December 18, 2006

Mealtime

Dining while gay, and other crimes… *

The members of Truro and the Falls Church over in Virginia have now declared that belonging to a church that permits gays and lesbians to become bishops is too great a tax on their conscience, while belonging to a church that believes gay people should be imprisoned for eating together in public is not. In other words, these two parishes are checking out of the Episcopal Church USA and cozying up with the church in Nigeria where recent legislation mandates such mealtime regulations.

I can suggest three reasons that these flocks may have taken this decision. The first is simple unadorned bigotry. The second is a willingness to trade the human rights of innocent Africans for a more advantageous position in the battle for control of the Anglican Communion. The third is a profoundly distorted understanding of who Jesus was and what he taught and whether or not Christ is present in us all.

I’d like to believe that the last of these reasons explains the majority of the votes, because I recognize that my own salvation may depend on God showing mercy to those of us who are also sincere in our misapprehensions.

But, if these Virginia congregations do, indeed, believe that gay Nigerians should be imprisoned for visiting a restaurant together, they need to inform us whether they believe gay Americans should also be imprisoned for similar activities. And if they do not support the criminalization of such behavior in the United States, they need to explain why they favor — or, at the very least, acquiesce in depriving Nigerians of rights that Americans enjoy.

*(adapted ever so slightly [to avoid plagiarism] from some of Jim Naughton’s comments and with abundant thanks)

December 16, 2006

Mohammed

His name badge said Mohammed, and he looked like our characterization of your run-of-the-mill terrorist, but he was pleasant enough standing there unarmed midst the stacks of folded shirts and sweaters and asking in some sort of accent could he help us. No, we said, like shoppers do, we’re just looking. But of course, we weren’t. We’d read about the sale, and he knew it, and that, along with Christmas, was why we were there — to spend. To shop while the Iraqis drop.

At least one of the three kings must have looked like this Mohammed, but probably hadn’t mastered English so well because there probably wasn’t any English to master or he would have. I don’t know why we make such a fuss over people learning English or thinking we’re such masterly good examples of it ourselves. The way I hear people mangle it, especially our unilateral Decider’s losing battle with its grammar, I often wonder just exactly which English we have in mind, our so-called (pick your region and ethnicity) or the original that the Brits insist is the way it is and the way it should be.

Sure, if you’re going to try to make a living in some country, whichever, it is only common sense when in Rome to shoot Roman candles. But if it happened to be the United Kingdom, most of us Merkins (as they say) would probably be standing around in the drygoods like Mohammed, trying to make it with the pound-sterling, and maybe not parsing all that well.

But PS: Languages and cultures seem inseparable to me. I still tear up over how savagely we insulted the Native Americans by robbing them of both and all the while trying to make them over into us. Even the name we call them is superimposed. They’re the natives. We’re the Americans. How very much we could learn from them, starting, say, with stewardship of our environment. Whatever happened to the melting pot? After all, yet.

December 15, 2006

Stoned

Every geologist knows that rocks talk. Every road cut and valley is a veritable baedeker that the present is the key to the past, that some language speaks louder than words, or to put it a bit fancier, that ontology recapitulates phylogeny.

When Jesus and John Baptist talked about the deafening silence of the stones, they were on to something long before the Brit engineer William “Strata” Smith discovered geology as we turned into the 19th century and changed the way the world listened to itself. John said the stones could “raise up children of Abraham” ever so well as those who bragged about being his kin (Lk 3.8). Jesus charged that if the folk along the Boulevard of Palms didn’t hail the King, “the very stones would cry out” (Lk 19.40).

It’s interesting how the creationists claim the fossils are only Satan’s tricks to deceive us and all the while the little petrified bugs are just another way of God’s saying “look at me and what I’m up to.” The more we learn about the cosmos and how all its stuff is the same only clobbered up differently, how in spite of our good looks, we’re only 90% or so water, the more we’re amazed at the way God imagines it all to be and become.

The stones haven’t got a lot of freedom, but they make it up with efficiency. By the grace of God, we’re pretty near as free as the birds, but about as inefficient as anything can get. Whatever, I just love it when John and Jesus get into geology. It’s enough to turn an old geologist’s heart to stone. Sure beats some of the other ways I can think of — and remember — for getting there.

December 14, 2006

Stones

Advent 3C Lk 3.7-18

“Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children of Abraham.” (Lk 3.8)

Saturday Night Live, that durable and pointedly satirical NBC show, brought me up short one night with its portrayal of one of the continuing heavies in our national drama. They called him “James ‘The Episcopalian’ Baker.”

That startled me for a moment, but it refreshed me, as well. I like to think that we’re one denomination that has the uncanny good sense not to take ourselves so seriously, one that understands forgiveness as easier to get than permission, one that, if we have not actually cornered the market on grace, at least knows how to recognize it and be amazed by it without going all
soupy.

Because these things are probably true, we really need John Baptist. Not just because he gives an Advent voice to the Christmas birth of peace and justice and good will. And not just because he speaks the gospel truth about the way things are and also about the way we are. But perhaps more importantly, because he is simply not “our type,” and the James Bakers of the world are.

Thus could John say that if there is to be any flag-waving about who we are let it be a sign of our contrition and reconciliation and not of our pride and our laurels. And thus could he say for us in our time that being an Episcopalian won’t get you any more points than being a Holy Roller all the while he’s calling us a “snake pit.”

John was furious with the religious establishment of his day for claiming descent from Abraham and otherwise living in blithe disregard of God. Bloodline isn’t faith. Heritage isn’t faith. Tribal identity isn’t faith. Political party isn’t faith. It isn’t that easy. For faith has to do with deciding, acting, willing. Faith bears fruit because of what it does. But so does sin bear fruit and disbelief bear fruit. Injustice bears fruit. Cruelty bears fruit.

The perceptive poet Maya Angelou tells of a woman in her audience taking offense with her and claiming, “But madam, I am a Christian!” only to hear Angelou answer, “Already?”

Christian identity is an evolving process. We build our faith as we go. We can always give thanks for whoever started shaping us. But if we don’t take up the mantle ourselves and make our own fresh approach to the throne of grace in the ways we make daily decisions, we have nothing.

There it is, and there we are, the very mark of our sin is in turning down love and forgiveness as fast as they come because we either don’t believe them or don’t want them or just plain couldn’t care less. But the Gospel Hound of Heaven persists and answers that extraordinary things happen just as all through the Bible and our tradition extraordinary things happen.

Remember David who got his mistress’s husband killed so he could have her all to himself, but was still the “apple of God’s eye.” And remember Zaccheus who climbed up a sycamore tree a crook and climbed down a saint. And remember Paul who set out as a hatchet man for the Pharisees and returned as a fool for Christ. And remember Peter who denied Jesus three times and walked away with the keys to the kingdom on his belt.

Perhaps whenever we’re tempted to take ourselves too seriously, we can remember the audacity of the old Franciscan benediction that speaks of discomfort and anger and tears over the seemingly insurmountable state of things as blessings. And we can remember that it asks God for enough foolishness to believe that we, in whatever state — poor or rich, smart or not so smart, old or young, sick or well, can make a difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done.

If Advent stirs up anything at all like this in us to get us truly ready for Christmas, so be it. Even the stones come to with this news.
___________________________________________________________________________
A Franciscan Blessing

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done. Amen.

December 13, 2006

Legacy

When we reincarnated our garage into a kitchen and a library, all the stuff stored in it but the car went into a new shed out back that an architect-who-had-nothing-to-do-with-it called “jaunty.” It was the front porch, like the stoa at Athens where Zeno taught, that suggested such an adjective. There was even on the porch a rocker. It was a rocking chair that my oldest son took off to college years ago. It needed some work. So we cleaned it up and moved it into the kichen-library. 

But what about the stuff? The garage was never all that good for a car except maybe CP’s Morris  Minor of years past, but it was perfectly swell for the stuff. The stuff that the shed received and that was also its inspiration shares its space with gardening accoutrement that qualifies the whole thing also as a potting shed for CP’s yard. Lots of pots have actually overflowed onto the porch where there’s also a deacon’s bench that’s warped so that it needs a wedge under one of its feet to keep its appearance straight. 

What weighs daily on me about all this is the stuff is our legacy. There’re a dozen or so file boxes stored there like the kind you get from Office Depot to make you seem orderly, that are full of a lot of genealogy and pictures of folk from the so distant and great-great grand past that I don’t even know their names, and also some old income tax files. 

Elsewhere in the shed and taking up too much room, there’s a lawn mower (Pogo called it a “long molar”) and a weed eater and lots of hand tools nobody ever uses and screens that’ll never be hung again and a Christmas tree stand that, at least, gets used once a year and shortly. 

And then there are the shelves of paint cans, some of which are probably empty. Heaven knows what else is out there in the largely very unfriendly contra asthma ambiance. But there you have it, a part of our legacy.

Important people talk about their “legacy.” Bishops do a lot, I’ve noticed. We’ve got one retiring about now who’s very much into the idea of legacy. They gave him a $60,000 Lincoln plus enough gasolene to go with it all the while our diocese is sending less than that to the Domestic and Foreign Mission Society of TEC. But I suppose all of us have a legacy of sorts, even sheds full. I certainly do, not to mention the dormer attics and the closet floors and all the books. 

CP frequently reminds me that none of our progeny give a fig for this stuff, and that we need to get rid of it while we’re still reasonably ambulatory. Maybe that’s why we’re in the rehab program where the clinical jocks ask us in the middle of our geriatric wrenching “Are we having fun?” so that one day, we’ll clear all this stuff out. Maybe the kids will be nicer about it if they inherit it while were still alive and thinking about our legacies before they start thinking about theirs.

December 12, 2006

Cards

I recently resubscribed to the cybersolitaire game package Ultimate. The old one refused to manifest itself in my new operating system. I went without it for some months, but always aware of my addiction’s gnawing at me for its return.

I don’t much care for its format and the icky graphic on the back of the cards. As well, there’s a kind of marshmallow-pie desktop background that seems altogether inappropriate to a card game. Regardless, when it returned among my computer’s bag of tricks, I picked up my long series of defeats at it hands just as if it had never been away. 

The game is called Klondike for reasons unknown to me, save to wonder whether this, apparently the simplest of Solitaires, has some Alaskan origin. Alaska does call up for me visions of solitude and the imbalance of day and night together with a pressing need to busy oneself with whatever is at hand. One might as well accept being a Myers-Briggs ENFP and just give up on the internal pressure of  always having to do something constructive.

December 9, 2006

Advice

We have written here only recently that neurosis has little if anything to do with how one behaves or how one suffers, or even with the fact that the psyche, the self, is infused with contradictions. Rather is neurosis primarily the failure of the capacity to attend to the truth about oneself, whatever it may be, with an awareness free of emotionalism, a capacity that the great spiritual masters called sobriety.

That thought returns to mind midst the tensions surrounding the Iraq Study Group’s unanimous report on our failure in our current preemptive destruction of that ancient biblical land and its people. A failure that comes at an embarrassingly outrageous and shameful expense in life and financial security.

Advice, any advice, especially that of those ten worthies making that study, even when asked for, is often hard to take. Especially when it is viewed through the twin lenses of denial and grandiosity that so often distort our humanity. As Christians, we believe that to be human is to be imagined by God into a freedom to love, to reason, to create, and to live in harmony with God and God’s created order. As well, do we believe that God’s grace is for now accessible for its healing when broken.

Denial and grandiosity, as two of the more powerful valences of neurosis, severely cripple our capacity to be truthful about ourselves. Grandiosity distorts our self-image beyond any reasonable bounds. Denial blinds us not only to that fact, but to any possibility of a balanced perspective about our collegial relationship with one another and with God.

That basic failure so apparent in our leaders permeates us all not only with the imbalance of anxiety, but with the necessity that we use our anger judiciously if we would accomplish any stability in the face of it. We should not be surprised.

We, as well, should be grateful that in the wisdom of our founders, we yet possess the means, the system whereby we can and we may recover our sobriety, our capacity to be truthful about ourselves, our nation, our environment, and, indeed, our world. It is altogether possible that we have now come to such a constructive bend in our history that portends real substance to this season’s message of Peace and Goodwill. God comfort us in the pursuing.

December 8, 2006

Prophetic Imagination

Advent 2C / Lk 3.1-6

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

John, the Baptist, was a baptizing fool. As Apostle Paul would put it, he was a “fool for Christ.” But that he was a “baptizer,” let there be no doubt. It is that calling from which comes his name. And it is that calling that always anchored his fiery and thundering antics. He carried a lot of freight in his flamboyant and head-long service to his God, and thus came the people, flocking to his cause.

John Baptist was a prophet in the grand sense. He must have had a set of lungs the envy of the New York Philharmonic’s brass section. He had precious little to no interest in the liturgical puffery some of us get into. Indeed, were he to show up in one of our churches come Sunday all arrayed in his rags with his mess kit full of grasshoppers, the more faint-hearted among us would likely not stay around all that long.

We do well when we think of him to remember that “prophet” means indicter, not predictor, spokesperson, not fortuneteller, and that the true prophet is always deeply rooted in and loyal to the tradition in order to effect his message even more clearly. His role — or hers, for we just may have one now in our new PB — is to unmask, to name, and to expose pretense in all its forms in and out of the church rather to encourage it. It is not a welcome task. There is little evidence to suggest that anybody ever invited a prophet home for supper more than once.

But prophets are essential, indeed, I believe, absolutely necessary in whatever the culture or the religion or the church. We need them to keep us away from our temptation to think of ourselves only as a tax-exempt and privileged society, somehow immunized from the run-of-the-mill cares everybody else has to take for granted.

Take, for example, the pretentious way some assume as a free pass the commission to make disciples of all nations and to define evangelism as running roughshod over whatever other religion and culture that may stand in the way. Take, for example, our perilous treatment of Native Americans in our early years as a nation and take again our recent shrugging off the destruction of Mesopotamian treasures in Iraq as just breaking up a bunch of pots with the offhanded comment that “stuff happens.”

This commission to make disciples is a truly noble charge, and it is from our Lord himself. But it can become a dangerously subtle way to presume that evangelism simply means to makeover others in the image of ourselves and then to overwhelm the world in some grand March of the Clones. Dwelling on this — as we are prone to do — can lead us to overlook an even more important and prior commitment, a wider and deeper evangelism to which the prophets must call us and which scares the socks off many.

When the early church was itself chosen, and given that Great Commission to make disciples, it was never set free to such ministry until it first attended to the prior and greater Commandment, the commandment on which hangs all the law and everything else, the commandment to love God and neighbor as self, and in doing so, thus to become a community under the holiest of orders one can ever imagine. These orders have been called the “prophetic imagination.” They are the way our ministry must constantly be conceived and shaped and implemented. And their very living heart is embodied deeply in our Baptismal Covenant.

Listening to and embracing these Covenant vows, we can hear them call us away from the presumption of grandeur and numbers and remind us that our true service to the world is not so much to “plant” church as it is to “be” church. This even greater evangelism is not all that different from the one described by the prophet in Isaiah — not to overwhelm the world in triumph but to suffer and die for the world and to be champions for a just peace over all. If we are to be leaders, let us be servant leaders in the image of our Lord. For it is to that imaginative ministry that we are called.

This is a quickening time in our lives as a parish and a diocese. There could not be found a richer juncture than the threshold on which we now stand, readying ourselves to enter into our own commissioned prophetic ministry in this community, indeed, in this nation. We’ve a new bishop, unknown and untested. We anticipate a new rector whose role with us we are making every intelligent and thoughtful effort to understand and articulate. We’ve a rich tradition in prophetic and pastoral and teaching ministry from which to draw our energies and to plan our future. God blesses us in many ways all the more to expect us to be an extravagant source of God’s grace to enrich and nourish ourselves and our fellows and the community at large.

This kind of neighbor love, however, is singularly personal and at most a matter no wider than one’s family and close friends. The church as institution cannot love in this way, and we’d be remiss to think that it can. But it can fulfill the Lord’s Great Commandment to love by continuing to create and model a just community where people can live together in security and safety, mutual commitment and freedom to be at peace, and to become who they are.

Advent as a season of preparation calls us not only to the ultimate joy of Christmas, but as well, to remind us that there is no more winsome evangelism than to become like a great magnet for God, drawing women and men and children into this new creation.

Perhaps you may remember when our colleagues in the United Church of Christ dared such an invitation through a TV commercial. They left no doubt that they welcomed all sorts and conditions of women and men into their fold. CBS and NBC refused to run it, labeling it “too controversial,” and what is even more absurd, calling it contrary to the Administration’s opposition to gay marriage — a fact which was not even mentioned in the commercial.

The UCC chooses to live by such prophetic imagination and needs have no concern for its own righteousness, but only to help create a fair, just, and open community. On the other hand, the networks are simply not into that sort of thing. Like the prophets, however, the UCC may well not be invited out to supper a second time.

And well may not we. But we can and have and will invite others to our board and table. It is that kind of imagination to which we are called, a prophetic imagination demanding justice and fairness and peace for all.

December 6, 2006

MOoN

The news says we’re going back to the moon. They say we’ll set up housekeeping there where astronauts will live for six months at a time.

Such was a piece of green cheese for Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon back when I was hanging on to their every word and deed a few decades ago. The moon was probably just a pit stop for them. A few years later, I heard Jack Kennedy announce our first trip to the moon to a crowded Rice University stadium. Nearly every night, I read “Goodnight Moon” to our progeny. We never tired of it, at least, I didn’t.

A full and almost full moon has been drifting in the cold black skies over our town these last couple of days. It’s a thrilling sight, the starkness of it. It recalls for me a popular jazz tune from the forties, “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome Shining through the Trees?” For a truth, it does, and I’m glad we’re finally taking that seriously enough to send it some company. Maybe that’s a better idea than just using it for a driving range, and maybe this time we’ll do a more creditable job of populating it.

December 5, 2006

Quirk

Canon Quirk called the other day, mad enough to beat hell. (For those of you who don’t know or remember or care, P D Quirk is a former mentor of mine who often re-assumes that role on an altogether unsolicited whim, especially when he thinks I might need stirring up for Advent.) 

This time, he’s got his cassock in a wad that while Iraq burns and the president dissimulates, the church stays comfortably preoccupied with its own maintenance and puffery rather than attending to be a prophetic voice for truth and a more just society. “Navel-gazing” is a favorite condemnation of his.

Now, he’s wondering whether our current flak over people’s sex lives is our own variety of civil war or is it sectarian violence or is it both. As usual, he sets me to thinking along lines I don’t find all that comfortable. But now that he mentions it and from what I’ve seen in my own diocese, it certainly couldn’t be called all that civil. 

“It’s getting more sectarian every time some covey of bishops meets off in a corner somewhere,” Quirk said. “For what is a sect, anyway, but a bunch of zealots excessive for their own religious point of view and excluding everybody else in the doing?” 

And violence? “We haven’t come to fisticuffs yet,” I said to Quirk. But then, how could I know what happens when a bunch of purple primates get all red in the face? Quirk interrupted. “Then what do you call it? Vows are being violated at every pronouncement and convention,” he said, “so much so, that one can’t find an ounce of loyalty left in the place.”

I wondered maybe I should do something, like maybe call up the bishop. But then I remembered that he’d said only recently that God will prevail and that we should start our Christmas shopping before it is too late.