May 18, 2007
Reminder
Once while I was in seminary and much more of a biblical theologian than I’ve ever been since or ever will be again, my bank notified me that my personal loan had come due. Their reminder stated simply that “grace has expired, and the law has taken effect.”
With an inspired Gotcha! I wrote them that they had their theology all confused, that with grace and law, the Bible says it is the other way around. They promptly wrote back and agreed, but then reminded me that their Bible told them not that the law had expired but that grace had fulfilled it. Then they went on to exegete that what James really meant when he wrote in his letter that “faith without works is dead,” was that one should not let the grace grow under one’s feet.
May 17, 2007
Git!
Ascension (Lk 24.49-53; Mk 16.9-15,19-20)
When the people in the world of the Bible experienced what they called principalities and powers, they were discerning the actual spirituality at the center of the political, economic, religious, and cultural institutions of their time.
Few today ever consider spirituality that way or as anything other than a vacuous synonym for religion and as a more or less irrelevant matter left to its practitioners. A further phenomenon is to presume that if it’s spiritual, it must therefore be good, thus to overlook the daemons that lurk not only in our societies, but also in ourselves, for they, too, are “spiritual.” That we allow all this to happen is to our ultimate peril.
But we allow it anyway, even encourage it in our public education systems with their disdain for the libraries and the humanities and the arts and the world’s religions. That we do so has perhaps never been more obvious and recklessly careless than it is today. No child left behind? I wonder how many, O Lord, how many.
All this leaves an empty space in the way we live, a space into which rush the daemons of denial and grandiosity, pleasure and distraction, and whatever else is at hand, thus rendering impotent the possibility of any creative stewardship of our lives.
Something of that order is happening now in places like the middle east. Iraq and the whole miasma of that area is emploding, and we seem helpless to know what, if anything, to do about it, save regime-change by violence, all the while in denial of the changes needed in our own regime. This, I suspect, is a result of our misunderstanding, just plain ignorance, and, even worse, indifference of how these spiritual energies, these principalities and powers work in societies, certainly in our own, let alone in others.
The Ascension gospel reminds us how the misery of sudden emptiness and withdrawal challenges the hapless and frightened disciples. Jesus had filled that space in their lives. His energy fed their energy, his charisma gave them enthusiasm, his manifest power gave them courage,his teaching gave them direction, and his confidence gave them hope.
Once Jesus left, the little circle seemed vacant, tattered, needing to be repopulated and reenergized. What had seemed so vibrant with Jesus present now seemed cold and lifeless with Jesus absent then. Doubt and fear rushed in to fill their hearts.
The gospel’s inherent irony is perhaps nowhere more poignant than in this scene. They’d already heard that something new and exciting had happened, but they chose not to believe it. Then, Mary Magdalene of all people and whom they knew only too well comes and tells them the good news of Jesus’ new life. Of course, neither did they believe her, even though they probably knew she’d been freshly purged of seven heavens-knows-what kind of daemons.
But the Magdalene was not your average soccer mom, for she becomes of all things the apostle to the apostles-to-become, and with little tribute to the rest of us males who claim to stand in their succession and who miss the point ever so clearly as did they.
In our liturgical keeping of time, we stand in between Ascension Day last Thursday when we remember Jesus’ return to his father and the Pentecost next Sunday when we commemorate the Holy Spirit’s ecclesiastical labor pains. Perhaps this, as well, can remind us of our empty spaces and call us to attend to how they will be filled.
Will we, as do so many, surrender to the usual crippled understanding of spirituality as merely another organized and irrelevant religion with which we can easily dispense? Or will we welcome this Pentecost, embracing God’s Holy Spirit to renew us again as church, letting that presence fill the space in our lives, feed our energy, spur our enthusiasm, encourage and direct us, give us confidence and hope?
As we observe the eleven disciples in the Ascension story, we know that the “space” that the earth-trodding Jesus filled is now theirs — the work, the ministry, the caring, the healing, the teaching, the conflicts, the suffering, the sacrificing, the storytelling, the recruiting, the dying and more. They could no longer follow Jesus as before. For they themselves had to embrace and ingest Holy Spirit as their own to fill the space he once occupied. And it is to our eternal benefit that they chose to do precisely that, thanks to God’s gift to them of the Magdalene’s wake-up call and that of others like her.
It was like moving to a new home, into space that is all promise and no warmth. It is like starting a companionship with someone who is largely a stranger, or starting a new job and knowing that all the sudden your resumé means nothing.
We can stand here in our religious puffery or we can take Holy Spirit by the horns and heart. Then go out into the marketplace, into the crowd, into the swirl of pilgrims seeking God. The Spirit did not fashion for the disciples a nest, where they would feel safe and comfortable. The Spirit set them on fire and drove them into the wilderness of the streets of the world.
Dan Corrigan was one of our church’s more devoted and exciting bishops. In the old 1928 prayer book days, there was no “dismissal” at the end of the Eucharist. So he would stand at the altar, pronounce the closing Blessing in all solemnity, then pause for a moment… then, then in his great, booming voice, he would literally shout at us:
“Get up! Get out! And get lost!”
May 16, 2007
Tact
Now we’ve got a “War Czar,” a rank idea in more ways than one that crams enough imperialism and violence into two words to last for a lifetime of international suspicion and skittishness. Even a handful of our retired generals had enough moxie to turn down the job until one for some unknown reason has come along now and assumed the mantle.
So far as I know, even the Russians — who put the “z” in czar and the czars in limbo — had enough PR sense years ago to quit calling anybody by that name. Vladimir Putin’s maybe the only current candidate, but he seems content just to be president and doesn’t even have to rattle a commander-in-chief sabre, unless, of course, somebody comes along needing reminding.
But not so with us over here on our side of the world. Our leaders, even with all their self-styled piety and geopolitical maladroitness, consistently show an amazing lack of savvy about history of any kind, especially religious, and about theodicy of all kinds. Recall that “crusade” Iraq was in for and what charming memories the word stirred up for the Muslims? And then there is the “Axis of Evil,” that bewitching bit of diplomacy which still reveals the inexcusable lack of theological erudition that thought it up.
Now, with the Brits changing the guard, and the French on a new fence, we’ll not have left anybody to invite over to help cut brush at Crawford.
May 16, 2007
Tact
Now we’ve got a “War Czar,” a rank idea in more ways than one that crams enough imperialism and violence into two words to last for a lifetime of international suspicion and skittishness. Even a handful of our retired generals had enough moxie to turn down the job until one for some unknown reason has come along now and assumed the mantle.
So far as I know, even the Russians — who put the “z” in czar and the czars in limbo — had enough PR sense years ago to quit calling anybody by that name. Vladimir Putin’s maybe the only current candidate, but he seems content just to be president and doesn’t even have to rattle a commander-in-chief sabre, unless, of course, somebody comes along needing reminding.
But not so with us over here on our side of the world. Our leaders, even with all their self-styled piety and geopolitical maladroitness, consistently show an amazing lack of savvy about history of any kind, especially religious, and about theodicy of all kinds. Recall that “crusade” Iraq was in for and what charming memories the word stirred up for the Muslims? And then there is the “Axis of Evil,” that bewitching bit of diplomacy which still reveals the inexcusable lack of theological erudition that thought it up.
Now, with the Brits changing the guard, and the French on a new fence, we’ll not have left anybody to invite over to help cut brush at Crawford.
May 15, 2007
Reconciliation
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) Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity which “writes the tune to which the universe dances,” and 3) Werner Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics, about as impractical a practical 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.
Three-in-one? Beauty? Elegance? Mystery? Now there’s a novel approach if ever there was one.
May 14, 2007
NYTimes
The following block advertisement appeared on the NYTimes op-ed page on 5/12/07:
The Episcopal Church
Marking a Milestone, Moving Forward
Somewhere near you, there’s a blue-and-white sign bearing the familiar slogan: The Episcopal Church Welcomes You .. It represents some 7,400 congregations that trace their beginnings in North America to a small but hopeful group of English Christians who arrived May 14, 1607 at a place they called Jamestown - the first permanent English settlement in the New World.
You may know us as Washington’s monumental National Cathedral, site of historic services and ceremonies, or the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, still unfinished, but already the largest cathedral in the world.
But the Episcopal Church is also Boston’s Old North Church, founded in 1723 and made famous by serving as the beacon for Paul Revere’s revolution-spurring “midnight ride.” And Philadelphia’s Christ Church, home parish of 15 signers of the Declaration of Independence, host to the first General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 1785.
It’s Trinity Parish on Wall Street in New York, formed in 1698, and St. Paul’s Chapel just down the street, frequented by George Washington and the spiritual healing center of Ground Zero since September 11, 2001.
It’s also Epiphany Church in Los Angeles, where Cesar Chavez rallied the United Farm workers. And Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Cumberland, Maryland, whose basement was a major stop on the Underground Railroad to freedom for enslaved African-Americans. And St. John’s Church in Greenwich Village, a meeting place for gay and lesbian action following the 1969 Stonewall uprising.
It’s a parish in Iowa. A campus ministry in Georgia. A mission in Dinetah - the Navajo Reservation. A cathedral in Utah. Even a house church in Vermont.
Wherever you find us, you’ll find the Book of Common Prayer and a Christian faith that honors and engages the Bible, the tradition of the Church, and God-given human reason.
Joined in prayer, you’ll find people with many points of view - Christians who are progressive, moderate, and conservative - yet who value the diversity of their faith community.
That’s a heritage drawn from our deep roots in nearly 2,000 years of English Christianity, and shared by a worldwide Anglican Communion that unites nearly 80 million people in 164 countries through prayer and ministries committed to caring for “the least of these,” as Jesus commanded, by reducing poverty, disease, and oppression.
Episcopalians struggle with the same issues that trouble all people of faith: how to interpret an ancient faith for today … how to maintain the integrity of tradition while reaching out to a hurting world … how to disagree and yet love and respect one another.
Occasionally those struggles make the news. People find they can no longer walk with us on their journey, and may be called to a different spiritual home. Some later make their way back, and find they are welcomed with open arms.
Despite the headlines, the Episcopal Church keeps moving forward in mission - in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, as well as congregations in Belgium, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Guam, Haiti, Honduras, Italy, Micronesia, Puerto Rico, Switzerland, Taiwan, Venezuela, and the Virgin Islands. We’re committed to a transformed world, as Jesus taught: a world of justice, peace, wholeness, and holy living.
We’ve grown a lot in 400 years, since that 1607 worship service from the Book of Common Prayer was held in Jamestown-inside and out. Come see for yourself. Come and visit. .. come and explore … come and grow.
May 14, 2007
Covenant
Big 18-wheeler trucks with the name “Covenant” in two-foot high letters along each side of their trailers run up and down the interstate highways around here. They’re hauling heaven knows what.
That a trucking company would use that name intrigues me. Everybody knows that in our recent primatial encouragement to do the new Anglican two-step that the notion of “covenant” is de rigueur. But there’s a more personal reason. For some years now together with some colleagues I’ve been editing and publishing an occasional paper called The Covenant Journal. So I googled the truckers to find what they were up to only to discover to my dismay from a web site called the “Trucker’s Report” the advice that “Covenant Transport has a very bad reputation among most drivers (sic for the bold face) and it is suggested not to work for them and especially not to be trained by them.” The report continues that their practices endanger the highways by using inexperienced student drivers.
We understand in our Anglican way of making sense of the experience of God that a covenant is “a relationship initiated by God, to which a body of people responds in faith” (BCP p 846). That definition has all along been a sort of mantra on our paper’s masthead which goes on to affirm that we are an alternative and independent journal of opinion unofficially published within the Episcopal Church and grounded editorially in the Baptismal Covenant (BCP pp 304f).
Scripture, of course, is also thought of as the Old and New Covenant. In other words, the idea and principle of “covenant” has been around a long time for Christians and many others, for that matter. It’s just sort of a Cowboy Way we connect with God and with one another.
TCJ is an occasional paper written to help keep that in mind and also to encourage leadership and collegiality among all four orders of ministry - lay persons, deacons, presbyters, and bishops - by promoting charitable, yet timely and vigorous discourse through articles and letters about church agenda and life, about church councils and moral choice, and about the way the church makes and implements decisions. We like, as well, to think of it as a safe place, a place where truth can be told, a place where we can trust one another, a place with a sense of humor.
We believe that for an editorial policy/premise one could hardly find a better and more Gospel-consistent mission strategy in both theological content and evangelical field-strategy than the Baptismal Covenant. So, from that perspective and maybe to put it another way, the Journal is a commentary on the church and how we do things and leave things undone and so often take ourselves so seriously that our work gets the hindmost. For the moment, as you might imagine, TCJ focuses more or less on the Grand Coup d’Eglise taking place here and elsewhere across the Anglican Communion.
(One of our national church leaders who should know better has said that we are the best kept secret in the Episcopal Church, something of a samizdat, a Russian word for “underground press.”)
In our forthcoming June issue (TCJ25), we plan to feature two articles on that other come-lately covenant that’s got so many in a stir these days. One will be in favor, the other opposed. There will also be a short response by the two authors to the other’s premise. We don’t know what they’ll say, but we welcome their opinions. As for me, our Baptismal Covenant together with the New and the Old ones, a few years of tradition, and what reason I’ve got left are just about all the connection I can handle.
PS> Should you wish to keep track of what we’re up to, you can find us and the OoN archive at
May 11, 2007
Hell
Clinton Simon Quin (one “n,” please) was bishop of Texas late 1920s-mid 1950s. He would sometimes introduce himself, “I’m Mike Quin. I work to beat hell.”
It’s a noble vocation for us churchers. One way to help might be to sharpen the definition. Hell and evil may be presumed to have a lot in common. Evil’s a term being used these days with more or less reckless abandon. As an opener and so we can have some notions we can disagree with, Scott Peck gave a few diagnostic characteristics of evil a shot in his book, “The People of the Lie.” Here’s what he wrote on page 129.
“In addition to the abrogation of responsibility that characterizes all personality disorders, evil would specifically be distinguished by a) consistent destructive, scapegoating behavior, which may often be quite subtle, b) excessive, albeit usually covert, intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury, c) pronounced concern with a public image and a self-image of respectability, contributing to a stability of life-style but also to pretentiousness and denial of hateful feelings or vengeful motives, and d) intellectual deviousness, with an increased likelihood of a mild schizophrenic-like disturbance of thinking at times of stress.”
That’s what we’re out to beat. Now that that’s perfectly clear, let’s start at home.
May 10, 2007
Yard sales
Easter 6C (Jn 14.23-29)
It is not all that easy to know God’s will. Some folk have less trouble discerning it than others and even seem altogether blasé about their gift. I’m not one of them.
And it’s too bad. I suppose it’s only natural to expect the clergy to know God’s will. We bring it on ourselves. It’s tempting for us not to have some handy answer when asked or even when not asked. So, in wrestling off and on with this problem about knowing God’s will, it suddenly dawned on me something that is clearly God’s will.
God’s will is to have yard sales.
For one thing, it is God’s will to have yard sales if only to remind us of how bountiful is God’s creation and how important is our stewardship of it. For another, to remind us once more of how much more blessed it is to give than to receive. But most of all are yard sales God’s will for our children and our neighbors.
Our children might show more gratitude — or any gratitude at all, for that matter — if they realized what a blessing for them is a downright inclusive, widespread, whole-section-of-the-city yard sale. If they’d only think of the attics and closets and garages and sheds and old trunks and mildew and moths and mold (and respiratory systems) that are emptied and cleared and cleansed by yard sales, maybe they’d catch on. Never mind the nostalgia and the tears and the withdrawal pains, just simply forge ahead. Besides all that, it sets good examples for us members of the Greatest Generation to behave this way.
Life as I know it and hear about it from others in these days, with my memory still more or less intact, seems to be a process of accumulation. Not only the accumulation of things, even though most things eventually wear out, and those that remain tend to have value only in the stories they suggest. Not only an accumulation of wealth, as nice as I suspect that that is, because wealth is slippery and, even when clutched, seems scant comfort in the night. Maybe it is good that we accumulate friends, but because some of us live so long, and also thanks to mobility, changes in our lives, and the just plain wearing out of persons, friends become fewer and farther between.
But we do accumulate. What we accumulate seems to be memories. Events, stories, faces, happy memories, sad memories, moments that make us grimace after all these years, and some moments that make us smile.
We become more and more — not necessarily more accomplished, or more secure, or more content, just more. We know the words to more songs. We remember more lines from movies. We have seen more dream cars, watched more double plays, held more hands, kissed more babies, cooked more macaroni, shed more tears, lost more dreams, paid more bills, endured more insults, enjoyed more kindnesses, said more prayers.
One of those prayers is for the gift of the Holy Spirit. Some perceive that gift as a prize to be won, perhaps even a sign of accomplishment. Some look for powers, like tongues or prophecy. Some seek the Spirit as proof of worthiness. Some long for energy, enthusiasm, passion. Some want to lose themselves in the great spiritual whoosh of it all and make life into one big mantra.
Jesus talked of remembering. He said the Spirit would come to teach us, specifically to help us remember all that he said and did. What he said suggests to me that life would be to us like layers of paint that turn the portrait from some splashes of color to the shapes of persons or places or things.
Jesus told lots of stories, and he said that life would also be like stories, that life is a story and a pretty good one if we’ll listen. Like the story of a wasteful son and a forgiving father, like the kindness of a Good Shepherd that would find us in our dark nights of the soul, like the story of the Samaritan woman at the well who became the first commissioned apostle. Stories that we would hear and later tell over and over. Stories that would enrich us and perhaps nourish others.
All this accumulation is not all intellectual or susceptible to memory; nor is it all experiential or even noticed. The story of Jesus and the stories he tells just keep shaping us like the tender and understanding love of a spouse. We become more. Not necessarily more happy or more holy. Just more of who God knows us to be and wants us to become.
Not all that the Spirit would teach us is easy or pleasant. Knowing Jesus tends to make people ask more questions, dare more doubts, see more injustice, touch more wounds, risk more choices. Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would be a Counselor who would teach us all things that he has said to us and bring them to our remembrance as they need to be remembered.
And then Jesus said he would leave us peace, his peace, a peace torn out of living, a peace that would leave our hearts neither troubled nor afraid. A peace that is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice.
He spoke of his leaving. We call that leaving his Ascension. We remember that leaving again this Thursday, forty days after Easter like Ash Wednesday was forty days before. And then comes again that explosion we call Pentecost when our apostolic founders seemed smashed with the joy of it all. That day when the Holy Spirit embraced them and inspired them and set them afire just like the Holy Spirit can embrace us and inspire us and turn up our heat.
It is all this and more that we accumulate as we mature in Christ. And it is all this that we must give away to make room for more. And it is all this that is the reason why it is God’s will that we have yard sales.
May 9, 2007
More Julian
In yesterday’s keeping of time as we churchers are wont in our way, we remembered Dame Julian of Norwich, that singular 14th-century lady who assured us that “All will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.” Many find comfort in those words, even jazz musicians especially whenever we end a tune together at the same time, well or no.
My “research” had found Julian prefacing those comforting words by saying, as I reported, “Sin is necessary.” A real Julian scholar who also happens to be an OoN reader gently called my hand and pointed to “Sin is inevitable” as rather the proper translation. I find that so comforting and refreshing that I’m sharing it herewith.
I’ve also been reminded of late that our own House of Bishops has charged its Theology Committee to prepare for us guidelines for dealing with the draft Covenant and, as well, the recent Communiqué from our Primates who like to think of themselves as appointed to tell lesser bishops how the cow ate the cabbage. These two documents have created quite a stir among those of us who suspect them as a kind of poor Christian’s Vatican Two-step, a new way of our being Anglicans. Dame Julian shows up in the midst of all this if for no other reason than that she’s a frequently sought after paradigm of precisely that.
Terry Holmes in his short monograph, “What is Anglicanism?” writes of Julian as a prime example of what might be called the “Anglican consciousness,” that is, a mode of making sense of the experience of God, which, of course, is what one’s religion is mostly about. It is also, I suppose, as good a definition as any of thinking about God, including atheism which by definition has to think about God whether it wants to or not.
In my own meager and limited way and lest the House of Bishops get all sidetracked on this attempt, I’d like to suggest they take a hard look at Holmes’s book and Dame Julian’s model. It will not only refresh their insight to the construction of reality by which they came to their own Orders, but perhaps also recall them to the old oxymoron of “ordered freedom” we Anglicans have not just enjoyed, but downright relished all these centuries of late. When they get this under their mitres, they can take a copy of Bishop Bennett Sims’s “Servanthood: Leadership for the Third Millennium” back home with them to savor for summer reading.