November 30, 2007

Flowers

The young wife of a newly ordained priest and doubly-newly vicar of a mission congregation got a phone call from a lady who obviously wanted to triangle. After multiple questions trying to find out “what kind of church” this is whose vicar’s wife she was talking to, questions that rightly belonged in the vicar’s ear rather than his wife’s, and after multiple suggestions and attempts so to direct them, finally came the big one.

“Do you have any gays and lesbians on the altar?” said the triangler. Relieved to get one she felt she could answer, the parson’s wife said, “No ma’am, only flowers.”

November 29, 2007

Watchout

Advent 1A  Mt 24.37-44

It’s Advent, and away we go! It’s that fork in the road again. Like Bishop Yogi said, When you come to it, take it. Don’t just stand there counting up the Pentecost.

And remember, Matthew said that Jesus said, “Watch… for you don’t know from nothing… ”

Lookout! Look for the signs. To understand the times, to read the seasons, to grasp the moment and how it fits into all the other moments…  Watchout.

Look at something else besides yourself. When we promise in the Baptismal Covenant to seek Christ in all persons it doesn’t mean just those comfortable ones around you. It means look everywhere for the hand of God and while you’re at it, get a notion of what God’s hand looks like. Watch. And don’t stop to count the fingers.

To understand our lives, we must see other lives. To understand events, we must see the ways those events impact other people. To understand our children, in spite of the confusion, we must see and listen to them. To understand our mates, we must step outside the shelters of our desires, our perceptions, our feelings, our needs, and see what kind of flag they’re flying and whether it’s upside down or not.

“Dying to self” has become so trite and oversimplified a phrase that we’ve got ourselves blind to what a messy job it can be. So easily can it escape us that it’s actually a way to God and to God’s point-of-view. It means stepping away from self-reference, from self-determination, from self-expression, not because they are wrong, but because they keep us from seeing over the next hill. It means to be surprised over and over again to find out that the gospel is not about how to live. The gospel is about how to die.

If we see life only from the vantage of self, we hurt others even if we want only to love them. We diminish ourselves. We trespass on community. We turn away from God. Before we know it, we become as parched and sterile as last summer’s  backyard.

So we look. What makes a difference? When it comes to planning our days, it’s easy to presume the time’s already used up. It’s not all that easy to realize that the point is more like the old Duke Ellington tune, “It ain’t hutchyewdo, it’s the way hutchyewdoit.” It’s the way we come and go, stay and return, meet and greet.

And don’t forget, there’s more to our lives than putting one foot in front of the other even though we’ll never get anywhere if we don’t. As we go, listen to the talk and then walk the talk. Tune in to the laughter and the crying, and then shed a few yourself. Take somebody’s hand. Listen to somebody’s story. Honor somebody’s journey. It never is and never could be parallel to ours. Unlike in geometry, we’ll intersect long before we get to infinity.

In God’s economy, all of life is connected in a way that we can neither create nor stop. So far as we know, maybe we are the only part of life even halfway self-conscious. The universe needs us for a voice. God made us for an audience that would talk back, and, as well, figured rightly how important it might be that we’d have each other to talk about. The commitment to be aware of this and to see it as it is remains an essential part of our being, our privilege, our responsibility, our vocation, our Advent.

And remember. Advent has Christmas by the tail and won’t let go.

November 28, 2007

Metaphor

Edward Albee came to our town last night to lecture at the prestigious university down the street. The vice-chancellor for public relations introduced him and warned us in case we did not remember how controversial he is. Albee has won three Pulitzers and tied Eugene O’Neill in the process. His lack of the customary arrogance one comes to expect from the likes of him was utterly disarming. He did say that he hoped we’d attend his plays whenever possible, because if they were offensive, we could walk out, that if we never came, we’d never have the opportunity to walk out.

He talked about being born in Virginia, adopted, then as a babe moved to Washington, DC. He said that he did not know he was adopted until he was six years old, but that he was relieved to find out he was not kin to his parents because they seemed to be somewhat to the right of Atilla the Hun. They did try, he said, to see that he got a good education. He talked about the schools he got kicked out of, how he never finished college, that somehow, the “required courses” were never the courses he required. He said that he became a distinguished full professor of the arts at a large university, anyway.

He warned any creationists in the audience that we are animals along with all the other animals. He said that what makes us different is that we make art and we make metaphor, and that we know we do. He said that too few of us know anything about art and government. Art shows us who we are, and government shows us what we can do together about who we are. He said that so long as we have a democracy, we’d best learn how to use it or we’ll not have it for long, like nowadays. He said that we no longer have a working class, that what was once a working class was by political ploy made into what is now the more manipulatable middle class, and that this has affected our democracy negatively.

He did not say that just because we can make metaphor, therefore, we do, because we don’t. But I wish he had, because I will. I believe one of the gravest problems we face is the way metaphor is slipping away from us by our own doing. It’s a western culture thing. Without metaphor, we’ll then be without art, without art, we’ll never know who we are, democracy will go down the chute, and we’ll make a farce of religion and its Bible (which we’re swiftly doing, anyhow).

November 27, 2007

Organ

We’ve a friend who is a docent for our local cathedral. Recently, he was showing a member of the Church of Christ around when she became interested enough to ask if she could attend a Sunday service to experience firsthand this liturgy that he kept talking about. They decided on a forthcoming evensong.

When the service was over and they’d adjourned to the parish hall for libations, he was expecting a myriad of questions. He thought surely she’d be eager to learn more. He was confident he was well prepared, when she said, “This so-called liturgy, it’s all about the organ, isn’t it?”

November 26, 2007

Yesterday

Yesterday’s preachment (OoN/23xi07) on the Feast of  Christ, the King, and Recovery Sunday, once each at the three celebrations of the Mysteries, came off without incident. Put another way, I didn’t trip and stumble on any of that big, high-steeple church’s marble steps that through bifocals all look alike.

There were opportunities between services to discuss some of the issues around addiction and recovery, not a lot about Jesus. The knowing and understanding questions and  comments were almost entirely from women, many of whom from time to time nodded in assent. The men were ominously silent.

Nobody seemed at all interested in picking up on addiction as about anything other than “alcohol and drugs,” never even “…and other drugs.” On the subject of addiction to power or greed or war or orthodoxy or churchmanship or shopping or cars or sports or whatever? Forget it. Like grace and some of the other worthies, it’s a word that’s pretty much lost its purchase.

November 23, 2007

Recovery

Note: I do not often have an opportunity to preach these weekly OoN homilies. They are written on the forthcoming Sunday propers mostly as a sort of “firehouse dog” discipline. This one, however, I’ve been asked to preach (keeping with the unintended metaphor) as a “visiting fireman” in another town.

It is supposed to be about the Feast of Christ, the King, and something called “Recovery Sunday,” a keeping new to me that I understand has been around for a while. The sermon is longer than usual, too long to suit me, but I got stuck and couldn’t do much more with it no matter how I tried. Maybe you can. The opening story is a true one and has always meant much to me. If you have room, please keep me in mind and prayer Sunday morning. Thank you. — Lane

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Christ, the King, and Recovery Sunday
Lk 19.29-38

A twelve-step meeting was just concluding when a young woman suddenly blurted out her name, shouted that she was an alcoholic, then burst into tears and rushed out of the room. An older woman followed and saw her seated over in a darkened corner sobbing her heart out. She approached and embraced her and speaking gently, said, “My dear, just let us love you until you can come to love yourself.”

In this simple, yet touching encounter, there is revealed what Twelve-Step programs are surely about. As well, there is witnessed, if not at all consciously, what the Gospel and the Gospel’s church are surely about. It is no coincidence that we celebrate the Recovery programs on the same day we keep the annual Feast of Christ, the King, for these two events are both about the same thing.

They are both about love and, if you will, about justice and inclusion and servanthood, and about finding a safe place where we can practice and learn to risk taking these skills of grace into the world. For that is surely the most winsome and winning kind of evangelism.

There is another way to think about this being Recovery Sunday. These two events conjoined — Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem as servant king and the twelve step entry into spiritual awakening — are about our recovering what it means to be human, what it means to live in the image of God, to reclaim and to live into that being which is the creative gift of God’s imagination. This is where the Great Commandment to love is at work and the Great Commission to make disciples throughout the world is unfurled.

Our prayer book catechism puts it this way. To be human is to be created in the image of God, which means to be free to choose to love, to reason, to create, and to live in harmony with all of creation and with God (BCP p 845), no less than the ministry of Jesus, himself. Addiction — and I’ll talk more about that in a moment — addiction in all its forms cripples the very process of becoming human.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all this majestic Way and Truth and Life is that this One, this Jesus who comes into Jerusalem to be our King, comes not to rule in the manner of empire to which we so often seem to aspire, but rather to lead in the manner of a servant.

This Jesus, this paradox of God, is God’s evangel, the One to whom we as his beloved children and as his commissioned church must look for the Way. Our vocation as Christians is not to become more spiritual, for we are already that by virtue of God’s creating us. Our vocation is to become more human.

But this Recovery Sunday is also about addiction.

If statistics mean anything at all, there’s probably not a family or a friend represented here today that has not known its very fabric severely torn by the intrusion of addiction in one of its many and too often subtle forms. And if we are fortunate, we have also seen the creative healing which can result in the miracle of the process of recovery that so often can be the consequence of one of the many twelve-step programs.

We must broaden our understanding of addiction. Perhaps we have already learned or will soon learn, Satan to the contrary, that addiction’s tentacles extend far beyond the chemicals such as nicotine, alcohol, and those other paralyzing narcotics. For addiction is any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits, that compromises the freedom of human desire, that jeopardizes our God-given vocation to become human. (repeat?) To come to that understanding is essential if we would fulfill our ministry as a church.

That brilliant story teller Madeleine L’Engle writes of a friend who despaired of seeking help for her addiction from the church. She had dropped out and turned to a twelve-step program. Madeleine asked her why and was startled to hear her friend’s tearful reply. “Because this simple twelve-step program knows who is the enemy.”

Addiction is our enemy at all levels of life, whether it be addiction to power or to greed or to war or to orthodoxy or to tradition or to whatever. It affects all our relationships. It is habitual, and it is a behavior, and it lurks. By the power of its subtlety, we may never know it, for denial is not a conscious act until it is thwarted, and even then, we’ll do almost anything to deny that it exists and that we must come to terms with its demands.

When Jesus, the King of Peace, entered into Jerusalem, there was another entry into Jerusalem on that same day, an entry of which we rarely take any notice. Actually, I was not at all aware of it until recently when your associate rector (as he so often does) reminded me that I still need continuing education. It was an entry not about peace, but about war and oppression. It was the entry of Pilate, the lesser Roman satrap, not on the foal of a donkey, but with his legions on the armored stallions of cavalry.

It was an entrance not to celebrate with the Jews, but to guard against and stamp the Roman boot on the possibility of any colonial insurrection at that time. And it was an entrance hurtling toward that confrontation with Jesus we know so well… about the understanding of truth and the very meaning of kingliness. Keeping this Feast today must remind us that we face a choice between defining peace in terms of war and peace in terms of justice, a choice between the servant kingly reign of God and the imperialistic and addictive compromise of our own worst selves.

This Christ, the King, shows us what must be done with the gift of recovery, that this is what God means by the “kingdom relationship.” Servant leadership is the timeless story of the gospel. It is no longer possible and truly has never been possible for leadership to commend itself alone with external credentials, or with “orthodoxy” or with “churchmanship” or even with the Bible apart from the community and the tradition which it inspires for its understanding.

Without an evident depth of integrity, the authority of servant leadership can easily degenerate into mere power and thus become menaced by its ever present temptation not to lead, but to manipulate and to exploit. That this delusion is rampant in today’s church may well be why those many whom the polls tell us cherish a belief in God no longer support or attend a church and become what some cynically call “the alumni association.”

Not altogether to fear, the late Bishop Bennett Sims of Atlanta, in his splendid book on servanthood, is convinced that there resides even now in the church the kind of servant leadership essential for a redemptive ministry to take hold and flourish. And we dare not presume — as so often we do — that it is relegated alone to the clergy, particularly to the episcopate. Lest we forget, our Book of Common Prayer affirms four orders of this ministry — laity, deacons, presbyters, and bishops — all of whom are commissioned in Baptism to the holiest of servant leadership.

Our Lord could not have put it any plainer when he said, “Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice” (Jn 18.37).

The church and our congregations cannot expect the world to get the drift of that until we, ourselves, hear that same voice and become deeply committed servant leaders embracing the authority of grace and eschewing the destruction of power, modeling this Jesus ministry for all to see. Then may we dare to recover the vision into the kingdom of God that awaits us and into which Christ, the King, would lead us, into our own Jerusalems.

November 22, 2007

Bird

My trusty word book says that the guinea-fowl was brought into Europe through Turkey and got its name that way. But the bird we now call a turkey is actually native to the new world.

The American bird was thought to be of the same species. When the difference was discovered, the name guinea-fowl was kept for the old-world bird, and by some circumlocution the turkey was transferred to our Thanksgiving tables.

The annual deferential reprieve of the White House turkey goes back down through the years and quite a number of presidents. Any conceivable nepotistic symbolism in that event seems more appropriate some years than others.

November 21, 2007

Tom

A family down the street once had a pet turkey named Tom that would escape from his corral ever so often and assume command of the neighborhood.

You can say what you will about turkey IQs, but this one took no guff from anybody. Cats and dogs were completely intimidated. The rest of us kept our distance whenever he came out for a stroll.

He soon took a liking to a walnut tree in our backyard. Roosting high on one of its branches, he’d waggle his wattles and gobble his grating cry whenever someone seemed to threaten his authority, day or night.

All worked well for him until one day when our town held its annual hot-air balloon festival. As the gentle breezes so ordained, a half-dozen wonderfully swollen and colorful balloons with their basketed passengers huffed and puffed their way by barely above the housetops near Tom’s tree.

Turkey that he was, he tried to join them. We never saw him again.

November 20, 2007

Pictures

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I wouldn’t want to have to say that with a picture. We thought in our town, our southeast, that our severe summer drought settled for once and for all that there’d be no fall colors this year. Especially no herald of maples and gums.

Thanks be to God, we were wrong. Those who know about these things say our late-coming rainy time, even though short, saved the day. Even in this intensely drought-ridden of seasons, the most startling of our middle Tennessee fall landscapes are the bright yellow/orange/crimson maples, especially when a gentle breeze sets their leaves to a flickering palette lit by a morning sun right before your eyes.

We came here years ago in the spring and found rich-blooming azaleas and forsythias and redbuds. Heaven knows that was startling and welcoming enough for anyone. But the fall turns out to be the real winner.

I couldn’t improve on on all this in a thousand words and, you may be pleased to know, don’t intend even to try.

November 19, 2007

Debates

I was graduated in the third quarter (aka first below the middle) of my high school class.* So you’ll perhaps see why I always admired my classmates who made the debate team. For one thing, I was so completely mystified by whatever debate was that I didn’t even bother to find out or why anybody would want to do it. Matter of fact, I still don’t know, but debates are so in the news that I turned to Google and found that…

There are several different formats for debate practiced in high school and college debate leagues. Most of these formats share some general features. Specifically, any debate will have two sides: a proposition side, and an opposition side. The job of the proposition side is to advocate the adoption of the resolution, while the job of the opposition side is to refute the resolution.

The resolution can take many forms, depending on the format. But in most cases, the resolution is simply a statement of policy or a statement of value. Some examples include, “Be it resolved, that the federal government of the United States should legalize marijuana.” “Be it resolved, that when in conflict, the right to a fair trial ought to take precedence over freedom of speech,” “Be it resolved, that men should wear boxers rather than briefs.” etc. In many debate formats, there is a requirement that a policy resolution (a resolution regarding the policies followed by some organization or government) represent a change from current policy, so that the opposition team will be defending the status quo.

Google concludes with, Usually, there is also a judge present in the debate whose job is to decide the winner.

Thanks to Google, I’ll stop having such high expectations of whatever it is the presidential wannabes are lining up and doing of a night on CNN now that I know what is a debate.

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*I flunked algebra and took it again and then eleven years later minored in math on my MA.