Out of Nowhere

Seminaries are so indispensable. That’s where I learned to call John Donne John Dunn rather than John Don and Ralph Vaughn Williams Rafe and to look him up under V instead of W. Three years it took.

Ernest Hemingway helped with Donne, as well. For Whom the Bell Tolls, the movie, helped me to fantasize on being Gary Cooper rather than James Stewart. And then there was Ingrid Bergman and her earth moving.

Donne’s No-man-is-an-island has better rhythm than Nobody-is-an-island, but it’s not nearly so politically correct. Political correctness doesn’t often lend itself to literary pace and rhythm.

But today, we remember Poet John Donne as well we should. It’s probably because he was born or died or did something on March 31 or nearby. But it recalls for me of how valuable indeed are the church’s reminders of our past, our spiritual kin, how unsung go those brilliant worthies who shape and frame the liturgical year and pick all those proper lections, and how poverty stricken are all those churches that don’t bother with things like Lent and Epiphany and Advent. I knew a trombone player once who always said Monday Thursday as if he knew.

Whenever I get too absorbed in myself, Donne reminds me that I am just a clod washing out to sea like the rest of us, yet how important are clods in the overall scheme of things.

I was learning how to fly B-24s out at a Naval Air Station smack in the middle of the midwest of all places. It was Palm Sunday morning, a date not much recognized by Uncle Sugar’s Navy. The bishop was at our neighboring town’s parish for that morning’s confirmation. Neither was he all that much recognized.

A couple of hints had come my way about whether I would be confirmed. I had not attended enquirer’s classes. I tried to avoid an answer, but without a lot of success. I was glad I had to fly that morning. Gave me an excuse to skip the episcopal visitation and, I hoped, the big decision.

When I got home about noon, I was told that the bishop had offered to wait around and confirm me privately that afternoon. I said I had not attended the classes. I was told that the bishop said that didn’t make any difference. The service would be at two pm. That’s one reason why Palm Sunday is the anniversary of my confirmation.

My baptism was a lot like that. I was fourteen and still under the impression that one did what one’s parents said do. We attended the East Dallas Christian Church. My mother said it was time for me to be baptized. It was not my choice any more than confirmation would be later down the road.

Although I was mindful of the farmer’s son working the field one day who saw the clouds form the letters G P C. He thought it meant Go Preach Christ. His pastor suggested rather that it might mean Go Plant Cotton.

I think it might have been God who wanted me to be a priest, although I don’t know how anybody can be sure of things like that. Just to help along that certainty, there were many others who were visibly shocked at the idea and recommended against it. On the other hand, I was twenty-eight and still under the impression that one did what God said do. I haven’t yet outgrown that. The “call” remains a remnant of my pretentiousness, although I do prefer cotton whenever I have the choice.

Sometimes I suddenly realize how much I miss Walt Kelly’s Pogo. There’s often something in the news that makes me wonder how Kelly’s graphic, not-so-subtly prophetic satire might reveal it for what it is without all the usual attempts at a sophisticated cover-up.

I suppose there’s now a whole generation that has never heard of Pogo, the possum, or had the benefit of his incisive wit. One of his long-enduring pronouncements that never stops ringing in the ears of my memory is his “We has met the enemy, and the enemy is us.”

It is not an easy charge for one for whom being right is of paramount importance, for one who even with sincere inner searching cannot come up with a single mistake one has made. For not to do so, not to be able to do so, strikes of such spiritual immaturity as never to discover the purchase such a personal turning point can make in one’s history. Without such “bases” on life’s corners, it is practically impossible to reach “home” and score runs toward the fulfillment of God’s imaginatively tailor-made purposes for us. We are these days facing such bends in our national history. They are being made manifest in of all places our proposed budget, the very concrete symbol of where we have been our own enemy, where we’ve succumbed to denial and grandiosity, where we’ve made a selfish farce of stewardship, and of which we are now being made painfully aware.

The times, if any, are rare where we may have more need of access to God than now, not that God will pat us on the head with a “Now, now,” but where God will once again remind us of who we are and of to what purpose we are called. There also comes to my mind at such a time as well there might Isaiah’s admonition that we “Seek the Lord while he wills to be found” (Is 55.6). But in the meanwhile, loving one’s enemy may never come more spontaneously.

Lent 5B Jer 31.31-34

Shortly after my seminary days, I had the privilege of serving on a conference staff with Norman Pittenger, one of our church’s outstanding theologians. Even more impudent then than now, I played a game of stump-the-professor with him. Never mind who won.

I asked him, “How does one ever know the will of God?” Rather than stumble around, pondering and harrumphing, as I hoped he might, he quipped instantly, “Just trust your hunches.”

That’s a hard charge for those of us “from Missouri,” who have to see the evidence, who think intuition is for the birds. But it wasn’t for Jeremiah.

“Behold,” he said, “the days are coming, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant… not like the covenant which I made with (your) fathers… my covenant which they broke… ” But now, “I will put my law within (you), and I will write it upon (your) hearts; and I will be (your) God, and (you) shall be my people” (Jer 31.31,33b).

Jeremiah stood in the biblical tradition that one’s heart is the seat of knowledge, the place where the hard choices are made, that one’s heart is the source for spiritual energy and courage and the ultimate storehouse where fundamental allegiances are kept. And he was apparently giving this tradition a lot of thought.*

But be that as it may, alongside that notion was this other tradition that gave immutable certitude, as well, to an external law of life and covenant given by God to Moses and developed over the centuries, both literally and virtually graven in stone.

On the other hand, Jeremiah’s hunches about God’s will were keeping him up at night. He was already convinced that nobody ever invites a prophet home to dinner more than once. And he knew full well that the old legal, hard-nosed approach never did much good, anyway, and that God was suggesting a radical change, if only he’d listen. So he stood up in the marketplace, took the risk to threaten his already shaky reputation, and shouted what he believed, might we say, with all his heart.

“Behold, the days are coming, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant… not like the covenant which I made with (your) fathers… my covenant which they broke… ” But now, “I will put my law within (you), and I will write it upon (your) hearts; and I will be (your) God, and (you) shall be my people” (Jer 31.31,33b).

Well, we apparently got the word.

On Ash Wednesday in every Lent, the special collect asks God to “create in us new and contrite hearts” (BCP p 267). And Matthew’s gospel reminds us that where our treasure is, there will our heart be also (Mt 6.21). And as if all that is not enough, today’s collect prays that “our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found” (BCP 219).

In this wartime Lent, we are called once again as followers of the Way to search even more deeply into our hearts where love and God’s law are inseparable, into our hearts where love is commitment, not mere disposition, and into our hearts where love is a deliberate act of the will, not a mere responsive feeling. And where most importantly — if Jeremiah is to be believed — God’s covenant with us is written in such a way that it can nourish and grow.

In these same hearts, we all pray fervently for peace. Some of us and not without considerable risk actually march and demonstrate for peace. The covenant God makes with us, together with the Incarnation that brought that covenant to fulfillment in his son, not only calls for peace on earth, but in its shocking scheme of things, asks us, as well, both to love and to pray for our enemies.

I thought, how refreshing to be reminded in a time of so much ill will that we truly are people of good will who strive for a government of good will, and how it dare us not to take notice of the irony that these enemies for whom we now pray, together with so many of us, are also children of Abraham, and that we are systematically killing each other and decimating the very spiritual homeland that God gave to us all.

After 9/11, the mystic Thomas Keating spoke of an “ocean of grief” that swelled out in its wake. And what is grief, but a broken heart, not broken only over our loss, but even more deeply perhaps over a broken covenant which God writes inside. On the death of John F Kennedy, Senator Pat Moynihan spoke of the Irish words that apply, as well, to us Christians. “There’s probably not any point in being (a Christian) if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.”

All this fear and grief only heightens our sensitivity to the horror and the hunger and the pain and the injustice and the subjugation of women that go on somewhere in our world every moment of every day. It only intensifies the need for what we do as the church all the time. If what we are doing here day by day is not relevant, even more relevant now, then it is never relevant at all.

We are people living in this covenant community trying to discern and to do God’s will. We are not of one mind. We have not a common understanding of these complex issues. Nevertheless, we come here again and again to be shaped by the gentle touch of God’s peace.

Let us, then, realize that our hunches and our hearts are often one and the same. Therefore, let us remember that in every choice we face we must steadfastly will the good as we understand it and put ourselves into the hands of God to be shapen at God’s pleasure, then it is altogether likely that trusting our hunches will open our hearts and reveal God’s will. Then will we know a peace that is not the mere absence of war, but the presence of love. Lent is indeed an affair of the heart.
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*In both Old and New Testament, the heart is the seat of wisdom (1 Kgs 3.12) and thought and reflection (Jer 24.7, Lk 2.19), the instrument of belief (Rms 10.10) and of will, the principle of action (Ex 35.21) which may be hardened so that it resists God (Dt 15.7; Mk 16.14). Heart is the principle both of virtues and vices, of humility (Mt 11.29) and pride (Dt 17.20), of good thoughts (Lk 6.45) and evil (Mt 15.19).

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 redeem all creation 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.

But the religious institution apparently can’t. It soon took hold of Mary and all her exemplary faith, humility, and commitment, gave her an Immaculate Conception (I can’t even imagine whatever on earth that could be) and a Bodily Assumption (likewise) into heaven, thus handily destroying her womanhood (aka human being). 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 Order.

A university of my acquaintance had, rather than sororities and fraternities, student associations called literary societies. The practice was to name them for prominent literary persons. One women’s group named their association the Oscar Wilde Literary Society. They were especially proud, not only that they’d chosen so prominent a person, but also, that an acronym of their society’s name spelled out the name of the school’s mascot.

When the administration got word of it, they disallowed the use of Wilde’s name and bounced it back to the students, saying it (as well as he) was too controversial. Wisely staying with their acronymage, the women simply became the Owen Wister Literary Society and so smugly satisfied the administration.

I’d never heard of Owen Wister at the time, took it for granted that if the young women were bright enough to be accepted into that demanding university, they were bright enough to know what they were doing with Mister Wister. It was much later that I was to learn that Wister wrote The Virginian, that quintessential story of the Great West than which there is claimed to be no whicher. That’s a far cry from Oscar Wilde’s fare, but then, so is a lot of literature a far cry from Oscar Wilde’s fare.

There is, Wilde wrote disturbingly as a playwright, a certain importance in being earnest. As well and so indeed, he wrote his only book, The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is said by those who know that The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered one of the last works of classic gothic horror fiction with a strong Faustian theme. It deals with the artistic movement of the decadents and with homosexuality, both of which caused some considerable controversy when the book was first published, hence the predictable behavior of the overseers’ understanding of academic freedom. However, in recent times, the book has been regarded as one of the modern classics of Western literature.

Owen Wister’s The Virginian is a different kind of Western literature, but no less wickedly suggested by the university women than one might imagine. There’s always such a delightful twist in irony, don’t you think, the presence of which our Lord himself seemed frequently to appreciate.

It recently came my good fortune to meet with an adult enquirers’ class. We were to have two sessions about liturgy and sacraments.

It’s been a while. They’re not called enquirers’ class anymore, it’s Christian formation now. I suppose that’s really more to the point, shaping and informing is what we do as we mature together as Christians, the Gospel as Information Theory. Whatever that means, I’ve never been all that sure, but it’s an impressive idea, and I am always wondering and seeking.

Anyhow, it struck me to attempt to show with the class some parallel of the shape of the liturgy with the Baptismal Covenant and with being human. How they reflect one another. Maybe in Jesus, God shows us a new way to understand ourselves. And the BC attempts to outline this for our understanding and expression. Over the years, I’ve come to understand that what it means to understand is not for to define or even to describe, but for to have meaning, to have a part in shaping as informing my life, giving my life form, even identity as a Christian.

The “take, bless, break, share” pattern of the eucharistic life is, of course, the parallel of what we’re commissioned to do and to be in our baptism and the covenant we make. The Covenant spells this out in and for us through the two kinds of faith — faith as believing and accepting as expressed in the Creed, faith as willing and acting as expressed in the balance of the commitment. We will to continuity with the apostles through succession, collegiality, and eucharist, in confession and reconciliation, in witnessing, in recognizing Christ in others, and in championing peace, justice, and dignity.

The Prayer Book Catechism suggests that to be human is to be created in God’s image, to be imagined into being by God’s quickening creativity. It means by this to be free to choose: to create, to love, to reason, and to live in harmony with God and all God’s creation. The Baptismal Covenant is the owner’s manual for that pattern, the shape of the eucharistic liturgy is our Lord’s way and truth and life for to leadt it. Christian formation indeed.

I keep wondering if there’s not some possibility for satire with the old decision question, The Chicken or the AIG. But the muse scowls in obvious disdain. Yet, and in trustworthy homiletic license (mine should have expired years ago), I soldier on oblivious to literary propriety and decorum.

What is it, though, with corporations? Offshore tax avoidance, corporate welfare, legal privileges as a person, and now apparent total disregard even in the face of what might otherwise be a humiliating need for any sense of limit in personal financial largesse. At the heart of all this, I suspect, is one of the running conflicts seemingly inherent in our political system, and that is the off-spoken claim to be a Christian nation where grace might be expected to abound and an unswerving pattern of institutional and personal evaluation and worth based on merit. Such inevitably leads to classes and then to class conflict. It does now. Historically, it always has. Why anyone would be surprised is beyond me.

Even the churches, the supposed champions of grace over merit, fall for it. We’re chief among the tax-evaders, a situation that more often than not probably dampens if not cripples any capacity we might have for a prophetic ministry. The least we can do is to take a hard look at that age-old privilege and measure it beside our Lord’s commission to emulate his ministry and that of the classical prophets. Is it God or empire, we must constantly be about asking ourselves.

Perhaps the currently most glaring symbol of all this is the proposed national budget. The loudest objections seem to come from those who can approve billions for war and its ultimate devastation and loss all the while oblivious to our Lord’s reminder that whatever we do unto the least of these, we do unto him. It’s really a matter of a lot more than whether we have prayer in the school and a creche on the courthouse lawn, when all we might truly need to do is to practice the stewardship already inherent and accessible to us in the Constitution.

Lent 4B Jn 6.4-15 (from the BCP lectionary barrel)

I left a call for my old friend and mentor Canon P D Quirk and asked him for some counsel about this Sunday’s gospel, John’s account of the Feeding of the Multitudes. It’s never been all that easy for me to talk about miracles, especially that one, the only one recounted in all four gospels. Quirk can talk about anything with impunity.

He called back shortly, and I had barely said hello, when he pronounced, “It is true that we do not live by bread alone. But it is also true that we don’t live long without it. To eat at all,” he said, “is to acknowledge our dependence — both on food and on each other.” He went on, “It also reminds us of the other kinds of emptiness that not even the Blue Plate Special can touch.” (I’ve a hunch Fred Buechner put these words in the Canon’s mouth.)

“That’s great,” I replied, only to be interrupted.

“When old Screwtape (he always liked C S Lewis’s name for Satan)… when old Screwtape challenged Jesus in the Wilderness to turn the stones into bread, he was told to get lost, to stop insulting God. When Jesus’ disciples challenged him to feed a few thousand families out there in the boonies whether or not there were any stones around, he took a kid’s basket of carp and some bread, fed the whole lot of them, and had more left over than he started with.” Then Quirk added, “Why did Jesus refuse a simple miracle in the wilderness with the Devil and readily fulfill one in the country side for the multitudes? Why?”

“Maybe,” I dared answer, “maybe he was clearer about the purpose of his life at the later time?”

“No,” the Canon roared. “Where did you ever get such an idea? What matters is that both stories are there and most importantly, they’re about bread. And once again they remind us that to eat at all is to acknowledge our dependence — both on food and on each other. And that it also reminds us of all of other kinds of emptiness that not even the Blue Plate Special can touch — the poor, the starving, the millions without health insurance, the….

“Eating,” the Canon was in full lecture mode now, “even when you’re alone, eating is a corporate act. You don’t make that food all by yourself. It’s a global economic affair. It’s a family affair. That’s the way the Holy Spirit works. That’s the way Jesus works. Out there with Satan,” he added, “it wasn’t a matter of eating. It was a matter of grandstanding, and Jesus wisely would have none of it.”

The rest of our conversation was more gossip about what happens to priests when they become bishops, a kind of bread neither of us had yet tasted and never would. Frustrated, we hung up.

Our conversation about bread reminded me that whether or not we’ve ever yet seen that what we do around this table is exactly what Jesus was doing out there with that crowd, surely we’ve seen it now. For both are miracles, not so much the kind that create faith, but the kind that faith makes accessible, that our corporate faith, itself, opens for God by grace to create. Miracle, indeed.

We bring our faith commitment to this table. Maybe it’s not all that commanding or noticeable to us or to anybody else in our lives, maybe there’s not even much piety in it, but it’s there or we wouldn’t be here. One of the startling things about this eucharistic life in which we, the church, center ourselves and which we embrace is how similar it is to all the rest of our life and especially to our relationships and, indeed, to this story about feeding the multitudes.

Life seems always richest when we’re thankful, even, I’ve found, when we’re thankful for the bad stuff as well as the good stuff. In the first few months of beginning to recover something of my humanity through learning to live a Twelve-Step program, I was consciously thankful and talking about it to the point of annoying others. But then along came an unfortunate disappointment, and in a New York minute, I was into a plague of the “poor me’s.” Finally, a friend said to me, “You have been so thankful that the rest of us are getting nauseated hearing about it. If you really mean it, why not try being thankful now for whatever this is that’s so terrible?” AA calls it an “attitude of gratitude.” I’ve never seen a time when it doesn’t accomplish miracles in itself. Such a capacity for thanksgiving is, indeed, evidence for the “spiritual awakening” of which the twelfth step speaks.

The celebration of the Eucharist, this celebration, just as Jesus’ celebration with the loaves and the fishes embodies such an attitude of gratitude. Eucharist means grace, it means thanksgiving, it is why we come here together every week, thankful or not, to celebrate thanksgiving and fill our lives with it.

We have met that offering, and it is us. The bread and the wine and the offering of money are us, our nourishment, our sustenance, a microcosm of us — our loves, our companionships, our families, our parenting, our children, our work, our loneliness, our joys, our sorrows, our anxieties, our angers, our guilt, our resentments, our pleasures. All are brought into the presence of the Christ to be blessed and received again. We are no different from the thousands gathered there on that hillside, for we are also gathered with Jesus.

The story continues. Watch the similarity with what we do in this place. Jesus took the loaves, and first, gave thanks. We sometimes call it saying grace, another meaning of the word eucharist. Then he broke the loaves and shared them. He would do this same thing again with the bread and the wine in the Upper Room, saying the very words we say here, and again on the road to Emmaus. And again, in a very few moments with us.

And further, Jesus is always apt to come into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable. Not in a blaze of unearthly light, not in the midst of a sermon — of all places — not in the throes of some kind of religious daydream, but at supper time or walking along a road, or in the person seated next to you. He never approaches from on high, but always in the midst of us, in the midst of people, in the midst of real life and in the midst of the questions that real life always asks.

Our vocation is to pattern that life that’s shaped in the Liturgy in our own way. To take and receive it as it comes to us. To bless it, which is to give thanks for it. To sacrifice it, which is to recognize that it is already made sacred. And to share it. Just as with the thousands gathered there and with those who gather here. That is to make eucharist, that is to share in a miracle.

The miracle is to acknowledge our dependence — both on food and on each other. It also reminds us of the other kinds of emptiness — in us and in our families and especially in our society and in the world, the kinds of emptiness that even the Blue Plate Special can never touch.

There was a time when some fell for the notion that the moon was made of green cheese. Dolts they were thought to be, but maybe their conclusion was not entirely without reason. Unaged wheels of cheese in dim, cool places could easily look a bit like the moon when it is full of itself.

Out west where I started my yet unfinished process of growing up, green and immaturity, lack of experience, gullibility, go hand in hand. Tenderfoot. Greenhorn. Actually, though, the new horns on young deer, so they say, often appear a little greenish.

On the other hand, St Patrick, like everybody else, probably wore brown… even on March 17th. Kermit, the frog, probably would, too, had he half the chance. It’s not easy being green.

But just to be on the safe side…

“O all ye green things upon the earth, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him forever.” (A Song of Creation, BCP p 48)