February 15, 2006
Power
One of the more thoughtful parts of the church’s General Conventions I’ve attended is the provision on the calendar for a daily Twelve-Step meeting.
There, we can refreshingly step aside from the otherwise churchy ways we rank and assort ourselves as deputies, bishops, hucksters, and hangers-on. There, we can honestly confront the malady we have in common and embrace a program of the day-by-day, step-by-step recovering of our humanity (aka spiritual awakening).
Our frequent pretense and the energy it inevitably consumes are put aside for an hour. We’re a powerless bunch. We know it, and there’s little question Who has the power. That, confessed and believed and remembered again, frees and enables us to let go and let God.
When we go back across the halls to the two legislative Houses, their infernally complicated sessions, and our often pompous puffery in dealing with them, we also find a common malady. Our faith tradition calls it original sin.
The palpable difference is that nobody seems ever to entertain the thought of how little power over that we have, only that whatever, we’re all in contention for a piece of it. Contending so, it is not all that difficult to lose sight of who we are and of Whose we are and of why we are there for reasons that are not at all generally conventional.
For we also have in common the gift of God’s grace in Jesus that heals us. Though at our best we interminably try to incarnate that reality into our canons, we never seem to learn that we cannot, but only that we must let go and let God here, as well, then see what happens.
February 14, 2006
Valentine
I’ve nothing against Cyril, the monk, and Methodius, the bishop, who were missionaries to the Slavs in the ninth century, but I do take issue with giving them today for their festive occasion. By all rights it belongs to the third century Valentines (there were two of them) who, of course, are relatively quite obscure and had so far as we know nothing at all to do with hearts and flowers associated with their names.
Nevertheless, only St Bah of Humbug would take issue with all the little paper hearts and candies proliferating in public school classrooms this morning. Surely word of this has got to the Supremes and the ACLU. But just as surely, we can hope, they skipped Sunday School often enough to have missed out on whether Valentine had any connection at all with, heaven forbid, anything religious.
Nice thing about the day, mayhaps, is to remind us if ever so faintly that love is here to stay, and that the tune by the same name was George Gershwin’s last. Here’s the lyric (with apologies to Q’s number one hug and my friend and mentor Barbara C who always thinks of this sort of thing first):
It’s very clear, our love is here to stay
Not for a year but ever and a day
The radio and the telephone and the movies that we know
May just be passing fancies and in time may go
But oh, my dear, our love is here to stay
Together we’re going a long, long way
In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble
They’re only made of clay
But our love is here to stay
February 13, 2006
Words
Once in a while, my old friend and mentor Canon Quirk runs across something he thinks I need to know. He’s usually right.
This time he called and said he’d read somewhere that if you have to choose between words that mean more than what you have experienced and words that mean less, choose the ones that mean less. He said that’s because that way you leave room for your hearers to move around in and for yourself to move around in too.
One of the best cures I’ve found for reminding me to do that, I reflected, is to use a word I’m really not all that secure about, that is, that means more than I have experienced, and then to have somebody who is more secure in general, hence, curious enough to be willing to learn, ask me what it means, and I don’t know.
In seminary, I wrote a paper on William Temple’s definitive Gifford Lectures, “Nature, Man, and God.” I took issue with that giant Anglican on some point and wrote, apologetically, “Who am I to… ” The professor noted in the margin, “On you, Denson, humility is not all that becoming.” Fifty plus years later, his diagnosis is still true.
Language is what makes us human. It can also make us less than human. It enables or disables our human being. To write about stuff which means more than what I’ve experienced gets me in trouble every time. For example, I always feel more suave than comfortable when I write about CP’s garden array. She has a throw pillow that says, “Gardeners Have The Best Dirt,” and I rarely, if ever, do. Not about dirt, anyway.
To write using words that mean less than I’ve experienced, old Quirk says, leaves room for the both of us, my reader and me, to “move around.” It’s in that space, that elbow room, that learning takes place. And learning’s what life is about. It’s where we make our communion. It’s where the Word becomes flesh, as the Evangelist was wont to say, and pitches its tent… a tent filled with grace and truth (Jn 1.14).
February 10, 2006
Lily
Lily Tomlin was on stage in our town last night. For two intermissionless hours, she regaled and guffawed us all by herself. Her only props were a table, a stool, a bottle of water, a can of hairspray, and a few sound effects. Nobody tapped her wire, so far as we could see, but it would have been to their benefit had they done so.
She gave us what we so sorely need, a look at ourselves and our habits, but what is more, a palpable sense of our humor. The early medics in the past knew what they no longer seem to know in the now, that our humor is a profound and singular measure of our health.
One of the standards for that measure is our religion, what we are bound to, what is most valuable to us. If it is not a source of enough security to allow us to let go and let God — who knows our humor far better than we — then it is of little worth, a cross to bear rather than a cross that sets us free.
Sometimes, one of the best ways we can come to know ourselves is through a caricature of ourselves and all that we hold dear, perhaps not in a mirror, but through a mirror, if only darkly. Jesus and his colleagues, the prophets, do that so well, if often painfully. Lily Tomlin stood right up there in that band of worthies last night.
February 9, 2006
Go!
Epiphany 6A Mk 1.40-45
“And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. And (Jesus) sternly charged him… and said to him, ‘See that you say nothing to any one… ‘” (Mk 1.42-44a).
Mark’s got two more stories like this with Jesus warning folk not to spread it around about his mysterious authority — one, the healing of a child (5.43), the other, Peter’s recognition that he is the Messiah (8.29f). And this is not even to mention how from the get-go, the daemons are always on to him. The scholars call it the “Messianic Secret,” and they’ve got all kinds of reasons why and why not. But start up a sermon with a phrase like that and watch all the congregation’s switches turn off, one by one.
So, let’s don’t bother about the New Testament scholars’ propensity to talk about Jesus’ Messianic Secret. We have one, too, you know, so let’s talk about our own, instead.
The early 20th-century evangelist Billy Sunday called the Episcopal Church the “Sleeping Giant of Christianity.” Billy Graham said his model for ministry was the same as that of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Evangelism.
Just the other day at Coretta Scott King’s funeral, Bush 41 said that he is an Episcopalian and not all that used to talking to 10,000 people gathered in one church. Bill Clinton followed and said, no wonder, Episcopalians aren’t called the “Frozen Chosen” for nothing.
And so, sleeping giants, yawn and stretch and dream. Or else if ever we wake, just stand around and watch Billy Graham make hay with our sunshine.
Actually, however, the Messianic Secret is not all that top-classified anymore. Now that the Council of Nicea has made it more or less accessible, the Athanasian Creed made it more or less obscure, and Johann Gutenberg has spread it all over the newsstands, we haven’t got much of an excuse for heeding Jesus’ stern admonition to the leper. I suspect he wouldn’t mind.
So what is the secret that’s no secret at all?
Well, among other things, it’s to know the difference between being faithful and being orthodox… between doing and willing… between surrendering to Jesus and submitting to the Windsor Report… between General Convention and “815″… between being loyal to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of ECUSA and succumbing to one’s phobias… between the consensus fidelium and biblical inerrancy, and whatever else. Certainly, by now, we get the point. If it’s not perfectly clear, we could nail the Baptismal Covenant up on the narthex door for good measure, then read it and will it coming and going.
If the real Messiah, the one who’s no secret at all, is not doubled up in gales of laughter by now at our impotence and childishness and spiritual illiteracy, he might be compassionate enough to suggest, “Go! Show it to the priest, and the both of you, go tell it on the mountain!”
February 8, 2006
Quicksilver
It’s an ancient stumbling block, religion, especially when it’s organized. Articulating faith is hard enough. The years have shown that defining it is so next to impossible that it might as well be. But we never seem to learn that so long as we’re human, the two — religion and faith — will be such as to require one another.
Religion is that corporate human endeavor to render faith both memorable and manageable. (The same may be said of government and justice, education and truth, medicine and health, marriage and love, and on and on.) Trouble is, faith will have none of it. Like mercury — which isn’t called “quicksilver” for naught — faith is often characterized by rapid and unpredictable changeableness. Nailing it down simply makes it into something it’s not. Yet, faithful is what we’re called to be, and religion is as good a way as any to be it.
Thus does religion remain a noble venture, but it’s not and never will be the same as faith. The Episcopal Church’s management system is a product of religion and is called General Convention. It remains, to the confusion and frustration of many, generally conventional.
On the other hand, our inescapable human “beingness” is centered in our freedom to choose. The least our religion — and that of others — can do is to respect and honor that freedom. And as has been warned here before — perhaps too often, but never, I suspect, often enough — we mustn’t let the grace grow under our feet.
February 7, 2006
Breath
If you call up best-selling author, Joan Borysenko and get her voice mail, this is what you’ll hear: “This is not a telephone answering machine, but a questioning machine. Who are you, and what do you want? If you think these are trivial questions, be aware that most people come into this world and leave it without answering either one.”
I can’t imagine why, but my friend Janet sent me this, thinking I might like it. I not only like it, I’m thinking seriously of using it. Furthermore, it showed up on the same morning the Psalm in the Daily Office closed with this harsh reminder for asthmatics: “For (God) remembered that they were but flesh, a breath that goes forth and does not return” (Ps 78.39).
This asking Who I am and What I want together with speculating on all these irretrievable breaths is not only challenging for a cornet player, but for a sometime loose and evil liver, as well. That these issues also arrived as I’m bamming into my ninth decade doesn’t either help matters any.
It doesn’t take a lot of breath to ask these questions, but it sure takes a lot to answer them.
February 6, 2006
Safe
Ann, a cyber friend of mine, ran across a 1916 advertisement for a library organizer and director in Northern Wyoming. It read, “Must be able to get along with Western people, ride and drive, as well as pack a horse, follow a trail, shoot straight, run an automobile, and be able to rough it whenever necessary.”
Accordingly, Jane Langton writes in The Thief of Venice that “To the poet Homer, libraries were holy places like churches, and the priestly librarians a blessed race, a saving remnant in a world of sin. Whenever God grew impatient and decided to destroy the world, he remembered the librarians and stayed his hand.”
CP is a librarian. There’s nothing like always being on the safe side.
February 3, 2006
Nose
It has been said of Reinhold Niebuhr that he had a nose swift to sniff out the irony and the ambivalence of things in general and of piety in particular, an eye sharp to perceive that the children of darkness are apt to be not only wiser but often more appealing and plausible than the children of light.
When we pray in our churches, insofar as we ask for anything, let us ask for that. For as we sharpen those skills do we also strengthen any capacity for love and servant leadership that might be latent in us. There’s a seductiveness, a quaint charm in the order now so many seek. The terrible anxiety of losing it and of not always being right provokes the anger — and often the meanness — to defend it. When that happens, fear has then taken the place of love and we are left with a not very secure place from which to exegete and understand.
The Great Commission to make disciples, as noble as it be, can blind us to the Great Commandment to love, thus leaving us merciless with numbers galore and no church at all.
February 2, 2006
Serve
Epiph 5B / Mk 1.29-39
So, as Mark tells it, Jesus and four of his colleagues stop by Simon Peter’s house after church for what some call “the thirst after righteousness.” It is one of the more delightful reminders that even after twenty centuries, we’re all pretty much alike.
Jesus, after preaching his heart out at the synagogue over at Capernaum and astounding everybody with his authority, is probably a mite weary. So he goes home with Simon and Andrew, and takes James and John along. When they get there, some of today’s readers may be startled to learn that Peter has a mother-in-law. Now don’t lose sight of this, for this is where I’m headed this morning.
It’s Peter and the tradition, of course, that all of us are usually most concerned with. But his mother-in-law never seems to get all that much attention. With Peter’s having given up his livelihood to follow some itinerant preacher, she may not have been all that pleased for her daughter and their family. Perhaps later on when he hit the big time, more or less, one might have said of her what the late senator Hubert Humphrey once said in aside, Behind every successful man, he remarked, one finds a surprised mother-in-law. But not now in this story.
Anyhow, when they get there, it’s no wonder they find that she is not well, that she “lay sick with a fever.” And, like so many of us guys, they just stand around in the kitchen wringing their hands and mumbling, “What’s for lunch?” Not so with Jesus. He put his special skills right to work. As Mark tells it, “he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her; and she served them.”
This gospel lesson is entirely about healing, but there’s a simple line in it that I find for the moment, more interesting. The line is — “And she served them.” It can so easily be overlooked. Partly, because it’s so often the way things go and had been going for generations and have been going ever since right up to now. It seems that there’s always one person in most every domestic relationship of whatever kind who takes the mantle and does the scut work while the rest of us stand around and watch the ball game.
But more than that and whatever, it’s the kind of willingness to serve that makes some of us not stand around, but stand apart. And it’s this will to serve that turns the servility of resignation into the servanthood of leadership.
One of the signs that makes for an outstanding church is whether it’s people are willing to serve, not just that they serve, but that they choose to serve. Jesus came among us as one who made that choice all the way from the humility of riding on a jackass to the suffering servanthood of hanging on a cross. And the model of all that he witnessed all the way from his vocational wilderness encounter with Satan to the Garden of Gethsemane was that such servanthood is purely and simply an act of the will, a matter of choice. He was very clear about that and thus, he never confused his role with his identity.
“When the lead persons in any enterprise habitually confuse role and identity, losing sight of the common humanity they share with the people they lead, an artificial distance is opened up between the leaders and the led, and everybody suffers — nobody more than the leaders themselves. Pomposity in a leader encourages phoniness and posturing all through an organization. Self-importance cuts off the leader from the people at all levels, and it sabotages the caring and truthful relationships that can energize family units and whole systems.”* And this most emphatically includes the church, especially the church. Any possibility of servant leadership is hopeless and only accelerates the current and growing malaise which is crippling the church.
True servant leadership not only can enrich a congregation, but it can turn a church away from an obsession with itself to an obsession to love and witness and serve the cause of peace and justice among our colleagues in all the churches and in the nation and in the world. For these, as well, are acts of the will, ministries that a church deliberately must choose and inspire others to choose. Further, it is a remarkable and profound way to evaluate all levels of ministry. It has always been essential. As my low-steeple Baptist preacher friend Will Campbell has said, it is what it means not just to be the church, but aggressively “to church.” It has never been more important.
What we do and who are in our sense of place has deep and intensive meaning. Nearly every choice we make, from the way we greet and welcome those who come in our doors to the way we pray about our corporate vocation as it may be most current for us, whatever, affects our health and purpose and ministry.
Having said that, you can start with whatever pain and sacrifice it takes by surprising your mother-in-law. Either her or a reasonable facsimile.
*Bennett Sims, “Servanthood: Leadership for the Third Millennium,” Cowley Publications, p 19
St Ann / Epiph 5B / Mk 1.29-39 / 5ii06 / JLD
Jesus, after preaching his heart out at the synagogue over at Capernaum and amazing everybody with his authority, is a might weary. He needs to quench what some might call the “thirst after righteousness.” So he goes home with Simon and Andrew, and takes James and John along. When they get there, some of today’s readers may be startled to learn that Simon (aka Peter) has a mother-in-law.
The Church of Rome has, I suspect, never cared much for this story in Mark’s gospel. They’ve a penchant for claiming Peter as their founder and first pope and at the same time making it big for all their clergy to remain celibate as, I suppose, they like to presume was he. That Simon Peter had a mother-in-law doesn’t speak all that well for the possibility of himself keeping such a vow, nor for the Bible giving the idea of celibacy on the face of it all that much “to do.”
It’s Peter and the tradition, of course, that all of us are most often concerned with. But so far as his mother-in-law goes, nobody seems to offer her all that much attention. Before we go on, we might at least give her what one-time Senator Hubert Humphrey said in aside, and that is that behind every successful man, one finds a surprised mother-in-law. With Peter’s having given up his livelihood as a fisherman, she was surely no exception.
Anyhow, when they get there, they find that she is not well, she “lay sick with a fever.” And, like so many of us guys, they just stand around in the kitchen wringing their hands and mumbling, “What’s for lunch?” Not so with Jesus. He put his special skills right to work. As Mark tells it, “he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her; and she served them.”
This gospel lesson is entirely about healing, but there’s a simple line in it that may be immediately more relevant. “And she served them.” That can so easily be overlooked. Partly, because it’s so often the way things go and had been going for generations and have been going ever since right up to now. It seems that there’s always one person in most every domestic relationship who takes the mantle and does the scut work while the rest of us stand around and watch the ball game.
But more than that and whatever, it’s the kind of willingness to serve that makes some of us not stand around, but stand apart from others. And it’s this will to serve that turns the servility of resignation into the servanthood of leadership.
One of the signs that makes for an outstanding church is whether it’s people are willing to serve, not just that they serve, but that they choose to serve. Jesus came among us as one who made that choice all the way from the humility of riding on a jackass to the suffering servanthood of hanging on a cross. And the model of all that he witnessed all the way from his vocational wilderness encounter with Satan to the Garden of Gethsemane was that such servanthood is purely and simply an act of the will, a matter of choice. He was very clear about that and thus never confused his role with his identity.
“When the lead persons in any enterprise habitually confuse role and identity, losing sight of the common humanity they share with the people they lead, an artificial distance is opened up between the leaders and the led, and everybody suffers — nobody more than the leaders themselves. Pomposity in a leader encourages phoniness and posturing all through an organization. Self-importance cuts off the leader from the people at all levels, and it sabotages the caring and truthful relationships that can energize family units and whole systems.”* And this most emphatically includes the church, especially the church. Any possibility of servant leadership is hopeless and only accelerates the current and growing malaise which is crippling the church.
True servant leadership not only can enrich a congregation, but it can turn a church away from an obsession with itself to an obsession to love and witness and serve the cause of peace and justice among our colleagues in all the churches and in the world. For these, as well, are acts of the will, ministries that a church deliberately must choose. Further, it is a remarkable and profound way to evaluate all levels of ministry, and it has always been essential. As my low-steeple Baptist friend Will Campbell has said, it is what it means not just to be the church, but aggressively “to church.” It has never been more important.
What we do and who are in our sense of place has deep and intensive meaning. As a parish, we are in a significant and challenging transition to which God has brought us, not only in our own life, but in the life of this diocese, this southeastern province, and in the national church, itself. Nearly every choice we make, from the way we greet and welcome those who come in our doors to the way we pray about our corporate vocation as it may be most current for us, affects our health and purpose and ministry.
Having said that, you can start at whatever pain and sacrifice — if you’ve not already — by surprising your mother-in-law. Or a reasonable facsimile.
*Bennett Sims, “Servanthood: Leadership for the Third Millennium,” Cowley Publications, p 19