June 7, 2004

Servant Leader

The staff announcer in our town’s Talking Library radio service for persons who are blind or otherwise handicapped is, himself, blind.

He tells of a time when an elderly lady volunteer was winding up the taping of her program at the second-floor studio late one evening. Just as she finished, the building’s power went off, and the place turned pitch-black. As she attempted to leave, she became lost in the vast halls of the building, feeling along the walls, stumbling and groping her way. Searching for and fearing the stairs, she cried out for help.

Hearing and following her cries, the announcer caught up with her, offered her his arm, and led her down the stairs safely out to her car.

June 4, 2004

Trinity

“It takes a mighty big stigma to beat a dogma.”

Dorothy Sayers said it. She was British. She was also a theologian, a mystery novelist, and a Dante scholar. So she knew, of course, what she was talking about. Even if I don’t.

She could have been talking about Trinity Sunday, the only time in the entire liturgical year that a dogma assumes front stage center and elbows all those majestic events like Christmas and Easter and Pentecost to the wings.

Preaching on Trinity Sunday makes me feel like the heart attack victim that called for a priest who, on arriving, knelt beside her and asked, “Do you believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?” With great effort, the stricken woman replied, “Here I lay dying, and the Father is asking me riddles.”

Dogma, that’s doctrine with legs, seems always to be faith’s more or less futile attempt to make sense out of nonsense. Whereas faith, like love (and they’re not all that different), is about as exposed a position as a person can take and with very little reason to support it. It’s like getting caught with your hand in life’s cookie jar. It makes you feel like you need some kind of excuse. Dogma, on the other hand, gets you out of hock and offers an alibi.

I suppose it is not without purpose, then, that on this Sunday dedicated to a big piece of Christianity’s hard drive, the grand and eloquent creation story from Genesis wraps a security blanket around the whole thing. It says we are put here, you and I, to mind God’s creation, as Frederick Buechner put it, to give the universe something to talk with, to give God someone to talk to, and to give us somebody to talk about.

Genesis says that whatever we do about it, God thinks it is good that we are created, so good that we are made in God’s image, that is, that we and all the rest are gently and lovingly brought forth with cause out of the unfathomable depths of God’s ingeniously rich imagination.

Not as clones, but as beloved sharecroppers in whatever may be our capacity in all this exercise in fertility. And that, beloved, is very scary stuff. So scary, and yet, so enticing, that right off we blew it out of the garden and have needed the safety belts and airbags of doctrine ever since.

Doctrine, dogma, whatever, serves us well. We want everybody to buckle up. But never, we are reminded, at the expense of our imagination, for it is as we imagine that we are most as God creates us to be, incarnating our spirit into human being and walking the talk.

June 3, 2004

Game

In baseball, a perfect game is a complete game in which the pitcher does not hit any batter with the ball and does not allow any hits, walks, or errors. A no-hitter is a nine-inning complete game in which a pitcher does not allow a hit to the opposing team. The opposition can have base runners through fielding errors or walks. I suppose this means that a pitcher could pitch a no-hitter and yet lose it by walked-in runs or runs on errors.

Randy Johnson of the Arizona Diamondbacks recently pitched a perfect game. He is the oldest pitcher ever to do that. If he or anybody else did that often enough, might we not soon hear charges that baseball was being ruined and was no longer a game, but had become a sideshow?*

Life remains a game, perhaps because of and thanks to original sin and to the covering admonition to be perfect like God is perfect. Of course, gospel perfect suggests more to mean what you say and follow through with what you mean rather than goody-two-shoes-ism. When we get that straight, we can attend more to the tasks at hand.

Meanwhile, we parsons can relish Peter Arno’s classic drawing of two young clerics enjoying a brandy and a cigar in their walnut-walled library where he has the one say to the other, “Do you ever wonder where we’d be if there were no sin?”

(* cf John Dominic Crossan on game and sport in “The Dark Interval,” Argus, 1975, pp 15-18)

June 2, 2004

Dignity

In a telly interview the other day, a spokesman for the Department of Defense was making the case for their policy of “no photos” of the flag-draped coffins of those killed in Iraq. After emphatically protesting over and over that the policy has nothing at all to do with politics, he finally said that the most important reason is that such publicity is altogether “unwarranted and undignified.”

As if war is not.

June 1, 2004

Phrases

Funny how a couple of phrases keep surfacing in everyday conversation.

“To die for” is perhaps the most macabre of the two and not all that appropriate in these current times. Most recently, it was only to describe somebody’s keylime pie the other night and even after she’d already said it came from Sara Lee.

The other day it was a litany of “no problems” overflowing a car salesman’s answers to our every question about a new model and its life-enhancing attributes. Later and refreshingly absent from a TV salesman’s pitch, I commended him for it. “Oh,” he said, “I deliberately avoid it. It’s so trite.”

The lapses seem to have something in common. “Problem” comes from one of those off-the-wall Greek declensions of a verb meaning “to throw,” and with the “pro,” it means something thrown out in front, I suppose for one to hurdle or maybe “to die for.”

We didn’t buy the car and aren’t. Something about its having a picnic table under its tail gate simply didn’t appeal to us. The keylime pie was a bit more impressive than the usual sweet green air with meringue.

We ate it and a sample of each of the other three desserts, as well. No problem. It was all to die for, probably in more ways than one.