September 30, 2008

Preconditions

Recovering from the “debate” last Friday night, I asked CP whether our conversations ever have any preconditions. She’d been watching a Cubs game and wasn’t all that sure what I had in mind. I briefed her, and she said all our conversations have preconditions. She added, How long since you’ve read the marriage liturgy either to yourself or to some helpless couple standing there before you?

Oh, I said.

Well, I continued, the presidential wannabes can’t seem to agree about whether they should even have conversations with their international counterparts at all, let alone without preconditions and preparations. They can’t even agree which is which, or whether they’re the same thing. One of them thinks that for a president even to talk to somebody, especially our enemies, automatically elevates the meeting into some kind of gold-plated Valhalla the bad guys don’t deserve.

Granted, I continued, our conversations have preconditions, but they never seem to have any preparation. They’re just more or less spontaneous. We just start off willy-nilly as if we always know what we’re talking about. My people never have a chance to make any plans with your people. (She didn’t get any of my intended humor in that.)

Yes, she said, and that’s usually how it ends, as well. Like now.

And as for that Valhalla thing, you never seem to appreciate…

I didn’t hear the rest of whatever she said, for by that time I was already in the next room, preparing.

September 26, 2008

Bailout

“Show me the money… ” (Mt 22.19a)

Money’s in the news. Nobody knows what to do about it. We done spent it all on dodging taxes and phony wars and fat cats and being generally irresponsible and now suddenly realize somebody’s got to divvy up and bail us out before we sink. And guess who it’ll be?

The Pharisees tried money to stump Jesus. They go after his allegiance, his patriotism, although why they’d expect a citizen living in poverty in an enslaved country to be all that patriotic is beyond me.

“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” they asked him. “Show me the money,” he replied. Voltaire took a few centuries to discover what Jesus already knew when he said: “When it’s a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.”

Maybe we’d rather think with Robert Frost, that religions, like poems, start with a lump in the throat. But we’d not want to forget that religions, unlike poems, inevitably end up becoming institutions, and money, for whatever the cause, is always not only the bind, but the binder. However sacred or secular one’s religion, it is always the ligament — note the “lig” in the two words — that holds spirit together, that by and to which one is most firmly and unswervingly bound and tied.

The Pharisees may have thought they were testing Jesus’s loyalty when, in fact, they once again, walked into a trap. When it is a question of money, everybody is working with the same symbols, the same rose-colored glasses, the same sacrament, the outward and visible sign of whatever inward and spiritual reality that we all have in common — whether it’s greed or lust or only security. So Jesus flipped a coin, noted the likeness and inscription and said pointedly, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

We nations presume it is of the highest honor to place an image of our heroes on our currency. For us, it’s the politicians and the warriors. For the Brits, it’s more often the royalty, the artists, the poets. It always tells a lot about us.

The Industrial Revolution was once the great sacrament of western civilization. That was before Silicon Valley and the internet. Technology in whatever form either trumps our religion or becomes it and holds it and remains the common thread, the outward and visible sign of Where It’s At.

We believe in God, say a large majority of us even on our money, but we pay more attention to the checkbook and the Gross Domestic Product. And like Michael Douglas said in the movie, Greed. “The poor remain poor on account of they don’t try,” some say proudly. The rich get richer, and the richer they get… well, you know how that shakes down politically and how it results in “voodoo economics” that don’t shake down at all. Hear George Bernard Shaw: “What’s the matter with the poor is poverty; what’s the matter with the rich is uselessness.” Jesus’s story about the rich guy and the camel and the eye of the needle is not about money, it’s about the saddle, how we use it.

One of the least popular suggestions among many that I ever made to a vestry in my salad days was that our parish either become more charitable or else pay taxes like every other institution, even maybe setting an example for our fellow tax-dodgers the universities. “Is it lawful … ?” asked the Pharisees.

In fact and intentionally or not, that’s their question — How do we use, how do we follow the money? And that’s the question Jesus answered.

We know how he felt about the sacrilege of offerings in the Temple and the tables of the moneychangers. We know what it meant to Judas who was paid off for betrayal and hanged himself in disgust and disgrace. We know how it was the cause of one of the earliest schisms in the church between Peter and Paul. It’s there to see, like biblical scholars tell us. If you want to know about that church’s early missionary zeal, don’t worry so much about the content and direction of the preaching, just “follow the money.” And we all know today how tempting it must be to fall for the ruse to assume ourselves so faith-based as to become a part of the national debt, ourselves.

But after all, it was still the taxes that prompted the Pharisees’ question. Are they lawful? The average Israelite probably benefitted very little from paying them. Matthew probably benefitted very much from collecting them until he stopped being a hit man for the Romans and went to work as a community organizer for Jesus. Jesus just turned the symbol around on those who got in his way.

When he took the coin, Jesus asked, “Whose likeness?” “Caesar’s,” they said. Then “render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” knowing all along that nothing belonged to Caesar, whatever the image, but that all belonged to God. Like us. For whose inscription and image is ultimately on “our” money in one way or another?

Yours. Mine. That’s who.

September 25, 2008

Race

Pentecost 20/21A (Mt 21.23-32)

A scene in an old Clark Gable movie shows him seated at a shoeshine stand getting a shine. The lad shining his shoes comments idly, “Great day for the race.” Gable, wondering if he’d missed a turn at the track, anxiously asks, “What race?” The lad answers, “The human race.”

Our vision, our understanding depend so very much on our perspectives. The two sons in Jesus’s parable were asked by their father to work in the vineyard. One said he would and didn’t. The other said he wouldn’t and did. This, like a lot of Jesus’s parables, begs an explanation that he doesn’t always give. When he does, it’s rarely the one we either want or expect.

So Jesus never said this was a parable of the kingdom until he elaborates. From a parable about two sons, Jesus segués to, “The tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” He’s talking to churchers, and he says that largely about the kind of folk you don’t often see at prayer in their midst, the kind you’d never expect to do the will of God, not on your terms, anyway, and he says they do it anyway, even if after their fashion.

Then Jesus reminds his audience that they’ve already heard all this from John, the Baptiser, and how they didn’t listen when he’d said it plain as day. Then he reminds them again that the last people they’d ever expect could find John’s “way of righteousness” are the IRS middle management guy and the streetwalkers. They “go into the kingdom God,” for they could never enter it unless they recognized it. They repent. They believe. It might be called “redundant redemption.”

It’s what we expect to see, what we look for, that without pausing to think, colors our perceptions. It’s a common communication mistake. We hear about the race, and one thinks about horses while the other thinks about humans. What on earth we hear when we hear about Anglicanism should be clear and confusing enough for most of us.

Jesus’s story is about such presumptions and intentions. Neither a church nor a nation will get very far on such a basis. We cannot and we dare not presume what a purple shirt or a religious vocabulary or a flag lapel pin or a Patriot Act alone means apart from the substance of it. Merely claiming to be an orthodox Anglican or a compassionate conservative will never reveal so much about caring or conserving as truly being and doing, for there’s the test.

The kingdom of God and its electorate are probably always a surprise. For it’s not a place. It’s a relationship. The real litmus test is that wherever the brokenness of the world is being mended, there is present the kingdom of God. Least of all may that healing have any discernible religious labels and probably doesn’t. It could be secular to the core. Jesus would sometime put it rather like this, “Wherever you did it unto one of the least of these, you did it unto me.”

In the kingdom of God, it is always a great day for the race.

September 24, 2008

Collateral

Megabucks — billion, trillion — remind me of a business math course I taught at one of our town’s tech schools during what was might we say rather a downtime in my professional career. The students didn’t care for such numbers, especially what with all the zeroes (forget superscripts), and wondered if there might not be alternatives. When it came to words like multiply and divide, one student said why don’t we just say “times it” and “under it.” I didn’t keep that job very long.

About money. There’s a story in the New Testament about some guy forgiving the debt of a lesser satrap, and the LS turning around and foreclosing on an even lesser one under his oversight. God didn’t think well of it. Makes me wonder how the Chinese are taking to our present plight. Here we are foreclosing on little guys and looking for more from the Bank of China to pay off our big guys. I never understood economics, anyhow. But what if the Chinese foreclose on us? What did we anyway use for collateral? Blue states or red states or both? Does anybody know?

Reading the internet to get my mind off my own vast investments, I discovered that Bill Cosby’s offered himself as a write-in candidate for president and has some attractive ideas about language and immigrants. Sarah Palin’s Biden her time doing a cram course at the UN on international relations, being squired around meeting important people with unpronounceable names. Obama’s got a debate coach down in Florida. McCain’s people are urging him to go to charm school and soon.

Does anybody know how you write in a vote where they use chads?

September 23, 2008

Loess

Loess is usually a buff to yellowish brown colored sedimentary loam. It is believed chiefly to be deposited by the wind.

Many if not most sedimentary rocks are deposited by water. Several hundred thousand millions of years later, give or take a few millennia, the loams and clays among them weather into the undulating slopes we usually associate with basin and range topography. When modern-day civil engineers make their usual road cuts to level our travel, they slope and sod them expertly and then step back for the usual maintenance.

Not so with loess that is so configured that when it surrenders to the elements, its “slopes” are near vertical, and there’s no changing it. Civil engineers with other ideas in mind for Mississippi River banks and road cuts down around Vicksburg where the loess is plentiful can testify to that phenomenon graphically — and frustratingly. It looks easy, but it is only a matter of a few years or sooner that their best design plans are foiled. The “cuts” collapse all over the roads and assume the shape the wind had intended all along. Benedicite, omnia opera Domini.

Jesus may not have had loess in mind when he spoke to old Nicodemus of the Spirit’s whimsical-a-la-King-James blowing where it “listeth” (Jn 3.8), but he and his listeners surely knew something of a similar frustration whenever they tried to “engineer” it.

As well might we.

September 22, 2008

Hunches

Only a few years out of seminary and into the hustings I had occasion to ask one of our church’s better theologians how does one know the will of God. I wasn’t so far into the hustings yet to have discovered how much I didn’t know and was pretty sure I’d nailed him with a Gotcha.

Blinklessly (like some people’s foreign policy), he said, Trust your hunches.

I was the one who had been gotched and left hanging speechless.

All this was long before Myers-Briggs had told me what is a hunch, that indeed I was an intuitive and probably a pretty dependable one. It was even longer before I believed them. And it is only just around the corner of my recent past that I dare so much as to follow the theologian’s counsel and trust a hunch now and then. Even so, his counsel has never left me. Right or wrong, I feel closer to the will of God every time a hunch comes along, whether I trust it or not. If I am a creature of God’s imagination and Paul tells me to entertain the mind of Christ, maybe using — and trusting — my imagination where the hunches live makes me more like God made me and wants me to be. Like I said, whether I act on all this, of course, is another matter.

Sometime hunches become opinions. Sometimes they even lead to being opinionated. The one is innocent enough and of some welcome importance in common human connections, exchanges, and conversations. The other is not all that attractive with its often preconceived notions and unduly inflexible adherence to one’s own perspective, a perspective that often risks and frequently succumbs to a most distasteful kind of patronizing and subsequent off-putting.

The distinction becomes increasingly important during election seasons, especially those elections that have a widespread propensity to affect large numbers of people, places, and things. What borders on the tragic is the frequent inability for some of us to realize the introspective nature of our opinions. We are the opinionates. Like claiming we know whether God wants us to build a bridge or preempt a war. My hunch is that God wants us to have opinions and to state them, but not to be so all-fired sure they’re hers.

September 19, 2008

Ferns

I was looking at some of the ferns in our entryway, the family narthex, where they like the light. Anything to get my mind off the economy.

Ferns have been around a long time. As a geologist, I’ve seen fossil ferns with fronds so delicately preserved in 400 million year-old Devonian shales that only the color had disappeared. They frequently kept me from getting lost in the geologic column.

The Creationists say God puts stuff like this around just to confuse us into not believing Bishop James Ussher’s claim that the world was only 6000 or so years old last January.

I prefer Albert Einstein’s assurance that God doesn’t shoot dice.

September 18, 2008

About

Pentecost 19/20A (Mt 20.1-16)

There must surely be better times than these for to tell a Bible economics story, especially the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. But come to think more about it, in our work-ethic, merit-rewarding society, there’s never been a good time for this story. It has always been an absolute plague either for labor or management. Those caught up in both 21st century America and its miasma of biblical literalism must wish to skip the whole matter. But it’s a parable about the kingdom of God, not the economy of western culture, and we churchers can’t just stand here with our fingers crossed behind our backs.

Thus and so, if it’s a parable about the kingdom, it’s a parable about grace. We’ve an economy based on merit, some think it’s full of voodoo. And the two — grace and merit — have never mixed all that well. Grace. Will we ever hear the end of it? Grace is inevitably, sooner or later, always a pain in our pride, right where God plants his foot. Until we find out what grace is about, what the kingdom of heaven is about, nothing about this Gospel will ever make much sense, for even so, it’ll never make sense anyway because making sense is not the way of Jesus’s good news.

“About” is a good word to start with. With that word, Irma Rombauer in her “Joy of Cooking” gives us a clue to understanding Jesus. With each new food entry, Irma writes a short piece concerning what it’s about. About meat. About sweet potatoes. About berries. Even if you’re not a cook, you know the drill. If you don’t cook, look at the book, anyway. It’s a charming little thing she does, always what it’s about, not what it is. Well, so does Jesus. The kingdom of God is about, he says, not the kingdom of God is, but what it is about, what it is like. It’s about a careless shepherd, it’s about a widow’s small change, and on and on.

The whole Bible is an about book, not an is book. So with life, so with us, each of us and all of us are parables. We are parables emulating Jesus who is the Parable of God. Jesus is not God. He himself said he wasn’t God. Jesus is about God. So, with grace, so with the payroll for the laborers in the vineyard. It is precisely where we turn all these analogies upside down and take then literally, that we emasculate the Good News.

One of the big troubles with religion is how difficult it is to get this straight. Religion wants to be an is way of handling grace instead of an about way. On the other hand faith is an about way. Religion needs faith to keep it honest. Faith needs religion — or a reasonable facsimile — and pretty near any religion’s as good as the next — like we need our bodies, to keep us between the curbs. But the two are never the same.

So, the kingdom of heaven is never a place, but a relationship with God nourished by grace and implemented by faith. It is a story, a parable, and, like all good stories, it leaves much to the imagination. It is for this relationship that we are imagined by God and freed to sign on in the vineyard at the beckon of the landowner and at whatever time we choose. Or, we can just stand around shuffling back and forth outside the unemployment office.

September 17, 2008

Elite

Elite is a five-letter word that’s now a four-letter word for the mavericks.

Elite gets around. Webster says it just means to choose, but somehow it has transmogrified into “choice” (like in sirloin steak), “socially superior,” and “powerful minority.” Frankly, I never liked it nearly so much for a type as the pica on the old manual word processors, but everybody’s forgot about that now.

Then if you really want to get down and dirty, there’s the Washington Elite, the Eastern Seaboard Elite, the San Francisco Elite, the gay elite, the Episcopalians, and heaven only knows what or where else. One quick way to become elite yourself is to wonder out loud whether making it to Miss Congeniality in a high school beauty contest is really an adequate qualification even to be president of the Rotary, let alone the US&A.

We hear a lot now about country first. It’s a resounding cheer like Friday night football when everybody said, “Go, Big Dogs! Go!” without being all that specific about where. But there doesn’t seem to be very much memory or respect about where this country first came from, like the Constitution that created it and the so-called founding fathers who imagined it. If it ever got out and about these days that some of them might even have read Latin and spoken French, we’d probably have never got past the Preamble.

September 16, 2008

Ampersand

Holy Cross Yesterday

Once upon a time when children were given the alphabet to copy and learn, following the “Z” was placed the rather squiggly symbol (&) we now use as an abbreviation for “and.”

It was called originally, “and per se, and,” survived as “ampersand,” and remains now as a sign for joining together other symbols and such like, as we say, a “conjunction.” There are, of course, numerous ampersands, some of elegant design. The cross is one and often so it functions, even as a “plus” in the language of mathematicians.

Imagine for a moment a scene perhaps only a short distance around the corner into our future.

A final international summit conference about missile shields and ABM treaties and global warming and WMDs is deadlocked at a point beyond which our proud, flag-draped leaders on both sides simply will not go.

Standing thus in their last refuge of patriotism, they release their weapons, their “clean bombs,” and without hardly any hesitation, they simply set fire to the planet. They never quite realize, even then, the difference between arson and Armageddon. Their grandeur’s delusion has long since blinded them to any remaining sense of stewardship at all. Once and for all, they have warmed the globe. As the old Eucharistic liturgy put so well, “this fragile earth, our island home” orbits, cremated, a giant cinder cast aside along some cosmic byway.

But it was not without notice.

All the while and for centuries before this holocaust, this once vibrant cell of life called Earth has been circled and monitored by intergalactic probes no larger than grapefruit, rendered invisible even to our most sophisticated stealth initiatives. Messages about us in every detail from Irma’s “Joy of Cooking” to Alex’s “Joy of Sex” are faithfully collected, sent, and recorded by another people intent on peaceful exploration and expansion in the universe.

They’ve watched our “progress.” They realize that our atmosphere once vaporized, now gradually returns, sufficiently rejuvenated to sustain life, perhaps even life such as theirs.

And so, they come. They come not to experiment, but to explore, not to conquer, but to conserve, not for greed, but for grace.

And imagine further that first landing party, excited, skillfully trained, disciplined. They touch down. They move out into the ruins, collecting, sampling, filing, their data instantaneously noted and analyzed into appropriate cyberarchival systems at their faraway origin. Perhaps, they conclude, this may indeed be a safe environment to nurture into a fuller and more fecund life.

Then one of the landing parties, sorting gently through the crumbling remains, sifts and dusts to expose intact and hardly damaged at all a large cross. They cease work immediately. They cordon off the area. They send for their leader who arrives and approaches cautiously the display as they all stand hushed, awaiting instructions.

With the care and respect of a competent archeologist, their chief observes the artifact at some distance, then closer, she reaches down to examine it. As she does, her tunic opens ever so slightly at the neck allowing a pendant chain to swing free and reveal, hanging there, a cross.