December 31, 2007

Mañana

I have three old clocks, the wind-up kind, and I have an obsession about them that in spite of their age they keep reasonably accurate time. Not Naval Observatory time like when we flew over the Pacific, though that would be nice, but close enough that the two that chime, chime within seconds of each other, preferably simultaneously. 

Maybe it’s New Year’s Eve that brings this to mind. For this is the worldwide grand moment of timekeeping when the entire planet takes notice with clocks and calendars. Only a few years ago on Y2K there was universal angst that we’d maybe never be able to do it again.

 

Maybe one of our vocations as human beings is  so that time never has to stop until we do. Time is not really running out, it’s just that we are running out of it. Time has really never run in for it never was off stage, waiting, if our notion of the Big Bang amounts to anything. 

 

Maybe the universe is one big clock, but so far as we know we may be the only ones who know it. We keep time as if we think we’ll never have to give it away, and you’d better believe it. We are the town criers. And the cosmos very patiently lets us think it’s important that we are. “Wait for me,” we shouted as soon as we could talk.

 

One of my handy word books says that time comes from ti, meaning to stretch, meaning also more or less, the fit time, hence, the good time, prosperity, as in Let the good times roll. The early word for everyday time was tide, like in Yuletide, glad tidings, high tide, low tide, and laundry soap. It took the Greeks to find kairos for fat time and chronos for thin time, the one always full of it, the other just sort of bammin’ along, again, waiting for something to happen.  Guy Lombardo’s band’s yard-wide tremolo forever once brought in the new year in with Auld Lang Syne, “times gone by,” for which we all drank a cup of kindness yet, and then started up the violence again the next day in the bowl games. 

 

Mañana is really the rule of the day and especially of New Year’s Day. Iraq? Mañana. The environment? Mañana. Our international reputation? Mañana. The busted up church ignoring Jesus’s prayer that we all be one? Mañana.

 

Mañana? Perhaps. If there is one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

December 28, 2007

Ingenuity

It has been said, and I am proud to join in the chorus, that one of the blunders religious people are fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.

If this season of The Incarnation — and of our incarnation — means anything at all, it means that our vocation is not to be more spiritual. It is to be more human. 

Speaking of human, W C Fields it was who said, “Anyone who hates children and animals can’t be all bad.” Some may be more with W C Fields about children than with Jesus, but when Jesus suggests that we consider children to be equipped with the owners manual to the kingdom of God, we’d better listen, for hardly anyone is more human…

… and more in touch with their humanity, than children. Perhaps that’s what the “terrible twos” are all about for that’s when the kids begin to see adolescence looming ominously ahead and throw all those tantrums watching their humanity go and then, of course, soon wondering where it went.

We remember the Bethlehem preschoolers today and call them the Holy Innocents not because they were without guilt so much as because they were without the burden of it. Precisely as we set out to make them like us — we call  it parenthood — do they catch on quick that guilt’s a thing to be reckoned with the rest of their lives. All the shrinks in the world will not let us see the rid of it.

And so Jesus’s counsel together with this twelve-days-of-Christmas reminder that we become less childish and more childlike is but another way of saying wake up and don’t let the grace grow under your feet. Go ahead and walk on it. It’s probably leading you back to the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the very path, if I remember,  to the kingdom.

 

December 27, 2007

Word

Feast of St John   Jn 1.1-18

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 our 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, some 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.

December 26, 2007

Boxing

I don’t remember ever hearing of Boxing Day until a few years ago from one of my more erudite associates who is something of an Anglophiliac and knows of this Day’s British connection which I’ll get to shortly. He’s a good friend, the kind who patiently keeps me both abreast of such things and mindful of my occasional drift into liturgical disorderliness.

In most places that bother with the appropriate calendars, today is also the Feast of Stephen. Why Good King Wenceslas, as we sing, looked down upon it or upon Stephen, himself, and whether from a superior perspective or merely in disdain, I’ve never been quite sure. I’m not even sure why he was considered “good,” though I’ll bet one of our readers will know and will say so. Actually, some versions of his superior observation say that he looked “out” rather than “down,” thus suggesting  even further ambiguity. Was he looking out as a matter of personal caution? Or was he looking down because he felt shy or possibly intimidated? I suppose I’ll never know without further research which I intend neither to look out for nor look down for. I might add, though, that preliminary research in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church reports that J M Neale’s Good King Wenceslas Christmas carol’s contents say “out” and are “wholly imaginary.”

Stephen was later named a saint by anybody’s  measure and largely, I suppose, because he was  reported to be the first Christian martyr. He was also among the first in the diaconate with its own built-in martyrdom complex from the outset, its being so ordered by the apostles just so they could begin to unload on somebody else to do the scut work (there were not yet any altar guilds or acolytes) and thus relieve subsequent bishops so they could begin to be freed up enough to claim their own version of apostolic success. 

In other words, I take it there were neither Boxing Days nor Feasts of Stephen during Stephen’s time. My parents’ wedding anniversary also happened on Boxing Day day some considerable years later. Not being keepers of any churchly liturgical cycle that I know of, my beloved parents may well have never heard either of St Stephen or Boxing (in that context), an absence of venue that could, perhaps, help explain that gap in my eventual liturgical disorderliness.

Boxing Day, according to my abridged dictionary, is “the first weekday after Christmas observed as a legal holiday in parts of the British Commonwealth (sic) and marked by the giving of Christmas boxes to service workers, such as postmen.” It doesn’t mention whether the boxes were in themselves presents to be treasured or whether they also contained some sort of virtual sugar plums and the like or why postmen were singled out. (I once had a senior warden, a lawyer, who during Christmastime handed out silver dollars to cops on the beat downtown in his town. He never spoke of the practice as having anything to do with Boxing Day, only with his maintaining peace, good will, and, of course, good relations with those who enforced the very law that he lawyered.)

However one keeps it, this is a great and wondrous season, these Twelve Days that just now begin and that somehow in spite of ourselves and their own song and all we continue to maintain in our frequently down and out and quaint ways. As for Boxing and St Stephen, they’re obviously, as well, an occasion for my sudden increase in loquaciousness.

December 25, 2007

Christmas

This is the irrational season

 

When love blooms bright and wild.

 

Had Mary been filled with reason,

 

There’d have been no room for the child.

 

– Madeleine L’Engle

          1918-2007

December 24, 2007

Chanticleer

Chanticleer is a remarkable a capella chorus of twelve men — counter tenors to basses. They are named for the “clear-singing” rooster in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Their Christmas recital from the acoustically exciting halls of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art came to our town via the telly a few seasons ago.

The setting was in front of a majestic Christmas tree as only the Met could conceive one. The program ranged from the arcane and obscure to southern gospel, most all of it inspired by and centered in the Nativity, every word and phrase, the epitome of clarity and much joy.

At the close of the recital, their greeting to us admiring listeners was that we have a Happy Holiday. The irony of how far political correctness has gone these days was not lost on us.

 

December 22, 2007

Recall

A few Christmases ago, Norman Rockwell designed a charming magazine cover with four parallel scenes rather like comic strips. 1) A child playing on the floor with pots and pans and a make-believe train made up of shoe boxes, 2) his observant father getting the notion to give him an electric train for Christmas, and 3) doing so. 4) A child playing on the floor with pots and pans and shoe boxes, the dormant electric train in the distant background. 

As it often is at Christmastime, this drawing was again in widespread circulation. Parents, resonating with knowing appreciation, were seen to be curtailing considerably their holiday shopping.

Word of this soon came to the Environmental Protection Agency. In their zeal to safeguard all forms of corporate welfare for American industry, offshore tax dodges,  and especially political contributions, there was issued an immediate recall of all pots, pans, handheld mixers, stirring spoons, and shoe boxes from off the market. 

December 20, 2007

Magnificatharsis

Advent 4A  Mt 1.18-25

“Now the birth of Jesus took place in this way” (Mt 1.18).

It was when Gabriel told Mary about the fix she was about to be in that the venerable old trumpet player’s unswerving loyalty to God was faced with a major challenge and test. StoryTeller Frederick Buechner imagines the scene this way:

“She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it.

“He told her what the child was to be named, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her. ‘You mustn’t be afraid, Mary,’ he said.

“As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl” (Peculiar Treasures, Harper & Row, 1979, p 39).

Gospeler Matthew’s accounting is not quite so colorful. He starts with a kind of biblical once-upon-a-time plainly and almost with resignation when he says, “Now the birth of Jesus took place in this way.” 

And then he tells the story through the medium of Joseph’s dream and about how it took the power and authority of Joseph’s angel to turn him away from abandoning his young betrothed altogether as he had every traditional  right to do. But for us, the Annunciation is more than “the medium is the message,” no matter how profound. For the medium is also the answer. 

First, there’s Mary’s answer. Her Yes, and her subsequent paean that we call her Magnificat (Lk 1.46-55; BCP 91f). And then, there’s our answer. These antiphons combine to model for us what God expects from all his children and his church as they gather, now and in every generation past and future. God wants a Yes from us in whatever way we can say Yes with the most integrity. And our souls, as well, are called to a Magnificat in however and whatever way we can proclaim the greatness of the Lord. It is ours, as well, again in our way, to magnify the Lord, to rejoice in God. It is our calling to show God’s strength. It is our ministry to scatter the proud in their very heart of hearts. It is our responsibility and, indeed, privilege to put down the mighty from their thrones and exalt those of low degree, to fill the hungry, and to empty the rich. 

In a very real way, this, our Magnificat, is what we call our Baptismal Covenant. When we take up that vocational commission to give birth to this Christmas Jesus in our way, we’re asked to respond ever so much as did Mary in her way. “Yes. Let it be to me according to your word.”

We enter now into a season marked by great expectations. These hopes are of the ways in which this season’s joys are informed, given shape and expression — and become flesh. The pulse of Christmas that courses through us may be in this entire coming year as near as we can ever an approach to our own Christ-in-us-and-others character that we confess and seek in the Baptismal Covenant. 

We know the pattern, we know the evidence. It’s the same evidence that Jesus sent to an emprisoned John Baptist — the “blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is he who takes no offense in me” (Mt 11.5f). And we know the ways this brokeness in our society can be mended, can take shape, can become a reality.

Once again, we’ve got the Twelve Days, the partridge and all the rest, the better part of a fortnight to load and lock the arsenal of grace that we’ll proclaim in Epiphany. 

Once again, the Yes. 

Once again, the Virgin’s cry, that magnificatharsis for the church.

December 19, 2007

Families

A neighbor down the street has got a splendid new mountain bike for his son for Christmas. It became our privilege to be asked to store it for him until late night Christmas Eve tree time. I like seeing it there in our upstairs room, bright, shiny, ready to roll, a seasonal nostalgic stirring it leaves in me. My first bike was red. It had only one gear, me. 

A moment ago, another neighbor called to see if we might have some cookie cutters he could borrow. He and his youngest are making Christmas cookies and trying to turn white sugar green by mixing it with food coloring. Their hands will bear an indelible yuletide message tomorrow.  

Both these neighbors are single parents. When they call for some need like these, they usually want to talk to CP. They’ve learned whose the grand mom in our house. She’s now added cookie cutters and red and green granulated sugar to her final Christmas shopping list. 

Our culture is so rigid about families. Every one must have two parents, they say, a woman and a man. Whether there’s love or not never seems to be mentioned, left alongside the way with dysfunction and the rising divorce rates. That a single parent family or a gay parents family might manifest a warm, loving, just, and giving companionship seems to so many to be utterly unimaginable. As Tiny Tim might have said, ‘Tis a pity.

December 18, 2007

Closets

There’s a Baptist church over in Ft Worth, Texas, celebrating its 125th anniversary. A part of the celebration is to make a pictorial directory. You’d think that’s simple enough, but the elders are struggling with what has become for them a monumental  question. It has to do with photographs and whether to include them. 

It seems to be an inclusive church, and as such sets an example. But they’re debating whether the directory should go ahead and include pictures of gay couples, or gay people individually, but not as couples, or even as families, or just whether to avoid the problem altogether by leaving out individual and family photos entirely. I suppose it’s as it should be that they aren’t so much closing the door on anybody, but they aren’t all that specially proud about it and apparently don’t want anybody to know all about it.

So, what if they do include photos of everybody? How will they know who’s who? And what if they prove to be wrong about somebody? Actually, they just might be overlooking a good thing. 

All would surely agree that church can be said to be just one big prayer meeting, especially on Sundays. And remember what Jesus said about when you pray, not to stand around carrying on  in public on the street corners, but pray, instead, in a convenient closet. If you try to decide how to make a big church more like a closet so you could pray there like Jesus said,  it would seem to me that gays and lesbians would be of considerable help. Imagine the experience they could bring to bear on this rather well-known Jesus requirement. And in the doing, just think about how much they could learn about closets if only they asked. As for photographs, Jesus never said much about that either.