January 15, 2005
Andrew
Epiphany 2A Jn 1.29-41
Peter was at the Pearly Gate before gates became the fashionable suffix for trouble. And Andrew, his brother, was before him, out there following the ragtag country preacher around when he suddenly got hooked enough to pass the word. And you know the rest of the story.
But we don’t know all that much about Andrew. The legend is he was probably crucified on an X-shaped cross and meant at least enough to the Scots that they named a golf course after him. But maybe the most important thing we know about Andrew was that he was a kind of advance man. It was he, after all, who got brother Peter on the sawdust trail.
The church makes a lot out of Peter. The celibates would rather ignore, of course, that reference to his mother-in-law. Rather would we claim that he started the apostolic succession without which the church would not be very whicher, but probably never meant to become the apostolic success that some seem to make of it. But we’ve never gone to much trouble over Andrew other than he’s got a special day right around the front of Advent.
When you think about it though, the ministry of the most of us is more like Andrew than Peter. We’re not called to rest on our laurels, to relish in the Petrine glory, waving the keys about.
We’re called to climb first out of the trenches and face the onslaught, to stake the claims out on the mission front, to go and tell it on the mountain, to love our neighbor enough that they, not we, can bask in Peter’s glory, golf course or no. Finally, of course, to take it on the lamb for God.
January 13, 2005
Order
Sister Mary Dementia plants forget-me-nots in her garden in order to remind herself. She can’t remember for what.
Gardens should be for more than just to look at, she feels, or else all that hard work doing them up is wasted. She is, however, fond of sunflowers just in themselves because they need so little attention and have such exemplary discipline turning around following the sun and all, a sort of Julian of Norwich syndrome, she imagines.
She has little use for Canon Quirk, and that troubles her conscience. For one thing, during his periodic visitation to the chapter house, he pays precious little attention to her gardening. That alone is enough for her to feel less than honorable about him. But mostly, she is very impatient with his needlessly disorderly attention to the count at the Eucharist. He always consecrates more wine than is necessary. Her naiveté has never quite caught on to the Canon’s low-church discipline that requires him to consume all the surplus lest someone even dare suggest the need for the papist habit of reservation, let alone that ghastly practice of adoration.
Sister is a fine woman in spite of all that. Her greatest contribution, some think, may be her presence — simply to remind her fellow sisters that they are, after all, an Order. But actually, it’s the forget-me-nots that every time remind one how very charming, indeed, she is.
January 11, 2005
Cosmos
A fabulous array of elements make up the cosmos and connect it intimately as if it were some living cell. Indeed do they move through the aeons and the ether suddenly to merge in their midst into us, of all people, both fervently aware of self and wondering enough to discover and know that the me is indeed we, all sorts of we’s, animate and inanimate.
We call it creation, a loaded word that implies a maker, a mind, and the abounding evidence that it is so. We can’t with integrity turn away from it. Like all of what we call life, it is made in cycles, growing, as it were. T S Eliot put it profoundly like this: “The dance along the artery / The circulation of the lymph / Are figured in the drift of the stars.”
But the stars are not all that drift, for so do the massive undergirdings of our planet, the one of which we’re all made. Whenever they break in their growing pains, so do we, sometimes hardly even noticeably, sometimes catastrophically. That this earth can consume us in its orgies as it often does wreaks heartbreaking tragedy, for we are as profoundly sentient as it seems not to be.
No one of us is an island entire of itself, Poet John Donne told us, but “every (one) is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any (one’s) death diminishes me, because I am involved in (humankind); and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, no. 6)
January 10, 2005
Baptism
Interesting, the turn some baptisms have taken in the ensuing years since John and Jesus started all this trouble.
A recent article in USA Today reported that christenings (formerly known as baptisms) are becoming a regular stop on the celebrity party circuit and reached a new level of extravagance recently in Sawbridgeworth, England, at a star-studded event that looked more like a Hollywood premiere than a religious ceremony.
The Church of England service was held at a private chapel on the mansion grounds and was followed by a six-course dinner and dance, all reportedly for only $900,000. The pop-star godfathers (who, some may have noticed, were partners) arrived by silver Rolls-Royce.
The article also reports that celebrity baby christenings are now all the rage, especially in Europe. In order to maintain privacy, most are hosted in their homes rather than in a church.
Some of us wondered if Bishop Eames (of Windsor Report fame) might be available to lead a pan-Anglican study of our shared theology of baptism. The study might even find the issue of the godparents’ partnership a troubling concern.
On the other hand, over here in ECUSA, we take an apparently different view about this rather fundamental scriptural sacrament. As our sisters and brothers in the Anglican Communion seem compelled to challenge us on scriptural grounds for an action of the General Convention of ECUSA, that should provide an altogether level playing field.
For openers, we might remember that John and Jesus, trouble or no, helped make this a scriptural sacrament of perhaps even greater significance and authority than that of the episcopate.
January 6, 2005
Show & Tell
As the story goes, they were very wise, even smart enough to be kings. On top of that, they must have had an unlimited personal line of credit. Surely they spent a bundle on the gifts they brought and then left in hardly the kind of place where they usually stayed overnight. In addition, they read stars and altogether well enough to find their way across a perilous desert and all the way home again.
It’s when they got home that makes me wonder what on earth they must have said.
That they found the one who made the very star they followed, the Ruler of the Cosmos, helpless on a bed of straw in a manger? When they began telling something like that around the courtyard, being a king and having executive privilege and all must have come in mighty handy.
No offense. But somehow, the record carefully neglects letting us know how it all came out back in their own precincts, save that history shows the Orient waited a lot of centuries before it ever heard the Good News.
You and I go to the manger every year and don’t seem to find it all that hard to locate. Just now, we’ve been once again. We’ve seen the star and borne the gifts, even if we do have a way of giving them to everybody but the one whose birthday we claim to be celebrating. We’ve made a lot of the usual fuss, often with considerable inconvenience and at great distances, and, heaven knows, we’ve spent a wad ourselves.
Like the three kings, we’re back on familiar ground again, settling down pretty much to normal. Yet if we will, we, too, have a whale of a story to tell all about what we found in a manger.
But unlike those royal magicians, we don’t have executive privilege. We can’t expect people to believe what we say all just because we say it. We learned long ago — or should have — that nobody believes much of anything until they are shown.
We’ve found the King of the Universe at Christmas, we tell them, and he’s that baby in the cow stall. He’s the Word, the Prince of Peace, and he became flesh and moved in. But nobody much listens. Nobody pays attention. Nobody, that is, until all our talk and song and tinsel and light itself becomes flesh. That’s when God’s peace and justice and good will and joy to the world comes alive in our time.
January 5, 2005
Calling
My friend Lynn is one of many down through the years with a remarkable talent and vocation that she implements with skill and vision. She leaves her presence all over the church where she’s created a design here and a lovely place there in a nave or over somebody’s shoulders or before an altar or simply to cover a chalice in wonderland, all unique and “tailored” to the person or the place. She’s a liturgical artist, a sculptor with needle, thread, and fabric.
A century or more will pass as her works and those of others of her colleagues endure, as they are admired and used by those who’ll never know who or what stresses and pleasantries and vision brought them to pass. They’ll be taken for granted just as they are granted for the taking, but they’ll always belong somehow to their creative artists and be in the presence of God where first they were offered.
Liturgy means the work, the vocation of the people. Liturgical art — and artists — remind us also of the joy and beauty that can be in our calling and theirs.
January 4, 2005
Piggy Bank
What if it became the national habit for a second term president’s inaugural to meet whatever the Constitution’s schedule and ritual might require in a nice library somewhere on a longer-than-usual lunch break, and then everybody go out for pizza?
This one coming up on January 20 will cost about forty million bucks, the ticket for the fanciest event set at $250,000. That’s lots of pizza. Well, we’re giving the tsunami victims thirty-five million (only fifteen million at first, until the press got wind of it) and promising more to come. We also promised more to New York City way back on 9/11.
One recent news story told of a youngster who emptied his piggy bank of about ten dollars and got it sent to Sri Lanka and thereabouts. He said simply, “They need it more than I do.” My friend Barbara, the Wonder Writer, reflecting this morning about all this, said, “We are what Christ has to work with here on earth. Surely our greatest blessing is to be able to save lives in his name.” Surely.
The Episcopal Relief & Development website at www.er-d.org can show you a way you can empty your piggy bank.
January 3, 2005
Door
Of all the names for Jesus — Light, Water, Word, Bread — Door intrigues me a lot at this new year’s onset. “I am the door; if any one enters by me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture” (Jn 10.9).
This front month of the year gets its name from the Latin word Janus, the Roman god of doorways and gateways. As doors can be passed in either direction, Janus came to represent both the past and the future, his image, that of a person with two faces looking away from each other, the one forward, the other, backward.
Jesus, the Door, also represents past and future. One can go either way with Jesus. Ignore him or embrace him, dwell securely on the Bible’s and the church’s defining of him, or walk with him, open to the risks he took, the challenge and the future, with all that uncertain kind of confidence that faith allows.
We churchers seem always standing at some door or another, looking back to comfort, looking forward to (shudder) change. But if the door is Jesus, entering it makes us whole and we can come and go knowing there’s plenty of pasture out there for whatever.
And, oh yes, Janus’s two-faced image has also, on occasion, been a symbol of deceit. This faithfulness business, it’s sometimes a lot like walking on eggshells. But after all, it’s January again. Let’s go for it.
January 1, 2005
Connection
The trees in our yard — Shumard oaks, river birch, black gum, walnut, hackberry, redbud, dogwood, slippery elm, and one of whose name I am unsure — largely lost their leaves before their turning this year. Nobody seems to know why. Maybe it’s because the sun rises late, barely peeking over the edge of the shed, seeming to come more under its porch roof than over it, so the trees were confused. Maybe not.
The junipers, the hollies, and Deodar, the Wonder Tree of OoN fame, have other ideas (and DNAs) about leaves and color and greenery.
I don’t spend as much time in the yard as once I did. But I listen to it, and I see it for the fathomless mystery that it is. The yard reminds me of my limits and of its own. It’s like with you, you readers, the wonder and mystery of you and our cyber connection maybe makes me fantasize. For there’s a great pleasure in knowing that you’re out there. And actually, what’s the use in writing if it’s only to one’s self? I doubt, for example, if Isaiah wrote only to himself. (I know, you knew Isaiah. You’ve worked with Isaiah. You don’t have to tell me that I’m no Isaiah.)
But now that it’s a New Year, don’t forget the five — and, of course, during the Peace, the high five.