October 18, 2005
Decrees
“Life commandments” are what some call those subtle little decrees ingested from the ambiance of the times that one never forgets and that create a deja vu almost every time one is mentioned. Among them for me is the wretched memory of my Depression-Era family when we had to make sure the cap was always back on the toothpaste before we brushed for fear of wasting any. Wretched, because it simply has never gone away.
I studied architectural drawing in high school and learned that writing in block letters instead of script is lettering, that print and printing are words to be reserved for Johann Gutenberg and linotypes or whatever. A scale should never be called a ruler. Straightedges and triangles are precisely and only that, expressly for drawing straight lines. The course was also my introduction to the French curve, a flat drafting instrument with curved edges and several scroll-shaped cutouts, used as a guide when constructing graphs or making engineering drawings and not what its name might have suggested to high school boys.
Rules of grammar sort of fall into a similar grouping like discerning when to use “few” or “less,” or when to hyphenate. People in general seem less and less to pay any attention, and fewer and fewer seem to at all nowadays. Furthermore, ending a sentence with a preposition is something even the style books seem to have given up fretting about (sic).
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October 17, 2005
Stew
A theologian friend of mine says that the Windsor Report which has so many of us Anglican Christians in such a stew is captive to a colonial paradigm.
He means, I think, like wherein power is exercised from the “center” and local variation is seen as either a matter of indifference or as a threat to be contained. The right wing in the US and in the UK has been very good at capitalizing on colonial resentment and painting the US as a neo-imperial power, which in some ways, of course, we are.
The progressive elements in our Church, of course, are the ones who are most opposed to imperialism and the right wingers are the most in favor of it. Somewhere back there in these lapses in the apses there are people who still make smug jokes about the poor. There’s also a Great Commandment about love, and a Great Commission about some sort of endeavor that’s supposed to pick up that theme and follow.
And Jesus wept.
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October 14, 2005
Wind
Jim Wallis, an Old Testament prophet in Lamb’s clothing, came to our town last evening to talk about God’s politics possibly becoming ours. Some five hundred of us — town and gown — packed the chapel of our university’s divinity school, a place that so far as social action goes has pretty regularly been less prophetic than meek. He was well received.
Among a lot of things, he talked about politicians’ holding their fingers on high a lot to check the wind. He said we need to be the wind. Nicodemus seemed confused by a similar idea, but we’ve come a long way since then. Maybe.
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October 13, 2005
Money
Pentecost 22/24A
“Show me the money… ” (Mt 22.19a)
The Pharisees played the angles, always looking for ways to stump Jesus and generally never coming off all that well in the balance. This time, they go after his allegiance, his patriotism, although why they’d expect a citizen living in poverty in an enslaved country to be all that patriotic is beyond me.
“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” they asked. “Show me the money,” he replied. Jesus must have known what Voltaire found out a few centuries later: “When it’s a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.”
Maybe that seems sacrilegious. Maybe we’d rather think — and rightly — with Robert Frost, that religions, like poems, start with a lump in the throat. But we’d not want to forget that religions, unlike poems, inevitably end up becoming institutions, and money, for whatever the cause, is always the common tie that binds. However sacred or secular, one’s religion is the ligament — note the similarity of the words — that holds spirit together, that by which one is most firmly and unswervingly bound and tied.
The Pharisees may have thought they were testing Jesus’ loyalty when, in fact, they once again, walked into a trap. When it is a question of money, everybody is working with the same symbols, the same pair of glasses, the same sacrament, the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reality that we all have in common — whether it’s greed or lust or only security. So Jesus flipped a coin a couple of times, then noted the likeness and inscription and said pointedly, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
Interesting, is it not, how nations presume it is of the highest honor to place an image of our heroes on our currency. For us, it’s the politicians and the warriors. For the Brits, we noticed last spring, it’s more often the royalty, the artists, the poets. Whatever it is, it speaks loudly about us.
The Industrial Revolution for example was once considered the great sacrament of western civilization. That was before Silicon Valley and the internet. Nevertheless, technology in whatever form takes its place and holds it and remains the common thread, the outward and visible sign of where it’s at. We believe in God, say a large majority of us, but we pay more attention to the checkbook and the Gross Domestic Product. “The poor remain poor on account of they don’t try,” some say proudly. The rich get richer, and the richer they get… well, you know how that shakes down politically and how it results in a “voodoo economics” that doesn’t shake down at all. Like George Bernard Shaw said, “What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.” Jesus’ story about the rich guy and the camel and the eye of the needle is not about money, it’s about how we use it.
We churchers are a part of a community that takes money seriously, but, I think, in quite a different way. Here, in this church family, we care enough to pray about it and offer it at the table along with the bread and wine every time we offer our praise and our thanksgiving to God. We’re generally pretty good about how we use it, and we know full well that it’s only part of, indeed, a small part of our stewardship because if life is about anything, it’s all about stewardship, and money is only one of its symbols.
One of the least popular suggestions among many that I ever made to a vestry in my salad days was that we either become more charitable or else pay taxes like every other institution and maybe set a good example for our fellow tax-dodgers the universities. “Is it lawful … ?” asked the Pharisees.
In fact and intentionally or not, that’s their question — How do we use the money? And that’s the question Jesus answered. We know how he felt about the sacrilege of offerings in the Temple and the tables of the moneychangers. We know what it meant to Judas who was paid off for betrayal and hanged himself when he realized what he had done. We know how it was the cause of one of the earliest schisms in the church between Peter and Paul, how biblical scholars say that if you want to know about that church’s early missionary zeal, don’t worry so much about the content of the preaching, just “follow the money.” And we all know today how tempting it must be to fall for the ruse to assume ourselves so faith-based as to become a part of the national debt, ourselves.
But after all, it was still the taxes that prompted the Pharisees’ question. Are they lawful? The average Israelite probably benefitted very little from paying them. Matthew probably benefitted very much from collecting them until he stopped being a hit man for the Romans and went to work for a nonprofit service organization. Jesus obviously had very little use for them, save to turn the symbol around on those who would thwart his purposes.
When he took the coin, he asked, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” “Caesar’s,” they said. Then “render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” knowing all along that nothing belonged to Caesar, whatever the image, but that all, including Caesar — and the Pharisees, themselves, if they only knew it — belonged to God.
As, of course, do we. For whose inscription and image is ultimately — of not graphically — on “our” money? Yours and mine, that’s whose.
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October 12, 2005
Crony
The dictionary says that “crony” comes from chronos, the Greek word for time, and that somehow with a few twists it wanders over into meaning a longtime friend. It’s so common, especially in politics, that it’s got itself an -ism all its own and means “the appointment of political hangers-on to office without regard to their qualifications.”
One might be prompted to say something like that about Jesus’ choices for disciples had he ever known any of them long enough. The fishers-of-men thing is maybe a neat homiletic device, but hardly counts as any special or convincing paper trail. Judas, of course, as is often noted, had the best resumé, being skilled as a moneyman and all.
If W’d picked any of them, which is highly unlikely, the Senate Judiciary Committee would have had cat fits. On the other hand, on the balance and all cronyism aside, as a pretty good judge of folk, Jesus done good.
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October 11, 2005
Much
It must have made quite a scene when a “woman of the city” crashed one of the rare seated dinners we ever hear of Jesus attending (Lk 7.36-50). It didn’t help any when she stood “behind him at his feet” kissed them and anointed them, then washed them with her tears and dried them with her hair. Furthermore, her obvious skill as a contortionist, is only implied in this story, but it should not be overlooked.
Simon, the host, complained, obviously recognizing her, but surely rarely, if ever, having had her or any of her sisters over for dinner. In response, Jesus treated him not only to a parable with a test to see if he got it right, but to a lagniappe about his lack of hospitality.
All that aside, this story’s about two of life’s major turns — forgiving and loving — and how neither works all that well without the other. Simon has already pronounced the woman a sinner, so with another “in your face,” Jesus forgives her on the spot for whatever and without going into lurid detail, thus triggering the dinner guests into the usual background murmurs expected in situations like this.
Then Jesus pulled one of his famous conundrums out the hat and said she loved a lot as she had just demonstrated because she’d been forgiven a lot, that if you haven’t been forgiven much, you can’t love all that readily. He wasn’t talking about quantitative forgiving so much as qualitative forgiving. There is a difference and it has a lot do with whether you’re willing or humble or open to the Holy Spirit (God’s forgiving agent) enough to admit it, hurdle it, and get a life.
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October 10, 2005
Ace
Dare Devil Aces was my first introduction to pulp magazines. The stories were racy, but of a different kind of racy. The Spads, the Sopwith-Camels, the Fokkers and the pilots who flew them, silk scarves, leather jackets, leggings and all were beyond my fondest boyhood imagination. I wanted to do that. I had to do that.
A decade later I was flying airplanes for Uncle Sugar’s navy in WWII. Slow, ponderous, four-engine land-based bombers — PB4Y-2 Privateers by designation — and hardly anything like those fragile craft of my early longings. The reason was simple. I was anything but deft in flight training when it came to snap rolls, slow rolls, spin recovery, loops — all the stuff that went into training fighter pilots.
Beside all that, flying, for me, never turned out at all as what it was cracked up (sic) to be. The USOs? Now, that was another matter.
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October 8, 2005
Alice
Alice Aforethought would often sleep curled up on the floor right next to the bottom of the fridge where the warm came out from the motor that pumped the freon. She was a “mountain cat,” sort of a gray flannel all over, conceived and born on the southwest end of the Cumberland Plateau, whose daddy, the locals claimed, was a panther.
Keeping with the ways of country cats, she subscribed to a Vermont general store catalogue that came announcing the latest in polka dots and moonbeams. We never read it much, but neither did she. It was, however, an interesting way to keep track of how mailing addresses go from hand to brand in the curious ways of marketing.
A neat little creek ran across our twelve acres up near where she was born. The water was shallow and cold, just about deep enough to reach her belly when she could no longer resist jumping in and chasing the leaves floating by. It was about as frustrating for her as she ever got, having the thing about water and cat DNAs.
She was a watch cat and would growl at the slightest provocation by a camel cricket or a mouse, but seldom more. We kept a ten by ten by twelve block of poplar near the fire place with a hand ax embedded in its top. It was, of course, for chopping kindling. I assured Alice, however, that it was a Manx Cat Kit, put there to remind her who was boss. She never seemed much impressed.
Alice is not with us anymore. She’d probably want royalties for my using her private life like this, all public and all.
[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.]
October 7, 2005
Philharmonia
The New Orleans based Louisiana Philharmonic — the only full-time orchestra in the country that’s owned and operated by its musicians — gathered itself from all over and came to town the other night to make music.
The Nashville Symphony invited them, lent them an auditorium, some instruments, filled a few vacant chairs, and gathered us all into a whale of a standing-ovation audience supporting this benefit performance. Beethoven, Shastokovich, and a striking fantasy on “When the Saints Go Marching In” maybe never had it so good. New Orleans native son Mark O’Connor helped thread it all together.
As well, airlines, hotels, restaurants, rental car agencies, music publishers, gave entirely of themselves to make all this possible. It was the LPO’s first go since Katrina and the beginning of an altogether new series with other major orchestras across the country.
What better way could be found for a considerable enlargement of the whole idea of Music City, USA? Like old Paul might have said, in Christ there’s neither jazz nor country western. Though as a jazz cornet player, I would have gravely regretted even the suggestion.
[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.]
October 6, 2005
Few
Pentecost 21/23A
For many are called, but few are chosen (Mt 22.14)
The Japanese name for Korea is “Chosen.” The U S Marine veterans who fought there in that mid-twentieth century misunderstanding rightly call themselves, “The Chosen Few.”
Now that I’ve succumbed to that homiletic temptation, what on earth was Matthew talking about that Jesus was talking about? Why was that aphorism that has stood so well and so perplexingly down through the ages attached to the story of a desperate and fickle king?
Maybe it was because Matthew was a bit fickle, himself, and was throwing his evangelical weight around. Maybe it was a hint to Luke not to take himself so seriously. Frankly, one may wonder, as some authorities do, whether Jesus ever said it at all. But there it is, in the scriptural canon for all time and as plain as day in the gospel this morning. Further, we believe the Holy Spirit has a lot to do with what is said there, including what Jesus says there, and with how the church interprets what is said there and, unlike Luke, we’d best take it more seriously than not.
“Many are called, but few are chosen.” I suspect there are no more important concepts about the life in Christ than vocation and choice, the very core of our Baptismal Covenant.
The Greek word for “church” is “ekklesia” which means something like “those who are called out.” The very characteristic of what it means to be a human being is the capacity, the freedom to choose. It is what is meant by being created in the image of God, what God means by imagining us into being.
Jesus realized that God had a special calling for him when he confronted the Devil out there in those early forty days in the wilderness. He still seemed not absolutely certain of that calling as late as his sweating blood about God’s will for him in Gethsemane. That he said Yes, may be the saving act, itself, rather, even, than the cross. Vocation and choice.
“Many are called, but few are chosen.”
Maybe that means that God calls a lot of us, maybe all of us, to be his church. Maybe it means not that God chooses only a few, for, after all, he’s called us all, but that only a few of us exercise the freedom to choose or not to choose his calling, actually, whether or not we choose to be human as God has imagined human to be. Maybe the church, the called, is where we work out that vocation and perfect it, which means to follow through on it as the chosen few.
Maybe all this is homiletic license, one of which I have, for better or worse.
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