May 18, 2005

AOV

OoN has had a number of enquiries about the increasing use of the first-person plural by certain Anglican pontiffs who, as best as can be determined otherwise, are all of the same sex. Curiously, the questioners also wonder in common if this behavior is any indication of same sex relationships afoot in the House of Bishops.

This was clearly a question for the reference librarians. They are normally not surprised by anything they find, but this time were startled to discover that, unknown to any reputable or, for that matter, disreputable biblical scholars, Jesus or otherwise, a new translation of the Bible has suddenly appeared.
It is OoN’s obligation to report that this first person plural usage has also appeared just as suddenly in the Book. The new Anglican Orthodox Version of the Bible (AOV) puts all the references to sex in red-letter, leaves the prohibitions against divorce and usury and calling somebody “father” out altogether. It even has God answering in the first-person plural.

For example, Moses’ request for credentials at the burning bush now reads, “We are who we are… Say this to the people of Israel, ‘We are has sent me to you’” (Ex 3.14). And when the Jews question Jesus’ authority, he assures them, “Truly, truly, we say to you, before Abraham was, we are” (Jn 8.34). Space prevents further examples, but perhaps you get the drift.

It is to be regretted, however, that the AOV will not anytime soon be available for either public or private lectionary use. The House of Bishops cannot arrive at a single mind about which shade of purple should be the Morocco binding, all the available paper has been outsourced to India, and they’ve not yet forgotten how disturbing were the release of the RSV fifty-five years ago and the new Book of Common Prayer only some twenty-five. They want, as well, to assure the people in the pews of how demanding a burden indeed it is be a guardian and keeper of the Faith.

May 17, 2005

Writing

It has been said that there is something dishonest about writing fiction. You can say anything and expect to get away with it, no responsibility.

On the other hand, writing nonfiction is of the essence of responsibility. You have to say something. When you do, you have to expect to take your licks. I am mostly a nonfiction writer. So if, say, when I call up my rector and get the parish secretary and identify myself, she seems always to say, “Is it anything?”

The main criticism fiction writers get is not so much what they say or how outrageous it may be, but more the way they say it, whether they’re a “good writer” or not. They also say often somewhat resentfully (though they’re probably right) that truth is stranger than fiction, so like anything alien, it always catches more attention. Unlike fiction, truth’s not so much taken for granted. Nobody asks about truth, except things like, What else is new? or What did you have to go and say that for? Questions like this are truly dispiriting for the nonfiction writer.

But some people do discredit fiction. For example, they’ll put down something by saying, Oh, that’s just a figment of your imagination, like there’s no possibility for truth and imagination having anything in common.

A figment, remember, is supposedly some feigned fantasy having no basis in reality, save, of course, that before there’s any possibility of either fantasy or feigning, it does more or less require a human being to be involved. That is, without humans being, reality doesn’t have, might we say, much of a leg to stand on. And being human, it seems to me, is mostly about as much grounded in reality as one could imagine, with some exceptions, of course.

May 16, 2005

Safety

One of the things that led Eve and Adam into losing their lease was to think they could find a godless place in Eden where they could hide out (Gen 3.8). Obviously, they weren’t the last to be so presumptuous.

According to the Associated Press, the Texas Southern Baptists have gone and done exactly that. They’ve recently pronounced the Houston public schools not only as “godless,” but “resolutely anti-Christian.” God left, they imply, when the schools allowed gay clubs, diversity training, anti-bullying courses, and programs about safe sex and safe schools. Thus alone, such a system could only be promoting “homosexuality” as an “acceptable alternative lifestyle.”

Not to worry, they comforted. Parents can now just remove their children and either “home-school them or enroll them in Christian schools.” Once there, I suppose, they’ll be protected by one of those safe sects.

May 14, 2005

Atmosphere

Pentecost Sunday

The Earth’s atmosphere is a thin layer of gases composed of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and a smidgen of others. Perhaps our most vital activity in return for our lives, together with all the rest of creation, the animals, the plants, is constantly to be at the process of recycling this envelope. For it connects us in an essential and almost intangible ambiance. It has been said to be most like the walls of a living cell

In a remarkably similar way does God’s Holy Spirit wholly contain us. It is there to sustain our lives, create our communities, enable our reconciliation. No wonder that in most languages it is translated as breath. And further, we well remember, that like Jesus told Nicodemus, this Spirit moves, comes, and goes as it well pleases.

Unlike the Earth’s atmosphere, God’s Spirit seems limitless. We, by God’s grace, become the occasions, the stewards to receive and recycle its energy in service to God’s will. We are created by God as such spiritual beings whose vocation is to shape the Spirit as we become human in the way God imagines us to be. Indeed, a case can be made that this life begins with our first breath just as it ends with our last. It is a case with which both pro-life and pro-choice advocates must contend.

Have you ever imagined how a symphony orchestra or a chorus could function if there were no air? The wind instruments, the strings, the percussion, all depend on there being an atmosphere which they can move and shape if there is to be music. So is our mission as churchers to shape Spirit. In the way a symphony orchestra shapes the air around it into sound, so must we take our lives, the instruments God gives us and use them to shape God’s Spirit in service to God and our fellow human beings.

Perhaps one of the most grievous examples of the way we cripple this stewardship is our continuing effort to transfix Holy Spirit in our own interests and not God’s. Of course, the mere thought of such a thing is ludicrous. But not a day passes that we churchers do not strive to fashion and refashion that Spirit in some way so as to warp the gift of Pentecost.

Just as we contaminate the Earth’s atmosphere by our carelessness do we defile God’s Holy Spirit by forcing our identity upon it. Global warming pales beside the toxicity of the church’s current selfish obsession with its manners, morals, and means at the expense of its mission. We must remember on this day that we are not only the community created at Pentecost, we are, as well, the community commissioned for Pentecost. We are Spirit-enabled to become Spirit enablers.

The constellation of propers for this Sunday overwhelms us with this good news. Acts’ accounting of the fire, wind, and apostolic headiness that birthed God’s church (Acts 2.1-11). Paul’s catalogue of the gifts of the Spirit to fulfill the church’s purpose with shape and substance (1 Cor 12.4-13). Jesus’ granting of apostolic ministry by the power of his own breathing, a portend of the Spirit to come (Jn 20.19-23).

This Pentecost Sunday calls us once again to such ministry. “Breathe on us breath of God,” we sing and pray. This Pentecost comes once again to brace and refresh us, to call us back to and enlist us in the Way, the Truth, and the Life revealed in the Upper Room. This Pentecost comes once again to drag us kicking and screaming away from our fascination with ourselves and our need for ecclesiastic security. And this Pentecost comes once again to license us as God’s agent as Mary sang to show the strength of God’s arm, to scatter the proud in their conceit, to cast down the mighty from their thrones, to lift up the lowly, to fill the hungry with good things, to send the rich away empty, and to champion God’s peace and justice and love for all.

Just for openers: It has recently been reported that Wal-Mart’s average fulltime employee is paid no more than $17,000 per year, and that fewer than half have adequate health insurance. In that same news, it was reported that Wal-Mart’s CEO’s annual salary is $17.5 million, more in two weeks than the underlings make in a lifetime.

Four of our bishops recently visited the president of the US&A. It was not so clear what they were doing there or who invited them or for whom they might have presumed to speak. Whatever they were up to, maybe some of us at a different level of grandeur and just to celebrate Pentecost might start with a visit to Wal-Mart’s CEO .

May 12, 2005

Bricks

A captionless cartoon depicts a mason seated beside a brick wall he’s laying. He’s taking a lunch break. The wall is up to about twenty inches high. He has set his drink on top of the wall. The liquid in the glass is clearly not level.

Reading daily the morning office sometimes just bams along, rather like building a brick wall. Once in a while, I’m surprised, maybe somewhat like the brick mason. The frequent typo in the Church Hymnal Corporation’s not-so-carefully proofed rendition of the Good Book. An heretofore overlooked entry in the Book of Common Prayer. And, when I’m lucky and sufficiently awake, an insight. Some unnerving, some just nerving.

In Luke’s accounting of the apostles’ activities one morning, he made this observation: “Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17.21).

These fellows were red meat for Paul. He was always telling something new. We churchers have got some of the same stuff, but the way things look with our constant distractions and all, we’re more than likely just not leveling with it.

May 11, 2005

Gardening

The blooms on our garden’s false blue indigo this year are yellow. The fire pinks are bright and brilliant red. Nature does as well it pleases, whatever name we tag it with.

Those pinks have nothing to do with color, I’ve discovered, but with how their blooms are shaped. It’s those serrated edges, pinked are they. Hence, one of the early mysteries of my childhood (there were — and are still — so many wonderful ones!) as to why pinking shears and the jazzy cuts they make across the fabrics they encounter. Now, I know, more or less.

I don’t know how far Eve and Adam got with their Eden inventory and filing system before their lease was up and the gate was shut behind them, but I suspect they left a few leaves unturned. And now that Jesus has slipped in and jimmied the lock open, it’s up to us to discover what’s under them and call them something for heaven’s sake.

Careful, though. When those early gardeners found out, you remember what a mess they got into.

May 9, 2005

Symbol

Ask somebody to define symbol and you’ll probably get all kinds of answers and illustrations except the most obvious symbol of all — words. We don’t often think of words and language as symbols.

The reason for this may be that words are more often spoken than written, heard than seen, and thus the notions to which they point, of which they are signs, are lost. Much of the occasional flap about burning flags, which are a kind of language, themselves, is the result of this illiteracy about symbols. It comes from an inability to understand a symbol as something that finds the meaning of itself beyond itself, whose presence is irrelevant, save to recall, once that relationship is established.

The kinds of religion that consider their written scriptures verbally infallible do a gross disservice to words. They are sub-religions. John Evangelist might well wonder at such a practice, having delivered himself of so profoundly beautiful an illustration of Word as symbol.

The scriptures are collections and combinations of words into the stories that the people of God strive to tell of themselves and their God and of how they’ve been faithful and unfaithful to that relationship. Life is story, and as story, is made up of symbols.

Story is portrait, not photograph, process, not product, continuing, not terminal. Story is “once upon a time,” and can be anytime, but ultimately has no time, like a river canoe trip which is more destiny than end. You never get behind when you are in such a process. It is like a portrait that is never finished, but only suspends a moment in life. Life is always now. So it is that gifts are always presents, not pasts, or futures (except maybe at a stock exchange).

Story as parable is instrumental to accomplishing a goal. Crises in story are like hinges on a door. The people, the places, the events are the occasions for the crises. Once we enter a space with “do you remember the time when?” the “time whens” start, and the search for identity begins.

Our ancestors came largely not as fortune seekers, but as identity seekers, identity maintainers, shapers, and for a sense of place. The crises in their search came at the intersections, the turning points. To seek fortune was to turn back on identity, and that is when the story stops.

When we read our scriptures, this is replicated in our own lives. They help us discover who we are and for whom we are called out.

May 6, 2005

Irony

Easter 7A 05.08.05 Jn 17.1-11

I’ve told this story before and on many occasions, but it’s frequently handy, and I rather like it. It’s about the way the Russians celebrate April Fool’s Day something like many other peoples of the world celebrate Mardi Gras — parties, parades, dancing in the streets, bizarre costumes — the zanier, the better.

I once caught a view of this holiday hooliganism on TV. The scene was in a financial district not unlike our own Wall Street. The camera zoomed in on a sign hung across the massive entrance doors of a tall building. The voice-over translated the sign: “Our Elevators Are Broken. Please Use The Ones Across The Street.”

This kind of irony is at the heart of the gospel, especially the gospel for today (Jn 17.1-11). It’s a spin on the old question about whether prayer is answered. It fools one because it’s foolish, not in the sense of wasteful or meaningless, but in the more profound sense that it’s ironic and thus reaches deeply into the senses of our humor.

Irony can be very strange and unnerving. It is nevertheless a profoundly and frustratingly pleasant dimension of humor. Some define it as an inconsistency in manners or in the arrangement of events. Some view it as a way to get the upper hand by smart-mouthing one’s way out of trouble. But the literati refine the definition to mean a marvelously subtle humor-become-painfully-exclusive simply by stating the obvious in such a way that mystifies everybody but the inner circle who claim, somehow, to get it. (But probably don’t.)

An illustration of this irony shows up in that conundrum scene of Jesus with his disciples gathered around him, asking him about parables. “To you,” he confides, “it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but for others, they are in parables so that seeing, they may not see, and hearing, they may not understand” (Lk 8.10). The Greek word for parables is “riddles” or “puzzles.” So Jesus says of his parables that they are riddles, and that they are riddles on purpose so that just when you think you’re getting it, you’re not, lest you sneak into the kingdom of God the easy way, by the back door.

Another way of putting this is to say that parables may not be used as crutches to create faith, but that they and all the other forms of humor and mystery and foolishness remain utter nonsense until they are seen and heard and understood through faith. Such, of course, is the very life blood of the good news we proclaim. Such vests us all in the comic apparel of those who willingly become fools for Christ. Being faithful and having a good sense of humor, indeed, a good sense of your own humor so that you can take a risk now and then, are not all that far apart.

John’s Gospel at this Eucharist this morning offers a part of what has been called Jesus’ great “high-priestly prayer” to God that the work he has done and is willing to die for and which he is about to release when he leaves, that this work and ministry be continued in the world. He asks God to give us — of all people — the same authority that God has given to him — the authority of truth, the authority of love, the authority of justice — that we might become one as he and his Father are one in order that through us, as it has been through him, the world might then know indeed — again, through us, through the church as his disciples — who is indeed in its midst.

This, of course, is the language of grace. The religious always recognize it. They often even claim it as their own as if they somehow define it in the creeds and liturgies. But only the faithful understand it. Only the faithful know it and know that it comes only from God.

Looking again at Jesus’ prayer, we remember that most prayer is not only directed to God, but expected to be answered by God. But not this time. Where’s the irony? Here’s the irony. To be sure, this great high-priestly prayer is offered to God, just as should be every prayer. But the answer this time depends not on God, but on us, on you and on me. Now, if you will, talk about irony, the irony of God who perhaps can be better known as the God of irony.

That God would leave so much in our hands, would so be willing to commission us, should not now at this late date surprise us. After all, over and over again, he illustrates himself as a shepherd, a reckless shepherd who would abandon ninety-nine nearsighted sheep to go after one. He appears as a vintner who would pay a full day’s wages to a grape picker who worked only half an hour at sundown. He allows his son to drop off for a nap on the fantail of a boat at sea during a hurricane. He even commissions an internal revenue agent named Matthew to take more interest in your salvation than in your income tax.

We are merely the current installment on that splendid wild and crazy ride down the kingdom road, the yellow brick road of irony.

An apocryphal story recounts some angels talking with Jesus. They ask what are his post-Ascension plans for commissioning someone to carry on his work. They ask him just who are to be his heirs, the ones who will tell the story. He answers, Well, I’ve called out a small community, where the women are all strong, the men are all good-looking, and the children are all above average. (That’s where Garrison Keillor got the idea.)

The angels fall into a respectful silence. Then one blurts out, “Is that all? What if they fail?” “Yes,” Jesus answers, “that’s all. I have no other plan.”

No other plan. Only the grandest plan of all. A loving community of reasonable people imagined into free being by God to be respectful of him and his creation, and, of course, imagined equally as free not so to be. A grandest plan of all and for which… God waits.

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine doing that yourself? A plan in which that God who lit the fuse for the Big Bang simply waits, waits for us to say “Yes.” Waits for us to become a community bound by love, not agreement, by covenant, not by canon law, by hope and faith, not by race and neighborhood and sex, by compassion and service, not by budgets, but by humility and even in conflict nourished by mutual respect, not by the simple merit of circumstance, and certainly not by orthodoxy, but simply by the grace of God and for those who move over, let go and let God.

Such is the language of grace. So let us not merely become proficient in that language, but let us come to understand it. Let us not be satisfied merely to be a religious people, but let us become a faithful people and dare to risk ourselves as Jesus’ only plan and ultimately — ironically — as the answer to his prayer.

May 5, 2005

Up

Ascension Day is as good a day as the next if not better to talk about string theory, mostly because I don’t really understand either one of them. But I do have an idea, if not the foggiest, at least foggy enough to confuse us both.

Brian Greene, the string theorist, is talking about science, of all things, as a metaphor. We churchers have been in the metaphor business all along, so we might at least give him an ear, even if few scientists ever much gave us one. He writes about the universe as “elegant.” If Genesis be correct, that’s pretty much what God thought about it all along.

Heaven, back when Jesus was in the flesh, was always “up.” That’s, of course, when we only had the three dimensions — up, down, and around — as about the only notion of space (which, remember, is now known as space-time) anybody could even think about, let alone understand. Now, the stringers suggest we might really have as many as eleven dimensions to fret over and maybe even a parallel universe “out” there. If so, that puts a whole new perspective on the Ascension, like, which way did he really go?

Well, that he went is what’s important, for he said his going was the condition for our getting the Spirit, and there wasn’t enough room for the both of them. We need the Spirit, he said, to get enough chutzpah to become a church, which we haven’t done all that well so far, and also to add the necessary dimension so we could have that puzzling doctrine. Trinity is really God’s business, anyway, even if we don’t understand that, either, and if that’s the way God chooses, it’s elegant enough for me.

Come to think about it, what if there’d been eleven dimensions back in Jesus’ space-time instead of only three? Whatever, just a thought to string this out a bit.

May 4, 2005

Word

John Evangelist, the writer, said that the Word became flesh, full of grace and truth. Toni Morrison, the writer, said that it is language that makes us human.

Even though it took a few centuries, the DNA people finally caught on. They take their intriguing double helices and make up a language with only four letters of the alphabet. It’s this word, they say, that when parsed a certain way for each of us becomes flesh, ours, and for a fringe benefit, makes us human. Further, and probably much to the chagrin of some, they now even claim that DNA shows us there’s no such thing as race.

Sure hope they leave sex alone, or else there won’t be anything left for us to make a fuss over. Like John suggested, we churchers would finally have to get on with the business of letting some light into the world through grace and truth and justice and love.

It might even please Jesus if we’d just leave sex to the fig leaves of our imaginations.