July 29, 2005

Care

I’ve a friend who runs a shuttle service for folk who can’t manage for themselves. It’s called “Mary & Martha.”

We keep liturgical track of those biblically famous sisters on every 29th of July. Martha is the symbol of the active life, Mary, the symbol of the contemplative, the one it’s fairly obvious that Jesus prefers, but surely doesn’t limit himself to. Neither does my friend, if the name of his service is any indicator. I don’t recall it happening all that often their being so closely associated in the same endeavor as all this suggests, but it’s quite appropriate in this instance that they are.

When it comes to loving your neighbor like the M&M transporters seem to do, both styles — care taking and caregiving — remind us of our fuller life and vocation. Indeed, when the sisters’ brother Lazarus died, their union in grief, their devotion and friendship, exemplifies fidelity and service. The gospels make no bones about the fact that the company of the both of them — and my friend’s, I suspect, as well — is the kind Jesus rather enjoys keeping.

July 28, 2005

Grace

Grace OoN 28vii05

“After centuries of handling and mishandling, most religious words have become so shopworn nobody’s much interested any more. Not so with grace, for some reason. Mysteriously, even derivatives like gracious and graceful still have some of the bloom left.

“Grace is something you can never get but only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.

“A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. Have you ever tried to love somebody?

“A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There’s nothing you have to do. There’s nothing you have to do. There’s nothing you have to do.

“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.”

The stories in this morning’s lections are about grace. Ezra’s report on the ingrates Moses led out of Egypt, how they worshipped a piece of golden hardware from the crafts fair and groused about the living and eating conditions and God took care of them anyway. That’s grace (Neh 9.16-20).

Paul’s lament to the Romans in his paean to the love of Christ always being around and accessible and our never being separated from it, not even by that pointless war over in the Middle East, that’s grace (Rms 8.35-39). Jesus’ grief over the brutal death of his friend John who baptized him and his desire to be alone about it. That’s grace. The people following him anyway without taking along any lunch. That’s grace. The little kid who’s mom had fixed him a snack and who anyway gave it up to the disciples, whether willingly or not, is not clear. That’s grace. Jesus’ patient compassion for others, poor planners that they were and even in his sorrow, that’s grace.

Jesus’ taking the loaves and fishes, blessing them, breaking them up, and sharing them is not only grace, it’s what we do every time we gather around this Table — take, bless, break, share — the very pattern of our lives whereby we become instruments of grace with an abundance left over and always more for the next time, that’s grace.

“There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it.

“Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift, too.” (all copy set off in quotes is from Frederick Buechner, “Wishful Thinking,” pp 33f, Harper & Row, 1973, without whom I am often helpless. Or hadn’t you noticed?)

July 27, 2005

Drapes

Our new Attorney General, I understand, took the drapes off the topless statue of the woman in the halls of justice. Maybe he moved the cameras around, as well, so that it wouldn’t appear that some of her anatomy was right over his shoulder like bothered his predecessor so much.

Maybe all this means that neither is he hung up on confining morality to sex, abortion, and gay marriage. Maybe it means he’s caught a glimpse of the vision that morality’s more about justice and peace and caring for the poor and oppressed. Maybe now he can even get over not being nominated to the Supremes and that maybe he’s found some other way to breast the trials and tribulations of his office.

Maybe. But given some of his old memos about Geneva and Guantanamo and his apparent lack of contrition, I’m not counting on it, drapes or no drapes.

July 26, 2005

Parents

When they started out, Joachim (aka Joseph) and Anne probably never much had in mind becoming the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

That aside, neither, I suspect, could they imagine having any part in an event that came to be known as the Immaculate Conception. (One of those notions, among others, about which seminarians, “in my day,” reveled in a superfluity of naughtiness.) Nevertheless, the church in its characteristic and considerably delayed wisdom decided they surely must have, and in 1854 proclaimed the dogma recognizing that Mary was conceived “free from all stain of original sin.”

The lesser feast today for Mary’s folks is one of those “fifteen minutes of fame” Andy Warhol touted. It is also one the few days I know about that’s set aside for parents, more or less the symbolic lot of the most of us standing in the shadow of above-average kids, which, if I’m not mistaken, includes us all.

`

July 25, 2005

James

Tradition has it that James, whose feast is kept today, was the first of the twelve to be martyred. The New Testament letter attributed to him, considering its plethora of hortatory imperatives, mostly takes the form of a preachment. In fact, it’s a style that continues to pay the rent for some, if the eminently successful and carefully coifed TV evangelists mean anything at all. 

With Peter and John, James was apparently on an inside track with Jesus, being chosen to witness both the Transfiguration and the agony in Gethsemane. Of course, that he slept through most of the best parts of both doesn’t commend him all that well.

He and Paul took conflicting spins on faith. For Paul, faith is the believer’s loyalty to the Christ, a way of life. For James, it’s mere assent to theological statements, pointless without works. Such perspectives remain very much alive today in all the self-styled  wrangle separating the sheep and the goats.

Martin Luther’s disdain for James’s reflections  preferred a Bible without him, casting his work off as an “epistle of straw.” On the other hand, maybe he’d have consented its being kept in the canon if only they had just translated “faith without works is dead” with “don’t let the grace grow under your feet.”

July 22, 2005

Magdalene

Mary Magdalene’s feast this year is stuck on a Friday over here in the hot and humid tag-end days of July. It’s almost as if the Kalendar Kids somewhere down in the distant past didn’t quite know what to do with her, but only knew they couldn’t do without her.

Neither can we. The apostle to the apostles-to-become got short shrift then and has been left out of their succession ever since. Such gospel irony always exposes this kind of pretense and shows us the understated persons who appear to be less than they are.

The hero on the other hand is the larger-than-life figure who appears to be more than the human condition will bear. The apostles did great things and laid a wall-to-wall carpet on the floor of our church’s history. But their treatment of the Magdalene was not one of them.

All of Jesus’ preaching about the kingdom is like this, the paradox that the extraordinary is like the ordinary, that it is a tale told through stories of the earth and earthy people, not through grandiosity and puffery.

We’d look a long way on the Way, you and I, before finding a better emblem of a life more like our own than the Magdalene. A life whose remembering is not mounted up and out of reach on the liturgical year’s promontories, but a life whose day is parked off in the shank of summer, a life that understood the sin, the forgiveness, the reconciliation, and the utter surprise by joy to which we all might well aspire.

July 20, 2005

Mercy

Of all the titles we human beings think up to separate and elevate ourselves, “justice” must be one of the most ludicrous. “Reverend,” of course, runs it a close second, but it’s only an adjective, if often a misplaced one, that sometimes requires “right” and “most” when and if folk need convincing and even when it’s wrong.

Justice, however, is another matter. We need it around to help keep us between the curbs, but if it were all there was, there’d not only be all hell to pay, but only all hell to pay. God is just, but God is also merciful, didn’t let it end that way, and that makes all the difference.

That the Supremes enjoy the high privilege of justifying life’s margins as they’re supposed to be constituted in this land and even have a title to go with it is okay by me and seems to have worked fairly well over the decades. It’s when their membership shifts every now and then like now, that I’d hope somebody would maybe just ask them what they think about mercy.

July 19, 2005

Practice

During the happy hour following the Eucharist Sunday, I  talked with a colleague about practicing on musical instruments. She’s a real musician, plays viola in the symphony. I play cornet in a jazz band. 

Putting aside that cornet and viola chops require vastly different kinds of attention, practicing is still practicing, usually altogether boring, alleviated only by watching TV, and unavoidably necessary. No less a worthy than the pianist Artur Rubenstein said that if he misses a day of practice, he knows it, if he misses two days, his friends know it, if he misses three days, the whole world knows it.

Even if they, too, have to keep at it, musicians and athletes know something that seems out of reach for most of the rest of us. For them, what most of us call work is play. On the other hand, for docs and lawyers, work is practice. Even if that’s not the most reassuring bit of information, I suppose it helps to understand why they call the rest of us patients.  

If there’s anything we churchers don’t need, of course, it’s more ambiguity (just cf the parables  and the evangelists insistence on allegorizing them). Hence, denominations, for example and after which we seem to lust, must be Satan’s alternative for how we can go about doing away with ambiguity. Nevertheless, all of us can always use more practice until one of these days, maybe we’ll get it right.

July 15, 2005

We

Pentecost  9/11A   Mt 13.24-30,36-43

Jesus said it’s not a good idea to separate the tares out from the wheat but to “let both grow together until the harvest… ” and then “tell the reapers, Gather the tares first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn” (Mt 13.29f).

It’s not an altogether comforting image. But it’s an accurate one. I was glad when the 1979 prayer book revision resumed using the first person plural for the Nicene Creed. “We believe,” not “I believe.” After all, this is a “we” religion, a wheat and tares religion that we profess. Not because of all those sayings like “there’s strength in numbers” and “united we stand,” but because Holy Spirit is God’s way of being collegial and rather God’s wish that we be  the same. 

The ambience of my new experience for the first time realizing a half century as a cleric lingers like an echo. And one of the things that keeps surfacing is how thoroughly collegial has been the experience. We do nothing alone save at our own peril and more than likely the peril of others, hence, the indispensability of mentors and all other sorts of companions, spouses, partners, communities, and examples. God bless and forgive them all. Will the fundies never learn that the Bible’s too big a dose to wrap just one mind around, and that it’s an ocean that floats many boats, not just a sauna or even a fountain of one’s own? Congregation means “gather together.”

Denominations, for example, are an affront to God and never, I suspect, what Jesus had in mind. For they imply, do they not, not only that a collegial mind means a common mind — which it does not — but also that we human beings are so smart and so holy that we’ve got it all figured out to the exclusion of those too dense for otherwise. It’s all rock and roll to us, the devil take the hindmost. 

This singleness of mind is what plagues the church sorely today. But the reality is — or was — that the church contains both good guys and bad guys. And there are those who would winnow it prematurely before God has a hand in it. 

For, you see, even the wheat and the tares are configured pretty much the same way, roots, stems, leaves, need for sunshine and rain. Depending on what part of the planet we’re on, one person’s weed is another person’s flower. In truth we are neither, we are the images of God’s creative imagination, God’s proliferous and ingenious imagination. We are the embodiment of God’s spiritual energy, rooted and nourished to become human.

May the church, then, be a garden in which God’s purpose, God’s plantings may become the resplendent sacraments, the parables of God’s presence. For finally, it is God, alone, who really knows a lily from a thistle.

July 14, 2005

Times

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” So goes the lead in Charles Dickens’s “Tale of Two Cities,” which, if I remember correctly, has something to do with the French Revolution.

For leads, it sure beats “It was a dark and stormy night… ” as well as most of the ones I strive for in getting a daily OoN off the launching pad. Further, it seems like a rather useful one for the keeping today of Bastille Day.

I realize that the Secretary of Defense might relegate such a holiday to Old Europe, especially if it’s French. On the other hand, I trust we not take too lightly the importance of revolutions as social cathartic, whether Gallic or American. They’re always an option and seem inevitable whenever a nation gets its priorities so distorted that the poor and the oppressed simply can’t — and won’t — take it any longer.

Happy Bastille Day citoyens.