July 17, 2007
Language
John Evangelist, the writer, said that the Word became flesh, full of grace and truth. Toni Morrison, another writer, said that it is language that makes us human.
The DNA people take their intriguing double helices plus only four letters of the alphabet and make up a language of their own. It’s these “words,” they say, that when parsed a certain way for each of us not only become our flesh, but make us human, as well. Further, and probably much to the disappointed amazement of some, they now claim there’s not even such a thing as race, just different “carnations.”
I sure hope they leave sex alone, or else, along with some other withdrawal pains, there won’t be anything left for us to make a fuss over. We churchers would simply have to get on with the business of grace and truth and maybe some justice on the side. Then we could leave sex to the fig leaves of our imaginations.
July 16, 2007
Choice
If I were an executor, I’d also need lots of executive privilege to go with it. Or even I were only a decider. It’s not an easy life, choosing.
But it’s the one God handed down, not just to me, but according to my belief, to all of us human beans . Those who know about such things, like people who write catechisms so they can ask their own questions and give their own answers say that to be human is to be created in the image of God. They say that means to be free to choose, and they don’t make any bones about it.
They say it means we’re free to choose a lot of major stuff — to love and to reason and to create and to live in harmony with all of God’s creation and even with God. Or, of course, free not to, and there’s the rub. If that’s not a tall order to execute, I’ve never heard of one. God’s image is one helluva an image to live up to, and it certainly bears no resemblance to the one staring back at me every morning from around the edge of the shaving cream.
I think it was Woody Allen said 90% of life is just showing up. If that’s so, then there ought to be another 10% out there somewhere that’s maybe the privilege part. Sounds a lot does 90/10 like the ratio I’ve come to get used to over the years. Maybe those up in Washington all the while claiming executive privilege at the same time claiming to be Christians might read that same Catechism I’m stuck with. Maybe they’d realize that life starts a lot with executive responsibility, try that, and then wait and see what happens about the rest.
July 14, 2007
Times
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” So goes the lead in Charles Dickens’s “Tale of Two Cities,” which, if I remember correctly, has something to do with the French Revolution.
For leads, it sure beats “It was a dark and stormy night… ” as well as most of the ones I strive for in getting a daily OoN off the launching pad. Further, it seems like a rather useful one for the keeping today of Bastille Day.
I realize that the former Secretary of Defense might have relegated such a holiday to Old Europe, especially if it’s French. On the other hand, I trust we not take too lightly the importance of revolutions as social cathartic, whether Gallic or American. Lest we forget, they’re always an option and seem inevitable whenever a nation gets its priorities so distorted that the poor and the oppressed simply can’t — and won’t — take it any longer.
Happy Bastille Day citoyens.
July 13, 2007
Congratulations
As he was checking out for the day, a workman pushed a wheelbarrow full of sawdust up to his company’s security gate. The guard took special care to poke around through the sawdust, then cleared the man to pass. Day after day, the two went through this same routine. One day, the guard said that he had been transferred, that his curiosity about what was being smuggled out was driving him bananas, that he would keep strict confidence if only the workman would tell him. So, cautiously looking over his shoulders both ways, the workman whispered, “Wheelbarrows.”
The Beatitudes occur in two places in the New Testament. In Luke’s Sermon on the Plain and in Matthew’s perhaps more familiar Sermon on the Mount. I can’t speak for you, but whenever I think of the Beatitudes, I nearly always envision those whom Jesus blessed — the poor, the mourners, the hungry, the peacemakers.
There plainly before us is our Lord’s handbook for pastoral ministry. It’s been the church’s model for centuries and rightly so. We may not always have measured up, but there it is, anyhow, reminding us to whom we are called so that we never lose sight of our purpose.
So it is that this remarkable and inclusive Jesus-sermon challenges any preacher. It certainly makes me wonder what more can be said or even needs saying about church and world. But then, like the curious company security guard, the obvious hits me smack-dab in the pulpit. What else is Jesus talking about in the Beatitudes?
Wheelbarrows! Of course. It’s the blessings! And further, it is not so much who or what the church blesses, but that the church blesses, and that the church itself be a blessing.
Strange is it not that the act of blessing is at the very heart of the schism over which we anguish in these times. The blessing of a priest to make him a bishop. The blessing of a loving relationship to make a commitment sacramental. The cry of thousands ringing in our ears to claim that blessing.
It is not only the church’s primary vocation to bless and to be a blessing for its own and for its neighbor, but it is also the calling of each and every one of us. What is our worship in this place, our service, but to bless God? At the end of every reading of the Daily Offices, there it stands.
“Let us bless the Lord! Thanks be to God!”
The circle of blessing is completed when we bless God, when we offer grace for God, that God’s blessing of us does not return empty. For the church ever to withhold blessing may be one of the gravest and most presumptuous of the ways we separate ourselves from God and from each other, for that is a judgment call that only God can make.
It must and should be clear that blessing does not always mean approval or that it is merited. God’s grace is always free and unearned. We who by that same grace are commissioned as God’s servants dare not risk the peril of standing in its way for another. We cannot claim thus to comprehend grace and not, as well, extend it, nor finally define the means for its giving as if it were some possession that we alone can certify. It is precisely when we are so addicted to our past or to Holy Scripture or to our fixed ways and take ourselves more seriously than we take our work that, for a pity, we become graceless and we are no blessing at all.
Now, may I add a lagniappe. A lagniappe is a kind of grace in itself, something given or obtained gratuitously or by way of good measure, like the thirteenth cheese Danish in a baker’s dozen.
In the matter of blessings, the scholars of the Jesus Seminar have suggested that the word “blessed” in the Beatitudes may well be translated as “congratulations.” Indeed, one has offered that the phrase, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” might be translated, “Congratulations, you bums!”
“Congratulations” is a word we often use, sometimes just a throw-off without much thought behind it. Somebody will say it to somebody else surely before this day is out. So let me then suggest that we may be blessing folk when we’re not even aware of it, and that, of course, is the best way, the least pompous way of all. For to “congratulate” literally means to “wish grace” to another, to hope for them joy for the time of their life.
Next time we share the Peace in the Liturgy, maybe we might just say, “Congratulations you bum, for God loves you!”
July 12, 2007
Who?
Pentecost 6/10C [Lk 10.25-37]
[My good friend and fellow country preacher Joel Keys over on St Simon’s Island, GA, once told a slightly longer version of this tale at his church’s Saturday night Golfer’s Mass. I’m preempting it here and now for today’s OoN and this Sunday’s preachment (without permission and with hope of forgiveness). — LD]
When a friend of mine was a student at Yale, he and another guy were on the road in a “college student” car (the kind students had before everybody got rich). It was in the middle of the night in Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” territory, the south Bronx. They had a flat.
Before they could open the trunk to see if they even had a spare, an ancient, rusty car squealed to a halt in front of them in the breakdown lane. Out climbed two large men speaking Spanish. The students figured, “This is it.” They were frozen in fear. But before they had a chance to decide whether to scream for help or run for their lives, the two Bronx types started changing the tire. They were done in minutes.
As they started to leave, my friends tried to pay them. They ignored them, walked away, got into their car, and left. If my friends had followed their fear, they wouldn’t have got the tire changed, and they’d have had to go and get help in the middle of the night.
That’s what our inner attitude, that’s what xenophobia, our fear of strangers, that’s what dismissing people by stereotype, that’s what demonizing people and calling them trash does. And as well, that’s how our corporate anxiety drives our confusion and dismay over how or even whether to be neighbors across our national boundaries. It often means how those who immigrate here — legally or illegally — don’t even have a chance for anything, let alone a good deed. What is even worse, it means we may never learn from them either about their selfless giving or any other of the manifestations of their culture and language if we won’t even let them help us out.
The lawyer asked Jesus “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus began his answer as he did so often, with a story. “But a Samaritan, as he journeyed…” Imagine the lawyer saying, “Aw, cool it. I’m not listening to any stories about those trashy Samaritans. I thought I was going to learn something from you. So long, Mister Savior of the World.”
If he had, he never would have learned about neighbors, and he never would have learned that sometimes our neighbors aren’t necessarily our friends, but, nonetheless, in our neighbors we might see the reflection of the face of God, and learn how to let our own faces reflect God to someone else. He wouldn’t have learned that and more than likely, neither would we. For it’s only when we allow God to let us look through the barriers we erect to separate ourselves that we can see God’s examples and then, as Jesus said, get one more chance to “Go and do likewise.”
July 11, 2007
Litmus
Today is the feast day of St Benedict. I don’t know if he’s the one the current pope is named after, but it doesn’t much matter. What I read about him suggests he was a moderate and gentle man, probably not an easy thing to be in the sixth century. Whoever keeps such records is not even sure whether he was ordained, but that doesn’t much matter, either.
I suppose what does matter is whether he was a Christian. He more than likely was, considering that he started a discipline and a monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy, a mighty imposing place. It was so imposing, that it was an easy target for WWII allied bombers who pretty well turned it to rubble because they thought that instead of monks, there were Germans holed up there.
I imagine the current Benedict wouldn’t have the same question about him as he seems to have about us, that is, whether if we don’t follow his current papal ways, we’re not Christians at all. At first, it troubled me when I heard that he had such doubts.
But then, I wondered if maybe it might serve for some distraction in our own present tensions. That is, it might give our primates something else to think about besides us and being papal wannabes if they have to defend not just being orthodox, as they claim, but have to defend whether or not they are actually Christians.
When an 800-pound primate knocks on the narthex door, instead of grabbing a valid baptismal certificate and running to beat hell, we apostate Episcopalians could remind our fellows that Jesus had something of a litmus test about how to find out whether one is a Christian. He said you could tell by how or, I suppose, just whether we loved one another. Maybe even the pope might warm up to that. Maybe.
July 10, 2007
Chambered
Dateline-once-removed: Highlands, NC
Music is the most existential of the arts. Written, improvised, heard and unheard, there it is — getting our attention and making us its subjects, willing or unwilling, bamming along in its way and after its fashion, and then it’s all over, lingering, a commanding presence.
North Carolina’s Highlands-Cashiers Chamber Music Festival is a celebration of the world’s best music performed by internationally-known musicians in an unforgettable setting. As a bit of incidental intelligence, the gala got its start twenty-six years ago at the hands of an Episcopal parson who liked chamber music probably because that’s the usual size if not content of most Sunday morning gatherings in small-town churches. (Let’s hear it for reed organs wheezing out “When Morning Gilds the Skies” with a choir of three and a congregation of eight.)
CP and I attended the Festival’s first week last week (there are five altogether) at the invitation of the Artistic Director, a longtime friend and “adopted” son of ours. Not the least of our intrigue was the opening concert of “Jazz as Chamber Music.” The Emory University in-residence Vega String Quartet and the Atlanta-based Gary Motley Jazz Quartet, together, interspersed with informative commentary, explored and illustrated how jazz developed from and is related to the classical tradition of small, intimate groups of virtuosic players. The program ranged from Bach to Boling, from Thelonious Monk to Bartok, and from Debussy to Herbie Hancock. Some aside serendipity: one night included local thespians doing “Kiss Me Kate” and bringing Cole Porter charmingly to bear on how his music, chambered or otherwise, can transcend even the least of the amateurs.
Music is one of life’s better metaphors and should be sought wherever and however one can find it. It is especially so not only being existential by nature but even naturally so being done existentially. I like to imagine that Eden surely had some precursor of Mozart on its Muzak.
July 4, 2007
Interdependence
It has been said that to sacrifice something is to make it holy by giving it away for love.
In the Eucharist, the place at which that action is perhaps most graphic is in the moment of offering bread and wine and money. In our congregation, we call additional attention to that with two short prayers through which we ask God to join with us in making holy what we are sacrificing, what we are giving away for love. We may not always be so conscious of this, but there it is, anyway, what the church has meant to do for twenty centuries.
On Independence Day or the nearest Sunday, as an exceptional way of adding to our celebration and, indeed, to our sacrifice, we offer together with these other symbols our nation’s flag, properly folded and placed in an alms bason.
There are many ways to display the flag, each with its own meaning. When it is to one’s right as in the president’s oval office, it symbolizes allegiance. When it is flown upside down, it is a sign of distress. When at half-mast, it is to indicate mourning. When a flag is torn, stepped on, or burned, the message is rejection and rebellion. When a flag flies at full staff, the announcement is peace, victory, rule or whatever adjective you might speak to the situation at the time. It is not our usual custom to display our nation’s flag in our chancel, though such is far from uncommon in many churches.
Whatever way we incorporate our national symbol, it is well to keep in mind that Hebrew and Christian scriptures record two problems about patriotism as always having plagued the People of God. One is to become so conformed to a culture and its ways so as to merge the two, rather than bringing the culture into the ways of God. The other is to allow the rule of God to be replaced by the rule of the State. Therefore, we must exercise care how we use our national symbols.
We Christians are believers in the incarnation, and it is thus not always easy to separate the issues from the people or the symbols who embody them. Patriotism — about which these days some of us hear more than enough and others never enough — is one of those very important issues which we incarnate and which is not all that easy to separate from the person or the symbol that embraces it.
Few of us, I suspect, would deny that we are patriots. We may find it easier to say what that does not mean for us than to say what it does mean. One thing we all have in common on the subject, however, is the Declaration of Independence. It seems to me always useful — especially this time of year and in these perilous times — to read it thoughtfully as Christians, and perhaps to discover anew what our founders had in mind when they undertook this great American political experiment by which they told us what patriotism meant for them.
On the celebration of our nation’s birthday each year, National Public Radio broadcasts a reading of the Declaration of Independence. Their announcers, reporters, analysts, and essayists each follow in turn reading a short, self-contained passage. The familiar voices are nameless, and one can only guess whose they are. The anonymity seems not only tantalizing, but somehow appropriate, as well. I like to imagine our founders as they wrote and shaped this great proclamation maybe having read it aloud similarly as they sought to get the feel, the rhythm, the power, and the authority of it.
Hearing it in this way even more convinces me that, for whatever and surely well-intended reason, the document seems strangely misnamed. I believe it might better have been called a Declaration of Interdependence, instead. It may be well for us to imagine it that way in these difficult times of another, newer, but not all that different national crisis.
Clearly and well, of course, the Declaration establishes us an autonomous nation among all the world’s geopolitical states. That, in itself, is daring enough. But it continues uniquely and refreshingly to proclaim a new and radical political relationship not only with its own citizenry, but also boldly and courageously with all the earth’s peoples who care to join in such a venture. It takes an incarnational view of the very nature of human being and of the body politic as itself a faithful way to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.
We live in a time when independence has come to mean the license to run amok unilaterally. The founding sense of the Declaration seems scandalously misunderstood and to be masquerading alone as codependency here, as sexual, ethnic, and political insularity there. These distortions recklessly affect not only individuals and families and our thoughtful and creative governing system of checks and balances, but regions and nations across this entire planet, as well. We seem to be abandoning the very corporate nature of the stewardship which this founding document affirmed and for which it called.
The answer to all this is not, I believe, some blind, unquestioning loyalty which is no loyalty at all, but an out-and-out denial of one’s citizenship. It is not the impudent display of flag lapel pins all the while blatantly ignoring the Constitutional systems which one has vowed to protect and defend. Rather is true patriotism to love our country enough to see that in a nuclear age it is not going to survive unless the world survives. True patriots are no longer champions of Democracy, Communism, or anything like that but champions of the Human Race. It is not the Homeland that they feel called on to defend at any cost, but the planet Earth as Home.
If in the interests of making sure that we don’t blow ourselves off the map once and for all, we end up relinquishing a measure of national sovereignty to some international body, so much the worse for national sovereignty. For there is only one Sovereignty that matters ultimately, and it is of quite another sort altogether.
Oh, and there is a tidbit which we dare not overlook after a reading of the Declaration of Independence. It is that King George III entered into his journal on that vital July 4, 1776, “Nothing of any importance or consequence took place today.”
Note: The useful reminders about ways and meanings of flag displays came my way from Pepper Marts, churchman, veteran, writer, and rattler of stained glass out in New Mexico. The splendid reflections on the meaning of patriotism belong to Frederick Buechner and appear in his “Whistling in the Dark,” Harper & Row, p 93.
July 2, 2007
Ambiance
The political experiment called democracy engendered by our nation’s founders and its subsequent ambiance not only affects the way we keep trying to run this country, it also affects the way we keep trying to run the Episcopal Church. It’s the polity, stupid.
The Anglican tradition of ordered freedom, oxymoronic though it be, when once imported to the US&A, seemed to fit rather well into this novel political experiment if not even perhaps to have influenced it more than a little. It’s almost as if our tradition finally found a way that it could actualize and articulate itself more fully than ever before, shirking once and for all the creeping gangrene of ecclesiastical puffery from which it escaped and which continues to lurk just over there behind the rood screen.
The Prayer Book Catechism and the episcopal ordinal affirm this. A new bishop at the outset is reminded that being “chief priest and pastor” is no longer any pontifical two-step dodge of responsibility, rather is it to take counsel with fellow presbyters as a first among equals [BCP p 518]. And further, the Catechism affirms that there are not only three, but four orders of ministry through which this church manifests itself — lay persons, deacons, priests, and bishops. The definition of each begins the same, “to represent Christ and his Church” [BCP p 855]. Further, it does no harm to be reminded from time to time that the laity clearly have us outnumbered, and that the holiest order of all is baptism.
There is no question that democracy is messy, clumsy, sometimes very tedious, not always welcomed by all and not at all so permissive as one might think. Further, it not only enhances, but ironically, depends upon as well, the honesty and truth-telling of its adherents. Is it any wonder we’re as troubled by it as we are attracted to it?