April 12, 2007

Indeed

Easter 2C Jn 20.19-31

Many of us probably remember Thomas more for his doubt than for his faith. We forget his courage and his enterprise. That we overlook this probably gives him a lot more grief than he deserves.

While the rest of the disciples were cowering up in the loft for fear of the Romans and probably full of resentment that they’d bet their lives and what fortunes they may have had on a loser, Thomas was out pounding the pavement, risking arrest, renewing old contacts, checking the want-ads, and looking for work.

He didn’t believe the talk about Jesus. He wanted better evidence than the cringing behavior of his old pals. But when he got it, he signed on for good or ill, accepted his commission as an apostle, wrote a gospel, and, some say, started a new church over in India.

Obviously, Jesus believed his commitment, and actually, Thomas could hardly have done otherwise. Whatever, John’s gospel stresses that Jesus specially blessed those who had not seen and yet believed, ultimately, those for whom John wrote in the first place, that we, you and I, “believing, may have life in his name” (Jn 20.31b).

We don’t have the hard evidence Thomas got. John knew that, but maybe he knew something else, as well. Faith is not only always surrounded by doubt and without evidence, but that it also creates both.

Faith is risk, and risk, by definition, contains doubt. But faith that comes only after evidence is no faith at all. It is merely trust one way or another. Faith is that daring commitment that walks life’s planks and then leaps. That’s all the evidence we get.

But faith creates evidence. Your faith is evidence for me. My faith is evidence for you. Our faith as a community is what makes church church and is the prime kind of evangelism. The groveling disciples in the upper room would probably never have convinced Thomas until he personally experienced the vision of the risen Lord. So it is that were fear our only motivation, we’d probably never convince any who pass by.

For not until we show the world by the faith by which we risk our love for one another can our witness ever become the winsome and compelling evangel of the Lord, himself. That’s church — that’s where the Lord is risen. That’s where the Lord is risen indeed. In deeds of your faith and your love and mine, indeed.

April 11, 2007

Alarm

I arrived at five twenty and parked in the back lot of our college work chapel. I was scheduled to supply for the six pyem Maundy Thursday Eucharist and Pedilavium. I waited a while. Nobody came. I noticed two back doors. The first one was locked. The second one opened and triggered the burglar alarm from Hell.

I got back in my car and called 911 on my cell phone because I couldn’t remember the other number we’re supposed to call when things are emergent, but not so dire. A woman answered and asked for my address and I told her and then tried to explain that this wasn’t a life-threatening occasion (except maybe mine) or anything like that, and that I couldn’t remember the other number. She gave me the other number. I called it.

I got put on wait-your-turn queue. Thankfully there wasn’t any Kenny G off-pitch-soprano-saxophone elevator music on the hold. The siren continued, only louder. Then it started getting really serious and wah-wah-wah-ing like on the police cars in the movies about Paris.

A live person answered, I explained my predicament. I said I was the priest there for the service. She said if you’re the priest why don’t you call the alarm company. I said I’m not in the building, and I don’t know who that is, anyway. I explained that I was not the alarm priest, that I was a visiting fireman there for the Maundy Thursday foot washing. She said, then, why don’t you call the fire department or a pedicurist.

Then somebody drove up. It was the senior warden. I told the emergency person that the warden had come and that she needn’t. She said, I thought you were at a church, not a prison. When Jesus said do this for the remembrance of me, I did, and I’ll not forget it.

April 10, 2007

Attention

Reinhold Niebuhr’s so-called Serenity Prayer is not a prayer about serenity so much as it is a prayer about change. It’s a prayer about change with peace and courage and wisdom wrapped around it. It’s a prayer and a prayer about the things we churchers need the most in these times.

We need most it seems to know about change. God help us, after all, the gospel which commissions us to be its stewards is mostly about change. Jesus tried his best to show us with the story about the widow’s mite that it’s even about small change.

A lot of change is coming down these days, and we’re having an embarrassingly wretched time with it. We can’t figure out whether it’s change for change’s sake or change for our sake, for our salvation, for our being made whole, for God’s way of completing what she started. It’s pretty clear which one a lot of us would prefer.

Living with this is unnerving, not just for the orthodoxers with the kevlar vests, but for the folk on the cutting edge with their necks all stuck out, as well. It takes courage, Uncle Reinhold told us, and not only courage, but enough horse sense to know the difference between the kind of courage Hemingway called “grace under pressure” and the plain old bullheaded stupidity which sometimes looks often the same.

On this new change coming our way, our hearts and our heads are clearly out of synch and having to play catch-up with the vocation we once thought we were pretty certain about. And one of the biggest changes going on in this now is in the leadership of the church (and of the nation, too, but we may be even slower finding out).

The women are taking over. Thank God. They did when Mary birthed Jesus and again when the Magdalen shattered the Upper Room Crowd with her announcement the other day. But it’s taken us two thousand years to get with it (if, indeed we have) and to stop robbing the both of them of their womanhood and starting to pay attention.

The women are regaining their balance and their creative energy as never before, and we don’t like it any better than we liked Isaiah and Jeremiah and John Baptist. Anybody who stands in the wake of these worthies — and a lot of those who do so seem coincidentally to be women — are not much going to be invited home for dinner more than once. Bishop Katharine has come along, thank God, and caught us on the verge of an exciting and demanding new time for all and for church women in particular together with whom God just might, repeat might, save her church. Maybe it’s a damn shame. But it’s the same way God had to get Jesus born without the help of any of us stand-around, screw-up males helping out, thank you.

We can write all the Windsors and communiqués and pastorals we want and write all our learned exegeses of them we can think up, my hearties, but we’re only putting off the inevitable and probably getting God all out of sorts. Isaiah warned us about that when he said for us to seek the Lord while the Lord may be found (Is 55.6).

What is there about all this that we don’t understand?

April 10, 2007

Attention

April 9, 2007

Once

Yesterday’s Easter Day ended the calendar time, at least, of a remembering of what was one helluva week for Jesus. John Evangelist says of him at that last supper with his friends that he was “troubled in spirit.” One should think so. Says that he knew that one of them was to betray him. Says that he knew who it was to be. Says that he told him to get on with it. And the plot is set in motion. Jesus is the plot.

There’s a constancy about this week we call holy. It’s built around the deliberate and intuitive will of Jesus. What would Jesus do? some ask in their decision-making. What would Jesus be? is the better question. How could Jesus be what and who he was midst the storm and chaos? How can we?

Jesus was surely running on empty when it came to the energies one needs to cope with the anxiety alone, not to mention that certain uncertainty that had been building in him all along from those first forty days consorting with Itself in the wilderness all the way to Gethsemane’s wrenching and final choice.

A couple of millennia later, we rather take Easter Day as the end of it, the settlement of it, the final — and successful — resolution of the whole theological melange. Low Sunday symbolizes something like that with its kind of Wholly Whew. In anticipation, our preacher yesterday, when welcoming the usual larger-than-usual congregation, reminded us that we do this every Sunday here. He was greeted with what might be called a mild murmur.

Easter Day may be the end of all the Lenten and Holy Week hoopla, but it’s only the annually renewed beginning for us of what Jesus was all about. Maybe it was his Last Week last week, but it is ever again our first. Another shot at it. Maybe we might find some semblance of holy continuity or again merely gird ourselves with diversions that allow the so-called lifestyles of others once again to impede the style of life to which we are called. After all, Easter came only once for Jesus, and that was plenty. How many times does it take for us churchers to get it right?

April 6, 2007

Wholly Weak Five

Good Friday

It was a Good Friday in a big-city church over in southeast Texas. I had settled into a pew for the three-hour liturgy to worship and to hear a visiting fireman preacher who was supposed to be pretty good. In those days, the grand hurrah and bone of contention was Communism and the plague it was in the nation and in the churches.

At the beginning of the parson’s first meditation on the seven last words, he said, “I am not going to talk about anything controversial.” There was a palpable sigh of relief throughout the congregation. The he added, “I am just going to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Now, I thought, there’s some real security for you. I never did find out about it, however. I didn’t even protest. Well, maybe silently. I just chickened out and left during the first hymn while everybody was standing up and my departure wasn’t so obvious.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu spoke to a packed audience at Vanderbilt University a few years ago on a Wednesday night during Holy Week. Instantly, as he walked on stage and before saying a word, a spontaneous and vigorous standing ovation burst forth, seemingly almost without end. His hour-long address was punctuated often with such praise.

His daughter lives here in Nashville and at the time was a member of a congregation where I was serving as interim. It came my good fortune to be invited by her to celebrate Eucharist with Bishop Tutu and his family the next morning (Maundy Thursday) at their hotel. The few of us gathered in the ante-room of their suite. The “Archbishop of the World” sat at coffee table in tee shirt, shorts, and knee-length black sox and presided over the Church of South Africa liturgy with a bun from the restaurant and a cup of wine.

Afterwards, I asked him how he felt about his Vanderbilt engagement. He said he was surprised and quite moved by his reception, that he had not expected such warmth and approval in the south. Then, he asked me why I thought he got such response.

I was stunned to have my opinion sought by such a man, but I could hear myself say, “Because you and all you say and stand for are symbols of hope and of justice and of truth. Because you together with others have shown that peaceful revolution in the midst of controversy is possible not only in South Africa but everywhere else, even here in this tortured country of ours.” He smiled, nodded his head, and touched my arm with gentle firmness.

It seems that in most controversies, whether it is about some ideology or about race or about sex there is at its center a ringing of changes on hope and peace, on justice and truth.

When we read about Pilate’s Good Friday question to Jesus, “What is truth?” might we realize once again that Jesus’s silent presence was the answer, an answer that can only be understood by faith. Thomas, the disciple, asked the same question of Jesus, when he asked, “Show us the way.” Then it was that Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

The question What is truth? is as old as the ages, and there’s no sign that it has lost any of its vitality. Philosophers, theologians, now, even quantum physicists strive to codify it. Some even claim to succeed. It is for us a Good Friday, and Easter question.

Any thoughtful person asks that question sooner or later. Why am I here? What does life and my life in particular mean? What is the truth of it? Jesus struggled in the wilderness and came to Gethsemane, that garden in the shadow of his cross, looking for meaning and asking the same questions. What he found is essential in our trying to understand how there can possibly be anything “good” about Good Friday. Paul put it like this in his letter to the Philippians:

“Have this mind among yourselves which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant… obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2.5-11).

In his search, Jesus seemed always to embody the tension between religion and faith. That tension may be nowhere more evident than in the events that we commemorate during this week now passing. For in his commitment, Jesus emptied himself of all pretense in order to become a servant. Thus committed, he made Good Friday an in-your-face confrontation with both religion and the state. It was his “Yes” to God and to the cross that turned the world around.

A colleague was asked where she sees that same Christ today. Noticeably, she did not mention the church as necessarily his location. Rather, she said, “I look for someone who has told me the truth so clearly (that) I want to kill him.”

April 5, 2007

Wholly Weak Four

When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles stand between us. It means that if we ever meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.

For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I’m feeling most ghostlike, it’s your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I’m feeling sad, it’s my consolation. When I’m feeling glad, it’s part of why I feel that way.

If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget me, part of who I am will be gone.

“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” the good thief said from his cross (Lk 23.42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.

When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” I wonder if maybe some of these same thoughts and feelings were going on with him.

(Thanks to Frederick Buechner in “Whistling in the Dark,” Harper & Row, 1988, p 100, for all but the last one-sentence paragraph.)

April 4, 2007

Wholly Weak Three

It’s not easy to find any humor in the morass of our ecclesiastical times, but maybe for some, that only challenges the search.

Of all the several shades of humor — wit, satire, sarcasm, cynicism, and more — irony seems the closest fit, the most subtle, and to appear most often. The parables, for example, and their pungent irony bring considerable relief, even in the judgment they bear upon us. There’s a certain “if only” about them, though, almost any of them. It’s an “if only” we would listen with our contemporary ears to hear their perennial word along with our obsession to emasculate them with allegory.

But the kind of churchy humor that I sense and that seems to surface most in these days is one I rarely hear mentioned by name. It’s called the sardonic. It’s that disdainful, skeptical, sometimes derisive perspective one is almost embarrassed to use when talking about something sometimes so patently holy as to render itself vacuous.

H W Fowler in his remarkable “Dictionary of Modern English Usage” classifies the sardonic as being called for in times of adversity and having a motive of self-relief. Its method or means is pessimism, and its audience is simply oneself. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t seem to be all that public. I think of it when I remember Jesus and that last week of his when he set for us the model of taking his mission so much more seriously than he took himself. The sardonic raises questions for me like, “Where is the (real) Monty Python Flying Circus when we need it most?”

April 3, 2007

Wholly Weak Two

It’s Tuesday, so it must be Jerusalem. According to Mark, it’s the “busiest” day in Jesus’s Last Week. We call it holy as if somehow, the other fifty-one are not. I wonder if Jesus ever thought like that.

But it is of the way we have come to have with words. “Holy Orders” and “reverend” for us parsons as if somehow we are more-so than the others, as if baptism is not holy enough to cover all the bases (and the baseness) — then, now, and when. It is one of the ways we turn church into Let’s Pretend… Chalice in Wonderland.

Pretense is a neat protection, a clever way to avoid confrontation. Like its colleagues denial and grandiosity, it draws attention to what’s not there. It has just now been claimed that the “surge” is working so well in Baghdad that it’s safe to take a stroll in the park. So the strollers who made that claim wear kevlar vests and take their outing in the company of a hundred or so troops with snipers on the rooftops and armed helicopters overhead. Pretense. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t go in the first place. I prefer to pretend where it’s safer.

It is an embarrassment the way we churchers sometimes use pretense to renege on the Good News. Not so with Jesus and his unclaimed, even repudiated and emptied right to holiness. When I think on it and even pray about it, all my phoniness surfaces. But like somebody said Karl Barth said when asked to sum up his massive tomes in a phrase, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” You, too, fellow pretender.

April 2, 2007

Wholly Weak One

Has it ever occurred to anybody that our birthright as Episcopalians is being stolen right out from under us more or less by what the CIA might call moles? An ecclesiastical oligarchy of primates and some of their underlings are eating our lunch along with our dreams, our heritage, our collegiality, and our pitiful attempts to squeeze justice out of canon law.

So listen up. It’s Holy Week. Like Jesus, we ought to be sick and tired of trying. Either we figure out how to keep that leverage out of our polity, or we lose it altogether.

Fortunately our House of Bishops may have found a way and may have shown the good sense that they need the rest of us and can’t and shouldn’t even try to do it alone. It wasn’t a provenance I would ever have expected, but at least enough of them to make it stick have finally taken on a “manner of life” — with apologies to General Convention’s infamous resolution B033 — which obviously challenges “the wider church” and has already led to “further strains on communion.” O blessed strains.

The Primes obviously don’t like the way we do business any more than the business we do with it and apparently care even less for their tromping all over our ways. On the other hand, we all in this “Communion” do have something in common that might please even them.

We call it the Lambeth Quadrilateral. It’s a four-legged stool that one-ups Richard Hooker’s three by referencing an extra that’s called “the Historic Episcopate.” This leg is so important that unlike the others (Scripture, sacraments, and creeds) allows, according to the Quad, for being “locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the Unity of His Church.” Whatever that means, it suggests at least the possibility of unity out of adaptability, a novel idea that’s maybe escaped a few of our keepers. Let’s hold it in mind.

I’ve been rather fond of our apostolic success over the years of my tactual enjoyment of it, but never quite realized its implications until lately. If episcopacy ranks right up there for us with all the major hitters and if episcopacy is obviously the only one flexible enough to be “adapted in its methods… ” etc, then perhaps the churches which get their juice from it and surround it here and there might receive as much respect for how all their other ways and truths and lives are so adapted. In the interest of unity, of course.