Organized Religion

Gospel Reading: Matthew 22.34-46
Click HERE for last Sunday's reading

I have come to suspect that when people complain about "organized" religion what they are really saying is that they can't stand other people.
- Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

When a friend and I were in Amsterdam for a few days in college, we pitched a tent at a public campground. The starkest sign that we were in Europe was not the omnipresent pile of Dutch bicycles or the strange accents or the topless volleyball players in the park (ok, maybe that was the starkest). Well, a very clear sign that we were a long way from America was in the way people camped.

In America, we camp like we do most things: as far as possible from one another. That's an overstatement. But I've never been to a campground in America where the tents were clustered together in one corner, leaving the rest of the grounds open for whatever (topless volleyball, for instance). But that's how people arranged their sites on the broad lawn.

There's a certain impulse to pitch our religious tents (or our spiritual tents) a comfortable distance from anyone else's as well. We don't want our spiritual stuff mixed up with theirs, perhaps. Creeds and Coleman lanterns may all look a lot alike. So we need to put our initials on the ones that belong to us.

But the truth is that in religion, the life seems to come from the stuff not that we keep to ourselves, but the stuff that passes through the hands and the lives of other people. And since we tend to choose distance, maybe the 'organization' of religion is part of what helps us pitch our tent closer to those others.

We tend to think that living as religious mavericks (the term o' the election season) makes for a more diverse world. But the diversity of the world is simply a fact. The question is whether we're going to let something like the organizing force of religious practice push our lives into a transformative proximity to these strange other people.

It may even happen in church on a Sunday morning. We say creeds composed 17 centuries ago, by people continents away. We read letters to churches in places like Ephesus and Galatia or stories about seas being parted or a man who saw God's back and lived.

So maybe it's our association of "organized" and "tidy" that we need to drop. And maybe we need to recover the root of religion: "ligare" That Latin word is also the root of 'ligament', and refers to something that binds or connects. Maybe the organizing force of religion isn't meant to undo difference so much as to push us all to a corner of the campground.

If we let this happen, we're likely to be surprised not by the world's sameness, but by the wonderful, transforming strangeness of the person in the tent next door.

The Bible: Give Me a Word

Gospel Reading: Matthew 21.33-46
Click HERE for last Sunday's readings.

I was installing a wainscot in a vinyl-sided 1970s ranch house bedroom. And the project was nothing like what that sentence sets you up to imagine. Perhaps a helpful detail to fill out the picture for you has nothing to do with the carpentry. The McKinnon's piano was a equally uninspiring spinet, but Laurie had decoupaged the thing entirely with sheet music.

Such was the tenor of the whole project. The dining room fireplace was tiled with shards from broken clay pots, and the soffits in the kitchen bore hand painted designs and favorite quotes about food. Calling Laurie a timid decorator is like calling Genghis Khan a diplomat.

So after we'd built tall shutters inside the French doors that swung into the living room, I was working around the sad, little gas-log insert, taking the v-grooved pine boards all the way to the ceiling above it.

I deferred to Laurie more than most clients. There was, quite literally, no telling what she'd choose. But I spoke my mind occasionally. I thought the pine boards needed some kind of border at the ceiling. Some thicker material that they could "die into" as carpenters say. But Laurie thought the boards should go right to the ceiling. When I argued carefully and respectfully (as her contractor - i.e. employee) her only explanation for the choice was "in here". She tapped at her heart, and the conversation was over.

I bit my tongue to keep my eyes from rolling.

Artistic types are easily dismissed by people (like, say, carpenters) more grounded in reality, more in touch with the sturdy things "out there" in our world, things that don't respond to the workings of our hearts. And nowhere are the battle lines between the "in here" people and the "out there" people more starkly drawn than among interpreters of the Bible.

But I think there may be less distance between the poles of interpretation than we pretend.

Truth is we all bring a lot of the "in here" to our decisions about how to draw meaning from the Bible. Our experiences and temperment and sometimes what we ate for breakfast affect how stories and which stories impact our lives whether we know it or not. We may think we're being objective, but everybody's self gets in the way. Or maybe meaning doesn't happen any other way.

Maybe this is why the desert monks often sent people away with a single word or less to sit with as they tried to untangle the meaning of scripture. Rather than explaining everything objectively, providing careful disinterested rationale for their choices, they told people to sit still and be quiet with the scriptures and see what happens.

I had lots of good reasons and the collected wisdom of trim carpenters on my side. But Laurie was right. The room looked great. The choices and the materials worked, or hung together through all those eccentric choices. The "in here" and the "out there" were in harmony something beautiful, the hardest thing to define in the world, happened.

So maybe it's not that we can read anything we want in the stories of scripture - like the strange parable from Sunday about wicked tenants and rejected cornerstones. But we are supposed to bring our own instincts, our own experiences, our own hunches and desires along with us in our reading. And if we can be quiet with all of it long enough, something unexpectedly beautiful might come into view.

Maybe silence is a way of sorting out the "in here" from the "out there" and letting God work through both.

Conversion: My Ebinezer

Gospel Reading: Matthew 20.1-16
Click HERE for last Sunday's readings.

"Here I raise my Ebenezer; hither by thy help I've come."
from "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing"

This morning I stepped bravely into a vulnerable place. Different groups at Christ Church each have a code to enter the building for after hours meetings. A member of one such class ended an email with "I'm surprised the code isn't 2046. Or do too many churches use that number?"

I had no idea what she was talking about.

2046. 2-0-4-6. 20-46. Hmmmm. What in the world did she mean? Is there some obvious cultural reference I'm too square to get? It's true that my TV watching habits are pathetic. They are limited almost entirely to the 8pm time slot on Thursdays: The Office.

Even so, I do know that 90210 is a Beverly Hills zip code. (I was in seminary with one of the show's stars, believe it or not. But I never mustered the nerve to tell Ann that I'd never seen a single episode.)

I also realize that I'm quite out of the apocalyptic literature loop these days. While in 1988 I was well aware of the book "88 Reasons Why Jesus will Return in 1988" I'm afraid that such a book now would have to create quite a stir among the heathens before it came to my attention. So is 2046 the latest greatest prediction of the rapture?

The vulnerable place I entered so bravely was a simple acknowledgment of ignorance. I emailed back that...gulp...I didn't know what she was talking about. Why 2046?

The sad reality is that I too often just nod along, smiling, while people drop references I don't understand. How shameful to flag myself as the only person in the free world who's never heard of . . . ?

And so I end up bereft of good things. Good things like "Ebinezers."

I love the hymn "Come thou fount." And our hymnal changes the cryptic original line "Now I raise my Ebinezer" to "Now I find my greatest treasure". Now it's true that most of us just sing right through those "Ebinezers" as though we know what we're doing. So maybe it makes sense to do away with these obscure references so nobody feels dumber than thou.

But there's a real 'treasure' to be unearthed for anyone willing to wonder "Who or what is an Ebinezer?"

The reference is to a moment in 1 Samuel. After a victory against all odds, Samuel set up a stone and called it "Ebinezer", "...saying, Hitherto hath the Lord helped us." Ebinezer isn't about some generalized treasure. It's about a moment in a story. It's a stone being tipped up, a marker to remind of a day when God helped us through when we thought we were done for. A marker to return to, perhaps, on a day when God feels awfully absent.

I think we impoverish our faith when we ditch the particular in favor of the general. Even if the particular is a strange and obscure reference it might be a more fruitful discovery than its paraphrase.

On Sunday we read another of Jesus' parables. And I'm reminded that Jesus taught in such a way that people were drawn into stories rather than given clear platitudes. It's as if he didn't mean for us to get his teachings so much as to get into them. Imagining myself a vineyard laborer who gets the shaft or tipping up my own Ebinezer might mean a lot more to our faith than generic notions of blessing or treasure or ... whatever.

So, I know you're dying to have the mystery of 2046 disclosed. Well, it's the sign of the cross on a keypad. And now every time I enter the building I might see that cross. A little, latent blessing there in the foyer. A sign hidden in plain view. And all I had to do was ask.

Worship

Gospel Reading: Matthew 18.15-20
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

My daughter Kate and her friend Clare are spies. Which means, of course, they have invented a code language. No respectable spy is without a code language. 

Most correspondence-written or verbal-between Kate and Clare includes the phrase "doog si efil". You won't need a Cracker Jack decoder ring to break this one. You don't need to speak pig latin. "Doog si efil" is the reverse of their favorite line of t-shirts: "Life is Good".

The fact that encoding and decoding is irresistable to kids is worth noticing, I think. There are any number of reasons this is so. Besides the mystique of spy work in general, there is something satisfying about having the answer to something that mystifies everybody else. It' s all great fun. 

But I think our encoding/decoding instincts lead us astray as soon as we stop playing. Or as soon as we don't realize we're playing.

Let's turn to the topic o' the blog: worship. One view of worship is as a very serious, adult kind of encoding. There's an idea that we intend to deliver. Let's say the idea is that God loves you. Well, we could send this message in an email or spraypaint it on a bridge. But we choose to deliver it along with smoke and bows and chants and hand gestures, presumably because each of these has encoded some bit of information about the mystery itself. 

Our assumption that this is so is made plain by almost every newcomer to liturgical worship. The question we all want answered is "What does it mean when....?" Whether we're talking about kneeling or making the sign of the cross or being delivered into the chancel on a zip line, our first instinct is to ask what something means. But a better first question might be "What does it do when..."

We tend to assume that worship is an encoded mystery. But worship is an embodied mystery. 

When we think we're encoding the faith in the vestments and the gestures and the words of our worship they are quickly put to use for "didactic purposes", as Kathleen Norris says. When put to use to deliver someone's agenda, liturgy stops being the work of the people and becomes a kind of work on the people. 

Maybe this is why worship has long been described as a kind of holy play. Kids don't play spies in order to gain information. Kids aren't so interested in what that encoded secret message actually means. They play because they like what the game does to them. They like inhabiting a world of mysterious unsolved things. Once the mystery is solved, the game is over.

And so it is with faith and worship. Worship is a way of inhabiting a mystery, not solving one. Worship isn't a code, and it's not just a pretty way to deliver important information about God to us. Liturgy can never be reduced to the information it delivers. Once the mystery is solved, the game is over.

Kate and Clare don't play spies to learn that "Life is Good". They play because life is good when you're a spy. Maybe that's the best reason to worship as well. 

The Bible Study

Gospel Reading: Matthew 16.21-28
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

One of the most enduring of truth is "hip sells". I haven't actually heard anybody say this, but I'm willing to bet. What passes for hip among folks like us, sells.

Depending on the particular us you belong to, definitions of hip vary. A lot. Let's just consider things automotive. Whether you purchase a Dale Earnhardt (rest his soul) comfortor and pillow sham set or the Hermes edition Bugatti, hipness played a big role. And I'll bet no one has ever sprung for both.

Kathleen Norris doesn't mention the word "hip" anywhere in her chapter on "The Bible Study." She may not mention the word in the book, but this seems like as good a moment as any to suggest that the meditations in Amazing Grace depends on the regular transgression of a hipness boundary that her readers roughly share.

Part of the pleasure of reading comes from believing that we're the author's kind of people. A good writer makes us feel like the rest of the world may not understand her subtle intentions, but we do. We understand just what she's saying and we're pretty sure she would like us if we ever met for cocktails.

It's clear from this week's reading that Kathleen Norris didn't see the women's Bible Study at Spencer Memorial Presbyterian Church as her target audience. Timid, older women who attend a regular Bible study have a decidedly smaller hipness quotient among most people than either Dale Earnhardt or Hermes.

That's why the story works on us. We're not meant to feel comfortable among these people, and we're not meant to feel like they might have stumbled onto anything much of interest within the small circumference of their lives. But there at the Bible Study, one of the women pulls a folded up placemat out of her purse (probably not a Hermes). She'd saved it from a church bazaar because it bore a quote from Martin Luther: "If you could understand a single grain of wheat you would die of wonder."

Sometimes reading the Bible feels like that. Like pulling something breathtaking from a tasteless purse.

After calling Peter "Satan" (tasteless, don't you think?), Jesus said, "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?" Letting go of our lives might be letting ourselves be transported just past the hipness boundaries that make the most sense to us. Or at least letting ourselves see beyond them and smile.

We let our likes be our likes, be they NASCAR or Bugatti, and we enjoy them. But we lose the illusion that the truth comes to us only in tasteful containers.

Christian

Gospel Reading: Matthew 15.10-28
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I often think that if I'm a Christian, I'll be the last to know
- Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

I used to wonder whether the whole world was a sham. It seemed possible to me as an introspective (neurotic?) child that the reality I experienced was carefully staged.

You see, I didn't know what people were thinking, and I didn't know what they really did as soon as they left my sight. Maybe they stepped into a waiting room replete with discarded magazines and the drone of unwatched television sets until it was their turn to appear as a jogger, or a bank teller, or a President of the United States in the underwhelming drama that is the life of Scott.

My description sounds terribly narcissistic (at best). But the whole strange hunch arose from an appreciation of all that we don't really know, more than the thrilling or terrifying sense that the universe revolved around me. Self consciousness was the definition of all I really knew firsthand.

Religious faith has come to be a self conscious affair. We assume that religion happens, if it happens, in the recesses of self consciousness. Or it arises from an overly exercised self consciousness. But Kathleen Norris makes the counterintuitive suggestion that if she's Christian, she may be the last to know. How can that be?

Our gospel Sunday also shakes up our idea of what it might mean to be a Christian. The hero of the story, a Canaanite woman, is dismissed and demeaned by Jesus himself. It's clear that she doesn't have a warm feeling that she's loved by this Jesus. She just won't go away. And Jesus tells us that this is what great faith looks like.

Self consciousness would have (and still does) kept me from Jesus, I'm afraid. I'm comfortable thinking about religion, but I'm challenged by this Canaanite woman's religion. The same root for 'ligament' lives in 'religion'. Which reminds us that religion binds us to other people. It's not just an isolated, internal affair. So maybe there's nothing more religious than begging an offensive but apparently holy man for the miraculous healing of someone we love.

I don't think this woman was thinking about what it meant to be a Christian. She probably would be the last to know. But maybe Christian faith has always been a leap beyond self consciousness and towards someone or something else. An uninhibited leap towards the holy.

Medieval

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13.31, 44-52
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Wendell Berry imagines an exchange between the prophet Isaiah and entomologist E.O. Wilson. Wilson had written dismissively about our sentimental affection for ancient people with outdated ideas. He wondered how useful a person who didn't know about the electromagnetic spectrum would be to us modern people.

Berry's vignette goes like this:

Isaiah (finger in the air and somewhat oblivious of the historical superiority of the modern audience): The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as of the flower of the field.

Edward O. Wilson (somewhat impressed, but nevertheless determined to do his bit for “evolutionary progress”): But . . . but, sir! Are you aware of the existence of the electromagnetic spectrum?

CURTAIN

I love that little play. Religious people have wasted plenty of breath resisting any science that challenges the literal sense of the Bible. But a few anti-religious people have returned the disfavor and denied the possibility of ancient wisdom, given all the obviously wrong information people once carried. Wrong information about things like our solar system, biology, and the infield fly rule. OK, even lots of modern folks don't understand the infield fly rule. But you get my point.

It's radical to think that someone of another century--particularly one from medieval times, the so called 'dark ages'--might see things that we don't precisely because of their limited world view. What difference does it really make that my information is accurate about which celestial body orbits another if I've lost the capacity to wonder about them?

I'll forge into new blog territory in terms of imposed self disclosure (isn't that what blogs are?) and include a poem I wrote 12 years ago.

Distraction

Alden is fixed on a knot in the floor:
Small discoveries lead ruthlessly to others.
A nail in the baseboard left unset.
A withered fruit dropped from the pepper plant.
Now this.
Grandeur eludes or bores him,
So he's gone prone,
Licking at the blemish as though its lost dimension might be tasted.
Distraction is his only discipline
And the world is mustered
And patient.

-Fall 1996

I guess on a day in the fall of 1996 my eyes were opened to all kinds of unseen things by my infant son's flailing about on his belly. His perspective was terribly limited. Or maybe I should say his perspective was wonderfully focused.

To use the imagery from Sunday's gospel, I wonder just who in our house in 1996 would have been most likely to find a pearl of great price? At less than a year old Alden couldn't change the oil in my car or macramé a plant hanger. But I saw the world differently, I saw things I wouldn't have because of his perspective--belly to the floor, arms and legs and tongue splayed.

Maybe our obsession with accurate information (which I hope my internist and my accountant never get free of) blinds us to things. It's not that we need to let go of modern knowledge or grow suspicious of modern things. We just need to open ourselves to the possibility that even some strange medieval person might see things in life's forest that our nifty new trees obscure.

The painting is "Hemlock" by Heidi Christensen, an artist who was studying at Virginia Seminary when I was a student.

Ecstasy

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry.
- Emily Dickenson

For a denomination so obsessed with sex (according to the headlines at least) the Anglican Church is rarely charged with tolerating too much ecstasy. Many of us understand well enough what Tobias Wolff wrote about himself as a student at Oxford: "When we talked about ideas, we treated them dispassionately, donnishly, as if they were moves in a game of chess."

Theology can be a similar exercise. Talking about God can be a safe substitute for an experience of the transcendent.

In English class we're made to memorize lists of poetic devices. We learn about rhyme and meter and simile and metaphor. And we can leave such a class with the impression (unspoken perhaps) that writing poetry is just a matter of careful assembly. As if the making of a poem were comparable to playing with a verbal erector set, bolting this to that to make this lovely other thing. But this doesn't sound like the poetry Emily Dickenson describes. She doesn't know poetry by its parts. She knows it by what it does to her.

I think faith is meant to be much the same. Our talk about the mystery of God was never meant to be a 'donnish' exercise. We're not meant to keep God at a safe distance. In fact, the contact we have with God in our liturgy, in our music, in our strange encounters with God's other children may be preparation for those rarer moments at life's extremes. It's in those experiences in which our bodies go so cold that no fire could ever warm them that faith suddenly matters. That God suddenly matters. That religion is nothing at all like a game of chess. It's a matter of life and death.

The seed parables seem to be safe because their central metaphors happen slowly. But to describe the life of faith as the growth of a seed is to say that it involves the whole being. Faith isn't something that happens out there in the world of ideas. Faith isn't a cosmic game of chess. Faith isn't about comprehending something. It's about being comprehended by something beyond us.

Maybe faith is meant to be a kind of ecstasy. Sometimes a slow and patient ecstasy. Sometimes a sudden inbreaking of the transcendent at life's extremes. But either way we are drawn into or towards the mystery of God. And the religious life becomes no longer something dabbled in, but something that takes hold of us at the core of our being. Like the strange, ordinary miracle of a sown seed growing into wheat.

Conversion: The Wild West

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13.1-9, 18-23
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Only in Montana do monks keep revolvers in their nightstands. Kathleen Norris tells the story of one such Montana monk who heard a drunk burglar in his cell at 2 a.m. It only took a warning and a cock of the pistol to send the would be thief stumbling into the night, with a "holy s***!"

The reason this encounter was possible was that many monasteries leave their doors unlocked at all times as a gesture of hospitality. It shocked me when I was in seminary in Alexandria, Virginia to find that the doors of the chapel had no locks. And this wasn't rural Montana. This was inside the Washington beltway.

The power of these sorts of open door images arises not only from the hospitality they signify, but from the implicit risk. If the things they contained weren't worth locking up the offering wouldn't be worth much. But because the space behind all those unlocked doors is sacred, vulnerability becomes an offering in itself.

Kathleen Norris suggested that such radical forms of hospitality or generosity can transform people. It may be that I am changed in the realization that something precious or sacred is not being withheld even from me. Some of the power of the Holy Eucharist must derive from this sense.

We read the parable of the sower Sunday, and part of that story seems to be about the conditions for transformation. The soil has to be right. As part of the Episcopal Church I think tending our particular soil for transformation will always involve signifying holy things, and then offering them generously. When we do our liturgy well we know that we are encountering the holy. And in the midst of that encounter we find an unlikely welcome for ourselves. These holy things are offered even to us. This is the beginning of gratitude. And gratitude is the beginning of transformation.

The doors stay open all day here at Christ Church. Is this a dangerous practice? You bet it is. If it weren't, it wouldn't be worth doing.

Oppression

Gospel Reading: Matthew 10.40-42
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

When we were in Seattle, one item on my son Alden's agenda was the acquisition of a Mariners baseball cap. We wandered into a few of the shops that line the street leading to Safeco Field until we found the right hat at the right price.

It's a little curious, if you think about it, to include part of a uniform in your casual wardrobe - a cap, a jersey, a pair of combat boots. Sometimes it's the irony itself that drives the fashion choice. My cousin Matt's band, Gas Huffer, dressed in coveralls on their "Janitors of Tomorrow" record. And the irony rests on the way we signify our roles and our realms of authority by wearing uniforms.

Oppressors quite often wear uniforms - military, religious, or, as in the case of the Seattle Mariners, athletic. Having the worst record in baseball I'm guessing pretty much everybody in a major league uniform looks like an oppressor to the M's this year. But in spite of this reality, a certain playfulness about uniforms seems healthy to me.

If you started walking around in what I wear in church on Sundays, I would be concerned. But that would have more to do with your fashion sense than anything else. Taking uniforms seriously but not too seriously reminds us that we are constantly moving among different realms of authority. And we need to be careful about how we wield the authority we're given.

Jesus talked about welcoming prophets, righteous people, and little ones in the gospel Sunday. He tells us to welcome each of these people as they are. And I'm wondering if the risk of my becoming an oppressor increases as I become more obsessed with my own uniform and less with that of others?

We all have the power to respond to one another. And our relative authority is one component of that power. Jesus seemed comfortable with his authority. He didn't pretend it didn't exist. But he also exercised it on behalf of the people he thought needed it most. He paid attention to the other.

Kathleen Norris's story about a massacre of Christians by Buddhist, Confucian, and Shinto oppressors reminds us that no religion, no system of authority is beyond the possibility of oppression. So we can't take solace in whatever our particular uniform or lack of one might be. Maybe we have to keep asking why we wear it, and for whose sake we exercise our authority.

So what's your uniform? We need to be nimble as we move in and out of the different places and relationships in which we're granted power. No matter our uniform - baseball cap, badge, golfing shoes, chasuble, t-shirt and cutoffs, or whatever tells us our place - we're called to be stewards of the influence we're given. Honest attention to the people around us may be the first step back from oppression, and a step toward actually being useful to someone besides myself.

After all, what good is the authority to redirect the Mississippi if the person in front of us just needs a cup of water?

Moss

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13.1-9, 18-23
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Decatur Island is a mossy place. Actually everything's pretty mossy out here in Seattle (that's where I am right now for some continuing education). You know about the famous Pacific Northwest drizzle. Moss is no surprise in a place like this.

I was admiring the moss as we were hiking in the woods of Decatur Island, out in the San Juans. It came in all shades of green. It clung to stones, tree trunks, and anything else that sat still long enough in the Decatur damp. Some mosses looked like tiny ferns. Others like a thin, short fur. Some moss was nothing but a faint hint of color, as if sprayed weakly from a near-empty can.

The presence of all this lovely moss made perfect sense, until my uncle bothered me with a few strange facts: The average annual rainfall in Seattle is about 37 inches, 11 inches less than Little Rock. And on Decatur Island, it's about 20. Go figure.

The lush fauna of the wet Northwest gets by on not much water by taking it a little at a time.

I heard last week's gospel read at Christ Church, Seattle soon after our return from the island. With that strange, ceremonious shaking of foot dust that Jesus recommends, he makes it clear that Seattle wasn't where the disciples were to find these inhospitable houses. Dust accumulates only indoors here.

But in telling his friends to head off without proper provisions for their journey, he sent them off depending on the hospitality of the people they would meet. And walking on Decatur island was a reminder to me that the sustaining kindness we depend upon need not be much if it comes often.
This harsh gospel reading serves as a reminder to me that our lives are caught up and held up in a great web of hospitality. And sometimes we need to be reminded of our dependence upon the goodness and gifts of others. The small, regular sustaining gifts of the people around us.

The small gifts of simple meals or rooms swept free of the day's dust. Small gifts of a look in the eye, or a well chosen word. We don't need such things in torrents. We need them just a little at a time, but often. Taken individually they don't amount to much. Even taken together their quantity may seem small. But drop by daily drop the fullness and health of our lives depends upon those hundreds of nearly invisible hospitable acts. From friend, stranger, child, spouse, neighbor. Whatever is green and growing in us is sustained by the hospitality of these others.

Jesus told the disciples to be harsh in their judgment of the inhospitable and he told them God would too. But he was talking to people from whom he was removing all illusions of self-sufficiency. Taking no gold, no copper for their purses was surely for the disciple's formation, not for the judgment of those hypothetical unworthy houses.

The disciples, like us, needed to see that their lives are like moss. They depend on the goodness of others. Not great bursts of philanthropy. But on the simple sustaining acts that are all around us. Our lives just need a little hospitality. But they need it all the time.

Inquisition

Gospel reading: Matthew 7.21-29
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

With a new Indiana Jones movie just released, I'm reflecting on power differentials. I haven't seen the show. But I have a good idea of what to expect: constantly shifting power differentials.

I'm pretty sure there will be chases in tight quarters - crypts or caves or maybe even spaceships I hear. And Indy will be at the weak end of a power differential. Whether it's a giant boulder or a ball of flames that's barreling towards him, his only hope will be to get out of the way. And if we've paid full price for a ticket, he'd better have to crawl through something wet or writhing or sticky or creeping or preferably all of the above to get free.

But the film's most satisfying moments will be when our hero reverses a power differential between people - namely between Dr. Jones and one of the villains du jour. We love it when a band of evildoers with scimitars or revolvers find themselves on the wrong end of Indy's whip.

Each Indiana Jones movie reminds us that power differentials are thrilling, and that we really wouldn't want a world free of them even if such a thing were imaginable. Life is a constant exchange of power. The physicists and the psychologists and the comic book writers all agree that this is so.

But there is a problem with the world as we know it, power being distributed as it is. And the problem isn't that the bad guys have power too. The problem, Kathleen Norris says, is that inquisition is a lurking possibility in every conversation, increasing as the differential in power grows.

She puts it this way: "Inquisition...is an attutude of mind, a type of questioning that resists true conversation, which like the word 'conversation,' at its root means to turn, or to turn around. The inquisitor has answers in hand and does not wish to change them." With her definition, inquisition becomes a present reality and temptation for the likes of me, and not limited to the infamous persecutions by Christians in the middle ages.

Because there is an almost primal (or perhaps a literally primal) satisfaction in reversing or relishing in a power differential, inquisition is a possibility in every conversation. You know an inquisition is being held when your response holds no sway in a conversation. The questioner wants to know nothing more than what side you're on. This is the interpersonal equivalent of that giant boulder rolling in one direction through the cave, crushing everything in its path. Indy knows quite well that his opinion or pushback won't matter a whit. So he gets out of the way. Ever been in a conversation or relationship like that?

The most famous chapter in The Brothers Karamazov is called The Grand Inquisitor. Ivan, one of the novel's main characters, tells a story or a parable perhaps about an appearance of Christ in Spain during the Spanish Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor recognizes Christ immediately by the miracles he performs. And tells him, "Thou must not meddle for the time, at least."

The Inquisitor's job is to try people for heresy. And he tells Christ himself that he "mayest not take from men the freedom which Thou didst exalt when Thou wast on earth." Faith depends on freedom. And any miracles would smother the freedom to disbelieve. So Christ himself must be stopped, in the Inquisitor's eyes.

A power differential. And the penetrating question (Dostoevsky himself is said not to have resolved the questions this chapter raises) of the parable has to do with how much of God's absolute power God withholds in order for us to be free. That's a big, old, unanswerable question. But if such difference matters in our relationship to God, how much more must it matter in our relationships with one another.

Of course the differences can't be eliminated and we wouldn't want them to be. (There would be no more Indiana Jones movies.) But what we do with the power we have, even in a single conversation matters. In our exchanges do we hold out the possibility that we might be changed by a response? Or is our opinion something of a fireball raging through a crypt? You can throw your pail of damp ideas back at it, but the impact will be negligible.

In our gospel Sunday Jesus said that not everyone who calls him "Lord, Lord" will enter the kingdom of heaven, even though they did "deeds of power" in his name. Only those who hear his words and act on them will enter. This is a troubling passage, but isn't it about our freedom and the exercise of power? We can appropriate our power - even religious or spiritual power - in life giving or in abusive ways. We've got some freedom. And whether we chose inquisition or conversation is up to us.

I guess the appeal of Indiana Jones depends on our desire that a proper give and take be returned to the exchange of power in our world. And the good news is that our work is really the same as that of Indiana Jones. We have to figure out how to put the power we have - whether whip, mind, or tongue - to bring things back into balance. And to do this we have to always put ourselves forward, open to the possibility that we will be changed, knowing that the last thing our world needs right now is another inquisitor.

God - talk

Gospel reading: Matthew 6.24-34
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

The very culture whose vernacular oozes with 'God-talk' may have also produced such language's best corrective. Maybe the correction had to be an inside job.

We in the South live in what Flannery O'Connor said is not a Christ-centered culture, but a Christ-haunted culture. And I suspect that this haunting presence has a great deal to do with the stark and sometimes startling language of Southern Gothic fiction.

Yesterday I finished a novel by a writer who pushes the envelope of even this strange genre. Wolf Whistle is Lewis Nordan's fictional meditation on the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, a murder that affected Nordan deeply as a boy growing up in a rural Mississippi town not far away. And a murder that would galvanize a nascent civil rights movement as well.

As he describes the murder of Bobo, the Till character in the novel, Nordan is at his gruesome best. His is language of swampy decay, of flesh, blood, and bones. And his language is also otherworldly, as the lost eye of the murdered boy watches the aftermath of his killing from the mysterious perspective of the dead. Its sight isn't limited to things nearby as that of living eyes must be. It watches the killer even after he's driven off into what's left of his sad life.

Nordan tells the fantastic, impossible story without flinching, without apology for mingling the supernatural and the horribly concrete. He owes debts to the likes of Flannery O'Connor and Faulkner, of course, but also to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the "magical realists". Like the magical realists, Nordan's language stays firmly rooted in the grisly reality of life on earth even when time and physics no longer hold their usual sway over things.

The language of Southern Gothic fiction strikes me as a perfect undoing of the 'God-talk' that Kathleen Norris critiques. God-talk is a coded vagueness detached from earthbound existence. It is a "spiritualized jargon that does not ground itself in the five senses." Such language should be anathema to a religion with incarnation at its core.

The best language in both Christianity and Southern literature refuses to be satisfied with vagueness in the face of mystery. They both display that whatever else there is to this life, whatever there is beyond or beneath this life, we encounter it in the particular, not in the abstract.

In Sunday's gospel Jesus said, "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these." These are as famous as religious words get. But somehow they're still not "God-talk". At least not to my ears. They still manage to cut through an abstraction like worry and direct me to lilies I've known. Lilies of the non-spinning, non-toiling variety. And somehow it's there among the flowers that I catch a better glimpse of the fist clenched in the bottom of my belly and what it might take and mean to be free of it.

To my mind "Consider the lilies" is everything that "Let go and let God" is not. Jesus directed our attention back to the world. To birds and flowers and kings like Solomon. To grass and ovens and clothing. He seems to be telling us that we'll find a way through the mysteries of this life among such things. So he doesn't say, "Let go." He says, "Consider the lilies."

Of course the best religious language doesn't consider only sparrows and lilies. It takes us face to face with Emmet Till as well. But this is a blessing in the end. Because whatever grace is, we need to know that it shows up in lives like ours. That it shows up in a world of bright useless flowers and sad useless deaths as well.

Language that's anything less just isn't worth our breath.

Orthodoxy

Gospel reading: John 20.19-23
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

There is only one, short paper from seminary that I've considered trying to expand into a book one day. It was titled "Housing the Meeting," and in it I considered the relationship between our worship and the buildings that we worship within.

But my interest wasn't in the differences between Gothic and Byzantine or modern strip mall architecture. I was coming at the subject as a house-builder. And I've long been curious about the notion that the walls we bump into and the furniture we step around each day all participate in making us who we are. In the paper I even speculated about an ancient and universal mystery: Why do people always gather in the kitchen at parties?

My hunch - about the kitchen phenomenon - is this: We are instinctively drawn to space set aside for a purpose. The signs of human intention decorate every kitchen. Appliances and utensils remind us of the ritual preparation of meals that takes place there day after day, year after year. And we are at home. Conversation happens more naturally among all this evidence that a house isn't just shelter.

And there in the kitchen we might realize that a house isn't just an expression of who we are. The way we move through our houses and the work we do within them are forever making us who we are.

For instance, the impact on who I am - in several ways, including the physical - won't be insignificant if my house is best arranged for unwrapping a Whopper in my La-Z-Boy in front of a large plasma TV rather than preparing a meal from scratch in my kitchen.

What does that have to do with orthodoxy? Quite a bit, I think.

As Kathleen Norris suggests, we tend to think of orthodoxy in terms of static truths or right doctrinal positions. We tend to speak and hear the language of the creeds as though they were simply collections of established facts. But for most of Christian history orthodoxy concerned right worship more than right belief. Orthodoxy wasn't primarily about holding the right set of ideas in one's head. It was about joining a larger Christian response to God with our whole selves.

Now, back to the kitchen. What if our attraction to the kitchen has something to do with the fact that we don't really learn about one another through the simple exchange of words? We're formed in the work we do, in the space we inhabit, in the way we move through our days. We know we'll get a broader picture of what makes each other tick if we catch a glimpse of working life.

There is something just as true about the life of faith. Our words matter deeply. But the Anglican tradition insists that our theology - our words about God - are best taken in through liturgy. The words are tied to gestures and postures, sights and smells. They are spoken near furniture and fixtures - like fonts and altars and crosses and candles - that bear part of their meaning.

A life altering attraction to the historic Christian faith, to orthodox Christian worship, is about more than a longing for right information about God. Orthodoxy is about more than words. It's a way of moving as much as a way of thinking.

Deciding to make orthodox worship a part of one's life is like stepping into a house. The walls are sturdy enough to move us here rather than there. The arrangement and appointments of the rooms will entice us and appeal to us for different reasons at different moments in our lives. But the consistent fact is that we'll be changed along the way by the movements we make.

Who knows if I'll ever get around to trying to write that book. But I do plan to stay orthodox. I do plan to continue living within the liturgy of the historic church, making the movements and using the words of this living and ancient Christian tradition.

You might say that I'm drawn to the nave of Christ Church like a dinner guest to the kitchen.

Creeds

Gospel reading: John 17.1-11
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I wish I had your happiness
And you had a do-wacka-do,
Wacka do, wacka-do, wacka-do.
- Roger Miller

Physically my friend Al was an odd combination of soft and lanky. His was a body perfectly unfit for athletic activity, but just right for flailing about to the boom-chicka rhythm of Do-Wacka-Do. He danced like one of those wooden figures sold at craft fairs that are made to move by bouncing on a flexible board. Their hinged limbs splay forward and backward, free of the limits ordinary knees and elbows impose.

I suppose this is an odd beginning for a blog about a "concise, formal, and authorized statement of important points of Christian doctrine." But it just seems like if I don't compare the Nicene Creed to Do-Wacka-Do no one will.

When we consider the creeds we usually talk about the way they limit or refine our speech about God. To be Christian is partly to take up a particular religious vocabulary. But when we stop there we forget that words aren't ends in themselves. They are only useful insofar as they stir up something in us that moves in the direction of truth.

So to do the work they were meant to do in our lives, creeds have to have a certain amount of do-wacka-do, if you will. The words themselves need to set something off in us whether we know quite what they mean or not. It's not enough that they've been authorized.

Kathleen Norris says she loves using the Nicene Creed in church because "no one can pretend to know exactly what it is they're saying: 'God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God.'" Which may be the 4th century religious equivalent to do-wacka-do. We don't know entirely what they mean, but they set off something in us that is true about God. Or they set something off in us towards what is true about God.

And our proof for this is primarily that we've seen these words set off something in Christians across the centuries towards the truth about God. We see goodness at work in the lives of people we love and trust. And maybe we're humble enough or desperate enough to see what this language might set off in us.

Kathleen Norris says it gives her "great pleasure to hear a church full of respectable people suddenly start to talk like William Blake. Only the true literalists are left out, refusing to play the game." Her pleasure must be just as great when we read the strange things Jesus says about glorification as we did on Sunday.

But we need not be left out. Playing this game isn't about using the creeds as fine sieves through which all truth about God must be strained. Their primary use is not keeping out wrong ideas about God, but planting fruitful ones that have been borne out in so many other lives over time.

I don't really expect the Christ Church congregation to go flailing about at the Creed this Sunday, like Al would to Do-Wacka-Do. But maybe something like this is what happens to us slowly over time as we say the creeds together. Limited and nonsensical as our meager words might be, they do bring something of the truth of God into our selves in a way that changes us - changes not just the way we think, but the way we live, and move, and have our being.

Heresy/Apostasy

Gospel reading: John 14.15-21
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I got a new bicycle in January. And in March I got my first flat.

Three of us were riding along the river trail near Murray Park. I was (not surprisingly) in the back, using the other two riders as a much needed windbreak. This meant that my front wheel was only a few inches from the bike in front of me. So I had barely enough time to get the "Oh" out (which was to be followed by an expletive) before I hit the pothole that appeared suddenly in my path.

The deep thud of a pothole rim at 25 mph is a particularly unsettling sound for a guy on a new bike. My front tire went quickly flat, as the force of the blow was enough to turn my handlebars downward about 30 degrees.

I think that's what heresy is like.

Here's what I mean. Sometimes words like heresy or apostasy or orthodoxy are used as though the truths they refer to are simply engraved verbatim into the universe on a cellular level. We speak of them as if they can be assessed and verified in the abstract. We equate eternal truth with stable truth. Reliable truth. Unchanging truth.

But the most helpful conceptions of heresy always include motion, in my opinion. They're not so much a declaration about the nature of the universe as a shout to the rider behind us, "Watch out! I really did a number on my front rim in that pothole."

Just in case the Walters pothole theory of heresy is taught in seminaries someday, I'll try to elaborate a bit. Sitting in the grass next to the bike path with a limp tire and a bent rim, that pothole didn't strike me as a matter of personal opinion. It wasn't just that I had personally experienced the world as a pothole. I hit something hard. And if there had been another rider behind me, and if I had spent that crucial split second apologizing and qualifying my experience of the flattening of a tire that seemed to be related to a void in the path, but that of course all paths are legitimate...well, you get the point. Now the only help I'd have to offer is a pump and a patch.

At the same time, when a warning is shouted from someone further down the path we have to decide what to do. She might have veered left to miss it, while I need to lean right. And of course the information is helpful only to the folks traveling this path. Hearing that there is an even bigger, and more dangerous hole in on a bike path in Tulsa isn't particularly relevant to me.

The reason the pothole theory is helpful to me is that it takes place and motion into account. Christian concerns with heresy have usually had to do with incarnation - keeping Jesus both a full expression of God's presence and a living, breathing human being. Sometimes we've imagined a Jesus so ethereal that it's hard to imagine his life having much to do with the likes of ours. Followers of Jesus have hit that pothole and sent warning. In fact, we've been reading from the Gospel of John in church, a gospel the church was a little suspicious of because Jesus can seem so otherworldly.

At other times we've been so bent on describing Jesus as a regular guy that people might rightly wonder why in the world people still bother with this Christian religion. I mean, as much as we love that wise and witty barista at the coffee shop, would it make sense to make the fuss we do over Jesus on a Sunday morning for him with our best silver and silk? Would you put her in a stained glass window? Followers have his this pothole too.

But incarnation still happens on the go. Life is charging on and religion is a great long conversation about the presence of God in our world. So maybe pothole theory doesn't mean watching suspiciously for heresy in all its usual haunts - sermons, prayers, offhand comments at coffee hour. Maybe it means listening. Listening to something like the chanted psalms on a Sunday morning not as watertight reservoirs of eternal truth. But as shouts of warning or blessing or comfort from people on the path ahead of us.

We always have to figure out what shouts from their lives might have to do with ours. But they are so much easier to listen to when I realize they weren't trying to cull me and my strange ideas out of this tradition. They were trying to keep me from ending up alone on the side of the road, wondering how long it will take to walk home with my bike on my shoulder and what's left of a wheel in my hand.

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

I think you can judge a book by its cover. Or at least I begin judging a book when I see its cover, starting with the title. A favorite title of mine is What Are People For? It's right up there with The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property and The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade.

What Are People For? is by Wendell Berry. And his is an appropriate name to drop a few days from Earth Day. He's a draft horse farmer in Kentucky as well as a poet, novelist, and essayist. And when he considers ecological concerns he's less likely to obsess over policy details than he is to reflect upon the web of relationships that are human culture and how we are formed by our choices within it. Environmental problems are always an ultimate matter of culture and character for Wendell Berry.

OK, that was a two paragraph digression. But the title of Berry's book catches my attention because it asks a question that seems obvious, but sounds strange. Even though you are one, have you ever wondered what people are for?

We could ask a similar question about the Bible. What is it for? Like people, we might be too close to the subject to see it, or to wonder about its purpose. But what we think something's for has a lot to do with what it ends up meaning to us. The assumptions we bring with us have a lot to do with what we get out of any encounter.

Some people have thought that the Bible was a reservoir of perfect and eternal truths, any of which might be plucked out of its pages and dropped into our lives unscathed and to our benefit.

Here's one example of the problem of such a hermeneutic (a 10 cent word that has to do with methods of drawing meaning from something) recounted in Garry Wills's book What Jesus Meant. It's a letter of unknown origin perhaps to a radio talk show host.

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's law. I have learned a great deal from you, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. How should I deal with this?

I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as it suggests in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

Lev. 25:44 states that I may buy slaves from the nations that are around us. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans but not Canadians. Can you clarify?

I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 10:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?

Lev. 20:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

As you can see, interpretation is a subtler art than cutting and pasting. I think Kathleen Norris is onto something in returning to the notion that scriptures were meant to be read in community and out loud.

An aural event always happens at a particular moment in time. Before long the vibrations that make for sound settle down and the words are gone. So we're reminded that whatever scripture is, its truth always reaches us at a particular moment in time. And our assumptions and experiences will always play a part in that encounter.

Postmodern literary theorists will emphasize the way each reader invests a text with meaning. Whatever the original author intended will never be retrieved perfectly in tact from the text. This is true whether the reading is private or public, silent or aloud. But somehow the public reading of scripture embodies its living presence in our lives. Scripture is always spoken into a new moment. Who knows just what I'll hear today. And only God knows what you might hear tomorrow.

So maybe we're meant to let go of the What is scripture for? question at least enough to let this holy book speak something new and unexpected into the forever changing circumstances of our lives. Maybe the answer to What is scripture for? is as deceptively simple as the question: it's for hearing.

Preaching

Gospel reading: John 10:1-10
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Some of you know that I've spent more of my life as a carpenter than I have as a priest. The career change was pretty stark for me. I went from wearing a tattered Carhart canvas jacket to wearing a cassock and surplice at work.

It's hard to imagine two careers with job descriptions that differ more than priest and carpenter. But I think preaching has been the bridge between the two for me.

My sermons begin as written documents, and I don't stray from my text beyond a sentence here or there to clarify a connection or make reference to something that has happened between printing and delivery. And that document satisfies that part of myself that needs to see a made thing result from my labor. But it's a pleasure that's not complete until it's shared.

The first carpenter I worked for was a very literate guy named James Fish. I joined his framing crew in a small town outside Tacoma. After I had moved back to Arkansas, he moved to Eastern Washington and began building traditional timber frame houses. These are the old post and beam structures that last for centuries, their great timbers joined by elegantly carved joints drawn together with oak pegs.

I once received a letter from James written entirely on a fir shaving like the one curling from the plane in the picture at the top. A timber framer needs first rate planes, and he needs to keep those planes tuned. So the message of James's missive was very much in (not just on) the medium. The shaving thin enough so as to be translucent, and it was at least two feet long.

His letter was sheer gloat. And I loved it. Because I knew of the labor it came from.

Sermons are like that for me. There is something very solitary about their making. But in making them, and then in delivering them, I find some of my most intense connections to the lives of the congregation that is forming me as a preacher and as a human being. It's in searching for that intersection between the stories of scripture and our stories that I lose myself in a task I love, but also realize that somehow the whole of that task is wonderfully contained within the life of a people who say their prayers at Capitol and Scott Sunday after Sunday.

The longer I'm here the more clearly I feel like I think James did. He spent hours honing the edge of his planes. Many more hours perfecting his technique. And when he watched that lovely, delicate sliver curl from his work, it pleased him. And he sent it to me, thinking, "Scott will get a kick out of this."

A sermon is like one of those slivers. To most people one may look like a curiosity at best, something to be swept up with the rest of what falls to the floor in a workshop. But because it has emerged from shared things - our scriptures, our stories, our lives - I know Christ Church will get it, or at least get some kind of kick out of it. Even when my thoughts fail to coalesce and when I stumble in their delivery, somehow, over time, Christ Church gets it. Christ Church is getting me. Because Christ Church is getting into me.

Good and Evil

Gospel reading: Luke 24:13-35
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)


I must be preoccupied with music lately. Last week it was John Fahey. This week: Yonder Mountain String Band.

Faith

Gospel reading: John 20.19-31
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I'm captivated by John Fahey's The Legend of Blind Joe Death. It's a record by this strange but legendary guitar player. His albums don't include vocals or accompaniment. Just John and his guitar.

His style is unmistakable. He plays like he's grasping the instrument by it's throat. His music sounds like something the calloused hands of a morose stonemason plucks angrily from the shuddering steel strings of his guitar. (OK, that's a bit much.) If you think acoustic music is all sweetness and light, you haven't heard John Fahey.

Last week the kids and I drove to North Carolina and back. (This is why I didn't manage to blog in case you happened to miss this weekly whatever.) And I realized on the drive that I only time I really listen to Blind Joe Death is late at night on road trips. And I always listen to the whole thing. I never get a hankering for say, "Sligo River Blues" or his dark rendition of "In Christ There is No East or West" by themselves. It's all or nothing.

The album has a rather odd format. Fahey plays nine songs. Then he plays them again. Then he plays three more songs. After each listening I feel like I've managed to be present to the whole of some process that only unfolds over a long, long time. I'm never quite sure whether the process has taken place in me or out there in what I've heard. There's a haunting familiarity when the tunes come around again, and I can't quite say just how they and I have been changed. But they...I...we...surely have.

When Kathleen Norris writes about faith being more like a verb, I think of John Fahey. At least this week I do. Listening to an album can be a simple thumbs up or thumbs down proposition. Have you ever listened to The Legend of Blind Joe Death? is a simple yes or no question. And too often we speak of faith in much the same way. As if it's something we get or do at a certain point in time.

But maybe faith is more like an immersion in something. Maybe it's a way of seeing or a kind of awareness that we slip into and out of. A way of being that grows only slowly, perhaps, over time.

Thomas's encounter with the risen Christ can seem to imply faith as a settled fact happening in an instant. But reading the story again we see that Thomas is given an experience both strange enough and concrete enough to open up the future for God knows what. The evidence he is given only confirms that all bets are off when it comes to what God might do next.

And so it is with us, I think. We tend to think of faith in terms of how much or how intensely we can manage to believe a particular set of (usually unbelievable) facts. But maybe faith is never belief in a something settled, never a possession, but rather, something strange and wonderful that possesses us. Something that seems to unfold slowly, over time. But something whose force we find ourselves unexpectedly present to.

I don't read the Bible like I listen to John Fahey. It's longer. And reading while driving late at night is a bad idea. But I wonder if I'd get something more from that strange book if I could. I wonder if I would really get its sense that faith is something that comes to be in great waves and surges and trickles over time. And maybe the experience would register somewhere within my self that faith is not a way of being that we achieve once for all, but that we step into or stumble into and maybe get wonderfully lost within.

Storage

Gospel reading for Tuesday in Holy Week: John 12.20-36
Click HERE for the day's readings.

It's Holy Week, which means this feels like a good day to double task. For my blog this week I'm using some thoughts I pulled together for our noon service today.

Insufficient closet space is a form of accountability in my opinion. I know well that I’m swimming upstream here. And when I worked as a carpenter, I never heard a homeowner say, “Could you reduce the size of that walk in closet? I’m afraid I might just fill it.

And now, I regularly drive past the Mid Towne Mall and our gleaming new “Container Store.” It’s a huge new store to buy expensive things in which store all the expensive things we buy at other stores. And the strangest thing about it to me is that it’s bigger than any of the other stores in the mall. Isn’t that weird?

There is a very familiar instinct that the strange economics of stuff storage depend upon: I need to hang on to this, because I might just need it someday.

This isn’t a neurosis. But the gospel reading today addresses a similar spiritual instinct. The impulse to play it safe and hang on to what we know. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,” Jesus says, “it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”The trouble for the people he was speaking to was that this Jesus wasn’t staying put. He preached that we have to let go of our lives to find them. And he tells the gathered crowd that he will be “lifted up from the earth.” Jesus wasn’t staying put. So storage of the present wasn’t an option.

It was all a little disconcerting for the crowd. “We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever.” Their fear makes some sense. What was that old Hebrew adage about a Messiah in hand is better than two in the bush?

Jesus was showing them, and us, how to let go of the lives God has given us. Life isn’t about storage. It’s about letting go of the seeds of the present so that they can die. And come to life again.

Life has no shelf life, Jesus tells us. It happens always on that razor’s edge of the present.

Jesus reminds us that our hope isn’t that God can keep things from deteriorating. Our hope isn’t even that God can preserve our lives. Our hope is in the fact that God is always going about the work of resurrection. In fact God has knit resurrection into the very fabric of life itself: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have started this blog with a smug comment about closet sizes. Our closets are small, but they are stuffed with the stuff that I can’t bear to throw out. If you thought “The preacher doth protest too much,” you’re right. But there’s hope I think. Not for my stuff but for my life. For our lives.

Jesus was showing us even before his resurrection that life is a gift that can’t be stored. The goodness we know today is goodness God has delivered into our lives through others. And that goodness stays living only as we give it away once again to our world.

Sinner, Wretch, and Reprobate

Gospel reading: John 11.1-45
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Late yesterday morning I was put under general anesthesia. For all I know, my dentist then braced his feet against my shoulders and extracted my wisdom teeth with a pair of vice grips. Mercifully, I'll never know.

I'm pretty grateful just now for anesthesia. I wouldn't trade it for a shot of whiskey - even a good single malt Scotch - when it comes to oral surgery. But I also wouldn't trade it for consciousness. I was only out of it for less than an hour, although Ardelle might argue that I wasn't entirely with it for much of the afternoon.

Kathleen Norris discussed three words that are disappearing from our religious vocabulary: sinner, wretch, and reprobate. I wonder if the urge to be rid of these terms is something like the perfectly sane desire for anesthesia. There are some things I simply don't want to be conscious of.

But anesthesia is meant to wear off. Oblivion is meant to be a short term experience.

I think this is why we should resist anesthetizing language, as well as art. When a term or concept is beyond the pale, we lose access to something real not just for a while, but forever. Too many of us have had experiences of sin, of wretchedness, of reprobation for us to dismiss them altogether.

On the other hand, we need to be find a way of talking about these all to familiar human conditions that doesn't let them define us completely. In fact, we may need only to hold on to the word 'reprobate' as Christians to say clearly that it applies to precisely no one. No one is 'rejected by God and destined for damnation'.

It makes a lot of sense to me that localized and temporary anesthesia might be appropriate for some of our faith's harsher words. When we've been beat up and belittled by them for a long time we'll need a little distance for a time. But I'm not sure we need to anesthetize ourselves completely from them.

Because when we look around in our world we see the results of something like sin. We see hatred and bigotry and cruelty. Christians have always held that we are partly complicit in our world's trouble. Jesus brought us the good news of our forgiveness. But he also told us that we carry the seeds of murder in our heart when we simply hate another person.

I don't think Jesus taught this to make us feel worse about ourselves. I think he was trying to remind us that we're in this thing together. You and me and Charles Manson. We matter to one another. But our goodness matters as surely as our failures do. Anesthetizing ourselves from this reality isn't a good long term policy.

Like the best art, the best religion shouldn't flinch from the grimmer or more glorious details of life. For anesthesia is never very local. We lose our capacity for wonder and goodness when we protect ourselves too well from the experiences of loss and pain.

In Sunday's gospel we saw Jesus weeping, and 'greatly disturbed in spirit'. There's something in us that wants to anesthetize Jesus from such emotion. And it's all the more surprising to find it in the gospel of John where Jesus seems so otherworldy at times. But there it is. Here he is. Here he is in the world of loss and death that we recognize. It turns out that the healing he means to bring is meant for lives like ours, for losses like ours. And the healing he means to bring can flow through lives like ours, sinners that we are.

The effects of last night's pain meds haven't worn off completely. If this blog's even less coherent than the others, I suppose I have an excuse. If it's not, well, never mind...

Christ

Gospel reading: John 9.1-41
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

No ideas but in things.
-William Carlos Williams

Most of us go through life searching for the ideal. The ideal job or the ideal mate or the ideal pair of pants. Even if we're hard headed realists, at least in our language we set up the "ideal" as what's best, don't we? As in "Sure, a cat with a good attitude that doesn't smell would be ideal, but good luck finding one."

Now I know what you're thinking (unless you're a cat lover, which means you're probably too busy thinking unkind thoughts about me to be thinking what I think you would be thinking). You're thinking, "We're just talking like good Neoplatonists."

Well, you're right. Which is why we need to be reading more William Carlos Williams.

That should be enough confusion to untangle (or tangle with) for one blog.

If you remember anything your old philosophy professor taught you it might be that Plato said that ultimate reality lies in the ideal. There is an ideal in which all the particular instances of a thing participate. We know this tree is a tree because it participates in the ideal of treeness. Or we say something is beautiful because is participates more fully in the ideal of beauty. "Oh, that would be ideal!" is the highest praise in Plato's world.

But not so for William Carlos Williams. His obsession was things. So after Philosophy 101 we wandered into English class and memorized his poem about a red wheelbarrow that didn't seem to be a poem at all. It just described a thing. And said that so much depends upon this unremarkable thing.

Now, if Plato and Williams occupy the ends of some kind of spectrum (I don't know that anybody else ever placed them on one) it would seem that religion would fall toward the Platonic end. God could be the name for the ultimate ideal. And William Carlos Williams was a New Jersey doctor with no interest in the supernatural. The thing in front of him held all the wonder he needed.

But I think Christianity actually falls towards the Williams end. The Christian faith isn't about ideals. It's about particulars. Incarnation is the opposite of God as an ideal. Ideals stay vague and stay put because they are perfect. Incarnate things move and surprise and challenge and offend. As Rilke says in the quote at the beginning of this chapter, "Who is this Christ, who interferes in everything?"

If the Christian faith rings true to us don't you think it's because in some way, we all come to God like the blind man from Sunday's gospel reading. We don't think our way to God. We don't imagine a perfect and life-giving concept. We have an encounter. And we try to make some sense out of it.

Somebody spat on the ground and rubbed mud on the eyes of this man. And when he was healed he began to suspect something wonderful was happening. Something even beyond his own healing. God was present in his life in the person standing right in front of him. He wasn't searching for an ideal to believe in. He was wondering about the person who had just touched his eyes.

The beauty of the Christian faith is that as God gives us God's self in face to face encounter we are given one another as well. We let go of the impossible search for the ideal and take up the wonderful exploration of the life and the people before us. As Kathleen Norris says, Christ is present among us "not as a static idea or principle, but a Word made flesh, a listening, active Christ who in the gospels tells us that he prays for us, and who promises to be with us always."

That's not ideal. It's something - or someone - much, much better.

Intolerance/Forbearance

Gospel reading: John 3.1-17
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

If God did not choose to work in ways that confound us, grace would not be amazing. It would not be grace.
~ Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

Since much of this week's chapter concerns sexuality, I thought this might be a good time to blog about the apocrypha.

To this day every time we read from the Apocrypha I get a tinge of the willies. I grew up believing there were exactly 66 books in the Bible. And none of these was called The Additions to Esther, or Susannah, or Bel and the Dragon. If asked to defend my response, I would probably offer a two point apology for a 66 book canon: 1. Oh, come on! and 2. Those don't sound like books of the Bible.

It's not just because I'm scared to blog about sexuality that I started with a diversion. Because I think we underestimate the power of our resistance to the unfamiliar. In fact I'm pretty sure that most of humanity's most elaborate philosophical and ethical systems arose in response to particular cases of the willies.

Maybe gay people give you the willies. Maybe Republicans or lawyers or insurance salesmen do. Maybe soldiers or hippies or bicycle riders do. But regardless, we ignore the sources of our willies at our peril.

Which brings me to Sunday's Gospel. You have to wonder what Jesus was experiencing with that woman at the well. Maybe you've heard often enough why Jesus' culture would have told him he had no business speaking to this woman. But nobody ever wonders whether she gave him the willies. What if she did?

I mean, when we are drawn across some threshold toward contact with the unfamiliar or the forbidden the most human response is visceral. Literally. It happens in the viscera.

Imagining Jesus with the willies adds a dimension to the story. It would mean that doing what he did took courage. Stepping across a boundary that was both outside himself in the culture and within himself in his culturally conditioned response would take courage. And I wonder if something like courage is being asked of us in this story.

I like very much Kathleen Norris's use of the old word 'forbearance' in place of the nearly bankrupt 'tolerance'. Forbearance strikes me as a more forceful word, a word that assumes some initiative on my part rather than clenched teeth and resignation. Forbearance is that careful and courageous act of acknowledging our willies, but not jumping in too quickly to validate them. Forbearance creates enough space for us to override the willies and experience something that might just change us.

Some of the grace that our struggle with issues of human sexuality might have in store for us is that nothing gives us the willies more reliably than sex. Do we ever really grow out of that first intense case of the willies that the thought of our parents' engaging in such acts brought on?

God does choose to work in ways that confound us. Because God chooses to work through other people. Strange people with different ideas. But when we learn to be forbearing, when we learn to give the willies a wide berth, we open ourselves to be changed. We open ourselves to see a little of God in the life of someone my willies would steer me away from.

It helps me to think that even Jesus might say, "I know how you feel."