September 30, 2005
Road
Scott Peck was a child of an “unchurched” family. He once told that on his one and only trip to Sunday School as a little boy he was handed a picture to color. It was of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac. He never went back.
He named his first book, “The Road Less Traveled.” He said it was not after Robert Frost. In all likelihood, it could have been after himself. Its first paragraph of only one sentence reads, “Life is difficult.” Since 1978, it has sold more than six million copies in North America and has been translated into twenty languages. By the mid-1990s, the book had made 258 appearances on The New York Times Magazine weekly bestseller list before it was removed by the editors in self-defense.
He styled himself as a cigarette-smoking, martini-drinking evangelist and frequently said that the more he learned, the less he knew. He asked a Methodist clergy friend to read the first draft of the Road only to be told that it was all in the New Testament. So he read the New Testament, called his friend, said he wanted to be baptized. Subsequently, he was, by that same Methodist parson using the Book of Common Prayer, in the chapel of an upstate New York convent surrounded by the Episcopal nuns for whom he was a consulting psychiatrist.
Shortly after the book began to hit the charts, I served as one of many seminar leaders for his lecture venture at the Kanuga Center in North Carolina. A record crowd of over four hundred swelled the auditorium to hear him. At the opening session, his first words were, “Faith is a bitch.” Then he began to demonstrate what he meant.
When he said that the only way to peace in the world is for the US&A to surrender its extensive armaments unilaterally into the hands of the United Nations, a whole gang of folk got up and left. Many of them, we learned later, were retired military. As a navy WWII veteran, I joined all the rest who gave him a standing ovation.
On the last night of that conference, we all queued up and marched through the Center, Peck in the lead, me on trumpet playing and everybody singing, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Scott Peck died a few days ago. He was surely still on that same Road, marching, but now joined by millions.
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September 29, 2005
Greed
Pentecost 20/22A
This is the third Sunday in a row that the gospel could as well have begun with something like, “Meanwhile, back at the vineyard… ” (Mt 21.33-43) For those New Testament times, the vineyard was as good a living metaphor as any. Trouble is, in our times we’ve not a lot of familiarity with vineyards, only with their fruit, preferably and properly fermented.
But you know, the parable Jesus tells is really not about vineyards. It’s about greed, and being about greed, it’s inevitably about violence. And we’re all very familiar with those twin evils — not only in his time, but for sure in ours, for they go hand in hand.
The householder sends his servants twice to check with his sharecroppers about the status of his grapes. They not only don’t report, they throw out his emissaries and kill them. So he sends his son. Out of their absurd overconfidence and misjudgment, they kill the son in the strange reasoning that this way, they can take possession of the entire inheritance.
It doesn’t take a lot of reflection to see how this story is an omen that parallels the whole sweep of how God first sent the prophets into the world and then sent her son, only to have him killed. But as powerful as is that, we can’t just leave it there.
Today, it may be more like this. Remember the scene in the l987 movie “Wall Street” where the protagonist Michael Gekko, CEO of a major brokerage house, is addressing the board and stockholders of a large paper company. After berating them at some length about their careless and malicious management of money, he concludes:
“I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
“Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed — you mark my words — will not only save (your paper company), but (as well) that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”
It is a shocking scene. The suspense is palpable, even in the theatre audience. It is as if the character Gekko has actually turned and indicted us. Perhaps it is the last place we’d ever expect to feel like we’d encountered an Old Testament prophet face to face. For not a one of us has not experienced at least a moment of greed or been the victim of someone else’s greed. Of the seven deadly sins, greed has a most impressive staying power and is not easily forgot.
It’s not an unfamiliar pattern. But it’s no longer grapes. It’s oil. It’s not vineyards. It’s refineries and SUVs and road rage. It’s not farming. It’s international chaos and poverty and genocide and corporate welfare resenting care for the poor. But at the seat of it all, it’s still greed, greed issuing in violence and what is more so often in some politicized cover-up.
George Orwell talked about this in his famous essay on “Politics and the English Language.” He spoke of how we use language to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Perhaps it might be something like this:
An invasion is engineered on false pretenses, hundreds of thousands are killed or maimed, no one is safe in the streets. It’s called “collateral damage.” Homes, hospitals, and mosques are blown up. Water, electricity, and other services are cut off. Civil society is destroyed. Half the population is left without any means of livelihood. Detainees are tortured and humiliated. Prisons are filled with people picked up off the streets. Cities are targeted and destroyed. And the insurgency is blamed on outside elements. All this is called “bringing democracy to Iraq.”
“Political language,” Orwell said, ” — and with variations this is true of all political parties — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.”
And so here we are. In the midst of all these givens that are in their way embarrassingly true of the church as well as the state. Somehow, we’re to find a way to contend with and incarnate the covenant we made at our baptism. It has never been easy to be a follower of that Way — the Way, that lovely word the early disciples of Jesus used to describe themselves. After all, greed for power coupled with violence crucified their Lord and likely could easily crucify them. He made that very clear for them and for us, for as we are signed with the cross do we take up the cross.
Let us recover Jesus’ metaphor of the vineyard for a moment. I confess it would be difficult to find a better one. For the irony of our time is that we are the sharecroppers and also the servants sent by the householder. And we are the his heir. We not only bear the Christ, but are asked to seek and serve the Christ in others. Meanwhile, back at the vineyard.
Note: Thanks to George Hunsinger of Princeton Theological Seminary for an idea or two herein.
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September 28, 2005
Poor
It’s been a while since I’ve run across the old notion that the poor are poor because they choose to be. But I recently got an e-mail that somebody had enough rancor to send and not to sign making that very claim.
The contention is that the poor are poor because they’re lazy and don’t take advantage of all the “opportunities” offered by our society, that they just expect to live on the dole from Uncle Sugar. It’s usually the affluent who make these pronouncements all the while they’re enjoying the same dole at another level and at the expense of the poor in the form of major tax cuts and dodges and welfare for their corporations.
I never quite understood why Jesus said we always have the poor with us until I remembered that he was not only one of them, but also one with them. Maybe the poor, willing or not, are called by God to remind us that her beloved son in whom she is well pleased is also always with us.
That same son did suggest, as well, that whatever we do unto the least of these, we also do unto him. And that however we judge them and presume their motives, so, indeed, do we judge him and all the while call ourselves Christians.
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to Katrina or Rita Relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
September 27, 2005
Forever
Humor, of course, is more than mere standup comedy, as important as that often is. For the difference between humor and comedy is the difference between the one that lasts forever and the one that evaporates as soon as it hits the air. It’s the difference, of course, between the ironic and the simply ludicrous.
Life’s deep mysteries keep company with such irony, for one of those mysteries is how so often life turns out to mean the very opposite of what it seems and requires of us special attention and insight to risk that discovery. Jesus taught this repeatedly in parables, those riddles that seem always so wry and so often laced with subtle humor. And the remarkable thing is that he did so never to create faith, but to call forth faith as the only way to discover their meaning. For faith, like love can come only from a deep sense of ourselves and of our own humanity.
Such humor reminds us that sooner or later at one time or another everybody is exhausted, wicked, afraid, frustrated, and desperately alone, even especially, perhaps, as when following St Paul’s admonition to be a “fool for Christ.” This is humor’s perspective and restorative power, its healing energy over life’s menaces, and ultimately, its comfort and strength.
It unites us with ourselves, our neighbor, and with the awesome roots of our beginnings, our purpose and destiny, nourishing our love and challenging our fear. Above all, it awakens our imaginations, the very medium through which love works its mysteries.
Nothing, indeed, can separate us from this presence of God in Christ in one another and in ourselves, especially among the poor whom he loved and cared for so deeply.
On the other hand, when our awareness of this sometimes fades, it is well, as Barney Fife might agree, that God raises up the trickster in our midst, the buffoon, the miscreant who lives in us all and allows us to laugh at evil and, as well, at ourselves, especially at ourselves. For in the seal of the cross at baptism we are marked as Christ’s own forever. Just what part of ‘forever’ is so hard to understand?
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September 26, 2005
Listen
I spent an hour and a half the other day in a soundproof room surrounded by fancy electronic stuff all designed and maneuvered under the skilled hands of a doctor of audiology. My hearing, or lack of it, was the occasion for our meeting.
The audiologist didn’t use earphones, but squirmy and irritating little gizmos stuck in each of my ears inflated to keep out extraneous noise. He sat in an adjacent room looking at me through a glass darkly and started covering his mouth when he suspected I was reading his lips. To my surprise, I was, and did, trying to get a leg up on the tests.
My problem turned out to be high frequency deficiency in both ears, the kind that turns cocktail party conversation into white noise. Of course, cocktails can do the same thing, but I couldn’t blame it on that anymore and still maintain my friendship with Bill W.
My graphs showed normal conversation volumes to be acceptable. And though a “digital hearing instrument” (”hearing aid” is apparently no longer PC) might enhance that somewhat, it was left up to me. My vanity was charmed for a moment when I was told that the recommended “instrument” was the same kind musicians use, especially brass players with our usual accompanying tinnitus. The literature said it also “addresses common wearer frustrations, such as problems with the sound of your own voice.” As that’s a pleasure enjoyed by most of us preachers, I sure don’t want anything to impede that.
So all things considered, including the price and the fact that Medicare considers such aids “cosmetic” and refuses to pay, I decided to take CP’s advice (she’d encouraged me to take the tests in the first place), stop worrying about hearing, and start listening. Actually, if I remember correctly, that was more or less the gist of Pastoral Theology 101 back in my seminary days.
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September 23, 2005
Act
We’re mighty quick with the theology when the earth moves. All the sudden, we drag the Bible down off the shelf, dust it off, lay it out as a kind of yard stick, then describe Big Mother wind and rain as of “biblical proportions.” We relegate everything we can’t do anything about to an “act of God.” And then we really hunker down — “All we can do now is pray.”
The insurance companies are around, one might think, to insure. They do, of course. At times like these, they, too, turn to God, and assure us that just because they cover hurricanes, doesn’t mean they cover floods, or vice-versa-read-the-fine-print. As if there’s ever been one without the other.
Interesting how we defer the bad stuff to the Almighty. Maybe it’s because it’s the only time we are forced to concede that God is all mighty. But if Atlas’s shrugging really is an “act” of God, that is, God’s choice, then what’s the use in praying? Do we think God’s going to change her mind?
But then maybe God’s just trying to remind us that the whole Big Shebang — earth moving and all — is an act of God, and that once we get that biblical notion straight, prayer — and especially stewardship — might begin to make some sense, after all.
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to Katrina Relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
September 22, 2005
Race
Pentecost 19/21A (Mt 21.28-32)
A scene in an old Clark Gable movie shows him seated at a shoeshine stand getting a shine. The lad shining his shoes comments idly, “Great day for the race.” Gable, wondering if he’d missed a turn at the track, anxiously asks, “What race?” The lad answers, “The human race.”
Our vision, our understanding depend so very much on our perspectives. The two sons in Jesus’ parable were asked by their father to work in the vineyard. One said he would and didn’t, and the other said he wouldn’t and did. This, like a lot of Jesus’ parables, beg an explanation that he doesn’t always give. When he does, it’s rarely the one we either want or expect.
So Jesus never said this was a parable of the kingdom until he elaborates. From a parable about two sons, Jesus segués to, “The tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” He’s talking to churchers, and he says that largely about the kind of folk you don’t often see in their midst, the kind you’d never expect to do the will of God, and he says that in their way, they do it anyway.
Then Jesus reminds his audience that they’ve already heard all this from John, the Baptiser, and how they didn’t listen when he’d said it plain as day. Then he reminds them again that the last people they’d ever expect could find John’s “way of righteousness” are the IRS middle management guy and the streetwalkers. They “go into the kingdom God,” for they could never enter it unless they recognized it. They repent. They believe. It might be called “redemptive redundancy.”
It’s what we expect to see, what we look for, that without pausing to think, colors our perceptions. It’s a common communication mistake. We hear about the race, and one thinks about horses while the other thinks about humans.
Jesus’ story is about such presumptions and intentions. Neither a church nor a nation will get very far on such a basis. We cannot and we dare not presume what a religious vocabulary or a flag lapel pin or a patriot act alone means apart from the substance of it. Merely claiming to be a compassionate conservative will never reveal so much about caring or conserving as truly being and doing.
The kingdom of God and its voting citizens are probably always a surprise. For it’s not a place. It’s a companionship. The real litmus test for it is that wherever the brokenness of the world is being healed, there is present the kingdom of God. Least of all may that healing have any discernible religious labels. It could be secular to the core. One way Jesus put it is rather like this, “Wherever you did it unto one of the least of these, you did it unto me.”
In the kingdom of God, it is always a great day for the race.
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to Katrina Relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
September 21, 2005
Nostalgia
Not many alumni, I suspect, have the rare experience of being the only surviving member of their school’s founding class. That my seminary over in Texas and I do and a buck will get you a cup of coffee.
Sometimes I feel about ETSS and the students, staff, and faculty there like they’re some distant progeny with only a faint family resemblance that I’d like to get to know better and probably never will. Even so, that doesn’t diminish my considerable pride in their accomplishments preparing church leaders over these past fifty years.
I spent a couple of weeks there last fall having graciously been invited to be a visiting fellow. That really got the vibes going again big time. I even entertained the fantasy that I could maybe have a more enduring part of its life than just an occasional visit. I wanted to teach that homiletics and standup comedy have a lot in common, but couldn’t figure out how to stretch that over a whole semester or ever sell anybody on such a silly idea. Anyhow, both the feeling and the possibility if ever there was one are pretty much over by how.
Our founder, the great bishop John Hines, and my classmates from the mid-fifties when it all got started would probably be as surprised as I am that I’m still around and that they’re all gone. That I was the youngest is only happenstance and coincidence. They became good, hardworking priests, Big John, himself, became the Presiding Bishop, and they all left their furrows in the vineyard and their seminary proud. I miss them and their collegiality more now than ever I realized it at the time. I’d like to think I am faithful to it, but one never knows those things.
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to Katrina Relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
September 20, 2005
Under
Some parents whom one must presume are well-meaning are trying once again to impress a judge to get the nation out from under God in the Pledge of Allegiance. They seem to be as alarmed as they might be if the Pledge were somehow X-rated.
Whatever, I say it’s high time, and beside that, the phrase is unnecessarily and historically redundant. Anybody who’d bother to look would see that our founders had already been there and done that when they repeatedly made clear in the Declaration of Independence what they were up to and who they were under. It’s surely no secret that they kept referring their actions to our “Creator” and to “Nature’s God” and to their reliance on “Divine Providence.”
Besides, the phrase never was in the Pledge in the first place until back in the 1950s when old Joe McCarthy intimidated us into thinking we were probably communists and unpatriotic if we didn’t put it there. Maybe we really ought to take it out. God’s surely got her hands full already.
Of course, those well-meaning parents might just take after Luis Bunuel, the Spanish film director, who, when asked about his religious views, said, “I am an atheist,” and then added, “Thank God.”
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to Katrina Relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
September 17, 2005
Socks
Incidental Intelligence, British variety:
Small producers often invent weird names for their foods as a way to distinguish them. There’s now a cheese called “Stinking Bishop” made in Dymock, on the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire border, UK. Its name comes from a variety of pear cider whose alcoholic product is used to wash the curds and give the cheese a unique flavor.
One writer says that the cheese has a “sticky yellow-orange rind and smells of old socks.” I wonder if they’re purple?
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to Katrina Relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchuyrch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]