Out of Nowhere

We have three old clocks, the wind-up, pocketa-pocketa kind. I have an obsession about them that in spite of their age they simply must keep reasonably accurate time. Not Naval Observatory time like we needed when we flew over the Pacific during WW2, though that would be nice, but close enough so that the two that chime, chime within seconds of each other, preferably simultaneously.

Maybe it’s New Year’s Eve that brings this to mind. For this is the worldwide grand moment of timekeeping when the entire planet takes notice with clocks and calendars and fireworks. Only a few years ago on Y2K there was universal angst that we’d maybe never be able to do it again.

Perhaps one of our vocations as human beings is so that time never has to stop until we do. Time is not really running out, it’s just that we are. For that matter, time has really never run in It never was off stage in the wings, waiting for its entrance. The Big Bang was its cue.

Maybe the universe is one big clock, but so far as we know we may be the only ones who know it, but I doubt it. We keep time as if we think we’ll never have to give it away. We are the town criers. And the cosmos very patiently lets us think it’s important that we are. “Wait for me,” we shouted as soon as we could talk.

One of my handy word book crutches says that time comes from ti, meaning to stretch, meaning also more or less, the fit time, hence, the good time, prosperity, as in Let the good times roll. The early word for everyday time was tide, like in Yuletide, glad tidings, high tide, low tide, and laundry soap. It took the Greeks to find kairos for fat time and chronos for thin time, the one always full of it, the other just sort of bammin’ along, again, waiting for something to happen. Chronos waits for kairos. Guy Lombardo’s band’s yard-wide tremolo forever once brought the new year in with Auld Lang Syne, “times gone by,” for which we all drank a cup of kindness yet, and then started up the violence again the next day in the bowl games.

Mañana is really the rule of the day and especially of New Year’s Day. Iraq? Mañana. The environment? Mañana. Our international reputation? Mañana. The busted up church ignoring Jesus’s prayer that we all be one? Mañana.

Mañana? If there is one, it is us.

“What’s Victoria’s Secret?” wrote a Brit friend in response to yesterday’s Holy Innocents OoN. The way he put the question revealed to me that Victoria has practically no secrets, but bares them all.

Gregory Dix made a parable of us when he wrote in his seminal “The Shape of the Liturgy” that his mother, attending his first mass, said that with all his circumlocutions up there at the altar, it looked like he had hold of a live crab and was trying to keep it out of sight.

Well, we’re still at it. Our spin on the gospel of peace and justice and love may be one of the best kept secrets in human affairs, its voice stifled by all our prejudices and infighting and parsimonious notions about morality. There’s a lot of messiness out there going overlooked by our seeming obsession to remain irrelevant.

So much for homiletic license. Another friend wrote about my claim yesterday to be wholly innocent. “You old lecher,” she commented.

Today, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, recalls a time when each year we had an open house at the rectory for college students home for the holidays. Most of them, I suspect, were oblivious either to the day and certainly to our sardonic motives.

Foolishness like that, however, has a way of coming home to roost.

We’ve an elderly neighbor around the corner. (Actually, she’s probably not much older than we, but we try to avoid that kind of self reference as much as possible.) Yesterday, she brought by two catalogues she’d got in the mail and left them for me with CP, said she thought that if CP didn’t mind, I might enjoy them as a sort of holiday diversion.

The catalogues? The Christmas specials offered this year by Victoria’s Secret. Wholly innocent, I accepted them with grace.

About the middle of the last century, along came Oswald Avery, F. Griffith, James Watson and Francis Crick, to bring us DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), its double-helix, and its four-letter alphabet from which we could learn to spell life. A few years later Nobel writer Toni Morrison said, simply, that it’s language that make us human.

Preferring, perhaps, to honor more its mystery, it took old prescient John (whose saintly evangelical feast we more or less keep today) to say something similar but without all the bells and whistles. The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us. He seemed altogether content to satisfy (and confound) us with the Word becoming flesh. No mangers in his New Testament bag of tricks. And we’ve been trying to exegete it ever since.

One of the great joys of this season is its profound mystery, a precious gift, a present which includes both a past and a future that never seem to go away save, maybe, on courthouse lawns. Mystery is often the missing ingredient of our attempts to understand ourselves, to govern ourselves, to choose our leaders. We often call it charisma and seem to be content, if not altogether clear, with that. We call some “icons” and seem to equate that with “idol” thus missing the beauty of the word which means simply window — Paul’s dark glass that obscures the view — through which we peer at least into the boundaries of mystery.

One of the great joys of the scientific effort and method is how it often when it is at its best brings us over and again to those boundaries. Understanding John’s Word and its incarnation may never fully come to us. As we stand on the threshold of a major turn in our history which can open even more for us the mysteries of our founding as a nation, may this Christmas in particular open our eyes that we may see what waits.

O all ye DNAs of the Lord, bless ye the Lord.

I was disappointed, but not surprised, to discover that the contents of J M Neale’s Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas” are considered to be wholly imaginary. The old 10th century king himself, of course, is not. The carol says he “looked down (some say “out”) on the Feast of Stephen” (which is today), but is not all that clear whether this means from some distant and higher perspective (like maybe from wherever it is that saints peer) or from a merely lower level, something, say, like disdain.

The both of them are considered saints, Stephen, stoned in service to his Lord a few centuries earlier, and Wenceslas, knocked off by his own brother Boleslav probably in 929 AD. He was soon venerated as a martyr. A couple of years later, that same brother, himself, transfered his relics to St Vitus Church, Prague.

The tales of his dysfunctional family are too numerous for this space (cf Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2d ed, p 1466), but they do suggest that his spin on Stephen may be more out of admiration, rather than resentment, for getting his canonical credentials in a more orderly manner. Whatever, these worthies in our spiritual genealogy and their attempts to serve their Lord, figuratively or no, only help to enrich the joy of this season, make us proud to be whatever or maybe even whoever we are. Perhaps they’ll inspire us this coming year to a more exemplary stewardship of our Gospel tradition.

This is the irrational season

When love blooms bright and wild.

Had Mary been filled with reason,

There’d have been no room for the child.

– Madeleine L’Engle
1918-2007

So some CEOs are paid four or five hundred times as much annually as their average company employee. There’s nothing new about that, just maybe more noticeable now so that many of them have become mendicants with their hands out to Uncle Sugar. It’s killing the conservatives who so often badmouth socialism and have to turn to it themselves to get their peers out of hock. The in the midst of all this are the bonuses, the corporate jets, and, well, you know the line. On the other hand, there’s nothing all that new about corporate welfare and tax dodging.

The Church Pension Group people who look after us “retired” parsons manage a bonus for us every Christmas whether we’ve earned it or not. This year, mine is about six hundred bucks and believe you me, CP and I are rightly pleased. (Her metro government retirement plan doesn’t even know the word.) Even so, the pensions and bonuses of some of my colleagues who were cardinal rectors of high steeples make my country preacher past pale in the eyes of the CPG. I guess there are even parishes that have corporate jets, but I don’t know about them and don’t want to. We clergy should know better than to risk letting class consciousness interfere, but our natural humanity often gets in the way.

As for bailouts, now there’s another thought. I saw an application form the other day. It was barely two pages long.

I took a college course in economics and barely got through by the skin of my teeth. That people even major in economics, take advanced degrees in it, make a profession of it continues to amaze me.

A well-meaning person once gave me a book called “Freakonomics,” subtitled, “A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.” I read some of it, enough to confirm my distrust in the discipline and especially its mysteries.

It was good preparation for the eventuality of whatever the economists are calling our present misfortune. I guess I’ll never understand that if we are broke, then where does all the money that we keeping giving away and lending come from, China? How come we can keep printing money that doesn’t stand for anything, and why don’t we just give it away instead of charging for it? And if our banks keep getting billions, why do they not refinance home mortgages instead of foreclosing on them, especially at Christmastime? And why doesn’t China ever foreclose on us and take over our considerable property?

As for the auto makers, I’d as soon see them chastised if it weren’t for all the workers they employ. Shame on them for making the big guzzlers and paying their CEOs such obscene salaries and bonuses, anyway. And furthermore, whoever said we need new cars every year?

If it weren’t for economics and if everybody was just bailed out with a comfortable living, then maybe we could inspire workers to work for the sake of the work and for pride in the work and the desire to learn a skill for something besides greed. Even more important, maybe we’d get a better understanding of grace. God’s grace is probably the least economic thing I ever heard of plus being the way we got here in the first place.

Frankly, though, I don’t understand grace any better than I understand economics. It just seems to make life more pleasant. Thought: neither do we ever run out of it.

(And PS, I hope nobody tries to explain any of this to me. It would just be a waste of our time and cyberspace.)

Old Apostle Andrew’s a favorite of mine. So is Advent. It’s a good that they show up together this time of year.

Reading Buechner’s “Listening to Your Life” in my daily wrestling with eccentering prayer, I once came upon this: “Anyone who has ever known God has known him perhaps better in the dark than anywhere else because it is in the dark where he seems to visit most often” (p 316).

Advent’s a dark time. It makes the light of Christmas shine brighter. Penitential season, no. Let’s leave that to Lent. But preparation season, waiting season, yes. Shadow time. Take-a-look-at-yourself time. Time for Mary’s Magnificat to show the rich a thing or two. Time for John the Baddest to make his play, stir us up. “Stir up thy power, O Lord, and with great might come among us… ” prays the Collect for Advent 3. I knew a clown of a cleric once who hung a saddle over the edge of his pulpit on that Sunday.

I like to preach in Advent. And I like that blue-black ink color for vestments and hangings that nobody ever uses because we skimp by on purple cobbled over from Lent. Then, there’s the Advent wreath with that problematic pink candle that our new PB once said was there because Mary wanted a girl.

Andrew was a kind of adventure, turning brother Simon on to Jesus like he did. The both of them in the dark. Like us, looking for God in all the light places and suddenly finding him in our shadow side.

The Earth’s atmosphere is a relatively thin envelope of gases composed of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and a smidgen of others. Perhaps our most vital activity in return for our lives, together with all the rest of creation, the animals, the plants, is constantly to be at the process of recycling this envelope. For it connects us in an essential and almost intangible ambiance. Philosopher-scientist Lewis Thomas, it was, who likened our atmosphere and its function most to the walls of a living cell.

In a remarkably similar way does God’s Holy Spirit wholly envelop us. It sustains our lives, creates our communities and connects us in them, and most importantly, enables our reconciliation with one another. No wonder that in so many languages spirit is translated as “breath.” And further, we well remember how it exists quite apart from us and like Jesus more or less told Nicodemus, this Holy Spirit lives and moves, comes and goes as it damn well pleases.

Unlike the Earth’s atmosphere, God’s Spirit seems limitless. We, by God’s grace, become the occasions, the stewards to receive and recycle its energy in service to God’s will. We are created by God as those spiritual beings whose vocation is to give human shape to the Spirit as we mature into the way God imagines us to be. Indeed, a case can be made, can it not, that this life begins with our first breath just as it ends with our last. That is a reality with which both pro-life and pro-choice advocates must contend.

Have you ever imagined how a symphony orchestra or a chorus or big jazz band could function if there were no air, no breath? The wind instruments, the strings, the percussion, all depend on there being an atmosphere if there is to be music, an atmosphere which they can move and shape if there is to be music. So is our mission as churchers to shape Spirit. In the way a musician shapes the air into sound, so must we take our lives, the instruments God gives us and use them to play God’s melodies, to shape God’s Spirit in service to God and to our fellow human beings, as well as to be sparing in our criticism of how they shape their own.

Perhaps one of the most grievous examples of the way we cripple this stewardship is our continuing effort to transfix Holy Spirit in our own interests and not God’s. Of course, the mere thought of such a thing is ludicrous. But not a day passes that we churchers do not strive to fashion and refashion that Spirit in some way so as to warp the gift.

Just as we contaminate the Earth’s atmosphere by our carelessness do we defile God’s Holy Spirit by forcing our or some other religious identity upon it. Global warming pales beside the toxicity of the church’s current selfish obsession with its manners, morals, and means at the expense of its mission. We must remember that we are not only the community created at the first such gathering, but we are, as well, the community commissioned for Pentecost. We are Spirit-enabled to become nothing less than Spirit enablers.

Scripture overwhelms us with this good news. Acts’ accounting of the fire, wind, and apostolic headiness that birthed God’s church (Acts 2.1-11). Paul’s catalogue of the gifts of the Spirit to fulfill the church’s purpose with shape and substance (1 Cor 12.4-13). Jesus’s granting of apostolic ministry by the power of his own breath, a portend of the Spirit to come (Jn 20.19-23).

We are called and called again to such ministry. “Breathe on us breath of God,” we sing and pray to brace and refresh us, to call us back to and enlist us in the Way, the Truth, and the Life revealed in the Upper Room. This Pentecost blessing comes to drag us kicking and screaming away from our fascination with ourselves and our need for ecclesiastic security. It comes to license us as God’s agents as Mary sang to show the strength of God’s arm, to scatter the proud in their conceit, to cast down the mighty from their thrones, to lift up the lowly, to fill the hungry with good things, to send the rich away empty, and to champion God’s peace and justice and love for all.