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.