January 17, 2008

Gates

Epiphany 2A Jn 1.29-41

Peter was at the Pearly Gates before gate became a fashionable suffix for trouble. And Andrew, his brother, was even earlier, out there following the ragtag country preacher around when he suddenly got hooked enough himself to pass the word. And you know the rest of the story.

But we don’t know all that much about Andrew. The legend is he was probably crucified on an X-shaped cross and meant at least enough to the Scots that they named a golf course after him. But maybe the most important thing we know about Andrew was that he was a kind of advance man. It was he, after all, who got brother Peter on the sawdust trail.

The church makes a lot out of Peter. The celibates, of course, would rather ignore the reference to his mother-in-law. Rather would we claim that he started the apostolic succession without which the church would not be very whicher, but probably never meant to become the apostolic success that some seem to make of it. But we’ve never gone to much trouble over Andrew other than he’s got a special day right around the beginning of Advent.

When you think about it though, the ministry of the most of us is more like Andrew than Peter. We’re not called to rest on our laurels, to relish in the Petrine glory, waving the keys about.

We’re called to climb first out of the trenches and face the onslaught, to stake out the claims on the mission front, to go and tell it on the mountain, to love our neighbors enough that they, not we, can bask in Peter’s glory, golf course or no. 

Finally, of course, it is ours to take it on the lamb for God.

January 16, 2008

Curious

John Ciardi’s a favorite of mine who once did five-minute segments on public radio called, Here’s Words to You. He was a poet, he wrote about poetry, he translated Dante’s Divine Comedy, and he wrote poems for children. 

 

I treasure especially his A Browser’s Dictionary and Native’s Guide to the Unknown American Language. Apparently with not enough title, it is also called A Compendium of Curious Expressions & Intriguing Facts.

 

There’s a page 95 entry on the adjective “curious” that says it means disposed to learn, to be informed, and that it also means unusual. I suppose there’s nothing so unusual about that, but the more interesting part is when he goes on to say that James Fenimore Cooper wrote in The Pioneer: “let him (Indian John) lend the doctor a hand, for old as he is, he is curious about cuts and bruises.” All of which means that Indian John has special knowledge of how to treat such wounds. Cooper used curious in its root sense, now obsolete, from the Latin that “would probably be alive today were our graduates Latin-literate.” (Ouch.)

 

We churchers sometimes call a clergy assignment a “cure” meaning care, management, supervision, actually characterized more by special care and ability. The connecting sense between unusual and marked by special skills, says Ciardi, is ingenious. Interesting that in churchese, the curate is usually only a lesser satrap.

 

He doesn’t mention curiosity’s special role in the demise of cats. Nor does he, save in his aside about graduate students, say anything about its centrality of importance for any educated and thoughtful person. When my children were very young, we read with much delight the stories about Curious George, the one who was the real monkey.

January 15, 2008

Lament

It’s Martin Luther King’s birthday, and I’m mindful of Jesus’s lament, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!” (Mt 23.37)

He might as well have said it not just about Jerusalem, but about us, as well (and probably has — and does). We’re pretty good at knocking off prophets, ourselves. It’s bad enough on the face of it for him to remind us of that, but when he started likening himself to a mother hen, he really started meddling. Our new presiding bishop called him Mother Jesus once, and all hell broke loose among the breakaway, grass-is-greener-in-Africa crowd. Of course, Dame Julian had already said the same thing a few centuries before, but nobody noticed because she at least had a guy’s name.

Once a week on the way to band I pass an otherwise typical residence among many, save that out front of this one there’s a big sign that says “Psychic,” together with some other words I don’t quite catch. There are never any cars parked there, so I wonder if there are ever any customers stopping by to get psyched, if, indeed, that’s what takes place.

The presence of that sign recalls county fairs with fortune tellers and palmists with pictures of hands and bald heads all marked off in sections numbered to mean and conjure up different things. It was not uncommon to call these entrepreneurs “prophets” in the sense that to prophesy means for some to see into the future. And I suppose in a way it does.

But that’s not what Jesus was saying about prophets. He surely had in mind those Old Testament top guns like Isaiah and Jeremiah, Hosea and Amos and the borderline John Baptist and any or all of those other meddlers. All of whom met with somewhat inglorious ends.

Nothing much had changed by his time, nor has it by ours. The prophets are still among the most loyal to tradition. They don’t predict, they indict. They don’t read palms, they expose palm artists. They don’t go to prayer breakfasts with the power structure, they throw out the doughnuts and show it all for what it is. 

We remember Martin Luther King today, some of us reluctantly, of course. Some wouldn’t even follow suit with the rest of the country when the nation set aside a holiday for him. But some of us care enough even to have written into the calendars of our liturgies a special prayer*, a prayer that calls up Moses, not because of his hydraulic skills, but maybe because he kept talking about a “promised land.” It’s also a prayer that also calls him a prophet, probably because he kept hanging out our laundry so often. So, like all the rest, we killed him, too. Denial along with grandiosity is often a murderer, sometimes literally, and by nature is always scared silly of the truth.

So it’s MLK’s birthday once again, and he’s back in the news. Not so much for that, but for all the wrong reasons and largely because some folk have got all in a sweat that it took him and his colleague who was certainly no prophet, but was no less than the president of the USA, to get the Civil Rights Act into law. 

After all, that’s what prophets do, and that’s largely why we never invite them home for dinner more than once. Anybody who remembers King’s president (who at the time was also ours and for whom we’ve no special liturgy that I know about) knows pretty well he needed a lot of reminding, arm twisting, and even inspiring to get him to moving and shaking the Congress into any kind of action on that delicate subject.

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem… ” when will you ever get it straight?

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*Almighty God, by the hand of Moses your servant you led your people out of slavery, and made them free at last: Grant that your Church, following the example of your prophet Martin Luther King, may resist oppression in the name of your love, and may secure for all your children the blessed liberty of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

January 14, 2008

Stretch

The tears were still in the news yesterday. Actually, it’s whatever it is that comes just before tears that’s in the news. In all the reruns, mayhaps to divert us from the poll-ish jokes, I’ve never seen so much as a teardrop, just moist eyes, a mild chokey swallow or two, and some refreshing candor. 

Some women whose opinion I trust suspect it was phony. Maybe so do you. A lot of men do, especially those who’ve seen once or twice in their romance histories what they’ve thought was something like it. But me, wandering around out here in gullible’s travels, I think it was a sudden, public encounter with a deep sense of vocation and an honest let-me-tell-you-about how I really feel, all with maybe even a touch of I-wish-I’d-just-practiced-law and never met whats-his-name. 

Whatever. For me, I’m convinced that when it comes to being human, it’s a reminder that women probably know better what that means, do it better, and if we’ll but listen to them, can show the rest of us better how to. 

And being human is not only just what the gospel and the gospel’s church is about, but also what this country is about in its marvelously clumsy constitutionally bill-of-rightsy way. I suspect the founders were surely in touch with their feminine consciences when it came to their understanding of what it means to be human, even if to get it said, they had to hurdle all their inherited macho impediments all along the way. 

It’s not easy being human. It’s a real Gethsemane to engage the freedom to make choices to love and create and reason and live in harmony with all of creation and with God. Just look around. But take it or leave it, that’s what our tradition says it is… the way of it, the truth of it, the living of it, the Judaeo-Christian being of it. 

The ordination of women as priests is a case in point. It was perhaps the greatest thing this church did in the 20th century. We had a bishop who didn’t think so and was so intimidated by it that he called it “apostolic suicide.” He was a real phrase-maker, that guy, and I always envied him that, but on that subject, he was also only a few strokes short of being a fool and not one to be suffered gladly. 

One of our sharper theologians said recently with considerable insight that the Episcopal Church should put away its delusions of grandeur, that we are only a small protestant denomination  whose only reason for being is to proclaim the Gospel. If we were not here, the Roman Catholics and the Baptists would keep Christianity going in America for some time to come. She said further that the Episcopal  Church has a distinctive niche in Kingdom-economy: to be a crucible of Gospel ferment and experimentation, to be a Church that takes risks to celebrate God’s newfangled sacraments, to hold them up and present them as Kingdom-heralds to our broken and divided world. The ordination of women and now the opening up of the doors to gays and lesbians is surely what she means. Maybe it’s an example to which we all might pay attention.

Whether or not we elect a woman or an African-American president this time, we’ve got the opportunity for the first time, and it’ll not be the last time. What’s really refreshing is that we just may be  getting in touch with the possibility that has been planted deep in our political DNA all along, and is now being realized by introducing some reality into all the perennially truly phony “smoke-filled” discourse.  

The time is on us to stretch this nation’s great potentialities more than ever to become who we really are — not only free to choose, but free to choose to love, to create, to reason, to live in harmony with all of creation and with God. E pluribus unum.

January 12, 2008

SSN

Some of our town’s thieves recently lifted a few computers from the voter registration office. The stolen laptops just happened to contain the names and social security numbers of hundreds of thousands of voters. A lot of people including CP and me are not a little anxious about this. Somebody did get fired over it, for whatever good that will do. And there’re services you can engage to put stops on any purchases that show up with your SSN. But that’s probably a lot more an inconvenience than it is a comfort.I looked in Google maybe to find something I could use to write about social security like I knew what I was talking about for a change. But I was so overwhelmed with information that I decided just to wing it, instead. I did find that I was only twelve years old when the program began, and that it is the inheritor of several off again, on again attempts to do something similar, one of the largest efforts having been during and following the American civil war for the millions of widows and children not only in grief, but in serious economic peril.My maneuverable dictionary (the one I can more easily lift) just writes off the noun “social” as “sociable,” but succumbs to verbosity with the adjective. It comes from the Latin meaning “companion” or “ally,” “gregarious,” “of plants that tend to grow in groups or masses,” a lot of others, and the obvious case of the Social Security Administration’s “of or relating to human society and the welfare of its members.” And then there’s always socialism and the Marxians and all.As an aside, I had an uncle who even though more or less financially independent was a lot prouder than he ever was wealthy. When his first social security check came in the mail, he called his broker and asked him what it was. When he was told it was because he’d turned sixty-five, he went into a mild rage, tore it up and threw it into the wastebasket.Though pride has on occasion tripped me up, I’ve never had that kind. Indeed, I am more than grateful for the monthly reminder not only of my so-called entitlement (a word the Republicans use only for corporations and the like), but especially of all those boomers out there keeping the fund solvent — on paper, at least.The recent theft, though, is a serious matter.Privacy has been increasingly on the wane in our society of late. Now it’s not only privacy but liability we’ve got to worry about, in our town at least. The SSN is a handy form of identity, but now there’s the new nationwide ID card for everybody fifty and under. That is, as well, a kind of comfort, for they say it’s to protect us against terrorists, and that they don’t expect any terrorists to be fifty-one or older. I wonder if this argument will work the next time at the airport when they riffle through my suitcase, throw away my valuables, and make me go barefoot? And at my age.

January 11, 2008

Progress

Around the corner from our house glaringly visible and audible, there now rises under construction a 6,000 square foot, three-story Marriott. There are actually no signs identifying it, and the rumor is that it is actually a house, a neighborhood residence, for two people. The appearance defies the claim.

The lot on which it is located was once a small forest of handsome trees accompanied by thickets of bushes and other miscellaneous flora. As if this were not enough pleasure, it was also a sort of mangled and lawnless central park for a myriad of beasts among which were great horned owls that hooted in the night to each other, at least one elegant red fox, not-so elegant possums, rabbits, a coyote, and heaven knows what other less public and more introversive residents.

It is a trend in our town, this “house.” Wherever one home and two cars once existed, three or four plus twice as many cars now take their place. Together with all this and as always, our potholes remain surrounded by our streets which enjoy no such expansiveness.

The larger these multiple-residences, the grander, it seems, the conveyances required to move their occupants about. Satirist Dave Barry once wrote that the company that makes the Suburban SUV plans next the Subdivision SUV in order to compensate for all this progress.

OoN, public spirited as we are by nature, wrote to our new councilman wondering if he might know of whether our town has a planning commission and, if so, do they actually plan or might they simply receive commissions. He is recently elected to his office and ran uncontested. He was most solicitous, said he would “see.” We invited him that when he did, might he come and look around the corner in our neighborhood at the new Marriott and see whether someone planner might have somehow misread the appropriate building code.

On the other hand, I asked myself, why get so worked up? The more polution, the more global warming, the more real estate is being deiced, the more room in the inn.

January 10, 2008

American Jesus

Epiphany 1A Mt 3.13-17Perhaps nothing so identifies Jesus with us, nor us with him, as does his baptism.The tender and touching nativity stories of Christmas evoke in us a warm and universal, but often distant compassion for him and his family. John Evangelist’s brilliant philosophical apologetic that the Word became flesh stuns us with awe.But Jesus’s baptism reveals for us how deeply he identified with his people… how he crossed the Red Sea out of slavery with them, how he entered into the Promised Land with them. In his baptism, he accepted their heritage and their hopes as his heritage and his hopes.So, in our baptism, do we identify with him in this same heritage and with the hopes of all those who have followed him down through the centuries to this very day. In his baptism as in ours, the rubber meets the road and we fast-forward into this new season called Epiphany. Here we are, alongside the three kings, riding camelback across the desert on the way home. What in God’s name do we say about where we’ve been and what happened to us there? Yes. It’s show and tell time in the neighborhood.Stephen Prothero has written a book which tells some of the ways we’ve answered that question. It’s called “American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon.” We’ve covered the spectrum with our answers, he says — from the second-person-of-the-Trinity Christ of the Creeds to Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightened Sage shorn of miracles, resurrection, and divinity, from the amiable, countercultural hippie-cum-rock-superstar fostered by the “Jesus freaks” of the 1960s to the willowy “sweet savior” given us by Currier and Ives and described by Dorothy Sayers as the “household pet” of little old ladies and pale curates.One worries, he suggests, with all these assaults on the Christian tradition together with the disintegration and misuse of the biblical foundation, that this Jesus, the Lord of the marginalized and forlorn, may soon become the man nobody knows in 21st century America [NYTimes, 8i04, p B9].With those in the church in these times who are so imprisoned by their obsessions, with their squeamish uneasiness about the “lifestyle” of some of their own colleagues, and with their lashing back in anger and judgment, fear and denunciation of the very tradition that has nourished them through the ages, we, ourselves, may well be distorting the image of Jesus. This Jesus of ours could soon become the man nobody knows not only in 21st century America, but in 21st century Christianity, as well.It is, indeed, show and tell time.Let us return to his baptism for a moment and listen to what God’s commanding Spirit proclaims to the world — “This is my beloved son; with whom I am well pleased” [Mt 3.17]. Jesus is what God means not only for the fulfillment of human being but by the very being and becoming of human.Here is the image as God intends it, the image in which we share in our own creation, and the same freedom which we are given as Jesus was given to accept God’s calling as the church, the Body of Christ in the world. To wrestle with it in our own wilderness. To question it in our own garden of Gethsemane. Or, of course, not.We, by grace, freely receive that commission, just as we, by grace, may freely reject it. Will it be the Gospel’s Jesus or the American Jesus? Will Jesus become the man nobody knows and we the people everybody knows as empty, introverted narcissists, navel-gazing our way into eternity?We pray in today’s collect, God… “grant that all who are baptized into [Jesus’s] Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior” [BCP p 214]. We embrace that in our Baptismal Covenant. There is no holier order and there is no more strategic evangelical commission than this and the way it gathers into itself all the dimensions and hallmarks of Christian life and mission.Listen again to the great verbs. Continue in what the apostles have begun. Persevere in resisting evil, and failing, return to the Lord. Proclaim the Good News in both word and example. Seek and serve Christ in all persons. Strive for justice and peace. What does it mean to be a Christian in any time and place? There’s the answer in our Covenant, quite as clear as can be. May the primates take notice. We need no otherWe’ve not made a contract to carry that out. We have made a covenant. A contract is by law entered into with clear and equal understanding and agreement as to the terms or conditions, results, consequences, and implies not only cooperation, but compromise. If broken, by either or subsequently abolished, it no longer pertains. A covenant is by grace initiated by one with others and even if broken, yet endures. A broken contract ends. A broken covenant lives on and by grace is renewed. Our Baptismal Covenant is a relationship initiated by God, to which we respond in faith. Once made, it is eternal, broken or not, and may always be healed and restored by forgiveness, reconciliation, and return. In such healing there is present the kingdom of God.This church we embrace is founded on that covenant with God, not on a contract made with the Windsor bishops. It is founded on a promise not to make life easier or more orthodox, God knows, but to make life more purposeful, more meaningful, not for self-serving, but for serving selves. When we are baptized, we say “Yes” to that covenant. Just so, did Jesus. So how do we use such freedom? By hoarding it or by giving it away?We shun political action in the church at our own peril and destruction. As most frequently practiced, politics is about power — who has it, who doesn’t, and over whom it is exercised, with rewards to the shrewd and the strong. It can and often does become a natural nursery for greed. From this does it get its scarlet name. Not often do those who practice it remember that the very word means “of the people” and that therein is the true authority that can be led to implement the community which grants it to be utilized for the fulfillment of God’s purpose.Our mission, our authority is not about telling people how, but about showing people how, not only about answering and providing, but also about creating an environment in which we and others can become and fulfill God’s image within us. Will it be the American Jesus or it will it be the Jesus with whom we are baptized into new life?

January 9, 2008

Curves

On the way home from strength training and walking laps this morning, I was thinking about the workout franchise called Curves. It’s probably a male thing, but I wouldn’t deny that the name has a certain appeal to it that seems somehow missing from one like Cardiac Rehab.

I suppose the intention for our program is to rehabilitate, and that’s all well and good. But from the looks of the coffee and homemade pastries sessions that customarily follow the morning drill it may just mean to rehabituate, like what got us there in the first place. At any rate, I think finding a better name for the program might be more conducive to the regular discipline which I am sure it intends.

I thought about suggesting we call it Abs. Such a name might be more inclusive and less sexist than Curves. After all, I do consider myself a feminist (with moments of inappropriate distraction, of course, that you don’t necessarily need to know about). Or maybe a name like Balance would be fitting. There’s always a certain amount of that necessary to achieve our goals.

On the other hand, reflecting back on myself, the thirty or so compatriots with whom I associate in these periodic endeavors, and those postprandial gorgings, maybe Abs would be too much to expect. Would you believe perhaps Flabs?

January 8, 2008

Strike

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert winged it last night for the first time since the writers’ strike. Over the past few weeks,  they’ve been making it with reruns.  

Considering they extended the guest interview segment a bit longer than usual last night, they did passing well filling the rest of their half-hour by improvising the Iowa and New Hampshire dog and pony shows. 

The strike had little or no effect on OoN. There’re no writers to speak of on this show. Though I’ll admit a professional or two here and there might enrich our punch lines. As for reruns, I’m certainly not beneath that. OoN’s been bamming along now since the summer of 2003, mostly at least five times a week and keeping a careful archive. So there’s a barrel of reruns handy whenever the muse takes a day or so off. One or two of our regular readers do not hesitate to let me know that they know that I know that the muse knows about these. 

At dry times, there’s always the temptation to plagiarism. It’s a different kind of rerun when you don’t steal from yourself, but the temptation to look in other barrels is there no less. After all, those NT synoptic guys weren’t beneath a bit of adaptation here and there, maybe more if they’d had John and all his fancy ideas around. 

 

January 4, 2008

Chrestomathy

Once upon a time, it came my good fortune to attend a used-book sale for a library fund raiser and to find a paperback with the title, “A Mencken Chrestomathy.” H L Mencken, the inveterate newspaper man, has long been a favorite of mine. To find a book by him with such a strange name and with the subtitle, “his own selection of his choicest writings,” was irresistible. Of course, I had absolutely no idea what chrestomathy might mean, even though with the tinge of Greek about it.

For sure, that much proved accurate, and then some. I might have guessed that there was an element of Mencken’s curmudgeonry in its selection. His editors and journalist colleagues had balked at the title, of course, saying the word would be unfamiliar to many readers, as it was to them. He responded that thousands of excellent nouns, verbs, and adjectives that have stood in every decent dictionary for years are still unfamiliar to such ignoramuses and that he did not solicit their patronage, anyway. He suggested that they should be left to continue to recreate themselves with whodunits and leave his vocabulary to him and his own customers who have all been to school.

Chrestomathy (accent on the antepenult) in its true sense, he wrote in his preface, means “a collection of choice passages from an author or authors.”  He chose to ignore a later meaning of “especially one compiled to assist in the acquirement of a language.” The word is at least as ancient as “scientist” (1840) or “anesthetic” (1846). In Greek, he wrote, it was contrived by joining chrestos, meaning useful, and mathein, meaning to learn, and it goes all the way back to Proclus Disdochos, who used it in Athens in the year 450. Mencken’s Prologue continues at some length and rings numerous fascinating changes on language and his skill with it.

The book is comprised of dozens of quite short entries under some thirty-one sections including such headings as Homo Sapiens, Types of Men, Types of Women, Religion, Morals, Music, The Lesser Arts, Buffooneries, and on and on. The ones I have read command almost instantly one’s appreciation for the exclusiveness and mystification of irony and the remarkable capacity for truth which that particular category of humor inevitably contains if one but searches for it.

I presume correctly or incorrectly and have gathered from many comments that numerous readers of OoN have at least a passing curiosity about irony and, of course, also about matters of faith and religion together with a working knowledge of their differences. Mencken, as  you might imagine, shares that with you. His entry entitled “The Believer,” though it unfortunately seems to equate belief with faith, yet contains some element of truth and may be of some interest. Herewith…

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. There is thus a flavor of the pathological in it; it goes beyond the normal intellectual process and passes into the murky domain of transcendental metaphysics. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) a capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable, for disappointment, being essentially an objective phenomenon, cannot permanently affect his subjective infirmity. His faith takes on the virulence of a chronic infection. What he says, in substance, is this: ‘Let us trust in God, Who has always fooled  us in the past‘” (p 11). 

I would contend, though I am glad I’d not have to do so with Mencken, that faith is far more a way of life unto which reason is in service than it is servant to a system of thought expressed through belief no matter how rational. So there. 

H L Mencken, though? How sorely, indeed, does the world need more of him.