March 31, 2007

Fools

Palm Sunday and April Fool’s Day coincide this year. Last time was in 1928, the same year we got a new prayer book. Some historian will know and probably tell us whether that occasion stirred the faithful as much as did the 1979 edition or anything else for that matter. Anyhow, we’re hardly ever short on uproars in this church — or any church, I suppose — and we’re sure not begging for one now.

Somehow, it seems fitting does April Fool’s Day for the current mess we’re in. Paul reminded us of the irony of the gospel when he said we might take more seriously being fools for Christ. I’m not all that sure he meant April fooling, but for lack of something better, we could use some comic relief about now. Something better, maybe, than just calling our greater satraps “primates”?

There’s always the rather ludicrous scene of anybody riding into town on a jackass, especially Jesus. But he was, after all, a man of controversy, and one of the sillier ones about him that we ever thought up was back down the years when there was all that fuss over whether Jesus ever laughed. I suspect he would be laughing now, watching us trying to tell God who’s eligible for the church’s blessing or not, as if the sacraments belonged to us. Fools we are, acting like we own the vineyard when about the best we ever come up with is petulant sharecropping.

Happy coincidence, anyhow. Palms and all the latter-day fools lining the roads waving them. Thank God for her infinite patience and her obviously profound sense of humor.

March 29, 2007

Parades

Palm Sunday Lk 19.29-40

There has been talk, perhaps even suggestion, albeit tangential in my experience, of creating a cabinet-level Department of Peace. If there is a Department of Defense, one might argue, which, of late, has perhaps been more offensive than defensive, why not one of Peace? When one of the more prominent candidates for the presidency heard of this, he was reported to have said, “Peace? We don’t want peace, we want victory.”

I don’t know if he realized how ludicrous was his statement or whether he subsequently backtracked and changed what he said. Strangely, though, I’m rather glad for his remark, for I believe it sums up in brief the truly bellicose, the war-mentality of our time.

It seems next to impossible for us to define peace in any other way save in terms of war. And it seems next to impossible for us to define war in any other way save in terms of victory — or the implicit alternative of defeat. The opposite of winning for so many is not losing. It is quitting. Victory — even with Viet Nam continuing so vivid in our minds — is the only acceptable alternative.

Coincidentally, Palm Sunday is about war and about peace, but it is a different peace. It is the peace of Jesus who is the Prince of Peace. It is the peace of the man of paradox, of the one who said, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Mt 10.34). And later, on the very eve of his crucifixion, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you” (Jn 14.27). Perhaps the contradiction fades when we realize that in the overall context for Jesus, peace meant not the absence of violence, but the presence of love and justice.

We celebrate on Palm Sunday, the entrance of Jesus, the King of Peace, into Jerusalem. We even act out his parade in our liturgy. But there was another entry into Jerusalem on that day, an entry of which we rarely take any notice and of which few probably even know, an entry not about peace, but about war and oppression. It was the entry of Pilate, the lesser Roman satrap, not on the foal of a donkey, but with his legions on the armored stallions of cavalry. It was an entrance not to celebrate with the Jews, but to guard against and stamp the Roman boot on the possibility of any colonial insurrection at that time.

A very integral part of our celebration of Palm Sunday must be, then, more than only a reenactment of that exciting and humble scene of Jesus riding on a borrowed jackass, not only of the messianic satire of Jesus’s parade. It must also be a choice between defining peace in terms of war and peace in terms of justice, a choice between the servant kingly reign of God and the imperialistic dimensions and temptations of our own worst selves.

On this Palm Sunday and as a whole throughout our own time, we are faced with not only our present international geopolitical reality, but perhaps even more critically with the ongoing theopolitical life of our church. Our nation’s leaders are careening unilaterally toward empire and challenging our great political experiment in the balance of powers on their way. And ironically, with so much of our church’s manner of governing itself patterned after our nation’s, our leaders are wrestling for our lives with those who would turn it once again either toward Rome or some unreasonable and equally imperial facsimile.

“As (Jesus) was now drawing near, at the descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, ‘Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest! And some of the Pharisees in the multitude said to him, ‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples.’ He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out’” (Lk 19.37-40).

As once again we celebrate this great Palm Sunday parade, let us turn to and listen carefully. Across town, there is being lead another parade. Will it take the very stones, themselves, to convince us which one to follow?

March 28, 2007

Mystery

Brian Greene’s new book, “The Fabric of the Cosmos,” (Knopf), describes the three parts of physics needed for making the story of cosmogony and cosmology understandable: 1) The second law of thermodynamics about order slipping always into chaos with only a few puzzling exceptions, 2) Einstein’s general theory of relativity which “writes the tune to which the universe dances,” and 3) quantum mechanics, about as practically an impractical idea as anybody ever came up with.

Reconciling these three into one Theory of Everything, a task based on the conviction that they simply must be and are, indeed, somehow reconcilable, is what leaves scientists totally frustrated, no matter how hard they try.

There are now several mathematically sophisticated and wildly imaginative proposals to pull this off, but they all face a fundamental defect. There’s no way to test them by comparison, and this kind of uniqueness, ie, “nature has no choice,” is anathema in this business. So guess what? Absent a lab routine, scientists are now pointing to descriptions like “beauty” and “elegance” as a way out.

A Theory of Everything? Three-in-one? Beauty? Elegance? Mystery? Who ever heard of such a notion?

March 27, 2007

Dandelions

Driving by, I slowed and watched some children on their way home from school yesterday. A few had stopped for momentary distractions. Two little girls were in somebody’s front yard of new grass making tiny bouquets from dandelion blooms. Three little boys were hanging over a nearby curb, shoulder-to-shoulder, trying to fish something out of the gutter.

For all the good it may have done, I wished that somehow the primates had been watching. Is it any wonder to whom God sent the angel Gabriel for that big announcement we celebrated yesterday?

March 26, 2007

Hello

The Annunciation

She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it.

He told her what the child was to be named, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her. “You mustn’t be afraid, Mary,” he said.

As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl (Lk 1.26-35).

(Buechner, “Peculiar Treasures,” Harper & Row, l979, p 39)

March 23, 2007

Oath

I suppose that in the best of all worlds, say, one in which Adam and Eve had kept it between the curbs better than we’re told they did, we wouldn’t even need oaths. On the other hand, they didn’t, and we do.

For example, we conduct — or at least start — most all of our important corporate human endeavors with some sort of promise if they’re going to have any promise at all. Marriages. Baptisms. Ordinations. Enlistments. Inaugurations. 

In our political system of checks and balances, we pass promises all around — executive, legislative, and judicial. One just doesn’t get the mantle without at least a nod (for some, maybe only a shrug) in the direction of wearing it properly and honestly. And of course, in none of these important offices will a private, unrecorded “interview” cut the butter as a substitute. 

Even so, knowing about the debacle in Eden,  we’ve got a necessary loophole in what may be one of the more important oaths of all. For example, in accordance with Article II, Section I of the U S Constitution, the president-elect recites the following oath: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” 

Execute the office? Yes, faithfully. Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution? Well, maybe, but there’s a catch — only to “the best of my ability” — an  option which leaves open a lot of wiggle room and maybe some maladroitness to go with it. Incompetence may simply be “the best” of someone’s ability. Whatever, again no simple interview, all out in public, and records galore.

But even if that’s the case, it’s no excuse for not allowing lesser satraps to take an oath to the “best of their ability,” especially since they’ve no constituency to bother with.* If the boss can get away with mayhem and nobody hold him to the task, then why can’t they? Insisting on no transcript, no oath, no audience sounds like an admission that somebody’s wearing flammable pants. After all, Adam and Eve were liars. Maybe it just runs in the family, originally.

*The story goes that when Lyndon Johnson became vice-president and met for the first time with JFK’s hotshot team of advisors, he couldn’t praise them enough to his old friend and mentor Sam Rayburn. Rayburn replied that he, too, was impressed, but that he would have been far more comforted if at least one of them had ever run for sheriff. 

March 22, 2007

Grapes

Lent 5C Lk 20.9-19

“A man planted a vineyard, and let it out to tenants… ”

When Jesus was telling this parable, surely he wondered how many times before we get it he must tell and how many changes he must ring on the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, the story of accountability.

Such is the way with parables. Whether about apples or fig trees or talents or Noah’s ark or good shepherds is really a side issue. Unlike allegories that often lead us around the block to look under every rock for meanings that are nearly always off-the-wall and usually wrong, a parable is a story with only one ax to grind. And further, like Jesus once advised his disciples about parables, they’re not told to create faith and understanding, but to require and challenge faith and understanding (Lk 8.10).

The Parable of the Vineyard is not about grapes. At its least it is about accountability. It challenges not only each and every one of us to be accountable, but all of the public and private institutions we inform and shape and think up to serve and govern, as well.

Our church’s House of Bishops is no exception. Singled out by recent heavy-handed maneuvering among the leaders of the several churches in our Communion and tempted to shift into some pontifical mode, themselves, they have set an example for outstanding collegial accountability not only by resisting that snare, but by affirming the integrity of the church that called them to be servant leaders in their own vineyard in the first place .

As an integral part of this Judaeo-Christian heritage and its stories that we claim as our own, this Parable of the other Vineyard especially challenges the church. We’re tenant farmers, the lot of us, and our vocation is to be and to set the model of the very paradigm of accountability. How could there be a greater evangelism than the winsome attraction of an accountable leadership?

One cannot avoid being drawn by the evangelical power of our bishops’ action this past week, by their obvious assumption of their rightful pastoral — and prophetic — leadership. There’s surely a profound sense of relief for all who’ve yearned so to hear such affirmative and inclusive words, and for the sudden, if only brief, refreshing transformation of what continues over and over to be a morass of self-serving ineptitude.

God speaks to the church in such exchanges. In them, God challenges our faith and understanding that we may see and hear him calling to us. We must not only join our bishops in this witness, we must find in it ourselves.

We’ve been created by and given a gospel to care for and the vineyard which is also its creation. We live our most faithful stewardship not when we stake claims on it as our criteria by which to judge others right or wrong. No. We live it most faithfully when we embrace its message of peace and justice, love and inclusion, confession and forgiveness, and when we become such a community in ourselves. It is this stewardship for which we are held accountable and to which we can now turn our energies and commitment.

March 20, 2007

Surprise

Life keeps surprising me. It’s like once when I took some complaint about an ague to a medic to diagnose, and she did, and I said, I’ve never had that before, and she said, Well, you do now.

Obviously, I’m still not paying a lot of attention. For I’ve only recently discovered James Carroll, a brilliant writer of all sorts of things including Constantine’s Sword which I’ve not yet read.

A while back, Carroll wrote an essay, “The Bush Crusade,” in which he rings devastating changes on the president’s unscripted slip-of-the-lip use of that word. It was in one of his initial proclamations about what has now become the geopolitical miasma of all time. Carroll writes, “With the Crusades, the violent theology of the killer God came into its own. To save the world, in this understanding, God willed the violent death of God’s only beloved son. Here is the relevance of that mental map, for the crusaders were going to war to rescue the site of the salvific death of Jesus, and they displayed their devotion to the cross on which Jesus died by wearing it on their breasts. When Bush’s remark was translated into Arabic for broadcast throughout the Middle East, the word “crusade” was rendered as ‘war of the cross.’”

It’s not all that easy to see stuff through someone else’s vision or the way one thing gets translated into another, but then, that may be why God gave Eve and Adam to each other and followed suit for the rest of us down through the ages. After all, even the cosmos can tighten up its communication and connections I’d hope for the better with us to discover and to articulate it.

For example, and I quote, “In his first post-9/11 column, aptly titled ‘Law not War,’ Carroll promptly asked whether ‘the launching of war (is) really the only way to demonstrate our love for America?’ In a column on the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, he wrote, ‘Whatever happens from this week forward in Iraq, the main outcome of the war, for the United States, is clear. We have defeated ourselves.’ In a very first essay, written on September 15, 2001, Carroll concluded: ‘How we respond to this catastrophe will define our patriotism, shape the century, and memorialize our beloved dead.’”

Surprised at how painfully prophetic that sentence has proved?

March 19, 2007

Mistakes

This Lent brings around the parable of the prodigal son and that fabulous, paradigmatic confession: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son” (Lk 15.21).

Such forthrightness is rather startling these days, considering the current popular substitute, “Mistakes were made.” It’s about as close to a personal admission of error as anybody ever gets. Nobody ever seems to remember or even want to remember the old adage that forgiveness is always easier to get than permission. They just assume permission while dancing the empirical two-step.

Lent’s a good time to review the bidding on confession, to come out from behind the liturgical “we” and get sorry in the first person singular. Actually, sorry doesn’t mean sorrowful anyway. It means sore, and that might be a good place to start.

Whether or not the prodigal was a prodigy, we’ll never know, but it’s evident in the text that he was gifted enough to figure out on his own the mess he’d made and not only to do something about it, but to do the right thing about it. He was sorry, all right, about as sorry as a guy can get.

The big savaging emotions of anxiety and anger, guilt and resentment, the kind — real or imagined — that usually hang around what we call sin, are all forms of fear — fear of the future, fear of the present, and fear of the past. And it’s so often fear that stands between us and whoever it is we’ve sinned against, ourselves, our neighbors, our God — or all three. There’s little love around when we’re so afraid. There’s practically no awareness of the grace that could buffer us against any onslaught, especially the onslaught of our own foolish dishonesty and denial — “mistakes were made.”

There’s finally only one unforgivable sin, and that’s the one that comes from the pride that thinks we’re so downright bad that even God is not even interested in hearing about us, let alone forgiving us. That’s the sin that blasphemously slams the door on the Holy Spirit.

It was a colossal piece of stupid theology that ever said that cursing is that sin. Rather was it — is it — the sin that arrogantly disenfranchises God, that robs God of his very way and willingness to forgive — Whole-making Spirit — to restore, to reconcile, to heal, to mend, to welcome us with the open arms and fatted calves that always sets the self-righteous on their ear.

Mistakes were and are made all right. There’s lying and greed and stupidity and just plain bumbling incompetence in high places and low places in all branches of government and all orders of ministry and everywhere else. The biggest mistake of all is not opening that door and ‘fessing up.

March 17, 2007

Green

There was a time when some fell for the notion that the moon was made of green cheese. Dolts they were thought to be, but maybe their conclusion was not entirely without reason. Unaged wheels of cheese in dim, cool places could easily look a bit like the moon when it is full of itself.

Out west where I started growing up, green and immaturity, lack of experience, gullibility, go hand in hand. Tenderfoot. Greenhorn. Actually, though, the new horns on young deer, so they say, often appear a little greenish.

On the other hand, St Patrick, like everybody else, probably wore brown… even on March 17th. Kermit, the frog, probably would, too, had he half the chance. It’s not easy being green.

But just to be on the safe side…

“O all ye green things upon the earth, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him forever.” (A Song of Creation, BCP p 48)