April 13, 2006
Remember
Maundy Thursday
Memory may well be the only way we know who we are.
When we lose it, as Alzheimer’s devastation can attest, our world disintegrates. Every morn when we awaken, we must reinvent our “wheel.” We are known, but we do not know. We forget, but we are not forgotten, for so much of us exists now only in the memory of another.
So it is with those who follow the Way from Jesus to the Christ. Come back to this moment. Through scripture and our family history, remember that we are the children of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel and Leah, as many as the stars, as many as the grains of sand.
Come back to this moment. Through symbol and story. Through the cross, through color and chorale, through holy community and Holy Communion. See it, hear it, be it.
Do this — in remembrance. Not like a class reunion to celebrate nostalgia, as sweetly painful as is the sound of it. Not to rehearse our anecdotage, as boringly painful as is the drone of it.
For we’re here not merely to share a memory, but to answer a mandate to remember — and not by some lowest common denominator of passive aggression, but by lifting high the cross of aggressive passion. “Do this,” our Lord commanded on the very eve of his crucifixion, “in remembrance of me.”
Do this in remembrance that we — and the world to which we are called in service — may know and never forget.
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.
April 11, 2006
Irony
Holy Week, rather like Holy Orders, is one of those peculiarly unnecessary phrases that begs the truth. When the Word became flesh, all of God’s creation was affirmed as holy, that is, for what it had always been, and for us eventually to discover through the aegis of the Word that this was so.
Of course, we need the cyclic liturgical year to remind us and the critical liturgical event to equip and enable our memories to appreciate these things. But when God created us, that is, imagined us into spiritual being with the vocation to become human, there became an abundance of holiness to go around.
It is said by those in the know that Christian faith is ironic, not heroic, and being so makes considerable demand on our imagination. The delightful tale of our Lord’s riding into Jerusalem on a jackass is of the most profound kind of comic irony which exposes our pretense and our foolishness and which shows us the figure of the eiron, the understated person who appears to be less than he or she is. He would soon meet Pilate, the hero, the larger-than-life figure who appears to be more than the human condition will bear: the champion, the pompous fool. Mrs Pontius Pilate knew, of course, and so did Jesus.
It is good then that we embrace this week as Holy, so long as we don’t get carried away with ourselves and start asking questions like “What is truth?” whose answers are often too ironic to understand, save through the imaginative icon of faith.
(With many thanks to Charles Rice, “Eikon and Eiron: Faith as Imagination,” St Luke’s Journal of Theology, Vol 32.4, September 1989, pp 249-256)
April 10, 2006
Palmistry
It’s the week of the palms, and it’s Monday and counting.
I’ve never been so sure whether there were palms handy for the crowds to strew, but that something was thrown about seems to be a fact, even if it was just new wishes and old tires. One point of this week seems to be that those who were for Jesus today won’t be come Friday. Whatever the latest old fragment of a codex says about whoever gave Judas the idea, he’s still figured to be the palm artist who helped things turn from what we thought was good to what we knew was bad to what we now for some crazy reason think is Good again.
Maybe they didn’t have palms, but we do, and that’s what matters. It is our palms, after all, from which the tree was named. It is our palms that we hold up in praise, hold down in disapproval, and hold out for help. It is our palms that we slap with and clap with and pat with and palm off and greet with.
We are the same ones who lined the streets to welcome our Lord and who then maligned and condemned him. It is in our spiritual DNA, that language that makes those words that become flesh, our flesh, the flesh that we live with, worship with, plead with, and honor with.
Come Easter Day, surely it’ll be no wonder why we’re wholly weak.
April 6, 2006
Molecules
Palm Sunday Mk 11.1-11a
“Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming! Hosanna in the highest!”
That cry and all its accompanying “king talk” was all the Romans and the Pharisees needed to shift into red alert. They smelled uprising and treason, and they knew the consequences. If alone for their own sake, the Pharisees warned Jesus to tell the people to cool it, only to hear him say in response…
“I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”
That simple affirmation could be the most overlooked and unsung song of perceptive wisdom in all the events and words that surround us during our celebration of Passion Week.
Bennett Sims reminds us in his book on servant leadership that the quantum physics theorists are certain that there is a caring pulse of energy that animates and interconnects all the entities in the cosmos. Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist, outraged his time when he said that the “molecules make love.” This, of course, got his books banned as a consequence. (The notion of “making love” and who or what does it and how and with whom never seems even now to sit all that well with the orthodoxers.)
In Jesus’ time, it might have been — indeed, was — seen all along that the created order in all its facets always knew and recognized in their own way who and what was present in him among them. The daemons, the loaves and fishes, the storms, winds, and waves, the human maladies, the fig trees, Satan itself in the wilderness, all were on to what had happened and was going on and about to happen when the Word became flesh.
No wonder Jesus could say that if the crowds were silent, even the stones, the seemingly most inert and mute of all creation (and, by the by, the epitome of efficiency), would burst forth in adulation. We call it atomic energy, but by whatever name, it remains, Benedicite, omnia opera Domini — “O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord.”
If the events we celebrate during this Passion Week tell us nothing more, they remind us once again how inseparable are we one from the other and from the very stones along the way. They may be inert, they may seem to have no freedom at all, but when it comes to presence and endurance and dependability — and even to praise — we can learn from them a thing or two.
And furthermore, my loverlies, we mustn’t ever be all that sure just what those molecules are up to, and altogether unpretentiously, right before our very eyes.
April 5, 2006
Carnations
In one of my previous carnations and for lack of anything else to do, I taught something called business math in our town’s two-year technological college. The thirty students who took the course were to have taken and passed high school algebra. I took the registrar’s word that this was so.
My credentials to teach this course were wandering, but, I thought, impressive. I was certified in celestial navigation as a naval aviator back in the Great Middle War. I had a minor in math on my master’s degree in geology. 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 use terms like “multiply” and “divide” when we could just as well use “times it” and “under it.” 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 literacy pandemic. 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 as one can imagine. Our village is simply not in to raising children. Most of our wealthy send their kids and their money to private schools to train our leaders and then complain about the public school budget all along for it’s only to train their followers.
The latest thing the schools have sanctioned for lack of money is abolishing anything in the curriculum that even looks like the humanities. They’ve even just now thrown out phys ed, as well. I can’t even imagine that the abolition of high school football might be right around the corner (and not because of no more Philosophy 101 or bands to play at half time).
Outsourcing is the current vogue, so why not also outsource our schools? It would probably be cheaper to fly all these kids to Bangladesh where they at least teach English well enough to say, “Please hold. This call may be monitored in order to improve our efficiency.”
April 4, 2006
Events
It just came in on the wireless early this morning that Wednesday (that’s actually tomorrow) at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 AM, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. Those who make it their business to know about things like this say that such will never happen again. Ever. Ever. Ever.
These kinds of announcements consume me with excitement, especially when they’re veritably right now and not six centuries into a future more or less beyond my bioscope.
The cosmos, of course, could care less. But to anthropomorphize some more, to be human at all is in a way to give the universe a voice and a timekeeper. It is to give it a present, an occasion in all the seeming infinitude of space/time for it to become aware of its awesome self. We know precious little about its past and can only speculate about its future, but, at least, we know this much about its now and the way we share the precious gift of being part with it.
Naturally, when I learned this about tomorrow’s early morn, I could hardly wait to share it. So I went rushing in at breakfast to tell CP.
“Yes,” she said. “And yesterday was the only opening day for baseball ever in 2006.” We have a profoundly complementary domestic relationship.
April 3, 2006
Color
The story goes that people complained when Henry Ford’s innovative assembly line offered the public a choice of colors on his new automobile. He said they could have any color they chose so long as it was black. (But he also paid his workers well enough, he said, so that they could actually afford to buy the cars they made.)
The freedom to choose is that imaginative gift from God that makes us human. But maybe it’s also what unleashes our daemons. Faith is in that bag of tricks somewhere, and so is love, for they are also choices. And the spectrum of life challenges us with far more than just shades of black.
It’s spring in our town about now, and, like they always do year in and year out, the colors are approaching dazzling. We need not choose, for mostly they’re there on this bush, that tree, those birds, and we can have them all at once. Ford was shrewd economically, both for himself and for his employees and for his wealth — and, of course, subsequently for the great and generous Ford Foundation. One might choose to say that he was colorful even in spite of himself, then one might choose not. That’s the beauty of it.