March 17, 2004

Green

There was a time when some fell for the notion that the moon was made of green cheese. Dolts they were thought to be, but maybe their conclusion was not entirely without reason. Unaged wheels of cheese in dim, cool places could easily look a bit like the moon when it is full of itself.

Out west where I started growing up, green and immaturity, lack of experience, gullibility, go hand in hand. Tenderfoot. Greenhorn. Actually, though, the new horns on young deer, so they say, often appear a little greenish.

On the other hand, St Patrick, like everybody else, probably wore brown … even on March 17th. Kermit, the frog, probably would, too, had he half the chance.

But just to be on the safe side, “O all ye green things upon the earth, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him forever.”

March 16, 2004

Foolishness

An OoN reader and fellow devotee of The Daily Show on Comedy Central writes, “Having seen (George) Carlin’s appearance on The Daily Show, let me add that his observations were even more astute (than you suggest).

“He rightly pointed out, echoing Acts 4.27 either consciously or unconsciously, that it was the combination of state power and religious power that crucified Jesus. He also noted the present tendency of religious fanaticism to link with nationalism as a danger to all people.

“There is a long tradition of ‘fools’ being the ones who tell the truth, and Carlin is a part of that venerable heritage.”

All this reminds me of an old Franciscan Blessing that closes thusly… “And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done. — Amen”

March 15, 2004

Fake news

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on the Comedy Central channel advertises itself as a “Fake News Show.”

There’s a lot to say about fakes who are out front about their fakery and not in somebody’s pocket trying to make fakery look like reality. Consequently, Stewart’s perceptive parody frequently turns out to be one of the better news sources available.

George Carlin was a recent guest. The subject of Mel’s movie inevitably entered the interview and prompted Carlin to say that religion crucified Jesus. He also added something like that it is because religion is so often evil that it does such things.

It’s not a conclusion that pleases many. Neither is it a conclusion all that easy to deny. Religion’s penchant to render faith both memorable and manageable inevitably snares it to claim to be an absolute franchise on truth.

Such a claim is, of course, evil in itself, for it presumes to replace God. That some enable and even encourage religion to do so is about as close to evil as one can get. It all started when the church became a religious institution, when its leaders took off the hair shirts and put on the stuffed shirts, when it ceased being content and honored to follow the Way.

No wonder we so often must look to the so-called fake news to find the Good News.

March 12, 2004

Attention

Lent 3C Exodus 3.1-15

When the late poet and wordsmith John Ciardi was asked, “What are human beings?” he answered: “We are what we do with our attention.”

Time and space have always been mysterious and vast, but in the past when they were thought to be absolute, one could go about life and living confident that things would stay put. The quantum physicists, however, have taught us now that everything is in motion — everything. Our attention, then, may be as close as we can come to having anything like a fixed point of reference.

We’ve just now attended to the story that “Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro,” as he’d done every day for years (Ex 3.1). Then suddenly, this ordinary day which began with his usual chore of protecting sheep from wolves, ended with a startling new commission to free his people from slavery.

So what happened? “He looked,” the story says, that’s what happened. Moses turned his head to pay attention, and a whole history turned with him. Moses’ attention was something God needed to get, but Moses’ attention was his alone to give. It was only “when the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see” that “God called to him out of the bush” (Ex 3.4).

God called not with an explanation for the interruption, but with a reminder not only of who was calling, but perhaps more importantly, with a reminder of who was being called and with a reminder of a past that Moses had conveniently forgot. “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”

Why had Moses forgot? Because he had been brought up as an Egyptian prince in the household of the Pharaoh, the very tyrant who had enslaved the Hebrews, the people of God’s covenant, the people who were Moses’ true kin. Had God begun with an explanation of all this, Moses would probably have started an argument, and it would have led to the mother of all seminars. Instead, “Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God” (Ex 3.4-6).

Had Hollywood casting got better informed about the role of Moses, they might have realized at this point in the story that instead of Charleton Heston, they’d have been better off with Mel Brooks.

God does not begin with an explanation, but with a call to attention, for once again, our attention is something God needs to get, but our attention is ours alone to give.

Like the bend in Moses’ history, Jesus’ wilderness turn in his understanding of himself and his work proved to be the furnace of his transformation. It protected him from becoming a victim of society and disillusioned him from any notions of a false self. In the face of the temptations, he affirmed God as the only source and substance of his identity. In John Ciardi’s words, Jesus was what he did with his attention, and he made God the sole point of reference for his universe and thus for our salvation.

The church today seems often to find itself in a vocational wilderness, wondering just what is its ministry and to whom. It seems to make a total commitment to the world’s values. It struggles for relevancy, it yearns after authority, and it is bewildered why the world simply doesn’t seem to notice. Many ask, I hope with sincere piety, “What would Jesus do?” but just as many don’t seem to pay attention to what it was that Jesus — and Moses — did and how it was that they refused to seek the answer to that question in the world’s terms.

March 11, 2004

“The whole state of Christ’s Church”

How much longer can we expect the Church Pension Group to stand the stress of holding us together? It’s high time it gets its rightful due and we stop confusing it with the Holy Spirit.

It was inevitable in the rush to judgment (think sex) that marks our current avoidance of the gospel that we find a polity that would bring us all together. Maybe it’s finally time to franchise the church.

Every attempt to organize religion seems inevitably to end in schism, anyway. This way could free us up, immunize us from the burdens and restrictions of select individuals or groups, and turn the whole thing over to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Talk about safe sects.

Can’t you see it now? Redemption Corporation of America. RCA is an already familiar and catchy logo, a natural for bumper stickers. Then a Spiritual Health Maintenance Organization (aka SHMO) could in one sweep do away with the onerous, confusing, and competitive task of selecting one’s own spiritual director. For those who want to bypass it all and choose the contemplative life, perhaps a Franchiscan Order?

The divisive problem of money, wealth, and property — an eighth sacrament and deadly sin all in one — could be solved by issuing a blanket EcclesiastiCard (credit or debit) to everyone. During the transition and as our obsession with tribalism perhaps begins to wane, we might for a time use AngliCard, VatiCard, JudaCard, IslaCard, AgnostiCard (for those not altogether certain), and whatever.

Let us pray for the real estate of the church.

March 10, 2004

Skids

Six months into the process of recovering and rediscovering my humanity from alcoholism, a time that had been filled with an increasingly obnoxious-to-others “attitude of gratitude,” life hit the skids. A colleague along the way said, rather impatiently, How about thanking God for the skids?

It was a refreshing surprise of an idea, though hardly original. For the Psalmist was practically finished with it all by the time she got to number 146 and wrote, “Praise him for what you can fathom; / for what you can’t fathom, praise him.” [Stephen Mitchell, “A Book of Psalms,” HarperCollins, 1993]

March 9, 2004

Cousins

My cousin Zenobia Ruth (aka Noby) was five feet tall. She once coached high school women’s basketball and played and taught piano and violin. She was the organist (and pianist, of course) for the Bay Springs Baptist Church for decades that even the deacons lost count of.

Bay Springs is a village of some 1,800 folk. Everybody recognized Cousin Noby’s car when she drove through town. They temporarily suspended any reliance on the one stop light on Main Street, as well.

In her part of the world, she and my dad were what they called “double first cousins.” That configuration comes to pass more or less like this: Her father and my grandfather were brothers. Her mother and my grandmother were sisters. I suppose that probably made us double second cousins.

If it didn’t sound too self-serving, I’d claim that it might have been something like this that led Watson and Crick back in 1953 to discover that DNA has a binary structure with a double helical twist. There’s a lot more that can be said about this, of course, but it just may mean that somehow we’re all double cousins of one kind or another and ought to act like it. Welcome.

March 8, 2004

Player piano

An ad came in the mail the other day. Imagine, it announced, a piano that plays all by itself at the touch of a button!

It assured me that I could hear — and see — my piano play my favorite songs — jazz to country, classical to broadway (sic). It’s almost like your favorite artists right in your living room, it claimed. A player grand system awaits you, now starting at under $10,000.

The great pianist Vladimir Horowitz once was asked, What is music? He answered that music is made up of little dots on a page, some black and some white. He said that anyone can learn to “read the dots,” then render them quite accurately on some instrument, rather like an expert stenographer might transcribe shorthand.

But, he warned, this is not music. One must first discover what is “behind the dots” for there to be music. Then one must play this discovery from one’s heart in one’s own way with spirit and imagination, maybe even quite differently from time to time, and certainly not be satisfied merely to replicate it, for only then is there music.

CP and I were at a reception in the great lobby of one of these fashionably musty old-folks homes with motel art on the walls, artificial schefflera in Rooms-to-Go Ming Dynasty urns, and machine-made orientals on the floors. Over in one corner, nineteenth-century parlor ballads labored out of a splendid Yamaha grand, its Walter Mitty keys pock-a-ta, pock-a-ta-ing right along. There was nobody on its bench and certainly nothing behind its dots.

As soon as CP was distracted elsewhere and nobody else was watching, I pulled the plug. The silence was music to my ears.

March 6, 2004

A prophet’s quarrel

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken, And I tell you, you will not see me until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’” [Lk 13.34f]

If Jesus didn’t love Jerusalem, he probably wouldn’t bother to tell it that it’s going to Hell. He’d just let it go. For Jesus’ quarrel with Jerusalem is a prophet’s quarrel with the world. With all the zeal that he condemns, he, as well, yearns to embrace with all the tenderness and security of a mother hen and her brood. For the prophets quarrel is deep down a lover’s quarrel. It is another example of the irony that pervades every church worth its salt. It can well be called the “prophetic presence.”

Perhaps there’s no better way to sum up the church’s ministry than the old saying about good preaching, that it must both comfort the afflicted and, as well, afflict the comfortable. There must be no doubt about our caring. And there must be no hesitancy about our enduring demand for justice and peace. This is the irony of prophetic presence. With arms outstretched, the church must beckon all to come for both solace and sacrifice, for comfort and also to be made holy.

Only those subject to the worst kind of religious addiction, that crippling malaise ever so rampant today with all its denial and grandiosity, can fail to see these dimensions in Jesus’ presence before Jerusalem. Just as only the very spiritually mature can possibly endure such moments of judgment and truth, only such endurance can bring us to spiritual maturity.

Jesus’ ministry could not remain rooted in the tribal religiosity of Jerusalem and either can ours in the tribal religiosity of our own narrow divisions. And just as his ministry came to be anchored in compassion and love, so must be ours. Such ministry reveals that the gospel is meant for anyone who will listen, that its healing is there for anyone who truly desires it, and that the grace of its salvation is accessible to any who dare take the risk of faith.

Tribe means nothing. Past affiliations mean nothing. The narrow-minded distinctions we impose on each other, as well, are simply silly. Any claim to be in the religious right is already by its very nature in the religious wrong. We have long since moved beyond the question of whether Jesus was Messiah only to Israel. We’ve already spent too much of our history in the opposite assertion that God cannot possibly love Jews. This, I suspect, is why the contention that the movie about the passion of Jesus is anti-semitic is at base fallacious. We crucified Jesus, and if need be to settle the argument, we are all Jews and whatever else the current anthropologic traffic will bear.

And yet, we continue to maintain our tribes within tribes, to erect barriers and lines across which Jesus supposedly doesn’t go or worse, still, dare not go. Some still make it their business to say that Jesus loves this one, but not that one, that Jesus will accept this group, but not that group.

An organization of Episcopal laity and presbyters in South Carolina, displeased with our Presiding Bishop’s urging that we listen more compassionately to one another, has, instead, asked him to resign. Two retired bishops have announced that they’ve excommunicated him. Another even closer to home refuses to worship with groups of his own people associated in well-established and unquestionably loyal church organizations, claiming that they are not “of the church” and all the while refusing to define what that might mean.

In years past it was race or national origin or the ordination of women or denominations or sects-within-denominations. We seem marvelously inventive and presumptuously arrogant in knowing the mind of God by asserting that some people are beyond the reach of salvation.

It is unlikely that we will ever stop seeing skin color or hearing accent or noticing behavior. But we must no longer allow our perceptions to be mistaken for truth. For our ways are not necessarily God’s ways. Virtually everything that people have fought over in the name of God has been proven to be meaningless, simply a token of personal rigidity, and hardly an expression of God’s will at all. Let us not lose sight that this gospel we profess is about conversion, about repentance, about returning, reconciliation, and renewal, in short, about change. And that we, the church, are called to be primary stewards of all that both compassionately and prophetically.

Jesus sets for us one more splendid example of such spiritual authority in his prophetic presence at Jerusalem. Just as we must in this place offer our own community of welcome and of explicit common sense by the power of a faith than can provoke for the world a renewed crisis in perception. The old hymn calls it well. “The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod. Yet let us pray for but one thing — the marvelous peace of God” [1982 Hymnal #661].

March 4, 2004

Wag the dog

Spooner is a Brittany spaniel with a ten-inch tail. Her owner wants to enter her into competitions run by the American Kennel Club.

The Club says in “The Complete Dog Book” that in judging the breed, “Any tail substantially more than four inches long shall be severely penalized.” That makes Spooner an incomplete dog by six inches, a case of less being more and more being less. It also raises questions. How would one penalize a tail? What is “substantially more”?

Spooner’s owner went all the way to New York State’s highest court trying to answer those questions about her DNA’s oversight and, as well, to take note of and enforce the animal cruelty laws. The Court ruled against a private citizen having such access to the system.

What are tails for, anyhow? Greeting, warning, cowering, chasing flies and gnats, locating birds? But showmanship? On the other hand, the American Kennel Club favors us with a splendid example of the tail wagging the dog, one more classic illustration of where orthodoxy will get you if ever you turn your back.