December 6, 2005

Moments

As I look back down the track, one of my crisis points must surely have been the Sunday morning I heard a sermon suggesting how intelligent it is of God to design the universe the way she* does and to use evolution to do it. I was on the early side of teenage, the preacher was the pastor of a big Disciples of Christ parish in east Dallas, Texas. I was there, not by choice, but by parental pressure and because it gave me one of my rare opportunities to take the family car out by myself, even if I had to bring my kid brother along.

That passing moment gave me a startling new appreciation for a God whom I’d never thought much about. The science of evolution and all the hoopla about it was completely off my mental radar, but the parson went on to say just enough to get me hooked.

I suppose the greatest gift came much later when I began to realize the majesty of time and space and of how we are so integral a part of the enigma of it all. We are not set aside like some wind-up toy to putter about, the preacher implied, but we are part and parcel of the whole shebang, closely kin to it all, and with the honorable commission to be its stewards, as well.

As the result of all this, the mythic power of the two creation stories in Genesis got all the richer as did the all-consuming beauty of story and parable, themselves, as such orphic** media of truth. Life is not all rock and roll, you’d better believe it.

(*Author’s momentary bias. **Aren’t spellcheckers wonderful?)

December 5, 2005

Rue

We’ve a fine stand of rue in our wildflower garden. It’s a lovely little plant whose delicate greenish yellow flowers make little show.

But what a name it bears. Sorrow. Regret. It’s a herb (Ruta graveolens) and, like many such, a herb with a tale to tell. Next to wormwood, rue — Shakespeare’s “herb o’grace” or, more colloquially, herbygrass — is the most bitter of plants. The 16th-century herbalist Thomas Tusser recommended the two for strewing in sick rooms — “What saver be better, if physick be true, / For places infected / than wormwood and rue.”

An aura of mystery hangs about the bushes, the strange, acrid scent of the blue-green leaves seems to conjure past associations with witches, magic, spells, incantations and, perhaps, more to come. Rue has always been counted a prime herbal antidote to poisons and plagues, as well as to the less material, but no less malevolent Evil Eye.

I never thought much about that Eye until the other day when a colleague told me that because of the big stir over our church’s momentary surrender of law to grace out in Minneapolis, we are now considered by some of the more pious to be a cult.

Maybe there’s an evil eye casting a spell over us. If ever there was one, and if it’s the case, we maybe should well lay in a good supply of rue. One never knows when there just might be a splendid occasion for an exorcism.

[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.]

December 2, 2005

Supper

In what seems a rush to cover all the bases, John Baptist and Mary, as different a pair as anybody might imagine, nevertheless, get equal billing in Advent. So far as the history of it goes, it’s a liturgical time warp. But the two maybe have more in common than meets the eye.

Both were committed to God’s will for them. And what passes for a lovely canticle at evensong — Mary’s Magnificat — is a model of John’s preaching on any street corner you might imagine. Just try this on for a message on your Christmas cards:

“(God) has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty” (Lk 1.46-55).

Mary sang it. John preached it. For that’s really what Christmas is all about. There’s a lot more to this forthcoming Jesus than decking the malls with bows of holly. If the institutional church would stop acting like the live stock standing around in the manger bleating and lowing and braying and get itself out on the hustings, listen to and emulate John in this day and age, we’d be so much closer to our calling.

But down deep underneath all the bravado, John, like a lot of us, must have been uncertain all along. When he finally got himself thrown in the slammer for all his good intentions, he worried enough about everything to send his friends to ask Jesus whether he was on the right track with the right man, after all.

He got an answer, all right. Jesus told them to tell John the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are model citizens, the poor hear the good news, and blessed are they who get all this straight for the right reasons (Lk 7.20,22). How long has it been since we heard anything like that as a result of our current preoccupation with ourselves?

John Baptist was a prophet with clarion lungs and precious little interest in liturgical foolishness. Were he to show up today in one of our churches come a Sunday morning, the more faint-hearted among us would likely cut and run. Neither would his calling the religious institution a “den of vipers” go over all that well with most of the vestries I’ve known. But he was a man in a hurry whose anxiety was pandemic, and “all the country of Judaea, and all the people of Jerusalem” must have thought pretty highly of him when they lined up and got themselves baptised by him in the river Jordan itself (Mk 1.1-8). But that was then.

It is only fair to him and well to pause to remember that “prophet” means spokesperson, not fortuneteller, and that the role of the prophet is to unmask pretense. It’s not a welcome task. There’s little evidence to suggest that anyone ever asked a prophet home for supper more than once.

But prophets are essential. The church is called to have and act on a “prophetic imagination,” that creative and inventive intention embodied deeply in the Baptismal Covenant. Listening to and embracing these vows, we can hear them call us away from the presumption of grandeur and numbers and remind us that our true service to the world and an even greater evangelism is not all that different from the one described by Isaiah… not to overwhelm the world in triumph but to suffer and die for the world in love and justice. The Baptismal Covenant’s prophetic message, as well, is not one to overwhelm, but to love. It is to that imaginative ministry that we are called.

But there’s a caveat. Start behaving like that, and you may well not be invited out to supper a second time.

December 1, 2005

Magnificatharsis

These are perilous if not momentous times for parishes looking for new parsons. It’s problem enough to expect counsel from our bishops and get back from them instead their selfish insistence on cloning themselves. 

Everybody loves the “interim rector,” and whatever he or she pleases to do turns out to be what everybody is pleased for him or her to do. It’s a forever honeymoon, and pretty soon in a few months they all want the interim for the new rector even though it was made clear at the outset that we don’t do it that way. And in the church when it’s something we don’t do some way or another or never have done that way, heaven knows that’s the eleventh commandment.

A friend who’s on a search committee for a new rector tells me there are folk in her parish who are withholding “their” pledge until they find out what the committee’s up to or who they’ll call and whether whatever happens fits “their” image of what “the Holy Spirit wants.” If the truth were known, the HS may not even want the church (if ever she did) certainly not in the shape we’ve got ourself into these days. The church is such a long way from all those great crazies at Pentecost, we may never find our way back.

The church, that is, we could use a good shaking maybe to come to our senses and to wake up to the possibility and to the reality that our ministry is for peace and justice and for tending to the poor and for joining into mending some of the brokenness in the world. Like maybe these parish search committees and bishops might start listening to Mary’s Magnificat for their job descriptions. For example, find a rector who’d lead us to put down a few mighties from their seats and exalt the humble and meek and fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away empty to take “their” pledges with them (Lk 1.46-55). Especially that.

Advent is no Lent, for heaven’s sake, but it is a good time for some catharsis and most of all hope — Mary’s hope that she’s on the right track getting herself in the shape she’s in for it certainly isn’t anything she’d planned and John Baptist’s hope that he’s picked the right guy after all.

The Advent collect starts the year off right asking for grace of all things to “cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” while we have a chance, as it were. There’s sure plenty of darkness around. But the only armor we seem to have is made out of kevlar, and apparently there’s not even enough of that to go around. James had it right when he said faith is dead without works, but he probably really meant that we’d see some improvement if we’d just stop letting the grace grow under our feet.