October 31, 2006

Pumpkins

Don’t you go and tell now that Hallowe’en is really the eve of All Saints Day — one of the big bellringers on the Christian calendar — or the next thing you know, the ACLU will put out a contract on anybody lighting up pumpkins on the Court House Square.

October 30, 2006

Raze

The humorist Dave Barry wrote that as SUVs get larger, cell phones get smaller. He reported that eventually we’ll not be satisfied with only a Suburban, but will need a Subdivision, and that the phones will be the size of Chiclets.

And so with the new houses in our neighborhood. The lot-scrapers (aka razers) are hard at work and with apparent disregard for the roads gaining them access to their derring-do. A pert little bungalow down the street from us has now been replaced by a three-story brick behemoth that looms like the proverbial 800-lb gorilla at the front door. It’s listed on the market now for ten  times more than the house it replaced. There’s another, even larger one underway next door. The entrepreneurs say it’s “the dirt” they want, that it’s “location-location-location” that really matters. The problem left for the neighbors now is how one goes about getting home on a street that was barely wide enough to begin with for two reasonably-sized cars to pass or park. The city planners just shrug their shoulders. The roads and streets maintainers don’t even try to count the potholes.

And that’s not all. There are some mighty handsome and enduring trees in our vicinage (thanks, Roget) that have been sacrificed to make way for these residential leviathans. How easily we forget that they and all their kin are serious 24/7 stewards of our environment — and of our respiratory systems — and that they truly belong to nobody but God. Where are Adam and Eve when we need them most? 

October 27, 2006

Sangfroid

The well-known Tennessee episcopal electile dysfunction keeps bamming along with yet another episcopate-wannabe walkabout last week. In this past year, we’ve already tried and failed  three times over thirty-plus ballots to elect one of four nominees. So a new date with new nominees was set for another go at it tomorrow on October 28th, all to get in under the rather arbitrary wire set by our sitting bishop and apparently effected by his retirement on the 31st. 
 
Our searchers received only seventeen names this time from which to choose. (Historically, elections here have drawn hundreds, a fact that ought to be some kind of a message.) Then, and only after we got five even to accept nomination, two of those, both from the same diocese, promptly withdrew with reasons all full of talk about God’s will and family needs. Strangely, their withdrawal did not come until it was too late to submit petitionary candidates. With wondering about their real reasons still hovering, we’re back now to going for one out of three.

Our incapacity to elect is not the only thing out of synch in this diocese. Some think it’s our polity requiring 2/3s majority-by-orders on the same ballot which, granted, seems like the Dark Ages. But truth be known, that tradition has, up until now, saved our lives from getting punched around by the Dark Side (a euphemism for our resident alphabetized schismatics).

The pulse here in the Diocese of Tennessee seems altogether in favor of electing — if only for the sake of electing — somebody, anybody, even though the evidence suggests we’re not actually capable. But feeling like a minority-of-one, I am opposed to any election at all. I would hope that we might turn to whatever canonical procedure is applicable for us to emplace an interim together with certified facilitators. Then, we could hope for an intentional procedure of reconciliation moving toward enough stability to make possible an intelligent and prayerful choice and a welcome place for a new bishop.

Might it be that the reason for all this obfuscation is that we’ve so eroded here our Anglican tradition of collegially ordered freedom that we no longer have the sangfroid* essential to our decision-making? Are we left now simply to misplace the goal with the process? 

(*Aren’t thesauruses wonderful?)

October 26, 2006

Reach

Pentecost 21/25B [Mk 10.46-52]

God is not established in our lives with the help of a dictionary or even by a course in systematic theology, but through a relationship. Whether it is a relationship of hostility or of hospitality, it is yet a relationship, for that is what matters.

It takes faith to do that in any creative way — God’s faith in us, our faith in God, ourselves, and our neighbor. Such faith can open in us an imaginative consciousness and a willingness to risk laying our lives on the line. We simply cannot assume that God is any more accessible to us than we make ourselves accessible to God. Isaiah said it: “Seek the Lord while he wills to be found… ” [Is 55.6]. God’s creatively imagining us is built on that kind of freedom.

The story of old Blind Bartimaeus that Mark tells about in today’s gospel is a case in point [Mk 10.46-52]. Bartimaeus cried out to Jesus for mercy. We cannot be absolutely sure how he wanted that mercy to take form and shape, but simply that it was overdue and he knew that this Jesus was a prime source. Heaven knew he could use some simple mercy in his life in very much the same way as can we in our times of crisis.

But mercy turned out to be more. It was not a laying on of hands or even a handout or even a handshake. It was simply Jesus stopping to listen. It was Jesus paying attention. Jesus said, “Call him.” Jesus told his disciples to put aside their sense of urgency, to stop and to listen, to enable the beggar’s cause, to encourage and to respect him as a fellow human being in need. Then and there is the miracle, that kind of listening is a reaching out that’s within reach for every one of us.

Jesus never even touched Bartimaeus. Healing moved between them in the vital and palpable conduit of the faith that connected them, that enabled them to share in the willful meeting of anguish and drouth with a willful nourishment of compassion and concern. It was this that made them whole in relationship.

We have a similar exchange whenever we celebrate together a baptism in our churches. Obviously, we must never discount our faith as sponsors (whatever happened to that lovely word “godparents”?) and as parents, but also as the community surrounding the sacrament as we are asked for our support and commitment and, indeed, for our faith.

We can take with us that exchange in that moment of grace along our own Jericho roadsides when we pray for others and even in those challenging moments when others are not all that enthusiastic about our praying for them.

“‘Go your way,’ Jesus said to Bartimaeus, — and to us — ‘your faith has made you well.’ And immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way” [Mk 10.52].

With that renewed sight — and with our renewed insight — we can also remember that Bartimaeus, even though offered the option to go once again on his own, chose Jesus’ way, instead. That kind of miracle is readily within reach to us with the same prayer — “Jesus, have mercy.”

October 25, 2006

Shrink

I still regret selling my first-edition Miata six years ago, but it had shrunk so much I could hardly get astride of it. Now I discover that if only I had waited it out, we might have made something together.

When I was flying for Uncle Sugar’s Navy forever ago, I measured in at 6′3″ and 160 lbs. As the tired saying goes, I was so thin, I had to run in circles in the shower to get wet all over. The other day, getting prepped for signing up for CP’s cardiac rehab program (I’ve not had a heart attack, I need the discipline), the trainer came up with my being only six feet tall. Without those three inches, I might be able to steer that Miata again after all.

Trouble is, the trainer also found another thirty-six pounds that for some reason had turned up in the seasons past since WW II. Maybe that’s the reason the Miata shrank.

It is hoped that (a reader scolded me the other day for using “hopefully” wrongly) with a few months into rehab, I’ll be ready for a Mini Cooper. Today’s NY Times says little cars are the current way to go, that SUVs are passé. If all that’s true, then prayers are truly answered, and the “Texas station wagons” are headed for the junk pile where they belong.

October 24, 2006

Poetry

“When power leads us to arrogance, poetry reminds us of our limitations. When power narrows the area of our concern, poetry reminds us of the richness and diversity of our existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

John Kennedy spoke these words in relation to the state and the way we govern ourselves. In our time, I hear them equally in relation to the church and the way we understand our ministry. Our common need for poetic cleansing in both church and state has never been more obvious and demanding. Nor has our capacity for the ecclesial stewardship of the parables of Jesus — which is our poetry — to understand and appreciate the metaphor of life ever been more in want. In few places is this more evident over this past decade or so than in those dioceses where there has been precious little “poetry.” Where there has been instead only denial, grandiosity, and an addictive confusion of authority with power together with all the movements and systems that will use almost any means to achieve such control.

Pretentiousness has led us in Tennessee beyond our limits both financially and spiritually. And those always questionable and so-called “big holy audacious goals” rather have been swamped by the sham of it. The fear of inclusiveness, ie, our common humanity, has insulted God’s imagination and thus narrowed our vision and blinded us to the richness and diversity of our Anglican heritage. Our spiritually incestuous deployment and placement practices have both sapped our will to be faithful and compromised our stewardship of the Gospel. The bishop, himself, has publicly declared in convention and in a most un-Anglican fashion that there “is no middle ground.”

We are faced again now in only a few days with the critical choice of a new bishop for the Diocese of Tennessee, a broken place masquerading as a whole one. Our collegial polity by which we must make such a choice has been severely compromised over this past decade by an understandably bewildered indifference of the laity and an inexcusable and embarrassing intimidation of the clergy. How we choose and how we face the change which demands that we choose takes the full measure of our spiritual maturity. It requires the kind of courage Ernest Hemingway called “grace under pressure.” And it requires wisdom of a biblical dimension.

Such wisdom is not only a matter of the mind but of the intuition and the heart. As the Book of Proverbs attests, there is a radical and refreshing feminine consciousness about such wisdom, a consciousness we do well to embrace for our enlightenment and leavening as we move into this time.

John Hines, once our presiding bishop, said that “A bishop’s job is to keep his church family on the firing line of the world’s most desperate needs and to learn to accept the exquisite penalty of such an exposed position.” Indeed, how can Christians so evangelize at all when the most visible cause they proclaim isn’t Christ crucified but the schismatic dismantling of his church? The Gospel is not about this. The Gospel is about that “firing line” of conversion of life and suffering servanthood, of love and freedom from fear, of self-denial, giving up illusions of control, and embracing God’s in-breaking kingdom as servant leaders.

May whomever we choose to serve and lead us not only come here to influence others and champion some lesser cause, but to be open to influence and the cause of Christ, not only to acknowledge and respect the freedom of another, but to seek to enhance the other’s capacity to make a difference. May whomever we choose serve with us to achieve a collegially pastoral and prophetic bond of caring and reconciliation that the world may so know that we are Christ’s and know so by the way we love one another. For there is, indeed, such an Anglican way, and this is it. There is no greater, no more faithful evangelism. Such poetry can only cleanse.

Note: This essay originally appeared in The Covenant Journal, an occasional paper and commentary on the church.

October 23, 2006

Coup d’Eglise

I have a confession to make.

I edit and publish a kind of a journal which a lot of people call a newsletter. That they do so unnerves me for we never advertise coverdish suppers featuring tunafish casseroles or vestry meetings or the like. I’ve not got anything against newsletters. Kipplinger did very well with his. But the name’s not for me or for my colleagues on The Covenant Journal, our “newsletter.”

Its subtitle is “a commentary on the church.” Its purpose is to tell the truth as however we can uncover or, if not, spin it. It came along about ten years ago when a new bishop we’d just elected began to show his colors as being at halfmast most of the time. (That’s a distress signal for those of you who never were in the navy or the like.) As he didn’t seem to know this, it behooved some of us to find a way to tell him (and others equally in denial), hence the birth of TCJ.

One thing led to another, however, as the church all over the place and not just in our diocese began to fly its colors at halfmast. Again, a lot of people didn’t seem to know it which fact gave us even more incentive, so we began to take on the whole establishment.

One of our church’s national leaders who does know about flags and masts calls TCJ the best kept secret in ECUSA. He also calls it a samizdat, Russian for “underground press.”

Our diocese is about as dysfunctional as any other codependent institution can be, a state of affairs which has come about coincidentally with the current episcopal tenure. You can make out of that whatever you’d like taking into account that it’s about the same span of time TCJ has been around. As a matter of fact, the bishop told us face to face not long ago that all our current coup d’eglise is entirely the result of TCJ’s saying “mean” things about what has now come to pass here and which we’ve probably known only the half of.

Anyhow, the bishop and others like him who more or less inspired TCJ is about to retire and some think we’ve got to elect another one. Trouble is we can’t seem to, having tried in three sessions for over thirty ballots. Some folk say we can’t seem to elect because of our somewhat troglodytic polity which requires a simultaneous 2/3s majority in both orders rather than the usual and more modern simple majority. It is clumsy. I’ll agree. But in fact and in my opinion, it’s saved our life and protected us from electing some of the clones that seemed to be the only nominees our also-cloned search committee could discover. Deployment around here over the past decade has turned up some doozies who are set on making Anglicanism what it’s never been and hopefully isn’t likely to be any time soon. Right soon on October 28th, we’ll have another go at an election. From the looks of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t — again. But then, what do I know?

October 20, 2006

Strings

String theory is in for bad times. It’s the notion that all the particles that make up the universe and all four of its forces — including that elusive gravity — are made up of tiny vibrating string-like filaments sort of like those leaping off a cello in full blast. For the twenty years of its study, its students have hoped it would be the answer to Einstein’s dream of a unified field theory, a theory that would stitch all of nature’s forces into a single, tightly-woven mathematical tapestry.

Trouble is, it’s yet to come up with anything more than questions and only skirts with the answers so many seek. So the top-gun astrophysicists are beginning to cast it aside for greener pastures [if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor].

It’s too bad. Maybe they should have listened more carefully to Dr Sinatra who had it in the palm of his hand all along when he sang…

I’ve got the world on a string
Sitting on a rainbow
Got the string around my finger
What a world, what a life - I’m in love

I’ve got a song that I sing
I can make the rain go
Any time I move my finger
Lucky me, can’t you see - I’m in love

And life is a beautiful thing
As long as I hold the string
I’d be a silly so and so
If I should ever let go

I’ve got the world on a string
Sitting on a rainbow
Got the string around my finger
What a world, what a life - I’m in love

October 19, 2006

Molecules

The late Bennett Sims, one-time bishop of Atlanta, reported a strange thing in his book on servant leadership. And that is that the quantum theorists are certain that there is a caring pulse of energy that animates and interconnects all the entities in the cosmos.

It’s not unlike Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist, outraging 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” — who or what does it with whom and how — never seems then or now to sit all that well with book-banning orthodoxers.]

In Jesus’ time, it was common knowledge and experience that the created order in all its facets always knew and recognized in its own way who and what was present amongst it. The daemons, the bread and fishes, the storms, the winds and waves, the human maladies, the fig trees, Satan itself in the wilderness, all across the universe were well onto the profound bend in cosmic history that happened when the Word became flesh.

No wonder Jesus could say on that first Palm Sunday that if the crowds turned silent, the very stones, themselves, the seemingly most inert and mute of all creation, would burst forth in adulation. Maybe it’s what we now call 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 regularly celebrate around our holy tables tell us nothing more, they remind us over and over again how inseparable we are one from the other and even from the very stones along the way. Those stones may seem inert, they may seem to have no freedom at all, but when it comes to efficiency and presence and endurance and dependability — and even to praise, might we allow — we can learn a thing or two.

When James and John cozied up to Jesus and asked for a place in the catbird seat midst all this created order, they got a job description that should bring all of us to our feet. Leadership, you bet, said Jesus. But servant leadership, my hearties, “For the Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” [Mk 10.45].

Christian “faith” is not always the same, if anywhere near or ever the same, as the Christian “Faith.” To confuse the two is one of the more profound blunders of Christian churches. For the one is deeply subjective and freighted with risk and humility. It has no place nor need for crippling circumscriptions like “orthodoxy.” The other is often so uncongenially certain and too often filled with pride. It is often in blind allegiance to orthodoxy, an obsession that has always compromised the church as, indeed, it does so in these very times.

Christian faith — that kind with the small “f” — always has to do with flesh and blood, time and space, more specifically with your flesh and blood and mine, with the time and space in which day by day we are all involved, stumbling, trying to appear as if we have good sense. The truth that Christianity claims to be true is ultimately to be found, if it is to be found at all, not in the Bible or the Church or Theology — the best they can do is point to the Truth — but is to be found in our own stories, yours and mine and our neighbors.

It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to stay in constant touch with what is going on in your own life’s story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others’ lives, for to say that faith is not some institutional doctrine is not to say that it is not corporate or communal. If God is present anywhere, it is in our stories. If God is not present there, then we might as well forget the whole thing.

Our Baptismal Covenant literally turns on our answer to that same question that stands at its center. “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” That is where we find the stories, that is where we find faith.

And that is where we find what Jesus means by true greatness when he says, He who is greatest among you shall be your servant. I hope it is not lost on us in today’s gospel accounting that Jesus chose the religious establishment and its frequent fixation with puffery with which to contrast his words about servanthood.

From the religious standpoint, servanthood tends to mean a lofty ideal, all right for the Scout movement and isolated from the so-called real world of win/lose. From such secular perspective, servanthood is often seen only as “servitude,” a condition imposed on women and racially different groups by male-dominant cultures or self-imposed by both men and women out of fear of their own power.

The kind of servanthood Jesus seems to imply is neither of these. Rather is it the way of fulfilling the human longing for peace and the planet’s need for preservation as the theater of all life. It is the kind of leadership that is needed to make the world safe. It is always a two-way exchange, never as subjugating dominance and never as a unilateral and preemptive arrogance.

It not only influences, but is also open to influence. It acknowledges and respects the freedom of another and seeks to enhance that other’s capacity to make a difference. It is a paradox — for it gains by giving.

Just as God could say for us to listen to Jesus, his son in whom he is well pleased, thus could he show us what he means by being human. So might we hope Jesus can say of the church as what he means by a community of servanthood, leading others into creativity, productivity, and, best of all, bonding people into communities of caring. We can have no greater ministry to the society and to the world in which we are
called.

And furthermore, my loverlies, we must never be too sure about what all those molecules are up to, not only here and in you and me, but in the farthest reaches of the Milky Way — and beyond.
_______________________________________
Note to: Frederick Buechner and to Bennett Sims, thanks for the better parts of this preachment on faith and story and servanthood.

October 18, 2006

Luke

My exegetical skills are so dated, that it’s hard to find any resemblance with that of, say, the Whiz Kid Jesus Scholars. Nevertheless, I just bam right along, anyhow, trusting them and a good friend who’s one of their acolytes to keep me straight, especially when it’s more convenient.

When it comes to Evangelist Luke, however, who gets his moment of fame on the red-letter calendar today, I take note that tradition says that his being a medic maybe had not only a little bit to do with his journalistic accuracy. It comes from the little story about the woman who touched the hem of Jesus’s garment and got herself well from a twelve-year malady. Mark tells it that she’d “suffered… many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse” [Mk 5.25-34]. On the other hand, Cool Hand Luke, perhaps in the interest of brevity, but maybe also doing the AMA two-step, recounts the same story simply by saying that she “could not be healed by anyone,” thus letting off not only his colleagues, but throwing in the alchemists, as well. He for sure skips all the bit about the big doctor bills [Lk 8.43-48].

We Anglicans are rather like that, though there’re some among us who seem to wish it otherwise. The Greatest Story Ever Told gets retold time and again and unavoidably through biased-colored glasses. If Mark and Luke couldn’t stay all that consistent in just a few years, how do you expect the rest of us to keep it even in the same ballpark after two-thousand or so?

Footnote: I really don’t want to know what the Jesus people would say about my exegesis.