scott's r.o.t.t.

The Real

2010-05-12T09:05:00.008-05:00

We finally got around to watching Lars and the Real Girl. This is one of those movies about which one probably shouldn't hazard a synopsis. But it's about a guy named Lars and the life sized mail order doll named Bianca who becomes his girlfriend.

Lars, I probably don't need to tell you, is delusional. But the movie is a cinematic wondering about whether a delusion might be a community matter more than one person's pathology. Lars's community decides to accept his delusion, holding out the possibility that Bianca is a symptom of something collective, something amiss, awry, or at least something at work in the life of a family, a church, a town.

But I think the movie is also about how we're made real. It's something of a Velveteen Rabbit without the miracles. In The Velveteen Rabbit, you may remember, toys are made real by the love of a child. And 'real' means that they live and breathe and hop off into the forest under their own volition. But as Lars's community pretends that Bianca is real (eventually they elect her to the school board) we sense that none of us may begin real. Perhaps we're made real by others.

Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." And we (in the West, at least) haven't looked back. We've taken his statement as a self evident truth that reality is an individual matter.

But theologian John Zizoulas once wrote that "one person is no person". In fact, in Being as Communion, Zizoulas lays out the mysterious Christian doctrine of the Trinity as an acknowledgment that God is one, but God is not an individual. There is community within God's very self.

This is heavy stuff. But it's heavy stuff that matters, I think. It mattered to the little Minnesota town where Lars lived. In making Bianca real, everyone was made a little more real.

After Bianca's burial Lars asks Margo to go for a walk. She's been in love with Lars all along. But even though its Lars who no longer feels human touch as pain, even though it's Lars who no longer lives alone in the garage, even though it's Lars who let's go of his mail order girl, it's not just Lars who gets real. Lars is as involved in making people real as he is in becoming real.

What if being really is communion, not just for God, but for us? What would change in our families and churches and towns if we believed that we're only and always made real in communion?

Believing such a thing would mean that the real "real girl" in a movie might well be harder to spot (is it Bianca or Margo?). But believing such a thing might radically change the way we conceive our politics, our families, and ultimately our selves.

What if my only truly inalienable, self evident right is to be in communion? What if?

An Easter Sermon

2010-04-07T11:04:00.006-05:00

The folks in our house are not fast food fans. Maybe it was the viewing of Supersize Me that we inflicted on our kids in their formative years that did it. But a couple of weeks ago we were trying to get out of town for a camping trip, and we found coupons for a free Jamocha shake with the purchase of any sandwich. So, adventurous souls that we are, we risked a stop at the Arby’s drive through window.

Maybe it’s that relative lack of recent experience with this food that made the encounter so surprising and unsettling for me. But along with the first unappetizing bite of my Market Fresh turkey sandwich came this curious hypothesis: I think that the people who name fast food sandwiches are the same people who name housing subdivisions.

Here’s what I mean. It was obvious that nothing in my Market Fresh sandwich was either purchased at any kind of market or fresh by any reasonable standard. Even the pepper seemed to leave a sort of antiseptic aftertaste. No, the sandwich’s name seemed to have nothing to do with the sandwich itself. It was named to appeal to people who like words like “market” and “fresh”. People who think these words sound nice. People who like these words might just buy a sandwich called “market fresh”. They do, and I did.

Wouldn’t you agree that this must be the work of the subdivision namers? You might live in a pleasant place called something like Timber Cove, even though the trees were all bulldozed and replaced with a few sad little saplings when the first road was cut. And the fact that your neighborhood is named something “Cove” or “Valley” or “Ridge” may or may not have anything at all to do with actual geographic features of the land.

This is the brave new postmodern world we were warned about. A world in which our language is emptied of real meaning. A world in which words might mean anything and are chosen more to make us feel some way rather than to point us toward something real, something sturdy, something true.

The stakes aren’t so high when we’re talking about sandwiches and subdivisions. But what if we’re talking about words like “Christian”. What if we’re talking about a word like “Jesus”? What are we to do if we wake up one day and the reality we thought our religious language pointed us toward is gone?

This sounds like a modern dilemma. But it’s at least as old as Easter. Because by Sunday morning, for Mary Magdalene even the name Jesus must have felt kind of hollow; it must have sounded a little foreign perhaps. All the hopes and expectations it had once been filled with were gone, emptied out completely on Good Friday. Maybe the word itself went suddenly strange. As though she’d read it for the first time that morning on a billboard, or a license plate, or the belt buckle of an odd stranger in the park.

You know the feeling, don’t you? Especially after the death of someone we love, the most familiar sights and sounds go a little strange. Everything hangs in a sort of obscuring fog that makes us wonder how we ever felt safe and at home in this world and makes us wonder how we ever thought names and words would mean something sure forever.

And countless people across time have had a similar experience with regard to their faith. Mary’s not the only one for whom the Jesus we thought we knew dies or disappears or just becomes strange. We thought Jesus answered all our prayers just so, watched out for our loved ones, pricked our consciences in reliable ways. Then one day that Jesus is gone. The people on television or on the bestseller lists or in the pulpit keep using his name, but the person they describe has less and less to do with any God we’ve actually encountered or any savior we’ve honestly longed for in a long, long time.

Once upon a time we believed. Once upon a time Christianity held meaning, and Jesus was the name of someone familiar and comprehensible. Once upon a time…

Sometimes in such moments of doubt we might push back a little. We might appropriate the methods of the sandwich and subdivision namers for a higher purpose. We might try to fill the vacant old religious words with the meaning we want them to hold and try to imagine a Jesus we might actually hope for into being. But the approach doesn’t work for long, because we sense that imagining a Jesus we want into existence, no matter how appealing he might be, is just another fraud, a short postponement of more disillusion.

Mary, at least, grieved honestly. Early on the first Easter morning she had begun imagining her way toward a future without Jesus, and she didn’t hope for much. She saw the empty tomb, but even with two angels in white framing the emptiness where the body had been, Mary thought it must have been stolen, and she begged only for the chance to treat that precious corpse with the dignity it deserved. But it was gone. And what other explanation, what other future could there be? It’s not the outcome she had hoped for, but how else could she make sense of it all?

All Mary knew to do that morning was visit the tomb. But Mary also lingered there for a while. And she lingered there long enough to hear her name. She didn’t solve the riddle, read the signs, comprehend the prophecy. The meaning of Jesus has been so completely lost that when Mary meets the risen Christ in the garden, she doesn’t know him. Which is one way the gospel writer tells us that Mary didn’t get the Jesus she was looking for. But when Mary hears her name, her eyes are opened.

For some of us, the Christian faith is a lot like lingering at a tomb. We’re not quite sure what else to do, so maybe we keep on using the old Christian words long after they’ve ceased to hold much meaning. Maybe we even keep coming to church. But for some of us, it’s only after we’ve stopped expecting to encounter the old Jesus at all that the risen Christ appears and calls to us. It’s only when we’ve let go of everything we think we’re supposed to do or think or believe to be properly religious that we encounter the living God who actually knows us and calls us by name. For us, as for Mary, faith is a gift.

The problem, of course, is that Mary wasn’t in control, which suggests that we may not be in control of this encounter either. Mary didn’t summon Jesus or figure out how to entice him. He just showed up. But after his questions, Jesus does offer Mary one simple instruction. He demands just one action. Almost as soon as Jesus speaks Mary’s name, he says, “Do not hold on to me.” The only thing he tells her to do is “Don’t cling.”

Could it be that for us as for Mary, the impulse to cling to the Jesus we think we know—no matter how bereft of meaning that Jesus has become—could it be that this impulse to cling is what keeps us from seeing the risen Christ who is actually among us? Who may actually be calling to us by name? Clinging to Christianity as we assume it must be—whether we cling in order to dismiss it or to fill it with our own made up meaning—clinging to Christianity as we assume it must be, might be what keeps us from a living faith that can actually fill our empty lives and direct them toward a future with God.

“Do not hold on to me,” said Jesus. And we should remember that he was telling Mary not to cling even to the risen Christ. Even after the resurrection, clinging too desperately to the Christ of that day might keep Mary from following the Christ who was calling her into the next. Even on Easter morning, he said, “Mary, don’t hold on.”

Might Jesus’ instructions be relevant to us and to our Christian tradition today? The great gift of our Anglican heritage is surely our generous but grounded understanding of worship and the sacraments. Because if we approach these holy mysteries without clinging to our notions and assumptions about what God must surely mean by them or what we think God will surely do to us through them, when we approach these holy mysteries open to a new experience of the loving God who creates and redeems and sustains us, we open ourselves to transformation.

And maybe when we learn to live this way as a church, we will stop clinging to the hollow shell of the Jesus we think we know or the fleeting Jesus we have wished into being for a time—whether he was liberal or conservative or orthodox or radical—maybe we will stop clinging, and linger honestly at the tomb and see just who it is that calls our name today.

For maybe it’s precisely when the language of faith goes a little strange, when the sights and sounds are a little less familiar, when the meaning of Jesus is no longer so settled and obvious, that resurrection is close at hand. Amen.

The Way of the Cross

2010-03-31T15:12:00.005-05:00

Here's a story told by Wendell Berry in an essay called, "The Burden of the Gospels":

"In 1569 in Holland, a Mennonite named Dirk Willems, under capital sentence as a heretic, was fleeing from arrest, pursued by a ‘thief-catcher.’ As they ran across a frozen body of water, the thief-catcher broke through the ice. Without help, he would have drowned.

What did Dirk Willems do then? Was the thief-catcher an enemy merely to be hated, or was he a neighbor to be loved as one loves oneself. Was he an enemy whom one must love in order to be a child of God? Was he ‘one of the least of these my brethren’? What Dirk Willems did was turn back, put out his hands to his pursuer and save his life. The thief-catcher, who then of course wanted to let his rescuer go, was forced to arrest him. Dirk Willems was brought to trial, sentenced, and burned to death by a ‘lingering fire.’

I, and I suppose you, would like to be a child of God even at the cost of so much pain. But would we, in similar circumstances, turn back to offer the charity of Christ to an enemy?"

What's stunning about Holy Week isn't just that it happened, but that it happens again and again in this world. And the question is, just as it is for the pacifist witness of Dirk Willems, "does it work?"

From our perspective, Willem's charity didn't work out for him. But our definition of a life's working out well is probably closer to Spock's than Jesus's. "Live long and prosper" we get. "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you," ...not so much.

Like Wendell Berry, I can't say that I would respond like Dirk Willems. I can't even manage to forgive the enemy who simply slanders or mistreats my ego in the mildest of ways. And I can easily construct a situation in my mind in which the pacifist witness would look less noble, or at least more complicated. But the truth is that Jesus' silence this week before his accusers is not some literary flourish to this story.

Jesus refused to return evil for evil, violence for violence, even when it meant his crucifixion. He taught us to do the same. Yet radical peaceableness toward enemies was explained away so long ago by most Christians that we rarely let the notion cramp even our emotional state. The righteous hatred and embrace of retributive justice by Christians are taken as matters of fact, by the world and by us Christians ourselves.

All I ask is that we listen honestly to the story that will unfold this Triduum, these three sobering days. And ask the question, "This way of Jesus, this way of the cross, did it work? Does it work?"

The answer probably comes down to whether I will let Jesus' way go to work on me.

Ignorance and Bliss

2010-03-16T16:26:00.008-05:00

"Since we're billions of times more ignorant than knowledgeable, why not go with our long suit and have an ignorance-based worldview?"

- Wes Jackson in The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge

Did you know about the Google calculator? If you type in a math problem into Google, you'll get the answer above the several million search results. This doesn't sound very impressive, since your old Texas Instruments calculator did the same thing back in 1980. But if you Google "answer to life, the universe, and everything" the Google calculator will answer "42". Try it.

Douglas Adams fans will appreciate this playful little quirk in the great search engine, as the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything does, in fact, turn out to be 42 in Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.

Google's California headquarters is named the "Googleplex", a nod to the "Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?" (again, see The Hithhiker's Guide to the Universe).

It's heartening to me that the folks at Google have a sense of humor. Because in the age of Google, it may be more important than ever to remember that the calculable answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything might just be something like 42. Put another way, we're increasingly amazed at how much we know and how accurate our knowledge is becoming. But we don't always stop to ask whether we can still find meaning in all that data.

Wes Jackson is a farmer and agricultural scientist. And the quote at the top of this page contrasts pretty sharply with googlization. It suggests that we might not be any closer to the truth about our selves and our world if we had a real Googleplex Star Thinker. And Jackson suggests that a respect for all we don't know is as crucial as the accumulation of information.

The book of Proverbs puts it this way:

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not rely on your own insight.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths.
Do not be wise in your own eyes;
fear the Lord, and turn away from evil."

That sounds like quaint, out of date wisdom from an age of inadequate information. Human insight has gotten us mighty close to the Googleplex that was science fiction humor a few decades ago.

But the stuff of tragedy is the same as it was in Homer's time and before. Hubris is ever the enemy. The prideful certainty that we can know enough is still our downfall. We are oh so wise in our own eyes, but are we happy? Are we whole? Can we still make a mess of things?

Trusting in God and acknowledging God are ways that we humans have embraced our ignorance. While we Christians believe that God has disclosed God's very self to us, God is not a problem to be solved by the Googleplex. God is a mystery that grows thicker, richer, deeper with every encounter. And, ironically, it's only in our acknowledgment of the realm and the One we know almost nothing of, that what we do know takes on meaning.

Without the reclamation of an ignorance-based world view we may never learn to use the information we've Googled well.

A Bottle o' Mystery

2010-03-09T09:20:00.005-06:00

"God did not become a movement, a concept, an ideal, or even a committee, but a man of flesh and bone with a parentage, friends, a language, a coutry, a home. He inhabited not just a time but places, streets, rooms, countrysides, and by his presence in the flesh he changed them all."

- Aidan Kavanagh, Elements of Rite

I heard on the radio this morning that a woman recently auctioned a glass bottle containing two ghosts for $2000. This is a great mystery.

The mystery, however, isn't about the contents of the bottle. The woman's the mystery. And I don't mean she's a mystery because she's crazy enough to believe in bottling ghosts. It's just that a thing (a person being some-thing rather than no-thing) is a far greater mystery than a concept. That's why wondering about whether ghosts exist is nothing like wondering at the mystery of a real person who gets out of bed on a particular morning in March and decides to sell her bottled ghosts on Ebay.

Today is Gregory of Nyssa's feast day. And in the fourth century, he wrote, "Concepts create idols; only wonder grasps anything."

Gregory of Nyssa and Aidan Kavanagh (the fellow quoted above) share a suspicion of our preoccupation with concepts, with disembodied ideas. And they both believed that God changed and changes us less through notions than with bodies. The incarnation isn't a concept. It's "a man of flesh and bone with a parentage, friends, a language, a coutry, a home."

Christian theology often seems to be about carrying around proper concepts about God in our heads. I love the struggles and arguments that these concepts have stirred up over the centuries. But the concepts are the ghosts in our bottles. They have a lot to do with who we are, but we're what's real, and it's us that God's at work in and on and through.

This is why Aidan Kavanagh cared so passionately about liturgy. Liturgy is a way of doing theology. Liturgy isn't a concept. Liturgy is always embodied. Liturgy is always about bodies and buildings and furniture, things seen and smelled and heard. Liturgy is never less than real voices singing and speaking among living people and sturdy things in a real moment in earthly time. Liturgy can be done well or poorly, but liturgy can't be done at all in our heads.

So I wish you a wonder-ful Lent. But a Lent less concerned with wondering about concepts than wondering at things. Ultimately wondering at the God who inhabited "places, streets, rooms, countrysides, and by his presence in the flesh he changed them all."

Sarcophagi, Shiny Things, and the Great Right Here

2010-03-02T08:45:00.006-06:00

To my mind, pharaohs and Egyptians were the Old Testament equivalent of Darth Vader and stormtroopers, the sorts of folks whose drowning gets celebrated in poems and happy songs.

Then, on Saturday, I saw a little model granary sent along with the Egyptian dead to ensure the provision of food in the next life. And those ancient villains and I became friends of a sort.

Our friendship is an unlikely one. Besides their bad guy reputation in my religious tradition, Egyptians were just wrong. Right? There's nothing in the Christian faith about the need for building models to make sure we get fed in the sweet by and by. Why, I'm pretty sure there's a kitchen somewhere in that mansion on a hillside I'll inhabit one day. Unless it turns out that resources got scarce after the gold street paving project, leaving the mansions more meagerly furnished.

Then the tetradrachm (that's the ancient Egyptian coin I just googled) dropped.

We're not so different, those ancient Egyptians and us. We all imagine ourselves into the mystery that lies on the other side of death with the best images from this life we can muster. And when we're at our best, the stories we pass around about heaven are less a means of escape than a celebration of the best of this life.

Loaves of bread and shiny golden things. Rivers and houses and walls set with precious gems. All these lovely images may serve us best when they point us not only to a wonderful reality beyond this life, but to something (or even some One) that lies beneath this life, to the source of beauty and goodness itself.

For in the end, a better question than "Will things really shimmer like gold in heaven?" may be "Why do we love things that shimmer at all?" Because "Will things really shimmer?" is a fair enough question. "Why do we love them?" might be the beginning of prayer.

An Accidental Lent

2010-02-23T10:39:00.007-06:00

Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, "She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand."

The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it... It's always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.

- Flannery O'Connor in Mystery and Manners

On my bookshelf sits a fine paddleball game, painted in bright colors and the words "Rainbows from Heaven". It was a gift from the leaders of a young adults retreat called Vocare that Ardelle and I spoke to a few months ago.

I keep the thing around because I don't know what it's for.

Paddleball sort of has a purpose, I guess: trying to make contact with the bouncy little ball that's been affixed to the paddle by a length of rubber band. But the decoration of the paddle with a grinning sun, three colored rainbow, and requisite dove makes the thing harder to make sense of. Reconciling the campy happiness of its message with the violent, percussive nature of the game is a little odd. So I don't bother. I just do it.

Lent is often a purposeful time. We deny ourselves chocolate, hoping we'll lose weight, or coffee, hoping our jittery hands will calm. Or we take up something like serving at a soup kitchen or reading the Bible, hoping we'll become more compassionate, or more faithful, or more something.

But it also might be helpful to be unsure of what Lent is for. Flannery O'Connor believed that the worst writing has long been produced by writers who think they know what they're doing, especially writers who have a moral or an agenda they'd like to embed in a story. As she puts it, the worst writers are more concerned with "grand ideas and bristling emotions" than they are with "putting list slippers on clerks".

The plot of Madam Bovary didn't hang on the sort of slippers worn by that clerk. But the story is enduring only because Flaubert created a believable world, and cared as much about its unnecessary particulars as he did about any lesson or theme to which his novel might be reduced.

Similarly, I'm deciding not to decide about the purpose or outcome of Lent this year. Without pretending to know what they're for, I'm going to relish Lent's spare details, the litany, the noonday prayers, my coffeeless mornings and Tuesday blogs... I'm going to relish these details without asking them to mean or do anything too soon.

Leaving them a little bit free, perhaps, to mean or do things that I can't quite imagine.

Paddleball anyone?

The Liturgical Door

2009-09-10T16:23:00.007-05:00

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

2009-07-28T13:39:00.005-05:00

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

2009-06-23T09:15:00.011-05:00

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

2009-06-09T08:55:00.006-05:00

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

2009-05-26T09:22:00.002-05:00

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

2009-05-21T08:46:00.004-05:00

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

2009-05-12T09:41:00.005-05:00

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

2009-04-28T09:44:00.006-05:00

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

2009-04-15T10:20:00.006-05:00

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

2009-03-25T06:26:00.000-05:00

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

2009-03-14T07:54:00.000-05:00

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

2009-03-03T11:16:00.001-06:00

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

2009-02-26T15:40:00.000-06:00

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

2009-02-22T06:08:00.000-06:00

"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

2009-01-30T15:20:00.000-06:00

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.

Organized Religion

2008-10-30T11:09:00.000-05:00

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

2008-10-09T09:12:00.000-05:00

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

2008-09-23T09:44:00.000-05:00

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

2008-09-09T13:56:00.000-05:00

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

2008-08-26T09:33:00.000-05:00

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

2008-08-19T10:30:00.000-05:00

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

2008-07-29T15:59:00.000-05:00

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

2008-07-22T11:49:00.000-05:00

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

2008-07-15T08:42:00.000-05:00

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

2008-07-01T09:48:00.000-05:00

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

2008-06-20T00:30:00.000-05:00

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

2008-06-03T09:40:00.000-05:00

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

2008-05-27T09:17:00.000-05:00

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

2008-05-13T10:06:00.000-05:00

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

2008-05-06T14:10:00.000-05:00

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

2008-04-29T13:19:00.000-05:00

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.

2008-04-24T10:19:00.000-05:00

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

2008-04-15T10:01:00.000-05:00

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

2008-04-08T10:07:00.001-05:00

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.

My son, Alden and I went to a concert last week. Yonder Mountain's instrumentation is pretty straight ahead bluegrass: upright bass, guitar, banjo, and mandolin. But if you go to one of their concerts expecting Lester Flatts and Earl Scruggs - well, for one thing, you will have forgotten your ear plugs. The instruments are acoustic, but Yonder Mountain isn't timid in their amplification of those instruments.

So the question arises: Is the Yonder Mountain String Band a bluegrass band? An old time string band? A rock and roll band? Something else entirely? People of good will disagree.

It's helpful for us to have categories to drop things into as we sort through what the world brings our way. But it always seems like the world's most creative people explore the edges or maybe the heart of the category they find themselves in. Sometimes we feel the need to create a new category. Bluegrass itself was a new term for what Scruggs and Flatt started to do in the 1940s. It's hardly an ancient form. But it's a form we can argue about what belongs rightly within it.

What does all that have to do with good and evil?

Only this. When good and evil become clear categories that describe people rather than actions they are dangerous concepts. And they are dangerous because they drain from both goodness and evil their subtlety and elusiveness. And they almost always allow us to place ourselves and our friends in with the good.

What's fascinating about Kathleen Norris's chapter this week is that she expolores the subtlety of evil through characters like Jeffrey Dahmer, the mass murderer who cannibalized his victims and stored their hearts in his freezer. Norris refers us, faithfully, I think, back to Jesus' teaching that the roots of murder are right there in our anger.

Jesus blurred some very useful moral categories (murder, adultery, etc.) not in order to let us all of the hook. But to remind us that we're all on the hook. The good and the evil in this world are both things we all participate in as we go about our lives. And like all of life, we participate in good and evil in ways that are always matters of degree, never pure forms of either.

Now back to the music. The best artists are never satisfied to simply occupy a place within a genre. They push at its edges. They explore the energy it arose from. In fact, it may well be that the best artists in any genre don't really believe in genres.

And so it is with our moral lives. Goodness is a lived reality. In fact, maybe goodness is an art. The old categories like murder and charity are necessary and useful. But the best in goodness comes about like the best in music. It always happens in the moment. Goodness isn't a designation for people. It's a way of being that we're always working at. And the moment we think we've mastered it the music of our lives loses its soul.

And here's a little taste of Yonder Mountain for anyone who wants one:

Faith

2008-04-01T10:02:00.000-05:00

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

2008-03-18T13:43:00.000-05:00

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

2008-03-12T10:05:00.000-05:00

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

2008-03-04T11:00:00.000-06:00

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

2008-02-26T15:58:00.000-06:00

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."

Grace

2008-02-19T09:48:00.000-06:00

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

Arrowheads were often found at the summer camp I attended as a child. Some of the counselors were fairly expert in the field, accumulating large and varied collections over the years. I suppose some folks could make informed guesses as to age, tribe, purposes associated with their finds.

But my interests almost always tend toward the particular. What fascinated me was not some general development in the tools of tribal warfare or hunting. It was that a particular set of hands chose this piece of flint one afternoon in the history of the world and set to knocking of its edges until the made thing satisfied its maker.

Equally compelling was the story of how the thing was lost. Did a lost arrow's shaft rot away in the woods, or did the head tumble out of a pocket before it ever got the chance to be thrown by a bow?

My mind makes the very same leap to this day when I read of Jacob taking the stone he had used for a pillow the night before and tipping it up to mark the place God had come to him in a dream. I imagine stumbling onto such a stone and seeing some evidence of human intention. Then wondering who tipped this up and why.

We get the who and why in the book of Genesis when this crafty deceiver named Jacob dreams a dream of breathtaking beauty as he waits nervously to meet the brother he lied to years ago. He tipped up that stone and poured oil on it, saying, "This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." (Gen. 28.17)

He was marking the spot where grace happened.

I think all the strange stories and songs and lists and letters that make up what we call the Bible are such stones. They can be confusing and contradictory even. But when we see them as markers of grace, as little monuments to the experience of God in our world we can find that grace for ourselves in real time.

On Sunday we read the most famous verse in the Bible: John 3.16. But we read the story it came to us within as well. We read of Nicodemus's coming to Jesus at night and of the strange conversation they had about being born from above and whether that meant reentering a mother's womb. That story made it all the way to us. It was a stone tipped up that we might say, "Look here. Grace again."

The great thing about arrowheads is that finding one isn't satisfying. It's intoxicating to the enthusiast. Finding one means that there might be more along this river or at the edge of that wood. Maybe that's the way the stories and the sacraments of our faith are meant to work on us. They don't pin God down by telling us that grace happens only here, in this place, in this wine, in this book, among people like these. They put our sacred imagination to work.

They are hints. Maybe even hints of hints that draw us on and draw our imaginations in. Tipped up stones marking yet another arrival of grace.

Conversion: One More Boom

2008-02-12T10:19:00.000-06:00

Gospel reading: Matthew 4.1-11
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Yesterday I had a meeting in a downtown office building I had never been in before. My meeting was on the sixth floor so I stepped into the first elevator I found and pushed the 6. Unfortunately the elevator I was on serviced only the parking garage, so when the doors opened I realized that I had to go back down to floor one, and I might even have to ask for directions.

But the elevator stopped on floor two, and a friend stepped in. Actually she gasped, then laughed, then clasped a hand to her mouth, then stepped back out, then back in, and then teared up. "I was just taking a short walk during my break, and thinking that I needed to call you." She had had a difficult weekend and thought talking through things a bit might help. What are the odds?

She wondered whether this encounter was a "God thing."

My own theological hunches lean more toward serendipity than providence in such matters. At least since the time I realized that God apparently wasn't going to step in and stop my mother's multiple sclerosis, I have had a hard time believing that God nudges people onto elevators for our edification, but never quite gets around to doing away with real suffering. It's an old and noble question, definitive answers for which we're no closer to than Job.

Needing to know how and why and when God acts in our lives has been a preoccupation of mine for a long time. And it has been something of a red herring at times. I felt like God's action in the world needed to be comprehensible before I could trust it.

But whether I decided that God places me in elevators or leaves me entirely alone, my wonderings were all about me. I was the center of the universe, the point on which God did or did not focus. And what this perspective kept (and keeps) me from was enjoying the grace that I do stumble into. The answer to "What are the odds?" was always "Not very good."

Kathleen Norris wandered reluctantly into a church one All Saints' day. And there she heard the Beatitudes read, only moments after she had found them in the Gideon's Bible in her room at the Super-8. "I had found the right place after all," she said.

And that seems like a more life-giving way to imagine "God things" for me: finding the right place. Maybe our world is strewn with grace. We're stepping into it all the time. And when we have a moment in which we're certain that we've found one of those right places maybe such moments can be signs for us of all the times and places our lives will intersect with grace.

Lent is a time of paring down. And as we read of Jesus' temptations, grace seemed sparse there in the wilderness. But I wonder if Lent, and perhaps even times like those of Jesus in the wilderness are a clearing away of the clutter of our experiences so that we can watch those instances of grace reappear, one by one, here and there, over and over again. We watch grace reappear in the midst of life's pain and confusion to be sure. But it comes. Or we stumble onto it.

Soon enough we may find ourselves answering, "What are the odds?" with "Pretty good. I wonder what we'll stumble into next?"

Fear

2008-02-05T12:57:00.000-06:00

Gospel reading: Matthew 17.1-9
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Instead of opening us up, allowing us to explore our capacity for devotion in the presence of something larger and wiser than ourselves, fear is seen as something that shrinks us, harms us, and renders us incapable of acting on our own behalf.

- Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

I wonder if some fears are meant to be gotten over. And others are meant to be gotten into.

It's worth nothing that most fear is a response to some unknown. I suppose that even if I knew exactly what the creature looked like who lived under my bed, and if I knew precisely the hour in the night at which he was scheduled to crawl out and do me in, what's most frightening is that I don't really know what it's like to be eaten or just how long it might take. While I'm fairly convinced that the experience will be generally unpleasant, most of it remains a mystery. And that's scary.

This kind of fear must be the shrinking, harmful form that Kathleen Norris writes about. If we happen to be religious and are describing the 'fear of God' mentioned in the Bible we'll probably argue that this is some other kind of fear. But I wonder.

It's tempting to simplify things by calling the fear of God something like 'awe' and the fear of everything else something like 'horror'. This feels more precise. Two different words to distinguish between two different experiences. But what fascinates me most is the breadth of response that an encounter with the unknown can elicit in my self.

I understand both the opening up and the closing down that fear can work on us. And let me propose that these are not two polar opposites. In the face of death I find both responses present in myself when confronted with this great mystery. Part of me shrinks away in a debilitating self protection. But something opens up as well. Something opens up about the ordinary mystery that there is anything but the silence of death. Through the bleary eyed fog that accompanies a funeral wake the world takes on a surreality. How strangely wonderful that people paddle canoes and paint windows and drink coffee and kiss grandmothers.

I think the encounter with God is meant to be a similar - and related, perhaps - sort of complex experience. One in which we can't always sift out the abject horror at the unknown from a very human fascination with that same mystery.

The grace in my mixed up responses to mystery is that it relieves me of the need to explain mystery away. My work in life is to cultivate a life giving, expansive response to the great unknowns we live with and before. My work is to let the mystery of God do its broadening work on my life.

On Sunday we read the story of the Transfiguration. Jesus' face shone like the sun, and when a voice spoke from the cloud that enveloped the mountain, Peter and James and John fell down in fear. They lay on the ground until Jesus said, "Get up and do not be afraid."

Maybe the "get up" is the most important part. Jesus didn't say that they really didn't experience a mystery beyond words. He didn't make it more comprehensible. He just said, "Get up." There is a way of living in relationship with the great mystery that is God without minimizing the wonder or shrinking away. Such religion might just be worth the trouble.

Annie Dillard once wrote,

"The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, making up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies hats and straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return."

I like that. Maybe Jesus wasn't telling those disciples to get over their fear, but to get into it. Maybe what he really said to them was, "Get up. And put on your crash helmets."

Chosen

2008-01-29T09:57:00.000-06:00

Gospel reading: Matthew 4.12-23
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

It's a little unsettling for me that this topic follows "The Feminist Impasse". Because when I think about being a chosen one or an insider, I remember the clan of boys that my brother and I ran with on Western Hills Drive.

We weren't officially a group and didn't have a name. But the Little Rascal's "He Man Woman Hater's Club" might have been more appropriate than we'd like to remember. There were girls on the block. But we had very little use for them. At least no polite uses.

Those childhood relationships expose something that remains true, even when we've grown up enough to be polite, or fall in love. They expose a tension between inclusion and identity.

Asked to choose between inclusion and exclusion the virtuous choice is deceptively easy. Of course we must be inclusive. But into what are we including these hypothetical outsiders?

We boys would have been much more inclusive if we forwent our affection for Wiffleball. We played long into the summer nights. Lewis kept statistics for us each season on his Commodore 64 computer (that's an instrument just this side of the quill pen for those who don't know). And loving that game as we did was a form of exclusion. If you couldn't hit or throw a curve or at least dive boldly into the skin-tearing holly bushes against the center field wall, you'd probably never feel chosen by this group.

We organize our lives in much the same way as adults even if the particulars change. You may not have joined a Wiffleball game lately (my brother, Kirk, who now works for a large research firm in Georgetown, still does fairly regularly). But I'm willing to bet that when you decide to invite someone to dinner or find a companion for a movie you don't open the phone book and call the first name your finger drops onto.

We don't get out of the inclusive/exclusive dilemma by choosing to be one or the other. The wonder of human personality might be described as a unique collection of loves. And nobody wants to live in a world free of preference, because that world would be free of us. Without our loves, we simply are not.

Believe it or not, I think the Christian tradition has something to offer (imagine that). One of the ways that the Episcopal Church excludes people is through our worship, and I'm not talking about churches that exclude the unbaptised from Communion. A vast, vast majority of the people in Arkansas have no interest in going to a church service where a priest who, based on his or her outfit, seems to have been upholstered to match the other furniture in the chancel (the what?), and then reads prayers in ancient forms that ask God to show up in some mysterious way in the bread and wine we consume together. Our identity excludes everybody who is disinterested or disdainful of the forms of our worship.

But I talk to people all the time who say, "I didn't know a church like this existed. I didn't think I'd ever find a way to be a Christian again." Being a faithful church demands that we hold on to something of our unique identity and welcome people graciously if they might be nourished here too. Otherwise we have no self to offer. If the Episcopal Church stopped being itself some people would have no religious home. Nowhere that they feel chosen.

A liturgical scholar named Gordan Lathrop puts it this way: "The task of the assembly is a task of polarity: make the center strong, the symbols large, the words of Christ clear, and make that center accessible, the circle large, the periphery permeable" (from his book, Holy Things). It's possible to make the periphery so permeable that there is no center. No place to welcome another person into. No way to chose. And it's also possible to make the center so strong that it becomes sealed off. This isn't only exclusive and uncharitable. It's a good way to suffocate.

On Sunday we read of Jesus' call to the first disciples. He told them to drop their fishing nets and follow him. He didn't ask everyone he met the same thing in the same way. We think would like God to be perfectly inclusive. But Incarnation meant living in the same world we do. So even Jesus chose twelve friends to spread the good news of grace to all kinds of excluded people. And that good news is still reaching people in unlikely places and unlikely times today. He showed us not how to live without preference. But rather, how to make our preferences a source of grace for others.

We boys on the block got the strong center part, but it took some growing up to allow for those much needed punctures in the periphery. I'm not sure anything less than a merciless surge of hormonal activity could have changed us. But it, and other people, and new experiences did. Those relationships became a source of strength. They gave us something we could then give away. They made us feel chosen. So that eventually we could learn to return that gift to our world. Even girls.

Conversion: The Feminist Impasse

2008-01-22T10:15:00.000-06:00

Gospel reading: John 1.29-42
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

"It was the false purity of ideology that I had to reject, in order to move toward the realistic give-and-take of community."
- Kathleen Norris

In seminary we fought over pronouns. I imagine that every group of specialists has its own arcane fields of battle. At Morning Prayer there was an ongoing battle between those who edited out the masculine pronouns for God in their responses, and those who took great offense at the practice. Interestingly, people from both camps were convinced that those from the others were shouting their theological preferences during worship.

Some of us milquetoast sorts never actually heard any yelling in chapel. Maybe an increase in aural sensitivity accompanies increases in other sensitivities.

The debate was over 'inclusive' language. If it weren't among a bunch of seminarians - a group that takes itself far too seriously to begin with - conversation about how we talk about God could have been really fruitful.

The interesting and important notion at the bottom of the debate is that words both stand for things and do things. If I say, "Gingie" the word may mean nothing to you, but conjures the image of an aquaintance for me. That's how words stand for things, or better, how words stand between us and the things we're trying to identify or describe or address.

But words also do things. If someone named Gingie punctured your tires, another Gingie passed you a hot check, and your mother, Gingie, forced you to eat liver weekly, well, the next Gingie you meet has a little psychic baggage to deal with before she wins your favor.

When we're talking about God we should remember that words work in both of these ways. And that seminary tiff over language was about something important. The first thing we have to acknowledge is that our language isn't up to the task. The words, God, or Father, or Holy Spirit don't capture God. They just stand for God or point us in God's direction.

But it's just as true that the words we choose shape us. There was an experiment with elementary school children in which groups were asked to draw pictures. Girls in groups that were instructed to draw "firefighters" and "police officers" were much more likely to draw a female in these rolls than were girls who were told to draw "firemen" and "policemen." The words we use affect the images we carry. And if the words we associate with God are all masculine it affects the image of God we carry, no matter what we say we believe about God and gender.

The trouble is, that we can't flippantly change every name that we stumble over. If Gingie changed her name every time it offended someone because of an unfortunate encounter with one of her namesake we would soon lose all track of who it was we were talking about. People would have to just grunt and point in her direction. Which, come to think of it, might not be helpful to Gingie in the end.

These are the tensions that we need to explore in our language about God. Unfortunately, too often in seminary we let our language simply place us in a particular camp. We forgot that language is a tool we share with one another for exploring the mystery of God.

Kathleen Norris's phrase "false purity of ideology" is helpful. When we talk about language in the abstract we forget that it's meant for the "give-and-take of community". We get closer to the mystery of God when we struggle with our language together. If addressing God as 'she' gives me the willies, why is that? There's nothing in the Bible or the creed about using only pronouns of a particular gender. If addressing God as "Father" offends me, why is that? Is vaguer language always better?

The false purity of ideology is the notion that I can think of the best term for God all by myself. Which is not language. It's babble. The power of language is in its shared meaning. The power of language is in the way other people can join us in our musings. Language is about give-and-take. And the surely the most powerful changes feminism has worked in our world have had to do with placing women, too slowly and too seldom perhaps, but placing women persistently in roles where they have long been excluded. Placing women more fully in life's give and take where we are all changed at a deeper level.

Mercifully, I didn't stay in the ivory tower that is seminary forever. I don't find as many "ists" and "isms" among worshiping people out here. I find people just as passionate about the rights and roles of women. And people just as passionate about using our language faithfully in our search for God. But maybe there's a little less staking out of ideological territory. More room for give and take. Maybe even more room to be changed.

Anger

2008-01-15T15:06:00.000-06:00

Gospel reading: Matthew 3.13-17
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one's self - it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is upon one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistably as anger does it...

- William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience

It's hard to imagine William James losing his inhibition. Or breaking anything. In his elegantly detached way, James suggests that our experiences accumulate in our selves as 'energy', and that if we're willing to live with that energy things may get broken.

Anger is an exotic emotion to me. I think I've long harbored some envy of boisterous, passionate Italian families. What would it have been like to grow up yelling across great bowls of pasta and bottles of wine at my siblings? What if I had learned to comprehend immediately the depth of every sleight or insult so that I could take my rightful offense and have the nerve to slap the offender as duty requires? The tearful reconciling embrace seems worth the trouble. (I can't wait to hear Clem's response to these blatant stereotypes.)

Maybe part of the reason that a more colorful emotional life seems appealing at times is that James was right. We do carry around energy that isn't meant to be inhibited. Not entirely at least.

On the other hand, I've had a few encounters recently with people exhibiting symptoms that suggest an autistic disorder like Asperger syndrome. One of the characteristics is a lack of empathy. And anger seems close to the surface, ready to spring forth at any time. The intensity of their reactions and their lack of inhibition wasn't just a glimpse of a mental disorder. I was reminded of the energy that all of us carry and the struggle we all share to express that energy in healthy and life giving ways.

Somewhere between my too-strong inhibition and an almost total lack of it exists a healthy spectrum of expression. And it may be that part of developing a healthy spiritual life or emotional life is learning how to be angry. Learning how to "live with energy, though energy bring pain."

There weren't any angry people mentioned in Sunday's gospel. We heard about Jesus' baptism by John. And we heard of a voice from heaven and the Spirit of God descending like a dove. God's energy seemed to be in the air, and mysteriously in Jesus as well. His struggle too would be how to live with that energy, though energy bring pain.

Fortunately for us Jesus learned to live faithfully with the energy he carried. He wasn't so inhibited and fearful of anger that we never got access to his gifts. Nor was he so uninhibited that his anger consumed him, and the people around him.

I think I'll try to start seeing anger not as a gift, but as evidence of a gift. Evidence that I have an urge toward goodness and justice that this world needs, but an urge that I can do damage with if I don't learn to express it faithfully. Maybe I can be careful but not fearful when the "strenuous mood" is upon me. And maybe only what needs to be will get broken in the process.

Virgin Mary, Mother of God

2008-01-08T08:59:00.001-06:00

Gospel reading: Matthew 2.1-12
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

As for myself, I have come to think of Mary as the patron saint of "both/and" passion over "either/or" reasoning, and as such, she delights my poetic soul... What Mary does is to show me how I indeed can be both virgin and mother. Virgin to the extent that I remain "one-in-myself," able to come to things with newness of heart; mother to the extent that I forget myself in the nurture and service of others, embracing the ripeness of maturity that this requires. This Mary is a gender-bender; she could do the same for any man.
- Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

One of the ongoing tasks in life is prioritization. Ardelle and I are constantly talking about what we should prioritize. Evenings at home with the kids. House projects. Relationships. Activities. It seems like much of life is about setting priorities. Saying no to this in order to say yes to that.

Maybe it's because I'm so convinced of the necessity of prioritization that the phrase "Virgin Mary, Mother of God" secretly delights me. Priority means that one thing comes before another either in time or in importance. And simply speaking the words "Virgin Mary, Mother of God" instantly makes a jumbled mess of whatever order we've attempted to impose on our religion.

The phrase is most common among Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians. But it just states with scandalous clarity what all sorts of Christians have confessed for centuries. And, as Freud might say, the problem is with the mother. Or maybe I should say the problem is in the relationship with the mother.

If we're up at the God end of things, everything comes later or after, right? God creates mothers, and mothers bear virgins. That's getting our priorities right biologically, theologically, and grammatically all at once. But our phrase of the day suggests that somehow virginity is possible after motherhood. And the One who created our world from nothing can have a mother.

So maybe something in this Christianity is about losing our priorities.

Mary reminds us that all bets are off when it comes to the mystery of God. God isn't limited to the eithers and ors that we are.

Kate Alexander, our curate here at Christ Church, told me once that she still feels a little scandalous at the altar sometimes. Her own religious upbringing taught her that the male priest was the icon for Christ. Fortunately, Kate didn't let the priority given male clergy in our either/or world cut off the possibility that she might be called to that work.

I guess that in the end, the Virgin Mary, Mother of God doesn't show us how to pretend that we don't live in a world that demands that we sort our eithers from our ors. Her life was limited in ways few of us can imagine. What she shows us best is how to keep ourselves open to possibilities we can't yet imagine, to "come at things with newness of heart."

Virgin Mary, Mother of God

2008-01-08T08:59:00.000-06:00

GospIf thtat doesn'tel reading: Matthew 2.1-12
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

As for myself, I have come to think of Mary as the patron saint of "both/and" passion over "either/or" reasoning, and as such, she delights my poetic soul... What Mary does is to show me how I indeed can be both virgin and mother. Virgin to the extent that I remain "one-in-myself," able to come to things with newness of heart; mother to the extent that I forget myself in the nurture and service of others, embracing the ripeness of maturity that this requires. This Mary is a gender-bender; she could do the same for any man.
- Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

One of the ongoing tasks in life is prioritization. Ardelle and I are constantly talking about what we should prioritize. Evenings at home with the kids. House projects. Relationships. Activities. It seems like much of life is about setting priorities. Saying no to this in order to say yes to that.

Maybe it's because I'm so convinced of the necessity of prioritization that the phrase "Virgin Mary, Mother of God" secretly delights me. Priority means that one thing comes before another either in time or in importance. And simply speaking the words "Virgin Mary, Mother of God" instantly makes a jumbled mess of whatever order we've attempted to impose on our religion.

The phrase is most common among Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians. But it just states with scandalous clarity what all sorts of Christians have confessed for centuries. And, as Freud might say, the problem is with the mother. Or maybe I should say the problem is in the relationship with the mother.

If we're up at the God end of things, everything comes later or after, right? God creates mothers, and mothers bear virgins. That's getting our priorities right biologically, theologically, and grammatically all at once. But our phrase of the day suggests that somehow virginity is possible after motherhood. And the One who created our world from nothing can have a mother.

So maybe something in this Christianity is about losing our priorities.

Mary reminds us that all bets are off when it comes to the mystery of God. God isn't limited to the eithers and ors that we are.

Kate Alexander, our curate here at Christ Church, told me once that she still feels a little scandalous at the altar sometimes. Her own religious upbringing taught her that the male priest was the icon for Christ. Thankfully Kate didn't let the priority given male clergy in our either/or world cut off the possibility that she might be called to just such ministry.

I guess that in the end, the Virgin Mary, Mother of God doesn't show us how to pretend that we don't live in a world that demands that we sort our eithers from our ors. Her life was limited in ways few of us can imagine. What she shows us is how to keep ourselves open to possibilities we can't yet imagine, to "come at things with newness of heart."

Blood

2008-01-03T09:02:00.000-06:00

Gospel reading: John 1.1-18
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

As blood has gained in entertainment value in our culture, it has lost some of its religious significance.
- from Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris

I've never been a fan of gory movies. But several - quite tame by today's standards - come to mind that I found worth the discomfort. Fargo and Fight Club are two. And then there's Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Interestingly enough, the first and last of these are comedies. (Yes, Fargo is a comedy.) And comic violence seems like the surest proof of the truth of the quote at the top of this blog.

But most comedy arises from crossing some kind of boundary, I think. And when a knight loses a limb in a campy movie, and an conspicuously fake stream of blood squirts from his shoulder, we laugh (or I did, at least) when he says "It's just a flesh wound. I've had worse."

The comedy depends on an incongruity. We laugh not in spite of the fact, but because blood is frightening. When an ordinary injury involved bleeding, my brother would scream...well...bloody murder in our elementary school days. "Blood!" he would yell. But Mom didn't call the paramedics. She'd respond with a kleenex and a band-aid, more for their calming effect on Kirk than to stanch the flow of blood. We might have learned to be less hysterical, but we know where his shock came from.

What I wonder is whether the entertainment value of blood really has impacted its religious significance negatively. In some ways I think that for blood to have an entertainment value it has to stir us religiously. It has to maintain its connection to the fragile mystery of life.

I'm not one to campaign for more gratuitous violence in our entertainment. There are lots of ways that our obsession with violence damages us. But I'm not so concerned about its negative impact on our religion. And, in fact, I wonder whether our ongoing fascination with blood suggests that the Christian belief in Incarnation is as relevant as ever.

Dark comedy and religion both depend on a deep and ancient connection between the mystery of life and the blood that pulses through our veins. How is it that all of the wonderful imaginings of the human mind, all the accomplishments of the human body, even all the connections among people through the mystery of human emotions, how is it that all these depend on the circulation of this fluid in our bodies?

Incarnation - and Christmas is the season of the Incarnation - Incarnation is about holding two mysteries together. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" said St. John. Somehow that Word was truly divine. And somehow that Word really dwelt in flesh.

And I think this mystery has fascinated so many people for so long partly because we each embody a similar mystery. Blood is common to all kinds of living things. But we still believe that people are holy. That human life is sacred. We're made of the ordinary stuff of the earth. And a single person embodies more mystery than the rest of the world can unravel in a lifetime.

This isn't the same mystery as the Incarnation of the Christ. But it rhymes with it, so to speak. As we keep ourselves grounded in our humanity, we're more likely to see our kinship with all kinds of other people and open ourselves to the mystery and wonder of their lives. And it just could be that an ordinary but holy substance like blood still holds the power to keep us all incarnate. To remind us that we really are creatures of the earth. And we really are God's holy creation.

Sometimes this is scary. Sometimes this is funny. But it is a truth that is a dependable source of grace, keeping us connected to our God and to one another at the same time. Kathleen Norris sums it up well at the end of her chapter:

Blood includes us in the Incarnation-not so crazy, after all, but an ancient thing, and wise. The rhythm of life that we carry in our veins is not only for us, but for others, as Christ's Incarnation was for the sake of all.

God

2007-12-18T10:25:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversion: The Stories

2007-12-12T08:34:00.000-06:00

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

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

-Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Righteous

2007-12-04T09:36:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bible

2007-11-27T13:01:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idolatry

2007-11-20T11:16:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commandments

2007-11-13T08:41:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2007-11-08T09:04:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annunciation

2007-10-30T21:26:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repentance

2007-10-25T11:36:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Belief, Doubt, and Sacred Ambiguity

2007-10-09T09:59:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prayer

2007-10-02T10:43:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfection

2007-09-25T09:08:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exorcism

2007-09-18T09:50:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversion: The Family Story

2007-09-11T15:16:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Detachment

2007-09-04T08:54:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incarnation

2007-08-28T13:36:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inheritance: Blessing & Curse

2007-08-21T12:55:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salvation

2007-08-14T09:56:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silence

2007-08-07T11:38:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antichrist

2007-07-31T13:41:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eschatology

2007-07-24T10:21:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Preface

2007-07-17T10:54:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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