April 4, 2005

Decisions

Continuing to meander around in my anecdotage these days, I’m thinking about decisions. The capacity to make them, if not with ease, at least with some judgment, is sometimes, I think, a measure of one’s spiritual maturity.

I had already been accepted at one of our church’s major seminaries when our coadjutor informed me we were starting up a new one, that he would like me to be a part of the founding class, and that I could take a couple of weeks to decide. The whirlwind of deciding to attend seminary at all with hopes to get ordained someday was sufficient trauma to add to a brand new baby daughter, a very reluctant wife, and leaving an adequate home that had a manageable mortgage.

Two weeks of anguished prayer passed. On a Saturday morning, I went in to see the coadjutor and said, Yes, I’d stay in Austin and join up. When I got home, a letter in the mail from the diocesan read “Dear Lane: We’re starting a new seminary in Austin, and that’s where you’re going.”

Spiritual maturity sometimes has to start over.

April 3, 2005

Imagination

There’ll soon pass fifty years since I once entertained the idea that upon my ordination to the priesthood, the kingdom would soon find it easier to arrive. The Kingdom of God (or Heaven, whatever), that is. The track would be greased. There’s nothing quite like the grandiosity of a new priest — or an old one, either, for that matter.

But now, fifty years later, instead of the kingdom showing up, many of us, too many of us, instead have gone from one preoccupation and clinical fixation to the next. Just in these five decades, it’s been race (and now DNA has shown that doesn’t even exist), prayer books and hymnals, and ordination of women, anything to avoid the Great Commandment.

And now, we’re obsessed with sex, or at least enough of us are to bog things down. What that has to do with the kingdom utterly defies me and, I’d like to think, defies all reason, as well. I have somehow in my determination to bring in the kingdom not been able to reach those people with the notion that the gospel is about peace and justice and love, not sex.

Now, I’ve nothing against sex. God had something pretty good in mind when God made us that way and not only something about keeping us going from one generation to another. I, for one, have certainly been known to enjoy it and so have you if you’ll only admit it.

Furthermore, I suspect that since we’re imagined by God to be as we are, and there’s all that inevitable intimacy in the notion of the Trinity, God surely knows something about sex that we can’t even imagine. Yet imagine, we must. If God’s image is in us, and we’re to be like God, or, as Paul put it, have the mind of Christ within us, and God thought we were good — or, at least, hoped we were or would be, eventually — then maybe being good and thus pleasing God has something to do with imagining.

So why don’t we try it? Try it about sex, put away all this tacky foolishness that’s stalling us in our tracks, and lets get on with the kingdom. I never thought I’d make it for fifty years, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have all that much time left. BriebJ4w

April 2, 2005

Surprise

Surprise! That which is being dismantled before our very eyes is a system of ecclesiastic polity in whose endurance we have trusted for over five centuries and simultaneously, a system of government in whose endurance we have trusted for over two.

Surprise disarms most severely those of us who take things for granted. Maybe because surprise is perhaps one of the more important elements in destruction, it is so much easier to destroy than to build.

For this reason alone, our nation needs a profoundly pastoral church now more than ever. But as well, it needs an equally prophetic church. Such a church, rooted in its treasured scripture and tradition with unswerving loyalty, must get out of the belly of the whale and constantly stand against and indict both itself and its culture, calling us to return to our Lord.

It is such sad irony that fear of our own God-imagined human nature has so compromised the possibility of such a presence both in state and church so as to render it helpless short of a truly faithful surrender to grace. It has been said that, “if we look for justice without suffering, we are romantics. If we look for renewal without struggle, we have missed the sequence of events.”

Jesus says, “How about for openers, ‘Pay attention!’ don’t let another Easter pass sitting on your hands.”

April 1, 2005

Doubt

Easter 2A Jn 20.19-31

We seem to remember the disciple Thomas more for his doubt than for his faith. We call him Doubting Thomas when Brave Thomas might be more appropriate to his enterprise, and that gives him a lot more grief than he deserves.

While the rest of the disciples were cowering full of resentment and fear that they’d bet their lives and whatever fortunes on a loser, Thomas was out pounding the pavement, risking arrest, renewing old contacts, checking the want-ads, and looking for work.

He didn’t believe the talk about Jesus. He wanted better evidence than the behavior of his former colleagues. Then, when he got it what he wanted, he signed on for good or ill. He accepted his commission as an apostle, wrote a gospel, and, some say, started a new church over in India. “Brother Thomas’s Sawdust Trail,” (aka Mar Thoma). Sounds like an evangelist to me.

We don’t have the hard evidence Jesus presented to Thomas. (If walking through closed doors with holes in your side and hands can be called “hard evidence.”) John knew that, but he apparently knew something else, as well. Faith is not only always surrounded by doubt and without evidence. Faith also creates doubt and evidence.

Faith is risk, and risk wouldn’t be risk without doubt. And faith that comes only after evidence is no faith at all. It is trust, yes, but not faith. Faith is that daring commitment that climbs out on life’s limbs and leaps. And that is all the evidence we get.

And it works two ways. My faith is a kind of evidence for me and maybe also for you. And your faith is a kind of evidence for you and also maybe for me. Our faith — all that touch and go — as a community is what makes church church. The ekklesia — the called — doesn’t even deserve the name if it is not first and foremost a community of faith — and probably of doubt, as well. And there is no evidence for that — even the kind that moves mole hills — until there is a pulsating, dynamic, nonjudging heart of love at its core.

The fearful disciples in the upper room would probably never have convinced Thomas until he experienced the vision of the risen Lord, himself. Nor if fear is our only motivation and keeping us in the closet would we ever convince those who pass by. Not until we show the world by the way we love one another can our witness ever become the winsome and compelling evangel of the Lord.

For it is in that nourishing and healing love that transcends both faith and doubt, wherever such love is found, within or without these naves — and only there — and that is where the Lord is risen, where He is risen, indeed. And it is there that we find “church.” BriebJ4w