September 7, 2006

Secrets

Pentecost 14/18B Mk 7.31-37

“And he charged them to tell no one; but the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it” (Mk 7.36).

Nearly every time Jesus heals someone like in this story from Mark’s gospel or when he casts out a daemon, he just as often admonishes silence. Some scholars call this phenomenon the “messianic secret,” and they make of a lot out of it.

Things like how timing is of the utmost importance, and Jesus doesn’t want to let on who he is and what he’s about until he’s ready and not a moment sooner. Things like nobody should find out until after he’s gone, then turn it over to the theologians so they’ll have something to do. Things like it’s entirely between him and his Father, so that makes it nobody’s business but theirs. And perhaps most important, like the way the Jesus Seminar scholars call Jesus a thaumaturge, a divine healer, who’s normal pattern is to perform healings in secret, so that if they fail, none is the wiser, and if they succeed, no one can witness how the divine healer pulled it off.

For me, I’m satisfied that he’s also concerned that if the word spreads, then he’ll have to take up all his time explaining what people think are miracles rather than his being able to get on, instead, with doing a few. Or even better, perhaps the real truth of the matter is our faith, not what we believe comfortably and firmly grounded and leaning for security on the trunk of the tree of doctrine, but what we risk believing, hanging out on a limb, exposed for dear life.

Whatever, Jesus usually seems to suggest that faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God. So, he says, don’t tell — and frequently, don’t even ask. But, of course, people do both anyway.

That’s the way it is with secrets, and maybe that’s as much the need for healing as any other kind and also what this story is about. We all, we humans, have secrets. It’s not long after we’re old enough to walk and talk that we’re into secrets, secret clubs, societies, secret passwords and rings and mottoes. And, of course, when we grow up, there’s that increasingly common secret called “insider trading” and not only with stocks and bonds, but with a whole nation in unilateral relations enough to shut out the entire world.

So why do we keep secrets? In our case, it’s hardly to mask a miracle. For if the truth were known, which, of course, it’s the nature of secrets that the truth is never known, however, pretty much all of us in the whole human family have the same secrets.

And they are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition — that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else to reveal.

It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are — even if we tell it only to ourselves. If we don’t, we run the risk of ourselves losing track of who we truly and fully are. Little by little we come to accept instead some highly edited version which we do reveal from time to time in the hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing.

It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people maybe to tell us a secret or two of their own. Such exchanges have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and consequently what being human is all about.

Finally, I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One, to the Christ in us all, who, whether we realize it or not, is — of all our secrets — the most telling and the most precious — and the most healing — one we have to tell.

(Note: Frederick Buechner again here and there from a book called of all things, “Telling Secrets.”)

September 6, 2006

Seek

“Seek the Lord while he wills to be found; call upon him when he draws near” (Is 55.6).

I never read these stringent words from Isaiah set apart in a canticle for the Morning Office that I don’t wince a little (BCP pp 86f). It’s not the way I was taught about the omnipresence of God, constantly available and constantly on the watch, both a comfort and a threat. And yet, there it is. Isaiah is no slouch, and one had well better pay attention when he speaks. We simply can’t take God for granted.

The thorough, dependable, and theologically-trained journalist Eric Sevareid spoke on the freedom of the media. About the “peoples right to know,” he said that that’s not we have. What we have, he said, is the “right to find out.” We can expect neither our singular political system nor our free press to be like some dorm mother intent on our getting three squares a day. We, at least, have to know where’s the board and when to show up.

There’s the story of a man who was wretched in poverty with no way even to house his family, let alone feed them. He was a devout soul and prayed daily for help, maybe even to win the local lottery. But time and again when the winners were announced, his name was not among them. One day he prostrated himself before his church’s high altar from dawn until dusk, pleading in frustration with God. As the sun set, a voice came from on high and said, “Well, you could at least go out and get yourself a ticket.”

“Seek the Lord while he wills to be found… ” And maybe also, to eisegete a bit, also “where” he wills to be found. While there’s yet time, when next you read your Baptismal Covenant (BCP pp 304f), you’ll find there at least one sure place to look.
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Okay, so your prayer book’s not handy. Here are the questions. The answers will come to you. Together, they make the Covenant.

• Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?
• Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?
• Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
• Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?
• Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

September 5, 2006

Lagniappe

Honeysuckle redux:

There’s been a humongous revelation at our house up here between the Cambrian and the Silurian on Ordovician Heights. As I wrote a while back, after forty-plus years, we’ve finally got rid of all, I repeat, all, the invasive Japanese honeysuckle that so well succeeded where its homeland’s more inglorious attempts failed.

The back yard now looks like city park. The parents of the kids next door have now got rid of all their honeysuckle, too, together with their many and very densely assorted weeds and undergrowth. The neighbor over the hill behind us has suddenly got friendlier. The kids next door have met their kids and started playing together in the marvelous childlike irrelevancy for common boundaries.

The folks over the hill came over and met the folks next door and said they didn’t even know there was a house down there, and Welcome to the hood. These folks (over the hill and next door together with a lot of others on our street) are university people. Customarily, university people around here don’t have a lot to do with one another, so there’s no telling where this might lead or what may have started just by getting rid of our honeysuckle. Ecumenia in academia? Even maybe the medical center and the college?

Leadership probably works best when one is not conscious of it. When CP, our resident landscraper, took things in hand to get rid of the ravenous honeysuckle hordes encroaching us from all sides, the general idea was to let in a bit of sunshine for some of the less aggressive flora. One of the first surprises was not so much the light, but the breeze, the pleasant circulation that stirred not only the air around us, but moved some of those plants that could into waving gently in what (anthropologically) I’d like to think is gratitude.

But there’s more. CP’s a librarian. Librarians are good at opening up conversation. So the big surprise, the lagniappe, is that “friendly” is becoming the norm. “Neighborly” may even be right around the corner. The other late afternoon, I was firing up the Weber to sear some salmon, and heard a child’s voice. “Hello. Are you camping out?” Our neighbor’s daughter was standing on the low, dry-stack stone wall running along the edge of our patio where, pre-honeysuckle, she’d have needed a periscope to see through and a machete to get through. As of yesterday, there’s even a tent rigged in her backyard for some serious camping out.

Actually, this is not all walking-in-the-park-with-George-one-day. It’s as well affecting the economy. Our landscape guy and his team of four have already been hired by three more air- and space- and sunshine-lovers down the street. Those of us around here who are over the hill in more ways than one couldn’t better be pleased — and, of course, just a little bit proud.

September 4, 2006

Work

Somebody said that if you lose yourself in your work, you find who you are. And that if you express the best you have in you in your work, it is more than just the best you have in you that you are expressing.

If that sounds a little like Yogi Berra and the AFLAC duck selling insurance, go easy, it clears up when you think about it. It’s Labor Day, strangely called, for to think about work that’s labor is probably not always the best place to start.

I like the way musicians and athletes think about work. It’s a way that seems to escape the many of us. They just don’t call it work, they call it play. Even the amateurs (literally, the lovers of the work or whatever it is they’re doing) in the arts and in the sports catch some of that spirit when they’re into it and, of course, have shoes that fit.

Millions of people are are out of work, without a place to lose themselves. Millions of people have only make-do work, without a place to find themselves. Labor Day celebrates work and workers. It’s a gossamer holiday, a kind of joke on ourselves. For those of us for whom it is a day off from a work that does not exist, it’s not even much of a time for play and too much of a time for thought.

September 1, 2006

Gravitas

Plumb lines are the simplest of tools for harnessing a phenomenon so mysterious and so complicated that even the most brilliant astrophysicists are yet to understand it.

We call it gravity. Earth life would be even graver without it. Space cadets, professional basketball players, and ballet dancers seem simply to ignore it and just float.

Aristotle said it’s why stuff falls, and then went on to something more interesting. Newton devised a formula and measured it. Einstein in one of his major league moments thought it caused by something like a curved-space ball. The quantum folk imagine itsy-bitsy gravitons charging all about in its service, but they’ve yet to catch one.

A plumb line is literally a string with a hunk of lead (plumbum) or some other heavy object tied to one end. Used properly, it keeps things on the straight and level. Just take hold of the loose end and let the whole thing dangle until it’s still. When it stops, you’re more or less in touch with the center of the earth and on the upright.

God took it for a remarkable metaphor and liked it so much he used it for show and tell with Amos who claimed not to be an engineer but a tree surgeon and that he had no idea what to do with it, but ended up doing it, anyway (Amos 7.7-15).

Lasers have pretty well replaced plumb lines these days, so the metaphor may be lost on this quantum generation. But the church, enamored as it often is with past matters of gravity and sometimes even mystery, must surely remember. For God has not forgot. That same old plumb line yet swings ever so gently and purposefully.