October 13, 2008

Festival

Our town hosted this weekend the annual Southern Festival of Books and the writers who write them. It’s a gala time.

But not, I suppose, for all. I read somewhere that twenty-five percent of us never read anything and have never read a book. I know somebody who has a TV remote and two books on the table by the barcalounger, one by Rush Limbaugh and one by King James. I don’t know whether they’re read or whether they’re just props for some bookends. And then, there’re even aspirants for high office who can’t for the life of them recall anything they might ever have read.

At book festivals, it’s the writers who are the cause for them and for me the most interesting. Some of them look like writers or like I think writers look, sort of seedy and with an ordered carelessness of attire. Others just look like the rest of us so much that one can hardly tell a writer without a program. Garrison Keillor was here last year. He sat around eating fast food and looking very much like a writer.

It’s also OktoberFest across the way at our Germantown with lots of knockwurst and sauerkraut and oompah. I’ve a friend who plays the helicon in the German band. A helicon looks like a sort of junior-grade sousaphone that’s all around as impressive keeping the tempo and the changes as well as any other of its tuba kin. If I weren’t such a jazzer, I’d almost like the helicon as much as an acoustic bass.

Anyhow, it’s all over now. It’s altogether comforting that books are still something to be festive about, and laptops are only also-rans with which to write them. One more thing about writers, Erskine Caldwell said that we must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and just to go on that basis. Not a great mind, he said, not a great thinker, not a great philosopher, but for sure, a story teller.

All the while this celebration has wound down, the national groundswell winds up elsewhere and probably here also catching up with the hatemongers on the presidential glory road. It may be, though, that enough hate’s sown already and once again beginning somewhere to germinate out of its horrid fecundity. The greed that’s thrown our economy into its current bollix is matched only by the greed that will do anything to gain power, a greed that no amounts of billions can ever rescue.

Trouble is, there’re surely some who couldn’t care less, maybe those who never read.

October 10, 2008

Decisions

Memo to: Joe Sixpack

Subject: Decisions, decisions

Your name is often mentioned on the Straight Talk Express and along the campaign trail as perhaps an authority on the forthcoming presidential election. As I am sure you want to live up to that reputation and to be as well-informed as possible before making your choice, may I share these thoughts for your consideration.

It was once said of someone who was an outstanding international leader and one of our country’s closest friends and allies that he “brought the wisdom to walk in the path of honor, the courage to follow his convictions, and an abiding compassion for others enriched all by the nobility of his spirit and the vision to which he devoted his life.”

He once offered some advice for all of us that I believe is altogether useful at times like these and that you, as well, may find of some value: “We must shun any continuance of vilification of others,” he said, “because that would diminish the democratic process (and) give free rein to ignorance… Perhaps what we should resist most of all is the tendency to make quick, emotional and superficial judgments on others — from a position different from theirs and without any responsible or realistic examination of their actions or decisions taken in the course of fulfilling their duties.”

As I know that democracy is dear to your heart and that your country always comes first as a model for this, you will surely want to know, as well, that this leader was a champion for and actual achiever of democracy by altogether persuasive and peaceful means in, of all places, the Middle East. Perhaps, by the way, you may want to know his name. It was Hussein, King Hussein I of Jordan.

October 9, 2008

Few

Pentecost 22/23A Mt 22.1-14

“For many are called, but few are chosen.” (Mt 22.14).

The Japanese name for Korea is “Chosen.” The U S Marine veterans who fought there in that mid-twentieth century misunderstanding rightly call themselves, “The Chosen Few.”

Now that I’ve got that homiletic spin out of the way, what on earth was Matthew talking about that Jesus was talking about? How has the Chosen Few, an aphorism that has stood so well and so perplexingly down through the ages, attached to the story of a desperate and fickle king like that told in today’s gospel?

Maybe it was because Matthew was a bit fickle, himself, and was throwing his evangelical weight around. Maybe it was a hint to is neighbor Luke not to take himself so seriously. Frankly, one may wonder, as some authorities do, whether Jesus ever said it at all. But there it is as plain as mud in the scriptural canon for all time. One reason I believe it has is that the Holy Spirit has a lot to do with what is said there, including what Jesus says there, and with how the church interprets what is said there and, unlike Luke, we’d best take it more seriously than not what is said there.

“For many are called, but few are chosen.” One dare not overlook that what we do with our lives and the choices that demands are at the very core of our Baptismal Covenant. Surely there are no more important concepts about the life in Christ than vocation and choice. The Greek word for church is ekklesia. It means something like “those who are called out.” The very characteristic of what it means to be a human being is not only to be called, to have a vocation, but also and perhaps even more distinctively, the capacity, the freedom to choose that calling — or to refuse it. This is what it means to be created in the image of God. This is what God means by imagining us into being.

Jesus realized that God had a special calling for him when he confronted Satan out there in those early forty devastating days in the wilderness. He was still wrestling with that calling as late as Gethsemane where he sweated blood trying to get it straight blood about God’s will for him. We must never overlook that he said Yes, and that that Yes may be the saving act, itself, part with the cross. Vocation and choice.

“For many are called, but few are chosen.”

Maybe that means that God calls a lot of us, maybe all of us, to be his church. Maybe it means not that God chooses only a few, for, after all, he’s called us all, but that only a few of us exercise the freedom to choose or not to choose his calling, actually and which probably means whether or not we choose to be human as God has imagined human to be. Let us understand the church, the called, to be where we work out that vocation and perfect it, where we follow through on it and become not only the chosen few, but, as well, the few who choose.

Maybe all this is homiletic license, one of which I have as do you for better or worse.

October 7, 2008

KJV

William Tyndale, priest, + One, 1536

William Tyndale was determined to translate the Scriptures into English for the masses, but his effort was cat and mouse with the royals and the prelates at every turn. His life reads like a 16th century cloak-and-dagger story.

He escaped to Germany where he finally produced over eighty percent of what we call the King James Version. His work has been called “a well of English undefiled,” which makes me wonder how anybody ever understood it at all even then.

Perhaps he would have been quietly pleased to learn that over four centuries later the Associated Press would report that an American country preacher would burn a copy of the new Revised Standard Version at a Sunday morning service and say to the churchers present, “If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”

For his reward, Tyndale was strangled to death on 6 October 1536.
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For my reward (maybe yours), my mail server went on the fritz yesterday making Tyndale a day late. — Lane

October 4, 2008

Francis

Francis of Assisi, Friar 1226

A Franciscan Blessing

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.

October 3, 2008

Sixpack

I had a call from John Doe the other day wondering who is this Joe Sixpack he keeps hearing about. That’s some coincidence, I said, for I was just about to call and ask you the same question. No need to ask me, he said. It ought to be obvious that he’s trying to stake a claim on a franchise I’ve had for years ever since Everyman became too archaic to stand in for modern times.

Doe, I thought, is about as American as one can get when you come to think about it which I had recently come to do. It was no wonder to me that John — and maybe Jane, too — were feeling a bit uneasy about their longtime reign as average citizens, chad-punchers, and poll-takers. I imagine it is something of an insult not only to be replaced, but to have one’s title usurped, as well, by someone with so quaint a name.

I asked John if possibly a more sober image for the average American had anything to do with his being piqued. That’s just it, John said, six pack of what? Nobody ever says what, and everybody knows six pack always means beer and tailgate and redneck and football and blue collar and obesity. (I could tell he was really getting steamed.) Well, yes, I said, hoping to calm him some, but in these days with so many purified water drinkers, it could mean just that and no more. Not for me, John said, not with fat being so much on the scene. One doesn’t get so overweight drinking plain water, he added.

I have never known whether Jane Doe is John Doe’s sister or wife or only a feminine counterpart, but just that she somehow seems necessary for to accomplish a kind of latter day gender balance and bipartisanship. Nobody ever seems to mention a Jane Sixpack, implying just that she’d probably do whatever Joe tells her including voting, sexism being what it is.

October 2, 2008

Rescue

Pentecost 21/22A (Mt 21.33-46)Vineyards get a lot of mileage in the Bible.There must be something about vines that appeals to preachers. “Meanwhile, back at the vineyard… ” It’s as good a metaphor as any, I suppose.And so we have today another vineyard story. But this time, the story is not about vines. At a deeper level, it’s uncannily about greed. And what could be more appropriate for our times, for this very moment, than greed? Seven hundred billion dollars worth of greed as if something that simple could bail us out.It’s about greed, and being about greed, it’s inevitably about violence. And we’re all very familiar with those twin evils — not only in Jesus’s time, but for sure in ours, for they go hand in hand. They’re going hand in hand at this very moment at this here and now.Our morning story recounts a householder who sends his servants twice to check with his sharecroppers about the status of his grapes. The croppers not only don’t report, they throw out the owner’s emissaries and murder them. So he sends his son. Out of their absurd overconfidence and misjudgment, they kill the son in the strange reasoning that this way, they can take possession of the entire inheritance. Greed.Remember the scene in the l987 movie “Wall Street” where the protagonist Michael Gekko is CEO of a major brokerage house. He’s addressing the board and stockholders of a large paper company. After berating them at some length about their careless and malicious management of money, he concludes: “I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed — you mark my words — will not only save (your paper company), but (as well) that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”It is a shocking scene. The suspense is palpable, even in the theatre audience. It is as if the character Gekko has actually turned and indicted us. Perhaps it is the last place we’d ever expect to feel like we’d encountered an Old Testament prophet face to face, least of all his character. For not a one of us has not experienced at least a moment of greed or been the victim of someone else’s greed. Of the seven deadly sins, greed goes by the fancier name avarice, has a most impressive staying power, and is not easily forgot.It’s not an unfamiliar pattern. But it’s no longer grapes. It’s oil. It’s not vineyards. It’s global warming. (I saw a bumper sticker. It said, “I love global warming.”) It’s refineries and SUVs and road rage. It’s not farming. It’s international chaos and poverty and genocide and corporate welfare resenting care for the poor. But at the seat of it all, it’s still greed, greed issuing in violence and even more tragically in some politicized cover-up.George Hunsinger of Princeton Theological Seminary writes that George Orwell talked about this in his famous essay on “Politics and the English Language.” He spoke of how we use language to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Perhaps it might be something like this:An invasion is engineered on false pretenses, hundreds of thousands are killed or maimed, no one is safe in the streets. It’s called “collateral damage.” Homes, hospitals, and mosques are blown up. Water, electricity, and other services are cut off. Civil society is destroyed. Half the population is left without any means of livelihood. Detainees are tortured and humiliated. Prisons are filled with people picked up off the streets. Cities are targeted and destroyed. And the insurgency is blamed on outside elements. All this is called “bringing democracy.”"Political language,” Orwell said, ” — and with variations this is true of all political parties — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder sound respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.”And so here we are. Somehow in the midst of all this we’re to find a way to contend with it and to incarnate the covenant we made at our baptism. It has never been easy to be a follower of that Way — the Way, that lovely word the early disciples of Jesus used to describe themselves and their purpose. After all, greed for power coupled with violence crucified their Lord and likely could easily crucify them. He made that very clear for them and for us. Every time we are signed with the cross do we take up and embrace the cross, the symbol of greed and violence and paradoxically of grace and justice.But let us recover Jesus’s metaphor of the vineyard for a moment. I confess it would be difficult to find a better one. For the irony of our time is that we are the sharecroppers and also the servants sent by the householder. And we are his heirs. We not only bear the Christ, but are asked to seek and serve the Christ wherever and in whomever.Meanwhile, back at the vineyard…

October 1, 2008

Chicken

Sometimes, it’s the better part of valor to turn things over to Tom Friedman who has our Congress in mind to give us something we need and writes this morning:

My rabbi told this story at Rosh Hashana services on Tuesday: A frail 80-year-old mother is celebrating her birthday and her three sons each give her a present. Harry gives her a new house. Harvey gives her a new car and driver. And Bernie gives her a huge parrot that can recite the entire Torah. A week later, she calls her three sons together and says: “Harry, thanks for the nice house, but I only live in one room. Harvey, thanks for the nice car, but I can’t stand the driver. Bernie, thanks for giving your mother something she could really enjoy. That chicken was delicious.