July 13, 2005
Way
When Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” the only answer he got was a silent one-on-one with the Word made flesh. Thomas got precious little more, but more than enough, when he asked Jesus to show him the way.
Incarnation, like democracy, is hardly the easiest access to the way, the truth, and the life, but it’s the nearest we’ve got or ever will have in this life while the glass is still dark. Trouble is, we’re always trying to improve on it with things like creeds and liturgies, even by flirting with that risky idolatry that forgets about Jesus and dares, instead, to call the Bible the Word of God.
The current fuss about all this shows up in that resurgent oxymoron we call “Anglican orthodoxy,” as if to embrace it would answer Pilate and Thomas once and for all. If they’d just had a handy Lambeth Quadrilateral or maybe even the Windsor Report.
Poor babies. If only they’d known. If only we’d been there to tell them.
July 12, 2005
Nostalgia
H L Mencken said that an archbishop is a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Jesus. I was ordained a priest fifty years ago today, and I never made it, either. It’s the only thing I have in common with Jesus.
It’s easy to get all maudlin on an occasion like this and just remember the good stuff like the time in between vestry meetings, but I’ll resist that. I can say, though, there’s nothing else I’d rather have done (unless maybe play trumpet with Count Basie). Society is generally good to clergy, even if frequently indifferent, though I suspect the old ministerial discounts we used to get may have been largely to keep our mouths shut and our pay minimal.
One seems always expected to give advice at a time like this, though I really don’t know why. I never listened to it much myself. Anyhow, there’s a lot in the Bible and its morality about justice and caring for the poor that God wouldn’t want you to miss. So before you get too enamored of the authority of primates and their apparent obsession with sex, remember old Mencken, and get yourself a life.
July 11, 2005
Influence
It is common knowledge that whatever the recruitment enticements, we’re facing a military manpower meltdown. The fact often gets people talking about, dare I mention it, The Draft. Yet, even the slightest hint of nationwide conscription lurking ever so faintly behind the usual curtain of denial can drive elected officials bananas.
Somebody asked in an op-ed piece in the NY Times why our president, with all his increasingly vacuous “stay the course,” but keep-on-shopping clarion, doesn’t broaden his message to encourage young Americans to serve in all areas where their country needs them and also for more of us of all ages to get serious about facing sacrifices. I wondered why not, myself, remembering his proud and unhesitating boasts and encouragement that any “C” student can become president of the United States. (Whether or not that increased college enrollment, it, for sure, discouraged a lot of faculty working hard to inspire a civil curiosity for learning among their students.)
On the other hand, the steady Iraqian depletion of such military resources as the National Guard obviously makes it now no longer so comfortably attractive a berth as perhaps once it was. Little wonder the president can’t as well so freely recommend that route as a way, perhaps, to become Commander-in-Chief.
July 8, 2005
Tickets
Pentecost 8/10A [Mt 13.1-9,18-23]
The wolf at his door and only a few steps ahead of the sheriff, a man finally resorted to prayer. He plead with God to relieve his severe poverty and perhaps if God would intercede that he might win the local lottery and turn his fortune around. At first, he prayed as often as it occurred to him which, of course, was a lot, then, with a bit more discipline. But nothing seemed to work.
Finally, he went prostrate before the parish high altar daily from dawn to dusk. The lottery drawings made their cycles, but he never won. Finally, and at his wit’s end with desperation, he literally screamed out for mercy. Quietly, gently, a soft, but stern voice came to him. “Well, you might consider getting up and maybe buying a ticket?”
The Parable of the Sower reminds me of the importunate guy and the lottery, because it — and especially the seeds — reminds me of the grace of God. Like that grace, neither do those seeds discriminate. Like that grace, they land wherever. Like that grace, they take good root only where faith receives them. Like that grace, it’s rather pointless if you don’t buy a ticket.
God sows grace. God sows grace wastefully, which is to say, abundantly. Whether it goes anywhere, puts down roots, puts up leaves, blooms, bears fruit and nourishment, is not altogether a matter of chance. It’s a matter of cooperation.
To be human, we believe, is to be created in the image of God. To be created in the image of God is to be free to choose. To be truly free to choose is to be free not to choose.
Reinhold Niebuhr’s so-called serenity prayer catches the same theme for it is a prayer about change and about the choices change always demands. It’s not a prayer just about playing it cool, and it’s not just about courage, about grace under pressure, but about the good common horse sense it takes to know the difference. It’s about getting up, going out, and buying a ticket.
July 7, 2005
Quirk
My old friend, colleague, and sometime mentor, Canon P D Quirk, called the other day and before I could hardly say hello, asked, “Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that our government can track a cow born in Canada almost three years ago right to the stall where she sleeps in the state of Washington and track her calves right to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country? Maybe we should give them all a cow.”
Hardly taking a breath, he said, “They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don’t we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it’s worked for over 200 years, and we’re not using it anymore.”
I was about to agree, when he asked, “Do you know the real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a Courthouse? You can’t post Thou Shalt Not Steal, Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery, and Thou Shall Not Bear False Witness in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians! It creates a hostile work environment!”
When he finally ended with a quote from George Carlin, I knew he was not only enjoying his retirement, but had expanded his interests, as well. “Boy,” he said Carlin said, “I feel a lot safer now that Martha Stewart’s behind bars. O J Simpson and Kobe Bryant are still walking around; Osama Bin Laden too, but they take the one woman in America willing to cook, clean, and work in the yard, and haul her off to jail.”
Before hanging up, he asked if I was still writing the foolishness with the name that sounded like a mantra. What could I say?
July 6, 2005
Things
Things change.
The Lambeth Walk used to be a walking dance done in a jaunty, strutting fashion. It was an old English step performed in the Limehouse district of London and danced to the song “Doing the Lambeth Walk.” This dance was introduced into the United States about 1937.
Not far away in time, guys were using the Windsor report as a crib sheet for the way to tie one’s tie after Edward, the Duke of Windsor, who ran off with Wally, the Duchess of Simpson, who tied his knot royally and, though a commoner, is of no known relation to the television series that bears her family’s name.
Staying with the era, “The Road to Singapore” is a 1940 movie starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour. Quite a few years later, the same road was taken by a couple of wannabe bishops who gottobe after their fashion and in their way and then stirred up a bunch. The road’s still open, but not nearly so full of whimsy as when Hope and Crosby were chasing Lamour.
“Network” was another movie in which a television personality said he was “mad as hell” about the state of affairs, then shot himself on live camera, but not before he advised everybody to throw their TV sets out the window, which, of course, they did.
Things not only change, they get different. People sure seem more serious.
July 4, 2005
Interdependence
Hebrew and Christian scriptures record two problems about patriotism as always having plagued the People of God. One is to become so conformed to a culture and its ways so as to merge the two, rather than bringing the culture into the ways of God. The other is through blind denial and grandiosity to allow the rule of God to be replaced by the rule of the State.
We Christians are believers in incarnation, and it is thus not always easy to separate the issues from the people or the symbols who embody them. Patriotism — about which these days some of us hear perhaps more than enough and others never quite enough — is one of those very important issues which we incarnate and which is not all that easy to separate from the persons or the symbols that embrace it.
Few of us, I suspect, would deny that we are patriots. We may find it easier to say what that does not mean than to say what it does mean. One thing we all have in common on the subject, however, is what is called the Declaration of Independence. It seems to me always useful — especially this time of year and in these perilous times — to read it over again thoughtfully as Christians, and perhaps to discover anew what our founders had in mind when they undertook this great American political experiment by which they told us what patriotism meant for them.
On the celebration of our nation’s birthday each year, National Public Radio broadcasts a reading of the Declaration of Independence. Their announcers, reporters, analysts, and essayists each follow in turn reading a short, self-contained passage.
The familiar voices are nameless, and one can only guess whose they are. The anonymity seems not only tantalizing, but somehow appropriate, as well. I like to imagine our founders as they wrote and shaped this great proclamation maybe having read it aloud similarly to one another as they sought to get the its feel and the rhythm, and a sense of its power and authority.
Hearing it in this way even more convinces me that, for whatever and surely well-intended reason, the document seems strangely misnamed. I believe it might better have been called a Declaration of Interdependence, instead. It may be well for us to imagine it that way in these difficult times of another, newer, but not all that different national crisis.
Clearly and well, of course, the Declaration establishes us an autonomous nation among all the world’s geopolitical states. That, in itself, is daring enough. But it continues uniquely and refreshingly to proclaim a new and radical political relationship not only with its own citizenry, but also boldly and courageously with all the earth’s peoples who care to join in such a venture. It takes an incarnational view of the very nature of human being and of the body politic as itself a faithful way to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.
But strangely in that light, we live in a time when independence has come to mean for some a license to run unilaterally amok not only over our own creative system of checks and balances, but, as well, our relationship to whole regions and nations across this entire planet. We seem thus to be abandoning the very corporate nature of the stewardship which this founding document affirmed and for which it called.
True patriotism is not, I believe, some blind, unquestioning loyalty which is no loyalty at all, but an out-and-out denial of responsible citizenship. Rather is true patriotism to love our country enough to see that in a nuclear age it is not going to survive unless the world survives. True patriots are no longer champions of democracy, communism, or anything like that, but champions of the human race. It is not the homeland that they feel called on to defend at any cost, but, as we say in the Eucharist Prayer, “this fragile earth, our island home.”
If in the interests of making sure that we don’t blow ourselves off the map once and for all, we end up relinquishing a measure of national sovereignty to some international body, so much the worse for national sovereignty. For there is only one Sovereignty that matters ultimately, and it is of quite another sort altogether.
On the other hand, we might just celebrate the occasion more or less like King George III who entered into his journal on July 4, 1776, “Nothing of any importance or consequence took place today.”
Memo to: Frederick Buechner, thanks for your notes on patriotism in “Whistling in the Dark,” Harper & Row, 1988, pp 92f.
July 2, 2005
Confidence
Pentecost 7/9A
We’ve got law on our minds. With resignations and presidential appointments at the very highest levels of the judiciary all over the press and getting more attention than usual, we can’t help but have law on our minds.
Nobody is above it, we insist. But neither do many seem to be beneath it, not when it comes to maneuvering it to their own ends. The judiciary ranks on par with the executive and the legislative, the law makers and the law enforcers, but when push comes to shove, the courts are our system to set them all straight . Even they are not above the very laws they themselves are supposed to make and implement.
This is the American political experiment. It’s the greatest gift we can give to the rest of the world. We give it best, of course, by making it work for us, by show and tell, not by breaking it and wrangling over it and being underhanded with it. Even so, it remains a major source of our confidence.
The proper lections this Sunday are about that confidence. The prophet Zechariah cautions Israel about placing its weary confidence in temporal rulers (Zech 9.9-12). With a strange irony, he even calls them “prisoners of hope.” Paul warns Jewish Christians about placing absolute confidence in the law (Rms 7.15-25a). Even its most careful keeping hardly liberates us from sin, he counsels.
Matthew goes into detail and reminds us not to romanticize the historical Jesus (Mt 11.25-30). If the law veiled this with the reverence of ordinances and stipulations to protect our frailty, the incarnation of the Word tore the veil away once and for all.
Further, the confidence of the faithful community is of a kind that binds friends together, no longer the kind that binds lawgiver and subject together. Such confidence finds wisdom in loving, not killing one’s enemy. The faithful community’s confidence is robust from within and based on the Christ. It makes nothing relative but the irrelevant. Jesus turns the common tradition of the Judaic yoke of legalism through his own offer of manageable gentleness. “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Where, then, is our confidence? Many claim us to be a Christian nation. As many more confirm that our religious pluralism is the better source of our strength. We pledge to be one nation under God, but even that is questioned by our judiciary. We’re never quite sure where prayer and the location of the Ten Commandments is really appropriate.
As Christians, where, then, must be our confidence? If, as Jesus so calls us, we place our confidence in him and accept the offer of his gentle yoke, we then become agents and servants of his love for God and neighbor and self, implementing that in our lives. For better or worse, we live in this land and in such a system by God’s grace and pledge the kind of citizenship to help make it work. Might the law in some strange irony incarnate grace, be motivated by the Great Commandment as it takes shape in justice and peace for all? Might that be our mandate? Might that be where we place our confidence?
Understandably, we’ve got law on our minds. Yet might we join the prophet Jeremiah and welcome God to put that law on the tablets of our hearts, as well?