April 29, 2005

Vine

Easter 6A Jn 15.1-8

This gospel story of Jesus as the vine makes me think of the way Garrison Keillor closes out his daily Writer’s Workshop with a salutation something like this, “Be well. Do good work. And keep in touch.”

It may seem that I have to go all the way around the barn to make that comparison, but it won’t be the first time, nor the last, and I won’t be the first preacher to do something like that. The reason I see a similarity is because there’s something of a “stinger” in both stories. For Jesus, it’s the fact that unless we abide in him, there’ll be no grapes. For Keillor, the reminder to stay healthy and to work hard is obvious, but pointless, if we don’t “keep in touch.”

For life is about connection, being connected, about keeping in touch. We are created for community. One of God’s first reflections in the Garden of Eden as he imagined us into being was that we not be alone. Abiding in Jesus — and in one another — is a way of keeping in touch. And keeping in touch is the groundswell of the church’s ministry to ourselves and to the world. The vitality symbolized in the vine is essential if our ministry would bear the fruit of peace and justice and love.

So how do we do that?

Some communities, some churches, do it by requiring members and potential members to believe alike, by requiring them to make and adopt a common confession. They’re actually called “confessional churches.”

The great negative energy in our beloved Anglican Communion currently driving us toward schism is the desire by some that we become that sort of church. When they speak of faith, they mean a system of belief, an orthodoxy that must be adhered to in every dot and tittle, a statement to which members must sign their names or not be trusted. When they speak of a “people of faith,” that’s usually what they mean.

The disciple Thomas wanted something like that from Jesus. Early on in that first Easter, he asked Jesus to show him the way. And Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” When Jesus said, “I am the vine,” he meant much the same thing. He was obviously not being literal in either case, but in both offering a powerful symbol of his life of peace and justice and healing and love.

This abiding, this keeping in touch is a way of faith which we freely choose to follow. It is a way of being a responsible branch of the vine and of bearing fruit. It is not some sterile system, but a living, changing, and vital life of commitment and love. Jesus spoke of keeping the Sabbath in this way when he said the Sabbath was made for us, not we for the Sabbath.

I wish and pray for a church like that. This Anglican Communion and our own ethnic spin on it in this land comes as close as anything I’ve seen or experienced. God gave us Holy Spirit so that we could continue and grow in such community, to abide in Jesus, and that we would have a way to keep in touch.

May we not be here, then, just to influence others and make them think as we do, but may we be open to influence, not only to acknowledge and respect the freedom of others, but seek to enhance their capacity to make a difference. May we choose always to serve together and to achieve a collegial bond of caring that the world may then know that we are Christ’s and know so by the way we love one another. That’s a kind of poetry that can only cleanse. There is no greater and no more faithful evangelism.

Oh, and one last note from Garrison Keillor. Maybe Lake Wobegon is a possible metaphor for the church. You know, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average. And where there’s always an exciting story to be told, even a story of a vine and its branches.

April 28, 2005

Over

The other day I was looking back up the hill I’m sometimes told that I’m over and wondering exactly where the downhill started. As I thought about it, the logic of the Over-the-Hill notion of life is that there’s only one zenith. That there is only one seems logical, of course, if not all that clear. I’ve not a lot of trouble remembering the multiple nadirs, but if there is only one top, forget it.

As it goes in mountain climbing, getting to the top seems always a mighty important occasion. Some people plant flags (usually one from whatever country they call home or that paid for the trip) or build a more permanent monument called a stele (or with an -a, according to most crossword puzzles).

The moon is a kind of a hill to be over, and the guys who went there planted a flag. But there’s no atmosphere on the moon, hence, no breeze. These “climbers” wanted their flag to show and not just hang there, limp, so you could see who the moon belonged to. So they had to brace it to hold it out and make it look as if it was in the midst of some sort of a wave on the Beaufort Scale. I guess it’s still there, “waving” back at us.

I was once a member of a group of eight or so folk, each of whom had practiced or was still practicing some sort of professional counseling. We called ourselves the Over the Hill Gang, and we provided audience and counsel when asked for those who’d not yet crossed over, who were still, one might say, under the hill and on one of the climbing sides.

Most hills have a number of climbing sides, some easier than others, but only one top. It’s probably good for the climbers to have an idea what the top looks like so they could recognize it when they get there. So our function as the OTHG was maybe to tell them what to look for, what was the evidence, what were the signs, and where might be the best way up so one could at least get a toehold.

Like you might imagine, I wasn’t much help. Being a member of the OTHG, though, and like most teachers, I had plenty of opportunities to learn more than I taught.

April 27, 2005

Fake

Jazz musicians use something called “fake books.” They’re not really books like maybe you normally think of books, but collections of songs that show the title, the composers names, the key signature, the melody, usually also the lyrics, and most importantly, the changes (aka the chord changes).

The contents are anything but fake. There’s even one called the Real Fake Book. The contents are altogether essential, especially for beginners who may not know very many songs. The old pros who know practically every song that’s ever been written hardly need them at all, but usually keep a few around just in case.

Ironically, the contents are not fake at all. The books get their name from the fact that musicians use them as a basis for improvising, ad libbing, that is, playing or “faking” another melody than the one that is written, but that follows pretty closely those important chord changes. It is rather like composing on the spot, in a sense, writing your own song as you go along.

Life is like that. God provides the basics, the chord changes. You improvise, write the tune. It’s just that simple. Of course, once in a while, God changes the key signature and the changes with it. I suppose that’s why Louis Armstrong said, “Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.”

April 26, 2005

Ambling

OoNs are sort of preambles that hope the reader will start ambling.

They’re like the Yellow Pages that spare you from any other effort than just to let your fingers do the walking. If they’re any good at all, they provoke thought, they plant a seed, catch your attention so that you can take it from there and do as you damn well please.

Maybe they’ll further the exploration of your own ideas. From the looks of the responses, some of you amble, others, mayhaps, right over to the delete key.

Housekeeping note: Covenant, the wonder journal and wellspring of OoN, is this month in its 20th edition. You may access it at as it appears in the flesh, Adobe-like, or just in plain and-so-it-goes text. Try www.covpubs.org. If you prefer hard copy, just ask and send your snailmail address.

April 25, 2005

Busy

With all the changes and occasional improvements of telephones, one thing that hasn’t changed much is busy signals. I don’t know how anybody came up with that pulsating buzz, but there’s not much possibility of mistaking its universal (and often annoying) sound.

I suppose most phones, like mine, have (for the lazier among us) redial buttons for calling the same number over and over when necessary. That, coupled with some good horse sense to know when a line’s busy, should be enough comfort even when you’re running out of patience. But apparently not so.

Ma Bell’s progeny have found another way, for a price, of course. Just in case you’re absolutely either stupid or maybe from Mars (ET knew better) and making your first Earth-side phone call, it’s called, “This line is busy.” After that admonishment, the computer’s schoolmarmish voice goes on to tell you that for a charge of 90¢ “we” will keep trying for 30 minutes, ring you back with a special ring when its available, and then automatically connect you.

Of course, I suppose there’s some solace in and no charge for knowing that a wrong number is never busy.

April 23, 2005

Smoke

Yesterday was Earth Day.

To make notice of it, the president came to the Smoky Mountains and made one of his tie-less, coat-less, and flagpin-less (aka earthier) speeches. Tennessee’s two senators stood photo-oply by, themselves appropriately in shirtsleeves.

Almost as if he were somehow surprised, the president said that the earth is not ours, we didn’t make it, so we have to take care of it. He failed to mention that the first thing we do is deregulate the caretakers, ignore the environmental treaties, and claim that the jury’s still out on global warming.

The Smokies got their name long ago because of their frequent low cloud cover and fog. To celebrate Earth Day, they were smokier than usual due to pollution. The speechifying party couldn’t get any closer than Knoxville.

April 22, 2005

Place

Easter 5A Jn 14.1-14Jesus said, “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” (Jn 14.2)Wendell Berry lives in Kentucky, but he is everybody’s neighbor. He wrote that if we don’t know where we are, we don’t know who we are. He is not talking about the kind of location that can be determined by looking at a map or a street sign.He is talking about the kind of knowing that involves the senses, the memory, the history of a family or a tribe. He is talking about the knowledge that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it.He is talking about a sense of place. Fewer and fewer of us enjoy a sense of place in that sense in this day and time. Not because we are not farmers, although awareness of the land is essential for our good health, but because we are so mobile, so restless, so displaced. Berry is talking not only about the sense of place that land gives us, but even more so, the sense of place in which poets specialize.It takes not much stretch for me to imagine that this is the kind of knowing, the kind of sense of oneself that the poet Jesus specialized in. He said, “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” It is not only there, in that house of many rooms, where Jesus prepares a place for us that one day we may occupy, but it is also from that house that Jesus reaches out to us and prepares a place for us that we can now in this day occupy.Perhaps one of the major causes of our social malaise is that we have become indifferent to, even contemptuous of, or afraid to commit ourselves to, our physical and social surroundings, always hopeful of something better. We seem as hooked on change as we are afraid of change. A lot of us have never stayed in one place long enough to learn it, or have learned it only to leave it.In our displaced condition we are not unlike the mythless person that Carl Jung wrote about, who lives “like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society. He… lives a life of his own, sunk in a subjective mania of his own devising, which he believes to be the newly discovered truth.”It is only a step from this to another: that no place is a place until it has had a myth, until it has a story, a spiritual genealogy. No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we can call poetry.John Kennedy said it well. “When power leads us to arrogance, poetry reminds us of our limitations. When power narrows the area of our concern, poetry reminds us of the richness and diversity of our existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”What Frost did for New Hampshire and Vermont, what Faulkner did for Mississippi and Steinbeck for the Salinas Valley, Wendell Berry is doing for his family corner of Kentucky, and hundreds of other place-loving people, gifted or not, are doing for places they were born in, or reared in, or have adopted and made their own.I doubt that we will ever get the motion out of us, for everything in our culture of opportunity and abundance has, up to now, urged motion on us as a form of virtue. The way we drive our roads makes it seem that vengeance has become a virtue. Our tradition of restlessness will not be outgrown in a generation or two, even if the motives for restlessness are withdrawn.At least in geographic terms, our frontiers have been explored and crossed. It is probably time we settled down. It is probably time we looked around us instead of looking ahead. We have no business, any longer, in being impatient with history. We need to know our history in much greater depth, we even need to know our geology, for our geology is only our history projected a little way back from our founding fathers and mothers.History was part of the baggage we threw overboard when we launched ourselves into the New World. We threw it away because it recalled old tyrannies, old limitations, galling obligations, bloody memories. Why else would our present administration speak of “old Europe” with such disregard and disdain? Plunging into the future through a landscape that had no history for us, we did both the country and ourselves considerable harm. And neither the country nor the society we built out of it can be healthy until we stop raiding and running, and learn to be quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of ownership but of belonging, until we have, the lot of us, a sense of place.”The land was ours before we were the land’s,” says Robert Frost’s poem. Only in the act of submission is the sense of place realized and a sustainable relationship between people and earth established.The place Jesus makes for us is uniquely ours, a gift of grace from which we can grow and become the human beings he intends for us to be. The church has no higher mission than to be that earthly place with many rooms where this can happen and be nourished. It is our story, our myth. Jesus is our vanguard, but as well, he is our shepherd in the here and now. With him, as T S Eliot reminds us, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

April 21, 2005

ConDominus

The news says Rome still has a thing about condoms, and apparently, there’s no sign of change.

I understand. When I was a grade school kid, I had a thing about them, too. Our world was maybe more macho then, but we didn’t even know how to spell condom, let alone know what they looked like. We could imagine, though, from the talk of the braggarts who always carried one in their wallet. You could tell by the indentation. They kept one there, they said, just in case.

Now, condoms are on full display in the drug stores, out for all to see — the creative designs, the colors, the special purposes, and, of course, the suggestive names. Back then, they were nowhere to be seen, one had to ask a pharmacist, and few of us were ever brave enough to do that. Whenever we did get up the nerve, there’d be a woman pharmacist on duty, and she’d suddenly look just like our mom.

All that was back when the risk of disease was much less a concern than the awesome fear of having babies. “Pregnant” was a double four-letter word said only in a hushed voice, and it served even more as a preventive.

Of course, all that’s changed with The Pill. Changed, that is, except for the Vatican. It’s not that anybody over there seems all that shy about condoms, rather are they so obsessed about birth control that the possibility of death control apparently escapes them altogether.

But I guess I still have a thing about the subject. Whenever I pick up a prescription at my pharmacy, I quickly pass by the prophylactic display, although I’d lot rather stop and gawk. (Okay, you say, so how did I know about the displays?) Whatever, I don’t plan to go there, so ConDominus, which is to say, the Lord be with you (var).

April 20, 2005

Birch

It is only a matter of an inch or two below the surface before the land assumes, I assume, a radical new appearance. In so short a space, it becomes an entwined maze of roots and little varmint farmers laboring away the hours and days and seasons to make the crops all go or not. Some nourishing, some devouring, some just busting it all up for what may seem only like play. There’s not much there of the color and variety of the surface, but, I suppose that depends on one’s perspective.

The sodbusters don’t always stay underground. For example, such were the beautiful tiny inchy and wormy infants terrible feasting on a salad they’d made off the leaves of our new river birch. We could tell the tree wasn’t thriving, as the pediatricians sometimes say of the newborn. Its greenery was yellowisher than its neighbors. Its leaves lagged in comparison.

How the Indians made their sturdy canoes from the bark of the birch truly impresses me. But that they did is one important reason we wanted one of those trees in our yard. Though its bark is hardly adequate to make even a bathtub toy, yet there it is, peeling and wrapping in its lovely shades of brown and tan.

God utterly mystifies me just going about being God, so infinitely tolerant, such a wealth of humor there, smiling over whether we can tell if smoke is black or white or just gray and whatever on earth that has to do with a pope — the “Vicar of Christ,” such a title we’ve come up with, how presumptuously we use our freedom. I should think mayhaps God finds more pleasure in the river birch, and, I should hope, in our admiration of it. But what God sees in those abominable worms that dine on it… I’ve an eerie feeling we’ll have to be accountable for what we did to them. How presumptuously we use our freedom, indeed.

April 19, 2005

Hinge

It’s never been all that clear to me whether the birds or the prelates came first or how the name got associated with the color. Cardinal means hinge, I’m told. Maybe a not-all-that-remote connection is that hinges are also what things hang on, even outcomes like the new pope everybody’s waiting for.

It’s possible we could wait a while. Back in the 13th-century in Viterbo, Italy, after three years of no decision for a new pope, the townspeople got fed up. They removed the palace roof, exposed the holy electorate to the elements, and sent in only bread and water. The deadlock quickly broke. It must have scattered all over the place, for a layman was elected and became Pope Gregory X. The record says he accomplished much in his five-year reign.

Maybe there’s a precedent here. We don’t have any Anglican cardinals, but we’ve sure got some wannabes. They’re so busy pontificating that they’re losing sight of the church’s real mission and wasting a lot of time and money fussing over the details. Next time these primates get together, maybe we ought to blow the roof and send in nothing but bread and water, then, if the laity will even have it, turn it over for them to take a crack at the whole thing.