November 15, 2005
Doxy
Our Bible-based tradition claims that we are created in the image of God which is, I take it, that we are imagined into being by God. By this, we mean what (maybe “who” is better) it is to be human. And by that, we mean that we are “free to make choices: to love, to create, to reason, and to live in harmony with creation and with God” (BCP p 845). Or, of course, free not to choose any of the above. History shows that whichever way we might go on that from time to time is pretty near always a crap-shoot.
Our record about handling that calling and all its multiple changes and choices — choices, choices, choices, together with God — produced the Bible, our tradition trying to understand it, and whatever is going on at the moment, like, church, the tabernacle for Jesus upon Transfiguration Mountain.
A lot of us kept on building the tabernacles and occasionally enjoying the view. Sometimes when we can we’re looking over Jesus’ shoulders while he’s back down in the foot hills wrestling with the daemons who often have a better idea than we of who he is — and consequently of what it means to be human and, of course, probably wishing they could be, too.
After all, it’s comfy up here where there’s not so much pollution and the globe is not so warm. And besides, being human is not all it’s cracked up to be what with all the different angles and spins and races and the Seven Deadlies storming about distracting our attention. This doxy business is hard work, yours and theirs and, of course ours, the ortho ones.
November 14, 2005
Risk
William Temple was one of the greater than lessor archbishops of Canterbury. It was he who said that Christianity is the most materialistic of the religions. Its incarnational premise suggests that we are spiritually imagined by God’s grace and called to be human. It’s a shaky place to be. But Jesus said to fear not, that God is love, and that love has cast out fear if we’ll just get out of the way.
One of the characteristics that troubles me most about the so-called religious right is that it often seems neither all that religious nor all that right. That it is so intense about being right should be one of the first warnings. A close second to that is its unswerving conviction that what’s right for it is also right for those who aren’t of it.
Such seems to have so little to do with and so little place for faith, simply bypassing faith as risk and substituting a doctrinaire system by the same name in its stead. The kind of faith Jesus asks of us is the key that opens to us this grand relationship with God after him. The risk of such faith is neither right nor wrong, but that which by grace always gives us the right to be wrong. And maybe makes any other path at the least questionable.
November 14, 2005
Risk
I don’t know why people make such a bug fuss over our origins and how it was that we got here. God’s known all along, anyway, and probably nothing much is added to God’s resumé by all our stewing. Question is not about how it all happened, but what do we do about it now that it has, and we’ve got it on our hands.
There seem to be two theories. There’s the system our founders came up with in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, The Constitution, and the snappy kinds of checks and balances with which to make it all work properly. For openers, we might even call that an Intelligent Design. I can’t imagine anybody would disagree that it was.
Then there’s the way we’re currently attending to it. Like cutting money for Head Start. Taking more poor children off health care. Compromising Medicare. Writing memos justifying torture. Cutting after-school nutrition and AIDS programs so multimillionaires can have bigger tax cuts.
And then there’s lying, let’s not forget lying. And the environment. Maybe some don’t believe in global warming, but anybody could agree that it’s not getting any colder what with all the glaciers melting and coastlines retreating. And let’s not forget the so-called Patriots Act, one old King George would have been proud of and probably couldn’t have thought of a better name for, himself.
When our founders wrote the Declaration of Independence, they seemed to have cared a lot about how the rest of the world felt about what we were doing. But now, their successors, with their attitude about the Geneva Convention, the Kyoto Treaty, the International Court, not to mention the United Nations, apparently couldn’t care less.
How about we call all this the Theory of Devolution. Intelligent Design or Devolution? Take your choice. Or maybe we already have.
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to catastrophe relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
November 11, 2005
Theories
I don’t know why people make such a bug fuss over our origins and how it was that we got here. God’s known all along, anyway, and probably nothing much is added to God’s resumé by all our stewing. Question is not about how it all happened, but what do we do about it now that it has, and we’ve got it on our hands.
There seem to be two theories. There’s the system our founders came up with in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, The Constitution, and the snappy kinds of checks and balances with which to make it all work properly. For openers, we might even call that an Intelligent Design. I can’t imagine anybody would disagree that it was.
Then there’s the way we’re currently attending to it. Like cutting money for Head Start. Taking more poor children off health care. Compromising Medicare. Writing memos justifying torture. Cutting after-school nutrition and AIDS programs so multimillionaires can have bigger tax cuts.
And then there’s lying, let’s not forget lying. And the environment. Maybe some don’t believe in global warming, but anybody could agree that it’s not getting any colder what with all the glaciers melting and coastlines retreating. And let’s not forget the so-called Patriots Act, one old King George would have been proud of and probably couldn’t have thought of a better name for, himself.
When our founders wrote the Declaration of Independence, they seemed to have cared a lot about how the rest of the world felt about what we were doing. But now, their successors, with their attitude about the Geneva Convention, the Kyoto Treaty, the International Court, not to mention the United Nations, apparently couldn’t care less.
How about we call all this the Theory of Devolution. Intelligent Design or Devolution? Take your choice. Or maybe we already have.
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to catastrophe relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
November 10, 2005
Talent
Pentecost 26/28A Mt 25.14f,19-29
The New Orleans poor got what they deserved. Not long after Katrina, a moderately wealthy and inordinately conservative Christian gentleman and otherwise law-abiding citizen used the Parable of the Talents to make this point to me. He implied that they had had the same opportunities as all of us and did not take advantage of them.
I suppose that for some, there may be more than an element of truth in that point of view and even some smug comfort. “Use it or lose it” is not for many an uncommon way of looking at life, nor is it always wrong. But punishing the poor for being poor strikes me as hardly consistent with Jesus’ prophetic ambiance of justice and grace and love, especially for the poverty-stricken. Indeed, that Jesus, according to Matthew, was the very source of this parable is a reality that must not be overlooked, for it is integral in searching for its meaning.
This is a kingdom parable. Jesus is saying, “The kingdom of God will be” the way this story tells us it will be. Those who refuse actively to obey God and to put to use the life God has given us are not only just missing the point, they are jeopardizing that life and that freedom in peril of losing both.
When Jesus spoke this parable, the word “talent” referred to a unit of weight measurement and also to money. It did not refer, at that time, to what we might call a “gifted ability.” As with all his parables, it is better that we let it speak from its own context at the time of its telling.
The story is about a man who had servants. He was going on a journey. He entrusted his possessions to them as stewards, not as owners. Further, it is helpful to note that each of the varying amounts was given according to the abilities of the recipient, a condition that obviously will affect the outcome.
The Kingdom of God is not a slave state. The parable does not defend slavery in any way. Our servanthood in the Kingdom is to be modeled after Jesus and balanced, as well, with the fact that we are children of God. The parable does not state that the kingdom of God is primarily about money. The presence of money surely serves to make it more lifelike for us, but that is not what it’s about.
It is not at all about what we have, but about our stewardship with what we have. Like the ordered freedom that is at the heart of our normative Anglican tradition, it is this point of commonality and of productive obedience among us all that is compared in this story. The parable challenges us to use our freedom to choose and to be obediently productive through staying open to and discerning the Holy Spirit in our lives.
My friend who was so ready to judge the poor apparently overlooked entirely any message there may be in the Parable of the Talents about our collegial stewardship as a nation. Perhaps for a moment, at least, did Katrina force us to face exactly to whom it is that our rich productivity is obedient.
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to catastrophe relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
November 9, 2005
Pretend
Four or so decades ago, John A T Robinson wrote “Honest to God” I understand while in traction for a back problem. Whether it was in that book or somewhere else, he gave that sound counsel for all of us preachers that the pulpit is too often six feet above contradiction. It is a good thing to keep in mind.
For that matter, so is the title of his book a good claim and prayer and the kind of wishful thinking to make before preaching. How refreshing and altogether less intimidating it might be for a preacher to stand up there looming over everybody and just say, “Honest to God,” and then start.
I never have cared much for the habit some parsons have of claiming that what they are about to say is in the name of the Trinity or, if they’re having momentary trouble with that onerous doctrine, just in the name of God . Even if it’s more of a hope than of a certainty, how do they know? It just seems, might we say, too pretentious for words?
Preaching is not a time for pretending. It’s a time for the rarest kind of honesty. And it is good time for remembering that when Jesus gave it all up to God, the Good Book says that in the midst of all the earthquaking and thunder and storming around, the veil of the Temple was ripped down the middle for all to see what they’d been told all along was the downright holiest of the holies, that is, the very thing they’d never been allowed to see before.
What had been hanging there, which is to say, pre-tending, was now out of business and hardly needed any more. Jesus would just have to do.
November 8, 2005
Language
Toni Morrison, the American author, on receiving her Nobel Prize for Literature, spoke of her vocation to writing as “word work.”
It is words, she suggested, that empower meditation, that “fend off the scariness of things with no names,” and that ease the burden of oppression. In the end, she continued, it is words that enable us to make some sense of our existence by allowing us to stand aside to narrate it. Ms Morrison’s clear insistence on the value of language seems pointedly appropriate in the midst of the current widespread epidemic of violence and its bedfellow illiteracy, for nothing makes less sense of our existence more thoroughly. Both strike at the very ground of security. In their presence, no person is safe, for every person is homeless. Nameless by its very nature, violence respects neither victim nor perpetrator, and there is no more oppressive burden than a fear one cannot name.
Without a level of maturity that achieves an appreciation for and a facility of language and all the other symbols available to us for naming, we simply cannot stand aside and gain perspective on our stories. That we lack this as a people is nowhere more apparent than in our systematic removal of the humanities from public education. We chortle when reminded that any “C” student can become president of the United States. It should be obvious by now that we do so at our peril. The subsequent loss of such values and the language skills necessary to interpret them is a careless and abusive violence in itself that goes largely unnoticed. If we teach such subjects at all, we’re only allowed to teach about them, rather than explore their meaning and possible place for us.
Such exploration often leads to the discovery (and rediscovery for some) of the beauty and power of myth and of the irony of human ambiguity, one value of which lies in the capacity to spare us from taking ourselves so literally — and consequently, so seriously. Compare, for example, what happens when the literal mind that often equates myth with falsehood takes charge and all is hardened into fact, moral code, and program. The disputations and legalistic preoccupations of a good part of our discourse can be attributed in no small part to such a mind’s typical failure to appreciate the perspective available through humanistic studies.
Some of the most remarkable science of our time is the current endeavor to discover the complete genetic blueprint for the over l00,000 genes that make up the DNA of a human being. For the accomplishment of this goal, scientists not so coincidentally approach DNA as a “language” with which to “tell” the human “story.” They speak of their research as “parsing” to find the “runes.” The purpose of all this, as in any responsible use of language, is not only to understand by naming, but in so doing, to heal, to make whole.
The irony of these noble motives and the considerable investment required to implement them seems lost on us. All the while we’re perfecting our biology, we’re allowing the obvious mystery of its presence and for which mystery it just may be the occasion for understanding to go untended. Language makes us human. Without it, how would we ever have thought of DNA, let alone become able to understand and use its “syntax”?
Language is reality. Whatever is without language is as unknowable as the answer to the question of how we would feel had we never been born. Try, if you will, to argue that “a picture is worth a thousand words” by using only a photograph or a painting.
Madeleine L’Engle, another brilliant story teller, writes of a friend who despaired of seeking help for her addiction elsewhere, especially in the church, and turned to the comfort of a twelve-step program. When asked why, her friend replied, “Because this program knows who is the enemy.” Tony Morrison might have said, because it “fends off the scariness of things with no names.”
Any who aspire to be responsible stewards of human being know that without words to name our fears, we remain subject to the illiteracy of violence in all its manifestations, and we can never be able to “stand aside to narrate our existence.” This is not only especially true for our vocation, but also for those with whom we engage in the healing art of listening and telling. Even Friedrich Nietzsche, a most unlikely exegete for any comfort in matters such as these, once reminded us in what seemed a moment of despair, “I fear that we will never get rid of God so long as we have grammar.”
November 7, 2005
Bread
Among our parish’s rare lapses into biblical inerrancy, we use a real loaf of freshly baked bread at the Eucharist each Sunday, not to mention the nectar of the grape once-removed into what it was fermeant for. As our All Saints Sunday multiple baptisms added another fifty percent to the congregants yesterday, we soon ran out of bread and into the handy fish-food reserve.
Just at that turn, a lad of six or so presented himself to receive. I placed a wafer in his outstretched hands. Quite so that all could hear, he said, “That’s not bread. I want bread.” A few small pieces were left. I gave him one, took his wafer, gave it to his father, then silently (and irreverently) thought, “Next!”
A while later during the following cover-dish gathering, someone who’d overheard the lad’s request remembered a rather penchant theological reflection once attributed to Madeleine L’Engel that it was easier for her to believe those wafers were the Body of Christ than that they were bread.
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to catastrophe relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
November 4, 2005
Voila!
Alterpreneur is a slangy new British invention based on the word “entrepreneur” and refers to people who leave their jobs to start a business of their own, not so much to make money as to improve their standard of living, get more control over their lives, and generally to be happier.
We’ve a similar phenomenon on this side of the pond. With only a slight variation typical of the way we and the Brits sometimes rearrange our common language, we call these folk altarpreneurs. They’ve a move underfoot to discard our traditional geographic diocesan structure, replace it with something called a “network,” and start a new church. This makes it all the easier, some say, to play that familiar old apsic fun game of Drop-the-Purificator and maybe snare a new suitor among the more eligible foreign primates already on the make for hostile takeovers.
On the other hand and Voila! doubled-in-spades, how could I ever have overlooked that the truth of the matter that not the least cause for all this is so that after all, a case can be made for same-sects marriage?
[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to catastrophe relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]
November 3, 2005
Beatniks
All Saints Sunday Mt 5.1-12
Maybe every once in a while we might add an Old Testament prophet to the roster of the calendar saints. Somehow, it’s always filled with Christians and never with any Jeremiahs or Micahs or Hoseas. And then, come this time of year, we add that beat up ragtag list Jesus blessed in his Beatitudes, however much they needed it and whatever they professed or were at the time.
Then, trouble is, we tend to make “the saints” into pale, household pets just to be around as dashboard bobble heads at the worst or to bless this and that as our “patrons” at the most. We even name our churches for them in the apostrophic possession (aka St Mark’s et al). You ever hear of a church named for a prophet? Sons of the Prophets, the country western band, maybe, but the Church of Isaiah?
Trouble further is that most of them were hardly anybody you’d ever build a shrine to or invite home to dinner more than once or want your daughter to go out with. Even John who lost his head over Jesus more or less and whom many think was the last of them, still gets confused as a founder of the Baptist Church.
It’s of a pity, because it’s been too long since we’ve had one and they are just the kind of people we need around so badly these days. I doubt if you’d find one taking faith-based government money or saying the blessing at presidential prayer breakfasts or looking the other way when prisoners were being tortured. Rather would they be telling Enron like they told old King David to stop stealing sheep and taking tax cut subsidies from the federal till and running off with corporate welfare.
They for sure wouldn’t be all that preoccupied with our sex lives or with whether creation was by fiat or evolution or whether there was much intelligent design showing up in fiddler crabs. They’d be out and about for justice and mercy and beating AK-47s into plowshares.
If we can’t pick up the ministry of the prophets and stop hiding behind the saints — if that’s what we seem to be doing — there’s not much to say for us. The prophets were also pretty durable customers. They suffered and accomplished a lot and they all had built-in you-know-what detectors, a service we might offer to our society more often than we do.
And you know, they didn’t have Jesus like the saints did and like we do. All they could do was to point to him or a reasonable facsimile of whom they never were all that sure. Now, however it seems, I haven’t got anything against the saints. They sure lived a better and more productive life than either I or most of my friends and colleagues have have. No offense.
On the other hand, a lot of offense. Come to think about it, I hope that later on, Jesus added the skeptical to his blessed list. These are not comfortable times, and we skeptics need all the help we can get.