March 31, 2004
Mary
It seems the very nature of religious institutions to resist becoming a church.
Take the Virgin Birth, an irony if ever there was one. However you feel about it, there’s this to say, God can handily redeem all creation without any assistance, thank you, from us males. Any church worth its brocades and brass ought to be able to handle such a notion with grace and humility.
But the religious institution apparently can’t. It soon took hold of Mary and all her exemplary faith, humility, and commitment, gave her an Immaculate Conception (I can’t even imagine whatever on earth that could be) and a Bodily Assumption into heaven, thus handily destroying her womanhood (aka human being). Next, it told women to be like the BVM. Then it told women they couldn’t be priests. Obviously, anybody like that is too holy for Holy Order.
March 30, 2004
Thinking about thinking
They’re thinking about thinking again.
And the thinkers, faced with having to use their own thinkers to do this sort of thing, are having trouble. They’ve discovered that the brain is not a logical organ at all and that even to talk about it they’re having to depend on metaphors (NYTimes, 27.3.04).
“The brain confabulates,” says neuroscientist Gerald Edelman. Or, as he explains, it associates diverse sensations, defies contradictions, creates coherence, and even seeks explanations for its own unfathomable behavior.
I wonder, did the brain think up logic just to confuse us, so it could then go on its merry way writing poetry? Whether it did or not, it does. So leave it to the scientists to discover myth as a way of knowing, all the while the religionists are rediscovering literalism as a way of doing away with myth.
March 29, 2004
Overseers
“Oversight” is a curious and ambiguous word. It can mean “to miss the point entirely,” or it can mean “to supervise,” actually to get with it and exercise some responsibility and leadership.
It’s unlikely that the world doesn’t know by now, but our church has bishops, overseers, as it were, and they are currently in a twit that their oversight might be overlooked. They’re concerned whether it means “to control” or just “to care.” They prefer the former if it’s their diocese, the latter, if it’s somebody else’s. After all, we are an “oversight,” not a “caring… ” (ooops) church. That doesn’t cure the ambiguity, but it can sometimes explain why we so often brush off stuff like peace and justice for the sake of our obsession with sex.
The bishops, and their impressive presence on the payroll, are meant to imply, sometimes even to provide, unity. After all, they’re not just bishops, they’re symbols, and they wear the royal purple somehow to make that clear lest we forget. Kermit, the frog, would probably agree in his own way that it’s not easy being purple, especially if all you can agree on is that you worship the same God (and privately, you’re not even sure about that).
Nobody ever asks much anymore why we need bishops. We just soldier on as if we do. Leaving that aside may have made things even more complicated, though, with the additional assumption that we also have to agree with them or even to like them before they can practice their peculiar liturgical specialties in our congregations.
Whatever, the current problem is that if you don’t much like the overseer you’ve got and want another one, then how do you go about fulfilling your dreams?
The bishops all met recently to consider that major conundrum in our salvific two-step through life and came up with a long list of what-ifs and how to solve them. Their plan didn’t please the AAC’s and FiFi’s or whatever. In fact, it just got them even more riled up and talking what they call “theology” again.
It’s comforting to know, however, that we — and the episcopacy, especially the episcopacy — are the objects of such affection. But it might be so much simpler and save a lot of travel time — and money — if we’d just get on with what it is Jesus thought was so special and take the advice of the old country song that says, “If you can’t be with the one you love, then love the one you’re with.” He’d probably like that.
March 26, 2004
Tenants
Lent 5C 2004
“A man planted a vineyard, and let it out to tenants… ”
(Lk 20.9)
When Jesus was telling this parable, surely he wondered how many times he must tell and how many changes he must ring on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden before we get it.
Such is the way with parables. Whether about apples or fig trees or talents or Noah’s ark or good shepherds is really a side issue. Unlike allegories that often lead us around the block to look under every rock for meanings that are nearly always off-the-wall and usually wrong, a parable is a story with only one ax to grind. And further, like Jesus once advised his disciples about parables, they’re not told to create faith and understanding, but to require and challenge faith and understanding (Lk 8.10).
The Parable of the Vineyard is not about grapes. It’s at least about accountability. It challenges not only each and every one of us to be accountable, but all of the public and private institutions we inform and shape and think up to serve and govern, as well.
As an integral part of this Judeo-Christian heritage and its stories that we claim as our own, this Parable especially challenges the church. We’re tenant farmers, the lot of us, and our vocation is to be the very paradigm of accountability. How could there be a greater meaning to evangelism than to pray that we get good at that.
This very week, the long overdue and some say stonewalled 9/11 Commission laid the groundwork for hearings on accountability. As they got underway, there was the usual “he said, she said” meandering.
Then came Richard Clarke, antiterrorism chief in this and several past administrations, who lit up the Commission’s center stage with his winsome and courageous admission to the families of the 9/11 victims and to the nation at large. “Those entrusted with protecting you, failed you,” he said. “And I failed you.” Then, he asked to be forgiven.
One cannot avoid being drawn by the power of that moment, by the profound sense of relief for those grieving families who’ve yearned so to hear those words, and for the sudden, if only brief, refreshing transformation of what continues over and over to be a morass of self-serving ineptitude.
God speaks to the church in such exchanges. In them, God challenges our faith and understanding that we may see and hear him calling to us. We must not only witness to this encounter of Clarke and Commission as of the essence of a gospel of reconciliation, we must find in it ourselves.
We’ve been created by and given a gospel to care for. We live our most faithful stewardship not when we stake claims on it as our criteria to judge others right or wrong. No. We live it most faithfully when we embrace its message of peace and justice, love and inclusion, confession and forgiveness, and when we become such a community in ourselves. It is this stewardship for which we are held accountable and to which we must attest in these times.
March 25, 2004
Magnificat
“She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it.
“He told her what the child was to be named, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her. ‘You mustn’t be afraid, Mary,’ he said.
“As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.” (Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures, Harper & Row, 1979, p 39)
“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed: the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.”
March 24, 2004
Boundaries
The lots on our hill tend to be pie-shaped or trapezoidal, narrowing near the top, fanning out down hill toward the street. The people who’ve lived up here for forty years plus never give that much thought. A yard is a yard is a yard.
It’s the new ones coming in and bringing with them a superfluity of surveyors to figure out these boundaries all over again once more, you’d think, for the first time. We long-timers are frequently surprised that a bush or a tree or a line itself isn’t where we thought it was all along. It never made any difference before. We just enjoyed it or hated it together.
When these changes come along, you’d think it only a minor kind of getting-used-to, that everything would settle down sooner or later. Not so. There’s a new neighbor, a medical school faculty doc than-which-there-is-often-no-whicher, who’s got big dogs, so he’s built an eight-foot fence around his back yard. The widow next door has lived there longer than the doc on this planet. She was naturally curious and wondered out loud about a couple of bushes she’d grown fond of over the years suddenly having been uprooted by the fencers and carted off to the trash. The doc got in a huff and called her “devious.” It hurt her feelings.
And we wonder why the United Nations doesn’t work.
March 23, 2004
Breasts
Wasn’t it Molly Pitcher who in the Battle of Monmouth in 1778 took up the flag and arms from her fallen husband and pressed on regardless of her battleworn threads exposing one bared breast? And wasn’t it our squeamish Attorney General who covered up another one, albeit on a statue, probably at the taxpayers’ expense? And then, there’s Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction.”
Now, it’s the Dutch. They’ve built a super 152 ft-tall “tall ship” with 27 sails, all based on the design of our American clippers and proudly sailed it over, stopping in seven ports, for all of us to see. But wait. Like all the great sailing ships down through history, there’s a painted figure on the bow, a woman with long red hair, a green dress — and a bared breast.
It was too much at the stop down in Jacksonville, FL, where a visiting class of schoolchildren got sidetracked from admiring this outstanding example of nautical architecture just in case they might notice that annoying piece of wooden anatomy. Never mind where you started life, kids, or all the comfort and nourishment you got at your mother’s breast. Never mind the gracious visit from the Dutch or the international compliment when we could use a few or the outstanding example of nautical architecture It was a mistake, say the prudes, so let us show you how we’ve bowdlerized that symbol in our sex-mad culture. Go home and watch the Super Bowl’s half-time orgies and the Viagra commercials, instead.
There’s a scene in the movie, “Oh, God!” where John Denver is stepping out of a steamy shower in his own bathroom, and there stands God (aka George Burns), smiling. Denver quickly grabs a towel to cover himself. God says, “What’s the matter with you? I’m rather proud of that. I made it myself, you know.”
March 22, 2004
Definition
Pogo, the wonder possum, it was, who said, “How’s we gonna know what to say, less’n you tells us what to think?”
We’re just now being told that for these next 90 days, the Administration will spend a few million bucks to tell us what to think about their opponent in the coming presidential election. They will “define” him, they say. They fear, they continue, that come summer, we, the electorate, will lose all interest in what they’re up to, anyway, and since we could hardly make up our minds otherwise, they’ll give us some grist to ponder at the beach.
They’re not alone, of course. It is the way we do things. We define each other — race, sex, color, religion, nationality, politics — presumptuously, subjectively. Or we let somebody else do it for us. And then, if we vote at all, we line up and punch out the chads.
Interesting, Jesus never defined the kingdom. He just told what it is like, what it is about, never really what it is. How refreshing it might be if this forthcoming time were spent by candidates telling us what the America they’d lead would be about, what it would be like, what it is they want for all of us, themselves included. How they’d celebrate the international kinship we all share as fellow human beings and the billions they’d spend helping to bring us to wholeness. How they’d be stewards of the great American political experiment. How they’d embrace the presidency as a servant leader.
The psalmist wondered something like, “What is man that you love him, and woman, that you gladden her heart?” (Ps 8.4 more or less). The whole covenantal sweep of things — old and new — seemed satisfied to say that to be human is to be created in the image of God, that is, to be as God imagines us to be, and then to be handed the keys and an owner’s manual without much further definition at all.
March 19, 2004
Mistakes were made
And the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son” (Lk 15.21).
“Mistakes were made.”
In the great political panorama of our times, that’s about as close to a personal admission of error as anybody ever gets. And yet, and usually after the fact, it seems always to be said that if only they’d owned up to it, they’d probably have been forgiven on the spot and even restored to whatever it was they’d screwed up in the first place. “Forgiveness is always easier to get than permission.”
Lent’s a good time to review the bidding on confession, to come out from behind the Liturgy’s “we did it and we’re sorry” first person plural, and to face up to the singular. Sorry doesn’t mean sorrowful anyway. It means sore, and that might be a good place to start.
Whether or not the prodigal son was a prodigy, we’ll never know, but it’s evident in the text that he squandered everything he had and had been given and yet was gifted enough to figure it out on his own and not only to do something about it, but to do the right thing about it. He was sorry, all right, about as sorry as a guy can get.
The big savaging emotions of anxiety and anger, guilt and resentment, the kind — real or imagined — that usually hang around what we call sin, are all forms of fear — fear of the future, fear of the present, and fear of the past. And it’s so often fear that stands between us and whoever it is we’ve sinned against, ourselves, our neighbors, or God — or all three. There’s little love around when we’re afraid and practically no awareness of the grace that could buffer us against any onslaught, especially the onslaught of our own foolish dishonesty and denial.
There’s finally only one unforgivable sin, the sin that comes from the pride that thinks we’re so bad that even God is not interested in hearing about it, let alone forgiving it. That’s the sin against — that closes the door against — the Holy Spirit. It was a colossal piece of stupid theology that ever said that cursing is that sin. Rather was it — is it — the sin that disenfranchises God, that robs God of his very way and willingness to forgive — Whole-making Spirit — to restore, to reconcile, to heal, to mend, to welcome us with the open arms and fatted calves that always sets the self-righteous on their ear.
Mistakes were and are made all right. There’s lying and greed and stupidity and just plain bumbling in high places and low places in all branches of government and all orders of ministry and everywhere else. But mistakes can be made all right by the grace and reconciliation of God. Just open the door and admit them.
March 18, 2004
Hospital calls
Don’t make many hospital calls, just when somebody else can’t or won’t or when it’s more or less expected. The last motive was in play yesterday when I stopped by a local dispensary to see a friend. I took the reserved sacrament and a purple stole and a prayer book.
My friend had checked out, so I looked up the chaplain’s office (aka suite) to see if maybe there were any stray Episcopalians down on their health. The secretary fumbled with a Rolodex, and said, “There aren’t any.” Then she paused, looked me up and down, said, “Are you a minister?”
I admit, I looked pretty scruffy. No clericals, two-day beard, ball cap from Brit’s Pub in Minneapolis, moth-eaten favorite sweater, running shoes. But I did wear a cross that came from the National Cathedral Book Store, and I had Jesus with me. I never even thought of shaking the dust off my feet.
What more could she want?