February 26, 2005

Irrational

Lent 3A (Jn 4.5-42)

That pensive mystic and altogether lovely person Madeleine L’Engle once wrote about Christmas as “…the irrational season / When love blooms bright and wild. / Had Mary been filled with reason / There’d have been no room for the child.”

The story of the Samaritan woman come to Jacob’s well for a jar of water is about such an irrational season. Here’s a woman who is surely down to her last nerve in monotony, dipping once more after countless times into that all-too-familiar well with its long and tiresome history. Suddenly, she’s faced with almost a time warp in her history, a totally unexpected detour in her seemingly unending serial of one domestic and personal crisis after another.

In a rapid succession of shocks, a stranger, a Jew, a man speaks to her, a woman, a Samaritan. He speaks not only across religious and ethnic and sexual boundaries, but with an alarming candor and penetrating insight. Then he brings her back to earth and does a “guy thing.” He asks for a drink of water. But then he speaks to her of a living water that does away with thirst forever. Step by step, he lays bare her past and her present and sees right through her into her future.

In one stroke, the rigid sanctions of the kind of worship and religion and custom that she and her people have embraced for centuries are abolished. Jesus proposes a revolutionary new liturgy based not on the usual male-dominated, retrogressive system of exclusion and judgment, but a worship grounded unpretentiously and candidly in spirit and in truth.

As if all this is not enough, he commissions her to be a disciple to her own people and does not send “a member of his staff” or some other man to accompany her to make sure she gets it right. Obviously, the ordination of women is not all that novel, after all. Those who oppose it could well do to meditate on this story.

The Samaritan woman dares to accept her charge and returns to her townsfolk to tell them her tale. Never did she have to say, “He told me how sinful I was.” Rather could she say, simply, “He told me everything about myself.” One can suspect that she’d never had such self-esteem before as in this altogether unreasonable assignment.

As well, there’s nothing especially rational about the Gospel which is entrusted to us. Every occasion in which we embrace it is an “irrational season” in our lives. The love at its center which can cast out fear, even the fear of risking the acceptance of such a trust, is perhaps the most unreasonable of all that we’ve ever undertaken. For it means that we remember ourselves, and that we love ourselves, and that this comes before any other truly creative love we could give to others, the love that “blooms bright and wild.”

At our baptism, we and those who sponsored us, stopped by a “well of living water” and received a bend in our own personal history. We made and continue to remake the Covenant that commissions us to go and to tell, not because of who we are, but because of who we can become.

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Note: May I suggest that the Baptismal Covenant be used in place of the Nicene Creed should the celebration include this preachment (BCP pp 304f).

February 22, 2005

Fortnight

CP and I are off to the mother country (AKA UK) tomorrow for a fortnight (already we sound Britty).

The 800-pound primates pawing the ground up north of us in an Irish monastery refused us press credentials, so we’ll just skip them. But should they break loose and head your way, be sure to grab a valid baptismal certificate and run to beat hell.

OoN will probably become less frequent, but I’ll try to keep you posted if I can get a bit more technically savvy about these things. So be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

February 21, 2005

Crossan

Dominic Crossan’s been in town this past weekend, lecturing six or seven times in three different venues. He talked about St Paul at Christ Church, Jesus at St Paul’s, and heaven knows whom at the divinity school.

We heard his lectures on Jesus. There’s a Woody Allenness about him, size, glasses, body language, quips, only perhaps a more authentic humility. (He writes on a Mac, says PCs are not mentioned in the Bible, but that apples show up a lot. Nobody questioned What about Word Perfect.) But he is so immersed in and well-informed about the social, political, religious milieu of Jesus’ time and message, that it’s not at all hard to see in him what Paul talked about as the “mind of Christ.”

His theme is justice, not the retributive, punishing kind pervading so much of today’s societies and especially our own, but the distributive kind at the heart of the gospel and the will of God. His lack of the pretense so often seen in scholars, especially religious scholars of his stature, is altogether refreshing and restorative. One senses in his presence a nourishing brush with the firm friendliness of grace, a renewed commission to let go and let God.

February 18, 2005

Understanding

Note: It’s not my usual style to be altogether personal, certainly not to appear to border on the maudlin in a preachment. Nevertheless, on reading the story of Nicodemus again in these days after no telling how many times, I am struck perhaps for the first time how deeply I resonate with what might have been — what must have been — his experience. I doubt if this “will preach,” as is said. But it will and does for me. May it not seem altogether self-serving. May your self also be served.

Lent 2A Jn 3.1-17

When Jesus told Nicodemus he must be “born anew,” it proved to be what started a firestorm of evangelical craziness in a so-called born-again Christianity. Nicodemus didn’t get it right at first. Instead, he got all anatomical and GYN about it. But he finally figured it out. I’m not so sure they ever have.

Water and the spirit, Jesus said. The image reminds me of when a football team douses their coach with a barrel full of iced-down Gatorade after winning a game. Nothing might wake up one’s spirit like a heavy dose of iced water to remind us that baptism doesn’t birth our spirits, it mostly reminds us that we have one, that we are one, that God creates us as spiritual beings for want of being human and sets us forth on a trek to discover our humanity, a discovery that bears all the resemblance to a new birth and gives us a Covenant to help shape the labor pains.

Nicodemus got a quick lesson that night visiting Jesus and lurking around to sort of stay out of sight of anybody who might get out of joint about his being there. He got a lesson that in spite of all the proper religious spin on his life, wasn’t enough. He set the same example for us that in spite of ours, we’re wasting our time — and Jesus’ time, too — unless we get our priorities straight. Unless we realize that this new birth is God reaching into our spirits and putting them back on the right track, spirits that are already there by virtue of God’s imaginative creation. But, as Nicodemus discovered, that’s not where it stops.

The twelve steps of recovery program fame contain one hurdle after another. But one of the most challenging — if the evidence means anything — is the third: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God.”

Too many folk come seeking in a Meeting what they know not. More than likely, if they’ve tried the church or a parson, they’ve found something wanting. “Just have faith, and all will work itself out,” they’ve heard over and again and too often with the implication (read judgment) that faith is what enough of they don’t have or they’d get over it.

When they come up on number three with its “turn over your will” challenge and risk and its God talk, they react with “Here we go again, more religion.” Even if they get past the admitting and surrendering of steps one and two, they inevitably balk on three. I’ve no trouble wondering if maybe Nicodemus maybe had a similar experience.

Some years ago and a mere six months into this experience of recovering my humanity (which is what recovering from addiction is all about), I told my AA sponsor I was ready to get on with taking the personal inventory of the good and the bad in my life suggested by step four. I asked for his help. It was in his response that I had what I might call my own “Nicodemus moment.”

I’ll discuss all that with you, he said, as soon as you take the third step. I felt insulted. It’d not been all that easy to remain abstinent for six months. I’d had enough humiliation, mostly at my own hand, and i was all that comfortable with it. I was ready to get into the rest of the program, to walk the talk, as they say.

So I said, “What do you mean, third step? You’re an insurance salesman. I’m the theologian.” He smiled. I fumed. And back and forth we went. But he was adamant.

Later, I realized that even with some twenty-five years into priesthood, I’d never taken anything like the third step. I was balking just like all those other religion-resisters — maybe even more so. And it was not until I heard a nun at a twelve-step meeting talk about her own problem with the third step.

She realized, she said, that her problem was that what was not “working” was that she’d been trying to turn her life over to her understanding of God and not to the God of her understanding. So, perhaps with Nicodemus. So, for sure, with me.

February 17, 2005

Strings

It fell my privilege the other evening to attend a lecture by Brian Greene, the famous astrophysicist and apologist for “string theory.” It was an exhilarating event attended by over 500 people.

As he talked, he took us gently by the hand and walked us down the path from Einstein’s general theory of relativity to Heisenberg’s relative theory of generality (my phrase, not his). It was so vivid, his teaching style, that one could almost reach out and scoop up the gravitons by the light of all the photons passing by.

It came as a real surprise to me, though, that as Greene moved in on his main point, strings turned out not to be strings as I had imagined like on Chet Atkins’s guitar, twanging and singing away in some space/time reel, but crinkly little circles shaking and dancing inside the quarks and leptons that power the whole universe, us, included.

I never did quite get the reason why the physicists are so proud of their strings (they are metaphors, you know) but I was pleased that they seem to get so much mileage out of them.
For it is further comforting to know that they turn more and more to metaphors to say what they mean. The church has been out in that communication briar patch for a long time, but never, it seems, able to create quite so much excitement.

Anyway, I was sitting by a senior in one of our swishy local private high schools. She hung on Greene’s every word just as I had and, it seemed, understood most of them just as I had not. When the time came for Q&A, she kept trying to get his attention, but to no avail. I asked her afterwards what was her question. She said she wanted to ask why it is that the string theory is now so widely discredited among younger astrophysicists.

I wondered on the way home, why is it that catching up is always so hard to do?

February 16, 2005

Ember

Churchers have kept the Ember Days in the calendar for maybe fifteen hundred years or so and devoted the time especially to praying about parsons, presuming we need them, figuring out ways to get more and make them all worthwhile at the same time. It’s a tall order, usually short on fulfillment.

I imagine somebody knows (and will probably tell me) why we call the Ember Days Ember Days. I don’t, and my limited research has produced nothing. The best I can come up with is that embers, as pleasant as may be the sight of them, only suggest one thing, fading out and cooling off. Maybe the four Ember seasons are to remind us ever so often what a good idea that would be for parsons in particular and for us as a whole.

We clerics seem to me more often than not to be too prominent, like who needs both drum majors and cheer leaders all the time? We could fade into the liturgical woodwork and probably accomplish more. And too many of us often get too hot under the collar about things that seem so altogether insignificant that any amount of cooling off would be welcome. You, too, / in the pew.

Ember Days. Maybe what they’ve meant all along is a time to fade out and cool off.

February 15, 2005

Turnaround

I read where the Krispy Kreme doughnut folk have picked for their upper level executive staff what the bidness world calls a Turnaround Specialist. Investors show hope that this person can reorganize the company to avoid bankruptcy proceedings.

It’s sure news to me that the doughnut makers are facing bankruptcy, but it’s good news. Maybe it means that we’re slacking off a little on the sugar and the fat. From the looks of the church meetings and the usual platters full of pastries for those who attend them, however, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence that this is so. It does seems pretty biblical though. Apparently, the more they proclaim the word, the faster it becomes flesh.

Further and along these same lines, I recently spent quite a few anxious hours watching and waiting and walking a local hospital cardiac floor. My anxiety was provoked not only because my main squeeze was having some serious problems, but because the hospital’s dietary department was, as well. Morning after morning, up and down the hall, orderlies wheeled breakfast wagons jammed with plates steaming with sausage and bacon and eggs and buttered grits, not exactly the sort of cardiovascular maintenance diet one normally expects in such places of all places.

On the other hand, the doughnut folk might could get some good turnaround tips from the hospital folk. As fast as they take the cholesterol out down the hall in the OR, they put it all back in on Cardiac Four.

February 14, 2005

Valentime(sic)

Early on, greeting cards sent on St Valentine’s Day commonly included comic lampoons. It’s only of late that we’ve got into the delicate sweetness-and-light-with-borders-of-old-lace syndrome.

Actually, what we do on this Day is a much altered survival — as you may have guessed by now because so much stuff is — of an ancient Roman mid-February fertility rite too ghastly to describe in a family column, but a more modern and less macabre variety of which is frequently the subject of TV dysfunction commercials. I can report, however, that the rite was thought to be equally quite as useful to those who needed it. On the other hand and for whatever it’s lagniappe value, there were two fellows named Valentine, both martyred in Rome at different times in the third century.

But their connection with the modern observance has nothing to do with what little — which is very little — is known of their lives. The name seems to be a common sort of name association — valatin cognate with galatin, a gallant, a lover. Hence, mayhaps, sweetness and light and lace is on target, after all.

The idea that saints, if, indeed, these two were saints, martyrs, yes, but saints? have been assigned particular functions by chance association with their names seems strange to many, except, perhaps, the Hallmark card people.

There are those of a more pious bent who are stricken by the notion that any observance at all of such a time is irreligious. And then there are those of a less pious bent who’d probably be altogether pleased, the less religion, the better.

February 12, 2005

Certain

Ann, my cyber friend, emailed me these startling words from Rabbi
Sheila Peltz. “As I stood before the gates (of Auschwitz) I realized
that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people
who built this place.”

Certain. Would that we could be. Would that I could be certain even
that we cannot be. For where does time and learning stop in my life,
go “on hold” with Kenny G elevator music in the background so that
from there on, I can be certain? Like a young friend wrote from his
freshman year in college, “I’ve not learned anything new since I was
twelve.”

Certainty is the barrier where curiosity atrophies. Where it is
useless to read further. The president of the United States says he
reads no newspapers, no books, no commentary even about himself, only
reads, perhaps, the “riot act” to those who do. He is certain. He is,
of course, not alone.

The church is riven by those who are certain about the mind of God.
Do we so soon forget how Jesus bled in uncertainty as he knelt there
in Gethsemane?

February 11, 2005

Temptation

Lent 1A Mt 4.1-11

Anybody wrestling with vocation is probably influenced and even tempted at one time or another by the world’s three grand compulsions: relevance, control, and notice.

When we’re pondering what we’ll do with our life or when we’re wondering what on earth we’re already doing with our life, we want our life and work to mean something, to be relevant. We want to have at least enough control over it and our environment to stay “between the curbs.” And we want to be noticed, if even only for Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes.”

The daemons presumed compulsions like these to be going on with Jesus, maybe even before he did. They seemed always to recognize him and what he was about before anyone else. Something like this may be true for us. The devil is, indeed, in these kinds details. Those stages in one’s life preoccupied with confusion about vocation can be the neatest briar patches of details as to make the devil feel right at home. Like why else was the devil waiting out there in the sand dunes until Jesus was half starved to death before moving in on his puzzled anguish?

You want to be relevant? Satan said. Then turn these stones into bread. You want to be in charge? Here’s a whole empire of kingdoms and all the power and glory that goes with it. You want to be noticed? Then take a flying leap off the pinnacle of this lofty temple, surely the angels won’t let anything happen to the Son of God, himself. No vocational headhunter could come up with better tests than these then or now for an individual or even for an institution.

Yes, even for an institution. The church is not exempt. Indeed, clear and strange parallels of temptation are going on in the church’s life at this very moment, at this very time and place. There’s a wait-for-us contingent apparently within the church, indeed, claiming to be the church, organizing and hoping and threatening and spending a lot of money just to be the most relevant, the most noticeable, and the most powerful, even if it means pulling down the whole community to make it so.

This contingent, and its name is legion: the American Anglican Council, the Anglican Mission in America, the Network, Forward in Faith, and heaven knows what others, wants all these things — relevance, power, and most of all to be noticed by the major Anglican brass.

They’re waiting on and for the church’s primates who meet later this month over in Ireland where they’re reading and pondering the Windsor Report, where they’re making a list and checking it twice to figure out what they’ll do with us recalcitrants.

The devil expected to have a field day by using these temptations out there in the wilderness with Jesus. This breakaway contingent is dangerously close to being caught in the same web. But the gospel as Jesus understood it and as we’ve received it never fails to confront every one of such pretentious priorities as it asks us not for relevance or power or fame, but for justice and peace and a fair concern and respect for all.

Of all the answers Jesus gave Satan and of all the answers we must give ourselves and those who would dismantle us, one stands front stage center. “You shall worship the Lord your God, and God only shall you serve.”

This major turning point in Jesus’ understanding of himself and his work became the furnace of his transformation to protect him from becoming a victim of society and from becoming entangled in the illusions of a false self. We are faced now, as well, with our own furnace of transformation to protect us from becoming a victim of society and from continuing to be entangled in the illusions of a false church.

In the face of these temptations, Jesus affirmed God as the only source and substance of his identity. In the face of these temptations, so must we, as well, affirm God as the only source and substance of our identity.

There’s a lot of Jesus-talk among these dissidents. I hate to say this about Jesus-talk, but sometimes it can be devilishly manipulative, mesmerizing, and downright wicked as it was out there in the desert. That can even become its primary use. It is so seductively tempting to wrap that mantle around oneself and claim to be speaking for God.

It would be so easy to think that these problems are simply and really just bad management got all out of hand. But I believe them to be something far more sinister and daemonic where bad management just becomes something behind which to hide the real purposes. It is absolutely no surprise to me that these arrogant and destructive forces in our Communion are circling for what they suppose will be the kill. They are clearly casting about to make friends among whatever overseas powers they can find.

Ironically, what Jesus told the devil in the wilderness, he tells the church today. Religion’s proud towers are for princes and tourists. Its intricate doctrines are for the angry and the arrogant. Its pretensions to power are just warmed over Caesar outlined in fancy script.

“You shall worship the Lord your God, and God only shall you serve.”

The kingdoms of this world are humanity’s mistake, not its glory. Can you imagine Jesus vested in silks and sitting on a throne demanding that we do him homage? Rather might he be here at table with us erasing centuries of warfare, turning us to discover our common humanity, easing us out of our historic enigmas and into the shared language of love.