November 16, 2006
Fakery
Pent 24/28B Mk 13.14-23
During the Great Depression in the turn of the 1920s into the 1930s, it was not uncommon for people, mostly men, sometimes a whole family, to come to the back door of our house looking for work and as often for food. My mom would never turn a single one away. She would welcome them in, feed them, sometimes clothe them and let them bathe. Once when I asked her why, she said simply that she took Jesus seriously when he said that helping one of these little ones or visiting prisoners or healing the sick was doing the same for him. She never knew when he might be standing there outside the back door. There was no if about it for her.
When our Baptismal Covenant reminds us that seeking and serving Christ in all persons, not only the poor at the back door, but the insurgents in Iraq and the illegal immigrants at the border, as well, I often recall those times about my mom’s ministry. But then along comes Jesus warning us to “take heed,” that there are false Christs and prophets out there who’ll lead us down the yellow brick road without a moment’s notice. Even the Good Samaritan, he implies, might have been in jeopardy for being a bit overly zealous.
False Christs. An oxymoron of some dimension, I’d say. Perhaps a disguise that even Satan itself could not trump. An evil personified that could easily sandblast our usual naiveté and even our informed faith.
So, blessed Lord Jesus, I pray, how does one know a false Christ, let alone a false prophet, when one sees one? Or perhaps more practically, since there are not nearly so many folk claiming to be you as there are those of us who wear our Christianity on our sleeves apparently without a lot of sincerity, what are the signs and wonders you say these impostors will show? How can we recognize them? What gives with such evil that I might even suspect it, let alone recognize it in life’s lineup, when it shows up as You, of all people?
“Well, my son,” Jesus might (repeat might plus unlikely) say, “do you remember Scott Peck, the psychiatrist who had some rare moments with fakery and evil and even with exorcisms? He wrote a book about evil and lying and he was right about how inseparable they are. He was a professed Christian, perhaps with a few reservations, but I’d say he knew something about anybody who would masquerade as me. Indeed, since he joined us only recently, I suspect he knows a lot more now.”
I’m never sure just how Jesus talks to anybody, let alone me, if ever. But just suddenly remembering Peck’s criteria for recognizing evil at a moment like this might mean something, but we don’t have to go there.
But it was in his book, “The People of the Lie.” So I looked, realizing that we’re not liable to run into many who’d be so bold as to claim to be Christ. But that we do have a daily fare — particularly in the media and the government and their minions and even the church — of those who make quite a bit of being Christian and then not acting much like it when the chips are down. What then might be a way of attending to our Lord’s warning and spotting the fakes?
Scott Peck says that evil, in addition to avoiding responsibility, a behavior that characterizes all personality disorders, would specifically be distinguished by consistent and destructive and often subtle buck-passing to others who are probably largely innocent and wonder what hit them.
He said there would be an excessive and usually underhanded intolerance to criticism and other forms of injury to their ego. And then, we might, as well, look for a pronounced concern for a public image and a self-image of respectability, contributing to an apparently stable life-style, but also to a showy grandiosity and a denial of hateful feelings or vengeful motives. Peck then suggests that there would generally if not always be signs of intellectual deviousness, with an increased likelihood of a mild, but noticeably emotional disturbance of thinking at times of stress. (People of the Lie, p 129)
Well, that ought to be enough to keep us wide-eyed. On the other hand, I suspect Jesus would not want us all to be paranoid, either. But he did say a lot about watching out for the sudden arrival of something called “the hour.” And there’s always the possibility of their being good reason for paranoia. We’ll just have to take responsibility for that, ourselves, I suspect. Or maybe bring it up with our neighbor when passing the peace instead of the buck.
November 15, 2006
Armistice
I missed Armistice Day. Maybe it’s because I miss it, too. November Eleven used to be Armistice Day, but it gave way to Veterans Day, I suppose, so it could include other GIs than only those from World War I. Armistice means truce, and honoring veterans makes more sense than honoring only those occasional pauses between wars when everybody means well for a time.
When I was marching in high school and college bands on Armistice Day every year, I always felt rather proud. I never gave it much thought why, it just seemed a nice thing to do. I liked the nostalgia of it. Of course, I was not much of a veteran of anything but lots of parades and trying on occasion to grow up. I had hardly enough years on my resumé to be nostalgic about.
I always marched behind the bass drummer on an outside file and in a rank of cornet players near the end of the band and just in front of the sousaphones. I remember that it was a better place to be than marching up front behind the horses where it was harder to keep in step.
Growing up has been a lifelong process for me. I’ve never found it all that easy to do. But there were moments when it bammed right along. The few years I spent in Uncle Sugar’s Navy later on provided an unwelcome and surprising acceleration in my hormonal adventure. Few people who now are my age then ever seem to have such an experience.
My time in the navy turned me into a veteran before I was ready. I was still not ready when, without even so much as asking, Tom Brokaw turned me into a part of the Greatest Generation. I don’t sit well with either. I never did anything all that great and was even overly compensated with the GI Bill.
I miss Armistice, but I simply refuse to be as old as it sounds. Anyway, I’ve always thought that my birth certificate must surely be counterfeit.
November 14, 2006
Sam
We should have known. Remembering our first bishop Sam Seabury’s day in the sun today reminds me how we got started so kaddywampus over here when we had to send him back in 1784 to get a kosher ordination from Scotland of all places.
Before that, the not-so-young American endeavor was being run by Standing Committees and doing rather well in spite. But we simply had to have (we thought) the apostolic succession even if we soon started treating it more like apostolic success. Ever since then, it’s been one lapse in the apse after another.
We’ve got a veritable zoo of primates out there all over the place now. Somebodies can’t even decide which one’s on first, and Sam’s probably rolling in his grave. It seems like a “my dad can whip your dad” sort of thing all over again. When Jesus said the kingdom’s like children, he meant childlike, not childish, but then it’s never been all that clear to some what he meant at all. Its taken the Jesus Seminar folk to straighten us out on that, and when the Dark Side gets around to them, the naves will get paved with anathemas, and it’ll look like the Vatican Two-step.
But be that as it may. Primatron Katharine could probably whup the lot of them with one crosier tied behind her back. After all, what did she say when asked how she’d respond when (not if) old Peter Akinola walked out of the room when she walked in? She said, Why, I’ll follow him and ask him how come he treats Christians so bad.
Sam Seabury might have liked that. I sure do.
November 13, 2006
Entranced
I was three years out of seminary and in New York City for the first time in my life. Our national church offices were on Park Avenue. My only image of Park Avenue was straight from Hollywood. It was an address that struck me as maybe a bit embarrassing for a church. Anyhow, I was more entranced by it all than a person my age should admit.
So I went by the offices to see what they looked like, met the receptionist, and asked to see Presiding Bishop Henry Knox Sherrill. I probably should have been, but was not surprised that she smiled, buzzed his office, announced my presence, and sent me right up, I think, to the fourth floor. It was a corner office, of course, lots of light. Bishop Sherrill got up from his desk, welcomed me, and we sat for a short visit. I’ve no memory what we talked about, save maybe my bishop whose name I was quick to drop. I didn’t stay long, but his manner was such that I felt I could have stayed all morning.
I’ve only known one presiding bishop personally, and that was by the circumstances that made my own bishop — the one whose name I dropped — a down-the-line successor to Bishop Sherrill.
I’ve never been to Presiding Bishop Katharine’s office and probably never will. But I already and, I suspect, with scads of the rest of us, feel like I know her personally. It is a good and new day for the church. Even though there’s once again the rumor we may move our national offices, somehow, 815 2d Avenue, seems an altogether more appropriate address than Park Avenue. Or maybe it’s because I’ve pretty well got over my goofy notions not only about Hollywood, but also about the church.
November 9, 2006
Change
Pentecost 23/27B (Mk 12.38-44)
There’s a pleasant irony in Jesus’ story of the widow’s two copper coins. It keeps us mindful that the gospel’s Good News is not only about change, it is also about small change.
This fact about the gospel seems forever to escape the church, and it is easy to see why. God puts the church in the world as a change-agent, but also as a “safe house” where people can come not only to worship, but to risk being themselves and talking about what really matters in their lives. To talk about change and about how hard it is to change, about why they need to learn to love and need to learn to be loved, about why some people are so mean-spirited and others so helpless, about why life is so difficult and often so unfair, about why there seems to be so much evil and so little good.
Imagine their feeling when they discover how consumed some churches are with self-preservation and with keeping the status quo. Imagine what a shock it must be to find the church’s limited energy wasted in debating a part of its security system, such as whether to change its prayer book or hymnal or its scheduled hour of worship or whether to allow God to give a sacramental blessing to a deep and devoted companionship outside legal marriage. Imagine how puzzled one must be to discover all these issues held on the same level of importance and labored about seemingly without end, as if the gospel really is decided by majority opinion.
No wonder one more segment of people becomes convinced that the church is an inept and limited institution with little or no interest in risking its life for the good health of a broken world. When millions need food and medicine, when religion-based violence produces slaughter and hopelessness, when a handful profits and masses struggle even to survive, when armies itch to seize the day, yet the church so often remains beset by the small-minded and self-serving.
Reflecting on St Paul, Paul Tillich reminded us that the message of Christianity is not Christianity, but a new creation (2 Cor 5.17). To risk a new creation is to risk the greatest change of all. But paradoxically, to embrace this gospel about change is the one condition that allows for the unconditional, and the unconditional love of God is the essential environment in which one can dare to risk surrendering to the frightening experience of a new creation.
For what is both Good and New about the Good News is the wild claim that Jesus did not simply tell us that God loves us even in our wickedness and folly and wants us to love each other in the same way and to love God, as well, but that if we will just get ourselves out of the way, God can and will single-handedly bring about this unprecedented transformation of our hearts.
And what is Good and New about the Good News is the mad insistence that Jesus lives on among us not just as another haunting memory but as the outlandish, holy, and invisible power of God working not just through the sacraments but in countless hidden ways to make even people like us loving and whole beyond anything we could conceivably pull off by ourselves.
And thus the gospel is not only Good and New but, if you take it in good humor, it’s a Holy Terror. Jesus never claimed that the process of being changed into a human being — and that, by the way, is what conversion is all about — was going to be a Sunday School picnic. On the contrary, one of life’s most painful experiences is hanging on for dear life to our refusal to change.
We think of the church as protection. We even speak of a part of its architecture as the sanctuary, but that hallowed ground was never intended to avoid change, only to nourish and enhance the onerous process of maturing spiritually. Such sanctuary is there to remind us of the widow and her gloriously pitiful offering as she majestically rubbed shoulders in the temple with the fat cats and their trickle-down economics yet gave away without question all that she had.
It is probably no accident that the liturgy gurus placed this story of the widow’s mite smack dab in the middle of these fall seasons when most parishes have their every member canvass. Perhaps the planners hope for at least a mild twinge of conscience in the pews and in the pulpits. But that is to miss the point. For the issue, you see, is not what we do with money, but what we do with ourselves and the ministry to which we are called and which money may or may not enable.
In our story this morning, Jesus warned us about the scribes, not because they were guilty of bad doctrine or wrong-footed politics, but because they were mean, and they were small. They trivialized their positions of respect in exchange for small favors. At a time when people needed large and noble spirits, they were petty. They remind us, as well, of one kind of human behavior that has hardly changed at all.
This small parish in its recent past and in its current transition seems already remarkably on its way to becoming an enclave where people can dare to wrestle productively with change. It can be a place where many of the larger church’s so resistant movements can be seen as mostly theater where vagueness and shouting and religiose performances make for marginal entertainment value at best. And it can proclaim to all who would hear that the world as it really is out there beyond this ecclesiastical myopia makes such shallowness seem positively dangerous.
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Note: My frequent “research” colleagues Tom Ehrich and Fred Buechner (plus a pinch of Jack Spong) again had something of a hand in this current homiletic mayhem.
November 8, 2006
PB
Katherine’s got the con. And there’s little doubt about the pilgrimage she’s planning.
Our new Presiding Bishop’s a mover and a shaker is she, and in spite of all the liturgical theater and whoop-de-doo at the National Cathedral this past weekend, her pastoral and prophetic presence turned us once again back into the Way.
The church is our home, she assured us, and home is the place from which we can never be turned away from seeking our rest in God. And we are the saints, she affirmed, who live and discover ourselves there to be sent out on fire to “get lit” and preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to free the oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. One could sense deeply there our Lord’s own awareness of those words from Isaiah being fulfilled and of our new PB’s intention to follow his lead.
Calling her fellow nominees for presiding bishop to join her, they together blessed the waters of baptism as we all renewed our Baptismal Covenant, the profound and inclusive Gospel brevity of it, and once again were commissioned into its service. A veritable spiritual ground swell moved through the thousands of us there as we burst into applause and cheers on her departure.
November 3, 2006
Matched
CP and I might not seem an all-that-oddly matched Mr and Mrs, being a librarian and a parson. But as I read somewhere about another pairing, ours is not just a marriage, it’s an adventure that includes a marriage and a two-person cultural exchange program. She’s a midwesterner. I’m a Texan. She’s opera. I’m jazz. Only she’s more jazz than I’m opera, and she’s a real musician. I’m a cornet player.
In an effort to shape up this cultural exchange, I just finished my first two days as a preschooler in her rehab program that she’s been at for nearly two years. One of the trainers greeted me right off, “Trying to catch up?”
What could I say? Actually not a lot, for I was already out of breath and hardly able to get from the stationary bike to the rowing machine. “Cool down” meant, I thought, a comfortable chair and a doughnut. It was instead “three laps before the next event.”
It’s been a while and a few pounds since Uncle Sugar’s naval aviation cadet jock-o preflight training. But my memory’s not so geriatrophied that I can’t recall all the similarities. I suppose I might be grateful that there’re still enough organic processes and phenomena left in place and in reasonably proper order to lever back into shape. I’m on my way, but I sure hate to be a sore winner.
Non-seq: We’re off today to PB-elect Katharine’s big whoopdedoo at the National Cathedral Saturday and Sunday. I’ll be reporting to you from the South Transept where I’ll be embedded in the liturgical two-step with all those big-time press worthies. Watch the headlines.
November 2, 2006
Reminder
All Souls’ Day
In our church’s liturgy, we pray for the dead. Some folk find that morbid and distasteful. At the least, maybe even pagan. Whatever, it doesn’t stop us. In my case, the older I get, the longer the list.
From the tenor of the prayers, praying for those who have died in this life and gone on to another or wherever is often like putting in a good word for them with God (as if I had any influence!) or it’s like asking them that if they can find one to put in a good word for me.
Rather does it seem to me — and this is where the nourishment is — that praying for the dead reminds me of how connected we were in ever being acquainted in the first place, let alone really knowing each other, and, maybe more importantly, how connected we continue to be, acquainted or not. The same thing’s true in praying for anybody, alive or dead, even me.
We sing “with all the saints who from their labors rest,” but I hope they don’t enjoy all that leisure so much that they forget who I am and maybe will send a note now and then saying something like, “Having wonderful time. Wish you were here.”
November 1, 2006
Sneeze
All Saints Day
In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints. (Buechner, “Wishful Thinking,” p 83)
Everybody has met a saint at one time or another, accidentally, because we weren’t paying all that much attention, or unexpectedly, because we weren’t all that much curious. Watch for them. It’s like when you sneeze and out of nowhere God blesses you.