The Liturgical Door

It's been a while since I've blogged. Below is an article to be published next week in The Christian Century. Just to be safe, I've posted my original submission here, which was shortened and edited a bit for the publication.

I learned to install a door on an ordinary weekday in small town Arkansas. The house was a nondescript tract home, whose pinkish, mottled brick was dated before the mason finished his work. The door was an equally uninspiring metal unit from the lumberyard, to be installed at the house’s main entry. It had been delivered to the site already hinged and hung in its jamb.

In a matter of minutes, my boss, Dave, had given me all the information I would ever need to install a door. He told me how to make sure the studs on the hinge side of the opening were plumb in two directions, tacking up shims to correct for the framers’ hurry. He explained to me that a push on a corner in one direction would effect a movement in another. All I had to do was fill the framed opening with the door, making all things plumb and flush.

When he returned an hour and a half later, Dave was clearly, but politely, surprised that I was still struggling at my task. I had all the information I needed, but when put into practice that seemingly rigid object behaved like a balloon in my inexperienced hands. A push to its here bulged its there wildly. A butterfly of a shim tap created a whirlwind of chaos in a faraway place on the door.

Dave stepped in, gave a few knowing bumps and shoves, and in a matter of moments, all was right with the door.

There are different kinds and loci of knowing. And the goal of any apprenticeship is an accumulation of knowledge in the hands. No explanation is required other than the properly fit thing: the flush door, the mitered corner. Things visibly meet and right.

Some traditions place a great deal of value on religious information. Accordingly, the Christian faith is measured in a quick tally of doctrinal positions. Real Christians are called ‘believers’ perhaps, a term that suggests the possession of some essential and accurate information about God.

I grew up in one such tradition. Our information happened to come from methods and sources embraced by the right end of the religious spectrum. The left had and has their methods and sources as well.

But even though I couldn’t have said so at the time, a hunch was growing that my knowledge of the faith wasn’t making its way into some terribly important parts of my self. I still felt like that clumsy apprentice with plenty of information in his head, but whose hands remained ignorant and inadequate.

Liturgical worship assumes that bodies must learn too. It’s not enough to fill one’s mind with an orthodox collection of facts—whether established by pope, prophet, or sacred text. Something happens, something is communicated to and into our selves when we bow, stand, kneel, sing, and process together. Colors and smells and even the arrangement of furniture deliver information to different parts of our selves.

So might we begin to imagine our hands, knees, noses, bellies, our bodies as curious? As seeking? As wanting to know something of the mystery of God as surely as our minds do?

When Christians read the insistence in James that “faith without works is dead”, we tend to understand works as expressions of faith. Faith is an interior reality that can and should make its way to the surface of a life. But what if more attention were paid to the way that “works”, the concrete actions of bodies in the world, infect faith with life? What if we understood the work we do—thinking here of liturgy, “the work of the people”—in terms of formation more than expression?

Even conspicuously liturgical traditions can ignore or deny liturgy as a means of formation. Gestures and movements are easily employed as secret handshakes, signs that someone carries the right information about how to worship. “Did you see that guy make (or fail to make) the sign of the cross at the Benedictus Qui Venit? Clearly he’s not one of us,” the thinking goes, whether we think the response all the way into words or not.

But more and more people are coming into church blessedly oblivious to the right liturgical answers once agreed upon in their high, low, evangelical, Anglo-Catholic, or broad church congregations. And these people bear a particular gift to the gathered assembly: They simply haven’t learned to read the signals.

The newness of the gestures and motions, perhaps even the clumsiness with which they are first employed reminds us all that sometimes grace is out at our fingertips first. It may take time and motion to settle inward.

Liturgical converts are naturally open to the possibility that liturgy isn’t meant to express who we are so much as it’s meant to transform who we are. Liturgical actions need not function as encoded messages, meant to mark out theological territory nor are they flashy vehicles meant to transport speakable doctrines to our heads. Such actions change us, because we are people who not only think thoughts about God, but who live and move and have our being in God. And the movement of our bodies is an irreducible, irreplacable way of knowing.

So maybe the liturgy is helpfully thought of as a door. Not as a portal to be walked through into someplace else. But a door like the one I struggled with all those years ago as a carpenter’s apprentice. For the transformation worked or wreaked by the liturgy is bodily. We lean into the mystery here and discover something moves there, our bodies learning, learning all the while. Maybe the liturgy itself is the sturdy thing my body is meant to struggle with until its wisdom makes its way into my hands, into my belly, into my bones.

Bearded and Blessed

A disclaimer: There's a decent chance that the story this blog opens with will find its way into a sermon one day. Sorry, Christ Church parishioners, but, as you know, this is the strange stuff I dig. Just nod knowingly if and when it shows up again.

Even among the stories of 16^th century iconoclasm, what happened at the Danish church of Holstebro is uniquely bizarre. As the ideals of the emerging Reformation took hold, pietists worshiping at Holstebro found a painting of the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in their church suddenly incongruent with, even offensive to their Lutheran worship sensibilities. So, with a few careful (one hopes) brush strokes, the virgin was transfigured into Jacob. She was given a beard. Conveniently, the twelve apostles did not need any corresponding alterations to take up their new identities as the patriarch’s twelve sons.

The edited painting remained unchanged until 1907, when the beard was removed and Jacob became Mary once again. Perhaps the long overdue unbending of Mary’s gender was a tragedy Marcel Duchamp intended to counter by providing the Mona Lisa with a goatee twelve years later.

The obvious question first asked about the project of the 16^th century proto-Dadaists is “Who would do such a thing?” But here’s another: “What did such a thing do to the people who prayed near it for four hundred years?”

Think about it. Sunday after Sunday, generation after generation of the Danish faithful said their prayers near a painting of a bearded Blessed Virgin. Were they changed by the experience?

I imagine some folks came to love the painting, perhaps even knowing its complicated story. Others may have been startled and excited to learn of the subversive presence of the Blessed Virgin, watching over them incognito all those strange years. The beard's erasure may have felt to them like a sacred cover blown. Maybe Mary looked more delicate and vulnerable than ever, her cheeks pale and naked as chalk. Who knows?

But even art can't go back. An old reality wasn't restored, because the restored gaze of the original image fell on a different generation of people, with different expectations, with a different set of experiences including the experience of an unshaven Mary named Jacob.

The strange story is one more reminder that meaning happens in the moment. Nothing is retrieved from history intact or unscathed.

So consider this the next time you retrieve a story from the Bible. Do we really want our art, our scriptures, our religion to stay put? Are they stable things to be preserved, or restored, or returned to? Or to they speak to us even as they are being scarred, defaced, and deformed by history and the hands of folks like us?

Permanence

So much for permanence. The house is gone. The driveway that wandered south where Holly Place turned north remains. But the asphalt is going fast to gravel and the gravel is going fast to grass. The house is gone entirely.

The porch where Grandpa sat in his aluminum lawn chair and tended the ice cream machine is gone. The great spirea bush outside the bedroom window is gone. I didn't venture into the woods to look for the rope swing we would ride out into the air as the hillside fell away below our kicking legs. If it's not gone, it's going.

Mark Strand's lines come to mind:

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

- from "Keeping Things Whole"

It was as if the air had moved in to fill the spaces where the house had been. And perhaps, in the process, things were kept whole. Strangely, I had a sense that they were.

It helped, no doubt, that the house wasn't much in itself. A clumsy addition and the awkward tie in of the house roof to the garage suggested that this building was not evolving into a higher form. It was time for a clean lot and a fresh start.

Which helped orient me to the real holiness I sensed or supplied on the day of my visit a few weeks ago. The fact that the house was gone made plain to me that the sacred lived not in a building or even in a persons, but in the interractions and exchanges that were always happening in some present.

The pleasure of peach ice cream was far more complex than it's sweetness on the tongue. The latent goodness in the soupy ingredients, the slow grinding of the motor and its increasing effort as the stuff got thicker as it froze, the lingering stickiness on our fingers all contributed to the pleasure that was passing through our lives on those fine summer evenings. Goodness was always in motion through our lives and to stop it would be to kill it. Goodness preserved would be like a butterfly stuck through with a pin.

So it made a kind of sense that the house had to pass away too. That's how goodness, holiness, the sacred makes its way through us. It can't be preserved alive.

I think St Paul's famous insistence that most things pass away but faith, hope and love abide was meant for a world in which houses fall down and wildness creeps back in even before memories have much faded. Before we get too sentimental and nostalgic we should also note that the dark side of this truth is the promise that the sins of the fathers are visited on the third and fourth generations. But Paul's good news is that faith, hope, and love will outlive even our sins.

The house is gone but something endures. Something subtler than memories. Something of that strange and lovely group of porch dwellers, whose bodies left us only a little more slowly than the melting ice cream of a muggy August evening. Something abides. In me. In my children. Perhaps somehow even in the abandoned lot that the persistent wildness of the earth is making its own once again.

Something, beginning with just the air, has filled the spaces where that house, where those bodies had been. They have moved, but things are kept somehow whole.

Liturgy's Allure

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the truth about laboratory mice is made plain. What the book's hero, Ford Prefect, discovers (during the adventures that follow the unsettling news that the Earth is to be razed to make way for an interstellar highway) is that the world's laboratory mice have been conducting an experiment on humans all these years.

We were the folks in the lab coats holding the clipboards. But the mice were in control, researching how humans might respond if they were to run around in little mazes, and ring bells. (Below is the cartoon in the New Yorker's most recent caption contest. Submit your entry if you find such contests alluring.)

Michael Pollan took this notion a step further in complete seriousness when he suggested that apple trees and tulips and marijuana plants and potatoes all get us to do the work necessary for their survival. They entice us into being their slaves through our desires for sweetness and beauty and intoxication and (the potato isn't so obvious) control (see his Botany of Desire).

We're not used to thinking about being allured into doing what we do and being who we are. And ever since Eden we've been conditioned to be suspect of and resist the alluring fruit or woman or handmade Waterford bicycle fitted with Campagnolo Record components throughout.

But it seems to me that we're always responding either to duty or allure. Both duty and allure prod us or lift us out of complacency.

I think my own movement into a liturgical tradition had something to do with an attempt to right a religious worldview tipped heavily towards duty. Worshiping among robes and chalices and soprano descants was powerfully alluring to me. And more importantly, I felt allured but not manipulated.

Kneeling, bowing, standing, making the sign of the cross, all of these movements and gestures were drawing me into something happening among that little crowd of peculiar Christians at Grace Episcopal Church on Mt. Olive Street in Siloam Springs.

Now Episcopalians can be a fairly heady group--sometimes pretentiously so, I'd say. To our credit, I think, a broad swath of belief and opinion is tolerated and voiced. What we don't tolerate so well are folks who don't think toleration is the chief virtue. This is to our detriment, I think. But that's a topic for another blog.

More than the Episcopal church's supposed "open mindedness", it's the allure of liturgy that drew me in, even if I was looking for a place where my opinions were more tolerable as well.

While traditional liturgy can look mighty contrived and controlled with all those read prayers and rubrics telling everyone when to kneel, stand, or sit, at its heart liturgy is a letting go. How often do you let yourself say what you're told to say (verbatim) and assume a posture you're told to assume?

For some, joining the liturgy may be a matter of duty. The prayer book says do a cartwheel, so I will do a cartwheel. Or, most people do cartwheels at this point in the service. So I'll do jumping jacks.

But for most, I think, it is the liturgy's allure that we respond to if we respond at all. We let go of our own prerogatives for an hour, and let ourselves be drawn into something larger than ourselves.

I still find myself surprisingly moved by the sounds of the great organ at Christ Church ringing through the nave. Or by the voices of 150 people as they stand and say, "We believe in one God..." Or by the bodies of those same people as their heads bow as a flip-flopped acolyte carries a cross past their pews. For reasons I can't adequately explain, I find it all terribly alluring.

But to be alive is to be allured, isn't it? To be alive is not to be completely in control. Whether we're subjects of a grand rodentine experiment or being seduced by tulips, or apples, or potatoes (I'll leave cannabis alone, or leave it for the comments to follow), or whether we're being drawn into the drama of the liturgy, we let ourselves go a little because we sense that it's desire that draws us through life. And maybe it's desire more than duty that sends our lives towards God.

We're always responding to something's allure. Maybe living well is about deciding how and when and before which allure to let go.

Mercy for the War Dead

On this Memorial Day after, I commend Stanley Hauerwas's prayer "Mercy for the War-Dead", adding nothing but my own amen.

Dear Lord, at our feet lie dead Iraqis, dead Kuwaitis, dead Kurds, dead Croats, dead Slavs, dead Salvadorans, dead Americans, dead Palestinians, dead Israelis, dead Jews, dead children, dead Christians--dead, dead, dead. We ask your mercy on these war-dead sisters and brothers. We ask for the same mercy for ourselves, for our failure to be your peace, to be the end of war. Save us from the powers that capture our imagination so that we think our only alternative is war. We know we cannot will our way to peace, for when we try we end up fighting wars for peace. So compel us with your love that we might be your peace, thus bringing life to this deadly world. Amen.

- from Prayers Plainly Spoken

A LUV is all we need

I was 16 years old and wanted a vehicle of my own in the most desperate way. And the best evidence of that desperation's intensity was the thrill that attended my uncle's call from his lumber yard one day. A customer's 1975 Chevy LUV pickup truck had broken down. And so had the customer. He'd had it with the truck and was ready to sell.

Being in retail, my uncle Stewart knew when the time was ripe make a deal. So he called me. "You need to come down and make an offer. He's talking like you might get the thing for $50." That's right. Fifty dollars. American currency.

Well, by the time I'd made it to the Lumbermart Building Supply parking lot, the price had reached $200. But not even that great and climbing sum could keep me from my first set of wheels. We closed the deal then and there.

The truck was the saddest shade of pea green and its eight years of life had been hard ones. The texture of the steel across the driver's side bore a striking resemblance to the cheeks of Keith Richards. Pitted, lumpy surfaces that also suggest travel along some pretty rough roads and more than a few trips right off into the ditch.

Lester, the lumber yard foreman, would become the lead mechanic on my project. And we set ourselves to the task of replacing the broken timing chain that had wreaked a good deal of havoc under the hood in its breaking. Eventually we found ourselves pulling the whole engine with the help of the Lumbermart forklift. And my crude training in the automechanical mysteries was underway.

This dismantling experience came to mind as I spent an evening with the EfM (Education for Ministry) group here at Christ Church last night. The EfM curriculum includes a little dismantling of the Bible and the Christian tradition. For instance, we read from the book of Deuteronomy at the eucharist service, and the EfMers would have studied the theory that the five books of Moses were not written by Moses (one clue is that he seems to narrate his own death at the end of Deuteronomy).

The process can be unsettling. What seemed like a glistening, perfect whole can suddenly rest in disarray at one's feet. It's exposed as a jumbled collection from varied sources with varied agendas and experiences that all inform how the stories were told. We might say that the book we thought of as a dignified old Bentley suddenly looks more like a 1975 Chevy LUV whose engine is dangling from a logging chain that's been looped around the tines of a forklift.

But somehow, as the illusion of the Bible as a staid, tame book fades, it becomes only more enticing and compelling to some of us. Far from seeming undone and lifeless, it looks a lot more like the unpredictable, shabby, glorious reality we all actually inhabit in this world.

The Chevy LUV sits hidden behind its own privacy fence in my parents back yard as it goes the way of the things of the earth. But my own 13 year old son is now the LUV infected one. And, yes, it seems like something almost hormonal is going on.

He's thrilled at the possibility of getting the old beast running again. He and his grandpa spent a few days this spring pulling off the valve cover, spraying WD-40 into the cylindars, loosening and lubricating the seized and rusted parts in the hope that they might move once again. And I'm convinced that these two dreamers are closer to the deep magic of the automobile than any Ferrari driver or polisher of Bugattis.

The stories of the Bible are sometimes beautiful and beautifully told. But they endure because they weren't told in order to be beautiful. The endure and continue to charge and change our lives because they come from the deepest realms of human experience, the parts of ourselves where meaning is made out of and amid the glorious mess that is life. It's a place of vibrant, enticing potential and possibility. It's the place where we're still thrilled, not in spite of, but because of the dents and dings and rust and corrosion that are signs of stories untold, barely hinted at, calling us towards their discovery.

Wikipedia Mundi

I'm wondering about Wikipedian faith. Not Wiccan faith. Wikipedian faith. Here's the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia page about Wikipedia:

Wikipedia is a free, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning 'quick') and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 12 million articles (2.8 million in the English Wikipedia) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website. Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, it is currently the most popular general reference work on the Internet.

Critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies, and target its policy of favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process.

I know what you're thinking. This will be another well deserved potshot at the silliness that is Wikipedia. And since this blog usually considers things religious, it will dismiss the contemporary religious world as similarly shallow and misinformed.

But I think Wikipedia is cool. Go ahead. Go to the Wikipedia page on some topic you fancy yourself an expert about. Admit it. It's a decent encyclopedia page.

We've long heard about the increasing suspicion of old authority structures. It's a trend that's been bewailed and bemoaned ad nauseam. Civilization will unravel. Religious and moral life will disintegrate. Chaos will reign.

But maybe something else is going on. The fear that has been drummed up about this age is that when the old authorities (Popes and Presidents and Bibles and Grandparents) lose their grip on us, we're left to our own individual opinions about what is right and wrong, about what is true. But maybe that's not quite right.

Maybe there is a collective wisdom at work. A Wikipedia Mundi, you might say.

Now this sounds like a fairly unchristian notion--that truth happens in us. But it's not. The early fights in the Christian tradition were waged against gnosticism. And one of the main problems the church had with gnostics was with the idea that truth comes in individual portions, packaged in heaven and delivered directly from God into the minds of the enlightened few.

But there was an early instinct in Christianity towards revelation in community. Jesus said he'd keep showing up where two or three are gathered in his name. Paul helped the earliest Christians start imagining themselves as members of a body--the body of Christ, no less. Hands, Feet, eyes, ears... parts that don't make much sense or do much good without their other compliments. Parts that are foolish if they think they're the whole.

We're told that this is a godless time. That people are now their own religious authorities and organized religion is dying. But what if this is just a time in which a new kind of organization is emerging? A wikipedian organization. And what if the Christian faith, in fact, has a rich vocabulary for the notion that God, truth, meaning and the likes come to us in our collective life.

What's shifting is that the magic is no longer believed to be in the hands of the priest or the literal text of the Bible. It's in us. Not in each of us. But in all of us. And maybe this isn't a time for denominations and dioceses to disappear, but rather for them to redefine themselves, or maybe to remember what they were supposed to have been all along. Structures for collective wisdom more than individual authority.

I've heard that a commedian mocked Wikipedia early on by inserting some foolishness in a page and watching it change. But the rest of the story (off camera) was that in a matter of moments "we" had corrected the post. Something larger was at work, and that larger something pushed in the direction of truth.

Could this be like that spirit that blows where it will, but insists on blowing through us?

Souls and Bodies

It's 4a.m. and I don't know whether it's the rain or my back that's awakened me. The pain is smaller than a dime, just left of center. It's smaller than a dime, but so is the tip of an icepick. It's reminding me that I'm a body.

I don't know how many dime sized areas there are on my surface. A lot, even though I'm not a very big guy. Perhaps I ought to be thinking about all those comfortable spots. A better person would be. A better person would think themselves in the direction of everything well and uninjured.

But when I'm awake in the middle of the night and mindful of being a body I read the undertaker: "We are bodies in motion and at rest--there in George's master bedroom, in the gray light of the midmorning, and hour or so after his daughter found him because he didn't answer when she called this morning, and he always answers, and she always calls, so she got in the car and drove over and found him exactly as we find him here: breathless, unfettered, perfectly still, manifestly indifferent to all this hubbub."

I don't think I'm a paranoid hypochondriac. Nothing in me is worried that my little portion of all the world's pain this morning is the beginnings of swine flu, or some other dreaded force soon to lay me out like poor George. No, I don't read the undertaker because any little ache or pain brings thoughts of doom and demise.

I read the undertaker because there's no mystery greater, or no access to great mystery more reliable than the bodily ones. And sometimes it takes nothing more than a dime sized discomfort to remind me that I'm a body, and, as such, a mystery.

On Sunday Jesus ate a fish, pointed to his hands and feet, insisted that the mystery before the gaping disciples was bodily. Not ghostly. It was a body in motion that should have been at rest.

Now there is plenty in these stories to suggest that the body of Jesus that stopped breathing at about 3pm one Friday, did not simply start breathing again early Sunday morning. His friends don't recognize him. I considered this in my sermon on Sunday.

But one thing these stories suggest is that a body is enough. The mystery of God, the mystery of meaning, of why and whether we matter comes to us most powerfully not in invisible forces and spiritual powers, but in bodies. In bodies at rest, like George's, where the mystery of being is unbearably present to us, and bodies in motion, even like mine, shifting away from the dime sized annoyance in my back, just to the left, screaming to me that I'm a body. Awake. Aware. And a body just the same.

Church

Wendell Berry noted that once upon a time the eyes were considered the window to the soul. Now, making eye contact with a stranger on an American city sidewalk can be construed as a form of aggression.

What does this say about our souls?

The problem here, I suggest, is not urbanization, but privatization. The privatization I'm talking about isn't about the ownership of banks or health care or security forces. The problem may be the privatization of our spiritual lives.

The house where my aunt and uncle lived in Siloam Springs was on an ordinary street, lined with ranch style houses. They were built during an era in which our dwellings were gradually evolving into garages with attached houses.

Front porches were disappearing or being reduced to stoops just large enough for a couple of visitors to stand uncomfortably within, awaiting their welcome into the house. But this neighbor pushed back against the architecture of the day, not by remodeling his house, but by sitting on a lawn chair in his open garage.

It was a defiant act, really, to read his paper and drink a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon there. It at least defied what his home and his neighborhood were trying to have him do. Everything was arranged with its back to the street, the life of the household directed to the backyard, privacy-fenced and accessible only to the invited.

But since front porch culture was gone, he also seemed a little pathetic, out of place, making motions that make no sense in his present environment, like the sad pumping of the useless gills of a landed fish.

The image of the modern spiritual pilgrim is often that of the lone explorer, going it alone deep into the mystery of life. But aren't there too many of us who have struck out on our own, only to find ourselves on an aluminum chair in the garage, looking for the life on the sidewalk that is no longer?

Privatizing the spiritual life comes at a cost. Because if the eyes really are the window to the soul, I can't gain access to my own soul without you. I can't see my own eyes.

So maybe the most faithful concept of church is about making an honest-to-God front porch for the spiritual life. A place where we plop ourselves precisely because there's no telling whom we might encounter there. Or because we do know whom we're going to encounter there: a smattering of those wonderful, annoying, hypocritical, brilliant, loving, petty creatures we call human.

Maybe the soul is better accessed in all those exchanges between selves rather than within the self in isolation. Maybe going to church is simply meant to be deciding to sit for a spell on the porch once a week and see who passes by.

For some of us, somehow, it works. "And that is why," Kathleen Norris says, "when the battles rage, people hold on. They find a sufficient unity, and a rubbed raw but sufficient love, and even the presence of God."

Maybe we don't have to forgo front porch spirituality, even in the day of decks and privacy fences. But it won't help to sit alone in the garage and pretend. We have to be porch sitters, or sidewalk walkers for each other.

Faith and Default Settings

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
- David Foster Wallace

Maybe this is how blogs are supposed to work. I publish something. Then someone else publishes a comment that includes a Hey, you ought to read this. And my next blog is about the this.

The this is David Foster Wallace's commencement address at Kenyon College from 2005 (thanks Winston Brown). Click HERE if you want to read it for yourself. The speech was (partly) about a trip to the supermarket after a long day at work.

Rather than telling all that bristling robed intelligence that great things await them, that they can achieve their dreams, that their enlightened minds will make the world a better place, David Foster Wallace said,

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in.

The startling thing about these lines is that they could be just as appropriately delivered to dropouts and misfits in a court ordered anger management group. Life is about choosing. And whether you're graduating from an elite private school or teetering on the edge of society, what we choose to worship matters. The ultimate choice becomes whether to worship something or someone out beyond myself or to live as "lord of [my] own tiny skull sized kingdom, alone at the center of creation."

Learning how not to end up alone and angry in the checkout line is what life and religion are about. It's as true in the Heights as it is in the 'hood. If all we have to worship is our selves, we'll live in one hell of a lonely place.

Not, perhaps, what the bright young graduates at Kenyon were expecting. But we all have to come to terms with the checkout line self. That familiar self there under the soul sapping fluorescent lights, among the soul sapped shoppers, among all those annoyingly other people, where everyone and everything is in my way.

There I find my basic default setting. It's my way that matters. Why can't everyone else get out of it?

But the good news is that we do get to choose. We get to choose whether or not to live like it's only my way that matters. And so I'm a Christian. Maybe this seems like a flimsy argument for religion. Maybe you're still hoping for 7 irrefutable facts that will pin you down and show you the light, or convince everyone else of the light by which you see. But I don't think there's a single airtight argument for the truth of the Christian faith. I'm less and less sure there's a single airtight argument for anything. And even if there were, we'd still have to choose. Ultimately I'm Christian because I find the perspective Jesus offered as compelling and life giving.

Faith is about stepping out into a perspective beyond the confines of my default setting. It's about giving up the small kingdom of my own skull and getting the whole world in return. The whole wondrous world of shopping cart clatter and traffic, of the shuffling old and the spastic young.

And maybe what I get first, when I override my default settings for even a moment, is simply that other soul on the other side of this table, just beyond my own cup of coffee, telling me who she is and why she's happy or sad or angry or bored and what the world looks like from a perspective beyond that of my own head.

Mine's an awfully small kingdom to give up for even just that.

The Daily Prophet

As they used to say on Monty Python's Flying Circus, "And now for something completely different..."

In other words, this blog isn't like anything I've ever written here.

When we moved to Little Rock from Virginia, Kate, then 5, asked, "Can we get one of those televisions that get channels?" So we plugged in the rabbit ears to our handmedown RCA. The few and often fuzzy channels we got were more than we'd ever had access to. But they obviously din't include Comedy Central.

After hearing about Jon Stewart's recent grilling of a CNBC commentator, I found the show on the internet. That show got this blog going. (Click here to watch it. Warning: it contains some thinly bleeped profanity.)

I think this was a prophetic moment.

It's news to most people that the Bible talks relatively little about sex, or what we call "family values". And most of the stories and teachings about sex and families would be scandalous to the folks who would present a middle class white Protestant American family from 1952 as the image of biblical perfection.

As I mentioned in a sermon on Sunday, what the Bible does talk a lot about is money and economics. Ingrained in the Torah, the Law, is a deep suspicion of the accumulation of too much wealth in the hands of too few. And a deep suspicion of making money just by having money. Charging interest was forbidden. Debts were forgiven every seven years. Property (which tends to gravitate towards a few) was to be redistributed every 50 years. The prophets repeat these warnings, more in the tenor of Jon Stewart. And my hunch is that the profanity was bleeped out of Isaiah as well.

Mr. Stewart's rage was towards managers and commentators like Jim Cramer who was caught on tape admitting that he and others in his business manipulated stock prices in order to make money. Piles of money. Some traders were just doing their jobs. But some were playing games with other people's money. Money earned by the real work of schoolteachers and electricians and business owners and all kinds of people whose wealth came from their work.

Jim Cramer advised people that a stock price might have nothing to do with the soundness of a company. It's not about whether a useful service or good work is provided. Buy a stock only if you think tomorrow somebody else will be convinced to pay more for it. It's wealth without work, unless manipulating stock prices by a hedge fund manager passes for work.

The point of this tirade is that it doesn't, or it shouldn't.

The new state lottery is something that can raise a lot of moral indignation on both sides. Some people have scruples about gambling. Some people say it's a way to fund scholarships in which people can choose freely whether or not to participate. But my concern is about the increasing notion that wealth comes out of nowhere. Which is precisely the myth promoted by the likes of Jim Cramer.

Long ago we started seeing ourselves primarily as consumers rather than producers. At what point will our economy seem to be a lottery to most of us, having almost nothing to do with what we each actually have to offer? When will we have lost the connection entirely between our work and our wealth?

The most important moral formation that goes on in our lives is not the formation that makes us say no when tempted to start a Ponzi scheme. Few of us will ever be so tempted. More important is the formation that cares about the consequences of our work and our wealth on other people. Moral formation is not about knowing the boundaries of the law (see "Mount, Sermon on the" by Jesus), or knowing allowable ways to make money in a market. Moral formation means learning in ever deepening ways that our lives and our choices matter to one another and giving all of those ways our attention.

Moral formation means putting away the convenient illusion (at least until now) that the free market will tell us what is good, and reviving the responsibility we have for imposing goodness on our markets in every exchange that we make.

Here ends the rant. Next week's topic: Something nicer.

Hospitality

I had seen her on Markham Street on my way to work a couple of times. She was hard to miss among the bizarre confluence of colors and patterns, the hats and skirts and beads that she had wrapped herself within.

She was even harder to miss on the front row of the Christ Episcopal Church nave. There she settled in, fully regaled not only with gowns and bags, but with a bright red bear. Throughout the service that bear was lifted up, perched on her head, and occasionally turned around so that the rest of the congregation might benefit from the message of love it bore on its belly.

I'll not pretend that my thoughts were only charitable. I'll not pretend that I thought only of the welcome to the displaced stranger Christ commanded of us. Probably the closest thing to a Christian response that stirred around in me was, "I wonder what it's like to be her."

What visions swim before or within her eyes that cause her to clap her hands, pleased with the sharp sounds bouncing around all that silent stone? What did the brass cross above the font bear or reflect or cry out to her? Something asked her to lift the stuffed red animal up in an offering gesture and to wave her hands and to stand while the rest of us sat. But what was that something, and how did it ask, and why?

I wonder what it's like to be her.

Such curiosity isn't always charitable. But could it contain or become the beginnings of hospitality?

Hospitality is fundamental to the Benedictine Rule of Life. But the practice of hospitality is meant to arise less out of obligation than expectation. It's that Christian anticipation of God's arrival into our lives through the life of the stranger that makes hospitality an avenue to the divine.

Ironically, religious fervor even among Christians is often marked by a deep suspicion of the 'other'. Suspicion and distrust fills all the space where one might wonder what it's like to be that street person or that gay person or that conservative person or that (fill in the uncomfortably other of your choice).

But maybe God has scattered the seeds of new life indiscriminately. Even in the seemingly perverse curiosity of our gawking selves we might find enough empathy to be tended and nurtured into the lifegiving expectation that God may be coming to us even through this strange one.

Kathleen Norris tells the story of an old aquaintance showing up at her door needing hospitality one night. She and her husband were in something of a crisis. He had fallen into a fit of depression, and Ms. Norris found it contagious. But the truth soon came clear that what these two people needed was to be hospitable that night. Not for the sake of the stranger, but for their own sakes. They needed to look up and out and away from their own lives for a moment, just long enough to break them open to a little grace.

Maybe that's what hospitality has always been for. While we know that there are people in this world whose very survival depends on the hospitality of others, what if the Christian practice of hospitality begins with my very own need to offer welcome to someone who is not myself.

Some days I need more than a nudge to be reminded of this truth. I need more than a whisper. Maybe some days I need the strangest of strangers to walk to the front row of my life and plop down, wave her arms, clap her hands, lift her red bear in the air. Reminding me of how bland and colorless God's world would be if it were populated by nothing but me. Opening up, I hope, enough hospitality to receive a little of that color, a little of that grace for myself.

Ash Wednesday

Most buildings are made by a process of addition. Stones or timbers are stacked. Maybe the walls are assembled or poured into forms on the ground and then tipped up. Shingles or tiles or sheets of tin are fastened on top. And the built thing stands where once there was nothing.

But buildings can also be made by a process of taking away.

About 1700 years ago people in Southern Asia began sculpting temples out of living rock. Rather than quarrying stones and arranging them into buildings they just started chiseling away.

Their work was more revelation than construction. The towers and columns and intricate statues had been quietly present in the hillsides all along, until these builders, perhaps the greatest the human race has known, just chipped away all that the temple was not.

In Lent we are inclined to consider pleasures or practices that might be removed from our lives. Maybe these forty days are a clearing away of some debris. The bad habits or patterns or any of the accumulations that bury long lost parts of our selves. But Lent is not about what’s chipped away. It’s about what remains. It’s about the good and lovely thing that God wants to be exposed to us in the process.

Whether you give up ice cream or bourbon or umbrellas, whether you take up serving at a soup kitchen or teaching someone to read, our attention is often on the ice cream or the umbrellas or the act of service itself. We think it’s good to give something up or to take something up—just because. Or just because it’s hard.

But listen to Isaiah. “Is this not the fast I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free?” For Isaiah the fast itself wasn’t the point. The results of fasting were meant to play out in the life of the community. Play out as justice and freedom and “…when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin…”

Isaiah seemed to be saying that fasting should bring an experience of kinship, or expose a kinship that was hidden. The practice was meant to connect people to one another, or make visible a connection that was present in their lives already. But
people were moving apart. Fasting employers still oppressed their workers. Quarrelling and fighting, pointing fingers and evil words persisted.

Even among good religious people. Imagine that!

We know all too well how this can happen. As soon as we begin to take our faith and our religious life seriously, we’re tempted to start making categories. There are people who fast and people who don’t. People who give things up for Lent and people who don’t. People who read their Bibles, or say their prayers, or speak in tongues and people who don’t.

We make distinctions where God meant us to make connections.

Of course we can do the same with Ash Wednesday. You and I can share a smug satisfaction about the fact that we’re here while the heathen world goes about its oblivious and sinful way. And we’ll miss the point of this day completely.

Because taking a smudge of ash on the forehead should expose for a moment the wonderful truth that the differences between you and me and the governor and the fellow who just passed out on the street corner amount to nearly nothing before God. “Remember that you are dust,” we hear, “and to dust you shall return.” Those somber old words apply to exactly everyone.

And Isaiah might say that forgetting this truth or denying this truth is a way of hiding ourselves from our own kin. It’s satisfying to reassure ourselves with all the ways we’re not like those less devout or less sober or just less interesting people. But is there really much difference between your dust and mine? Between our dust and theirs?

Confessing our mortality on Ash Wednesday is a way of chipping away almost everything away from our lives for a moment. And maybe one of the lovely things that remain is our kinship with one another before God. Admitting that we all have come from and that we all will return to the same dust means that we can’t so easily ignore or dismiss the suffering ones, or the offensive ones, or the hungry ones.
Because there’s not much difference between their dust and ours.

So whatever your practice might be this Lent, whether you give up a little food or a little time for prayer or service or whether you give up a little of your routine, consider Isaiah’s words and look beyond the practices themselves and into the lives around us.

Look beyond these practices and see the strange paradox of Lent’s abundance. The season is not about the things we chip away from our lives. It’s about what remains or emerges when we do. Things like justice and broken bonds, things that arise naturally as we remember our essential kinship with one another before God. And if we look up and out and beyond our lives perhaps Lent becomes for us not a parched place, but the rebuilt ruins and watered garden the prophet spoke of. A time in which our bones grow strong, when light breaks forth like dawn.

A copper plate from the great Kailasa stone temple bears this inscription: “…Even the architect who constructed [this temple] was struck with wonder. His heart failed him when he considered building another like it, for “how is it possible that I built this except by magic?”

Could Lent be even a time of such magic? A time to be wonderstruck at what remains when we chip away at the edges of our lives a bit? What we may find is that when we give up a little of those lives, God gives us, or God exposes to us the lives of the people around us, and shows us that these are the lives of our own kin. People of dust like us made suddenly visible to one another in this room, on these streets, in our homes, wherever we go. And maybe we’ll find that the grace of Lent is not in what’s chipped away. It’s in what remains. In all these blessed remains. Amen.

Sermon: The Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany

"At the moment when Mary Pickford fainted, the Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot, down in the parsonage of the Fourth Presbyterian Church at the corner of Straight Street and Broadway, felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct—a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward."
(from In the Beauty of the Lilies, by John Updike)

Clarence Arthur Wilmot is a character in one of the now late John Updike’s novels, so you can hold off on your prayers for this doubting pastor’s soul.

What escaped upward along with Mr. Wilmot’s faith that day in 1910 was the sanctity of the world. Suddenly nothing was holy. Not himself nor his wife nor the farmer and horse clacking their way up State Street at the moment of his faith’s exit. The universe suddenly seemed as oblivious to each of these at is was to a lump of coal.

But the clergyman did not resign his position immediately with the church. And he soon lost something else. Midway through the Sunday service his vocal chords clenched, and Wilmot lost his voice. Worship halted and waited until his wife Stella “stepped forward to the rail and called into the varnished depths of the ill attended church, ‘With gladness, let us present the offering of our life and labor to the Lord.’”

It was, of course, a desecration to have a woman speak these words. And Mrs. Wilmot wasn’t finished. She let the rest of the service. The congregation coughed and rustled, the ushers bumped into each other as they made their way down the aisle with the alms basins. Miriam Showalter, the church organist, was so stunned that she forgot to start the accompaniment to the offertory solo, so the plates pass through the congregation in a fraught and awkward silence.

Now what’s curious about poor Pastor Wilmot’s situation is this: If nothing is holy, nothing can be defiled. Not even having a woman, God forbid, lead worship at the Fourth Presbyterian Church makes a difference. Nothing is supposed to matter any more.

But even Clarence Wilmot’s unbelief in the holy couldn’t insulate him from the collective agony in the church that day. All the familiar emotions from the old sacred, meaningful universe he used to inhabit came rushing upon him. The indignation, the frustration, the embarrassment, the fear. In spite of his crisis of faith, “His cheeks felt hot, but his fingertips felt cold, and a shiver kept passing uncontrollably across his chest.”

So Pastor Wilmot’s discomfort, his own lingering sense that something was being defiled or profaned, raises an old question: Does holiness reside in places and things—like the chancel of a Presbyterian Church in New Jersey—or does holiness happen in the encounters and exchanges of life? Something was still swirling around among Clarence Wilmot’s congregation that day that he couldn’t quite be free of. Even though no one and nothing was sacred any more, something like holiness still moved among them.

Something similar was going on in Corinth it seems. And the pastor of that small first century congregation, a fellow named Paul, decided to help these people sort out the holy from the profane in their lives.

Paul begins his argument by saying, “no idol in the world really exists.” In other words, the things that the meat in question was being sacrificed to weren’t holy or unholy. The idols carried no power in themselves. So a wooden carving couldn’t desecrate an otherwise acceptable lamb chop any more than a Louisville Slugger baseball bat could. They’re both just lumber in the end.

But Paul’s discussion didn’t end there. It was just beginning. Maybe meat can’t be defiled. But a conscience can. “Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled.”

Holiness and defilement it seems don’t happen to things. Holiness and defilement happen among people.

What this teaching does, in predictable Pauline fashion, is to simplify and complicate the situation at once. Don’t worry, he says. Nothing has happened if your dinner started out as a pagan sacrifice. But do worry. Or at least do pay attention to what’s going on between you and the other dinner guests. Because even if an idol can’t defile things, we can. And we don’t need wood or precious metals to do so. We can defile things with nothing more than a little knowledge.

Now sometimes this passage is read as instruction never to do anything that offends another person. “If food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall,” said Paul. But you’d better just stay in bed if you plan not to do anything offensive to anyone for a day. And, of course, staying in bed all day is plenty offensive too. So we’re never safe.

No, I don’t think Paul was pretending we can just opt out of offensive situations. Rather, he was reminding us that what’s sacred in our lives is what’s passed between us. Sometimes it’s a plate of food. Sometimes it’s knowledge. But the holiness that happens, happens there. There in the exchange. So if we want to keep from defilement, we have to pay attention to the person in front of us and whatever it is that’s passing between us.

To prove things aren’t sacred or profane in themselves, Paul uses the example of knowledge. He is speaking to people with accurate knowledge about idols. He tells them that they’re right. That the idols are powerless and that we’re not going to get closer to or further from God because of what we eat. But he reminds them that we can defile a relationship even with the truth.

A person can wield their knowledge, even right knowledge, in ways that are destructive. In fact the knowledge itself can be a source of pride. And pride’s a problem because it separates us from the people whom we suddenly find unworthy of us.

A further problem for the community was that the issue of idol meat probably involved class distinctions. Poorer people wouldn’t have eaten much meat at all. But the wealthier ones would have been invited to feasts at the local temples for social gatherings—for weddings, and birthdays, and all kinds of occasions.

Paul insists that the meals were harmless. Smugness about their own enlightenment was a far more likely source of defilement for the upper classes than anything in the pagan rituals themselves. And so, to preserve the holiness in these relationships, each person needs to consider the experiences of the other. What’s perfectly ordinary to one seems strange and forbidden to another. And if we take satisfaction in the fact that we’re in the know and someone else is not, we’ve defiled something. We’ve defiled the relationship. Defiled a relationship with someone God loves. A relationship through which God comes to us. And love doesn’t do that, Paul says.

Like Pastor Wilmot we are caught up in a web of holiness, whether we believe in that web or not. Maybe faith comes easily to you. Maybe some days it doesn’t. But if we play St. Paul’s teaching on out, we may find that there’s a place here for us even in times of doubt. Because it’s not the content of our knowledge that matters most, Paul says. It’s whether we express that knowledge in love. It’s through the love, not the knowledge that holiness makes its way into our lives.

So maybe even our doubts need not defile what happens here. Bread and wine are invested with holiness by God, but through us, in what we do together. Liturgy is always the work of the people. The holiness is present in our loving exchanges, not in the hands of a priest or the possession of right doctrines. And we defile these things not when we get our words or our beliefs or our gestures wrong. But when we use them wrongly. When we let our knowledge puff us up rather than using our love to build one another up.

Unlike his character, the Reverend Clarence Wilmot, John Updike said he could never quite take the leap of unbelief. Many of his literary friends found his religion, especially his church attendance quaint, maybe naïve. But something in John Updike couldn’t quite disbelieve in a God given web of holiness that holds us all together. And he seemed to believe that even people like the doubting pastor Wilmot were part of that web as well.

So remember, when your faith is strong, be thankful. But remember, knowledge doesn’t make our lives holy. And remember, when your faith is wearing thin, unbelief doesn’t defile you nor does doubt defile this place or the great work of our worship. For God has arranged this world so that love, given in the imperfect but faithful exchanges of our lives, love is how holiness happens in our lives. Holiness can be made, even by ordinary people like us, people of imperfect knowledge and inadequate faith. Holiness is built up even among us one loving act at a time. Amen.

Sermon: The Second Sunday after the Epiphany

Gospel Reading: John 1.43-51

It’s the fact that you haven’t heard of the Ghosts of Pasha that made them a perfect subject for an Improv Everywhere mission.

Improv Everywhere was conceived by a guy named Charlie Todd. Its purpose: “to cause scenes of chaos and joy in public places.” Improv Everywhere missions have included the No Pants! Subway Ride, in which 2,500 people took off their pants on subways in 22 cities around the world, and Food Court Musical, in which, as you might have guessed, 16 “agents” suddenly staged a choreographed musical in the food court of a Los Angeles shopping mall.

The concept for “The Best Gig Ever”, the brainchild of Agent Lee, was simple: Give some struggling small time rock band the show of their life.

The Ghosts of Pasha of Burlington, Vermont, had recorded their first five songs the previous summer, and were on their first tour. So they were pleasantly surprised when 38 fans showed up for a Sunday evening show at the Mercury Lounge in New York.

What they didn’t know was that exactly three people besides the Improv Everywhere crew had purchased tickets for the show.

The agents had done their homework. They had listened to those five Ghosts of Pasha songs over and over until they had every word memorized. Then they each adopted a groupie persona for the night. Some sported temporary Pasha tattoos and t-shirts designed for the event. The faux fans jumped and danced and sang along. One bobbed his head introspectively, eyes closed, as if he were soaking in the band’s genius one beat at a time. At the show’s close a shirtless Agent V leapt onto the stage and threw an ecstatic bear hug around lead singer Milo Finch, with a convincing “I love you, man”.

And then they were gone. Mission accomplished. The Ghosts of Pasha had just played the best gig ever. And the Improv Everywhere agents slipped away into the night.

Now, it’s hard to say whether the Ghosts of Pasha were beneficiaries or victims in this stunt. Their feelings were more complicate a few weeks later when someone sent them the Improv Everywhere website where all was made plain. But for one Sunday evening in New York the Ghosts of Pasha felt like rock stars.

Improv Everywhere plays with and on the simple assumption that what we do affects other people. I’ll be impacted if I step onto a train and a group of perfect strangers throw me a birthday party. In their own quirky way Improv Everywhere reminds us that our lives matter to one another, because our encounters change us.

It was that encounter of Jesus and Nathanael that got me thinking about Improv Everywhere. Something about the scene seems staged almost. And the way Jesus addresses Nathanael seems almost as odd and intentional as an Improv Everywhere mission.

We just heard the story, but let’s recap. Jesus finds Philip and asks him or tells him to follow. Philip finds Nathanael and tells him that this Jesus of Nazareth is the one Moses wrote about in the Law and the Prophets.

Nathanael isn’t immediately convinced. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” he asks, memorably. “Come and see,” says Philip.

And here is where Jesus’ improv mission seems to happen. Seeing Nathanael approaching, Jesus says, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!”
It’s an odd greeting. Apparently Jesus hadn’t met this Nathanael. From our perspective we might wonder not just whether Jesus was right. We might wonder what he was up to. What was this mission all about?

Nathanael might not have been deceitful, but he was the first follower to respond to Jesus with a little resistance and skepticism in the gospel of John. And Nathanael is the first disciple whom Jesus addresses with a compliment rather than a command.

To the other disciples he says things like, “Come and see” and “Follow me” or even “You are to be called Cephas.” But to Nathanael, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!”
That’s a curious thing to say for several reasons. But you may remember that back in Genesis, Israel was the name given to Jacob, the one who deceived his brother Esau out of his birthright. And when Jacob fled his brother’s wrath he stopped for the night and dreamed of a ladder reaching into heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending upon it.
“You will see heaven opened” said Jesus to Nathanael, “and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

We can’t know just what was going through Nathanael’s mind in all this. But with a few carefully chosen words, Jesus pushes Nathanael into the strange, morally complicated, but grace-filled story of Israel. Maybe Jesus was calling Nathanael a Jacob without the deceit—strange but wonderful praise. Whatever he meant, Nathanael was changed.

This story is even more compelling if we resist the urge to make Jesus a mind reader. It’s not clear that there was anything miraculous about his seeing Nathanael under the fig tree, nor is it clear why Nathanael believes that Jesus has come to know him. All we know is that the strange little conversation changed Nathanael. It turned him around. He followed.
While the question of how Jesus changed people is a perfectly good one, the question of how our lives change those around us seems just as relevant. We stand in a long line of Jesus’ followers stretching back to Nathanael, so might this story also remind us that the ways we engage people can make all the difference in the world? Or at least all the difference in their lives.

Think about the people who send all your defenses up, and the ones whom you easily trust? The difference can be subtle, but that difference is life and death. And somehow if we’re going to move through this world in a healing and life giving way as Jesus did, don’t you think we each have to find a way of being that opens up trust in the lives we encounter?

I suppose being Christian all these years later is still about responding as Nathanael did, trusting this Jesus and letting ourselves be known. There are plenty of reasons for the mention of Jesus to send up our defenses and turn us off. But for all that’s been done in the his name, if you’re here, it probably means that something in Jesus’ life and story has opened up something up in you. For reasons you might not be able to explain, you trust him.

“Where did you get to know me?” asked Nathanael. Which, if you’re one of the Ghosts of Pasha, might be paraphrased, “Where did you learn the words to our songs?” And a distance between strangers is closed.

So often we assume that Jesus’ gifts were divine and that only his limitations were human. But what if Jesus’ life changing impact on people began with the ordinary miracle of human trust. And of all Jesus’ singular gifts and powers, didn’t they all rest on this one? On the simple gift of looking at another person, and knowing them and gaining their trust with a clear eyed love?
We can live this way too. Imperfectly, but we each of us in our own way can live this way. We can learn to leave our assumptions and agendas behind long enough to see the person in front of us for who they are, no matter how foreign or strange their life might seem to us. We can give people the simple dignified feeling of being known and loved, and the trust that can follow changes everything.

And if this seems like nothing more than a little common sense relationship advice, remember this. God became incarnate in just this way. God’s redeeming love moved out beyond the body of Jesus and into the lives around him in the simple exchanges of human life. Whether it was to one Nathanael or 5000 hungry people on a hillside, maybe the ripple of God’s love making its way through the world sounded like, “Where did you get to know me?” or even “Where did you learn the words to my songs?”
Maybe it still does. Amen.