September 11, 2008

9/11

Pentecost 18/19A Mt 18.21-35

The grace of God is not about magic. It is certainly not about anything easy. It’s about something simple, that God can be trusted, but not taken for granted. It’s complicatedly simple.

One discovers this fact of life along a way that twists and turns, where Yogi Berra’s advice, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” makes perfect sense. It is what those early disciples first called “The Way,” and what we later unfortunately called “Christianity.” We might better have stayed with them. For “The Way” is a name that catches all the delicious ambiguity of the Gospel, doesn’t lend itself to the outrageous misuse of the label “Christian,” and most nearly follows Yogi’s counsel.

To be forgiven is to be found. It is to be found by the grace of God. Like C S Lewis discovered, it is to be “surprised by joy.” It is not to care especially whether light is wave or particle, but to celebrate gladly that there is light at all, and that it’s suddenly bathing and basking in our corner of life. God’s offer (aka Holy Spirit) is there for everybody. Whether all accept it is quite another matter.

Peter seemed not so sure. He, like a lot of his type today, was not into ambiguity. He was like a member of our town’s council who wants to make English the “official language.” He didn’t appear to have anything against forgiving, he just wanted to be careful not to overdo it. He didn’t ask Jesus whether to forgive, he simply wanted to know how much. “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” (Mt 18.21)

Jesus’ answer of 490 probably pleased him immensely, not because it surely overtaxed his capacities, but because Jesus gave him the kind of left-brain teaser he really cherished. Whether Peter would climb all over his brother on number 491 or whether Jesus put any limit at all on redemption is not mentioned. Neither is there any reference to what must surely have been Peter’s immense pleasure over Jesus restoring him to the fellowship after a mere three betrayals — and then actually giving him his own pin number.

Forgiveness never comes easy — either giving it or, especially, receiving it. The sin against the Holy Spirit, the so-called unforgivable sin, is precisely that not because God won’t forgive us, but because we won’t be forgiven, we won’t accept the reconciliation into God’s graces that forgiveness allows. By God’s imagining of us, we are free to choose the facility of Holy Spirit. And that means we are free to refuse it, as well.

Forgiveness, of course, never means to forget, nor does it mean there aren’t consequences or punishments. What it does mean is that the connections are opened and kept open, the channels of communication are freed up, the vision, the eye-to-eye remains clear, the arms are open for embrace, the key are yours to use as you will.

And forgiveness never means there are no risks. For the same painful exchange that created the need in the first place might well happen again. But, as well, the lack of forgiveness never means there is no love or no grace, just that the love, the grace cannot break through to start its healing nourishment unless one gets one’s act together and gets a life.

This week has included the anniversary of 9/11. We’ve spent billions, we’ve killed thousands, and we’ve pretty well trashed our beloved Constitution and the country it helped create trying to get some vengeance for our hurt. And we’ve dared to call it all patriotism. Wherever now are those murdered in the Trade Center Towers, my hunch is they’ve found another way to manage all their pain.

They’ve discovered that we are the way God forgives. It is through you and me that God’s grace is known. It is when we — in the words of our baptismal covenant — “seek and serve Christ” in the other — that grace can explode into our lives, and we are overwhelmed by it.

But then, if we just can’t buy all this, there’s always Oscar Wilde who said, “Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much.” Whether or not he’d read St Paul, he was coming from the same place. Only Paul, the scoundrel, must have been beyond simply annoying somebody when he wrote, “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head” (Rms 12.20).

Well, we might add, it could be a lot worse. Actually, we found out how it can be.

But then, Jesus trumped the lot of them and all the rest of us when he said, simply, “Love your enemies” (Mt 5.44). Somehow and for some weird reason, I think the victims of 9/11 might be wondering why we didn’t think of that. As hard as it might be for the lot of us, it is really so very complicated, it is downright simple.

September 9, 2008

Maverick

Ranchers usually brand their range animals. For whatever other reasons, the brands prove a useful way to avoid livestock identity theft. (Aside: Books about brands also make popular collector’s items.)

John Ciardi’s “A Browser’s Dictionary” confirms that Samuel Maverick was a 19th-century Texas cattleman who refused to brand his cows, said it was too cruel. As it was, unbranded animals on an open range belonged to first come, first served. Intended so or not, any unbranded cows came to be thought of as Maverick’s, and subsequently just mavericks.

It didn’t take long for the word to enter everyday parlance as applied to an unorthodox person who for whatever reason leaves his metaphoric herd to go his own way. Any originality claimed for the word today is, of course, way out of date. The range story was well into the lore when I was growing up in Texas a while back. Coupled with it, there has always been an air of malfeasance and arrogance if not an ambiance of sheer illegality. Mavericks, the people type, were hardly the kind of folk anyone would choose as leaders, especially of the very herd whose welfare they’d once enjoyed and now spent for their own exclusive benefit.

September 8, 2008

Habit

For me, it takes a ton of diligence to build a good habit, like regular exercise, for example. Or regular practice on the Bb cornet. Or writing an OoN when I say I will. Or, and it’s the greater pity, regular prayer. For regular prayer can be the foundation of all habits. I wonder if that’s why the religious call their regular wear a habit. Denis the Menace was shaking his pastor’s hand one Sunday morning after service. He asked, Is black your favorite color? Nuns’ and priests’ habits, must they be so funereal? bishops so royal? rebels so blue or pink or striped? I wonder why I change the subject so cleverly?

But to break a good habit? It takes hardly any effort at all. Artur Rubenstein said that if he missed practicing for one day, he knew the results. If he missed two, his friends knew. If he missed three, the whole world knew.

I wrote that regular prayer can be the foundation of all habits. My mind said must. My keyboard said can. These past two weeks of avoidance have included two political conventions, the U S Tennis Open, a new rector’s first Sunday in our parish, and a major bend in my and CP’s taken-for-granted good health. We’ll recover, though it takes a stretch of my imagination to believe it. We’ll redirect seems a better analysis. So many have graciously turned to help with food, maintenance, attention, advice.

We say, don’t we, that it’s more blessed to give than to receive. I think not. For it’s quite the other way around. And a lot harder and takes a lot more than mere habit.

September 4, 2008

Justice

Pentecost 17/18A Mt 18.15-20

It strikes me that the Great Commandment to love God and to love neighbor as oneself must surely have been easier to keep track of back during Jesus’s time. Even if there was only one God then as there is now, surely there were a lot fewer neighbors.

On the other hand, justice and fairness were no less important. So, as Matthew tells us, the early church devised its own system of appeals to find it all the way from one-on-one — to only a few — to the whole community. If all that process failed, then it was down the chute along with all the other sinners. Although something tells me that not Jesus, but some of his confused followers came up with that “chute” idea.

This Great Commandment, this summary of the law and the prophets, talks about love, but it is also about justice. Justice is the way societies and institutions and governments best love one another. Justice is the way our nation began and once again has the opportunity to embrace the stricken Gulf Coast remembering how deeply connected are we all.

Justice has always been the very heart of the gospel. A just peace for all continues as the thrust of the church’s ministry and the message we proclaim in the name of God. Be it not only for the way we treat one another in our congregations, but be it also the way a diocese learns to live together and to use its energies in God’s name and not it’s own. And be it that way on and up to the highest courts in our land.

Hearing Jesus’ counsel about a just society once again well serves to remind us and to recall us to that charge. We surely now don’t want for enough neighbors on whom to practice.

But justice is on hard times. We are so distracted, it’s difficult to do anything about it. Not long ago, in a church right here in our community and with a lot better media connections than we have, the religious right got considerable press claiming — actually judging, if the truth be known — that our courts are as bad and as dangerous as, if not worse, than the terrorists. A short time later, one of their patrons closed his case by recommending assassination be added to the simple and somewhat gentler appellate system just now suggested in Matthew’s gospel. Lets hear it for terrorism.

This nation at its founding declared its interdependence with all nations and affirmed the notion that we are created equal…. and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among (us), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Further, our founders struck an international chord consistent with and resonant to the gospel understanding of human being when they wisely devised a system of justice by balancing authority in our judicial, legislative, and executive branches. They left us this legacy surely that we might be its beneficiaries, but even more importantly, its stewards. They certainly did not have in mind that it be hijacked by some or any religion and thus thrown into imbalance with total disregard for their wise counsel and, I might add, their understanding of the gospel and its Judaeo-Christian tradition.

But if Justice is the grammar of things, Mercy is the poetry. The Cross says something like the same thing on a scale so cosmic and so full of mystery that it is next to impossible to grasp. As it represents what in one way or another we are always doing to each other, the death of that innocent man hanging up there convicts us as the whole of humanity, and so it would seem that we deserve the grim world that over the centuries we have made for ourselves. As it also represents what one or another thing we are always doing not so much to God above us somewhere as to God within us everywhere. That is the justice of things.

But the Cross also represents the fact that the good is also present in the grim, and God is present even in the godless. That is why the Cross has become the symbol not of our darkest hopelessness, but of our brightest hope. That is the mercy of things. Granted who we are, perhaps we could have understood it no other way.

So long as the religious right remains wrong about justice, it will never be right about mercy. If the hurricanes are punishment about anything — as some say they are — they are surely the consequence of our continuing lack of stewardship, not only of our environment, but, as well, of our system of checks and balances, of our social responsibilities, and of our economic inequities. A carelessness that gradually bulldozes our relationships into what could ultimately become a class warfare beyond our wildest imagination.

Jesus fulfilled the law and the prophets and what they portended. He fulfilled it by consummating it with justice and peace and love. We are commanded to go and do likewise, for that is our stewardship. That is the way out of Gethsemane through the Cross, back to Eden, and into the kingdom of God.

September 3, 2008

Water

I looked up water on Wikipaedia hoping I could find something to make me sound informed. I found so much, I got thirsty and also realized I couldn’t fool anybody, anyway.

What I had in mind was to write about that splendid prayer over the water in the Baptism Office. The one that recalls not only how critical is water for life and what a gift it is, but also those remarkable times and stories in which water appears throughout the Bible. Creation. Getting out of Egypt. John’s and Jesus’s handy river. The burial and the new life we share with Jesus and the Holy Spirit. If I thought I knew all the prayers in the Book of Common Prayer, that prayer would probably be my favorite. Actually, it comes tolerable close.

Water’s what we’re always looking for first whenever we start exploring planets. It or a reasonable facsimile seems to be the precursor of any possibilities for life of whatever kind, I suppose even the mitochondria. Water’s the simplest of compounds and probably about as much chemistry as a lot of people know. Hydrogen and oxygen, both among the earliest of the elements spun off by God and her Big Bang. Isn’t it just like God to start things that way? “I am who I am.” How coy can one be when long before the bush* was the Noise. Maybe that Noise is the big one from Winnetka that Bob Haggart and Ray Bauduc had in mind.

It certainly wasn’t what I had in mind when this started.

*My friend Louie Crew says the burning bush shows how little regard God had for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I wish I’d thought of that before Louie did.

August 29, 2008

Difference

Conventions tend to be conventional. Certainly our own, the generally conventional big fat Anglican wedding we churchers throw every three years. And, as well, the national political ones that come our way every four.

Watching the one ending just now and hearing how exceptionally “historic” it is, one can certainly agree that it is certainly unprecedented. MLK and LBJ who especially had so much to do with making this day possible are surely smiling along with thousands, even millions of others. On the other hand and anticipating the next one due up shortly, one might not expect anything quite so historic, but if the past is any indication, one can easily expect some notable change in direction.

Shifting into my intuitive gear, all this boils down for me as to be whether we seek for our presidents someone who has the good judgment to be a servant leader or, as we so often hear and as if it were all that mattered, someone who has the “experience” to be a Commander-in-Chief.

I suppose it’s only natural to equate that C-in-C facet of the presidency with bellicosity. But this is to risk missing the point our founders made by including it as only one part of the president’s job description and whether or not the office holder had any or no military experience, but primarily to assure that the armed forces remain under civilian control and to dampen their inherent and understandably more aggressive leanings. Whatever the undertaking, judgment always trumps experience, especially the kind of judgment arising out of a servant power that is never a subjugating trigger-happy dominance, but an authority that not only influences others, but is also open to influence. That kind of servanthood acknowledges and respects the freedom of another and seeks to enhance the other’s capacity to make a difference.

I rather think that to be the kind of difference in leadership this nation is seeking that it might be brought around after so many years of the opposite kind.
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Note: Thoughts about servanthood are influenced by Bennett Sims’s brilliant monologue, “Servanthood: Leadership for the Third Millennium,” Cowley, 1997. This book is a refreshing resource for enhancing an intelligent franchise in these perilous times.

August 28, 2008

Gardens

Pentecost 16/17A 2008

“I never promised you a rose garden.”

That’s the often familiar copout when the chore we took on for somebody doesn’t turn out as comfy as we thought it might. I don’t know why roses. Rose gardens are lovely, but anybody who ever planted one knows they’re no snap to nurse, and that their thorns last a lot longer than their blooms.

Being faithful to the call of God is like that. Do it, and life right away is likely to get complex and tumultuous as well as simple and peaceful. The stories from Jeremiah and Paul and Jesus that make up today’s lections can all testify to this. The common theme? Faithfulness will either get you nowhere or maybe somewhere you’d rather not be.

Jeremiah tangles with God’s dynamic and swings between faith and doubt, peace and turmoil, certainty and confusion (Jer 15.15-21). Paul’s commitment to the Gentiles only drives a deeper wedge between himself and the Jews (Rms 12.1-21). Jesus’s certain awareness of the perils ahead challenges the loyalties of his disciples and puts their relationship on very shaky ground (Mt 16.21-26).

Any church worth its salt lives in this kind of tension all the way from leaving its doors open 24/7 and risking theft and vandalism to exposing — even “wasting” — its program and budget in the interest of the sick and the poor and dispossessed. Too many of us never get that far being preoccupied with orthodox niceties like we so often are. Faith is always risky and even clumsy, especially when we try to use canon law and discipline as instruments for grace and love.

Today’s church is too often busy setting standards for membership in pew and pulpit and requiring of its clergy to withhold its blessing for love wherever and in whatever form we may find it. When Jesus sets his demand for discipleship — Take up your cross and follow me — it’s not in terms of rules to be followed or specific tasks to be accomplished. He talks about the need for us to get out of the way of ourselves with an open invitation to follow him when we have not the vaguest notion where his Way will lead and are not all that sure that he does, either. In short, to let go and let God.

As well with Paul’s counsel to the Romans. “Do not be conformed to this world… ” but be “transformed by the renewal of your mind” Do not be conformed to the world’s obsession with the symbols of power and prestige, but be transformed in Christ. Do not be conformed by and to the exploitation of others, but be transformed by letting your love be genuine. Do not be conformed to the way of vengeance and hatred, but bless them that persecute you and, as Jesus urged, even love them and offer them justice.

Facing the world’s current traumas, how is such a ministry informed and shaped? What might the world’s families be like now had our response to 9/11 been to set out to conquer poverty and genocide by pouring our billions into such a mission rather than into the explosive and interminable violence of Iraq? How might the victims of 9/11 and their families feel about our giving love and generosity and justice in their name and the memory of their loved ones? How might our armies of death now function and what might they have accomplished had we enlisted them rather as legions of peace? What if we had truly risked modeling our constitutional democracy as a palpable community of justice more consistent with our founding rather than trying to transplant it into a cultural soil not all that fecund and receptive?

I don’t remember any rose gardens ever figuring in the gospel scheme of things. But I do remember a couple of memorable gardens that did. Eden and Gethsemane stand prominent in our tradition. One, a garden of irresistible temptation, another, a garden of redemptive commitment.

August 27, 2008

Lip

When the Pharisees and Scribes asked Jesus to explain why his disciples didn’t wash their hands before eating, they weren’t seeking insight. They were demanding proof of worthiness.

On the other hand, Jesus saw people’s needs and met them with no expectation of response, no policies, no procedures. It was all so simple. Any casual reading of the gospels makes it clear.

Isn’t it ironic, the maze of proprieties we churchers have cobbled together over the centuries and all in the name of one who had so little use for them? It’s like the Victorian father taking his son out behind the barn and saying, belt in hand, “I’ll beat the love of God into you if it takes all night!”

The Pharisees and Scribes meant well. It was in their job description. We mean well. What is religion, after all, but a corporate human endeavor to render faith both memorable and manageable? Who can blame us for that?

Well, Jesus for one. And he had Isaiah to back him up. “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men” (Is 29.13; Mk 7.6f).

I suspect God had enough lip long ago and would like some heart for a change, maybe somewhere else beside only on bumper stickers about NY.

August 26, 2008

Spines

It is so easy to take things for granted. Like spines.

One person’s stenosis is another person’s disc. CP’s got the disc and the left leg sciatica. I’ve got the right. We each have one good one. Trouble is they’re hooked to the wrong hips. Another impediment (sic) is that the one who can’t cook for nothing (guess which) is momentarily the abler of the two and so — gets the kitchen duty. The diet suffers while the nerves get on our nerves. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches go only so far.

When one of our progeny was about six, I fixed him a bowl of cereal one Saturday morning while the rest of the brood slept. When I served him, he said, Gee, Dad, I didn’t know you could cook. I haven’t progressed at all. He’s fifty-four now and, by the by, an excellent cook.

One of the blessings in all of this — and there are many — is home communion last Sunday from one of our parish LEMs who’s just recently started into this ministry. She was pleasant and efficient as can be, but mumbling a bit about having to do one of her first visits to an old east Texas preacher of all people. I tried to lighten things a bit and lit a candle. She called me high church.

August 21, 2008

Who?

Pent 15/16A Mt 16.13-20

“Who do (people) say that the Son of Man is?”

It may have seemed to his companions that he would never ask. Jesus doesn’t quite strike me as the type to care all that much what other’s think, but perhaps things had gone on long enough. So when he finally asks them the question, it seems that he really wants to know how they are sizing him up more than just to hear what’s the skinny on the street.

“Who do (people) say that the Son of Man is?” Their answers are consistent and probably not all that surprising. John the Baptist. Elijah. Jeremiah. Or surely one of the prophets. Then Jesus asks, “But who do you say that I am?”

Peter gets it. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” With this realization — profound in its seeming simplicity — Peter wins the Blue Ribbon Prize — a set of keys to the Kingdom itself. But that’s not all. He is also handed the very heaven-sanctioned authority to forgive. One wonders how he’ll feel about that when he soon denies that he ever knew Jesus and suddenly be in need of some mighty big-time forgiveness, himself.

Who do we say is this Son of Man?

Over the centuries since that question, we’ve come up with some answers. They’re not always answers to the questions people ask, but they’re answers, all neat and organized, systematized and religionized. On this key question, the church answers with what we call Christology. “You are the Christ!” Peter realized, as do we. But I doubt he had anything like the Athanasian or even the Nicene Creed in mind.

Rather might it be like the person attending her first Quaker meeting and being deafened with silence. Finally, she asked her neighbor in the pew, “When does the service begin?” “As soon as the Meeting is over,” came the gentle reply.

The Baptismal Covenant sets us altogether straight on this service and emphatically answers our Lord’s question once and for all. “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” the Covenant asks. There in the midst of that question is Jesus’s prior one — “Who do people say that I am?”

So where do we look? I once rather impertinently asked one of our church’s leading theologians “How can one know the will of God?” I expected him to pause, even to ponder. But no. His answer was instant. “Follow your hunches,” he said. Look for the Christ, he implied, look for Jesus in yourself, for that’s where he is. And that’s what this ministry is about. Those who are called out to follow the Way need no further creed, no further confession, no further systematic theology, and, God help us, no more denominations.

Like Jesus gave Peter the keys to kingdom, Holy Baptism gives us the keys to the Kingdom’s mission. We’re given the authority to forgive and to restore and to reconcile. We’re commissioned to seek out this Jesus in ourselves, in our intuition, in our God-given hunches, in our imaginations. Thus finding him, we’ll more than likely discover that he doesn’t look all that different in our neighbors.