Out of Nowhere

Easter 4B: Acts 4.5-12; 1 Jn 3.16-24; Ps 23; Jn 10.11-18

Those who questioned Peter about the healing of the sick man were rulers, elders, and scribes, major satraps. Think bishop, maybe even archbishop. They’d probably made considerable sacrifices along with lots of smiles and handshakes and kissing babies to gain the high status of their offices (Acts 4.5-12).

Now that they had “arrived,” one might say, when they asked questions, they expected both respect and answers, so much so that in this encounter, at least, they seemed altogether less impressed with the actual healing than with the authority — both the power and name — of how it came about.

On the other hand, it is interesting that both the epistle and the gospel in this Sunday’s propers take less regard for power and hierarchy in lieu of another approach. They talk about love, and that we churchers are called to be shepherds, not veterinarians. And they are separated by Psalm 23 about goodness and mercy. A psalm that was interpreted so well by the kindergartner who when asked what it was about said, “The Lord is my shepherd. That’s all I want.”

Things have not changed all that much from Peter’s experience. Today’s church leans so often in favor of orthodoxy and catechisms and covenants and confessions and who can bless whom that it is not always so easy either to tell when some pastoral healing is taking place or even to allow conditions whereby it may happen. It’s like that sometime Sunday morning all important hawking when the ushers are handing out the leaflets, that you can’t tell a bishop from an acolyte without a program.

It is a matter of how we witness. So often witnessing means telling one’s own and one’s tradition’s story. And it’s well and good when we know that history so well that we can. Its goal seems mostly to convince others of our way and its preference and how come they don’t join up. This is so often what evangelism is taken to mean and understandably why so many will have none of it, no standing on the street corners announcing Repent, the End of the World is Coming Soon! and no paying attention to those who do.

But there is another way. We can take a clue from the courtrooms where witnessing means to tell what one sees, chapter and verse. It means to be a channel for the facts and to let the facts speak for themselves.

Krister Stendahl, the Lutheran scholar, made it so plain and simple when he said, Wherever the brokenness of the world is being mended, there is present the kingdom of God. Ours is not to want credentials first. Rather is it to recognize such mending, such healing, and regardless of how it came about — what power or what name or what church, or what religion, or whether or not either — but to dance in the streets rejoicing and to go and and tell it on the mountain anywhere that the healing of brokenness has come and that this is what the kingdom is about.

Palm Sunday redux and other random thoughts:

The separation of church and state is essential that both can contribute to and be faithful to their roles in a healthy society. That separation is symbolized in Palm Sunday with the two entrances into Jerusalem, Jesus on a jackass, Pilate on a stallion, and understood I think better by Jesus than by Pilate.

Palm Sunday also reminds us not only of our priestly role, but for the moment and perhaps more importantly of our prophetic role which is not only a privilege, but a responsibility in a system such as our nation’s based on peace and justice and freedom. The church may not be a paragon of all this, but it has a mandate to manifest, to witness to it and to understand and exercise its prophetic ministry.

Eugene McCarthy said: “Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it’s important.”

Eric Idle, an original Monty Pythoner, said, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will make me go into a corner and cry by myself for hours.”

An OoN reader writes:

Once our cat Flannery, a youngster then (named after Flannery O’Connor), became glassy-eyed and very quiet for several hours, as if meditating. At about 8 pm, she nearly keeled over (she was sitting upright) and fell off the bed, but righted herself, and continued to gaze. That did it. I called the vets’ emergency number, and got a soft-voiced very southern fellow, and described the situation.

“Does she like critters?” he asked. “Excuse me? Critters?” “You know, like little animals. Does she catch things and bring them to you, or eat them?” “Well, yes.” “Do you have any blue-tailed skinks around your house?” “Well, yes, they run into the ivy right outside the front door, and sometimes they get inside.” “That’s the answer.” “It IS?”

“Yes ma’am. Cats like blue-tailed skinks. They get the tails and chew on them. The tails have a kind of hallucinogen, and some cats really like it. Some get almost addicted. She’ll probably be just fine in the morning.” End of cat tale.

And quite true. Flannery is 16, almost 17, now. She’s not fast enough to catch them any more, but I’m sure she dreams of her blue-tailed skink days. Oh, and she’s part Manx.

A family of skinks at our house make home on the dirt side of a stone retainer wall that helps hold up the backyard. Like most lizards, they enjoy a remarkable facility to ditch their tails when an enemy grabs or threatens. Starfish share the same phenomenon. Madeleine L’Engle wrote her novel The Arm of the Starfish about scientists trying to find a way to incorporate this for human amputees. I don’t remember whether they found it or whether such research ever got out of her book and into today’s labs.

A skink is an animal protected not only by its disposable tail but by its reportedly disgusting taste to predators. Gardener CP’s herbs kept disappearing causing her to wonder whether the skinks were eating the roots of her herbs until Google told us they prefer bugs and other insects.

I’m thinking as well that a skink is not all that attractive should one ever want to make a pet of it. Our skinks are certainly not as attractive as Bo, the new presidential dog that actually made the cover of the current New Yorker magazine showing him on the White House front yard very much as if it and all the rich green of it is his and his alone.

I can’t tell from what pictures I’ve seen whether Bo has a tail, but I am certain that if he does, it’s hardly disposable. We had a cat once named Alice Aforethought. We kept a block of pine 4×4x8 and a hand ax near the fireplace ostensibly for chopping kindling. We told Alice when she misbehaved that it was actually a Manx Cat Kit. It didn’t seem to concern her much more than I am sure does this tall tail tale concern you.

One of the nicer things about being “retired” is the clock. There’s no more time, there’s just no more nine-to-five imposed by somebody else. And there’s Saturday. In fact, it’s because today’s Saturday that these things come to mind. Saturday loses some of its pizzazz if you’re retired because it’s always been there, wating. There’s still Sunday. Retired or not, Sunday for parsons stays about the same, a second Monday, always, and a fourth of mine, I’m pleased to say, are now up north at Calvary Church, Cumberland Furnace, TN.

The old traditional eight-hour day remains ingrained and has to be dealt with somehow. So, an hour practicing the Bb trumpet or cornet (don’t I wish), at least three hours writing (OoN and The Covenant Journal, maybe more, depending), another two reading (the endangered species newspapers, David McCullough’s Pulitzer on John Adams, or Jon Meacham’s Pulitzer on Andrew Jackson, or Robert B Parker’s Non-Pulitzers on Spenser and Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall, or watching Marcel Proust running out of patience there on the book shelf and Thoreau’s Walden on the bedside table, both beckoning. That’s only five hours of the eight. Mustn’t forget the one spent MWF at rehab on the cardiovascular system. Whatever’s left must be entirely for goofing off and plumbing for ideas. But then, there’s the Daily Office when I remember it.

There’s always the social life together with the cyclic and the crisis liturgies. Not to mention entertainment by Jon Stewart’s fake news, but then that’s not in the eight hours unless we watch the daytime reruns. The social life… there seems more now, not less as in the olden days, but ironically, more welcome then, less welcome now, save for a special day each for the Kentucky Derby and New Year’s and others with some favorite souls.

I detest the word retire, but I’m stuck with it so long as the Church Pension Group thinks that’s what’s happening down here and keeps on keeping on. Reading the obits, I find that people my age and younger keep dying. Currently, that’s not an option, just an inevitability.

It is an interesting spin on whether torture is torture when one is forced to justify it by whether it “works,” that is, by whether it accomplishes whatever we might intend by such drastic means. I suppose it took the debate on torture to get this issue of morality and pragmatism into the news and onto the top of the fold. On the other hand, I cannot imagine a war that is not founded on the same pragmatic principle. Even so did the Nazis justify their nastiness.

Torture, like war, is a moral issue. If you have to doubt that, you have already somehow proved it. Even to entertain evaluating it on sheer practicality seems something less than human. We seem puzzled beyond our capacity to understand, as well, when morality creeps in as a chief reason for any budgetary, legislative, or executive decision-making. The uniqueness of the Constitution and the Declaration and the apparent motives of their framers is that they are moral documents before they are pragmatic ones. This is their primary function as the basis for our society. Not to appreciate this is to fail to understand the remarkable contribution of our system in the affairs of women and men.

We can look with gratitude to our new administration in its obviously taking our founders more in this way than as mere makers of legal writs.

Easter 3B/ 26iv09

Imagine, for a moment, the shock on that first Easter when Mary Magdalene came and told the cowering disciples what she had found. They were facing what they thought to be the tragic end of their lives, their own crosses in the hands of the Romans, ready and waiting. And here she comes brandishing in her hands a hope beyond their fondest imaginations. Once they got past their chauvinistic disbelief, they realized there had taken place a major transition such as their world — and surely the whole world — had never seen and has never seen since.

It is all too easy rather to let the startling claims of Easter — both biblical and traditional — merely to slide by amid the lilies, the choral excitement, and the pastel eggs. I’ve never noticed that we Anglicans seem all that sanguine about debating either the empty tomb or the appearances of Jesus. Our tradition, so far as I know it, has never made it a “matter of faith” whether we take the resurrection literally or metaphorically, but that either belief is welcome, and that what truly matters is the question of what the Resurrection really means for us, for the church.

Which is to say that it is no less true and that it is always a matter of life and death, whether it is factual or not. The historical Jesus said that the kingdom of God was not just future, nor even imminent, but that it was already under way. There had already begun the cosmic transformation of this world from a world of evil and injustice and impurity and violence into a world of justice and peace and purity and holiness. However we view its mode, that is, the manner in which it happened, it is that meaning which when the church is true to itself drives the church and our ministry of servant leadership in the world.

In the early church, the question was not “Do you think that Jesus is Lord?” It was “Do you think Caesar or Jesus is Lord?” And if you said, “Jesus is Lord,” you just committed high treason. If Caesar is Lord, then Rome’s empirical program of “first war, then victory, then peace” would be embraced, a program that sounds only too familiar in these present times. But if Jesus is Lord, then the program would be, “first justice, then peace,” for indeed, the two would be inseparable. Whether one takes the resurrection literally or metaphorically, the meaning, the truth, remains the same, that God’s Reign of justice and peace, that is, his Kingdom, has already begun. How we embrace, embody, and implement that Reign is what matters.

And when Jesus speaks of that Kingdom, he does not speak of the reorganization of society. He speaks of what it is like to find a diamond ring you thought you had lost forever. He speaks of what it is like to win the Lottery. He tells stories and parables that catch us by surprise. Sometimes he is cryptic, sometimes he is obscure, sometimes he is irreverent, but all the while, consistently provocative. The themes of these stories were not always grave and somber, some were even antic, comic, and often quite shocking.

It was the evil and sin of the empire that crucified Jesus. It is the power of God’s inbreaking kingdom to overcome evil, to bring hope to otherwise hopeless situations, to make creative transformations possible no matter what. It is this that is the stuff of resurrection. Feminist theologians say that “God makes a way out of no way.” This is resurrection.

Easter is the news of this profound transition. It is the coming together of God in God’s unending greatness and glory and the coming together of ourselves in our unending search, always prepared for the worst, but rarely prepared for the best, always prepared for the possible, but rarely prepared for the impossible. That it seems too good to be true must mean in fact it may be just too good not to be true. It is this news, this Good News, that the Magdalen brought back to the incredulous disciples in the Upper Room. She was the first apostle. It is whenever and wherever this healing, this newness, this getting in touch with ourselves, indeed, that our humanity takes place and the church is truly becoming the church.

There is a dangerous and frighteningly ominous odor of empire once again afoot in the world both in state and church. Peace in this empirical mindset is again and as always is defined by the absence of conquest and not by the presence of justice and love. Such a mindset preaches a gospel of preemption and exclusion — again both in church and state — and not one of example and enticement and ordered freedom, of right and wrong, of orthodoxy and heresy, not of good and evil. What, instead, is really important for us is to think about the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus in the present and of how that profound transition that took place in the disciples can and does take place in us.

I believe that this kingdom presence of justice and peace and inclusiveness of which Jesus speaks has at least, might we say, its nose under our contemporary tent. The church is in transition all over the country, congregations are often in conflict, but also in renewal. One must frankly be startled when finds true community with the capacity for change both in our leaders and in us followers already at work in this forthcoming new life for us.

There is a saying that “coincidence” is often to be thought of as “God at work anonymously.” It is that kind of coincidence that I believe brings us to these times we now embrace as we celebrate God’s great transition at Easter and once again proclaim that Jesus, not Caesar, is Lord. We are called to display this full life of justice-as-the-body-of-love and love-as-the-soul-of-justice in our celebration of Easter and dare not let the church’s message be only an empty echo to the world.

Our rich history here turns now in this congregation’s life as we increasingly discover how we can be the church and what is more can help lead the church, as one biblical scholar rather quaintly said, to “take back the world from the thugs.”

[Note: This preachment has been outrageously cobbled (almost, but not quite, cut and paste) from Frederick Buechner, Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and Richard Wheatcroft because they are so good and so much smarter and also in such a manner as possibly to avoid the charge of plagiarism only because I have admitted it. Bibliography if you insist. — JLD]

Newsweek’s Jon Meacham was on the telly today to celebrate his winning the Pulitzer for American Lion, his book about Andrew Jackson. In his interview, he said, “History to a country is like memory to a person. Without it you can’t know where you are or where you’re going.”

Memory may be one of the most important gifts we humans have, not uniquely, but especially so for Christians. It is what makes us human, and that is what God showed us in Jesus and what he both imagines and wills us to be.

When the dying thief on the cross said to Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom,” he may have prayed the most intimate prayer that anyone can pray. It was not unlike Jesus’s own prayer for us as we discern our own history and Way into that same Realm with him.

He said, “Do this in remembrance of me.”

I don’t know whether shaking hands was a manner of greeting during Jesus’s times, but it’s pretty clear that foot-washing was. And it’s also clear that we churchers are asked to love our enemies, and that obviously doesn’t preclude washing their feet. Well, it’s two thousand or so years later, and we’re still told to be judicious about with whom we do any of these things.

Folk had some pretty unambiguous notions about the kinds of people Jesus ought to frat with, and they were often at opposites with his choices. It’s like some wise man said a bit later something like how people get more out of joint about the gospel being practiced than its being doubted.

It’s strange how the people our president associates with seem to have more to do with affecting his stature than he has with affecting theirs. That’s a kind of insecurity that shows less confidence in the caliber of the American executive office and its holder than in that of the bad guys around the world.

When I was growing up and would meet a new friend — boy or girl — my dad would always first ask what their father did, not who he was, but what he did. Of course, that was during hard economic times when doing anything was ofen the exception rather than the rule. I was too young to appreciate that, I suppose, but our leaders aren’t. Once again, all this adolescent insecurity about with whom our president shakes hands raises the question about our claiming to be a Christian nation out of one corner of our mouths and showing anything but out the other.

In Jesus, God shows us a new way to understand ourselves. The “owner’s manual” for that gift is the covenant we make in our baptism, that we will continue in the faith and liturgy of the apostles. Failing, that we will repent, return, and proclaim the gospel by walking the talk. That walk will seek and serve Christ in everyone including ourselves and, as well, strive for a just peace that respects the dignity in and among all people.

The eucharistic liturgy, our collegial public service in gratitude, is the way we remember, refresh, and act out the commission in that covenant. So there is not only a parallel in the shape of the liturgy and the covenant and how they reflect each other. It is also the Jesus paradigm: the way we understand ourselves and how God imagines us to be human. Identity, covenant, liturgy, world. The Way, the Truth, the Life, the Mission.

That is our true vocation. We will know that we are doing it whenever we don’t feel like we should be doing something else.