Scripture for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 9) includes II Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10; II Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13
One suit, one sport jacket, two pairs of dress slacks, two pairs of chinos, a pair of shorts, four polo shirts, five dress shirts, three bow ties, one cassock alb, one clergy shirt, and four pairs of shoes… not to mention all the incidentals. Such was the load I lugged to New Orleans, several days ago, for the black tie optional (and rather grand) wedding Diana and I attended.
My list of “necessities” could have been longer: I could have brought my tuxedo. I chose to slip through that loophole, figuring that my vestments would cover me at the ceremony, and candlelight at the reception would make that black suit look formal enough—and a Williams bow tie would be all the gilding my lily required.
But did I ever flunk simplicity! My packing list was a polar opposite to our Lord’s marching orders. Except for going out two by two. That we did.
I filled two suitcases and a shoulder bag in an effort to fit a social occasion (actually, several social occasions, all part of Guy’s and Lacee’s gracious wedding weekend, which started on Thursday evening and ended Sunday, taking place in five different venues ranging from a Po’Boy bar to a cathedral). Diana and I did a pretty good job gauging what it would take to fit all those settings; but if you had watched us hauling our bags through the Albany Airport parking lot (from the outer rim of Longterm), you might have thought of something else Jesus said, right in keeping with today’s Gospel. I’ll paraphrase it, to make my point: Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who would lug half his wardrobe to enter the kingdom of God.
To enter anywhere, one must fit through the doorway! While the kingdom of God will never shut out a person who chooses to enter, our stuff won’t fit along with us. And choosing to enter that kingdom requires certain attitudes toward stuff. It has to fit our mission.
Jesus also told a parable about a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. Royal henchmen were sent out to compel his subjects to attend. This one poor bloke didn’t have time to go home and change out of his overalls; and didn’t the king single him out and expel him for not being properly dressed for the occasion. More on this in a moment… but doesn’t it seem as if nothing is simple, not even simplicity?)
To be a guest at any table, at any celebration, is to be honored. It is to be given the gift of inclusion, belonging, mattering to the host. If that’s the receiving side of being a guest, there is also a giving side: the giving of a wedding gift, the giving of time and effort and expense in traveling… and also the giving of response (one might even call it responsibility) to contribute to the festivity by one’s attitude, appearance, and behavior.
Clothing is not irrelevant to the celebration and blessing of a rite of passage, such as marriage. The apostle Paul, coaching the Christians at Colossae, used clothing as a metaphor for living one’s faith. He did this also in his letter to the believers in Rome, when he urged them to put on the Lord Jesus Christ, suggesting that our Savior’s intimate love is the finest, most enduring apparel we can wear. So, in his letter to the Colossians (which Guy and Lacee chose to be read at their service) Paul counseled, “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other.”
There is clothing used as a figure of speech to represent attitude, behavior, and personal mission. Something like this is going on in that parable I mentioned: to take your place in the kingdom of God, you must put on the Lord Jesus Christ. You must clothe yourself in his grace, and allow it to work: for power is made perfect in weakness.
Which brings us back to today’s Gospel, where Jesus is asking his interns to consider what they need to fit… not to fit into the society they’re returning to serve, but to fit the calling he has given them.
Our Lord’s teaching style is bold, confrontational, paradoxical. He doesn’t engage us gently with sweet reason. He would spare us endless trial and error, by issuing clear orders that cut to the chase.
Here’s what you won’t need to do, in order to do what matters most to me, he explains. You won’t need to make reservations for lodging on the road: I want you under the roofs of seekers just like yourselves, so that our fellowship may extend into the world.
Nothing personal, but you won’t need to put your trust in what you can prepare and control ahead of time. Leave the thermos and picnic basket at home: I need your hands free to be my hands. I want your attention to be on what matters to the people you’ll be touching, not on protecting your own possessions. We’re doing what we’re doing because God is at work in society, and needs us to do our part. Reach your empty hands to God to free and fill them with the Spirit’s power. You can’t do that and be holding onto your wallets—or your smart phones-- at the same time.
Care first how your choices fit you for the calling I have given you. Do you remember when I called you from many preoccupations in the work you were doing? Matthew, when you were a tax collector holding every poor soul to what he owed… Peter, John, James, when you were working around the clock following the fish wherever they ran and ran you ragged… Now I’m sending you back into your old neighborhoods, and you have something newer and finer to offer than the old compulsions. But it’s a spiritual authority I’ve given you. Be aware how your choices serve not your fitting-in, but the making you fit for the calling I have given you.
Be outstanding—stand out—in ways that people will notice and be drawn to: Trust the God of surprises to have an abundance that will meet and exceed the needs around you. Open yourselves to learn how to gain access to that abundance. Remember that you will see clearly only with your heart—anything truly essential will require this kind of seeing, and the reaching I teach you.
To practice that reaching, take with you a walking staff. The span you create when you thrust it forward, the short distance between your extended reach and your perceiving heart, that is how close I call you to draw to my people, your neighbors, that you may know them as I know them, and love them as I love you.
Monday, July 9, 2012
Monday, June 25, 2012
Things Not Always as They Seem
Scripture for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 7) includes I Samuel 17:32-49; II Corinthians 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41
As I listen to our readings this morning, I hear one caption that applies to all three: Things are not always as they seem.
I wonder if that simple message resonates at all for you, today. Things are not always as they appear.
This is doubly true in that action-packed portion of I Samuel. Goliath is thought to be invincible, but he is not. David is said to be just a boy, but he is more. Each of these men represents a certain kind of strength and power, and in the contrast between these two different kinds the point of the story is revealed. You could even say that it is the chief and central point of the entire Bible.
The Philistine warrior is all about size. The Hebrew shepherd is all about speed. Given David’s technology, all he needs is for Goliath to hold still long enough that he can get off a good shot; and when you’re the size of Goliath, and loaded down with iron and bronze, you do a lot of holding still and moving slowly. While this contrast does give us something to think about— like the advantages of traveling light—it barely scratches the surface of the differing strengths and powers of these two men.
Dig deeper and notice that for the warrior there is no higher power, no greater cause, no transcendent frame of reference, than his own brute force and arsenal of weapons. “Today I defy the ranks of Israel! Give me a man, that we may fight together.” That is life, for Goliath.
David’s reply reveals the contrast between them. “You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand… so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel…” That is life, for David.
The shepherd is a rustic theologian. What he sees as he looks on the encounter before him is not a giant of a man growling for blood; David sees a big windbag mocking the God of Israel, and all around him those hosts the Lord God of hosts has to do his bidding, an army of angels, their fiery swords filling the sky, confirming what David knows: You don’t mess around with God. (I know, I made some of that up, but I do believe we get to use our imaginations as we tell these stories, don’t you?)
So while Goliath sees himself as what the show is all about, David seems himself as a small cog in the gears of God’s action to establish God’s people, Israel. He sums this up, saying, “The Lord does not save by sword and spear; for the battle is the Lord’s…” To Goliath, our caption applies: Things are not always as they seem.
Those words apply to David, too. He is no small cog: he is on his way to meteoric promotion and all its attendant dangers. And the more powerful he becomes, the more he yields to the temptation to lead with the sword and cause Israel’s history to be written in human blood. Things are not always what they seem.
That insight fits also our portion of St. Paul’s 2nd Letter to the Corinthians: “We apostles are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”
There is Paul, the next principal voice of the New Testament after Jesus, describing what to expect if you’re a follower of Jesus. Bliss, rapture, comfort, security, and fulfillment? Not so much. And yet, because we are committed to what God is doing in the world, we learn to trust God’s ability to work through what the world dishes out, the afflictions, hardships, hungers, and sleepless nights we experience—not only to build up what God needs in the world, but also to build us up. For Paul, like David, the battle is the Lord’s. And things are not always what they seem.
Which brings us to that boat on the Sea of Galilee. Waves swamp that little boat, as a sudden storm threatens them with mortal danger. And Jesus is asleep in the stern, on a cushion. “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” It looks to them as if he does not.
I’m pretty sure they had spent enough time with Jesus by then to realize that mystery and paradox would likely remain their constant companions as long as they followed him. He was training them to respond in trust rather than react in anxiety, to cast all their cares on
God who cares for all. So in this moment they cast their cares on him: Teacher? Teacher, wake up! Do you not know? Do you not care?
They’re simply being honest, aren’t they?
I doubt this will be the last time his disciples urgently ask whether God is still in the battle with them, still on board, still with hand near the helm. As the agents of political and ecclesiastical treachery circled around them at that last Passover, their anxiety must have shot high, for he spoke to it directly in the Last Supper (which we’re still unpacking, each Lord’s Day) when he used the bread and wine of table fellowship and the water and towel of servanthood to shape their faith into an adequate answer to their fears.
Things are not always what they seem. A crisis may give birth to honesty and new determination to choose trust over anxiety. Smooth sailing may not develop our skills of navigation.
How does this little caption apply to you?
As I listen to our readings this morning, I hear one caption that applies to all three: Things are not always as they seem.
I wonder if that simple message resonates at all for you, today. Things are not always as they appear.
This is doubly true in that action-packed portion of I Samuel. Goliath is thought to be invincible, but he is not. David is said to be just a boy, but he is more. Each of these men represents a certain kind of strength and power, and in the contrast between these two different kinds the point of the story is revealed. You could even say that it is the chief and central point of the entire Bible.
The Philistine warrior is all about size. The Hebrew shepherd is all about speed. Given David’s technology, all he needs is for Goliath to hold still long enough that he can get off a good shot; and when you’re the size of Goliath, and loaded down with iron and bronze, you do a lot of holding still and moving slowly. While this contrast does give us something to think about— like the advantages of traveling light—it barely scratches the surface of the differing strengths and powers of these two men.
Dig deeper and notice that for the warrior there is no higher power, no greater cause, no transcendent frame of reference, than his own brute force and arsenal of weapons. “Today I defy the ranks of Israel! Give me a man, that we may fight together.” That is life, for Goliath.
David’s reply reveals the contrast between them. “You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand… so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel…” That is life, for David.
The shepherd is a rustic theologian. What he sees as he looks on the encounter before him is not a giant of a man growling for blood; David sees a big windbag mocking the God of Israel, and all around him those hosts the Lord God of hosts has to do his bidding, an army of angels, their fiery swords filling the sky, confirming what David knows: You don’t mess around with God. (I know, I made some of that up, but I do believe we get to use our imaginations as we tell these stories, don’t you?)
So while Goliath sees himself as what the show is all about, David seems himself as a small cog in the gears of God’s action to establish God’s people, Israel. He sums this up, saying, “The Lord does not save by sword and spear; for the battle is the Lord’s…” To Goliath, our caption applies: Things are not always as they seem.
Those words apply to David, too. He is no small cog: he is on his way to meteoric promotion and all its attendant dangers. And the more powerful he becomes, the more he yields to the temptation to lead with the sword and cause Israel’s history to be written in human blood. Things are not always what they seem.
That insight fits also our portion of St. Paul’s 2nd Letter to the Corinthians: “We apostles are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”
There is Paul, the next principal voice of the New Testament after Jesus, describing what to expect if you’re a follower of Jesus. Bliss, rapture, comfort, security, and fulfillment? Not so much. And yet, because we are committed to what God is doing in the world, we learn to trust God’s ability to work through what the world dishes out, the afflictions, hardships, hungers, and sleepless nights we experience—not only to build up what God needs in the world, but also to build us up. For Paul, like David, the battle is the Lord’s. And things are not always what they seem.
Which brings us to that boat on the Sea of Galilee. Waves swamp that little boat, as a sudden storm threatens them with mortal danger. And Jesus is asleep in the stern, on a cushion. “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” It looks to them as if he does not.
I’m pretty sure they had spent enough time with Jesus by then to realize that mystery and paradox would likely remain their constant companions as long as they followed him. He was training them to respond in trust rather than react in anxiety, to cast all their cares on
God who cares for all. So in this moment they cast their cares on him: Teacher? Teacher, wake up! Do you not know? Do you not care?
They’re simply being honest, aren’t they?
I doubt this will be the last time his disciples urgently ask whether God is still in the battle with them, still on board, still with hand near the helm. As the agents of political and ecclesiastical treachery circled around them at that last Passover, their anxiety must have shot high, for he spoke to it directly in the Last Supper (which we’re still unpacking, each Lord’s Day) when he used the bread and wine of table fellowship and the water and towel of servanthood to shape their faith into an adequate answer to their fears.
Things are not always what they seem. A crisis may give birth to honesty and new determination to choose trust over anxiety. Smooth sailing may not develop our skills of navigation.
How does this little caption apply to you?
Monday, June 11, 2012
Creating New Family
Scripture for the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost includes I Samuel 8:4-11, 16-20; II Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-35
What an intriguing Gospel to hear on a day when we honor high school seniors. I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again: I don’t pick these readings. They’re assigned from headquarters, appointed for a given Sunday, listed in the Book of Common Prayer, and they are what we make of them.
To help us roll up our sleeves and discover what we’re hearing today, I’d like you to notice two of our stained glass windows. It’s said that in the middle ages stained glass became popular in churches because it became the Bible for people who couldn’t read. And for people whose attention span doesn’t match the length of an average sermon, I’ve often taken comfort in the thought that some of the wandering eyes I may notice from here land on Bible scenes that can launch alternative sermons, perhaps of the Spirit’s making.
So the first window I want you to notice today is the second one on the west aisle. That’s Jesus as a teenager in the temple at Jerusalem. If he looks as if he’s about to dive into a debate, he is: this is that scene where Jesus’s mom and dad are frantic because he’s been missing for 24 hours and when they finally find him he’s in the temple having it out with the religious high muck de mucks. And there’s electricity in the air, this kid Jesus carrying his side of the debate so brightly that the poobahs are beginning to wish he’d go home and stop showing them up.
What I admire about this window is how its designer, Louis Comfort Tiffany, plays with our eyeballs. Where does he direct our attention? To the face, yes, earnest and pure of heart but intense and ready to tangle. Also to the chest, where a dose of pretty outrageous color locates his heart, the seat of his passion. And to the play of light on the floor, where it looks to me like the shape of a cross emerges as light streams in from above and illuminates this young man’s future.
The second window is a lost cause to see until you come to the altar rail: it’s in the bottom half of the first window in from the left. It’s the same scene as our first window, but imagined differently. Jesus sits (a sign of a teacher’s authority) and his highly educated and officially powerful elders appear to be scrambling through their scripture scrolls as Jesus holds his against his chest, from the heart presenting to them the Word of God which he has come not just to explain, but to be.
How come one little church has in it two windows dedicated to the only story we have about Jesus as an adolescent? And it’s not an easy story to hear, if you’re a parent, because it ends with Mary and Joseph finally finding their runaway child, letting their feelings hang out as they say to him, “What were you thinking? Didn’t you know we’d be scared out of our minds worrying about you?”, only to hear him say, “What? Why didn’t you know where you would find me, right here in my Father’s house.” Here was an attitude that illuminated their future even more so than that light on the floor.
Today’s Gospel fast-forwards us almost twenty years. One thing hasn’t changed. Jesus is in a very different place from where his family is. He is neither tied to his mother’s apronstrings nor following in his father’s footsteps (I know there’s the legend that Joseph was a carpenter and so was Jesus, but by the time of today’s encounter Jesus has hung up his toolbelt).
He is at the epicenter of a tsunami of people who swamp him and the little band of disciples at every turn. What drives them to him is their need. Many are sick with physical disease, others with psychosis, some are paralyzed, others are troubled by guilt, and quite likely a lot of them were hungry and thirsty, and most were on empty in terms of their faith and hope and love. The rest were there to watch.
One joker has said that this sounds like your typical Episcopal parish.
That crowd was so vast and their expectations so relentless that Jesus and his team could not even eat. Word traveled to Jesus’s family that he was beside himself, maybe even losing his grip on reality. Loyal to Jesus in ways that only parents and siblings know how to be, they move in to protect him, maybe helicopter him out of there… somehow… but they get only close enough to overhear nasty comments from a few high-placed scribes from Jerusalem, maybe some of the same men Jesus had outshone in the temple, once upon a time many years before. “He’s possessed by demons,” these men say, discrediting him, defaming him.
What Jesus has done for the crowds, what has kept those crowds growing, the healing, the forgiving, the feeding, the teaching and empowering, he has done by the Spirit of God. So he defends himself now, pointing out that if he were an agent of evil he could not achieve what he does.
It’s at that moment that word reaches Jesus that his family is there, looking for him. Instead of letting that be a reason to step out of the eye of the storm, Jesus reveals and acts upon a loyalty that runs deeper than that between parents and child, deeper than that among siblings.
There had to have been gasps in the crowd when he raised his voice to reply, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Looking at those who were with him there on the front lines he exclaimed, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
Doesn’t this remind you of how he stood apart from Mary and Joseph, twenty years earlier? Is this evidence that the American Psychological Association is right, saying that traits of adolescence, especially in males, can persist into the thirties?
However that may be, Jesus models for us a courageous use of freedom as he fashions his new family. Parents are wise when they recognize early on that this is the task of their children. Families that equip their increasingly adult children to create new circles of kinship may reap the harvest of grown children who, claiming that freedom, discover that they do not lose it when they maintain loyalty to their own original families.
We stand today with seven families who celebrate the high school graduation of their daughters and sons, whom they treasure, and whose freedom to create new community, new family, they respect (even while it may make them catch their breath in wonder).
What does it mean that in this holy place there are prominent windows remembering the adolescence of Jesus? Perhaps, situated at the heart of a college campus, this place just has to bear witness to the holy task of becoming. And to hallow and bless the rubs, those occasional confrontations, that generations must have as freedom is exercised. And to marvel at how increasingly adult children cause their parents to keep growing in wisdom, patience, comprehension, courage—all those traits parents have sought for their children-- until, eventually, parents begin to appear to their children wiser, smarter, braver than they once seemed.
Finally, perhaps our two windows of the becoming Jesus tell us that whatever our age, we are all, from God’s vantage point, simultaneously God’s treasured children, God’s trusted partners in creation and reconciliation, and God’s dwelling-place in the world, by the Spirit we have been given.
What an intriguing Gospel to hear on a day when we honor high school seniors. I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again: I don’t pick these readings. They’re assigned from headquarters, appointed for a given Sunday, listed in the Book of Common Prayer, and they are what we make of them.
To help us roll up our sleeves and discover what we’re hearing today, I’d like you to notice two of our stained glass windows. It’s said that in the middle ages stained glass became popular in churches because it became the Bible for people who couldn’t read. And for people whose attention span doesn’t match the length of an average sermon, I’ve often taken comfort in the thought that some of the wandering eyes I may notice from here land on Bible scenes that can launch alternative sermons, perhaps of the Spirit’s making.
So the first window I want you to notice today is the second one on the west aisle. That’s Jesus as a teenager in the temple at Jerusalem. If he looks as if he’s about to dive into a debate, he is: this is that scene where Jesus’s mom and dad are frantic because he’s been missing for 24 hours and when they finally find him he’s in the temple having it out with the religious high muck de mucks. And there’s electricity in the air, this kid Jesus carrying his side of the debate so brightly that the poobahs are beginning to wish he’d go home and stop showing them up.
What I admire about this window is how its designer, Louis Comfort Tiffany, plays with our eyeballs. Where does he direct our attention? To the face, yes, earnest and pure of heart but intense and ready to tangle. Also to the chest, where a dose of pretty outrageous color locates his heart, the seat of his passion. And to the play of light on the floor, where it looks to me like the shape of a cross emerges as light streams in from above and illuminates this young man’s future.
The second window is a lost cause to see until you come to the altar rail: it’s in the bottom half of the first window in from the left. It’s the same scene as our first window, but imagined differently. Jesus sits (a sign of a teacher’s authority) and his highly educated and officially powerful elders appear to be scrambling through their scripture scrolls as Jesus holds his against his chest, from the heart presenting to them the Word of God which he has come not just to explain, but to be.
How come one little church has in it two windows dedicated to the only story we have about Jesus as an adolescent? And it’s not an easy story to hear, if you’re a parent, because it ends with Mary and Joseph finally finding their runaway child, letting their feelings hang out as they say to him, “What were you thinking? Didn’t you know we’d be scared out of our minds worrying about you?”, only to hear him say, “What? Why didn’t you know where you would find me, right here in my Father’s house.” Here was an attitude that illuminated their future even more so than that light on the floor.
Today’s Gospel fast-forwards us almost twenty years. One thing hasn’t changed. Jesus is in a very different place from where his family is. He is neither tied to his mother’s apronstrings nor following in his father’s footsteps (I know there’s the legend that Joseph was a carpenter and so was Jesus, but by the time of today’s encounter Jesus has hung up his toolbelt).
He is at the epicenter of a tsunami of people who swamp him and the little band of disciples at every turn. What drives them to him is their need. Many are sick with physical disease, others with psychosis, some are paralyzed, others are troubled by guilt, and quite likely a lot of them were hungry and thirsty, and most were on empty in terms of their faith and hope and love. The rest were there to watch.
One joker has said that this sounds like your typical Episcopal parish.
That crowd was so vast and their expectations so relentless that Jesus and his team could not even eat. Word traveled to Jesus’s family that he was beside himself, maybe even losing his grip on reality. Loyal to Jesus in ways that only parents and siblings know how to be, they move in to protect him, maybe helicopter him out of there… somehow… but they get only close enough to overhear nasty comments from a few high-placed scribes from Jerusalem, maybe some of the same men Jesus had outshone in the temple, once upon a time many years before. “He’s possessed by demons,” these men say, discrediting him, defaming him.
What Jesus has done for the crowds, what has kept those crowds growing, the healing, the forgiving, the feeding, the teaching and empowering, he has done by the Spirit of God. So he defends himself now, pointing out that if he were an agent of evil he could not achieve what he does.
It’s at that moment that word reaches Jesus that his family is there, looking for him. Instead of letting that be a reason to step out of the eye of the storm, Jesus reveals and acts upon a loyalty that runs deeper than that between parents and child, deeper than that among siblings.
There had to have been gasps in the crowd when he raised his voice to reply, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Looking at those who were with him there on the front lines he exclaimed, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
Doesn’t this remind you of how he stood apart from Mary and Joseph, twenty years earlier? Is this evidence that the American Psychological Association is right, saying that traits of adolescence, especially in males, can persist into the thirties?
However that may be, Jesus models for us a courageous use of freedom as he fashions his new family. Parents are wise when they recognize early on that this is the task of their children. Families that equip their increasingly adult children to create new circles of kinship may reap the harvest of grown children who, claiming that freedom, discover that they do not lose it when they maintain loyalty to their own original families.
We stand today with seven families who celebrate the high school graduation of their daughters and sons, whom they treasure, and whose freedom to create new community, new family, they respect (even while it may make them catch their breath in wonder).
What does it mean that in this holy place there are prominent windows remembering the adolescence of Jesus? Perhaps, situated at the heart of a college campus, this place just has to bear witness to the holy task of becoming. And to hallow and bless the rubs, those occasional confrontations, that generations must have as freedom is exercised. And to marvel at how increasingly adult children cause their parents to keep growing in wisdom, patience, comprehension, courage—all those traits parents have sought for their children-- until, eventually, parents begin to appear to their children wiser, smarter, braver than they once seemed.
Finally, perhaps our two windows of the becoming Jesus tell us that whatever our age, we are all, from God’s vantage point, simultaneously God’s treasured children, God’s trusted partners in creation and reconciliation, and God’s dwelling-place in the world, by the Spirit we have been given.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Holy Trinity!
Scripture for Trinity Sunday includes Isaiah 6:1-8; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17
To devote one Sunday to the central Christian vision of God as the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit seems, well, stingy— more giving a nod to ancient doctrine than modeling a profound bow to the living God.
Far back in antiquity, this was simply the Sunday next after the Day of Pentecost, and that proximity gave it an afterglow which, by the Middle Ages, got the Church thinking that it made sense to let this Sunday mark the conclusion of that half of the Christian year, Advent to Pentecost, that presents liturgically the life of Christ and the bestowal of the Holy Spirit.
So I think of Trinity Sunday as a big bold exclamation mark, our way of saying, “See where all this story of redemptive love comes from? God! See where all this commitment to incarnate love leads to? God!”
Exactly when it was that Trinity Sunday began to be observed we don’t know. But in 1334 a memo went out from Rome urging this observance everywhere. It already had special cachet in England, since St. Thomas Becket had been consecrated bishop on that day in 1162. Those of us of a certain age will recall that the old Book of Common Prayer measured all the rest of the Sundays of the year by numbering them after this day (as in the Umpteenth Sunday after Trinity), whereas these days the Prayer Book numbers the second half of our Sundays as “after Pentecost”.
That’s not to diminish the importance of the Trinity; I hear it, rather, as a choice to anchor the whole of the Christian year in the one story of what God has done for us in Jesus
Christ, whose giving of the Spirit is understood not as the end of that story but the beginning of our story as the Church. To recognize Pentecost as the birthday of the Church is to claim as our own the whole story of salvation which is still being written by our choices, our commitments, our communion with God.
The vision of the Holy Trinity remains central to our faith and practice, no less so as we hear the persons of God recast from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to Creator, Redeemer, and Guide. Are those terms as intimate as the originals? Are they fresh and accessible in an age when many yearn to reach beyond needlessly masculine reference to God?
And speaking of what may seem dated, what is meant by “the persons of God”? In ordinary language, three persons would sound like a committee; and if there’s one thing the doctrine of the Trinity does not want to say, it is that we worship three gods.
So here is where we need to read the footnotes and recall what we must have heard in at least one Trinity Sunday sermon from the past, that the term “personae” comes from the ancient Roman theater. On a familiar level, any drama brings us characters emanating from the creative processes of an author’s writing and the actors’ taking on those roles. On a less familiar note, ancient actors used masks to express their characters, and these masks were called “personae”.
It doesn’t ring true to imagine Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as masks of God. That’s too superficial an image to describe the intimate reality we expect of God. But to say that God has more than one character sounds credible, and to listen to such New Testament texts as we’ve heard today is to notice that indeed from the first century three characterizations of God were familiar: Abba Father (in Aramaic, Abba was a term of endearment, what a child called his or her Dad), the Son of Man sent into the world to save people from what diminishes them, and the Spirit who intimately engages our spirit and gives new birth to what is spiritual in us.
John’s Gospel is a rich sketch book of how these personae of God operate. Jesus takes his Father’s truth and makes it known to people. After his ascension, this work of revelation is continued by the Spirit who demonstrates what Jesus has taught, and implants this truth in people, equipping them to do in the world what Jesus does in the world, a costly love that glorifies God whose likeness (image, persona) in us is this very ability to love.
In the rough and tumble forum of world religions, the concept of the Trinity takes its share of hits, often because it is not understood. And often it is not understood because Christians have not presented it well. In the unfolding conversation between Christianity and Islam, the Trinity is a stumbling block to Muslims. They may have 99 names of God, each revealing a characteristic of Allah, but their cri de coeur is that there is one God; and they fault Christians for believing there are three.
Shame on us, if that misunderstanding is the result of our poor public relations. Good for us, that the dialogue with Muslims will point us to the doctrine this day advances, for this vision of God is not the property of seminary professors and their students. The Holy Trinity makes theologians of us all, as we discover that getting the sense of this vision is not an elective—it’s required that we get clear how we have one God, not three, while having access to God in three ways, not one.
We’ll gain more and more of that sense, not so much through exercises in symbolic geometry like the equilateral triangle, the trefoil clover leaf, the three fish in circular motion, or the traditional tic-tac-toe model you’ll find in today’s announcements sheet.
We’ll gain the vision by practice. From very early times, Christian prayer has been made to God the Father through Jesus Christ the Son in the Holy Spirit that unites us to God. Catch those prepositions—to, through, in—and notice what we might call the aerodynamics of the Holy Trinity, how prayer moves.
And if you’re a Foundations course alum, you know how triangles pop up everywhere in the big picture of Christian practice. My favorite is nicknamed The Benedictine Promise, a shorthand way to grasp the big picture as it is experienced in monastic communities. You have a graphic for this today, too.
Picture a triangle. At the peak is stability, where the promise is that we will keep finding God as we enter more and more deeply the relationships and patterns of a congregation’s life. Bloom where you’re planted.
At the next point of the triangle is obedience: the promise is we will keep finding God as we listen deeply to the world, to holy scripture, to the wisdom of the church over the ages, to each other, to the whole of creation, and to the deepest longings and prayer of our hearts.
At the third point is conversion of life: the promise that we will keep finding God on the journey and in the new place our obedience calls us to go to, in losing the familiar and becoming ready to desire and find new life, in openness to our own transformation.
A commitment to stability allows the hearing required by obedience. Our commitment to obedience, to deep hearing, will guide our steps both to risk and to safety. Our commitment to conversion as a way of life leads on to more blooming where we’re next planted.
In the mystery of Trinity, these three points are in continuing spin and dance. The Trinity is much about movement, freedom, becoming.
And when I look at that model, Stability reminds me of God our Father/Mother/Maker/Sustainer. Obedience makes me picture Jesus who redeems by fulfilling a call and a vision not of his own design. Conversion of life causes me to imagine the Holy Spirit, mighty wind of holy change.
The Holy Trinity makes theologians of us all, enrolls us as disciples in a discipline not requiring a classroom, but a practice of life in a costly love out in the world.
And if you think that’s surprising enough to justify an exclamation mark, well, so be it! It’s the nature of this day. It’s in the nature of this faith.
To devote one Sunday to the central Christian vision of God as the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit seems, well, stingy— more giving a nod to ancient doctrine than modeling a profound bow to the living God.
Far back in antiquity, this was simply the Sunday next after the Day of Pentecost, and that proximity gave it an afterglow which, by the Middle Ages, got the Church thinking that it made sense to let this Sunday mark the conclusion of that half of the Christian year, Advent to Pentecost, that presents liturgically the life of Christ and the bestowal of the Holy Spirit.
So I think of Trinity Sunday as a big bold exclamation mark, our way of saying, “See where all this story of redemptive love comes from? God! See where all this commitment to incarnate love leads to? God!”
Exactly when it was that Trinity Sunday began to be observed we don’t know. But in 1334 a memo went out from Rome urging this observance everywhere. It already had special cachet in England, since St. Thomas Becket had been consecrated bishop on that day in 1162. Those of us of a certain age will recall that the old Book of Common Prayer measured all the rest of the Sundays of the year by numbering them after this day (as in the Umpteenth Sunday after Trinity), whereas these days the Prayer Book numbers the second half of our Sundays as “after Pentecost”.
That’s not to diminish the importance of the Trinity; I hear it, rather, as a choice to anchor the whole of the Christian year in the one story of what God has done for us in Jesus
Christ, whose giving of the Spirit is understood not as the end of that story but the beginning of our story as the Church. To recognize Pentecost as the birthday of the Church is to claim as our own the whole story of salvation which is still being written by our choices, our commitments, our communion with God.
The vision of the Holy Trinity remains central to our faith and practice, no less so as we hear the persons of God recast from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to Creator, Redeemer, and Guide. Are those terms as intimate as the originals? Are they fresh and accessible in an age when many yearn to reach beyond needlessly masculine reference to God?
And speaking of what may seem dated, what is meant by “the persons of God”? In ordinary language, three persons would sound like a committee; and if there’s one thing the doctrine of the Trinity does not want to say, it is that we worship three gods.
So here is where we need to read the footnotes and recall what we must have heard in at least one Trinity Sunday sermon from the past, that the term “personae” comes from the ancient Roman theater. On a familiar level, any drama brings us characters emanating from the creative processes of an author’s writing and the actors’ taking on those roles. On a less familiar note, ancient actors used masks to express their characters, and these masks were called “personae”.
It doesn’t ring true to imagine Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as masks of God. That’s too superficial an image to describe the intimate reality we expect of God. But to say that God has more than one character sounds credible, and to listen to such New Testament texts as we’ve heard today is to notice that indeed from the first century three characterizations of God were familiar: Abba Father (in Aramaic, Abba was a term of endearment, what a child called his or her Dad), the Son of Man sent into the world to save people from what diminishes them, and the Spirit who intimately engages our spirit and gives new birth to what is spiritual in us.
John’s Gospel is a rich sketch book of how these personae of God operate. Jesus takes his Father’s truth and makes it known to people. After his ascension, this work of revelation is continued by the Spirit who demonstrates what Jesus has taught, and implants this truth in people, equipping them to do in the world what Jesus does in the world, a costly love that glorifies God whose likeness (image, persona) in us is this very ability to love.
In the rough and tumble forum of world religions, the concept of the Trinity takes its share of hits, often because it is not understood. And often it is not understood because Christians have not presented it well. In the unfolding conversation between Christianity and Islam, the Trinity is a stumbling block to Muslims. They may have 99 names of God, each revealing a characteristic of Allah, but their cri de coeur is that there is one God; and they fault Christians for believing there are three.
Shame on us, if that misunderstanding is the result of our poor public relations. Good for us, that the dialogue with Muslims will point us to the doctrine this day advances, for this vision of God is not the property of seminary professors and their students. The Holy Trinity makes theologians of us all, as we discover that getting the sense of this vision is not an elective—it’s required that we get clear how we have one God, not three, while having access to God in three ways, not one.
We’ll gain more and more of that sense, not so much through exercises in symbolic geometry like the equilateral triangle, the trefoil clover leaf, the three fish in circular motion, or the traditional tic-tac-toe model you’ll find in today’s announcements sheet.
We’ll gain the vision by practice. From very early times, Christian prayer has been made to God the Father through Jesus Christ the Son in the Holy Spirit that unites us to God. Catch those prepositions—to, through, in—and notice what we might call the aerodynamics of the Holy Trinity, how prayer moves.
And if you’re a Foundations course alum, you know how triangles pop up everywhere in the big picture of Christian practice. My favorite is nicknamed The Benedictine Promise, a shorthand way to grasp the big picture as it is experienced in monastic communities. You have a graphic for this today, too.
Picture a triangle. At the peak is stability, where the promise is that we will keep finding God as we enter more and more deeply the relationships and patterns of a congregation’s life. Bloom where you’re planted.
At the next point of the triangle is obedience: the promise is we will keep finding God as we listen deeply to the world, to holy scripture, to the wisdom of the church over the ages, to each other, to the whole of creation, and to the deepest longings and prayer of our hearts.
At the third point is conversion of life: the promise that we will keep finding God on the journey and in the new place our obedience calls us to go to, in losing the familiar and becoming ready to desire and find new life, in openness to our own transformation.
A commitment to stability allows the hearing required by obedience. Our commitment to obedience, to deep hearing, will guide our steps both to risk and to safety. Our commitment to conversion as a way of life leads on to more blooming where we’re next planted.
In the mystery of Trinity, these three points are in continuing spin and dance. The Trinity is much about movement, freedom, becoming.
And when I look at that model, Stability reminds me of God our Father/Mother/Maker/Sustainer. Obedience makes me picture Jesus who redeems by fulfilling a call and a vision not of his own design. Conversion of life causes me to imagine the Holy Spirit, mighty wind of holy change.
The Holy Trinity makes theologians of us all, enrolls us as disciples in a discipline not requiring a classroom, but a practice of life in a costly love out in the world.
And if you think that’s surprising enough to justify an exclamation mark, well, so be it! It’s the nature of this day. It’s in the nature of this faith.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
All That Matters
Scripture for the Day of Pentecost includes Ezekiel 37:1-14, Acts 2:1-21, and John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
To say that the Day of Pentecost is the next most important festival day in the year, after Easter and Christmas, is true, but often deflated by its landing on Memorial Day weekend, a time when Americans love to get away, not so much to decorate graves as to embrace life at a spectacular time of year when we all feel drawn to the great outdoors.
In Judaism, Pentecost started out as an agricultural festival. In the Book of Leviticus, Israel is instructed to count off seven weeks from the Passover: “You shall count until the day after the seventh sabbath, fifty days; then you shall present an offering of new grain to the LORD.” Right in keeping with that is the instruction to bring fresh baked bread as a first-fruits offering to God. And then comes the bloody part: seven lambs, one young bull, two rams, and two goats are to be sacrificed. Finally, “On that same day you shall make proclamation: you shall hold a holy convocation; you shall not work at your occupations. This is a statute forever in all your settlements throughout all your generations.”
And presumably, with all that fresh meat, the holy convocation adjourned to a mighty barbecue.
So that background may suggest why the disciples were all together in one place, this day in Jerusalem. Don’t think twelve disciples (or eleven, with the loss of Judas Iscariot): Team Jesus was about 120 persons, we heard in last Sunday’s lesson from the Book of Acts.
Does this mean that they were all fired up at the thought of celebrating the wheat harvest? I doubt it. Something far more immediate, intimate, and life-changing was happening to them. With today’s portion of John’s Gospel as an audio clip of what was on their minds, they were still struggling with the meaning of their experiences across those previous fifty days: their Lord’s brutal death and momentous emergence from an empty tomb, his sporadic and astonishing appearances (usually at meal times), then his dramatic disappearance on the fortieth day.
“Sorrow has filled your hearts,” says Jesus to his followers in John’s Gospel. “Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not… the Advocate will not come to you… the Spirit of truth… (who) will guide you into all the truth.”
That gives us a taste of what those disciples are still chewing on, come the Day of Pentecost. They are still grieving, still looking in a mirror dimly, a rear-view mirror to try to figure out what the meaning of all this is.
Eugene Peterson in “The Message” tweaks the language this way: “If I don’t leave, the Friend (capital F) won’t come. But if I go, I’ll send him to you.” Or her, if you’re encouraged by some tweaking to do some more.
Now whatever meanings this day carried into this roomful of Jesus’s friends—gratitude for the earth and its bounty, sorrow and confusion over their losses—suddenly a sound filled the entire house, a sound like the rush of a violent wind. In many places today this moment in the story will bring a twinge of trauma: Joplin, Missouri… Springfield, Massachusetts, and points east… it was this time of year…
The full attention of everyone in that house was claimed, not by the meaning of past events, but by encounter with God in the immediate moment. What mattered now was not the traditions of Leviticus or the anguish of recent weeks: they were in the eye, not of a storm, but of God. Those flames of fire tell us so, as each mind and heart becomes filled with the Holy Spirit, and the mighty sound in that room is no longer wind but speech, their speech, in languages they had not studied or learned by trade or travel. And their speech is their tool to wield God’s mission given in that flow of the Spirit.
Because in Jerusalem at that time were devout Jews from every nation under heaven. And at the sound of all these languages in simultaneous fluency, an international crowd gathers. Amazed and astonished, they hear intriguing, appealing, longed-for announcement of God’s crossing the boundaries between past and present, God’s doing wonderful things not only long ago but now, God’s radical, even revolutionary, treasuring of all nations, all races, all gender, all classes. From where we stand, this is the stuff of breakthrough, the human race discovering a vision of God transcending all the tribal views of God, the human race finding itself at the threshold of unity—not under the iron fist of a Roman emperor, but at the open hand of a loving God.
Almost instantly, the nay-sayers say it can’t be so: these Jesus followers must be drunk. “Not so,” replies Peter,”it’s only nine o’clock in the morning, for heaven’s sake. What you’re hearing is fulfillment of ancient prophecy, that God would pour out his Spirit upon all flesh, not just the ordained few or the noticeably religious or the established righteous. Slaves as well as free, women as well as men, now find their voices in God.
And at this moment in time, the religion of ancient Israel is still where the action is. Notice how the Christian author of Acts (we believe it was St. Luke) gives credit to the Jews for having advanced the cause of universal partnership, even though, by the time he wrote this, the doors of the synagogues were closing to Christians and the hearts of Christians were turning against Jews.
Luke tells of the birth of the Jesus movement at a moment when it could have kept bringing its new blood, new life, to the table of orthodoxy. But it is in the nature of the orthodox to resist change, argue with the new, miss the opportunity to reach out and welcome, and instead circle the wagons. This is the fuller story Luke will tell, post-Pentecost.
By the same token, it is in the nature of movements to step on toes, impose changes, and generally set fire to the bleachers. All that is also part of the story, post-Pentecost. While we can’t expect Luke to tell that part of the story like it was, we know ourselves and our history well enough to guess that the estrangement of Christians and Jews was reciprocal.
And little would Luke have guessed that the Jesus movement itself could become just as resistant an orthodoxy as that of the Jewish temple. Luke remembers the days when it was said, “See how these Christians love one another!” Could he have time-traveled three or four centuries forward, he would have seen troubles ahead as the Church imposed uniformity in theology, worship, and politics, breaking into armed camps, excommunications, burnings of heretics, religious wars, and a never-ending splintering of the Body of Christ into tribal religions of denominationalism.
All of which is to say how critically important to us the Day of Pentecost, the story of Pentecost, the Spirit of Pentecost is.
And how dangerous to our own favorite orthodoxies. Remember the story: The sound, like a violent wind, claims the attention of all, levels all preoccupations, transcends all issues and struggles, sweeps everyone off their feet. Then comes the fire that frees and fills minds and hearts. No one emerges unchanged. No one can claim to be in charge.
All that is left is mission. And a community made ready by communion with the divine. All that matters is recognizing God, allowing inspiration, taking part in what God is doing in the world, expressing and extending the gift of being in God.
To say that the Day of Pentecost is the next most important festival day in the year, after Easter and Christmas, is true, but often deflated by its landing on Memorial Day weekend, a time when Americans love to get away, not so much to decorate graves as to embrace life at a spectacular time of year when we all feel drawn to the great outdoors.
In Judaism, Pentecost started out as an agricultural festival. In the Book of Leviticus, Israel is instructed to count off seven weeks from the Passover: “You shall count until the day after the seventh sabbath, fifty days; then you shall present an offering of new grain to the LORD.” Right in keeping with that is the instruction to bring fresh baked bread as a first-fruits offering to God. And then comes the bloody part: seven lambs, one young bull, two rams, and two goats are to be sacrificed. Finally, “On that same day you shall make proclamation: you shall hold a holy convocation; you shall not work at your occupations. This is a statute forever in all your settlements throughout all your generations.”
And presumably, with all that fresh meat, the holy convocation adjourned to a mighty barbecue.
So that background may suggest why the disciples were all together in one place, this day in Jerusalem. Don’t think twelve disciples (or eleven, with the loss of Judas Iscariot): Team Jesus was about 120 persons, we heard in last Sunday’s lesson from the Book of Acts.
Does this mean that they were all fired up at the thought of celebrating the wheat harvest? I doubt it. Something far more immediate, intimate, and life-changing was happening to them. With today’s portion of John’s Gospel as an audio clip of what was on their minds, they were still struggling with the meaning of their experiences across those previous fifty days: their Lord’s brutal death and momentous emergence from an empty tomb, his sporadic and astonishing appearances (usually at meal times), then his dramatic disappearance on the fortieth day.
“Sorrow has filled your hearts,” says Jesus to his followers in John’s Gospel. “Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not… the Advocate will not come to you… the Spirit of truth… (who) will guide you into all the truth.”
That gives us a taste of what those disciples are still chewing on, come the Day of Pentecost. They are still grieving, still looking in a mirror dimly, a rear-view mirror to try to figure out what the meaning of all this is.
Eugene Peterson in “The Message” tweaks the language this way: “If I don’t leave, the Friend (capital F) won’t come. But if I go, I’ll send him to you.” Or her, if you’re encouraged by some tweaking to do some more.
Now whatever meanings this day carried into this roomful of Jesus’s friends—gratitude for the earth and its bounty, sorrow and confusion over their losses—suddenly a sound filled the entire house, a sound like the rush of a violent wind. In many places today this moment in the story will bring a twinge of trauma: Joplin, Missouri… Springfield, Massachusetts, and points east… it was this time of year…
The full attention of everyone in that house was claimed, not by the meaning of past events, but by encounter with God in the immediate moment. What mattered now was not the traditions of Leviticus or the anguish of recent weeks: they were in the eye, not of a storm, but of God. Those flames of fire tell us so, as each mind and heart becomes filled with the Holy Spirit, and the mighty sound in that room is no longer wind but speech, their speech, in languages they had not studied or learned by trade or travel. And their speech is their tool to wield God’s mission given in that flow of the Spirit.
Because in Jerusalem at that time were devout Jews from every nation under heaven. And at the sound of all these languages in simultaneous fluency, an international crowd gathers. Amazed and astonished, they hear intriguing, appealing, longed-for announcement of God’s crossing the boundaries between past and present, God’s doing wonderful things not only long ago but now, God’s radical, even revolutionary, treasuring of all nations, all races, all gender, all classes. From where we stand, this is the stuff of breakthrough, the human race discovering a vision of God transcending all the tribal views of God, the human race finding itself at the threshold of unity—not under the iron fist of a Roman emperor, but at the open hand of a loving God.
Almost instantly, the nay-sayers say it can’t be so: these Jesus followers must be drunk. “Not so,” replies Peter,”it’s only nine o’clock in the morning, for heaven’s sake. What you’re hearing is fulfillment of ancient prophecy, that God would pour out his Spirit upon all flesh, not just the ordained few or the noticeably religious or the established righteous. Slaves as well as free, women as well as men, now find their voices in God.
And at this moment in time, the religion of ancient Israel is still where the action is. Notice how the Christian author of Acts (we believe it was St. Luke) gives credit to the Jews for having advanced the cause of universal partnership, even though, by the time he wrote this, the doors of the synagogues were closing to Christians and the hearts of Christians were turning against Jews.
Luke tells of the birth of the Jesus movement at a moment when it could have kept bringing its new blood, new life, to the table of orthodoxy. But it is in the nature of the orthodox to resist change, argue with the new, miss the opportunity to reach out and welcome, and instead circle the wagons. This is the fuller story Luke will tell, post-Pentecost.
By the same token, it is in the nature of movements to step on toes, impose changes, and generally set fire to the bleachers. All that is also part of the story, post-Pentecost. While we can’t expect Luke to tell that part of the story like it was, we know ourselves and our history well enough to guess that the estrangement of Christians and Jews was reciprocal.
And little would Luke have guessed that the Jesus movement itself could become just as resistant an orthodoxy as that of the Jewish temple. Luke remembers the days when it was said, “See how these Christians love one another!” Could he have time-traveled three or four centuries forward, he would have seen troubles ahead as the Church imposed uniformity in theology, worship, and politics, breaking into armed camps, excommunications, burnings of heretics, religious wars, and a never-ending splintering of the Body of Christ into tribal religions of denominationalism.
All of which is to say how critically important to us the Day of Pentecost, the story of Pentecost, the Spirit of Pentecost is.
And how dangerous to our own favorite orthodoxies. Remember the story: The sound, like a violent wind, claims the attention of all, levels all preoccupations, transcends all issues and struggles, sweeps everyone off their feet. Then comes the fire that frees and fills minds and hearts. No one emerges unchanged. No one can claim to be in charge.
All that is left is mission. And a community made ready by communion with the divine. All that matters is recognizing God, allowing inspiration, taking part in what God is doing in the world, expressing and extending the gift of being in God.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Between-times
Scripture for the 7th Sunday of Easter includes Acts 1:15-17, 21-26; I John 5:9-13; John 17:6-19
Fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus, his people will rise, renewed with power from on high. The fiftieth day of Easter, the Day of Pentecost, trains the church to look up and open up to that rushing wind of the Spirit of God, that pouring out of “amore”, the love that sweeps us off our feet and empowers us to love God in all things, receiving the love that is above all things, the passion that sends us into the world to see what we can do with such power.
But before we get to the fiftieth day of Easter (next Sunday), we arrive at the fortieth day (last Thursday), when the church is challenged to raise its sights, looking up not so ready to receive as to grieve; for on that day, the Ascension of Jesus slaps us in the face with an ultimate puzzle. Our Lord appears to be taken from us, yet all the language of the day claims that this happens so that all things may be filled with his presence. He is in all things; he is above all things.
On the Day of Pentecost, remembered as the birthday of the church, some congregations serve a great big cake. On the Day of Ascension, the conflicting themes of disappearance and omnipresence make it sound as if we get to eat our cake… and keep it, too.
These great fifty days provide the spin to the church year and make it behave like a roller coaster ride. Our faith tells us that the cross of Good Friday is actually the tree of new life (shown in the central and topmost window above our altar as a bright green cross, have you ever taken that in, while at the rail?); but bitter is the grief that rivets mother Mary and friend John to that dark hillside, and for at least a while the whole company of disciples is plunged into despair. Until Mary Magdalene explodes in joy and Team Jesus, in ones and twos and threes, experiences the fresh but familiar presence of their mentor, become convinced that death has not been able to silence him, and so become witnesses to his resurrection.
But this isn’t a fairy tale where they’ll all live happily ever after. Joyfully, yes. Powerfully, creatively, generously, bravely, yes. But it isn’t happy faces on those disciples, the fortieth day out. He is taken from them. The roller coaster lunges one more time, and their hearts sink as they face a heaven that claims the brightest and best. How will they come down from this mountain of loss and navigate a world without him?
This is part of the Gospel story that it’s tempting to rush over. But the answer for them can’t have been much different than the answer for us. We navigate our losses by passing through them head on, heart on, recognizing that it takes time to heal, takes a community of caring to heal, takes openness to the promised Spirit of God in Jesus to heal, takes reliving and retelling the story of our gains and our losses, to heal.
The story of the Ascension is the church’s story of her gains and losses. It works best as a story. Try to depict it realistically in a painting, and you have to deal with dangling feet and gaping mouths. But as a story, we get to imagine the impact, sense the mystery, and treasure the metaphors as we let it become our story.
For each of us is on a roller coaster ride that ascends in love of life, in love of God, and can come rumbling down in stomach-flipping speed in the loss of someone upon whom our life has hinged, or can take an abrupt turn we weren’t anticipating and we then face intensely the challenges of adapting to change. It is then that we dare to take him at his word and trust his promise, “I am with you always, to the close of the age.”
Come to think of it, wouldn’t it be smarter not to wait until then to practice the adaptability of faith in Jesus? To hinge our lives more intentionally on him, building familiarity and facing mystery in our praying, having an honest and open conversation with scripture, finding spiritual community with one another, seeking and serving where we are needed?
These must have been the same choices embraced by the church between Ascension and Pentecost, moving them through grief to joy, through helplessness to leadership, through dizzying change into transformation in the way of Christ. The story of this between-times is our story.
Fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus, his people will rise, renewed with power from on high. The fiftieth day of Easter, the Day of Pentecost, trains the church to look up and open up to that rushing wind of the Spirit of God, that pouring out of “amore”, the love that sweeps us off our feet and empowers us to love God in all things, receiving the love that is above all things, the passion that sends us into the world to see what we can do with such power.
But before we get to the fiftieth day of Easter (next Sunday), we arrive at the fortieth day (last Thursday), when the church is challenged to raise its sights, looking up not so ready to receive as to grieve; for on that day, the Ascension of Jesus slaps us in the face with an ultimate puzzle. Our Lord appears to be taken from us, yet all the language of the day claims that this happens so that all things may be filled with his presence. He is in all things; he is above all things.
On the Day of Pentecost, remembered as the birthday of the church, some congregations serve a great big cake. On the Day of Ascension, the conflicting themes of disappearance and omnipresence make it sound as if we get to eat our cake… and keep it, too.
These great fifty days provide the spin to the church year and make it behave like a roller coaster ride. Our faith tells us that the cross of Good Friday is actually the tree of new life (shown in the central and topmost window above our altar as a bright green cross, have you ever taken that in, while at the rail?); but bitter is the grief that rivets mother Mary and friend John to that dark hillside, and for at least a while the whole company of disciples is plunged into despair. Until Mary Magdalene explodes in joy and Team Jesus, in ones and twos and threes, experiences the fresh but familiar presence of their mentor, become convinced that death has not been able to silence him, and so become witnesses to his resurrection.
But this isn’t a fairy tale where they’ll all live happily ever after. Joyfully, yes. Powerfully, creatively, generously, bravely, yes. But it isn’t happy faces on those disciples, the fortieth day out. He is taken from them. The roller coaster lunges one more time, and their hearts sink as they face a heaven that claims the brightest and best. How will they come down from this mountain of loss and navigate a world without him?
This is part of the Gospel story that it’s tempting to rush over. But the answer for them can’t have been much different than the answer for us. We navigate our losses by passing through them head on, heart on, recognizing that it takes time to heal, takes a community of caring to heal, takes openness to the promised Spirit of God in Jesus to heal, takes reliving and retelling the story of our gains and our losses, to heal.
The story of the Ascension is the church’s story of her gains and losses. It works best as a story. Try to depict it realistically in a painting, and you have to deal with dangling feet and gaping mouths. But as a story, we get to imagine the impact, sense the mystery, and treasure the metaphors as we let it become our story.
For each of us is on a roller coaster ride that ascends in love of life, in love of God, and can come rumbling down in stomach-flipping speed in the loss of someone upon whom our life has hinged, or can take an abrupt turn we weren’t anticipating and we then face intensely the challenges of adapting to change. It is then that we dare to take him at his word and trust his promise, “I am with you always, to the close of the age.”
Come to think of it, wouldn’t it be smarter not to wait until then to practice the adaptability of faith in Jesus? To hinge our lives more intentionally on him, building familiarity and facing mystery in our praying, having an honest and open conversation with scripture, finding spiritual community with one another, seeking and serving where we are needed?
These must have been the same choices embraced by the church between Ascension and Pentecost, moving them through grief to joy, through helplessness to leadership, through dizzying change into transformation in the way of Christ. The story of this between-times is our story.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
In All and above All
Scripture portions for the sixth Sunday of Easter include Acts 10:44-48; I John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17
As a preacher, I plead guilty to treating each Sunday’s Collect of the Day as if it were eye candy. The collect is that prayer we say together just before we start hearing the Bible portions of the day; its name suggests its purpose, to collect a hundred or so minds and hearts that otherwise might at that moment be rolling around this room like marbles, focusing our attention on the major theme of the readings we’ll hear. That’s a mighty important role, and, while I’m aware that the Sunday collects in the Book of Common Prayer also are eloquent little gems, I confess that I seldom bring them into the pulpit with me.
Today’s collect can be traced back to the Gothic Missal (or altar book) of the early 8th century French church, and has ancient roots also in Celtic worship. In both its Latin form and its later English translations, its words have been changed here and there by editors (Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, for one), but the long keeping of this prayer makes it one of the Christian Church’s family jewels, and in both this keeping and that editing we recognize the same family dynamics that gave us the Bible: We keep the texts we call holy. We call them holy because they effectively communicate God. And having saved them from the fate of obscurity that landed many another text on the cutting-room floor, we’ve been unafraid to edit, tweak, and tease their words not to change their meaning but to better reveal it.
This collect announces that the whole enterprise of Christian religion is based on a human power, the power to choose, the power to choose to love God. Which is, as the collect tells us, intimately bound to loving life.
The prayer opens with a promise: that for those who make that choice, God has prepared “such good things as surpass our understanding.” It doesn’t square with best theology to hear this saying that we earn those good things: they come purely by gift and grace. And it surely doesn’t settle with good theology to think that God doesn’t care for people who do not choose to love God. In as few words as a collect is built of, what is said is that the choice to love will be rewarded, and not in ways we can anticipate or logically explain.
You would think that what comes next would be a good dose of hectoring, like, “so you all had better try, harder and harder, to love God.” Instead, God is asked to pour into our hearts such love towards God that we, loving God in all things and above all things, may obtain those promises.
This reinforces what we heard last Sunday in the First Letter of John: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us, showing this love by sending his only Son into the world so we might live through him. We love because God first loved us.”
Go back to the 8th century Latin version of our collect and you’ll find two different words for “love.” (This is the sort of thing that interests a preacher, in a forensic sort of way.)
To show you what I mean, hear again the collect’s three phrases about love.
First, “O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding…”
Second: “Pour into our hearts such love towards you…”
Third, “…that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire…”
First is the love we choose to invest in God. This word for love is related to the Latin verb “diligere”, the root meaning of which is “to choose.” Diligent love, choosing and choosing and choosing again to invest our hope and trust in God, choosing to build and maintain relationship, this same word appears as a result of what we ask for in the “Pour into our hearts” petition: “that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises…”
A different word for love appears when we describe what we want poured into our hearts: that is “amore”, love rooted in emotion, “amoris affectum”, affection and more—passion. This is the love we cannot manufacture on our own, the love that we need to have happen to us.
Aren’t these the two poles between which swings our experience of loving God? At one pole, we need from God love that sweeps us off our feet, frees us from our fretful need to control, opens us to deeper powers and hallows our weakness. At the other pole, we offer to God diligent love, caring for people, recognizing our duty to love God by loving our neighbors, seizing opportunities to love one another as Jesus loves his disciples.
At one pole, God gathers us up to breathe new life into us. This is the very motion that frees us to go and see what we can do with that power, as we swing towards the pole of diligence. To love God in all things, we must receive what God has for us above all things.
A very dear couple in our parish have a quiet personal practice of loving God.
Each of them starts the day with three or four polished stones in their left pockets. They go their separate ways, but each has the same practice: As soon as one recognizes that something good has happened, a kindness experienced, a blessing felt, he or she takes a stone from that left pocket, fingers it, feels it, and moves it to the right pocket. This is a practice of counting blessings. It makes me think of the two poles of loving God, the welcoming of the Spirit of God and the going to see what can be done with it.
What had real impact on me was the setting and the moment for their telling me about their stones. We were in a crowded hectic hallway off the lobby of a hospital. This was a place where life and death were held in precarious balance. A place where people are swept along in events beyond their own control, a place where diligent care and relentless love play their part in working wonders.
It was a perfect place to reveal the power of human choice. In their practice, the choice to recognize and welcome love whenever and wherever it happens to them, even in the valley of the shadow, the choice to recognize God setting a table before them in the presence of all that could trouble them. And the choice to remember what a full pocket is for.
As a preacher, I plead guilty to treating each Sunday’s Collect of the Day as if it were eye candy. The collect is that prayer we say together just before we start hearing the Bible portions of the day; its name suggests its purpose, to collect a hundred or so minds and hearts that otherwise might at that moment be rolling around this room like marbles, focusing our attention on the major theme of the readings we’ll hear. That’s a mighty important role, and, while I’m aware that the Sunday collects in the Book of Common Prayer also are eloquent little gems, I confess that I seldom bring them into the pulpit with me.
Today’s collect can be traced back to the Gothic Missal (or altar book) of the early 8th century French church, and has ancient roots also in Celtic worship. In both its Latin form and its later English translations, its words have been changed here and there by editors (Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, for one), but the long keeping of this prayer makes it one of the Christian Church’s family jewels, and in both this keeping and that editing we recognize the same family dynamics that gave us the Bible: We keep the texts we call holy. We call them holy because they effectively communicate God. And having saved them from the fate of obscurity that landed many another text on the cutting-room floor, we’ve been unafraid to edit, tweak, and tease their words not to change their meaning but to better reveal it.
This collect announces that the whole enterprise of Christian religion is based on a human power, the power to choose, the power to choose to love God. Which is, as the collect tells us, intimately bound to loving life.
The prayer opens with a promise: that for those who make that choice, God has prepared “such good things as surpass our understanding.” It doesn’t square with best theology to hear this saying that we earn those good things: they come purely by gift and grace. And it surely doesn’t settle with good theology to think that God doesn’t care for people who do not choose to love God. In as few words as a collect is built of, what is said is that the choice to love will be rewarded, and not in ways we can anticipate or logically explain.
You would think that what comes next would be a good dose of hectoring, like, “so you all had better try, harder and harder, to love God.” Instead, God is asked to pour into our hearts such love towards God that we, loving God in all things and above all things, may obtain those promises.
This reinforces what we heard last Sunday in the First Letter of John: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us, showing this love by sending his only Son into the world so we might live through him. We love because God first loved us.”
Go back to the 8th century Latin version of our collect and you’ll find two different words for “love.” (This is the sort of thing that interests a preacher, in a forensic sort of way.)
To show you what I mean, hear again the collect’s three phrases about love.
First, “O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding…”
Second: “Pour into our hearts such love towards you…”
Third, “…that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire…”
First is the love we choose to invest in God. This word for love is related to the Latin verb “diligere”, the root meaning of which is “to choose.” Diligent love, choosing and choosing and choosing again to invest our hope and trust in God, choosing to build and maintain relationship, this same word appears as a result of what we ask for in the “Pour into our hearts” petition: “that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises…”
A different word for love appears when we describe what we want poured into our hearts: that is “amore”, love rooted in emotion, “amoris affectum”, affection and more—passion. This is the love we cannot manufacture on our own, the love that we need to have happen to us.
Aren’t these the two poles between which swings our experience of loving God? At one pole, we need from God love that sweeps us off our feet, frees us from our fretful need to control, opens us to deeper powers and hallows our weakness. At the other pole, we offer to God diligent love, caring for people, recognizing our duty to love God by loving our neighbors, seizing opportunities to love one another as Jesus loves his disciples.
At one pole, God gathers us up to breathe new life into us. This is the very motion that frees us to go and see what we can do with that power, as we swing towards the pole of diligence. To love God in all things, we must receive what God has for us above all things.
A very dear couple in our parish have a quiet personal practice of loving God.
Each of them starts the day with three or four polished stones in their left pockets. They go their separate ways, but each has the same practice: As soon as one recognizes that something good has happened, a kindness experienced, a blessing felt, he or she takes a stone from that left pocket, fingers it, feels it, and moves it to the right pocket. This is a practice of counting blessings. It makes me think of the two poles of loving God, the welcoming of the Spirit of God and the going to see what can be done with it.
What had real impact on me was the setting and the moment for their telling me about their stones. We were in a crowded hectic hallway off the lobby of a hospital. This was a place where life and death were held in precarious balance. A place where people are swept along in events beyond their own control, a place where diligent care and relentless love play their part in working wonders.
It was a perfect place to reveal the power of human choice. In their practice, the choice to recognize and welcome love whenever and wherever it happens to them, even in the valley of the shadow, the choice to recognize God setting a table before them in the presence of all that could trouble them. And the choice to remember what a full pocket is for.
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