April 12, 2006
Driven
Wednesday in Holy Week 2006
Ted Weddell, onetime warden of the College of Preachers, told of his being a visiting fireman on a college campus celebrating Religious Emphasis Week. In an evening fireside chat, a coed asked him to talk about the Holy Spirit. He answered,”Well, first of all, let’s get it straight that it wasn’t that blessed pigeon.”
He obviously had reference to the baptism of Jesus when the dove came down and landed on Jesus. The doves in our yard are anything but that friendly. They fight a lot, and to associate them with peace is, as Weddell implied, to stretch the image.
Perhaps not so when Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River. Imagine that picture. As Jesus comes up out of the water at the hands of his cousin John, the bird lands, and the voice speaks — “Thou art my beloved son; with thee I am well pleased.” (Think James Earl Jones or maybe the great film director John Huston.) Then the Spirit drove Jesus — not led him, but drove him — into the wilderness for forty days to savage not only with his vocation, but with old Screwtape itself. And ultimately to bring him to this, this Last Week in his life. But that’s another story.
It’s God’s pleasuring with Jesus that attracts me. “Beloved son.” “Well pleased.” Whatever, but that God’s Spirit drove Jesus away to find himself, he was surely, in God’s eyes, still a work in progress. Son, beloved, pleased — but not finished. Incomplete, but not yet ready for the task ahead.
On the other hand, and perhaps this is where we come in, God has modeled here for all to see what he means by human being. This is the image of God we hear about, that we, indeed, are, ourselves. This is the Christ-in-us touted in the Baptismal Covenant. It’s almost as if God is a sculptor of sorts and stands back from his creation, admiring, pleased, smiling, laying down his mallet and chisel, walking around to get different, perhaps better perspectives. Yet, not completely finished with Jesus — nor neither now with us.
Our tradition confirms that to be human, to be imagined by God, is to be free to choose… to be free to choose to love, to create, to reason, to live in harmony with all of creation — the atmosphere, the spotted owl, the great redwoods, the wetlands, the wretched neighbors next door and the ingrates over in the middle east, the works — and with God. Lord, how many times have I beat this horse (metaphorically, of course!)? But I suspect I shall never tire, for it is so true. And then, to take it another step, there’s this:
There’s church. Church is not the Smithsonian Institute for the preservation of the Lambeth Quadrilateral which can take care of its ever-loving self. Church is not parchments vacuumed under glass. Church is not a place just for the warm and fuzzy confirmation of Aunty Sizzle’s nostalgia.
No. Church is a gathering of worldlings with all our warts and languages and biases and ethical stumblings, holy and spiritual to the core precisely because that’s the way God makes us. Church is all this humanity cobbled together with one mighty calling — to grab this spirit God gave us by the tail and, with God’s always inclusive grace, shape it, inform it, and build it into the human being God imagines.
The church’s vocation is to make us human. God creates us and says, “These are my beloved children in whom I am well pleased,” and then stands back and smiles. Our vocation is to get on with becoming these loving, reasoning, creative, harmonious stumblers, these canonized Slobs that God has in mind, but maybe most of all to keep God smiling, maybe even laughing in surprise whenever — on our way to the wilderness — we get it right.
That’s all.