June 10, 2006

Watching

Here I am two days and 390 miles away from Columbus, Ohio, and General Convention 2006 where the so-called Windsor Report is to be the big enchilada, and I not only haven’t read it all, it’s been over a year since I’ve even looked at it, save for the fancy binder it’s in. 

Of course, I’ve heard a lot about it, read opinions for and against, how it’s consistent with the “orthodox catholic faith for all time,” and how it’s a step backwards into the Reformation, and finally, how it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. But like somebody said the King James Bible was good enough for Jesus, Anglicanism’s oxymoronically ordered freedom has for most of my lifetime been good enough for me. 

My GC reporting, as you might expect, is apt to be not all that objective. For example, I watch for the ironic, and that makes me miss the more heroic stuff, but you’ll likely hear about that from those writing from a different bias. Mine, just so you’ll know, is that the Christian faith is more ironic than heroic. 

In case you need a refresher, comic irony exposes pretense and foolishness and shows us the figure of the understated person (or event) that appears to be more than he or she (or it) is. On the other hand, the hero is the larger-than-life person (or event) that appears to be more than the human condition will bear: the champion, the invincible warrior, some archbishops, the pompous fool, eg  Donald Duck. You can fill in your own list. Church conventions inevitably supply a long one from which to choose. 

On the other hand, the ironic person is given to understatement and is usually more than meets the eye. Think, maybe, Charlie Chaplin or Maya Angelou or Jimmy Carter anybody you’ve known who’s unpretentiousness is downright annoying, a person whose humanity shines through, the more, in my opinion, congenial to the Christian faith.

Yogi Berra said you can observe a lot just by watching. If it doesn’t make me miss too many naps, that’s what I plan to do.

June 9, 2006

Angstlicanism

To tell the truth — and that’s what I strive to do now and then — the thought of being an embedded reporter next week in this forthcoming Big Fat Anglican Wedding up in Columbus, OH, called the General Convention makes me nervous as hell. That in itself is enough.

But to report on it fairly is even nervouser-making. After all, I’m just a country preacher from central Texas where a lot of people never heard of the Windsor Report or even the Episcopal Church, for that matter. So I shall rely on my own shaky judgment, but especially those many who know so much more and seem always to be in touch with some mysterious ecclesiastical mafia where they get their information. They’ve never let us down in the past. There’s always that. It’s some comfort, but not much.

What continues to alarm me most is that there seems to be no ceasing of the vocal few (or that they may not really be “few”) who are so incensed over what seems to me so little. When otherwise respectable-looking Episcopalians are standing around on the corners of one’s life mad as hops and shouting “Repent!” at the tops of their voices, it’s a cause for some considerable distraction no matter how deranged one may think they are.

When you get people together to make binding decisions and all of them at one time or another have made the same vows more or less (aka the Baptismal Covenant or a reasonable facsimile), you still have to recognize that those vows of necessity are filtered through our own imaginations and experiences and come out, might we say, different. We pray a lot for the Holy Spirit to stop whatever it’s doing elsewhere and to pay attention to us for a moment or two as if we were so all-fired important. But even so and even if that really happens (doubt, remember, is a part of faith), we all, we deputies and bishops and hangers-on, never seem to read the mail the same way.

It’s no bed of roses to legislate grace. Even Jesus who fulfilled the law and was God’s Parable of Grace had his moments trying to communicate that reality. And we’d better believe it.

For now, as Garrison Keillor says so reassuringly, “Be well. Do good work. And stay in touch.”

June 6, 2006

Koko

Fred Rogers wanted to meet Koko, the gorilla who had been taught American Sign Language and had watched “Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood.” When they met, the 280-pound gorilla gave the diminutive Rogers a big hug, then took off Mister Rogers’ shoes.

It is only too easy to think of a neighborhood more as a place than as a relationship, more realty than reality. In our better moments, we might even call it an outward and visible sign of an inner and spiritual reality. Then maybe we’d be on to something. For there is a kind of spirit that helps make a neighborhood and sort of hold it together with a kind of pride, like that keeps trash off the streets and the grass mowed. People in our town sometimes call where they live “the Hood,” and they say it with pride.

Right now and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get General Convention off my mind. After all, to use a neighborly term, it’s just around the corner. It’s sort of our Hood. I keep thinking of ways we can set aside religion’s entrenched and protective security long enough to dare faith’s loblolly off-the-wall openness and risk. Somebody suggested we call General Convention our Big Fat Anglican Wedding and accept it as something like the neighborhood God’s Great Commandment intends when God says love the folk who live there, among others, of course.

Gorillas have a way of being hard to avoid noticing. So perhaps Koko has a clue. Why not, just before each legislative session next week, we give one another a big hug, then take off our neighbor’s shoes?

PS. I made more or less this same suggestion three years ago just before GC 2003. So far as I know, nobody took up on it. But I figure there’s no use not trying again.

June 5, 2006

Wind

“If you can’t raise consciousness, at least raise hell.” Writer/novelist Rita Mae Brown said it. Somehow, it’s precisely such prophetic elevation that seems appropriate for this windy season in the church’s year. Holy Spirit is a hell-raiser. Like Jesus in his best Elizabethan English told old Nicodemus, the Spirit bloweth wherevereth it damneth welleth pleaseth. It for sure raised the apostles and their friends off their fundaments at Pentecost. Problem is keeping all us multiple generations of progeny cocked and loaded.

A lot of churchers these days don’t much seem to want to raise hell. There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, of course, which includes a lot of roomy patience, but having tested it daily, myself, I would say quite presumptuously there’s just got to be an edge to it out there somewhere.

It is good that we crank up General Convention, our triennial nod to the necessaries of original sin, this close to the Spirit’s arrival. Perhaps it’ll turn up with something other than its general conventionality. It’s no bowl of cherries legislating grace, but, being who we are and all, that’s mostly what we’re left with. Would that the Spirit also give us a quick Berlitz like at the original Pentecost that put the apostles into action, so we’d not take so much time and energy trying to comprehend what is otherwise plain English.

A Kentucky Irishman was bishop of Texas in the middle of the twentieth century. Among other virtues, he was a master of tough love. He often introduced himself at Rotary meetings of all places, “I’m Mike Quin. I work to beat hell.” It’s a pretty good mantra for this GC 2006 starting up next week.

June 2, 2006

Breath

Pentecost Sunday 2006

The Earth’s atmosphere is a thin layer of gases composed of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and a smidgen of others. Perhaps our most vital activity in return for our lives, together with all the rest of creation, the animals, the plants, is constantly to be at the process of recycling this envelope. For it connects us in an essential and almost intangible ambiance. Philosopher-scientist Lewis Thomas, it was, who likened it most to the walls of a living cell.

In a remarkably similar way does God’s Holy Spirit wholly contain us. It is there to sustain our lives, create our communities, enable our reconciliation. No wonder that in so many languages it is translated as breath. And further, we well remember, that like Jesus told Nicodemus, this Spirit moves, comes, and goes as it well pleases.

Unlike the Earth’s atmosphere, God’s Spirit seems limitless. We, by God’s grace, become the occasions, the stewards to receive and recycle its energy in service to God’s will. We are created by God as such spiritual beings whose vocation is to shape the Spirit as we become human in the way God imagines us to be. Indeed, a case can be made that this life begins with our first breath just as it ends with our last. It is a reality with which both pro-life and pro-choice advocates must contend.

Have you ever imagined how a symphony orchestra or a chorus could function if there were no air, no breath? The wind instruments, the strings, the percussion, all depend on there being an atmosphere which they can move and shape if there is to be music. So is our mission as churchers to shape Spirit. In the way a musician shapes the air into sound, so must we take our lives, the instruments God gives us and use them to play God’s song, to shape God’s Spirit in service to God and our fellow human beings.

Perhaps one of the most grievous examples of the way we cripple this stewardship is our continuing effort to transfix Holy Spirit in our own interests and not God’s. Of course, the mere thought of such a thing is ludicrous. But not a day passes that we churchers do not strive to fashion and refashion that Spirit in some way so as to warp the gift of Pentecost.

Just as we contaminate the Earth’s atmosphere by our carelessness do we defile God’s Holy Spirit by forcing our identity upon it. Global warming pales beside the toxicity of the church’s current selfish obsession with its manners, morals, and means at the expense of its mission. We must remember on this day that we are not only the community created at Pentecost, we are, as well, the community commissioned for Pentecost. We are Spirit-enabled to become Spirit enablers.

The constellation of propers for this Sunday overwhelms us with this good news. Acts’ accounting of the fire, wind, and apostolic headiness that birthed God’s church (Acts 2.1-11). Paul’s catalogue of the gifts of the Spirit to fulfill the church’s purpose with shape and substance (1 Cor 12.4-13). Jesus’ granting of apostolic ministry by the power of his own breath, a portend of the Spirit to come (Jn 20.19-23).

This Pentecost Sunday calls us once again to such ministry. “Breathe on us breath of God,” we sing and pray. This Pentecost comes once again to brace and refresh us, to call us back to and enlist us in the Way, the Truth, and the Life revealed in the Upper Room. This Pentecost comes once again to drag us kicking and screaming away from our fascination with ourselves and our need for ecclesiastic security. And this Pentecost comes once again to license us as God’s agent as Mary sang to show the strength of God’s arm, to scatter the proud in their conceit, to cast down the mighty from their thrones, to lift up the lowly, to fill the hungry with good things, to send the rich away empty, and to champion God’s peace and justice and love for all.