March 31, 2008

Holy

It seems the very nature of religious institutions to resist becoming a church.

Take the Virgin Birth, an irony if ever there was one. However you feel about it, there’s this to say, God can handily turn creation into the Way without any assistance, thank you, from us males. Any church worth its brocades and brass ought to be able to handle such a notion with grace and humility.

Not so, the religious institution. It soon took hold of Mary and all her exemplary faith, humility, and commitment, gave her an Immaculate Conception into earth and a Bodily Assumption into heaven, thus handily compromising her womanhood. 

Next, it told women to be like the BVM. Then it told women they couldn’t be priests. Obviously, anybody like that is too holy for Holy Orders.

March 28, 2008

Humour

Early medics thought that what they called “the humours” pretty well summed up life. We have four, they postulated. Too much or too little of one throws us out of balance, and we get sick. They considered health and a good sense of humor one and the same.

It was a good idea then, and it still is now.

For one thing, humus (don’t forget old Adam), human, humility, and humour have always had a very recognizable DNA in common. Instead of the smothering and ponderous sobriety so often characteristic of our goings on, we churchers might well remember that we, together with God, are in the human-making business, and that that’s what humility and spirituality are all about.

Bob Hope had it right. His family, gathered around his death bed and giving him one more of the audiences he so dearly loved, asked where he might wish to be buried. “Surprise me,” he said.

March 27, 2008

Upper Room

Easter 2A Jn 20.19-31 2008

We give Thomas more grief than he deserves. We seem to remember him more for his doubt than for his faith. We call him Doubting Thomas when Courageous or Faithful or Risking Thomas might be more appropriate to his enterprise.

While the rest of the disciples were cowering full of resentment and fear that they’d bet their lives and whatever fortunes they had on a loser, Thomas was out pounding the pavement, risking arrest, renewing old contacts, checking the want-ads, and looking for work.

He didn’t believe the talk about Jesus. He wanted better evidence than the behavior of his cowering colleagues. Then, when he got it, when he got what he wanted, he signed on for good or ill. He accepted his commission as an apostle. He wrote a gospel. And, some say, he started a new church over in India. “Brother Thomas’s Sawdust Trail,” (aka Mar Thoma). Sounds like a hustling evangelist to me.

We don’t have the hard evidence Jesus presented to Thomas. (If walking through closed doors with holes in your side and hands can be called “hard evidence.”) John knew that, but he apparently knew something else, as well. Faith is not only always surrounded by doubt and without hard evidence. Faith creates both doubt and evidence.

Faith is risk, and risk wouldn’t be risk without doubt. And faith that comes only after evidence is no faith at all. It is trust, yes, but not faith. Faith is that daring commitment that climbs out on life’s limbs and leaps. And that is all the evidence we get.

And it works two ways. My faith is a kind of evidence for me and maybe also for you. And your faith is a kind of evidence for you and also maybe for me. Our faith — all that touch and go — as a community is what makes church church. The ekklesia — the called — doesn’t even deserve the name if it is not first and foremost a community of faith — and probably of doubt, as well. And there is no evidence for that — even the kind that moves mole hills — until there is a pulsating, dynamic, nonjudging heart of love and justice at its core.

The fearful disciples in the upper room would probably never have convinced Thomas until he experienced the vision of the risen Lord, himself. Nor if fear is our only motivation and keeping us in our upper rooms would we ever convince those who pass by. Not until we show the world by the daring way we love one another can our witness ever become the winsome and compelling evangel of the Lord.

For it is in that nourishing and healing love that transcends both faith and doubt and even hope, if St Paul is to be believed. And wherever such love is found, that is where the Lord is truly risen, where He is risen, indeed. It is there and only there that we find “church.”

March 26, 2008

Liturgies

A friend of ours has one of these postage-stamp gardens outside her condominium back door, complete with birdbath and feeder. The birds come and go, altogether lackadaisical to her presence.

A mockingbird and a cardinal have built nests there. One in a bush, the other in a vine, clearly visible and accessible, not just to them, but to anyone who cares to look.

The cardinal’s is a masterwork of architecture, symmetrical, each tiny twig and bits of silken stuff fitting together precisely, as if straight off some avian genetic blueprint. The mockingbird’s is a picture of fractal chaos, casually thrown together, barely adequate for any potential occupants, seeming as if it might collapse for anything other than a soft landing.

The cardinal has one song. The mockingbird’s repertoire is unlimited, some say even to mimicking a cell phone. Given the order and structure of its home, the cardinal seems quite appropriately named. On the other hand, the mockingbird must surely be an Anglican. Is it any wonder the music of our liturgies?

March 25, 2008

Boundaries

The lots on our hill tend to be more or less trapezoidal, narrowing near the top, fanning out down toward the street. The people who’ve lived up here for forty years or even more never give that much thought. A yard is a yard is a yard.

Not so with the newer residents bringing with them a superfluity of surveyors to figure out the boundaries all over again, you’d think sometimes for the first time. So we’re frequently surprised that a bush or a tree or a line itself isn’t where we thought it was all along. It never made any difference before. We just enjoyed it or ignored it together.

When these changes come along, you’d think it only a minor kind of getting-used-to, that everything would settle down sooner or later. Not so. One of our newer neighbors, a medical school faculty doc than-which-there-is-often-no-whicher, has got big dogs. So he’s built an eight-foot fence around his back yard. The woman next door has lived there longer than the doc has on this planet. She was naturally curious and wondered out loud one day about a couple of bushes she’d grown fond of over the years suddenly having been uprooted by the fencers and carted off to the trash. The doc got in a huff and called her “devious.” It hurt her feelings.

And we wonder why the United Nations doesn’t work.

March 24, 2008

Justice redux

Our country’s leaders get scarier with every new greed-based initiative and failed commitment. Few seem to realize that kind of behavior is ever so much adultery all the same, that infidelity wherever can assume more shapes than one, even oval.

A newspaper columnist put the current damage assessment right: “I’m afraid to drink the water,” she said. “I’m afraid to breathe the air. I’m afraid glaciers will melt and seas will rise. I’m afraid to visit California in the dark. I’m afraid the Dow will dip below 5,000. I’m afraid Russia will take leave of its senses. I’m afraid China will take leave of its senses. I’m afraid North Korea will lob a missile our way. Soon, I’ll be fearing fear itself.”

Such anxiety literally cries out for pastoral care and presence. Such failure of leadership calls for prophetic indictment. Such an environment calls for a church. Of course, there’s that irksome old problem of whether the Bible is infallible, whether our clergy are orthodox, and who’s shacking up with whom. There’s simply no time for justice.

March 22, 2008

Vigil

Our family tradition as the children of Abraham is told through stories. All these stories, however old they are, however embroidered they are, are our stories.

The Easter Vigil liturgy gathers these stories of our heritage, our genealogy, together in one celebration that consecrates our beginning into that heritage through our baptism and again renews it through our family reunion in thanksgiving around the Holy Table.

Over and over, we come together to tell these stories. Some actually happened at a place in time. Some probably did not. All of them may not be factual, but all of them are true. For myths and stories and family remembrances and no telling how much of our anecdotage are always true. We cannot live well without them. We dare never to try.

These stories are true because they seek meaning rather than fact. These stories are true because they seek understanding rather than explanation. And these stories are true because they, like the carillons in bell towers, ring changes on the three great themes of our biblical tradition.

We are created in God’s image, we are as God imagines us to be. God’s gracious love for us is completely, totally unconditional. Our lives in faith have no other purpose save simply to be all that we can be.

The humorist Erma Bombeck had a most appropriate word for us in this season. She said, “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I have not a single bit of talent left and can say, ‘I used everything You gave me.’”

Jesus offered his life like that all the way from the Wilderness to the Garden to the Cross and said, “It is finished.” He had used it all. He had made Good Friday good.

That we can strive through faith and God’s grace in our own lives in our own ways in our own stories is enabled in the Easter Eucharist and in this community together with all the others who have gone before. This is where we consume such love that we may in turn be consumed by it.

March 21, 2008

Oddly

Oddly (and tragically) the one remark by Pastor Jeremiah Wright that has proven most controversial seems to me fairly basic to a responsible understanding of the Christian faith. Stripped of the emotion and the phraseology, he is saying that the United States of America stands under God’s judgment for our actions in just the same way that we believe other countries stand under God’s judgment. Surely we don’t think we get a free pass on the torture we have inflicted in our current as well as past wars, the bombings of civilian targets, resorting to armed combat for economic reasons, the practice of slavery, and on and on. I am seriously depressed at the depth of the civil religion practiced in this country that would exempt us from being held responsible for our national sins. Are any of us reflecting on this? This is not a conservative or liberal matter is it?•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••Note: The Revd Thomas B Woodward, friend and colleague, recently made these comments about one of the current misunderstandings sweeping the presidential  campaign trail. I wish I had. So I asked his permission to forward them as today’s OoN. Tom lives in Santa Fe with his wife, Ann. He and I have had some considerable years in orders and especially in college and university ministries that kept us a lot on our toes. He may be reached at… 

March 20, 2008

Do it

Maundy Thursday 2008

Memory may well be the only way we know who we are.

When we lose it, as Alzheimer’s devastation can attest, our world disintegrates. Every morn when we awaken, we must “reinvent the wheel.” We are known, but we do not know. We forget, but we are not forgotten, for so much of us exists now only in the memory of another.

So it is with those who follow the Way from Jesus to the Christ. Come back to this moment. Through scripture and our family history, remember that we are the children of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel and Leah, as many as the stars, as many as the grains of sand.

Come back to this moment. Through symbol and story. Through the cross, through color and chorale, through holy community and Holy Communion. See it, hear it, be it.

Do this — in remembrance. Not like a class reunion to celebrate nostalgia, as sweetly painful as is the sound of it. Not to rehearse our anecdotage, as boringly painful as is the drone of it.

For we are here not merely to share a memory, but to be a memory, to answer a mandate to remember — and not by some lowest common denominator of passive aggression, but by lifting high the cross of aggressive passion. “Do this,” our Lord commanded on the very eve of his crucifixion, and do it “in remembrance of me.”

Do this in remembrance that we — and the world to which we are called in service — may know and may never forget.

March 19, 2008

Sacred

Sacred space.

It is a phrase one encounters. It usually has something to do with religion, especially organized religion. We churchers like to think of our places, our spaces, as somehow sacred, not only just sacred in themselves, but more sacred than other places which may not seem so sacred.

The temple of Jesus’s time had what was believed to be a most sacred space. It was known as the “holy of Holies,” sacreder than sacred itself. It was even curtained off from possible view so that those who were not considered by religious authorities to be holy enough to gaze upon it could not. In recounting this ecclesiastical archeology, it is significant to note that when Jesus died on the cross, the curtain went kaput. And not without reason.

Matthew put it like this: “And Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom; and the earth shook, and the rocks were split; and the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised… and they went into the holy city and appeared to many. ” (Mt 27.50-53).

It was an audacious symbol. Even the stones finally cried out. For it meant, at least, that there are no sacred spaces more sacred than others. Now, all God’s creation and all God’s time is sacred, none holier than any other. Like nothing else in our calendar, Holy Week affirms this audacity, this affront to religion, for the irony is that it takes the calling of it holy to make known that nothing is holier than anything else. And it is to remind us that we profess an incarnate religion. And that we are an incarnate people, a sacramental people, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reality people.

These few days which we call holy so that all else can be known as holy are begun by our recalling the daring march into Jesus’s Jerusalem. Once more, the adventure surrounds our own Jerusalems. Once again, we are challenged by the absurd rashness of it all. The Gospel which gives birth to the church now calls the church to give birth to the Gospel. Contemptuous of religion’s legalisms, our faith brings us to enter again into the tragedy and into the comedy of love and justice and hope.

We mark and celebrate these events, these realities, with a liturgy, a work of the people, which risks a same-old same-old affected only by what we bring to it. In whatever way we can, are we caught up in the intrepid daring of our Lord and we pray, May we as well be grasped by this refreshing and restorative dawning, a light in these dark days that opens the way for others. As today’s collect affirms, “confident of the glory that shall be revealed” (BCP p 220).