“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
At various times across the year, I’ll hear a Gospel and will also hear laughter in the background. This is one. The kind of humor it strikes is dark, or perhaps sympathetic—the chuckle under the breath that says, “Yes, isn’t that the truth?”
And if humor is struck, it’s rather like striking a match: it happens as one hard subject strikes against another. With wonder we see the sparks fly and what we laugh at may be ourselves, the weighty part of our own soul’s baggage that we have to drop in order to catch truth and light and love as they erupt. Here it’s anxiety bumping up against faith and its imperative: “But strive first for the rule of God and God’s right values on earth…” When beleaguered anxiety collides with faith like that, when the soul is summoned out of despond and into mission, we can laugh at the proverb about today’s trouble being enough for today because we are reminded that today’s grace will also be enough for today’s responsibilities.
But there’s nothing to laugh about in this week’s news from so many places: China, Myanmar, and the Tornado Alleys across the midsection of our own country. For these children of God, a day’s trouble is too much for one day, even for one lifetime.
There is something called disaster fatigue, a form of denial that distances its victim from taking in the enormity of someone else’s disaster, because it comes right on the heels of someone else’s tragedy, and it has been enough of a downer to hear about that one. Depending on what kind of day we’re having, it probably happens to all of us, this refusal to read anything more on the subject… today. Perhaps we even excuse ourselves with that verse of our psalm, “I do not occupy myself with great matters, or with things that are too hard for me.”
I do believe that disaster fatigue does enough collateral damage that we should consider ourselves its victims, because it’s our own humanity that may get lost in the shuffle as we skip those pages in The Eagle, The Times, or The Globe. If I’m not reading about China, eight or nine days into their national disaster, or about Myanmar as the fist of that nation’s junta finally opens, then I may miss the inspirations that come as the truest victims of cyclone and earthquake, and their helpers, reveal the beauty and power of their humanity.
The only people I know in China are Ling Ling Qi and her husband, Yiqiang Qi. She teaches opera; he is an art historian who spent a year here as a visiting fellow at The Clark. You can tell that they don’t live in a rural village. During their time here, Ling Ling worshiped with us. We’ve kept in touch ever since. Replying to my email after the earthquake, she assured me she is all right, her husband is traveling, and their daughter Shu Shu is still studying in Europe. Ling Ling wrote, in her own words, "But thank God, it is the first time for me to see that the determination of the whole country being holding together to conquer the difficulties, and Love that God created for the people show its power. I am sure He will take over the ruin for us and people will knowing God one day."
"God taking over the ruin…"-- what a phrase! The God Ling Ling knows and loves is Isaiah’s God who has inscribed her and all other children of God on the palms of his hands. When they suffer, the compassion of God will meet them because their suffering is felt by God, instantly and intensely, as a woman shows compassion for the child of her womb.
Think of all the hands of rescuers picking at rubble, sometimes finding and freeing people trapped beneath debris, think of those as the hands of God bearing the imprint of her children, and the voices of those rescuers giving voice to God as they say “to the prisoners, ‘Come out,’ to those who are in darkness, ‘Show yourselves.’” Ling Ling’s God takes over the ruin much as Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, the mound of Jesus’s crucifixion, was taken over by redeeming love after the powers of this world had done their worst to the peasant prophet from Nazareth. It is what redeeming love did there that causes Ling Ling to say, “I am sure He will take over the ruin for us and people will knowing God one day.”
More than 50,000 people dead, over 60,000 hospitalized, countless more wounded, millions traumatized by three minutes of absolute terror and more than three hundred aftershocks. Hundreds of dams cracked, rivers diverted by the collapse of cliffs and hillsides. Four million homes destroyed, two hundred thousand public buildings in rubble, seven thousand of them schools, too many in session, some with as many as nine hundred or a thousand students inside.
Does God cause such ruin? That seems an uncivilized question to ask, doesn’t it? This question rattled Europe in 1755, when the greatest earthquake ever to hit Western Europe destroyed much of the city of Lisbon, killing 100,000. This was a watershed moment for western civilization, not unlike the Holocaust in the twentieth century, the acid test for all kinds of thinking. Enlightened thinking had been steering philosophy and theology in that century, but when this happened the tombs opened and countless voices explained the earthquake as God’s will.
Those same graves creak open today, as certain evangelical preachers have their way explaining disasters, both the natural kind and the manmade varieties, as being caused by the will of God. You know that “evangel” means “good news”, and we all know it’s hard to find much of that in tragic times, but I find no good news in blaming God for the fact that beneath the crust of the earth India and China are in constant collision, or that cyclones and hurricanes, barreling into deltas laid bare by decades of deforestation, should engulf and drown the poor who live where they live because they are poor and because their governments do not care.
Those who explain the unexplainable as God’s responsibility would do well to meditate on our reading from St. Paul today: “Do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.”
This does not excuse us from determining the purposes of our hearts. Here we are, kvetching about the price of gasoline and a 6% rise in the cost of hot dogs. That deserves to collide with the imperative of our mission, clearly put today by our Lord and Savior, the peasant teacher from Nazareth: “I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”
That is a much harder question to answer today in China and Myanmar. Whatever our own state of sticker shock, we are clothed and fed. They are not.
For two weeks, Raile’s Bowl has received gifts for emergency relief in Burma. Nearly $500 was gathered and routed to a Burmese healthcare organization which has its own people on the ground there.
Now we turn Raile’s Bowl towards China. Episcopal Relief and Development is using the Amity Foundation as its hands and feet in China. The Amity Foundation, an independent Chinese organization, was created in 1985 on the initiative of Chinese Christians to promote education, social services, health care, and rural development from China’s coastal provinces in the east to the minority areas of the west.
In an email written last Sunday, as China began a three-day period of national mourning, Amity’s staff announced their decision to focus relief work in certain rural areas of Sichuan Province. From their assessment, emergency relief was flowing to mainly urban areas. Outlying rural areas have not received much attention. With funding from Episcopal Relief and Development, and from ecumenical Church World Service, Amity is distributing rice, plastic sheeting, and quilts.
And volunteers. One, Ms. Liu Xiaofang, has traveled by train to Chengdu as Amity’s first counseling volunteer. Ms.Liu lost her son to blood cancer ten years ago when he was five. She reports that, having been helped abundantly and blessed by warm-hearted people, she has been waiting for an opportunity to pay back that debt. Now is her time.
Let’s make sure she does not go empty-handed.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Monday, May 12, 2008
Seven Reasons Why I'm an Episcopalian
Readings for the Day of Pentecost are Acts 2:1-21, I Corinthians 12:3b-13, and John 20:19-23.
I want to thank our Gospel readers today. Christopher, father of Ben, our baptismal candidate, read in Latin, a language he will teach here at Williams next year, a language his wife Amanda teaches at Williams, as well. Elizabeth read in Shona, one of three official languages in her homeland, Zimbabwe. And Elvy read in svenska, Swedish, her native tongue.
We think of language as being a function of the mind. But the human heart also moves to language beyond words, and Mothers’ Day invites us to celebrate dimensions of love communicated to us through the mothers we know. In relationship with them, in struggle with them, our ability to speak love has been shaped and influenced. By taking part in a baptism today, we may catch the ways, the images, the language by which the mothering love of God is expressed.
“In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power,” marveled the international pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem, hearing the Galilean apostles. Unlike our readers today, those apostles were not learned people. Like those pilgrims, however, we affirm these languages as ours because they are among the many that belong to members of this congregation. When our neighbors in these pews join the psalmist in praying, “May these words of mine please you,” those words may not be in English, but in Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, German, Japanese. This is a good day to acknowledge that when we meet here for worship, we meet at a crossroads as did those pilgrims in international Jerusalem.
I met with a band of pilgrims here, Wednesday morning, about two dozen adult students in the Osher Life-long Learning Institute, headquartered at Berkshire Community College. County residents come together to pursue whatever interests them, and for this bunch it was applied religion. Six North County pastors, including our local rabbi, were invited to lecture, each describing the origins, development, and practice of his or her religious tradition. On Wednesday they came here, and I was their lecturer.
And they were my questioners. I’ll guess that between a quarter and a third of them were Jewish. Only a couple of them had ever been in this building before. I believe that most came from central and south Berkshire County. That this course was centered on the North County may have been due to the fact that the Wednesday afternoon course this term is at the Clark.
In preparing for this, I couldn’t imagine at first speaking for a whole hour as requested—I’m trained to speak for thirteen minutes-- but once into it, my cup ran over and I had to drain it off. My audience members also shortened it with their eagerness to ask questions, but as we neared the final ten minutes I asked if they wouldn’t mind if I ended with a portion I hadn’t gotten to and really wanted to, a section I’d called Seven Reasons Why I’m an Episcopalian. If you get the sense that you’re about to hear them, you’re right.
Reason #1: Bobby Ouelette. I was eleven or twelve, and my good friend Bobby was enrolled by his parents in the vacation Bible school at our local Episcopal Church. He told me that if he had to go, then I had to go. I loved it. I wasn’t born into this tradition. I’m an Episcopalian because I was brought into the community of a church with a very active youth ministry. I wasn’t yet a teenager, but I was treated as a living member of the Body of Christ with valuable work to do for him, and I was expected and helped to find it. And I’m an Episcopalian because in college, another crossroads time in my life, I sought and found a fellowship of Word and sacrament and friendship and service both on campus through its chapel ministry, and off-campus through the nearest Episcopal church where I met the woman whom I married. She’s the cradle Episcopalian, not me. What I found in her, in her family, and in her congregation made me all the more certain I was in the church where I belonged.
Reason # 2: Consistently, in every community I’ve belonged to in the Episcopal Church, I’ve been encouraged to take the Bible honestly—to let it pry me open and then pour out on me the good news that I am not the captain of my salvation but Jesus Christ is, and holds me, as he holds you, in eternal love. The Episcopal Church has encouraged me to take the Bible honestly, seriously, joyously, without requiring that I take it literally when to take it literally misses the point of God’s love. The Anglican way is one of vigorous thinking and curiosity, encouraging an informed and imaginative reading of the Bible. I’m a student of literature, and am grateful for a church that urges me to be fearless about the contradictions and moral tempests I find in the Bible, which aren’t to be explained away but to be heard, worked with, and understood. One of the best things my church did for me in my early teens was to urge me to read the Gospels and meet the Jesus of Matthew, of Mark, and Luke and John. As you come to know the Word made flesh, all other words can be judged in his light, the keepers kept and the baggage of the past left in the baggage room.
Reason 3: Year by year, I’ve grown more grateful for a tradition that values individual conscience, puts into my hands and yours responsibility to respond to the One by whose love we are rescued and redeemed. That responsibility is a keen Reformation commitment, an intently Protestant attitude. Yet what the Episcopal Church has put into our hands is the catholic heritage handed on by the apostles, the endlessly rich resources of sacrament and community, all under the authority of the risen Christ who has poured out his Spirit so liberally. His ministry is entrusted to each believer, each having some essential role to play in the whole priesthood of believers, because the Spirit has been given in a rainbow of manifestations, gifts, passions for the common good of the world.
Reason #4: In order to get the full wonder of God’s love for the full human race, and in order to praise God for this wonder, I need and enjoy color, beauty, variety, experimentation in music, message, art, and movement. I belong to a church that values all of these in the service of worship and faith formation. I admire in the Episcopal tradition its openness to the eclectic, the international, the inspirational, and the edgy.
Reason 5: Anglican theology has me hooked. Not because it’s a neat ordering of all the answers to all my questions—it isn’t—but because of its attitude, its insistence on being rooted in God’s action in the world, not just God’s action in the church. 19th-Century theologian Charles Gore summed this up: “The real development of theology is… the process in which the Church, standing firm in her old truths, enters into the apprehension of the new social and intellectual movements of each age: and because ‘the truth makes her free,’ is able to assimilate all new material, to welcome and give its place to all new knowledge, to throw herself into the sanctification of each new social order, bringing forth out of her treasures things new and old, and showing again and again her power of witnessing under changed conditions to the catholic capacity of her faith and life.”
Reason #6 comes clearer to me, the older I get. I am able to be an Episcopalian because in Anglicanism there’s a long history of respect for science. The scientific enlightenment that swept through Europe in the 19th century had a special haven in the many English rural parsonages where vicars proved themselves to be darned good amateur botanists and students of nature. Nothing in our approach to scripture and tradition throws evolution into question. What makes reasonable sense within human experience need not be contradictory to scripture and tradition.
My seventh reason is that the Episcopal Church remembers, often enough, that it is the earthen vessel, the clay jar, and that the treasure within belongs to God, indeed the truest treasure is God. Like every denomination, we can get enormously wrapped up in our own preoccupations and take ourselves too seriously. But I admire about our church its sense of being not a finished product, but a work in progress. Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey said about Anglicanism: “Its credentials are its incompleteness, with the tension and travail in its soul. It is clumsy and untidy, it baffles neatness and logic. For it is sent not to commend itself as ‘the best type of Christianity,’ but by its very brokennesss to point to the universal Church…” In other words, to point beyond itself to something far greater than itself. And I recall the Dean of my seminary addressing us seniors before our graduation, to this effect: “The Episcopal Church is often called a ‘bridge church’ because it is both catholic and protestant. If we do our job and help God build that bridge, we should put ourselves out of business.”
I had barely said those words when Norm, in the front pew, said, “But that presupposes that each side of the divide cooperates—will that be true?”
I told him that I am not qualified to answer for any other tradition. But I can pray. And in that praying I will be reminded that the work of reconciliation in the world is God’s work. Which means that it is ours to do, by the grace we are given.
Very much in-business yesterday in my neighborhood were members of Bible Baptist Church. I was at the back door of my garage when at the open front door appeared a fellow in his forties, two little boys about seven and nine, and behind them an older man. The first fellow explained that they had for me a packet of information, but first he wanted to ask if I’m already settled in a church.
I assured him I am, and with that they turned and left, without leaving the packet of information. “Keep up the good work!” I called out to them, sincerely.
I’m impressed by how they were honoring what Pentecost is about. I suspect that their reasons for being Baptists would have some differences from the list I’ve shared with you today. They would have been quite willing to share their reasons with people they’ve never met. Their church will grow from that willingness.
This church of ours will grow, if we are willing to share our reasons with people we do know, people who aren’t settled in a church of their own. May the Spirit of God free that willingness in us.
I want to thank our Gospel readers today. Christopher, father of Ben, our baptismal candidate, read in Latin, a language he will teach here at Williams next year, a language his wife Amanda teaches at Williams, as well. Elizabeth read in Shona, one of three official languages in her homeland, Zimbabwe. And Elvy read in svenska, Swedish, her native tongue.
We think of language as being a function of the mind. But the human heart also moves to language beyond words, and Mothers’ Day invites us to celebrate dimensions of love communicated to us through the mothers we know. In relationship with them, in struggle with them, our ability to speak love has been shaped and influenced. By taking part in a baptism today, we may catch the ways, the images, the language by which the mothering love of God is expressed.
“In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power,” marveled the international pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem, hearing the Galilean apostles. Unlike our readers today, those apostles were not learned people. Like those pilgrims, however, we affirm these languages as ours because they are among the many that belong to members of this congregation. When our neighbors in these pews join the psalmist in praying, “May these words of mine please you,” those words may not be in English, but in Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, German, Japanese. This is a good day to acknowledge that when we meet here for worship, we meet at a crossroads as did those pilgrims in international Jerusalem.
I met with a band of pilgrims here, Wednesday morning, about two dozen adult students in the Osher Life-long Learning Institute, headquartered at Berkshire Community College. County residents come together to pursue whatever interests them, and for this bunch it was applied religion. Six North County pastors, including our local rabbi, were invited to lecture, each describing the origins, development, and practice of his or her religious tradition. On Wednesday they came here, and I was their lecturer.
And they were my questioners. I’ll guess that between a quarter and a third of them were Jewish. Only a couple of them had ever been in this building before. I believe that most came from central and south Berkshire County. That this course was centered on the North County may have been due to the fact that the Wednesday afternoon course this term is at the Clark.
In preparing for this, I couldn’t imagine at first speaking for a whole hour as requested—I’m trained to speak for thirteen minutes-- but once into it, my cup ran over and I had to drain it off. My audience members also shortened it with their eagerness to ask questions, but as we neared the final ten minutes I asked if they wouldn’t mind if I ended with a portion I hadn’t gotten to and really wanted to, a section I’d called Seven Reasons Why I’m an Episcopalian. If you get the sense that you’re about to hear them, you’re right.
Reason #1: Bobby Ouelette. I was eleven or twelve, and my good friend Bobby was enrolled by his parents in the vacation Bible school at our local Episcopal Church. He told me that if he had to go, then I had to go. I loved it. I wasn’t born into this tradition. I’m an Episcopalian because I was brought into the community of a church with a very active youth ministry. I wasn’t yet a teenager, but I was treated as a living member of the Body of Christ with valuable work to do for him, and I was expected and helped to find it. And I’m an Episcopalian because in college, another crossroads time in my life, I sought and found a fellowship of Word and sacrament and friendship and service both on campus through its chapel ministry, and off-campus through the nearest Episcopal church where I met the woman whom I married. She’s the cradle Episcopalian, not me. What I found in her, in her family, and in her congregation made me all the more certain I was in the church where I belonged.
Reason # 2: Consistently, in every community I’ve belonged to in the Episcopal Church, I’ve been encouraged to take the Bible honestly—to let it pry me open and then pour out on me the good news that I am not the captain of my salvation but Jesus Christ is, and holds me, as he holds you, in eternal love. The Episcopal Church has encouraged me to take the Bible honestly, seriously, joyously, without requiring that I take it literally when to take it literally misses the point of God’s love. The Anglican way is one of vigorous thinking and curiosity, encouraging an informed and imaginative reading of the Bible. I’m a student of literature, and am grateful for a church that urges me to be fearless about the contradictions and moral tempests I find in the Bible, which aren’t to be explained away but to be heard, worked with, and understood. One of the best things my church did for me in my early teens was to urge me to read the Gospels and meet the Jesus of Matthew, of Mark, and Luke and John. As you come to know the Word made flesh, all other words can be judged in his light, the keepers kept and the baggage of the past left in the baggage room.
Reason 3: Year by year, I’ve grown more grateful for a tradition that values individual conscience, puts into my hands and yours responsibility to respond to the One by whose love we are rescued and redeemed. That responsibility is a keen Reformation commitment, an intently Protestant attitude. Yet what the Episcopal Church has put into our hands is the catholic heritage handed on by the apostles, the endlessly rich resources of sacrament and community, all under the authority of the risen Christ who has poured out his Spirit so liberally. His ministry is entrusted to each believer, each having some essential role to play in the whole priesthood of believers, because the Spirit has been given in a rainbow of manifestations, gifts, passions for the common good of the world.
Reason #4: In order to get the full wonder of God’s love for the full human race, and in order to praise God for this wonder, I need and enjoy color, beauty, variety, experimentation in music, message, art, and movement. I belong to a church that values all of these in the service of worship and faith formation. I admire in the Episcopal tradition its openness to the eclectic, the international, the inspirational, and the edgy.
Reason 5: Anglican theology has me hooked. Not because it’s a neat ordering of all the answers to all my questions—it isn’t—but because of its attitude, its insistence on being rooted in God’s action in the world, not just God’s action in the church. 19th-Century theologian Charles Gore summed this up: “The real development of theology is… the process in which the Church, standing firm in her old truths, enters into the apprehension of the new social and intellectual movements of each age: and because ‘the truth makes her free,’ is able to assimilate all new material, to welcome and give its place to all new knowledge, to throw herself into the sanctification of each new social order, bringing forth out of her treasures things new and old, and showing again and again her power of witnessing under changed conditions to the catholic capacity of her faith and life.”
Reason #6 comes clearer to me, the older I get. I am able to be an Episcopalian because in Anglicanism there’s a long history of respect for science. The scientific enlightenment that swept through Europe in the 19th century had a special haven in the many English rural parsonages where vicars proved themselves to be darned good amateur botanists and students of nature. Nothing in our approach to scripture and tradition throws evolution into question. What makes reasonable sense within human experience need not be contradictory to scripture and tradition.
My seventh reason is that the Episcopal Church remembers, often enough, that it is the earthen vessel, the clay jar, and that the treasure within belongs to God, indeed the truest treasure is God. Like every denomination, we can get enormously wrapped up in our own preoccupations and take ourselves too seriously. But I admire about our church its sense of being not a finished product, but a work in progress. Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey said about Anglicanism: “Its credentials are its incompleteness, with the tension and travail in its soul. It is clumsy and untidy, it baffles neatness and logic. For it is sent not to commend itself as ‘the best type of Christianity,’ but by its very brokennesss to point to the universal Church…” In other words, to point beyond itself to something far greater than itself. And I recall the Dean of my seminary addressing us seniors before our graduation, to this effect: “The Episcopal Church is often called a ‘bridge church’ because it is both catholic and protestant. If we do our job and help God build that bridge, we should put ourselves out of business.”
I had barely said those words when Norm, in the front pew, said, “But that presupposes that each side of the divide cooperates—will that be true?”
I told him that I am not qualified to answer for any other tradition. But I can pray. And in that praying I will be reminded that the work of reconciliation in the world is God’s work. Which means that it is ours to do, by the grace we are given.
Very much in-business yesterday in my neighborhood were members of Bible Baptist Church. I was at the back door of my garage when at the open front door appeared a fellow in his forties, two little boys about seven and nine, and behind them an older man. The first fellow explained that they had for me a packet of information, but first he wanted to ask if I’m already settled in a church.
I assured him I am, and with that they turned and left, without leaving the packet of information. “Keep up the good work!” I called out to them, sincerely.
I’m impressed by how they were honoring what Pentecost is about. I suspect that their reasons for being Baptists would have some differences from the list I’ve shared with you today. They would have been quite willing to share their reasons with people they’ve never met. Their church will grow from that willingness.
This church of ours will grow, if we are willing to share our reasons with people we do know, people who aren’t settled in a church of their own. May the Spirit of God free that willingness in us.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Colliding Galaxies
Today’s collect and first lesson show us that the Ascension of our Lord is in the air today. The 40th day after Easter is one of those creedal feast days when what we celebrate is a doctrine, in this case “He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father.”
In a better-ordered parish than this one, there would be a celebration of the eucharist on Ascension Day; but on Thursday, May 1, we did not gather at the table here. We came as close as Monday’s Sweetwood eucharist honoring the Ascension, and Tuesday’s midweek eucharist here observing the Ascension. And today, after the fact, we at least look in the rear view mirror to catch what we can of this airborne and clearly movable feast.
I don’t know the artist, but a medieval painter tried his hand at the Ascension. For better or for worse, he has the disciples clustered around a spot where our Lord had stood, just a moment before, whereas at this moment that the artist attempts to catch, Jesus has lifted off and all we see of him is a pair of dangling feet at the top of the canvas. It is not among the great paintings of the Middle Ages, I suspect.
But it does push the question: Does it require belief in a multi-layered vertical universe to make sense of the Ascension?
The Hubble telescope has revealed a far more complex cosmos than first-century astronomers could describe. Think of all the reframing you have had to do in your lifetime, in order to take in magnitudes of enormity to catch up with modern astronomy’s description of the heavens. Every other thing, some stunning new image pulls us into the orbit of a startling concept we might never have imagined. The latest I saw was an image of the collision of two galaxies, a complex event that would see some stars make it through any number of near misses, and some explode on impact. I’m sure there’s a much more accurate description of that image than what I’ve just said, but I haven’t enough command of the language and science to give it to you.
But I’m imagining that our Williams seniors, whom we celebrate today, have a more coherent understanding of the heavens than I do, in part because they are the heirs of finer science in their formal education than I was in mine. Perhaps one of them can explain to me the collision of galaxies, later… Or, educational evolution being what it is, perhaps that will require a seventh grader?
Recall those angels in our first reading, and their questioning the disciples, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”
For them, it was a simpler thing than it may be for us to locate heaven. The psalmist could sing, “God rides in the heavens, the ancient heavens… God’s strength is in the skies,” and in that several-storied universe, this all made sense.
But where do we locate heaven? If astronomy helps us do that, I’ll bet it will be by giving us new metaphors. Those black holes I read about while I’m in Dr. Lapidus’s waiting room enjoying The Smithsonian, will some astrophysical image like that give future artists and poets and preachers and musicians new descriptive language for imagining heaven?
Or will it always be the work of angels to address disciples with a gentle scolding, “Why spend your time speculating about heaven? Get on with your mission, for this Christ who has ascended will return to this earth—and if this realm is that important to God, hadn’t you better steward it just as generously as you can, build in it the right ordering of peace on earth, good will towards all?”
What does the Ascension of Christ have to do with this physical life of ours? The Prayer Book Catechism asks this question. I don’t know about you, but I find that those curt, tense little answers in the Catechism dangle like verbal counterparts to those feet on that medieval canvas. But this answer may be helpful:
“Q: What do we mean when we say that he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father?
A: We mean that Jesus took our human nature into heaven where he now reigns with the Father and intercedes for us.”
At the end of today’s Gospel portion, we hear him pray, “Holy Father, protect them (us, his people in the world) protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
There, for me, is the meaning of the Ascension: this doctrine shows that, despite the worst that the world could do to Jesus, his unity with God his Source and Origin and his All could not be broken. Because of the grace given to us in baptism, it is true for us as well: the unity we have with God in Jesus Christ cannot be broken.
In our relationship with him, given to us in baptism, claimed in faith, we are in that unity that he has with the Father. He has taken our nature with him into the center of God, making possible for us daily that centering in God that we are built to enjoy. Protecting us, freeing us, for unity with God is that name Jesus says God has given him.
That sent me to the commentary. “Name,” I muttered. What name?
“Name”, I learn there, means the identity and character and nature of God. Jesus has revealed God’s name—that is, God’s identity and character and nature—and that revelation has shaped the identity and character and nature of the faith community of the disciples during Jesus’s ministry. (Somewhere in the First Letter of John we read, “As he is in this world, so are we.”) He now asks that God keep secure the community’s grounding, centering, in that name. That God ensure the unity of the faith community which mirrors the unity of God and Jesus.
Put that with the simplicity you’ll find in the First Letter of John, and it sounds like this: “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God… for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him… Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another… if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit… God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
Anne, Ben, Caitlin, Paul, Sara, Scot: God abides in you. You have shown your love among us in service, worship, and community. You will have left an abiding name here, and we hope that something of us will abide with you.
Now back to the colliding of galaxies. Something like that is happening throughout our little cosmos. Empires of culture collide in war. Economic forces and failures clash in the world’s markets. Presidential elections pit star against star. Our own Anglican Communion is hot with friction as values and beliefs smash into one another.
In the face of all this, power deeper and truer than force is at work among us. The Book of Acts tells us: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you…” The First Letter of Peter says, “The God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.” And as John told us, God has given Jesus authority for the benefit of all people. So in him, deep authority of love is given to us as well.
Scot, Sara, Paul, Caitlin, Ben, Anne: May you wield it well, this spiritual power, along with fine science, and all the good you carry with you.
In a better-ordered parish than this one, there would be a celebration of the eucharist on Ascension Day; but on Thursday, May 1, we did not gather at the table here. We came as close as Monday’s Sweetwood eucharist honoring the Ascension, and Tuesday’s midweek eucharist here observing the Ascension. And today, after the fact, we at least look in the rear view mirror to catch what we can of this airborne and clearly movable feast.
I don’t know the artist, but a medieval painter tried his hand at the Ascension. For better or for worse, he has the disciples clustered around a spot where our Lord had stood, just a moment before, whereas at this moment that the artist attempts to catch, Jesus has lifted off and all we see of him is a pair of dangling feet at the top of the canvas. It is not among the great paintings of the Middle Ages, I suspect.
But it does push the question: Does it require belief in a multi-layered vertical universe to make sense of the Ascension?
The Hubble telescope has revealed a far more complex cosmos than first-century astronomers could describe. Think of all the reframing you have had to do in your lifetime, in order to take in magnitudes of enormity to catch up with modern astronomy’s description of the heavens. Every other thing, some stunning new image pulls us into the orbit of a startling concept we might never have imagined. The latest I saw was an image of the collision of two galaxies, a complex event that would see some stars make it through any number of near misses, and some explode on impact. I’m sure there’s a much more accurate description of that image than what I’ve just said, but I haven’t enough command of the language and science to give it to you.
But I’m imagining that our Williams seniors, whom we celebrate today, have a more coherent understanding of the heavens than I do, in part because they are the heirs of finer science in their formal education than I was in mine. Perhaps one of them can explain to me the collision of galaxies, later… Or, educational evolution being what it is, perhaps that will require a seventh grader?
Recall those angels in our first reading, and their questioning the disciples, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”
For them, it was a simpler thing than it may be for us to locate heaven. The psalmist could sing, “God rides in the heavens, the ancient heavens… God’s strength is in the skies,” and in that several-storied universe, this all made sense.
But where do we locate heaven? If astronomy helps us do that, I’ll bet it will be by giving us new metaphors. Those black holes I read about while I’m in Dr. Lapidus’s waiting room enjoying The Smithsonian, will some astrophysical image like that give future artists and poets and preachers and musicians new descriptive language for imagining heaven?
Or will it always be the work of angels to address disciples with a gentle scolding, “Why spend your time speculating about heaven? Get on with your mission, for this Christ who has ascended will return to this earth—and if this realm is that important to God, hadn’t you better steward it just as generously as you can, build in it the right ordering of peace on earth, good will towards all?”
What does the Ascension of Christ have to do with this physical life of ours? The Prayer Book Catechism asks this question. I don’t know about you, but I find that those curt, tense little answers in the Catechism dangle like verbal counterparts to those feet on that medieval canvas. But this answer may be helpful:
“Q: What do we mean when we say that he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father?
A: We mean that Jesus took our human nature into heaven where he now reigns with the Father and intercedes for us.”
At the end of today’s Gospel portion, we hear him pray, “Holy Father, protect them (us, his people in the world) protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
There, for me, is the meaning of the Ascension: this doctrine shows that, despite the worst that the world could do to Jesus, his unity with God his Source and Origin and his All could not be broken. Because of the grace given to us in baptism, it is true for us as well: the unity we have with God in Jesus Christ cannot be broken.
In our relationship with him, given to us in baptism, claimed in faith, we are in that unity that he has with the Father. He has taken our nature with him into the center of God, making possible for us daily that centering in God that we are built to enjoy. Protecting us, freeing us, for unity with God is that name Jesus says God has given him.
That sent me to the commentary. “Name,” I muttered. What name?
“Name”, I learn there, means the identity and character and nature of God. Jesus has revealed God’s name—that is, God’s identity and character and nature—and that revelation has shaped the identity and character and nature of the faith community of the disciples during Jesus’s ministry. (Somewhere in the First Letter of John we read, “As he is in this world, so are we.”) He now asks that God keep secure the community’s grounding, centering, in that name. That God ensure the unity of the faith community which mirrors the unity of God and Jesus.
Put that with the simplicity you’ll find in the First Letter of John, and it sounds like this: “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God… for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him… Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another… if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit… God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
Anne, Ben, Caitlin, Paul, Sara, Scot: God abides in you. You have shown your love among us in service, worship, and community. You will have left an abiding name here, and we hope that something of us will abide with you.
Now back to the colliding of galaxies. Something like that is happening throughout our little cosmos. Empires of culture collide in war. Economic forces and failures clash in the world’s markets. Presidential elections pit star against star. Our own Anglican Communion is hot with friction as values and beliefs smash into one another.
In the face of all this, power deeper and truer than force is at work among us. The Book of Acts tells us: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you…” The First Letter of Peter says, “The God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.” And as John told us, God has given Jesus authority for the benefit of all people. So in him, deep authority of love is given to us as well.
Scot, Sara, Paul, Caitlin, Ben, Anne: May you wield it well, this spiritual power, along with fine science, and all the good you carry with you.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Planting, Pruning
Let’s hear it for the trees! In just the past few days they’ve begun exploding in bud—maybe I hadn’t been paying attention, but on Friday it looked as if someone had flipped a switch and suddenly we’re seeing green, as if the trees were saying, “Hey, it’s Arbor Day! Let’s do it!”
We know there is a flip side to all this proleaferation. Many of us have brought rakes to church today to deal with the down side, as we tackle what may be a first: an all-generations Sunday-morning spring cleanup of last year’s leaves, not to mention a winter’s load of beer cans.
I want to thank all of you who will be part of this work project. You’re helping us deal with a serious budget deficit by reducing our dependence on paid help. Speaking of paying, there’s another way to help St. John’s keep its fiscal head above water: with the arrival of quarterly statements from the Treasurer, it’s time for parish households to make sure they’re caught up with their estimated giving. Perhaps, in this season of resurrection it’s time to exceed what you and I estimated we would give this year—and perhaps the arrival of a federal rebate check in the coming days will provide that opportunity.
But enough about that kind of greenery. Not only was Tuesday Earth Day and Friday Arbor Day, but today is Rogation Sunday, from the Latin rogare, to ask. The three days before Ascension Day (so it moves about in conjunction with Easter, since Ascension Day is the 40th day after Easter), these are called rogation days and from as long ago as the 5th century they’ve been days when Christians have marched in procession out to the local fields and gardens to ask for a rich harvest, ask God to keep the fungus off the tomatoes, keep the gypsy moth under control, whatever the local farmers and gardeners saw blocking the way to a bountiful season, that they asked God to work on. In England this parading out and about is called “beating the bounds of the parish.” And in England, as in America, as in every other place on this fragile earth, God has answered such prayer in a slyly respectful manner, along these lines: “Sure, I understand what you’re asking. Now you understand that I am with you always, so get to work as if it all depends on you (even if we know that it all depends on me).”
So in John’s Gospel, a portion not assigned for today but one I thought fits well the greenness of this Sunday, Jesus tells us that he is the true vine—I imagine “true” means true life, potent life, abundant life, eternal life flows through this vine to its branches, and that would be us. “My Father,” Jesus says, “is the vinegrower. He removes the deadwood. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been pruned back by the message I have spoken.”
Come again on that last verse? Our version said, “You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.” But “cleansed”, it says in the footnotes in my Bible, has the same Greek root as “pruned”.
So the very thing I cringe at doing, deciding to lob off a live branch at a certain point so the bush will be better shaped, the tree healthier, the vine more fruitful (I don’t know what I’m doing when I attempt this, do you?)—that cutting and relinquishing that I have to learn to do by trial and error, Jesus does gracefully and organically by aiming his Word right to the heart of my need to cling and keep, and snip he cuts through my anxious wanting and snip he slices my resistance to change by the appeal and the sharp edge of his Word.
For example, “Consider the lilies of the field. Solomon in all his glory was not clothed as well as they are. They neither toil nor spin, yet your heavenly Mother clothes them perfectly, does she not? So tell me again why you’re worried about your transitional spring wardrobe, hmm?”
Or, “Don’t talk to me about the faith you don’t have. Have as little as a mustard seed, but plant it, use it, and watch it grow. Get out of your own way, for heaven’s sake.”
And by other such horticultural stories he makes his point. The truest work we have to do is to abide in him. To live life on his terms. “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.”
What is that abiding? Our baptismal covenant that we renewed last Sunday tells us how to abide: Continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayer. Persevere in making faithful choices, and, when you fail, open yourself to God’s mercy. Proclaim the message that cuts to the quick. Seek and serve Christ in all persons. Reach for justice and respect the dignity of all life. All these abidings are the real work, the truest work, we have as human beings. These are the abidings God asks of us.
Let’s return to the trees. When pioneers traveled west and settled the Nebraska Territory in the 1850s, many of them from the farmed-out northeast, they missed their trees. Trees were needed as windbreaks to keep the soil in place, needed for fuel and building materials, needed for shade from the sun.
So they planted trees, and it was there in Nebraska that a tree-planting holiday evolved, Arbor Day. More than one million trees were planted on the first Arbor Day, 1872.
In our own day, Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai has led the women and children and men of Kenya in the planting of trees to offset the encroaching desert. Her Green Belt Movement has spread to other African nations, 40 million trees planted under its influence.
Quaker author Elton Trueblood said that “People have made at least a start at understanding the meaning of life when they plant shade trees under with they know full well they will never sit.”
With that in mind, and with all our trees urging us on to do the abiding work we have to do, we take a step today to strengthen our abode, our parish community, and that is to establish St. John’s Arbor Fellowship, a growing circle of people who have used—or will use—their wills, or other means of planned giving, to bless St. John’s and the world that we serve by this form of future stewardship.
You will see their names listed on the upper half of an insert in your leaflet. You’re bound to hear names of people you know as I read them now…
Perhaps you too are in this Fellowship, and we don’t know it yet. We hope this list will grow, like the great oak that is the logo for this Fellowship.
What grows among us also is an abiding gratitude for this creative stewardship the members demonstrate, investing in the future that will be beyond their reach except by their generosity. They understand the respectful ways of God, that for God’s abiding values to work on planet earth, it’s for us to put those values to work now, for the sake of the future.
We know there is a flip side to all this proleaferation. Many of us have brought rakes to church today to deal with the down side, as we tackle what may be a first: an all-generations Sunday-morning spring cleanup of last year’s leaves, not to mention a winter’s load of beer cans.
I want to thank all of you who will be part of this work project. You’re helping us deal with a serious budget deficit by reducing our dependence on paid help. Speaking of paying, there’s another way to help St. John’s keep its fiscal head above water: with the arrival of quarterly statements from the Treasurer, it’s time for parish households to make sure they’re caught up with their estimated giving. Perhaps, in this season of resurrection it’s time to exceed what you and I estimated we would give this year—and perhaps the arrival of a federal rebate check in the coming days will provide that opportunity.
But enough about that kind of greenery. Not only was Tuesday Earth Day and Friday Arbor Day, but today is Rogation Sunday, from the Latin rogare, to ask. The three days before Ascension Day (so it moves about in conjunction with Easter, since Ascension Day is the 40th day after Easter), these are called rogation days and from as long ago as the 5th century they’ve been days when Christians have marched in procession out to the local fields and gardens to ask for a rich harvest, ask God to keep the fungus off the tomatoes, keep the gypsy moth under control, whatever the local farmers and gardeners saw blocking the way to a bountiful season, that they asked God to work on. In England this parading out and about is called “beating the bounds of the parish.” And in England, as in America, as in every other place on this fragile earth, God has answered such prayer in a slyly respectful manner, along these lines: “Sure, I understand what you’re asking. Now you understand that I am with you always, so get to work as if it all depends on you (even if we know that it all depends on me).”
So in John’s Gospel, a portion not assigned for today but one I thought fits well the greenness of this Sunday, Jesus tells us that he is the true vine—I imagine “true” means true life, potent life, abundant life, eternal life flows through this vine to its branches, and that would be us. “My Father,” Jesus says, “is the vinegrower. He removes the deadwood. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been pruned back by the message I have spoken.”
Come again on that last verse? Our version said, “You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.” But “cleansed”, it says in the footnotes in my Bible, has the same Greek root as “pruned”.
So the very thing I cringe at doing, deciding to lob off a live branch at a certain point so the bush will be better shaped, the tree healthier, the vine more fruitful (I don’t know what I’m doing when I attempt this, do you?)—that cutting and relinquishing that I have to learn to do by trial and error, Jesus does gracefully and organically by aiming his Word right to the heart of my need to cling and keep, and snip he cuts through my anxious wanting and snip he slices my resistance to change by the appeal and the sharp edge of his Word.
For example, “Consider the lilies of the field. Solomon in all his glory was not clothed as well as they are. They neither toil nor spin, yet your heavenly Mother clothes them perfectly, does she not? So tell me again why you’re worried about your transitional spring wardrobe, hmm?”
Or, “Don’t talk to me about the faith you don’t have. Have as little as a mustard seed, but plant it, use it, and watch it grow. Get out of your own way, for heaven’s sake.”
And by other such horticultural stories he makes his point. The truest work we have to do is to abide in him. To live life on his terms. “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.”
What is that abiding? Our baptismal covenant that we renewed last Sunday tells us how to abide: Continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayer. Persevere in making faithful choices, and, when you fail, open yourself to God’s mercy. Proclaim the message that cuts to the quick. Seek and serve Christ in all persons. Reach for justice and respect the dignity of all life. All these abidings are the real work, the truest work, we have as human beings. These are the abidings God asks of us.
Let’s return to the trees. When pioneers traveled west and settled the Nebraska Territory in the 1850s, many of them from the farmed-out northeast, they missed their trees. Trees were needed as windbreaks to keep the soil in place, needed for fuel and building materials, needed for shade from the sun.
So they planted trees, and it was there in Nebraska that a tree-planting holiday evolved, Arbor Day. More than one million trees were planted on the first Arbor Day, 1872.
In our own day, Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai has led the women and children and men of Kenya in the planting of trees to offset the encroaching desert. Her Green Belt Movement has spread to other African nations, 40 million trees planted under its influence.
Quaker author Elton Trueblood said that “People have made at least a start at understanding the meaning of life when they plant shade trees under with they know full well they will never sit.”
With that in mind, and with all our trees urging us on to do the abiding work we have to do, we take a step today to strengthen our abode, our parish community, and that is to establish St. John’s Arbor Fellowship, a growing circle of people who have used—or will use—their wills, or other means of planned giving, to bless St. John’s and the world that we serve by this form of future stewardship.
You will see their names listed on the upper half of an insert in your leaflet. You’re bound to hear names of people you know as I read them now…
Perhaps you too are in this Fellowship, and we don’t know it yet. We hope this list will grow, like the great oak that is the logo for this Fellowship.
What grows among us also is an abiding gratitude for this creative stewardship the members demonstrate, investing in the future that will be beyond their reach except by their generosity. They understand the respectful ways of God, that for God’s abiding values to work on planet earth, it’s for us to put those values to work now, for the sake of the future.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Into the Full Stature of Christ
“Will you by your prayers and witness help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ?”
“I will, with God’s help.”
In just a few moments, we’re going to hear that astonishing question and, I trust, we’ll also hear that breath-taking answer. We’d better, or else Fiona Claire won’t taste the water of baptism trickle down her cute little cheek.
Do you hear how stunning that question is? “…help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ.” Utterly amazing. The Church’s question is not, “Will she go to Sunday School?” or “Will she be a good Episcopalian?” The question is, “Will she grow into the full stature of Christ?”
Today we hear the Gospel promise, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” So we might make it our prayer, “Jesus, help Fiona grow into your likeness.” But that would miss the point that today we hear Jesus asking Aaron and Chrissie and Ali and Bill to do that helping, to help Fiona grow into the full stature of Christ.
And, without an operator’s manual, each of them is expected to say, “I will do that, God being my helper.” Before long, it’s clear that we too are being asked by Jesus to do that helping. “Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support this person in her life in Christ?”
I did a little digging, since this goal of Christian growth, this hope to bear the very likeness of Christ, always startles me. I learned two things. One is that the question wasn’t part of the baptismal rite until this 1979 Prayer Book—though it appeared in German baptismal rites at the time of the Reformation, and came close to being included in the English Prayer Book of 1552.
And I was reminded where the language comes from, the Letter to the Ephesians in the fourth chapter, and I’ll select a few verses: “But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift… The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ…. Speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.”
Hear how an individual’s call to grow is simultaneously the congregation’s call, and the call of the whole Church, to grow.
That had to be a favorite text to the Protestant reformers. No wonder they worked it into their baptisms, insisting on a high vision of God’s call to each person. This is the priesthood of all believers, the ministry of Jesus Christ entrusted not to a few prominent men sealed away from the world in temples made with hands, but the very life of Jesus Christ invested in every baptized child, woman, and man whose place in the world, whether high or low, rich or poor, is the meeting place of humanity and divinity, the holy place where love transforms fear, anxiety gives way to freedom, and truth works its healing way. And it requires “all of us”, as it says in Ephesians, “each part working properly”, promoting the growth of the Body of Christ in love, in the world.
This was the early Church of the first century, which spread like sunlight in a dark valley because the world wanted the powers of love, freedom, and healing demonstrated by those who in time became known as Christians.
Here we are in the 21st century, standing at the end of a week when great attention has been drawn by two religious stories and by what they represent.
One is the visit of Pope Benedict XVI. He’s showing that there’s more to him than we thought, back when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, before he started wearing red patent leather shoes. Anglicans do color and ceremony, but there’s no question that our bling factor has been reined-in and toned down by our Reformation training. We do have prominent Anglican leaders, women as well as men, and we want them to represent not so much the ascended and glorified Christ (we tend to believe that he can do that for himself so much better than bishops can), but believe rather that they should represent the servant Christ. That, as we know, is the purpose of the papacy, for the pope is called “servant of the servants of God.”
And we saw Benedict be this do this when he sat, one by one, with three recovering victims of sexual abuse at the hands of pedophile priests. That these victims and the abuse that damaged them deserve more than 25 minutes of attention was suggested by the number of times Benedict spoke to the subject.
And he represented the servant Christ when he addressed the United Nations and called on the world’s few major powers—called on us—to disavow war and violence and recommit ourselves to a powerful defense of human rights.
He represented the servant Christ when he gathered the faithful in eucharist and so strengthened their trust, their hope, and their love. That elected public officials asserting freedom of conscience about abortion, and favoring the right of women to decide, that these lawmakers were asked not to receive communion drew a clear battle line that may have represented both consistency and an imperious spirit.
Conditions under which children are brought into this world also figures in that other story of the week, 416 minor children being separated from their parents by the State of Texas, while the appropriate agencies investigate charges of physical and sexual abuse within the closed community of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
I can’t find any red slippers to chuckle about in this story. I feel embarrassed for having failed to realize that polygamy was still such a potent force, and I feel confused over why it has been allowed in a nation—and a state—that prides itself on law and order. In Texas, for heaven’s sake.
I’m spooked by the silky smooth voices of mothers content with their heavenly Zion on earth, and I’m jarred by realizing that they themselves were born into this hierarchical world in retreat from the world, bred in captivity, bred for the captivity they describe as freedom, bred to breed future generations of loyal, devout believers. It’s chilling. It’s a story that forces us to think hard about what limits are needed for freedom, in particular religious freedom.
How is this story being heard in other nations of the world? How does it represent America? How does it represent Christianity?
Meanwhile, 416 smaller stories are being written as this country’s most bizarre courtroom scene plays out, 416 lawyers defending the rights of these children as one judge determines what next steps are in their best interest, while the investigation goes on. Perhaps this is a story about the demise of a renegade sect. But don’t our hearts tell us that the destiny of these children is the central story?
“Will you, by your prayers and witness, help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ?”
In the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke, we hear the tag end of yet another story. It reads, “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in divine and human favor.”
Do you remember the story that had to come first, before he grew into his full stature? He was twelve. His parents, Mary and Joseph, had taken him to Jerusalem to keep the Passover festival (which falls on this very weekend). Back then, Jesus was separated from his parents. They didn’t notice this until they’d gone a day’s journey, during which they thought he was among relatives or friends. Imagine their panic, as every effort to find him failed. They retrace their journey all the way to Jerusalem, and you know what that was like, each minute an eternity, no face mattering but his, their minds racing to keep terror at bay. Three days later they find him in the temple, debating religious questions with the elders. Tension uncoiled right past relief and back round again to anger as Mary asked him, “Why have you treated us like this? Didn’t you know we’d be searching?” Only to hear her son question her, “Why were you searching? Didn’t you understand that I must be here?”
Aaron, Chrissie, Ali, Bill: be warned! The full stature of Christ requires freedom, requires that Fiona keep knowing this God who counts her essential for the world’s healing, and that she keep hearing the call to find and respect her freedom and its limits which will in time limit you as well, free you as well. “By your prayers and witness,” it says. The God of your praying must be this one we hear about in John today, who has no limits to the interest that meets us, the commitment that meets us, the faithfulness that meets us when we open ourselves to all that is truly God.
Aaron, Chrissie, Ali, Bill: As you respond to that call of God, and as you grow up into all that is truly God, giving yourselves to the servant ministry of Christ in the world, Fiona will learn from your witness, as she will from ours, from the community that keeps knowing God and hearing the call.
At the heart of that call is God’s perfect freedom. Each of us is to be centered in freedom, so to move with God in the world—like dancing.
Do you watch “Dancing with the Stars?” I do.
God is the pro, the effortless dancer, the trainer. Fiona, you’re the celebrity partner. Baptism shows us that we all are God’s partners. We bring our limits. God includes them in the dance, training us in the freedom and faithfulness already given to us.
“I will, with God’s help.”
In just a few moments, we’re going to hear that astonishing question and, I trust, we’ll also hear that breath-taking answer. We’d better, or else Fiona Claire won’t taste the water of baptism trickle down her cute little cheek.
Do you hear how stunning that question is? “…help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ.” Utterly amazing. The Church’s question is not, “Will she go to Sunday School?” or “Will she be a good Episcopalian?” The question is, “Will she grow into the full stature of Christ?”
Today we hear the Gospel promise, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” So we might make it our prayer, “Jesus, help Fiona grow into your likeness.” But that would miss the point that today we hear Jesus asking Aaron and Chrissie and Ali and Bill to do that helping, to help Fiona grow into the full stature of Christ.
And, without an operator’s manual, each of them is expected to say, “I will do that, God being my helper.” Before long, it’s clear that we too are being asked by Jesus to do that helping. “Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support this person in her life in Christ?”
I did a little digging, since this goal of Christian growth, this hope to bear the very likeness of Christ, always startles me. I learned two things. One is that the question wasn’t part of the baptismal rite until this 1979 Prayer Book—though it appeared in German baptismal rites at the time of the Reformation, and came close to being included in the English Prayer Book of 1552.
And I was reminded where the language comes from, the Letter to the Ephesians in the fourth chapter, and I’ll select a few verses: “But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift… The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ…. Speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.”
Hear how an individual’s call to grow is simultaneously the congregation’s call, and the call of the whole Church, to grow.
That had to be a favorite text to the Protestant reformers. No wonder they worked it into their baptisms, insisting on a high vision of God’s call to each person. This is the priesthood of all believers, the ministry of Jesus Christ entrusted not to a few prominent men sealed away from the world in temples made with hands, but the very life of Jesus Christ invested in every baptized child, woman, and man whose place in the world, whether high or low, rich or poor, is the meeting place of humanity and divinity, the holy place where love transforms fear, anxiety gives way to freedom, and truth works its healing way. And it requires “all of us”, as it says in Ephesians, “each part working properly”, promoting the growth of the Body of Christ in love, in the world.
This was the early Church of the first century, which spread like sunlight in a dark valley because the world wanted the powers of love, freedom, and healing demonstrated by those who in time became known as Christians.
Here we are in the 21st century, standing at the end of a week when great attention has been drawn by two religious stories and by what they represent.
One is the visit of Pope Benedict XVI. He’s showing that there’s more to him than we thought, back when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, before he started wearing red patent leather shoes. Anglicans do color and ceremony, but there’s no question that our bling factor has been reined-in and toned down by our Reformation training. We do have prominent Anglican leaders, women as well as men, and we want them to represent not so much the ascended and glorified Christ (we tend to believe that he can do that for himself so much better than bishops can), but believe rather that they should represent the servant Christ. That, as we know, is the purpose of the papacy, for the pope is called “servant of the servants of God.”
And we saw Benedict be this do this when he sat, one by one, with three recovering victims of sexual abuse at the hands of pedophile priests. That these victims and the abuse that damaged them deserve more than 25 minutes of attention was suggested by the number of times Benedict spoke to the subject.
And he represented the servant Christ when he addressed the United Nations and called on the world’s few major powers—called on us—to disavow war and violence and recommit ourselves to a powerful defense of human rights.
He represented the servant Christ when he gathered the faithful in eucharist and so strengthened their trust, their hope, and their love. That elected public officials asserting freedom of conscience about abortion, and favoring the right of women to decide, that these lawmakers were asked not to receive communion drew a clear battle line that may have represented both consistency and an imperious spirit.
Conditions under which children are brought into this world also figures in that other story of the week, 416 minor children being separated from their parents by the State of Texas, while the appropriate agencies investigate charges of physical and sexual abuse within the closed community of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
I can’t find any red slippers to chuckle about in this story. I feel embarrassed for having failed to realize that polygamy was still such a potent force, and I feel confused over why it has been allowed in a nation—and a state—that prides itself on law and order. In Texas, for heaven’s sake.
I’m spooked by the silky smooth voices of mothers content with their heavenly Zion on earth, and I’m jarred by realizing that they themselves were born into this hierarchical world in retreat from the world, bred in captivity, bred for the captivity they describe as freedom, bred to breed future generations of loyal, devout believers. It’s chilling. It’s a story that forces us to think hard about what limits are needed for freedom, in particular religious freedom.
How is this story being heard in other nations of the world? How does it represent America? How does it represent Christianity?
Meanwhile, 416 smaller stories are being written as this country’s most bizarre courtroom scene plays out, 416 lawyers defending the rights of these children as one judge determines what next steps are in their best interest, while the investigation goes on. Perhaps this is a story about the demise of a renegade sect. But don’t our hearts tell us that the destiny of these children is the central story?
“Will you, by your prayers and witness, help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ?”
In the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke, we hear the tag end of yet another story. It reads, “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in divine and human favor.”
Do you remember the story that had to come first, before he grew into his full stature? He was twelve. His parents, Mary and Joseph, had taken him to Jerusalem to keep the Passover festival (which falls on this very weekend). Back then, Jesus was separated from his parents. They didn’t notice this until they’d gone a day’s journey, during which they thought he was among relatives or friends. Imagine their panic, as every effort to find him failed. They retrace their journey all the way to Jerusalem, and you know what that was like, each minute an eternity, no face mattering but his, their minds racing to keep terror at bay. Three days later they find him in the temple, debating religious questions with the elders. Tension uncoiled right past relief and back round again to anger as Mary asked him, “Why have you treated us like this? Didn’t you know we’d be searching?” Only to hear her son question her, “Why were you searching? Didn’t you understand that I must be here?”
Aaron, Chrissie, Ali, Bill: be warned! The full stature of Christ requires freedom, requires that Fiona keep knowing this God who counts her essential for the world’s healing, and that she keep hearing the call to find and respect her freedom and its limits which will in time limit you as well, free you as well. “By your prayers and witness,” it says. The God of your praying must be this one we hear about in John today, who has no limits to the interest that meets us, the commitment that meets us, the faithfulness that meets us when we open ourselves to all that is truly God.
Aaron, Chrissie, Ali, Bill: As you respond to that call of God, and as you grow up into all that is truly God, giving yourselves to the servant ministry of Christ in the world, Fiona will learn from your witness, as she will from ours, from the community that keeps knowing God and hearing the call.
At the heart of that call is God’s perfect freedom. Each of us is to be centered in freedom, so to move with God in the world—like dancing.
Do you watch “Dancing with the Stars?” I do.
God is the pro, the effortless dancer, the trainer. Fiona, you’re the celebrity partner. Baptism shows us that we all are God’s partners. We bring our limits. God includes them in the dance, training us in the freedom and faithfulness already given to us.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Called to Freedom
(The scripture portions cited here are Acts 2:42-47, I Peter 2:19-25, and John 10:1-10)
At our monthly eucharist at Williamstown Commons Nursing Home Wednesday, I read this Gospel. We use a large-print song book at that service, but nothing else in print. I noticed Psalm 23 and thought, “We can do that—they’ll know those words.” I knew my little flock there well enough that I’d already decided to use the King James Version. Give me that old time religion…
Sure enough, they knew it. I’ll bet a lot of you do, too. Perhaps you don’t know that that old version was not printed in any edition of The Book of Common Prayer until 1979, the famous “new Prayer Book” that irritated many who thought they were losing the baby with the bathwater. We who have patiently lived with this book for 29 years, and I believe most of us have learned to love it, we’ve learned that its chief characteristic is not what it left out, but what it added, providing many more options than we had before.
Among them, the old language for Psalm 23. I mean the one that many people of a certain age know so well. Let’s find out if we do. To help your synapses fire, close your eyes. Now, let’s make a deal. If you don’t know these words, relax and enjoy hearing them…
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his Name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”
That was impressive! I wonder what else lives in there, in your memory. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills…” No, that’s a sermon for another time.
If you want to get better acquainted with that old language of Psalm 23, you’ll find it in the Prayer Book on page 476, in the Burial Office. Not the one at the top of the page. That’s the really old version, found in the Book of Common Prayer of 1549, a translation by Miles Coverdale in 1535. What we’re so sure is old was in fact the new version of 1611, a result of King James’s bright idea that a new fresh translation of the Bible was needed. (Can’t you imagine, during those early decades when the King James Version was a novelty on the shelf, devout Anglicans grumbling at the new wording, “That trippeth not off the tongue the way the old one doth, now doth it?”)
Ah, well. No one ever said evolution would be easy.
The images of sheep and shepherd have a lasting place in Christian faith. It’s not just that newborn lambs are so darned cute. Do you remember the parable of the lost sheep? Archbishop Desmond Tutu tells how that story shapes our theology, showing us how God has a particular soft spot for those who stray from the fold. Tutu writes, “The Good Shepherd in the parable Jesus told had been quite ready to leave ninety-nine perfectly well-behaved sheep in the wilderness to look for, not an attractive, fluffy little lamb—fluffy little lambs do not usually stray from their mummies—but for the troublesome, obstreperous old ram. This was the one on which the Good Shepherd expended so much energy.”
And that would be because the nature of God, the nature we bear is the capacity for freedom. The Bible teaches that human beings are made in the image of God, and that likeness is shown in freedom. So the Book of Genesis starts in the garden of Eden, a safe contained space for man and woman and all the species to cohabit in freedom within limits. And it takes little time for our race to test and push and transgress those limits. The Bible sees this as our signature sin, disobedience: hearing God but not listening, doing as we like (or being sold on the idea of what we might like), finding it just too hard to accept limitations on our freedom.
But freedom remains the gold standard of our experience, our nature, and our calling. Go to the second book of the Bible and there is the Exodus, God freeing an enslaved tribe whose calling is to become a free nation, free within limits. The setting of those limits is the long story of young Israel learning to love God by obeying, fulfilling, God’s covenant expectations so as to grow into mature Israel shaped by covenant love.
The next 36 books of the Hebrew Bible (and aren’t you glad I’m not taking you to each of them?) reinforce, story upon story, that signature sin of our race: hearing God but not listening, knowing the covenant but not keeping it, sensing the spirit of the law but finding it more intriguing to get around the letter of it, disobedience.
You could say that the prophets are the schoolteachers, the faculty of the Bible, their seventeen or so books recording all those educable moments, all those fiery lectures and fierce arguments, brilliant visions, stormy scoldings, constant pleadings meant to train our race to what is required of us: “…to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.” These are the very terms of our limits and of our freedom, simultaneously.
And in the fullness of time, God resolved Word into flesh. Having had enough of talk, God acted in perfect freedom, emptying the divine self, taking the form of a slave. Go figure. Freedom, God’s quintessential state, embracing servitude and sin, mankind’s primary plight, breaking the grip of death by a life so truly fulfilling covenant love that the early Church would learn to sing, with the apostle Peter, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness.”
With that long preamble, think with me now about sheep and shepherd.
What limits do we need to safeguard our freedom? Three. First, a sheepfold, just enough structure around us to hold us together for facing the darkness. For freedom, just enough structure.
And, second, movement-- out of the sheepfold and out unto the hills to seek and find, feed and fertilize and, well, evolve. For freedom, rhythms of rising to work and folding to rest, patterns of movement and growth.
And, third, guidance, direction. Sheep may not be the brightest bulbs in the barnyard, but they have a reputation for responding to their own shepherd’s voice. At least on a good day, that’s all it takes to move a flock, to restore the strays. For freedom, recognizing God’s voice when we hear it, listening unafraid and trusting, following where it leads.
We have a case study of this in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. There’s the Bible, in its New Testament, showing what freedom looks like when human beings trust and follow the Good Shepherd. Power is found for the devoting of one’s own life to the life of the community. Private possession is cashed in for common wealth, the good of all. The table fellowship of mealtime and worship feeds the gladness and generosity of everyone. Day by day their numbers grew—the apostles had found perfect freedom, and the world wanted it.
And here we are. Heading into a recession. Even the cheeriest glass-half-full’ers of us may be having to ask what it means when the glass looks half empty.
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his Name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”
Hear the shepherd constant in his rhythm of calling us into the structure and shelter of renewing faith experienced in the apostles’ community and fellowship, and calling us to move out into the world to seek and find, feed and nurture, evolve. Structure, movement, guidance—gifts that are at the same time our limit and our freedom.
Hear how these dynamics of freedom mark the evolution of our race. Men and women devoted to the common good have their passions and principles renewed within the fold of their covenant community where their call originates—the call to freedom, to lead movements that confront tyranny, defeat prejudice, build justice.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr…. Archbishop Desmond Tutu… President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia… The Dalai Lama… Aung Sun Suu Kyi, champion of freedom in Burma, under house arrest since 1990 (like Nelson Mandela, locked-up and powerful).
And think of their counterparts emerging in Sudan, Kenya, Tibet, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, the Middle East.
Let’s think of them as we wonder how full or empty our glasses are. And let’s vow not to lose our freedom to anxieties that could make slaves of us, that could distract us from listening to the one whose voice we know, and who knows us by name.
At our monthly eucharist at Williamstown Commons Nursing Home Wednesday, I read this Gospel. We use a large-print song book at that service, but nothing else in print. I noticed Psalm 23 and thought, “We can do that—they’ll know those words.” I knew my little flock there well enough that I’d already decided to use the King James Version. Give me that old time religion…
Sure enough, they knew it. I’ll bet a lot of you do, too. Perhaps you don’t know that that old version was not printed in any edition of The Book of Common Prayer until 1979, the famous “new Prayer Book” that irritated many who thought they were losing the baby with the bathwater. We who have patiently lived with this book for 29 years, and I believe most of us have learned to love it, we’ve learned that its chief characteristic is not what it left out, but what it added, providing many more options than we had before.
Among them, the old language for Psalm 23. I mean the one that many people of a certain age know so well. Let’s find out if we do. To help your synapses fire, close your eyes. Now, let’s make a deal. If you don’t know these words, relax and enjoy hearing them…
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his Name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”
That was impressive! I wonder what else lives in there, in your memory. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills…” No, that’s a sermon for another time.
If you want to get better acquainted with that old language of Psalm 23, you’ll find it in the Prayer Book on page 476, in the Burial Office. Not the one at the top of the page. That’s the really old version, found in the Book of Common Prayer of 1549, a translation by Miles Coverdale in 1535. What we’re so sure is old was in fact the new version of 1611, a result of King James’s bright idea that a new fresh translation of the Bible was needed. (Can’t you imagine, during those early decades when the King James Version was a novelty on the shelf, devout Anglicans grumbling at the new wording, “That trippeth not off the tongue the way the old one doth, now doth it?”)
Ah, well. No one ever said evolution would be easy.
The images of sheep and shepherd have a lasting place in Christian faith. It’s not just that newborn lambs are so darned cute. Do you remember the parable of the lost sheep? Archbishop Desmond Tutu tells how that story shapes our theology, showing us how God has a particular soft spot for those who stray from the fold. Tutu writes, “The Good Shepherd in the parable Jesus told had been quite ready to leave ninety-nine perfectly well-behaved sheep in the wilderness to look for, not an attractive, fluffy little lamb—fluffy little lambs do not usually stray from their mummies—but for the troublesome, obstreperous old ram. This was the one on which the Good Shepherd expended so much energy.”
And that would be because the nature of God, the nature we bear is the capacity for freedom. The Bible teaches that human beings are made in the image of God, and that likeness is shown in freedom. So the Book of Genesis starts in the garden of Eden, a safe contained space for man and woman and all the species to cohabit in freedom within limits. And it takes little time for our race to test and push and transgress those limits. The Bible sees this as our signature sin, disobedience: hearing God but not listening, doing as we like (or being sold on the idea of what we might like), finding it just too hard to accept limitations on our freedom.
But freedom remains the gold standard of our experience, our nature, and our calling. Go to the second book of the Bible and there is the Exodus, God freeing an enslaved tribe whose calling is to become a free nation, free within limits. The setting of those limits is the long story of young Israel learning to love God by obeying, fulfilling, God’s covenant expectations so as to grow into mature Israel shaped by covenant love.
The next 36 books of the Hebrew Bible (and aren’t you glad I’m not taking you to each of them?) reinforce, story upon story, that signature sin of our race: hearing God but not listening, knowing the covenant but not keeping it, sensing the spirit of the law but finding it more intriguing to get around the letter of it, disobedience.
You could say that the prophets are the schoolteachers, the faculty of the Bible, their seventeen or so books recording all those educable moments, all those fiery lectures and fierce arguments, brilliant visions, stormy scoldings, constant pleadings meant to train our race to what is required of us: “…to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.” These are the very terms of our limits and of our freedom, simultaneously.
And in the fullness of time, God resolved Word into flesh. Having had enough of talk, God acted in perfect freedom, emptying the divine self, taking the form of a slave. Go figure. Freedom, God’s quintessential state, embracing servitude and sin, mankind’s primary plight, breaking the grip of death by a life so truly fulfilling covenant love that the early Church would learn to sing, with the apostle Peter, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness.”
With that long preamble, think with me now about sheep and shepherd.
What limits do we need to safeguard our freedom? Three. First, a sheepfold, just enough structure around us to hold us together for facing the darkness. For freedom, just enough structure.
And, second, movement-- out of the sheepfold and out unto the hills to seek and find, feed and fertilize and, well, evolve. For freedom, rhythms of rising to work and folding to rest, patterns of movement and growth.
And, third, guidance, direction. Sheep may not be the brightest bulbs in the barnyard, but they have a reputation for responding to their own shepherd’s voice. At least on a good day, that’s all it takes to move a flock, to restore the strays. For freedom, recognizing God’s voice when we hear it, listening unafraid and trusting, following where it leads.
We have a case study of this in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. There’s the Bible, in its New Testament, showing what freedom looks like when human beings trust and follow the Good Shepherd. Power is found for the devoting of one’s own life to the life of the community. Private possession is cashed in for common wealth, the good of all. The table fellowship of mealtime and worship feeds the gladness and generosity of everyone. Day by day their numbers grew—the apostles had found perfect freedom, and the world wanted it.
And here we are. Heading into a recession. Even the cheeriest glass-half-full’ers of us may be having to ask what it means when the glass looks half empty.
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his Name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”
Hear the shepherd constant in his rhythm of calling us into the structure and shelter of renewing faith experienced in the apostles’ community and fellowship, and calling us to move out into the world to seek and find, feed and nurture, evolve. Structure, movement, guidance—gifts that are at the same time our limit and our freedom.
Hear how these dynamics of freedom mark the evolution of our race. Men and women devoted to the common good have their passions and principles renewed within the fold of their covenant community where their call originates—the call to freedom, to lead movements that confront tyranny, defeat prejudice, build justice.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr…. Archbishop Desmond Tutu… President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia… The Dalai Lama… Aung Sun Suu Kyi, champion of freedom in Burma, under house arrest since 1990 (like Nelson Mandela, locked-up and powerful).
And think of their counterparts emerging in Sudan, Kenya, Tibet, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, the Middle East.
Let’s think of them as we wonder how full or empty our glasses are. And let’s vow not to lose our freedom to anxieties that could make slaves of us, that could distract us from listening to the one whose voice we know, and who knows us by name.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Real Doubts
I worry that we Christians have so raised a wall between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the world, that we will hear this story of Thomas’s doubting as being about the kind of disconnect we mean when we say we doubt this or that church doctrine or phrase in the creed.
If that’s what we read into Thomas’s story, I suspect we miss what’s going on. There’s just not enough life or death in those intellectual conflicts we sometimes think of as doubt, to justify all the biology, all the embodying of woundedness and touching that we get in Thomas’s crisis.
What’s going on between Jesus and Thomas isn’t located in a church sanctuary. It’s in a rented room where, days ago, Jesus and his twelve friends kept Passover, the annual celebration of God’s freeing Hebrew slaves and making of them a nation.
This rented room is on a back street in a capital city, Jerusalem, teeming with world travelers who all have in common a love-hate relationship with the Roman Empire, brutal but efficient superpower, policeman of the known world. Of the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims eager to hear news of the day, none belongs to an independent nation bravely fulfilling its founding purpose. They all come from countries reduced to vassal states dependent on Rome.
Outstanding at counter-terrorism, the Roman imperial army kept the boat of empire from getting rocked anywhere in its vast reach.
When Jesus says to Thomas, “Peace be with you,” he isn’t reading from page 360 of the Book of Common Prayer. This is not ceremonial peace, but actual peace. What Jesus has to give in his peace is the subversive power of a higher power.
How subversive? The first shall be last and the last first. That subversive. God has cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. That subversive. A patriarchal world watches women welcomed as disciples, called to be apostles. That subversive. Old pecking orders of power and influence no longer control the seating arrangement at the tables Jesus sets, where all are equal. That subversive. Tables of another sort he throws over: they’re being used to exchange street money for temple money to buy animals for sacrifice, and as if all that’s not bad enough they’re cluttering up the one part of the temple where foreigners were supposed to be welcome. That subversive. And in this very rented room, Jesus, their master, washes his disciples’ feet as if he were their hired hand. That subversive.
All four Gospels agree that his purpose is to inaugurate and fulfill a new kingdom. All four Gospels agree that the powers of this world, both church and state, find Jesus’s new kingdom subversive. And they were right: it is a new order in this world but not protected by the powers of this world.
The building of this reign of justice and peace is described by St. Peter in his letter today: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”
Language like that is too hazy to run a country by, or defend a homeland, or set national policy. It’s religious language, spiritual language, communication meant to inspire. But this living hope and imperishable inheritance is not only about spirituality. These first Christians would soon suffer persecution, imprisonment, torture, and barbarous execution—not because their new kingdom was spiritual and not of this world, but because it was so taking hold in this world that it rocked the boat of empire and set off the scanning devices of homeland security.
Now consider us. Our Christian hope appears to be locked up in the churches. Open and available Sundays, 8:00 a.m. to Noon.
In Tibet, Buddhist hope is spilling out of the monasteries and into the streets. The Dalai Lama is staking everything on keeping Tibeans committed to nonviolent confrontation.
In Zimbabwe, where national elections take place this weekend, Christian pastors have risked arrest and worse, leading nonviolent prophetic action consisting of marches and prayer meetings, to protest deterioriation of the country under 28 years of President Robert Mugabe.
But we believe in separation of church and state. This has become such a national creed that we of the once-established churches think the conservative evangelicals are un-American for trying to tear down that wall.
Perhaps we are less than Christian for wanting that wall. We like its protection from government interference with the church, but do we also like to be protected from any responsibility to bring the church and its Gospel out into the public square? Is the wall that separates church and state the same wall that segregates the Gospel of Jesus Christ from the world?
I think I know what you may be thinking. Religious extremism is enough of a plague on the earth to justify boundaries that safeguard civic life. I agree, of course.
But as we stay inside our churches, are we doubting that the peace of Christ is anything more than ceremony? Do these five years of virtual silence by the churches in a war spiraling into waste and chaos mean that we doubt there is any truer path than war?
Now, that’s doubt. That cuts right to the heart of Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace. That is doubt which he will rise to meet with wounded hands and side for us to re-examine, and consider what we are protecting and how we are willing to do it.
Doubting the power of love that empties itself for the salvation of the world, doubting the justice of protecting the vulnerable and holding responsible the privileged, doubting the wisdom of healing our molested mother earth and repairing our deterioriating human society… These are doubts full of life and death, doubts that justify all the biology, all the embodying of woundedness and touching that we get in Thomas’s story—and that show how his crisis is ours, and his Lord our Lord.
It’s part of our human condition to have doubts about what—and who—we believe. We can be grateful for every experience that helps us confirm or discover what we do believe, from a short series on the Apostles’ Creed that will start here on April 13, to that seemingly endless ordeal we go through to elect a president.
But let’s pay attention to our faith and our doubts where they are most needed to help end war, prevent genocide, protest discrimination, educate and inspire children, combat HIV/AIDS, feed the hungry, and build public and affordable housing.
Thomas tells our story. Enlightenment, wholeness, salvation will not come to us in isolation with our own thoughts, but in touching the wounds of Christ in the world, and in common cause—communion—with the apostles.
If that’s what we read into Thomas’s story, I suspect we miss what’s going on. There’s just not enough life or death in those intellectual conflicts we sometimes think of as doubt, to justify all the biology, all the embodying of woundedness and touching that we get in Thomas’s crisis.
What’s going on between Jesus and Thomas isn’t located in a church sanctuary. It’s in a rented room where, days ago, Jesus and his twelve friends kept Passover, the annual celebration of God’s freeing Hebrew slaves and making of them a nation.
This rented room is on a back street in a capital city, Jerusalem, teeming with world travelers who all have in common a love-hate relationship with the Roman Empire, brutal but efficient superpower, policeman of the known world. Of the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims eager to hear news of the day, none belongs to an independent nation bravely fulfilling its founding purpose. They all come from countries reduced to vassal states dependent on Rome.
Outstanding at counter-terrorism, the Roman imperial army kept the boat of empire from getting rocked anywhere in its vast reach.
When Jesus says to Thomas, “Peace be with you,” he isn’t reading from page 360 of the Book of Common Prayer. This is not ceremonial peace, but actual peace. What Jesus has to give in his peace is the subversive power of a higher power.
How subversive? The first shall be last and the last first. That subversive. God has cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. That subversive. A patriarchal world watches women welcomed as disciples, called to be apostles. That subversive. Old pecking orders of power and influence no longer control the seating arrangement at the tables Jesus sets, where all are equal. That subversive. Tables of another sort he throws over: they’re being used to exchange street money for temple money to buy animals for sacrifice, and as if all that’s not bad enough they’re cluttering up the one part of the temple where foreigners were supposed to be welcome. That subversive. And in this very rented room, Jesus, their master, washes his disciples’ feet as if he were their hired hand. That subversive.
All four Gospels agree that his purpose is to inaugurate and fulfill a new kingdom. All four Gospels agree that the powers of this world, both church and state, find Jesus’s new kingdom subversive. And they were right: it is a new order in this world but not protected by the powers of this world.
The building of this reign of justice and peace is described by St. Peter in his letter today: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”
Language like that is too hazy to run a country by, or defend a homeland, or set national policy. It’s religious language, spiritual language, communication meant to inspire. But this living hope and imperishable inheritance is not only about spirituality. These first Christians would soon suffer persecution, imprisonment, torture, and barbarous execution—not because their new kingdom was spiritual and not of this world, but because it was so taking hold in this world that it rocked the boat of empire and set off the scanning devices of homeland security.
Now consider us. Our Christian hope appears to be locked up in the churches. Open and available Sundays, 8:00 a.m. to Noon.
In Tibet, Buddhist hope is spilling out of the monasteries and into the streets. The Dalai Lama is staking everything on keeping Tibeans committed to nonviolent confrontation.
In Zimbabwe, where national elections take place this weekend, Christian pastors have risked arrest and worse, leading nonviolent prophetic action consisting of marches and prayer meetings, to protest deterioriation of the country under 28 years of President Robert Mugabe.
But we believe in separation of church and state. This has become such a national creed that we of the once-established churches think the conservative evangelicals are un-American for trying to tear down that wall.
Perhaps we are less than Christian for wanting that wall. We like its protection from government interference with the church, but do we also like to be protected from any responsibility to bring the church and its Gospel out into the public square? Is the wall that separates church and state the same wall that segregates the Gospel of Jesus Christ from the world?
I think I know what you may be thinking. Religious extremism is enough of a plague on the earth to justify boundaries that safeguard civic life. I agree, of course.
But as we stay inside our churches, are we doubting that the peace of Christ is anything more than ceremony? Do these five years of virtual silence by the churches in a war spiraling into waste and chaos mean that we doubt there is any truer path than war?
Now, that’s doubt. That cuts right to the heart of Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace. That is doubt which he will rise to meet with wounded hands and side for us to re-examine, and consider what we are protecting and how we are willing to do it.
Doubting the power of love that empties itself for the salvation of the world, doubting the justice of protecting the vulnerable and holding responsible the privileged, doubting the wisdom of healing our molested mother earth and repairing our deterioriating human society… These are doubts full of life and death, doubts that justify all the biology, all the embodying of woundedness and touching that we get in Thomas’s story—and that show how his crisis is ours, and his Lord our Lord.
It’s part of our human condition to have doubts about what—and who—we believe. We can be grateful for every experience that helps us confirm or discover what we do believe, from a short series on the Apostles’ Creed that will start here on April 13, to that seemingly endless ordeal we go through to elect a president.
But let’s pay attention to our faith and our doubts where they are most needed to help end war, prevent genocide, protest discrimination, educate and inspire children, combat HIV/AIDS, feed the hungry, and build public and affordable housing.
Thomas tells our story. Enlightenment, wholeness, salvation will not come to us in isolation with our own thoughts, but in touching the wounds of Christ in the world, and in common cause—communion—with the apostles.
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