December 17, 2005

Integers

It fell to my favor the other evening to celebrate Eucharist and visit some with the Integers — that’s what Integrity calls its members — down and over at Calvary Church in Memphis, the home of The Blues. We remembered St Margaret, Queen of Scotland, her eight progeny, her short span of life, and how she moved the Brits and the Scots into a more likely relationship, for a while, at least.

We got to dine and talk a bit afterwards. I recalled as we did that how moved I am that their purpose is to implement a “justice ministry” to  the church maybe to do for us what Margaret did for those two unfriendly countries. We’re already one, holy, apostolic, and catholic, but mostly on paper filed off in a Nicene theological vault somewhere. At that meeting last evening, though, justice, the idea, poured out like Amos’s waters.  And we can never have enough of that.

Integrity gets kicked around a lot by those of us who just can’t wrap our minds around the way God imagines us, that is, the many ways being human turns out to be. We get so religious that we end up trying to be more spiritual than God, and we seem to forget that our vocation is rather otherwise to be human, ourselves. We’re already as spiritual as God wants us to be or else God wouldn’t have settled that in our creation.

Integrity understands itself as a “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender justice ministry to the Episcopal Church.” Not for, not from, not by, but to. Heaven knows, we need justice now like we’ve never needed it before, let alone, the rarity of it in the rest of creation. Why does anybody have any trouble figuring that out and welcoming it with open arms?

December 16, 2005

Inerrancy

We not only have to face this Christmas without Christ, we’re stuck with a Bible we can no longer trust, as well.

After a couple millennia more or less, the Vatican has recently announced that we can no longer expect “total accuracy” from the Bible, that some parts of it are just plain not true. To help spread the word, the hierarchy has published a teaching document instructing the faithful to cool it on biblical inerrancy.

Even though this press release from the TimesOnLine was not specific as to which parts of the Bible are no longer considered dependable, the news still sent a shudder through those for whom scriptural consultative services like   www.TheBibleSays.com have proven so valuable and beyond question in the past. 

The rest of us, however, can relax and hope Rome will also dispense with some of the infallibles (cf divorce, usury, slavery) we’ve ignored forever and would rather not keep, anyway. Perhaps the Religious-Always-Right will be forced to turn to the Constitution, after all.

On the other hand, first thing you know, maybe here’ll come Galileo, Copernicus, and Darwin at the front of the canonization line expecting sainthood, the quantum mechanics, wrenches in hand, not far  behind.

December 15, 2005

Mary

Advent 4B (Lk 1.26-38)

Agnus Day is an on-line comic strip that reports the conversations of a couple of sheep around, of all things, the liturgical lectionary. In their discussion of Mary’s exchange with Gabriel, the gospel for Advent 4, they exegete thusly:

One says, What if Mary had said, “You know, this isn’t a good time for me… ” But, says the other, she didn’t! God calls, and his people heed the call. It’s pretty straightforward. So, says the first, you’re saying that Mary’s jist a ‘girl who cain’t say no?

Mary doesn’t get much attention until Christmas rolls around, and then, she has to share it with John Baptist of all people. Yet, without Mary — and her profound “Yes” to Gabriel — we’d be in a fine kettle of fish. For her Yes not only allows the occasion for the greatest redirection of human history as we know it, it also models for us who God imagines us to be and what God calls us to do.

I not only wish Christians as a whole made more of this, but I can’t understand why feminists don’t. Thank you very much, God says, but I’ll redeem things any way I please and especially without any intervention whatsoever by you arrogant, generally screw-up males. Do what you will with the Virgin Birth — or with any virgin birth at any level of the fauna and flora — believe it or don’t believe it, but please never overlook that here’s an altogether productive system that does quite well without you.

Christmas has simply got to be a traumatic time for mothers. Not only because they do ninety percent of the work pulling it off at home and hearth and mall, but because, like with their share in Mary’s vocation, there would be practically nothing to it at all. Watch women with any baby, not only their own, and you’ll witness the richness and radiance of creation in all its glory. Further, how they respond inwardly to the mystery of the Nativity must be one of the greatest ongoing mysteries of all. We men will never know, but the least we can do is get a life and show some appreciation and awe.

This “girl who cain’t say no” models for us what the sheep says, “God calls, and his people heed the call.” Don’t we wish. One of the popes called Mary, the “Mother of the Church” and by that, I trust, he meant here is what the church is to be. And in Mary’s magnificent recounting how God scatters the proud in their conceit and casts down the mighty from their thrones, lifts up the lowly and fills the hungry, and sends the rich away empty (Lk 1.46-55), he means what the church is to be about.

December 14, 2005

Answer

Maybe the season now upon us is a time when more people pray than usual. Maybe not. Maybe if they do, some might wonder whether prayer is ever “answered” and what an answer would look like if ever it came. What would be the evidence? Where’s the beef?

Jesus prayed a lot. At least once out there in that garden and up there on that cross, he prayed hard, and he felt major betrayal and abandonment, a kind of answer in itself. Some of us have felt that way from time to time, perhaps not as earthshaking, but enough to know something not all that comfortable was going on.

John took note in his gospel of another prayer Jesus apparently felt mighty serious about (Jn 17). It was when he more or less recounted before God what you might call his resumé, all the things he’d done with his life with and for us and the world. He was concerned enough about us in that prayer to ask God to protect us from all the flack he was sure we’d get if we’d followed him. It was up to God to answer that part.

Then he prayed that we might have as close a walk with God as had he, and that we might be one as he and God had been and were now. And then he sort of let it go and, as they say, let God. And, of course, let us. Whether we are one in that God-Jesus way seems pretty much up to us. For better or worse, that’s the kind of freedom God gives us and, of course, the grace to go with it, but even that, we have to reach out and take.

Now, whether or not prayer is answered, we ask? This big Jesus prayer John tells us about, nobody can answer, not God, for sure, but only us. Are we going to be one, or not? Is prayer answered? Well, it all depends on the evidence on what you mean by “answer.” Even though Christmas is moving in on us, it doesn’t look all that promising, does it?

December 13, 2005

Silence

Bamming along reading the Daily Office, there suddenly appears the rubric, “Silence may be kept.” It was a good idea of the liturgers to think of that, especially in our time when silence comes at such a premium. It’s rather a wake-up call.

We need rubrics. We need silence. The rubrics (from the Latin for “red,” I’m told, and originally printed thusly so we couldn’t miss them) are neat and useful little road signs along the pages of the Book of Common Prayer. When they say “may,” it’s more or less up to you, when they say “shall,” you’d better believe it. We’ve got them everywhere. In the owner’s manual for the VCR (as my son reminds me when he’s adjusting it) and for the Honda. But so much for that. It’s silence that’s also important.

It may be kept, the rubric says, as if one doesn’t have to return it. It’s a keeper, a gift. We can make it a part of our retinue so that we can fetch it now and then when the world gets so noisy which is most of the time. 

Maybe we’re getting deafer in self-defense and will soon have built-in silence all the time. I asked the tenor man sitting next to me in our band if he ever has tinnitus. He said, “You mean you can’t hear it?” In it’s rather quaint way, my dictionary says silence is “forbearance from speech or noise.” 

Forbearance. Now, there’s an idea overdue for its time.

December 12, 2005

Algebra

In his book, “There Is No Such Thing As Free Speech, And It’s A Good Thing, Too” [Oxford], Stanley Fish, who says he was influenced by C S Lewis, writes that political correctness is a term that has originated on the left “in a kind of self-mocking way by people raising consciousness about parts of our vocabulary that are saturated with implicit racism and sexism.”

He also says that the logic by which the neoconservative polemic acquires its force is to abstract persons and issues from the flow of history so that real-world questions can be reduced to problems in a kind of “moral algebra.”

I wonder if he means, for example, that any policy that takes race into consideration is equivalent to any other policy that takes race into consideration. On such a premise, the Nazis are equivalent to Israeli hard-liners, the KKK, to those who favor minority set-asides?

Might it be, then, that old Paul’s contention to the Galatians that all of us are one in Christ Jesus, and that there’s neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female nor whatever rather abrogates any necessity for such algebraic morality? Maybe then Christians might just get on with life, and when it comes to our current fixation about however it is God’s imagination oriented us, let it go, and tend more to our spiritual inclusiveness rather than our political decorum?

December 10, 2005

______mas

Laura and George sent out a million cards that wished a Happy Holiday instead of a Merry Christmas. When the religious right got up in arms and said this was a religious wrong, their press agent countered with it’s because they have so many friends of numerous persuasions.

Nobody seemed just pleased to note that these days, the Bushes have that many friends at all.

After trying for years of late, however, maybe we’re really getting Christ out of Christmas. People finally got aware who they were celebrating and naming their trees after and said Enough, already. Next thing you know, they’ll discover holiday really means holy day, and we’ll be into trying to amend the Constitution again.

Any way you look at it, it’s still a season of Peace and Goodwill to All. Why else would we have sent the Secretary of State herself off this time of the year to assure everybody that the only thing tortured over here is grammar?

December 9, 2005

Zeal

In one of my previous carnations and for lack of anything better to do, I taught something called business math in our town’s two-year technological college. The thirty students who took the course were said to have had and passed high school algebra. I took the registrar’s word that this was so.

Among my credentials to teach this course were my certification in celestial navigation as a naval aviator back in the Great Middle War, a minor in math on my master’s in geology, and the fact that the only course I flunked in high school was algebra. I was prepared.

But I was not prepared for the day a student asked me why we used terms like multiplication and division when we could just as easily use “times it” and “under it” (as verbs, she meant, but only implied, probably not being all that sure what is a verb, let alone a predicate nominative). When I couldn’t think of any reason why not, I realized I was losing whatever zeal of approval I may have had.

I suppose we don’t have to worry yet about there being any pandemic of literacy. I’ve a good friend who’s darn near killing herself serving on our town’s school board trying to do something about this, as thankless a job short of rectoring a parish (which she also does) as one can imagine. Our village is not all that sanguine about raising children, most of its wealthy sending their kids and their money to private schools and complaining about the public school budget all along.

The latest thing the majority of our school board has sanctioned for lack of money is abolishing anything in the curriculum that even looks like the humanities and, as well, throwing out phys-ed. I can’t even imagine that the abolition of high school football — that secondary-school raison d’être — might be just around the corner (and not because of no more Philosophy 101).

Out sourcing is the current vogue, so why not also out source our schools? It would probably be cheaper to fly all these kids to Bangladesh where they at least teach English and math well enough to parse the language, solve the quadratic equation, and help a telepatron get a crashed computer back on the runway. And, of course, where they leave no child behind.

December 8, 2005

Possibilities

Advent 3B

Let us get one big Advent mystery out of the way at the outset. Bishop Katherine Schori told her people out in the Diocese of Nevada that they need no longer speculate about “why” the pink candle in the Advent wreath on this third Sunday. It’s there, she said, because Mary wanted a girl.

The cosmologists tell us that if we look through the great Hubble telescope coasting weightlessly somewhere out there in orbit, not only may we see all the way to the edge of space, but to the edge of time, as well.

Space and time, we learn, are actually created in such a way that one simply may not exist apart from the other. Indeed, as are we, spatially and temporally we are one. And though we know rather precisely how this gospel saga resolves itself, we’ve not the foggiest notion about the resolution of our own lives.

This “new” season of Advent returns from old each year again and again, reincarnating itself — quietly, gently, and, thank God, with few if any shopping malls dedicated to its cause. But it always recalls for me something in our human becoming, our maturing, something that is very similar to these notions about time and space.

The stories from our family history as a people of God ring changes on Advent’s two great biblical themes of possibility: Blessed Mary’s progeny and Blessed Baptiser John’s anxiety and the inevitable anger the other side of it. Advent gathers matter and spirit and points to their mysterious union, Word and flesh caught up in the star-crossed saving event of Christmas which sharpens the great themes of creation, judgment, and redemption into one.

What is created in the image of God is, as well, redeemed in the image of God, assuring us that finally, in a way very similar to what we’ve learned about God’s universe, never again need we — nor can we — separate the one from the other.

December 7, 2005

Lying

The world’s too big to fool — or to fool with. Lincoln talked about something like that when he counseled about fooling some or all and when you can do it.

But then of course, fooling is just another way of lying, only milder, perhaps, and more fun. Paul talked about being a fool for Jesus as if he figured Jesus would rather like that. But I suspect that lying’s not what Paul meant or Jesus wants. Sticking your neck out for the Truth, the Way, and the Life seems more like the kind of foolishness they had in mind. Amazing that the some of the world still recognizes that equation after all these centuries.

Fooling is surely not what our leaders are doing when they can’t seem to make up their minds about torture and who’s doing it and whether it’s being done at all and whether we should actually make it legitimate of all things. And it’s surely not being a fool for Christ whatever the pious nostrums they utter.

I suppose there’s just enough image of God left in most of us to know damn well when we’re lying and misusing our freedom to choose (which is what that “image” is all about). And I suspect there’s enough of that gracious gift left in us to know that torture is sure as hell not what God has in mind for the way to love your neighbor.

But when we behave this way, about all we think we have left is to lie about it in the hope that somebody will fall for it and think we’re really okay, and that this is what we have to do in order to be honest. Apparently some folk will vote for irony every time if simply because they never recognize when it hits them square in the face.

[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.]