God

Gospel reading: Matthew 11.2-11
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I guess my favorite version of "The Arkansas Traveler" is on Michelle Shocked's album of the same name. It just nudges out Jerry Garcia and Dave Grisman's rendition. Both include the traditional spoken exchanges between a farmer and a traveling stranger after every verse.

Jimmy Driftwood's ancient strained voice speaks for the farmer in Michelle Shocked's recording. The conversations are backwoodsy groaners for the most part. For instance, when asked why he doesn't fix his roof, Jimmy Driftwood says, "Well, stranger. When it's rainin' it's too wet to work. And when it's dry my roof's as good as any man's roof."

Or he's asked if he knows the way to Little Rock and responds, "Well, stranger, you can't get there from here."

When we tell someone that you "can't get there from here" we usually mean that it's a lot of trouble to get "there". But in theology we mean it quite literally sometimes.

Immanence and transcendence are big, old, heavy, theological terms. And sometimes they are used generally to distinguish between closeness and distance. If you experience God as immanent, God is close to you. A transcendent God is beyond us, far away we might say.

The trouble with using these terms this way is that both describe God as staying put either right here or out there. But this is a false choice and the term 'transcendence' itself should be enough to correct this misperception. To transcend something is not to be beyond it. It is to move beyond it.

I really like the way theologian Kathryn Tanner (expanding some of Karl Barth's thoughts) describes this. Here's a gross oversimplification of what she says. The Incarnation is a paradox, because to be human means we're not God. But God is transcendent. Which means that perhaps God can be fully present in Jesus. God can 'transcend' categories that we can't.

To return to our Arkansas traveler, from our perspective you really can't get to Little Rock (divinity) from here. But God can get here from there.

Now we may have reached a level of confusion never achieved before in this blog. And I'm pretty accomplished at muddying things that were once perfectly clear. Just ask my wife, Ardelle. (My wife of fourteen years as of today, I might add.)

But let me take some of the pressure off. All of this philosophical gymnastics is meant to remind us that we can't quite wrap our minds around the mystery of God. But God comes near to us anyway.

As Kathleen Norris put it to open this chapter, "I take refuge in God's transcendence, continually giving thanks that God's ways are not my own." This sounds strange. We can understand being thankful for how much sense someone else makes to us. But even in human relationships, mystery is just as important as knowledge.

I've been married to Ardelle for 14 years. No one has ever known me like she does. And I've never known anyone the way I know her. But as much as what's known, it's the mystery of what is yet to be discovered in her that excites me about what the next 14 years might hold. And the next. And the next.

This is the wonderful mystery of all meaningful relationships. We're partly amazed that someone understands us a little or has experienced something like we have. But the suspicion that we have so much more to discover in this other person is what carries us on into the future.

As we move through Advent toward Christmas we celebrate a great mystery. We don't know how to get to God. But somehow God gets to us. We can't quite wrap our minds around this. But we've seen just enough of God's presence in our lives and in the lives of others to be enticed.

Maybe the old farmer is right and we can't get there from here. But in ways we'll never quite comprehend God can and does get here from there. That's transcendence. We get just enough of the mystery of God to be drawn into a relationship forever.

Conversion: The Stories

Gospel reading: Matthew 3.1-12
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

"...She also needed conversion in another sense, a long, slow dialogue with the scriptures to enlarge her as a person."

-Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

My spiritual director in seminary was a remarkable man named Roger Ferlo. Before going to seminary himself he taught Shakespeare and Dante. And I think his long, slow dialogue with literature had a great deal to do with his affection for scripture. (Some of you have read his lovely book, Sensing God: Reading Scripture With All Our Senses.)

I met with him after chapel one day where we had just read one of the stranger passages from Revelation. One with beasts and swords and blood. My early encounters with Revelation were pretty harsh. And I think I had replaced the sheer terror certain passages once inspired with a mild embarrassment. Among more broad minded Christians it was acceptable to roll one's eyes at John of Patmos, or Paul, or even the bewildering character of Yahweh in the Old Testament - as thought they were all some offensive relative we feel compelled to distance ourselves from and apologize for.

We met in Roger's office. And as I sat down, he eased into a chair opposite mine and said, "What were those people going through?"

It took me a few moments to realize what he was referring to. I had evicted the images from Revelation almost immediately from my imagination. They were still expanding in Roger's. Knowing that all stories emerge from real lives he wondered what must have been going on in the lives of the community that produced a book like Revelation. What were they suffering to write of such things? Where do such terrible and glorious imaginings come from?

I think that Roger's lovely openness and trust of the scriptures must be the fruit of that long, slow dialogue Kathleen Norris speaks of. And in Roger I can see clearly how a person is enlarged in the process.

In some ways our relationship with scripture is not so different from other human relationships. We learn how to take things from people over time. What once offended us about an old friend we now take with a grain of salt. Or when someone we love and trust lashes out at us, we don't wonder suddenly if we were wrong about them all along. We don't wonder whether this person is really a monster who's pulled the wool over our eyes. We wonder what else is going on. We wonder what's wrong. We wonder how they've been hurt.

Before our relationship 'enlarges', while we're still feeling things out we don't know quite what to make of the strange gestures, the blunt way of speaking, or the saccharine sweetness of this new acquaintance. With an old friend whatever is said, no matter how offensive or bizarre, is just one more phrase in a long, slow dialogue. Old trusts aren't so fragile.

A simple comment by someone I trust changed my experience of scripture forever, I think. The strange parts of the Bible don't frighten me so much anymore. And I no longer want to purge the Bible of its strangeness. It's often the strangeness that entices me now.

So when I read from the last chapter of the Bible's last book - yes, dear old Revelation - among images of a city with gates like pearls and walls of jasper and gold and precious gems, among all this wonder I read, "These words are trustworthy and true." And in spite of myself, in spite of my incomprehension, in spite of my too small imagination, I somehow respond, "Amen."

Righteous

Gospel reading: Matthew 24.36-44
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Righteous is a good case study for the way meaning accumulates in a word over time. As a child I used to enjoy saying a word over and over again until the meaning drained from it completely. The sounds of the word became as strange and arbitrary as those of another language. I'm not sure why it pleased me to unlearn a word for a moment. But it did.

There is a scene in a William Faulkner novel (As I Lay Dying, I think) in which a character talks about a similar experience with a name. As I recall, he imagined himself gradually filling or taking the shape of his name. And his name was sort of a formless void until he did.

The sheer repetition of speaking the word 'self' before the word 'righteous' may have worked in much the same way in our lives. Words take on meaning for us as we speak them. They conjure up emotions and images for us based on what went on in us and around us when the word was spoken in our past. Somewhere along the way 'righteous' got buried in the phrase 'self righteous' and became associated in our minds only with prigs...and worse.

But much of Kathleen Norris's project in Amazing Grace was to reclaim a language or a vocabulary. Reclaim might not be the best word, actually. Reimagine might be better.

My first real carpentry job was as an apprentice on a framing crew in Eatonville, Washington. And James, my boss, was a former surfer from southern California. (Before you let the word 'surfer' conjure up too many associations you should know that he worked on a doctorate at UCLA for a time and read a lot of Tolstoy.) But on the job site 'righteous' was usually preceded not by 'self' but by 'totally', as in "The fit of that hip rafter was totally righteous".

This was helpful to my relationship to the word, even if the phrase was rarely spoken without a little affectation and irony. Righteousness gradually became associated with what's good and lovely in the world again.

Righteousness is so essential to biblical faith that I hope we can speak some goodness back into the word. I hope there is a way we can want to be righteous again. Maybe I'll need to type "I want to be righteous" 100 times in a blog before the word is fully redeemed for me. But shouldn't we want to be righteous? In fact, shouldn't our Christian faith be about formation as righteous people?

I wonder sometimes if my own embarrassment with the notion hasn't arisen with the persistent association of 'self' with 'righteous'. The same thing can happen with 'goodness'. Say 'do-gooder' or 'goody two shoes' enough and we'll be free of that word's uncomfortable challenges to our lives as well.

But the truth is we do want to be righteous. We want to be people who live justly. People who treat the vulnerable ones in our world with the love and respect that our scriptures and our faith demands. We want to be people whose aim is true. If we didn't, why in the world would we be reading this line in this blog together?

I believe that God is making us righteous. Little by little, our lives can accumulate meaning just like the words we use. It doesn't happen all at once. But over time, perhaps as we "continue in the apostles teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers" (in the prayer book's words) we are changed. Our lives take on a new meaning and a new direction gradually as we learn together, eat together, and pray together. Maybe even as we blog together.

Bible

Gospel reading: Luke 19.29-38
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I want to start this post by saying how much I enjoy the interaction of blogging. Often there are several comments added to mine, and at other times I'll talk to someone at church and find that they've been reading as well. One parishioner simply flashed me the 'silent coyote' as he walked into church one Sunday, referencing a camp tradition that I mentioned in an earlier post. I love not only the particular insights of your reflections, but the notion that somehow we're all in this project together. So, thank you.

This week's chapter is short. It's really just a single story of a wedding gift. A South Dakota rancher had received a large family Bible from his grandfather when he married. He and his wife had delivered the obligatory 'thank yous', so they couldn't understand why this grandfather kept asking about the gift from time to time.

Eventually they pulled the Bible down from the closet where it had been stashed and found a twenty dollar bill at the beginning of every book - nearly $1300.

Kathleen Norris really doesn't elaborate much on the story, and initially I found it pleasing, but not terribly thought provoking. Then I read our gospel lesson from Sunday, and the strange combination of the two stories opened up something new.

On Sunday we read Luke's version of the 'triumphal entry' of Jesus into Jerusalem. I put triumphal entry in quotation marks because the scene has always struck me as almost comical. Maybe there were a 'multitude' of disciples there spreading their cloaks for this rabbi hobbling in on a colt. But I've never been able to imagine the scene as impressive enough to convert anybody present who didn't already believe that this Jesus was a kind of king.

Compared to the entry of an emperor, this little procession must have looked like a sad little small town homecoming parade. We locals are proud enough, and the homecoming queen is lovely, but we don't really expect the President's entourage to follow the floats.

This seems almost sac religious to suggest. But I think the comic element, the strangeness of the story is part of the good news. And it's not unlike those twenties tucked into the wedding Bible. We often find God's blessings in the most unlikely places.

Oddly enough, the triumphal entry loses some of its power if it really comes off as triumphal. Because it distracts us from something essential to our faith: this king didn't look anything like a king.

Some of the good news comes to us in the overwhelming inconspicuousness of this savior. And this news is good because when we stop looking for God in the parts of our world that seem to approach perfection, we might begin to see God in lives like our own.

I don't know about you, but my life usually feels like that small town parade at best. The local high school band might play, but I've gradually learned not to expect the Marine Band to show up. So the humbler beginnings of our faith, even the humble life of our Lord remind me that Christ still shows up at simple, clumsy, unimpressive affairs like my life.

And maybe I'll even be more likely to poke around in some unlikely places for God's presence. Maybe a blessing awaits me even in those more challenging relationships, in that stressful week at work, in that dusty old gift, lost in the back of a closet. Come to think of it, poking around for God in the world's most unlikely places is what Advent is all about.

Idolatry

Gospel reading: Luke 21.5-19
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I had never associated Snidely Whiplash with idolatry until now. If you never watched the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show, you might not know Mr. Whiplash. He was the show's villian. Clad in a black top hat, sporting a sinister handlebar mustache he always seemed to be lashing the heroine, Nell Fenwick, to the train tracks. Not to worry, though. Soon enough her bumbling paramour, Dudley Do-Right would make it onto the scene, and Nell would narrowly escape the charging train.

Snidely, Nell, and Dudley, of course were parodies of the classic melodramatic characters of the silent film era. And what made this genre delightful was its total lack of ambiguity about whom we should be rooting for. The characters were caricatures. Thoroughly good or thoroughly evil. We expected them to be one dimensional.

Kathleen Norris's reflections on idolatry suggested that our definition of an idol is probably too one dimensional if we limit it to golden calves or the carvings of what we might call 'primitive' religions. What's idolatrous about calves and carvings is their reduction of the mystery of God. What Kathleen Norris shows us is that we do the same thing to one another.

She makes the interesting comment that etymologically 'idol' and 'idea' are related. And this is where something clicked for me. Because sometimes it's a whole lot easier to deal with the idea of someone than the person in the flesh.

You know how this works. I have all kinds of 'principles'. I form my opinions in the abstract and my reasoning is always absolutely watertight. And then it happens to a friend. Whatever the principle, when we're considering a whole person my tidy little system starts to unravel. When someone I know falls into a category - be it cultural or political or moral or religious - that I have rejected or dismissed, then all the motives and biases that I had assumed on behalf of my caricatures are exposed. Somehow I realize that a (fill in the villianous political party or religious perspective of your choice) isn't a Snidely Whiplash. We can know quite well that a friend is a sinner, but we know that their sin isn't the whole story, too.

Today it's the implications for our relationship with God that I'd like to consider as well. It seems that the notion of Incarnation which Christians profess would have been a step toward idolatry in the older sense of a god in a tangible, concrete form. When Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth he was just as visible as a fertility goddess, just as tangible as a golden calf.

But, in fact, the Incarnation was the ultimate counter to our idolatrous instincts. For as long as we simply ponder the 'idea' of God, we're safe. We can construct the god we think we need, or the god who serves our purposes. And we all do this from time to time, I'm afraid.

Incarnation, however, suggests an encounter not just with an idea, but with a person. And it is that personal encounter that opens up the complexity or the mystery of God powerfully for us. My idea of God often ends up being something like a cosmic Dudley Do-Right with a much higher I.Q. Graven images have some obvious limitations, but so do imagined images. We do great damage when we reduce anyone, divine or human, to a single dimension.

It makes some sense, then, that the risen body of Christ is a community, not an individual. God still comes to us in the midst of all the rich and infuriating complexity of human relationships. Which means that to put aside our idols isn't really just about changing our ideas about who God is. It's about loving the people right in front of us as if they were Christ himself. We don't give up our idols alone.

Loving is harder work. It's messier work. And it might not be worth it if you're looking for an encounter with Dudley Do-Right. But for those of us who long for an encounter with God's redeeming love, we're stuck with the wonderful, healing work of loving one another. If anyone's told you there's another way, they were probably trying to sell you an idol.

Commandments

Gospel reading: Luke 20.27-38
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Grandpa Springfield let on to my brother and me that he was considering taking us to Kansas City to see our first major league baseball game. He seemed to be almost confiding in us when he told us this, because he said, "The game is on a Sunday. Does your daddy have scruples about that? Do you know what scruples are?"

I didn't know what a scruple was. But I could guess it had something to do with the obvious conflict. Sunday was church day.

But in that little exchange with Grandpa, I also sensed that two categories of people were beginning to form in my mind. Some let their religion get in the way. Others...not so much.

Besides the obvious thrill inherent in a big league baseball game, I was also secretly pleased to have access to the 'not so much' crowd in my very own grandfather. He was a Methodist. A tepid and convenient form of religion in the minds of more serious Christians. Or religion free of unnecessary scruples, as Grandpa might put it.

"Tobacco, banjo playing, and dominoes do not figure in the Decalogue as recorded in the Book of Exodus," says Kathleen Norris in our chapter for this week. This is her way of saying that the 10 Commandments are not a collection of scruples. But she also says that they are meant to get in our way. In the end, she may be saying that both my Grandpa's Methodism and the folks I knew who carried grave suspicions about denominational Christianity were partly right about commandments.

The problem with scruples is that their significance seems to lie in how they define us rather than how they form us. I sensed from a very early age that the real problem with tobacco use wasn't lung damage (although we inisted that it was). It was joining another category of people. The real tragedy wasn't smoking. It was becoming a "smoker".

When we use our religion simply to define ourselves over and against others it has become idolatrous. This holds true for people on the left, right, and center. But when we remember that our faith is about transformation and abundant life our scruples become practices that open up new life to us.

We live in a time in which our mere opinions about sins are enough to divide us deeply. When the Pharisees asked Jesus to speculate about a woman who marries seven brothers - in succession, of course, after each one dies - (click HERE to read Kate Alexander's insightful sermon on the passage) they want to know what Jesus will say about marriage after the resurrection. But what they really wanted was to make a division. The information they hoped to get from Jesus had no practical use in their lives other than to define Jesus as one of those strange people who think like that - whatever 'that' may be.

When I remember that even the 10 Commandments are about finding an abundant way of living, God can use them to shape me in life giving ways. God gives them for the purpose of restoring relationship with God and with one another. And so often God shapes us by opening us to God's work in other people. We may find that in keeping ourselves sequestered and safe from the strange lives of banjo players and smokers and people who go to ballgames on Sunday we are keeping ourselves safe from another unexpected encounter with the redeeming love of God.

Inheritance: What Religion Were You Raised in and What Are You Now?

Gospel reading: Luke 19.1-10
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

My brother recently told me to Google the name of one of my college roomates. When I did, I was surprised to find a good deal of national press coverage of a fairly sordid extramarital affair he had been involved in. The national interest had to do with the company his mistress worked for and what favors his favors might have earned him.

Mercifully, I don't remember many of the details, but one line caught in my memory. "I can't believe you're from here," said the woman. By 'here' she meant Arkansas, of course. And her incredulity was meant as a high complement.

Now I'm not fiercely patriotic about my home state. But the line, which probably didn't mean much to the reporter, struck me as particularly telling. Sometimes we want nothing more than to have someone to tell us that we're somebody else.

Kathleen Norris says that religion might be an antidote to the banal assurance we receive each year from Miss America that we can be anything we want to be. "What we were raised in" has something to do with who we are.

Such a reminder sounds like bad news. Until we consider the alternatives. In one of his stories C.S. Lewis described hell not as the place where we don't get anything we want. Hell is where we get exactly what we want instantly. And from high above, hell doesn't look like a single blazing lake of fire, but thousands of lonely, individual houselights.

Lewis's imagined hell worked like this. Since everyone gets exactly what they want, when a neighbor or a family member becomes a nuisance or inconvenience people just move apart. Separation is easy and instant so the lights of the houses grow more and more isolated. He told of Napoleon rattling around in an empty castle, a sad image of the loneliness we could make in a world in which anything is possible.

Another word for limits is definition. Most of the world is made up of what you're not. Which helps me a great deal in recognizing you. We may wish that the end of our noses or our waists were there rather than here, but we need the particular and unique set of limits we call a body in order to be a person.

And so it is with faith. Delving into the faith tradition that formed us is an act of self definition. We might say the work has a way of limiting our options for the future. But that's also called focus. If there's no me to begin with, I'm sadly 'free' to choose from all the possible selves in the world and a few more that exist only in my imagination. Perfect freedom turns out to be perfect disorientation.

In our gospel reading from Sunday Jesus tells Zacchaeus that salvation has come to his house because he too is a son of Abraham. An interesting comment since Zacchaeus had just promised to pay back anyone he had defrauded and give of his ill gotten wealth to the poor. I think Jesus was telling Zacchaeus that his change of life was really about finding his truest self. He wasn't just anywhere. He was somewhere. A particular person in a particular religious tradition. And from this vantage point he could finally see the life giving choices that really were before him.

Annunciation

Gospel reading: Luke 18.9-14
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

There's a world of difference between "How will I know this is true?" and "How can this be?" Both questions are reasonable responses to an angel's annunciation of an unexpected pregnancy. But one seeks to close off a mystery. The other seeks to open one up.

The first question is Zechariah's after he is told that his wife will bear a child. The second is Mary's when she is told that she is pregnant as well.

"How will I know this is true?" has served humanity well in many ways. Disproving what is false in the realm of science or theology is important enough. But sometimes we're lulled into thinking that if something can't be proven, it can't be important.

Robert Capon has said just the opposite. He says that the provable things in our faith are those that matter least. Philosophers and theologians like Thomas Aquinas have offered some fairly elegant proofs of the existence of God. But learning what God is like and why God might matter to the likes of us is a subtler affair.

Human analogies are useful here. There is no single, definitive proof of one person's love for another. Every action, or word, or gesture is open to suspicion. Asked to prove our love for another, we never get to don a white lab coat and offer up DNA evidence in our defense. No, love always depends on the trust of the beloved for its proof. Love is never received by one asking "How will I know?" It needs at least the space of "How can this be?"

An appreciation of mystery is essential to love. And banishing space for mystery in our lives shuts us off from too much of the world. Kathleen Norris points out that Zechariah went mute after his response. Mary delivered the Magnificat.

For much of my life I thought faith should not be spared the hard, "How will I know?" questions. I thought conversion was about being convinced beyond a reasonable doubt by a preponderance of evidence for things like annunciations and resurrections and transfigurations. But I've come to believe that true faith asks "How can this be?" Faith is that humble delight in the possibility of grace. Nothing has been proven. But perhaps we move only from a fearful "What if it's false?" to a hopeful "What if it's true?" And everything shifts. Energy dissipates around the fearful first quesiton. Life and energy gather around the second.

In our gospel lesson from Sunday we can assume that we're meant to feel sorry for the poor tax collector whose world seems to have crumbled thoroughly enough for him to cry to God for mercy. But the Pharisee's world makes sense and is all the sadder for it. He can comprehend quite easily why God might be pleased with him. But a comprehensible world is too small. Jesus seems to be telling us that something crucial opens up in the tax collector's plea for mercy, and maybe he leaves asking "How can this be?"

When we think the Christian faith makes perfect sense we should beware. Not because its truths are absurd or patently false. But because we're probably not asking the questions it is meant to address. We're not changed by the fact of God or the fact of redemption. We're changed by our encounters with God. We're changed by our experiences of redemption. We're changed in ways mostly small, ways we mostly don't understand. And maybe we only see these changes looking back. But when we do, we're likely to ask, "How can this be?"

We won't get an answer. But we'll know we're in good company. Which may be all we ever really get to know anyway. And somehow it's enough.

Repentance

Gospel reading: Luke 18.1-8a
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

This entry on repentance probably should begin with some of my own. I didn't blog last week. But maybe you know that the word translated 'repentance' in the New Testament is metanoia which means to turn around. It's not really about saying you're sorry.

I guess the poem, "The Monster Who Was Sorry" was a kind of turning.

It was written by a boy whom Kathleen Norris had taught. He started it by saying how much he hated it when his dad yelled at him. Then the poem progressed violently as he pushed his sister down the stairs, wrecked his room, and eventually destroyed the whole town. But it concluded, "Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, 'I shouldn't have done all that.'"

Norris insisted that the boy had written a pretty good cursing psalm. You've probably read them before. In them the psalmist imagines all kinds of misfortune for his enemy, sometimes in gruesome detail. We rarely think of such psalms as part of a process of repentance. But Norris's pupil shows us how this can be.

It seems helpful to think of the anger in the poem as something that needs a change in direction, a metanoia. The boy ended up turning his father's anger around, or halting it. The imagined destruction was from a continuation of the destructive force. What new anger might his have ignited? Remember the cheesy old campfire song, "It only takes a spark"? It's just as true of anger as of love.

The insight the boy's poem opened up for me is that repentance is a kind of imagination. How do we take the anger, or violence or hatred we've been given and turn it around? Because it does take up residence in us. It becomes our own anger, and we end up being the only ones who can repent.

Healing was possible because the boy was willing to express just what kind of anger was alive in himself. It would push sisters down staircases, and wreck towns and only by realizing the destruction it would wreak was the boy able to turn that anger around. "Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, 'I shouldn't have done all that.'" He let his imagination loose just enough to realize the damage the anger he received from his father would do if he just passed it along unchecked. He imagined honestly enough to turn his anger around. This is true repentance.

A cycle was broken when the boy was honest enough to describe his anger, but strong enough or humble enough to keep from passing it on. His imagination was redemptive, because his imagination was a form of repentance. His imagination provided the space in which he might turn.

Repentence doesn't seem so grim an obligation when we realize that it's less about satisfying an indignant God than imagining a way out of a destructive cycle of anger or guilt or any other sin. It's about imagining life in the messy house we're about to make and turning in a different direction.

Belief, Doubt, and Sacred Ambiguity

Gospel reading: Luke 17.5-10
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

One of my favorite phrases in the Bible comes in St. Paul's speech in Athens in the book of Acts. He has seen an altar inscribed 'to an unknown god', and he decides to tell the gathered crowd about that god. In his sermon, says that the living God is the one in whom "we live and move and have our being".

His debate had been with the local philosophers. And these people believed that happiness came through philosophical discussion (the Epicureans) or through knowledge, self-sufficiency, and reason (the Stoics). Paul was the first Christian theologian. So he did value careful thought about God. But when he described his God to these philosophers he didn't describe the Christian faith as holding more accurate propositions about the universe. He spoke in terms of the wonder of living, moving, having our being within the life of God.

We still see the world much as those Greek philosophers did. We can still see faith as assenting to a proposition. (I considered this a little in my sermon on Sunday. Perhaps I should have just read this chapter in Amazing Grace from the pulpit.) But faith may be more about movement. And the way we move through our lives may have more to do with who we are than how we think.

As some of you know I used to build houses. Over time I've come to be less interested in how our houses express who we are and more interested in how our houses make us who we are. For instance, it's worth noting that front porches were gradually replaced by back decks with privacy fences. But we don't get the whole picture if we just say that this architectural change was a symptom of our increasingly private personalities. Daily patterns change when our houses change, and I think those daily patterns may have more to do with who we are than we can imagine. Churchill said that we shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us. So one might ask whether back decks and privacy fences make us into more private persons.

What in the world does that have to do with the Christian faith? Well, when I visited the Episcopal Church seminary in Austin, I was intrigued by their chapel. If you've been there you know it's very unique. The space is not symetrical. The cross behind the altar is outside, seen through the clear windows at the (liturgical) east end of the chapel. But the most interesting feature to me was subtler. The chancel was a kind of a semicircle. And behind the pulpit was a short wall that caused a bottleneck as people went to communion. The bottleneck, however, was not an architectural oversight. It was intentional. For after taking communion, if you keep your head down and try to get back to your seat you may well run into someone. To make it through you have to lift your head and look at the person coming to the rail.

Whether you like the space or the feature is one thing. But can you see the notion behind it? Our buildings will shape us, so this community wanted to be shaped by having to look at one another, by having to see oneself as part of a larger gathering every time they received the body and blood of Christ.

Kathleen Norris pushes us to see the life of faith less in terms of assenting to a few dubious facts, and more in terms of participation, of repetition, of rhythm, of the ongoing involvement in the worship of God. She managed to stop waiting to believe the collection of facts she thought faith was about and start trusting the ongoing life of worship in community. She started the practice of prayer before she understood prayer. And what she found was that the life of faith is more about living and moving and having our being in God than it is about explaining God.

I suppose the good news for us is that we're not meant to figure out faith as a cosmic brain teaser which every human is required to solve before death. Faith is a way of being in the world. And we're transformed not by being convinced of a new theological proposition. We're transformed by the patterns of our lives. Shaping the form of our worship is like shaping our buildings. Our worship doesn't just reflect who we are. It transforms us into something new as we live and move together, having our being in the mystery that is God.

Prayer

Gospel reading: Luke 16.19-31
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

When I was growing up we would travel to Pennsylvania once every few years to visit Dad's family. With the exception of my dad the whole Walters clan lived within a few hours of Hershey. Uncle Russell had ventured as far as the Pocano Mountains where he pastored a little Methodist church for decades. But they all remained very much Pennsylvanians.

If you've been to that part of the country you'll recognize the unique accent spoken. This isn't the kind of thing that lends itself to description in a blog. But I noticed things like the attachment of "dontchya?" to sentences and the way my cousins' voices went down rather than up in pitch at the end of a question.

It was one thing to hear these exotic tongues spoken by people I barely knew. But what I had not expected was the contagion of the accent. As soon as we arrived the inflections would infect my father's speech as well. And with every day that we stayed Dad would sound more and more like a Pennsylvanian.

Part of the way we talk depends on whom we're talking to.

If we think of prayer as a way of talking - far too narrow as a definition, but it may work as a metaphor - what if it works a little like traveling to Pennsylvania did for my dad? Let's just play with this notion for a bit.

Sometimes our language changes as soon as we realize that we're talking to God. We put our best...well...tongue forward, so to speak. If we don't slip into thees and thous, we might affect that calm, earnest, pious voice we imagine God wants to hear. This seems like a less than helpful way to be changed by prayer. Taken far enough we can pray as though we're pretty sure the person God really wants to hear from is somebody else. So we try to talk like her.

But this isn't what happened to Dad when we joined his family again. No, the accent got stronger as stories were told. It was clear that Dad was changed a little by the encounter, but he wasn't becoming less himself. A voice long quiet was returning. The change was audible. I heard parts of my father's past that I simply couldn't have in Arkansas.

Kathleen Norris says that "prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine. To be made more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been."

Maybe the change that occurs in prayer is something like the unexpected return of a lost accent. We often don't even know it's happened. But in the process of sending the deepest parts of our selves toward God - anger, hope, confusion, joy, the stuff of psalms - we are given access to our selves once again. Access to our lives once again. And the truly miraculous result may be that our gratitude for what is overtakes our grief for what might have been. The miraculous result is that we come alive in the present.

Chiefly on Prayer

The three year old
came in from the rain
and told his mother
he had a talk with Jesus.
What did he mean
she wanted to know.
“Well,” he said
“I was sitting on top
the slide and I asked Jesus
if I should let go
and he said
if I were you
I’d go for it
but
you’re gonna get
a wet bottom.

- John L. Wright*

*"Chiefly on Prayer" comes from a collection of poems by my uncle, John L. Wright titled Through an Old Wooden Bowl.

Perfection

Gospel reading: Luke 16.1-13
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Have you ever seen one of Sam Maloof's chairs? Let me take a stab at a new trick. There's one on the right side of the page. They're compelling, I think. The bend of the slats and the curve of the crest rail and the arms that reach out just so. They're compelling, but not perfect.

At least they're not perfect as we usually conceive perfection. This isn't my opinion, by the way. It's their maker's.

Sam Maloof has practiced and taught woodworking for years in Alta Loma, California. And in an interview he once described the difficult task of getting his students away from the age old association of perfection with precision. He said that if one was having trouble sharpening a chisel, she need not go out and buy a contraption to hold the tool at precisely the proper angle to the stone. The source of the trouble is more likely an unnatural motion in the hands of the woodworker. Likewise he would preach that woodworkers have no need for micrometers, as though they were milling surgical instruments from stainless steel. No, lumber needs a different kind of attention. It changes with humidity. It's grain must be honored. The wrong notion of perfection means we never get a Sam Maloof chair.

Kathleen Norris suggests that Christians have been distracted and maybe even hamstrung by wrongheaded notions of perfection. We too confuse it with precision and freedom from flaws. But Norris tells us that the word often translated 'perfection' from the New Testament is closer to completion or maturity. It carries the sense that a thing or a person has become what it was intended to be.

This is good news. Norris offers Martha Stewart as "the high priestess of Perfection: one dare not let the mask slip, even in one's home, where all is perfect right down to the last hand-stenciled napkin ring." Most of us can't sustain that kind of perfection with regard to homemaking, much less with regard to our moral and religious lives. But progressing toward a more authentic self, toward the person I was made by God to be, that sounds like good work to take up rather than the burdensome work of keeping up - with God's impossible expectations or the Jones's.

Our gospel reading on Sunday was that unsettling parable of the dishonest manager. Read it and try to make sense of it while holding on to our default definitions of perfection. A rich man fires his manager for squandering his property. Then the manager goes out to his former employer's debtors and settles accounts for less than full value. And the rich man approves. The manager apparently made the best out of this bad situation. The parable implies that this must have been the real job he was hired to do.

Jesus' interpretation of the story is just as unexpected. He tells us to make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth. He ultimately tells us we can't serve God and mammon, but we apparently can't live free of contact with mammon either. Perfection isn't accomplished by a kind of quarantine from dishonest wealth. It has something to do with serving God in spite of the dishonest wealth we encounter which may be kind of like that manager's making the best of a bad situation.

On this 50th anniversary of the witness of the Little Rock Nine a reevaluation of our notions of perfection seems relevant. A few brave students changed our world. But our world isn't perfect. Race relation troubles are hardly a thing of the past. But sometimes the shrillest voices seem to describe some other world. One voice says, "Everything's fine now. There are laws on the books that legislate perfection. Access is no longer denied." Another voice says, "Nothing's changed. And we won't say things are better until... [Insert your own vision of utopia. It usually entails a world in which everybody has migrated freely to your point of view.]"

In the world we actually inhabit, isn't the real question How can our culture, how can our churches, how can our schools participate in the maturing of people into the fullness God intended for each of them? This is a messier task than pressing each person into a single mold labeled 'perfect'. Those who struggle with moral and religious OCD should beware.

But Jesus seems to be telling us that our call is to live faithfully in this imperfect world. Maybe even the pursuit of justice needs to be like building a Sam Maloof chair. The knots and curls in the grain must be incorporated into whatever beauty we will manage. The beautiful things of this world don't pretend to be made of materials from another. They're perfect. They have become fully themselves. Blemished and beautiful.

Exorcism

Gospel reading: Luke 15.1-10
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

"The need for everyday, ordinary exorcism is not much acknowledged." (from Amazing Grace)

Sentences like this one have a lot to do with why I find Kathleen Norris's book engaging. My hunch is you've never heard that sentiment expressed. And if you have it wasn't in such a nonchalant, understated way. Exorcism and demonic possession are the domain of raving street corner preachers or the inhabitants of mental institutions. One can define what constitutes 'polite' company very, very broadly and still manage to exclude exorcists.

But the reason for our discomfort may in fact point us to a distortion in the way these words have been appropriated. And correcting that distortion might just show us why talking of demons and exorcisms might still be useful.

My discomfort, and yours too perhaps, stems from the notion that a demon is a being out there. Even if I come to believe that I am 'possessed' by one, it is still something or someone alien to myself. But scholar Peter Brown wrote that for the early monastics the demonic was "an extension of the self." It may well be helpful to describe a part of ourself even as a dragon, but there's a sense in which if I never acknowledge how much of my own history, my own predispositions, my own wounds make up my demons exorcism may not quite be possible.

Discussion of demons opens up a related discussion about language and its impoverishment in a scientific age. In reality, language has expanded in mind boggling ways as scientific knowledge has. But somewhere along the way as we kept naming our world from the tiniest scraps of matter to expanses that must be described in terms of the speed of light, somewhere along the way we forgot that language doesn't just name things. It evokes things too.

If a demon is one more 'thing' alongside frogs and fluoride and flap jackets an exorcism is a kind of surgical procedure that has little to do with me. Believing in such demons may not sound terribly scientific, but it's our instinctive preference for assigning things to clear categories that pushes us into a false choice. Do you believe in demons or not? was a less interesting and less helpful question to those ancient monks than What are your demons? The first question presses us to choose between competing facts. The second opens our imagination and our language enough to start probing the mystery of our selves.

Kathleen Norris attempted to exorcise a demon from her adolescence. She was half apologetic about the relative insignificance of common middle school cruelty compared with some of the world's suffering. But what she realized was that a bitterness took up residence within her as an 11-year-old, and it stayed for years. Had she pretended not to need exorcism simply because the demons of other people seemed greater than hers, she would still be possessed, so to speak.

Lewis Hyde once wrote that we forgive when we lose attachment to our wounds. And something in Norris's story struck me as a struggle to detach from a wound. Exorcism must bear some relationship to forgiveness if only that they are both ways of gaining just enough freedom from our past to move forward.

The gospel we read yesterday suggested that there is joy in heaven when such shifts occur in our lives. When we repent, when we turn around, there is joy. And when I think of exorcism as a movement in the direction of God's joy or a participation in God's joy it becomes an enticing possibility. Rightly imagined, everyday, ordinary exorcism might just be a life-giving practice as we slowly come to take more interest in God's joy than our tired old wounds.

Conversion: The Family Story

Gospel reading: Luke 14.25-33
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

"The word 'conversion' comes from the Latin for 'to turn around.' Thus it denotes a change of perspective but not of essence: a change of view but not of location." (from Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris)

I've been reading a book called Imagining Redemption by David Kelsey. And in it he takes issue with the notion (or cliche really) of a 'point of view.' He writes, "No human person can live on a point. No one can really occupy some one point for viewing the world...The phrase 'point of view'...is abstracted from the messiness, contingency, and oddity of everyday life."

That's a lot of quoting in the first two paragraphs in a blog. Seems like cheating. But the two quotes are helpful to me as I imagine conversion. And what I come away with is even if or when or while I'm converted, I'm still here. More to the point, I'm still here with all of you fools among the "messiness, contingency, and oddity of everyday life."

I think this sentiment might have been part of what led Kathleen Norris to call conversion a family story. Usually we think of conversion in individual terms. And we're inclined to think of it as a delivery from the world's troubles. Maybe you've known a convert who suddenly had no use for you and your unenlightened view of the world.

But that's not how it goes in the Bible at least. Even that quintessential convert, St. Paul, would tell us about his struggles. He does the things he doesn't want to do, and doesn't do the things he wants to do. And this is life after the blinding flash on the Damascus road.

And so it is with us. But the difference may be a newfound faith that the entanglements of life are not something to be delivered from. Conversion renames them incarnation and suspects that if God works at all, God works in our life together.

Calling conversion a family affair seems to defy what we read from the gospel of Luke on Sunday. Jesus said that his disciples had to hate mother and father, brother and sister, even life itself to be his disciple. We have to be ready to walk away from everything. But what he asks is that we follow. And the rest of the New Testament seems to be telling us that if we follow he will lead us right back into relationship with the same old people of the world. In fact he says things like the law comes down to loving God and loving neighbor, and he even suggests that there might me less difference between the two kinds of loving than we think.

Perhaps the call to conversion, drastic as it can be, is good news. It's bad news if we are converted into someone who loses their love for and connection with this world. But that's not conversion at all. When we think we inhabit a different plane of existence from the rest of the world, we think there's been a change of location, not perspective. Life-giving conversion "...is seeing ourselves, and the ordinary people in our families, our classrooms, and on the job, in a new light. Can it be that these very people-even the difficult, unbearable ones-are the ones God has given us, so that together we might find salvation?" When we believe that they can, we're being converted.

Detachment

Gospel reading: Luke 14.1,7-14
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I knew a boy once - I'll call him Alan (his name has been changed to protect his innocence) - who said, "Mom, I wish I was a girl. Because then I might not like weapons so much."

Now I'm steering clear of debates over gender stereotypes, nurture vs. nature, or the pros and cons of the total disarmament of children (the banishing of all guns from squirt to BB). What that five-year-old boy was really expressing was a desire for detachment, and there's not much difference between the longing behind his words and those of a sixth century monk named Dorotheus of Gaza. He described detachment as "being free from [wanting] certain things to happen," and remaining so trusting of God that "what is happening will be the thing you want, and you will be at peace with all." (quoted in Amazing Grace, p. 32)

Christianity has a long and varied past with regards to its teaching about wants. Fringe sects like the Shakers distrusted desire so much that they forbade sexual intercourse. This placed rather too much burden on the evangelism committee, and they've all but died out. But detachment is not really about avoidance of desire itself. It's about a proper distance from a desire. It's about finding life giving ways of wanting.

If peace has something to do with an alignment between "what is happening" and "the thing you want" then it seems there are two strategies we might employ. We can work on our wants. Or we can work on the rest of the universe. If you have one marginally significant relationship in your life, you know well enough how difficult a task it is to bring a single human will into alignment with your set of priorities, preferences, and pet peeves. Multiply that will by several billion, add in the rest of the animal kingdom (the pets and the pests), and as you can see, the project gets rather unwieldy long before we other relevant concerns...like weather, for instance.

As impossible as attending to my wants can seem, the alternative is only more hopeless.

On Sunday we read one of Jesus' wedding banquet parables. In it he warned about seating ourselves at the prestigious end of the table, because we may be asked to make way for someone more important. Sitting in the lowest place is parablese for humility. But I wonder if Jesus' story is helpfully considered as a teaching about wants. The further up the table we seat ourselves the more hardened our wants have become.

So maybe taking that lower seat is really about detachment. Maybe it's really about a distance from our wants that becomes an openness to the future. The good news in this is that it's always better to be open to the blessing that actually comes our way rather than obsessed about the blessing we think we need or deserve. The universe is terribly uncooperative, and the chances are good that the seat we want most is already taken.

Kathleen Norris has a very straightforward strategy for detachment. She prays the psalms. In them we find the most shocking an irreligious wants spoken right out loud to God. In them we find the most elegant thanksgivings for the unexpected blessings and moments of grace we are given. Maybe we 'want' better by speaking the truth to God, and listening to what we say. And maybe over time we find ourselves a little detached, freed from what might be in order to enjoy what is.

Alan's parent had the wits not to recommend a sex change operation as a solution to his dilemma. But he spoke the truth about his wants, and maybe it was a form of prayer even though he hadn't addressed his thoughts to God directly. I'd like to think the wants didn't go away, but loosened their grip a little.

I guess Alan came through it alright. He didn't head to the hills to join a militia, but he didn't lose a child's large imagination that is so powerfully in touch with the risk and adventure inherent to life in this world. The best stories tell us of such risk. And the best stories tell us we might just need a few weapons for such an adventure. Maybe not swords and revolvers so much as a little detachment and a practice of prayer. With these we might just find our seat at the table is better than we could have imagined.

Incarnation

Gospel reading: Luke 13:22-30 (Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Two hours ago I was sitting with my wife in the Double Wells Assembly of God church in Sulphur Springs, Arkansas. It's only about an hour from Christ Episcopal Church in downtown Little Rock, but in every way other than the geographical it's about as far away as you can get.

The church building is several miles from town, near the cemetery. An oil painting of a river, probably painted by a well meaning member of the congregation, hangs behind the baptistry. We were there for Aunt Florence's funeral.

I've heard stories of the gospel sings and dinner on the grounds that Aunt Florence would organize to raise money for the cemetery each year, and stories of the way church services at Double Wells always included her invitation to anyone in the congregation who might like to come on up and sing in the choir.

At the funeral her son made his way to the piano, dressed in his best dark suit. He told us he didn't quite know what song his mother would have called her favorite, but he opened the shape note hymnal with a creak of its spine, and said he thought this one would be appropriate.

He found a singable key, and then started blocking out the chords, adding only a few unpretentious flourishes that his mother taught him in their living room, no doubt. His voice was strong and clear and mediocre as he sang, "I've got a mansion just over the hilltop in that bright land where we'll never grow old..."

And as he sang, I stopped feeling out of place if only for a moment. Up to that point I felt like my tie was too neat, my shoes were too shiny; I felt like, well, an Episcopalian from Little Rock. But there was something in the honest longing in that old gospel song and the honest longing in the voice that was singing it distracted me from all our irreconcilable differences. And we were just people gathered in the name of Christ, and he was in our midst. Incarnate again.

That's not supposed to happen. Our theology is different. Our worship is different. Our language is different. Our architecture is different. Our images of heaven are probably different, but when we let our guards down we recognize something like a hope for a "bright land where we'll never grow old" in ourselves. If our hope isn't quite the same shape, it comes from the same place.

Kathleen Norris considers the Incarnation through Mary's exchange with the angel Gabriel. And her question is one Christians have struggled with for 2000 years: "How can this be?" I suppose I was asking this very question when I sat in that little pentecostal church, realizing that when Jesus said he would be among us when two or three or gathered, he didn't mean two or three people like me. Realizing, perhaps, that incarnation still happens in ways that we think cannot be.

I think I caught a glimpse of Incarnation today. It felt a little like this: "...Even in terrible circumstances and calamities, in matters of life and death, if I sense that I am in the shadow of God, I find light, so much light that my vision improves dramatically. I know that holiness is near...coming from Galilee as it were, from a place of little hope, it reveals the ordinary circumstances of my life to be full of mystery, and gospel, which means 'good news.'" (from Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris)

Inheritance: Blessing & Curse

Gospel reading: Luke 12:49-56 (Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

My parents' garage looks a lot like mine. Only bigger. And older. And fuller. Dad makes no attempt to conceal his pleasure when he retrieves something useful from his accumulation. That one relevant object somehow validates the whole garage project - a project that has rarely included the housing of an automobile.

My garage is a miniature version of my parents'. Apparently the you-know-I-might-just-find-a-use-for-that-one-day gene is not recessive.

For me and for my children I have tended to think of inheritance in terms of garage contents rather than beach houses and holdings in successful companies. Possibly because we actually might inherit the contents of a garage one day.

Inheritance is always a mixture of blessing and curse. Kathleen Norris says that it's easy enough to accept the more savory characters in the communion of saints. Who wouldn't want St. Theresa (of Avila or Calcutta) among their spiritual forbears. "But it's far less pleasant--it can feel like a curse--to include in my welcome the difficult ancestors: the insane, the suicides, the alcoholics, the religiously self-righteousness who literally scared the bejesus out of me when I was little, or who murdered my spirit with words of condemnation. Abel is welcome in my family tree, but I'd just as soon leave Cain out." (Amazing Grace, p. 23)

The messy reality of inheritance is that we don't get to sift through our past beforehand. We get the whole garage.

In the rural South, some consider religious and cultural inheritance to be nothing but curse. We think that tent meetings and revivals are put on by lunatics at best, con men at worst. Some of us would rather just walk away from it all, declaring it cursed. But if we do, we probably haven't even given our honest attention to that old time religion, much less the rest of the culture.

At a workshop once I was made to stand face to face with another person and talk about the culture that formed us. I'm a white Protestant male from small town Arkansas. My partner for the exercise was an African-American woman from Manhattan. It wasn't hard to dredge up some of the sinfulness of the culture that formed me. But it wasn't hard to name some blessings as well. I talked about the music that has been passed down through generations not on recordings, but first hand. On porches and in churches. Songs meant to be sung, not heard. I told of gatherings in which everybody present made some of the music. In all the plucking, thumping, strumming, and singing the stories were passed along more as energy than information.

Along with the bigotry was the music. There with the violence and oppression were the stories. Denying our inheritance is futile. Reclaiming and refashioning the gifts from our past is what it means to be alive.

In Sunday's gospel reading Jesus seems to be saying that people will be cut off from what they have inherited if they follow him. Fathers and sons and mothers and daughters will be divided. But what Jesus speaks most forcefully is that we are called to attention to the present. "Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" he asks. If our heritage keeps us trapped in the past, we may need to be cut off. But maybe that past contains keys to understanding present as well.

Maybe my dad had it right when it comes to the life of faith. The Christian tradition is a big old garage. Some see only rusty lawnmower blades and broken skateboards and would rather walk away from the whole pile. But some of us know there is great treasure here. Not treasure from another time to make us nostalgic or embarrassed, but treasure to be brought into our lives today. Ways of seeing and being that help us interpret the present time.

So open your mind and dig around a bit in the faith. Soon you too might emerge with an unexpected treasure that actually helps us make some sense of today. You may not be able to contain your pleasure either. Which, by the way, is called praise in this old garage. You'll find it over in the corner just past the judgment and condemnation, underneath that pile of grace.

Salvation

Gospel reading: Luke 12.32-40 (Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Sometimes a guy walks into a bar, and it's not funny. The guy Kathleen Norris described in this chapter slept on her couch one night after her bartender husband deemed him too drunk to drive home. He had done some hard living while working in the oil fields of North Dakota. But for a time things seemed to be looking up. A promising future made a new business partner's shady past easy enough to ignore. Then one day the partner pulled his truck suddenly to the side of the road. An acquaintance had passed them headed in the opposite direction. Norris continues the story:

"I need to kill him," he said matter-of-factly, reaching for a gun that our friend had not known was stashed under the front seat. "I need to kill him, but he's with someone, and I don't know who. So it'll have to wait. Damn."

"It was right then I decided to get out," he said. "This was over my head." And that is salvation, or at least the beginning of it. The Hebrew word for "salvation" means literally "to make wide," or "to make sufficient," and our friend had recognized that the road he had taken was not wide enough to sustain his life; it was sufficient only as a way leading to death." (from Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris)

What's interesting about this story is the way Kathleen Norris doesn't make it into an analogy of salvation or an allegory about salvation. It's an instance of salvation. Humans tend to fold their hands reverently and speak sweetly and beatifically when they speak of salvation. But the term wasn't primarily a religious one for the Hebrews. It was meant for the here and now.

When our son Alden was about three we hadn't been attending the Episcopal church in town for long. He wasn't receiving Communion then, and one Sunday the cup went past and he heard the words "The blood of Christ. The cup of salvation." He snapped to attention, pointing at the cup, saying, "I want some of that! I want some salvation!"

Salvation wasn't a spiritual concept. It was the stuff in that cup. And when we sat back down Ardelle started to explain to him that it wasn't really salvation in the cup. And then she realized that he was probably a lot closer to the truth than those of us in the adult world of abstractions and spiritual meanings. If salvation happens, it happens here. If it's not in the cup, what is? If it's not in the cup, where is it?

In last Sunday's gospel Jesus says "Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys." This is one of those biblical sound bytes that are so effective in turning our attention away from this life and toward the next in our search for salvation. Jesus certainly does tell us of treasure that does not wear out. But what he really tells us is to pay attention. Right now.

"Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit...Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert." There are eternal treasures it seems. But Jesus doesn't tell us to think about eternity. He says pay attention. Pay attention to the revolver pulled from under the seat of your friend's pickup truck. Pay attention to the cup that just passed in front of you. If you're off thinking about heavenly things salvation might just pass you by.

Silence

Gospel reading: Luke 12.13-21 (Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I spent a week up on Petit Jean mountain this summer at Camp Mitchell as chaplain. Silence is hard to come by among 95 elementary school kids. But it can happen.

The Camp Mitchell gimmick is the silent coyote. You can make one yourself out there in blogland. Touch your ring and middle fingers to your thumb and extend your index and pinky fingers. There you have it: the silent coyote.

Now as you might suspect, some training - or Pavlovian conditioning, perhaps - is necessary for the silent coyote to silence a roomful of campers. The routine is much like the one Kathleen Norris describes in the elementary classrooms she visited. The kids are told to make as much noise as they can and then to stop the noise immediately at a signal - a dropped hand or a silent coyote as the case may be. It takes a little practice, but eventually they get it. The kids learn how to, in Katheen Norris's words, 'make silence'.

Considering silence as something made, as a presence of something rather than an absence, reminds me of Claude Debussy's famous insistence that music is "the space between the notes". Space and notes are both necessary to music (John Cage notwithstanding), just as silence and noise are both necessary to our lives. Bad music happens when we stop paying attention to one or the other.

You see this chapter wasn't only about silence. It was also about the words that can come about when we have been silent. When the children were asked to write about their experience they said things like, "strength is as slow and silent as a tree" and "Silence is spiders spinning their webs" and even, "Silence reminds me to take my soul with me wherever I go." Silence makes for better words.

On Sunday we read one of Jesus' more famous lines: "Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." I suppose greed is a kind of noise without silence. Maybe greed is not allowing enough space around our desires to enjoy the things we really want.

Sometimes we have to stop talking in order to hear, to stop wanting in order to enjoy, to stop the noise in order to speak. Maybe we need a silent coyote (I know you made one when you read the second paragraph) too. A signal to ourselves that the space in our lives must be made. And without it the notes are just noise.

Antichrist

Gospel Reading: Luke 11.1-13 (click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

For almost all my life I've been farsighted. The condition is more annoying than debilitating in my case. Still, it's more difficult to focus on things close up than on things at a comfortable distance - antichrists included.

The distance between the antichrist and me was once very comfortable. Fortunately I had heard that there was to be only one Antichrist, an evil world ruler who would come near the end of time. So even if he were to be living, the chances that I was the Antichrist were one in several billion. My task then was simply to keep the distance between us comfortable. But that distance has been closing ever since.

I was first surprised to find that antichrist is never mentioned in the apocalyptic book of Revelation. It only appears in the epistles of John. And there it says that "...even now many antichrists have appeared." So there's not just one. And they were already showing up in the first century. Maybe I am still in the running...which, of course, is the point. I'm always still in the running for antichrist.

We all must share (I hope it's not just me) a tendency to locate the world's problems and even our own problems out there somewhere. A huge industry depends upon this inclination. How many talk shows - on radio or television - depend on parading one form of dysfunction or another before us so that we might be reassured that our problems are the fault of people like that. Advertisers know well enough that we'll tune in.

How startling, then, are the closing words in this week's chapter in Amazing Grace. "Each of us acts as an Antichrist...whenever we hear the gospel and do not do it." The distance between the Antichrist and me didn't just get uncomfortable. It disappeared.

Jesus taught the disciples how to pray in the gospel reading on Sunday. And even in Luke's shorter version of the prayer, Jesus includes these familiar and impossible words: "...forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us." When we really consider the life and words of the Christ, becomming an antichrist doesn't just seem possible. It seems inevitable.

But the Lord's prayer gives us a clear, simple way to start acting like the Christ, even acting on behalf of the Christ. In ways we probably can never fully comprehend, our forgiving is bound up in or flows out of the forgiveness of God. Jesus did not teach us to pray, "Make us indignant towards those wicked people, as you are indignant towards them." He taught us to forgive, so that we might stop being antichrists. We need nearsighted vision for this, but the impact will be out of sight.

Eschatology

Gospel Reading: Luke 10.48-32 (click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Clearly The Sound of Music isn't going to provide the organizing principle for Ms. Norris's book. You remember how the song goes, "We'll start at the very beginning, a very good place to start..." Then again, anyone who was reading Kierkegaard at sixteen might not look next to Julie Andrews for insight.

The first chapter of Amazing Grace is about last things: eschatology. T.S. Eliot might have approved of Norris's strange decision to begin her book with a chapter on endings. The third of Eliot's Four Quartets is a poem titled "East Coker" which begins, "In my beginning is my end..." and ends, "In my end is my beginning." Both writers seem to believe that our endings have a great deal to do with our present lives.

I need to confess a little baggage of my own with regard to eschatology and the notion that last things should impact my present life. At summer camp as a child we would 'play' the persecution game. It was a form of capture the flag, but with a dark, Cold War twist. To be captured in enemy territory was to fall into the hands of the KGB. Prisoners were then interrogated by agents who tried to get us to renounce our faith.

As you might expect, with associations like these eschatology is a word I would be glad to let slip from my own religious vocabulary. Yes, we learned that our beliefs about the 'end times' should impact our present lives. But that impact mostly took the form of fear as we wondered whether our faith would be found wanting on Judgment Day. But, thanks to people like Kathleen Norris and T.S. Eliot, I am finding that 'eschatology' might not be the life sapping term I thought it was. In fact eschatology might help me live more fully rather than more fearfully.

I'll try not to do too much violence to the gospel readings when I bring them into the conversation each week, but one moment in the reading seems relevant. We are told that Martha was 'distracted by her many tasks.' There seems to be a certain kind of attention to the present that the story of Mary and Martha is asking us to pay. Mary's attention is contrasted to Martha's distraction. And Mary chose the better part.

Kathleen Norris's story of how the life of a friend opened up after an encounter with cancer might be making a similar point. Considering what's eternal, or considering our mortal limits can be a way of focusing ourselves on the miracle of life that is right in front of us - a turning from our distractions, we might say. And in the process we get glimpses of what's eternal in the here and now. 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand' is the way Jesus put it.

Near the end of the Four Quartets Eliot returns to the theme:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning...

There is a way of considering ultimate things and the end of things that can make us only more attentive to the life that is before us. Not fearful attention, wondering what horror might await us on the other side of the grave if we haven't got our religious acts together, but a powerful engagement with the life God has given us. The Christian faith is about not ceasing from this exploration. And maybe arriving back where we started, but knowing the place or knowing ourselves for the first time. Maybe eschatology can be life-giving after all.

The Preface

These are the first words I've ever blogged. My plan is to write each Tuesday, reflecting both on a chapter of Amazing Grace, by Kathleen Norris, and the previous Sunday's gospel reading. So here goes...

Gospel reading from Sunday: Luke 10.25-37
The Parable of the Good Samaritan

And here is a quote from the preface of Amazing Grace
to kick things off:

I drifted away from religion when catechism came to the fore, and the well-meaning adults who taught Sunday school and confirmation class seemed intent on putting the vastness of "God" into small boxes of their own devising. Theirs was a scary vocabulary, not an inviting one. And religion came to seem just one more childhood folly that I had to set aside as an adult. In my mid-thirties, however, it became necessary to begin to reclaim my faith, scary vocabulary and all.

We're probably all familiar enough with the tendency to reduce the mystery of God to a manageable size, or maybe a recognizable shape. Before we dismiss the instinct to do so, we ought to remind ourselves that incarnation might be one word for this. And incarnation isn't a term Christians should dismiss too flippantly from their vocabulary.

But language itself is a box. And I think that what makes Kathleen Norris's perspective compelling is that she is honest enough to admit that in reclaiming her faith, she had to reclaim the little boxes - the words of the Christian faith. Even the scary ones. She reminds us that we need the boxes. We just need to remember that the boxes will never be up to the task of describing God.

In the parable of the good Samaritan a lawyer is apparently on the right track with regard to eternal life. He answers with the right words that the key is in love of God and love of neighbor. But those words need to be fleshed out a bit. So Jesus tells a story.

Once again, the lawyer finds that he knows what a neighbor is just as surely as he knows how to gain eternal life. Hearing the words in a story seems to make their meaning more concrete and relevant, but the story also reminds us that the words aren't adequate in themselves. They need to point us toward the larger mystery to do their work. Words like 'love' and 'God' and 'neighbor' are fine old words. But until they point us toward the messier reality of human interactions, they are not just boxes. They're empty boxes.

I hope that the coming weeks and months of reflection on Amazing Grace and on the gospel stories will point us toward God's vastness using the battered boxes that are the vocabulary of the Christian faith. And along the way I hope to explore with you whether they are still sturdy enough to speak towards or maybe even to the ineffable.