momentary fears and silence the storm. He meant to permanently displace the structure of their understanding and the form of their life. Mark wants us to see what the disciples in their confusion could not comprehend, which is a pervasiveness of divine love so great that even Paul’s words seem too small. If we understand God, we have no reason to be afraid, no matter what descends around us. If we understand God, we have no need of rescue, because nothing will be able to sever us from his devotion. If we understand God what pervades our lives is gratitude of such resilience that it can redeem everything. Truly.

God is not distant. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. This is what is visible in the saints – not their ability to rescue others but their capacity to transform everything, even death, by love. And this is not heroics. It’s adoration – something too little practiced in a world where all our intentions are turned toward self preservation and promotion. Yet this is what Mark hoped to open before us… if we hear what he wrote.

So let us borrow a few more words from Paul: we need not be tossed to and fro, for there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all. There is no greater story, no greater message, no finer trust than this.

What others pass over in dull understanding, he has learned to fail to understand

2006-07-27T11:52:00.000-04:00

I keep in my office a reminder -- a single sentence framed for ready reference. It was used to describe a man who was a notable scholar. But, more than this, he is remembered for being a deeply influential mentor. In summarizing his life, one of his former students wrote simply this about him: “What others pass over in dull understanding, he has learned to fail to understand…[he refused] to pretend to be on the straight and open highway.”

After two thousand years of Christianity, our tradition is heavy with words we use freely, almost flippantly, with the assumption that we, of course, already know what they mean. They are words well-worn, like stones that have been made smooth from centuries of being tumbled across our tongues. Grace, love, faith, hope, mercy, forgiveness: it’s all church-talk. These are words that have been made dull, words by which we then, in turn, lull ourselves, perhaps looking for a moment of solace, a touch of inspiration, the temporary comfort of easy assurance. Isn’t this what worship has in many ways become, the automatic recitation of ancient texts by which we affirm a nice spirituality – or, perhaps more to the point, the spirituality of being nice. Our deepest words are often so emptied of content, so innocuously tossed out, so routinely applied – without even the merest scent of scandal or fear or awe – that, across the board, Christianity itself has been made supremely dull and wearying to many both near and far.

Isaiah speaks of eternity, of holiness, of anger and reconciliation. Together with Paul, both proclaim a peace that conclusively overcomes wickedness. What did they mean, using these words? Do you know? Do you understand this with crystalline clarity? Did Isaiah speak of wickedness so that we could look at others and shame them? (Isn’t this part of the church’s most enduring reputation?) Did both the prophet and the evangelist speak of peace so that, ultimately, we as Episcopalians could have a clumsier, liturgical way of mumbling “Good morning?” (And isn’t this what, in fact, we have done with these words? “Peace,” we say, and soon enough this term is exchanged for phrases that simply say “Hello.”)

It’s important, especially when confronted with Biblical texts, to stop in order to learn to fail to understand what so many others blithely pass over with hardly a thought. We must allow that sometimes, stepping backward is the best way forward.

Isaiah spoke of wickedness. It’s easy for us to look around and find a thousand examples of what we take wickedness to be. Every day, now in our world, innocent people are killed by suicide bombers, fanatics who have made murder a religious virtue. And with just the same regularity, every day we mark the appearance, near and far, of predators, abusers, thieves, liars, and cheats. It’s what makes the front page of our news. Behind these actions, we cite the profusion of hatred, of suspicion, of jealousy, bigotry, fear, resentment, and ice cold indifference. We see, too, the hurtful consequences of unbridled ambitions, of insatiable greed, of personal conquests made regardless of the cost in human lives. When ships are flooded with refugees, and all airline passengers must be screened and searched by an evermore sophisticated array of technologies, and churches feel they must resort to mandating public background checks on all their leaders and volunteers in order to make parish programs safe, wickedness is not hard to identify. And with its identification, much of our energy, then, is engaged in vast programs of prevention, penalization, and restitution.

Isaiah, however, mentions none of this. The root of wickedness, he declares, lies deeper than any of the instances we usually identify. Well below any of these actions or intentions or base perspectives, wickedness originates, he said, in just one characteristic. Isaiah names it as restlessness. The wicked, he said, are those who cannot rest, or pause, or stop. And this is not a moral qualification. The wicked are not simply those who disgust us, whose actions are aberrant. They aren’t merely those others who we find abhorrent, sick, or malicious. Wickedness is much broader than this. It exists wherever we suffer agitation in any form, whenever we are anxious about anything – either about what we fear or, just as significantly, about what we want and pursue with great passion. In Isaiah’s terms, wickedness occurs whenever we forget that every moment of our lives is enfolded within the eternity of God, whenever we are too mindful of the limits of our own time, whenever, charged with eagerness for what we feel we must or can accomplish, we forget that what is most important God has already secured for us – so, before all and in all, we may be always thankful.

This contention might seem hopelessly abstract and vague. On a day to day basis, eternity doesn’t have much traction. It’s not what we casually talk about over lunch, especially when there’s so much luscious gossip available to us. But the theologian Stanley Hauerwas stated Isaiah’s point with beautiful succinctness when he wrote that wickedness “is the form our character takes as a result of our fear that we will be ‘nobody’ if we lose control of our own lives.” This is as relevant a statement as any can be – and it is very intimate to all of us. When we forget our inclusion in God’s eternity, when this ceases to be the first hope of our prayers and the central conviction of our hearts, then, immediately, we are left to ourselves. And as soon as we are left to ourselves we become victim to ceaseless sways of self-preservation, working hard to be somebody, propped up by all the accomplishments we can parade before others, fearful all the while that our status, our earnings, our enjoyments, or the entirety of all our achievements might somehow fall short. We won’t make the grade. We won’t be accepted by the club. We won’t be able to acquire what we desire, across a wide spectrum of possibilities. And thus, we make life this struggle, a constant competition, racing to stand squarely on our own two feet, proud yet always vulnerable – as if the value of our lives were in our own hands, as if we could claim our independence when, in reality, we are always creatures, tied to God from our beginning, through all our time, and beyond this time in God’s eternal kingdom. Wickedness is the merest departure from this trust. We become restless, in work, in play, in acquisition, in consumption. And in doing so, we lose every real sense of peace as well.

The difficulty with peace in our world is that we tend to define it negatively. It is the absence of war, the cessation of conflict, the end of violence. Aggravated by all sorts of disagreements, frustrations, and irritations, we call for peace as the dissolution of our troubles. It’s the product of our best and hardest efforts, achieved through exhausting negotiations. It’s the constant work of discerning what is tolerable and what must be changed in order to effect coexistence without active hostility. As such, it is often compromising and unsatisfactory, and sometimes it’s just plain distasteful. And it is always fleeting. Our finest, crowning accomplishments are also our most fragile. Peace can be utterly destroyed in an instant. A single act of aggression can unleash a wave of rage that has no limit. And peace, then, seems to be never more than a frail, false dream, continually dashed by the first light of harsh reality. This sense of peace, says Isaiah, this, too, says Paul, we must learn to fail to understand. For true peace is different.

In truth, peace is not ours to establish by our own lights. Peace comes from God alone, unconditionally, as gift. It is God’s bestowal of his eternity to us, in which we may choose to abide. And thus, peace is God’s word. As Paul declared, Jesus is our peace. And this word addressed to us declares that we are not strangers or merely sojourners in our time. We are (and we must tune our ear to hear this acutely) – we have been named – “fellow citizens with all the saints and members of the household of God.” Borrowing Hauerwas’ phrase again, we might well say that peace, rather than being this accomplishment or that accord, is, more significantly, the form our character takes when we trust – even when confronted with all of life’s vicissitudes – that nothing of who we are can be lost because all of God’s eternity is bent toward our redemption, in resurrection and reconciliation. All of God’s eternity is bent toward you. Do you understand that? And there is nothing fragile about this at all.

We are here made free: delivered from restlessness, and invited instead to realize life as the ceaseless expression of love – no matter how many other masks wickedness presents. And exchanging the peace, then, is not just the pleasant exercise of wishing one another well, which soon enough can turn to nothing. It is actually our repeated confirmation that what we see, in fact, in the face of all others – friend or enemy, it makes no difference – is God’s Kingdom, a glimpse of God’s infinite joy and pleasure. If we could pause or stop to acknowledge this, if we dared, we might discover anew how there is nothing dull in any of our recitations – because these words, given to us, reveal the glory of God and of all creation.

If only we learn to fail to understand…

Clean out the clutter of your lives, make room in your conscience and your souls for the presence of God.

2006-07-27T11:50:00.000-04:00

Mark has brought us to a very important turning point in the unfolding story of Jesus’ mission and ministry. Up to this point in the Gospel, Jesus’ followers have been learning from him what it means for them and for all creation for the kingdom of God to have crossed the boundary line between heaven and earth and broken into the world. Now, mundane and sacred mix and mingle.
Jesus’ followers have been witnesses to the miracles, the acts of power; they have heard his teaching, and received private instruction. Now Jesus has deemed them ready to go forth into the world on their own and spread the good news. They are empowered to heal and preach. Our reading is about their graduation—once disciples, now evangelists, once followers, now proclaimers.
Jesus unleashes his disciples on the world. They are to bring the good news to everyone within hearing: The kingdom of God is right here in the middle of us! Up to this point in the Gospel, Jesus has been the one doing the teaching and the preaching. Now those who follow him are sent into the world with a clear and simple message - shout it from the housetops, “The kingdom of God is here, now!”
The good news is so exciting and so precious, Jesus instructs his followers not to load themselves down with all sorts of spare clothing and unnecessary junk—just do it—just go, no extra cloaks or any of that stuff, just go and spread the good news.
Watching the news from Morango Valley, California, those horrendous fires, thinking about this passage made me start thinking about my own list of necessary items to take along in case of emergency. The passage from Mark’s Gospel was absolutely no help whatsoever at all. How can you make a list of what to take if the only instruction you have is a list of things not to take? No bread, bag, money, tunics—a literal reading of scripture here could be a problem—the passage demands interpretation—take only a staff and sandals, that’s all—I hesitate to impose this image on you so early in the day, but wearing nothing but sandals and carrying a staff would make short work of my journey. Maybe, I might make it as far as the ice cream store before the blue lights and the whoop—whoop came up, wrestled you to the ground. Indecent exposure, disorderly conduct, “I’m spreading the good news!”—“Tell it to the judge!” “The kingdom of God is near!”—“Tazer him, boys, this one’s dangerous.”
Suddenly sent out into the world with a life-changing message, you would naturally want to pack everything you might possibly need in every situation. Best to be prepared for everything: lap top computer, theology books, study Bible.
“Travel light,” is the instruction. Don’t let material things and material values overwhelm you. Clean out the clutter of your lives, make room in your conscience and your souls for the presence of God. Trust in God’s love and mercy—have faith.
Jesus didn’t send his disciples out with nothing, with no resources. They had received from him certain treasures to take with them on their journey. These were those wonderful kinds of treasures of which there is an infinite supply, treasures which increase as they are given away: love, reconciliation, compassion, joy, joyful generosity, hope, hopeful mercy, and the greatest gift of all, faith. This is stuff we all already have. These are the treasures God has already bestowed upon us. We are as rich as Jesus’ disciples. We are his disciples.
According to Mark’s account, the disciples went off into the world with Jesus’ blessing. Baptism is our blessing and instruction to go. We too have been instructed to spread the good news. We’ve been given a blessing for our journey. We are blessed in order to be a blessing. We are called in order to be sent.
Consider, for a moment, how very powerful this makes us. God has called us in order to send us, and we have been given the freedom and the power to say, “No! I don’t want to go! I’m not going to do it.” This brings us right to the edge, right to that boundary line that we spoke of at the opening of the sermon. Here we are at the dividing line between the sacred and the mundane, the frontier between the kingdom of God and the world.
The Psalmist this morning has taken that giant step across the boundary line of faith: I will listen to what the Lord God is saying, for he is speaking peace to his faithful people and to those who turn their hearts to him. Truly his salvation is very near to those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land. Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.
Would you, could you strap on a pair of sandals and grab a staff if the call to go and spread the good news came? Paul says the call has already come: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.
To be willing, to be open to God’s encouragement to go to those who haven’t heard the good news or can’t believe what they have heard about the good news—to be willing to do that is to be Christian. In this ministry to which we have been called we will always run into people who have chosen to reject the good news, people who simply cannot discern the good news.
The lessons and the psalm this morning are all about hearing and responding to the word of God to us. We must respond to the good news faithfully and in trust. Do we act because we are guided by the Holy Spirit or by our own devices and desires?
Was the Holy Spirit present when the people of New Hampshire elected Gene to be their bishop? Was the Holy Spirit present when the Seventy-fifth Convention of the Episcopal Church elected Katherine to be our Presiding Bishop?
I will listen to what the Lord God is saying, for he is speaking peace to his faithful people and to those who turn their hearts to him.
O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and may have the grace and power faithfully to accomplish them.
Having done what is right and having done what has to be done because the Holy Spirit has led us to that place is righteousness. When righteousness and peace have kissed each other, when mercy and truth have met, we are in the right place. We are in the kingdom of God. Now we can pick up the staff and put on the sandals and set out to proclaim the good news of the love of God to a world that is dying to hear the word.
©John T. Talbott

We have been given a left and a right, and the choice is ours.

2006-07-05T08:44:00.000-04:00

“The poor,” said Moses, will never cease out of the land, therefore I command you, you shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor in the land.’”

With the reading of this singular line, given in Moses’ farewell address to the people of Israel, we have been placed at the edge of a yawning divide, and we are asked to make a fundamental decision. Which is not primarily the obvious, moral one – whether we will choose to consciously and actively address some small portion of the world’s poverty. The more important question lies deeper. It involves how we understand the world itself. For Moses has balanced us between two ways of being. We have been given a left and a right, and the choice is ours. We may see the world as a place of great struggle, where, by the evidence of bare fact, the ruthless survive best, or we may perceive it, and our own time within, as a surpassing gift that calls forth our own generosity, not because of need but as a constant act of thanksgiving.

The pivotal point comes in one small word, “command.” God, Moses said, has commanded. He has pointed the direction we should go. But right away we tend to misunderstand, for God’s command is not our obligation. We hear it tediously, as an onerous task, as law that is matched with judgment. This, however, misconstrues everything, because, in truth, God’s command is our freedom. Command is invitation. It is God’s showing the way to beauty and joy. The most debilitating problem the Christian church faces is that we are so utterly blind to this possibility. We have learned a terrible chorus that we recite far too easily: faith, we admit, under our breath, is restrictive. It squelches life and spoils fun with puritanical earnestness. We make our message sound like the worst combination of threat and resentment, and then we wonder why others don’t hear it as good news and why it doesn’t seem all that wonderful to us either. But Moses gives us reason to believe otherwise.

How do we deal with the poor? It’s a timeless question, and Moses readily conceded this. They will always be among us. There will never be a time when poverty will be eradicated or even substantially eased. As long as the world exists, wrenching poverty will persist with it. We must not try to sidestep away from this. Moses was not speaking metaphorically or abstractly. He had seen poverty’s agony and despair while wandering the Sinai desert for forty long years. We see it displayed in gaunt faces and emaciated bodies, in communities that subsist in slums, in persons who rake through heaps of garbage searching for food, in neighborhoods whose only economy is the drug trade. Moses knew that this was not conquerable. Not ever. Four thousand years after his address, our world has not changed. No solution has been found. Economic theories have come and gone, countless policies have been tried, only to be discredited and rejected. Millions have participated in programs and initiatives and reforms of every sort. But poverty continues. Government has not changed this. Business hasn’t. Nor has charity. Nor has the church. It never ceases.

As a result, we adopt any number of other responses to the poor. Avoidance is one; periodic pity is another. We settle safely secluded away from them. We become practiced in assigning blame. We learn early that we have to strive to earn our own living, that there is little mercy in open markets, that competition is our basic reality. After all, there is only so much pie to be sliced, and all of us want some of our own. Inevitably, some will be denied. Hopefully, it will be those who deserve the nothing they receive. Thus we can spend our lives spinning all sorts of excuses and accommodations and denials, shoring up our own security, dispatching others to their own lot, here and there offering a token from our remainders.

It is extremely hard to deny that this is the essential nature of our world. It is, in fact, dog eat dog. It is, in fact, a race for survival. And it is scientifically and philosophically and pragmatically asserted now that our primal, hardwired drive is pure survival – by means of personal acquisition and public resignation. For you see… there will never be a time when poverty ceases. So don’t waste your time, your energy, your life, in pursuit of a lost cause. See to yourself. That’s duty enough.

Into this context, however, there erupts the command of God. And, significantly, it neither explains nor really accomplishes anything, directly. Moses didn’t offer the people of Israel an economic policy by which they could achieve equality. He didn’t play out a scenario by which they could envision and realize a just society. The command of God wasn’t intended to be a solution to a problem. It’s simply a directive placed against the resigned fate of the world. “Regardless!” God says, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor.” No limit is established to this. No minimum is declared. This command has no borders. If it included specific instruction it would become only one more dreary attempt at problem management – when what is really at stake is a much more profound trust. Because care for others, hospitality, generosity, have no true quid pro quo. They are not meant to be efficient or measured in fairness or subject to statistical analyses of effectiveness. They are excessive, exuberant, and often unexplainable acts that spill out. They are, in this way, super-natural. And thus, in their extraordinariness, they reveal God. And in revealing God, the truth of our world is revealed as well. And so too, the possibility and promise of our lives.

In the Book of Genesis, the very first words of the Bible, no explanation is given for why God chose to create our world. There is no preamble that declares why, God being God, he should call creation into order. There was, we are told, only an elemental poverty, to which God then turned an open hand. And after each turn of his hand, there came the response that this was good. It was good – but it was not resolving. God’s order was not absolute or permanent. It wasn’t meant to be a solution, from which God could then walk away, because creation isn’t an entity. It’s a relation. Before it is any thing, it’s the open hand of God, a generosity that never ends – and never succeeds, for there is always another need, another shift, another generation. All of the world’s subsequent history is the testimony of God’s continuous bestowing, of God’s applying himself to our poverty, even our own self-impoverishment. And we, who have been made in the image of God, who have been called to be stewards, have not been asked then merely to keep order or maintain a status quo. We have been commanded to take on ourselves the same generosity, to show something of God’s roving generosity in our own lives.

This isn’t grim duty, a task that prevents us from being ourselves. It’s our opportunity to be fully ourselves in the vast expansiveness of the world, just as God is. For we see ourselves best not in the mirror of self-reflection, but in meeting the eyes of others. We know who we truly are when others respond to us. Our giving is our receiving, most explicitly, when we stand face to face, with open hands. Our isolation and loneliness are most apparent when, face to face, we choose to offer nothing at all.

Our fate is not to be resigned and to, then, scramble to carve out for ourselves our own world, apart from and secure from others. God has invested in us his own generosity. His command is the way we may hear in our own lives the gleeful response that resounded at creation: it is good! – not the strange goodness that we pinch and distort into awful, suffocating moralisms, but the goodness that explodes with integrity, intimacy, and connection.

In the story we heard this morning from the Gospel according to Mark, there are two parallel paths described. One is defined by fear and ridicule and resignation to death. The people knew the facts. They weren’t naïve. The girl was dead. But at each step along the way, they were countered by Jesus: instead of fear, he offered them a solid confidence and assurance; subject to their ridicule, he maintained a quiet trust; rather than conceding death, he called this young girl back to life.

This latter path is the form of Christian faith in regard to all things. It’s the opportunity we too often close off with by our own stubborn anxiety and listless indifference. It’s the the joy we sabotage, thinking law, when God offers Gospel. Sleeping, thus, however, the same Gospel word is addressed to us, “Rise up,” we are commanded. Be amazed.

Have we missed entirely the real message?

2006-06-28T13:26:00.000-04:00

As a way to get at what is most important in today’s readings, I want to make quick reference to a couple of stories also recorded by Mark, for his particular form helps determine the meaning that, otherwise, might not be apparent.

Early in his Gospel, he tells of an incident when several men carry a paralytic friend to the house where Jesus is staying. By the time they arrive such a crowd has gathered that there is no room for them to enter. As a mark of their determination, they lower their friend on a stretcher through the roof. The scene is set. Expectations are high. And Jesus looks on this man and tells him that his sins are forgiven. But no one has come for this. Jesus’ declaration is disappointing and unsatisfactory, for everyone had rushed in to witness something more impressive. They want to see the man healed – a wish that Jesus grants, but not without first warning them that they are missing the point. His first words were finer and more astounding. But the people didn’t care a wit about forgiveness. They were amazed only when the paralytic walked out of the house on his own.

Not long after this, Jesus and his disciples retreat to a desolate area to get some relief from the continuous press of the crowds. Their efforts are thwarted, however, when they are spotted and soon surrounded by thousands of persons, each eager for something from this possible Messiah. By late in the day, all are tired and hungry, and rather than leaving each to his own resources, Jesus instructs his disciples to gather what food they can. Five loaves and two fish are collected. The food is blessed and distributed, and all, more than five thousand, are fed, and they are fed more than enough. As night falls, the people return to their homes, the disciples set out in their boats for a more hospitable place, and Jesus remains behind, alone. We are informed, then, that the wind on the water became ferocious, that progress in the boat was hard fought and tenuous, and that the disciples, increasingly exhausted, became terribly anxious. At the darkest hour, Jesus came to them, walking on the water. As he approached, he told them not to be afraid. And as he stepped, then, into the boat, the winds stopped. And the disciples were stunned by Jesus’ seeming control of the weather.

It is here that Mark adds one of the most caustic lines of his Gospel, suggesting that in the disciples’ amazement at this they have missed entirely the real message. For what does the wind matter after they, by Jesus’ instruction, have fed so many with so little? They are transfixed by a mere gesture, and remain oblivious to the greater care that is God’s sure promise. Loaves and fish and baskets full were, hours later, not even a distant memory. They were forgotten.

And so, too, this morning, we have heard a third story from the Gospel with the same form. Again, the disciples, with Jesus, are crossing the sea. And again, a storm arises. Again, the disciples are terrified – a terror that is all the more aggravated by Jesus’ complete inattention. While the rest are battling, he is asleep. They wake him to angrily protest his indifference to their fate. He, in turn, stills the waves, and he asks them, then, why they were afraid, when there was no cause, when there is no longer any cause for fear at all, if they would only truly understand him. But the disciples do not answer. They are, rather, more impressed by how, at his word, the storm had ceased. And, again, they miss the point, for this is the smaller matter. Fear is more insidious, more malicious, than any calamity. It is far harder to quell. Yet precisely this is not heard. In the immediacy of the moment, the mere calming of the waters took precedence.

In his text, Mark provides us numerous warnings that we tend to look in the wrong places for the wrong things. This is evident not only within the events he has recorded; it holds for us as readers no less. We are all probably tempted toward the same misdirection, believing that the power of the story read today must, somehow, lie in the miraculous stilling of the sea. And in many churches today, I imagine that endless bad analogies will be made, with the implication that, if only we have enough faith, Jesus will quiet the storms of our own lives, too. This is not, however, what the story says, no matter how much we would like it to be so. The real point of revelation is not that the seas were settled at Jesus’ command. Mark prods us always to look elsewhere, to find the central point right where we would least expect it. And in this story, that place is the disclosure of Jesus’ sleeping. This is the miracle, literally – his sleeping while all around him chaos was literally descending. This is what should capture our attention, because this is what is most marvelous.

Dorothy Soellee, the acclaimed German theologian, once noted that the supreme form of intimacy available to us as human beings is not any act that we can engage. It is, rather, the simple submission we make in sleeping with one another. For sleep is not an interaction, during which we are attentive and aware and therefore able to withdraw if threatened. When we sleep we allow ourselves to be fully passive in the presence of another, and, as such, it requires and shows unequalled trust. We give ourselves into the hands of someone else, with the confidence that, having nothing between us, not doors or locks or any effective buffering space, even in such utter proximity, we are safe. This, she said, is a stupendous beauty in life and a deep expression of love. And in the story from Mark, Jesus’ sleeping reveals his own absolute conviction that his life is, profoundly, in God’s hands, regardless of all the turmoil around him. He lives his own words. He is not himself afraid, not because he mysteriously knows the storm will not defeat him, but because he has chosen such intimacy with God that nothing in or of the world can ultimately disturb this peace. His trust has no boundaries. It isn’t hedged by a gnawing wariness that keeps him awake or ill at ease. God is too close for such disturbances. Jesus slept. The singular goodness of this is what should astound us. While, all the while, the disciples fretted and lashed out with irritated accusation, interjecting fear where there might have been assurance instead.

Now, this short pericope is followed immediately by the more complex account of Jesus’ encounter with a man possessed by what is referred to only as an unclean spirit. At every level, the man is troubled. He makes his home in graveyards. He roves about, aimlessly, injuring himself. No one can subdue him. He is able to break every form of constraint. And, most forebodingly, he calls himself Legion, explaining that he – or those like him – are many.

There has been much speculation about his affliction, that he was bi-polar, or schizophrenic, in need of medication. But I think that Mark leads us to a more dramatic insight. What this man suffered was fear, as plain as that, as common as that, as general and as varied and as ambiguous as our own or anyone’s being afraid. Mark notes of him: he was sleepless, wandering night and day, even among the dead. He was loud and restless even amid the heavy silence of the tombs. And he, destructive and haunted, is even more than many. For, in truth, as such, Legion represents all of us. In him we see the consequence of the fear we all experience, the fear we perpetrate, and all the anxieties that lead us to our own injury even today.

We are engaged in a war right now, but, following Mark’s lead, we might be inclined to check whether this is the right one, conducted in the right way. It has been continually called a war on terrorism, and it was begun in the usual manner, with a blazing show of force bent toward shock and awe. In the years since, we must admit, it has not defeated terrorists but has further spawned insurgence, institutional abuse, rationalized torture, suicide, civil chaos, widespread protests, entrenched hatred, and such utter confusion that no one knows who to trust or how all this turmoil may come to an end, someday. I must try to be clear here: I am not trying to make a political comment. I am not qualified to do so. But I am struck by a deeper, rhetorical observation. Whatever victory means, it won’t come by swinging a bigger stick. And our safety won’t be secured by so exponentially multiplying our suspicions that, trusting no one, we can locate all our enemies ahead of time. Fear breeds faster than we can act… for it is Legion.

Our primary struggle is not against terrorism. It is against its beginning and its end, which is fear, which seduces us to falling prey to the same impulse, and, woefully, the same actions. Faith has a different vision, a different means, a different goal. For its focus is not whatever it is that troubles us. It is the more fundamental grace that in God we gain the freedom to forgive the evil that has been done, even to us. In him, we are able to feed others even when we wonder if there is any food at all. And faith’s first object, always, is the prayer that our life itself can be the expression of such intimacy with God’s eternal love and mercy that anxiety will never drive us to anger, accusation, division, and, finally, injury.

Our world, as all profess, has become smaller with the advent of globalization. But in so doing, it hasn’t become more intimate – a world set at greater ease, able to sleep easily. It may be that the most important gift we as Christians can contribute is the very peace that arises from this very different form of courage.

"We are all promised eternal life; the question . . . is where."

2006-06-21T12:28:00.000-04:00

One of the wardens reminded me this week of a sign that was for a time posted outside a local Episcopal church, the kind of sign that is supposed to encourage the interest of passing motorists and thereby invite them into the church – the kind of sign that is supposed to offer some indication of the substance of our faith. It read: “We are all promised eternal life; the question… is where.”

Ordinarily such a message might be the occasion for a bit of humor, even though is was intended to be deadly serious. Some might be a bit more polite in offering a more empathetic comment. After all, there was nothing highly original or creative suggested here. This has become the standard line of Christianity, all of God’s grandeur reduced to a quick and convenient either/or, made in reference to something entirely abstract – our fate after our fate, God’s judgment that issues an unchangeable decree of punishment without end or an everlasting reward. We have learned, somehow, to assume that, indeed, this is what Christianity is all about: a hope for a heaven that bears no compelling resemblance to our life now (it is commonly envisioned as being wholly ethereal), and conversely, an equal warning of hell that erases all the beauty of our present time, because all of this will ultimately pass away in the blink of an eye, anyway. The point of decision is promise or threat, up or down, bliss or torment. And in the face of such extreme stakes, while driving by on Sunday morning, one would do well to get groceries at another time or postpone brunch in order to cross the threshold of the church to gain some important disaster insurance. A little time spent in worship is negligible in comparison to the risk of dying unsaved. So the sign seems to suggest.

On this matter, however, we can no longer afford to be politely quiet, because it is exactly this presentation of Christianity that is its worst degradation. Right out of the gate, everything is warped. This kind of a message is an offense, bad religion for small minds and even smaller spirits, often promulgated by those who want to lure people in by calculated manipulation, offered, falsely, tragically, as the church’s wisdom. As many a politician knows, nothing is as effective as simple fear, most of all when it is conveyed in God’s name. This message deserves the ridicule it receives, and we should be the first in line with the fiercest objections, for it is our own faith that is being twisted from within and, consequently, vilified and rejected from without – with good cause.

In the interest of clarity, I hope that you will pardon my being just a bit pedantic this morning, but it is imperative that we can be eloquent counter-witnesses on behalf of the church and, even more, on behalf of the glory and the grace and the reconciliation that is our true calling.

So first, in regard to eternal life, our testimony is that, precisely here, there is no question at all. Nothing trails after this promise threatening to disappoint it. This is our news. No conditions wait to be satisfied. Our destiny has been already determined. It has been accomplished not only irreversibly but from before the beginning of the world. No barriers remain before us. No exclusions hold. The last, said Jesus – the very last – shall be first. Never, in all the times this is recorded in the Gospels, is there added a qualification or even a reference to what, distinctly, should be measured here. It may be that this phrase was meant to be without limit. This is how comprehensive the reach of God is.

Yet we constantly retreat from this trust, protesting that God and divine love can’t be this generous, thrusting up extraordinary examples that must, by rights, demand condemnation: Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Timothy McVeigh, the list could soon become quite weighty. Some actions, we protest, are simply too horrific for mercy, too depraved to forgive.

But our fundamental claim is that in Jesus God has destroyed death itself, and with death, all evil and all its effects. There is no longer any place so removed that we cannot be reached, either left to abandonment or banished – there is no place. For even the tomb has been emptied, literally, and thus, in every manner, figuratively too. We have no basis on which to speculate about or declare any persisting division between punishment and reward. There is no “where” to fret about, no last and final accounting to face with trepidation. Jesus’ resurrection has abolished every nagging doubt. Borrowing the words of Gertrude Stein, we may and should say, “There is no there there.” The only hell we can posit is not God’s but the one we create ourselves, in our own denial of grace, in vengeance then taken against others, and in the injustice we perpetrate by seeking our own private heaven at the cost of those we deem expendable, insignificant, or reprobate. We must dispose of this picture of faith. “Where?” is not the question. And asking it, pressing it forebodingly, diminishes us all, and it blinds us, hiding from us from the true revelation of Christianity.

Which leads to a second correction. Eternity, in the Christian perspective, is not a future event, that awaits us in a fog of obscurity, dependent first on our demise. Eternal life is our here and our now. It is being made evident all around us in the explosion of life that occurs in every moment of time, in such profusion that we cannot trace even its merest dimensions. This eternity is already. It has long preceded us. It includes us, presently. It is available to us whenever we choose to see and be astounded by the conviction that God’s promise is not merely a pledge given to us. It is us. We are his promise. In us, in our very lives, he is bringing his word to fulfillment. And when we realize this, then nothing remains the same, not our past or our future or our understanding of this very day. For this – all that so magnificently encompasses us – is God’s disclosure of what his kingdom is and what it will be, abidingly. In so far as we can imagine any legitimate heaven, it looks like this world. It looks like our faces. It consists of God’s unwavering faithfulness to his whole creation and to us, not as diaphanous souls, but as persons of beautiful carnality, who, in the thrill of touch, sense, and embrace, live the love of God.

In us, God’s pleasure is being expressed, currently. It is not our task to win it, nor should we be haunted by the possibility that we lose it. Our delight comes from the deep recognition that all that we are, now, is the substance of God’s own joy. This is the measure of our celebration and this is the root of our thanksgiving as Christians – as Paul noted, all our time, no matter our circumstances, should be reason for rejoicing – every day – because every unfolding of every experience is and will be part of God’s infinitely extended redemption – ourselves included.

Paul set this out in a single phrase. Our reality is fully defined, he wrote, by this one progression, this one confidence: all that is mortal is being swallowed up by life. The whole of creation therefore stands, first and always, as the vehicle of the glory of God, in redemption and exaltation. Our true word is this victory and freedom, which opens to us an unabashed gladness, solace, and an hopefulness without any boundaries. For, by God’s will and passion, there is no place where mortality prevails and defeat will, by force, be either pronounced or conceded. God’s life swallows up all death, literally, and thus, too, in every small way that we suffer guilt, harm, or the pangs of inadequacy.

Our mortality is being swallowed up by life: there isn’t much more we need to know, nor is there more we need to say. If we were to put out a sign, this is the message that should be posted. Mortality is not our end, nor is it the nature of our time, impressed upon us in judgment and division. As the church we gather to give witness to a greater love, which transforms all things, which gives life with abandon, which extinguishes all fear. To worship is to consciously draw your own life into this eternity, more eloquently, more profoundly in our present time, more collectively in gratitude for one another, so that these words may be our constant witness, our own disclosure of God’s heaven in our midst: our mortality is being swallowed up by life. So we may sing a song of perfecting grace for all the world to hear.

Trinity Sunday

2006-06-13T13:30:00.000-04:00

In a recent opinion piece printed in our denominational magazine, The Living Church, Bishop Duncan of the diocese of Pittsburgh put forth what he believes is the major divide now in the Episcopal Church. The issue, he argued, is not fundamentally about the place and privileges extended to gay men and women. As persons, he wrote, they should be welcomed and embraced as the church would any others. The real point of controversy is not our differing understanding of sexuality, per se. It is rather, and far more gravely, the liberal church’s wholesale disposal of the doctrine of sin. This, he insisted, is the departure from orthodoxy that can’t be tolerated – because this conviction of us by God is the very heart of the Christian faith, matched, then, only after, by the opportunity we are afforded by Jesus to be saved from a grim and terrible condemnation. We have lost our bearings, Duncan declared, by so seeking to affirm others that we have lost the courage to mark sin’s presence, with righteous judgment, calling others to repentance and amendment of life, so that they might attain the grace of forgiveness. According to this view, we live tenuously balanced at the edge of a great abyss, at risk of plunging in untimely manner into the consuming fires stoked by the long and sorry history of our misdeeds, and the message must be urgently conveyed by fervent voices that salvation is possible, if only we turn around to grasp the sturdy hands of Jesus, reaching for us, waiting for us.

It’s a familiar summary of Christianity, especially suited to our modern, American perspective. Faith is burnished down into private piety, consisting ultimately only of one’s own individual relationship with God. It’s not enough that Jesus is Lord and Savior. He must be this personally, claimed and grasped. And absent this singular confession, we are lost. It’s been the ploy of many revivalists and televangelists, people who have proved themselves impressively skilled at whipping up potent combinations of fear and guilt and deep remorse, all to then announce God’s costly deliverance, which comes with maximal emotional punch. Jesus snatches us from the clutches of the devil. Jesus redeems us from all the shameful burdens we have been encouraged to dredge up from within ourselves. And in the drama of shouts and tears people declare their conversion. And some, thereafter, in bouts of enthusiasm, are even inclined to post this on the bumpers of their cars, letting all passers-by know their conviction, proclaiming “God is my co-pilot” and “ My boss is a Jewish carpenter.”

Now I want to be careful here, for I am not trying to discredit either the redemption that does indeed come from God or the way that this can be experienced profoundly and with breath-taking intimacy. But exactly here we must be wary too. We must be wary because too easily this piety makes God too small, too friendly, formed too much in the image of our own personal feelings about what is right and wrong, good and bad, reprehensible or admirable. And sin then names not a vast, mysterious, and humbling blindness that conceals God’s vigorous and present grace. It becomes, instead, a lengthy and exhausting laundry list of do’s and don’t’s, personal and often petty, by which we then divide ourselves, as if the first act of religiousness is to endlessly wag a scolding finger – which is in many circles the primary public image of the church.

All this does, however, is make us hypocrites or purist tyrants or both. There are plenty of examples of preachers and evangelists who have risen astronomically, only to fall, themselves humiliated, with tragic and comic and awful effect. And the same pattern, in lesser ways, is sadly carried on in Christ’s name daily by many within the church as well. It is deeply injurious, and, in its worst form, it is absolutely consuming, leaving no one unscathed. We should be reminded how God’s presence was manifested to Moses. When he came to holy ground, the fire he saw did not destroy the wood nor kill the bush. It preserved everything even as it burned. In so far as we make any claim to holiness, ourselves, then, perhaps it should be seen in the same light, a fire that emerges from and among us, yet without causing harm, without destroying or dividing.

In this regard, especially today, on Trinity Sunday, I think it should be said that the fundamental message of Christianity is not sin and redemption. And the divide that threatens the church isn’t the displacement of the doctrine of sin for a more progressive and baldly affirmative agenda. For God is not merely our savior, and faith is not just about me or any other individual, and grace is not found in forgiveness alone, and sin should never be woefully reduced to the offenses and violations we mark best in others. On all counts, there is more that has been revealed and must be included in both our understanding and our witness. Holiness is greater than and different from any assessment of moral uprightness we can make, and God’s reality extends well beyond the slight measure of our actions, good and evil. Such a God, such a faith, such a calling are all too small, for all are pinched back to fit primarily the nature of our own failures, missing, then, the surpassing magnificence of God himself. And as so much violence has shown, it is a dreadful thing to thus make God in our own image.

Trinitarian faith disciplines us to maintain a more comprehensive and expansive vision. We cannot speak of a savior without first acknowledging a creator. We cannot speak of the Son without noting, clearly, that Jesus’ sole function was to do the will of the Father. Whatever redemption he accomplished, it was no less than the fulfillment of creation itself, of all things – not souls alone, not persons chosen here and there from amid the rabble, but the infinite fruition of everything that has emerged from the Father’s hand in the abundance of finite time itself. God the Holy Spirit draws us into this confidence and truth, cosmic and universal. In the spirit we realize this ahead of time. By the spirit’s making known to us the Father and the Son, we are given the glory of living now within eternal promise, in the joy of expectation beyond all the boundaries we can name. We are not precariously poised at the very edge of personal destruction, awash in fatal sin. We are, rather, more fundamentally, persons included, without exception, within the marvelous and exquisite beneficence of God.

This is God’s revelation of himself: as God he gives – without reserve. He gives of himself in creating. He gives of himself in sustaining all things. He gives himself to us, in descent, in degradation, and even in death, for our reclamation. He gives himself in reconciliation, so that we, as the church may offer ourselves in kind, as a community of challenging hospitality. This generosity, unlimited, is, in God, first and last and absolute – love both patient and relentless. The foundation of Christianity, therefore, does not lie in threat laid against us, an impending and severe judgment. Christian faith is established in the deeper recognition that all the world and all of time is God’s unfolding of divine gift, and to us, within this dynamic grace, is bestowed a peace that extinguishes all anxiety. Holiness is exemplified in freedom, a freedom from the constraints of ourselves and all the pettiness we proudly propound, thinking it right and courageous. Instead, in all things a greater grandeur is being furthered, of which we are an integral part.

This is the whole thrust of Paul’s exhortation that we have heard this morning. We must listen closely, because in two-fold manner he unveils the true heart of the matter – in the negation of negation and in the affirmation of affirmation. “You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear.” No. We have “received the spirit of sonship,” so when we cry, Father, “it is the spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ.” This is the destiny of all creation, to which the church stands as witness, which sin can surely occlude from view. But, by God’s own testimony, his own incarnate Word, neither rebellion nor abandonment can prevail. Brokenness is not our foundation, and personal salvation is not our goal. The purposes of God far exceed this; it is only a thread within the weave of a greater fabric.

Our divisions begin when this reduction is given too much prominence, when sin disposes of grace – for some – and when, still most eager to point out shadow, we as the church curtail the light of God.

May this day, of extravagant expression, of even seraphim and cherubim in endless song, be a strong word toward our glad and joyous correction.

The Glory of Pentecost

2006-06-13T13:27:00.000-04:00

This morning I’d like to set the record straight about Pentecost, especially because the church’s own long habit has been to encourage exactly the wrong understanding of what this event was and what it means. Whatever happened on that day, and whatever hope we may glean from the descent of God’s own spirit upon us, it has nothing to do with the multiplicity of languages or, as some enthusiastically advocate, the experience of speaking in tongues. It was not the occurrence of an extraordinary miracle, brazenly supernatural, nor was it God’s impromptu breaching of the language differences we suffer in order to announce the start of the Christian Church with an appropriate bang.

We seem to be perennially inclined to misread the text, eager for splash. As the whole testimony of the Bible shows, we are repeatedly more seduced by special effects than content. Even now, even among those who adamantly declare their absolute rationalism and dismiss the validity of any religious conviction, we still use our most advanced technologies to create virtual, magical worlds that promise to enthrall us, that offer all the excitement without any of the consequence. And just so, it is seductive to imagine Pentecost in the same manner, as an impressive instance of divine interruption, the kind of magic, the kind of intervention, we’d like from God every once and a while. It’s easy to be swept away by visions of tongues of fire, even when this is just a simile; as it is easy, too, to marvel at a cacophony of foreign voices, all sputtering at once, yet all being understood. And I’m sure that in many churches today, in some way, what will be tacitly celebrated is precisely this plurality of languages and, for some, the extravagance, the eccentricity, of being ecstatically caught up in the spirit. Such emphases as these can make us feel exceptional, and that can be powerfully attractive… and very marketable. But this all falls away as quickly as it’s spoken, and then, outside these doors, nothing is changed. Like television, church becomes little more than one more momentary diversion, always searching for new ways to be enticing, relevant, or as some painfully attempt, cool.

If, however, you read on in the Book of Acts, you will see that the Apostle Peter’s own response to the event was far more mundane. In essence, he told the crowd to take a more sober view. The event, the phenomenon, he said, was not the point. It was only a sign, a symbolic occurrence. The point was neither the variation in languages nor the diversity of tongues but the singular importance of one word, the message of the story of God as it was disclosed in Jesus. This word, said Peter, unlike all others, addresses all persons. This word alone has universal bearing. In Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection God has judged the whole world, the world in every age, the world of every culture and religion, by a grace of infinite measure. And thus, in him, all our painful divisions are refracted and experienced in a different way. They are transcended – in effect, it is as if, in the embrace of such love, we can begin to hear strangers as if, now, they were friends. The miracle lies only in him. Jesus is the comprehensive word of God, whether you are Parthian or Mede, an Elamite… or even a resident of Mesopotamia.

All other talk fractures. All other talk, no matter how vigorous or patient or careful, still marks our distance from one another. We separate ourselves by thousands of distinctions; every distinction given a name; every distinction hardened, all the more, by the frequent need for translation, which, at best, is no better than approximate. Our own speech, of itself, inevitably divides us. No amount of talk brings lasting union. And in this light, the story of the event of Pentecost is not a miracle but only a gesture. It relays an event in service of a greater reality: which is the total reconciliation that God has accomplished by one person for all. Our only stable unity is this one name, the event of God’s passion that touches, gathers, and changes everything.

As Christians, in regard to Pentecost, we can no longer afford to maintain our pleasant delusions. Our own relatively quiet world is being tested and torn by the resurgence of vicious, ever-expanding tribalism. A quick, familiar recitation skims only the surface. Sunnis are killing Shiites and Shiites Sunnis. Both are ambushing American forces. And when soldiers react in kind, killing indiscriminately, mitigating factors are voiced. Even marines break under the stress of violent difference, some say. Brokenness explains our breaking, carrying the cycle even further. As Rwanda tenuously rebuilds, Darfur descends. As immigrants march in the streets, citizens become increasingly agitated. We have become well-versed in the vocabularies of identity politics. Whites can’t understand the plight of blacks. Christians can’t comprehend Muslims. Palestinians can’t sympathize with the suffering of the Jews; Israelis have no empathy for the Palestinians. Our own denomination is stubbornly divided by unrepentantly maintained caricatures: liberal/conservative, traditionalist/progressive, fundamentalist/neo-pagan. At countless levels we insist: to each, her own voice; to each, her own language; to everyone of us, our own absolute individual right to declare our individuality with particular shrillness. This is the cause of much injury, degradation by means of self-promotion. Which has no natural end. As Christians, we can’t afford to imagine Pentecost with the quaintness of its being just a long-ago fantastic event. It’s an offense to the violence we are suffering. It’s an offense to the violence we are perpetrating. If the Spirit of God is present to us, truly present, then we must be engaged in a more dramatic, demanding, and transforming calling.

The last verse of the Gospel lesson places before us the choice that is the heart of the matter. We have before us always, Jesus said, this singular option, waiting for decision. We may blithely choose to continue binding ourselves in division, opposition, alienation, and condemnation, or we may choose, with sturdy deliberateness, to make of our own lives the radical freedom of offering forgiveness, such forgiveness as is not diminished by any difference, however egregious. We may choose to approach others, assiduously, in love alone, as if it were inexhaustible, as if it were its own language that never needed translation but was always heard as one’s native tongue. We may breathe peace.

We are naturally more skilled at conflict. But it has been given us to enact reconciliation – no matter who we are, no matter what our position. When Jesus announced this to the disciples they were hiding away for fear of their lives, terrified by the hatred they thought might be directed against them. In our modern terminology, they were the victims. They were the oppressed. Yet it was precisely to them that this divine mission, this command, and this promise came.

This is the glory of Pentecost, that even the least and the last have no less role in forgiveness, in opening unexpected space for communion and joy. For here we all share the same undifferentiated word. One man, one death, one resurrection, one abiding voice addresses all of us. When the Spirit of God descends, we may be those who, by exhibiting such grace as his, allow others in seeing us to see something true of God – not miracle but marvel, the marvel of God’s own boundless love being accomplished by our decision, our action, and our own extension of ourselves, selflessly. Pentecost is more a way of breathing than a mode of speaking.

Dominican Republic film loop

2006-06-06T11:28:00.000-04:00

Play Scripture like a Stradivarius

2006-05-19T08:43:00.000-04:00

The theologian Karl Barth once gushed about the Biblical interpretive skills of his famous predecessor, Friedrich Schleiermacher, that he, above than all others, was able to “play Scripture like a Stradivarius.” So thrillingly adept was he. But then, with typically Swiss precision and devastating effect, Barth immediately countered his own compliment, declaring that the problem with this is that we are not supposed to play Scripture. It is supposed to play us. We are the instruments through which its music is heard, and reversing this order gets everything wrong. It was one of the most incisive remarks he ever made, both a warning and a beckoning.

There are some days when brilliant texts shouldn’t be sullied with commentary that, inevitably, diverts attention away from its exposition of us to lesser matters – our own clumsy ruminations about rules or virtues or inspiration. Today is one of those days, when what has been set before us in the Scripture readings speaks with overwhelming eloquence of the radical heart of the Gospel. Ezekiel, in his restless condemnation of our blatant disregard and thievery, and John, in his utter confidence in God’s persistent reclamation of us all: these together show how it is that being Christian is deeply subversive, as Barth noted, inverting the things we tend to trust most deeply and wrongly. Our most insistent, hidden motivations are made subject to withering critique, in Ezekiel three times repeated: “You, shepherds, who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves in wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep… You do not feed the sheep.” What more needs to be said? Is this not indicative of our own time too: when everyone is chasing after oil, when behind every deal there seems to be a whole host of greased palms, when daily we are treated to scandals marked by names like Abramoff, Skilling, Fastow, Lay, Rowland, Ellef, Tomasso? With dreary repetition such conniving, indeed, proves to be the way of the world… and of all of us in some ways.

And yet, even when crushed in judgment, we are not abandoned, neither to despair nor resignation. For the word of the prophet is succeeded by the word of God, the Good Shepherd, who, in freedom, chases us down, regardless of the cost, who, in freedom, gathers us in, who, alone, opens such goodness to us that we, choosing the same freedom, may exhibit ourselves a similar, surprising, and disarming grace.

Being Christian is profoundly subversive – in spite of the fact that the church is often broadly portrayed as being thoroughly and stiflingly proper, hopelessly staid, and suffocatingly dull. Too surely, it can be all of these, in a thousand different forms keeping rituals that are both irrelevant and vacuous. But these can only be hollow in so far as the church’s true speech is neither spoken nor heard, when its practices are merely endured, complacently, when God’s promise is neither absorbed nor pondered nor ever realized with the kind of gratitude that shears through the thick layers of our narcissistic indifference. This failure, however, is the fault of our souls and not the weakness of the text. What is announced before us is the redemption of all things, which subverts all the deep impulses we have – the many desires, with glee, to see others get their due, while we, hidden still, quietly, advantageously, make our way. Neither Ezekiel nor John allows this.

I am fully aware that in our time, so inundated with gossip and prattle and the incessant chatter of cell phones, instant messaging, and blogging, the tight bond of word to person has been severely loosened. It’s quite possible now to talk a lot and never mean anything. Nonetheless, this morning we have dared to put into our mouths and voices words of astounding courage and expectation, poetic verse that announces something no less than the transformation of the core logic of the world. This was our testimony:
“My song is love, unknown.”
It would be enough to stop with this phrase alone. However mundane we think it, this single line announces our departure from all that is usually assumed to be inevitable, the entire plodding course of our habits. Music interrupts. Song erupts. And love is expressed – not a love of our own, not fickle, not coy, not deceiving, not jealous, not vulnerable to slipping suddenly into an equal, consuming hatred. We must acknowledge this difference: it is love unknown. It is not natural to us. Its fortitude is alien. Its expansiveness is disquietingly foreign. Its dedication is uncompromised. It is the love of God. Yet we have been so bold to fit this into our song, our life, our own commitments to one another.

“My song is love unknown, my Savior’s love to me,
love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.”
In this one verse, we name the overcoming of the world, a new disposition set in stark contrast to all that Ezekiel saw; the dis-positioning of all the practical wisdom of our terrorist driven age, when so much of our energy is turned toward securing ourselves against our fears, when in nearly every matter we are urged toward this singular end – succeeding by defeating others. Our protest is an invitation, without qualification. There is no deserving in this love, no carefully measured apportionment, no convenient exception for what we have received. It extends indefinitely, even to the least, even to the worst, even to the most repulsive. Because its passion is transformation, a transformation that does not succumb to disappointment or stumbling or even ferocious resistance. It is love that has the patience of the infinite, because, again, it is not our own and did not arise from our own hearts. It is, (and now this must be said with the absolute focus of perfect literalness) it is God’s, given tangibly and conclusively in the unwavering reality of death and resurrection. “Let us not mock God with metaphor”…

We are all included in this embrace. Woefully loveless, still, God names us otherwise: he declares us lovely.

Need more be added? We talk of many things, religiously, constantly falling to the temptation of making the institution of the church the instrument that is supposed to play our favorite song: inclusion, orthodoxy, tolerance, morals, social justice, social order. We argue at great length, sometimes angrily and with pointed accusation. But this is all dross and meaningless if, first, we haven’t fully taken in this proclamation, this song, the astounding generosity of God’s covenant, determined, dared, and done. This message doesn’t need interpretation or explanation or long trails of apology to make it more credible and to our liking. It asks only a vigilance of heart, such attentiveness that we might be stopped, moved, amazed and changed – and then inclined to “stay and sing, no story so divine.”

The Rev. Peter Vanderveen

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence:
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
Faded credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
Grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter

Created Time

2006-05-02T14:40:00.000-04:00

Thomas Friedman, the highly regarded columnist, is notable for his skill in turning a memorable phrase. He writes simply about enormously complex issues, without compromising either analysis or insight, and his creative quips often serve as reasonable lenses through which to see the vagaries of international politics with greater clarity. The title of his latest book provides as good an example of this as any. The World is Flat, he declared. Of course, he did not mean this geographically, but now, because of the many developments of our technology, this, he argues, is our new reality geopolitically and economically.

It’s an effective pun, playing off something we believe unquestionably. The world, in fact, is round. Copernicus demonstrated this centuries ago. It was one of the great revolutions of science, which shook the foundations of all our knowledge and radically changed the way we look at everything. Friedman’s point was to announce that in globalization another revolution has occurred, of similarly Copernican dimensions, and very few of our traditional assumptions of life and livelihood will be left untouched or remain the same. Modern technology has wiped out many of the hurdles to advancement that gave natural advantage to advanced nations and kept third world economies languishing. In unprecedented ways, markets are open to anyone who wishes to succeed, and thus competition has been exponentially increased. And every presumption to inherited wealth and status has been conclusively flattened. The incumbent challenges are daunting.

In just as dramatic a way, a coinciding effect has been the flattening of time, no less. In the course of the last several decades we have progressively lost the fullness and roundness of our experience of time, our glad recognition and acceptance of its clear divisions, primal distinctions like day and night, work and Sabbath, toil and recreation and rest. These rhythms are still readily apparent in the whole environment around us, but they are being strongly overridden by the sheer force of our desires and the extraordinary tools we have developed by which we can live at nearly non-stop pace, undeterred by any natural obstacle. Night and its darkness is no problem. We have light enough whenever we want it. Food is rarely dependent on seasons anymore. Supermarkets stock whatever we like for whenever we’d like it. Work rarely ends at 5:00 PM. Equipped with computers, blackberries, and cell phones, we can leave the office without its ever leaving us. Time is no longer as compelling as it once was, forcing us into its restrictions. We now drive through the hours, days, and seasons compelled primarily by our own agendas, which, largely untempered by other factors, can become as exhausting as they are edifying.

Time has become flat. Rarely constrained by external factors, we have steadily internalized a new motto: we are to seize the day. This is our modern wisdom: carpe diem. It appears on bumper stickers and T-shirts, and it has been given the unofficial imprimatur of being printed on coffee mugs for sale at museum gift shops everywhere. It sounds good, encouraging, enticing. But this slogan is far from innocent. A little inspection reveals that it is freighted with equal amounts of greed and anxiety: greed for all that can be grasped and taken for oneself; anxiety for all that others may get ahead of you, and, thereby, instead of you. Hesitation is risky. Patience is questionable. It is not that time waits for no man. In our modern world, it is we who do not wait for time. We dare not. There is too much to lose by living in consonance with time’s natural cycles. We are the restless ones, eager to get what we want, worried that others will beat us to the prize. Seizing is an apt description. Stemming from fear, it leans toward violence. We must grasp at all we can, clutch it close, and squirrel it away. Life is confiscation, and we, along with everyone else, feel we must grab as much as we can. Consequently, insatiability has become a chief virtue, in spite of its constant pressures – pressures we can easily mark in habits great and small, petty and broad.

What is dismissed by this view is the possibility that, in truth, the world is not ours to seize at all, not in any legitimate way. It is, rather, and appropriately, only ours to receive, which is a wholly different action, which arises from a wholly different perspective. Receiving, from the very first, is an acknowledgement of grace. It is unfettered by greed or anxiety. Receptivity implies that, already, before anything else, someone is giving and something is being provided. There is a generosity to the world that precedes us, that, without any work on our own part, sustains us and holds our lives. Of all the things we forget, this is probably most central and most intrinsic to our being creatures. We did not imagine ourselves into existence, nor did we construe the world. It was, however mysteriously, given to us. And part of that gift is its intrinsic order. Our world has a definiteness of both space and time. There are material rules that can’t be broken, laws of nature, elemental relations that give distinction and allow for possibility. In correlation with these, there are characteristics of time that are just as basic and necessary. The world has a history, from which it cannot be loosed. Everything that is has followed from what was. Being dynamic, and not static, creation consists of the interplay of many, harmonic rhythms – divisions of time that offer structure and meaning to what is. As creatures made in the image of God we live fully within this creation and yet, too, we have the capacity to reflect on it, as if from a distance, so that, more than all other creatures, we may marvel and rejoice in the blessing of our allotted time and the richness of God’s world. In this timeliness there is a robust roundness, a deep dimensionality that we ignore only at our peril.

Seen aright, there is no flatness in creation. Nor is our task a striving after seizing. We are, rather, from the Christian perspective, recipients of God’s invitation to delight in the amazing complexity and order of all things, and to do so with an unabashed freedom, a freedom that comes from the confidence that God’s own passion will preserve what he has brought forth – in all its spectacular particularity. Time is not something to race against and defeat. It is what affords us endless variations of gladness, in all that transpires within the arc of God’s providence. In this, we have reason to offer supreme adoration, when time is perceived not as brute fact but as an integral part of the promise of God, good in every way.

In the Gospel that was read this morning, Luke was very careful to note how Jesus’ resurrection confirms this. The nature of our hope after death is not some ambiguous continuance in a ghostly fashion, that we will achieve immortality as diaphanous souls set adrift from the world, (which is often the little that people believe when they believe nothing else). Instead, in a very calm manner, in his return, Jesus informed his disciples that he was precisely the same man that he had been. He was so demonstrably: flesh, bones, able to touch and able to eat. Death did not destroy his life. Resurrection did not make him someone or something else. All who he had been, remained. And in him, said Luke, God’s promise was being extended to all. This was Jesus’ word, made obvious in his presence. To which the disciples responded with joy and wonder, experiencing a reality of such intensity that it bordered on the utterly inconceivable.

The beauty of the disciples’ reaction is that it doesn’t refer only to the point of resurrection. In addition, their response shows us how, in the light of resurrection, we may approach all of life, in its essential timeliness – because every moment we live discloses the actual substance of what will be raised. Time, thus, is not a tragic dimension of the world, that eventually sweeps us away, to be forgotten – a flatness that flattens us. It is the form of the disclosure of God’s glory and love, in the expansive extravagance of the cosmos, and in the tight intimacy of friends reuniting, even when thinking that all was lost, even as they hid themselves away. Our wisdom is not carpe diem; the panic of seizing. It is found in two alternative words: laudate Dominum – give praise to God, praise in concert with all that creation brings about, which is delivered to us, a splendor always immeasurable.

This is the Copernican revolution of faith that overturns the world. It undoes all despair and resets our lives in gratitude and astonishment. This is the opportunity laid before us, with every turn of time, nighttime to morning, season to season, generation to generation, incarnation to resurrection. Laudate Dominum: for in our own finiteness, something of God’s eternity is being unfolded, as gift upon gift. And arising from this trust, with every given moment, we are free, above all, to be astounded, with gladness, noting well how we receive without ever having had to stoop to ask. The many dimensions of created time mark how this is so. Our witness is to rejoice in this marvelous fullness.

Closure is not a virtue

2006-04-25T08:42:00.000-04:00

Sermon: Year B, Easter Day

Late last week, I attended the funeral of a young man. I had officiated at his wedding less than two years ago. 29 years old, inexplicably, his car swerved off the road as he was driving home from work, and, in an instant, he was killed. The large church where his service was held was filled with hundreds of people, a corporate witness to bewilderment. Every strained face reflected the same pressing desire – which was to find some way to make sense of this. No answers came.

What do you do when so much promise is extinguished with such implacable finality? He was at a time in life when all his expectations were ripening: richly talented, he was vibrant, smart, wonderfully engaging. Breathing was enough to elicit from him a ready smile. Yet now he was dead. His body was present, but he was gone. Other people spoke of their memories of him, but he was silenced. A vast congregation gathered around a single casket that carried the shattered remains of a life, stilled beyond recovery, and no amount of effort could breach the gap between the vitality he had so freely exuded and the immense absence of his repose.

Death is this stymieing closure. Just as closure is a form of dying, the shutting down and boxing up of life’s irrepressible hopes and dreams. It is the resignation that we mark, materially, when we carry a casket down the aisle, removing it from the midst of a grieving community, placing it, with unquestioned permanence, in the ground.

Though it is taken as wisdom, closure is not a virtue. It is a deep violation and wound. Yet, obviously, it’s the way of the world. Equally obviously, the demise it reflects is inevitable for all of us. Some say, then, that it must be natural, as if, in some significant way, this excused it. But, in proper measure, such closure as this is entirely offensive. It’s an offense against creation, the term we use when we contemplate the world not just in its facts but in its fullness, when, beyond the limited scope of our usual considerations, we examine the broader expanse of life and struggle to make a complete accounting of its wealth. Which is inestimable. For life is that which, in the world, overwhelms all the world’s boundaries. It overwhelms every mode by which we try to define it, whether by scrutiny or imagination. And this persistent excess is what creation means: that, no matter how assiduously we try, our lives can’t be circumscribed by any set of rules or cleanly ordered by laws. Something about us defies explanation. There is always more, something that agitates… infinitely, beyond the compass of every closed system, no matter how complex. This openness for surprise makes life thrilling and beautiful. In death, it becomes the chasm of our grief, that inexpressible distance between our being and our understanding.

On that first Easter morning, the women who went to the tomb were practicing closure. They went to honor a corpse. Nothing could have been more mundane, nothing more certain. They expected only what was utterly expectable, because death is the irrevocable end of all surprises. What could have been more ordinary?

What is astounding about Mark’s announcement of Jesus’ resurrection, what is supremely telling, is its sheer abruptness. It required only eight verses to tell, no more than that. “He has risen, he is not here; he is going before you:” this was the message. Mark included no theorizing, no information telling how or by what means this had happened. He made no bumbling attempts at smoothing the way to make resurrection seem somehow plausible. It is essential that we note this one thing: his Gospel ends with alarming succinctness. Ironically, it ends, after death, with surprise – a surprise of stupendous magnitude. For the most certain thing in the world had been upended.

Brazen testimony. In a world so devoted to explanation, this brevity looks like weakness. Truth, we like to say, demands more explicit description, more evidence, a clearer line of continuity. But Mark leaves us only with this: his last word is rupture, a profound break, the breaking of brokenness. The most inevitable thing known, has been shattered.

Nearly two thousand years of Christian observance has loosed the story from the text, much to our detriment. Easter has been thoroughly domesticated. Mark, however, never retreated from this supreme sense of dismay. The women at the tomb responded entirely in kind with the message. They fled, with fear, trembling, suffering an astonishment that they could neither quell nor reason away, because they realized that, suddenly, nothing in the world was sure any longer. Or, put another way, they had become witnesses to this singular truth, that with God nothing is impossible – even in regard to us and to all that we count indubitable and finally settled. Even the firmest work of our hands could be undone, and in that undoing it could, all the more, be redeemed. For the God who had created the mystery that is life had suddenly proved himself fully capable of re-creating another mystery no less real, which is life from death.

Jesus’ resurrection does not tell us anything about us. It doesn’t confirm something intrinsic to our human nature. Easter isn’t the celebration of our own immortality, as if this could be taken as a general rule, a law of nature, or a fact of the world. It isn’t any of these. In truth, it stands in opposition to them all. Indeed, the vast momentum of our time moves us, inexorably, toward closure. But Easter is God’s emphatic objection: it is God’s Yes exploding the No to which we so dutifully resign our selves and our lives. Definitively, by resurrection, he interjected a renewed openness where all was shut down. This is not merely the stuff of tradition, layered with the sediment of time and ritual. It is news every time it is spoken. It is always, in every instance, surprising and disturbing – but gloriously so, because in the light of God’s act, we are given the freedom to sing, even at the grave, not down into silence, but Alleluias ascending.

And if this is so, then nothing else is closed off either. All the old inevitabilities of our present time fall away, too, the dreary habits of endless reciprocity: meeting like with like, injury for injury, aggression with aggression, insult with penalty, offense with vengeance, threat with preemption. This world is too much with us. We feel strangely bound by it. But we have a counter-language, an array of divine terms that arise from a deeper and more humbling truth, afforded us by a voice not our own that addresses us, alarmingly. Easter opens the way, resiliently, to the constant possibility of greater realities: of forgiveness, reconciliation, peace, generosity, abundance, and unwavering gratitude – even in the face of all the world’s despair. For even death no longer has any claim.

We are armed with many conceits in our enlightened age, and we have become nearly immune to surprise. It’s terribly easy to be immersed in smaller things, when the only voices that really count are our own. This makes for great danger and, ultimately, the isolation of sorrow compounded by sorrow. But today is a day of seismic interruption, of life disturbed by life, eternally, from which springs faith, hope, and love, inextinguishably. May that acclamation of resurrection move you to amazement, an amazement edging toward disquietude for all that is at stake. For then it is God’s voice that has been heard… singing, for us.

Welcome to our Blog

2006-04-11T11:49:00.000-04:00

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