October 15, 2003

Auto-da-fe’

ECUSA’s too often maladroit collegial system of law and order apparently irritates the purple socks off any prelate who prefers organized religion to love and justice and has precious little patience with our kind of apostolic lip.

If Dallas with its loyalty oaths and armed guards last week means anything at all, we may need an altar passport sooner than we think. And there’s no telling what their Global Worthinesses meeting in the UK this week will be up to. The smell of inquisition and excommunication is once again in the air, so remember, an auto-da-fé is hardly a foreign sports car.

So what else to do if an 800-pound primate knocks on the narthex door? Get yourself a valid baptism ID and run to beat hell. Isn’t that why we’re here in the first place?

October 13, 2003

The Pitcher

In tribute to the Great American Game…

THE PITCHER
by Robert Francis

His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at.

His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.

The others throw to be comprehended. He
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.

Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late.

October 11, 2003

Caskets

My old mentor and colleague Canon P D Quirk recently left me a long voice mail.

Actually, when it comes to Quirk, I prefer voice mail. He rarely calls unless it’s about something he hopes to stump me with — and often does. I like having time to prepare. He’d called this time to ask if I’d read about the funeral industry’s latest challenge. I had.

Caskets, like terry-cloth robes, come in one-size-fits-all, take it or leave it. The standard width is 24″, a felicitous size for most of us. Length is never a problem. Undertakers solved that long ago in ways they’d rather not make all that widely known.

But folks are dying fatter these days, and no matter how hard the funeral people try, there’s simply no way for them to take their job and stuff it. So they’re forced to make some products 20″ wider than standard, better-braced and stronger, and with extra handles for the increased number of pallbearers required.

The story, of course, is the stuff of which parody is made, but even a modicum of empathy curtails that. On the other hand, I should think that casket makers would welcome the diversion. I don’t imagine that there’s ever been much artistic flexibility in designing their products. And some would argue that the industry is not without pushing the boundaries of license and taste from time to time.

I was ready for Quirk, or so I thought. When he finally caught me, all he wanted to know was how was I doing on keeping up with my recent regimen of exercise and diet.

October 10, 2003

Approval

Two questions for anybody presuming to be the president of the United States, incumbent or aspirant:

“What sacrifices do you ask of the American people to make this a better, safer, and more just society? What are the duties and responsibilities of being an American in the year 2003?”

Such questions are veritable mine fields for anybody concerned to be elected to a position of trust. We followers are not known for wanting to hear from our leaders about sacrifices. We don’t customarily want to be handed a list of chores and obligations. And we’re apt to be quite wary choosing anybody suggesting such an “owner’s manual” for our consideration.

More often do we want to hear about what can be done for us, what can make the going easier, the retirement better, life in general healthier and safer, and all with as little effort as possible on our part. If the full truth were known, of course, we’d like as little change as possible along with a blanket approval for the status quo.

At every stage in life, we seek the approval of others. From the star who kicks a goal and then races around the field harvesting applause, to the new kid on the block who gives away his prize possessions to win the approval of neighbors, to the presidential hopefuls who suffer those quadrennial face-to-face encounters to win our votes, we lift our faces to the sun of the approval of others.

With young children, it’s a benign inner drive which a wise teacher can turn to curiosity about knowledge. This same motivation, however, can make insecure teens easy prey for marketers and hustlers. Young adults dive into consumer debt to support the habit of showing off. Employers are masters at exploiting the need for approval in the “rising stars” on their work force.

All through life, from neighborhood games to retirement center socials, we use the giving and withholding of approval to control other people. We clergy can usually count on the newcomer who praises us later on saying they won’t stay unless the church changes to meet their needs. Sometimes they have checkbook in hand. Sometimes they simply sound like spoiled children.

In the gospel this morning, the rich man who came to Jesus was no different. “Good teacher,” he called him. But Jesus cut through the flattery. The man had a serious need — as do we all — but the two of them had to get beyond the tinsel. (Mk 10.17-27)

The man had a problem. He asked a question whose honest answer he wasn’t prepared to accept. He didn’t want insights into eternal life. He wanted approval for the path he was on. That’s why he led with adulation. He was like the professional athlete who hits a home run and then saunters around the bases looking for applause, all the while deep inside begging to be told that devoting his life to a child’s game has made him a man.

Perhaps the most astonishing dimension of grace is that we don’t need to win God’s approval. Grace is like the unordered grits on the breakfast blue plate special at a southern truck stop cafe. It’s not on the menu. We cannot earn it even if it were for sale. We cannot turn off the fact that God has chosen to love us in spite of ourselves.

Even though the manipulators who masquerade as authorities throw up hurdle after hurdle — rules we must obey, doctrines we must accept, oaths we must sign, practices we must avoid, people we must shun, tithes we must pay, books we must read — the fact is that God’s approval belies the old proverb that there’s “no such thing as a free lunch.” Of course and on the other hand, we might not like God’s answers about sacrifice and about asking what we might do rather than what can be done for us. But that isn’t because God is withholding approval until we attain certain attributes.

Remember that after Jesus cataloged the commandments to the rich young man, he looked “upon him and loved him.” He loved him with that genuine and inclusive kind of tough love that simply isn’t impressed by all the smoke and mirrors of our favor-seeking and our overbearing penchant for orthodoxy, for always having to get it “right” either individually or corporately.

I cannot help but be reminded of the prophet Amos’s probing admonition from the Lord so appropriate for our time.

“I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in (the noise of) your solemn assemblies…” and his affirmation of what seems for us perhaps the greatest sacrifice of all, that we, his people in both church and state, do whatever it takes to… “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5.21,24)

October 9, 2003

Hard Rock Cafe

Our town of a million-plus is supersaturated with churches and Bible publishers and Protestant “vaticans,” enough so that we’re often called the “buckle on the Bible belt.”

Considering all that, I don’t know why the news about getting our first Hard Rock Cafe stirred so much excitement, almost as much as when the NFL franchise came to town. What I mean is that Jesus must have liked rocks so much that he started up his church on one tough enough to outlast hell and then centered its entire worship life around a meal. Hard Rock Cafe, indeed.

October 8, 2003

Word

Science fiction guru Ray Bradbury one time said that if first-grade teachers do not teach their students to read within a year, they should be fired and replaced by someone who can. Harsh words, but overdue.

Reading informs writing. Writing develops language facility. Writer Toni Morrision claims that language makes us human. “The Word became flesh” was writer John Evangelist’s take on it. Became. Enhanced. Suited. Adorned. Embellished. Flesh.

DNA, God’s autograph, the language that informs human being, was there all the time, its discovery, another of grace’s markers. It was Pogo, the Wonder Possum, who said, “How will we know what to say less’n you tells us what to think?” DNA may not tell us what to think, but it does provide the occasion, the “family” reunion, the embraces, the anecdotes, and fires them up to know how to and when to go to new places, to think.

Then comes the real pleasure. If we’ll let it and trust it, imagination moves in. Imagination, wishful thinking, implements faith, welcomes its Creator, affirms commitment, dares to be vulnerable, and shapes our world.

Word, God’s private system for imagining human being.

October 7, 2003

Jesus laughed

My old friend and mentor Canon P D Quirk and I were wondering the other day about how some folk can take themselves so seriously that even God has to make an appointment.

Quirk recalled that there was a time in long-ago church history, albeit obscure, when the big kaboozle was over whether or not Jesus ever laughed. The church split its sides over the question. (Quirk lusted after irony even when he had to make it up, himself.)

When I demurred, he admonished me that it became a grave enough matter to top the agenda at an oecumenical council. By a majority comfortable for some, the gathering opted for a more humorous Jesus over a more somber one.

As was their nature, the losers failed to get the point. But unfortunately, they didn’t threaten to leave, they threatened to stay. Then they called another council on their own terms, and they welcomed anybody with whatever sense at all, except, of course, a sense of humor.

October 6, 2003

Tyndale

William Tyndale’s life reads like a 16th century cloak-and-dagger story. From the time he was determined to translate the Scriptures into English for the masses, it was cat and mouse with the royals and the prelates at every turn.

He had to escape to Germany to finally produced what became over 80% of what we call the King James Version. His work has been called “a well of English undefiled,” which makes me wonder how anybody ever understood it at all.

Perhaps he would have been quietly pleased to learn over four centuries later that an American country preacher would burn a copy of the RSV on a Sunday morning and say, “If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”

He was strangled to death for his efforts on October 6, 1536 AD.

October 3, 2003

Male and female

There is great comfort in the creation story by the affirmation that God does not want us to be alone and that the way God accomplishes this, as Jesus reminds us, is by making us both male and female (Gen 2.18-24; Mk 10.2-9).

Underlying all this is our faith that we are made in the image of God, that somehow, we are what God imagines human being to be, not alone, for one thing, and, please note, not male or female, but male and female.

Creative artists nearly always reflect something of themselves in their creations. Perhaps the same thing is true about God. If it is, then 1) God does not wish to be alone and 2) God contains all we can ever say or know and more about both male and female.

God cares enough, yearns enough, loves enough, wants us enough to put the full force of the cosmic imagination into our being exactly the way we are.

Whatever these lessons say about marriage, about family, about intimacy, about our sexist and phobic tendencies, they say plenty. Not the least of what they tell us is the way we can so thoroughly mess up the message. Still more wondrous of what they say is it that in our creation, we are made for relationship, that we are incomplete without it, that we are given the capacity to co-respond not only to and with another, but also to and with ourselves, for in that way, we are never alone. Thus are we made ready for grace, for our relationship with God.

Henri Nouwen speaks of spiritual growth as “reaching out” in three ways. We give audience to ourselves as we grow and reach from loneliness to solitude, to our fellows, as we grow and reach from hostility to hospitality, and to God, as we grow and reach from illusion to prayer.

This is the way we strive to complete ourselves and to be completed. We’ve learned in our psychology what God has known all along, that we’ve different ways of being conscious of ourselves as part of God’s creation. We call them feminine and masculine until we find a better way. It is a serious, crippling, and ultimately fatal mistake to assume one superior to the other, for it is truly, I believe, to separate what God intends as one.

To affirm that is why we are here. We come together in liturgy — the work of the people, not only of one — to be in this place together, to hear and learn of these things, to be in relationship in this place, to share and to respond to these mysteries which we are. To paraphrase Pogo, one of my favorite theologians, “we have met the mysteries, and they is us.”

So stop by for a moment — to correspond — to exchange love letters with one another and with God.

October 2, 2003

Bouquets

The story goes that painter Renoir once said to fellow painter Matisse: “When I have arranged a bouquet for the purpose of painting it, I always turn to the side I did not plan.”

These words are a “text” for a book on outer space photography. They’re meant to emphasize the profound beauty of nature beyond earth, a beauty quite beyond anything we’ve had to do with arranging.

Life is often much into arranging bouquets. Our religions, our politics, our preemptive rightness absorb our attention. If we can’t, then God will turn them for us to the side we did not plan and hand us a canvas and brush. We may find a profound beauty there.