Scripture cited here includes Jeremiah 20:7-13, Romans 6:1b-11, and Matthew 10:24-39
That Gospel, and that passage from Jeremiah, are meant to show how demanding obedience to God can be. Perhaps they’re just the right texts for a Sunday when we send off medical missioners to the Dominican Republic. The fact that these members and friends of ours are packing their bags this week says that they’re dealing with the God who calls people to respond, to serve, and to grow.
So let’s roll up our sleeves and get in there with Jeremiah and Matthew, who know all about mission trips. Let’s start with Jeremiah.
Here’s this bright young fellow, raised in a cultured home, a talented poet whose gift at finding words and conveying meaning has been commandeered by God. “O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed.”
Jeremiah was the son of a priest. From childhood, he had known the influence of the great prophet Hosea. Becoming a prophet was not likely high on Jeremiah’s to-do list. Becoming a fine poet, yes. He knew how to struggle with his words, to find just the right ones. But becoming a prophet—Jeremiah knew this—meant struggling against the very word given to him to speak. “For the word of the LORD has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”
Jeremiah knew that becoming a prophet meant hitting the road and leaving behind a settled life. Why? Because the obedient prophet speaks for God, rattles everybody’s cages, goes where God sends, and once there spits out the truth without cushioning the blow.
Prophets are thought of as religious figures. And if prophets stick to what’s narrowly religious, no one minds them. For instance, if they criticize idolatry, or if they preach against the kind of pride that refuses to acknowledge dependence on God, or give fine speeches on ethics, then they’re basically acceptable. Maybe people laugh at them behind their backs, but they’re treated as harmless. And the professional prophets a king might keep on his palace staff—at the White House they’re called advisors— might actually be popular, especially when they forecast rosier times ahead. Very few are doing that, these days.
Nor does Jeremiah. “For whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, ‘Violence and destruction are coming upon this people if they do not change their ways, if this country does not denounce violence and destruction, that’s what will keep befalling us!”
The obedient prophet is the exact opposite of a politician. A politician, to make the message acceptable, avoids extreme language, steers the speech so as not to offend or lose the audience. A prophet has no filter system, lets nothing of his own get in the way of speaking the whole truth. And an obedient prophet travels real light, because once the majority of his hearers have laughed at him, there will always be a few who are ready to rub him out. “Denounce him! Let us denounce him!” Even formerly close friends watch for the prophet to stumble: “Perhaps we can prevail against him, and take our revenge on him.” So the prophet keeps moving—not running like a coward, but keeping on the move like a resistance fighter. “The LORD is with me like a dread warrior.”
And what’s at the core of the true prophet’s message? What makes it so abrasive to hear? For one thing it’s often about the economy… “Sing to the LORD; praise the LORD! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers.” The great prophets denounce every shape injustice takes, especially when the rich press their advantage against the poor, because this violates the covenant love that Israel owes to God. Translated into today’s terms, tax advantages for the wealthy, loopholes for corporations, prophets talk about these—and, for sure, the disparity between the minimum wage and the outsized pay packages of more than a few CEOs. Why? Because to prophets like Jeremiah God is equally sovereign over the life of the nation as over the interior life of the prophet, and God holds all sectors of society equally accountable to one standard of justice that makes of all citizens equal stakeholders in the covenant, equal claimants to the status of child of God.
“Then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones…” We shouldn’t be too surprised when we hear Jeremiah vent his heat and pray, “Let me see your retribution upon my persecutors.”
But that is not what we hear in Matthew’s Gospel. There, the disciple is expected to be like the teacher, and Jesus our teacher does not condone retaliation. If Jeremiah shows how demanding it is to be a prophet, Matthew helps us see that the bar is raised for Christian obedience.
I know, he does say that he comes not to bring peace, but a sword. Jeremiah has prepared us to hear that the Messiah in prophetic tradition is going to rock the boat. Creating a new heaven and new earth is going to require one heck of a lot of commotion, that we can understand.
But what’s with the sword? The Hebrew word for sword means literally “flashing”, lightning. Used as a figure of speech as Jesus does here, the sword represents judgment. Think of Jeremiah’s pent-up burning fire flashing free in his oracles of judgment against the nation. In the Letter to the Ephesians, remember that one part of the armor of God worn by Christians is “the sword of the spirit”, and in the Letter to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation the authors explain that the sword of the spirit is the Word of God.
It has a mighty sharp edge, cutting deep into families within that first-century community. The message appears to be that the hallmark of true disciples is that nothing silences their expressing the reason for the faith and hope and love they feel, nothing pulls the plug on their acknowledging what God means to them in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit that has been given them. Not even fearful family members who understandably worry that their enthusiastic children or parents or inlaws, openly showing their new allegiance, may be arrested for breaking the rules of the all-seeing empire.
It’s thought that this portion of Matthew describes what makes legitimate Christian evangelists. It was meant to instruct the first Christians how to tell the difference between authentic missioners and flashy entrepreneurs trying to create a following. The bona fide witness to the love of Christ has first been honest and consistent at home in his or her personal life, has resisted the natural desire to keep peace in the family at all costs, and has chosen to let the truth make them free.
Jeremiah shows what it takes to be a prophet. Matthew reports what it takes to be a disciple of Christ. In both, it appears to be a tough love.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t come by tough love easily. I’m in my sixties and I’m still learning it. What allows that toughness? St. Paul answers that in his letter. What’s the worse that a prophet or a disciple might fear? Death? Paul says that fear of death is what we stare down in Christ. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his…. If we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.”
That attitude towards death toughens love. Death is not alien to the purposes of God. It is not physical death that a prophet or a disciple needs to fear.
The fuller story of Jeremiah shows what is to be feared. Jeremiah did everything he could to awaken his nation, Judah, to a particular danger. That was the threat posed by the Babylonian kingdom. Superimpose a modern map on that ancient territory and you’re looking at the region of Iraq.
Jeremiah’s King, Jehoiakim, believed that nothing could bring down the Kingdom of Judah. God had blessed Judah and given her a high mission. God would never let her suffer disgrace. Jeremiah knew otherwise, that headstrong Judah was deluded by pride. Jeremiah’s oracles were brought to the King, written on a scroll, and King Jehoiakim would read a few verses then, with a penknife slice them off and toss them into the fire. He had no ear for differing points of view.
Jeremiah’s prophetic poems predicted that Babylon would invade and defeat Judah. King Jehoiakim’s advisors called Jeremiah a traitor, and the blindered King could not see or hear the truth. Inch by inch, he cut off dialogue, refused to allow honest debate.
That’s what needs to be feared: the head of state whose own head is deaf and blind to the bigger truth of what’s happening in the world, and who leads a nation to ruin by false appraisals, and refuses to consider information that doesn’t fit his own ideas or those of his advisors.
Why does the Church keep reading Jeremiah? I’ll ask you to judge that. The wise and healthy nation listens to its truest prophets.
And why should we care about tough gnarly Gospel texts like Matthew’s today? Because the Gospels equip us to test the spirits of those who present Christianity to the world. The Gospels remind us that Christian discipleship is not about having a flashy presence in the media and making a big noise at a microphone. Christian discipleship is about the desire and the discipline to be like our teacher, Jesus. Our medical missioners are about to have unique opportunities to give the same humble service of hospitality, healing, befriending, and loving that our Gospels record Jesus giving to the people around him. He does it now, and our missioners will feel the mystery of how their actions become what is needed by the power of God at work in their touch, in their trust, in their relationships with unknown people well-known because they bear the same image of God who blesses all.
“If your first concern is to look after yourself, you’ll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you’ll find both yourself and me.”* That is Jesus’s message in Matthew today.
Jeremiah would have understood that. Matthew says that’s the call of God in Christ. We need our missioners to come back and present to us fresh what happens when disciples act on that call.
* Matthew 10:39 as paraphrased by Eugene Peterson in The Message
Monday, June 23, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
On a Day of Ordination
The readings for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost include Genesis 18: 1-15; 21:1-7 and Romans 5:1-8 and Matthew 9:35-10:23.
What a rich set of readings for a day when someone we love will be ordained. That is Brooke Pickrell, who from the late summer of 2005 to the early summer of 2007 served as our Youth and Campus Minister, and who today at 4:00 p.m. will be ordained in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. And some of us will be there at First United Presbyterian Church in Troy, to add our joyful amens to the good judgment of that presbytery in approving her ordination. I hear that clergy of other denominations may be invited to join in the laying-on of hands to ordain Brooke, and that will be a first for me.
Ordinations are in the air at this time of year. It’s an expected season for the Episcopal Church to ordain transitional deacons, the first of two separate ordinations that Episcopal priests experience. That happened yesterday to a former parishioner, Grace Pritchard Burson, in Christ Church Cathedral, Hartford. Grace and her husband Josh sang in our choir during their years at Williams. (Ellen Beebe represented us at Grace’s ordination yesterday.)
And some of you know that Ann Clark-Killam, a friend of St. John’s, will be ordained a pastor in the United Church of Christ in late September. At the beginning of July she’ll become Pastor of the Richmond Congregational Church.
What may feel unusual about this set of ordinations is their ecumenical character, yet in common among them is that each woman journeyed with us for a while here at St. John’s. Whatever role we may have played in their vocations, we can thank God for the privilege of having played it, for not having convinced them that seeking ordination was the last thing they ought to do, and for having given them something of us to keep with them in the future.
Thirty-five years ago tomorrow I was ordained a deacon in St. John’s Cathedral in Providence. I was raised in a suburb nearby, and the congregation of St. Mark’s in Riverside played a big role in my growing up. The ladies there laid out a generous spread of sandwiches and desserts on the afternoon of that service in Providence. I suspect that half of them might have been saying, “I always thought he’d make a good clergyman,” while the other half were wondering, “Him? Wasn’t he that chunky kid who used to sing in the junior choir?”
That was 1973. I was one of several young men ordained that day by Bishop Fred Belden, a man who every day wore red sox. He was proud to show his baseball loyalty, and I think he was the kind of man who enjoyed making it difficult for people to take him too seriously.
In 1973, the Episcopal Church ordained to the priesthood only men. Women were enrolled in Episcopal seminaries, several of my classmates among them, including Jeannette Piccard in her late 70’s, noted balloonist and first woman to enter the stratosphere. They would help break that stained-glass ceiling. And when it happened the very next year, 1974, the sound of smashing glass was heard around the Anglican Communion, in part because it happened renegade-style, eleven women strongly qualified for the office (including Jeannette Piccard) were ordained priests by several bishops who were fed up with the foot-dragging of the American Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion. The bunch of them resisted resistance to change, and acted with prophetic courage.
You’ll see a photo from this event on your leaflet insert today. Notice that this bishop is no young man. He and his comrades were, I believe, retired and willing to risk their pensions in breaking with tradition—though many urged stronger retribution than that. These were bishops who in the 50’s and 60’s had helped put the L in Liberal, and were convinced that God’s justice and compassion needed to be shown, not just talked about.
If you’ll read the little essay on that insert, you’ll catch another L word, Lambeth Conference. At the end of this month, 800 or more Anglican bishops from all around the globe will gather in England for the once-every-decade conference named for Lambeth Palace, residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The two weeks they spend together will not result in legislative action, but, hopefully, in better understanding across cultures and theologies.
The Lambeth Conference of 1968 issued a statement refusing to support the ordination of women. The Lambeth Conference of 1978 showed the bishops (to quote this essay) “that the world had moved on without them. Women had already been ordained in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Hong Kong.” Lambeth 2008 will see the arrival of at least ten female bishops (and their husbands).
While first to be ordained in the American church, the Philadelphia Eleven weren’t first in the Anglican Communion. Florence Li Tim-Oi, resident of Hong Kong, was ordained a deaconess in 1941, just months before the fall of Hong Kong to Japan. The Bishop of Hong Kong decided that new occasions were teaching new duties, and in 1944 ordained Florence a priest. After the war ended, controversy flared over her ordination. She chose not to exercise her priesthood until the Anglican Communion acknowledged it. Her bishop nonetheless made her rector of a parish, and insisted she be called priest. After the Communists came to power in China, Florence tried to work within that system—but was eventually accused of counter-revolutionary activity and was forced to undergo political re-education, working (until 1974, when she retired) in a factory. Five years later the churches reopened, and Florence resumed public ministry. Visiting family members in Canada in 1981, she was licensed as a priest in the Dioceses of Montreal and Toronto, where she finally settled.
Enough history for one morning. How do our readings today help us imagine what will soon be given to, and expected of, Brooke?
Like Abraham, Brooke will be expected to recognize the presence of God when she sees it, even in unexpected strangers who turn out to be angels unawares. Like Abraham, she’ll know that it’s as people eat together that they come to know one another (and, while she may not get away with turning to her spouse to rustle up the meal, as Abraham did with Sarah, she will know when it’s time to encourage her people to make cakes and serve them up).
Like Sarah, she will hear some amazing proposals and may laugh at some—but unlike Sarah, she won’t be listening in from outside the tent. She’ll be inside, and she’ll be facilitating her people in dialogue and discernment as they propose to one another how to fulfill the mission God has given them.
Like St. Paul, Brooke will become more and more familiar with the mystery of faith, that it is the power that unites us to God and to one another, and is somehow made of the messy mix of suffering, endurance, character, hope, and love. Nothing like a congregation to teach you that! And to constantly reinforce the core of the mystery: that at the right time God acts, not waiting for us to get our house in perfect order, but ordering our household through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us—not primarily to the ordained by the Spirit moving in ordination, but primarily to the entire household of faith by the Spirit moving in baptism.
And like the first apostles, Brooke, you will receive the preposterous mandate to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons—and as you try to lift a finger to attempt any of this, the memory of hands laid on you this afternoon will remind you that the preposterous mandate is given to the whole Church, not you alone, or your congregation alone.
Like the first apostles, those who are ordained today are sent out as sheep, meaning that the gifts they bring are in their flesh as well as in their spirit (isn’t a sheep worth its weight in what it produces through its very being, the wool, the meat?), but are also wise enough to know when to be perfectly still and deeply observant, like a snake, and when to just coo and hang around, innocent as a dove.
As rich as these readings are for a day of ordination, I find that the collect today says, clearly and simply, what an ordained pastor does. She helps God keep holy the people of God by consistently turning and returning their common life to the steadfast faith and love of God, so that they are saved from too many lesser pursuits than proclaiming God’s truth with boldness and ministering God’s justice with compassion, the central work and joy of every baptized person.
Collect for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost
"Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love, that through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness, and minister your justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen."
What a rich set of readings for a day when someone we love will be ordained. That is Brooke Pickrell, who from the late summer of 2005 to the early summer of 2007 served as our Youth and Campus Minister, and who today at 4:00 p.m. will be ordained in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. And some of us will be there at First United Presbyterian Church in Troy, to add our joyful amens to the good judgment of that presbytery in approving her ordination. I hear that clergy of other denominations may be invited to join in the laying-on of hands to ordain Brooke, and that will be a first for me.
Ordinations are in the air at this time of year. It’s an expected season for the Episcopal Church to ordain transitional deacons, the first of two separate ordinations that Episcopal priests experience. That happened yesterday to a former parishioner, Grace Pritchard Burson, in Christ Church Cathedral, Hartford. Grace and her husband Josh sang in our choir during their years at Williams. (Ellen Beebe represented us at Grace’s ordination yesterday.)
And some of you know that Ann Clark-Killam, a friend of St. John’s, will be ordained a pastor in the United Church of Christ in late September. At the beginning of July she’ll become Pastor of the Richmond Congregational Church.
What may feel unusual about this set of ordinations is their ecumenical character, yet in common among them is that each woman journeyed with us for a while here at St. John’s. Whatever role we may have played in their vocations, we can thank God for the privilege of having played it, for not having convinced them that seeking ordination was the last thing they ought to do, and for having given them something of us to keep with them in the future.
Thirty-five years ago tomorrow I was ordained a deacon in St. John’s Cathedral in Providence. I was raised in a suburb nearby, and the congregation of St. Mark’s in Riverside played a big role in my growing up. The ladies there laid out a generous spread of sandwiches and desserts on the afternoon of that service in Providence. I suspect that half of them might have been saying, “I always thought he’d make a good clergyman,” while the other half were wondering, “Him? Wasn’t he that chunky kid who used to sing in the junior choir?”
That was 1973. I was one of several young men ordained that day by Bishop Fred Belden, a man who every day wore red sox. He was proud to show his baseball loyalty, and I think he was the kind of man who enjoyed making it difficult for people to take him too seriously.
In 1973, the Episcopal Church ordained to the priesthood only men. Women were enrolled in Episcopal seminaries, several of my classmates among them, including Jeannette Piccard in her late 70’s, noted balloonist and first woman to enter the stratosphere. They would help break that stained-glass ceiling. And when it happened the very next year, 1974, the sound of smashing glass was heard around the Anglican Communion, in part because it happened renegade-style, eleven women strongly qualified for the office (including Jeannette Piccard) were ordained priests by several bishops who were fed up with the foot-dragging of the American Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion. The bunch of them resisted resistance to change, and acted with prophetic courage.
You’ll see a photo from this event on your leaflet insert today. Notice that this bishop is no young man. He and his comrades were, I believe, retired and willing to risk their pensions in breaking with tradition—though many urged stronger retribution than that. These were bishops who in the 50’s and 60’s had helped put the L in Liberal, and were convinced that God’s justice and compassion needed to be shown, not just talked about.
If you’ll read the little essay on that insert, you’ll catch another L word, Lambeth Conference. At the end of this month, 800 or more Anglican bishops from all around the globe will gather in England for the once-every-decade conference named for Lambeth Palace, residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The two weeks they spend together will not result in legislative action, but, hopefully, in better understanding across cultures and theologies.
The Lambeth Conference of 1968 issued a statement refusing to support the ordination of women. The Lambeth Conference of 1978 showed the bishops (to quote this essay) “that the world had moved on without them. Women had already been ordained in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Hong Kong.” Lambeth 2008 will see the arrival of at least ten female bishops (and their husbands).
While first to be ordained in the American church, the Philadelphia Eleven weren’t first in the Anglican Communion. Florence Li Tim-Oi, resident of Hong Kong, was ordained a deaconess in 1941, just months before the fall of Hong Kong to Japan. The Bishop of Hong Kong decided that new occasions were teaching new duties, and in 1944 ordained Florence a priest. After the war ended, controversy flared over her ordination. She chose not to exercise her priesthood until the Anglican Communion acknowledged it. Her bishop nonetheless made her rector of a parish, and insisted she be called priest. After the Communists came to power in China, Florence tried to work within that system—but was eventually accused of counter-revolutionary activity and was forced to undergo political re-education, working (until 1974, when she retired) in a factory. Five years later the churches reopened, and Florence resumed public ministry. Visiting family members in Canada in 1981, she was licensed as a priest in the Dioceses of Montreal and Toronto, where she finally settled.
Enough history for one morning. How do our readings today help us imagine what will soon be given to, and expected of, Brooke?
Like Abraham, Brooke will be expected to recognize the presence of God when she sees it, even in unexpected strangers who turn out to be angels unawares. Like Abraham, she’ll know that it’s as people eat together that they come to know one another (and, while she may not get away with turning to her spouse to rustle up the meal, as Abraham did with Sarah, she will know when it’s time to encourage her people to make cakes and serve them up).
Like Sarah, she will hear some amazing proposals and may laugh at some—but unlike Sarah, she won’t be listening in from outside the tent. She’ll be inside, and she’ll be facilitating her people in dialogue and discernment as they propose to one another how to fulfill the mission God has given them.
Like St. Paul, Brooke will become more and more familiar with the mystery of faith, that it is the power that unites us to God and to one another, and is somehow made of the messy mix of suffering, endurance, character, hope, and love. Nothing like a congregation to teach you that! And to constantly reinforce the core of the mystery: that at the right time God acts, not waiting for us to get our house in perfect order, but ordering our household through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us—not primarily to the ordained by the Spirit moving in ordination, but primarily to the entire household of faith by the Spirit moving in baptism.
And like the first apostles, Brooke, you will receive the preposterous mandate to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons—and as you try to lift a finger to attempt any of this, the memory of hands laid on you this afternoon will remind you that the preposterous mandate is given to the whole Church, not you alone, or your congregation alone.
Like the first apostles, those who are ordained today are sent out as sheep, meaning that the gifts they bring are in their flesh as well as in their spirit (isn’t a sheep worth its weight in what it produces through its very being, the wool, the meat?), but are also wise enough to know when to be perfectly still and deeply observant, like a snake, and when to just coo and hang around, innocent as a dove.
As rich as these readings are for a day of ordination, I find that the collect today says, clearly and simply, what an ordained pastor does. She helps God keep holy the people of God by consistently turning and returning their common life to the steadfast faith and love of God, so that they are saved from too many lesser pursuits than proclaiming God’s truth with boldness and ministering God’s justice with compassion, the central work and joy of every baptized person.
Collect for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost
"Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love, that through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness, and minister your justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen."
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Are You Busy-- or Free?
(The readings referred-to here are Genesis 12:1-9, Romans 4:13-25, and Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26.)
I’m trying to picture that tax booth Matthew sat in. I’m seeing Lucy’s little makeshift booth in “Peanuts”, with her hand-lettered sign, “The Doctor is in”… The tax collector is in.
But “excluded” is what he really was, written off by his neighbors for collaborating with the imperial tax office, the folks who sucked them dry. There he sat, inside his cage, a bird kept by the emperor’s people to keep singing the song, “Pay your taxes on time!” Yet in the wider community around him, this bird did not fly.
Not until this moment we witness, when Jesus walks along and sees the man, Matthew, ands calls to him, “Follow me.”
In the iconography of early times, Matthew is represented by the ox. There he is, in the upper right quadrant of the cluster of four evangelists, painted on our altar. So let’s not call him a bird. He’s a beast of burden, and he has just swapped his burdens. From today he is yoked to the God of mercy whom he has met in Jesus of Nazareth. And he will do his part to help pull the human race out of its ditches and set them onto the road to freedom.
Who else is trapped, boxed-in, and caged in our Gospel today? A woman who has had a flow of blood for twelve years. By the laws in the Book of Leviticus, she was to be shunned by society. She couldn’t be touched, nor could she touch anyone, without spreading ritual uncleanness. That’s where there is magical thinking in her story, not her believing that she could be made well, but society’s fearing her touch.
“If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well,” she says to herself. She wasn’t the only person to believe this. At chapter 14, verse 36 in Matthew’s Gospel we find the sick residents of Gennesaret begging Jesus “that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.”
St. Mark tells the story of this same woman. Some of the details are identical (she has suffered for twelve years in both versions), but Mark’s story is fuller. She has spent all that she had seeking a cure, and has endured much at the hands of many physicians, says Mark.
More interesting is how Mark describes Jesus’s experience of her touch. Both evangelists say that she came up behind him. Twelve years of being rebuffed, scolded, and recoiled from have left their mark on her. It’s what happens next that’s different in Mark.
Matthew’s Jesus turns to her, sees her, and says, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.”
Mark says, “Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’ He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well: go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’”
Matthew and Mark agree: this woman has nothing to fear in Jesus. Both remember that his first words to her include calling her “daughter”, for he sees and respects her dignity as a child of God, a fact forgotten and denied by her culture.
But Mark dramatizes this moment of touch. Is it because he has a great crowd surrounding Jesus, while Matthew reports that only his disciples and one or two others witnessed this healing?
Mark’s Jesus seems to speak to the crowd, for the sake of the crowd, and I am in that crowd; perhaps you are, too. As he looks around, asking who has touched him, it isn’t to imply that no one should touch him: it’s to encourage each of us to come out of his or her tight boundaries and stand before him, open to him face on.
I need to hear that. You, too?
When I’m too busy to pray, too busy to renew a friendship, so busy that I talk myself into driving a short distance I could walk and be the better for it; when I’m filling my calendar enough that I am failing to kneel in the garden or dance into a day without appointments, and when work or worries claim my attention so there’s no more attention to share with my nearest and dearest, then I am just as hemmed in as Matthew or this nameless woman.
And when I realize it, my first instinct is to reach for the fringes of my faith and sort of sneak up on Jesus, you know, touch base with him-- and then get busy again. I know I’m not alone in this… am I?
I mean, we come to church for Word and sacrament. We at least brush up against spiritual community, the Spirit herself bearing witness with our spirits that life is for more than work, life is (as we heard one recent Sunday) more than clothing and the price of gasoline. We catch good messages like this. They invite us to acknowledge the heart of faith, that God desires mercy and not sacrifice, that God’s promise rests on grace. We have heard these very words in today’s scriptures.
But from inside my cubicle, I really relate to this woman who sneaks up on Jesus and satisfies herself with the fringe.
And he invites us around to the front, for some face to face time. The way Mark puts it, this woman steps out from the crowd, and certainly out of her comfort zone, falls down before Jesus, and tells him the whole truth.
That is prayer. I cannot even brush up against the fringe of these readings today and not hear him inviting me to pray. Can you?
And my telling him the truth, a good place to start, is not where we’ll end. If I stay open, if I don’t slip back into the crowd too soon, he’ll tell me more of the whole truth than I could hear in any other way than to be still with him.
I’ll be reminded that the promise does rest on grace. That God desires mercy. But also that the God of Abraham and Sarah calls to mission those who are open to hear, which is to say that prayer may be unsettling, which may help explain human resistance to prayer.
But I need unsettling, if that is another name for the freeing that is felt wherever the Gospel of Jesus Christ is heard. Matthew from his booth, the woman from her illness and isolation, Abraham and Sarah from the settled boundaries of their homeland and tribe. You and me from the confines and compulsions of work or worry or whatever may be boxing us in.
And the world could use some unsettling, if that is how all the families of the earth shall be blessed by freedom. What most needs unsettling is suggested by that Genesis reading today. Israel tells the story of Abraham and Sarah as the story of Israel gaining a homeland. But there’s that pesky verse, “At that time the Canaanites were in the land.” The children of Israel and the children of those Canaanites have yet to settle boundaries in that part of our world. What most needs unsettling is the human addiction to owning without sharing.
Let’s help that along by welcoming God’s unsettling our human addiction to being busy without praying. Let’s hear the call of God to come out of our little cubicles of busy-ness, our workstations, our calendars, and our tunnel vision—for some face to face time with God. From that we will be blessed, and will be a blessing to the world.
I’m trying to picture that tax booth Matthew sat in. I’m seeing Lucy’s little makeshift booth in “Peanuts”, with her hand-lettered sign, “The Doctor is in”… The tax collector is in.
But “excluded” is what he really was, written off by his neighbors for collaborating with the imperial tax office, the folks who sucked them dry. There he sat, inside his cage, a bird kept by the emperor’s people to keep singing the song, “Pay your taxes on time!” Yet in the wider community around him, this bird did not fly.
Not until this moment we witness, when Jesus walks along and sees the man, Matthew, ands calls to him, “Follow me.”
In the iconography of early times, Matthew is represented by the ox. There he is, in the upper right quadrant of the cluster of four evangelists, painted on our altar. So let’s not call him a bird. He’s a beast of burden, and he has just swapped his burdens. From today he is yoked to the God of mercy whom he has met in Jesus of Nazareth. And he will do his part to help pull the human race out of its ditches and set them onto the road to freedom.
Who else is trapped, boxed-in, and caged in our Gospel today? A woman who has had a flow of blood for twelve years. By the laws in the Book of Leviticus, she was to be shunned by society. She couldn’t be touched, nor could she touch anyone, without spreading ritual uncleanness. That’s where there is magical thinking in her story, not her believing that she could be made well, but society’s fearing her touch.
“If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well,” she says to herself. She wasn’t the only person to believe this. At chapter 14, verse 36 in Matthew’s Gospel we find the sick residents of Gennesaret begging Jesus “that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.”
St. Mark tells the story of this same woman. Some of the details are identical (she has suffered for twelve years in both versions), but Mark’s story is fuller. She has spent all that she had seeking a cure, and has endured much at the hands of many physicians, says Mark.
More interesting is how Mark describes Jesus’s experience of her touch. Both evangelists say that she came up behind him. Twelve years of being rebuffed, scolded, and recoiled from have left their mark on her. It’s what happens next that’s different in Mark.
Matthew’s Jesus turns to her, sees her, and says, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.”
Mark says, “Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’ He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well: go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’”
Matthew and Mark agree: this woman has nothing to fear in Jesus. Both remember that his first words to her include calling her “daughter”, for he sees and respects her dignity as a child of God, a fact forgotten and denied by her culture.
But Mark dramatizes this moment of touch. Is it because he has a great crowd surrounding Jesus, while Matthew reports that only his disciples and one or two others witnessed this healing?
Mark’s Jesus seems to speak to the crowd, for the sake of the crowd, and I am in that crowd; perhaps you are, too. As he looks around, asking who has touched him, it isn’t to imply that no one should touch him: it’s to encourage each of us to come out of his or her tight boundaries and stand before him, open to him face on.
I need to hear that. You, too?
When I’m too busy to pray, too busy to renew a friendship, so busy that I talk myself into driving a short distance I could walk and be the better for it; when I’m filling my calendar enough that I am failing to kneel in the garden or dance into a day without appointments, and when work or worries claim my attention so there’s no more attention to share with my nearest and dearest, then I am just as hemmed in as Matthew or this nameless woman.
And when I realize it, my first instinct is to reach for the fringes of my faith and sort of sneak up on Jesus, you know, touch base with him-- and then get busy again. I know I’m not alone in this… am I?
I mean, we come to church for Word and sacrament. We at least brush up against spiritual community, the Spirit herself bearing witness with our spirits that life is for more than work, life is (as we heard one recent Sunday) more than clothing and the price of gasoline. We catch good messages like this. They invite us to acknowledge the heart of faith, that God desires mercy and not sacrifice, that God’s promise rests on grace. We have heard these very words in today’s scriptures.
But from inside my cubicle, I really relate to this woman who sneaks up on Jesus and satisfies herself with the fringe.
And he invites us around to the front, for some face to face time. The way Mark puts it, this woman steps out from the crowd, and certainly out of her comfort zone, falls down before Jesus, and tells him the whole truth.
That is prayer. I cannot even brush up against the fringe of these readings today and not hear him inviting me to pray. Can you?
And my telling him the truth, a good place to start, is not where we’ll end. If I stay open, if I don’t slip back into the crowd too soon, he’ll tell me more of the whole truth than I could hear in any other way than to be still with him.
I’ll be reminded that the promise does rest on grace. That God desires mercy. But also that the God of Abraham and Sarah calls to mission those who are open to hear, which is to say that prayer may be unsettling, which may help explain human resistance to prayer.
But I need unsettling, if that is another name for the freeing that is felt wherever the Gospel of Jesus Christ is heard. Matthew from his booth, the woman from her illness and isolation, Abraham and Sarah from the settled boundaries of their homeland and tribe. You and me from the confines and compulsions of work or worry or whatever may be boxing us in.
And the world could use some unsettling, if that is how all the families of the earth shall be blessed by freedom. What most needs unsettling is suggested by that Genesis reading today. Israel tells the story of Abraham and Sarah as the story of Israel gaining a homeland. But there’s that pesky verse, “At that time the Canaanites were in the land.” The children of Israel and the children of those Canaanites have yet to settle boundaries in that part of our world. What most needs unsettling is the human addiction to owning without sharing.
Let’s help that along by welcoming God’s unsettling our human addiction to being busy without praying. Let’s hear the call of God to come out of our little cubicles of busy-ness, our workstations, our calendars, and our tunnel vision—for some face to face time with God. From that we will be blessed, and will be a blessing to the world.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Act with Authority
Jesus said, "Not everyone who says to me, `Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, `Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?' Then I will declare to them, `I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.'
"Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell-- and great was its fall!"
Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.
Matthew 7:21-29
What is this authority that people sense in our Lord’s teaching? We’re told it’s unlike what we get from our scribes. I’m assuming that scribes are teachers who have an investment to protect, and whose allegiance therefore is not to God or to the people, but to the institution upon which their livelihood depends. They are retainers, hired hands who do not care, role-players who are not invested in what they teach or in whom they teach.
So let’s venture the obvious answer, that Jesus’s authority is his honest care for the truth, for God, and for the people. He shows this care in the very illustration he uses today: a wise man who builds his house upon rock, and a foolish man who builds his house on sand.
He makes it easy for his hearers to care along with him, to care for the truth and for God and for themselves: Who among us does not care for the house in which he or she lives? As we hear over and again in this cloudy season in the housing market, one’s home is often one’s primary asset. More personally, it is also a sanctuary of renewal for repeated return to the world and its demands.
He uses a similar image at another famous moment in his teaching, when he reaches for language to speak of eternal life: “In my father’s house are many dwelling places… I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am there you may be also.”
You recall that he introduces that promise with the invitation, “Believe in God, believe also in me.”
On the basis of his teaching today, we might hear him adding to his invitation “Believe in God, believe in me” a third bidding, “Believe in your own power to choose, to trust, and to act.”
More specifically, he says “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man…” What words of his does he mean?
That’s the biblical call to examine the context. Too often, we settle for hearing snippets of the Bible taken out of context. If more scripture were read within its context, fewer theological and ecclesiastical houses would be built upon sand, more upon rock.
So backspace from chapter 7:21-29 in Matthew’s Gospel and you have in chapters 5, 6, and early 7 the Sermon on the Mount, the quintessential message of Jesus. Among the words of Jesus we’re invited to act on are these:
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
“When you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”
“If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.”
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good…”
What is this authority that Jesus shows in his teaching? Heaven knows, it isn’t the authority of logic or of custom. It is that he cares about each of us and all of us, pushing “us” to embrace all the globe, and by that love invites us to care for self and neighbor and community as one cares for his or her own home. This house he wants us to build on rock, our own house that he cares to help us get in order, is the network of trust that constantly builds and repairs relationship, the knowing and loving that Jesus finds missing when we pour our effort into pious public show—“Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?”—but do not care to know and love and trust, do not take the risk of acting today as if we belong to the kingdom of heaven and have the authority of Jesus, for we do.
"Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell-- and great was its fall!"
Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.
Matthew 7:21-29
What is this authority that people sense in our Lord’s teaching? We’re told it’s unlike what we get from our scribes. I’m assuming that scribes are teachers who have an investment to protect, and whose allegiance therefore is not to God or to the people, but to the institution upon which their livelihood depends. They are retainers, hired hands who do not care, role-players who are not invested in what they teach or in whom they teach.
So let’s venture the obvious answer, that Jesus’s authority is his honest care for the truth, for God, and for the people. He shows this care in the very illustration he uses today: a wise man who builds his house upon rock, and a foolish man who builds his house on sand.
He makes it easy for his hearers to care along with him, to care for the truth and for God and for themselves: Who among us does not care for the house in which he or she lives? As we hear over and again in this cloudy season in the housing market, one’s home is often one’s primary asset. More personally, it is also a sanctuary of renewal for repeated return to the world and its demands.
He uses a similar image at another famous moment in his teaching, when he reaches for language to speak of eternal life: “In my father’s house are many dwelling places… I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am there you may be also.”
You recall that he introduces that promise with the invitation, “Believe in God, believe also in me.”
On the basis of his teaching today, we might hear him adding to his invitation “Believe in God, believe in me” a third bidding, “Believe in your own power to choose, to trust, and to act.”
More specifically, he says “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man…” What words of his does he mean?
That’s the biblical call to examine the context. Too often, we settle for hearing snippets of the Bible taken out of context. If more scripture were read within its context, fewer theological and ecclesiastical houses would be built upon sand, more upon rock.
So backspace from chapter 7:21-29 in Matthew’s Gospel and you have in chapters 5, 6, and early 7 the Sermon on the Mount, the quintessential message of Jesus. Among the words of Jesus we’re invited to act on are these:
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
“When you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”
“If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.”
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good…”
What is this authority that Jesus shows in his teaching? Heaven knows, it isn’t the authority of logic or of custom. It is that he cares about each of us and all of us, pushing “us” to embrace all the globe, and by that love invites us to care for self and neighbor and community as one cares for his or her own home. This house he wants us to build on rock, our own house that he cares to help us get in order, is the network of trust that constantly builds and repairs relationship, the knowing and loving that Jesus finds missing when we pour our effort into pious public show—“Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?”—but do not care to know and love and trust, do not take the risk of acting today as if we belong to the kingdom of heaven and have the authority of Jesus, for we do.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Earthquake in China: God Taking Over the Ruin
“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
At various times across the year, I’ll hear a Gospel and will also hear laughter in the background. This is one. The kind of humor it strikes is dark, or perhaps sympathetic—the chuckle under the breath that says, “Yes, isn’t that the truth?”
And if humor is struck, it’s rather like striking a match: it happens as one hard subject strikes against another. With wonder we see the sparks fly and what we laugh at may be ourselves, the weighty part of our own soul’s baggage that we have to drop in order to catch truth and light and love as they erupt. Here it’s anxiety bumping up against faith and its imperative: “But strive first for the rule of God and God’s right values on earth…” When beleaguered anxiety collides with faith like that, when the soul is summoned out of despond and into mission, we can laugh at the proverb about today’s trouble being enough for today because we are reminded that today’s grace will also be enough for today’s responsibilities.
But there’s nothing to laugh about in this week’s news from so many places: China, Myanmar, and the Tornado Alleys across the midsection of our own country. For these children of God, a day’s trouble is too much for one day, even for one lifetime.
There is something called disaster fatigue, a form of denial that distances its victim from taking in the enormity of someone else’s disaster, because it comes right on the heels of someone else’s tragedy, and it has been enough of a downer to hear about that one. Depending on what kind of day we’re having, it probably happens to all of us, this refusal to read anything more on the subject… today. Perhaps we even excuse ourselves with that verse of our psalm, “I do not occupy myself with great matters, or with things that are too hard for me.”
I do believe that disaster fatigue does enough collateral damage that we should consider ourselves its victims, because it’s our own humanity that may get lost in the shuffle as we skip those pages in The Eagle, The Times, or The Globe. If I’m not reading about China, eight or nine days into their national disaster, or about Myanmar as the fist of that nation’s junta finally opens, then I may miss the inspirations that come as the truest victims of cyclone and earthquake, and their helpers, reveal the beauty and power of their humanity.
The only people I know in China are Ling Ling Qi and her husband, Yiqiang Qi. She teaches opera; he is an art historian who spent a year here as a visiting fellow at The Clark. You can tell that they don’t live in a rural village. During their time here, Ling Ling worshiped with us. We’ve kept in touch ever since. Replying to my email after the earthquake, she assured me she is all right, her husband is traveling, and their daughter Shu Shu is still studying in Europe. Ling Ling wrote, in her own words, "But thank God, it is the first time for me to see that the determination of the whole country being holding together to conquer the difficulties, and Love that God created for the people show its power. I am sure He will take over the ruin for us and people will knowing God one day."
"God taking over the ruin…"-- what a phrase! The God Ling Ling knows and loves is Isaiah’s God who has inscribed her and all other children of God on the palms of his hands. When they suffer, the compassion of God will meet them because their suffering is felt by God, instantly and intensely, as a woman shows compassion for the child of her womb.
Think of all the hands of rescuers picking at rubble, sometimes finding and freeing people trapped beneath debris, think of those as the hands of God bearing the imprint of her children, and the voices of those rescuers giving voice to God as they say “to the prisoners, ‘Come out,’ to those who are in darkness, ‘Show yourselves.’” Ling Ling’s God takes over the ruin much as Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, the mound of Jesus’s crucifixion, was taken over by redeeming love after the powers of this world had done their worst to the peasant prophet from Nazareth. It is what redeeming love did there that causes Ling Ling to say, “I am sure He will take over the ruin for us and people will knowing God one day.”
More than 50,000 people dead, over 60,000 hospitalized, countless more wounded, millions traumatized by three minutes of absolute terror and more than three hundred aftershocks. Hundreds of dams cracked, rivers diverted by the collapse of cliffs and hillsides. Four million homes destroyed, two hundred thousand public buildings in rubble, seven thousand of them schools, too many in session, some with as many as nine hundred or a thousand students inside.
Does God cause such ruin? That seems an uncivilized question to ask, doesn’t it? This question rattled Europe in 1755, when the greatest earthquake ever to hit Western Europe destroyed much of the city of Lisbon, killing 100,000. This was a watershed moment for western civilization, not unlike the Holocaust in the twentieth century, the acid test for all kinds of thinking. Enlightened thinking had been steering philosophy and theology in that century, but when this happened the tombs opened and countless voices explained the earthquake as God’s will.
Those same graves creak open today, as certain evangelical preachers have their way explaining disasters, both the natural kind and the manmade varieties, as being caused by the will of God. You know that “evangel” means “good news”, and we all know it’s hard to find much of that in tragic times, but I find no good news in blaming God for the fact that beneath the crust of the earth India and China are in constant collision, or that cyclones and hurricanes, barreling into deltas laid bare by decades of deforestation, should engulf and drown the poor who live where they live because they are poor and because their governments do not care.
Those who explain the unexplainable as God’s responsibility would do well to meditate on our reading from St. Paul today: “Do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.”
This does not excuse us from determining the purposes of our hearts. Here we are, kvetching about the price of gasoline and a 6% rise in the cost of hot dogs. That deserves to collide with the imperative of our mission, clearly put today by our Lord and Savior, the peasant teacher from Nazareth: “I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”
That is a much harder question to answer today in China and Myanmar. Whatever our own state of sticker shock, we are clothed and fed. They are not.
For two weeks, Raile’s Bowl has received gifts for emergency relief in Burma. Nearly $500 was gathered and routed to a Burmese healthcare organization which has its own people on the ground there.
Now we turn Raile’s Bowl towards China. Episcopal Relief and Development is using the Amity Foundation as its hands and feet in China. The Amity Foundation, an independent Chinese organization, was created in 1985 on the initiative of Chinese Christians to promote education, social services, health care, and rural development from China’s coastal provinces in the east to the minority areas of the west.
In an email written last Sunday, as China began a three-day period of national mourning, Amity’s staff announced their decision to focus relief work in certain rural areas of Sichuan Province. From their assessment, emergency relief was flowing to mainly urban areas. Outlying rural areas have not received much attention. With funding from Episcopal Relief and Development, and from ecumenical Church World Service, Amity is distributing rice, plastic sheeting, and quilts.
And volunteers. One, Ms. Liu Xiaofang, has traveled by train to Chengdu as Amity’s first counseling volunteer. Ms.Liu lost her son to blood cancer ten years ago when he was five. She reports that, having been helped abundantly and blessed by warm-hearted people, she has been waiting for an opportunity to pay back that debt. Now is her time.
Let’s make sure she does not go empty-handed.
At various times across the year, I’ll hear a Gospel and will also hear laughter in the background. This is one. The kind of humor it strikes is dark, or perhaps sympathetic—the chuckle under the breath that says, “Yes, isn’t that the truth?”
And if humor is struck, it’s rather like striking a match: it happens as one hard subject strikes against another. With wonder we see the sparks fly and what we laugh at may be ourselves, the weighty part of our own soul’s baggage that we have to drop in order to catch truth and light and love as they erupt. Here it’s anxiety bumping up against faith and its imperative: “But strive first for the rule of God and God’s right values on earth…” When beleaguered anxiety collides with faith like that, when the soul is summoned out of despond and into mission, we can laugh at the proverb about today’s trouble being enough for today because we are reminded that today’s grace will also be enough for today’s responsibilities.
But there’s nothing to laugh about in this week’s news from so many places: China, Myanmar, and the Tornado Alleys across the midsection of our own country. For these children of God, a day’s trouble is too much for one day, even for one lifetime.
There is something called disaster fatigue, a form of denial that distances its victim from taking in the enormity of someone else’s disaster, because it comes right on the heels of someone else’s tragedy, and it has been enough of a downer to hear about that one. Depending on what kind of day we’re having, it probably happens to all of us, this refusal to read anything more on the subject… today. Perhaps we even excuse ourselves with that verse of our psalm, “I do not occupy myself with great matters, or with things that are too hard for me.”
I do believe that disaster fatigue does enough collateral damage that we should consider ourselves its victims, because it’s our own humanity that may get lost in the shuffle as we skip those pages in The Eagle, The Times, or The Globe. If I’m not reading about China, eight or nine days into their national disaster, or about Myanmar as the fist of that nation’s junta finally opens, then I may miss the inspirations that come as the truest victims of cyclone and earthquake, and their helpers, reveal the beauty and power of their humanity.
The only people I know in China are Ling Ling Qi and her husband, Yiqiang Qi. She teaches opera; he is an art historian who spent a year here as a visiting fellow at The Clark. You can tell that they don’t live in a rural village. During their time here, Ling Ling worshiped with us. We’ve kept in touch ever since. Replying to my email after the earthquake, she assured me she is all right, her husband is traveling, and their daughter Shu Shu is still studying in Europe. Ling Ling wrote, in her own words, "But thank God, it is the first time for me to see that the determination of the whole country being holding together to conquer the difficulties, and Love that God created for the people show its power. I am sure He will take over the ruin for us and people will knowing God one day."
"God taking over the ruin…"-- what a phrase! The God Ling Ling knows and loves is Isaiah’s God who has inscribed her and all other children of God on the palms of his hands. When they suffer, the compassion of God will meet them because their suffering is felt by God, instantly and intensely, as a woman shows compassion for the child of her womb.
Think of all the hands of rescuers picking at rubble, sometimes finding and freeing people trapped beneath debris, think of those as the hands of God bearing the imprint of her children, and the voices of those rescuers giving voice to God as they say “to the prisoners, ‘Come out,’ to those who are in darkness, ‘Show yourselves.’” Ling Ling’s God takes over the ruin much as Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, the mound of Jesus’s crucifixion, was taken over by redeeming love after the powers of this world had done their worst to the peasant prophet from Nazareth. It is what redeeming love did there that causes Ling Ling to say, “I am sure He will take over the ruin for us and people will knowing God one day.”
More than 50,000 people dead, over 60,000 hospitalized, countless more wounded, millions traumatized by three minutes of absolute terror and more than three hundred aftershocks. Hundreds of dams cracked, rivers diverted by the collapse of cliffs and hillsides. Four million homes destroyed, two hundred thousand public buildings in rubble, seven thousand of them schools, too many in session, some with as many as nine hundred or a thousand students inside.
Does God cause such ruin? That seems an uncivilized question to ask, doesn’t it? This question rattled Europe in 1755, when the greatest earthquake ever to hit Western Europe destroyed much of the city of Lisbon, killing 100,000. This was a watershed moment for western civilization, not unlike the Holocaust in the twentieth century, the acid test for all kinds of thinking. Enlightened thinking had been steering philosophy and theology in that century, but when this happened the tombs opened and countless voices explained the earthquake as God’s will.
Those same graves creak open today, as certain evangelical preachers have their way explaining disasters, both the natural kind and the manmade varieties, as being caused by the will of God. You know that “evangel” means “good news”, and we all know it’s hard to find much of that in tragic times, but I find no good news in blaming God for the fact that beneath the crust of the earth India and China are in constant collision, or that cyclones and hurricanes, barreling into deltas laid bare by decades of deforestation, should engulf and drown the poor who live where they live because they are poor and because their governments do not care.
Those who explain the unexplainable as God’s responsibility would do well to meditate on our reading from St. Paul today: “Do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.”
This does not excuse us from determining the purposes of our hearts. Here we are, kvetching about the price of gasoline and a 6% rise in the cost of hot dogs. That deserves to collide with the imperative of our mission, clearly put today by our Lord and Savior, the peasant teacher from Nazareth: “I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”
That is a much harder question to answer today in China and Myanmar. Whatever our own state of sticker shock, we are clothed and fed. They are not.
For two weeks, Raile’s Bowl has received gifts for emergency relief in Burma. Nearly $500 was gathered and routed to a Burmese healthcare organization which has its own people on the ground there.
Now we turn Raile’s Bowl towards China. Episcopal Relief and Development is using the Amity Foundation as its hands and feet in China. The Amity Foundation, an independent Chinese organization, was created in 1985 on the initiative of Chinese Christians to promote education, social services, health care, and rural development from China’s coastal provinces in the east to the minority areas of the west.
In an email written last Sunday, as China began a three-day period of national mourning, Amity’s staff announced their decision to focus relief work in certain rural areas of Sichuan Province. From their assessment, emergency relief was flowing to mainly urban areas. Outlying rural areas have not received much attention. With funding from Episcopal Relief and Development, and from ecumenical Church World Service, Amity is distributing rice, plastic sheeting, and quilts.
And volunteers. One, Ms. Liu Xiaofang, has traveled by train to Chengdu as Amity’s first counseling volunteer. Ms.Liu lost her son to blood cancer ten years ago when he was five. She reports that, having been helped abundantly and blessed by warm-hearted people, she has been waiting for an opportunity to pay back that debt. Now is her time.
Let’s make sure she does not go empty-handed.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Seven Reasons Why I'm an Episcopalian
Readings for the Day of Pentecost are Acts 2:1-21, I Corinthians 12:3b-13, and John 20:19-23.
I want to thank our Gospel readers today. Christopher, father of Ben, our baptismal candidate, read in Latin, a language he will teach here at Williams next year, a language his wife Amanda teaches at Williams, as well. Elizabeth read in Shona, one of three official languages in her homeland, Zimbabwe. And Elvy read in svenska, Swedish, her native tongue.
We think of language as being a function of the mind. But the human heart also moves to language beyond words, and Mothers’ Day invites us to celebrate dimensions of love communicated to us through the mothers we know. In relationship with them, in struggle with them, our ability to speak love has been shaped and influenced. By taking part in a baptism today, we may catch the ways, the images, the language by which the mothering love of God is expressed.
“In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power,” marveled the international pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem, hearing the Galilean apostles. Unlike our readers today, those apostles were not learned people. Like those pilgrims, however, we affirm these languages as ours because they are among the many that belong to members of this congregation. When our neighbors in these pews join the psalmist in praying, “May these words of mine please you,” those words may not be in English, but in Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, German, Japanese. This is a good day to acknowledge that when we meet here for worship, we meet at a crossroads as did those pilgrims in international Jerusalem.
I met with a band of pilgrims here, Wednesday morning, about two dozen adult students in the Osher Life-long Learning Institute, headquartered at Berkshire Community College. County residents come together to pursue whatever interests them, and for this bunch it was applied religion. Six North County pastors, including our local rabbi, were invited to lecture, each describing the origins, development, and practice of his or her religious tradition. On Wednesday they came here, and I was their lecturer.
And they were my questioners. I’ll guess that between a quarter and a third of them were Jewish. Only a couple of them had ever been in this building before. I believe that most came from central and south Berkshire County. That this course was centered on the North County may have been due to the fact that the Wednesday afternoon course this term is at the Clark.
In preparing for this, I couldn’t imagine at first speaking for a whole hour as requested—I’m trained to speak for thirteen minutes-- but once into it, my cup ran over and I had to drain it off. My audience members also shortened it with their eagerness to ask questions, but as we neared the final ten minutes I asked if they wouldn’t mind if I ended with a portion I hadn’t gotten to and really wanted to, a section I’d called Seven Reasons Why I’m an Episcopalian. If you get the sense that you’re about to hear them, you’re right.
Reason #1: Bobby Ouelette. I was eleven or twelve, and my good friend Bobby was enrolled by his parents in the vacation Bible school at our local Episcopal Church. He told me that if he had to go, then I had to go. I loved it. I wasn’t born into this tradition. I’m an Episcopalian because I was brought into the community of a church with a very active youth ministry. I wasn’t yet a teenager, but I was treated as a living member of the Body of Christ with valuable work to do for him, and I was expected and helped to find it. And I’m an Episcopalian because in college, another crossroads time in my life, I sought and found a fellowship of Word and sacrament and friendship and service both on campus through its chapel ministry, and off-campus through the nearest Episcopal church where I met the woman whom I married. She’s the cradle Episcopalian, not me. What I found in her, in her family, and in her congregation made me all the more certain I was in the church where I belonged.
Reason # 2: Consistently, in every community I’ve belonged to in the Episcopal Church, I’ve been encouraged to take the Bible honestly—to let it pry me open and then pour out on me the good news that I am not the captain of my salvation but Jesus Christ is, and holds me, as he holds you, in eternal love. The Episcopal Church has encouraged me to take the Bible honestly, seriously, joyously, without requiring that I take it literally when to take it literally misses the point of God’s love. The Anglican way is one of vigorous thinking and curiosity, encouraging an informed and imaginative reading of the Bible. I’m a student of literature, and am grateful for a church that urges me to be fearless about the contradictions and moral tempests I find in the Bible, which aren’t to be explained away but to be heard, worked with, and understood. One of the best things my church did for me in my early teens was to urge me to read the Gospels and meet the Jesus of Matthew, of Mark, and Luke and John. As you come to know the Word made flesh, all other words can be judged in his light, the keepers kept and the baggage of the past left in the baggage room.
Reason 3: Year by year, I’ve grown more grateful for a tradition that values individual conscience, puts into my hands and yours responsibility to respond to the One by whose love we are rescued and redeemed. That responsibility is a keen Reformation commitment, an intently Protestant attitude. Yet what the Episcopal Church has put into our hands is the catholic heritage handed on by the apostles, the endlessly rich resources of sacrament and community, all under the authority of the risen Christ who has poured out his Spirit so liberally. His ministry is entrusted to each believer, each having some essential role to play in the whole priesthood of believers, because the Spirit has been given in a rainbow of manifestations, gifts, passions for the common good of the world.
Reason #4: In order to get the full wonder of God’s love for the full human race, and in order to praise God for this wonder, I need and enjoy color, beauty, variety, experimentation in music, message, art, and movement. I belong to a church that values all of these in the service of worship and faith formation. I admire in the Episcopal tradition its openness to the eclectic, the international, the inspirational, and the edgy.
Reason 5: Anglican theology has me hooked. Not because it’s a neat ordering of all the answers to all my questions—it isn’t—but because of its attitude, its insistence on being rooted in God’s action in the world, not just God’s action in the church. 19th-Century theologian Charles Gore summed this up: “The real development of theology is… the process in which the Church, standing firm in her old truths, enters into the apprehension of the new social and intellectual movements of each age: and because ‘the truth makes her free,’ is able to assimilate all new material, to welcome and give its place to all new knowledge, to throw herself into the sanctification of each new social order, bringing forth out of her treasures things new and old, and showing again and again her power of witnessing under changed conditions to the catholic capacity of her faith and life.”
Reason #6 comes clearer to me, the older I get. I am able to be an Episcopalian because in Anglicanism there’s a long history of respect for science. The scientific enlightenment that swept through Europe in the 19th century had a special haven in the many English rural parsonages where vicars proved themselves to be darned good amateur botanists and students of nature. Nothing in our approach to scripture and tradition throws evolution into question. What makes reasonable sense within human experience need not be contradictory to scripture and tradition.
My seventh reason is that the Episcopal Church remembers, often enough, that it is the earthen vessel, the clay jar, and that the treasure within belongs to God, indeed the truest treasure is God. Like every denomination, we can get enormously wrapped up in our own preoccupations and take ourselves too seriously. But I admire about our church its sense of being not a finished product, but a work in progress. Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey said about Anglicanism: “Its credentials are its incompleteness, with the tension and travail in its soul. It is clumsy and untidy, it baffles neatness and logic. For it is sent not to commend itself as ‘the best type of Christianity,’ but by its very brokennesss to point to the universal Church…” In other words, to point beyond itself to something far greater than itself. And I recall the Dean of my seminary addressing us seniors before our graduation, to this effect: “The Episcopal Church is often called a ‘bridge church’ because it is both catholic and protestant. If we do our job and help God build that bridge, we should put ourselves out of business.”
I had barely said those words when Norm, in the front pew, said, “But that presupposes that each side of the divide cooperates—will that be true?”
I told him that I am not qualified to answer for any other tradition. But I can pray. And in that praying I will be reminded that the work of reconciliation in the world is God’s work. Which means that it is ours to do, by the grace we are given.
Very much in-business yesterday in my neighborhood were members of Bible Baptist Church. I was at the back door of my garage when at the open front door appeared a fellow in his forties, two little boys about seven and nine, and behind them an older man. The first fellow explained that they had for me a packet of information, but first he wanted to ask if I’m already settled in a church.
I assured him I am, and with that they turned and left, without leaving the packet of information. “Keep up the good work!” I called out to them, sincerely.
I’m impressed by how they were honoring what Pentecost is about. I suspect that their reasons for being Baptists would have some differences from the list I’ve shared with you today. They would have been quite willing to share their reasons with people they’ve never met. Their church will grow from that willingness.
This church of ours will grow, if we are willing to share our reasons with people we do know, people who aren’t settled in a church of their own. May the Spirit of God free that willingness in us.
I want to thank our Gospel readers today. Christopher, father of Ben, our baptismal candidate, read in Latin, a language he will teach here at Williams next year, a language his wife Amanda teaches at Williams, as well. Elizabeth read in Shona, one of three official languages in her homeland, Zimbabwe. And Elvy read in svenska, Swedish, her native tongue.
We think of language as being a function of the mind. But the human heart also moves to language beyond words, and Mothers’ Day invites us to celebrate dimensions of love communicated to us through the mothers we know. In relationship with them, in struggle with them, our ability to speak love has been shaped and influenced. By taking part in a baptism today, we may catch the ways, the images, the language by which the mothering love of God is expressed.
“In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power,” marveled the international pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem, hearing the Galilean apostles. Unlike our readers today, those apostles were not learned people. Like those pilgrims, however, we affirm these languages as ours because they are among the many that belong to members of this congregation. When our neighbors in these pews join the psalmist in praying, “May these words of mine please you,” those words may not be in English, but in Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, German, Japanese. This is a good day to acknowledge that when we meet here for worship, we meet at a crossroads as did those pilgrims in international Jerusalem.
I met with a band of pilgrims here, Wednesday morning, about two dozen adult students in the Osher Life-long Learning Institute, headquartered at Berkshire Community College. County residents come together to pursue whatever interests them, and for this bunch it was applied religion. Six North County pastors, including our local rabbi, were invited to lecture, each describing the origins, development, and practice of his or her religious tradition. On Wednesday they came here, and I was their lecturer.
And they were my questioners. I’ll guess that between a quarter and a third of them were Jewish. Only a couple of them had ever been in this building before. I believe that most came from central and south Berkshire County. That this course was centered on the North County may have been due to the fact that the Wednesday afternoon course this term is at the Clark.
In preparing for this, I couldn’t imagine at first speaking for a whole hour as requested—I’m trained to speak for thirteen minutes-- but once into it, my cup ran over and I had to drain it off. My audience members also shortened it with their eagerness to ask questions, but as we neared the final ten minutes I asked if they wouldn’t mind if I ended with a portion I hadn’t gotten to and really wanted to, a section I’d called Seven Reasons Why I’m an Episcopalian. If you get the sense that you’re about to hear them, you’re right.
Reason #1: Bobby Ouelette. I was eleven or twelve, and my good friend Bobby was enrolled by his parents in the vacation Bible school at our local Episcopal Church. He told me that if he had to go, then I had to go. I loved it. I wasn’t born into this tradition. I’m an Episcopalian because I was brought into the community of a church with a very active youth ministry. I wasn’t yet a teenager, but I was treated as a living member of the Body of Christ with valuable work to do for him, and I was expected and helped to find it. And I’m an Episcopalian because in college, another crossroads time in my life, I sought and found a fellowship of Word and sacrament and friendship and service both on campus through its chapel ministry, and off-campus through the nearest Episcopal church where I met the woman whom I married. She’s the cradle Episcopalian, not me. What I found in her, in her family, and in her congregation made me all the more certain I was in the church where I belonged.
Reason # 2: Consistently, in every community I’ve belonged to in the Episcopal Church, I’ve been encouraged to take the Bible honestly—to let it pry me open and then pour out on me the good news that I am not the captain of my salvation but Jesus Christ is, and holds me, as he holds you, in eternal love. The Episcopal Church has encouraged me to take the Bible honestly, seriously, joyously, without requiring that I take it literally when to take it literally misses the point of God’s love. The Anglican way is one of vigorous thinking and curiosity, encouraging an informed and imaginative reading of the Bible. I’m a student of literature, and am grateful for a church that urges me to be fearless about the contradictions and moral tempests I find in the Bible, which aren’t to be explained away but to be heard, worked with, and understood. One of the best things my church did for me in my early teens was to urge me to read the Gospels and meet the Jesus of Matthew, of Mark, and Luke and John. As you come to know the Word made flesh, all other words can be judged in his light, the keepers kept and the baggage of the past left in the baggage room.
Reason 3: Year by year, I’ve grown more grateful for a tradition that values individual conscience, puts into my hands and yours responsibility to respond to the One by whose love we are rescued and redeemed. That responsibility is a keen Reformation commitment, an intently Protestant attitude. Yet what the Episcopal Church has put into our hands is the catholic heritage handed on by the apostles, the endlessly rich resources of sacrament and community, all under the authority of the risen Christ who has poured out his Spirit so liberally. His ministry is entrusted to each believer, each having some essential role to play in the whole priesthood of believers, because the Spirit has been given in a rainbow of manifestations, gifts, passions for the common good of the world.
Reason #4: In order to get the full wonder of God’s love for the full human race, and in order to praise God for this wonder, I need and enjoy color, beauty, variety, experimentation in music, message, art, and movement. I belong to a church that values all of these in the service of worship and faith formation. I admire in the Episcopal tradition its openness to the eclectic, the international, the inspirational, and the edgy.
Reason 5: Anglican theology has me hooked. Not because it’s a neat ordering of all the answers to all my questions—it isn’t—but because of its attitude, its insistence on being rooted in God’s action in the world, not just God’s action in the church. 19th-Century theologian Charles Gore summed this up: “The real development of theology is… the process in which the Church, standing firm in her old truths, enters into the apprehension of the new social and intellectual movements of each age: and because ‘the truth makes her free,’ is able to assimilate all new material, to welcome and give its place to all new knowledge, to throw herself into the sanctification of each new social order, bringing forth out of her treasures things new and old, and showing again and again her power of witnessing under changed conditions to the catholic capacity of her faith and life.”
Reason #6 comes clearer to me, the older I get. I am able to be an Episcopalian because in Anglicanism there’s a long history of respect for science. The scientific enlightenment that swept through Europe in the 19th century had a special haven in the many English rural parsonages where vicars proved themselves to be darned good amateur botanists and students of nature. Nothing in our approach to scripture and tradition throws evolution into question. What makes reasonable sense within human experience need not be contradictory to scripture and tradition.
My seventh reason is that the Episcopal Church remembers, often enough, that it is the earthen vessel, the clay jar, and that the treasure within belongs to God, indeed the truest treasure is God. Like every denomination, we can get enormously wrapped up in our own preoccupations and take ourselves too seriously. But I admire about our church its sense of being not a finished product, but a work in progress. Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey said about Anglicanism: “Its credentials are its incompleteness, with the tension and travail in its soul. It is clumsy and untidy, it baffles neatness and logic. For it is sent not to commend itself as ‘the best type of Christianity,’ but by its very brokennesss to point to the universal Church…” In other words, to point beyond itself to something far greater than itself. And I recall the Dean of my seminary addressing us seniors before our graduation, to this effect: “The Episcopal Church is often called a ‘bridge church’ because it is both catholic and protestant. If we do our job and help God build that bridge, we should put ourselves out of business.”
I had barely said those words when Norm, in the front pew, said, “But that presupposes that each side of the divide cooperates—will that be true?”
I told him that I am not qualified to answer for any other tradition. But I can pray. And in that praying I will be reminded that the work of reconciliation in the world is God’s work. Which means that it is ours to do, by the grace we are given.
Very much in-business yesterday in my neighborhood were members of Bible Baptist Church. I was at the back door of my garage when at the open front door appeared a fellow in his forties, two little boys about seven and nine, and behind them an older man. The first fellow explained that they had for me a packet of information, but first he wanted to ask if I’m already settled in a church.
I assured him I am, and with that they turned and left, without leaving the packet of information. “Keep up the good work!” I called out to them, sincerely.
I’m impressed by how they were honoring what Pentecost is about. I suspect that their reasons for being Baptists would have some differences from the list I’ve shared with you today. They would have been quite willing to share their reasons with people they’ve never met. Their church will grow from that willingness.
This church of ours will grow, if we are willing to share our reasons with people we do know, people who aren’t settled in a church of their own. May the Spirit of God free that willingness in us.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Colliding Galaxies
Today’s collect and first lesson show us that the Ascension of our Lord is in the air today. The 40th day after Easter is one of those creedal feast days when what we celebrate is a doctrine, in this case “He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father.”
In a better-ordered parish than this one, there would be a celebration of the eucharist on Ascension Day; but on Thursday, May 1, we did not gather at the table here. We came as close as Monday’s Sweetwood eucharist honoring the Ascension, and Tuesday’s midweek eucharist here observing the Ascension. And today, after the fact, we at least look in the rear view mirror to catch what we can of this airborne and clearly movable feast.
I don’t know the artist, but a medieval painter tried his hand at the Ascension. For better or for worse, he has the disciples clustered around a spot where our Lord had stood, just a moment before, whereas at this moment that the artist attempts to catch, Jesus has lifted off and all we see of him is a pair of dangling feet at the top of the canvas. It is not among the great paintings of the Middle Ages, I suspect.
But it does push the question: Does it require belief in a multi-layered vertical universe to make sense of the Ascension?
The Hubble telescope has revealed a far more complex cosmos than first-century astronomers could describe. Think of all the reframing you have had to do in your lifetime, in order to take in magnitudes of enormity to catch up with modern astronomy’s description of the heavens. Every other thing, some stunning new image pulls us into the orbit of a startling concept we might never have imagined. The latest I saw was an image of the collision of two galaxies, a complex event that would see some stars make it through any number of near misses, and some explode on impact. I’m sure there’s a much more accurate description of that image than what I’ve just said, but I haven’t enough command of the language and science to give it to you.
But I’m imagining that our Williams seniors, whom we celebrate today, have a more coherent understanding of the heavens than I do, in part because they are the heirs of finer science in their formal education than I was in mine. Perhaps one of them can explain to me the collision of galaxies, later… Or, educational evolution being what it is, perhaps that will require a seventh grader?
Recall those angels in our first reading, and their questioning the disciples, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”
For them, it was a simpler thing than it may be for us to locate heaven. The psalmist could sing, “God rides in the heavens, the ancient heavens… God’s strength is in the skies,” and in that several-storied universe, this all made sense.
But where do we locate heaven? If astronomy helps us do that, I’ll bet it will be by giving us new metaphors. Those black holes I read about while I’m in Dr. Lapidus’s waiting room enjoying The Smithsonian, will some astrophysical image like that give future artists and poets and preachers and musicians new descriptive language for imagining heaven?
Or will it always be the work of angels to address disciples with a gentle scolding, “Why spend your time speculating about heaven? Get on with your mission, for this Christ who has ascended will return to this earth—and if this realm is that important to God, hadn’t you better steward it just as generously as you can, build in it the right ordering of peace on earth, good will towards all?”
What does the Ascension of Christ have to do with this physical life of ours? The Prayer Book Catechism asks this question. I don’t know about you, but I find that those curt, tense little answers in the Catechism dangle like verbal counterparts to those feet on that medieval canvas. But this answer may be helpful:
“Q: What do we mean when we say that he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father?
A: We mean that Jesus took our human nature into heaven where he now reigns with the Father and intercedes for us.”
At the end of today’s Gospel portion, we hear him pray, “Holy Father, protect them (us, his people in the world) protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
There, for me, is the meaning of the Ascension: this doctrine shows that, despite the worst that the world could do to Jesus, his unity with God his Source and Origin and his All could not be broken. Because of the grace given to us in baptism, it is true for us as well: the unity we have with God in Jesus Christ cannot be broken.
In our relationship with him, given to us in baptism, claimed in faith, we are in that unity that he has with the Father. He has taken our nature with him into the center of God, making possible for us daily that centering in God that we are built to enjoy. Protecting us, freeing us, for unity with God is that name Jesus says God has given him.
That sent me to the commentary. “Name,” I muttered. What name?
“Name”, I learn there, means the identity and character and nature of God. Jesus has revealed God’s name—that is, God’s identity and character and nature—and that revelation has shaped the identity and character and nature of the faith community of the disciples during Jesus’s ministry. (Somewhere in the First Letter of John we read, “As he is in this world, so are we.”) He now asks that God keep secure the community’s grounding, centering, in that name. That God ensure the unity of the faith community which mirrors the unity of God and Jesus.
Put that with the simplicity you’ll find in the First Letter of John, and it sounds like this: “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God… for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him… Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another… if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit… God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
Anne, Ben, Caitlin, Paul, Sara, Scot: God abides in you. You have shown your love among us in service, worship, and community. You will have left an abiding name here, and we hope that something of us will abide with you.
Now back to the colliding of galaxies. Something like that is happening throughout our little cosmos. Empires of culture collide in war. Economic forces and failures clash in the world’s markets. Presidential elections pit star against star. Our own Anglican Communion is hot with friction as values and beliefs smash into one another.
In the face of all this, power deeper and truer than force is at work among us. The Book of Acts tells us: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you…” The First Letter of Peter says, “The God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.” And as John told us, God has given Jesus authority for the benefit of all people. So in him, deep authority of love is given to us as well.
Scot, Sara, Paul, Caitlin, Ben, Anne: May you wield it well, this spiritual power, along with fine science, and all the good you carry with you.
In a better-ordered parish than this one, there would be a celebration of the eucharist on Ascension Day; but on Thursday, May 1, we did not gather at the table here. We came as close as Monday’s Sweetwood eucharist honoring the Ascension, and Tuesday’s midweek eucharist here observing the Ascension. And today, after the fact, we at least look in the rear view mirror to catch what we can of this airborne and clearly movable feast.
I don’t know the artist, but a medieval painter tried his hand at the Ascension. For better or for worse, he has the disciples clustered around a spot where our Lord had stood, just a moment before, whereas at this moment that the artist attempts to catch, Jesus has lifted off and all we see of him is a pair of dangling feet at the top of the canvas. It is not among the great paintings of the Middle Ages, I suspect.
But it does push the question: Does it require belief in a multi-layered vertical universe to make sense of the Ascension?
The Hubble telescope has revealed a far more complex cosmos than first-century astronomers could describe. Think of all the reframing you have had to do in your lifetime, in order to take in magnitudes of enormity to catch up with modern astronomy’s description of the heavens. Every other thing, some stunning new image pulls us into the orbit of a startling concept we might never have imagined. The latest I saw was an image of the collision of two galaxies, a complex event that would see some stars make it through any number of near misses, and some explode on impact. I’m sure there’s a much more accurate description of that image than what I’ve just said, but I haven’t enough command of the language and science to give it to you.
But I’m imagining that our Williams seniors, whom we celebrate today, have a more coherent understanding of the heavens than I do, in part because they are the heirs of finer science in their formal education than I was in mine. Perhaps one of them can explain to me the collision of galaxies, later… Or, educational evolution being what it is, perhaps that will require a seventh grader?
Recall those angels in our first reading, and their questioning the disciples, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”
For them, it was a simpler thing than it may be for us to locate heaven. The psalmist could sing, “God rides in the heavens, the ancient heavens… God’s strength is in the skies,” and in that several-storied universe, this all made sense.
But where do we locate heaven? If astronomy helps us do that, I’ll bet it will be by giving us new metaphors. Those black holes I read about while I’m in Dr. Lapidus’s waiting room enjoying The Smithsonian, will some astrophysical image like that give future artists and poets and preachers and musicians new descriptive language for imagining heaven?
Or will it always be the work of angels to address disciples with a gentle scolding, “Why spend your time speculating about heaven? Get on with your mission, for this Christ who has ascended will return to this earth—and if this realm is that important to God, hadn’t you better steward it just as generously as you can, build in it the right ordering of peace on earth, good will towards all?”
What does the Ascension of Christ have to do with this physical life of ours? The Prayer Book Catechism asks this question. I don’t know about you, but I find that those curt, tense little answers in the Catechism dangle like verbal counterparts to those feet on that medieval canvas. But this answer may be helpful:
“Q: What do we mean when we say that he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father?
A: We mean that Jesus took our human nature into heaven where he now reigns with the Father and intercedes for us.”
At the end of today’s Gospel portion, we hear him pray, “Holy Father, protect them (us, his people in the world) protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
There, for me, is the meaning of the Ascension: this doctrine shows that, despite the worst that the world could do to Jesus, his unity with God his Source and Origin and his All could not be broken. Because of the grace given to us in baptism, it is true for us as well: the unity we have with God in Jesus Christ cannot be broken.
In our relationship with him, given to us in baptism, claimed in faith, we are in that unity that he has with the Father. He has taken our nature with him into the center of God, making possible for us daily that centering in God that we are built to enjoy. Protecting us, freeing us, for unity with God is that name Jesus says God has given him.
That sent me to the commentary. “Name,” I muttered. What name?
“Name”, I learn there, means the identity and character and nature of God. Jesus has revealed God’s name—that is, God’s identity and character and nature—and that revelation has shaped the identity and character and nature of the faith community of the disciples during Jesus’s ministry. (Somewhere in the First Letter of John we read, “As he is in this world, so are we.”) He now asks that God keep secure the community’s grounding, centering, in that name. That God ensure the unity of the faith community which mirrors the unity of God and Jesus.
Put that with the simplicity you’ll find in the First Letter of John, and it sounds like this: “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God… for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him… Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another… if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit… God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
Anne, Ben, Caitlin, Paul, Sara, Scot: God abides in you. You have shown your love among us in service, worship, and community. You will have left an abiding name here, and we hope that something of us will abide with you.
Now back to the colliding of galaxies. Something like that is happening throughout our little cosmos. Empires of culture collide in war. Economic forces and failures clash in the world’s markets. Presidential elections pit star against star. Our own Anglican Communion is hot with friction as values and beliefs smash into one another.
In the face of all this, power deeper and truer than force is at work among us. The Book of Acts tells us: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you…” The First Letter of Peter says, “The God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.” And as John told us, God has given Jesus authority for the benefit of all people. So in him, deep authority of love is given to us as well.
Scot, Sara, Paul, Caitlin, Ben, Anne: May you wield it well, this spiritual power, along with fine science, and all the good you carry with you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
