Out of Nowhere

Unobtainium is a material that is unobtainable mostly because it doesn’t seem to exist.A word maven column that I read says the name incorporates the suffix common to chemical elements in order to suggest some desirable substance either that isn’t at all or else is so rare that even folding money can’t get you any. It’s also a potent excuse, of course, for non-delivery. If only you had some, you can lament, there’d be no problem.One must be careful, I was warned, to distinguish between unobtainium and handwavium. Handwavium refers to a way of ignoring the laws of physics, among others, as if one might banish an insuperable impediment by simply waving a hand at it.The Star Trek series makes great use of handwavium. The familiar replicator, the transporter, and the phaser come to mind. Faster-than-light space drives which, of course, can’t exist at all, take handwavium for granted and speed on their way.Naturally, things like this eventually work their way into the church. At this very moment, the Breakawayers, having got where they are with unobtainium and, as well, being overburdened by it, are making great use of handwavium by simply phasering canon law into oblivium, another entity which, for some, is no problem at all.

Pentecost 4/8B [Mk 5.22-24,35b-43]

“Do not fear, only believe.”

Jesus said this to Jairus, the synagogue leader, whose daughter lay dying. Interesting that Jairus was already doing both. His fear drove him to Jesus, and ironically, his belief drove him to Jesus.

The crowd jeered. It is the way with crowds. But at Jesus’s touch and command, the child arose and walked, anyway. We need now to hear Jesus’s words. We need Jesus.

“Do not fear, only believe.”

We act, instead, as if our fear transcends our belief. For indeed, it does. Rather than turn to how belief can quench our fear, rather than turn to the faith and love and justice that our belief entails, we churchers turn again to the law, to our legislative bodies to pass resolutions, as if somehow, that will still our fear, when all it does is protect us for a moment.

We remain afraid. It is the most pernicious kind of fear when we are afraid of what we do not know but think we know. We are afraid when authority goes into the hands of women or of gays and lesbians. We are afraid that it will turn into power and manipulation and patronizing as it always has in our hands. Our fear drives us to foolish statements, even childishly adolescent notions about how people should properly show their love. We are afraid that same gender parents will destroy the family. We are afraid to know that child abuse and domestic violence and divorce most often occurs in families with different gender parents.

We are not only afraid of what we do not know but of what we might learn if only we tried. We were and many still are afraid of new translations of the Bible and of our liturgies. We are afraid of illegal immigrants when we live in a land founded by illegal immigrants who rather than ask the native Americans for visas and green cards, stole their land from them, instead.

But enough of our fear. Enough of our preoccupation that turns us away from our true occupation to love, to heal the sick, to feed the poor, to bring justice and peace to all. And to embrace our belief that we take this Anglican Christian heritage and shape it — in the language of the Lambeth Quadrilateral, itself — “adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples of God into the unity of His Church.” Let all respect that fundamental affirmation as the several members of this Communion receive the same.

Let Jesus take us by the hand and say, “I say to you, arise.” Then, let us joyfully go out together and, like Jairus’s daughter, get something to eat.

One doesn’t have to be the least curious at all to wonder about Naked Hiking Day on the Appalachian Trail. I hope that at least the rules of the Forest Service allow one to wear shoes and socks and to take along more than the usual amount of deep woods anti-bug and sun screen.

It’s a mystery to me on the face of it, but that the Governor of South Carolina would disappear and as well be suspected off hiking on Father’s Day of all days — and all the while allow his state and his family to languish — is more than I can even imagine. But then my imagination is usually put into service in other directions.

Take naked. There’s Adam and Eve and all the trouble they caused when the figment of their imaginations put them over the edge and out the EdenGate. Salomé came close as she dropped all those veils as the music went on and led to John’s demise. Then there’re the topless bars. I went hopefully to one once only to discover it was actually in an outdoor garden with only a pergola for the vines and “ceiling” fans.

If the Appalachians can do it for a day, maybe it’s a thought for one of the forthcoming General Convention’s legislative days and all the gender talk it’ll have there. I hope the deputy from somewhere in New England will be there this time so she can take the microphone, scold us mildly, and once more remind everyone that gender is for words and sex is for people.

In a NYTimes interview, clarinetist Artie Shaw, 84 at the time, was asked how he felt about the rivalry between himself and Benny Goodman. He said he thought Goodman was too intense. He said, “Benny plays the clarinet and I play music.”

Shaw quit his big band in the fifties, said he was played out, but tried a comeback in the seventies only to give up again, said, no matter what I try to do, all the public wants is “Begin the Beguine.” His first record for Victor featured an arrangement of “Indian Love Call” of which he was quite proud. In those days of 78 rpm’s, one side would feature what the artist thought would be a hit with a “filler” or “throw away” on the flip side. The filler was Cole Porter’s “Beguine,” one of the largest selling records ever.

I don’t know what this has got to do with anything. I could never quite make up my mind about Shaw and Goodman, but it was always a rich subject for young wannabe jazz players to fuss over. We were very much into Dixieland two-beat in those days, as if we were some sort of know-it-alls. On the other hand, if it weren’t for my own ambivalance, I might suggest that the story sort of illustrates something about orthodoxy and some other kind of doxy. I can get less ambivalent about that. Are you with me?

In 1956, the two-year old Brown decision legally desegregating the public schools was enforced at the small state college where, fresh out of seminary and collared green, I had just been appointed as our church’s chaplain.

At registration time that fall, African-American students, many of whom had day jobs, came in considerable numbers to register for night classes only to find campus entrances blocked by picketers carrying signs, baseball bats, and ax handles. As the word spread, the campus Methodist chaplain, the Presbyterian campus worker, the rector of our downtown parish, and I met, got our signals together, and walked students, one on each arm, through the pickets onto the campus and to the Registrar’s Office. There were more than several hundred clergy in our southern town.

State lore often recounts with pride that it never takes more than one Texas Ranger to settle any size misunderstanding. I was comforted to note that in addition to the presence that night of a few dozen of our local finest, there were not one, but two Rangers. We were comforted, but not all that much, for it only made things look more ominous. It is not easy when lore is questioned.

The next morning paper’s front page pictured us brazen clergy at work and surrounded by pickets. Later in the day, my bishop called, said, “Looks like you’re having quite a time over there. I’m getting a lot of unsympathetic callers wondering why I sent you where I sent you in the first place, and why don’t I send you somewhere else.” I mumbled something very unprophetic.

He said, “I know you’ll probably have to make some quick decisions, and I just want to let you know that whatever they are, they’re also mine. Just let me know as soon as possible so I’ll be able to say what we’re doing. Be safe.”

Nine years later, that same bishop became the Presiding Bishop of the church. He said at that time, “A bishop’s job is to keep his church family on the firing line of the world’s most desperate needs and to learn to accept the exquisite penalty of such an exposed position.”

It only took one bishop for such leadership. How greatly the church and I miss him and, as well, his kind.

Newsweek’s Jon Meacham was on the telly to celebrate his winning the Pulitzer for American Lion, his new 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 one of the things that makes us human and what God showed us in Jesus and what he both imagines and wills us to be, rememberers.

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 ever pray. It was not unlike Jesus’s own prayer for us as we discern our own Way into that same Realm with him. “Do this in remembrance of me.”

Maybe one of the closest things we can do to what God wills for us is to study history. Without it we for sure can’t know where we’ve been, where we are, or where we’re going. Anybody who can’t manage history or has no curiosity about it must be satisfied to be caught in the briar patch of the now with no plans for elsewhere or elsewhen. History plus imagination is what makes us story people, once-upon-a-time, it-was-a-dark-and-stormy-night people.

Every celebration of the liturgy is storytime. Genealogy time when we hear about our kin and how they responded to God’s will for them from the wondering awesomeness of it to the incarnation of it to the stumbling about with it. It starts each week at the Eucharist with memory time, reunion time.

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.”