May 13, 2008

PenteCost

Nothing in the Beatitudes suggests that “blessed are the religious.” Maybe it’s because the more religious one is, the fewer blessings one needs because religion is all about security and being right and decreasing the risks one takes.

On the other hand, the more we let our spirit loose from our religion, the riskier things get. Pentecost was a kind of turning or breaking point between religion and spirit. Jesus had been hammering away trying to bust up that union now for a few years and not without a lot of risk to himself and here comes the Holy Spirit at his behest to blow it all out of the tub.

When it happened, everybody got drunk on it (they don’t call that stuff “spirits” for naught) and wailed away in a linguistic whirlwind. For once, they communicated and chummed up pretty good. But it didn’t last long.

One of the worst things about a hangover is facing whoever your liable to wake up with. You or they rarely ever look as good as the night before. So ever since then, we’ve be building more religions to keep us between the curbs and the Spirit, of course, at arm’s length.

It’s good for us to celebrate Pentecost, to remember that ordered chaos out of which we came and where we got a glimpse of what Jesus wanted us to see and wanted us to be, then carrying on in our own tongues about the “mighty works of God” (Acts 2.11). The church needs Pentecost maybe worse than ever right now. It seems to be becoming more and more religious and throwing up barriers against anything that looks like that smoke and mirrors fiasco reported in the Acts of the Apostles.

Generally, the more religious we are, the fewer risks we take. On the other hand, to mature spiritually (to live, grow, awaken) is to move from attachment to detachment. The more loving, the more risks. The more inclusive, the more need to cover your rear.

A collegial style of life seems more becoming to a church than a hierarchical, pontifical style. It’s about community, and community is that possible state of grace to which we are called and that allows us to live in and sustain the inevitable tension between religion and faith. May the forthcoming Lambeth Bash take note.

Faith is the way Spirit moves among us. Faith questions, religion answers. Religion patronizes. Faith cares. The church’s vocation is least of all, if at all, to preserve religion, nor even to propagate faith (in the sense of “adding” to it), but to be faithful, to be a sanctuary in which one can explore what it means to be human, that is, to discover the mystery of what it means to be created in the image of God, as well as to witness to other communities or sanctuaries where such creativity can happen.

True conversion moves us away, then, from pretense to nonsense. The tragedy of religion is that it must always make sense of the world, that it seems so, might we say, rational. Maybe that’s where original sin came from, being reasonable.

One of the more profound things a church can do by being a church, a people, is to become a “somewhere” one can find a sense of “place,” a locus in the chaotic, madding crowd not for some brain-dead serenity and liturgical lethargy, but where chaos can be discovered as not all that alien to life, but indeed perhaps even quite central to life, where women and men and children can dare to discover who they are and be content to be who they discover, where all can connect and exchange their deepest searches into the wells of human imagination and spirit and offer them to one another with God’s comfort and joy and confidence.

It sickens me to hear some of our leaders speak as if the world would be “without” God if it were not for the church whose task they perceive is somehow to “bring” God to the world. Far from that, “church” is where people who may be thought of as “places-where-God-is” share those places in reverence and awe and jolly good hilarity. Not to bring God, but to find God.

A church marquee up in Denver, Colorado, counseled, “If you want to make God laugh, tell God your plans.” Pray let us be a Pentecost church where we dare not fear to tell God our plans.

May 12, 2008

Change

The liturgical calendar reminds us today that it’s the anniversary of the first Book of Common Prayer and that it got started back in 1549. That was about a big change that people didn’t much care for then any more than they do now.

Change is on everybody’s mind these days. The presidential aspirants talk a lot about it, whose change is better, whose change is worse. Nothing seems to be spared. Talking about change usually creates some serious pastoral problems in the church. If there’s anything we churchers get nervous about, it’s change. When I think about it, a lot, if not most, of my energy over the past half century as an east Texas country preacher has been used up dealing with change.

First of all, there’s the gospel we’re supposed to be preaching. That’s an ongoing problem that keeps rearing its head. It’s not only about the big change as such, the one that conversion is about, but if the story about the widow’s mite means anything at all, it’s also about small change, the one the Every Member Canvass usually ends up being about. But every time I tried to say much of anything about the gospel as change without using carefully veiled terms, there’d inevitably be something come up at a vestry meeting in opposition to it. Like one of our members said once, they all act like a bunch of colonels trying to tell the general how to run the army.

And then there are all the lesser changes down through the years. About the time I got out of seminary, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was coming along and folks were saying things like If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it was good enough for them. If that wasn’t enough, here came the Seabury Series of Sunday School material with all its so-called maieutic midwifery talk about teachers and students. That really made people nervous to think it was going to be about telling little children where babies come from, and that it was not Chicago like they thought.

Then there was the National Council of Churches which some claimed was a communist front masquerading behind a Christian mask. Next there was Bishop James Pike, and people began to realize that Isaiah wasn’t so nice after all. Then it suddenly began to dawn on people that Jesus probably loved all the races about the same, and we started integrating the schools and even the churches alongside. A reporter called me up one Saturday, said he was going to bring some black people to our eleven o’clock service the next day, and what was I going to do about it. I told him we’d usher them to a seat and give them each a pledge card. He said they’d go somewhere else, and they did.

Not long after, we got into ordaining women and changing the prayer book and the hymnal all in about the same time and opening up all kinds of ways of getting the laity up front to lead the liturgy. One of our bishops got so incensed about it, he called it the creeping gangrene of participatory democracy.

Now it’s sexual orientation. Trouble with that is that people think it’s about sex when in fact it’s not about sex at all. It’s about orientation. And it’s orientation that’s always bothered churchers. When that gets out, we’ll really have a problem, because orientation usually means change or at least paying attention to where you’re headed and to what’s going on. Now that’s a real problem, especially when you’ve still got the 1928 prayer book memorized and are wondering when it’s ever coming back.

May 11, 2008

Mum

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde* wrote: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.”

My teenage son and I were single parenting at one stage in our lives. He was good about leaving notes around for me. One of my fondest on one Mother’s Day was a Mother’s Day card. I’d already been through several of our culture’s also-ran Father’s Days with him and his siblings over the years, but nothing ever quite touched me as much about these commercialized “sentiments” until this gesture.

Oscar Wilde was right, at least, about men. The most persuasive ground for the Virgin Birth is Karl Barth’s contention that it shows God’s considerable displeasure with the way we men had previously handled our privileged lives as stewards and the fact that God, thanks all the same, can manage things quite as well — or better — altogether without us.

Apparently, we’re yet to get the point. We’re either too blind or just sublimely too intimidated to discover Gloria Steinem’s pungent aphorism that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
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*Reported in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac 11 May 2008.

May 8, 2008

Breath

The Day of Pentecost 2008

The Earth’s atmosphere is a relatively thin envelope of gases composed of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and a smidgen of others. Perhaps our most vital activity in return for our lives, together with all the rest of creation, the animals, the plants, is constantly to be at the process of recycling this envelope. For it connects us in an essential and almost intangible ambiance. Philosopher-scientist Lewis Thomas, it was, who likened our atmosphere and its function most to the walls of a living cell.

In a remarkably similar way does God’s Holy Spirit wholly envelop us. It sustains our lives, creates our communities and connects us in them, and most importantly, enables our reconciliation with one another. No wonder that in so many languages spirit is translated as “breath.” And further, we well remember how it exists quite apart from us and like Jesus told Nicodemus, this Holy Spirit lives and moves, comes and goes as it damn well pleases.

Unlike the Earth’s atmosphere, God’s Spirit seems limitless. We, by God’s grace, become the occasions, the stewards to receive and recycle its energy in service to God’s will. We are created by God as those spiritual beings whose vocation is to give human shape to the Spirit as we mature into the way God imagines us to be. Indeed, a case can be made, can it not, that this life begins with our first breath just as it ends with our last. That is a reality with which both pro-life and pro-choice advocates must contend.

Have you ever imagined how a symphony orchestra or a chorus or big jazz band could function if there were no air, no breath? The wind instruments, the strings, the percussion, all depend on there being an atmosphere if there is to be music, an atmosphere which they can move and shape if there is to be music. So is our mission as churchers to shape Spirit. In the way a musician shapes the air into sound, so must we take our lives, the instruments God gives us and use them to play God’s melodies, to shape God’s Spirit in service to God and to our fellow human beings.

Perhaps one of the most grievous examples of the way we cripple this stewardship is our continuing effort to transfix Holy Spirit in our own interests and not God’s. Of course, the mere thought of such a thing is ludicrous. But not a day passes that we churchers do not strive to fashion and refashion that Spirit in some way so as to warp the gift of Pentecost.

Just as we contaminate the Earth’s atmosphere by our carelessness do we defile God’s Holy Spirit by forcing our or some other religious identity upon it. Global warming pales beside the toxicity of the church’’s current selfish obsession with its manners, morals, and means at the expense of its mission. We must remember on this Pentecost Feast that we are not only the community created at the first such gathering, but we are, as well, the community commissioned for Pentecost. We are Spirit-enabled to become nothing less than Spirit enablers.

The constellation of propers for this Sunday overwhelms us with this good news. Acts’ accounting of the fire, wind, and apostolic headiness that birthed God’s church (Acts 2.1-11). Paul’s catalogue of the gifts of the Spirit to fulfill the church’s purpose with shape and substance (1 Cor 12.4-13). Jesus’s granting of apostolic ministry by the power of his own breath, a portend of the Spirit to come (Jn 20.19-23).

This Pentecost Sunday calls us once again to such ministry. “Breathe on us breath of God,” we sing and pray. This Pentecost comes once again to brace and refresh us, to call us back to and enlist us in the Way, the Truth, and the Life revealed in the Upper Room. This Pentecost comes once again to drag us kicking and screaming away from our fascination with ourselves and our need for ecclesiastic security. And this Pentecost comes once again to license us as God’s agents as Mary sang to show the strength of God’s arm, to scatter the proud in their conceit, to cast down the mighty from their thrones, to lift up the lowly, to fill the hungry with good things, to send the rich away empty, and to champion God’s peace and justice and love for all.

May 7, 2008

Class

Kurt Vonnegut said, “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” I disagree. True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is no longer running the country and that somebody else’s is.

My high school class was smart when it was okay to be smart. If my placement in my graduating class means anything, the whole batch of them were a lot smarter than I. Then, of course, according to Tom Brokaw, we were all of us the Greatest Generation and still are and could have told Tom at the time if only he’d been around to ask.

Anyhow, it’s all rock and roll. Whatever number of my high school class is left to run anything is so far as I know not running anything that amounts to anything to run, let alone a country. But the truth is, whatever high school class is running the country these days should be ashamed of themselves. From the looks of things, if they weren’t already dropouts, they must have flunked civics.

May 6, 2008

Worms

With the light and all, our mostly glassed-in dogtrot entryway aka the Narthex is a good place for growies, what some architects and other designers call intentionally-located greenery. Among other contenders, we’ve three ferns out there — a Dallas, an African, and a Korean called Suzy Wong. We’ve decided the Dallas must be the earliest at something because it seems always to get the worm.

A little black quiggly varmoot had set about systematically dismantling Dallas the other day when we spied it and promptly put it out to pasture. It had made the mistake of crawling on top of a frond in plain sight.

Intelligent Design (aka ID), however, must move fast, for the next day one of the worm’s colleagues was found crawling underneath a frond, surely considering itself out of sight. It was even tidier with its table manners, but it had not been designed well enough to contend with our superior intelligence.

Ferns — and worms — have been around a long time. In my geologist days, I’d occasionally find a fossil fern, its fronds so delicately preserved in some 400 million year-old shale that only the color had disappeared. Such plant fossils make nice markers to keep one from getting lost along the geologic way.

I don’t know what ID says, but I hear their Creationist devotees claim the devil puts such as this around just to trick us into going along with old Bishop James Ussher that the world is hardly four million years old, but actually was created not before October 23, 4004 BCE. So the worm turns, but I’d just as soon we don’t teach this sort of thing unless Albert Einstein’s assurance gets equal time, you know, that God does not play dice with the universe.

May 5, 2008

Connections

Verlyn Klinkenborg is a writer and a farmer. He wrote the other day about his farm, the animals who live there, and about how connected are they and he and we. He added, “I am stunned by the human ability to think of one’s life as a thing apart.” 

He’s probably stunned a lot, as am I. Perhaps one of the highest gifts we’ve got by virtue of our creation and by virtue of Who it is we claim imagined us into being  is our own imagination and its potential for creatively returning the favor, a favor which just might be one of the higher forms of worship. 

When it comes to us humans, instead, we make up races and thus use them so to separate ourselves without considering maybe this is one of God’s  masquerades as trickster just to see if we can work our way out of the maze and turn it into a labyrinth, the one with no apparent way out, the other with no apparent way in save to discover ourselves. 

A maze is defined as a “tour puzzle” in the form of complex branching passages through which the solver must find a route. A labyrinth has an actual through-route and is not designed to be difficult to navigate, despite the common use of the word to indicate the opposite.

I wonder has it occurred to us that maybe the only prayer we’ve the power and the privilege to answer is the prayer Jesus prays to God that we may all be one (Jn 17.1-11, yesterday’s gospel) as they are one, which is pretty much One, I’d say, and apparently a prayer Jesus couldn’t or wouldn’t answer, himself. Instead, we prey… on all the ways we can find to separate ourselves — race and sex to name a couple — but also put considerable energy and hostility into creating even more — language, nation-states, Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, war, family names, immigrants. 

Perhaps worst of all for us so-called churchers and other kinds of God-lovers, some of the very ones Jesus prayed about, we dream up religions and religions-within-religions (aka denominations,  and the like). First, insulting God, and then tripping along our merry way to  condemn each other to some horrible fate for not coming over to the other side as if it were ours. 

Please, God, I hope you’re laughing. And Jesus, keep on praying. 

May 2, 2008

Shoes

Canon P D Quirk called the other day all in a twist over the pope’s visit, his getting so much media attention, and all of it so favorable. He was remembering Amanuensis Matthew’s take on Jesus’s counsel for the disciples when he sent them out exorcising on the dusty trail and the like. I looked it up: “Take no gold, nor silver, nor copper for your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor a staff… ” (Mt 10.9).

The Canon said, if apostolic succession is all its cracked up to be, a copy of that note ought to be lying around the Vatican archives somewhere. I said, maybe it’s not all that handy. Whatever, the current Vicar of Christ must not have got the memo before he left to cast out the daemons in the promissory land.

Like he does so often, Quirk distracted me to reflecting. I don’t know about the economics of the pope’s trip, though I suspect it cost a bundle. But he did seem to have more than a few tunics, if only one walking staff. It’s the question of Jesus and the sandals that caught my eye. I remembered from Graham Greene’s book Monsignor Quixote that monsignors wear purple sox, and that it was the communist mayor who possessed that vital information. I suppose it’s only a few notches on the ladder from socks to the red shoes like the pope was wearing. I wondered whether he got them at Prada, so I looked up their website and found some almost identical ones there for about seven hundred bucks a pair.

I can’t fault Benedict, for I’ve purchased a few vestments off and on over the years. And I confess I’ve done so, myself, usually with more attention to apostolic success than to missionary accouterment. So I can more or less appreciate the pope’s oversight (aka episkopos) if that’s what it was.

As for the red shoes, the last time I saw Quirk, he was wondering whether Gucci’s Fifth Avenue might stock them. And as for me, I’ll just try to remember how much trouble Hans Christian Anderson’s little girl Karen got into for wearing hers.

May 1, 2008

Up

Ascensiontide  Lk 24.44-53

I am told that the astrophysicists have begun to talk about their science less with theories and formulas and more with metaphors. I am glad for that. We churchers have been into metaphors all along and continue to be, so we might at least give our colleagues an ear. Some of them have begun  to write about the universe, for example, as “elegant,” even made up of strings. In Genesis, when God admired her creation and thought it was good, I don’t remember her stringing us along, but I know that elegant would have been as fine a word as any.

Ascensiontide is as good a tide as the next if not better to talk about astrophysics. It is so mostly because I don’t really understand either of them all that well. But I can attempt to confuse both us and them.

I cannot think of Jesus’s Ascension without thinking about “up.” Back when he was in the flesh, heaven was always “up,” and it’s pretty much stayed there ever since. That’s, of course, when we only had the three dimensions — up, down, and around. We call it space. We also had time, but not all that long ago, we’ve begun to think of time as a fourth dimension. Add them all together, and for lack of a better name, we call them space-time. This leaves us not only with up, down, and around, but with up, down, around, and on-the-go. That’s about as much as anybody could even think about, let alone understand. But now, those in the know believe we could really have not only four dimensions, but as many as eleven to fret over and maybe even another universe alongside this one. If all that’s a fact, that puts a whole new perspective on the Ascension, like, which way did Jesus really go?

The problem with getting preoccupied with that is to risk missing what really might after all be the point. For to hear Jesus tell it, it is that he went that is important, not so much the way he went. We know that he couldn’t stay around in the flesh forever. Further, he said that his leaving was the condition for our receiving his Spirit, his Holy Spirit, and that there wasn’t room here for the both of them. 

We need this Holy Spirit, he said, because that is the way he can best remain with us and give us enough chutzpah to become a church.  And also this could give us something special, like another riddle to puzzle over and call the Doctrine of the Trinity. The answer to that mystery is really God’s business and the way God chooses to be. Even if along with astrophysics we don’t understand that, either, and if that’s God’s option, it is surely elegant enough for me.

What if there’d been eleven dimensions back in the space-time of Jesus instead of only three? Maybe it would have been more to the point. For like Jesus said, it wasn’t so important where he went, that we couldn’t go there, anyway. But what was important and remains important is that he went. For now, with the profound help of Holy Spirit, the only up that really matters, is the up that’s up to us.

April 25, 2008

Basie

Count Basie’s band is coming to town tonight, and today’s the Feast of St Mark. Coincidence. But maybe the two have a lot in common — minimalism and dynamics, to say the least.

Mark tells the same story as his synoptic colleagues, just notes the facts, builds anticipation, spares a lot of detail. Basie’s band has always followed the Count’s lead as a pianist — spare, appropriate, complete, special attention to what’s between the notes. Elijah’s “sound of gentle stillness” comes to mind (1 Kgs 19.12b, AV).

A music critic once likened the Basie band to the finer symphony orchestras with their equal attention not only to a uniform attack of a note, but as well, to its uniform release. Such ensemble playing — so utterly foreign to those who nowadays play amplifiers rather than music — leaves one with the sensation that a razorblade could be slipped between the notes.

Scott Peck often held up jazz bands and basketball teams as models of what he believed to be true community — people who knew one another’s skills and limits as well as how to incorporate them into an impressive whole often greater than the sum of its parts. In an age when some suspect pianissimo may be a variety of pizza at Papa John’s, any illustration of how churchers with a little imagination might be together is altogether welcome.

Let’s hear it for the One O’Clock Jump. Mark would surely have understood.