When Abraham Lincoln (R) and Stephen Douglas (D) ran for the US Senate
from Illinois in 1858, they had seven debates over a three-month period.
Douglas got elected, but Lincoln positioned for president, and you know
how that came out. Their only ground rule was that they do everything
above it.
There’s a new study called “toonology.” It’s about scientists trying to find out what’s so funny about humor. Their lab work is to analyze the 68,647 cartoons that have appeared in the New Yorker magazine since its inception in February 1925. They’ve chosen cartoons because there’s an “incredible amount of cognitive machinery involved in understanding” them and, like the fruit fly, they’ve a short life-cycle and an easily traced heredity.
Essayist E B White chose another analogy when he said dissecting humor is like dissecting a frog: nobody is much interested, and the frog dies. It occurs to me that something like that may apply to this entry in the OoN life-cycle.
Not to leave your cognitive machinery completely humorless and somehow to drag religion into this, I’m reminded of the Peter Arno cartoon showing two young priests seated in their sumptuous study smoking cigars and sipping brandy. One is saying to the other, “Do you ever wonder where we’d be if there were no sin?”
My sainted mom often made it very clear that if I didn’t change this or that or whatever behavior, I’d sooner or later encounter dire consequences. Sounding ever so much like a prosecuting attorney, she would ask, “Do you just want to grow up to be good for nothing?”
After quite a few decades trying to be good for something, whatever it might be, I’ve discovered she was not all that far off the mark, whether she meant it that way or no. For if God is as good as his word, even God, himself, is “good for nothing.” And it is by that word made flesh that we are good not only from the outset, but for the upsets, as well. For what is grace, after all, but good, for nothing?
My friend Barbara writes that in poetry, one finds God most present in the places where the meter breaks. I wonder, then, that if in music, one might find God most present in the silences.
An ensemble plays with careful attention to “attacking” the notes precisely together. It is a pleasure when this happens, a mark of training and skill, a “tight” performance. But the remarkable and far more winsome reading is when the players release the notes together. It is there that the fabric and direction of the melody, the arrangement, is informed, when the silences are heard.
I think of the great symphony orchestras, but especially of the Count Basie band so well known for writing the book on big band jazz. For one thing, they are masters of dynamics, a skill largely lost or simply ignored in much modern pop music, but for another, their hard, driving swing — pianissimo or triple forte — comes across not only in the attack together, but in the way they release together, break the meter, as it were, so well-synchronized that one could slip a razor blade between the notes.
Elijah sought God in the midst of all the overwhelming dissonance only finally to hear God in the “sound of gentle stillness.”
Pentecost 17/21C
At the Wheel Museum* there was on display what was perhaps the world’s largest collection of wheels ever brought together in one place, both the invented and the reinvented.
These hundreds of authentic examples were carefully documented, even carbon-dated. The Curator and the team of docents were well-trained, each of them articulate in explaining handily the function, use, history, ethnic, and cultural place of each wheel on display.
There was, however, a deep and growing concern among the Museum staff about the diminishing attention from the public to this collection of wheels. They realized that something must be done once again to get people’s attention to this valuable and priceless resource of the world’s greatest collection of wheels.
Then someone suggested that if the public is not going to come to us, then we must take the Museum to them. But how? said another. This is a massive old and ponderous place. There is no possible way it could be moved.
And so they formed a committee, some trained and certified wheelers, others not so trained, but who just liked to join things. Then they went to work on the problem of finding a way the Wheel Museum could become mobile and reach the people.
Segué…
In last Sunday’s saga in our biblical family history, Amos and Jesus are at it again. Apparently for them, nothing beats the old adage to Follow The Money. But this time it’s not just the rich, or the shrewd steward. It’s what the rich do with their rich. Trickle down economics was just as voodoo then as it is voodoo now.
Neither Amos nor Jesus condemn wealth as inherently wrong. The more the better, it seems. The danger is the preoccupation with wealth and the callousness to the needs of others. The texts call for repentance from all who seek to be so secure or comfortable that they no longer need to be concerned about anything or anyone.
Most of us would not consider ourselves to be among the “idle rich,” but we live in one of the most prosperous nations on earth and can scarcely extract ourselves from the pursuit of wealth, leisure, and economic security that is endemic to American culture. Materialism and over consumption are two of the clearest characteristics of 21st century American life. The church’s preoccupation with its own precious orthodoxy and its subsequent indifference to the needs of others, the nation’s disparate attitude toward the poor and their well-being and its own fundamental ethic, and the distortion of the Word of God in the name of God continues in new forms, but its consequences are no less severe.
That’s all well and good. But it shouldn’t be anything new and probably isn’t to anybody who pays attention. What really intrigues me about us and about Jesus’ parable is what the rich man is up to when he dies and is torment in Hades and what he says to the living.
He realizes there’s no hope for him, but even then he can’t get out of his arrogant rut. He doesn’t ask Abraham for water, he asks him to send Lazarus for water. And the answer he got in effect was, “Lazarus ain’t gonna run no mo’ yo’ errands, rich man.”
Then probably for the first time in his life, he thinks of someone else. “Then I beg you, father Abraham,” he says, “(I beg you) to send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.” But Abraham answered — and here’s the punch line — “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead” (Lk 16.27-31).
That parable was never more alive and relevant than it is now. We’ve got Moses and the prophets plus Jesus and two thousand years of history. We are the brothers, and we are the sisters. And are we convinced?
The deeper the national deficit — and the bottom recedes from view — the richer some seem to get. The Asians are bankrolling us, the economists say. They literally own us on paper. Any prophetic reminder we may make to them about human rights comes across as a timid and pointless “tut-tut.” It’s like complaining to your mortgage company about their employment practices. Wealth is the great sacrament of western civilization, and what we do with it is the true measure of our evangelism.
And oh yes, there’s that Wheel Museum, and how were all the docents going to get it mobile and out to the people. Last I heard, that committee was still meeting and working on the problem.
*Wheels redux, but couldn’t resist it. — Lane
The keynoter at a clergy conference started out, “I am a member of no organized religion. I am an Episcopalian.”
For one reason or another, a lot of folk have stripped the name “Episcopal” off their church signs. It’s supposed to be some sort of message. Maybe it is that they actually want to be a member of an organized religion. Forgiving the redundancy (religion’s a cognate with ligament which is about as organized as a body can be), I’d say, Welcome. Maybe they’ve done a good thing for the wrong reason. We might do well to set aside religion for a while in favor of just being church, and they might as well take it with them.
Episcopal is not such a hot name for a church, anyway. We don’t baptize people as Episcopalians or ordain them as Episcopal whatevers. Our name, of course, suggests that we lay a lot of stock in bishops, supers, tenant farmers (vintners, if you prefer). Maybe even shepherd is a kinder and more hopeful way of looking at it.
A friend and colleague of mine thought so and put it well when he wrote, “The Episcopal Church will do well to make the powerful symbol of the Good Shepherd come alive in the daily ministry of her bishops… repudiating those who take license to dictate some personal agenda… calling and electing only those who would be shepherd, pastor, and conservator of the very doctrine, discipline, and worship that makes it possible for them to hold office.”
I haven’t known of any of those deleters — virtual or real — yet to take any such a notion very seriously.
I don’t know if there’s more lying nowadays or just more ease of communication that makes it seem that way.
Back when it took as long as two weeks even to learn who’d been elected president of the US, it surely took as long for a lie to make the rounds. Maybe this made it seem different, like maybe we were more truthful then. I’d like to think that we were.
I can’t remember there ever being a seeming Culture of Lies — a literal ambiance of dishonesty — like there is now so that lying seems to have become the MO. Everybody does it. Presidents. CEOs. Cardinals. Children. And we just give an indifferent shrug. Unless, of course, you happen to be a highly successful woman of whom we can make an example.
The truth-tellers have become the outcasts. A woman whose son was killed in Iraq wore a T-shirt at a Laura Bush rally that said, The President Killed My Son. She was hustled out by the Secret Service and thrown into the local slammer for trespassing.
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” With one exception, Lord.
Gardens are a veritable microcosm of the stewardship to which God has called us. CP’s our resident gardener, hence, the better steward in our family. She is also the stonemason who rearranges the Ordovician limestone that makes our hill, the manager of the “long molar” that cuts the grass, and the keeper of all that’s wholly floral.
One of her proudest is Deodar, the Wonder Tree, India’s “timber of the gods” of past OoN fame. Deodar’s sexual orientation is not altogether apparent and, we understand from a botanist friend, can actually be both — or all three, I suppose. At any rate, it has grown a few feet and, as well, produced a tiny progeny that has crept up and out from its roots through a nearby stone wall. And we are proud.
I can’t for the life of me understand why Eve and Adam who had such a good thing didn’t repent or something and ask God for a second chance. On the other hand, maybe forgiveness was something that occurred to God much later than those early, formative days when grace was merely a twinkle in her eye, and she was experimenting with all this foolishness. At any rate, think at what a loss would be the Creationists without that lovely story.
A Roman Catholic bishop up in New Jersey ruled a child’s first communion invalid because the priest used bread made of rice flour. The bishop made no exception even when he learned that the child is allergic to wheat.
I don’t know of any scriptural qualifiers about the bread — or the wine — at the Last Supper. Of course, there are those who would not welch(sic) even on their death bed in their conviction that it was grape juice. And then there was the frenzied rapture a few decades ago when plain old bakery bread began to replace the fish food.
One other story against the grain is that the Jesuits or some other hard-nosed missionaries managed to entice a lot of Chinese into baptism over the years by providing them one of their main staples during times of drought. Maybe old +New Jersey could figure out how he might invalidate all those baptisms so he could disenfranchise a few generations of rice Christians.
Pent 16/20C
A friend once said that he would like to ask God why God allows such things as war, famine, hunger, terrorism, disease, and poverty, but that he was afraid to. “Why?” I asked. “Because,” he said, “God might ask me the same question.”
Whether or not Amos ever wondered much about God’s stewardship on such matters — and there’s not much evidence that he did — God sure wondered about his. Like many of us, Amos was pretty much minding his own business, when, with no warning at all, God signed him on, and it wasn’t just to teach Sunday School. Again, like many of us, Amos could think of plenty else he’d rather do, but it didn’t take long for him to make the turn. Pretty soon, he had everybody running for cover, and his special target was that one percent of us with all the tax breaks, the noblesse who consistently disregard the oblige.
“Hear this,” said Amos, “you who trample on the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end… ” Pretty soon the Lord will send a famine all over the place, he went on, and not the usual food and water kind which probably wouldn’t bother you anyhow, but a famine of making himself so scarce that you won’t even have the foggiest idea under whom you’re pledging allegiance anymore [Amos 8.4,11].
We could use a little more of that kind of Amos and a little less of our kind of bragging and strutting. Nevertheless, all we’ve got is us, a church that a couple of millennia ago was called The Way, and if its present behavior speaks at all, has lost its own. But prophetic witness, you know, is not just about showing off our own treasures and threatening others to sign up. It’s also about showing others the treasures they’ve already got and don’t even know about. That could be, for the moment, the better part of our prophetic ministry.
Historian and churchman Thomas Govan spoke of our system of government as “the American political experiment.” He said that it is perhaps the greatest gift we have to offer. But if any of the polls about government are correct, not a lot of people know enough about it to give it away to anybody. We churchers could find a lot less important things to do than tell them. And one way to do that is to learn about it ourselves, maybe take a course on Constitution as a second language, and then to be about in a convincing and winsome way.
Trouble is, the system’s not working, and it’s not just because we’ve failed, although there’s that. Why are so many millions in poverty and without security of mind and body? Why do we seem so to revere the economy at the ultimate expense of the environment and our people? When will we learn that justice is the social equivalent and embodiment of love? Perhaps as soon as we pay attention and stop our leaders from pulling the flag over our eyes in the name of patriotism.
Among other things, God makes a covenant with us to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being. We’ve got a Constitution that has that primarily in mind. All we have to is insist on its being employed and implemented and to stop tolerating the outrageous way that its being mishandled and even ignored.
So what does God ask of us? God wants a loving fellowship of faith that withstands the temptation to hide behind its religion and that becomes a secure community of mutual trust and accountability that not only speaks with authority, but demonstrates it by attending to its gospel. It must ask the necessary and searching questions first of itself and then of the society in which it finds itself in service. Only then can it lead by example to become an instrument for healing, always mindful that the nature of God is more nearly shown by grace and forgiveness than by judgment and condemnation.
Then we must learn to have and lead our nation to have a serious and respectful dialogue with the Muslim world and its political leaders, for it is proven time and again that a capacity for self-criticism produces a stronger people. We must ask not only why is such engagement not tolerated today by any Arabian leader, but why is it even less and less tolerated by our own leaders both in church and state? Surely Islam, a grand religion that never perpetrated the sort of Holocaust that Europe did, is being distorted when it is treated as a guidebook for suicide bombing. How is it that not a single Muslim leader will say that? How is that we cannot help them say it?
The church has all the gifts of grace from God with which to be nourished and energized and made secure so that it can ask such questions and model such a society, so that it can listen creatively, witness to its own resources, and to all those others, as well, that wherever the brokenness of the world is being mended and under whatever name, there is present the kingdom of God.
Let not the hostile outrage provoked by the perils of this time impede us, but stir and inspire us as it did Amos in our mutual vocation and in our will to love and perfect justice as children of God. Let us pray that we may engage this challenge comforted by Paul’s profound assurance “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rms 