December 17, 2007

Restoration

We’re running out of Advent, and it’s way overdue for The Episcopal Church (aka TEC)  to get a life. Belief in the one holy catholic and apostolic church does not one holy catholic and apostolic church make one be. We’re only a couple of million folk barely surviving a not altogether enthusiastic missionary escape west into the colonies a few hundred years ago.  

Oxford University theologian Marilyn McCord Adams, a sister Anglican, by the by, recently reminded us even more sternly in the kind of  terms we detest that TEC is a mere Protestant denomination. But, she went on, not to worry, for the Roman Catholics and the Baptists will see to it in good order that at least for the time being there’ll be plenty of Christians in the US&A.

So it’s Advent yet. We might just be among the few who know, and at least we can keep the pink and purple candles going as best we can. It’s a good season, even if the commercial anticipation of Christmas blinds it to so many. A whole two weeks ago as we were setting up at our jazz band’s current venue, the owner was noticeably running Jingle Bells on his sound system. I said to him in my most winsomely convincing evangelical manner, I see you’re celebrating Advent right off. What’s that? he said. [Rubric: The congregation will now shrug, elbows in, palms up and extended.] 

So it’s Advent. It’s a blessed time that includes such unlikely fellow travelers as the BVM and Big Bad John. If it can include them in the same crowd, surely there’s hope for us. So an 800-pound Primate bangs on the narthex door. Don’t run to beat hell, instead, invite him in. Let him sit wherever he’d like, put out some mistletoe, and then get on with it. It’ll soon be Christmas, and the restoration of hardware isn’t all that needs to be done.

December 14, 2007

Travel

From my perspective cooped up here in a room that I call a “study” (what with all the books) and CP, the Librarian, calls the “stacks”  (what with all the dusty books), I sometime dream of being a travel writer. Maybe it would get me up and out. Trouble is, I don’t like travel. 

For one thing, I resent Uncle Sugar’s Airplane Protectors who on a recent trip threw away my 3.75-ounce bottle of Listerine because it was a quarter ounce over the limit. They already had  a barrel full of such wherewithal. Do you ever wonder maybe whether they start their own Department of Homeland Security Flea Market? A sort of latter day G I Surplus.  And thanks to the shoe-fuse bomber, I once broke a shoelace and almost missed my flight. 

One of the things I dislike about travel is that I have yet learned to pack. I’ve never taken a trip where I had exactly what I needed in the way of stuff, always too much. And it seems that it only gets harder to haul it all around. I tried one of those cases on wheels once and seemed always to be running into long, steep stairs in escalatorless airports.

Travel writers seem to have a lot more fun than travel agents and to be popular, as well.  Like all those other celebrities, they get to sign books. The movie, The Accidental Tourist, is a case in point. It’s from a 1985 novel by Anne Tyler that won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. What I remember most about it is Geena Davis, Kathleen Turner, and the family that kept all their stuff in the kitchen pantry in alphabetical order. 

Speaking of alphabets, my packing ideal must be Kinsey Millhone in Sue Grafton’s alphabet mysteries. She mostly wears jeans, sweat shirts, and running shoes. She owns one dress, a little black one for whenever the occasion demands, proving that need is a better packing system for travel than want. Trouble is, I never seem to be able to tell which from which, a fact that comes mighty close to describing my  life, for that matter. No wonder. 

(Okay. So this is a set-up for some wiseacre to say something about a little black dress.)

December 13, 2007

Risk

Advent 3A   Mt 11.2-11

There is always an element of uncertainty in a life of faith.

For this, faith must have an open mind. And open minds are not only marked by curiosity, they are also marked by risk. Curiosity and risk are two of the hallmarks of a faithful life. To make faith into a closed system, nailed down in some century long past and for all time, is not faith, but dogma. It has its place. It is orderly. Above all, it is safe, for there is little or no risk. It is the life blood of religions. But it is not faith.

Even John Baptist, as certain as he once had been, finally had his moment of zen there in the dark of that prison when he sent his followers to ask Jesus, “Art thou he that should come? Or do we seek another?” Are you the one? Or do we have to keep waiting — and looking?  If we’re to believe that meeting between Mary and Elizabeth, their moms, John spent his entire life pointing to Jesus and walking and talking and preaching the risk of faith.

When the Baptiser finally got prison for his reward and entertained his greatest moment of doubt, Jesus understood. Jesus answered John in effect with what John already knew. He answered him with the only truthful answers that can ever be given to certify the presence and work of Jesus, the Christ.

The work you have already witnessed, he said to John, continues. Be assured. The blind see. The lame walk. The deaf hear. The poor and hungry   are fed and finally know justice and peace. A broken world is being mended. And you know, as I, that wherever such healing takes place, there is present the kingdom of God.

We make covenant in our baptism to “seek and serve Christ in all persons… ” And we can fairly ask, “Yes, but how will I know this Christ?” It is the same question John asked. Our baptism not only commissions us to be Christians, it commissions us to a ministry altogether, like John’s, as well… a ministry to witness, to point, to say Here is the Christ… There is the Christ… in this event, in that healing, in that judgment, in that moment of truth.

Civil rights leader Howard Thurman set the stage for us to know this Christ when he wrote of Advent and Christmas as seasons of hope. “When the song of the angels is stilled,” he said. “When the star of the sky is gone. When the kings and princes are home. When the shepherds are back with their flocks. The work begins… To find the lost. To heal the broken. To feed the hungry. To rebuild the nations. To bring peace among people. To make music in the heart.”

But it’s no promise of a rose garden. There are “false Christs,” Jesus said. There are those who in his name would justify war, who would substitute piety for service, who would put orthodoxy before sacrifice, who would make of the gospel a system or a philosophy rather than the Way of life, who would claim me and then turn their backs on me, who would elevate doctrine before faith.

When we make that vow in our baptism to seek and serve Christ, when we ask that question with John, Are you the one? we’re soon, to take C S Lewis’s great phrase, surprised by joy to discover that we are not only part of the answer, we are the answer. In this present time in the church… we cannot just be handed out the answer by some prelate, we must be the answer by our faith. For it is the Christ in us that will always recognize and know the Christ in others — and in all.

December 12, 2007

The Hood

Like the kingdom of God, the neighborhood is not a place, but a relationship, not a condition, but a way of being.

 

Life works best in such neighborhood, that possible state of grace that allows us to live in and sustain the tension, say, that we find between religion and faith, that is, whatever we are bound to and whatever we can let go of, a tension that confuses so many, even today. The more religious I am, the more secure I am, the less risk I take. It is quite possible that the more faithful I am, the less religious I am, the more risk I take. Nothing in the Beatitudes suggests that “blessed are the religious.”

 

We could even ask and might better ask our myriad of presidential wannabes not how religious they are or what religion they are, but how faithful they are, not such pointless questions as whether they take the Bible literally, but whether they take it at all. And how.

 

Life is more livable if we move away from such attachment to detachment, something like stumbling and wandering around the neighborhood. St Dorotheus it was who said, “detachment is being free from wanting certain things to happen, trusting so in God that what is happening will be the thing you want, and you will be at peace with all.” Might it not be a way of searching for and finding the holy in holiday?

December 10, 2007

Mortgage

Mortgage is a lot in the news. It’s such an ominous word, having death planted dead center in its etymological DNA and all. Most of us middle class types, even if we’re only half-way making it, have at least one mortgage, probably two. It’s as certain as taxes, its fellow traveller (for only some, of course).

Those who know about such things tell us we should never have more than a third of our income tied up in paying off debt. Those of us  who don’t are getting foreclosed with no place all over the place. In a land of plenty like ours with all this milk and honey on our hands and with happiness as a constitutional right, it’s a downright shame.

It’s especially a shame when we look around at the way our leaders mortgage off the country like they’re doing and what they do with it and more every day all the while. What if the Asians foreclosed on us and the three trillion dollar debt we’ve run up over the last seven years? “What, me worry?” Shades of Mad magazine’s Alfred E Neuman. Whenever night falls, just sleep like a babe and have somebody else shred the eviction notices.

They must know something we don’t. We miss too many payments, those once so willing to help us suddenly want “our” house, “our” car all back, and whatever else we thought we bought — with interest, of course. Then we’re left with the kitchen sink out in the front yard so all the neighbors can talk. But of course, it’s not all careless borrowing. Those are not wolves at the door, but predator lenders who not only should know better, but do… and with all the protection from on high anybody ever needs.

They say we’re a Christian nation. That’s supposed to mean, at least, that we’re made solvent by grace, not bankruptcy laws. Maybe so, but don’t you get all holy serious and pious about it.  And for sure, don’t you lay a hand on those money changers, you.

December 7, 2007

Ambrosia

Ambrose, himself

 

Contrary to popular opinion, ambrosia is not known to be named for nor invented by old Bishop Ambrose whose feast today is usually preëmpted by Pearl Harbor Day, but it could have been. In Greek, ambrosia means “immortality” and the dish was thought to be what the gods ate on Mt Olympus.

 

The ambrosia* we’ll be eating around holiday boards these days will have oranges and coconut and cherries among less discernible things. Sharon Tyler Herbst’s “Food Lover’s Companion” (Barron’s, Hauppauge, NY, 1990) says on page nine that it is a “dessert of chilled fruit, usually oranges and bananas mixed with coconut,” and that it is also “sometimes served as a salad.”

 

Ambrose, you’ll remember, wasn’t even baptised when he was chosen bishop of Milan in 397 AD. He was just such a rock star and the choices available from holy ranks were so abominable, they simply couldn’t live without him. Had he been around these days with all the narcissism and other shenanigans it takes to get bishops into harness, he’d probably never have made it, and we’d continue to wonder where the dessert didn’t come from.

 

*Maybe “heavenly hash” might fit the old bishop better, but did they have marshmallows then?

December 6, 2007

Big Bad John

Advent 2A Mt 3.1-12

 

John, the Baptiser, was an impatient soul, a prophet with clarion lungs and precious little interest in the liturgical foolishness some of us get into. Indeed, were he to show up in one of the churches some Sunday morning, the more faint-hearted among us would likely cut and run.

 

It is well to pause and to remember that “prophet” means spokesperson, not fortuneteller, and that the role of the prophet is to unmask pretense. It’s not a welcome task. There is so much of it to unmask nowadays. Furthermore, there’s little evidence to suggest that anyone ever asked a prophet home for dinner more than once.

 

Prophets are necessary. The church is too easily tempted to think of itself as a kind of exclusive society. It seems sometimes even to glory in the idea. For example, the church rightly embraces its commission to make disciples of all nations, seems to understand this as what evangelism is all about, and can even lead the pretense parade about it.

 

Such, of course, is truly a noble charge and from our Lord himself. But it can become a dangerously subtle way to presume that evangelism simply means to make others like ourselves and then to overwhelm the world in “clonial” triumph. Dwelling on this, as we are prone to do, we can overlook an even more important and prior commitment, a wider and deeper evangelism to which we are called and which scares the socks off many.

 

When the early church was itself chosen, and given that “Great Commission” to make disciples, it was never set free to that ministry until it first attended to the “Great Commandment,” the commandment to love God and neighbor as self, and thus to become a community where that holy order is fulfilled. Some call this the so-called “prophetic imagination.” You’ll find it embodied deeply in the Baptismal Covenant.

 

Listening to and embracing these vows, we can hear them call us away from the presumption of grandeur and numbers and remind us that our true service to the world and an even greater evangelism is not all that different from the one described by the prophet in Isaiah… not to overwhelm the world in triumph but to suffer and die for the world in love and justice. The Baptismal Covenant’s prophetic message, as well, is not one to overwhelm, but to love. It is to that imaginative ministry that we are called.

 

Love, however, is singularly personal and at most a matter no wider than one’s family and close friends. The church as institution cannot love, and it is foolish to think that it can. But it can fulfill the Lord’s Great Commandment to love by creating and modeling a just community where people can live together in security and safety, and in mutual commitment and freedom to be at peace, to discover and to become who they are.

 

Advent calls us not only to the ultimate joy of Christmas, but as well to remind us that there is no more winsome evangelism than to become like a great magnet drawing women and men and children into this new creation.

 

Our colleagues in the United Church of Christ once dared such an invitation in a TV commercial, welcoming all sorts and conditions of folk. The television networks refused to run it, labeling it “too controversial,” and what is even worse, calling it contrary to the Administration’s opposition to gay marriage (which is not even mentioned in the commercial).

 

The UCC chose to live by such prophetic imagination and needs have no concern for its own righteousness, but only to help create a fair, just, and open community. Obviously, the networks were simply not into that sort of thing. Like the prophets, however, the UCC may well not be invited out socially a second time.

December 5, 2007

Whether

A newspaper columnist wrote recently that Iraq has become a quagmire of the vanities — a place where America is spending blood and treasure to protect the egos of people who won’t admit that they are ever wrong. 

 

I guess we could give these inadmissibles some slack, for it’s not all that easy just looking into a glass darkly and finding out you are wrong, let alone admitting it. Trouble here is the same folk who are so very wrong now started out then doing what they said God told them to do and which they of course thought surely must be right because God said so even if everything else seemed to suggest otherwise. Further, to admit that you are wrong about something God told you to do suggests that something must be awry  about God’s judgment. ‘Tis a pity, for they seemed so sure about that then and also convinced a lot of people who wanted to believe them. And spent a lot of money, a fact we don’t want to forget because the Asians who floated us aren’t.

 

But that’s the trouble dealing with God. It takes faith, and you can never be all that sure about faith, or God, for that matter. That’s why we talk about faith as risk, about whether the light at the end of the tunnel is just plain daylight or whether it’s the head lamp on the Rocky Mountain Limited. Even Jesus had his moments out there in the garden that night asking God to let him off the hook of what he had been so sure about earlier. 

 

It’s bad enough if it’s just me who’s wrong and who has a hard time admitting it. It’s when those with the big wrenches stick them into the gears at the wrong times and places. It’s getting to where in these past few years that “late  breaking news” is already broke by the time we get it. Just now, Iran has become  Also Ran, and you’d think we could relax, that  everything we’ve been told about it is down the chute, that the smoking gun wasn’t smoking after all, but that somebody else probably was. 

 

I imagine that the spin must have been lying in wait for just such a late break, because now we’re being told it really doesn’t make any difference at all whether our leaders were right or wrong. At any rate, maybe it’ll be made to look good in some Presidential Library where it can be chiseled into stone in big, bold Century Gothic.

 

 

 

 

December 4, 2007

Choices

A talk show panel host asked presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin about what might be the characteristics of a good president. She listed seven: Withstand adversity, accept diverse perspectives, loyalty, admit mistakes, manage emotions, define goals, and ability to relax.

A friend of mine is writing a book on presidential leadership skills from JFK to W. He says they run all the way from a lot to some to none. He did not go into any further detail with me. Neither did he say what sort of discernment and assessment capacities one might expect to be necessary from the electorate in choosing such a president.

Given the state of our public education systems, the apparent curricular preferences for vocational training over education, and the dropout rates before finishing high school, it’s no wonder the choices we make. If a voter has no knowledge of the humanities and all they entail as a whole, either his own or that of the nation and the world, hence little way of discerning or anticipating the effect of our nation’s leadership’s judgment on his or her general well-being and security, then how can we expect intelligent choices in the polling booth?

Pretty soon, Ms Goodwin’s criteria, so often missing in the electorate, will inevitably be missing or not even sought for in the candidates for the several public offices essential for our leadership. Or, put another way, if we can’t manage our own perspectives any better than we’ve been prepared so to do, how can we expect the United Nations to work? Pretty soon, we’ll not even know who belongs in or out of the Axis of Evil itself.

December 3, 2007

Overlook

We’ve a neighbor who’s a gerontologist at the big whoop-de-doo med center down the street. Daily, he walks his Dalmatian in front of our house. Neither he nor his dog are all that cautious about where his dog makes rest stops. There’s an ordinance directing a $50 fine for such matters left unattended, but we haven’t yet pointed that out to them.

The temperature the other morning was right at 32º. The frequent walkers and runners on our street are usually well-insulated at times like this. The doctor came by in watch cap, scarf, LL Bean-type jacket, gloves, all topping Bermuda shorts and with his bare feet in barefoot sandals, the dog, au naturel.

Our street is called Overlook Drive. I wondered if it was not too cold at the time for him to take it all that literally. But then I remembered what Edward Albee said in his lecture the other night about metaphor (OoN 28xi07) and about how we’re not all that on to it in our culture. On second thought, I figured there was more than likely neither much attention paid to it in the curricula of most medical schools, anyway.