March 16, 2007
Benedicite
Early morning news reports that somebody’s found a “confessed atheist” in the House of Representatives. The same story says a poll shows 95% of us would vote for a Roman Catholic for president, and 45% would vote for an atheist. Jews came in second. Episcopalians didn’t make the cut.
Considering Deists were rather prevalent among our founding fathers, I’m surprised they weren’t mentioned. I wonder if even the question was asked, and if not, why not. I find it rather refreshing that an atheist showed up in the House and in the poll. Of course, I’m never quite sure just what is an atheist or whether the name, itself, is not a one-word oxymoron. I always want to ask what Jim Pike, one of my favorite bishops, used to ask. “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.”
The famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says there’s all kinds of evidence for a God-by-whatever-name, but precious little that this GBWN cares one way or another. That comes close to Deism as I understand it.
On the other hand, the late Bennett Sims, one-time bishop of Atlanta, wrote in his book on servant leadership that some quantum theorists are certain there is a caring pulse of energy that animates and interconnects all the entities in the cosmos. It’s not unlike Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist, outraging his time when he said that the “molecules make love.” This, of course, got his books banned. The notion of “making love” — who or what does it with whom and how — never seems then or now to sit all that well with the book-banning types.
In Jesus’s time, it was common knowledge and experience that the created order in all its facets always knew and recognized in him in its own way who and what was present among us. The daemons, the bread and fishes, the storms, the winds and waves, the human maladies, the fig trees, Satan itself in the wilderness, all across the universe were well savvy to the major bend in cosmic history that happened when the Word became flesh.
No wonder Jesus could say on that first Palm Sunday that if the crowds turned silent, the very stones, themselves, the seemingly most inert and mute of all creation, would burst forth in adulation. Maybe it’s what we now call atomic energy, but by whatever name, it remains Benedicite, omnia opera Domini — “O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord.”
March 15, 2007
New creation
Lent 4C / 2 Cor 5.17-21
God and the Devil are walking along the way and find something lying there in their path. “What’s that?” says the Devil. “Truth,” says God. “Let me have it,” says the Devil. “I’ll organize it.”
As is our custom, we’ve just now heard read a segment of one of the chapters in our spiritual genealogy. It’s a letter to our kin over in Corinth. It says in part, “If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (2 Cor 5.17).
“New creation.” It is a careful, a cautious phrase. It has a ring in it of Genesis and of Eden. In these present times of churchly turmoil, it can be, it is, indeed, a refreshing insight into our remembering who we are, what our Baptismal Covenant calls us to be and to become, that “in Christ,” the “old has passed away” and the new has, as it were, made the scene.
Is it possible that we’ve become so fond of the notion of being “in Christ” that we’ve lost sight of being with Jesus, that same Jesus who spoke of himself as the way to that new creation, as the truth of it, as the life of it? Jesus himself, remember, questioned anyone calling him “good.” He said that “no one is good but God alone” (Mk 10.17f). Granted, he also said, “When you have seen me, you have seen the father.” Jesus is the icon of God, the window through whom we see God, the beloved son in whom God is well pleased and to whom God demands that we listen (Lk 9.28-36). It is with Jesus that we share this life, indeed, this baptism.
Maybe we should never have called this religion of ours “Christianity” in the first place. For this letter to Corinth says in effect that the message of Christianity is not Christianity. The message of Christianity is a “new creation.” Like God and the Devil, when we came upon that truth in our path in those early days, almost the very first thing we did was to organize it, to make a religion of it. For what is religion after all but a human endeavor to render faith — that is, the life in the new creation — both memorable and manageable? A noble task, but never an end in itself.
Are our leaders so obsessed now, so immersed in and with religion — with formulas and covenants and communiqués and Windsor Reports and resolutions that they’ve possibly – as our overseers — overlooked the fact that the old is gone and the new is here, the new creation? Are we repeating questions Jesus condemned in his disciples, questions like who sits at your right hand and who sits at your left? (Mk 10.35-45) Or worse, like Simon, are we trying to buy the chutzpah? (Acts 18.18-24)
If I were asked to sum up the Christian message for our time in two words, I would say with Paul who has the credit for that letter to Corinth what he said to our cousins and thus to us: The sum of the Christian message in two words is the message of a “New Creation.” To put it in a more exact translation: “If anyone is in union with Christ, he is a new being, (a new creation); the old state of things has passed away; there is a new state of things.”
Look for a moment at those sitting near you. Whatever your calendar time may be, you are each new creations. You are new beings. You are reconciled reconcilers. You are ambassadors through whom God is forgiving the world. And you will meet once again and finally in heaven. Paul would say that it is simply that simple.
My old dear friend and mentor Canon P D Quirk never relents reminding me that it must be in my very nature to complicate things. Maybe you have a tinge of that, as well. We Christians have a two-thousand year track record of complicating things. Turn over in the Book of Common Prayer sometime to pages 864-865 and read the “Definition of the Union of the Divine and Human Natures in the Person of Christ” as put forth by the Council of Chalcedon, Act V, in 451 AD long before ever even we thought of our generally conventional General Conventions. And if that is not sufficient to put you away, try what follows immediately and is called the “Creed of St Athanasius.” Read it and give thanks that we settled for the creed of Nicaea, and your insomnia will also be cured, at least temporarily.
You see, as Paul quite a few years earlier said, “the old state of things has passed away; there is a new state of things.” But as we a bit later said at Nicaea and at Chalcedon and at Lambeth and at Windsor and most recently at Tanzania… “Not so fast.”
As we ponder these things and wonder how our bishops might respond to these latest demands on us at their meeting this weekend over in Texas, it seems wise to turn to something relatively familiar and to reflect on our Baptismal Covenant once again. We might pray that they do something like that, as well. For it is the only covenant for us, the owner’s manual for the “new creation,” a gentle, but thorough extension of our commandment to love and, as Paul wrote, our commission to be ambassadors of reconciliation. We need no other covenant than that by which to identify ourselves or to be in communion with all.
Some of you have been studying the so-called Communiqué this Lent. You may have seen our new bishop’s response to it. A copy is available just outside. In it, he praises the primates for, among other things, what he considers their prayerful sincerity and their pastoral well-meaning. And he has said of this, “I hope that we can provide the assurances that are now being asked (in the Communiqué) of the House of Bishops.” Then he adds what, I believe is a most unfortunate, if well-meaning and perhaps misunderstood, comment. “I recognize,” he writes, “that these assurances will come at some cost for gay and lesbian members of the Church.”
These “assurances” which the primates ask and which our new bishop would honor are of the stuff of religion and of the way religion is practiced. They place unity before truth and justice and thus would organize them. They place orthodoxy as they understand it before love and inclusion as the gospel understands it. With or without religion good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion. It has very little if anything to do with being “in Christ” and being a “new creation.” For our assurances and the way we are known come in the way we love one another and live in fairness and justice together. They do not come in the way we believe or the doctrine we espouse or the communiqués we assent to and give such assurances to.
Certitude comes in just how willing and enabling is our whole community to help us become more human, more inclusive, more sharing, to become more the way God imagines us to be and the more we embrace this “new creation,” this new way, this new truth, this new life manifest in Jesus.
What is it about that that so many can’t seem to understand? And above all, why must it always seem to come as our bishop has said, “at some cost for gay and lesbian members of the Church”? Why must they always be called on to pick up the tab for our lack of prophetic and pastoral responsibility and servant leadership? Why must they “pay the bill” again and again, over and over again? Why are they always singled out and treated as if they are some latter-day Job with infinite patience and loyalty?
Wherever such compassion and lack of understanding is absent, wherever church is failing to be church, we must stand forth and offer it and embrace our Baptismal Covenant, for that is our mission, that is our servant leadership, that is what it means to be a “new creation.”
March 13, 2007
Research
Coincidence. Only yesterday talking with Canon Quirk about whether Jesus ever laughed, and today, the news reports that scientists are saying there’s nothing funny about laughter. Which is to say, they say, that laughter has nothing to do with humor.
The researchers — and a lot of the philosopher-theorists from Plato to Schopenhauer — tried explaining laughter as a response to humor. But now they believe from trying out jokes on folks that it’s an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit. Put simply, laughter has a lot to do with where one is in the satrap pecking order. Underlings laugh at the boss’s bad jokes (Two muffins baking in an oven, one yells, “Wow, it’s hot in here.” The other replies, “Holy cow! A talking muffin!”). But the bosses rarely ever return the favor. Laughter’s not about getting the joke, it’s about getting along.
The topic stymied philosophers for 2,000 years. But scientists have scanned brains and tickled babies, chimpanzees, and rats. “They’ve traced the evolution of laughter back to what looks like the primal joke,” says the news story, “or, to be precise, the first standup routine to kill with an audience of primates.”
I couldn’t wait to tell Quirk about the study. He was especially interested in what the scientists said about the primates and wondered if the prelates’ recent communiqué might be a sort of ecclesiastical standup routine, albeit, somewhere in the range of the muffin joke. “Maybe we should laugh,” he said, “for surely, they must be kidding.”
As for Jesus, I wondered out loud. Undoubtedly he smirked once in a while turning out those ironic parables like he did and watching the apostles miss the point. Perhaps, Quirk said, they’re still missing it, apostolic succession being what it is and all.
March 12, 2007
Quirk
My old friend and mentor Canon P D Quirk and I were wondering the other day about how some folk can take themselves so seriously that even God has to make an appointment. We’d just read the Communiqué.
Quirk recalled that there was a time in long-ago church history, albeit obscure, when the big kaboozle was over whether or not Jesus ever laughed. The church split its sides over the question. (Quirk lusted after irony even when he had to make it up, himself.)
I was puzzled, so he admonished me that it became a grave enough matter to top the agenda at an oecumenical council. By a majority comfortable for some, the gathering opted for a more humorous Jesus over a more somber one.
As was their nature, the losers failed to get the point. But unfortunately, they didn’t threaten to leave, they threatened to stay. Then they called another council on their own terms, and they welcomed anybody with whatever sense at all, except, of course, a sense of humor.
The more things change, Quirk reminded me, the more they stay the same.
March 10, 2007
Handles
Woe to you who strive with your Maker, an earthen vessel with the potter! Does the clay say to the one who fashions it, “What are you making?” or “Your work has no handles?” (Isa 45.9)
It came my good fortune this very morning to run across this text from Isaiah. I was checking out a website on the counsel of a friend who knows about such things, and there it was, staring me in the face.* It’s like all sorts of stuff and particulars one has heard or seen or read no telling how many times before, and suddenly there it is for the first time.
We gave Isaiah a pretty thorough going over in seminary and never really tired of him then — or now, for that matter. And surely this verse was on the agenda. But it’s the bit about the handles that I must have somehow overlooked. Maybe it’s because I’m not all that comfortable with Isaiah thinking of me or my elegant prose as perhaps an earthen vessel. It’s pretty clear that I’ve noticed in one way or another over the years certain personal shortcomings. I may even have asked God Why. I just never put it quite so poetically as did the old prophet.
“Your work has no handles?” Actually, I should have no fault with thinking of OoN as such an earthen vessel and plain, all in all. Readers sometimes say they can’t quite get a grip on it.
*http://anglicanscotist.blogspot.com/
March 9, 2007
Primatron
The primates are coming! The primates are coming!
But fear not, me hearties! So are the women! More than 80 Anglican women representing 34 countries as delegates to the UN Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW) have just now issued a statement vowing “to remain resolute in our solidarity with one another and in our commitment, above all else, to pursue and fulfill God’s mission in all we say and do.” On top of that, they’ve pledged to be a model of “reconciliation” for the 38 Anglican primates — of all people — and show them just what it’s really like.
Back in my youth when things of no matter what size got out of hand, it usually took only one Texas Ranger to settle the affair. As well, remember when the Poles came to a fork in the road a while back and vowed their own solidarity to follow Yogi’s advice and then took it? That piece of derring-do bent Polish history enough even of all things to get a poet elected prime something-or-other. Can you even imagine what 80 Anglican women claiming solidarity can do to a mere 38 primates?
But then, please don’t forget Bishop Katharine. With eighty other Anglican women plus our own brand new Primatron on our side we’ve not a worry in the world.
March 8, 2007
Figs
Lent 3C (Lk 13.1-9)
I prefer not ever to question whether Jesus knew what he was talking about when he was talking about it. It’s too easy to put words in his mouth. My words in his mouth. They never fit.
Whatever, we’ve got another fig tree on our hands in today’s gospel. I say “another fig tree” because fig trees show up a lot in the Bible. For example, Eve and Adam started us off with one, the fig leaves of their imagination, and you know where that got us.
But the fig stories and most other stories are good examples of the trouble with metaphor, the often slippery slope of metaphor. First, some people want to make metaphor into allegory which it isn’t. They want to take it apart at the seams and make each of the parts stand for this or that. Trouble with that is this — everybody has different this-and-thats, usually whatever they choose, and they change a lot.
Another problem with metaphor is simply to deny it altogether and just take it literally. This is what happens so often with the Bible. “It says what it means and it means what it says.” Trouble there is it too often means whatever I say it means rather than what it means it means which is probably not correct and rarely all that clear.
So I’m not going to fall for the sometimes notion that the fig tree over in Matthew and Mark that failed to produce and got zapped by Jesus is simply an allegory about inadequate churchers and their lot (Mt 21.18-20; Mk 11.12-14). Nor am I making a point that because the fig tree comes off a little better in Luke’s version today, it means that we get another chance (well, maybe I will). What I am content to read at least is that Jesus maybe specially liked figs (as do I), and that fig trees may have had some additional literary value for him (as maybe they should but don’t for me).
So. Now that all that’s perfectly clear and I’ve pretty well put aside parabolic symbolism, I am reminded that parables — like metaphors and as opposed to allegories — are intended to have only one point toward which all their “parts” move. So I shall try that, myself.
This parable of the fig tree perhaps invites us, simply, to consider the gift of another year of life as an act of God’s mercy. Earlier in Luke, John the Baptist declared that the ax lay at the root of the tree, poised to strike (Lk 3:9). Any tree that did not bear fruit would be cut down. In Jesus’ parable, however, the gardener pleads for and is granted one more year. The year that Jesus proclaimed, remember, “the year of the Lord’s favor” (Lk 4:19), would be a year of forgiveness, restoration, and second chances.
What might we do if we had only a year left to live, or, in the light of today’s churchy circumstances, what if the church had only a short time in which to get itself back between the curbs and clean up all the opportunities in God’s commandment and commission currently being missed? I suspect it would be an important time.
Luke’s lesson of the fig tree could be a challenge to live each day as a gift from God. Live each day in such a way that we will have no fear of giving an account for how we have used God’s gift, of whether we even, as they say, give a fig.
If there’s any such thing as a “sin” of the fig tree, it is not that it is doing something bad, but that it is doing nothing but just taking up space in the orchard. What is the church doing in our community — loving and working for justice and tending the poor? — or just taking up space and meditating on its navel? If it suddenly disappeared, would its absence be noticed? The commentary about this story I was looking at suggests a poem that I find especially painful, like, right now:
A man called / Christ / Went about doing good. / It is very disconcerting to me / That I am so easily / Satisfied / With just / Going about.
March 7, 2007
Titles
Canon Ted Weddell was head of the College of Preachers during the Great Middle War (aka WW II) years. The pattern then was a weekly gathering during the academic year for some twenty or so clergy attending by invitation. The curriculum included writing and preaching sermons, study, visiting lecturers, plus room and board.
As wartime required food rationing, meals for that many proved a problem. Weddell had to make a special appeal to the rationing board representing the “College of Preachers.” The members were not especially impressed with whatever this might have to do with the national emergency. Fortunately, a member asked what was his title as head of the College. “Warden,” he answered.
The Ration Board was satisfied. The College went down in history as an “ecclesiastical penitentiary.”
March 6, 2007
Fakery
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on the Comedy Central channel advertises itself as a “Fake News Show.”
There’s a lot to say about fakes who are out front with their fakery and not in somebody’s pocket trying to make it look like reality. Consequently, Stewart’s perceptive parody frequently turns out to be one of the better news sources available. Many in its increasing audiences are said to claim it’s where they get theirs.
Once upon a time, the unhesitatingly inimitable George Carlin was a guest. The subject of Mel Gibson’s movie about passion inevitably came up and prompted Carlin to say that religion crucified Jesus. He also added something like that it is because religion is so often evil that it does such things.
It’s not a conclusion that pleases many. Neither is it a conclusion all that easy to deny. Religion’s penchant to render faith both memorable and manageable inevitably snares it to claim to be an absolute franchise on truth. And that claim turns it inward to its obsession with orthodoxy and self-preservation, blinding it to its vocation to serve a world tortured in agony.
Such claims are, of course, evil in themselves, for they presume to replace God. That some enable and even encourage religion to such ends is about as close to evil as one can get. It all started when the church became more an institution with secular values and structures than an organism approximating the body of Christ. It built up steam when its leaders took off the hair shirts and put on the stuffed shirts, when it ceased being content and honored with its vocation to follow the Way.
No wonder we so often must look to the so-called fake news in search of the Good News.
March 2, 2007
Noses
I wonder how many of us ever realize that the way we treat one another just might be, in effect, also the way we treat God. Even if we don’t believe in God, there’s a mystery out there somewhere enshrouding us and wearing our genes, our purpose, our origin, our destiny. The mystery pretty much just bams along whether we notice or not. Also, that’s irony, in case you missed it in language class and whether you take it in.
So, if you’re an insurgent, and you set off a homemade bomb and blow up yourself and a gang of others, you’re thumbing your nose at the mystery — or God or, if you prefer, Allah. The seventy-two virgins surely will be at least circumspect about such behavior before you start collecting your reward.
If you’re president of the US&A or a member of its congress or its judiciary, and after your fashion you send troops off (equipped or ill-equipped or whatever) on a cock-and-bull chase for the fuzziest of reasons and get thousands of them and other collateral folk killed, you’re all thumbing your nose at the mystery — or Christ, or somebody like that.
Or if you’re obese out of carelessness or smoke cigarettes or eat crummy stuff or both or all, you’re thumbing your nose at the mystery — and also at the rest of us who have to pay your hospital bills with our increased premiums. Ask yourself the question, If you can’t keep track of your own personal hygiene, how do you expect the United Nations to work?
Or if there are millions everyhere, everythere, and everywhere without health insurance or food or clothes or a roof or a leg to stand on, you’re… well, you got it.
And oh yes, don’t forget the environment and our collective gasoline substance abuse and the pervasive inconvenience of truth. And on top of all this for heaven’s sake — the Primates are coming! the Primates are coming!
Ye gods and little fishes!