The Gospel for this Sunday was Matthew 14:22-33
Six hundred-plus Anglican bishops have packed their rochets and chimeres and headed home, leaving a quieter cathedral at Canterbury, but neither leaving nor returning to a quieter Church. They began their two weeks with three days of silent retreat together, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, a brilliant new way to start the Lambeth Conference, speaking well for his instincts: silence those bishops for three days, and get your word in first!
Much of their time was devoted to sitting together in groups large enough to mix the continents and cultures, small enough to share airtime between extroverts and introverts, between eloquent high-profile prelates and humbler frontier types. The chief goal of this once-in-a-decade conference was for our bishops to know Christ in one another and to make known to one another the Christ who emerges from more than six hundred mission fields, each bishop’s missionary story different from the next, the Christ of his or her journey an equally brilliant ray of the one light.
I wonder if the unplanned, unchoreographed moments didn’t carry their own unique discoveries. One was reported in the press: a very early-morning false fire alarm emptied the dorms where many bishops and spouses were sleeping, and out they poured, in their nighties, to wait for the all-clear. And I’ll guess that a lot is clear at that hour, in that state of unreadiness and undress…
And there were well-rehearsed moments, too. Solange De Santis reports in this month’s Episcopal Life that the opening eucharist in Canterbury Cathedral started with a brass fanfare greeting Archbishop Williams, who was clad in white and gold mitre and vestments bearing the ancient cross of Canterbury… Bongo drummers accompanied the choristers… One Bible reading was in Korean and the Gospel was in French. The intercessions were in English, Hindi, Portuguese, Japanese, and French.
The Gospel Book was borne to the center of the cathedral by a procession from the order of Melanesian Brothers and Sisters, from the South Pacific Solomon Islands. The men were barefoot and bare-chested and dressed in grass skirts, the women in colorful shifts. Several held the book on a little wooden boat and danced with it down the aisle, while others played a sweet silvery melody on wooden flutes.
In a document of reflection issued by the bishops, an observation is made: in an age of globalization, why would anyone ever want to lose this precious gift we have as Anglicans, spanning the earth in a heritage of longstanding mutual respect? That risk is in the air, though the Gospel that deserves to be borne in a little boat teaches us to embrace the opportunity that waits within the risk. No risk/no growth is a law of the spirit, not just a maxim of investment advisors.
Peter seems to know it, as he answers Jesus, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”
“Why would anyone want to name a child Peter?” I heard a trusted friend ask, as we were unpacking this Gospel together. I thought it best to stay very still at that, and just taste the moment rather than take it as personal affront. My trusting this friend helped me keep silence, even as I saw no smile to soften the blow, even as my impulse was high to react.
“He’s so impulsive,” this person explained. I quietly thanked God that I hadn’t proven the point.
Yes, Peter’s story is full of impulses: he is remembered for having swung hard from enthusiastic pledging of loyalty to pathetically anxious betrayal. Quicksilver as he is, he is the rock on which Jesus builds his church. Christian faith is rich in paradox.
Peter is the first to have seen who Jesus is. So in this encounter today he sees that he has to take risk if he is to step into the kingdom that Jesus has introduced to the disciples on that hillside we sat on last Sunday. There economic necessity became an opportunity. When five thousand-plus hungry people stared at those twelve disciples at supper time, twelve empty-handed men urged their teacher to depend on the power of buying and selling (“Send them into the villages so they can buy something to eat! Now!”) But he depended on the power of sharing, he depended on the calculus of grace, and answered them, “You give them something to eat. Now.” And, as we know, a child produced his lunchpail and the rest is mystery.
However you understand the power demonstrated on that hillside, Peter and his companions were intimately part of it. So he knows that he’s on the right track assuming that he must be part of the power being shown on the sea. He must choose in to be in.
Except, well—and here Peter oscillates—he instinctively knows this, but impulsively resists. So he hedges his bets, patron saint of Anglicanism, and blurts out, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water. If I’m right down deep, call me to do what you do.”
“I do. Come.”
So what is this, if not the early Church employing imagination to teach and evangelize a fearful world. What water are we all called to walk on, to be in Christ? The waters of baptism. That sacrament of full inclusion calls us to grow into the full stature of Christ. Waters don’t get deeper than that. The early Church’s practice of Baptism was to fully immerse the adult believer, three times in the name of the Trinity lowering and raising the person in the living water of river, lake or sea, causing him or her to feel the mystery of being joined to Christ in a death like his so as to be joined to Christ in a resurrection life like his.
More often now, infants and children are candidates for baptism. All the stronger is the message that the first steps are really God’s steps: we walk on the waters of baptism because God makes firm the love that includes us, approaches us before we know how to approach, makes of faith a miracle that leaves behind no footprint, “but only the shimmering place of an infinite step upon water.” And a community wades in with each of us at the font, promising to walk with us as we learn how to be part of the power of Christ.
It was not hard for the early Christians to see themselves in Peter, to let his story make sense of theirs. That still works.
Let Peter be the Olympic gymnast who walks on air, or a swimmer who rides the water, or a pole vaulter becoming herself the catapult. What does Peter’s story teach? Embrace the opportunity within the risk. Get distracted by a strong wind and sink.
Are those examples too unrelated to ordinary life? Let Peter be a first-year student leaving all that is familiar and daring to step across to an unknown future. Or imagine him an aging homeowner realizing it’s time she lives more simply. And Peter teaches? No risk, no growth. Choosing into new life takes a whole heart.
At a time of environmental crisis, let Peter be everyperson, facing urgent evidence that we are called to be one with our fragile world, treasuring life rather than exploiting it. He teaches us to make choices out of deep instinct, not anxious impulse. And to anchor the instinct, and surrender the impulse, to the one who is always within reach of us, who promises, “Take heart, it is I; do not fear.”
(The phrase “but only the shimmering place of an infinite step upon water” is lifted from James Dickey’s poem “Walking on Water”, worth finding in Robert Atwan’s and Laurance Wieder’s anthology “Chapters Into Verse”, Volume II, page 108.)
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Empty-handed and Full
Scripture cited today includes Isaiah 55:1-5 and Matthew 14:13-21.
“Everything! Counter and scales—
I’ll take whatever you give.
I’m through and off to Athens,
Where a man like me can live.
And Hipparch, the baker, is going;
My chum, who came with me
To follow the crowds who follow
The prophet of Galilee.
We two were there at Damascus
Dealing in figs and wine.
Nice little business! Some one
Said: ‘Here, I’ll give you a line!’
‘Buy fish, and set up a booth,
Get a tent and make your bread.
There are thousands come to listen,
They are hungry, and must be fed.’
And so we went. Believe me,
There were crowds, and hungry, too.
Five thousand stood in the desert
And listened the whole day through.
Famished? Well, yes. The disciples
Were saying to send them away
To buy their bread in the village,
But the prophet went on to say:
‘Feed them yourselves, O you
Of little faith.’ But they said:
‘We have just two little fishes
And five little loaves of bread.’
We heard it, me and Hipparch,
And rubbed our hands. You see
We were there to make some money
In the land of Galilee.
We had stock in plenty. We waited.
I wiped the scales, and my chum
Restacked the loaves. We bellowed,
But no one seemed to come.
‘Fresh fish!’ I bawled my lungs out:
‘Nice bread!’ poor Hipparch cried,
But what did they do? Sat down there
In fifties, side by side.
In ranks, the whole five thousand.
Then—well, the prophet spoke,
And broke the two little fishes,
And the five little loaves he broke,
And fed the whole five thousand.
Why, yes! So gorged they slept.
And we stood beaten and bankrupt.
Poor Hipparch swore and wept.
They gathered up twelve baskets
Full from the loaves of bread;
Two fishes made twelve baskets
Of fragments after they fed.
And we—what was there to do
But dump our stock on the sand?
That’s what we got for our labor
And thrift, in such a land.
We met a man near Damascus
Who had joined the mystagogues.
He said, ‘I was wicked as you men
Until I lost my hogs.’
Now Hipparch and I are going
To Athens, beautiful, free.
No more adventures for us two
In the land of Galilee.”
That was “Business Reverses”, a poem by Edgar Lee Masters, famed for his “Spoon River Anthology”. In case it flew by you too fast, the fellow at the end who had lost his hogs and appears to be a step ahead of the fishmonger and the baker? This former hog farmer lost his livelihood that day when Jesus called to their right minds two shunned and suffering men called “demon-possessed” by their neighbors, a change so frightening to the swine nearby that they ran off a cliff and into the sea.
Remember that intriguing moment? So long as those two homeless men were still seen to be crazy, the hogs were fine. They were used to a normalcy of human dysfunction around them, the crazy homeless men ranting up in the caves, the neighbors keeping their distance, some scornful, some sympathetic. But bring those men to sanity, down from the caves and dressed for breakfast, ready for some bacon and eggs, and the whole status quo got broken—scared those pigs out of their ruts, clueless.
A quieter miracle is suggested by the poet: the hog farmer didn’t despair, didn’t follow his herd over the cliff. He suffered loss, it must have been greater than the fishmonger and the baker, but in the crucible of his empty hands he held hope that such new life as freed those troubled homeless men would grace him with finer life, too. The poet hints that the hog farmer became a disciple, that his loss had freed him to really hear the prophet Isaiah, “Why do you labor for that which does not satisfy?” And to really hear the prophet from Galilee, “Come, follow me.”
That freedom hasn’t yet blessed the poem’s fishmonger and baker. They’re still recovering from their misadventure, that critical moment in our Gospel today when the disciples’ support of locally-grown food vendors (“let them go into the villages and buy food for themselves!”) is thwarted by Jesus’s reply, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”
That was the moment when the local status quo was broken. Exactly how, we are not told. Except that outward and visible goods, five barley buns and two dried fish, were the starting point of chain reaction that brought to that herd of humanity such abundance that not only did all eat and were filled, not only were twelve baskets of leftovers packed for take-out, but these several thousand poor had an unforgettable taste of most resilient power.
You may remember that later, several times, Jesus would refer to the power set loose on that grassy hillside. “You are following me, not because you understand the power you felt, that day, but because your stomachs were filled and you hope that will happen to you again.” So it’s important that we pay attention to the question, What is this power?
And you may recall that our patron, St. John the Evangelist, uses all the bells and whistles of this story to adorn his teaching about the eucharist, about the self-offering of Jesus Christ to his people so that his people will offer themselves to his world. St. Matthew recognizes that same pattern in his verbs describing what happens to those buns and herrings: Jesus takes them, blesses them, breaks them, gives them to the disciples who in turn give them to the crowds. That is the action of eucharistic love, thankful love that does not keep but tastes and shares.
What is this most resilient power at work on that hillside? Careful how we answer, still hearing Jesus say it’s about more than filling stomachs, remembering too that the power that met them there meets us here, catching the poet’s point that this power works not just by filling us but also by emptying us, freeing us from laboring for that which does not satisfy…
How is this power God’s power? However we answer that, don’t we expect that God’s use of power will go beyond giving these people fish, and will teach them to fish?
How is this power the people’s power? I find powerful the moment in the story when Jesus tells his disciples they’re wrong in thinking that the answer to life’s challenges lies in buying and selling. That is the way the world may turn, the way the herd may move, but Jesus shows that the kingdom of God, unlike empires and governments, does not muck about with economic stimulus packages and bailouts. It is at this moment that Jesus says to his twelve trainees, “You give them something to eat,” that he may have inspired some in the crowds to give those twelve poor devils a hand.
This moment is heightened in St. John’s telling of our eucharistic story. There, Jesus plays with Philip, asking him “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” This, says John, was to test Philip, for Jesus was thinking along other lines. Philip bites the bait, truly not knowing what to do with that empty-handedness he feels: “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little!”
It’s then that additional inspiration flashes forth. A little boy has brought up to Andrew the sack lunch his mother had prepared for him, and Andrew brings him to Jesus. In John’s lesson about eucharist, this must be the offertory.
Is this lad the only person on that hillside who came prepared—or is he rather the first to understand the moment and reach down into his power, the power to share, and, perhaps by being a child, to specially inspire?
“What’s happening up there? It’s Miriam’s boy, and he’s sharing his lunch with the Prophet! Isn’t that sweet? Why here, I have some dates… and what’s that you’ve got in your pouch—is that some dried meat and onion that I’m smelling? You’re happy to share it, too? Let’s see what we can get going, here!”
It’s no small miracle when hands that grip their own possessions open to give and receive, when fear is erased as boundaries around me-and-mine fall open to something greater and finer, the becoming of community, the feeling of common purpose and the finding of common mission.
Someone has observed that it’s not good news, that Matthew counts the number of men who ate, but not the number of women and children. Too often, it is women and children who suffer from hunger and struggle with poverty.
Among the fourteen households burned out last Tuesday night at 716 North Street in Pittsfield, many were women and children. Few of those many residents had much by way of earthly goods, and now they have none. In our eucharist today, we remember that we are fed so that we may feed. What we place in this bowl today will pass to their empty hands, through the American Red Cross. They need us to use our power, while their powers of trust and hope are met and multiplied by the One who knows how to lift up the lowly.
The morning after the fire, one woman, speaking in Spanish, asked firefighters to go to her apartment and find her papers. Captain Ray Tart returned, dripping wet, and handed her a vinyl folder. “Mojado,” she said, “they’re drenched”. Through a translator, Tart explained that a pipe had burst in her ceilings, which were caving in. Reporter Jenn Smith writes, “Still, there were no tears and hardly a cringe from this woman and her family. Asked why, the woman with the folder said, “Jesus Christo.”
The one who knows what to do when we are empty-handed, the one who works through us when our hands are open.
(Edgar Lee Masters’s poem can be found in Chapters Into Verse, volume II, edited by Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder. Jenn Smith’s article appeared in the July 31st, 2008, issue of “The Berkshire Eagle.”)
“Everything! Counter and scales—
I’ll take whatever you give.
I’m through and off to Athens,
Where a man like me can live.
And Hipparch, the baker, is going;
My chum, who came with me
To follow the crowds who follow
The prophet of Galilee.
We two were there at Damascus
Dealing in figs and wine.
Nice little business! Some one
Said: ‘Here, I’ll give you a line!’
‘Buy fish, and set up a booth,
Get a tent and make your bread.
There are thousands come to listen,
They are hungry, and must be fed.’
And so we went. Believe me,
There were crowds, and hungry, too.
Five thousand stood in the desert
And listened the whole day through.
Famished? Well, yes. The disciples
Were saying to send them away
To buy their bread in the village,
But the prophet went on to say:
‘Feed them yourselves, O you
Of little faith.’ But they said:
‘We have just two little fishes
And five little loaves of bread.’
We heard it, me and Hipparch,
And rubbed our hands. You see
We were there to make some money
In the land of Galilee.
We had stock in plenty. We waited.
I wiped the scales, and my chum
Restacked the loaves. We bellowed,
But no one seemed to come.
‘Fresh fish!’ I bawled my lungs out:
‘Nice bread!’ poor Hipparch cried,
But what did they do? Sat down there
In fifties, side by side.
In ranks, the whole five thousand.
Then—well, the prophet spoke,
And broke the two little fishes,
And the five little loaves he broke,
And fed the whole five thousand.
Why, yes! So gorged they slept.
And we stood beaten and bankrupt.
Poor Hipparch swore and wept.
They gathered up twelve baskets
Full from the loaves of bread;
Two fishes made twelve baskets
Of fragments after they fed.
And we—what was there to do
But dump our stock on the sand?
That’s what we got for our labor
And thrift, in such a land.
We met a man near Damascus
Who had joined the mystagogues.
He said, ‘I was wicked as you men
Until I lost my hogs.’
Now Hipparch and I are going
To Athens, beautiful, free.
No more adventures for us two
In the land of Galilee.”
That was “Business Reverses”, a poem by Edgar Lee Masters, famed for his “Spoon River Anthology”. In case it flew by you too fast, the fellow at the end who had lost his hogs and appears to be a step ahead of the fishmonger and the baker? This former hog farmer lost his livelihood that day when Jesus called to their right minds two shunned and suffering men called “demon-possessed” by their neighbors, a change so frightening to the swine nearby that they ran off a cliff and into the sea.
Remember that intriguing moment? So long as those two homeless men were still seen to be crazy, the hogs were fine. They were used to a normalcy of human dysfunction around them, the crazy homeless men ranting up in the caves, the neighbors keeping their distance, some scornful, some sympathetic. But bring those men to sanity, down from the caves and dressed for breakfast, ready for some bacon and eggs, and the whole status quo got broken—scared those pigs out of their ruts, clueless.
A quieter miracle is suggested by the poet: the hog farmer didn’t despair, didn’t follow his herd over the cliff. He suffered loss, it must have been greater than the fishmonger and the baker, but in the crucible of his empty hands he held hope that such new life as freed those troubled homeless men would grace him with finer life, too. The poet hints that the hog farmer became a disciple, that his loss had freed him to really hear the prophet Isaiah, “Why do you labor for that which does not satisfy?” And to really hear the prophet from Galilee, “Come, follow me.”
That freedom hasn’t yet blessed the poem’s fishmonger and baker. They’re still recovering from their misadventure, that critical moment in our Gospel today when the disciples’ support of locally-grown food vendors (“let them go into the villages and buy food for themselves!”) is thwarted by Jesus’s reply, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”
That was the moment when the local status quo was broken. Exactly how, we are not told. Except that outward and visible goods, five barley buns and two dried fish, were the starting point of chain reaction that brought to that herd of humanity such abundance that not only did all eat and were filled, not only were twelve baskets of leftovers packed for take-out, but these several thousand poor had an unforgettable taste of most resilient power.
You may remember that later, several times, Jesus would refer to the power set loose on that grassy hillside. “You are following me, not because you understand the power you felt, that day, but because your stomachs were filled and you hope that will happen to you again.” So it’s important that we pay attention to the question, What is this power?
And you may recall that our patron, St. John the Evangelist, uses all the bells and whistles of this story to adorn his teaching about the eucharist, about the self-offering of Jesus Christ to his people so that his people will offer themselves to his world. St. Matthew recognizes that same pattern in his verbs describing what happens to those buns and herrings: Jesus takes them, blesses them, breaks them, gives them to the disciples who in turn give them to the crowds. That is the action of eucharistic love, thankful love that does not keep but tastes and shares.
What is this most resilient power at work on that hillside? Careful how we answer, still hearing Jesus say it’s about more than filling stomachs, remembering too that the power that met them there meets us here, catching the poet’s point that this power works not just by filling us but also by emptying us, freeing us from laboring for that which does not satisfy…
How is this power God’s power? However we answer that, don’t we expect that God’s use of power will go beyond giving these people fish, and will teach them to fish?
How is this power the people’s power? I find powerful the moment in the story when Jesus tells his disciples they’re wrong in thinking that the answer to life’s challenges lies in buying and selling. That is the way the world may turn, the way the herd may move, but Jesus shows that the kingdom of God, unlike empires and governments, does not muck about with economic stimulus packages and bailouts. It is at this moment that Jesus says to his twelve trainees, “You give them something to eat,” that he may have inspired some in the crowds to give those twelve poor devils a hand.
This moment is heightened in St. John’s telling of our eucharistic story. There, Jesus plays with Philip, asking him “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” This, says John, was to test Philip, for Jesus was thinking along other lines. Philip bites the bait, truly not knowing what to do with that empty-handedness he feels: “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little!”
It’s then that additional inspiration flashes forth. A little boy has brought up to Andrew the sack lunch his mother had prepared for him, and Andrew brings him to Jesus. In John’s lesson about eucharist, this must be the offertory.
Is this lad the only person on that hillside who came prepared—or is he rather the first to understand the moment and reach down into his power, the power to share, and, perhaps by being a child, to specially inspire?
“What’s happening up there? It’s Miriam’s boy, and he’s sharing his lunch with the Prophet! Isn’t that sweet? Why here, I have some dates… and what’s that you’ve got in your pouch—is that some dried meat and onion that I’m smelling? You’re happy to share it, too? Let’s see what we can get going, here!”
It’s no small miracle when hands that grip their own possessions open to give and receive, when fear is erased as boundaries around me-and-mine fall open to something greater and finer, the becoming of community, the feeling of common purpose and the finding of common mission.
Someone has observed that it’s not good news, that Matthew counts the number of men who ate, but not the number of women and children. Too often, it is women and children who suffer from hunger and struggle with poverty.
Among the fourteen households burned out last Tuesday night at 716 North Street in Pittsfield, many were women and children. Few of those many residents had much by way of earthly goods, and now they have none. In our eucharist today, we remember that we are fed so that we may feed. What we place in this bowl today will pass to their empty hands, through the American Red Cross. They need us to use our power, while their powers of trust and hope are met and multiplied by the One who knows how to lift up the lowly.
The morning after the fire, one woman, speaking in Spanish, asked firefighters to go to her apartment and find her papers. Captain Ray Tart returned, dripping wet, and handed her a vinyl folder. “Mojado,” she said, “they’re drenched”. Through a translator, Tart explained that a pipe had burst in her ceilings, which were caving in. Reporter Jenn Smith writes, “Still, there were no tears and hardly a cringe from this woman and her family. Asked why, the woman with the folder said, “Jesus Christo.”
The one who knows what to do when we are empty-handed, the one who works through us when our hands are open.
(Edgar Lee Masters’s poem can be found in Chapters Into Verse, volume II, edited by Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder. Jenn Smith’s article appeared in the July 31st, 2008, issue of “The Berkshire Eagle.”)
Monday, July 28, 2008
How Good Is the Good News?
Scripture for this Sunday includes I Kings 3:5-12, Romans 8:26-39, and Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52. Primary for this sermon is the Gospel portion, and the version in Eugene Peterson’s “The Message” has influenced this message.
So what is this kingdom of heaven we’re hearing about? We’re told what it’s like—a pine nut planted, yeast added, hidden treasure found, a fine pearl bought, a net-full of fish sorted—but these figures of speech make us wonder all the more, what is this kingdom of heaven?
With that many similes, watch for just as many definitions. But I’ll go with St. Paul and what he writes to the Church in Rome. The kingdom of heaven is that inseparable union with God in Jesus Christ our Lord, it is that reigning love of Christ which proves stronger than hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword.
How good is this good news? Good enough to arm that vulnerable band of 1st-century believers as the bloody wrath of Roman emperors fell on them viciously, ruthlessly, because these Christians would not worship those emperors. Good enough to convince them that neither death, nor life, nor rulers, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
So is the good news of the kingdom of God, the reigning love of God, good enough to shape a healthy attitude of peaceable courage in our vulnerable band of 21st-century believers? Good enough to convince us that neither recession, nor presidential campaigns, nor globalizing greed, nor electromagnetic fields, nor global warming, nor fanatic religions, nor terrorism and war, nor private grief will be able to separate us from that love of God in Jesus Christ?
That’s the question, isn’t it? I mean the question that keeps drawing us here, keeps belonging here where we find the common prayer and the apostolic buildup of hope and the kindling of love that make us bold enough to ask the question.
When I first went to tap it out on my keyboard, I thought it was a no-brainer. Look at those first-century Christians, I thought: their lives were on the line, they were so threatened, and yet listen to their sureness. Their faith and hope and love were their only safety. And we, I thought as I wrote, think it’s a crisis when the Dow Jones drops another two hundred points. We complain about having to adjust our lifestyle—what a far cry from being dragged into the Coliseum! If the good news is good enough to arm them, surely it’s good enough to equip us.
But I’ve got to admit, when I went to list all those things we’re up against, this good question of ours no longer felt like a no-brainer. We really need to ask the question honestly: How good is the good news of God in Christ?
At our weekly wardens’ meeting this week, we lived a while with this Gospel. Our Junior Warden pointed out that most important of all is the message that God’s kingdom is, and is here, not off in some transcendent place or future time. It’s here and it’s now. It started long ago in God’s first embrace of the world in creation; it went exponentially deeper in God’s embrace of the world in Jesus, the new creation. And so, to hear Peterson’s version of Paul, “I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.”
Maybe the likeliest wedge to get in the way between us and God’s love is none of those external forces, but a person’s own self-doubt and self-reproach. Taking honest stock of oneself ought to give a person cause to repent, confess, accept pardon, and make amends. The self-doubt and self-blame I mean have forgotten that rhythm of repentance and try to replace the uncondemning voice of God with another, condemning, voice.
A monastic writer observes that the purpose of prayer is to bring the human voice into harmony with the voice of God. Jean Leclercq writes, “Prayer is not a dialogue with God, but rather a duet. It does not consist in stating problems and receiving answers, in alternating our words with God’s, but in placing our voice in harmony with the voice of God in the Church and in ourselves, harmonizing our voice with his.”
“Who is to condemn?” asks Paul. “If God is for us, who is against us?”
So these five little parables of Jesus today are like voice lessons, music lessons, teaching us how to move in harmony with God, in keeping with the reign of God’s love.
In baptism, that love is planted in us like a pine nut. Over years, it may grow into a pine tree where eagles may nest.
In childhood, the love of God leavens the dough in young Christians when imaginations are sparked and a life of service is inspired.
Adolescents and young adults can’t help but trespass some boundaries, and it’s in pushing boundaries that they may learn what they treasure most.
By middle age, we may have acted on it! An eye for excellence, for what really matters, focuses us to invest ourselves wholeheartedly in what truly completes life.
And by old age our fishnets have certainly caught all kinds of fish. The prayer of Solomon is answered: understanding to discern what is right leads us to the beach where we allow the tide to carry out much that we must shed, leaving intensified in us what is good and valuable, please God.
Each little parable invites us, teaches us, to practice a basic skill of the spirit: to keep planting seeds and nurturing them, to fold in yeast and wait, to pay attention to what may be hidden, to let ourselves be inspired by the true and the brave and the lovely, and to let God cull the net results.
So being well-trained in God’s kingdom is “like the owner of a general store who can put his hands on anything you need, old or new, exactly when you need it.”
Williamstown used to have a general store, Phillips’ on Water Street, where Brown’s is now. It made me want to go there. I went there one day for cup hooks and came home with Nigerian handwoven tablecloths. The kingdom of God is full of surprises, and so was Phillips’.
The Anglican Church is like a general store. As our bishops meet at Canterbury, we need them to teach each other more about the kingdom of God, so they may come home and teach us, in just as simple language as Jesus in these parables.
Some bishops have gone there—and more than a few have refused to go there—believing that they, rightly trained in the kingdom of God, are appointed to pick out the bad fish from the good.
Addressing the 650 bishops at the opening of the Lambeth Conference, Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, said to them, “We need to get beyond the reciprocal impatience that shows itself in the ways in which both liberals and traditionalists are ready—almost eager at times, it appears—to assume that the other is not actually listening to Jesus.”
In that address he also said, “Our own communion and unity are created and nourished by God for the sake of the Good News. If our efforts at finding greater coherence for our Communion don’t result in more transforming love for the needy, in greater awareness and compassion for those whose humanity is abused or denied, then this coherence is a hollow, self-serving thing, a matter of living ‘religiously’ rather than ‘biblically’…”
Holy One, save us from the first. Open us to the second.
So what is this kingdom of heaven we’re hearing about? We’re told what it’s like—a pine nut planted, yeast added, hidden treasure found, a fine pearl bought, a net-full of fish sorted—but these figures of speech make us wonder all the more, what is this kingdom of heaven?
With that many similes, watch for just as many definitions. But I’ll go with St. Paul and what he writes to the Church in Rome. The kingdom of heaven is that inseparable union with God in Jesus Christ our Lord, it is that reigning love of Christ which proves stronger than hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or sword.
How good is this good news? Good enough to arm that vulnerable band of 1st-century believers as the bloody wrath of Roman emperors fell on them viciously, ruthlessly, because these Christians would not worship those emperors. Good enough to convince them that neither death, nor life, nor rulers, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
So is the good news of the kingdom of God, the reigning love of God, good enough to shape a healthy attitude of peaceable courage in our vulnerable band of 21st-century believers? Good enough to convince us that neither recession, nor presidential campaigns, nor globalizing greed, nor electromagnetic fields, nor global warming, nor fanatic religions, nor terrorism and war, nor private grief will be able to separate us from that love of God in Jesus Christ?
That’s the question, isn’t it? I mean the question that keeps drawing us here, keeps belonging here where we find the common prayer and the apostolic buildup of hope and the kindling of love that make us bold enough to ask the question.
When I first went to tap it out on my keyboard, I thought it was a no-brainer. Look at those first-century Christians, I thought: their lives were on the line, they were so threatened, and yet listen to their sureness. Their faith and hope and love were their only safety. And we, I thought as I wrote, think it’s a crisis when the Dow Jones drops another two hundred points. We complain about having to adjust our lifestyle—what a far cry from being dragged into the Coliseum! If the good news is good enough to arm them, surely it’s good enough to equip us.
But I’ve got to admit, when I went to list all those things we’re up against, this good question of ours no longer felt like a no-brainer. We really need to ask the question honestly: How good is the good news of God in Christ?
At our weekly wardens’ meeting this week, we lived a while with this Gospel. Our Junior Warden pointed out that most important of all is the message that God’s kingdom is, and is here, not off in some transcendent place or future time. It’s here and it’s now. It started long ago in God’s first embrace of the world in creation; it went exponentially deeper in God’s embrace of the world in Jesus, the new creation. And so, to hear Peterson’s version of Paul, “I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.”
Maybe the likeliest wedge to get in the way between us and God’s love is none of those external forces, but a person’s own self-doubt and self-reproach. Taking honest stock of oneself ought to give a person cause to repent, confess, accept pardon, and make amends. The self-doubt and self-blame I mean have forgotten that rhythm of repentance and try to replace the uncondemning voice of God with another, condemning, voice.
A monastic writer observes that the purpose of prayer is to bring the human voice into harmony with the voice of God. Jean Leclercq writes, “Prayer is not a dialogue with God, but rather a duet. It does not consist in stating problems and receiving answers, in alternating our words with God’s, but in placing our voice in harmony with the voice of God in the Church and in ourselves, harmonizing our voice with his.”
“Who is to condemn?” asks Paul. “If God is for us, who is against us?”
So these five little parables of Jesus today are like voice lessons, music lessons, teaching us how to move in harmony with God, in keeping with the reign of God’s love.
In baptism, that love is planted in us like a pine nut. Over years, it may grow into a pine tree where eagles may nest.
In childhood, the love of God leavens the dough in young Christians when imaginations are sparked and a life of service is inspired.
Adolescents and young adults can’t help but trespass some boundaries, and it’s in pushing boundaries that they may learn what they treasure most.
By middle age, we may have acted on it! An eye for excellence, for what really matters, focuses us to invest ourselves wholeheartedly in what truly completes life.
And by old age our fishnets have certainly caught all kinds of fish. The prayer of Solomon is answered: understanding to discern what is right leads us to the beach where we allow the tide to carry out much that we must shed, leaving intensified in us what is good and valuable, please God.
Each little parable invites us, teaches us, to practice a basic skill of the spirit: to keep planting seeds and nurturing them, to fold in yeast and wait, to pay attention to what may be hidden, to let ourselves be inspired by the true and the brave and the lovely, and to let God cull the net results.
So being well-trained in God’s kingdom is “like the owner of a general store who can put his hands on anything you need, old or new, exactly when you need it.”
Williamstown used to have a general store, Phillips’ on Water Street, where Brown’s is now. It made me want to go there. I went there one day for cup hooks and came home with Nigerian handwoven tablecloths. The kingdom of God is full of surprises, and so was Phillips’.
The Anglican Church is like a general store. As our bishops meet at Canterbury, we need them to teach each other more about the kingdom of God, so they may come home and teach us, in just as simple language as Jesus in these parables.
Some bishops have gone there—and more than a few have refused to go there—believing that they, rightly trained in the kingdom of God, are appointed to pick out the bad fish from the good.
Addressing the 650 bishops at the opening of the Lambeth Conference, Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, said to them, “We need to get beyond the reciprocal impatience that shows itself in the ways in which both liberals and traditionalists are ready—almost eager at times, it appears—to assume that the other is not actually listening to Jesus.”
In that address he also said, “Our own communion and unity are created and nourished by God for the sake of the Good News. If our efforts at finding greater coherence for our Communion don’t result in more transforming love for the needy, in greater awareness and compassion for those whose humanity is abused or denied, then this coherence is a hollow, self-serving thing, a matter of living ‘religiously’ rather than ‘biblically’…”
Holy One, save us from the first. Open us to the second.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Seeding the Space We Inhabit
Scriptures for this Sunday include Isaiah 55:10-13, Romans 8:1-11, and Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
More than 50 years ago, archeologists examined Masada, the fortress palace built by one of the Herods in the century before the birth of Christ, set dramatically on a twenty-acre mesa 800 feet above the surrounding plain, a nearly impregnable stronghold overlooking the Dead Sea. When the Roman army destroyed Jerusalem around the year 70 in the common era, they laid waste to Masada as well.
Among the surprises found in the early 1960s was a little batch of ancient seeds discovered beneath the rubble at the Northern Palace approach. Radiocarbon testing confirmed the age of these seeds. For four decades they were stored at room temperature, and in 2005 they were identified as dates, palm dates. Nicely enough, their Latin name is Phoenix dactylifera, and while I haven’t a clue what that second word means, these seeds certainly did rise from the ashes like the legendary phoenix known to all Harry Potter fans.
After preparation in a quarantined site, three seeds were planted. One germinated. Now, 26 months later, it shows normal development and has reached a height of 121 cm.
And I can’t get grass to grow in that one spot in my back yard…
In the first century of the common era, the Judean Dead Sea region was famous for its high-quality dates. Over the next two thousand years, those cultivars disappeared and had to be replaced by cultivars from Morocco, Egypt, and Iraq. Genetic analysis of Phoenix the fearless date shows similarity with those best dates from Iraq and Egypt.
How did Phoenix survive? Scientists say that high summer temperatures and low rainfall at Masada minimized the generating of free radicals, an important cause of aging in seeds—and in humans.
What little I understand about radicals, though, tells me that without them Jesus would have had no parable to tell. It’s the power of reactivity that radicals play their part in, and every seed planter knows that what we want out of seeds, what we admire in them, is that they do react. Jesus’s story of the sower is built on his having observed how seeds (and seedlings) react in different settings.
But at the heart of his story—I guess you could call it the kernel—is the message of the kingdom of God. When he explains the parable, he says that the seed is the word of the kingdom. God is planting this kingdom in every person who is ready to welcome it.
If you had been among those hearing this story in the first century, back when Phoenix the seed was still sealed in the pit of a date, you’d understand “the kingdom” to mean God’s reordering of all that was wrong and broken in the oppressive violent unjust world controlled by vain emperors and occupying armies, God’s kingdom of justice and peace foreseen by great prophets like Isaiah who saw in the future a servant who would accomplish the purpose of God and usher in that age of God’s rule. Sometimes, Isaiah and other prophets spoke of this kingdom as a restored garden, as it was in the beginning in Eden before man and woman stopped listening to their Maker. Jesus’s sower scatters seed so it will bear fruit in a great garden that yields to God such abundance that no one could go hungry ever again.
But now the seed falls in four kinds of places: on the path, on rocky ground, among thorns, and on good soil. In three of those settings, it germinates. Quickly. People react to this news that God is at work so near to them, closer than breath itself, yet hidden within their own experience so they have to discover how to work with God and not against God.
Can you hear how this story was a best seller in the early Church? It summed up the actual experience of apostles and evangelists who spread the news that in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, who had walked their streets and touched their lives, God had released into this sad old world a whole new order of being, a realm of right relationship with God and with neighbor and with self, had set loose like a dove from the ark the Holy Spirit to nest in each person, hatching gifts of the Spirit and stirring-up powers of the Spirit.
Apostles and evangelists knew the fulfillment of Isaiah’s promise: they went out into the world in joy and were led back into their fellowship in peace. They were agents of God renewing the earth and God kept renewing them around the Lord’s table in the community of faith—but they couldn’t persuade everyone, couldn’t introduce everyone to the sacred space of their fellowship, and couldn’t help all their hearers recognize themselves as children of the Most High. For every one who learned to walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh, how many were there who listened and seemed interested, even eager, but never came through—never passed over from flesh-walking, to walk by the Spirit?
In this story today, it isn’t just Jesus telling a story: he’s telling their story, the apostles’ story, and, if we have ears to hear, we’ll catch him telling our story. And it’s all about how we receive God.
Sometimes we receive a word from God on the path, on the hoof. We hear it, we even feel it make an appeal to the heart, but we don’t stop long enough to invest the time it takes to understand, to connect that appeal to our own longing. We move fast, we’re distracted easily, and soon enough, poof, it’s gone and we’re on to the next thing.
Sometimes we’re on rocky ground when God chooses to come by. It may not dawn on us that that’s why God’s choosing to appear, let’s say in the honest interest of a friend who really wants to know how we are. We’ll gladly, joyfully, take that love and feel it a while, but we won’t let it get at the root of our restlessness because there are all those rocks to move around, aren’t there?
Sometimes our space is weedy with brambles and other invasive species that fill every square inch and occupy every moment. We’ll hear a word of grace in a space like this and give it an inch or two, a moment or two, but then what Eugene Peterson calls “weeds of worry and illusions about getting more and wanting everything under the sun strangle what was heard, and nothing comes of it.”
Do you think this story needs much adjustment or translation, from first century to twenty-first century? I don’t think so. Jesus speaks about human nature, what the Word of God is up against that is within our realm, within our reach to work on. What’s wrong and broken in the world is certainly on God’s agenda. What’s wrong and broken in us is every bit as much God’s gracious concern, and aren’t we fortunate that this is God’s nature? And that it is God’s strategy: to build a peaceable world by setting-free peacemakers, to reconcile the ways of heaven and earth by releasing mercy within the reconcilers, to do all that the kingdom requires by means of incarnation, entrusting the mission to the likes of us who know that we bear the likeness of him.
Hear how important to God is the space that you inhabit. Given the nature and strategy of God, we cannot accept an explanation of this parable that takes away from us the power to change, the responsibility to be transformed. So no one today gets excused because they’re hard by nature, rocky by nature, weedy by nature.
And we don’t get to look longingly at the few really good souls we know who bear fruit and yield a hundredfold, or sixtyfold, or thirtyfold, and say about them, “They’re just good soil. Some have it, and some don’t.”
That could be how this parable gets heard. Let’s not go there. Instead, let’s recover in our own space what we need: the detachment from anxiety that comes from cultivating a relationship with God, the understanding that comes from service and community, the rootedness and enrichment that come through sacrament and scripture.
How important to God is the space that you inhabit. How you tend it relates to how you will hear God, and how you will serve God. For whatever it is that makes us hard, or shallow, or rocky, or thorny in our welcome of God and our growth in Christ may make us that way in our welcome and love of one another.
More than 50 years ago, archeologists examined Masada, the fortress palace built by one of the Herods in the century before the birth of Christ, set dramatically on a twenty-acre mesa 800 feet above the surrounding plain, a nearly impregnable stronghold overlooking the Dead Sea. When the Roman army destroyed Jerusalem around the year 70 in the common era, they laid waste to Masada as well.
Among the surprises found in the early 1960s was a little batch of ancient seeds discovered beneath the rubble at the Northern Palace approach. Radiocarbon testing confirmed the age of these seeds. For four decades they were stored at room temperature, and in 2005 they were identified as dates, palm dates. Nicely enough, their Latin name is Phoenix dactylifera, and while I haven’t a clue what that second word means, these seeds certainly did rise from the ashes like the legendary phoenix known to all Harry Potter fans.
After preparation in a quarantined site, three seeds were planted. One germinated. Now, 26 months later, it shows normal development and has reached a height of 121 cm.
And I can’t get grass to grow in that one spot in my back yard…
In the first century of the common era, the Judean Dead Sea region was famous for its high-quality dates. Over the next two thousand years, those cultivars disappeared and had to be replaced by cultivars from Morocco, Egypt, and Iraq. Genetic analysis of Phoenix the fearless date shows similarity with those best dates from Iraq and Egypt.
How did Phoenix survive? Scientists say that high summer temperatures and low rainfall at Masada minimized the generating of free radicals, an important cause of aging in seeds—and in humans.
What little I understand about radicals, though, tells me that without them Jesus would have had no parable to tell. It’s the power of reactivity that radicals play their part in, and every seed planter knows that what we want out of seeds, what we admire in them, is that they do react. Jesus’s story of the sower is built on his having observed how seeds (and seedlings) react in different settings.
But at the heart of his story—I guess you could call it the kernel—is the message of the kingdom of God. When he explains the parable, he says that the seed is the word of the kingdom. God is planting this kingdom in every person who is ready to welcome it.
If you had been among those hearing this story in the first century, back when Phoenix the seed was still sealed in the pit of a date, you’d understand “the kingdom” to mean God’s reordering of all that was wrong and broken in the oppressive violent unjust world controlled by vain emperors and occupying armies, God’s kingdom of justice and peace foreseen by great prophets like Isaiah who saw in the future a servant who would accomplish the purpose of God and usher in that age of God’s rule. Sometimes, Isaiah and other prophets spoke of this kingdom as a restored garden, as it was in the beginning in Eden before man and woman stopped listening to their Maker. Jesus’s sower scatters seed so it will bear fruit in a great garden that yields to God such abundance that no one could go hungry ever again.
But now the seed falls in four kinds of places: on the path, on rocky ground, among thorns, and on good soil. In three of those settings, it germinates. Quickly. People react to this news that God is at work so near to them, closer than breath itself, yet hidden within their own experience so they have to discover how to work with God and not against God.
Can you hear how this story was a best seller in the early Church? It summed up the actual experience of apostles and evangelists who spread the news that in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, who had walked their streets and touched their lives, God had released into this sad old world a whole new order of being, a realm of right relationship with God and with neighbor and with self, had set loose like a dove from the ark the Holy Spirit to nest in each person, hatching gifts of the Spirit and stirring-up powers of the Spirit.
Apostles and evangelists knew the fulfillment of Isaiah’s promise: they went out into the world in joy and were led back into their fellowship in peace. They were agents of God renewing the earth and God kept renewing them around the Lord’s table in the community of faith—but they couldn’t persuade everyone, couldn’t introduce everyone to the sacred space of their fellowship, and couldn’t help all their hearers recognize themselves as children of the Most High. For every one who learned to walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh, how many were there who listened and seemed interested, even eager, but never came through—never passed over from flesh-walking, to walk by the Spirit?
In this story today, it isn’t just Jesus telling a story: he’s telling their story, the apostles’ story, and, if we have ears to hear, we’ll catch him telling our story. And it’s all about how we receive God.
Sometimes we receive a word from God on the path, on the hoof. We hear it, we even feel it make an appeal to the heart, but we don’t stop long enough to invest the time it takes to understand, to connect that appeal to our own longing. We move fast, we’re distracted easily, and soon enough, poof, it’s gone and we’re on to the next thing.
Sometimes we’re on rocky ground when God chooses to come by. It may not dawn on us that that’s why God’s choosing to appear, let’s say in the honest interest of a friend who really wants to know how we are. We’ll gladly, joyfully, take that love and feel it a while, but we won’t let it get at the root of our restlessness because there are all those rocks to move around, aren’t there?
Sometimes our space is weedy with brambles and other invasive species that fill every square inch and occupy every moment. We’ll hear a word of grace in a space like this and give it an inch or two, a moment or two, but then what Eugene Peterson calls “weeds of worry and illusions about getting more and wanting everything under the sun strangle what was heard, and nothing comes of it.”
Do you think this story needs much adjustment or translation, from first century to twenty-first century? I don’t think so. Jesus speaks about human nature, what the Word of God is up against that is within our realm, within our reach to work on. What’s wrong and broken in the world is certainly on God’s agenda. What’s wrong and broken in us is every bit as much God’s gracious concern, and aren’t we fortunate that this is God’s nature? And that it is God’s strategy: to build a peaceable world by setting-free peacemakers, to reconcile the ways of heaven and earth by releasing mercy within the reconcilers, to do all that the kingdom requires by means of incarnation, entrusting the mission to the likes of us who know that we bear the likeness of him.
Hear how important to God is the space that you inhabit. Given the nature and strategy of God, we cannot accept an explanation of this parable that takes away from us the power to change, the responsibility to be transformed. So no one today gets excused because they’re hard by nature, rocky by nature, weedy by nature.
And we don’t get to look longingly at the few really good souls we know who bear fruit and yield a hundredfold, or sixtyfold, or thirtyfold, and say about them, “They’re just good soil. Some have it, and some don’t.”
That could be how this parable gets heard. Let’s not go there. Instead, let’s recover in our own space what we need: the detachment from anxiety that comes from cultivating a relationship with God, the understanding that comes from service and community, the rootedness and enrichment that come through sacrament and scripture.
How important to God is the space that you inhabit. How you tend it relates to how you will hear God, and how you will serve God. For whatever it is that makes us hard, or shallow, or rocky, or thorny in our welcome of God and our growth in Christ may make us that way in our welcome and love of one another.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Word from The Dominican Republic
Scripture for this day includes Zechariah 9:9-12, Romans 7:15-25a, and Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
Our medical missioners in The Dominican Republic have called home. Laurie Glover phoned Madeline on Thursday. “We have no electricity where we’re staying, but there’s a cell signal,” she reported, using it.
The dorm they’re staying in has “a rustic pool”, make of that what you will. It’s hot, so even a rustic pool probably invites use. Adrienne, Bart, Laurie, and Peter are working directly in the surgical clinic. The kids (Andrea, Keith, John, Chris, Nate, and Cleo) are doing great. Maureen is holding down the pharmacy. The van is running well. And all those supplies we provided, and that our missioners lugged with them, all six hundred pounds or more, have been a real blessing, piece by piece, Laurie says.
So they have begun week two, and we keep them in our prayers and look forward to their return next weekend.
They represent so much that’s good and right about this nation, whose 232nd birthday we’ve celebrated this weekend. Our missioners, and vicariously our modest part in supporting them, is one of myriad ways that Americans share resources and use personal freedom to build bridges of caring and relationship and service with people of other cultures around the globe.
In our first summer forum last Sunday, Sue O’Riley and Molly Mackin spoke about the visit they and their colleagues will make this summer to Guatemala, one of many mission trips made under the banner of the Rural Literacy Project that Sue founded, bringing books and libraries to smaller towns in several Latin American countries. They’ve been doing this long enough to have encountered a certain failure: not all the small satellite libraries set up in past visits have survived. It sounds as if local support that was promised to maintain the books in good working order has fallen through, in some places.
In the forum, we heard how Sue and her volunteers are learning to understand this. They’ve consulted experts in the field, and are learning to travel lighter. They’re putting aside their old agenda of creating libraries, and investing themselves in building relationships that will in time help the Literacy Project fine-tune its efforts by teaching them what the people in these small towns want and need. Sue and Molly spoke of this as if it meant a shedding of their American insistence on achieving measurable results, and a letting-go of their American assumption that books and libraries are so valuable that they ought to be everywhere, the more the better.
So these volunteers do something like, but also unlike, what our missioners do. Sue and Molly and their team will live with families and find a variety of ways to spend time getting acquainted with villagers, especially children and teenagers, including finding ways to read with them, supporting them in basic kinds of reading that may help them stay in school, not leave prematurely.
By contrast, our volunteers have to hit the ground running. The organization that runs the clinics, Medical Ministry International, has the structure in place for teams of volunteers to move in and get right to work, each person taking a specific task, a cog in the system that moves lots of underserved people through medical and dental clinics that may be the only form of health care that these people have. The clinics aren’t equipped to handle all needs, but in the dental clinics many fillings, extractions, and fluoride treatments are performed, and in the surgical clinics hernias are repaired and tubal ligations performed, alongside countless other operations. Onsite pharmacies dispense needed prescriptions.
If you visit the MMI website, http://www.mmint.org/, you’ll find a quick overview with lots of streaming photos.
You’ll see that their mission is to serve Jesus Christ by providing spiritual and physical health care in this world of need. Their vision is to care annually for one hundred million of the world’s needy by the year 2050. Their strategy is a commitment to meet the need for medical care among the world’s poor with lasting solutions through excellence in medicine, patient care, and health education, by mobilizing volunteers on one and two-week medical projects and by establishing and equipping permanent medical centers.
You may recall that last summer MMI asked St. John’s to send a team to Bolivia to help open a new clinic there. We’ve got a reputation for sending hard workers.
They too experience the people and the culture, though at a different pace. Both kinds of mission trips bless all the participants involved. Both kinds give a positive introduction of Americans to the world, and of the world to Americans. Both kinds are examples of what’s good about this nation whose people are willing to serve and to learn, to leave their comfort zones and dare attempt what it takes to help the Creator God call forth a new heaven and a new earth, to help God the Holy Spirit restore prisoners of hope, and to help Jesus Christ receive the weary and give them rest.
Our medical missioners in The Dominican Republic have called home. Laurie Glover phoned Madeline on Thursday. “We have no electricity where we’re staying, but there’s a cell signal,” she reported, using it.
The dorm they’re staying in has “a rustic pool”, make of that what you will. It’s hot, so even a rustic pool probably invites use. Adrienne, Bart, Laurie, and Peter are working directly in the surgical clinic. The kids (Andrea, Keith, John, Chris, Nate, and Cleo) are doing great. Maureen is holding down the pharmacy. The van is running well. And all those supplies we provided, and that our missioners lugged with them, all six hundred pounds or more, have been a real blessing, piece by piece, Laurie says.
So they have begun week two, and we keep them in our prayers and look forward to their return next weekend.
They represent so much that’s good and right about this nation, whose 232nd birthday we’ve celebrated this weekend. Our missioners, and vicariously our modest part in supporting them, is one of myriad ways that Americans share resources and use personal freedom to build bridges of caring and relationship and service with people of other cultures around the globe.
In our first summer forum last Sunday, Sue O’Riley and Molly Mackin spoke about the visit they and their colleagues will make this summer to Guatemala, one of many mission trips made under the banner of the Rural Literacy Project that Sue founded, bringing books and libraries to smaller towns in several Latin American countries. They’ve been doing this long enough to have encountered a certain failure: not all the small satellite libraries set up in past visits have survived. It sounds as if local support that was promised to maintain the books in good working order has fallen through, in some places.
In the forum, we heard how Sue and her volunteers are learning to understand this. They’ve consulted experts in the field, and are learning to travel lighter. They’re putting aside their old agenda of creating libraries, and investing themselves in building relationships that will in time help the Literacy Project fine-tune its efforts by teaching them what the people in these small towns want and need. Sue and Molly spoke of this as if it meant a shedding of their American insistence on achieving measurable results, and a letting-go of their American assumption that books and libraries are so valuable that they ought to be everywhere, the more the better.
So these volunteers do something like, but also unlike, what our missioners do. Sue and Molly and their team will live with families and find a variety of ways to spend time getting acquainted with villagers, especially children and teenagers, including finding ways to read with them, supporting them in basic kinds of reading that may help them stay in school, not leave prematurely.
By contrast, our volunteers have to hit the ground running. The organization that runs the clinics, Medical Ministry International, has the structure in place for teams of volunteers to move in and get right to work, each person taking a specific task, a cog in the system that moves lots of underserved people through medical and dental clinics that may be the only form of health care that these people have. The clinics aren’t equipped to handle all needs, but in the dental clinics many fillings, extractions, and fluoride treatments are performed, and in the surgical clinics hernias are repaired and tubal ligations performed, alongside countless other operations. Onsite pharmacies dispense needed prescriptions.
If you visit the MMI website, http://www.mmint.org/, you’ll find a quick overview with lots of streaming photos.
You’ll see that their mission is to serve Jesus Christ by providing spiritual and physical health care in this world of need. Their vision is to care annually for one hundred million of the world’s needy by the year 2050. Their strategy is a commitment to meet the need for medical care among the world’s poor with lasting solutions through excellence in medicine, patient care, and health education, by mobilizing volunteers on one and two-week medical projects and by establishing and equipping permanent medical centers.
You may recall that last summer MMI asked St. John’s to send a team to Bolivia to help open a new clinic there. We’ve got a reputation for sending hard workers.
They too experience the people and the culture, though at a different pace. Both kinds of mission trips bless all the participants involved. Both kinds give a positive introduction of Americans to the world, and of the world to Americans. Both kinds are examples of what’s good about this nation whose people are willing to serve and to learn, to leave their comfort zones and dare attempt what it takes to help the Creator God call forth a new heaven and a new earth, to help God the Holy Spirit restore prisoners of hope, and to help Jesus Christ receive the weary and give them rest.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The Timeless Story of Abraham and Isaac
Readings cited here are Genesis 22:1-14 and Romans 6:12-23
So what do we do with that startling story of Abraham’s abuse of his son Isaac?
Scripture calls Abraham “the father of us all”. When you consider this story, do you want to call him that?
And if we’re prepared to call Abraham abusive for his response to God’s call, how about God’s role in apparently condoning this test of faith?
Some may not agree that Abraham’s behavior is abusive. Anyone caught trying that kind of thing today ought to face criminal charges, sure, but can our values be applied to this ancient culture?
That’s a good question. But here’s another one: Aren’t we responsible for what we do with these powerful stories that are part of our legacy as 21st-century people of faith? To be good stewards of biblical power, don’t we have to apply an evolutionary principle to our use of the Good Book so that it’s used to help human beings become instruments of reconciling love in this world, not hinder the human race by justifying violence against the innocent?
So I’ll wonder aloud again, what do we do with this story?
Let’s consider what two poets have done with it. If you’d like to follow with your eyes as well as your ears, turn to the back panel of your announcements and find first Emily Dickinson’s poem “Abraham to Kill Him”:
Abraham to kill him
Was distinctly told –
Isaac was an urchin –
Abraham was old –
Not a hesitation –
Abraham complied –
Flattered by obeisance –
Tyranny demurred—
Isaac – to his children
Lived to tell the tale –
Moral – with a mastiff
Manners may prevail.
Now, there is some shocking interpretation. To fearless Emily of Amherst, Abraham’s excessive obedience (“obeisance”) is not to God but to Tyranny. Abraham is not showing faith – he’s suffering from extreme obsessive compulsive disorder. He can’t shake free from a besetting dark destiny to betray his own happiness by putting to death the very child he brought to life. This is as if Abraham could be heard finally admitting, “I knew I should never have thought I could be this happy, love this boy so much, imagine that at my age I could have such satisfaction,” and so slides down the rabbit hole so far that he’s willing by one act of violence to take down everyone in his family in order to punish himself.
That is how tyranny works – mental tyranny – yet the poet says, “Tyranny demurred…” leaving us wondering what altar Abraham will worship at next – will he more truly find God after this harrowing brush with mental tyranny? Is it at this very point that St. Paul’s words would make sense, could Abraham have heard them?
“Do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under tyranny but under grace.”
While we’re wondering that, Emily is not finished with Abraham. She sees a moral in this tale: “with a mastiff manners may prevail.” Emily’s good at leaving us wondering. Is Abraham the vicious dog that young Isaac’s passive behavior has prevailed over? Or is it over God the mastiff that Abraham’s compliance has prevailed?
If so, that’s not to say that Emily’s theology is showing—just that she’s saying that from where she sits, in that lovely old house in Amherst, Abraham’s God appears to be bloodthirsty. Good reason, still, to hope that after dodging the bullet that flies from that altar, Abraham will find a truer way to worship God.
The second poet I’ve brought with me today is Wilfred Owen, leading poet of the First World War, whose shocking realistic war poetry on the horrors of trench and gas warfare stood in start contrast to the confidently patriotic verse of other poets. Killed at the very end of the war, news of his death reached his Shropshire hometown just as the church bells were pealing in celebration of peace.
This is his “Parable of the Old Man and the Young”:
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, ‘My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Thousands of years dissolve as the land of Moriah becomes the Western Front. Owen says that this story is timeless. The terrible temptation it posed in ancient time is posed today, whenever the leaders of this world consider violence as a way to resolve conflict.
For this poet, the ram caught in the thicket is Pride. What an image! Rams have very strong desire to get what they want—there’s a trait bound to get horns caught in all sorts of dilemmas.
Owen says what he knows from the battlefield, that when the princes of this earth refuse to sacrifice their pride, they sacrifice instead their young. In vast numbers they are killed, one by one, as we see at the end of the PBS News Hour, when each of our sons and daughters killed in Iraq is named and shown in sheer silence.
That this happens, says the poet, is the result of our Abrahams refusing to imagine making the very sacrifice that God calls for, the offering, the slaying of their pride.
So Owen doesn’t let us get away with thinking that if we were in Abraham’s sandals we would never have terrified our Isaac by binding him to our own ways, laying on him all the responsibilities we believe duty requires of us. Pride does get in the way of many things: parenting, leadership, and many other choices we have to make.
It is what God provides for sacrifice. In one of the psalms we hear, “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
As St. Paul develops his argument that the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life, he speaks of being “freed from sin and enslaved to God.” Surely that requires each Abraham—the old man in each of us—to offer the Ram of Pride. It is what God provides for sacrifice.
So what do we do with that startling story of Abraham’s abuse of his son Isaac?
Scripture calls Abraham “the father of us all”. When you consider this story, do you want to call him that?
And if we’re prepared to call Abraham abusive for his response to God’s call, how about God’s role in apparently condoning this test of faith?
Some may not agree that Abraham’s behavior is abusive. Anyone caught trying that kind of thing today ought to face criminal charges, sure, but can our values be applied to this ancient culture?
That’s a good question. But here’s another one: Aren’t we responsible for what we do with these powerful stories that are part of our legacy as 21st-century people of faith? To be good stewards of biblical power, don’t we have to apply an evolutionary principle to our use of the Good Book so that it’s used to help human beings become instruments of reconciling love in this world, not hinder the human race by justifying violence against the innocent?
So I’ll wonder aloud again, what do we do with this story?
Let’s consider what two poets have done with it. If you’d like to follow with your eyes as well as your ears, turn to the back panel of your announcements and find first Emily Dickinson’s poem “Abraham to Kill Him”:
Abraham to kill him
Was distinctly told –
Isaac was an urchin –
Abraham was old –
Not a hesitation –
Abraham complied –
Flattered by obeisance –
Tyranny demurred—
Isaac – to his children
Lived to tell the tale –
Moral – with a mastiff
Manners may prevail.
Now, there is some shocking interpretation. To fearless Emily of Amherst, Abraham’s excessive obedience (“obeisance”) is not to God but to Tyranny. Abraham is not showing faith – he’s suffering from extreme obsessive compulsive disorder. He can’t shake free from a besetting dark destiny to betray his own happiness by putting to death the very child he brought to life. This is as if Abraham could be heard finally admitting, “I knew I should never have thought I could be this happy, love this boy so much, imagine that at my age I could have such satisfaction,” and so slides down the rabbit hole so far that he’s willing by one act of violence to take down everyone in his family in order to punish himself.
That is how tyranny works – mental tyranny – yet the poet says, “Tyranny demurred…” leaving us wondering what altar Abraham will worship at next – will he more truly find God after this harrowing brush with mental tyranny? Is it at this very point that St. Paul’s words would make sense, could Abraham have heard them?
“Do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under tyranny but under grace.”
While we’re wondering that, Emily is not finished with Abraham. She sees a moral in this tale: “with a mastiff manners may prevail.” Emily’s good at leaving us wondering. Is Abraham the vicious dog that young Isaac’s passive behavior has prevailed over? Or is it over God the mastiff that Abraham’s compliance has prevailed?
If so, that’s not to say that Emily’s theology is showing—just that she’s saying that from where she sits, in that lovely old house in Amherst, Abraham’s God appears to be bloodthirsty. Good reason, still, to hope that after dodging the bullet that flies from that altar, Abraham will find a truer way to worship God.
The second poet I’ve brought with me today is Wilfred Owen, leading poet of the First World War, whose shocking realistic war poetry on the horrors of trench and gas warfare stood in start contrast to the confidently patriotic verse of other poets. Killed at the very end of the war, news of his death reached his Shropshire hometown just as the church bells were pealing in celebration of peace.
This is his “Parable of the Old Man and the Young”:
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, ‘My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Thousands of years dissolve as the land of Moriah becomes the Western Front. Owen says that this story is timeless. The terrible temptation it posed in ancient time is posed today, whenever the leaders of this world consider violence as a way to resolve conflict.
For this poet, the ram caught in the thicket is Pride. What an image! Rams have very strong desire to get what they want—there’s a trait bound to get horns caught in all sorts of dilemmas.
Owen says what he knows from the battlefield, that when the princes of this earth refuse to sacrifice their pride, they sacrifice instead their young. In vast numbers they are killed, one by one, as we see at the end of the PBS News Hour, when each of our sons and daughters killed in Iraq is named and shown in sheer silence.
That this happens, says the poet, is the result of our Abrahams refusing to imagine making the very sacrifice that God calls for, the offering, the slaying of their pride.
So Owen doesn’t let us get away with thinking that if we were in Abraham’s sandals we would never have terrified our Isaac by binding him to our own ways, laying on him all the responsibilities we believe duty requires of us. Pride does get in the way of many things: parenting, leadership, and many other choices we have to make.
It is what God provides for sacrifice. In one of the psalms we hear, “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
As St. Paul develops his argument that the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life, he speaks of being “freed from sin and enslaved to God.” Surely that requires each Abraham—the old man in each of us—to offer the Ram of Pride. It is what God provides for sacrifice.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
