Out of Nowhere

Andrew, advanced man for Jesus, gets his fifteen minutes of fame today. He trusted what he heard and followed suit. His commitment, of course, was primarily an act of faith, but his faith informed his trust which is as it should and must be.

So much of our energy with regard to God these days has to do not with trust, but with control. At some deep level, our increasingly inordinate concern for doctrine, theology, and some elusive thing called “Anglican orthodoxy” seems grounded in distrust. We want faith to be a dependable system, not a personal risk. We want assurance of its benefits, proof of its performance. We have our eyes on the prize, not on the giver of the prize.

When we gather in communities of faith, we insist on negotiating contracts to protect our interests. We don’t call them contracts, of course, but what else are we doing when we argue about budgets, vision statements, liturgical norms, and leadership? We demand commitments, letters of agreement, pledge statements, creeds, and job descriptions.

In our polity, when it is exercised properly, legitimately, and only with appropriate and welcome episcopal oversight, parishes have both the privilege and the responsibility to call their rectors. But fear permeates the search processes, and it now includes extensive (and expensive) background checks, takes longer and longer, causes unnecessary delays. Is this a sign that the searchers don’t trust their own abilities, that they worry about the congregation’s trust in them, and that they don’t even trust prospective pastors?

All of this is embarrassingly doubled in spades in those dioceses where bishops frequently and irregularly intrude into the search process and into the autonomy of the Standing Committee suggesting that neither do they trust us. But as insulting and patronizing to the laity as this is, maybe there’s a reason. Maybe they neither trust those who elected them nor those officials throughout the church who approved their election and subsequent ordination. Maybe they don’t even trust themselves. How can any good come of such distrust?

I wish we could simply trust that the Holy Spirit will do what is right, and trust that we need to listen up. I wish some of our bishops could, as well. Then we might have a net that works. Like the one Andrew used.

My genes are feeling rather tight of late, a sort of hemmed-in sensation. It’s that I’m trapped, you see, between two generations, neither of them mine, both of them younger and progenerated, and neither all that respectful.

It’s when the holiday seasons begin to close in on one another that I feel this confinement the most. It’s comforting, of course, that Tom Brokaw called my generation The Greatest, but his opinion has never seemed all that important in my family. In fact, I’ve never heard a one of them ever mention it, save a granddaughter who, on learning I’d once flown airplanes for Uncle Sugar’s Navy, asked if I’d ever killed anybody. I thought she seemed rather disappointed when she learned that I hadn’t. Like what’s a war for, anyway?

Now that Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday are history, it’s time to get into Advent, the best kept secret of the National Retailers Association. But it’s a shame that all its substance about John’s anxiety and Mary’s willingness seems to get wasted on the young. It’s no wonder to me that Advent’s color is blue.

But notice, please, lest all this be taken as lamentation, it’s far from it. Ninety percent of life is just showing up, and thankfully, I did that this morning.

For our solo homiletic flight in seminary, we drew texts out of a hat. I got John 3.16, and it got me. Over twenty hours of commentaries and scribbling plus as many minutes of delivery before faculty and fellow students drew this comment from the Dean: “Nice homily perhaps for cathedral dons at evensong, but for heaven’s sake, don’t ever preach it on your Sunday layreader circuit in the diocese of Texas.”

Fifty years or so later this fall and back at that same seminary now writ larger and once removed I was invited again to preach to the faculty and students. The honor of standing where our founder John Hines and other giants and apprentice giants had stood was just short of overwhelming.

The day commemorated James of Jerusalem. The gospel text polished off the overwhelment. “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country and in his own house” (Mt 13.57b).

Advent 1A Mt 24.37-44

Jesus said, “Watch… for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

“Watch.” Look outside. Look for the signs. To understand the times, sense the seasons and their impact on life, to understand this moment and how it fits into all other moments, watch.

Look at events that don’t necessarily spring from ourselves. When we vow in our Baptismal Covenant to seek Christ in all persons it means to look everywhere for the hand of God. Watch.

To understand our lives, we must see other lives. To understand events, we must see the ways those events impact other people. To understand our children, we must see and listen to them. To understand our spouses, we must step outside the shelters of our desires, our perceptions, our feelings and see how life unfurls in another.

“Dying to self” may have become so trite a phrase that we overlook how complex and difficult a process it is. Yet it is the very pathway to God and to God’s perspective. It means stepping away from self-reference, from self-determination, from self-expression, not because they are wrong, but because their horizons are too limited. It means that the gospel message is not to teach us how to live, but to teach us how to die.

If we see life only from the vantage of self, we become blind. We hurt others even if we want only to love them. We diminish ourselves. We trespass on community. We turn away from God. Before we know it, we become parched and sterile.

But having looked, would we do anything differently? When it comes to planning our days, most of us don’t tend to have a lot of discretionary, perspective time. Besides, the point is not so much what is done, but the manner in which we do it, the way we come and go, stay and return.

This Advent season begins another year, another journey which recalls us to the rich tradition and heritage from which we come and in which, as it goes, we have a share in the making. Advent is a fork in the road. Yogi Berra’s wise counsel is to “take it.”

But there is more to our lives than putting one foot in front of the other. We talk as we go, we laugh and cry, we take another’s hand, we listen to another’s story. We honor their journey, a journey that is never parallel to ours, but always intersecting.

In God’s economy, all of life is connected in a way that we can neither create nor stop. So far as we know, maybe we are the only part of life with self-consciousness. Someone said that human beings are “so the universe will have something to talk through, so God will have something to talk with, and so the rest of us will have something to talk about.” The commitment to be aware of this and to see it as it is remains an essential part of our being, our privilege, our responsibility, our vocation.

A story is told of a not altogether very saintly man who donned the mask of a saint in order to woo and win the truly saintly woman he loved. Years later when his ruse was discovered, he was challenged to show his face. When he removed his mask, he discovered that his face had, indeed, been saved to become the face of a saint.

This new national time of thanksgiving comes in a national time of crisis. Our remarkable system for governing and living together is crippled almost beyond belief, apparently to a degree that none of our founders ever anticipated. Whatever our political persuasion, there’s enough anxiety for everyone and no immediate sign of its passing whichever way things might go, however they might be resolved. Our anxiety makes it an easy time in which to forget to be thankful.

But Jesus said, “Do not be anxious… ” about life or security or sustenance. You don’t find anxiety anywhere in the rest of God’s creation, so where does it get you to be anxious? Well, we must say if we’re honest, nowhere, save maybe to the pharmacist for Prozac. And even that doesn’t help all that much.

Every Sunday in the churches, we reenact the Last Supper. We call it Eucharist, thanksgiving. One reason we call it that is because at that supper, Jesus gave thanks, and on our part, we Christians have nothing for which to be more thankful. For it is not only our giving thanks to God here and especially at this season, but even more importantly, our receiving thanks from God here consciously every time we surround this altar. That’s the miracle of saying grace (and saving face) that makes all the difference.

I heard the other day on the cosmetic intelligence circuit that it’s now possible to have your nose removed in favor of a nose more suitable to your self image. Surely that’s not true, but neither would it be surprising if it were.

My recent cataract surgery which, in effect, replaces old eyes with new ones complete with built-in ultra violet protection, is a case in point. I don’t regret it for a moment, but there have been a few surprises. I hadn’t realized that along with all the bright new colors out there, my face has suffered an onslaught of new contours, bags, and droops that I’d never imagined when looking through original equipment lenses darkly.

In the middle of all this new perspective, there suddenly appears my nose. The agnatic noses in my family are trim and make a rather nice profile, but it was my lot to get one of the more aggressive enatic ones. Loyal to its DNA programming, it has taken on a post-cataract prominence and seems much larger than I remember. Think W C Fields without the laughs.

CP suggests in her unavoidable way that I don’t much notice things. That’s not a very good trait for a writer, so I asked her please to point out things she had noticed that I had not.

The witch hazel is blooming. The new neighbor next door was cutting up a fallen tree with a coping saw until CP offered him our ax, and now the tree’s parts are stacked along a stone wall where a lot of other stuff has also been cleared. He has raked his leaves, but rather than bagging them, has left them in wet piles.

The green tarp that foiled a leak in the flat roof of our entry room needs refolding and storing. The roofer keeps procrastinating. I have not yet assembled the power leaf shredder I gave CP for her birthday last May.

There’s more. Actually, she quit pointing out stuff after the ax-lending episode. The rest of this list comes from me, the wonder columnist, and my alert observational skills. Frankly, I find it rather distracting.

A friend of mine lost a part of her nose to some epidermal malady and got it fixed with a skin graft on loan from her forehead. It wasn’t a pleasant time for her, but it may have saved her life.

The skin is our largest organ, and its irregularities and surprises are not all that easy with which to keep track. But as a consequence of my friend’s experience, I began a closer watch and also made an appointment with a dermatologist.

There were some things I’d noticed, but he wrote them all off to geriatrics and sent me on my way, telling me that my skin was in good shape (you know the line, “for someone your age”). If I keep on making the clinical specialty rounds brought on by my decadence (I’m in my ninth, now), I may start a “Dear OoN” advice column just to help pay the rent.

Pentecost last 29C Lk 23.35-43

A little child, marveling in pleasure at her newborn baby brother, gently whispered in his ear, “Tell me about God and about heaven, while you can still remember.”

Though the venue is radically different, the yearning in the story in our gospel this morning is so very much the same when the good thief on the cross asks Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

An essential part of our identity, of our knowing who we are, is anchored in our remembering and in our being remembered. It doesn’t have to be much. It doesn’t have to be profound. It can be just a card in the mail. It can be a phone call on an anniversary. It can simply be hearing someone call my name when passing me on the street or missing me when I skip church.

All these and many others play a central role in our being who we are. The terror of alzheimer’s is precisely so devastating because it robs us of the capacity to remember and robs those who love us of the assurance of being remembered.

One of the more important reasons for any gathering of people, particularly of religious people is that we come together to remember and to be remembered. Through our scriptures, we keep in touch with all those who, in faith, share our spiritual DNA and have gone before us. For this is our family history. Every gathering for worship is a momentary experience in genealogy.

At the once-upon-a-time so-called “crisis” liturgies — the baptisms and confirmations, the weddings, the funerals, the ordinations — the happy times and the sad times, our emotions and conversations are filled with the common theme of being remembered.

“When you remember me, it means that you have something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even through countless years and miles that may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.

“For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I’m feeling most ghostlike, it’s your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I’m feeling sad, it’s my consolation. When I’m feeling happy, it’s part of why I feel that way.

“If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget me, indeed, part of who I am will be gone.” *

To be remembered was the plea of the little child and, as well, the plea of the good thief from his cross when he said, “Jesus, remember me…” There are perhaps no more human words we can say, no prayer we can pray so well.

Indeed, our Lord asks the same of us. “Do this,” he said, “in remembrance of me.”

(*Frederick Buechner in Wishful Thinking, p 100)

We hear much talk today of schism, even of heresy. Perhaps some clarity about these two ancient words is in order.

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church than which there is no whicher says that schism is distinguished from heresy in that the separation involved is not at basis doctrinal. Heresy is opposed to faith. Schism is opposed to love. (2d ed, p 1242)

The great risk of schism and of the cavalier way some seem even to provoke and to welcome it is that it can create before our very eyes a loveless church for which orthodoxy means everything. If I must choose (I hope not, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it these days), I would choose without question even an unfaithful church that is loving over a loveless church that is orthodox.

Talk about evangelism. How about modeling a place, a community not where there is a rigid demand for right thinking and a lot of petty squabbling, but where there is unqualified love and acceptance and justice and peace?

Rather like the movie “Field of Dreams.” If we build it, they will come. So then, look around you, and if someone asks, “Is this heaven?” we can say, “No. It is only us.”