April 18, 2005

Genes

Our senator’s a heart surgeon. When we found out he’d never even voted in an election for seventeen or so years, we rewarded him by sending him to the U S Senate. In my opinion, our electorate’s judgment is not making us look so hot. Here’s why.

According to a London news service, the latest scientific research has determined that certain genes are responsible for creating religious fanatics. Much to the chagrin of church authorities, scientists are calling them “god genes.” That seems to explain a lot.

The idea appeals to me, probably because I’m hardly a church authority and never have been. Our senator, who was only a chest cutter in his previous carnation, has got the notion somewhere that the president’s judicial nominees are ipso facto “people of faith.” To favor the time-honored filibuster when voting to approve them, he claims, is sheer persecution.

I’ve never heard whether genes are contagious, but it would seem to me that anybody who fools around a lot by cutting on people’s hearts could be at risk. If I remember correctly, it was the prophet Jeremiah who said that that’s where, of all places, one might expect to find something like god genes (Jer 31.33). It’s been rumored that our senator has presidential aspirations. Maybe those genes are contagious after all.

April 16, 2005

Hounded

A priest friend, newly ordained, had been asked to invoke a meeting of her state legislature. She asked the woman who recruited her if it mattered whether, in her opinion, such prayer was unconstitutional.

Oh, no, the woman said, no problem. Reluctantly, then, but in a spirit of good citizenship perhaps unconsciously motivated somewhat by a need to impress her rather conservative vestry, my friend accepted the invitation.

She immediately set about searching through her liturgy collection for an impressively unique, but appropriate prayer for the occasion. She soon found a splendid blessing of the hounds she never expected to get to use which, with a few minor changes, seemed altogether adequate.

Thus prepared and moving on to other duties, she received in the mail a few days later, an official-looking envelope. Inside was a VIP pass to the legislative parking lot together with guidelines and examples for how to pray “inoffensively” at a meeting of a government agency.

April 15, 2005

Doors

Easter 4A / Jn 10.1-10

When my youngest son Scott was about three, he would sometimes come in from play and, if no one was in sight, stand facing inside through the doorway and call out, “Hey, somebody, I love you.”

The church, like the sheepfold in John’s parable of the Good Shepherd, is to be a safe house, a place where one can seek wholeness to become the human being God imagines us to be, receive love and care and compassion, and learn, if necessary, the meaning of trust. These things, at least, and not judgment and condemnation and orthodoxy, comprise our ministry to one another.

When Jesus speaks of himself as “the door” in this story before he speaks of himself as the “shepherd,” I think he means that we must come into this relationship, this “family” not through convention or respectability or because it is “the thing to do,” but through him, if it is to be a place of nourishment at all.

We have no right to call others to adopt our traditions or to follow our manner of life. It is too easy to assume that what seems to us good must be the will of God. We make our plans for God’s work, even ask God to prosper them. But they may be seriously flawed with our prejudice, ignorance, and shortsightedness. We so want to be right and can never see in advance that the way to final success often lies through immediate failure.

How then may we avoid these things?

Again, by coming through Jesus as “the door.” Why do we this pastoral work, exercise this influence with others? Through love of power or fame or repute or partisanship and the desire to win adherents for our own special bias? Nothing can give us the credentials for the sacred responsibility of deliberately influencing another except that we approach that other through Christ as the door.

This means at least three things: 1) to come to the task and every part of it in prayer, 2) to refer all of our activities to such basic guidelines as those laid down in the Baptismal Covenant, and 3) to accept whatever happens as nearer the will of God than our own planned outcome would have been. It is this “door” that opens both into the “fold” and out again to the world.

In the aftermath of the horror wrought every day in this world, our minds and hearts are filled not only with searing pain but with searing frustration of how we may truly shepherd a peaceful world. We’ll quite rightly tighten all the rules, stiffen the penalties, ban the guns, trust no one, and hope, knowing all the while that this, too, will fail.

I remember the irony of a war hero like General Dwight Eisenhower, when he became president, naming his presidential airplane not with a militaristic aphorism like the current “Air Force One,” but instead, “Columbine.” The word means “dove,” the worldwide symbol for peace. And I remember how when he left office warned us to be wary of the so-called military-industrial complex and its lust for power and control. And I remember today how we’ve never learned that lesson and are paying today with our money, our environment, our health, and our lives as a consequence.

If there is any answer to this agony run wild, any peace, any justice, it is here, in sheepfolds like the church is called to be, where children and everyone else can know how deeply they are cared for and what treasures they are, where Jesus is the doorway in which we all can stand, and say, “Hey, somebody, I love you.”

April 14, 2005

Naiveté

A gathering like the one yesterday in Texas celebrating a close friend’s life and death and the simultaneously continuing news in this morning’s papers about the destructive tensions surfacing even more in the Anglican Communion remind me painfully how very much I love this church and am embarrassed by it.

When we come together like that, I cannot avoid the presence of a nourishing and almost palpable connection across all our smugly self-styled orders. We’ve a common ministry of reconciliation, do we, and our selfish divisions fly in the face of it.

I hope I am not so long in tooth as not to know how very naive I am about this sort of thing. That naiveté, once almost a mortification for me, inevitably resurges now in my later life and feels far more like a blessing than a curse. For if one is to be faithful, must not one also embrace this kind of wary unawareness, an essential vulnerability to remaining open to come what may?

Frankly, I am mad as hell over the shallow and destructive fear that permeates our beloved Communion so unnecessarily. Are we so blind as not to realize how this insults our God, the one whose imaging imagines us for the human beings we are (and can become) and smiles over whatever clumsy ways we expressing it? That great Burial Office prayer that rang out across our celebration told us once again that we are “sinners of God’s own redeeming” and implied, “then listen up and get a life.”

Perhaps I’ve stopped preaching now and gone to meddling, but all this self-righteous hooliganism in which we are so mired just seems so tacky and so unbecoming to whatever it is God has in mind for us. I am glad, though, that this took place in San Antonio where my friend Jim Cullum’s great jazz band of NPR fame plays nightly at the Landing on Riverwalk. Jim let me sit in on cornet last night. The first tune we played was that old war horse, “Lady Be Good,” unwittingly, perhaps, a prayer to the BVM to get us out of this mess.

April 13, 2005

+SFB/RIP

Still unpacking from our move to Nashville to become rector of Christ Church forty years ago, I was also writing an anonymous honorary doctorate citation for my good friend Scott Field Bailey, suffragan of Texas at the time. He was such an outstanding priest, bishop, and churchman, it was difficult to keep within the Virginia Seminary’s copy limits and, as well, meet their deadline.

I’d served on the search committee that called him to All Saints, Austin, TX, and on his first vestry there, just as I was about to enter ETSS’s founding class as a junior. This began a long relationship in which he became an invaluable mentor, example, and subsequently, boss bishop. I was honored to be one of his attending presbyters at his consecration.

He was a gentle person, powerful preacher, superb and thoughtful family man, all together with his winsome and convicting witness to the Good News. He was bishop of West Texas when he retired a few years ago.

Scott Field died April 9, 2005. The celebration of his life and ministry is today in St Mark Church, San Antonio, TX. Please keep him and his family — and me — in your prayers.

April 12, 2005

Excesses

CP and I were on a train to London. Hauling our luggage (mostly mine) up and down station steps and crosswalks at the transfers was a constant reminder that I’d not needed to empty and pack the most of the contents of my closet and chest of drawers. She had warned me several times before we left and reminded me again and often enough with her firm stares.

En route, a sort of textbook, fifty-ish English country gentlemen got on the train and sat across from us. He almost instantly started talking, mostly about himself. He raises horses and loses £5,000 on each of them. He was on his way to London for a Wagnerian opus at the Royal Opera House where he is a patron and has front row orchestra seats (right behind the conductor). He travels all over the world wherever Wagner is being performed.

Opera, especially Wagner, was all it took to get CP’s mind off the suitcases and on one heldentenor after another. Finally, when we got to London and started fighting all our baggage again, our friendly squire jumped right in and helped.

In the midst of it all, rolling up and down stairs and chasing connections, he got a call on his cell phone. We could easily overhear him talking to someone, quite likely his wife. At one point, probably responding to her asking what was going on, he said, “Oh, I’m helping a couple of elderly Americans with their things.”

Footnote: There’s actually a shipping service called “Excess Baggage” in London. I sent the most of mine home at some considerable cost. Got along just fine with what I kept, comforted that I was a supporting British entrepreneurship.

April 11, 2005

Friendship

Over the recent years, there has crept into our lives as churchers the so-called “background check.” It is now, I suppose, a universal requirement for anyone being considered even as a nominee for one of the so-called ordained offices. Apparently, vestry members, acolytes, and altar guilders are spared, but probably not always.

Precisely to the degree that we need the background check — if, indeed, we really do — is a measure of our failure to be the church, a community whose faith might be reasonably expected to establish some dependable ground of trust, whose mutual word is honored, and in which forgiveness is practiced. But, of course, one might say, as well, that the background check is a vindication of our loyalty to old Augustine’s skittishness about original sin and how careful we must be about our orthodoxy and that ubiquitous “Catholic faith” we claim as our sole possession.

Jesus called his followers “friends,” not “servants,” because he’d withheld nothing that God had told him from them (Jn 15.14ff). Of course, maybe he’d been wiser to do a background check on Judas. But then, even though somebody had to do what Judas did if Scripture is to be honored, it doesn’t mean that we all have to. After all, I’m not aware that God has withheld anything all that important from us, if only we’d pay attention.

It is often said that neither Jesus nor Paul nor any of those twelve (well, eleven) holy renegades would ever be considered for our next rector and certainly not for our next bishop. If they were, somebody would insist that they submit to a background check and, of course, as is now done, pay for it themselves.

Friendship? In the church? Forget it.

April 8, 2005

Story

Easter 3A Lk 24.13-35

Luke uses an interesting literary device in recounting the walk down the road to Emmaus. He writes a story within a story. [Shakespeare did it in “Hamlet.” Maybe he got the idea from Luke.]

History already knows about Good Friday and Easter for more or less the 2005th time. Luke’s early readers knew. We know. But these two men walking along the nine miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus were right on the front line of the news that we call the Good News, and they didn’t know. Maybe better it is to say, they didn’t know that they knew. And then begins the story within the story.

Jesus suddenly appears from nowhere. The men excitedly and sadly tell him about how the crucifixion had crushed their hopes. But then, they say, still startled beyond belief, that some women of their company amazed them by claiming they’d been there and done that and seen the empty tomb and had had a vision of angels who told them Jesus was alive. The men didn’t believe them [of course not, they were women!], so they went to look for themselves and all they found was an empty tomb. I like to think that’s all they saw because of the way (aka the attitude in which) they looked.

“O foolish men,” says Jesus, “and slow of heart to believe… ” (And there’s a tip off.) Then he offers for them his own private accounting — Moses, the prophets, all with the whole sweep of scripture up to and concerning himself. They still do not know who he is, but they’re obviously intrigued, invite him for dinner, and in the breaking of bread together, their capacity is opened finally to know what they knew.

Life is a kind of story within stories. It is a collection of stories, mine, yours, our families, the world’s from the Big Bang to the mild disturbance that our personal saga makes on the cosmos. We are a part of the pulse of the vascular system of the universe, pumping along and, it seems until we learn otherwise, giving it heart and voice and mind. Our own histories are made as we tell of them, as they unfold, as we walk them and come ever so often to our own forks in the road, and, as Yogi Berra counseled, take them.

The ever-present Jesus is always there on the road with us, but, as Luke’s story tells it, our eyes are kept from recognizing him. As I’ve read this story so many times before, I’ve always presumed it was Jesus who kept his identity to himself. But no, I suddenly realize that whatever, it is I who keep his identity from myself. I keep my eyes from recognizing him, from seeking and serving Christ in all persons, from loving my neighbor as myself.

For he is there in every act of kindness, in every gift of freedom and justice, in every act of compassion, in every risk of faithfulness, in every warmth and inclusion and receptiveness, in every act of love and commitment. And, of course, he is there when just the opposite of these things takes place. Faith opens our eyes to see him wherever he joins us on our road and especially as we come to Table with him in the breaking of bread. He is the Story within our story.

April 6, 2005

Choice

MnJzBd It is said that choice is the driving force of capitalism. But the pros can’t make up their minds whether it’s best to have more choice or less. Despite all the problems in choosing, free marketeers argue that the more choice the better. They say it builds character.

I agree. And I suspect Reinhold Niebuhr might agree, as well. For his ever-present “Serenity Prayer,” despite its name, is really about choices and the changes that always demand them. Change and choice are the twin jewels on which our spiritual maturity turns and maybe even grows, so that that prayer of Niebuhr’s is a natural even for those who aren’t all that prayerful.

The measure of our spiritual maturity resides in how secure we are in responding to and effecting change. God creates us in God’s image, that is, God’s grace imagines us into being who we are and gives us freedom to choose. Niebuhr’s prayer simply asks God for the serenity, the courage, and the wisdom to accept his creation as it comes down our path. All three are characteristics of being human as God imagines human being.

Ernest Hemingway defined courage as “grace under pressure,” maybe like the choice way in which God gives it.

April 5, 2005

Condolence

Aldous Huxley was never known as a raving optimist. Even so, he seemed hopeful when he said, “Death is the only thing society has not succeeded in completely vulgarizing.”

One of the hardest things about being a president must be all those times when one is called upon to give condolences. All must sympathize with him. Of course, surely some speechwriter keeps timely laments on the old and famous ready on a moment’s notice. But even though someone else thinks them up and fills in the relevant blanks, the speaker yet must deliver them with dignity and some measure of conviction before the whole world. That’s not easy to do without seeming glued to a script one obviously didn’t write and seems to have seen only too recently .

But even with plenty of warning, it’s no rose garden to respond to the death of somebody like the pope. Especially not during the lingering shadow of a war you yourself had a major hand in starting and the pope so strongly condemned. All this, of course, is not to mention a young woman whose terminal illness and death has so recently been used for what seemed to many like political opportunism. Compassion and tenderness surely don’t come all that easily for the bellicose.

“Dear Aldous: We’re grateful for your optimism. But just you wait.”