Organized Religion

Gospel Reading: Matthew 22.34-46
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I have come to suspect that when people complain about "organized" religion what they are really saying is that they can't stand other people.
- Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bible: Give Me a Word

Gospel Reading: Matthew 21.33-46
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I was installing a wainscot in a vinyl-sided 1970s ranch house bedroom. And the project was nothing like what that sentence sets you up to imagine. Perhaps a helpful detail to fill out the picture for you has nothing to do with the carpentry. The McKinnon's piano was a equally uninspiring spinet, but Laurie had decoupaged the thing entirely with sheet music.

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

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

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

I bit my tongue to keep my eyes from rolling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversion: My Ebinezer

Gospel Reading: Matthew 20.1-16
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"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.