Ecstasy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversion: The Wild West

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13.1-9, 18-23
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Only in Montana do monks keep revolvers in their nightstands. Kathleen Norris tells the story of one such Montana monk who heard a drunk burglar in his cell at 2 a.m. It only took a warning and a cock of the pistol to send the would be thief stumbling into the night, with a "holy s***!"

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

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

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

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

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

Oppression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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