October 31, 2003
Saints
In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints. (Frederick Buechner, “Wishful Thinking,” p 83)
Everybody has found one at one time or another, accidentally because we weren’t paying attention, unexpectedly because we weren’t at all curious. Watch for them. It’s like when you sneeze and God blesses you.
October 30, 2003
Addiction
Without human beings, reality would be safe. (That’s so profound, I must have read it somewhere.)
Anyhow, as you know, the way a person defines self is with language and other symbols and with making stories out of them. Story shapes world. But when spirituality, the mystical, the mysterious (the stuff that makes stories) takes form in the cognitive, which it must, sooner or later, there’s usually all hell to pay. Reality needs an offensive line.
Addiction, for example, can really make a mess of reality. I can testify. Listening to him speak, I suspect that Russ Limbaugh has tampered with reality some, himself. So it’s comforting to know that he’s on track again with recovering (it’s always a present, never a past participle) and will get some help.
It’s like scaling a mountain. The first time up, it’s mighty handy to take along a guide, someone who has been there before and knows where is the sure footing. With all due respect, most medics are too preoccupied with pharmacology to help much with addiction, that is, to be climbing guides.
A wise and thoughtful priest of recent yore named Jody Kellerman put it like this: those who counsel addicts are called to be shepherds, not veterinarians.
October 29, 2003
Interdependence
A friend of mine stopped wearing her wristwatch in an effort to force herself to ask others for the time and as a reminder to cool it on her increasingly brash independent behavior.
Those who declared our independence a couple of hundred years ago probably didn’t wear wristwatches. Maybe that’s why they submitted their arguments to a candid world and to God. They didn’t seem so much to want affirmation where they felt uncertainty, but to want to witness to the inseparable nature of human being. Ironically, their conviction that we are actually interdependent was the sound of silence in their great document.
We’ve lost sight of the considerable courage of our founders and replaced it with bravado. Their political experiment was the total opposite of today’s unilateralism and, instead, proved to be the very gift to humankind we’ve so pitifully claimed to offer.
Perhaps our present leaders might leave their watches at home on their next visit, say, to the United Nations and remember how such even got the French on our side two centuries ago.
October 28, 2003
Box cutters
A 20-year-old college junior and ham radio buff hid box cutters, bleach, and matches on board two airliners.
Everybody was out front about it. He told the FBI. The FBI told the court that he’d told them that he’d tucked all that stuff in Ziploc bags and hid them under the restroom sinks of two airplanes as a test of airport security. They were
undetected for a month.
Our judicial system has charged the student with carrying a concealed dangerous weapon aboard the planes. A preliminary hearing is set for November 10th. He could be fined and imprisoned for up to ten years if found guilty.
Now that the messenger has been identified, charged, intimidated, and — surprise — released without bail, has anybody thought about the message?
October 22, 2003
God’s number
One of the Pentagon’s top generals got into some comparative religion the other day and started sizing up God.
He claimed that his Christian God is bigger than the Muslim’s and that, in fact, theirs really isn’t a god at all. It wasn’t the sort of thing generals customarily say in public, but apparently he just couldn’t help himself. It wasn’t the first time.
A little boy had just celebrated his sixth birthday. A day or so later, it was yet very much on his mind when he asked his father (within earshot of his chortling mother), “Dad, does God have a number?”
Startled, his father quickly came to and realized that his son was wondering whether God also might have birthdays. As he scrambled for an answer, the boy came to his rescue. “Of course not,” he said, with an insight that might have made Paul Tillich proud, “I guess God just be’s himself.”
October 21, 2003
Finger
One of our presidents, observing the crowds lining his parade route, reportedly commented to a colleague, “Look, someone’s giving me half of the peace symbol.”
A Texas motorist recently sued another for sending him the same message. When the Court of Appeals, Third District, at Austin, got the case, they ruled that the timeworn gesture of digitus impudicus (Latin for “impudent finger”) may be “repugnant, distasteful, and crass” and even beyond free speech protection, but if directed by one motorist against another, it neither constitutes disorderly conduct nor does it “incite an immediate breach of the peace.”
It is comforting in a society so infected with literalism and confused by myth, metaphor, and other languages, biblical or whatever, to realize that the meaning communicated by some symbols remains reasonably and functionally intact. Or, as Paul Tillich once put it, “not everything in reality can be grasped by the language which is most adequate for (the) mathematical sciences” (Theology of Culture, p 54).
October 20, 2003
Mother Theresa
A couple of years ago, a local bakery turned out an order of cinnamon buns only to discover that one of them was so configured as to seem strangely to appear like Mother Teresa. Word spread. A photo of the bun got a lot of press, more than pleased those without a fully functioning sense of humor.
I don’t know whether news of that ever made it either to Calcutta or the Vatican. It occurs to me, however, now that the Mother’s on her way to sainthood without, as some say, a full deck of miracles, maybe this sudden intrusion into the culinary mundane would help move the process along.
Anyhow, her beatification, the first step now on her path to canonization, drew quite a crowd into St Peter’s Square. The gathering was depicted in a couple of striking photos on the front page of the New York Times. One showed a veritable sea of of prelates, each crowned in a scarlet zucchetto, the other, adjacent, a small contingent of Teresa’s sisters, each wearing her trademark coif, what appears to be a dish towel edged in blue and white stripes.
One prays that the symbolism not be lost in Anglicanism’s current distractive moment of zen.
October 18, 2003
Incarnation
A sign on a parish convalescent home announced, “For the sick and tired of the Episcopal Church.” Underneath hung a smaller one that read, “SRO.”
The old church militant has become the church irritant and again for all the wrong reasons. Paul Tillich said that the Incarnation is the peculiarly Anglican heresy. Maybe it was because we talk about it so much and always seem so uncomfortable with it. We get all precious with John’s brilliant insight that the Word became flesh. But inevitably, we do so at the risk of overlooking the rest of the saving miracle — that the flesh allowed it to.
Humanity — even Jesus’ humanity — keeps on surfacing in one form or another, and every time it does, we panic. It’s like the English Don sat looking at his supper, saying, “This mutton is harder to take than the lamb of God.” We make biblical authority the stalking horse, when the real issues are about humanity — race, women, sex in one facet or another. Maybe the one thing that keeps Anglicans together is that for us, anguish has become a second language.
The primary prelates hurried into London last week with the common mind it seems that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. They left letters and statements and interviews and the usual obfuscation that results whenever we try to exegete for the world our oxymoronic notions about what old Caroliner H R McAdoo called our “ordered freedom.”
The charm — and frustration — of Anglicanism, like love and faith, is that just as it gets out on the cutting edge of risk, somebody always wants to turn back, forgetting that the less you bet, the more you lose when you win.
October 17, 2003
Get up. Get out. Get lost.
Bishop Daniel Corrigan was one of this church’s remarkable servant leaders in the 1960s and ’70s. His distinction combined both prophet and pastor in the very finest sense of those words. But among other skills, he was not above devilishly teasing and testing the old 1928 Book of Common Prayer around its somewhat rigid edges.
In the 1928 liturgy for Holy Communion, there was no form for a Dismissal following the Blessing as there is now. So perhaps you can imagine the shocked surprise of the hundreds assembled at a college work conference one time when Bishop Corrigan, presiding at the celebration, stood at the completion, pronounced the customary benediction, paused for that solemnly silent moment, then boldly dismissed the congregation in full voice, “Get up! Get out! And get lost!”
Mark’s gospel reminds us once again as it did only a few weeks ago that however we read our vocation as Christians, its center is always God’s call to servant leadership. On this particular occasion along the way, we find those slow learners James and John continuing to do some insider trading on how Jesus plans to set up his hierarchy. “Grant us,” they plead, “to sit one at your right hand and one at your left” (Mk 10.35-45).
Perhaps they’d be pleased to know that their question is still alive. Beyond their fondest dreams and by some not altogether clear technicality, we Anglicans claim a continuity of clerical authority down through the ages that also has a lot to do with where people sit. We call it “apostolic succession.” Actually, it is a concept well-intended to conserve order, and sometimes it works quite well. Had Jesus thought of such a thing at all, however, it seems clear from his response to James and John, that he would never have intended apostolic succession merely for the purpose of “apostolic success.”
I’m not promising you any rose garden, Jesus says to the aspiring leaders. The others overhear this conversation and are instantly indignant. Then Jesus reminds them all that this is not a Trinity Network production — no majestic thrones, no fancy threads, and no big hair — and that “it shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be slave of all. For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Our Baptismal Covenant (BCP p 304f) is as neat a sum-up of what it means to be a Christian in this day and time as one could ever imagine. It actually begins with a reminder of this scene with Jesus and his followers by asking us after all these centuries to “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship.”
It rightly construes that fellowship as a collegial assembly through all the orders grounded in Holy Baptism and given appropriate shape as bishops serving priests, priests serving laity, and laity serving the world. Further, it understands apostolic teaching as that which honors equally and with no distinction the integrity of all people in a world rather like Garrison Keillor’s up in Lake Wobegon where “the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are all above average.”
Even a casual look at church history reminds us that within hardly a century after Jesus’ time, this revolutionary understanding of community disappeared into an ecclesial fog that had largely sold out to a secular/imperial model of rank and privilege and sexist discrimination that replaces respect with intimidation, awe with indifference, and grace with merit.
Is it any wonder, then, that we must be reminded by hearing the good news over and over as Mark recounts it for us this morning that we — all of us — are called to lead in each of our respective capacities by serving?
Bennett Sims, one time bishop of Atlanta and now president of the Institute for Servant Leadership, speaks to the church’s viable realization of a New Testament integrity of servant leadership in this way:
“What is needed for hope’s encouragement is to see that evolution is not first a matter of humanity improving morally, but of humanity rising to a higher level of consciousness — a new awareness that awakens to the fundamental relatedness of all life and finds its fullest joy in relationships that honor the integrity of all others.
“This, I believe,” he continues, “is the meaning of peace. And it is the true source of any higher morality — not in admonitions or promises to do better, but in the emergence of a finer sensitivity to the dearness of the earth and the beauty of the souls of others.” (Servanthood, Cowley, 1997, p 174)
The goal of our servanthood in whatever order is to help such things happen. The church’s ministry is not to admonish us or even to teach us to “be good,” but to stir and awaken us. Our vocation is to be a place where people can explore and share their awe over their deepest mysteries and commitments without fear and where a just peace reigns, a community whose posture, like God’s, is one of persuasion through attraction.
As old Bishop Corrigan often charged us, may we “Get up, get out, and get lost” to engage our servanthood in the world, listening for our neighbors at work or home or ballpark or saloon or, indeed, even church, who are challenged by life’s mysteries groping not only for answers but for ways to cope and be better stewards.
And may we show and tell them about a place — this place — that could aptly be called “searchers anonymous,” where to sacrifice something is to make it sacred by giving it away for love and where they thus can be loved until they can discover how to love themselves. Such a place surely is at the “right hand” of Jesus.
October 16, 2003
Atheism
Whenever Bishop Jim Pike was confronted by a self-confessed atheist, he would ask, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” The ensuing conversation would inevitably ring changes on a lot of theology that hadn’t much ever surfaced before.
Theology has a way of surfacing at the most unexpected, even inopportune times. In spite of the fact that God is such a heavy player in the founding documents of our nation and in the building of so much of its history, there comes along the inevitable atheist who wants to make it otherwise by taking advantage of the very opportunities the American political experiment made possible in the first place.
Now, somebody wants to excise the phrase “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. The argument is that reciting it that way is offensive to people who don’t believe that God exists. Nobody seems ever to ask Pike’s question or one like it, “Tell me about the God whom you don’t believe exists.” Perhaps they couldn’t handle the answer so well as Pike even if they got one.
Maybe the Supremes, who’ve just now agreed to consider the Pledge and its rather recently (1954) included phrase, will ask, but I doubt it. On the other hand, they might just avoid “God” altogether, and concentrate on the preposition “under.” That way, they could give us a grammar lesson and keep their distance from the onerous task of defining “God” and then watching things really hit the fan.
Now that Werner Heisenberg’s left us so uncertain as a matter of principle, “up” and “down” don’t mean much anymore. So even to suggest “over God,” which may be closer to the complaining person’s theology, still wouldn’t help much. As good theologizing takes into account good cosmology, why not turn to another preposition perhaps more consistent with quantum reality? What about “with”?
“One nation, with God… ” would preserve the aura of rugged individualism and partnership so indigenous to the American character. But “with” in quantum mechanics also implies “without,” depending on how one looks at it. So maybe the better solution might be “one nation, with or without God…”, thus preserving not only our character, but reaffirming and even expanding the meaning of “liberty and justice for all.”