Out of Nowhere

I never tire of the view out the window at the left end of my desk. It’s always the same, but never the same. The yard is steep. My view is the back half of a suburban lot held up by four hundred million year-old Devonian limestone terraces. It’s topped off by a majestic oak that rules the neighborhood hill and is named for a one-time Texas geologist (Quercus shumardii). The rest is CP’s lovely native wildflowers (asleep at the wheel right now), some hollies and cedars, a twelve-foot volunteer oak, some Otto Luken laurels, a dogwood, a jaunty potting shed, a hammock frame, grass, and a handsome woodpile.

Bill Gates and company were apparently smart to use the name Windows and the neat little flaggy bright-colored logo that calls all that attention to itself. It makes them a lot of money, and they spend it wisely and generously. Trouble is, you can’t see squat through their Windows, and that’s what windows are for. Ironically, such a “window” is pointless as a window (as we Mac writers will tell you if you just ask), for the very name — and idea — is not to shut out the view, but to ventilate it with both light and air. A window is never an end in itself, but a means to an end in itself.

“Icon,” the Greeks call windows, and icons and their iconography have a mightily refreshing place in the ventilation of one’s spirit. We (and their sycophants) miscall celebrities icons all the time when what we really seem to mean is idol. Idols, they aren’t. Icons, they aren’t, either, except when they are, and the view is usually not all that great.

There’s a splendidly brilliant day outside my window this morning. The air is brisk, so the window is closed. But the view remains. I wish you could see it with me and enjoy watching life bam along out there.

Do you suppose that when God set off the Big Bang, she actually knew where it would all lead?

If it’s of one’s nature to be a creator, even The Creator, it must be hard to avoid doing something creative every waking hour. And if one never sleeps or has any need to, something creative might be going on all the while. It’s no wonder the universe is expanding just to keep out of the way of whatever’s bamming along behind it. And then, there’s always the possibility that there are multiple universes constantly getting in the way of one another.

Somewhere in the midst of all this and just so it wouldn’t all go unnoticed except by its Creator, there simply had to be an audience. Ipso facto — us or a reasonable facsimile, and that meant eyes and ears and vocal chords and whatever else. Somebody once defined human being that way — something to talk for the universe, something for God to talk to, and something for us to talk about.

Well, we do. But to be in a position such as this that God has put us is a terrible risk. Some of us, too many of us, get the notion into our heads that since we have all this capacity to watch and name and listen, we must be pretty special. Well, we are. But we seem to forget one thing about it, and that is that God is God, and we’re not.

It’s time long overdue that our Anglican colleagues around the world come to Jesus on the subject that though we were once over here a colony, we aren’t anymore. Let some of them continue to walk the pontifical two-step all they wish, but we do it now different on this side of the pond.

In spite of this, we Anglican Episcopalians even with this tribal and only partially eccelsial way we identify ourselves, would remind our global fellows that we are all together the baptised people of God. These God-commissioned holy orders and the Covenant by which we keep them transcend all those lesser housekeeping solteriological orders we’ve created and have come to suggest are holier than thou.

Further, we’ve discovered a way we believe to access God’s grace through a collegial and intentionally non-pontifical system that honors that Covenant equally for all, above and beyond any other “covenant” so-called. It’s the way of the General Convention, and though it’s more often than not generally conventional, it’s what we’ve got, and it works for now quite well for us with a catholicity of its own.

I was recently reminded that forty years ago when the American church faced an urban and even deeper racial and ethnic crisis, Presiding Bishop John Hines called a special General Convention to face those issues. We didn’t think much then about all the baptised through their proper representatives being the church’s voice, but John Hines did. He did not ask only the House of Bishops to act. He was a better informed churchman than that. Rather did he call us all to act and properly so according to our polity through all four forms of our ministry.

It is said by historians that on the day the American Declaration of Independence was signed, old King George III entered into his journal that “nothing at all of much importance happened today.” As well, H L Mencken once defined an archbishop as a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Jesus. I suspect he was right.

They’re an optimistic bunch over at the rehab center where CP and I workout with all our fellow old duffers. I mean that everybody seems to presume that we each must have something left to rehabilitate or else there wouldn’t be any use for our being there.

But as for me, I’m not so sure. There was a time, of course, when pre- and mid-middle age seemed, over and again when out of shape, to offer an occasion to get back in. It was an opportunity I took more than once and usually with positive result, as if there was indeed some sort of fundament of muscle and bone and gullet left inside with a reasonably malleable condition to take hold of. There’re all kinds of benefits for that, I suppose. There was a group of college faculty I used to “train” with when one of the guys, an English teacher, I remember, said he liked to exercise in the late afternoon especially because it made his pre-prandial martinis taste all the better.

I hate to see the church getting so bent out of shape and condition about its treasures these days and wonder if we might be overindulging ourselves beyond any possibility of rehabilitation. We seem to have a penchant always for taking God’s gifts for granted and forgetting Isaiah’s admonition that we’d best seek the Lord while he wills to be found and not at some other less convenient time (Is 55.6). I imagine (and hope) that God’s grace probably keeps God’s patience somehow in check, but I can never be all that sure, over here as I am on the dark side of faith and with my own limits and all.

I guess, though, that with all its obvious risks and for all we know, during-life seems more certain and reliable than afterlife. That being the case as it surely is, let’s hope rehab doesn’t just mean rehabituate.

Lent 1C Lk 4.1-13

When we’re pondering what we’ll do with our life or when we’re wondering what on earth we’re already doing with our life, we want it to mean something, to be relevant. We want to have at least enough control over it and our environment to keep it, as they say, “between the curbs.” And we want to be noticed, if even only for Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes.”

Anybody wrestling with vocation is probably influenced and even tempted at one time or another by these three great compulsions: relevance, control, and notice.

(Super)naturally, the daemons presumed compulsions like these to be going on with Jesus, maybe even before he did. They seemed always to recognize him and what he was about uncannily before anyone else. There’s no reason not to think that something like this may be true for us. The devil is, indeed, in these kinds of details. Those stages in one’s life preoccupied with confusion about vocation can be the neatest briar patches of details as to make the devil feel right at home. Like why else was the devil waiting out there in the sand dunes until Jesus was half starved to death before moving in on his puzzling anguish?

You want to be relevant? Satan said. Then turn these stones into bread.

You want to be in charge? Here’s a whole empire of kingdoms and all the power and glory that goes with it.

You want to be noticed? Then take a flying leap off the pinnacle of this lofty temple, surely the angels won’t let anything happen to the Son of God, himself.

No vocational headhunter could come up with better tests than these then or now for an individual or even for an institution. Yes, even for an institution. The church is not exempt from these same desires. Indeed, clear and strange parallels of temptation are going on in the church’s life at this very moment.

There’s a wait-for-us contingent within the church, indeed, not just waiting, but claiming to be the church, organizing and hoping and threatening and spending a lot of money just to be the most relevant, the most noticeable, and the most powerful, even if it means pulling down the whole community to make it so.

This contingent, and its name is legion: the American Anglican Council, the Anglican Mission in America, the Network, Forward in Faith, and now the primates in Tanzania scolding and threatening, and heaven knows what others, wants all these things — relevance, power, and most of all to be noticed by the major Anglican brass — and perhaps even the Vatican — from around the world. They’re pondering the treasured Windsor Report, making a list and checking it twice, to figure out and design what they’ll do with those of us recalcitrants who somehow strive to find ways to take our work more seriously than we take ourselves.

The devil expected to have a field day by using these temptations out there in the wilderness with Jesus. This breakaway contingent seems dangerously close to being caught in the same web. But the gospel as Jesus understood it and as we’ve received it never fails to confront every one of such pretentious priorities. In this confrontation, the gospel asks us not whether we are relevant, or noticed, or powerful, but whether our ministries offer an occasion for justice and peace and a fair concern and respect for all.

Of all the answers Jesus gave Satan and of all the answers we must give ourselves and those who would dismantle us and make us a second rate and unwelcome cousin, one stands front stage center: “You shall worship the Lord your God, and God only shall you serve.”

This major turning point in Jesus’ understanding of himself and of his work became the furnace of his transformation to protect him from becoming a victim of society and from becoming entangled in the illusions of a false self.

We are faced now, as well, with our own furnace of transformation to protect us from becoming a victim of society and from continuing to be entangled in the illusions of a false church. In the face of these temptations, Jesus affirmed God as the only source and substance of his identity. In the face of these temptations, so must we, as well, affirm God as the only source and substance of our identity.

There’s a lot of Jesus-talk among these breakaways. I hate to say this about Jesus-talk, but sometimes it can be devilishly manipulative, mesmerizing, and downright wicked as it was out there in the desert. That can even become its primary use. It is sometimes seductively and almost irresistibly tempting to wrap that mantle around oneself and claim to be speaking for God.

It would be so easy to think that these problems are simply and really just bad management got all out of hand. But I believe them to be something far more sinister and daemonic where bad management just becomes something behind which to hide the real purposes. It is absolutely no surprise to me that these destructive forces in our Communion are circling for what they are sure will be the kill. And in doing so, they are clearly casting about to make friends among whatever sympathetic powers they can find.

Ironically, what Jesus told the devil in the wilderness, he tells the church today. Religion’s proud towers are for princes and tourists. Its intricate doctrines are for the angry and the arrogant. Its pretensions to power are just warmed over Caesar outlined in fancy script.

The kingdoms of this world are humanity’s mistake, not its glory. Can you imagine Jesus vested in silks and sitting on a throne demanding that we do him homage? Rather might he be here at table with us erasing centuries of warfare, turning us to discover our common humanity, easing us out of our historic enigmas and into the shared language of love which makes this gentle, but no less firm demand of us — “You shall worship the Lord your God, and God only shall you serve.”

Ash Wednesday 2007

Two friends of mine once sang as part of a vocal quartet at a midtown Manhattan church. They tell the story that after a “lovely, reverent, and rueful” Ash Wednesday service, a small group of them adjourned to the subway and their trek home. This is their story:

We were still charged and energized from the solemnity and sweetness of the service and stood around talking, waiting for the train to show up, when a rather wild, apparently homeless man came up to us pointing at the large ash crosses on our foreheads. We started gently to explain, but he clearly had his own agenda and was not satisfied with our answers.

As the train pulled in, we piled on. The semi-scary man kept haranguing us. As the open subway door kept bumping against him, he shouted, “Whose ashes are they? Which dead person’s?” And we kept repeating, “They’re not from a person! They’re from palms… and they mean…. ” But he kept on, “Palms don’t have ashes!! Who is on your heads?”

The door closed. The man stood there on the platform, shouting, as the train left the station. He was so sure that we were marked with human remains, as, of course, in a way, we are. It is Jesus on our heads. It is Jesus on our minds. We’re all marked somehow, carrying our wounds, our memories, the signs for which we stand, seen or unseen. It is such a deep connection. His voice continues, “Who is on your heads?”

Many passengers around us also had smudgy crosses on their foreheads. To break the mood, we smiled plaintively at each other as we swayed into the night. We made a rough joke that if anything happened to any one of us, the police would charge our priest. His fingerprints were all over the place.

New York is always interesting.

There are crisis liturgies that come only once in a lifetime — baptism, marriage, ordination, burial, and the like. And there are cyclic liturgies that repeat themselves through the years, for some, perhaps, ad nauseum — Christmas, Easter, anniversaries. But for others, with renewed meaning and vigor as our own personal and communal histories turn through our lives.

The Eve of Ash Wednesday may be one of these. A sort of ordered mad zaniness makes the substance of it, an hilarity over anticipating the rigors (for some, anyhow) of the Lenten shroud that covers ever so finely as the ashes to come.

We call it Mardi Gras from the French for Fat Tuesday, and Fat Tuesday from using all the lard in the house for festive baking before the meatless Lenten fast. Some call it Shrove Tuesday in honor of the good riddance of old sins and the exciting anticipation of a journey into newer ones.

“New Orleans” is an almost instant thought integral to the image of this day. New Orleans, whose being was savaged almost beyond recognition only a few memories ago, now suddenly bursts alive again with the mere thought of it,

Mardi Gras. And throughout this planet of storms and quakes and floods and wars and incompetent leaders we all rejoice and let the jazz ring out. We are saints, our gospel tells us, and once more, we’ve done gone marching in.

It was on an August morning in 1958 on 126th Street in Harlem, that a historic crowd of famous jazz musicians gathered in front of a brownstone between Madison & Fifth avenues. They were there — together with an impressive row of awestruck neighborhood kids on the curb — for what photographer Art Kane rightly, if immodestly, calls “the greatest picture of that era of musicians ever taken.”

Collectively, these fifty-seven artists spanned a large part of the entire history of jazz. They assembled at ten am, an absurd hour for musicians who work all night, to have their picture taken for a jazz issue of Esquire magazine. The gathering has come to be known as A Great Day in Harlem.

As in any group photo, you’ll not notice everybody saying “cheese” at the camera at the same time. Some are chatting together, some smoking, some posing, some wearing white coats so they won’t be missed. The famous Count Basie, himself, sat on the curb with all the kids.

All in all, the picture vibrates with a palpable collegiality one might not expect at that hour from that many who for the most part are stars of the first order in their own right. It was truly a great day in Harlem and a great day for relishing our collective human being.

You can also find currently at any number of websites a collection of pictures of thirty-eight or so primates of the Anglican Communion and their lesser satraps. They’ve just now ended a kind of summit meeting in Tanzania where in spite of their common membership and claims to vocation in Christ, some not only won’t talk to one another, but, as well, even refuse our Lord’s invitation to share the bread and wine together at his Table. You might could call it a Not So Great Day in Tanzania and something of an insult to God’s imagining of our collective human being.

When Scott Peck was searching in his book “The Road Less Traveled” for a meaningful analogy for Christian community, he suggested two — a basketball team and a jazz band. For it is there that the players know and accept each others skills and limits and styles and how these can be complemented for the greater good of the whole. It is something of a model to which we churchers may well attend. May the prelates find in that picture of that gathering on that great day in Harlem, a symbol of a way back into the Way to which we all are called.

A newspaper columnist wrote the other day that Iraq has become a “quagmire of the vanities” — a place where America is spending blood and treasure to protect the egos of men who won’t admit that they were wrong.

My tendency is to jump all over these same men, to get one of these little square black and white “W for Wrong” bumper stickers for the whole lot of them. But on the other hand maybe I should give them some slack. I know myself from personal experience that it’s not all that easy just plain knowing you are wrong, let alone having to admit it. Maybe this is a trespass — albeit a rather big one — that the Lord prayed that I should forgive.

Trouble is the same folk who are so wrong now started out then doing what they claimed God of all people told them to do and which they of course thought surely must be right because God said so even if everything else seemed to suggest otherwise. Further, to admit that they are wrong now is all the same as saying that God was wrong then, and one needs to be real careful about that sort of thing. Pity is, they seemed so sure about that then and convinced a lot of us also short on vertebrae who seemed itching to believe them, anyway.

But that’s the problem dealing with God. It takes faith, and whatever you say, you can never be all that sure about faith. That’s why some say that faith is risk and wonder about whether the light at the north end of the tunnel is just plain daylight or whether it’s a south bound freight train. Jesus, himself, wondered about that sort of thing out there in the garden that night when he asked God to let him off the hook of what had been his puzzled certainty all along since that time in the wilderness with Itself who was so sure about everything.

But then and according to the columnist, there’s that “quagmire of the vanities,” a matter that just can’t simply be ignored any more than Br’er Rabbit could get his own vanities unstuck from the Tar Baby.

Last of Epiphany

Fred Rogers of TV’s “Mister Rogers’s Neighborhood” was asked once why it is people so often seem afraid to talk to one another.

He sat quietly for a moment, then he answered. “Perhaps we think that we won’t find another human being inside that person, and how sad it is to think that we would give up on any other creature who’s just like us.”

I wonder how he might feel about the current meeting of the primates of our church over in Tanzania. Some of these fellows have made it altogether clear that there are not only certain of their number they won’t talk to, but with whom they won’t even stay in the same room or at the same table. If Mr Rogers is right, there’s a lot of fear at hand at that meeting.

Maybe we’re missing perhaps one of the most distinguishing characteristics of Mister Rogers’s Neighborhood. That was his recognition of our common humanity and how that seemed so often almost inseparable from our fear. What a sight it would be to see him now at the primates’ meeting. There he is, inviting us in, taking off his suit jacket and putting on his sweater, taking off his loafers and putting on his sneakers, feeding his fish, suggesting we change out of our purple shirts and let the air out of our puffery, but always listening respectfully to whomever might be talking about their craft or their concerns or their big, impressive province somewhere around the world.

Maybe he would gently introduce topics likely troubling to a four-year-old, maybe even to them. Are scary things on television really real? Will I be sucked down the bathtub drain with the water? Will people who leave come back? Is it all right to get angry? Such questions in one form or another are not all that far off the mark for many of us.

And I can especially see Eddie Murphy’s parody, his Mister Robinson lamenting with embarrassing accuracy, “I hope I get to move into your neighborhood someday. The problem is that when I move in, y’all move away.”

Rogers once told of his often puzzling over a verse in one of our more popular hymns, A Mighty Fortress is Our God. The verse says, “The prince of darkness grim, / We tremble not for him; / His rage we can endure, / For lo! his doom is sure, / One little word shall fell him.” He asked one of his favorite seminary teachers, then retired, with whom he had studied for the Presbyterian ministry and with whom he visited often, “What is that one little word that would wipe out all evil?”

“Forgiveness,” said his professor. “Evil disintegrates in the presence of forgiveness. For Satan would prefer that you look with accusing eyes at your neighbor, thus extending the accusing spirit, the greater power of evil. On the other hand,” his professor continued, “if you can look on your neighbor with the forgiving eyes of the one who is our Advocate, those are the eyes of Jesus, himself.”

Fred Rogers was of certain a pastor. His compassion was prophetic, as well. His clear, almost palpable caring could often challenge one into a nourishing reflection and resolution. The neighborhood he created and welcomed us into as fellow advocates was literally permeated with forgiveness and acceptance, reconciliation and the banishment of fear. It knew nothing of judgment.

It’s not easy for us to discover the human in the other person and not succumb to our fear of the unknown. The church struggles with this very problem now and not all that successfully. We seem to prefer keeping our distance. When there comes an opportunity to open ourselves to everybody or even to somebody, perhaps unconditionally as healers, including these “others,” we pass. We say “No, thanks.”

We make covenant in our baptism to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves. I suppose all the primates vow somehow to do something like that, or, if they don’t, we might suggest that they do. For this Christ — this other human being of whom we seem to be so afraid, who seems so often elusive and unknown — is in fact God’s beloved son in whom he is well pleased, to whom God would have us listen, the very same image in which we are all uniquely created.

We err when we so often would make the church a remote shrine above it all for our protection. Mr Rogers’s Neighborhood is as good a metaphor for the church as I can imagine. If it’s not, may it pray to become a neighborhood where we can discover not only our own humanity and begin to fulfill it, but where we can discover the humanity of others. May we there dare to become more human precisely as our fear is dispelled, and to do so by the grace God gives us to love our neighbors as ourselves.

It is a pastor’s work to lead people into reconciliation and truth. It is especially a primate’s work. Fred Rogers was a pastor and prophet, perhaps one of the finest. As we now leave this Epiphany time, this time of telling others where we have been and what we have seen, may we enter into this more introspective Lent to become now such a Mister Rogers neighborhood where fear is no more.