August 5, 2005

Moxie

It all got started when in the late 1950s the Christian Century magazine ran a series for prominent clergy of all denominations asking them to write about how over time they’d changed their minds. Bishop James Pike was one of them. He wrote that he’d changed his mind about the literal historical Virgin Birth, that he no longer believed in it.

The article catapulted him into national prominence and a superfluity of speaking invitations. Not the least of the surprises his article provoked were 1) that so many people had ever even heard about the virgin birth as a matter of such importance and 2) that so many seemed to care at all, or at least thought maybe they should, but were not altogether sure why.

In the wake of all that, Pike could just walk into a room of his fellow bishops, and the keepers of the status quo among them would get nervous. He was asking questions publicly that surely more than a few of them wanted to ask, but didn’t have the moxie to let anybody know about it.

Naturally, as it was then once again becoming more our way of doing things, some wanted to try him for heresy. But the only benchmark they could find to hang a plumb line over was “The Faith of the Church,” volume three in the six-volume Episcopal Church’s Teaching Series, a book on the creeds that Pike, himself, had written with Norman Pittenger, professor of theology at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in the United States [than which there was nor is no whicher], (Seabury Press 1950 or so).

What his wannabe inquisitors either overlooked or intentionally avoided was a report of a 1922 Commission on Christian Doctrine appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. No less a worthy than William Temple (Archbishop of Canterbury 1942-45) had been chairman of that Commission whose report comes about as near as anything ever articulating an Anglican “system.”

In the Introduction to the report, Temple affirmed his own “wholehearted” acceptance of the Virgin Birth and the physical Resurrection, and wrote in sound Anglican comprehensiveness, “I fully recognize the position of those who sincerely affirm the reality of our Lord’s Incarnation without accepting one or both of these two events as actual historical occurrences, regarding the records rather as parables than as history, a presentation of spiritual truth in narrative form.”

At any rate, there was soon a run on that previously and generally coming-to-be ignored Church Teaching Series. Church school adult (and even teen) classes had never been so well attended. During his Lenten noonday preachment tour in our cathedral church, Pike met with the diocesan clergy. It became clear that many of us had been digging out old seminary notes and playing catch-up. A young priest asked the Bishop please to tell us what he was not going to believe in next so that we could do our homework in advance. In those days, folk, Anglican folk, that is, rather than run off halfcocked after some foreign primate, just rolled with the punches and welcomed all the excitement.

August 4, 2005

Walking

Pent 12/14A Mt 14.22-33

Once again, having fed all those thousands on such a slim budget, Jesus is needing some privacy. So he has the disciples shove off and go back across the sea.

Of course, as in every dime novel since, “it was a dark and stormy night.” When it got good and late and the waves were up and the wind was stiff and the boat was half way to the other shore, here comes Jesus. As if feeding all those folk didn’t seem enough grandstanding for one day, he chooses not to rent a boat or to swim in the water, but to walk on it. Peter may be terrified by all this like the story says, but seeming never at a loss for an inappropriate idea, tests Jesus. “Lord, if it is you (test # 1), bid me come to you on the water (test # 2).” “Come,” Jesus says. And sink, Peter does.

That winsome novelist and essayist Madeleine L’Engle once said that if we believe as we surely do that Jesus was fully human and could walk on water, then so can we walk on water. It’s only that we forget how.

I don’t like to think of us that way. I like to think of us as a remembering people. We remember every time we gather around this Table and celebrate Eucharist. We remember the Christ and we reaffirm the Christ in each of us and in all of us as a worshiping community. But I suppose we are, as well, a forgetting people, and we forget a lot more than just how to walk on water. Of course, we should not overlook that we can be deeply grateful that when Jesus said “do this in remembrance of me,” he was at supper and not at sea.

Maybe L’Engle is right. But if she is, our forgetting how to walk on water, as exciting as such a skill may be, is but a symptom of something far greater. It means, in effect, that we’ve also forgot how to be human. After all, if Jesus is God’s prototype of what it means to be human, and he could do all these logic- and science- and gravity-defying things, then we’ve forgot a tolerable lot. But then there’s not much sense in our anguishing over that when there’s something else that we’ve apparently forgot, and that’s much nearer at hand and altogether more doable in God’s human scheme of things. And the church’s spiritual rehab program is the place to go about doing it.

“Spiritual rehab” is probably a misnomer. “Human rehab” may be better. For with God’s imaginative creation of us, we are already spiritual beings at the outset. But given that kind of moxie by God, we are to become human beings in the manner of God’s great, sometimes shaky, plan of incarnation.

But how? By choosing to be, that’s how. Here we are, charged with spiritual energies beyond our most fanciful conception. And here we are, suited out in all this human hardware whose very first gift as God imagines us is the freedom to choose. Our tradition tells us that to be created in the image of God means we are free to choose to be loving, to be reasonable, to be creative, and to live in harmony with God and all God’s creation. And God, in the giving, tells us also that we are also free to dump the whole gift down the trash chute. That we end up making a mix of all these favors and privileges is what makes the party so exciting.

But there it is and no less. Not a one of us who has ever tried these freedoms to love and create, to be reasonable, to be good stewards of God and God’s creation could ever claim that such an owner’s manual and job description doesn’t turn out altogether quite well. On the other hand, the evidence not only suggests, but proves on the whole how unstewardly we are at all levels of our society.

We’re making a mess of the environment and giving everybody asthma. Millions live below the poverty level while millions more benefit on their backs from irresponsible taxation and corporate welfare. We restrict morality to the bedroom and exempt it from the Pentagon’s war room.

All this freedom to choose started out and was quickly thwarted in Eden. It was redeemed in Gethsemane, once again reenvigorated at Pentecost, and set forth on the Way. When we get it all straight and get our humanity more or less up to speed, then maybe we can take a shot at that water again and show old Peter a thing or two.

August 3, 2005

Gardening

It’s a modest drawing with no caption. It shows a grave site, the tombstone reading something like ECUSA RIP. A slender stalk labeled “Network” grows out of the grave.

One of my fellow presbyters received it in the mail recently. It was sent anonymously. She was mad enough to beat hell, but then, after all, that is our common vocation. And if any one of us could do that with one hand tied, etc, she could.

Old Presiding Bishop St John Tucker often praised evil for its consistence and predictability. It never occurred to me that Screwtape might also be interested in gardening.

August 2, 2005

Sabbath

In all the current flurry about orthodoxy being my doxy and heterodoxy being yours, I’m mindful of Mark’s little story about Jesus and his cronies walking the grainfields one sabbath and not being above copping an ear or two (Mk 2.23-28).

The Pharisees got their phylacteries in a twist over this unseemly behavior in a manner not unlike their modern day counterparts’ rigorous and frequent reminders of the errancy of the rest of us. Jesus reminded them that even the Archbishop of Canterbury when he was thirsty would probably not be above stopping by the sacristy for a quaff of the grape. Well, not really, but actually, he told of how old King David ate the bread of the Presence and passed it around to others and how that didn’t seem to disturb God from whatever she was about at the time.

To agitate further those keepers of all they thought holy, he added a zinger, and said, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath; so the Son of man is lord even of the sabbath.” Such is always a hard learn for those of us rather more caught up in the propriety of ecclesiastical jots and tittles than in things like hunger and maybe even poverty or justice.

August 1, 2005

Apology

Apologetics, they say, has naught to do with saying you’re sorry. Of course, neither does saying you’re sorry have much to do if anything with regret, rather is it, I suppose, an adjectival form of sore.

The current miasma in our diocese is caught up in the throes of a bishop search to elect in March 2006. Two members of the Search Committee of fifteen (all appointed by the currently enthroned [sic] bishop) visited our parish yesterday. Whether they anticipated it or not, I’m not sure, but they were invited to apologize for themselves, that is, to make a report on and a rational defense of their work to date.

Some twenty of us met with them following the Eucharist. It was an eye-opening jolly old time. I’ve heard of Come-to-Jesus meetings, and now I’ve been to one. I suspect that when the bishopers left, they may have been sorry they came.