March 20, 2006
Crash
It was recently reported that a delegation from Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, was invited over to Moscow for a “crash course in diplomacy.”
I appreciate irony whenever I run across it, but I must say that the newspaper’s unfortunate choice of metaphor doesn’t hold out a lot of hope. I suppose, however, it may be appropriate enough, considering the current urgencies. To their credit, the Russians did give the delegates a pointed warning at the outset that their organization must recognize Israel and also dismantle its militias or face isolation.
It is Hamas, remember, that has implied that the best way to recognize Israel is to abolish it. They didn’t say how, but considering their customary reconciliatory ways and all the WMD talk on both sides of the ocean, it doesn’t take too much imagination.
The story didn’t say whose idea it was for the Russians and the Palestinians to get together and play nice, but maybe it’s a good sign, anyhow. On the other hand, geopoliticians who know about these sorts of things have been puzzled that the Palestinian electorate would in the first place choose leaders who are not exactly known for their diplomacy. It could be though, that maybe they’ve just been observing the way we choose ours. Our brand of preëmptive diplomacy, the kind we’re so fond of staging for the Middle East, could be just the ticket. Shock and aw shucks.
March 17, 2006
Green
There was a time when some fell for the notion that the moon was made of green cheese. Dolts they were thought to be, but maybe their conclusion was not entirely without reason. Unaged wheels of cheese in dim, cool places could easily look a bit like the moon when it is full of itself.
Out west where I started growing up, green and immaturity, lack of experience, gullibility, go hand in hand. Tenderfoot. Greenhorn. Actually, though, the new horns on young deer, so they say, often appear a little greenish.
On the other hand, St Patrick, like everybody else, probably wore brown … even on March 17th. Kermit, the frog, probably would, too, had he half the chance.
But just to be on the safe side, “O all ye green things upon the earth, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him forever.”
It’s not easy being green.
March 16, 2006
Menagerie
Lent 3B 2006
Here we are in the middle of Lent, and the appointed Bible lessons catch the theme altogether well: order, depression, and confusion. (We call them “the propers.” It’s the Anglican way.) Moses, just as you might expect, is about keeping Law and Order and all those commandments (Ex 20.1-17). Paul is about breast-beating and on one of his spiritual “poor me” kicks (Rms 7.13-25). And Jesus is throwing the Temple furniture and all the cats and dogs around for he has had it with the prelates and their puffery (Jn 2.13-22).
I’ve a hunch Jesus would like the Jesus Seminar. You know, those biblical scholars who take apart every religious and sectarian jot and tittle to give us a remarkably accurate picture of things that were in those New Testament days, sort of a latter day You Are There kind of experience. And Jesus would like their work not just because of the flattery, but because he is long on metaphor, and those guys understand metaphor with the best of them and aren’t always needing somebody else to explain it to them. And I also think he’d like them (does [or doesn’t] like them, what am I saying?) because they seem to know so well what he was up against.
Today’s story is a splendid metaphor (with some literal thrown in) about what Jesus was up against. It’s Passover time and like the devout Jew he was, he went to church. And instead of a chance for some prayerful peace and quiet and tightening up of his discipline, he found the mother of all unholy messes. It was not altogether unlike today, a church obsessed with itself and its “toys” rather than being a proving ground for staging its mission. The menagerie is different, but the zoo-like confusion is about the same, and we’ve obviously not yet got rid of the pigeons.
We churchers do share a common life with those in that time, maybe for different reasons, but with considerable sameness. These stories illustrate it.
A lot of us would like a bit more, maybe a lot more, law and order. Grace is okay, and grace is really where it’s at. But as a reward for hard work, we’d like something a little more tangible. That southern judge, for example, was not content with the court house as the only symbol of the judiciary. He wanted the Ten Commandments immovably chiseled in stone like the originals and planted right there in the lobby in front of the elevators for all to see. He probably meant well, and a lot of people agreed with him. But we just can’t do it like that in our system. It has to be more in our vision and, like Jeremiah said, in our hearts, more than just hanging up there in a framed sampler down the hall at grandmum’s house.
Paul does a better job of breast-beating than most of us, surely more than I. But Paul had a hand on the action for which we can be grateful for a lifetime, even if he did elbow out the rest of the apostles and get better press.
But it’s Jesus who’s the author and finisher of our faith. It’s Jesus with his puzzling parables and who is, indeed, himself, The Parable. It’s Jesus with all the crazies in his entourage. It’s Jesus going about loving and healing and teaching and walking on water. It’s Jesus to whom we look and find mystery and wholeness and new life. And there’s the rub.
Just as Jesus was frustrated by the misuse of the Temple in his time, so must we be in ours. As noble a cause as is Lent for us and as frustrating at times must it be, there is yet no better time to reorient our lives and purpose with our Lord. There’s no limit to God’s grace, but old prophet Isaiah did recommend that we “seek the Lord while he wills to be found” (Is 55.6). We don’t want to be presumptuous about that, and there’s no sign yet that God’s backing off. But there was that considerable uproar in the Temple once, and nobody can presume it won’t happen again — wherever or whenever the time might be ripe. In God’s way with irony, Lent could be such a time.
March 15, 2006
Choice
“When power leads us to arrogance, poetry reminds us of our limitations. When power narrows the area of our concern, poetry reminds us of the richness and diversity of our existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”
John Kennedy spoke these words in relation to the state and the way we govern ourselves. In our time, I hear them equally in relation to the church and the way we understand our ministry. Our common need for poetic cleansing in both church and state has never been more obvious and demanding. Nor has our capacity for the ecclesial stewardship of the parables of Jesus — which is our poetry — to understand and appreciate the metaphor of life ever been more in want. In few places is this more evident over this past decade or so than in those dioceses — including the Diocese of Tennessee — where there has been precious little “poetry.” Where there has been instead only denial, grandiosity, and an addictive confusion of authority with power together with all the movements and systems that will use almost any means to achieve such control.
Pretentiousness has led us in Tennessee beyond our limits both financially and spiritually. And those always questionable and so-called “big holy audacious goals” rather have been swamped by the sham it. The fear of inclusiveness, ie, our common humanity, has insulted God’s imagination and thus narrowed our vision and blinded us to the richness and diversity of our Anglican heritage. Our spiritually incestuous deployment and placement practices have both sapped our will to be faithful and compromised our stewardship of the Gospel. The bishop, himself, has publicly declared in convention and in a most un-Anglican fashion that there “is no middle ground.”
We are faced now in only a few days with the critical choice of a new bishop for the Diocese of Tennessee, a broken place masquerading as a whole one. Our collegial polity by which we must make such a choice has been severely compromised over this past decade by an understandably bewildered indifference of the laity and an inexcusable and embarrassing intimidation of the clergy. How we choose and how we face the change which demands that we choose takes the full measure of our spiritual maturity. It requires the kind of courage Ernest Hemingway called “grace under pressure.” And it requires wisdom of a biblical dimension.
Such wisdom is not only a matter of the mind but of the intuition and the heart. As the Book of Proverbs attests, there is a radical and refreshing feminine consciousness about such wisdom, a consciousness we do well to embrace for our enlightenment and leavening as we move into this time.
John Hines, once our presiding bishop, said that “A bishop’s job is to keep his church family on the firing line of the world’s most desperate needs and to learn to accept the exquisite penalty of such an exposed position.” Indeed, how can Christians so evangelize at all when the most visible cause they proclaim isn’t Christ crucified but the schismatic dismantling of his church? The Gospel is not about this. The Gospel is about that “firing line” of conversion of life and suffering servanthood, of love and freedom from fear, of self-denial, giving up illusions of control, and embracing God’s in-breaking kingdom as servant leaders.
May whomever we choose to serve and lead us not only come here to influence others and champion some lesser cause, but to be open to influence and the cause of Christ, not only to acknowledge and respect the freedom of another, but to seek to enhance the other’s capacity to make a difference. May whomever we choose serve with us to achieve a collegial bond of caring and reconciliation that the world may so know that we are Christ’s and know so by the way we love one another. For there is, indeed, such an Anglican way, and this is it. There is no greater, no more faithful evangelism. Such poetry can only cleanse.
March 14, 2006
Lagniappe
It’s on days like today that I get the feeling that any Muse to whom I may have had access has given me up for Lent. So here’s a blessing attributed to the Franciscans, a Lenten Lagniappe.
“May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.
“May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.
“May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.
“And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done. Amen”
March 13, 2006
Eden
Pathos is a quality that moves one to pity or sorrow. There is little comfort in it. It is not a state that one healthy of mind might favor. And yet, when reaching for a way to describe the sadness of our time both in church and state, it is pathos that covers the scene. The further tragedy is that it is so unnecessarily brought upon ourselves.
The sophisticated often cast aside the myth of Eden and the profound truth about us which that story embodies. And yet, generation after generation do we little more than repeat it, not merely to reenact it as some drama on the world’s stage, but to realize it again and again. Any careful thought about the season of spring would comprehend creation’s eternal cycle of welcome that every gardener and farmer already knows deep within. God wants us not merely as stewards of Eden, but as servant leaders mutually inspiriting and offering back the benefits of our share in all of God’s creation.
If for no other reason, God wants that offering not because of any need of hers, but because of every need of ours. All this as in order that we might attend to what was never really ours at all, but of how much of it we are allowed to enjoy as sheer grace in return for our pathetic care. Perhaps that is the sadness.
March 10, 2006
Protest
I spent a few days in Kansas City once at one of those tedious professional conferences featuring experts who claim expertise, you know, that attribute of knowing more and more about less and less until you know all there is to know about nothing and just can’t wait to tell others about it for a handsome fee. The only redeeming grace about the time I was there was getting to hear Count Basie’s band in person a couple of nights in a row.
Sorry about this clumsy segué, but Kansas has been on my mind of late, and it’s mostly been about God. First, there’s the penchant over there for creation being intelligently designed. Now I don’t see how anybody can take issue with that. After all, the more we find out about creation, the more remarkable it seems. Even to call it “creation,” though, is something of an act of faith that implies a creator, as if that weren’t enough in itself to rankle the ACLU. But then to go so far as to suggest that we’re intelligent enough to know that it was somehow intelligently brought about might only serve to amuse both Charles Darwin and God.
But that’s not all. There are some crazies from Kansas who are actually marching in protest at funerals and in the name of Jesus, of all people. They’re marching around with vulgar signs claiming who God loves and who God doesn’t love as if they’re on some kind of inside track with heavenly priorities. Everybody knows that when a person’s dead, they’re dead, regardless of their principles. What is done about grieving them and their life is the business of their family and their friends. It’s a time to make nice, not naughty, to celebrate the Big Sleep with the Big Wake.
We forget that Jesus never wrote anything that we know about, nor said anything that we know first hand about, save only that he had to depend on other people’s filters. And there’s nothing in even that corpus that could lend even the slightest credence to protest marches at somebody’s funeral. One could make biblical argument for having an adequate supply of the sauce at weddings, maybe, but protest marches at funerals?
We should know better. We should be ashamed. Because we’re all in this together. What we should really be about grieving and protesting is the unthinking and devastating complicity in our own lives and in the lives of others.
Everybody knows how it is to feel good and safe about something even if we’ve only had a few moments feeling it. Everybody should be aware and alert about that and about how to make feeling safe in a just society possible for ourselves and for others as far as we can reach. If the church is about anything, it’s about that, about teaching folk to be human and to get some pleasure out of it, for God’s sake, and to be grateful. I suppose there are those who’d protest even that for lack of something better to grouse about just to get themselves noticed.
We’re better than that. God said so when he wrote Genesis and when he baptised Jesus and started off Lent so we’d take notice.
March 9, 2006
Choice
Lent 2B (Gen 22.1-14; Rms 8.31-39; Mk 8.31-38)
Scott Peck, author of the of mega-bestseller, “The Road Less Traveled,” grew up in an unchurched family. Of his first and only trip to Sunday School in all his childhood, he tells of the class being handed a drawing to color. It was of the scene in the story from Genesis in today’s propers when Abraham was preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac. He never returned.
It is a daring and frightful story, one not easily calculated to confirm the notion that God is love. Nor is the comparable one in Mark’s gospel today with Jesus’ prediction of his impending crucifixion, and his mandate that we, as well, must take up our cross with the paradox in hand that to save one’s life is first to lose it.
Not to worry, says Paul to the Romans in the morning epistle. “It is God who justifies,” he writes, “who is to condemn?… For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
We’ve stepped now through Ash Wednesday’s door into Lent. In his letter to his fellow primates across the Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury writes of this time, “Our hearts are still on the way to full conversion, and so the work of the Cross, finished in itself once and for all, is still working itself through the life of every Christian. Lent is our best opportunity to let God move more deeply and permanently into the areas of our lives that still resist his grace.”
We do, indeed, resist God’s grace. Albeit that grace is a central reality of the gospel, we yet hold back as a kind of meritocracy — both in church and state — a idolized system in which the talented are rewarded and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement, and the vast and growing numbers of the poor are merely left aside to fend for themselves.
Lent is a time to turn from this resistance and to open ourselves to grace. In God’s call to Abraham to test his obedience and in God’s driving Jesus into the wilderness of temptation to test his, it is not the sacrifice — as devastating a reality as it is — that should command our attention to emulate. It is the choice which both Abraham and Jesus made. It is thus that our faith, if it would be more than mere assent to a creed, must be a willfully open and vulnerable risk to whatever God would have of us. Only that can open the pathways that grace may abound.
I was discussing these lessons for this Sunday in Lent with a dear friend, wondering with her about choice and moral agency. With her usual devoted skill, she suggested some of these insights that follow. When Jesus asks us to take up our cross and to follow him, she said, one of the things he offers is a glimpse into his life, a model of a healthy moral life, not one that’s all cut and dried, black and white, but one that’s about wrestling with all the moral questions that confront us as they confronted him. He wasn’t against the law and the prophets (nor even about a mild meritocracy, I suspect) but he was firmly against a calloused and conventional faith. He wanted scripture and tradition to be real, to be now, to be alive. And the only way for these to be alive for him then and for us today is by engaging in real moral discernment.
So Jesus was sent into the wilderness to discover his moral purpose, to realize it, to choose whether he’s willing to embrace it. And when he does, he returns a changed man with an unswerving purpose anchored in the cross. Thus choosing, he becomes a singular moral agent commanding the human landscape so that we, as well, can rescind our resistance and surrender ourselves to grace.
The apostle Paul was, himself, a model of one who gave up his life and then received it renewed. Only then could he offer this remarkable paean in his letter to the Romans, an anthem for all who would embrace Lent once again and serve. We can find no better way to greet each of these Lenten days as we live them.
“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
March 8, 2006
Oath
When one of our special congressional committees puts somebody on the hot seat to find out whether they know anything or whether they’re up to whatever their croneyhood has suddenly got them nominated for, there comes a time for oath-taking. It would seem to be a natural, this being a so-called Christian nation with notions about original sin and all. But for some reason we’ve recently taken to making exceptions.
Five oil company executives were called up a while back to talk about all the money they’re suddenly making off us — it’s called “windfall profits.” And recently, the US Attorney General was brought in to defend his administration’s sudden obsession with wiretapping along with some other irregularities like hiding executive responsibilities behind executive privileges.
For some reason, the Republicans on the committee stonewalled efforts to require any of these six worthies take oaths before they testified. I’m sure it occurred to somebody that this sets the oathless free either not to tell the truth — if they are of such a mind — ever so much as to tell it. It apparently did occur to the Democrats on the committee, but they were outnumbered to speak in what just might have been the interests of us, the people.
Frankly, and no offense meant, there’s just not a lot about an oil company exec or an administration appointee that makes anybody comfortable that they’ll tell the truth any more readily than the next fellow, that is, without some assurance there’ll be consequences if they don’t. Even Pontius Pilate wanted to know what is truth perhaps so he could take things from there if he had to, although I don’t recall his asking for an oath, either. But I’m sure you would agree that was another matter.
Strikes me as passing strange not asking for oaths when we’ve every right and need to in a time like this when secret-keeping is downright palpable and our leaders have become past masters at that and also at dodging the truth. Promises and “just trust us” have about worn themselves out, especially when the only thing we can trust anymore is that untrustworthiness is de rigueur and competence is not all that easy to come by.
I figure people who are so deep into secrets must have some reason not to talk. I usually did as a lad whenever my folks got suspicious and sternly reminded me over and again of the virtues of truth-telling. Obviously, and like most of us, I never could get away with anything like claiming some sort of exemption.
Trust, of course, is a neutral kind of word. It’s sort of based on experience. If a person lies a lot, you can trust that’s what’ll happen on most any occasion. Or if they don’t, well, you can trust that, too. Long familiarity will tell you more or less what to expect. Like my banker wrote me once when my loan repayments got overdue by a stretch, “Grace has expired, and the law now takes effect.” Any attempt to help him with that warped kind of theology proved to no avail. Come to think about it, even my oath wasn’t worth all that much.
[Since Uncle Sugar keeps on dragging his feet, 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.]
March 7, 2006
Incurious
Incuriosity will be the end of us yet. It’s why kids drop out of school. It’s why churchers haven’t the chutzpah to accept change and deal with it. And it’s obviously why the nation is being derailed by incompetents and their cronies. I once heard of a guy — a grown man — who was so incurious that he kept only two books readily accessible by his TV cathedra — the King James Bible and something or other by Rush Limbaugh. And of course, the Remote.
But I should carp. The only thing I was curious about when in my earlier adolescence I took my first crack at college was the best valve oil for trumpets, whether to use it at all, how to improvise on any tune other than the blues changes in the key of concert Bb, and, of course, women. The curriculum held little interest. My school was run by some Methodists who really liked to keep the enrollment up. It was that desire plus a band scholarship that got me through four semesters before the registrar found out, and we had a mutual understanding.
To be curious is to be disposed to learn, to be informed, to read the Bible, of course, but also the newspaper, as well, for yourself, and not to depend on somebody else to tell you only what’s in it that they think won’t rankle you.
Maybe it’s also to be a little bit unusual like Indian John in Fennimore Cooper’s book, The Pioneer, who was “curious at cuts and bruises,” which meant that he had special knowledge about treating wounds. Actually, Indian John had a grip on the root sense of the word, ie, to be characterized by special care and ability, which meaning would probably be alive today if any of our graduates were Latin- or even semi-literate.
But things are different now. I’m a lot older and increasingly more curious lest I run out of time. On top of that, I’ve discovered the best valve oil in existence and I’ve given up the trumpet for the cornet. As for improvising, I’ve learned maybe four or five more keys than Bb, though none of them are likely to work the locks on the Gates to the Kingdom. As for women… if anybody will ever save this old world, it’ll be them, thass whom.