August 29, 2003
Proprieties
When the Pharisees and Scribes asked Jesus to explain why his disciples didn’t wash their hands before eating, they weren’t seeking insight. They were demanding proof of worthiness.
On the other hand, Jesus saw people’s needs and met them with no expectation of response, no policies, no procedures. It was all so simple. Any casual reading of the gospels makes it clear.
Isn’t it ironic, the maze of proprieties we churchers have cobbled together over the centuries and all in the name of one who had so little use for them? It’s like the Victorian father taking his son out behind the barn and saying, belt in hand, “I’ll beat the love of God into you if it takes all night!”
The Pharisees and Scribes meant well. It was in their job description. We mean well. What is religion, after all, but the corporate human endeavor to render faith both memorable and manageable? Who can blame us for that?
Well, Jesus for one. And he had Isaiah to back him up. “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men” (Is 29.13; Mk 7.6f).
I suspect God had enough lip long ago and would like some heart for a change, maybe somewhere else beside only on those bumper stickers about NY.
August 28, 2003
Mindless vengeance
Ever so often, the news from LaLa Land seems so tragically ludicrous that for some macabre reason, we can’t resist reporting it.
A St Louis federal appeals court ruled that officials in Arkansas could force a prisoner on death row to take antipsychotic medicine to make him sane enough to execute.
The judge reasoned that the prisoner “presents the court a choice between involuntary medication followed by an execution and no medication followed by psychosis and imprisonment.” He added, “the first choice was the better one, at least when the drugs were generally beneficial to the prisoner.”
If it’s any comfort to be reminded that all the judiciary isn’t like that, Justice Thurgood Marshall once called this sort of thing “the barbarity of exacting mindless vengeance… ” We’d like to think that neither is all the ecclesia like that, in spite of the spate of noseless faces these days.
August 27, 2003
Hagioscopes
Mars is paying us a call and may be doing us a big favor by the visit.
Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Percival Lowell, astronomer for whom the Lowell Observatory in Arizona is named, spent some fifteen years looking at Mars and sketching what he perceived as a network of fine lines connecting the polar cap with a number of dark areas. He argued that these were canals built by an intelligent civilization to move water from the polar ice caps to deserts, similar to phenomena he also saw on Venus.
Years later, subsequent studies revealed that he had so configured the aperture on his telescope as (unintentionally) to make it mimic an ophthalmascope, an instrument used to examine the interior of the eye. What Lowell saw as spokes on Mars and Venus were actually shadows of the blood vessels and other structures in his own retina.
The way some churchers these days are making such certain claims and big threats and even signing proclamations and petitions and all makes me wonder when’s the last time they configured the apertures on their hagioscopes.
August 26, 2003
Setup guy
I went to the hardware store to see about repairing the faucet over the kitchen sink. It wouldn’t stop dripping. It is a one-handle, swivel model.
I asked a salesman if he was in charge of plumbing. “I’ve bumped my head a few times,” he said, making me feel right at home. I told him about the problem with the faucet, that it was a kind I’d never worked on before (aside: actually, most of them are).
He very patiently walked me through the steps to repair it, illustrating his lecture with the parts he proposed to sell me. I said, “I guess I should turn off the water before I start working on the faucet?” He said, “Unless you’re a sporting man.”
We went through the process once more. I said, “Then when I finish, I turn on the water?” He said, “And receive a hero’s welcome.”
Maybe it’s a kind of ministry … being the setup guy for somebody else’s punch lines.
August 25, 2003
Apostolic succession
Bartholomew was probably as surprised as the next guy when Jesus chose him as an apostle.
Nevertheless, there he was, without a miter to his name, charged with a nonstipe job to heal sick and raise dead Jewish dropouts, including cleansing any who were leprous and exorcising any demons that got in the way. It was tough, but it was one that Simon, the Samaritan sorcerer, was willing to die for and more than likely wished he had (Mt 10; Acts 8).
It all helped start what we get so carried away with that we call it “apostolic succession,” but with more trappings and fewer exorcisms. We seem to prefer and claim the mainstream and pretty well forget the creeks and rivulets where the twelve itinerant mendicants who loved their Lord prayed and preached and simply settled for a little apostolic success here and there.
They did, however, each of them, end up with a red-letter day on the calendar, for whatever that’s worth.
August 22, 2003
A hard saying
Jesus said, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven… [the one] who eats this bread will live forever.” Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” [Jn 6.60f]
Only a fortnight has passed since our 74th General Convention which was anything but generally conventional, and the propers have stopped preaching and gone to meddling. It’s John-on-Jesus and talking hard, and it’s high time.
So long as John speaks pleasantries about Jesus like Word, or Light, or Good Shepherd, we’re comforted by the biblical remoteness of it all. Great metaphors, but not very contagious.
But then John starts putting Jesus and the daily diet together. Bread, Bread of Life, flesh and blood, food and drink, food-and-drink-without-which we are kaput. Like the English Don at supper who sat, looking at his plate, and said, “This mutton is harder to take than the lamb of God.” Our attention has been got.
This Jesus-according-to-John reminds us that our spirituality, precisely ever so much as his own, finds its God-imagined purpose not only in some neat philosophical concept nor in some otherworldly experience nor even in Anglican orthodoxy or “parallel provinces,” but instead, in the hard-nosed realities of human life. Eating, drinking, working. Making love. Birthing babies. Suffering pain, celebrating joy. Living. Dying. Always in relationship, relationships, relationships, always.
Leave it to Mark Twain, “there’s a considerable amount of human nature in people.”
It’s God’s way in Jesus. God’s Word became flesh, not a book or an idea or even a hymn at the right tempo. God’s Word became flesh and blood, indeed, food and drink, life’s victuals. And we seem not yet to fathom it.
For why else do we celebrate mystery? Merely for the puffery? Why else “feed… by faith, with thanksgiving?” Why “feed” at all? Certainly not only to enhance our spirituality, as noble a goal as that may be, but to enhance our humanity — ours and yours and theirs, together — for there’s the treasure of God’s creation, there’s the goal of his Son’s redemptive cross, and there’s the only holiness worth talking about. The very image of God.
That image became earthy flesh and blood in Jesus and, please don’t forget, in us, as well. It confronts us with race and sex, nationality and politics, and, heaven forbid, even religion — orthodox and unorthodox — and we seem so often horrified by it.
“This is a hard saying; who can listen to it? ”
The covenant we make at our baptism is clear enough. “I will, with God’s help… continue in the breaking of bread…[and] to seek and serve Christ in all persons … [and] to respect the dignity of every human being.”
Mark Twain said it well, on account of “there’s a considerable amount of human nature in people.”
August 21, 2003
Moment of silence
In one of our southern states, there’s a law that requires in all the public schools a moment of silence at the start of each day.
The law says that a moment should be no more than sixty seconds, and that the silence is “not intended to be, and shall not be conducted as, a religious service or exercise.” Simple, but not so simple.
The meaning of silence seemed easier to define than to keep. But not so with moment. Some resented defining a moment at all, thought it should remain its usual pleasant and ambiguous self, like “just a moment” when on the phone you get put on hold and treated to another endless concert of elevator music, or like when the dentist starts in on you and says, “it’ll only take a moment”.
Moment (from momentum) was originally about motion, not time at all. Later, it came to mean a “movement of time.” It has varied all the way from “twinkling of an eye” to an “historical moment” to “he has his moments.”
Mathematicians define a moment as “the mean of the nth powers of the deviations of the observed values in a set of statistical data from a fixed value” or “the expected value of a power of the deviation of a random variable from a fixed value.”
Their definitions are usually easily followed by a moment of silence.
August 20, 2003
Bluebirds
A middle-Tennessee vegetable gardener friend rejoiced to discover bluebirds had taken up housekeeping and family-making under one of the eaves of her house.
When their season ended, the bluebirds flew away. In their absence, my friend carefully built a bluebird house, ornithologically proper in all respects. She placed it just under the eaves where the family had been, scrunched a bit of straw into its entrance, and waited.
Next year, back they came, built their nest, started their family, and settled in right where they’d been before, just about six inches above the top of their meticulously designed quarters.
Even selfless regime change seems a frivolous idea.
August 19, 2003
Burnout
Burnout is no laughing matter.
I know. Father Ashe over at Sisyphus Memorial called the other day to say not only that he had it, but that he’d had it, and that he’s fast approaching meltdown.
He was serious. When I suggested he get in touch with Bishop Duress up at the Church Tension Group, he hung up. Ashe never behaves that way.
Then I remembered Drew Sinnick’s lecture at the fall clergy conference, the one about survival tactics. Sinnick holds the seminary’s chair in Dogmatic Duplicity. Nobody ever is quite sure what he’s talking about, but that seems only to make him more in demand. I looked up my notes on his talk, hoping maybe I’d find something to help Ashe beat the heat.
“To avoid burnout,” Sinnick had said, “every parish parson must maintain five basic qualities or attitudes: a high tolerance for indecisiveness, an inordinate patience with unimaginative leadership, a voracious appetite for ambiguity, a low level of frustration over the penchant for preserving peace at all costs, and finally, an acceptance and appreciation of the lowest common denominator in mediocrity.”
I couldn’t wait to call Ashe, but decided first to run the whole problem by my old mentor Canon P D Quirk, who often has useful counsel in matters such as these.
“Burnout!” he exploded, as if I, not Ashe, had the problem. “You latter-day natural theology dropouts always miss the point.” I settled in for a long one and wondered again why I insist on calling him about anything.
“Burnout?” He seemed to savor the word. “Can’t you see that what the church really needs is a red-hot burn-in?”
“I beg your pardon… ”
“Pentecost!” he punctuated. “What do you think that was all about? There never was a more burned-out bunch of rejects in all of religious history than that crowd. Whether they knew it or not, they got exactly what they needed — a thorough, spiritual roasting. It was the only answer then. It’s the only answer now.”
I thanked him, remembered why I inevitably turn to him at times like these, made an appointment with my spiritual director, then picked up the phone and called Ashe.
August 18, 2003
Anecdotes
Lewis Thomas, physician, self-styled biology-watcher, and essayist wrote that few things discredit a scientist’s conclusions more than to have them discounted by other scientists as anecdotal. The only thing worse, he added, is for them to be disdained as trivial.
An anecdote is a narration of an incident or an experience, frequently personal, often used to illustrate or affirm a point. It literally means “unpublished.” In history and biography, it’s about something heretofore undisclosed.
The true pleasure of the word may lie in its burden to suggest not only story, but also story with an amusing perspective on whatever is the subject at hand. It can be a welcome relief from taking oneself so seriously.
Amuse is another Greek contrivance-with-opposites meaning to distract. It shouldn’t be confused with amusia, medicine’s trashing of an otherwise delightful word simply to describe an unfortunate condition when one’s capacity for song is ended and the malady lingers on.
Faith is unquestionably anecdotal. It can be amusing. It is hardly ever trivial.