Out of Nowhere

The Quakers have a wisdom about calling their weekly gatherings meetings. They take place in what I believe they call Meeting Houses. We call our meetings services, but I’ve never heard the places we gather called Service Houses, and I’ve never been all that clear about what service to whom takes place there.

Here’s a short story that suggests an answer. A visitor arrived somewhat early at a Quaker meeting, took a seat, and impatiently waited in silence past the appointed time. Then she turned to her neighbor, thinking she might have made a mistake, and asked what time the service was to begin. Her neighbor answered gently: When the meeting is over.

This brief exchange which could easily go unnoticed reflects what is perhaps a necessary difference between religion and organized religion, between church and institutional church, between, if you will, what indeed are we doing here.

Perhaps it is a human thing, a necessity because of the way we’re hardwired, a fact that somehow we must transcend in order to get on with things. It seems to reveal itself in the two ambiguous ways we speak of faith, faith as belief as in the creeds, faith as will and commitment as in the covenants we make. Maybe it has something to do with Paul’s notion that faith and hope are mostly of this life, but love as in servant leadership endures in both so as to include itself in whatever is next.

Our late departed Vice says we’re not as safe now as we were when he was carrying the water.

I guess safety is often a matter of how certain of us feel about others of us. Some people just don’t like some people, and they don’t especially care what happens to them, will even plot their demise if neccessary. Trust is two-edged. One can trust ill-will from others or one can trust good-will. Experience shapes and defines whatever kind.

It’s not exactly the way Jesus did it, but as it turned out, he was never all that safe, himself. Time has proven, though, that as a way of managing things, diplomacy beats war if for no other reason that it’s certainly not necessary that anybody dies.

So this season, we’re off on the road to Advent. Maybe it would make a good Hope and Crosby road movie. Heaven knows Pentecost’s long and often tedious and probably safe enough to get us there, one prayer at a time.

The majority does not always make things right, but it does make things so. So what? At least so that the minority has to come along.

It is good for a new majority when it seems more like an old minority and maybe can sigh a less anxious sigh. But then there’s the new minority which is the old majority to contend with, and to help remind us that the majority even the new one does not always make things right, just so.

The gospel is a case in point. It was not at first decided by a majority vote, is not now, and probably will not be next week. It is a radical Christ Movement that is altogether disturbing and noticeable either when practiced or ignored, minority or no. But it has all the possibility of being a leaven in whatever lump it ends up in, maybe even something creative. For one thing, majority or minority, it has an owners manual that when practiced and properly maintained can keep itself and others between the curbs.

 Pent 2/6B

In the gospel this morning, Mark recounts that, “With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it;  he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples” (Mk 4.33f).

There is a parallel story in Luke’s gospel in which the disciples are puzzled about parables, and they ask what a certain parable meant. And Jesus answers, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand” (Lk 8.4-10).

And then Paul in 2d Corinthians this morning, who is not always so obscure as we might think and as if to answer Jesus’s puzzling comment, reminds us, “for we walk by faith, not by sight” (2Cor 5.7).

There is often a certain ironic humor at the heart of the parables. And I shall try to say why I think so. At the least is Jesus implying that he uses them because he doesn’t want anybody to catch on to this radical Christ Movement.

Let us first take notice, then, that humor is not comedy. The difference between humor and comedy is the difference between the one that endures as a part with us and the one that evaporates almost on contact. Humor gives, comedy takes. Humor has character, comedy, mere personality. Paul was talking about humor when he said we must be fools for Christ, not just to fool around. Humor doesn’t fool around, and that is the ironic paradox. When Father Emil of the Church of Perpetual Reponsibility up in Lake Wobegon had to tell his parishioners that the Bishop required them to use the Peace in the Liturgy, he said,  Though you must do so, you don’t have to make eye contact.

This mystery in which we live and which we call life draws on irony to reveal its story. That’s why life, like irony, often seems to mean the opposite of what it seems to mean and requires that we give it special audience for understanding, audience that takes the risk of understanding, whch means the risk of finding meaning. A life in faith is a splendid name for that audience, that risk. Like Paul told the Corinthians, “for we walk by faith, not by sight.”  (2 Cor 5.7)

Humor, especially at its most caustic as satire, reminds us that everybody sooner or later and maybe more often than not is sometime exhausted, wicked, afraid, frustrated, and desperately alone. That is humor’s perspective and its restorative power, its healing energy over life’s menaces. By identifying us and identifying with us, that is as is said, by knowing our number, humor can be redemptive.

Humor does not wish us ill, but always wishes us well, and there is much to say for that. At times, it may condemn us and make us livid, often embarrass us, but always it instructs us, informs us, not simply pedantically, but by shaping us and giving us form, preparing us to receive it, by the tough love of breathing spirit into our clay. Humor unites us with ourselves, our neighbor, and with the roots of life, the awesome mystery of beginnings and endings, purpose and destiny, love and fear. Take not light the startling similarity of humus and human and humor.

And humor works best through story. Such story takes a mythic form that creates our worlds for us, that reveals to us our role in the drama, and that prepares us for it, as well. This mythic form takes shape in the parables.

Again Jesus says, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” Everybody knows that mustard plants never get that big except in our imaginaton or myths which are no less true perhaps even truer.

With many such parables Jesus spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.” (Mk 4.31-34) The kingdom of God is a parable, it is ironic. Another way to speak of it is that wherever the brokenness of the world is healed, wherever healing takes place, there is present the kingdom of God.

Listen to the parables of Jesus. But listen to them by envisioning and imagining them, putting them on, wearing them. Be the lost sheep. Be the mustard seed. Be the importunate woman banging on the judge’s chambers. Be that guy on the other side of the road beat within an inch of his life. Be the prodigal son. Be the son who kept the rules.

This is what faith is about. We do an injustice to the parables to expect them to create faith. Like scripture as a whole, they do not create faith. For in a real sense, faith creates them. One comes to them with the ears of faith, the risk of faith, the key of faith which unlocks the parables to us and which so often reveals the subtle humor and wit in their core. We enter the parables that way, the way that in a real sense we “put on” Jesus. A lot about this marvelous gospel of ours is ludicrous, is it not? Especially that God would care for us so sincerely and so gently as to have his beloved son to  tell us stories, stories about ourselves.

But there can never be enough of that kind of humor. For God is a God of irony. It is in that mystery and at that level in us that God moves. Maybe one of the greatest impediments in our national life in this time and for sure among us churchers is that we just don’t get it because we’re just too darn serious, because we lack a sense of humor, a sense of our humor.

And so remember what Jesus said to his disciples, he also says to us present-day disciples, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand”

And Paul also saying to us, “for we walk by faith, not by sight.”

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk said: “What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears.” I don’t know from whom is Pamuk, but he reminds me of something our seminary’s Ethics prof once said, more or less: Good fiction rather than textbooks is where one finds a better understanding of ethics.

The gospel is probably as much about fear as it is about love. It reminds us that perfect love casts out fear. Fear is not one among many emotions. Rather is fear the wall-to-wall carpet that underlies emotions. Anxiety is fear of the future. Anger is fear in the present, the attempt to regain the balance one loses from anxiety. Guilt is fear of what I have done — real or imagined which can be just as real as real. Resentment is fear of what others have done to me — likewise. Resentment and guilt are among the larger bugaboos for recovering addicts. Love encompasses all these dimensions that Pamuk insists literature must assuage.

Church is the place to take our fears, to share and to hear the narratives that encompass and inform them. In church, we immerse ourselves in our family history and learn how our peers, past and present, dealt with their fears, their awe before the awesomeness of God. Life is that story, their stories, our stories, our awe.

Miles Davis played a tune called “So What,” a sort of in-your-face melody with a neat bass line plus only two chords that ring changes on mediaeval church modes. Seems logical if ironical that this may be one that he plays with his back to the audience. So here’s to fear and love and all that jazz. Peace.

A reader writes: “Having a lifelong interest in words, like C.S.Lewis, I like to play with them sometimes, and see how many forms a word may take. Sometimes, a verb. Sometimes, an adjective. So I said your OoNs were lucubracious. Not lugubrious as you seem to think by your referring to possible misspelling. Now I am tired of playing with you. I still like to read what you write.”

American Heritage Dictionary, 3d ed, says, lucubrate means to write in a scholarly fashion; produce scholarship. From Indo-European leuk = Light, brightness.

Neat word. Never heard of it. Glad to discover it. Honored to be associated with it. Sometimes I feel like the lad in “Our Town” walking through the public library stacks, gawking up and saying in utter amazement, “Words. Millions of words.”

I like finding new words, not neologisms, but old words, words with cognate histories running out their ears that are new to me. Wikipedia says “neologisms are words and terms that have recently been coined, generally do not appear in any dictionary, but may be used widely or within certain communities. Protologisms are neologisms that have not yet caught on widely. (In fact, “protologism” is a neologism to be avoided.)” I’d just as soon avoid neologisms, for that matter, save for “certain communities” that are so avant-garde they must use them and depend on them and sometimes, I suspect, delight in them ever so much as finding what they had to get a new name for in the first place.

Gospeler John must surely have been delighted when he discovered Word while looking for a new synonym for Jesus. Little did he know how the notion would intrigue Bible scholars and theologians down through the years. Then later, the DNA guys also took the alphabet and grammar to parse what makes us tick and only needed four letters to pull it off. Indeed, they found the words that become us in a way that old John might be proud to know about. Maybe they aren’t exactly neologisms, but they do just fine until something better comes along.

Trinity Sunday 7vi09

“It takes a mighty big stigma to beat a dogma.”

Dorothy Sayers said it. She was British. She was also a theologian, a mystery novelist, a poet, and a Dante scholar. So she knew, it’s safe to say, what she was talking about, whether I do or not.

She could have been talking about Trinity Sunday, the only place in the entire liturgical keeping of time that a dogma assumes front stage center, can leave a stigma all over one’s preaching, and elbows all those majestic events like Christmas and Easter and Pentecost to the wings.

Preaching on Trinity Sunday can make one feel like the heart attack victim that called for a priest who, on arriving, moved the gathering crowd aside, knelt beside her, and asked, “Do you believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?” With great effort, the stricken woman addressed those surrounding her, “Here I lay dying, and the Father is asking me riddles.”

Dogma, that’s doctrine with legs, seems always to be faith’s more or less futile attempt to make sense out of nonsense. Whereas faith, not unlike love (and they’re not all that different), is about as exposed a position as a person can take and with very little reason to support it. It’s like getting caught with your hand in life’s cookie jar. It makes you feel like you need some kind of excuse. Dogma, on the other hand, gets you out of hock and, as well, with an alibi.

It somehow makes me mindful of that grand and eloquent creation story from Genesis that wraps a security blanket around the whole idea (Gen 1.1-2.3). It reminds us that we are put here to tend God’s creation by giving the universe something to talk with, giving God someone to talk to, and giving us somebody to talk about (cf Frederick Buechner).

And further, Genesis says that whatever we do about it, even to the making of enigmatic riddles, God thinks that it is good and makes us unconditionally in God’s image. Which is to say that we and all the rest of us — and them and it — are gently and lovingly shaped and brought forth with cause out of the unfathomable riches and depths of God’s ingeniously fecund imagination.

And not as mere clones. But as beloved sharecroppers in whatever may be our capacity in all this exercise in fertility. And that, beloved, is very scary stuff. So scary, and yet, so enticing, that right off, we blew it out of the garden and have needed the safety belts and air bags of doctrine and dogma ever since.

But dare not overlook that doctrine, dogma, and all their theological progeny serve us well. We want everybody to buckle up. But be aware, as well, we are reminded — and warned — too much of this good thing can be at the expense of our imagination and worship. Such insight as that is perhaps no more obvious than in the turn of phrase at the very heart of the collect for Trinity Sunday, as we pray, “Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity… ” (BCP p 228)

We acknowledge doctrine. We worship God. We’re not to confuse these. For it is in the imagination of our worship that we are most godlike, most as God creates us to be, imagining and incarnating our spirit into human being — and what is more leading us forth to walk the talk.

In the dark days just before the Council of Nicaea, there was something called Layreaders’ Sermons. These were written by various and sundry clergy around the church who were selected by some mysterious Vatican Rolodex at “815,” the affectionate name for the midtown address of the New York headquarters of the Episcopal Church. There was no reimbursement, just the “honor” of having your name attached to one.

When I was some five or so years out of seminary, a request came for me to write one for Trinity Sunday. The instructions were that it would be nice if the sermon not be too long and kept more or less to the theme and the propers for the Sunday, but not necessarily so, and please cool it with the erudition.

I had a mentor who was a sage and learned Armenian cleric, so I asked him how to handle a sermon on the Trinity — or did I really have to. He said, “Of course not. No self-respecting Anglican cleric ever preaches on Trinity Sunday, he just schedules Sunday School Commencement.”

I was a carefree college chaplain at the time, and Trinity Sunday was on the calendar the week after the university had shut down for the summer and our chapel had shut down with it. Fortunately for me and sundry congregations, I didn’t have to preach anywhere on that Sunday, just write a sermon for some poor sucker to preach somewhere out in the boonies.

I didn’t remember Jesus ever preaching on the Trinity or whether he was even all that conscious of the notion in the first place, but it’s possible somebody will point out to me that he was and give me chapter and verse. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea might not have occurred to him once or twice. I could not imagine any theological orthodoxy whatever that may have impeded his sense of vocation at the time.

That should have been intuitive warning enough, but of course, it wasn’t. After all, I was just out of seminary for a few years and still pretty much in possession of the notion that there was very little that was known that I didn’t already know including making a homily on the riddle of all riddles. It was the last time I tried.

It’s different now. How different, I’m not so sure. But different enough that I’ll spare you (and me) that preachment I sent in to 815 for its nihil obstat. Tomorrow’s weekly homily time for Sunday next when I once more confront such questions yet awaits.

Note: As some may not be aware of such terms or care less, the “Nihil Obstat” and “Imprimatur” are official Roman Catholic declarations that a book or pamphlet is free of doctrinal or moral error. No implication is contained therein that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat and the Imprimatur agree with the content, opinions or statements expressed. As OoN is neither book nor pamphlet, I shall forge on, anyhow.

It’s June, and we saw the first double-breasted seersucker of the season at the bird feeder. We were having morning coffee at a favorite spot in our house where we frequently practice awakening. The view slopes up and away the backyard with its rich green and several gardens of native wild flowers, herbs, and hollies, the new October Glory maple waiting to crown all with its orange-red umbrage in the fall.

The yard in its entirety is CP’s domain, horticultured attentively as it is. She is not given to my foolishness with bird’s names or much else, for that matter. But this morning the lightness of our being seemed more nourishing than usual as we anticipated working out at rehab the next hour. We had only yesterday got the pump going again in the leaden cistern with the spouting lion’s head and fixed the leak along one of its joints with duct tape. Public television’s Red Green, I thought, would be proud of us.

I had enough yard work on my resumé by the time I got out of high school and into college to keep me from pursuing anymore. I’ve never been of much help save to admire CP whose strength and alacrity with forty-pound bags of topsoil is amazing for her size. All of which serves her well at rehab where the treadmills, stationary bikes, and workout machines with all their pulleys and levers and weights and pocketa-pocketa remind me of Walter Mitty hard at work in Dr Frankenstein’s monster assembly lab.

This morning was no different. But I must confess that workout seems always better in retrospect than in anticipation. It is good that God gives us these carnations with which to recycle her spirit in the hope maybe of doing some good every once in a while, that is, as the Quakers might say, when the meeting is over and the service begins.

PS. What is a sense of humor after all, but an awareness of our own humanity?