scott's r.o.t.t.

Ecstasy

2008-07-22T09:49:00.000-07:00

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry.
- Emily Dickenson

For a denomination so obsessed with sex (according to the headlines at least) the Anglican Church is rarely charged with tolerating too much ecstasy. Many of us understand well enough what Tobias Wolff wrote about himself as a student at Oxford: "When we talked about ideas, we treated them dispassionately, donnishly, as if they were moves in a game of chess."

Theology can be a similar exercise. Talking about God can be a safe substitute for an experience of the transcendent.

In English class we're made to memorize lists of poetic devices. We learn about rhyme and meter and simile and metaphor. And we can leave such a class with the impression (unspoken perhaps) that writing poetry is just a matter of careful assembly. As if the making of a poem were comparable to playing with a verbal erector set, bolting this to that to make this lovely other thing. But this doesn't sound like the poetry Emily Dickenson describes. She doesn't know poetry by its parts. She knows it by what it does to her.

I think faith is meant to be much the same. Our talk about the mystery of God was never meant to be a 'donnish' exercise. We're not meant to keep God at a safe distance. In fact, the contact we have with God in our liturgy, in our music, in our strange encounters with God's other children may be preparation for those rarer moments at life's extremes. It's in those experiences in which our bodies go so cold that no fire could ever warm them that faith suddenly matters. That God suddenly matters. That religion is nothing at all like a game of chess. It's a matter of life and death.

The seed parables seem to be safe because their central metaphors happen slowly. But to describe the life of faith as the growth of a seed is to say that it involves the whole being. Faith isn't something that happens out there in the world of ideas. Faith isn't a cosmic game of chess. Faith isn't about comprehending something. It's about being comprehended by something beyond us.

Maybe faith is meant to be a kind of ecstasy. Sometimes a slow and patient ecstasy. Sometimes a sudden inbreaking of the transcendent at life's extremes. But either way we are drawn into or towards the mystery of God. And the religious life becomes no longer something dabbled in, but something that takes hold of us at the core of our being. Like the strange, ordinary miracle of a sown seed growing into wheat.

Conversion: The Wild West

2008-07-15T06:42:00.000-07:00

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13.1-9, 18-23
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Only in Montana do monks keep revolvers in their nightstands. Kathleen Norris tells the story of one such Montana monk who heard a drunk burglar in his cell at 2 a.m. It only took a warning and a cock of the pistol to send the would be thief stumbling into the night, with a "holy s***!"

The reason this encounter was possible was that many monasteries leave their doors unlocked at all times as a gesture of hospitality. It shocked me when I was in seminary in Alexandria, Virginia to find that the doors of the chapel had no locks. And this wasn't rural Montana. This was inside the Washington beltway.

The power of these sorts of open door images arises not only from the hospitality they signify, but from the implicit risk. If the things they contained weren't worth locking up the offering wouldn't be worth much. But because the space behind all those unlocked doors is sacred, vulnerability becomes an offering in itself.

Kathleen Norris suggested that such radical forms of hospitality or generosity can transform people. It may be that I am changed in the realization that something precious or sacred is not being withheld even from me. Some of the power of the Holy Eucharist must derive from this sense.

We read the parable of the sower Sunday, and part of that story seems to be about the conditions for transformation. The soil has to be right. As part of the Episcopal Church I think tending our particular soil for transformation will always involve signifying holy things, and then offering them generously. When we do our liturgy well we know that we are encountering the holy. And in the midst of that encounter we find an unlikely welcome for ourselves. These holy things are offered even to us. This is the beginning of gratitude. And gratitude is the beginning of transformation.

The doors stay open all day here at Christ Church. Is this a dangerous practice? You bet it is. If it weren't, it wouldn't be worth doing.

Oppression

2008-07-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

Gospel Reading: Matthew 10.40-42
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

When we were in Seattle, one item on my son Alden's agenda was the acquisition of a Mariners baseball cap. We wandered into a few of the shops that line the street leading to Safeco Field until we found the right hat at the right price.

It's a little curious, if you think about it, to include part of a uniform in your casual wardrobe - a cap, a jersey, a pair of combat boots. Sometimes it's the irony itself that drives the fashion choice. My cousin Matt's band, Gas Huffer, dressed in coveralls on their "Janitors of Tomorrow" record. And the irony rests on the way we signify our roles and our realms of authority by wearing uniforms.

Oppressors quite often wear uniforms - military, religious, or, as in the case of the Seattle Mariners, athletic. Having the worst record in baseball I'm guessing pretty much everybody in a major league uniform looks like an oppressor to the M's this year. But in spite of this reality, a certain playfulness about uniforms seems healthy to me.

If you started walking around in what I wear in church on Sundays, I would be concerned. But that would have more to do with your fashion sense than anything else. Taking uniforms seriously but not too seriously reminds us that we are constantly moving among different realms of authority. And we need to be careful about how we wield the authority we're given.

Jesus talked about welcoming prophets, righteous people, and little ones in the gospel Sunday. He tells us to welcome each of these people as they are. And I'm wondering if the risk of my becoming an oppressor increases as I become more obsessed with my own uniform and less with that of others?

We all have the power to respond to one another. And our relative authority is one component of that power. Jesus seemed comfortable with his authority. He didn't pretend it didn't exist. But he also exercised it on behalf of the people he thought needed it most. He paid attention to the other.

Kathleen Norris's story about a massacre of Christians by Buddhist, Confucian, and Shinto oppressors reminds us that no religion, no system of authority is beyond the possibility of oppression. So we can't take solace in whatever our particular uniform or lack of one might be. Maybe we have to keep asking why we wear it, and for whose sake we exercise our authority.

So what's your uniform? We need to be nimble as we move in and out of the different places and relationships in which we're granted power. No matter our uniform - baseball cap, badge, golfing shoes, chasuble, t-shirt and cutoffs, or whatever tells us our place - we're called to be stewards of the influence we're given. Honest attention to the people around us may be the first step back from oppression, and a step toward actually being useful to someone besides myself.

After all, what good is the authority to redirect the Mississippi if the person in front of us just needs a cup of water?

Moss

2008-06-19T22:30:00.000-07:00

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13.1-9, 18-23
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Decatur Island is a mossy place. Actually everything's pretty mossy out here in Seattle (that's where I am right now for some continuing education). You know about the famous Pacific Northwest drizzle. Moss is no surprise in a place like this.

I was admiring the moss as we were hiking in the woods of Decatur Island, out in the San Juans. It came in all shades of green. It clung to stones, tree trunks, and anything else that sat still long enough in the Decatur damp. Some mosses looked like tiny ferns. Others like a thin, short fur. Some moss was nothing but a faint hint of color, as if sprayed weakly from a near-empty can.

The presence of all this lovely moss made perfect sense, until my uncle bothered me with a few strange facts: The average annual rainfall in Seattle is about 37 inches, 11 inches less than Little Rock. And on Decatur Island, it's about 20. Go figure.

The lush fauna of the wet Northwest gets by on not much water by taking it a little at a time.

I heard last week's gospel read at Christ Church, Seattle soon after our return from the island. With that strange, ceremonious shaking of foot dust that Jesus recommends, he makes it clear that Seattle wasn't where the disciples were to find these inhospitable houses. Dust accumulates only indoors here.

But in telling his friends to head off without proper provisions for their journey, he sent them off depending on the hospitality of the people they would meet. And walking on Decatur island was a reminder to me that the sustaining kindness we depend upon need not be much if it comes often.
This harsh gospel reading serves as a reminder to me that our lives are caught up and held up in a great web of hospitality. And sometimes we need to be reminded of our dependence upon the goodness and gifts of others. The small, regular sustaining gifts of the people around us.

The small gifts of simple meals or rooms swept free of the day's dust. Small gifts of a look in the eye, or a well chosen word. We don't need such things in torrents. We need them just a little at a time, but often. Taken individually they don't amount to much. Even taken together their quantity may seem small. But drop by daily drop the fullness and health of our lives depends upon those hundreds of nearly invisible hospitable acts. From friend, stranger, child, spouse, neighbor. Whatever is green and growing in us is sustained by the hospitality of these others.

Jesus told the disciples to be harsh in their judgment of the inhospitable and he told them God would too. But he was talking to people from whom he was removing all illusions of self-sufficiency. Taking no gold, no copper for their purses was surely for the disciple's formation, not for the judgment of those hypothetical unworthy houses.

The disciples, like us, needed to see that their lives are like moss. They depend on the goodness of others. Not great bursts of philanthropy. But on the simple sustaining acts that are all around us. Our lives just need a little hospitality. But they need it all the time.

Inquisition

2008-06-03T07:40:00.000-07:00

Gospel reading: Matthew 7.21-29
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

With a new Indiana Jones movie just released, I'm reflecting on power differentials. I haven't seen the show. But I have a good idea of what to expect: constantly shifting power differentials.

I'm pretty sure there will be chases in tight quarters - crypts or caves or maybe even spaceships I hear. And Indy will be at the weak end of a power differential. Whether it's a giant boulder or a ball of flames that's barreling towards him, his only hope will be to get out of the way. And if we've paid full price for a ticket, he'd better have to crawl through something wet or writhing or sticky or creeping or preferably all of the above to get free.

But the film's most satisfying moments will be when our hero reverses a power differential between people - namely between Dr. Jones and one of the villains du jour. We love it when a band of evildoers with scimitars or revolvers find themselves on the wrong end of Indy's whip.

Each Indiana Jones movie reminds us that power differentials are thrilling, and that we really wouldn't want a world free of them even if such a thing were imaginable. Life is a constant exchange of power. The physicists and the psychologists and the comic book writers all agree that this is so.

But there is a problem with the world as we know it, power being distributed as it is. And the problem isn't that the bad guys have power too. The problem, Kathleen Norris says, is that inquisition is a lurking possibility in every conversation, increasing as the differential in power grows.

She puts it this way: "Inquisition...is an attutude of mind, a type of questioning that resists true conversation, which like the word 'conversation,' at its root means to turn, or to turn around. The inquisitor has answers in hand and does not wish to change them." With her definition, inquisition becomes a present reality and temptation for the likes of me, and not limited to the infamous persecutions by Christians in the middle ages.

Because there is an almost primal (or perhaps a literally primal) satisfaction in reversing or relishing in a power differential, inquisition is a possibility in every conversation. You know an inquisition is being held when your response holds no sway in a conversation. The questioner wants to know nothing more than what side you're on. This is the interpersonal equivalent of that giant boulder rolling in one direction through the cave, crushing everything in its path. Indy knows quite well that his opinion or pushback won't matter a whit. So he gets out of the way. Ever been in a conversation or relationship like that?

The most famous chapter in The Brothers Karamazov is called The Grand Inquisitor. Ivan, one of the novel's main characters, tells a story or a parable perhaps about an appearance of Christ in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor recognizes Christ immediately by the miracles he performs. And tells him, "Thou must not meddle for the time, at least."

The Inquisitor's job is to try people for heresy. And he tells Christ himself that he "mayest not take from men the freedom which Thou didst exalt when Thou wast on earth." Faith depends on freedom. And any miracles would smother the freedom to disbelieve. So Christ himself must be stopped, in the Inquisitor's eyes.

A power differential. And the penetrating question (Dostoevsky himself is said not to have resolved the questions this chapter raises) of the parable has to do with how much of God's absolute power God withholds in order for us to be free. That's a big, old, unanswerable question. But if such difference matters in our relationship to God, how much more must it matter in our relationships with one another.

Of course the differences can't be eliminated and we wouldn't want them to be. (There would be no more Indiana Jones movies.) But what we do with the power we have, even in a single conversation matters. In our exchanges do we hold out the possibility that we might be changed by a response? Or is our opinion something of a fireball raging through a crypt? You can throw your pail of damp ideas back at it, but the impact will be negligible.

In our gospel Sunday Jesus said that not everyone who calls him "Lord, Lord" will enter the kingdom of heaven, even though they did "deeds of power" in his name. Only those who hear his words and act on them will enter. This is a troubling passage, but isn't it about our freedom and the exercise of power? We can appropriate our power - even religious or spiritual power - in life giving or in abusive ways. We've got some freedom. And whether we chose inquisition or conversation is up to us.

I guess the appeal of Indiana Jones depends on our desire that a proper give and take be returned to the exchange of power in our world. And the good news is that our work is really the same as that of Indiana Jones. We have to figure out how to put the power we have - whether whip, mind, or tongue - to bring things back into balance. And to do this we have to always put ourselves forward, open to the possibility that we will be changed, knowing that the last thing our world needs right now is another inquisitor.

God - talk

2008-05-27T07:17:00.000-07:00

Gospel reading: Matthew 6.24-34
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

The very culture whose vernacular oozes with 'God-talk' may have also produced such language's best corrective. Maybe the correction had to be an inside job.

We in the South live in what Flannery O'Connor said is not a Christ-centered culture, but a Christ-haunted culture. And I suspect that this haunting presence has a great deal to do with the stark and sometimes startling language of Southern Gothic fiction.

Yesterday I finished a novel by a writer who pushes the envelope of even this strange genre. Wolf Whistle is Lewis Nordan's fictional meditation on the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, a murder that affected Nordan deeply as a boy growing up in a rural Mississippi town not far away. And a murder that would galvanize a nascent civil rights movement as well.

As he describes the murder of Bobo, the Till character in the novel, Nordan is at his gruesome best. His is language of swampy decay, of flesh, blood, and bones. And his language is also otherworldly, as the lost eye of the murdered boy watches the aftermath of his killing from the mysterious perspective of the dead. Its sight isn't limited to things nearby as that of living eyes must be. It watches the killer even after he's driven off into what's left of his sad life.

Nordan tells the fantastic, impossible story without flinching, without apology for mingling the supernatural and the horribly concrete. He owes debts to the likes of Flannery O'Connor and Faulkner, of course, but also to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the "magical realists". Like the magical realists, Nordan's language stays firmly rooted in the grisly reality of life on earth even when time and physics no longer hold their usual sway over things.

The language of Southern Gothic fiction strikes me as a perfect undoing of the 'God-talk' that Kathleen Norris critiques. God-talk is a coded vagueness detached from earthbound existence. It is a "spiritualized jargon that does not ground itself in the five senses." Such language should be anathema to a religion with incarnation at its core.

The best language in both Christianity and Southern literature refuses to be satisfied with vagueness in the face of mystery. They both display that whatever else there is to this life, whatever there is beyond or beneath this life, we encounter it in the particular, not in the abstract.

In Sunday's gospel Jesus said, "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these." These are as famous as religious words get. But somehow they're still not "God-talk". At least not to my ears. They still manage to cut through an abstraction like worry and direct me to lilies I've known. Lilies of the non-spinning, non-toiling variety. And somehow it's there among the flowers that I catch a better glimpse of the fist clenched in the bottom of my belly and what it might take and mean to be free of it.

To my mind "Consider the lilies" is everything that "Let go and let God" is not. Jesus directed our attention back to the world. To birds and flowers and kings like Solomon. To grass and ovens and clothing. He seems to be telling us that we'll find a way through the mysteries of this life among such things. So he doesn't say, "Let go." He says, "Consider the lilies."

Of course the best religious language doesn't consider only sparrows and lilies. It takes us face to face with Emmet Till as well. But this is a blessing in the end. Because whatever grace is, we need to know that it shows up in lives like ours. That it shows up in a world of bright useless flowers and sad useless deaths as well.

Language that's anything less just isn't worth our breath.

Orthodoxy

2008-05-13T08:06:00.000-07:00

Gospel reading: John 20.19-23
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

There is only one, short paper from seminary that I've considered trying to expand into a book one day. It was titled "Housing the Meeting," and in it I considered the relationship between our worship and the buildings that we worship within.

But my interest wasn't in the differences between Gothic and Byzantine or modern strip mall architecture. I was coming at the subject as a house-builder. And I've long been curious about the notion that the walls we bump into and the furniture we step around each day all participate in making us who we are. In the paper I even speculated about an ancient and universal mystery: Why do people always gather in the kitchen at parties?

My hunch - about the kitchen phenomenon - is this: We are instinctively drawn to space set aside for a purpose. The signs of human intention decorate every kitchen. Appliances and utensils remind us of the ritual preparation of meals that takes place there day after day, year after year. And we are at home. Conversation happens more naturally among all this evidence that a house isn't just shelter.

And there in the kitchen we might realize that a house isn't just an expression of who we are. The way we move through our houses and the work we do within them are forever making us who we are.

For instance, the impact on who I am - in several ways, including the physical - won't be insignificant if my house is best arranged for unwrapping a Whopper in my La-Z-Boy in front of a large plasma TV rather than preparing a meal from scratch in my kitchen.

What does that have to do with orthodoxy? Quite a bit, I think.

As Kathleen Norris suggests, we tend to think of orthodoxy in terms of static truths or right doctrinal positions. We tend to speak and hear the language of the creeds as though they were simply collections of established facts. But for most of Christian history orthodoxy concerned right worship more than right belief. Orthodoxy wasn't primarily about holding the right set of ideas in one's head. It was about joining a larger Christian response to God with our whole selves.

Now, back to the kitchen. What if our attraction to the kitchen has something to do with the fact that we don't really learn about one another through the simple exchange of words? We're formed in the work we do, in the space we inhabit, in the way we move through our days. We know we'll get a broader picture of what makes each other tick if we catch a glimpse of working life.

There is something just as true about the life of faith. Our words matter deeply. But the Anglican tradition insists that our theology - our words about God - are best taken in through liturgy. The words are tied to gestures and postures, sights and smells. They are spoken near furniture and fixtures - like fonts and altars and crosses and candles - that bear part of their meaning.

A life altering attraction to the historic Christian faith, to orthodox Christian worship, is about more than a longing for right information about God. Orthodoxy is about more than words. It's a way of moving as much as a way of thinking.

Deciding to make orthodox worship a part of one's life is like stepping into a house. The walls are sturdy enough to move us here rather than there. The arrangement and appointments of the rooms will entice us and appeal to us for different reasons at different moments in our lives. But the consistent fact is that we'll be changed along the way by the movements we make.

Who knows if I'll ever get around to trying to write that book. But I do plan to stay orthodox. I do plan to continue living within the liturgy of the historic church, making the movements and using the words of this living and ancient Christian tradition.

You might say that I'm drawn to the nave of Christ Church like a dinner guest to the kitchen.

Creeds

2008-05-06T12:10:00.000-07:00

Gospel reading: John 17.1-11
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I wish I had your happiness
And you had a do-wacka-do,
Wacka do, wacka-do, wacka-do.
- Roger Miller

Physically my friend Al was an odd combination of soft and lanky. His was a body perfectly unfit for athletic activity, but just right for flailing about to the boom-chicka rhythm of Do-Wacka-Do. He danced like one of those wooden figures sold at craft fairs that are made to move by bouncing on a flexible board. Their hinged limbs splay forward and backward, free of the limits ordinary knees and elbows impose.

I suppose this is an odd beginning for a blog about a "concise, formal, and authorized statement of important points of Christian doctrine." But it just seems like if I don't compare the Nicene Creed to Do-Wacka-Do no one will.

When we consider the creeds we usually talk about the way they limit or refine our speech about God. To be Christian is partly to take up a particular religious vocabulary. But when we stop there we forget that words aren't ends in themselves. They are only useful insofar as they stir up something in us that moves in the direction of truth.

So to do the work they were meant to do in our lives, creeds have to have a certain amount of do-wacka-do, if you will. The words themselves need to set something off in us whether we know quite what they mean or not. It's not enough that they've been authorized.

Kathleen Norris says she loves using the Nicene Creed in church because "no one can pretend to know exactly what it is they're saying: 'God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God.'" Which may be the 4th century religious equivalent to do-wacka-do. We don't know entirely what they mean, but they set off something in us that is true about God. Or they set something off in us towards what is true about God.

And our proof for this is primarily that we've seen these words set off something in Christians across the centuries towards the truth about God. We see goodness at work in the lives of people we love and trust. And maybe we're humble enough or desperate enough to see what this language might set off in us.

Kathleen Norris says it gives her "great pleasure to hear a church full of respectable people suddenly start to talk like William Blake. Only the true literalists are left out, refusing to play the game." Her pleasure must be just as great when we read the strange things Jesus says about glorification as we did on Sunday.

But we need not be left out. Playing this game isn't about using the creeds as fine sieves through which all truth about God must be strained. Their primary use is not keeping out wrong ideas about God, but planting fruitful ones that have been borne out in so many other lives over time.

I don't really expect the Christ Church congregation to go flailing about at the Creed this Sunday, like Al would to Do-Wacka-Do. But maybe something like this is what happens to us slowly over time as we say the creeds together. Limited and nonsensical as our meager words might be, they do bring something of the truth of God into our selves in a way that changes us - changes not just the way we think, but the way we live, and move, and have our being.

Heresy/Apostasy

2008-04-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

Gospel reading: John 14.15-21
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I got a new bicycle in January. And in March I got my first flat.

Three of us were riding along the river trail near Murray Park. I was (not surprisingly) in the back, using the other two riders as a much needed windbreak. This meant that my front wheel was only a few inches from the bike in front of me. So I had barely enough time to get the "Oh" out (which was to be followed by an expletive) before I hit the pothole that appeared suddenly in my path.

The deep thud of a pothole rim at 25 mph is a particularly unsettling sound for a guy on a new bike. My front tire went quickly flat, as the force of the blow was enough to turn my handlebars downward about 30 degrees.

I think that's what heresy is like.

Here's what I mean. Sometimes words like heresy or apostasy or orthodoxy are used as though the truths they refer to are simply engraved verbatim into the universe on a cellular level. We speak of them as if they can be assessed and verified in the abstract. We equate eternal truth with stable truth. Reliable truth. Unchanging truth.

But the most helpful conceptions of heresy always include motion, in my opinion. They're not so much a declaration about the nature of the universe as a shout to the rider behind us, "Watch out! I really did a number on my front rim in that pothole."

Just in case the Walters pothole theory of heresy is taught in seminaries someday, I'll try to elaborate a bit. Sitting in the grass next to the bike path with a limp tire and a bent rim, that pothole didn't strike me as a matter of personal opinion. It wasn't just that I had personally experienced the world as a pothole. I hit something hard. And if there had been another rider behind me, and if I had spent that crucial split second apologizing and qualifying my experience of the flattening of a tire that seemed to be related to a void in the path, but that of course all paths are legitimate...well, you get the point. Now the only help I'd have to offer is a pump and a patch.

At the same time, when a warning is shouted from someone further down the path we have to decide what to do. She might have veered left to miss it, while I need to lean right. And of course the information is helpful only to the folks traveling this path. Hearing that there is an even bigger, and more dangerous hole in on a bike path in Tulsa isn't particularly relevant to me.

The reason the pothole theory is helpful to me is that it takes place and motion into account. Christian concerns with heresy have usually had to do with incarnation - keeping Jesus both a full expression of God's presence and a living, breathing human being. Sometimes we've imagined a Jesus so ethereal that it's hard to imagine his life having much to do with the likes of ours. Followers of Jesus have hit that pothole and sent warning. In fact, we've been reading from the Gospel of John in church, a gospel the church was a little suspicious of because Jesus can seem so otherworldly.

At other times we've been so bent on describing Jesus as a regular guy that people might rightly wonder why in the world people still bother with this Christian religion. I mean, as much as we love that wise and witty barista at the coffee shop, would it make sense to make the fuss we do over Jesus on a Sunday morning for him with our best silver and silk? Would you put her in a stained glass window? Followers have his this pothole too.

But incarnation still happens on the go. Life is charging on and religion is a great long conversation about the presence of God in our world. So maybe pothole theory doesn't mean watching suspiciously for heresy in all its usual haunts - sermons, prayers, offhand comments at coffee hour. Maybe it means listening. Listening to something like the chanted psalms on a Sunday morning not as watertight reservoirs of eternal truth. But as shouts of warning or blessing or comfort from people on the path ahead of us.

We always have to figure out what shouts from their lives might have to do with ours. But they are so much easier to listen to when I realize they weren't trying to cull me and my strange ideas out of this tradition. They were trying to keep me from ending up alone on the side of the road, wondering how long it will take to walk home with my bike on my shoulder and what's left of a wheel in my hand.

2008-04-24T08:19:00.000-07:00

Gospel reading: John 14.1-14
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I think you can judge a book by its cover. Or at least I begin judging a book when I see its cover, starting with the title. A favorite title of mine is What Are People For? It's right up there with The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property and The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade.

What Are People For? is by Wendell Berry. And his is an appropriate name to drop a few days from Earth Day. He's a draft horse farmer in Kentucky as well as a poet, novelist, and essayist. And when he considers ecological concerns he's less likely to obsess over policy details than he is to reflect upon the web of relationships that are human culture and how we are formed by our choices within it. Environmental problems are always an ultimate matter of culture and character for Wendell Berry.

OK, that was a two paragraph digression. But the title of Berry's book catches my attention because it asks a question that seems obvious, but sounds strange. Even though you are one, have you ever wondered what people are for?

We could ask a similar question about the Bible. What is it for? Like people, we might be too close to the subject to see it, or to wonder about its purpose. But what we think something's for has a lot to do with what it ends up meaning to us. The assumptions we bring with us have a lot to do with what we get out of any encounter.

Some people have thought that the Bible was a reservoir of perfect and eternal truths, any of which might be plucked out of its pages and dropped into our lives unscathed and to our benefit.

Here's one example of the problem of such a hermeneutic (a 10 cent word that has to do with methods of drawing meaning from something) recounted in Garry Wills's book What Jesus Meant. It's a letter of unknown origin perhaps to a radio talk show host.

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's law. I have learned a great deal from you, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.
When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. How should I deal with this?
I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as it suggests in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
Lev. 25:44 states that I may buy slaves from the nations that are around us. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans but not Canadians. Can you clarify?
I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 10:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?
Lev. 20:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

As you can see, interpretation is a subtler art than cutting and pasting. I think Kathleen Norris is onto something in returning to the notion that scriptures were meant to be read in community and out loud.

An aural event always happens at a particular moment in time. Before long the vibrations that make for sound settle down and the words are gone. So we're reminded that whatever scripture is, its truth always reaches us at a particular moment in time. And our assumptions and experiences will always play a part in that encounter.

Postmodern literary theorists will emphasize the way each reader invests a text with meaning. Whatever the original author intended will never be retrieved perfectly in tact from the text. This is true whether the reading is private or public, silent or aloud. But somehow the public reading of scripture embodies its living presence in our lives. Scripture is always spoken into a new moment. Who knows just what I'll hear today. And only God knows what you might hear tomorrow.

So maybe we're meant to let go of the What is scripture for? question at least enough to let this holy book speak something new and unexpected into the forever changing circumstances of our lives. Maybe the answer to What is scripture for? is as deceptively simple as the question: it's for hearing.

Preaching

2008-04-15T08:01:00.000-07:00

Gospel reading: John 10:1-10
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Some of you know that I've spent more of my life as a carpenter than I have as a priest. The career change was pretty stark for me. I went from wearing a tattered Carhart canvas jacket to wearing a cassock and surplice at work.

It's hard to imagine two careers with job descriptions that differ more than priest and carpenter. But I think preaching has been the bridge between the two for me.

My sermons begin as written documents, and I don't stray from my text beyond a sentence here or there to clarify a connection or make reference to something that has happened between printing and delivery. And that document satisfies that part of myself that needs to see a made thing result from my labor. But it's a pleasure that's not complete until it's shared.

The first carpenter I worked for was a very literate guy named James Fish. I joined his framing crew in a small town outside Tacoma. After I had moved back to Arkansas, he moved to Eastern Washington and began building traditional timber frame houses. These are the old post and beam structures that last for centuries, their great timbers joined by elegantly carved joints drawn together with oak pegs.

I once received a letter from James written entirely on a fir shaving like the one curling from the plane in the picture at the top. A timber framer needs first rate planes, and he needs to keep those planes tuned. So the message of James's missive was very much in (not just on) the medium. The shaving thin enough so as to be translucent, and it was at least two feet long.

His letter was sheer gloat. And I loved it. Because I knew of the labor it came from.

Sermons are like that for me. There is something very solitary about their making. But in making them, and then in delivering them, I find some of my most intense connections to the lives of the congregation that is forming me as a preacher and as a human being. It's in searching for that intersection between the stories of scripture and our stories that I lose myself in a task I love, but also realize that somehow the whole of that task is wonderfully contained within the life of a people who say their prayers at Capitol and Scott Sunday after Sunday.

The longer I'm here the more clearly I feel like I think James did. He spent hours honing the edge of his planes. Many more hours perfecting his technique. And when he watched that lovely, delicate sliver curl from his work, it pleased him. And he sent it to me, thinking, "Scott will get a kick out of this."

A sermon is like one of those slivers. To most people one may look like a curiosity at best, something to be swept up with the rest of what falls to the floor in a workshop. But because it has emerged from shared things - our scriptures, our stories, our lives - I know Christ Church will get it, or at least get some kind of kick out of it. Even when my thoughts fail to coalesce and when I stumble in their delivery, somehow, over time, Christ Church gets it. Christ Church is getting me. Because Christ Church is getting into me.

Good and Evil

2008-04-08T08:07:00.001-07:00

Gospel reading: Luke 24:13-35
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I must be preoccupied with music lately. Last week it was John Fahey. This week: Yonder Mountain String Band.

My son, Alden and I went to a concert last week. Yonder Mountain's instrumentation is pretty straight ahead bluegrass: upright bass, guitar, banjo, and mandolin. But if you go to one of their concert expecting Lester Flatts and Earl Scruggs - well, for one thing, you will have forgotten your ear plugs. The instruments are acoustic, but Yonder Mountain isn't timid in their amplification of those instruments.

So the question arises: Is the Yonder Mountain String Band a bluegrass band? An old time string band? A rock and roll band? Something else entirely? People of good will disagree.

It's helpful for us to have categories to drop things into as we sort through what the world brings our way. But it always seems like the world's most creative people explore the edges or maybe the heart of the category they find themselves in. Sometimes we feel the need to create a new category. Bluegrass itself was a new term for what Scruggs and Flatt started to do in the 1940s. It's hardly an ancient form. But it's a form we can argue about what belongs rightly within it.

What does all that have to do with good and evil?

Only this. When good and evil become clear categories that describe people rather than actions they are dangerous concepts. And they are dangerous because they drain from both goodness and evil their subtlety and elusiveness. And they almost always allow us to place ourselves and our friends in with the good.

What's fascinating about Kathleen Norris's chapter this week is that she expolores the subtlety of evil through characters like Jeffrey Dahmer, the mass murderer who cannibalized his victims and stored their hearts in his freezer. Norris refers us, faithfully, I think, back to Jesus' teaching that the roots of murder are right there in our anger.

Jesus blurred some very useful moral categories (murder, adultery, etc.) not in order to let us all of the hook. But to remind us that we're all on the hook. The good and the evil in this world are both things we all participate in as we go about our lives. And like all of life, we participate in good and evil in ways that are always matters of degree, never pure forms of either.

Now back to the music. The best artists are never satisfied to simply occupy a place within a genre. They push at its edges. They explore the energy it arose from. In fact, it may well be that the best artist in any genre don't really believe in genres.

And so it is with our moral lives. Goodness is a lived reality. In fact, maybe goodness is an art. The old categories like murder and charity are necessary and useful. But the best in goodness comes about like the best in music. It always happens in the moment. Goodness isn't a designation for people. It's a way of being that we're always working at. And the moment we think we've mastered it the music of our lives loses its soul.

And here's a little taste of Yonder Mountain for anyone who wants one:

Faith

2008-04-01T08:02:00.000-07:00

Gospel reading: John 20.19-31
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I'm captivated by John Fahey's The Legend of Blind Joe Death. It's a record by this strange but legendary guitar player. His albums don't include vocals or accompaniment. Just John and his guitar.

His style is unmistakable. He plays like he's grasping the instrument by it's throat. His music sounds like something the calloused hands of a morose stonemason plucks angrily from the shuddering steel strings of his guitar. (OK, that's a bit much.) If you think acoustic music is all sweetness and light, you haven't heard John Fahey.

Last week the kids and I drove to North Carolina and back. (This is why I didn't manage to blog in case you happened to miss this weekly whatever.) And I realized on the drive that I only time I really listen to Blind Joe Death is late at night on road trips. And I always listen to the whole thing. I never get a hankering for say, "Sligo River Blues" or his dark rendition of "In Christ There is No East or West" by themselves. It's all or nothing.

The album has a rather odd format. Fahey plays nine songs. Then he plays them again. Then he plays three more songs. After each listening I feel like I've managed to be present to the whole of some process that only unfolds over a long, long time. I'm never quite sure whether the process has taken place in me or out there in what I've heard. There's a haunting familiarity when the tunes come around again, and I can't quite say just how they and I have been changed. But they...I...we...surely have.

When Kathleen Norris writes about faith being more like a verb, I think of John Fahey. At least this week I do. Listening to an album can be a simple thumbs up or thumbs down proposition. Have you ever listened to The Legend of Blind Joe Death? is a simple yes or no question. And too often we speak of faith in much the same way. As if it's something we get or do at a certain point in time.

But maybe faith is more like an immersion in something. Maybe it's a way of seeing or a kind of awareness that we slip into and out of. A way of being that grows only slowly, perhaps, over time.

Thomas's encounter with the risen Christ can seem to imply faith as a settled fact happening in an instant. But reading the story again we see that Thomas is given an experience both strange enough and concrete enough to open up the future for God knows what. The evidence he is given only confirms that all bets are off when it comes to what God might do next.

And so it is with us, I think. We tend to think of faith in terms of how much or how intensely we can manage to believe a particular set of (usually unbelievable) facts. But maybe faith is never belief in a something settled, never a possession, but rather, something strange and wonderful that possesses us. Something that seems to unfold slowly, over time. But something whose force we find ourselves unexpectedly present to.

I don't read the Bible like I listen to John Fahey. It's longer. And reading while driving late at night is a bad idea. But I wonder if I'd get something more from that strange book if I could. I wonder if I would really get its sense that faith is something that comes to be in great waves and surges and trickles over time. And maybe the experience would register somewhere within my self that faith is not a way of being that we achieve once for all, but that we step into or stumble into and maybe get wonderfully lost within.

Storage

2008-03-18T11:43:00.000-07:00

Gospel reading for Tuesday in Holy Week: John 12.20-36
Click HERE for the day's readings.

It's Holy Week, which means this feels like a good day to double task. For my blog this week I'm using some thoughts I pulled together for our noon service today.

Insufficient closet space is a form of accountability in my opinion. I know well that I’m swimming upstream here. And when I worked as a carpenter, I never heard a homeowner say, “Could you reduce the size of that walk in closet? I’m afraid I might just fill it.

And now, I regularly drive past the Mid Towne Mall and our gleaming new “Container Store.” It’s a huge new store to buy expensive things in which store all the expensive things we buy at other stores. And the strangest thing about it to me is that it’s bigger than any of the other stores in the mall. Isn’t that weird?

There is a very familiar instinct that the strange economics of stuff storage depend upon: I need to hang on to this, because I might just need it someday.

This isn’t a neurosis. But the gospel reading today addresses a similar spiritual instinct. The impulse to play it safe and hang on to what we know. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,” Jesus says, “it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”The trouble for the people he was speaking to was that this Jesus wasn’t staying put. He preached that we have to let go of our lives to find them. And he tells the gathered crowd that he will be “lifted up from the earth.” Jesus wasn’t staying put. So storage of the present wasn’t an option.

It was all a little disconcerting for the crowd. “We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever.” Their fear makes some sense. What was that old Hebrew adage about a Messiah in hand is better than two in the bush?

Jesus was showing them, and us, how to let go of the lives God has given us. Life isn’t about storage. It’s about letting go of the seeds of the present so that they can die. And come to life again.

Life has no shelf life, Jesus tells us. It happens always on that razor’s edge of the present.

Jesus reminds us that our hope isn’t that God can keep things from deteriorating. Our hope isn’t even that God can preserve our lives. Our hope is in the fact that God is always going about the work of resurrection. In fact God has knit resurrection into the very fabric of life itself: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have started this blog with a smug comment about closet sizes. Our closets are small, but they are stuffed with the stuff that I can’t bear to throw out. If you thought “The preacher doth protest too much,” you’re right. But there’s hope I think. Not for my stuff but for my life. For our lives.

Jesus was showing us even before his resurrection that life is a gift that can’t be stored. The goodness we know today is goodness God has delivered into our lives through others. And that goodness stays living only as we give it away once again to our world.

Sinner, Wretch, and Reprobate

2008-03-12T08:05:00.000-07:00

Gospel reading: John 11.1-45
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Late yesterday morning I was put under general anesthesia. For all I know, my dentist then braced his feet against my shoulders and extracted my wisdom teeth with a pair of vice grips. Mercifully, I'll never know.

I'm pretty grateful just now for anesthesia. I wouldn't trade it for a shot of whiskey - even a good single malt Scotch - when it comes to oral surgery. But I also wouldn't trade it for consciousness. I was only out of it for less than an hour, although Ardelle might argue that I wasn't entirely with it for much of the afternoon.

Kathleen Norris discussed three words that are disappearing from our religious vocabulary: sinner, wretch, and reprobate. I wonder if the urge to be rid of these terms is something like the perfectly sane desire for anesthesia. There are some things I simply don't want to be conscious of.

But anesthesia is meant to wear off. Oblivion is meant to be a short term experience.

I think this is why we should resist anesthetizing language, as well as art. When a term or concept is beyond the pale, we lose access to something real not just for a while, but forever. Too many of us have had experiences of sin, of wretchedness, of reprobation for us to dismiss them altogether.

On the other hand, we need to be find a way of talking about these all to familiar human conditions that doesn't let them define us completely. In fact, we may need only to hold on to the word 'reprobate' as Christians to say clearly that it applies to precisely no one. No one is 'rejected by God and destined for damnation'.

It makes a lot of sense to me that localized and temporary anesthesia might be appropriate for some of our faith's harsher words. When we've been beat up and belittled by them for a long time we'll need a little distance for a time. But I'm not sure we need to anesthetize ourselves completely from them.

Because when we look around in our world we see the results of something like sin. We see hatred and bigotry and cruelty. Christians have always held that we are partly complicit in our world's trouble. Jesus brought us the good news of our forgiveness. But he also told us that we carry the seeds of murder in our heart when we simply hate another person.

I don't think Jesus taught this to make us feel worse about ourselves. I think he was trying to remind us that we're in this thing together. You and me and Charles Manson. We matter to one another. But our goodness matters as surely as our failures do. Anesthetizing ourselves from this reality isn't a good long term policy.

Like the best art, the best religion shouldn't flinch from the grimmer or more glorious details of life. For anesthesia is never very local. We lose our capacity for wonder and goodness when we protect ourselves too well from the experiences of loss and pain.

In Sunday's gospel we saw Jesus weeping, and 'greatly disturbed in spirit'. There's something in us that wants to anesthetize Jesus from such emotion. And it's all the more surprising to find it in the gospel of John where Jesus seems so otherworldy at times. But there it is. Here he is. Here he is in the world of loss and death that we recognize. It turns out that the healing he means to bring is meant for lives like ours, for losses like ours. And the healing he means to bring can flow through lives like ours, sinners that we are.

The effects of last night's pain meds haven't worn off completely. If this blog's even less coherent than the others, I suppose I have an excuse. If it's not, well, never mind...

Christ

2008-03-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

Gospel reading: John 9.1-41
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

No ideas but in things.
-William Carlos Williams

Most of us go through life searching for the ideal. The ideal job or the ideal mate or the ideal pair of pants. Even if we're hard headed realists, at least in our language we set up the "ideal" as what's best, don't we? As in "Sure, a cat with a good attitude that doesn't smell would be ideal, but good luck finding one."

Now I know what you're thinking (unless you're a cat lover, which means you're probably too busy thinking unkind thoughts about me to be thinking what I think you would be thinking). You're thinking, "We're just talking like good Neoplatonists."

Well, you're right. Which is why we need to be reading more William Carlos Williams.

That should be enough confusion to untangle (or tangle with) for one blog.

If you remember anything your old philosophy professor taught you it might be that Plato said that ultimate reality lies in the ideal. There is an ideal in which all the particular instances of a thing participate. We know this tree is a tree because it participates in the ideal of treeness. Or we say something is beautiful because is participates more fully in the ideal of beauty. "Oh, that would be ideal!" is the highest praise in Plato's world.

But not so for William Carlos Williams. His obsession was things. So after Philosophy 101 we wandered into English class and memorized his poem about a red wheelbarrow that didn't seem to be a poem at all. It just described a thing. And said that so much depends upon this unremarkable thing.

Now, if Plato and Williams occupy the ends of some kind of spectrum (I don't know that anybody else ever placed them on one) it would seem that religion would fall toward the Platonic end. God could be the name for the ultimate ideal. And William Carlos Williams was a New Jersey doctor with no interest in the supernatural. The thing in front of him held all the wonder he needed.

But I think Christianity actually falls towards the Williams end. The Christian faith isn't about ideals. It's about particulars. Incarnation is the opposite of God as an ideal. Ideals stay vague and stay put because they are perfect. Incarnate things move and surprise and challenge and offend. As Rilke says in the quote at the beginning of this chapter, "Who is this Christ, who interferes in everything?"

If the Christian faith rings true to us don't you think it's because in some way, we all come to God like the blind man from Sunday's gospel reading. We don't think our way to God. We don't imagine a perfect and life-giving concept. We have an encounter. And we try to make some sense out of it.

Somebody spat on the ground and rubbed mud on the eyes of this man. And when he was healed he began to suspect something wonderful was happening. Something even beyond his own healing. God was present in his life in the person standing right in front of him. He wasn't searching for an ideal to believe in. He was wondering about the person who had just touched his eyes.

The beauty of the Christian faith is that as God gives us God's self in face to face encounter we are given one another as well. We let go of the impossible search for the ideal and take up the wonderful exploration of the life and the people before us. As Kathleen Norris says, Christ is present among us "not as a static idea or principle, but a Word made flesh, a listening, active Christ who in the gospels tells us that he prays for us, and who promises to be with us always."

That's not ideal. It's something - or someone - much, much better.

Intolerance/Forbearance

2008-02-26T13:58:00.000-08:00

Gospel reading: John 3.1-17
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

If God did not choose to work in ways that confound us, grace would not be amazing. It would not be grace.
~ Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

Since much of this week's chapter concerns sexuality, I thought this might be a good time to blog about the apocrypha.

To this day every time we read from the Apocrypha I get a tinge of the willies. I grew up believing there were exactly 66 books in the Bible. And none of these was called The Additions to Esther, or Susannah, or Bel and the Dragon. If asked to defend my response, I would probably offer a two point apology for a 66 book canon: 1. Oh, come on! and 2. Those don't sound like books of the Bible.

It's not just because I'm scared to blog about sexuality that I started with a diversion. Because I think we underestimate the power of our resistance to the unfamiliar. In fact I'm pretty sure that most of humanity's most elaborate philosophical and ethical systems arose in response to particular cases of the willies.

Maybe gay people give you the willies. Maybe Republicans or lawyers or insurance salesmen do. Maybe soldiers or hippies or bicycle riders do. But regardless, we ignore the sources of our willies at our peril.

Which brings me to Sunday's Gospel. You have to wonder what Jesus was experiencing with that woman at the well. Maybe you've heard often enough why Jesus' culture would have told him he had no business speaking to this woman. But nobody ever wonders whether she gave him the willies. What if she did?

I mean, when we are drawn across some threshold toward contact with the unfamiliar or the forbidden the most human response is visceral. Literally. It happens in the viscera.

Imagining Jesus with the willies adds a dimension to the story. It would mean that doing what he did took courage. Stepping across a boundary that was both outside himself in the culture and within himself in his culturally conditioned response would take courage. And I wonder if something like courage is being asked of us in this story.

I like very much Kathleen Norris's use of the old word 'forbearance' in place of the nearly bankrupt 'tolerance'. Forbearance strikes me as a more forceful word, a word that assumes some initiative on my part rather than clenched teeth and resignation. Forbearance is that careful and courageous act of acknowledging our willies, but not jumping in too quickly to validate them. Forbearance creates enough space for us to override the willies and experience something that might just change us.

Some of the grace that our struggle with issues of human sexuality might have in store for us is that nothing gives us the willies more reliably than sex. Do we ever really grow out of that first intense case of the willies that the thought of our parents' engaging in such acts brought on?

God does choose to work in ways that confound us. Because God chooses to work through other people. Strange people with different ideas. But when we learn to be forbearing, when we learn to give the willies a wide berth, we open ourselves to be changed. We open ourselves to see a little of God in the life of someone my willies would steer me away from.

It helps me to think that even Jesus might say, "I know how you feel."

Grace

2008-02-19T07:48:00.000-08:00

Gospel reading: John 3.1-17
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Arrowheads were often found at the summer camp I attended as a child. Some of the counselors were fairly expert in the field, accumulating large and varied collections over the years. I suppose some folks could make informed guesses as to age, tribe, purposes associated with their finds.

But my interests almost always tend toward the particular. What fascinated me was not some general development in the tools of tribal warfare or hunting. It was that a particular set of hands chose this piece of flint one afternoon in the history of the world and set to knocking of its edges until the made thing satisfied its maker.

Equally compelling was the story of how the thing was lost. Did a lost arrow's shaft rot away in the woods, or did the head tumble out of a pocket before it ever got the chance to be thrown by a bow?

My mind makes the very same leap to this day when I read of Jacob taking the stone he had used for a pillow the night before and tipping it up to mark the place God had come to him in a dream. I imagine stumbling onto such a stone and seeing some evidence of human intention. Then wondering who tipped this up and why.

We get the who and why in the book of Genesis when this crafty deceiver named Jacob dreams a dream of breathtaking beauty as he waits nervously to meet the brother he lied to years ago. He tipped up that stone and poured oil on it, saying, "This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." (Gen. 28.17)

He was marking the spot where grace happened.

I think all the strange stories and songs and lists and letters that make up what we call the Bible are such stones. They can be confusing and contradictory even. But when we see them as markers of grace, as little monuments to the experience of God in our world we can find that grace for ourselves in real time.

On Sunday we read the most famous verse in the Bible: John 3.16. But we read the story it came to us within as well. We read of Nicodemus's coming to Jesus at night and of the strange conversation they had about being born from above and whether that meant reentering a mother's womb. That story made it all the way to us. It was a stone tipped up that we might say, "Look here. Grace again."

The great thing about arrowheads is that finding one isn't satisfying. It's intoxicating to the enthusiast. Finding one means that there might be more along this river or at the edge of that wood. Maybe that's the way the stories and the sacraments of our faith are meant to work on us. They don't pin God down by telling us that grace happens only here, in this place, in this wine, in this book, among people like these. They put our sacred imagination to work.

They are hints. Maybe even hints of hints that draw us on and draw our imaginations in. Tipped up stones marking yet another arrival of grace.

Conversion: One More Boom

2008-02-12T08:19:00.000-08:00

Gospel reading: Matthew 4.1-11
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Yesterday I had a meeting in a downtown office building I had never been in before. My meeting was on the sixth floor so I stepped into the first elevator I found and pushed the 6. Unfortunately the elevator I was on serviced only the parking garage, so when the doors opened I realized that I had to go back down to floor one, and I might even have to ask for directions.

But the elevator stopped on floor two, and a friend stepped in. Actually she gasped, then laughed, then clasped a hand to her mouth, then stepped back out, then back in, and then teared up. "I was just taking a short walk during my break, and thinking that I needed to call you." She had had a difficult weekend and thought talking through things a bit might help. What are the odds?

She wondered whether this encounter was a "God thing."

My own theological hunches lean more toward serendipity than providence in such matters. At least since the time I realized that God apparently wasn't going to step in and stop my mother's multiple sclerosis, I have had a hard time believing that God nudges people onto elevators for our edification, but never quite gets around to doing away with real suffering. It's an old and noble question, definitive answers for which we're no closer to than Job.

Needing to know how and why and when God acts in our lives has been a preoccupation of mine for a long time. And it has been something of a red herring at times. I felt like God's action in the world needed to be comprehensible before I could trust it.

But whether I decided that God places me in elevators or leaves me entirely alone, my wonderings were all about me. I was the center of the universe, the point on which God did or did not focus. And what this perspective kept (and keeps) me from was enjoying the grace that I do stumble into. The answer to "What are the odds?" was always "Not very good."

Kathleen Norris wandered reluctantly into a church one All Saints' day. And there she heard the Beatitudes read, only moments after she had found them in the Gideon's Bible in her room at the Super-8. "I had found the right place after all," she said.

And that seems like a more life-giving way to imagine "God things" for me: finding the right place. Maybe our world is strewn with grace. We're stepping into it all the time. And when we have a moment in which we're certain that we've found one of those right places maybe such moments can be signs for us of all the times and places our lives will intersect with grace.

Lent is a time of paring down. And as we read of Jesus' temptations, grace seemed sparse there in the wilderness. But I wonder if Lent, and perhaps even times like those of Jesus in the wilderness are a clearing away of the clutter of our experiences so that we can watch those instances of grace reappear, one by one, here and there, over and over again. We watch grace reappear in the midst of life's pain and confusion to be sure. But it comes. Or we stumble onto it.

Soon enough we may find ourselves answering, "What are the odds?" with "Pretty good. I wonder what we'll stumble into next?"

Fear

2008-02-05T10:57:00.000-08:00

Gospel reading: Matthew 17.1-9
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Instead of opening us up, allowing us to explore our capacity for devotion in the presence of something larger and wiser than ourselves, fear is seen as something that shrinks us, harms us, and renders us incapable of acting on our own behalf.

- Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

I wonder if some fears are meant to be gotten over. And others are meant to be gotten into.

It's worth nothing that most fear is a response to some unknown. I suppose that even if I knew exactly what the creature looked like who lived under my bed, and if I knew precisely the hour in the night at which he was scheduled to crawl out and do me in, what's most frightening is that I don't really know what it's like to be eaten or just how long it might take. While I'm fairly convinced that the experience will be generally unpleasant, most of it remains a mystery. And that's scary.

This kind of fear must be the shrinking, harmful form that Kathleen Norris writes about. If we happen to be religious and are describing the 'fear of God' mentioned in the Bible we'll probably argue that this is some other kind of fear. But I wonder.

It's tempting to simplify things by calling the fear of God something like 'awe' and the fear of everything else something like 'horror'. This feels more precise. Two different words to distinguish between two different experiences. But what fascinates me most is the breadth of response that an encounter with the unknown can elicit in my self.

I understand both the opening up and the closing down that fear can work on us. And let me propose that these are not two polar opposites. In the face of death I find both responses present in myself when confronted with this great mystery. Part of me shrinks away in a debilitating self protection. But something opens up as well. Something opens up about the ordinary mystery that there is anything but the silence of death. Through the bleary eyed fog that accompanies a funeral wake the world takes on a surreality. How strangely wonderful that people paddle canoes and paint windows and drink coffee and kiss grandmothers.

I think the encounter with God is meant to be a similar - and related, perhaps - sort of complex experience. One in which we can't always sift out the abject horror at the unknown from a very human fascination with that same mystery.

The grace in my mixed up responses to mystery is that it relieves me of the need to explain mystery away. My work in life is to cultivate a life giving, expansive response to the great unknowns we live with and before. My work is to let the mystery of God do its broadening work on my life.

On Sunday we read the story of the Transfiguration. Jesus' face shone like the sun, and when a voice spoke from the cloud that enveloped the mountain, Peter and James and John fell down in fear. They lay on the ground until Jesus said, "Get up and do not be afraid."

Maybe the "get up" is the most important part. Jesus didn't say that they really didn't experience a mystery beyond words. He didn't make it more comprehensible. He just said, "Get up." There is a way of living in relationship with the great mystery that is God without minimizing the wonder or shrinking away. Such religion might just be worth the trouble.

Annie Dillard once wrote,

"The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, making up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies hats and straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return."

I like that. Maybe Jesus wasn't telling those disciples to get over their fear, but to get into it. Maybe what he really said to them was, "Get up. And put on your crash helmets."

Chosen

2008-01-29T07:57:00.000-08:00

Gospel reading: Matthew 4.12-23
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

It's a little unsettling for me that this topic follows "The Feminist Impasse". Because when I think about being a chosen one or an insider, I remember the clan of boys that my brother and I ran with on Western Hills Drive.

We weren't officially a group and didn't have a name. But the Little Rascal's "He Man Woman Hater's Club" might have been more appropriate than we'd like to remember. There were girls on the block. But we had very little use for them. At least no polite uses.

Those childhood relationships expose something that remains true, even when we've grown up enough to be polite, or fall in love. They expose a tension between inclusion and identity.

Asked to choose between inclusion and exclusion the virtuous choice is deceptively easy. Of course we must be inclusive. But into what are we including these hypothetical outsiders?

We boys would have been much more inclusive if we forwent our affection for Wiffleball. We played long into the summer nights. Lewis kept statistics for us each season on his Commodore 64 computer (that's an instrument just this side of the quill pen for those who don't know). And loving that game as we did was a form of exclusion. If you couldn't hit or throw a curve or at least dive boldly into the skin-tearing holly bushes against the center field wall, you'd probably never feel chosen by this group.

We organize our lives in much the same way as adults even if the particulars change. You may not have joined a Wiffleball game lately (my brother, Kirk, who now works for a large research firm in Georgetown, still does fairly regularly). But I'm willing to bet that when you decide to invite someone to dinner or find a companion for a movie you don't open the phone book and call the first name your finger drops onto.

We don't get out of the inclusive/exclusive dilemma by choosing to be one or the other. The wonder of human personality might be described as a unique collection of loves. And nobody wants to live in a world free of preference, because that world would be free of us. Without our loves, we simply are not.

Believe it or not, I think the Christian tradition has something to offer (imagine that). One of the ways that the Episcopal Church excludes people is through our worship, and I'm not talking about churches that exclude the unbaptised from Communion. A vast, vast majority of the people in Arkansas have no interest in going to a church service where a priest who, based on his or her outfit, seems to have been upholstered to match the other furniture in the chancel (the what?), and then reads prayers in ancient forms that ask God to show up in some mysterious way in the bread and wine we consume together. Our identity excludes everybody who is disinterested or disdainful of the forms of our worship.

But I talk to people all the time who say, "I didn't know a church like this existed. I didn't think I'd ever find a way to be a Christian again." Being a faithful church demands that we hold on to something of our unique identity and welcome people graciously if they might be nourished here too. Otherwise we have no self to offer. If the Episcopal Church stopped being itself some people would have no religious home. Nowhere that they feel chosen.

A liturgical scholar named Gordan Lathrop puts it this way: "The task of the assembly is a task of polarity: make the center strong, the symbols large, the words of Christ clear, and make that center accessible, the circle large, the periphery permeable" (from his book, Holy Things). It's possible to make the periphery so permeable that there is no center. No place to welcome another person into. No way to chose. And it's also possible to make the center so strong that it becomes sealed off. This isn't only exclusive and uncharitable. It's a good way to suffocate.

On Sunday we read of Jesus' call to the first disciples. He told them to drop their fishing nets and follow him. He didn't ask everyone he met the same thing in the same way. We think would like God to be perfectly inclusive. But Incarnation meant living in the same world we do. So even Jesus chose twelve friends to spread the good news of grace to all kinds of excluded people. And that good news is still reaching people in unlikely places and unlikely times today. He showed us not how to live without preference. But rather, how to make our preferences a source of grace for others.

We boys on the block got the strong center part, but it took some growing up to allow for those much needed punctures in the periphery. I'm not sure anything less than a merciless surge of hormonal activity could have changed us. But it, and other people, and new experiences did. Those relationships became a source of strength. They gave us something we could then give away. They made us feel chosen. So that eventually we could learn to return that gift to our world. Even girls.

Conversion: The Feminist Impasse

2008-01-22T08:15:00.000-08:00

Gospel reading: John 1.29-42
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

"It was the false purity of ideology that I had to reject, in order to move toward the realistic give-and-take of community."
- Kathleen Norris

In seminary we fought over pronouns. I imagine that every group of specialists has its own arcane fields of battle. At Morning Prayer there was an ongoing battle between those who edited out the masculine pronouns for God in their responses, and those who took great offense at the practice. Interestingly, people from both camps were convinced that those from the others were shouting their theological preferences during worship.

Some of us milquetoast sorts never actually heard any yelling in chapel. Maybe an increase in aural sensitivity accompanies increases in other sensitivities.

The debate was over 'inclusive' language. If it weren't among a bunch of seminarians - a group that takes itself far too seriously to begin with - conversation about how we talk about God could have been really fruitful.

The interesting and important notion at the bottom of the debate is that words both stand for things and do things. If I say, "Gingie" the word may mean nothing to you, but conjures the image of an aquaintance for me. That's how words stand for things, or better, how words stand between us and the things we're trying to identify or describe or address.

But words also do things. If someone named Gingie punctured your tires, another Gingie passed you a hot check, and your mother, Gingie, forced you to eat liver weekly, well, the next Gingie you meet has a little psychic baggage to deal with before she wins your favor.

When we're talking about God we should remember that words work in both of these ways. And that seminary tiff over language was about something important. The first thing we have to acknowledge is that our language isn't up to the task. The words, God, or Father, or Holy Spirit don't capture God. They just stand for God or point us in God's direction.

But it's just as true that the words we choose shape us. There was an experiment with elementary school children in which groups were asked to draw pictures. Girls in groups that were instructed to draw "firefighters" and "police officers" were much more likely to draw a female in these rolls than were girls who were told to draw "firemen" and "policemen." The words we use affect the images we carry. And if the words we associate with God are all masculine it affects the image of God we carry, no matter what we say we believe about God and gender.

The trouble is, that we can't flippantly change every name that we stumble over. If Gingie changed her name every time it offended someone because of an unfortunate encounter with one of her namesake we would soon lose all track of who it was we were talking about. People would have to just grunt and point in her direction. Which, come to think of it, might not be helpful to Gingie in the end.

These are the tensions that we need to explore in our language about God. Unfortunately, too often in seminary we let our language simply place us in a particular camp. We forgot that language is a tool we share with one another for exploring the mystery of God.

Kathleen Norris's phrase "false purity of ideology" is helpful. When we talk about language in the abstract we forget that it's meant for the "give-and-take of community". We get closer to the mystery of God when we struggle with our language together. If addressing God as 'she' gives me the willies, why is that? There's nothing in the Bible or the creed about using only pronouns of a particular gender. If addressing God as "Father" offends me, why is that? Is vaguer language always better?

The false purity of ideology is the notion that I can think of the best term for God all by myself. Which is not language. It's babble. The power of language is in its shared meaning. The power of language is in the way other people can join us in our musings. Language is about give-and-take. And the surely the most powerful changes feminism has worked in our world have had to do with placing women, too slowly and too seldom perhaps, but placing women persistently in roles where they have long been excluded. Placing women more fully in life's give and take where we are all changed at a deeper level.

Mercifully, I didn't stay in the ivory tower that is seminary forever. I don't find as many "ists" and "isms" among worshiping people out here. I find people just as passionate about the rights and roles of women. And people just as passionate about using our language faithfully in our search for God. But maybe there's a little less staking out of ideological territory. More room for give and take. Maybe even more room to be changed.

Anger

2008-01-15T13:06:00.000-08:00

Gospel reading: Matthew 3.13-17
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one's self - it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is upon one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistably as anger does it...

- William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience

It's hard to imagine William James losing his inhibition. Or breaking anything. In his elegantly detached way, James suggests that our experiences accumulate in our selves as 'energy', and that if we're willing to live with that energy things may get broken.

Anger is an exotic emotion to me. I think I've long harbored some envy of boisterous, passionate Italian families. What would it have been like to grow up yelling across great bowls of pasta and bottles of wine at my siblings? What if I had learned to comprehend immediately the depth of every sleight or insult so that I could take my rightful offense and have the nerve to slap the offender as duty requires? The tearful reconciling embrace seems worth the trouble. (I can't wait to hear Clem's response to these blatant stereotypes.)

Maybe part of the reason that a more colorful emotional life seems appealing at times is that James was right. We do carry around energy that isn't meant to be inhibited. Not entirely at least.

On the other hand, I've had a few encounters recently with people exhibiting symptoms that suggest an autistic disorder like Asperger syndrome. One of the characteristics is a lack of empathy. And anger seems close to the surface, ready to spring forth at any time. The intensity of their reactions and their lack of inhibition wasn't just a glimpse of a mental disorder. I was reminded of the energy that all of us carry and the struggle we all share to express that energy in healthy and life giving ways.

Somewhere between my too-strong inhibition and an almost total lack of it exists a healthy spectrum of expression. And it may be that part of developing a healthy spiritual life or emotional life is learning how to be angry. Learning how to "live with energy, though energy bring pain."

There weren't any angry people mentioned in Sunday's gospel. We heard about Jesus' baptism by John. And we heard of a voice from heaven and the Spirit of God descending like a dove. God's energy seemed to be in the air, and mysteriously in Jesus as well. His struggle too would be how to live with that energy, though energy bring pain.

Fortunately for us Jesus learned to live faithfully with the energy he carried. He wasn't so inhibited and fearful of anger that we never got access to his gifts. Nor was he so uninhibited that his anger consumed him, and the people around him.

I think I'll try to start seeing anger not as a gift, but as evidence of a gift. Evidence that I have an urge toward goodness and justice that this world needs, but an urge that I can do damage with if I don't learn to express it faithfully. Maybe I can be careful but not fearful when the "strenuous mood" is upon me. And maybe only what needs to be will get broken in the process.

Virgin Mary, Mother of God

2008-01-08T06:59:00.001-08:00

Gospel reading: Matthew 2.1-12
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

As for myself, I have come to think of Mary as the patron saint of "both/and" passion over "either/or" reasoning, and as such, she delights my poetic soul... What Mary does is to show me how I indeed can be both virgin and mother. Virgin to the extent that I remain "one-in-myself," able to come to things with newness of heart; mother to the extent that I forget myself in the nurture and service of others, embracing the ripeness of maturity that this requires. This Mary is a gender-bender; she could do the same for any man.
- Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

One of the ongoing tasks in life is prioritization. Ardelle and I are constantly talking about what we should prioritize. Evenings at home with the kids. House projects. Relationships. Activities. It seems like much of life is about setting priorities. Saying no to this in order to say yes to that.

Maybe it's because I'm so convinced of the necessity of prioritization that the phrase "Virgin Mary, Mother of God" secretly delights me. Priority means that one thing comes before another either in time or in importance. And simply speaking the words "Virgin Mary, Mother of God" instantly makes a jumbled mess of whatever order we've attempted to impose on our religion.

The phrase is most common among Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians. But it just states with scandalous clarity what all sorts of Christians have confessed for centuries. And, as Freud might say, the problem is with the mother. Or maybe I should say the problem is in the relationship with the mother.

If we're up at the God end of things, everything comes later or after, right? God creates mothers, and mothers bear virgins. That's getting our priorities right biologically, theologically, and grammatically all at once. But our phrase of the day suggests that somehow virginity is possible after motherhood. And the One who created our world from nothing can have a mother.

So maybe something in this Christianity is about losing our priorities.

Mary reminds us that all bets are off when it comes to the mystery of God. God isn't limited to the eithers and ors that we are.

Kate Alexander, our curate here at Christ Church, told me once that she still feels a little scandalous at the altar sometimes. Her own religious upbringing taught her that the male priest was the icon for Christ. Fortunately, Kate didn't let the priority given male clergy in our either/or world cut off the possibility that she might be called to that work.

I guess that in the end, the Virgin Mary, Mother of God doesn't show us how to pretend that we don't live in a world that demands that we sort our eithers from our ors. Her life was limited in ways few of us can imagine. What she shows us best is how to keep ourselves open to possibilities we can't yet imagine, to "come at things with newness of heart."