February 14, 2008

The Way

Lent 2A Jn 3.1-17

When Jesus told Nicodemus he must be “born anew,” it proved to be what I think unintentionally started a firestorm of evangelical craziness midst a so-called born-again Christianity. Nicodemus didn’t get it right at first. Instead, he got all anatomical and GYN about it. But he finally figured it out. I’m not so sure they ever have.

Water and the spirit, Jesus said. The image reminds me of when a football team douses their coach with a barrel full of iced Gatorade after winning a game. Nothing might wake up one’s spirit like a heavy dose of iced-down juice to remind us that baptism doesn’t birth our spirits, it mostly reminds us that we have one, that we are one, that God creates us as spiritual beings for want of being human and sets us forth on a trek to discover our humanity, a discovery that bears all the striking resemblance to a new birth and then gives us a Covenant to help shape the labor pains. No wonder we’re confused and want to make something else of it.

Nicodemus got a quick lesson for his slow learning curve that night visiting Jesus, lurking around to stay out of sight of anybody who might get out of joint about the company he was keeping. He got a lesson that in spite of all the proper religious spin he had on his life, it simply wasn’t enough. He set a splendid example for us that in spite of whatever our spin, unless we get our priorities straight, we’re wasting our time — and Jesus’s time, too. Unless we realize that this new birth is God reaching into our spirits and putting them back on track, spirits that are already there by virtue of God’s imaginative creation. But, as Nicodemus discovered, that’s not where it stops.

The twelve steps of recovery program fame contain one hurdle after another. But one of the most challenging — if the evidence means anything — is the third. It says, “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God.”

Like Nicodemus, many folk come seeking in a Step Meeting what they know not. More than likely, if they’ve tried the church or a parson, they’ve found something wanting. They’ve heard over and over again, “If you’ll just have faith, all will work itself out,” and too often with the implication (read judgment) that faith is what enough of they don’t have or they’d either never have the problem or too soon get over it.

When they come up on number three with its “turn over your will and life” challenge and its risk and God talk, they react with, “Here we go again, more religion.” Even if they get past the admitting and surrendering of steps one and two, they inevitably balk on three. Maybe Nicodemus had the same problem.

One of my most refreshing experiences with the third step came at the hands of a nun in recovery talking about her own problem taking it. She realized, she said, that her problem was that she’d been trying all this time to turn her will and her life over to her understanding of God and not to the God of her understanding. So, perhaps with Nicodemus. So, for sure, with me. Religion, with all its sometime good intention, can so easily get in the way of the Way.

February 14, 2008

Valentime(sic)

Early on, greeting cards sent on St Valentine Day commonly included comic lampoons. It’s only of late that we’ve got into the delicate sweetness-and-light-with-borders-of-old-lace syndrome.

Actually, what we do on this Day is a much altered survival — as you may have guessed by now because so much stuff is — of an ancient Roman mid-February fertility rite too ghastly to describe in a family column, but a more modern and less macabre variety of which is frequently the subject of TV dysfunction commercials. I can report, however, that the rite was thought to be equally quite as useful.

On the other hand and for whatever it’s lagniappe value, there were two fellows named Valentine, both martyred in Rome at different times in the third century. But their connection with the modern observance has nothing to do with what little — which is very little — is known of their lives. The name seems to be a common sort of name association — valatin cognate with galatin, a gallant, a lover. Hence, mayhaps, sweetness and light and lace is on target, after all.

The idea that saints, if, indeed, these two were saints (martyrs, maybe, but saints?), who have been assigned particular functions by chance association with their names seems strange to many, except, perhaps, the Hallmarkers.

There are those of a more pious bent who are stricken by the notion that any observance at all of such a time is irreligious. And then there are those of a less pious bent who’d probably be altogether pleased, the less religion, the better.

FootNote: The forthcoming Sunday preachment usually occupying this space (in this case Lent 2A) will be along shortly. First, ya gotta have heart.

February 13, 2008

Fading Ember

These current Lenten Ember Days make me mindful of the canonical requirement that postulants and candidates for Holy Orders (sic) “communicate with the Bishop personally or by letter, four times a year, in the Ember Weeks, reflecting on the individual’s academic experience and personal and spiritual development” (Canon III.4.8).

When some of us now aging more or less affirmatively were in seminary back in the mid-twentieth century, Kathleen Winsor wrote “Forever Amber” and accelerated a craze that launched the bodice-ripper boom. For the times, the movie might be said to be risqué. It antedated ratings, so you took your chances — usually without hesitation.

The Ember Days come four times a year and eventually force one’s imagination to write creatively and convincingly about academics and spirituality which some think are largely mutually exclusive. So, taking a bit of a risqué myself, I once wrote, “Dear Bishop: Did you hear about the seminarian who wrote to his Bishop and signed the letter, Forever Ember?”

He wrote back immediately, “Dear Fading Ember: That’s what you’re going to be if you don’t start convincing me that accepting you for the Postulancy was not a grave error in judgment.”

February 12, 2008

Design

The latest broken news is that there is now another version of the so-called Anglican Covenant. It is also-called as the St Andrew’s Draft. It was prepared by the Covenant Design Group, itself, after a round of golf in Scotland. An earlier version was called the Nassau Draft in their continuing and often failed attempt at inclusiveness.

When I learned of this still newer version, I called OoN’s UK stringer to see if she could find out more. By sheer coincidence, she had already been following the Design Group across the continent, anticipating the possibility of a momentary news item. As it was, I collected her in the very same clubhouse where they were and where she was playing a round of Texas Hold ‘Em. She had just heard the news about the revised version and had already cornered the CDG spokesperson for an interview which she was about to phone directly to our stateside newsroom as soon as she had played her hand.

She said that he had told her that designing a covenant is not all that easy impeded as it was by there already being so much contention about the process. He was clearly annoyed by her questions as, when she found him, he was turning his scorecard over to his caddy for a proper accounting by the club handicap officials.

He spoke adamantly and reemphasized how we should understand and show more appreciation about how hard is revising a Covenant. He went on that she should know how the Judaeo-Christian tradition already lays great stock by the so-called idea with the Old and New Covenants, which are also called the Holy Bible, but that they are somewhat dated and obviously not all that easily understood. Nor did he seem to appreciate what he called “you errant Americans” who are continually arguing that God makes all things new as if you had some special revelation of the Divine Plan not readily available to the rest of us. For an example, “take that liturgy that you presumptuously insist on calling the Baptismal Covenant.”

Nothing could be more confusing, he said, as the Group is becoming inundated with enquiries about just how many covenants can the Anglican Communion bear. At this point, our reporter suggested that maybe what we need is another Elizabethan Settlement. We could call it a “middle way,” a via media, she said, a novel idea that should make everyone happy, or should at least avoid infuriating any more people than was absolutely necessary.

This would mean, of course, still another and perhaps newer edition of the Book of Common Prayer rather more like the older one that continued the tradition of being as vague as possible. This motive of achieving maximum inclusiveness with minimum change was once an important, even defining aspect of Anglicanism, at least until recently. One would think that the Covenant Design Group is heralding a move to understand God as making all things old.

By this time, other members of the Group were attempting to join the conversation. It was becoming clear to her that she had trapped herself in breaking the first rule of investigative journalism never to become an apologist. This, of course, had successfully ended the interview just as her reporter’s handbook had suggested it would. So naturally, she apologized, not to the spokesperson, but to our international desk’s editor with whom she usually filed her reports. Being of strong will, however, she returned to finish playing her hand in Texas Hold ‘Em, this fascinating new game which was sweeping Scotland.

February 11, 2008

Sackcloth

It’s sackcloth and ashes time. Canon Quirk called and said he went churching yesterday morning hoping to hear again about Jesus’s First-Sunday-in-Lent temptations and for counsel what he might do about his.

Instead, he got another travelogue. The preacher is one of those who has been around a lot to holy places and apparently can’t wait to remind us that he’s been where Jesus or somebody has also and what it’s like. This time, he was candid enough to say he didn’t walk around the same wilderness for anything like forty days and nights and that he never met the devil at all. I asked whether he said he thought he could turn stones into bread. Quirk said that never came up, just left the congregation wondering how he might have answered if asked.

I was surprised at Quirk’s call. He usually has nothing but disdain for those who get all holier-than-thou seasonally and then return to their nefarious ways on the in-between Sundays, then hang it all up on Holy Saturday afternoon. When I remind him Lent is at least an oversized tithe of the year, and that’s better than nothing, he never seems all that convinced

If Lent affects anything for me, it at least gets at my conscience. I shared parish boundaries with a younger presbyter colleague some years ago who every Lent fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays and got me to doing the same. I was never all that comfortable with it, but was inspired by him and his abundant spiritual energy, whatever that might be. I wonder now that he’s a lot older whether he’s still into this sort of thing. I’m not.

Being Lent, I looked up “conscience” in one of my favorite word-crutch books only to find the entry referred me directly to “remorse.” Turning there, I read enough to discover that remorse comes from a word meaning to bite again and suggests that maybe one’s conscience is something that gnaws inside. I already knew that, so when it also said there may be an earlier Latin connection of mors = bite with mors = death, I decided that was enough, Quirk’s provocation to the contrary.

It’s too early and too cold for Lent, anyhow. Even our Lenten roses are dormant. I’m following their lead.

February 8, 2008

Babel

I was telling a Brit friend of mine that there’s a move underway in our land to make English the official language.

“Finally,” he said. “We thought you never would. We’d given up over here altogether.” He paused for a moment, then added, “But where would you get enough trained teachers, for heaven’s sake?” Then he sighed, “Well, it is a noble idea, but don’t you really think it’s rather late?”

I hardly knew what to say. I certainly didn’t want to tell him that those who oppose the movement — and there’s quite a majority — are being labeled as traitors who should be convicted of treason and at best exiled as unpatriotic, if not just hung. Frankly I was embarrassed, first because I feared he might agree, but actually because this kind of name-calling is such a typical reaction by those whose insecurity and violent, mean-spirited mindset is altogether consistent with illiteracy.

Thankfully, he was courteous enough not to mention he was already quite aware of our current president’s considerable lack in language skills. That concerned me, too, for one cannot help but wonder and need not be reminded about what hardships making English official would probably work on him.

We both agreed that if one would succeed in an alien land, one must surely learn the indigenous language, whatever it might be, though that never meant giving up or not using one’s own. But then we remembered what God did about the Tower of Babel and those folk getting all uppity because they were so proud of having an official language. Thanks to them, we’ve now got over 6700 languages in the world, Pentecost to the contrary.

After we disconnected, I recalled how many lives were saved in World War II by Native American soldiers. They would encode top secret plans in their unbreakable tribal languages then translate them for those whose only official language was English.

February 7, 2008

Compulsion

Lent 1A Mt 4.1-11

Anybody wrestling with vocation is probably influenced and even tempted at one time or another by the world’s three grand compulsions: relevance, control, and notice.

When we’re pondering what we’ll do with our life or when we’re wondering what on earth we’re already doing with our life, we want our life and work to mean something, to be relevant. We want to have at least enough control over it and our environment to keep “between the curbs.” And we want to be noticed, if even only for Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes.

The daemons presumed compulsions like these to be going on with Jesus, maybe even before he did. They seemed always to recognize him and what he was about before anyone else. Something like this may be true for us. The devil is, indeed, in these kinds of details. Those stages in one’s life preoccupied with confusion about vocation can be the neatest briar patches of details as to make the devil feel right at home. Like why else was the devil waiting out there in the sand dunes until Jesus was half starved to death before moving in on his puzzled anguish?

You want to be relevant? Satan said. Then turn these stones into bread. You want to be in charge? Here’s a whole empire of kingdoms and all the power and glory that goes with it. You want to be noticed? Then take a flying leap off the pinnacle of this lofty temple. Surely the angels won’t let anything happen to the Son of God, himself. No vocational headhunter could come up with better tests than these then or now for an individual or even for an institution.

Yes, even for an institution. Our vocation as the church is not exempt. Indeed, clear and strange parallels of temptation are going on in the church’s life at this very moment. We’re in a kind of wilderness, although I wonder whether it’s by choice, a self-imposed test. There’s a wait-for-us contingent claiming to be the church, organizing and hoping and threatening and spending a lot of money just to be the most relevant, the most noticed, and the most powerful, even if it means pulling down the rest of the whole community just to make it so.

This contingent’s name is legion. Most know who they are. They want it all — relevance, power, and most of all to be noticed by the major worldwide Anglican brass. It is astounding the deference paid to the primates and the Windsor Report and the self-styled and so-called instruments of unity which are proving to be anything but.

The devil expected to have a field day by using these temptations against Jesus. The church’s breakaway contingent is dangerously close to being caught in the same web. But the gospel as Jesus understood it and as it has been received never fails to confront every one of such pretentious priorities as it asks us not for relevance or power or fame, but for justice and peace and a fair concern and respect for all.

Of all the answers Jesus gave Satan and of all the answers we must give ourselves and those who would dismantle us, one stands above all. “You shall worship the Lord your God, and God only shall you serve.”

This major turning point in Jesus’s understanding of himself and his work became the furnace of his transformation to protect him from becoming a victim of society and from becoming entangled in the illusions of a false self. We are faced now, as well, with our own challenge to protect us from becoming a victim of society and from continuing to be entangled in the illusions of a false church.

In the face of these temptations, Jesus affirmed God as the only source and substance of his identity. In the face of these temptations, so must we affirm God as the only source and substance of ours.

There’s a lot of Jesus-talk among the dissidents. Like that of Scripture-quoting daemons, it can be devilishly manipulative, mesmerizing, and as downright wicked as it was out there in the desert. It is altogether too seductively tempting to wrap that mantle around oneself and claim to be speaking for God.

It would be so easy to think that these problems are simply and really just bad management got all out of hand. But I believe them to be something far more sinister where management just becomes something behind which to hide real purposes. It is absolutely no surprise to me that these arrogant and destructive forces in our Communion are circling for what they suppose will be the kill. Obviously, they are clearly casting about to make friends wherever they can find them.

What Jesus told the devil in the wilderness, he tells the church today. Someone has put it like this… Lent is an even more appropriate time than most to remind us that religion’s proud towers are for princes and tourists. That its intricate doctrines are for the angry and the arrogant. That its pretensions to power are just warmed-over Caesar outlined in fancy script.

The call of Lent is clearly that “You shall worship the Lord your God, and God only shall you serve.”

It has also been said that when the kingdoms of this world become the idols of our pride, they are not humanity’s glory, they are its mistake. Can you imagine Jesus vested in silks and sitting on a throne demanding that we do him homage? Rather might he be here at table with us erasing centuries of warfare, turning us to discover our common humanity, easing us out of our historic enigmas and into the shared language of love and justice and peace.

February 6, 2008

Manhattan Transfer

Ash Wednesday 2008

Two friends of mine once sang as part of a vocal quartet at a midtown Manhattan church. They tell this story:

“After a lovely, reverent, and rueful Ash Wednesday service, a small group of us adjourned to the subway and our trek home.

“We were still charged and energized from the solemnity and sweetness of the service and stood around talking, waiting for the train to show up, when a rather wild, somewhat deranged man came up to us pointing at the large ashen crosses on our foreheads. We started gently to explain, but he clearly had his own agenda. He was not satisfied with our answers.

“As the train pulled in, we piled on. The semi-scary man kept haranguing us. As the open subway door kept bumping against him, he shouted, ‘Whose ashes are they? Which dead person’s?’ And we kept repeating, ‘They’re not from a person! They’re from palms… and they mean…. ‘ But he kept on, ‘Palms don’t have ashes!! Who is on your heads?’

“The door closed. The man stood there on the platform, shouting, as the train left the station. He was so sure that we were marked with human remains, as, of course, in a way, we were. It was Jesus on our heads. It is Jesus on our minds. We’re all marked somehow, carrying our wounds, our memories, the signs for which we stand, seen or unseen. It is a deep connection. The man’s voice rings in our minds, ‘Who is on your heads?’

“Many passengers around us also had smudgy crosses on their foreheads. To break the mood, we smiled plaintively at each other as we swayed into the night. We made a rough joke that if anything happened to any one of us, the police would charge our priest. His fingerprints were all over the place.”

New York, New York, Start spreading the news…

February 5, 2008

Cycles

There are the so-called crisis liturgies that come only once in a lifetime — baptism, marriage, ordination, burial, and the like. And there are the cyclic liturgies that repeat themselves through the years, for some, perhaps, ad nauseum — Christmas, Easter, anniversaries. But for others, with renewed meaning and vigor as our own personal and communal histories turn through our lives.

The Eve of Ash Wednesday may be one of these. A sort of ordered mad zaniness makes the substance of it, an hilarity over anticipating the rigors (for some, anyhow) of the Lenten shroud that covers ever so finely as the ashes to come. We call it Mardi Gras from the French for Fat Tuesday, and Fat Tuesday from using all the lard in the house for festive baking before the meatless Lenten fast. Some call it Shrove Tuesday in honor of the good riddance of old sins and the exciting anticipation of a journey into new ones.

“New Orleans” is an almost instant thought integral to the image of this day. New Orleans, whose being was savaged almost beyond recognition, now suddenly bursts alive again with the mere thought of it, Mardi Gras. And throughout this planet of storms and quakes and floods and wars and incompetency we all rejoice and let the jazz ring out. We are the saints, our gospel tells us, and once more, we’ve done gone marching in.

February 4, 2008

Ya gotta have…

For Ash Wednesday or Lent or Valentine or Whatever…

From the prophet Jeremiah: “The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt — a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer 31.31-33).

Only a few years after my seminary days, I had the privilege of serving on a conference staff with one of our church’s outstanding theologians by name of Norman Pittenger. Even more impudent then than now, I played a game of stump-the-professor with him. Never mind who won.

I asked him a question I was hearing more often than I could answer. “How does one ever know the will of God?Rather than stumble around, pondering and harrumphing, as I had hoped he might, he quipped instantly, “Just trust your hunches.”

That’s a hard charge for those of us “from Missouri,” who have to see the evidence, and who think intuition is for the birds. But it wasn’t for Jeremiah, the prophet whose words I’ve just read for us.

Jeremiah stood in the biblical tradition that one’s heart is the seat of knowledge, the place where the hard choices are made, that one’s heart is the source of spiritual energy and courage and the ultimate storehouse where fundamental allegiances are kept. And he was apparently giving this tradition a lot of thought.*

But be that as it may and rather like today, alongside that notion was this other tradition that gave immutable certitude, as well, to an external law of life and covenant given by God to Moses and developed over the centuries, both literally and virtually graven in stone.

On the other hand, Jeremiah’s hunches about God’s will were keeping him up at night. He was already convinced that nobody ever invites a prophet home to dinner more than once. And he knew full well that the old legal, hard-nosed approach never did much good, anyway, and that God was suggesting a radical change as is often said about God, making all things new, if only he’d listen. So he stood up in the marketplace, took the risk to threaten his already shaky reputation, and shouted…

“Behold, the days are coming, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant… not like the covenant which I made with (your) fathers… my covenant which they broke… ” But now, “I will put my law within (you), and I will write it upon (your) hearts; and I will be (your) God, and (you) shall be my people” (Jer 31.31,33b).

Well, we apparently got the word.

On Ash Wednesday in every Lent, the special collect asks God to “create in us new and contrite hearts” (BCP p 267).

And Matthew’s gospel reminds us that where our treasure is, there will our heart be also (Mt 6.21). And as if all that is not enough, one of our Lenten collects prays that “our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found” (BCP 219).

In this wartime Lent, we are called once again as followers of the Way and reminded to search even more deeply into our hearts where love and God’s law are inseparable, into our hearts where love is commitment, not mere disposition, and into our hearts where love is a deliberate act of the will, a choice, not a mere responsive feeling. And where most importantly — if Jeremiah is to be believed — God’s covenant with us is written and can nourish and grow.

In these same hearts, we all pray fervently for peace. Some, not without considerable risk, march and demonstrate for peace. The covenant God makes with us, together with the Incarnation that brought that covenant to fulfillment in his son, not only calls for peace on earth, but in its shocking scheme of things, asks us, as well, both to love and to pray for our enemies — one thing in peacetime when our enemies may sort of come and go, quite another in wartime when they may be wearing a dynamite corset with their finger on the trigger.

I thought, how refreshing to be reminded in a time of so much ill will that we truly are called to be people of good will who strive for a government of good will, and how it dare us not to take notice of the irony that these enemies for whom we now pray, together with so many of us, are also children of Abraham, and that we are systematically killing each other and decimating the very spiritual homeland that God gave to us all.

After 9/11, the mystic Thomas Keating spoke of an “ocean of grief” that swelled out in its wake. And what is grief, but a broken heart, not broken only over our loss, but even more deeply perhaps broken over the covenant which God writes inside us in our very being. On the death of John F Kennedy, Senator Pat Moynihan spoke of the Irish words that apply, as well, to us Christians. “There’s probably not any point in being (a Christian),” he said, “if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.”

All this fear and grief only heightens our sensitivity to the horror and the hunger and the pain and the injustice that go on somewhere in our world every moment of every day. It only intensifies the need for what we do as the church all the time. If what we are doing here day by day is not relevant, even more relevant now, then it is never relevant at all.

We are people living in this covenant community trying to discern and to do God’s will. We are not of one mind. We have not a common understanding of these complex issues. Nevertheless, we come here again and again to be shaped by the gentle touch of God’s peace.

Let us, then, realize that our hunches and our hearts are often one and the same. Therefore, let us remember that in every choice we face we must steadfastly will the good as we understand it and put ourselves into the hands of God to be shapen at God’s pleasure, then doing that it is altogether likely that trusting our hunches will indeed open our hearts and reveal God’s will. Then will we know a peace that is not the mere absence of war, but rather the presence of love. And like Jesus said, “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt 6.21b). After all, what is Lent but an affair of the heart?

*In both Old and New Testament, the heart is the seat of wisdom (1 Kgs 3.12) and thought and reflection (Jer 24.7, Lk 2.19), the instrument of belief (Rms 10.10) and of will, the principle of action (Ex 35.21) which may be hardened so that it resists God (Dt 15.7; Mk 16.14). Heart is the principle both of virtues and vices, of humility (Mt 11.29) and pride (Dt 17.20), of good thoughts (Lk 6.45) and evil (Mt 15.19).