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)
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
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.
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.
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