January 19, 2007
Witness
Al Franken’s considering running for the US Senate from Minnesota. He’s wondering whether there’s a place for a comedian in that august body. He’s not kidding. There are probably not any left.
Comedy, as important as it often is as a diversion from the moment, has not the potential healing power of humor. Our times starve for humor and for a sense of it. For the difference between humor and comedy is the difference between the one that lasts forever and the one that evaporates as soon as it hits the air. It’s the difference, of course, between the ironic and the simply facetious.
Life’s deep mysteries keep company with such irony, for one of those mysteries is how so often life turns out to mean the very opposite of what it seems and requires of us special attention and insight to risk that discovery. Jesus taught this repeatedly in parables, those puzzling riddles that seem always so wry and so often laced with the kind of foolishness Paul thought essential to the Way.
The remarkable thing about Jesus and the frequent humor in his parables is that he never seemed to tell them to create faith, but to call forth faith as the only way to the discovery of their meaning. For faith, like love, can come only from a deep sense of ourselves and of our own humanity, what, indeed, is surely a sense of humor.
Such humor reminds us that sooner or later at one time or another everybody is exhausted, wicked, afraid, frustrated, and desperately alone, even especially, perhaps, when being a “fool for Christ.” This is humor’s perspective and restorative power. This is its healing energy over life’s menaces, and ultimately, its comfort and strength. It was the Lutheran bishop and New Testament scholar Krister Stendhal who reminded us than wherever this brokenness of the world is mended, there is present the kingdom of God.
Humor unites us with ourselves, our neighbor, and with the awesome roots of our beginnings, our purpose and destiny, nourishing our love and challenging our fear. Above all, it awakens our imaginations, the very medium through which love and faith work their mysterious transformation. Nothing, indeed, can separate us from this presence of God in Christ in one another and in ourselves, especially among the poor whom he loved and cared for so deeply.
On the other hand, when our awareness of this sometimes fades, it is well, as Franken and maybe Barney Fife might agree, that God raises up the trickster in our midst, the buffoon, the miscreant who lives in us all and allows us to laugh at evil and, as well, at ourselves, and especially at ourselves.
Our great gravity over our self-inflicted divisions in these days can begin to seem awfully silly if we would only pause and look at it this way. For in the seal of the cross at baptism, we are already marked as Christ’s own forever. Just what part of “forever” is so hard for us to understand? Just what could be any more ironic than that and maybe put the wit back in witness where it belongs?
January 18, 2007
Shine
Epiphany 3C (1 Cor 12.12-27; Lk 4.14-21)
Just so we can hear what this Sunday’s lectionary press release is all about, Paul and Jesus have stopped preaching and gone to meddling.
Paul’s lesson in gross anatomy never fails to make abundantly clear how connected we are to one another. If that fails, there’s always the Eucharist to remind and re-member us driving home again and again that we are the body and all its parts, homely and handsome, functional and freeloading. Even with all our selfish preoccupation about whether we’ve got it right (aka “orthodox”), that’s yet the way God does it.
So it is with Jesus’ reading of Isaiah. Justice is all wrapped up in good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to all. But that’s not enough. Whatever one’s take on the Bible — infallible book or dust-collecting bookend — as glorious as may be its words, it’s all pointless until it’s fulfilled.
“Today this scripture [Isaiah’s wild and crazy ideas about peace and justice] has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus wasn’t talking about still another Morocco-bound red-letter version or a new commentary. He was talking about himself. He was the fulfillment. He was the word become flesh. If you’ve got ears, listen.
And, like Paul, he was also talking about us. We are the body. All this Bible talk, all these resolutions, all this voting and consenting and whatever, we are IT. Is IT fulfilled or not? That’s what our Baptismal Covenant is about, to fulfill, to re-member, to put the members back together, to embody good news and vision and release and freedom. To be what God calls us to be.
Maybe it might be good to recall last Sunday’s collect when we prayed, God grant that “your people, illumined by your word and sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory… ” (BCP p 215).
Our new PB said it another way at her investiture, when she blessed us all with — “Shine, Baby, shine.”
January 17, 2007
Swear
To make our courtroom jury system work, you’ve got to have a jury. To have a jury, you’ve got have the proper number plus all without any known bias about the trial or the principals. Jury selectors have a ball with this when it comes to picking the jurists they want and think they can trust. It’s the Cowboy Way.
So one of the number-one satraps on the staff of the vice president of the US&A is about to go on trial, and they’re picking a jury. It seems altogether likely that Vice himself may be called as a witness. Trouble is, he’s not all that easy not to have an opinion about. There’re the Halliburton contracts and Iraq and Katrina, there’s quail hunting, there’s stonewalling congress with backdoor executive privilege about that energy commission thing, there’s torture, there’s the closet cabinet, and I’m sure heaven knows a few other things. There’re all these rumors and facts and gossip and attitude. Let’s hear it for attitude. So it’s hard to have an opinion more or less like his mom’s. How can we get a jury we can depend on if Vice shows up as a witness?
Well, in most cases like this, you do what they call changing the venue. If too many folk in Podunk know the sucker to pick an “unbiased” jury, just go down the road a piece to Flapsaddle and start over. Like I said, it’s the Cowboy Way.
Trouble is, when Podunk is the whole US&A, maybe even the whole world, how do you find another venue when there’s this ambiance thing all over the place? How do you do that when Vice is vice of an administration not all that well known up and down for truth-telling, and he shows up and down in all the ups and downs?
And then there is, we must remember, the Oath, this swearing to tell the truth and the whole truth just in case we missed something. And all this especially when a lot of us are still taking a new look at oaths, reeling from the fellow out in Minnesota who insisted on using the Qur’an for swearing, a book which we’ve probably read even less of than that other book which most swearers and juries expect to be used for occasions like this.
God bless America.
January 16, 2007
Dynamics
Dave Barry, the wit who makes an adjective out witness, has a rock band made up entirely of writers. He wrote that one time when they were in the midst of a concert, a rumor came across the bandstand that there’d been a chord change.
Of a truth, but the only thing rock and roll changes fewer times than chords is dynamics. My trusty Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music says about dynamics what ought to be obvious, that dynamics is that aspect of music relating to volume (aka loudness). Loudness spans from triple forté (think rock bands) to pianissimo (don’t think a kindergartener’s keyboard). Along with theory, meter, and tempo, dynamics are largely what make music music, the sort of thing we don’t hear a lot of these days.
The Cleveland Orchestra along with Mahler’s First (that’s not the warm-up band) came to our town last evening. My friend, the principal violist with our town’s orchestra, says without hesitancy that the Cleveland is the best in the world. Their concertmaster says quite frankly and with equal modesty, “We strive for clarity and unanimity of articulation, but also for a sound which is constantly changing, with different levels of transparency, in short, a wide dynamic range that’s also precise and balanced.” Articulation means the attack and decay of a note. It is no mean feat for a section of instruments to attack a note together, but decay (or release) together is another matter. If you can slip a razor blade between the notes, then you’ve got effective articulation. And if last evening is any illustration, what the Cleveland strives for is what they get — and how we benefit.
The same thing’s true among the great jazz bands. With this skill, the Count Basie Orchestra runs the Cleveland a close second. That’s why when you hear their “L’il Darlin’” or “Shiny Stockings” or “Corner Pocket” you’ve got a chance to hear what swing is all about. If you’re lingering now with any doubt, the Cleveland does the same thing with Mahler.
January 15, 2007
Mother Jesus
It was Jesus who lamented, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!” (Mt 23.37).
Once a week on the way to band I pass an otherwise typical residence among many, save that out front of this one there’s a big sign that says “Psychic,” together with some other words I don’t quite catch. There are never any cars parked there, so I wonder if there are ever any customers stopping by to get psyched, if, indeed, that’s what takes place.
The presence of that sign recalls county fairs with fortune tellers and palmists with pictures of hands and heads all marked off in sections numbered to mean different things. It was not uncommon to call these entrepreneurs “prophets,” in the sense that to prophecy means to see into the future. And I suppose in a way it does.
But that’s not what Jesus was saying about prophets. He surely had in mind those Old Testament top guns like Isaiah and Jeremiah, Hosea and Amos and John Baptist and all their other hard-nosed colleagues. All of whom met with somewhat inglorious ends.
Nothing much had changed by his time, nor has it by ours. The prophets are still steeped in and loyal to their tradition. They don’t predict, they indict. They don’t read palms, they expose palm artists. They don’t cozy with the power structure, they dismantle it and show it for what it is. And they rarely ever get invited home for dinner more than once.
We remember Martin Luther King today, some of us reluctantly, of course. Some wouldn’t even follow suit with the rest of the country when the nation set aside a holiday for him. But some of us care enough even to have written into the calendars of our liturgies a special prayer, a prayer that likens him to Moses, maybe because he kept talking about a “promised land,” and a prayer that calls him a prophet, probably because he kept hanging out our laundry so often. So, like all the rest, we killed him, too. Denial is often a murderer and by nature is scared silly of the truth.
When Jesus grieved and wept over Jerusalem, he yearned to embrace them. He reached perhaps from his own experience as a child to find a metaphor to express his feelings and to communicate the depth of his sorrow and his love. Of all things, he likened himself to a Mother Hen. Such imagery and need drove the late 14th and early 15th century nun Julian of Norwich to speak of him as “Mother Jesus.” Only naturally, thanks be to God, so has the 21st century Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. And as could easily have been expected, even some of her own colleagues and others took grave (if somewhat ludicrous) issue with, as Frank Sinatra oft would say, “all that mother jazz.”
I don’t know about you, but I am deeply comforted in these perilous days and times to have such a leader who is so in touch with herself, her scripture, her tradition, and her insight to speak in such truly profoundly moving ways. I cannot imagine the denial and the effrontery with which she is even now being treated by some of her peers around the church who apparently with all their biblical profundity and “orthodoxy” have such short memories of our mutual Lord himself.
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem… ”
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Almighty God, by the hand of Moses your servant you led your people out of slavery, and made them free at last: Grant that your Church, following the example of your prophet Martin Luther King, may resist oppression in the name of your love, and may secure for all your children the blessed liberty of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
January 12, 2007
Doublecross
Old Bishop Dan Corrigan, once-upon-a-time head of the one-time Home Department up at 815, would poke fun at his episcopal colleagues who had a penchant for adding a + mark to their signatures. He’d call them “Plus John,” “Plus Frank,” etc. With archbishops now adding on ++, it’s a wonder what he’d call them. Double-crossers?
I saw recently where somebody had actually tagged the Archbishop of Canterbury, himself, with three. I guess that approaches Calvary more nearly, though I’m not so sure if that’s the intention.
H L Mencken once defined an archbishop as a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Jesus. There seem to be more of them around of late, a few taking quite an interest in us Episcopalians. Some have even begun tweaking with our canons, saying, of all things, that they’re too ambiguous. (Next time you need a definition for irony, try “one Anglican calling another Anglican ambiguous.”)
Our polity, admittedly clumsy though it may be, has never seemed all that clear or probably even necessary to our colleagues in the overseas provinces. If it’s any comfort, neither is it all that clear to us. Democracy is messy. Nevertheless, it’s our tireless attempt to accomplish justice by legislating grace, oxymoronic as it may seem.
Our generally conventional system probably comes across from outside our jurisdiction as more than just geographically foreign. When some of those other primates begin to catch the gist of how much more collegial it is than pontifical, it may well scare their purple socks off. Under those circumstances, one might need all the pluses one can get.
January 11, 2007
Cana
Epiph 2C / Jn 2.1-11
The wedding at Cana is one of the more charming tales in biblical lore. It’s a family story that many of us can easily identify with almost instantly.
It’s about parental pride, the kind that shows off the kid and her first lessons on the Suzuki fiddle. So Jesus’s mum says, “They have no wine, Jesus. Do something. You know what.”
It’s about impulsive, not-so-mild resentment. Jesus responds, “O woman, what have you to do with me? You know I’m not ready for this.”
It’s about knowing as a parent that you’ve won, but that you probably won’t win much longer. So Mary, giving up, says, “Do whatever he tells you.”
It’s about a mildly impatient and indirect response. “Fill the jars with water.”
There’s more, of course, let alone the maitre d’ wondering why the preferred vintage came after everybody’s sufficiently sauced not to know the difference. ”Everyone serves the good wine first;” he says, “and when folk have drunk freely, then the poor wine, but you have kept the good wine until now.”
But over and on top of all that and even more fascinating, this is a tale about symbols. John Evangelist was into symbols. Throughout his gospel he writes of signs and symbols. He told us that Jesus spoke of himself as bread, as light, even as living water and shepherd. And elsewhere at the Last Supper, Jesus, himself, said he was both bread and wine. Some say Jesus was himself a symbol, even a parable, indeed, a sacrament than which there is no whicher. For Jesus and his eucharistic way of giving thanks are together the hands-down best parable of them all.
But let’s take a look at the wine, the wine as symbol. A lot of folk have trouble with wine in church of all places and insist that at Cana it was really grape juice. You know the line, if grape juice was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for us. If so, I can’t imagine why the maitre d’ would be so concerned as he seemed to be about the guests’ sobriety.
Of course, unfermented grape juice is a bland and pleasant drink, especially on a warm afternoon mixed half and half with ginger ale and maybe on the rocks. But on the other hand, it is a ghastly symbol for the life blood of Jesus Christ, especially when served in individual antiseptic, thimble-sized glasses (some places call them “shot glasses” of all things) all neatly in a tray and passed up and down the pews.
Then there’s no denying that wine is booze, which means it is dangerous and drunk-making. It makes the timid brave and the reserved amorous. It loosens the tongue and breaks the ice especially when served in a loving cup. Too much of it makes some of us go downright bananas.
But it kills germs. And, as symbols go, it is a rather pleasant and useful one.
We sometimes forget that language, itself, is symbol. Like all symbols and signs, language points beyond itself. It sets visions. It helps create moods. It perhaps implies more than it explains. To take it and the stories it makes possible literally is to destroy it altogether. The wine that Jesus used and created at Cana was more than a beverage, it was also a symbol, and it was used at a party that Jesus attended.
When two people join in marriage or in an otherwise loving and binding commitment, they both must remember that they still have their lives apart as well as a life together. They still have their separate ways to find. But the great and joyful risk they take is that they can well become more richly themselves together than the chances are either of them could have ever have managed to become alone. When Jesus changed the water into wine at Cana, perhaps it was a way of saying more or less the same thing.
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(The better parts of this preachment were used without either permission or forgiveness from Frederick Buechner writing about wine in Wishful Thinking and about marriage in Whistling in the Dark.)
January 10, 2007
Pat & God
Jay Leno says, “Pat Robertson says that God told him personally that a major terrorist attack will happen in the United States in 2007. God says that’s not true and that anyway, whenever Pat calls, he lets the answering machine take it.”
Answering machines and caller ID have got to be one of the more useful inventions. For one thing when the read-out shows “unidentified 800 number,” you can be sure it’s somebody on the take then go ahead and finish your dinner before it chills out.
Isaiah must have been sure God had caller ID and voice mail. “Seek the Lord while he wills to be found…” he wrote (Is 55.6). How many times when things get to going raunchy have you heard or said that “all we can do now is pray.” Listen up, says the prophet, this last resort and all-too-common practice about a take-for-granted God is for the birds. The widespread notion that God’s just standing around on one foot and the other with nothing more to do than wait for us to make his day is not exactly what’s meant by humility. Anyhow, when God said what Pat said is not true, did he mean that God didn’t tell Pat any such thing or that it’s not true that we’re having a terrorist attack in 2007? Or maybe neither?
Whatever, back to Pat and God and speaking of 2007 and terror, the U S health care system is a kind of holy terror in itself, a scandal and a disgrace. But whether God says so or not, maybe he’d smile on 2007 if it’s the year we start the move toward universal coverage. If we as a nation never do another thing faithful to our founders, and it seems that we daily do fewer and fewer, the establishment and support of universal health care might suffice, at least, for a time.
If only slightly reoriented, the billions we waste on the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about so long ago would do for openers to underwrite the tab. Next could follow the disparate corporate welfare which is such an insult to honest taxpayers. We’d be pretty near home free, at least with enough to satisfy the medics and the pharmaceutics.
After that could come the heedless and wanton sacrifice of our environment on the altars of greed. Scientist-philopher Lewis Thomas likened this earth to a cell whose atmosphere is its wall. Anybody who’s had Bio 101 knows what happens to the innards of a cell when you start poking holes in it. Pro-life, indeed.
If we be stewards in any way consistent with our Judaeo-Christian commission, how can we continue to be so foolhardy? Maybe Pat was right. Maybe, to paraphrase Pogo, we has met the terrorist and he is us.
January 9, 2007
Enquiry
“The strains of rewrite.” James Thurber once used these words to suggest the awkward language that can appear when a piece has been reworked once too often. Lewis Thomas, philosopher/scientist and one of the better essayists I’ve ever read, claimed never to rewrite. What he wrote is what you got, and no editor had better ever lay a blue pencil on it.
This quote from Thurber, something of an essayist himself, prompted me to realize that perhaps I could use an editor — or more rewrite — whenever I hear from my old friend and mentor Canon P D Quirk. His opinions are anything but vague, and I try to report them as accurately as I can, but it is apparently not always easy for the reader to separate them from my own. Actually, I depend on you readers (where on earth would I be without you?) to do that, especially when I struggle with satire, an endeavor which is not all that easy or simple.
A while back, I reported on one of my conversations with the Canon about his disdain for centering prayer and his preference for what he calls eccentering prayer, and that his chaplaincy at the convent with the Sisters of Constant Concern is beginning to annoy the Abbess (as it has for some time). One reason is that his penchant for ellipses in communication as a result of his prayer life is beginning to affect their capacity for centering, namely concentrating on their tasks and their own prayer life. As if he weren’t difficult enough already to understand, this ellipsis business simply complicates it further. (An implied pun — the best kind — is in all this somewhere, but I’ll attempt to ruin it by explaining it. An ellipse, as you know from geometry, has two centers as differentiated from a circle which has only one, hence, it might be construed to be eccentric. An ellipsis is the omission of one or more words that are obviously understood, but that must be supplied to make a construction grammatically complete. It is a generally annoying habit.)
Anyhow, a reader wrote: “We just read your blog (Ed note: ugh) on centering prayer and are totally perplexed by this obvious disdain for a healthy spiritual practice. We are Episcopalians who found CP (Ed note: Centering Prayer, not the CP who is my life’s companion and frequent mentor) draws on the best of the spiritual knowledge of the Church’s fathers and mothers. While T. Keating is RC we know nothing about any ‘papist’ push of CP (”papist” was Quirk’s word) which leads one to contemplation. Are you opposed to contemplation or to prayer that unites one to God?”
He went on to add, “My background is as a theologian with a PhD in classical spirituality.”
I don’t usually reveal my background, largely because fortunately it came long before the practice of background checks came into vogue, and I see no value to bring it up at this late stage in my career. Anyhow, I answered this obviously genuine enquiry by suggesting it might be best to ask Canon Quirk directly. This wasn’t altogether fair of me, for I knew that his several communication systems are generally unlisted or broken down. However, perhaps the next time I hear from him, maybe I’ll remember to ask him myself. Now that all this is perfectly clear and rewritten, what else can I possibly say?
January 8, 2007
Bootstraps
“We are all going to heaven, some of us will just like it better than others.” Credit that observation to Verna Dozier, fierce laywoman, teacher, and prophet, and make a note that it’s about grace.
I got an unsolicited email the other day (rather in the same way this one comes to some of you) telling all about how admirably industrious, true blue, and thoughtful are the folk out in Denver for cranking up their SUVs and helping each other get out of the snow and ice without “whining” for Uncle Sugar to come and help. As usual in pieces like this, the not-so-altogether innuendo was knee-deep that the folk over on the Gulf Coast when staggered by Katrina were pleading like hand-wringing wimps for the feds to come and help when, I suppose, they should have used their SUVs, instead.
In this land which many want to believe is Christian and some couldn’t care less, merit trumps grace more often than not. Of course, it’s one of the reasons we have over forty million with no health insurance and so much angst about “universal health care” among those who have all they need. And it’s also one of the reasons we hand out corporate welfare to the Enron types all the while blaming the poor for their plight. And it’s also why we can spend billions killing thousands of our own and others in an absurd vengeance that nurtures more and more terrorists. Let’s face it, we live in a bootstrap culture. You have to earn your way unless you’re like those Ann Richards said were born on third base and presumed they’d hit a triple.
The same people who deny global warming apparently have no trouble equating a few feet of snow and ice causing a temporary impasse for a few days with a hurricane that erases a whole coastal civilization now for years. Of course, Jesus did say the poor will always be with us, but I don’t recall his suggesting that as a copout for insisting that they just need to get better bootstraps or for not recognizing him among the least of them (Mt 25.34-46).
Like old James, when talking about faith without works being dead could just as easily have said, “Don’t let the grace grow under your feet.”