June 14, 2007

Little

Pentecost 3/6C

“One who is forgiven little, loves little” (Lk 7.47b).

Once when asked by the press what mistakes he had made, the president could think of none. Try then as he may — and the apparent anguish in his inner search seemed authentic — nothing at all showed up.

From what Jesus told Simon at the dinner party, I suppose it follows — no mistakes, no need for forgiveness, not just “forgiven little,” but actually not at all. As well, that also suggests something about how much one loves. “One who is forgiven little, loves little.” Next question?

Jesus is not unknown for quaint sayings, but this one equating forgiving and loving seems quainter than usual. Could it mean that if a person needs no forgiving, they’re exempt from the Great Commandment to love God and neighbor and whatever comes along? Or could it mean that a person is so much an overbearing slob as to be beyond forgiveness, so forget it with the loving? Or might it mean that a person simply won’t accept forgiveness either because he thinks he doesn’t need any or because he believes — or at least feels — he’s beyond God’s capacity to meet the challenge and his own capacity to love even himself?

It’s this capacity of God thing, this God-could-never-forgive-me-for-what-I’ve-done thing, that I run into most often in others and, I regret to say, in myself.

And it seems it is this about us humans that is the point of Jesus’s parable. For there is little difference between being so good I don’t need forgiveness and being so bad as to remove any possibility of forgiveness from the agenda. Both establish something about moral worth, the one, by looking down on those morally inferior (cf Simon), the other, by looking up to those whose moral superiority I can never achieve. Pridefully, both exclude God.

But perhaps the greater stumbling block in all this is how such selfishness renders us impotent to love. Precisely as one is self-centered, so is one incapable of loving. We who are forgiven little, love little, not because God short-shrifts us, but because as we are too proud to accept forgiveness, we are also equally too proud to love.

A friend once asked me how things were going in my life. “Better than I deserve,” I answered. “My,” she replied, “you must have a very low opinion of yourself.” I was startled at her insight. It was the last time I ever answered the question that way. Further, her words continue to help me abolish the thought, as well.

Pride masquerading as humility is probably the worst kind. Paul put it to the Corinthians this way, there’ll not be another time, he’s saying, or a better time or a more appropriate time than now to put grace to work, so get a life.

The gospel is surely about sin. But the gospel is also about the grace and forgiveness of God. We risk losing sight of forgiveness — and about the presence and grace of God — in our temptation to dwell on the distance and judgment of God.

Forgiveness means to “let go,” or even to “send away.” We can think of it as a matter of self-protection, of refusing to let someone else’s real or imagined sin have power over our life or, as they say in AA, refusing to let someone or some thing live “rent free” in our mind.

It also means to set that person or thing free from me and my persecution or my wringing it dry with self-pity, especially if that person happens to be me. Forgiveness means I will not allow neither your sin nor mine to be an obstacle to my loving you. Forgiveness means, as well, I will not allow my sin to be an obstacle to my loving me.

“Accept the grace of God, but do not accept it in vain,” said Paul. For the one who is forgiven much, will love perhaps even more.

June 13, 2007

Dancing

Common sense and a sense of humor, said William James, are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

Might common prayer and a sense of humility be the same thing, moving at different speeds… a sense of humility, just common prayer, dancing?

Nothing so well defines Anglicans as the Book of Common Prayer. Through the cycles and the crises of life, it tells the world who we are and what we believe about ourselves and about God. If we listen carefully, it can center us and protect us from letting too much distance show between our sense of humility and our sense of humor. Perhaps then may we experience something like an incredible lightness of being.

Common prayer dancing, indeed.

June 11, 2007

Anecdotage

The personnel department of a head office sent out a letter to all branches requesting a listing of their staff “broken down by age and sex.” One local office replied: “Attached is a list of our staff. We currently have no one broken down by age or sex. However, we have a few alcoholics.”

Alcoholics Anonymous was seventy-two years old yesterday, June 10. It got started in Akron, OH, by a stock broker and a proctologist who found out that the best way to keep from drinking was to spend time with other people who wanted to keep from drinking and to talk about it. Through the both of them together with an Episcopal parson, they developed the Twelve Steps and the main traditions of AA — anonymity, confession, and mutual support.

AA is said by some to be the only truly indigenous American religion. It is said by others not to be a religion at all, indeed, to be anything but. If the question ever comes up, and it does sometimes, the notion of what is a religion is about as ambiguous — and tendentious — at an AA meeting as it is in society as a whole. It’s no wonder. The difference is that AA pretty much knows about ambiguity a lot better than does society as a whole. The difference is that AA is about as unorganized an organization, sometimes even disorganized, as you could ever imagine. And that’s surely one reason why, whatever it is, it works.

A while back, I spent a few years as chaplain for a big long-white-coat medical center addiction treatment program with more than its share of psychiatrists nosing about. They were mostly psychopharmacologists, whatever that is, doing “research.” Their residents rotated reluctantly through our service and avoided the group twelve-step meetings like the plague.

Their researchers were working on perfecting a pill you could take so you could drink all you want. Nobody ever seemed to ask why drinking all you want was so important as to deserve a federal grant. Lewis Thomas, the physician-philosoper, wrote that the only thing worse than calling a scientist’s work anecdotal was to call it trivial. The shrinks in our program openly called the Twelve-Step Program anecdotal. Sometimes, we had to use it on the sly, anonymously.

My name’s Lane, and I’m an alcoholic. AA was seventy-two years old yesterday. I’ll be twenty-eight tomorrow. I got a late start. I’m catching up one day at a time, anecdotally, of course.

June 8, 2007

Humo(u)r

I suppose that if I had to choose another book as enduring as the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer it would probably be H W Fowler’s “Dictionary of Modern English Usage” (Oxford). Although actually, I don’t use it all that much, only a part of it, the entry about humor on pp 240f.

Fowler puts humour (he prefers the “u” and says why elsewhere), wit, satire, sarcasm, invective, irony, cynicism, and the sardonic all together in the same place. Then he says, “So much has been written on the nature of some of these words… that it would be both presumptuous & unnecessary to attempt a further disquisition.” So he presents them all in what he calls a “tabular” form with the eight words down one side and four more or less categories across about their their motive or aim, their province, their method or means, and their audience. It’s a useful way, but frankly, as long as I’ve referred to it, I’m never all that clear about it.

Irony is the one of Fowler’s entries that most often shows up in my attempts to understand the foolishness of our times, that is, to find some meaning in events. Fowler suggests that the motive of irony is “exclusiveness,” its province (by which word I suppose he means its proper or appropriate function or scope) is simply “statement of facts,” its method or means is “mystification,” and its audience is “an inner circle.”

Irony is my favorite of the lot. For whenever I am confronted by the way our leaders attempt to incarnate and implement our uniquely fine constitutional form of government (if, indeed, they ever do), irony always comes to mind. Lately, for example, a top government official has got himself convicted for lying as if that were an inappropriate thing to do. It makes me wonder where on earth could he ever have got such an idea.

June 7, 2007

Miracles

Pent 2/5C (1 Kgs 17.17-24; Lk 7.11-17)

Madeleine L’Engle says that if Jesus was as completely human as we believe him to be and if he could walk on water, then we should be able to walk on water, too. The fact that we largely cannot is only that we have forgot how. (”Walking on Water” [Shaw])

When we read these lessons for this Sunday about Elijah, the prophet, and about Jesus raising folk from the dead, I find it comforting to remember L’Engle’s counsel. For that’s probably the way it is with most miracles. There’s abundant testimony in scripture about God’s anointed pulling off miracles here and miracles there. There’s not so much testimony since then, of course, leaving mostly questions for anyone who tries to follow suit.

If Jesus was fully human and could interrupt the celebration of that New Orleans-type wake by bringing that fellow back to life, then we should be able to, as well. Only we must have forgot how which might also mean that we’re not yet fully human. So next time you say when you mess up, “I’m only human,” be careful you don’t remind God to send you back for refurbishing.

So what about miracles?

I don’t have many answers, especially at my pay grade. But I know some places to look. More and more as we keep on learning about outer space and inner space, it’s possible to find a rational explanation in terms of natural cause and effect. Even if I can’t paint a Rembrandt, I know that it’s only canvas and paint. Or if I can’t compose a Bach fugue, I know it’s only a bunch notes all in the right places. And I can remember Jesus admonishing folk not to believe because of his miracles, but instead to embrace for themselves the miracle of faith.

Put another way, it seems to me that faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than are miracles from faith in God. When folk trying to work Twelve-Step Programs have trouble with abstinence, the common advice they’re given is to “act as if.” I suppose this counsel works as well for whatever malady may have crossed one’s path.

One of my favorite theologians, Frederick Buechner, writes about miracles in his little book, “Wishful Thinking” (Harper). For those who prefer not to believe in miracles, he offers a number of helpful approaches:

1) The idea of miracles is an offence both to reason and to human dignity. Thus, a priori, miracles don’t happen.

2) Unless there is objective medical evidence to substantiate the claim that a miraculous healing has happened, you can assume it hasn’t.

3) If you can’t explain something with present scientific knowledge, then present scientific knowledge is simply deficient.

4) If an otherwise intelligent and honest human being is convinced, despite all arguments to the contrary, that it is God who has healed her, you can assume that her sickness, like its cure, was purely psychological. Whatever that means.

5) The crutches piled high at Lourdes and elsewhere are a monument to human humbug and credulity.

Maybe we’ve not thought about it but even God may want some support. You remember the fellow who prayed over and over to win the lottery and never won a dime? When he finally got altogether exasperated with God and said so, a James Earl Jones voice boomed, “Why don’t you try buying a ticket?”

Buechner offers some more ideas rather like this… You can always give prayer a try. Maybe God can use you. If you feel like a fool as you are doing this, don’t let it throw you. You are a fool of course, only not a damned fool, for a change.

If God doesn’t seem to be giving you what you ask, maybe God’s giving you something else. If you’re worried about whether you have to believe in miracles to be a Christian, or if you cross your fingers behind your back when reciting the Nicene Creed, read over again the Baptismal Covenant. Put all that to work in your life, and miracles will abound. Like the guy out at the Men’s Wearhouse who sells suits on the television obnoxiously assures us over and over, “I’ll guarantee it.”

June 6, 2007

Justice

On this day in 1944, the invasion of Europe took place during World War II as Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, France. The movie “Saving Private Ryan” probably casts that event as graphically as can be, short of actually being there. It was another clash of empires.

Dom Crossan writes in his new book “God & Empire” (Harper) that violence is inherent in the concept of empire and that it has always been. Both empire and the kingdom of God seek justice, he argues. It is easy to be blind to the difference. For empire, justice is retributive and achieved unilaterally, vindication and punishment is its goal. For the kingdom of God, justice is distributive and achieved multilaterally, grace seeking reconciliation is its goal. Empire dominates. The kingdom of God serves.

There have been sixty-three more years of history since D-Day in Europe. There have also been Korea and Viet Nam, Cuban missiles and 9/11. There is Afghanistan and Iraq. All the while, violence and “justice” in between. There are those who seem to take some comfort in the belief that ours is a “Christian nation.” There are those whose behavior is mindful of the Victorian father who disciplined his son out behind the barn, saying, “I’ll beat the love of God into you if it takes all night.” There are also those who say, “I have a vision.”

The subtitle of Crossan’s book is “Jesus against Rome, Then and Now.”

June 5, 2007

Wrong

Canon Quirk has often cautioned that it’s not always right to be right, that sometimes it’s wrong. Looking at it another way, he adds, it may be right to be wrong if for no other reason than the freedom of speech more often than not trumps the risk of remaining silent.

I wonder why I need constantly to be reminded of this. For whether or not Quirk is right or wrong seems irrelevant, especially in so far as theology goes. And theology is more or less what I’ve been up to for a while, my formative seminary faculty quite to the contrary.

Fretting about being right or wrong is really of little matter, because all theology is autobiographical, anyhow, and salvation is by grace, not orthodoxy. Not withstanding, however brilliant one’s opinion may be, however on target, however consistent even with God’s own self-knowledge (which is to say, I suppose, God’s autobiography and therefore God’s theology) it is yet unavoidably filtered through me and my experience and my convictions and, of course, my need to be right about it. And you, too, of course. Taking the both of us into account — and heaven knows how many others — that’s probably what’s usually so wrong.

The mishap in all this still is how woebegone I often feel about being wrong and even just to risk being wrong. Or what seems a lot worse is the annoyance of having to put up with those who always have to be right. There are those disciplines and their disciples whose faith always has not only to be right, but to be the only one, the only way to Whatever. They so often seem to be in fear of something like excommunication if there’s still such a thing.

We could think about it this way. There is something of this kind of risk in a jazz band when it’s one’s turn to improvise (a kind of autobiography in itself) on a theme and its relative systemat of chord changes, its “theology,” as it were. Although one usually finds more mutual acceptance in jazz than in most religions I know anything about. If one’s improvisation is only playing comfortably alongside and around the melody, some may think the audience and even the whole band is the loser, for any one of them can do that. But not so. Such extroversion may seem like a self-contradiction, an oxymoron, for brazen as we often are, even jazz players can be introverts, and come to think on it, like a lot of churchers, many of them probably are.

If all this doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, it probably doesn’t. Which goes to suggest that reason needs a shot of nonsense ever so often if faith is to prevail.

June 1, 2007

Riddles

Trinity Sunday

“It takes a mighty big stigma to beat a dogma.”

Dorothy Sayers said it. She was British. She was also a theologian, a mystery novelist, a poet, and a Dante scholar. So it’s safe to say that she knew what she was talking about, whether I do or not.

She could have been talking about Trinity Sunday, the only time in the entire liturgical keeping of time that a dogma assumes front stage center and elbows all those majestic events like Christmas and Easter and Pentecost to the wings.

Preaching on Trinity Sunday makes me feel like the heart attack victim that called for a priest who, on arriving, moved the gathering crowd aside, knelt beside her, and asked, “Do you believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?” With great effort, the stricken woman addressed those surrounding her, “Here I lay dying, and the Father is asking me riddles.”

Dogma, that’s doctrine with legs, seems always to be faith’s more or less futile attempt to make sense out of nonsense. Whereas faith, not unlike love (and they’re not all that different), is about as exposed a position as a person can take and with very little reason to support it. It’s like getting caught with your hand in life’s cookie jar. It makes you feel like you need some kind of excuse. Dogma, on the other hand, gets you out of hock and with an alibi.

I suppose it is not without purpose, then, that on this Sunday dedicated to a major piece of Christianity’s hard drive, there is appointed in the propers that grand and eloquent story from Genesis that wraps a security blanket around the whole idea (Gen 1.1-2.3). It reminds us that we are put here to mind God’s creation and as Frederick Buechner once wrote, to give the universe something to talk with, to give God someone to talk to, and to give us somebody to talk about.

And further, Genesis says that whatever we do about it, even to the making of enigmatic riddles, God thinks that it is good and makes us unconditionally in God’s image. Which is to say that we and all the rest of us are gently and lovingly shaped and brought forth with cause out of the unfathomable depths of God’s ingeniously fecund imagination.

And not as mere clones. But as beloved sharecroppers in whatever may be our capacity in all this exercise in fertility. And that, beloved, is very scary stuff. So scary, and yet, so enticing, that right off, we blew it out of the garden and have needed the safety belts and air bags of doctrine and dogma ever since.

Doctrine, dogma, whatever, serves us well. We want everybody to buckle up. But never, we are reminded — and warned — at the expense of our imaginations and our worship. Such insight is perhaps no more obvious than in the turn of phrase at the heart of the collect for Trinity Sunday, as we pray, “Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity… ” (BCP p 228).

We acknowledge doctrine. We worship God. For it is thus as we use our own imaginations that we are most godlike, most as God creates us to be, incarnating our spirit into human being and leading us forth not to rest our laurels on fancy words no matter how orthodox, but, as all our Twelve-Step cousins are rightly wont to say… to walk the talk.