July 31, 2007

Emeritus

I’ve been rector of only two parishes. One’s now a cathedral, the other’s a funeral home. The rest of the time I was a carefree chaplain of a college or something or other. Oh, the fond memory and glory of it.

But every once in a while, when an OoN correspondent signs off as “rector emeritus” of somewhere, I realize I’ve never been the emeritus of anything. Even the piano player on our band is an emeritus professor of theology from a reputable divine school. But not I, just the cornet player, hardly a qualification for emeritus, unless maybe Bix.

Then there are clergy — bishops and even priests — who get a building or a classroom or a hall or a columbarium or something named after them, even while they’re still alive. I know one guy who left more or less under a cloud, but who they named something after, anyhow, maybe just to remind themselves how glad they were he was gone.

And then there are the medics — and even baseball players — who get diseases or injuries named for them. That doesn’t seem like much of an honor to me, especially some of the shadier maladies, and certainly one I could easily dispense with. I was talking to one of our nurse-trainers at rehab the other day and asked how they’d like to have a disease named after them. They didn’t seem much to like the idea, either.

The question continued to annoy me, though, especially when I realized it was actually piquing my vanity. It was too late and I too long in the tooth ever to get a building or even a storeroom or a trash compacter with my name on it and, of course, I’m not eligible for any diseases, and my injuries are too common place. So what?

Then it dawned on me, being a parson and all, I could maybe have a sin named after me. Not one of the deadlies that are already spoken for, but just maybe like a white lie, there could also be a white sin sort of like a junior grade venial. Heaven knows that in my case there’d be lots of possibilities, both public and private, but I have no plans of listing them here.

July 30, 2007

Diversion

We have at least one homeless-by-choice guy in our parish and a few who aren’t. He’s a regular at the Sunday Eucharist. He’s a devotee of Julia Child. He and CP discuss recipes. He lives under bridges in the mild seasons, when not so mild, at the hostelry nearby another parish where he makes his winter home.

The other Sunday, I noticed he was reading a paperback during the Interim’s sermon. Afterwards, I asked what he was reading. “Mary, Queen of Scots,” he said. Still another Sunday, it was “Elizabeth I.” I commended him on such appropriate reading considering the church’s confusion about all this in our time. Then I asked him what he planned to read the next time I preach. Staging a wicked grin around his bewhiskered face and sparkling eyes, he said, “Covenant.”

[Covenant (aka The Covenant Journal, not Anglican) is an occasional paper that I publish and edit and that often goes wanting, resting and out of date as it is there in the parish kiosk.] God never ceases in her imaginative choice of apostles to bear her gentle, but noticeably skewering and firm messages to us smart mouths.

July 26, 2007

Forgive

Pentecost 9/12C Lk 11.1-13

Once upon a time, I was at a cocktail party. Heaven only knows what I was doing there. Along with whatever else I had in my hand, there was this small paper napkin. As small paper cocktail napkins seem to go, this one bore a message. It said, “To err is human. To forgive is out of the question.”

In Luke’s accounting of things this morning, the disciples finally ask Jesus to teach them to pray. I say “finally,” because the question seems long overdue. So he answers sort of with, “I thought you would never ask” and with what we now call the Lord’s Prayer, the one that shows up nearly every time Christians and all sorts and conditions of others, as well, get together to pray.

There is a lot to say about the Lord’s Prayer, but since I’m more or less stuck with my cocktail napkin story, it’s the phrase in the Lord’s Prayer about forgiving that I’d like to talk about. By the time it got to us, it became “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Some others use “debts” and “debtors,” I suppose because “trespassing” is hardly common parlance except maybe largely to show up on fences and yard signs.

“To err is human, to forgive is out of the question.”

Like most good humor, that saying is of a truth. Forgiving a wrong — even one of our own — may be one of the most difficult choices we human beings ever face, and that, for some of us, we never face. Not the least of the reasons for this reluctance, I suspect, is not only the pain of bringing it up and wrestling with it, but that the meaning of forgiving and forgiveness is pretty confusing stuff.

So at the outset, maybe it’s best to get rid of the notion that to forgive means also to forget. Neither does forgiving mean that wrongs have no consequences or any need for punishment or that these things can be altogether dismissed.

To forgive — and the meaning is always close to reconcile — means at least that a relationship be kept open. Even hostile communication is better than none. And it applies to all levels and kinds of relationships. In all the continuing rhetoric about 9/11 and as we go through all the rituals and ceremonies recalling this terrible wrong that has been committed against us and against all humankind, we rarely if ever hear anything about forgiveness. May we never lose sight that as hard as it might be, 9/11 is also something we must inevitably come to forgive. Otherwise, so much for the Lord’s Prayer and so much for this notion of our being a Christian nation.

It’s up to us, of course, and to God’s grace whether we ever forgive anything, personal or public, individual or international. Yet, it is still ours to give it our best shot, not only for our own spiritual well being, but for that of our nation, and ultimately for that of the entire world. We must remember. We must never forget. But we must, as well, forgive. Sure, it’s a burden, but we are not somehow exempt, for it’s also a blessing. The reason is quite simple.

Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian who wrote tediously and unbearably long volumes, was asked to sum up his theology in one sentence. He answered, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” The reason we must forgive is that simple. Because Jesus said so. It is a reason every parent sooner or later uses when their authority is questioned. So indeed, we must forgive — and especially forgive our enemies — because God’s son says so.

It was that way with Jesus. It is also the prime jewel in the gospel covenant we made in our baptism. The Lord’s Prayer plants forgiving in every liturgy we celebrate. But the reason is also simple because it’s right. It is ultimately the sanest way for people to live together in harmony, whatever our religion or lack of it, wherever we hang or don’t hang the Ten Commandments, on the court house square or over the kitchen sink.

So we’re not talking about individuals in a family or a congregation where love and forgiveness might be readily accessible, where the steps outlined in the gospel just might be followed. We’re talking about a whole country. But just as countries or nations make clumsy at loving their neighbors, just so are they altogether maladroit at forgiving. But there is a way.
We are a nation already proven vulnerable precisely because our commitment to liberty and justice has been used as a terrifying and devastating weapon against us. But the irony is that it is these very principles, themselves, at national and international levels, that are the stuff of forgiveness and reconciliation. Loving never has cured vulnerability, and it never will. It only makes it more so.

We must ask, then, How does a nation enter into reconciliation? What are the instruments of justice and liberty? How are they manifest? By vengeance? By isolation and withdrawal? By denial and arrogance? By breaking promises? By dissimulation? It should be obvious from our own personal experience that these not only prolong, but as well intensify hostility and resentment and postpone any possible resolution into a peaceful community, whatever the size — two or two billion.

There is a clue in our Declaration of Independence where our founders made a startling offer. It had as much to do with our nature and with what we wanted to become as a nation as almost any other of those great documents that signaled our founding. In the prologue to the Declaration, we expressed that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that (we) should declare the causes which impel (us) to the separation (from Great Britain).

And then we said, as we outlined our grievances, “let (these) facts be submitted to a candid world.” And then, near the end, we appealed to the “Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions…”

For this nation to enter into a mode of forgiving and a desire for reconciliation, we must first keep our own founding commitments clearly in mind and what is more, practice them among ourselves. One of the most important steps we can take in that direction is not to let our fear and its ensuing anxiety and anger and resentment, no matter how justified, distort our system of government, hamper our capacities to use it fully and honorably, and blind our vision to be and to become who and what we are.

This American political experiment is currently on precarious times. Not only is it in jeopardy from without, but, as well, in peril from within by an all too casual, passive, and permissive manipulation of its impressively balanced systems of justice.

So let us take this heritage and this commitment once again to ourselves,. Let us evermore renew our Baptismal Covenant and the forgiveness at its heart. Let us reach out in all the ways we can find appropriate for us and our system. Let us choose and call on our leaders to enlighten the minds and stir the consciences of all. We’ve spent untold billions on war over the ages, and millions have died, so often in vain. Might those billions have better been spent on preventing poverty and genocide and on adequate health care and clean air?

Justice is always compromised precisely as forgiveness and reconciliation diminishes. War never has winners, only losers. The message on the cocktail napkin was uncomfortably close to accurate, but for us, it must say: To err is human, but to forgive must never be out of the question.

God’s criteria are always love and justice and peace for all, including our enemies. And if all else fails, remember the words of St Paul about heaping coals of fire on our enemies by loving them. If that illustration proves too quaint, then try it as translated through no less than Oscar Wilde, who said, “Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.”

July 25, 2007

Santiago

Tradition has it that James, whose feast is kept today, was the first of the twelve to be martyred.

The New Testament letter attributed to him, considering its plethora of hortatory imperatives, mostly takes the form of a preachment, maybe one reason for his early demise. In fact, it’s a style that for some continues to pay the rent, epecially if the eminently successful and carefully coifed TV evangelists mean anything at all.

With Peter and John, James was apparently on an inside track with Jesus, being chosen to witness both the Transfiguration and the agony in Gethsemane. Of course, that he slept through most of the best parts of both doesn’t commend him all that well.

He and Paul took conflicting spins on faith. For Paul, faith is the believer’s loyalty to the Christ, a way of life. For James, it’s mere assent to theological statements, pointless without works and hardly a work in itself. Such perspectives remain very much alive today in all the self-styled wrangle separating the sheep from the goats.

Martin Luther disdained James’s reflections and preferred a Bible without him, casting his work off as an “epistle of straw.” On the other hand, maybe he’d have consented to its being kept in the canon if he had only realized that if James had been a bit more hip, what he really meant by “faith without works is dead” was “don’t let the grace grow under your feet” (Jas 2.17).

July 24, 2007

Lightness

Along with this often dotty absurdity currently pervading the Anglican Communion, we need a lot more humor and a lot less comedy.

Comedy is not humor. The difference is between the one that evaporates as soon as it hits the fan and the other that endures. It’s the difference between the simply ludicrous and the ironic. Both have their place, but the one is merely ephemeral and passing, the other, lasting.

Humor reveals then commands. Comedy diverts. That is, of course, part of its refreshing joy. On the other hand, humor reminds us that everybody sooner or later and maybe more often than not is exhausted, wicked, afraid, frustrated, and desperately alone. That’s humor’s perspective and restorative power, its healing energy over life’s menaces. As such, humor, like the parables of Jesus, identifies and redeems.

Humor always wishes us well, and there is much to say for that. At times, it may condemn us and make us livid, often embarrass us, but always instruct us. Humor informs us, not only with selected data, but by shaping us and preparing us to receive it. Humor connects us with ourselves, our neighbor, with the roots of life, and indeed, with God and the awesome mystery of beginnings and endings, purpose and destiny, love and fear.

In all this present malaise and distracting obsession with ourselves, how lovely it could be were we somehow able instead to embrace in good humor the gospel’s gift of the unbearable lightness of being… and then, as is our true service, offer it to a world also sorely in need.
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July 23, 2007

Capacity

As if it were somehow news, we are told that the president has recently been incapacitated, and, of course, that we’re not to worry.

We’ve got this law does our nation that when the president is incapacitated for one reason or another and even if only briefly, the official executively privileged presidential wizardry must be handed over to the vice-president for whatever time is necessary and until presidential capacity returns to the president himself. This law has apparently been used very sparingly over the years. It is probably a good and thoughtful law.

Anyhow, it seems to presume at least three things. One is that there is already present a capacity such that one can tell when it is noticeably or actually jeopardized. Two, this would require, it might seem, someone other than the incapacitated person who can verifiably make such a discernment. The incapacitation in and of itself might by definition make such a time indiscernible by the incapacitated person. A third thing is to presume that the vice-president, perhaps especially the incumbent, once so encapacitated, can reasonably be convinced willingly to become himself decapacitated when this time comes. There’s probably some way to avoid this third possibility, but what if there’s not?

For example, in this exchange of capacities, even if assumed to be only temporary, the vice-president has now become, among other things, the Commander-in-Chief. In this capacity, one might anticipate some reluctance by the vice-president to relinquish such a capacity of chiefness in particular and instead to desire to use it indefinitely and inclusively of other capacities. In order to accomplish this, the new, albeit presumed temporary, C-in-C could call up anything that’s left of the National Guard somehow to prevent any designated capacity-returners from turning the vice-president back into himself.

Such complications obviously seem not only beyond my capacities to resolve, but, I often find, altogether typical of me to create. From time to time and on occasion my Twelve-Step sponsors have often been wont to remind me that this characteristic of mine can lead to dire consequences. But frankly I think that they, themselves, by virtue of their capacity for being sponsors frequently show a capacity for exaggerating if not even overcomplicating things. I could not really depend on any of them to determine whether I might, myself, be incapacited. Right?

July 21, 2007

More dust

In yesterday’s OoN (Dust 20vii07), I recalled how Jesus charged his disciples to go out two by two on the sawdust trail with, among other things, “no money in their belts.” The recollection was prompted by the recent news about the RC Archdiocese of Los Angeles paying off megabucks in abuse cases which propelled in turn a sardonically rhetorical question something like — Where did they get all that money in their belts?

I was comforted by an informed, history-astute reader who wrote, the “cash… ultimately came from hedge fund profits arranged by Constantine, Inc., who did a reverse takeover for the Christian Church in 312 AD using Empire Bonds in purple notes for international Roman reinvestment funds. Some property in LA may need to be sold to pay off local debts.”

Further, “the Holy Orthodox church has had no financial liability for RCC debts since 1054 AD when CEO Constantinople ceased to come under the jurisdiction of CEO Rome.”

Gee, how I love those times when I find out people actually read this stuff, especially well-informed people. Further, the reader’s comment reminds me how I wish, for example, I had a research staff like Garrison Keillor and his “Writer’s Almanac” obviously does. Just think how much richer could be OoN’s copy — and perhaps even my money belt.

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Non-seq: The Covenant Journal for June 2007, a occasional paper of some repute, is a commentary on the church and is now on-line at http://covpubs.org/. It includes the article “The Anglican Covenant Process and the theological ethics of committed same-sex partnerships: Raising concerns and questions,” by Bishop David Russell and available only in the on-line version. Bishop Russell, of the Diocese of Grahamstown, Anglican Church of Southern Africa, is now retired.

July 20, 2007

Dust

Jesus sent out the original twelve two by two with a commission to show folk a better Way and to show daemons the door.

He charged them “to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics.” He said that if anybody wouldn’t join them in walking their talk, then “to shake off the dust that is on your feet for a testimony against them” (Mk 6.7-9,11b).

A couple of thousand years later of what some think of more or less as apostolic success, some of that dust has come home to settle out in Los Angeles. The RC church has had to fork over 660 million bucks from its archdiocesan belts to 500 folk who’ve claimed sexual abuse by clergy. The Cardinal apologized “to anyone who has been offended, to anyone who has been abused.” To any of you 500 who haven’t been, I suppose, take the money anyway and run. We’ll even give you one of our spare tunics to remember us by.

It’s been a long walk since that’s worn out lots of sandals, and those originally empty belts have somehow got mighty full. Holy Image of Caesar! Where’d all that cash come from?

Money surely brings comfort to the church’s surviving victims, but the report on all this claims that the full truth and accountability has yet to be satisfied. It’s like a phony sacrament, the outward and visible signs minus the inward and spiritual realities. Three years after that historic meeting of the RC bishops out in Dallas resolving to set their house in order, the spirit of openness, humility, and reconciliation has failed to take root. But of course, as any of us churchers know, they’re not alone.

July 19, 2007

Woman’s Work

Pentecost 8/11C
Gen 18.1-14; Lk 10.38-42

A friend of mine who is a priest was having a “What-do-you-want-to-do-when-you-grow-up?” conversation with her young son. She asked him whether he’d like to be a musician and song writer like his dad. “No,” he said. Then she asked whether he might want to be a priest like his mother. “No,” he said, indignantly, “that’s woman’s work.”

Coincidentally and by the way, the propers this Sunday are about “woman’s work,” but they may be too subtle to penetrate some biases very widely. Of course. It’s always been that way. We’re only now coming to our senses about it. It’s been only a few decades that we’ve finally had the gumption and good judgment to ordain women in this sorely maligned province of the Anglican Communion.

On the face of it, they could be just about visiting — desert nomads visit Sarah and Abraham, Jesus visits Mary and Martha. But they’re also full of other themes — caprice and laughter, hospitality and surprise, the work ethic and play, even dark humor about whether Medicare might cover nursery expenses. On the other hand, there are still religious traditions that drag these texts out over and over to make their usual anachronistic and insecure pitch for the “place” of women.

But these are no casual nomadic passersby who drop in on Sarah and Abraham. They’re not making a survey or taking a census. They already know who lives there and why. They’ve not hesitated to make the kind of plans for them that tie them down for the rest of their lives.

Furthermore, Jesus, with that terrible and ominous sense of urgency constantly hovering over him, would hardly be whiling away time at high tea over at Mary’s and Martha’s without a purpose. Just as Sarah held such a critical and essential place in anything Abraham might be doing for the Lord and could never do without her, so can we assume that Mary and Martha must must have held an equally critical and essential place in Jesus’ plans for his kingdom.

So let us take these stories a step further for a moment and consider them as being not about Abraham and not even about Jesus, but primarily about women — about Sarah, about Martha, and about Mary, and about all those others, unsung for whatever conscious or unconscious reason. These women were not simply “walk-ons” in the drama of salvation. They have names, purpose, capabilities, needs, children to birth and grief to bear, unique ministries to perform, houses to visit, water to share, wounds to heal, a male social hierarchy to tolerate and endure, and, of course, on occasion, bless the Lord, to manipulate and even laugh about. Lady Bird Johnson’s death and all the anecdotes surfacing about her being the power behind Lyndon come to mind.

These are not stories only about vocational values and leadership or the relative importance of running a home, and least of all are they about the priorities of what we rather presumptuously call “holy orders.” It took no canon law and no discernment process and no commissions on ministry and no General Conventions to design and confirm the validity of the vocational insights of these women.

Jesus and Abraham’s desert visitors were building order into God’s strategic itinerary, raising up a faithful genealogy of caregivers, shepherds, bearers of the word. Of course, there’s much more here than simply gender issues, but these are stories of a radical breaking open of the established, taken-for-granted scheme of things. Each of the principals in these stories had something that the children of Abraham and ultimately the Jesus movement needed.

Of course, within a century or so after Jesus’s times, the church in its increasingly pompous and male-dominated establishment of itself had pretty well sold out to the old secular gender hierarchies. It had successfully removed women from leadership, and swiftly put them where they “belonged.” Even twenty centuries later, the seventh bishop of Tennessee still could publicly refer to the imminent and inevitable ordination of women as “apostolic suicide.”

Incarnating the good news, it seems, does not mean standing still within the comfortable embrace of the inherited tradition, whatever some of our leaders might claim. Rather does it mean prayerfully and thoughtfully informed amazement at God’s making all things new, even things that have held back church and state and culture and, indeed, the family, things that have hitherto had an impressively, if regrettably large following for entirely too long.

Many will remember Katherine Graham of The Washington Post. (Yes, another Katharine!) She was a churchwoman and one of the most powerful figures in American journalism. A comment about her in her obituary seems altogether appropriate as we think about Sarah and Mary and Martha and all those who’ve stood and now stand in their succession.

A colleague wrote, “Throughout the last half of the twentieth century, (Katherine) used her intelligence, her courage, and her wit to transform the landscape of American journalism.”

And so it has been and is that our women in orders through their intelligence, their courage, and their wit are transforming the landscape of the Episcopal Church in the USA.

My friend’s young son, when he quipped that the priesthood was not for him because it is “woman’s work,” more than likely did not know how close he was to a truism that was and surely has had its day. In a very few years, I trust, I am confident he will find out.

July 18, 2007

Momentary

In one of our southern states, there’s a law that requires in all the public schools a moment of silence at the start of each day.

The law says that a moment should be no more than sixty seconds, and that the silence is “not intended to be, and shall not be conducted as, a religious service or exercise.” Simple, but not so simple.

The meaning of silence seemed easier to define than to keep. But not so with moment. Some resented defining a moment at all, thought it should remain its usual pleasant and ambiguous self, like “just a moment” when on the phone you get put on hold and treated to another endless concert of elevator music, or like when the dentist starts in on you and says, “this’ll only take a moment.”

Moment (from momentum) was originally about motion, not time at all. Later, it came to mean a “movement of time.” It has varied all the way from “twinkling of an eye” to an “historical moment” to “he has his moments.”

Mathematicians define a moment as “the mean of the nth powers of the deviations of the observed values in a set of statistical data from a fixed value” or, if you prefer, “the expected value of a power of the deviation of a random variable from a fixed value.”

Their definitions are usually easily followed by a moment of silence.