August 31, 2006
Lip
Pentecost 13/17B Mk 7.1-8,14f,21ff
When the Pharisees and Scribes asked Jesus to explain why his disciples didn’t wash their hands before eating, they weren’t seeking insight. They were demanding proof of worthiness.
On the other hand, Jesus saw people’s needs and met them with no expectation of response, no policies, no procedures. It was all so simple. Apparently something else besides cleanliness is also next to to godliness.
Isn’t it ironic, the maze of proprieties we churchers have cobbled together over the centuries and all in the name of one who had so little use for them? It’s like the Victorian father taking his son out behind the barn and saying, belt in hand, “I’ll beat the love of God into you if it takes all night!” It’s like all those movements underway in the church today that require catechisms and commitments over and beyond the Baptismal Covenant.
The Pharisees and Scribes meant well. It was in their job description. We mean well. What is religion, after all, but a human endeavor to make faith both memorable and manageable? Meaning well. Who can blame us for that?
Well, Jesus for one. And he had Isaiah to back him up. “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men” (Is 29.13; Mk 7.6f).
I suspect God had more than enough lip long ago and would like instead some heart for a change and maybe somewhere else beside only on bumper stickers about NY.
August 30, 2006
Al-gebra
Incidental Plagiarism:
A public school teacher was arrested at an airport as he attempted to board a flight. He had in his possession a ruler, a protractor, a set square, a slide rule, and a calculator.
At a morning press conference, the Attorney General said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. He did not identify the man, who has been charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.
“Al-gebra is a problem for us,” the AG said. “It desires solutions by means and extremes and sometimes goes off on tangents in search of absolute value. It uses secret code names like ‘x’ and ‘y’ and refers to them as ‘unknowns.’ We have determined, however, that the Al-gebra belong to a common denominator of a mediaeval axis with coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles often said, ‘There are three sides to every triangle.’”
When asked for comment on the arrest, an administration spokesman said, “If God had wanted us to have better Weapons of Math Instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes.”
August 29, 2006
Wanderers
Before the editors rush to the next edition and while there’s yet time, I checked in my Webster’s New Collegiate for the entry on planets. I was surprised to find that planet or no, Pluto’s not the smallest. It’s got 400 more equatorial miles than Mercury, and I haven’t heard anything about excising Mercury. Maybe that’s because it’s the closest, and Pluto is safely 100 times farther away.
I also found that the word “planet” actually means “wanderer.” Ironically, wandering in a wobbly orbit is apparently one of the behaviors that got Pluto excommunicated.
Wandering’s not an all that foreign a notion for some of us churchers. Some of us have been accused ourselves and even threatened with excommunication for wandering, although, might I say, by the somewhat more anglophilic-sounding term “walking apart.” Mayhaps that’s rather like sauntering, another interesting term once coined to describe those on their way to the Holy Land (cf Saint Terre, get it?) which, metaphorically, at least, is where we’d all probably like to be walking if we could just find one yet intact.
God surely knows what’s a planet, whether we do or not, and which ones with occupants who have enough smarts to name things, eg, like we were commissioned to in Genesis. And God also is fully aware, we can presume, of those among God’s creatures — churchers et al — who take at least as much care for their environment and its purpose as they do for its labels. Talk about walking apart.
August 28, 2006
Gus
When it came to theology, Augustine of Hippo was a real horse. Some folk still think he was the greatest, others, that he pretty well mucked up even worse than Freud on certain matters that still en-gender controversy.
He led a pretty raunchy life up to a point until one day while gardening, he took up with St Paul [Rms 13.12ff], made a hasty, rather surprising turnaround, got himself baptised, and gave a serious boost to the current practice of publishing one’s confessions as a book. Actually, though, there was still some apparent reluctance left in him when he resisted being ordained priest, only five years later to be chosen bishop with even fewer years on his resumé than our new presiding bishop-elect. In his case, however, nobody seemed much to object and let it pass without asking for extra-primatial oversight.
For those who’ve not so closely followed his theology, and for those who couldn’t care less, there’s always been his name to keep his memory alive. Few can ever agree on whether it should be pronounced AWEgusteen or AweGUStin, thus leading to one of those charming polarized trivialities we Anglicans so much enjoy and, if only for distraction, could use a few more of in these times.
Whatever, today’s his day.
August 25, 2006
Rules
Pentecost 12/16B Jn 6.60-69
A Roman Catholic bishop up in New Jersey ruled a child’s first communion invalid because the priest used bread made of rice flour. He made no exception even when he learned that the child is allergic to wheat.
I don’t know of any scriptural qualifiers about the bread — or the wine — at the Last Supper. Of course, there are those who would not welch(sic) even on their death bed in their conviction that it was grape juice all along. And then there was the frenzied rapture a few decades ago when plain old bakery bread began to replace the fish food.
One other story against the grain is that the Jesuits or some other hard-nosed missionaries managed to entice a lot of Chinese into baptism over the years by providing them one of their main staples during times of drought. Maybe old +New Jersey could figure out how he might invalidate all those baptisms so he could disenfranchise a few generations of Chinese Rice Christians.
Jesus said, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven… (whoever) eats this bread will live forever” [Jn 6.60]. It was a big saying, and it bothered a lot of people, probably still does. When he first said that, church membership dropped off noticeably to an unprecedented low leaving pretty much the original twelve.
Obviously, as if it made any difference, he never went far enough to say whether this new bread was of wheat or rice or barley or whatever, just mostly of himself which was problem enough. Leave it to the church and to its bishops like the astute Bishop from New Jersey for major theological decisions like that.
As for the rest of us, we’ll keep avoiding the real bread by busying ourselves, thank you, with and about who can love whom and how and even whether.
August 24, 2006
Surprise
Bartholomew was probably as surprised as the next guy when Jesus chose him as an apostle [Mt 10]. Nevertheless, there he was without a miter to his name, charged with a nonstipe job to heal sick Jewish dropouts and raise a few from the dead, including cleansing any who were leprous and exorcising any demons that got in the way.
It was a tough and dirty job, but it was one that Simon, the Samaritan sorcerer, was willing to die for and more than likely wished he had [Acts 8.18-21]. Anyhow, it all helped start what we get so carried away with that we now call it “apostolic succession,” only with more puffery and trappings and fewer exorcisms. We seem to prefer and claim the mainstream and pretty well forget the creeks and rivulets where those other itinerant mendicants who loved their Lord prayed and preached and simply settled for a little apostolic success here and there, now and then.
They did, however, most of them, just like old Bartholomew, end up getting called a “saint” and with their own red-letter day on the calendar. But for whatever that’s worth, it sure cost them a bundle.
[This rerun is turning into a St Bartholomew’s Day special, but so far, nobody’s picked it up as a DVD.]
August 23, 2006
Pluto
All the current scrap about whether Pluto is a planet or a planet not makes me mindful of Frederick Buechner’s suggestion that a human being is so the universe will have something to talk through, so God will have something to talk with, and so the rest of us will have something to talk about. It is for us, isn’t it, in the final analysis, so much about talk.
When for God, if I read the story aright, it’s, if not all about, then at least mostly about walk. In our more fanciful theological moments, we call it Incarnation. Our Twelve Step colleagues, as usual, make it simpler and rightly insist that the only way to get ourselves back (aka recover) is to walk the talk.
We are scientists, all of us in one way or another, and we rather get used to the notion that if we say something is enough times, then that must be the the way it is. Maybe we forget that Pluto is also a Disney dog of some considerable repute. We are all theologians, as well, even if only we’ve once had no more than a smidgen of a notion about God or a reasonable facsimile by some other name, like, maybe, Higher Power, the favorite softener.
We churchers seem very much into this sort of thing these days. Who else might there be for the Gospel to have something to talk through? And so, we write scripture and creeds, covenants and systemats, reports and resolutions, and old time religion, all the better the more who agree the closer it gets to Truth and the more like Truth it must surely be.
All the while, the Gospel was so long ago, and there’ve been so many zillions of human beings since and, God help us, so much talk, so very much talk all trying to make it so, that it is just plain humanly easy to forget that it was never so much about talk as it is about walk. James tried to tell us about faith and works, and his epistle barely made the cut.
Whatever we decide about Pluto, Pluto — or a more or less reasonably similar ball of ice — is still out there wobbling along and not giving us a lot of thought. I hope it’s different about God.
August 22, 2006
Honeysuckle
Japanese honeysuckle [Lonicera japonica] was introduced into the United States as an ornamental vine more than 100 years ago. It smothers native plants in woodlands throughout the eastern United States.
I don’t know when it was introduced into our yard, but the last couple of days, it’s being outtroduced. And by the hardest. The remarkable new views of sunrise and sunset together with some struggling trees getting new leases on life makes it worth all the effort to get shed of the tenacious stuff.
OoNameDropping Department: The great trombone player and blues singer Jack Teagarden was on stage in a Houston pub once when I got to spend an intermission talking with him. He told me this perhaps apocryphal story:
He and Fats Waller and some others were jamming late one night when they ran out of beer money. Waller asked them to wait while he went to get some money. When he came back, he had fifteen dollars. He said he had sold a tune he had written. It was “Honeysuckle Rose.” Thanks to Google’s appreciation for fine music, they’ve come up with the lyrics…
Ev’ry honeybee…. fills with jealousy
When they see you out with me
I don’t blame them….goodness knows
Honeysuckle Rose
When you’re passin’ by….flowers drop and sigh
And I know the reason why
You’re much sweeter….goodness knows
Honeysuckle Rose
Don’t buy sugar….you just have to touch my cup
you’re my sugar….it’s so sweet when you stir it up
When I’m taking sips…from your tasty lips
Seems the honey fairly drips
You’re confection…..goodness knows
Honeysuckle Rose.
[Louis Armstrong recorded “Honeysuckle Rose” with Fats Waller on December 12, 1938, and again with his All Star band in 1955.]
August 21, 2006
Kingdom
“The one who sings prays twice,” goes an old saying. The written word combined with music is a most beloved treasure of our Anglican heritage. The opportunities to hear it done well, for example, in Evensong, are rare in our town.
Yesterday afternoon, our children’s choir sang the office to the settings of Telemann and Arnatt, Howells and Long, Marcello, Rawsthorne, and Corrette. I know of no other sound quite like that, especially when sung so well by those who seem so blissfully unaware of how very difficult it is.
To celebrate an occasion so utterly void of pretense and rancor and so delightfully exemplary of collegial joy is altogether refreshing in these ecclesial days and times. When it comes to children, I’m usually more on the curmudgeonly side of W C Fields. But when I hear these voices and these prayers “twice done,” I am once again convinced that the Kingdom of God must truly be of such.
August 19, 2006
Wannabes
Somebody on the cyberwire reminded us the other day of Golda Meir’s oft-quoted, “Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs (Muslims, terrorists, Palestinians, fill in the blank) learn to love their children more than they hate us.” ‘Tis an apt statement and a winsome idea, one with a bit of modifying which we churchers might well take to heart.
One way might be the country music poet’s “if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one with you’re with.” We Anglophiles keep writing reports and resolutions to a fare-the-well, all the while dodging the slings and arrows of love and justice that end up falling by the way. [Some of us are pretty good at mixing metaphors, too.]
On the other hand, maybe the Anglican Way has had its day. Queen Elizabeth tried to tell us that it’s not all that easy to balance God and neighbor and self and still keep an open eye on the Vatican wannabes in the next pew.