August 29, 2008

Difference

Conventions tend to be conventional. Certainly our own, the generally conventional big fat Anglican wedding we churchers throw every three years. And, as well, the national political ones that come our way every four.

Watching the one ending just now and hearing how exceptionally “historic” it is, one can certainly agree that it is certainly unprecedented. MLK and LBJ who especially had so much to do with making this day possible are surely smiling along with thousands, even millions of others. On the other hand and anticipating the next one due up shortly, one might not expect anything quite so historic, but if the past is any indication, one can easily expect some notable change in direction.

Shifting into my intuitive gear, all this boils down for me as to be whether we seek for our presidents someone who has the good judgment to be a servant leader or, as we so often hear and as if it were all that mattered, someone who has the “experience” to be a Commander-in-Chief.

I suppose it’s only natural to equate that C-in-C facet of the presidency with bellicosity. But this is to risk missing the point our founders made by including it as only one part of the president’s job description and whether or not the office holder had any or no military experience, but primarily to assure that the armed forces remain under civilian control and to dampen their inherent and understandably more aggressive leanings. Whatever the undertaking, judgment always trumps experience, especially the kind of judgment arising out of a servant power that is never a subjugating trigger-happy dominance, but an authority that not only influences others, but is also open to influence. That kind of servanthood acknowledges and respects the freedom of another and seeks to enhance the other’s capacity to make a difference.

I rather think that to be the kind of difference in leadership this nation is seeking that it might be brought around after so many years of the opposite kind.
________________________________________________________________________
Note: Thoughts about servanthood are influenced by Bennett Sims’s brilliant monologue, “Servanthood: Leadership for the Third Millennium,” Cowley, 1997. This book is a refreshing resource for enhancing an intelligent franchise in these perilous times.

August 28, 2008

Gardens

Pentecost 16/17A 2008

“I never promised you a rose garden.”

That’s the often familiar copout when the chore we took on for somebody doesn’t turn out as comfy as we thought it might. I don’t know why roses. Rose gardens are lovely, but anybody who ever planted one knows they’re no snap to nurse, and that their thorns last a lot longer than their blooms.

Being faithful to the call of God is like that. Do it, and life right away is likely to get complex and tumultuous as well as simple and peaceful. The stories from Jeremiah and Paul and Jesus that make up today’s lections can all testify to this. The common theme? Faithfulness will either get you nowhere or maybe somewhere you’d rather not be.

Jeremiah tangles with God’s dynamic and swings between faith and doubt, peace and turmoil, certainty and confusion (Jer 15.15-21). Paul’s commitment to the Gentiles only drives a deeper wedge between himself and the Jews (Rms 12.1-21). Jesus’s certain awareness of the perils ahead challenges the loyalties of his disciples and puts their relationship on very shaky ground (Mt 16.21-26).

Any church worth its salt lives in this kind of tension all the way from leaving its doors open 24/7 and risking theft and vandalism to exposing — even “wasting” — its program and budget in the interest of the sick and the poor and dispossessed. Too many of us never get that far being preoccupied with orthodox niceties like we so often are. Faith is always risky and even clumsy, especially when we try to use canon law and discipline as instruments for grace and love.

Today’s church is too often busy setting standards for membership in pew and pulpit and requiring of its clergy to withhold its blessing for love wherever and in whatever form we may find it. When Jesus sets his demand for discipleship — Take up your cross and follow me — it’s not in terms of rules to be followed or specific tasks to be accomplished. He talks about the need for us to get out of the way of ourselves with an open invitation to follow him when we have not the vaguest notion where his Way will lead and are not all that sure that he does, either. In short, to let go and let God.

As well with Paul’s counsel to the Romans. “Do not be conformed to this world… ” but be “transformed by the renewal of your mind” Do not be conformed to the world’s obsession with the symbols of power and prestige, but be transformed in Christ. Do not be conformed by and to the exploitation of others, but be transformed by letting your love be genuine. Do not be conformed to the way of vengeance and hatred, but bless them that persecute you and, as Jesus urged, even love them and offer them justice.

Facing the world’s current traumas, how is such a ministry informed and shaped? What might the world’s families be like now had our response to 9/11 been to set out to conquer poverty and genocide by pouring our billions into such a mission rather than into the explosive and interminable violence of Iraq? How might the victims of 9/11 and their families feel about our giving love and generosity and justice in their name and the memory of their loved ones? How might our armies of death now function and what might they have accomplished had we enlisted them rather as legions of peace? What if we had truly risked modeling our constitutional democracy as a palpable community of justice more consistent with our founding rather than trying to transplant it into a cultural soil not all that fecund and receptive?

I don’t remember any rose gardens ever figuring in the gospel scheme of things. But I do remember a couple of memorable gardens that did. Eden and Gethsemane stand prominent in our tradition. One, a garden of irresistible temptation, another, a garden of redemptive commitment.

August 27, 2008

Lip

When the Pharisees and Scribes asked Jesus to explain why his disciples didn’t wash their hands before eating, they weren’t seeking insight. They were demanding proof of worthiness.

On the other hand, Jesus saw people’s needs and met them with no expectation of response, no policies, no procedures. It was all so simple. Any casual reading of the gospels makes it clear.

Isn’t it ironic, the maze of proprieties we churchers have cobbled together over the centuries and all in the name of one who had so little use for them? It’s like the Victorian father taking his son out behind the barn and saying, belt in hand, “I’ll beat the love of God into you if it takes all night!”

The Pharisees and Scribes meant well. It was in their job description. We mean well. What is religion, after all, but a corporate human endeavor to render faith both memorable and manageable? Who can blame us for that?

Well, Jesus for one. And he had Isaiah to back him up. “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men” (Is 29.13; Mk 7.6f).

I suspect God had enough lip long ago and would like some heart for a change, maybe somewhere else beside only on bumper stickers about NY.

August 26, 2008

Spines

It is so easy to take things for granted. Like spines.

One person’s stenosis is another person’s disc. CP’s got the disc and the left leg sciatica. I’ve got the right. We each have one good one. Trouble is they’re hooked to the wrong hips. Another impediment (sic) is that the one who can’t cook for nothing (guess which) is momentarily the abler of the two and so — gets the kitchen duty. The diet suffers while the nerves get on our nerves. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches go only so far.

When one of our progeny was about six, I fixed him a bowl of cereal one Saturday morning while the rest of the brood slept. When I served him, he said, Gee, Dad, I didn’t know you could cook. I haven’t progressed at all. He’s fifty-four now and, by the by, an excellent cook.

One of the blessings in all of this — and there are many — is home communion last Sunday from one of our parish LEMs who’s just recently started into this ministry. She was pleasant and efficient as can be, but mumbling a bit about having to do one of her first visits to an old east Texas preacher of all people. I tried to lighten things a bit and lit a candle. She called me high church.

August 21, 2008

Who?

Pent 15/16A Mt 16.13-20

“Who do (people) say that the Son of Man is?”

It may have seemed to his companions that he would never ask. Jesus doesn’t quite strike me as the type to care all that much what other’s think, but perhaps things had gone on long enough. So when he finally asks them the question, it seems that he really wants to know how they are sizing him up more than just to hear what’s the skinny on the street.

“Who do (people) say that the Son of Man is?” Their answers are consistent and probably not all that surprising. John the Baptist. Elijah. Jeremiah. Or surely one of the prophets. Then Jesus asks, “But who do you say that I am?”

Peter gets it. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” With this realization — profound in its seeming simplicity — Peter wins the Blue Ribbon Prize — a set of keys to the Kingdom itself. But that’s not all. He is also handed the very heaven-sanctioned authority to forgive. One wonders how he’ll feel about that when he soon denies that he ever knew Jesus and suddenly be in need of some mighty big-time forgiveness, himself.

Who do we say is this Son of Man?

Over the centuries since that question, we’ve come up with some answers. They’re not always answers to the questions people ask, but they’re answers, all neat and organized, systematized and religionized. On this key question, the church answers with what we call Christology. “You are the Christ!” Peter realized, as do we. But I doubt he had anything like the Athanasian or even the Nicene Creed in mind.

Rather might it be like the person attending her first Quaker meeting and being deafened with silence. Finally, she asked her neighbor in the pew, “When does the service begin?” “As soon as the Meeting is over,” came the gentle reply.

The Baptismal Covenant sets us altogether straight on this service and emphatically answers our Lord’s question once and for all. “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” the Covenant asks. There in the midst of that question is Jesus’s prior one — “Who do people say that I am?”

So where do we look? I once rather impertinently asked one of our church’s leading theologians “How can one know the will of God?” I expected him to pause, even to ponder. But no. His answer was instant. “Follow your hunches,” he said. Look for the Christ, he implied, look for Jesus in yourself, for that’s where he is. And that’s what this ministry is about. Those who are called out to follow the Way need no further creed, no further confession, no further systematic theology, and, God help us, no more denominations.

Like Jesus gave Peter the keys to kingdom, Holy Baptism gives us the keys to the Kingdom’s mission. We’re given the authority to forgive and to restore and to reconcile. We’re commissioned to seek out this Jesus in ourselves, in our intuition, in our God-given hunches, in our imaginations. Thus finding him, we’ll more than likely discover that he doesn’t look all that different in our neighbors.

August 19, 2008

PDQ

Canon P D Quirk seems to come out of some sort of self-imposed hibernation from time to time. That is, I never hear from him until some hot button issue surfaces (at least, hot for him, if not for others). Then, for some reason unknown to me, here he comes. Why he always singles me out, I’m not sure. I know he must have a friend or a colleague somewhere in his pantheon with whom he could discuss the things that are on his mind. Needless to say, the current tempest in a ciborium (his delightful phrase) rattling the Anglican franchises fits rather precisely his quasispiritual patterns of mind.

Then, there’s our quadrennial electoral cycle for getting ourselves a president, an idea that really annoys him and his Anglophilia, as he says that if the results mean anything at all, it never seems to work all that well. If, indeed, he says, as we claim to be the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth, then how come we’re so up to our red, white, and blue wazoo in debt. And to the Chinese, of all people? If we insist on starting a war that we claim is for everybody’s best interest and rarely is, how come we can’t finish it one way or another? Or, as he said, one time, are wars the only way Americans can learn geography?

I never know what to tell him. Usually, anything I say just hammers him off on another tangent that is hard enough to follow, let alone answer. For the moment, though, he’s currently distracted from the Anglican two-step and back into the presidential wannabe spectrum.

He rang me up the other day and asked how come our greater satraps have all the time got evil on their minds. And why, when they talk about it, is it always somebody else who’s either doing evil or who is inherently evil or who is seesawing on an axis of evil, whatever that is. Why is it that the evil one is never ourselves or better, still, the satraps themselves.

What got next to him the most, was the question about whether or not if one were president would they defeat evil. For one thing, he said, it took Jesus to do that in the first place, and that made it a done deal. The cross put evil in its place once and for all, but that it’s people who keep leaving the door unlocked for evil to come and go as it pleases. All people! he bellowed through the phone. Beside that, God would take care of Satan and all his minions when the final role is called up yonder, as it were.

It’s probably not all that consistent with professional integrity for me to be telling you these things, but I know that somehow you’ll understand. I also hope that letting you in on Quirk and me once in a while might give you some further notions about evil for your own self-understanding and some appreciation for what I am occasionally up against.

August 18, 2008

Evil

Clinton Quin was bishop of Texas during the late 1920s to the mid 1950s. He would sometimes introduce himself, “I’m Mike Quin. I work to beat hell.”

It’s a noble vocation for us churchers.

Just the other evening on the telly a similar vocation came up in an interview with the current presidential wannabes. I don’t remember hell being mentioned, but evil got its usual press. Hell and evil may be presumed to have a lot in common, but evil seems to be the in term being used these days, sometimes with more or less reckless abandon, and most of the time, anyway, by people who, like most of us, seem to know more about what it does than what it is or who have an overly simplistic notion about it that denies how altogether complicated it is.

Separately, the candidates were asked the same questions. Does evil exist? Do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it? Both agreed that evil exists. Like so many of us, neither defined it, but mostly just talked about what it does, maybe how it’s recognized. Like a supreme court justice once said about obscenity that he couldn’t define it, but he sure knew it when he saw it.

So, as an opener, and so we can have a few notions we can disagree with, Scott Peck suggested some diagnostic characteristics of evil in his book, The People of the Lie — The Hope for Healing Human Evil. Here’s what he wrote on page 129.

“In addition to the abrogation of responsibility that characterizes all personality disorders, evil would specifically be distinguished by a) consistent destructive, scapegoating behavior, which may often be quite subtle, b) excessive, albeit usually covert, intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury, c) pronounced concern with a public image and a self-image of respectability, contributing to a stability of life-style but also to pretentiousness and denial of hateful feelings or vengeful motives, and d) intellectual deviousness, with an increased likelihood of a mild schizophrenic-like disturbance of thinking at times of stress.”

More generally, he also wrote that evil is that force, residing either inside or outside human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. Goodness is its opposite, goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness. And evil is the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own sick selves (Ibid, pp 43 & 119). In short, it is not only scapegoating, but seems to have an altogether casual disregard for its accuser.

Frederick Buechner calls our attention to the cross and says that practically speaking there is no evil so dark and so obscene — not even this — but that God can turn it to good. No less, he adds, the problem of evil is perhaps the greatest single problem for religious faith. (Wishful Thinking, p 25) It seems obvious that evil, like good, pretty well requires us human beings for a carnation ever to make its case. Like the daemons Jesus cast out of the Gerasene that required somewhere to go only to get a herd of pigs for their efforts.

Can evil be defeated? The pigs drowned, but the daemons? Even our scapegoating seems not always that efficient. Like somebody said, When I point one finger at something or someone for whatever reason, there are usually three pointing back at me.

August 16, 2008

Olympics

Some standup said recently that the reason Americans watch the Olympics is because the two things we hate most are foreigners and gym.

I’m still trying to unpack that, like if that’s the case, how come we watch? I’m not getting anywhere with my exegesis, only that I don’t especially care for watching the Olympics and have not even a lot of interest in who wins. Except how come the Chinese can spend all that money on all that razzmatazz and still let all those thousands of earthquake victims continue to suffer?

Pondering, though, I’ve a sneaking notion that our more or less chronic illiteracy and lack of curiosity as a people may have something to do with it. Xenophobia, of course, is what hatred and fear of foreigners is about. Illiteracy strings out a lot of people, places, and things about which we know nothing, which are, it be said, foreign to us, or “dead to us,” as Stephen Colbert might say.

Illiteracy and fear (and don’t forget violence) are bedfellows in general, and when the fear is incarnate in someone who’s more or less like us but at the same time isn’t, then that’s just more than we can handle. It’s too confusing. And confuse me not with my xenophobia for I am already content to let it be and occasionally stir my adrenaline.

But there’s yet gym. Gym and compulsory chapel were the two things most of my fellow laggards and I dodged in school. When sometimes I wonder why, the only reason that occurs to me is that maybe they were both too organized and demanded of me more than I was ever willing to give. But what has that got to do with my watching the Olympics?

Actually, I don’t know. Organization, I suppose. But what the comic said yet continues to intrigue me. Maybe it’ll come to me one of these days.

On the other hand, this seems as good of a place as any to report to you that one of our town’s council members has finally got enough signatures to put on the ballot the question of making English our official language. My Brit friend asked which English. I told him I didn’t know. I didn’t tell him I was surprised that considering the results of our usual elections, I didn’t know that that many people could sign their own name.

August 15, 2008

Resistance

Feast of Mary, the Virgin Mother

It seems almost a principle that the very nature of religious institutions is to resist becoming a church.

Today is Mother’s Day for Jesus’s mum. So let us take the Virgin Birth, an irony if ever there was one and a good illustration of this principle. First and however you feel about it, there’s this to say in its favor: God can handily redeem all creation without any assistance, thank you, from the masculine side of the coin. Any church, even caught up in its brocades, brass, and bravado, 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 (cf The Magnificat), gave her an Immaculate Conception (I can’t even imagine whatever on earth that could be), and then sent her off to heaven in a Bodily Assumption. From start to finish, thus handily destroying her womanhood (aka human being). That done, it told women to be like the her. Then it told women they couldn’t be priests because they were.

Obviously and of course, anybody like that is too holy for Holy Order. It took a church to overcome that institutional fallacy, but from the looks of things, we’ll probably never hear the end of it.

August 14, 2008

Crumbs

Pent 14/15A / Mt 15.21-28

“Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.”

Charlotte Whitton, one of the 20th century’s most colorful and controversial women, spoke these words. When she did, she paused and added, “Luckily, this is not all that difficult.”

Had she been alive today, she may have been thinking of Cindy Sheehan, whose 24-yr old son was killed in Baghdad, and who camped out on the road near a certain ranch over in Crawford, Texas. And she may have thought of the many women reportedly coming in from all over to join her. But she could have, as well, had in mind the Canaanite woman in this morning’s gospel.

Again and again in this saga of the Way we all strive to follow, it is women who so often provide the major turning points. It began for us with Mary’s commitment to God’s wish even in her frightfully young life on the very edge of her womanhood. That other and later Mary exemplified for Jesus the contemplative life. The importunate widow set the pattern for spiritual endurance with the unjust judge. The Samaritan woman at the well became the first evangelist. And finally, Mary Magdalene became the apostle who gave the wake-up call to the apostles-to-become.

It has often been a bone of contention whether God — or even Jesus — ever changed his mind. I don’t know why, for even a casual reading of Scripture — both Old and New — can demonstrate that reality quite easily.

In today’s gospel, this Gentile woman with the possessed daughter should leave us with little doubt. Here she is, pleading with Jesus. She even calls him Lord and Son of David to make it altogether clear she knows to whom she is speaking. And what does she get for her reward? First, she’s stonewalled with silence. Next, she’s shunned by the disciples. Then twice, she’s insulted by Jesus. Only then does he realize there’s something new going on in addition to him. Then, accepting it fully, he has only to recognize and affirm her faith for her child instantly to be healed.

“Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good,” said Charlotte Whitton, and then she added, “but luckily, this is not all that difficult.”

In this simple and maybe not all that uncommon encounter, there comes a major bend in the history of the gospel and of Jesus’s ministry — and, of course, in ours. His way is not only an ethnic religion’s fulfillment as Jesus may once have thought. It is far more, for it is now seen as the redemptive Good News for all people everywhere. Without this moment, one cannot even imagine such a ministry as Paul’s to the Gentiles, ironically, the Canaanite woman’s kin. And without Paul’s ministry, it would be next to impossible even to conceive of the bulk of the New Testament as we know it.

But maybe there’s at least one more equally important and vital thing especially for us.

As a child growing up in the wilds of west Texas, I remember being fascinated by and not a little confused by the term “melting pot.” It seemed somehow to be associated with people, especially with immigrants and always with the Statue of Liberty. As I look back, I had a vision of some humongous cauldron that was surely located in New York City, wherever that was. I suppose I never worried about the unbearable heat implied by such an image, rather only the intense and purposeful mixing and blending of the radically different — especially the radically different peoples that might and could and would take place there.

Now, even if I know better and have a somewhat improved appreciation for metaphor, the image is no less vivid. At its outset, this great land of ours was conceived as a vast and inclusive undertaking. And further, this remarkable political experiment and concept welcomed in its Declaration of Independence not only the audience, but also the judgment of the whole world to this daring venture as a new nation state — under God. “To prove this,” said our founding mothers and fathers, “let (the) Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

Not the least of the reasons for this unique aspiration for fundamental human inclusiveness, civility, and collegial justice and for the compensating checks and balances at its very heart is human being as the gospel conceives it. Is it too much of a stretch of the imagination that such a wild and crazy notion first caught fire in that encounter with the woman from Cana?

Of course, I do not mean even to imply that I believe this to be a Christian nation. Our frequent moral imbalance, our moral complexity and moral confusion in high places, our ambient puritan stigmata, our embarrassing and shameful treatment of Native Americans and enslaved Africans, let alone the plurality and freedom of expression of our many religions are evidence enough never to entertain such a notion.

But it is, I believe, true that we’ve inherited a residual pattern and keenness of desire that just as in Christ, there is here, as well, “neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female” (Gal 3.28) in whatever figurative way we can bring that to pass.

I don’t know much if anything about Australia, but in the wake of some of our recent confusion about sex and religion, I’m mindful of an Aussie’s comment on the internet. She said how grateful she is that in the distant past, the United Kingdom sent their prisoners to Australia and their Puritans to the USA.

We might even in some strange way be grateful for that, ourselves. But I am not exactly sure why.