August 18, 2006

Preachment

A Celebration of New Ministry
for the Revd Lisa Hunt
and for the Parish of St Stephen, Houston, TX
on the Feast of the Transfiguration 2006

Being here at St Stephen’s is a kind of homecoming for me. Nearly fifty years ago, two of my children started their education in your parish day school while I was chaplain at Rice and the Medical Center. Vicki and Rector Claxton Monro became our dear friends. I am a native Texan, a teasipper, a member of the founding class of 1954 at ETSS, a deacon and a priest at the hands of Mike Quin and John Hines. I am a guest here at the grace of Don Wimberly, another Bishop of Texas who stands in this grand tradition. Thank you, Bishop.

There’s a story about a distinguished-looking elderly gentleman standing at a street corner when an attractive young woman took him by the arm. “Young lady,” he said, “are you trying to pick me up?” “No sir,” she answered, “I’m just trying to keep you from falling down.”

Lisa Hunt has been steadying me for over two decades since she came charging into my office one day to start her field-ed training for Vanderbilt Divinity School. She had two questions. Did she want to become an Episcopalian? And did she want to become a priest? Well, here she is. Most recently, she has kept me standing as priest associate at St Ann, Nashville, and by graciously inviting me to be here sharing this exciting new ministry with her and with my fellow communicants from St Ann, and with you all. Thank you.
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We couldn’t find a better biblical and liturgical beginning for our time together than the story of the Transfiguration [Lk 9.28-36]. It is one of the rarest events in the gospels. I think it more than a passing delight and to our considerable benefit that our celebration of this new ministry of rector and parish coincides on this day. For this story is a parable of the church. Just so as Peter, James, and John, we latter-day disciples often seem to want and prefer high and holy places. We want especially to find one away from the incessant, mind-numbing controversy, and we wonder why we can’t just make one here with our Lord and keep it that way. Celebrate now. Pay later.

[It is interesting that our lectionary planners for some reason omit from Luke’s accounting of the Transfiguration that the next day, when Jesus and the disciples came down from the mountain, they were confronted by a family whose child was being consumed by a daemon.]

But meanwhile, back at the mountain, there is always the Voice, surely the Voice of God, telling how pleased he is, indeed, with his son. [Think James Earl Jones reminding us that “this is CNN.” And think, if you will, Maya Angelou] It is good to hear God smile like this. God smiled before at Jesus’ baptism, and here, once again, that same Voice, “This is my Son, my Chosen.”

But this time, there is more. Much has transpired since that fate-filled baptism. The Voice seems to have gained an impatient tone. “This is my Son, my Chosen,” yes. But then, I imagine a dramatic pause before we hear — “Listen to him.” It is enough to recharge his drowsy disciples. May it be enough, as well, to energize all of us on our Way to becoming God’s church.

We’re gathered here to celebrate a new ministry. In one way, of course, it is not new at all. This parish has “been there and done that” for decades. You have an impressive record of servant leadership in church and community most recently brought into focus with your outstanding rector Helen Havens.

As well, my colleague Lisa Hunt has a couple of challenging decades on her resumé. She’s a well-seasoned priest, pastor, and preacher. She has led a parish once close to becoming moribund and once practically blown away by a tornado into becoming a parish caught up by another Holy Wind to become a source of nourishing service to its neighborhood, a source of singular and essential leadership for its diocese. In her wake, there continues a most impressive and informed leadership of wardens, vestry, and congregation. At St Ann, the message is unswervingly clear that absolutely all are welcome. Those who need to be loved can be loved until they can come to love themselves — and then love others. Every day, it proves that if you build it, they will come.

A brief note about Lisa’s preaching: As she started her sermon one Sunday, a third-grader was overheard in a stage whisper to her mother when she said, “This is my favorite part of the service.” And then on another Sunday when the gospel was about Jesus exorcising a daemon. Lisa had assumed Jesus’ role for a moment. You could almost feel her shaking the possessed man as she shouted, “Come out! And shut up!!” A stunned silence followed. And then there came a child’s voice… “Uh oh!” But there is at least one caveat: She can be an altogether unnerving prophet for those of us of all ages, especially when her Isaiah DNA kicks in.

When two histories, two vocations such as this parish and this new rector are brought together by the obviously prayerful discernment that has so moved them both, a critical mass of explosive dimensions stands ready to unleash spiritual energy. It is good that you both, parish and new rector, have wisely followed Yogi Berra’s counsel. When you came to this fork in your road, you took it. New ministry, indeed! Let us joyfully, even foolishly celebrate!

And what sort of celebration might this be? Perhaps some foolishness for Christ might help turn us into this new journey. Here’s a quaint parable about just such a thing.

One of the older nuns in a community was suffering from chronic confusion and loss of memory. From time to time, she would wander through the convent emptying people’s mailboxes, striking up strange, but pleasant conversations, collecting items from sisters’ bedrooms and giving them to others.

The community sponsored a school. One day, one of the teachers was called to the phone and left her mid-term exams and grade book on a table in the community room. When she returned, they were gone. A frantic two-day search began, notes left on the bulletin board, pleas made on the public address system. Finally, somebody thought of the wandering collector. There, buried in her laundry, were the grade books and the tests, all studied and corrected. Everyone got an A.

Nowadays, they say, when sister wanders the halls, passersby bow inwardly to her. Through her seemingly foolish actions, wandering and reminding all by her presence not to fear the final judgment, they discovered a new sense of themselves, that there are, finally, no record books, and everyone makes an A. “There is no end to the birth of God,” wrote D H Lawrence.

Many of our Anglican colleagues around the world speak now of what they are convinced is the senseless direction our beloved Episcopal Church is taking in these days. Perhaps so. But also, perhaps Sister’s behavior suggests that what appears most senseless can often seem most meaningful of all. Life fills to overflowing with opportunities to make the senseless meaningful to an irrationally rational world. At a new time like this for priest and people, might we but grasp the moment and, as the voice at the Transfiguration said, Listen, listen to my Son and listen for what it might be about him that pleasures God so.

Sometimes we are senselessly poetic, and the world is charged with a moment of beauty. Sometimes we are senselessly tender, and hardened hearts begin to melt. Sometimes we are senselessly nonjudgmental, and we see through a glass darkly into the nature of life.

What if we became senselessly vulnerable and reduced the defense budget? Might the world know less fear? Can we ever recover from the generations of fear that were born in the horror of that other transfiguration at Hiroshima whose anniversary we keep on this very day, and that has enveloped the world ever since, first in that strangely named cold war and now in the continuing reign of terror that is its bad seed?

So what if we were senselessly forgiving and abolished the death penalty? Would our children then understand and have more respect for life? What if we were senselessly generous and created a new societal system that gave the poor a fighting chance? Might our own hearts be softened?

We are surrounded by the seemingly senseless. What can be more ludicrous than a church legislature called a General Convention that is so often only generally conventional, but yet in its finer moments struggles to become an instrument for grace and justice and to do so through the sometimes stifling stuffiness of canon law?

Bill Sanders, a former Bishop of Tennessee, said five years ago at a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the ordination of women that it was the greatest thing the Episcopal Church did in the twentieth century. Perhaps, however, even now, it risks becoming almost commonplace, as this little story suggests. Our church’s chaplain at Vanderbilt University was having a what-do-you-want-to-do-when-you-grow-up talk with her young son. She asked, “Do you want to be a successful musician and composer like your dad?” “No,” he said. “Well, would you like to be a priest like your mom?” “No,” he said indignantly, “that’s woman’s work!”

It is no secret that this parish and this diocese have had an early and informing hand in setting a paradigm for “woman’s work” in our church. Rector Helen Havens was the first woman ordained priest in Texas, and my fellow ETSS graduate Archdeacon Dena Harrison is the first woman elected Suffragan Bishop for this diocese. These two women along with your new rector have demonstrated so clearly the wisdom of Bishop Sanders’s affirmation. Now, that momentum continues not only here, but as well a part of the same high-speed curve and inspiration that chose Katharine Jefferts Schori to lead the church into this challenging century shattering the church’s glass ceiling and no telling how many other such restraints in our society once and for all. We’d be remiss not to celebrate her new ministry together with ours in our hearts and prayers today.

For among all these senseless things are things that are worth happening, things like being a little more passionate for our pains, a little more alive, a little wiser, a little more beautiful, a little more open and understanding, in short, a little more human. And to remember with St Paul that, “God chose what to the world seems foolish to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are… ”

We are called to be challengers and servant leaders, out front with the mystics, the poets, the clowns, the so-called irrational and impractical people, and all those whose manner of life along with that of Jesus challenges the wider church. For only as we do so may we discover how much we are really all alike, acting out the divine comedy that involves us all. Surely this partakes of grace. And we are all there, are we not, along with our Lord, writing something in the sand. May God then say of us in our own transfigurations — These are my children in whom I am well pleased. Listen to them.

The Revd Lane Denson
Priest Associate
St Ann Church
Nashville, TN 37206
615.254.3534 pass@stannsnashville.org

August 17, 2006

InYourFace

Pentecost 11/15B Jn 6.53-59

“As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me” [Jn 6.57].

I love Jesus when he cuts the nuances. Hear these words about eating his flesh and drinking his blood and watch the eyeballs roll. Hear them, and you know right now that even his patience is thinning and his time and ours is running out.

William Temple, one of the greater archbishops of Canterbury, spoke of Christianity as the earthiest and least otherworldly of all religions. By that, I believe he meant to affirm the Incarnation as God’s radical way of reminding us that we are already spiritual beings by virtue of our creation, that Jesus is God’s example for our humanity, and that our vocation is not to be more spiritual, but to be more human. And like Jesus is saying, consume me, take me into your life in the most intimate of all ways possible, and let’s get on with it!

John’s in-your-face gospel this morning makes that brutally clear. Jesus is flesh and blood — not some stained-glass irrelevance — and unless we absorb him into our lives that way as God’s model, we “have no life in us.” Unless we come to grips with that reality about him and about ourselves, we’ll be far from experiencing that marvelous and incredible lightness of being which this gospel offers to a world sorely in need, an overwhelming gift of a love that abolishes fear.

It seems that every time we churchers come face to face with this truth about our earthly-grounded, Jesus-centered gospel, we are shattered by crisis and by fear.

First, it was slavery, then we heard the same arguments when we marched in Selma in 1965, when we ordained women in 1974, when we regularized those ordinations in 1976, and when we consecrated the first woman bishop in 1987. Now it’s the full acceptance and recognition of gays and lesbians and the remarkable election of Katharine Jefferts Schori as our presiding bishop. With an incarnational gospel, the word, like the Word, is always made flesh. The talk is made for walking.

In each and every one of these self-inflicted challenges that have come our way, there is the lurking suspicion that somehow, these people — these “others” — either were not fully human or were too human or were the wrong kind of human, at any rate, they were not “like us,” whatever we chose “like us” to mean at the time. We’ve been through one long shakedown cruise after another into the understanding of humanity and human nature, and we have not come into port yet.

Bishop Bill Sanders, once Ordinary of Tennessee, believed that women’s ordination was the most important decision of the church in the twentieth century.

The twenty-first century is yet too soon on the calendar to make any such claim like that by Bishop Sanders, and there are many more decisions awaiting us, but the decisions out in Minneapolis and up in Columbus will, I believe, be seen to come tolerable close to qualifying.

For this Church of ours is on a roll! It is very much in touch with itself. And one of the primary reasons that ha come to pass is the remarkable and creative ministries of hundreds of women, gays, and lesbian priests and bishops over this last quarter-century, and maybe even together with a few of us guys.

With the consent to New Hampshire’s election, with a significant step forward toward claiming the blessing which is ours, with the election of our new Presiding Bishop, and with the refusal to accept the touted Windsor Report for anything more than the invitation to conversation that it is, this church has come out of the closet. This church has entered firmly into this century, in faithful service to its Lord and renewed commitment to its Baptismal Covenant. And as well has it stepped forth as a leader and example to everyone — to religious people of all persuasions and to those of none, to this nation, to its president, and to the world.

So how do we come down off that high? We must, you know. We cannot just sit pretty on the mountain, all transfigured and cozying up with Jesus. How do we incarnate that good news over and over into our own lives? How do we make this new and radical turn in our own flesh and blood and in that of others?

By sheer coincidence — that’s God acting anonymously — the Old Testament lesson from the Book of Proverbs this morning tells us that wisdom is a mighty handy resource about now and, what is more, surprise, wisdom is a woman.

“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,” she says [Prov 8.22]. Which is to say that she, wisdom, was there when God made the heaven, the sea, the earth. It was as if God needed a woman’s imagination to help make them, a woman’s eye to make sure they were made right, a woman’s spirit by which to measure their beauty. Wisdom is not only a matter of the mind, but of the intuition and of the heart where imagination, discernment, and spirit become the very blueprint of its dimensions. [Fred Buechner said it in Whistling in the Dark, Harper & Row, p 112, 1988]

Wisdom — imagination, discernment, spirit. Imagination to continue to create what has never happened before. Discernment to continue to evaluate our times and our place within them, remembering Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian, who admonished every Christian to keep the Bible in one hand and the daily news in the other.

Imagination, discernment, and the Spirit to reopen ourselves to a servanthood energized, shaped, and emboldened to breach old boundaries. We must continue to pray for and adopt an empowering innerness and an explosive outwardness. One is the intensive energy of galvanizing commitment, the other, the extensive power of lavish inclusiveness that embraces the whole of humanity in a geography without boundaries [cf Bennett Sims, Servanthood: Leadership for the Third Millennium, Cowley, 1997, p 66].

You know, by the grace of God, we may well have been prophetic. And now by that same grace, we must become thoughtfully pastoral. Our parishes, where the rubber meets the road, must become well-equipped to assume the stole of servant leadership Jesus calls us to. We cannot rest in the false security of religion and so-called orthodoxy as would so many, even the well-intentioned.

Several other denominations have been stalling for years on what we are now affirming. Everyone should be welcomed. No one should be content with second-class citizenship and excluded from leadership. There is no room for pretense, least of all in the church.

We as Christians need to get past this enervating debate so that we can move on to other pressing issues that require the churches’ attention, such as the growing gap between the rich and the poor — about which Jesus did have something very clear to say.

Our church has refreshingly and deliberately come to a decision about the nagging questions that have paralyzed so many other churches. Unlike many of our fellows and leaders, I am proud of our church and that I am an Episcopalian, for together with you and you and you, I am that church. And I am not equivocating or preaching any eulogies or draping any black crepe over that proud fact.

Let us continue to embrace that selfless risk of faith and love, peace and justice, and to care for the wounded, feed the hungry, and show compassion to the brokenhearted and to the broken-spirited, perhaps any of those who’ve hung out the black crepe, as well. As Bishop Gene Robinson reminds us so often, “We’re all going to heaven… so lighten up. And, as well, for those who despise us, love ‘em, anyway.”

August 16, 2006

Frankly

I’ve a suspicion Melchizedek might not be so pleased with the periodic talk in the church of disenfranchising retired clergy. The reason for such is not altogether clear, save to suggest that some might think that when the pension kicks in, the collegial privileges, responsibilities, capacities, and, of course, ordination vows kick out.

Priests are enfranchised in their ordination to take their “share in the councils of the church” and bishops, to “share in the leadership of the church throughout the world” [BCP pp 517, 531]. There’s nothing in the ordinal that retires or curtails those charges at some canonically arbitrary age.

What’s afoot here other than a seemingly inordinate problem with control on the part of some seems to be at base a doctrine of orders. We Anglicans have scruffled with Rome for centuries over our notions about priesthood. Now, we seem to have an internal scrap in hand, as well.

Exercising the franchise [whether lay or clergy] in church councils calls, at least, upon one’s capacities for judgment. For some of us, once a priest, always a priest. Some functions, of course, change, like with everyone, but orders continue. To disenfranchise the clergy at retirement strikes me as an altogether secular appraisal system contrary to the biblical, traditional, and, as well, reasonable priorities one might expect in the church.

August 15, 2006

Clutter

New Jersey priest Elizabeth Kaeton saw a tire cover on the back of a jeep that affirmed, Life is good. She pondered.

“Instead of the code language recognized only by the cognoscenti: Sunday Services 8 AM Rite I, 10 AM, Rite II,” she wrote, “what if our sign simply said: Life is good. Or, God’s love is unconditional. Or, The Episcopal Church: It’s a come-as-you-are party. Maybe we’d get a few more folk who’d wander in through those imposing red doors.”

The streets are cluttered with signs and with hardly a symbol in sight. With a sign, what you see is what you get. With a symbol, what you get is what you see — on the other side. Our metaphor-compromised world rarely has the moxey to tell symbols from signs or to see the other side or perhaps even to know there is another side or even to care. The wide-spread scriptural inerrant errancy in some churches has seen to this.

All the while, Jesus talked like that’s why he used parables that were full of signs, but in fact were, themselves, symbols. The parables didn’t make faith, they required, indeed, demanded faith. It took faith to see their “other side.”

Maybe if our church signs — not only the billboards out front — but the people inside were also more out front, symbols that life is good, come as you are, maybe, just maybe one could see the other side.

Yes. The streets of our world are cluttered with signs and so is the church and with hardly a symbol in sight. Because, you see, the clutter is the symbol, and until we see that — on the streets and in the church — we’ll not see through to the other side.

August 14, 2006

What if?

How strange it is to see a contemporary on the calendar of saints. Yet, Jonathan Myrick Daniels whom we remember this day was demonstrating in Alabama for civil rights in 1965, more or less at the same time I was starting a new cure as rector of a fat-cat parish in our town. He was a seminary student. I was a know-it-all, deeply sympathetic with his cause, but apparently not enough so to be there with him.

I have no regret that it took only a few years after that to come to a mutual agreement with our vestry that high-steeple churches were not for me [and probably neither for them, but that is another story]. I do regret, however, that I wasn’t instead in Alabama with my colleagues of a common mind and who had better sense than I to know that the height of steeples is irrelevant. What if? — this day recalls.

Life is filled with “what if’s.” I know there’re plenty in mine. What if I’d followed my bliss like Joseph Campbell counseled instead of letting others live rent-free in my vocational mind? Or what if I’d got good enough on trumpet to try for a gig with Count Basie’s Band? Or what if after seminary I’d stayed with the college ministry and a promising Canterbury/Danforth fellowship, instead of lusting after status as a cardinal rector? What if I’d taken those relatively empty summers forty years ago and studied for a PhD? And what if I’d simply taken Yogi Berra’s fork in the road instead of all those turns I’d rather not mention, let alone even remember?

Jonathan Daniels gave his life at the hands of some bozo racist’s shotgun whom God loved ever so much as the lot of us. When a time to recall that comes along like today, those gaps and turns and what-if’s in mine are not only revealed, they are strangely healed by the grace of the God whose light pours through them all.

What if Jesus had said No in the Garden?

August 12, 2006

Flight

I was reading Daredevil Aces pulp lit and Tom Swift instead of Proust when I was ten.

So, instead of becoming a philosopher, I flew four-engine bombers for Uncle Sugar’s navy during the Great Middle War [aka WWII]. Having enough of that by the time it was over, I took up geology so I could become a millionaire. Not wanting to seem fickle, I confess that music was all along and remains my true vocation, so I went to seminary as a matter of penance and, of course, that being no place to become a millionaire unless you get a coif and a limp Bible and go into evangelism, I had at least to find some form of support in the face of the considerable competition among professional musicians.

Flying as a means of getting from one place to another had pretty well lost any appeal I’d got from reading Daredevil Aces by the time I landed a navy bomber for the last time. There have been any number of unappealing flights since then, but always at the hand of some other person for whom the motivation apparently continued.

But now that the enfants terrible are doing everything they can to discourage us from flying, I’ll cooperate in any way I can, even if it seems unpatriotic. The new rules they’ve provoked that mean I not only have to have my shoes inspected, but that I can’t take my toothpaste did the trick. I don’t mind growing a beard, but the possibility of having to shave my teeth is more than I even want to think about.

So, I quit. From now on, it’s either stay at home or find some other way of taking my Crest and my handy little Swiss army knife with me. I haven’t either got around to Proust yet, but now with all this travel time on my hands, one never knows. I have a copy of something he wrote somewhere on one of our bookshelves, and already I have learned how to pronounce his name.

August 11, 2006

Nature

I’ve a friend whose real imagination includes a real hummingbird named Ethel Merman, of all things. She actually talks to that bird, better said, preaches to it about its lack of generosity with its neighbors. Apparently, as much of a naturalist as she is, she has little patience with feral pecking orders. Even though hummingbirds, having more than adequate beaks, might be expected to excel in that capacity.

Our hummingbirds have come back to Overlook Drive recently. We have been told that they return to places they have found hospitable in the past. We have no reason to disagree with that.

We welcome them with the usual sugar water, but CP always has more natural resources available, as well. One they seem to like best is the abutilon, a four-foot tall pint-sized kin of the maple tree, with its showy red solitary bell-shaped flowers that bloom year round.

One of our hummingbirds is named Judy Garland. I don’t know why, for I’ve not heard her sing, and I would never have named her that if I hadn’t got such a silly idea from my friend’s fertile imagination. Judy, as well, has not-so-hot table manners and chases off the others with a fare-thee-well. There’s a yellowwood tree nearby “her” feeder that provides an excellent place to keep watch. When she perches there, it’s not all that easy to tell whether it is she or merely a fat twig, although I suppose another hummingbird wouldn’t have that problem.

The moral to this story is inspired by many of our contemporary leaders: When you don’t have anything to say, say it anyway.

August 10, 2006

Diet

Pentecost 10/14B Jn 6.37-51,60

Jesus said, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh… Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’”

Hardly a month has passed since our 75th General Convention which was anything but generally conventional. The appointed Sunday propers, like the old country parson when he got wound up, have stopped preaching and gone to meddling. It’s John-on-Jesus and talking hard, and it’s high time.

So long as John speaks pleasantries about Jesus like Word, or Light, or Good Shepherd, we’re comforted by the biblical remoteness of it all. Great metaphors, but in a world not all that long on metaphors, not altogether contagious.

But then John starts putting Jesus and the daily diet together. Bread, Bread of Life, flesh and blood, food and drink, food-and-drink-without-which we are kaput. When this happens, it’s then and there that our attention has been got, and we’ve been had. We’re like the English Don at supper who sat staring at his plate, and said, “This mutton is harder to take than the lamb of God.”

This Jesus-according-to-John reminds us that our spirituality, precisely ever so much as his own, finds its God-imagined purpose not only in some neat philosophical concept nor in some otherworldly experience nor even in Anglican orthodoxy or “parallel provinces,” but instead, in the hard-nosed realities of human life. Eating, drinking, working. Making love. Birthing babies. Suffering pain, celebrating joy. Living. Dying. And what is this Good News all about? Relationships, relationships, relationships.

Leave it to Mark Twain, “there’s a considerable amount of human nature in people.”

It’s God’s way in Jesus. God’s Word became flesh, not a book or an idea or even a hymn at the right tempo. God’s Word became flesh and blood, indeed, food and drink, life’s victuals. And do we really fathom it?

For why else is there church? Why else is there this gathering? Why else are we called out? Why else do we celebrate mystery? Merely for the puffery? Why else “feed on him by faith, with thanksgiving?” Why “feed” at all? Certainly not only to enhance our spirituality, as noble a goal as that may be, but to enhance our humanity — ours and yours and theirs, together — for there is the treasure of God’s creation, there is the goal of his Son’s redemptive cross, and there is the only holiness worth talking about. The very image, the very imagination of God.

That image became earthy flesh and blood in Jesus and, please don’t forget, in us, as well. It confronts us with race and sex, nationality and politics, and, heaven forbid, even religion — orthodox and unorthodox — and we seem so often horrified by it.

“This is a hard saying; who can listen to it? ”

The covenant we make at our baptism is clear enough. “I will, with God’s help… continue in the breaking of bread…[and] to seek and serve Christ in all persons … [and] to respect the dignity of every human being.”

Mark Twain bears repeating, for he said it well that “there is a considerable amount of human nature in people.”

August 9, 2006

Lighthearted

From time to time, readers respond to an OoN that triggers their imagination [or ire or both]. The way they point out my oversight often deepens my insight.

Only recently, I had made some disparaging remarks about Texas and about jazz in Houston. A fellow Texan called my hand and rightly said I needn’t talk that way about Texas, and that there is plenty of jazz in Houston. He is right, I answered. Later, he wrote that he’d responded before his first cup of coffee and sort of apologized, but he needn’t have.

Another time, I wrote that I’d read somewhere that vines do so well because they don’t need trunks and things like other plants, they just cling, and so they can devote all their chlorophyl to their own deserts. I’d commented that when Jesus said he was the vine, it was one of his lesser analogies in my opinion, since he hardly ever acted like one.

A reader took issue and wrote that vines do not just cling. She wrote that they provide shade and grapes [for eating and for wine] and homes for bugs and spiders and hiding places for tiny prey, and beauty, and that they last for a long, long time, whether nurtured or not. She thought that Jesus was right on target, and that I should know better, being a preacher and all.

Sometimes I ask how readers discovered OoN and, if they wish, to tell me a bit about themselves. Then I forget when I’ve asked the same person twice. One lawyer very graciously reminded me that I’d asked him before and that his first OoN was one about some dog. I’d written about an Australian terrier that is not exactly Australian, but probably a Tennessean, not very proud of it, and having a hard time playing up the down-under role. That was Spenser, spelled with an “s,” not a “c,” and named primarily for Robert B Parker’s private eye who, in turn, is named for the poet. Spenser had acted strangely in my presence, I’d thought, turning in circles and sliding around on a hardwood floor whenever I spoke. I saw Spenser again just the other night. He showed no signs of our previous encounter.

The second time I wrote this person, he noted that I no longer seemed as lighthearted as once I had, that perhaps that is because, in the meanwhile, the world has grown darker. I am grateful for that observation and suspect it is true, but that’s no excuse for my growing darker with it. I hope it was not some variety of Seasonal Affective Disorder which is, according to Google, my staff consultant, a type of “winter depression” that affects millions of people world wide. Usually, I suppose, when there’s not enough light at hand.

For millions of people, SAD is no joke, but a serious debilitating illness preventing it’s sufferers from functioning normally during winter. Another type is subsyndromal SAD or “winter blues,” a milder form of SAD which can cause discomfort but is not so seriously debilitating. The malady may begin at any age, but the main age of onset is between 18 and 30 years. To speak of the world as growing darker is, of course, a metaphor, but a sad one, any way you look at it.

Nobody, even that old quantum mechanic Werner Heisenberg, seems to know whether light is particle or wave, but that shouldn’t make all that much difference. Light is sometimes as good as it gets and always a pleasant way for to lighten one’s heart.

August 8, 2006

Churchiness

The Christian faith is more ironic than it is heroic.* There’s nothing like remembering that to help our stumbling along following the usual spin off a big church convention like last June 2006.

Irony always 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, a lot of us clergy at all levels, the other pompous fools, eg Donald Duck. You can fill in your own list. Church conventions inevitably supply a long one.

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 whose unpretentiousness is downright annoying, who is a person whose humanity shines through like God’s having a field day, the more, in my opinion, congenial to the Christian faith. Our new PB-elect Katharine Jefferts Schori comes across as this kind of person. It’s no wonder she’s already scaring the purple socks off the pontiffs.

Just keeping these things in mind helps prevent — or maybe just stall — the crazy-making patterns church decisions so often take. Why we have to be so damn serious about ourselves never ceases to amaze me. Of course, it’s not only churchiness that provokes such behavior, it’s mostly everybody at one time or another. One needs only to look around the international geopolitical scene to observe how this so dominates as ultimately to kill thousands, obliterate a lot of real estate, and literally poison the rest of the environment.

The apparently inevitable ecclesiastical puffery that affects us as we go about our daily tasks it is that cripples our vocation to deflate, not to inflate and to contribute to this sort of thing. There’s no better place to start than with an honest look at the gospel’s irony viz-a-viz our own heroicism. The Baptismal Covenant stands on square one ready for this sort of search.
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*Charles Rice, “Eikon and Eiron: Faith as Imagination,” St Luke Journal of Theology, Sept 1989, pp 249-256