July 19, 2004
Faith
We do faith an injustice if we think of it only as a security and not as a risk or even as its own evidence. For one of faith’s great gifts is that it creates doubt.
Doubt circumscribes faith, makes it true to itself and not merely a trusting shadow of itself. Doubt energizes faith both through encouragement and discouragement, for both can attract and challenge faith into new realms of exploration, into what can become a fulling of life.
Faith led us out of Eden and back into Gethsemane. Gardeners, bless them, always seem naturally to know this better than we.
July 17, 2004
Dings
The coffee pot dings five times when the coffee’s ready, twice two hours later when it shuts off. The new Italian toaster/convection oven dings in groups of two for a total of six when it finishes its appointed task. When opened, the refrigerator drawers give you a scant few seconds to get what you’re after and then begin scolding with rapid and unceasing dings until closed. The drier just offers a laconic buzz when it’s finished.
Then there’s the car — lights, ignition, open door — all different, less terse, more melodic dings so you can tell which is which. Even the horn is more of a ding than a honk, despite the neat little trumpets on its pressing place (aka button). Then there are always the dings from the parking lot, but they’re a reminder of another kind.
The little whatsits on the pro tennis courts tell us when the serves are out or long. They’re even talking now about an electronic strike zone that’ll replace the annoying and unpredictable ambiguity of umpires, maybe even mimic their strange gutturals that so perturb batters and pitchers.
These signals are not all so obvious nor does everybody mind them all the same. Some, like the coffee pot, take our authority and control problems into account and simply disconnect after a sensible amount of time so we don’t burn the house down. But most just come and go, expecting us to have enough good sense to cooperate. They’re all there to warn us, to keep us, as they say, “between the curbs.”
Jesus didn’t use dings or honks or buzzes or even smoke and bells and whistles like some churchers, but he did use signs all the same. He used the seasons and the weather and coins and fig trees and mustard seeds. And the cross.
We know them, if we pay attention. What we do about them, he leaves up to us, for example, among other things, thinking up words like onomatopoeic.
July 16, 2004
Woman’s work
Pentecost 7/11C
Gen 18.1-14; Lk 10.38-42
A friend of mine who is a priest was having a “What-do-you-want-to-do-when-you-grow-up?” conversation with her young son. She asked him whether he’d like to be a musician and song writer like his dad. “No,” he said. Then she asked whether he might want to be a priest like his mother. “No,” he said, indignantly, “that’s woman’s work.”
Of course. It’s always been, We’re only now coming to our senses about it. In a couple of weeks, we commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the ordination of women in this sorely maligned province of the Anglican Communion. Coincidentally, the propers this Sunday are about “woman’s work,” but they may be too subtle to penetrate some biases very widely.
On the face of it, they could be just about visiting — desert nomads to Sarah and Abraham, and Jesus to Mary and Martha. But they’re also full of other themes — caprice and laughter, hospitality and surprise, the work ethic and play, even dark humor about whether Medicare covers nursery expenses. On the other hand, there are still religious traditions that drag these texts out over and over to make their usual anachronistic pitch for the “place” of women.
But these are no casual nomadic passersby who drop in on Sarah and Abraham. They’re not making a survey. They already know who lives there and why. They’ve not hesitated to make the kind of plans for them that tie them down for the rest of their lives.
Furthermore, Jesus, with the terrible and ominous sense of urgency constantly hovering over him, would hardly be whiling away time at high tea over at Mary’s and Martha’s without a purpose. Just as Sarah held such a critical and essential place in anything Abraham might be doing for the Lord and could never do without her, so can we assume that Mary and Martha must must have held an equally critical and essential place in Jesus’ plans for his kingdom.
So let us take these stories a step further for a moment and consider them as being not about Abraham and not even about Jesus, but primarily about women — about Sarah, about Martha, and about Mary. These women were not simply “walk-ons” in the drama of salvation. They have names, purpose, capabilities, needs, children to birth and grief to bear, unique ministries to perform, houses to visit, water to share, wounds to heal, a male social hierarchy to tolerate and endure, and, of course, on occasion, bless the Lord, to manipulate and even laugh about.
These are not stories only about vocational values and leadership or the relative importance of running a home, and least of all are they about the priorities of what we rather presumptuously call “holy orders.” It took no canon law and no commissions on ministry to design and confirm the validity of the vocational discernment of these women.
Jesus and those desert visitors were building order into God’s strategic itinerary, raising up a faithful genealogy of caregivers, shepherds, bearers of the word. Of course, there’s much more here than simply gender issues, but these are stories of a radical breaking open of the established, taken-for-granted scheme of things. Each of the principals in these stories had something that the children of Abraham and ultimately the Jesus movement needed.
Of course, within a century or so after these times, the church in its increasingly pompous and male-dominated establishment of itself had pretty well sold out to the old secular gender hierarchies. It had successfully removed women from leadership, and swiftly put them where they “belonged.” Even twenty centuries later, the seventh bishop of Tennessee still could publicly refer to the imminent and inevitable ordination of women as “apostolic suicide.”
Incarnating the good news, it seems, does not mean standing still within the comfortable embrace of the inherited tradition, whatever some of our leaders might claim. It means rather making all things new, even things that have held back church and state and culture and, indeed, the family, things that have hitherto had an impressively, if regrettably large following for entirely too long
Many will remember Katherine Graham. She was a churchwoman and one of the most powerful figures in American journalism. A comment about her in her obituary seems altogether appropriate as we think about Sarah and Mary and Martha and all those who’ve stood and now stand in their succession:
A colleague wrote, “Throughout the last half of the twentieth century, she used her intelligence, her courage, and her wit to transform the landscape of American journalism.”
And so it has been and is that our women in orders through their intelligence, their courage, and their wit are transforming the landscape of the Episcopal Church in the USA.
My friend’s young son, when he quipped that the priesthood was not for him because it is “woman’s work,” more than likely did not know how close he was to the truth. In a very few years, I trust, I am sure he will find out.
July 15, 2004
Walls
Israel is building a “separation barrier” (aka Wall) through the West Bank. I suppose it’s no surprise that their Supreme Court said that, with only a few exceptions, it’s okay for them to do that. It seems to be a pattern to get around almost anything you want approved if you happen to have some friendly Supremes in your pocket.
On the other hand, the International Court of Justice in The Hague thinks otherwise and says the whole idea is mostly “unlawful,” a fact that Israel, having had a few examples set in this sort of thing, just chooses to ignore.
The irony of all this is that the Israelis, of all people, should know more than a little bit about walls. They’ve even got one reserved just for wailing. But perhaps they’ve forgot that a while back, Jericho also had a wall they were probably pretty proud of and that even did double-duty as a space-saving condominium. Then along came these current wallbangers who, together with God and a few unemployed trumpet players, busted it up pretty bad.
If the Palestinians would employ more cultural anthropologists in their diplomatic corps, they might could return the favor and, in the interest of international relations, just hire the Canadian Brass.
July 14, 2004
Practice
Professional musicians often practice their instrument six or more hours a day. Artur Rubenstein once said of his daily piano practice that if he missed one day, he knew it, two days, his friends knew it, three days, the whole world knew it.
I play trumpet. I practice at least 30 minutes a day. The world couldn’t care less whether I do or don’t. My friends don’t seem to notice at all. If I miss a day, the next day makes me wonder where I ever got the notion — some seven decades ago — that I could ever learn to play one of these things.
I read somewhere that churchers who know about such stuff describe an active/regular church member as one who attends some service once a week for three weeks out of the month nine months out of the year. Whether such is considered to be a practicing Christian, I wouldn’t know.
On the other hand and quite apart from those stats, if every one of us practiced some part of our Baptismal Covenant at least 30 minutes a day, we’d know, our friends would know, and maybe the whole world would know. For sure, God would.
July 13, 2004
Annointing
A couple of years ago, CP accompanied me to the hospital for some outpatient tests. We were seated in the waiting room when, to my surprise, one of my fellow clerics of a “higher” persuasion arrived. He couldn’t have attracted any more attention had he worn a chasuble and brought a vested thurifer swinging incense. The crowded room came to an ominous silence.
After a rather bombastic hello with hugs all around, including greetings to the other waiting patients, he asked in his best pontifical voice if I’d like him to anoint me. Everyone stared, quizzically awaiting my answer. Certain that they had sized me up as terminal and never having learned that “No” is a complete sentence, I said, “Why yes, of course.”
When he left, a woman across the room said to us, “I’m new in town, and I’ll bet you all are just the ones who can tell me where I can find St Mary’s Book Store.”
July 12, 2004
Deodar Redux
Some of our long-time readers will remember that we’ve a deodar cedar in our yard. It grows outside a bank of front windows that make one wall of the kitchen library, perhaps the choicest spot of all its fellow adornments. This way, it can be admired all around.
When last I wrote of it, it’d not yet given up its Christmas lights and seemed rather to be smirking that Douglas, the mobile fir serving as the inside Christmas “tree,” not only had given up its, but was also on its way to the shredder ultimately to line the city park pathways.
A native of India, deodar is also known as the “timber of the gods.” None other of our landscapers can claim such a birthright, nor have they the comparable noblesse oblige that accompanies it.
Seemingly to fulfill that obligation (note the anthropomorphic segué), deodar began in late spring — and continues — to put forth resplendent new growth in the customary lighter shade of green of most plants. Deodar’s already uniquely elegant feathery appearance thus becomes even more startling. Almost as if to replace the lights that came off on Christmas Twelve, it makes its own, if somewhat overdue, epiphany.
We churchers perhaps thought we were done with all that show-it-to-the-Gentiles stuff come Lent and certainly by now could settle in for a long Pentecostal nap. On the other hand, perhaps deodar might, for a moment, turn us way from our current obsessions to get moving with some of God’s gifts to us ourselves and stop letting the grace grow under our feet.
July 10, 2004
Waiting rooms
Doctor’s waiting rooms are no place to go when you’re sick. They’re too full of impatient patients, most of whom probably have some exotic malady without which you can do. The whole place looks like the Readers’ Digest graveyard. Any other magazines are also so out of date that their crossword puzzles are worked and what might have been any revealing pictures of starlets are all torn out.
Some waiting rooms provide an oversize TV for those who prefer not to read or whose eyes are dilated or who can’t find where the story they just started reading continues. The TV’s always on too loud and tuned in either to soap operas, game shows, or the Fox Cable News channel.
Whenever the nurse walks through, I always make sure she sees me look at my watch and hears me sigh. Or if she calls, mispronounces my name again, and tells everybody my birthday, I never get to know how the soap opera comes out.
When the big moment comes, I get to go to another, smaller, TV-less, and more clinical waiting room where to find out that my blood pressure is too high and my weight is too much. Then, when the doc finally shows up and asks, “How are things?” I’m tempted to tell her like everybody told the 9/11 commissioners, “I’m fine, there’s just been a systems failure.”
July 9, 2004
Samaritan
My good friend and fellow country preacher Joel Keys will tell a slightly longer version of this tale of his at the weekly Golfer’s Mass Saturday night at a church down on St Simon’s Island, GA. I’ve preempted it (with permission, but probably not forgiveness) for today’s OoN. — LD
Pentecost 6/10C Lk 10.25-37
When a friend of mine was a student at Yale, he and another guy were on the road in a “college student car” (the kind students had before everybody got rich). It was in the middle of the night in Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” territory, the south Bronx.
They had a flat. Before they could even open the trunk to see if they had a spare, an ancient, rusty car squealed to a halt in front of them in the breakdown lane. Out climbed two large men speaking Spanish. The students figured, “This is it.” But before they had a chance to decide whether to scream for help or run for their lives, the two Bronx types started changing the tire. They were done in minutes.
As they started to leave, my friends tried to pay them. They ignored them, walked away, got into their car, and left. If my friends had followed their fear, they wouldn’t have got the tire changed, and they’d have had to go and get help in the middle of the night.
That’s what our inner attitude, that’s what xenophobia, that’s what dismissing people by stereotype, that’s what demonizing people and calling them trash does. It means they don’t even have a chance for anything, let alone a good deed. Even worse, it means we will never learn from them about their selfless giving if we won’t even let them help us out.
When Jesus began his story-answer to the lawyer question, “But a Samaritan, as he journeyed…” imagine the lawyer saying, “Aw, cool it. I’m not listening to any stories about those trashy Samaritans. I thought I was going to learn something from you. So long, Mister Savior of the World.”
If he had, he never would have learned about neighbors, and he never would have learned that sometimes our neighbors aren’t necessarily our friends, but, nonetheless, in our neighbors we might see the reflection of the face of God, and learn how to let our own faces reflect God to someone else. It’s only when we allow God to let us look through the barriers we’ve erected to separate us that we can see God’s examples and then, as Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.”
July 8, 2004
Apostolic suicide
Where’s a good old engaged Lent when we need it most? While the world goes to hell in a Humvee, we churchers drift into a disengaged Pentecost and start our annual vacation from vocation.
Nobody seems to be able to decide whether the issue is the war or the economy or both/and. Our nation’s leaders say Not to Worry, just trust us, reelect us, and shop. Our church’s leaders say Worry, but about sex, abortion, and all the other wrong things while some of us bankrupt an archdiocese and the rest keep on navel-gazing our way into apostolic suicide.
Perhaps the issue is neither war nor economy, as vital — and distracting — as they be. Rather might the issue be risking two centuries of American political experiment for peace and justice now struggling not to go down the chute. And, as well, might the issue be a servant leadership made secure by God which we churchers can offer to help drag that experiment kicking and screaming into reality.