So who gets to sit at the table of God? Not waiting on that table as a servant, but seated there as belonging? Consider the table a metaphor representing the love, the deep-hearted relentless love of God from whom we come, in whom we live and move and have our being, and to whom we go when life no longer animates our bodies. For God has come to humankind in Jesus Christ to dwell within each of us and among all of us, to make us a people generously included in the covenant love that has long embraced the Jewish people.
That embrace goes back, says the Book of Genesis, to Abram. “For he is the father of all of us,” says St. Paul in his letter today. And the noteworthy thing about Abraham, says Paul, is that we celebrate not his righteousness through keeping the law of Israel’s covenant with God—there was no such law, or covenant, or Israel in his time—but instead we remember him for his sheer faith, his trusting of God. (You remember that story: God called a fairly elderly Abram and Sarai his wife to pick up their stakes and move from a settled life in Ur of the Chaldees—that would be modern Iraq—to journey to Canaan, the famous promised land that Israel would one day claim, and endlessly fight over.)
Abraham stops being Abram when he agrees to obey God and become displaced from his homeland, a moment when covenant is made between them and Abram emerges a changed man. Abram, the Hebrew for “exalted father”, gives way to Abraham, an Aramaic form meaning “father of many nations”.
And the point, lest we miss it: Abraham is noteworthy because Jew and Christian and Muslim alike can celebrate him in terms that trump all religious claims that he is one of them. He wasn’t. There was no Judaism to belong to, in any formal sense, in that time. And it’s a sure thing there was no Christianity or Islam. Yet all three recognize his righteousness, and lay claim to him, “father of us all.”
This fractured world needs Abraham!
You can see the cast of characters in our readings today already shaping an answer to the question, “Who gets to sit at the table of God?”
In his letter, St. Paul speaks Abraham language to the Romans, to show that the Christian faith, while rising from Judaism, is not restricted to Jewish people. Christianity “depends on faith, in order that God’s promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all God’s descendants, not only to the adherents of the Jewish law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham…”
And what is the faith of Abraham? Certainty that God allows no resting on laurels. Sureness that God will upset your applecart, even in old age. Assurance that you should never put your hiking boots too far in the back of your closet. Conviction that God never calls you to do anything that God doesn’t also equip you to do. Awareness that God is always making all things new, always conceiving, always gestating a new heaven and a new earth. Realization that here on earth we have no permanent dwelling place. Assent to God’s radical agenda, that God is blessing all nations, not just our own. And, finally, the faith of Abraham is a shedding of the illusion that God’s blessing means ease and comfort, absolute clarity that God’s blessing awakens a person, a nation, to new responsibilities, new insights, new questions, and new ability to pursue the mission that is entrusted whenever God blesses.
Who gets to sit at the table of God? In the light of today’s portions from scripture, perhaps the question ought to be: On what basis could people not find their seats there? And I hear the Gospel answering, not with the suggestion that God could have an exclusivist attitude, but with the words of Jesus: “You must be born from above.” Without openness to the Spirit of God, without being born of the Spirit, one doesn’t look for the table. Without news of the fiesta, one doesn’t come to the fiesta.
Nicodemus gets close. He has come to Jesus by night, and could there not have been a meal in the background of this meeting? We get the sense, though, that Nicodemus, a religious leader with a lot at stake should he be discovered in the ragtag company of Jesus and friends, Nicodemus stands at the edge of holy space, not at the table—in the obscurity of shadow, not out in the torchlight. “How can these things be?” he asks painfully, yearning for what he will not allow himself to reach for.
Nicodemus has a seat. He is a member of the powerful Sanhedrin which will one day pass lethal judgment on Jesus, and, of course, already has judged him a threat to the established order. Nicodemus is not ready to give up that seat. Understandably, since until he met Jesus he had every reason to believe that there was no finer seat at the table of God than to be an elder of Israel. Rather like being an Anglican bishop.
Jesus upsets that sureness. Nicodemus feels drawn, cannot shake the appeal Jesus makes with authentic integrity of divine Spirit that makes the soul of this old man sing. But he has paid attention, has heard Jesus insist that at God’s table no one sits higher than the next, no one gets favored portions or special influence. It is to a table of equals that Jesus invites him, and could it be that Nicodemus can’t yet see his equal in the likes of boastful James and John, the fisherman Peter, that nervous Judas Iscariot—not to mention earnest Mary of Bethany, her fussy sister Martha, and that one with the long hair and bold look, the Magdalene?
Nicodemus’s resistance may be explained by verses from the Gospel of Mark: “As Jesus sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ When Jesus heard this, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick do; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’” (Mark 2:15-17)
If you know him well, you will not hear those last words as excluding anyone. But he had a sharp tongue, and used it to slice people free from false assumptions and presumptions. The consummate truth-teller, Jesus tells it like it is: the already-righteous do not need him. Those with big important seats to occupy will not see the compelling beauty or hear the sweet wisdom of God’s hospitality without being born from above, of the Spirit.
Who gets to sit at the table of God?
There’s no more important question to be answered than that one. The Episcopal Church is just one of several parts of Christ’s one Body in spasm at this time in history, over this question.
It is a question that you’ll want to ask and answer before you vote in the presidential election, this fall.
The question is being answered falsely wherever racist grafitti appears on walls, or sexist reaction is allowed to go unchallenged, or fear of the stranger is allowed to block our best impulse to welcome, include, and celebrate the seating of yet another who is revealed to be sister, brother.
Now, what if you ask the question of yourself? Is it just some righteous part of you that gets to sit at the table of God, just the commendable part?
My all-time favorite Lenten book is Martin Smith’s A Season for the Spirit. I’ve set out a few copies at the foot of the aisle, if you’d like to borrow one. His premise is that within each self there is a little world of selves, and he says this:
“The Holy Spirit of God dwells in your heart and is no stranger to the diversity and conflict there. The Spirit dwells with and among and between all the selves of your self. There is no secret place where the Spirit has no access, nor any inner person excluded from the Spirit’s presence…
“…What the Spirit struggles to achieve in human societies will throw light on what the Spirit is bringing about in my own conversion and healing. If the Spirit unites people into communities of love where there is room for everyone, then the conversion of each heart will be a similar process of reconciliation. The Spirit will bring the selves of the self into a unity around the center of the indwelling Christ. The New Self will be a kind of inner community based on the principle of love in which there is room for everyone.
“Jesus proclaims the hospitality of God that beckons all the excluded and disabled and powerless out of the shadows into the full light of day.
“Jesus is serving notice that the present arrangements of human society are obsolete. The announcement of God’s community of equals requires the abolition of human structures that alienate and oppress and starve out the needy, and that maintain enmities between societies and races…” (And, we might add, deepens the opposition between political parties, among churches, and among people with differing viewpoints who need to hear one another.)
“The Spirit’s work in the heart is not a matter of a few adjustments here and there, a little polishing and refining. There has to be a breaking up of the present order… And so the scriptures speak of a breaking down of the old way of being a person and the discovery of a completely new one. They speak of our need to be born again.”
Compassion is not just for others. Acceptance and forgiveness are not for export only. Carrying around a burden of self-rejection is not going to leave us free to love others, try as hard as we will. Smith says, “Without an inner climate of compassion in the heart it is not possible to be a peacemaker.”
God’s call to take our place at the table is not a call to seat just the righteous part, leaving the rest in the shadows. The righteous part may not even have heard that there is a fiesta, and may simply not need—or may be too busy—to come.
It may need to be a disadvantaged self within the self, a part that is wounded or unwell, that will hear the invitation to come to the table of God.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Thursday, February 14, 2008
What is Lent for?
So here’s our Lenten mantra this year: “Lent is not about giving up potato chips, but about hearing the story, fresh and deep.”
Today, we might ask “which story?”
Let’s start with the tornadoes in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. On Tuesday, February 5, storms moving across the South spawned a cluster of killer tornadoes, along with hail and heavy snow. Fifty-five people were killed, over a hundred injured, and countless homes, schools, and businesses were reduced to rubble.
Episcopal Relief and Development has already reached out on our behalf to affected dioceses, beginning assessment to determine critical needs. Don’t assume that working through dioceses means that we’re only taking care of our own. It means that dioceses have local arms and legs, networks and connections. What we heard the prophet Isaiah urge us to do on Ash Wednesday, our Church is doing: to share our bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into our house, to cover the naked, and not to hide ourselves from our own kin.
Let’s call this a Lenten ka’ching moment: what the Emergency Relief Fund of ERD is disbursing, needs replacing. Your gifts placed in Raile’s Bowl this morning will go to that purpose.
Months ago, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori declared this Sunday Episcopal Relief and Development Sunday—a date well chosen.
Other stories circle around us today. St. Matthew tells us of our Lord’s dark night of the soul (in fact, forty nights and days) in the desert, facing down one temptation after another, and all on an empty stomach and in profound solitude.
The first of these temptations catches my imagination: “Command these stones to become loaves of bread.”
What I see when I hear those words is all the stones in this building that we have labored over, these past two years. That each is in its place is already a great act of recycling and change, these many hundreds of glacial pebbles rubbed off in the passage of the Ice Age. For farmers to plow, these stones had to go; and while some became fill and some were piled in walls, these became a church.
Are they of any use, unless they are turned to bread? If we fail to express our faith through works of mercy, compassion, and justice, how does our pile of stones, however charming, glorify God? Without our faith becoming action in the world, don’t we become cold and inert, stone upon stone, with a sad tendency to wobble in our cracking mortar?
There’s one temptation. But Jesus’s own ju-jitsu with the tempter asserts the primacy of God’s living Word over the importance of bread, even to the famished. I hear him saying that if we’re always in motion and never still, always adding to our lists and never emptying our independent souls as Jesus was doing in the desert, if we’re afraid to pray, afraid to really listen and to recognize God in our own experience—then we’ll become hollow and insubstantial. At least stones have mass and dumbly know how to support. Disciples, on the other hand (as we saw last Sunday), tend to get agitated and close up when confronted by change and transcendence. Think of Peter, James, and John on the mount of Transfiguration, nervously offering to build shrines to capture a passing glory while the demand from God is, “Listen to my beloved Son.”
What was Jesus doing in the desert? He was being empty so that the mind and heart and will of God might fill every cell and fiber of his being. He was knowing with God his own weaknesses so that God’s brand of might could build itself in him. He was listening, and he was hearing.
As if this day’s cup of stories isn’t overflowing already, we have yet another about listening. Adam, Eve, and the serpent all share a growing commitment not to listen to the LORD God. The way the story is told and taken, disobedience is the result, and the root of that word tells the story: the edience part of obedience is from the Latin audire, to hear. I’ll guess that the ob part, a Latin preposition, may mean towards.
Towards hearing. That’s what Lent is for: to move us towards hearing, fresh and clear and deep, the story of Jesus’s passion, God’s compassion, and our mission as Christian hearers. The kind of Lenten obedience that will reward us and delight God is not the obedience of grim will power, but the obedience of open-minded, open-hearted listening.
That’s our purpose in the Lenten lunch series that follows this service today and on the four following Sundays. Not business as usual, but time invested in community, gathered around tables for homemade soup and hearty breads. Then hearing a story teller who will help us walk the way of the cross, telling us one story from one day in that holy week that opens with Palm Sunday and, in Easter, refuses to end. We’ll be rediscovering that we’re always in holy week, that all time is within the reign of the Prince of Peace, and that we’re given the mission to claim all moments in his name—as Paul puts it in his letter today, exercising dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
After we hear John Ladd tell the story of Palm Sunday, our Lord’s dramatic entry into Jerusalem, we’ll choose into small groups, either one that will consider how this story speaks to our faith journey, or one that will explore how this story addresses issues of social justice in the world.
Then we’ll hear how this first of the stories of holy week has been enacted and celebrated in the Church’s life over the centuries, how we usually do it here, and we’ll be listening for inspirations as to how we might observe Palm Sunday this year.
All that in eighty minutes, including lunch. And you won’t have to wash the dishes.
You’ll just need to place yourself at the gates of Jerusalem and be open to what you hear and see as Jesus enters the city famed for killing its prophets, chewing up and spitting out its peacemakers. In that respect it could be any modern city, but to belong to all time a story first must have its traction in one time and place, even as it requires us to see and understand our own nature. Does any day in the Christian year do that better than Palm Sunday, when our very own voices call out Hosanna! and Crucify him! all within eight minutes in St. Matthew’s story?
For it is in our nature both to listen deeply and to listen not at all, to hear and understand, and to have an urgent truth pass through the chambers of our ears, in one side, out the other.
“Do not be like horse or mule, which have no understanding; who must be fitted with bit and bridle, or else they will not stay near you.” We said those words that God, through the psalmist, says to us, and we’ll do well to hear them summon us to a Lent of listening. Listening to Jesus’s story so we rightly hear our own, and better understand our own nature, letting it be re-shaped to a finer obedience.
So, if Biscuit the donkey visits us again this Palm Sunday, you and I won’t be shown up as creatures less in tune with God than an ass.
Today, we might ask “which story?”
Let’s start with the tornadoes in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. On Tuesday, February 5, storms moving across the South spawned a cluster of killer tornadoes, along with hail and heavy snow. Fifty-five people were killed, over a hundred injured, and countless homes, schools, and businesses were reduced to rubble.
Episcopal Relief and Development has already reached out on our behalf to affected dioceses, beginning assessment to determine critical needs. Don’t assume that working through dioceses means that we’re only taking care of our own. It means that dioceses have local arms and legs, networks and connections. What we heard the prophet Isaiah urge us to do on Ash Wednesday, our Church is doing: to share our bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into our house, to cover the naked, and not to hide ourselves from our own kin.
Let’s call this a Lenten ka’ching moment: what the Emergency Relief Fund of ERD is disbursing, needs replacing. Your gifts placed in Raile’s Bowl this morning will go to that purpose.
Months ago, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori declared this Sunday Episcopal Relief and Development Sunday—a date well chosen.
Other stories circle around us today. St. Matthew tells us of our Lord’s dark night of the soul (in fact, forty nights and days) in the desert, facing down one temptation after another, and all on an empty stomach and in profound solitude.
The first of these temptations catches my imagination: “Command these stones to become loaves of bread.”
What I see when I hear those words is all the stones in this building that we have labored over, these past two years. That each is in its place is already a great act of recycling and change, these many hundreds of glacial pebbles rubbed off in the passage of the Ice Age. For farmers to plow, these stones had to go; and while some became fill and some were piled in walls, these became a church.
Are they of any use, unless they are turned to bread? If we fail to express our faith through works of mercy, compassion, and justice, how does our pile of stones, however charming, glorify God? Without our faith becoming action in the world, don’t we become cold and inert, stone upon stone, with a sad tendency to wobble in our cracking mortar?
There’s one temptation. But Jesus’s own ju-jitsu with the tempter asserts the primacy of God’s living Word over the importance of bread, even to the famished. I hear him saying that if we’re always in motion and never still, always adding to our lists and never emptying our independent souls as Jesus was doing in the desert, if we’re afraid to pray, afraid to really listen and to recognize God in our own experience—then we’ll become hollow and insubstantial. At least stones have mass and dumbly know how to support. Disciples, on the other hand (as we saw last Sunday), tend to get agitated and close up when confronted by change and transcendence. Think of Peter, James, and John on the mount of Transfiguration, nervously offering to build shrines to capture a passing glory while the demand from God is, “Listen to my beloved Son.”
What was Jesus doing in the desert? He was being empty so that the mind and heart and will of God might fill every cell and fiber of his being. He was knowing with God his own weaknesses so that God’s brand of might could build itself in him. He was listening, and he was hearing.
As if this day’s cup of stories isn’t overflowing already, we have yet another about listening. Adam, Eve, and the serpent all share a growing commitment not to listen to the LORD God. The way the story is told and taken, disobedience is the result, and the root of that word tells the story: the edience part of obedience is from the Latin audire, to hear. I’ll guess that the ob part, a Latin preposition, may mean towards.
Towards hearing. That’s what Lent is for: to move us towards hearing, fresh and clear and deep, the story of Jesus’s passion, God’s compassion, and our mission as Christian hearers. The kind of Lenten obedience that will reward us and delight God is not the obedience of grim will power, but the obedience of open-minded, open-hearted listening.
That’s our purpose in the Lenten lunch series that follows this service today and on the four following Sundays. Not business as usual, but time invested in community, gathered around tables for homemade soup and hearty breads. Then hearing a story teller who will help us walk the way of the cross, telling us one story from one day in that holy week that opens with Palm Sunday and, in Easter, refuses to end. We’ll be rediscovering that we’re always in holy week, that all time is within the reign of the Prince of Peace, and that we’re given the mission to claim all moments in his name—as Paul puts it in his letter today, exercising dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
After we hear John Ladd tell the story of Palm Sunday, our Lord’s dramatic entry into Jerusalem, we’ll choose into small groups, either one that will consider how this story speaks to our faith journey, or one that will explore how this story addresses issues of social justice in the world.
Then we’ll hear how this first of the stories of holy week has been enacted and celebrated in the Church’s life over the centuries, how we usually do it here, and we’ll be listening for inspirations as to how we might observe Palm Sunday this year.
All that in eighty minutes, including lunch. And you won’t have to wash the dishes.
You’ll just need to place yourself at the gates of Jerusalem and be open to what you hear and see as Jesus enters the city famed for killing its prophets, chewing up and spitting out its peacemakers. In that respect it could be any modern city, but to belong to all time a story first must have its traction in one time and place, even as it requires us to see and understand our own nature. Does any day in the Christian year do that better than Palm Sunday, when our very own voices call out Hosanna! and Crucify him! all within eight minutes in St. Matthew’s story?
For it is in our nature both to listen deeply and to listen not at all, to hear and understand, and to have an urgent truth pass through the chambers of our ears, in one side, out the other.
“Do not be like horse or mule, which have no understanding; who must be fitted with bit and bridle, or else they will not stay near you.” We said those words that God, through the psalmist, says to us, and we’ll do well to hear them summon us to a Lent of listening. Listening to Jesus’s story so we rightly hear our own, and better understand our own nature, letting it be re-shaped to a finer obedience.
So, if Biscuit the donkey visits us again this Palm Sunday, you and I won’t be shown up as creatures less in tune with God than an ass.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Called by a New Name
I notice that our Lord changed a name in his encounter with his first two disciples. We’re not told whether Andrew underwent such a change, but his brother Simon did: “’You are to be called Kephas,’ (which is translated Peter).”
The fact is, of course, that Kephas is the Greek form of the Aramaic word that Jesus had in mind, the word for rock. What a merry little linguistic chase that is to make the point that our Lord saw in a flash, knew in his gut, read it clearly that Simon aka Kephas aka Peter was going to play a key role in his mission plan.
“The Rock”: says it all. Last Sunday, I urged you to hear the divine voice Jesus heard at his baptism addressing you: You are my son, my daughter, beloved; with you I am well pleased. Today, imagine yourself in the shoes of this fisherman. You’re being welcomed to the very core of a team that Jesus is forming simply by his Word, and he’s calling you Rock.
You will spend the rest of your life scratching your head, wondering why. You will spend the rest of your life trying to live into the truth of that name.
That he did live into this truth is shown in that every year the Church keeps January 18th as the Feast of the Confession of Peter, recalling how he was also the first of the disciples to recognize who Jesus truly is, and to call him by the name Messiah.
Names are important, aren’t they? Today, we heard Jesus change one in the calling of a disciple. We might all agree that he has authority to do that.
You may have noticed that in the opening verses and responses of the baptismal rite today, a name was changed in that we called God not just Father, but Mother as well. I did that. In the moment when I used that red pen, I had no doubt whatsoever that it was time to do so. In the moments that followed, doubt grew. And then it was printed, making it time to, well, deal with it.
Perhaps I need to be wary of those moments when I feel no doubt whatsoever—for I did not have authority to make that change.
It’s hardly a novel idea, calling God Mother. Not in the Judaic portion of our religious tradition, where at places in the Wisdom literature of the Bible Wisdom is named Sophia, and she speaks with God’s voice.
In the Book of Ecclesiasticus, we hear, “Wisdom tells of her glory… In the assembly of the Most high she opens her mouth… ‘I came forth from the mouth of the Most high, and covered the earth like a mist… I sought a resting place… Then the Creator of all things gave me a command… “Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance.”’”
And in the Book of The Wisdom of Solomon, “Wisdom protected the first-formed father of the world, when he alone had been created;… She delivered him from his transgression, and gave him strength to rule all things…” Later, “She brought (Israel) over the Red Sea, and led them through deep waters…”
Nor is it novel, calling God Mother, in the Christian tradition that brings us the likes of Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and Hildegard of Bingen. Saints of God have been calling her Mother for, literally, centuries.
And it is in prayer that they found her. Doubtless, they were trained to pray to God their Father, and doubtless they did. Or was it doubtful, after they’d lived long enough to consider their own experience and recognize there the gentle patience of God, the tender cradling of God, the sensual intimacy of the Spirit, prayer’s relentless loving silence of the womb—was it doubtful, in time, that only the fatherhood of God “worked” to communicate the fullness of love within the Godhead?
Here’s Julian’s answer. In one of her “showings” or revelations she writes,
“And thus in our creation God Almighty is our natural father, and God all-wisdom is our natural mother, with the love and goodness of the Holy Spirit. These are all one God, one Lord. In the knitting and joining he is our real, true spouse and we are his loved wife and his fair maiden. ….”
So I hear Isaiah say that God names us in the womb, I look at the name Sophia Catherine, and I hear these female witnesses rejoicing that their number is about to grow by one, and I hear them testifying to how much more God is than our liturgical language permits us to celebrate, and I wonder how will we help train Sophia Catherine and all our children if we don’t allow our language of worship to reach to express the fullness of our tradition? How will we show our children the fullness of who God is, and help them embrace the wholeness of who they are, if we are afraid to expand our language in worship, keeping it true to what we know in prayer?
It exceeds my authority, to alter the language of the baptismal rite. By that same principle, I shouldn’t have drawn today’s post-communion prayer from the Presbyterian Church—and without that our communion rite today would say nothing about Martin Luther King, Jr. on a day when we need to have communion with him.
Perhaps my own aging is causing me to question the Anglican premise that we will not change words in our liturgy until the entire Church decides how to make those changes and makes them all together. Somehow, I’m sensing that the Episcopal Church will be preoccupied for the foreseeable future, and won’t be revising the Book of Common Prayer in the active years I have remaining.
Does that mean that our Lord won’t change a few names as he moves his mission team forward in the world? He will, for he has that authority. And when he changes the names we use, it is so that we will wonder and pray our way to growing into what new names mean.
Sophia Catherine’s name will not change today, but what she is called will grow. In just a few moments, we will take action with water in the name of God and from then on she will be called child of God, member of Christ’s Body the Church, and inheritor of the Kingdom of God. These are her new names, according to the teaching of the Book of Common Prayer. Isn’t it interesting that “Episcopalian” is missing from that list?
That is because this branch of Christ’s Church understands Holy Baptism as a sacrament that belongs to the whole Church. Because it is the defining sacrament that brings a person into union with Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection, it is an ecumenical action, not a denominational one. To borrow an image from our patron, St. John, baptism welcomes a person into the one household of God, without assigning her to one of those many dwelling-places (“mansions” in the King James Version) where we in time settle.
Seen that way, today’s baptism fits beautifully the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in which we find ourselves. On Wednesday at noon, people from several Williamstown churches will meet in our upper room to celebrate the unity we recognize in Jesus Christ, and to repent of our disunity. Episcopalians need to sharpen that spiritual skill, repenting of disunity. I hope you will come to welcome our Baptist, Methodist, Congregational, and Roman Catholic neighbors. Noon, Wednesday.
Those denominational places we settle in, those religions mansions we inhabit, give us specific places into which we sink roots and find nourishment. What we are specifically called as Christians, our own variety, is a name given to us to live into.
What fills me with wonder and delight is the variety of religious experience and expression we have even in this one congregation. We’re still getting acquainted with ten new households worshiping with us since the fall, and while some come to us as Episcopalians, two people come as Adventist Christians, two are Unitarian Universalists, one is a Congregationalist, another describes himself equally at home with Buddhism as with Christianity. We are blessed to have among us people who did, and people who still do, identify themselves as Lutherans, as Roman Catholics, as Presbyterians. I believe we’re also blessed to have among us a share of agnostics who ask wonderful edgy questions.
This is small-town American Christianity. Many of us have taken new names during our spiritual journeys.
This happens in the story John tells today about Andrew and Peter. They were, at verse 35, disciples of John the Baptizer. By verse 42, they have become disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. All because their former teacher, John, gives Jesus a new name, Son of God.
Many of us like a settled life. Today’s Gospel—in fact, the whole Gospel of Jesus Christ—gives us little reason to expect a settled life in company with Jesus. He changes names. He adds to what we are called.
The fact is, of course, that Kephas is the Greek form of the Aramaic word that Jesus had in mind, the word for rock. What a merry little linguistic chase that is to make the point that our Lord saw in a flash, knew in his gut, read it clearly that Simon aka Kephas aka Peter was going to play a key role in his mission plan.
“The Rock”: says it all. Last Sunday, I urged you to hear the divine voice Jesus heard at his baptism addressing you: You are my son, my daughter, beloved; with you I am well pleased. Today, imagine yourself in the shoes of this fisherman. You’re being welcomed to the very core of a team that Jesus is forming simply by his Word, and he’s calling you Rock.
You will spend the rest of your life scratching your head, wondering why. You will spend the rest of your life trying to live into the truth of that name.
That he did live into this truth is shown in that every year the Church keeps January 18th as the Feast of the Confession of Peter, recalling how he was also the first of the disciples to recognize who Jesus truly is, and to call him by the name Messiah.
Names are important, aren’t they? Today, we heard Jesus change one in the calling of a disciple. We might all agree that he has authority to do that.
You may have noticed that in the opening verses and responses of the baptismal rite today, a name was changed in that we called God not just Father, but Mother as well. I did that. In the moment when I used that red pen, I had no doubt whatsoever that it was time to do so. In the moments that followed, doubt grew. And then it was printed, making it time to, well, deal with it.
Perhaps I need to be wary of those moments when I feel no doubt whatsoever—for I did not have authority to make that change.
It’s hardly a novel idea, calling God Mother. Not in the Judaic portion of our religious tradition, where at places in the Wisdom literature of the Bible Wisdom is named Sophia, and she speaks with God’s voice.
In the Book of Ecclesiasticus, we hear, “Wisdom tells of her glory… In the assembly of the Most high she opens her mouth… ‘I came forth from the mouth of the Most high, and covered the earth like a mist… I sought a resting place… Then the Creator of all things gave me a command… “Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance.”’”
And in the Book of The Wisdom of Solomon, “Wisdom protected the first-formed father of the world, when he alone had been created;… She delivered him from his transgression, and gave him strength to rule all things…” Later, “She brought (Israel) over the Red Sea, and led them through deep waters…”
Nor is it novel, calling God Mother, in the Christian tradition that brings us the likes of Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and Hildegard of Bingen. Saints of God have been calling her Mother for, literally, centuries.
And it is in prayer that they found her. Doubtless, they were trained to pray to God their Father, and doubtless they did. Or was it doubtful, after they’d lived long enough to consider their own experience and recognize there the gentle patience of God, the tender cradling of God, the sensual intimacy of the Spirit, prayer’s relentless loving silence of the womb—was it doubtful, in time, that only the fatherhood of God “worked” to communicate the fullness of love within the Godhead?
Here’s Julian’s answer. In one of her “showings” or revelations she writes,
“And thus in our creation God Almighty is our natural father, and God all-wisdom is our natural mother, with the love and goodness of the Holy Spirit. These are all one God, one Lord. In the knitting and joining he is our real, true spouse and we are his loved wife and his fair maiden. ….”
So I hear Isaiah say that God names us in the womb, I look at the name Sophia Catherine, and I hear these female witnesses rejoicing that their number is about to grow by one, and I hear them testifying to how much more God is than our liturgical language permits us to celebrate, and I wonder how will we help train Sophia Catherine and all our children if we don’t allow our language of worship to reach to express the fullness of our tradition? How will we show our children the fullness of who God is, and help them embrace the wholeness of who they are, if we are afraid to expand our language in worship, keeping it true to what we know in prayer?
It exceeds my authority, to alter the language of the baptismal rite. By that same principle, I shouldn’t have drawn today’s post-communion prayer from the Presbyterian Church—and without that our communion rite today would say nothing about Martin Luther King, Jr. on a day when we need to have communion with him.
Perhaps my own aging is causing me to question the Anglican premise that we will not change words in our liturgy until the entire Church decides how to make those changes and makes them all together. Somehow, I’m sensing that the Episcopal Church will be preoccupied for the foreseeable future, and won’t be revising the Book of Common Prayer in the active years I have remaining.
Does that mean that our Lord won’t change a few names as he moves his mission team forward in the world? He will, for he has that authority. And when he changes the names we use, it is so that we will wonder and pray our way to growing into what new names mean.
Sophia Catherine’s name will not change today, but what she is called will grow. In just a few moments, we will take action with water in the name of God and from then on she will be called child of God, member of Christ’s Body the Church, and inheritor of the Kingdom of God. These are her new names, according to the teaching of the Book of Common Prayer. Isn’t it interesting that “Episcopalian” is missing from that list?
That is because this branch of Christ’s Church understands Holy Baptism as a sacrament that belongs to the whole Church. Because it is the defining sacrament that brings a person into union with Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection, it is an ecumenical action, not a denominational one. To borrow an image from our patron, St. John, baptism welcomes a person into the one household of God, without assigning her to one of those many dwelling-places (“mansions” in the King James Version) where we in time settle.
Seen that way, today’s baptism fits beautifully the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in which we find ourselves. On Wednesday at noon, people from several Williamstown churches will meet in our upper room to celebrate the unity we recognize in Jesus Christ, and to repent of our disunity. Episcopalians need to sharpen that spiritual skill, repenting of disunity. I hope you will come to welcome our Baptist, Methodist, Congregational, and Roman Catholic neighbors. Noon, Wednesday.
Those denominational places we settle in, those religions mansions we inhabit, give us specific places into which we sink roots and find nourishment. What we are specifically called as Christians, our own variety, is a name given to us to live into.
What fills me with wonder and delight is the variety of religious experience and expression we have even in this one congregation. We’re still getting acquainted with ten new households worshiping with us since the fall, and while some come to us as Episcopalians, two people come as Adventist Christians, two are Unitarian Universalists, one is a Congregationalist, another describes himself equally at home with Buddhism as with Christianity. We are blessed to have among us people who did, and people who still do, identify themselves as Lutherans, as Roman Catholics, as Presbyterians. I believe we’re also blessed to have among us a share of agnostics who ask wonderful edgy questions.
This is small-town American Christianity. Many of us have taken new names during our spiritual journeys.
This happens in the story John tells today about Andrew and Peter. They were, at verse 35, disciples of John the Baptizer. By verse 42, they have become disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. All because their former teacher, John, gives Jesus a new name, Son of God.
Many of us like a settled life. Today’s Gospel—in fact, the whole Gospel of Jesus Christ—gives us little reason to expect a settled life in company with Jesus. He changes names. He adds to what we are called.
Monday, January 14, 2008
A Baptismal Reflection on Suicide
It all starts in baptism. I joined our younger children in church school this morning to explore that very subject, how baptism is the moment when God sets up headquarters within a human life. You may describe this as happening by invitation (next Sunday, a sweet little girl named Sophia will be baptized here because her parents invite this partnership between Sophia and God), or you might describe this happening by recognition of the claim God has upon every human life. However you understand it, baptism is the moment of joy on earth and in heaven, the celebration and support of relationship between the God of all and the all of one person, child of God.
It all starts in baptism. In our Lord’s baptism, what starts is his public ministry. He will fulfill Isaiah’s vision of God’s anointed servant, and this baptism in the muddy waters of the Jordan is his anointing. He will fulfill justice and righteousness on the earth. The very heart of the ancient covenant between God and Israel beats in Jesus and Christians hear Isaiah’s words fitting him perfectly: “I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations.” Once our Lord’s public ministry is complete in his death and resurrection, every person baptized in his name becomes his partner in covenant relationship with God. Open to every baptized person is Jesus’s passion for justice, Jesus’s commitment to right relationship of love for God, and for neighbor as for self.
It all starts in baptism, our entering a community of covenant promise and fulfillment. The baptismal covenant that we will reaffirm together next Sunday calls us to a life of worship, a life of repentance, a life of expressive faith, a life of recognizing Christ in all other people, and a life of respect for the dignity of every human being.
What starts in baptism is a reverence for life. Christianity has no unique claim on that: reverence for life is taught and reached by many religious pathways. But this is what we see in Jesus, who fulfills not just the dramatic vision of Isaiah (opening blind eyes and freeing people from dungeons of fear and despair) but also the quiet vision of Isaiah: “…a bruised reed he will not break, a dimly burning wick he will not quench… He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth.”
“A bruised reed he will not break, a dimly burning wick he will not quench.”
That verse has always intrigued me, its two metaphors resisting explanation while inviting imagination. Today I wonder if those two images, the bruised reed and the dimly burning wick, might help me speak about the unspeakable, the suicide last Monday of a man whom I liked and admired, Hank Payne, 14th President of Williams College.
His death has shaken and bewildered countless friends, colleagues and students both former and present, and, beyond our imagining, his family. But it isn’t only his death that I’ll have in mind today. I attended a poetry reading at Bennington College on Thursday, and there, months after the fact, they were preparing to gather students and faculty of the Bennington Writers Seminar for a memorial tribute to their founder and former Director, the poet Liam Rector, who took his life last summer.
Are men at higher risk of successfully committing suicide than women? Yes, four times so.
Each year, at least thirty thousand Americans, and as many as fifty thousand, take their own lives. There are more suicides than homicides in this country annually. Each year, between a quarter million and three-quarters of a million Americans attempt suicide. Of them, women outnumber men three to one.
To put these numbers in some context, it’s sobering to realize that worldwide the U.S. suicide rate is 45th among 95 nations: in 44 other countries, the rate is higher.
These statistics suggest that more than a few of us in this room have lost a loved one—or more than one—in this way. More than a few of us have lived through an attempt made by someone we love. Or may be the survivor of an attempt.
“A bruised reed he will not break. A dimly-burning wick he will not quench.” What is the most common cause of suicide? Untreated depression.
No one who knew Hank Payne seems to think that he suffered from that. No one knows. Everyone who knew him knows that human beings don’t come with keener intellects than his, that his educational, administrative, fundraising, and community accomplishments were remarkable. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution quotes a friend as saying, “…if you knew him, you would say, ‘Here is this bright, funny, thoughtful guy, great job, broad interests, lovely family. He’s got everything going for him… I don’t know if anybody will ever know.”
His rabbi remembers Payne as a man who preferred to stand at the entrance to the synagogue, welcoming visitors and handing out prayer books, rather than take his own seat. “After the funeral,” said Rabbi Karpuj, “I still had a feeling of ‘This isn’t real. This isn’t happening.’ It’s very hard to grasp this and make any sense of it.”
Hank’s and Deborah’s first grandchild is due in weeks.
In their holiday letter to friends—Hank’s project—he wrote about their “gentle giant dog Abe,” who keeps them busy “serving his love of walks and his love of just being loved.” The one note of sadness in this letter: the death of his mother last year, at 92.
Since 2000, he served as President of Woodward Academy in Atlanta, the largest private preparatory school in the country, and led them in a $47 million campaign. Last year, he joined two new boards, professional and cultural.
Within this gentle, gifted, committed man, was there a bruised reed? Was the wick of his inner lamp dimming? Was he living so much outside himself that there wasn’t much inner man left? That he should choose to jump from the balcony of an eighth-floor hotel room, was this to relieve and escape the vertigo, the imbalance of intolerable claims on his mind and heart and soul?
If so, we are left seeing the irrationality, the last and lethal distortion, that a pathway to escape should destroy the escapee and lock a family in a maze of unknowing.
Destroyed, also, is our orderly expectation that such an alien experience as this should not happen to the likes of us. Denial, of course, has a long half-life and will again insist on its own way, in time. Until then, we must pay attention to ourselves, to one another, and to God.
“This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” There is the voice of God. I believe that if we’re listening to God who sets up headquarters in the human spirit, we will hear this voice, this message of unexpectable delight, this sheer epiphany of relentless love. “You are my son, my daughter; with you I am well pleased.”
If you’re having a hard time imagining that being said to you by God, perhaps you’ll suspend judgment and entertain the possibility of such grace. On days when this voice is hard to hear, it’s still speaking—and on those days we need others to hear it for us, with us. “You are my daughter, my son; with you I am well pleased.”
This was first said by the God of Israel to the Jew Jesus. We can be sure that this voice is there to be heard more widely than in just our own faith.
So much static blocks our hearing this voice. So much severe theology argues against amazing grace. Too much, too often, we try to build our own covenant faithfulness as if it were a tower that could get us to heaven.
It is God’s covenant faithfulness that will do that. We have only the brilliance of this love with which we are loved, to build with in this world. If we will not hear the baptismal voice of God’s approval, the baptismal invitation to partnership, the baptismal recognition of the treasure of community, then reverence for life may go unfed, bruised reeds may be broken, dimly-burning wicks quenched. The very, very busy exhausting life that then is left… may not be life.
Life requires more than requirements. The will to live has to be fed by deeper channels than those we have to listen to, day in and day out, those channels that bring us the voices of our bosses, our parents, our checkbook balance, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, soccer schedule, reactionary politics, reactionary religion, late-night news, and the alarm of the clock radio.
We need feeding through deeper channels where living waters flow. We need light from higher sources to shine into the dark places we constantly reach into, just to get by. Life requires protecting the reeds by which we make our music, weave our meaning, breathe when underwater. Life requires tending the wicks that, before they can burn, must soak in oils of healing, sit in the fearless myrrh of the magi, absorb deep down the sweet oil of chrism that reaches the forehead in baptism, tracing the cross that must speak to the human spirit its truth, meaning, and mystery.
It all starts in baptism. In our Lord’s baptism, what starts is his public ministry. He will fulfill Isaiah’s vision of God’s anointed servant, and this baptism in the muddy waters of the Jordan is his anointing. He will fulfill justice and righteousness on the earth. The very heart of the ancient covenant between God and Israel beats in Jesus and Christians hear Isaiah’s words fitting him perfectly: “I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations.” Once our Lord’s public ministry is complete in his death and resurrection, every person baptized in his name becomes his partner in covenant relationship with God. Open to every baptized person is Jesus’s passion for justice, Jesus’s commitment to right relationship of love for God, and for neighbor as for self.
It all starts in baptism, our entering a community of covenant promise and fulfillment. The baptismal covenant that we will reaffirm together next Sunday calls us to a life of worship, a life of repentance, a life of expressive faith, a life of recognizing Christ in all other people, and a life of respect for the dignity of every human being.
What starts in baptism is a reverence for life. Christianity has no unique claim on that: reverence for life is taught and reached by many religious pathways. But this is what we see in Jesus, who fulfills not just the dramatic vision of Isaiah (opening blind eyes and freeing people from dungeons of fear and despair) but also the quiet vision of Isaiah: “…a bruised reed he will not break, a dimly burning wick he will not quench… He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth.”
“A bruised reed he will not break, a dimly burning wick he will not quench.”
That verse has always intrigued me, its two metaphors resisting explanation while inviting imagination. Today I wonder if those two images, the bruised reed and the dimly burning wick, might help me speak about the unspeakable, the suicide last Monday of a man whom I liked and admired, Hank Payne, 14th President of Williams College.
His death has shaken and bewildered countless friends, colleagues and students both former and present, and, beyond our imagining, his family. But it isn’t only his death that I’ll have in mind today. I attended a poetry reading at Bennington College on Thursday, and there, months after the fact, they were preparing to gather students and faculty of the Bennington Writers Seminar for a memorial tribute to their founder and former Director, the poet Liam Rector, who took his life last summer.
Are men at higher risk of successfully committing suicide than women? Yes, four times so.
Each year, at least thirty thousand Americans, and as many as fifty thousand, take their own lives. There are more suicides than homicides in this country annually. Each year, between a quarter million and three-quarters of a million Americans attempt suicide. Of them, women outnumber men three to one.
To put these numbers in some context, it’s sobering to realize that worldwide the U.S. suicide rate is 45th among 95 nations: in 44 other countries, the rate is higher.
These statistics suggest that more than a few of us in this room have lost a loved one—or more than one—in this way. More than a few of us have lived through an attempt made by someone we love. Or may be the survivor of an attempt.
“A bruised reed he will not break. A dimly-burning wick he will not quench.” What is the most common cause of suicide? Untreated depression.
No one who knew Hank Payne seems to think that he suffered from that. No one knows. Everyone who knew him knows that human beings don’t come with keener intellects than his, that his educational, administrative, fundraising, and community accomplishments were remarkable. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution quotes a friend as saying, “…if you knew him, you would say, ‘Here is this bright, funny, thoughtful guy, great job, broad interests, lovely family. He’s got everything going for him… I don’t know if anybody will ever know.”
His rabbi remembers Payne as a man who preferred to stand at the entrance to the synagogue, welcoming visitors and handing out prayer books, rather than take his own seat. “After the funeral,” said Rabbi Karpuj, “I still had a feeling of ‘This isn’t real. This isn’t happening.’ It’s very hard to grasp this and make any sense of it.”
Hank’s and Deborah’s first grandchild is due in weeks.
In their holiday letter to friends—Hank’s project—he wrote about their “gentle giant dog Abe,” who keeps them busy “serving his love of walks and his love of just being loved.” The one note of sadness in this letter: the death of his mother last year, at 92.
Since 2000, he served as President of Woodward Academy in Atlanta, the largest private preparatory school in the country, and led them in a $47 million campaign. Last year, he joined two new boards, professional and cultural.
Within this gentle, gifted, committed man, was there a bruised reed? Was the wick of his inner lamp dimming? Was he living so much outside himself that there wasn’t much inner man left? That he should choose to jump from the balcony of an eighth-floor hotel room, was this to relieve and escape the vertigo, the imbalance of intolerable claims on his mind and heart and soul?
If so, we are left seeing the irrationality, the last and lethal distortion, that a pathway to escape should destroy the escapee and lock a family in a maze of unknowing.
Destroyed, also, is our orderly expectation that such an alien experience as this should not happen to the likes of us. Denial, of course, has a long half-life and will again insist on its own way, in time. Until then, we must pay attention to ourselves, to one another, and to God.
“This is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” There is the voice of God. I believe that if we’re listening to God who sets up headquarters in the human spirit, we will hear this voice, this message of unexpectable delight, this sheer epiphany of relentless love. “You are my son, my daughter; with you I am well pleased.”
If you’re having a hard time imagining that being said to you by God, perhaps you’ll suspend judgment and entertain the possibility of such grace. On days when this voice is hard to hear, it’s still speaking—and on those days we need others to hear it for us, with us. “You are my daughter, my son; with you I am well pleased.”
This was first said by the God of Israel to the Jew Jesus. We can be sure that this voice is there to be heard more widely than in just our own faith.
So much static blocks our hearing this voice. So much severe theology argues against amazing grace. Too much, too often, we try to build our own covenant faithfulness as if it were a tower that could get us to heaven.
It is God’s covenant faithfulness that will do that. We have only the brilliance of this love with which we are loved, to build with in this world. If we will not hear the baptismal voice of God’s approval, the baptismal invitation to partnership, the baptismal recognition of the treasure of community, then reverence for life may go unfed, bruised reeds may be broken, dimly-burning wicks quenched. The very, very busy exhausting life that then is left… may not be life.
Life requires more than requirements. The will to live has to be fed by deeper channels than those we have to listen to, day in and day out, those channels that bring us the voices of our bosses, our parents, our checkbook balance, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, soccer schedule, reactionary politics, reactionary religion, late-night news, and the alarm of the clock radio.
We need feeding through deeper channels where living waters flow. We need light from higher sources to shine into the dark places we constantly reach into, just to get by. Life requires protecting the reeds by which we make our music, weave our meaning, breathe when underwater. Life requires tending the wicks that, before they can burn, must soak in oils of healing, sit in the fearless myrrh of the magi, absorb deep down the sweet oil of chrism that reaches the forehead in baptism, tracing the cross that must speak to the human spirit its truth, meaning, and mystery.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Resolving Our Longing
So what is the significance of these three mysterious figures who arrive at the crèche today? We sing about them as kings, but the commentaries tell us that they were not political rulers. They were not running for office. If we retold their story to bring it into the present, these three would not be stumping for votes in New Hampshire: not three would-be heads of state ringing the doorbell, promising hope, change, and universal health care.
The version of Matthew’s Gospel we heard this morning says that “a band of scholars arrived in Jerusalem from the East.” That way of putting it observes the fact that nowhere does Matthew say that there were three visitors from the East (and Matthew is the only one of the Gospel writers who tells this story at all); rather, he says there are three gifts. By tradition, three gift-bearers have been assumed. Or not: perhaps it was “a band of scholars”.
Great. Just what’s needed. A committee. Another committee of academics. Maybe they’ve come to study the Messiah’s ontological ground of being. But is a team of visiting scholars from abroad cause for Herod and most of Jerusalem to become terrified? Not likely.
Matthew suggests that their particular brand of study is observing the stars, reading the silent signs in the heavens. And, from the fact that they made such a long journey, we see that they tested the theories they discovered by looking up. They sound rather like scientists, don’t they? Whatever else we notice about these magi, let’s give them credit for using scientific method, putting theory to the test, applying what they’ve learned.
It may make an interesting sermon, one day, to imagine what the three gifts would be if held in the hands of scientists offering them to God. Christian tradition sees the three gifts Matthew mentions (gold, frankincense, myrrh) representing royal power, divine presence, and a holy death. What 21st-century gifts might carry those meanings?
But don’t chase that rabbit for long. Far more important is noticing what purpose the gifts fulfill in the larger story.
They are all about recognition. The three gifts describe who Jesus is and what he will do.
He has come to bring order finer and broader than that of a kingdom: in his reign of justice and peace, no one will wear a gold crown, gold will not be a market commodity hoarded by the powerful and the privileged. In the hands of the Messiah, gold represents a living wage and fair trade.
He has come to ensure that God will be felt as one open hand touches another, that divine presence will be known in such simple actions as the breaking of bread, that God will be recognized where two or three gather and where one struggles alone. God will be nearer than breath itself, permeating all of life as burning frankincense fills a room.
He has come to quell our rebellion against death and dying, to show that even death is subject to the new creation that God is bringing about through this Incarnation. All the crazy things we do to deny that we are mortal and to distract ourselves from our own frailties, all the ways we resist change because something might die, all the ways we get stuck, even paralyzed, by fear of letting-go… On all these, on all of us, he who makes peace by the blood of his cross will pour fragrant oil of anointing on the very things we dread, making them holy and useful.
Through the gifts we see who God is in Jesus Christ, and what God is doing in the world. The gifts serve the larger purpose of revealing, showing, truth. That’s what we celebrate today, the Feast of the Epiphany. That’s a very old Greek word, epiphany, and it means showing, revealing.
Nothing can rob this story of its sheer wonder and mystery. We need the gift-bearers to be magi more than we need them to be politicians, scholars, or scientists. We need them to be mysterious enough to catch our breath—not by their lamé and sequins, impressive as they are, but by their being so “other”, so out of the ordinary, so from beyond our borders that they shake us up, as they did for many in Jerusalem.
Magi catch the imagination to recognize that God is always at work outside the doors and windows of our closed shops and homes and churches. Beyond the tight systems we build to ensure security, enshrine order, guard privilege, and keep death at bay, beyond all this status quo of our own making, God the wholly Other moves freely and acts in new ways. There’s nothing like the arrival of magi to set a fresh breeze blowing through the old alleys of our own Jerusalem.
Epiphany: showing, revealing. Recognizing God, paying attention to the truth in our own experience, being open to what’s ahead of us, even right in front of us. Epiphany.
We sometimes use that word when we feel we’ve made a discovery: an “aha” moment, an epiphany. What goes on in such a moment? A longing… that is somehow met… And joy that this should be, our longing become reality… and sheer surprise, that it should come this way as gift and sign… gratitude for the gift, wisdom to read the sign, courage to let this new energy shape our living.
Speaking of longings and fulfillments, have you made new year’s resolutions?
If so, perhaps yours is based on an epiphany, a recognition that it’s time to respond to a yearning, a longing. Whatever becomes of your resolution (every January is littered with unkept resolutions, we know), be grateful for the gift of recognizing that it’s time to act upon your longing.
Be wise to read that sign as one that is meant to open you not just to your own responsibility to do something about it, but also to open you to the support you’ll need to make the journey. Notice that the Wise Men didn’t travel alone.
And might it help if you imagine what you’ve resolved to do as a gift that you may bring to the crèche? Might this help you discover how important and valuable to God is whatever that resolve represents—your health, your relationships, your faith? Whatever that fulfillment might be, that it’s part of what God is yearning to do in the world?
And may it help you take courage, to see all over again that the crèche of Jesus is the place where God is vulnerable and powerful at the same moment? You will see this again on Good Friday, when love holds the holiness of his flesh against wood, not of a manger but of a cross, that our fulfillment cannot be measured in terms of success or failure, but in the full embrace of God whose energy shapes new life.
The version of Matthew’s Gospel we heard this morning says that “a band of scholars arrived in Jerusalem from the East.” That way of putting it observes the fact that nowhere does Matthew say that there were three visitors from the East (and Matthew is the only one of the Gospel writers who tells this story at all); rather, he says there are three gifts. By tradition, three gift-bearers have been assumed. Or not: perhaps it was “a band of scholars”.
Great. Just what’s needed. A committee. Another committee of academics. Maybe they’ve come to study the Messiah’s ontological ground of being. But is a team of visiting scholars from abroad cause for Herod and most of Jerusalem to become terrified? Not likely.
Matthew suggests that their particular brand of study is observing the stars, reading the silent signs in the heavens. And, from the fact that they made such a long journey, we see that they tested the theories they discovered by looking up. They sound rather like scientists, don’t they? Whatever else we notice about these magi, let’s give them credit for using scientific method, putting theory to the test, applying what they’ve learned.
It may make an interesting sermon, one day, to imagine what the three gifts would be if held in the hands of scientists offering them to God. Christian tradition sees the three gifts Matthew mentions (gold, frankincense, myrrh) representing royal power, divine presence, and a holy death. What 21st-century gifts might carry those meanings?
But don’t chase that rabbit for long. Far more important is noticing what purpose the gifts fulfill in the larger story.
They are all about recognition. The three gifts describe who Jesus is and what he will do.
He has come to bring order finer and broader than that of a kingdom: in his reign of justice and peace, no one will wear a gold crown, gold will not be a market commodity hoarded by the powerful and the privileged. In the hands of the Messiah, gold represents a living wage and fair trade.
He has come to ensure that God will be felt as one open hand touches another, that divine presence will be known in such simple actions as the breaking of bread, that God will be recognized where two or three gather and where one struggles alone. God will be nearer than breath itself, permeating all of life as burning frankincense fills a room.
He has come to quell our rebellion against death and dying, to show that even death is subject to the new creation that God is bringing about through this Incarnation. All the crazy things we do to deny that we are mortal and to distract ourselves from our own frailties, all the ways we resist change because something might die, all the ways we get stuck, even paralyzed, by fear of letting-go… On all these, on all of us, he who makes peace by the blood of his cross will pour fragrant oil of anointing on the very things we dread, making them holy and useful.
Through the gifts we see who God is in Jesus Christ, and what God is doing in the world. The gifts serve the larger purpose of revealing, showing, truth. That’s what we celebrate today, the Feast of the Epiphany. That’s a very old Greek word, epiphany, and it means showing, revealing.
Nothing can rob this story of its sheer wonder and mystery. We need the gift-bearers to be magi more than we need them to be politicians, scholars, or scientists. We need them to be mysterious enough to catch our breath—not by their lamé and sequins, impressive as they are, but by their being so “other”, so out of the ordinary, so from beyond our borders that they shake us up, as they did for many in Jerusalem.
Magi catch the imagination to recognize that God is always at work outside the doors and windows of our closed shops and homes and churches. Beyond the tight systems we build to ensure security, enshrine order, guard privilege, and keep death at bay, beyond all this status quo of our own making, God the wholly Other moves freely and acts in new ways. There’s nothing like the arrival of magi to set a fresh breeze blowing through the old alleys of our own Jerusalem.
Epiphany: showing, revealing. Recognizing God, paying attention to the truth in our own experience, being open to what’s ahead of us, even right in front of us. Epiphany.
We sometimes use that word when we feel we’ve made a discovery: an “aha” moment, an epiphany. What goes on in such a moment? A longing… that is somehow met… And joy that this should be, our longing become reality… and sheer surprise, that it should come this way as gift and sign… gratitude for the gift, wisdom to read the sign, courage to let this new energy shape our living.
Speaking of longings and fulfillments, have you made new year’s resolutions?
If so, perhaps yours is based on an epiphany, a recognition that it’s time to respond to a yearning, a longing. Whatever becomes of your resolution (every January is littered with unkept resolutions, we know), be grateful for the gift of recognizing that it’s time to act upon your longing.
Be wise to read that sign as one that is meant to open you not just to your own responsibility to do something about it, but also to open you to the support you’ll need to make the journey. Notice that the Wise Men didn’t travel alone.
And might it help if you imagine what you’ve resolved to do as a gift that you may bring to the crèche? Might this help you discover how important and valuable to God is whatever that resolve represents—your health, your relationships, your faith? Whatever that fulfillment might be, that it’s part of what God is yearning to do in the world?
And may it help you take courage, to see all over again that the crèche of Jesus is the place where God is vulnerable and powerful at the same moment? You will see this again on Good Friday, when love holds the holiness of his flesh against wood, not of a manger but of a cross, that our fulfillment cannot be measured in terms of success or failure, but in the full embrace of God whose energy shapes new life.
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Anxiety and Trust at Christmas
Here’s what I don’t understand about Christmas.
Why would a long journey by foot and mule in order to report to the Internal Revenue Service…
Why would a night of childbirth in a barnyard, no midwife, no epidural, no one to shoo away the dogs, the goats, where no carpenter’s sandpaper smoothed the splintery boards of the cradle…
Why would a setting like this, where everyone feels so threatened, vulnerable, and unsafe that the story requires counselors from heaven to fly about urging people not to be afraid (as if that could have helped any)…
Why would all this inspire a festival of perfection, a celebration of abundance, an enshrining of beauty, in which we knock ourselves out to get everything as just-right as we can?
Why are we arriving breathless and spent (emotionally and financially), at the end of a shopping season, rather than stepping across to the start of a season of renewal?
Why have we been worshiping at the mall and poring over our catalogues more than we’ve kept still in our sanctuaries or searched our scriptures?
Why have we ended an old year volunteering for sacrifice in the temples of perfection?
Could it be that we are anxious?
Ancient peoples like the Mayans dreaded the final days of the ending year. As astute as they were about astronomy and chronology, each year’s ending terrified them with worry that there wouldn’t be enough time given to cross over into a new year. It was as if they feared the universe might run out of breath and, just as they needed a little more to enter the future, life might inhale and take them all into oblivion.
And what did they do? They got very, very busy. They sacrificed overtime in their temples, the blood of slaves and captured enemies poured out to the gods to ensure successful passage into a new year.
So is that it? As we near the winter solstice, are we human beings programmed to hyperactive performance in order to get it right and make it across?
If so, wow, do we ever need saving. I do. I recognize enough Mayan mania in me that I think it could be an answer to why our cultural Christmas is what it is.
If you don’t buy that, if you find that theory too primitive, let me offer another possible answer. It is that we don’t know when to stop. If a little bling and material comfort are good, surely more is better? When it comes to Christmas, don’t we all have a sweet tooth, aren’t we all ready to party? Like the sofa-full of cherubs in the L. L. Bean ad, don’t we all have our head-mounted searchlights beaming-in on the fireplace tonight?
If so, we still need to be saved. One beautiful thing Christmas Eve does is to convince us that it’s time to stop. Stop the frenetic makeover and be still before the mystery of deep change that God is about tonight. Stop our orchestrating of life, admit that we’re powerless to lay down the remote, the impulse to control, for more than an hour or so: but in this hour or so, be awestruck that God invites us into a harmony not of our own making—and will we go there?
For there is where Mary and Joseph go, and though the birth belongs to Jesus, the story’s entry point for us is the experience of these two young parents. We who need saving can watch in them how a person is converted from anxiety to trust. Mary first, facing the disintegration of her world by a pregnancy too soon, and from the angel Gabriel an invitation to trust God in her present condition, as is. Joseph next, fearing that his community, his family, his village could not contain the unexplainability of life’s getting out of order—then finding, in a dream, that same counsel from heaven: live with this, find God in this, serve God by this.
There is a gift for each of us tonight in their story. Their story of how useful to God imperfections can be. Their story of how real perfection is God’s work, ours is just being useful, and always for that our first step is to trust. By their trusting, they are the heroes in this nativity story.
What is being born in you? How do you need community, family, friends, fellow-travelers, to support you and celebrate your growing, your birthing? What heroism does this call for, and what humble but breathtaking next step may be yours to take, to stop worshiping in the temples of perfection, and to enter harmony with God?
Why would a long journey by foot and mule in order to report to the Internal Revenue Service…
Why would a night of childbirth in a barnyard, no midwife, no epidural, no one to shoo away the dogs, the goats, where no carpenter’s sandpaper smoothed the splintery boards of the cradle…
Why would a setting like this, where everyone feels so threatened, vulnerable, and unsafe that the story requires counselors from heaven to fly about urging people not to be afraid (as if that could have helped any)…
Why would all this inspire a festival of perfection, a celebration of abundance, an enshrining of beauty, in which we knock ourselves out to get everything as just-right as we can?
Why are we arriving breathless and spent (emotionally and financially), at the end of a shopping season, rather than stepping across to the start of a season of renewal?
Why have we been worshiping at the mall and poring over our catalogues more than we’ve kept still in our sanctuaries or searched our scriptures?
Why have we ended an old year volunteering for sacrifice in the temples of perfection?
Could it be that we are anxious?
Ancient peoples like the Mayans dreaded the final days of the ending year. As astute as they were about astronomy and chronology, each year’s ending terrified them with worry that there wouldn’t be enough time given to cross over into a new year. It was as if they feared the universe might run out of breath and, just as they needed a little more to enter the future, life might inhale and take them all into oblivion.
And what did they do? They got very, very busy. They sacrificed overtime in their temples, the blood of slaves and captured enemies poured out to the gods to ensure successful passage into a new year.
So is that it? As we near the winter solstice, are we human beings programmed to hyperactive performance in order to get it right and make it across?
If so, wow, do we ever need saving. I do. I recognize enough Mayan mania in me that I think it could be an answer to why our cultural Christmas is what it is.
If you don’t buy that, if you find that theory too primitive, let me offer another possible answer. It is that we don’t know when to stop. If a little bling and material comfort are good, surely more is better? When it comes to Christmas, don’t we all have a sweet tooth, aren’t we all ready to party? Like the sofa-full of cherubs in the L. L. Bean ad, don’t we all have our head-mounted searchlights beaming-in on the fireplace tonight?
If so, we still need to be saved. One beautiful thing Christmas Eve does is to convince us that it’s time to stop. Stop the frenetic makeover and be still before the mystery of deep change that God is about tonight. Stop our orchestrating of life, admit that we’re powerless to lay down the remote, the impulse to control, for more than an hour or so: but in this hour or so, be awestruck that God invites us into a harmony not of our own making—and will we go there?
For there is where Mary and Joseph go, and though the birth belongs to Jesus, the story’s entry point for us is the experience of these two young parents. We who need saving can watch in them how a person is converted from anxiety to trust. Mary first, facing the disintegration of her world by a pregnancy too soon, and from the angel Gabriel an invitation to trust God in her present condition, as is. Joseph next, fearing that his community, his family, his village could not contain the unexplainability of life’s getting out of order—then finding, in a dream, that same counsel from heaven: live with this, find God in this, serve God by this.
There is a gift for each of us tonight in their story. Their story of how useful to God imperfections can be. Their story of how real perfection is God’s work, ours is just being useful, and always for that our first step is to trust. By their trusting, they are the heroes in this nativity story.
What is being born in you? How do you need community, family, friends, fellow-travelers, to support you and celebrate your growing, your birthing? What heroism does this call for, and what humble but breathtaking next step may be yours to take, to stop worshiping in the temples of perfection, and to enter harmony with God?
Monday, December 17, 2007
Please Be Seated
On a snowy weekend, hear the prophet Isaiah announce God’s promise that the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus, and rejoice with joy and singing. Let’s picture our crocuses beneath their snow shrouds: I’ll guess they’d rather be here than tucked into the sands of a desert. Some of us, on the other hand, might volunteer for that assignment?
And in this season of precipitation without end, hear the apostle James exhort, “Be patient, therefore, beloved… The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.” Or snows, as the case may be. Snow also plays its role in preparing the ground for eventual harvest.
I can’t hear either of these great texts without accompaniment by Brahms. He set them both to absolutely gorgeous haunting music in his German Requiem. If you have a recording of that, or can borrow one, you might find it a good counter-cultural Advent experience to listen to it. I believe I can promise you a solid hour of relief from jolly muzak about Santa, White Christmasses, and mistletoe, if you will treat yourself to what Brahms heard in these texts. Not many people will be doing that, this Advent. You will be in a select minority.
A requiem deals with death, and isn’t that an odd place to go in Advent?
Well, no. Advent is a time for hearing who the Messiah is, how he comes, and what he has come to do. Prophets like Isaiah tell us the purpose of the Messiah: “’He will come and save you.’ Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.”
I celebrated eucharist in a circle of sixteen nursing home residents last Wednesday. Right after reading to them Matthew’s story of the correspondence between John the Baptist and Jesus, I sat down in the one empty chair in their circle (as I do here, I usually stand to speak briefly after the Gospel). I had just read our Lord’s immodest but straightforward claim of having fulfilled Isaiah’s vision of the Messiah: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them…” Something in me said, “Elvin, sit down.”
Matthew’s words helped me feel the Incarnation. God’s anointed one, Jesus, enters our estate, not in soft robes and royal palaces, but against the splintery boards of a cattle trough. Powerless he comes, and though he exercises divine power by his sacramental touch, it is to give away that power to the poor and the injured and the reviled. When the powerful take offense, his powerlessness marks the mystery of his passion. I was suddenly aware that standing in a room filled entirely by people in wheelchairs was the wrong posture to keep, to consider his claim.
So, eye to eye, I reminded them what our Gospel means. That our Lord Jesus Christ has come to dwell with the blind, the lame, the deaf, the poor, and all who are facing death. This is by his own choice, and in response to the mission entrusted to him by Father-Mother God, and because of our need. I said, “He is in the wheelchair next to you; even more, he is in the wheelchair you’re sitting in, because he is in you.”
I could not stand to say that. Perhaps I should not be standing now. Sitting is the ancient posture for preaching, and Advent suggests why.
He comes powerless. Hotels.com has not worked for him. No family influence prevents his family from reporting all to the Internal Revenue Service. State-sponsored terrorism soon hastens this family across the border, political refugees. This is no season for standing—not on ceremony, not on principle, not in strength. It is time to sit very close to the earth that yearns to be made new, redeemed from soaking up the blood of the innocent, the off-scourings of civilization, the pollutions of the proud and the upright. It is time to sit with the patience commended by James, realizing that we cannot stand without the strength of God, and we cannot have that strength except by God’s gift, and we cannot receive the gift if we cannot sit still enough to want it, and we will not want it unless God’s Spirit stirs us up like dough in a bowl which cannot rise unless first it sits.
This is what Mary and Joseph both learn. That Mary must sit with Elizabeth her cousin, as they share their months of pregnancy. Mary must sit beneath the scornful gaze of those who judge her young and foolish. Mary must sit on a donkey on a journey that out-airports any airport story you or I can tell. Mary must bear a son.
Joseph sits with his fears, resolving to break up with his fiancée, who is unexplainably pregnant. Then Joseph must sit at the feet of an angel, who in a dream instructs him in the unexplainable.
It takes a lot of sitting, for the Messiah to be revealed. Let’s not resist the sitting we have to do. Let’s expect, from those places, even those places of powerlessness, to see and hear God.
And in this season of precipitation without end, hear the apostle James exhort, “Be patient, therefore, beloved… The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.” Or snows, as the case may be. Snow also plays its role in preparing the ground for eventual harvest.
I can’t hear either of these great texts without accompaniment by Brahms. He set them both to absolutely gorgeous haunting music in his German Requiem. If you have a recording of that, or can borrow one, you might find it a good counter-cultural Advent experience to listen to it. I believe I can promise you a solid hour of relief from jolly muzak about Santa, White Christmasses, and mistletoe, if you will treat yourself to what Brahms heard in these texts. Not many people will be doing that, this Advent. You will be in a select minority.
A requiem deals with death, and isn’t that an odd place to go in Advent?
Well, no. Advent is a time for hearing who the Messiah is, how he comes, and what he has come to do. Prophets like Isaiah tell us the purpose of the Messiah: “’He will come and save you.’ Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.”
I celebrated eucharist in a circle of sixteen nursing home residents last Wednesday. Right after reading to them Matthew’s story of the correspondence between John the Baptist and Jesus, I sat down in the one empty chair in their circle (as I do here, I usually stand to speak briefly after the Gospel). I had just read our Lord’s immodest but straightforward claim of having fulfilled Isaiah’s vision of the Messiah: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them…” Something in me said, “Elvin, sit down.”
Matthew’s words helped me feel the Incarnation. God’s anointed one, Jesus, enters our estate, not in soft robes and royal palaces, but against the splintery boards of a cattle trough. Powerless he comes, and though he exercises divine power by his sacramental touch, it is to give away that power to the poor and the injured and the reviled. When the powerful take offense, his powerlessness marks the mystery of his passion. I was suddenly aware that standing in a room filled entirely by people in wheelchairs was the wrong posture to keep, to consider his claim.
So, eye to eye, I reminded them what our Gospel means. That our Lord Jesus Christ has come to dwell with the blind, the lame, the deaf, the poor, and all who are facing death. This is by his own choice, and in response to the mission entrusted to him by Father-Mother God, and because of our need. I said, “He is in the wheelchair next to you; even more, he is in the wheelchair you’re sitting in, because he is in you.”
I could not stand to say that. Perhaps I should not be standing now. Sitting is the ancient posture for preaching, and Advent suggests why.
He comes powerless. Hotels.com has not worked for him. No family influence prevents his family from reporting all to the Internal Revenue Service. State-sponsored terrorism soon hastens this family across the border, political refugees. This is no season for standing—not on ceremony, not on principle, not in strength. It is time to sit very close to the earth that yearns to be made new, redeemed from soaking up the blood of the innocent, the off-scourings of civilization, the pollutions of the proud and the upright. It is time to sit with the patience commended by James, realizing that we cannot stand without the strength of God, and we cannot have that strength except by God’s gift, and we cannot receive the gift if we cannot sit still enough to want it, and we will not want it unless God’s Spirit stirs us up like dough in a bowl which cannot rise unless first it sits.
This is what Mary and Joseph both learn. That Mary must sit with Elizabeth her cousin, as they share their months of pregnancy. Mary must sit beneath the scornful gaze of those who judge her young and foolish. Mary must sit on a donkey on a journey that out-airports any airport story you or I can tell. Mary must bear a son.
Joseph sits with his fears, resolving to break up with his fiancée, who is unexplainably pregnant. Then Joseph must sit at the feet of an angel, who in a dream instructs him in the unexplainable.
It takes a lot of sitting, for the Messiah to be revealed. Let’s not resist the sitting we have to do. Let’s expect, from those places, even those places of powerlessness, to see and hear God.
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