September 4, 2008

Justice

Pentecost 17/18A Mt 18.15-20

It strikes me that the Great Commandment to love God and to love neighbor as oneself must surely have been easier to keep track of back during Jesus’s time. Even if there was only one God then as there is now, surely there were a lot fewer neighbors.

On the other hand, justice and fairness were no less important. So, as Matthew tells us, the early church devised its own system of appeals to find it all the way from one-on-one — to only a few — to the whole community. If all that process failed, then it was down the chute along with all the other sinners. Although something tells me that not Jesus, but some of his confused followers came up with that “chute” idea.

This Great Commandment, this summary of the law and the prophets, talks about love, but it is also about justice. Justice is the way societies and institutions and governments best love one another. Justice is the way our nation began and once again has the opportunity to embrace the stricken Gulf Coast remembering how deeply connected are we all.

Justice has always been the very heart of the gospel. A just peace for all continues as the thrust of the church’s ministry and the message we proclaim in the name of God. Be it not only for the way we treat one another in our congregations, but be it also the way a diocese learns to live together and to use its energies in God’s name and not it’s own. And be it that way on and up to the highest courts in our land.

Hearing Jesus’ counsel about a just society once again well serves to remind us and to recall us to that charge. We surely now don’t want for enough neighbors on whom to practice.

But justice is on hard times. We are so distracted, it’s difficult to do anything about it. Not long ago, in a church right here in our community and with a lot better media connections than we have, the religious right got considerable press claiming — actually judging, if the truth be known — that our courts are as bad and as dangerous as, if not worse, than the terrorists. A short time later, one of their patrons closed his case by recommending assassination be added to the simple and somewhat gentler appellate system just now suggested in Matthew’s gospel. Lets hear it for terrorism.

This nation at its founding declared its interdependence with all nations and affirmed the notion that we are created equal…. and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among (us), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Further, our founders struck an international chord consistent with and resonant to the gospel understanding of human being when they wisely devised a system of justice by balancing authority in our judicial, legislative, and executive branches. They left us this legacy surely that we might be its beneficiaries, but even more importantly, its stewards. They certainly did not have in mind that it be hijacked by some or any religion and thus thrown into imbalance with total disregard for their wise counsel and, I might add, their understanding of the gospel and its Judaeo-Christian tradition.

But if Justice is the grammar of things, Mercy is the poetry. The Cross says something like the same thing on a scale so cosmic and so full of mystery that it is next to impossible to grasp. As it represents what in one way or another we are always doing to each other, the death of that innocent man hanging up there convicts us as the whole of humanity, and so it would seem that we deserve the grim world that over the centuries we have made for ourselves. As it also represents what one or another thing we are always doing not so much to God above us somewhere as to God within us everywhere. That is the justice of things.

But the Cross also represents the fact that the good is also present in the grim, and God is present even in the godless. That is why the Cross has become the symbol not of our darkest hopelessness, but of our brightest hope. That is the mercy of things. Granted who we are, perhaps we could have understood it no other way.

So long as the religious right remains wrong about justice, it will never be right about mercy. If the hurricanes are punishment about anything — as some say they are — they are surely the consequence of our continuing lack of stewardship, not only of our environment, but, as well, of our system of checks and balances, of our social responsibilities, and of our economic inequities. A carelessness that gradually bulldozes our relationships into what could ultimately become a class warfare beyond our wildest imagination.

Jesus fulfilled the law and the prophets and what they portended. He fulfilled it by consummating it with justice and peace and love. We are commanded to go and do likewise, for that is our stewardship. That is the way out of Gethsemane through the Cross, back to Eden, and into the kingdom of God.

September 3, 2008

Water

I looked up water on Wikipaedia hoping I could find something to make me sound informed. I found so much, I got thirsty and also realized I couldn’t fool anybody, anyway.

What I had in mind was to write about that splendid prayer over the water in the Baptism Office. The one that recalls not only how critical is water for life and what a gift it is, but also those remarkable times and stories in which water appears throughout the Bible. Creation. Getting out of Egypt. John’s and Jesus’s handy river. The burial and the new life we share with Jesus and the Holy Spirit. If I thought I knew all the prayers in the Book of Common Prayer, that prayer would probably be my favorite. Actually, it comes tolerable close.

Water’s what we’re always looking for first whenever we start exploring planets. It or a reasonable facsimile seems to be the precursor of any possibilities for life of whatever kind, I suppose even the mitochondria. Water’s the simplest of compounds and probably about as much chemistry as a lot of people know. Hydrogen and oxygen, both among the earliest of the elements spun off by God and her Big Bang. Isn’t it just like God to start things that way? “I am who I am.” How coy can one be when long before the bush* was the Noise. Maybe that Noise is the big one from Winnetka that Bob Haggart and Ray Bauduc had in mind.

It certainly wasn’t what I had in mind when this started.

*My friend Louie Crew says the burning bush shows how little regard God had for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I wish I’d thought of that before Louie did.

August 29, 2008

Difference

Conventions tend to be conventional. Certainly our own, the generally conventional big fat Anglican wedding we churchers throw every three years. And, as well, the national political ones that come our way every four.

Watching the one ending just now and hearing how exceptionally “historic” it is, one can certainly agree that it is certainly unprecedented. MLK and LBJ who especially had so much to do with making this day possible are surely smiling along with thousands, even millions of others. On the other hand and anticipating the next one due up shortly, one might not expect anything quite so historic, but if the past is any indication, one can easily expect some notable change in direction.

Shifting into my intuitive gear, all this boils down for me as to be whether we seek for our presidents someone who has the good judgment to be a servant leader or, as we so often hear and as if it were all that mattered, someone who has the “experience” to be a Commander-in-Chief.

I suppose it’s only natural to equate that C-in-C facet of the presidency with bellicosity. But this is to risk missing the point our founders made by including it as only one part of the president’s job description and whether or not the office holder had any or no military experience, but primarily to assure that the armed forces remain under civilian control and to dampen their inherent and understandably more aggressive leanings. Whatever the undertaking, judgment always trumps experience, especially the kind of judgment arising out of a servant power that is never a subjugating trigger-happy dominance, but an authority that not only influences others, but is also open to influence. That kind of servanthood acknowledges and respects the freedom of another and seeks to enhance the other’s capacity to make a difference.

I rather think that to be the kind of difference in leadership this nation is seeking that it might be brought around after so many years of the opposite kind.
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Note: Thoughts about servanthood are influenced by Bennett Sims’s brilliant monologue, “Servanthood: Leadership for the Third Millennium,” Cowley, 1997. This book is a refreshing resource for enhancing an intelligent franchise in these perilous times.

August 28, 2008

Gardens

Pentecost 16/17A 2008

“I never promised you a rose garden.”

That’s the often familiar copout when the chore we took on for somebody doesn’t turn out as comfy as we thought it might. I don’t know why roses. Rose gardens are lovely, but anybody who ever planted one knows they’re no snap to nurse, and that their thorns last a lot longer than their blooms.

Being faithful to the call of God is like that. Do it, and life right away is likely to get complex and tumultuous as well as simple and peaceful. The stories from Jeremiah and Paul and Jesus that make up today’s lections can all testify to this. The common theme? Faithfulness will either get you nowhere or maybe somewhere you’d rather not be.

Jeremiah tangles with God’s dynamic and swings between faith and doubt, peace and turmoil, certainty and confusion (Jer 15.15-21). Paul’s commitment to the Gentiles only drives a deeper wedge between himself and the Jews (Rms 12.1-21). Jesus’s certain awareness of the perils ahead challenges the loyalties of his disciples and puts their relationship on very shaky ground (Mt 16.21-26).

Any church worth its salt lives in this kind of tension all the way from leaving its doors open 24/7 and risking theft and vandalism to exposing — even “wasting” — its program and budget in the interest of the sick and the poor and dispossessed. Too many of us never get that far being preoccupied with orthodox niceties like we so often are. Faith is always risky and even clumsy, especially when we try to use canon law and discipline as instruments for grace and love.

Today’s church is too often busy setting standards for membership in pew and pulpit and requiring of its clergy to withhold its blessing for love wherever and in whatever form we may find it. When Jesus sets his demand for discipleship — Take up your cross and follow me — it’s not in terms of rules to be followed or specific tasks to be accomplished. He talks about the need for us to get out of the way of ourselves with an open invitation to follow him when we have not the vaguest notion where his Way will lead and are not all that sure that he does, either. In short, to let go and let God.

As well with Paul’s counsel to the Romans. “Do not be conformed to this world… ” but be “transformed by the renewal of your mind” Do not be conformed to the world’s obsession with the symbols of power and prestige, but be transformed in Christ. Do not be conformed by and to the exploitation of others, but be transformed by letting your love be genuine. Do not be conformed to the way of vengeance and hatred, but bless them that persecute you and, as Jesus urged, even love them and offer them justice.

Facing the world’s current traumas, how is such a ministry informed and shaped? What might the world’s families be like now had our response to 9/11 been to set out to conquer poverty and genocide by pouring our billions into such a mission rather than into the explosive and interminable violence of Iraq? How might the victims of 9/11 and their families feel about our giving love and generosity and justice in their name and the memory of their loved ones? How might our armies of death now function and what might they have accomplished had we enlisted them rather as legions of peace? What if we had truly risked modeling our constitutional democracy as a palpable community of justice more consistent with our founding rather than trying to transplant it into a cultural soil not all that fecund and receptive?

I don’t remember any rose gardens ever figuring in the gospel scheme of things. But I do remember a couple of memorable gardens that did. Eden and Gethsemane stand prominent in our tradition. One, a garden of irresistible temptation, another, a garden of redemptive commitment.

August 27, 2008

Lip

When the Pharisees and Scribes asked Jesus to explain why his disciples didn’t wash their hands before eating, they weren’t seeking insight. They were demanding proof of worthiness.

On the other hand, Jesus saw people’s needs and met them with no expectation of response, no policies, no procedures. It was all so simple. Any casual reading of the gospels makes it clear.

Isn’t it ironic, the maze of proprieties we churchers have cobbled together over the centuries and all in the name of one who had so little use for them? It’s like the Victorian father taking his son out behind the barn and saying, belt in hand, “I’ll beat the love of God into you if it takes all night!”

The Pharisees and Scribes meant well. It was in their job description. We mean well. What is religion, after all, but a corporate human endeavor to render faith both memorable and manageable? Who can blame us for that?

Well, Jesus for one. And he had Isaiah to back him up. “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men” (Is 29.13; Mk 7.6f).

I suspect God had enough lip long ago and would like some heart for a change, maybe somewhere else beside only on bumper stickers about NY.

August 26, 2008

Spines

It is so easy to take things for granted. Like spines.

One person’s stenosis is another person’s disc. CP’s got the disc and the left leg sciatica. I’ve got the right. We each have one good one. Trouble is they’re hooked to the wrong hips. Another impediment (sic) is that the one who can’t cook for nothing (guess which) is momentarily the abler of the two and so — gets the kitchen duty. The diet suffers while the nerves get on our nerves. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches go only so far.

When one of our progeny was about six, I fixed him a bowl of cereal one Saturday morning while the rest of the brood slept. When I served him, he said, Gee, Dad, I didn’t know you could cook. I haven’t progressed at all. He’s fifty-four now and, by the by, an excellent cook.

One of the blessings in all of this — and there are many — is home communion last Sunday from one of our parish LEMs who’s just recently started into this ministry. She was pleasant and efficient as can be, but mumbling a bit about having to do one of her first visits to an old east Texas preacher of all people. I tried to lighten things a bit and lit a candle. She called me high church.

August 21, 2008

Who?

Pent 15/16A Mt 16.13-20

“Who do (people) say that the Son of Man is?”

It may have seemed to his companions that he would never ask. Jesus doesn’t quite strike me as the type to care all that much what other’s think, but perhaps things had gone on long enough. So when he finally asks them the question, it seems that he really wants to know how they are sizing him up more than just to hear what’s the skinny on the street.

“Who do (people) say that the Son of Man is?” Their answers are consistent and probably not all that surprising. John the Baptist. Elijah. Jeremiah. Or surely one of the prophets. Then Jesus asks, “But who do you say that I am?”

Peter gets it. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” With this realization — profound in its seeming simplicity — Peter wins the Blue Ribbon Prize — a set of keys to the Kingdom itself. But that’s not all. He is also handed the very heaven-sanctioned authority to forgive. One wonders how he’ll feel about that when he soon denies that he ever knew Jesus and suddenly be in need of some mighty big-time forgiveness, himself.

Who do we say is this Son of Man?

Over the centuries since that question, we’ve come up with some answers. They’re not always answers to the questions people ask, but they’re answers, all neat and organized, systematized and religionized. On this key question, the church answers with what we call Christology. “You are the Christ!” Peter realized, as do we. But I doubt he had anything like the Athanasian or even the Nicene Creed in mind.

Rather might it be like the person attending her first Quaker meeting and being deafened with silence. Finally, she asked her neighbor in the pew, “When does the service begin?” “As soon as the Meeting is over,” came the gentle reply.

The Baptismal Covenant sets us altogether straight on this service and emphatically answers our Lord’s question once and for all. “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” the Covenant asks. There in the midst of that question is Jesus’s prior one — “Who do people say that I am?”

So where do we look? I once rather impertinently asked one of our church’s leading theologians “How can one know the will of God?” I expected him to pause, even to ponder. But no. His answer was instant. “Follow your hunches,” he said. Look for the Christ, he implied, look for Jesus in yourself, for that’s where he is. And that’s what this ministry is about. Those who are called out to follow the Way need no further creed, no further confession, no further systematic theology, and, God help us, no more denominations.

Like Jesus gave Peter the keys to kingdom, Holy Baptism gives us the keys to the Kingdom’s mission. We’re given the authority to forgive and to restore and to reconcile. We’re commissioned to seek out this Jesus in ourselves, in our intuition, in our God-given hunches, in our imaginations. Thus finding him, we’ll more than likely discover that he doesn’t look all that different in our neighbors.

August 19, 2008

PDQ

Canon P D Quirk seems to come out of some sort of self-imposed hibernation from time to time. That is, I never hear from him until some hot button issue surfaces (at least, hot for him, if not for others). Then, for some reason unknown to me, here he comes. Why he always singles me out, I’m not sure. I know he must have a friend or a colleague somewhere in his pantheon with whom he could discuss the things that are on his mind. Needless to say, the current tempest in a ciborium (his delightful phrase) rattling the Anglican franchises fits rather precisely his quasispiritual patterns of mind.

Then, there’s our quadrennial electoral cycle for getting ourselves a president, an idea that really annoys him and his Anglophilia, as he says that if the results mean anything at all, it never seems to work all that well. If, indeed, he says, as we claim to be the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth, then how come we’re so up to our red, white, and blue wazoo in debt. And to the Chinese, of all people? If we insist on starting a war that we claim is for everybody’s best interest and rarely is, how come we can’t finish it one way or another? Or, as he said, one time, are wars the only way Americans can learn geography?

I never know what to tell him. Usually, anything I say just hammers him off on another tangent that is hard enough to follow, let alone answer. For the moment, though, he’s currently distracted from the Anglican two-step and back into the presidential wannabe spectrum.

He rang me up the other day and asked how come our greater satraps have all the time got evil on their minds. And why, when they talk about it, is it always somebody else who’s either doing evil or who is inherently evil or who is seesawing on an axis of evil, whatever that is. Why is it that the evil one is never ourselves or better, still, the satraps themselves.

What got next to him the most, was the question about whether or not if one were president would they defeat evil. For one thing, he said, it took Jesus to do that in the first place, and that made it a done deal. The cross put evil in its place once and for all, but that it’s people who keep leaving the door unlocked for evil to come and go as it pleases. All people! he bellowed through the phone. Beside that, God would take care of Satan and all his minions when the final role is called up yonder, as it were.

It’s probably not all that consistent with professional integrity for me to be telling you these things, but I know that somehow you’ll understand. I also hope that letting you in on Quirk and me once in a while might give you some further notions about evil for your own self-understanding and some appreciation for what I am occasionally up against.

August 18, 2008

Evil

Clinton Quin was bishop of Texas during the late 1920s to the mid 1950s. He would sometimes introduce himself, “I’m Mike Quin. I work to beat hell.”

It’s a noble vocation for us churchers.

Just the other evening on the telly a similar vocation came up in an interview with the current presidential wannabes. I don’t remember hell being mentioned, but evil got its usual press. Hell and evil may be presumed to have a lot in common, but evil seems to be the in term being used these days, sometimes with more or less reckless abandon, and most of the time, anyway, by people who, like most of us, seem to know more about what it does than what it is or who have an overly simplistic notion about it that denies how altogether complicated it is.

Separately, the candidates were asked the same questions. Does evil exist? Do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it? Both agreed that evil exists. Like so many of us, neither defined it, but mostly just talked about what it does, maybe how it’s recognized. Like a supreme court justice once said about obscenity that he couldn’t define it, but he sure knew it when he saw it.

So, as an opener, and so we can have a few notions we can disagree with, Scott Peck suggested some diagnostic characteristics of evil in his book, The People of the Lie — The Hope for Healing Human Evil. Here’s what he wrote on page 129.

“In addition to the abrogation of responsibility that characterizes all personality disorders, evil would specifically be distinguished by a) consistent destructive, scapegoating behavior, which may often be quite subtle, b) excessive, albeit usually covert, intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury, c) pronounced concern with a public image and a self-image of respectability, contributing to a stability of life-style but also to pretentiousness and denial of hateful feelings or vengeful motives, and d) intellectual deviousness, with an increased likelihood of a mild schizophrenic-like disturbance of thinking at times of stress.”

More generally, he also wrote that evil is that force, residing either inside or outside human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. Goodness is its opposite, goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness. And evil is the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own sick selves (Ibid, pp 43 & 119). In short, it is not only scapegoating, but seems to have an altogether casual disregard for its accuser.

Frederick Buechner calls our attention to the cross and says that practically speaking there is no evil so dark and so obscene — not even this — but that God can turn it to good. No less, he adds, the problem of evil is perhaps the greatest single problem for religious faith. (Wishful Thinking, p 25) It seems obvious that evil, like good, pretty well requires us human beings for a carnation ever to make its case. Like the daemons Jesus cast out of the Gerasene that required somewhere to go only to get a herd of pigs for their efforts.

Can evil be defeated? The pigs drowned, but the daemons? Even our scapegoating seems not always that efficient. Like somebody said, When I point one finger at something or someone for whatever reason, there are usually three pointing back at me.

August 16, 2008

Olympics

Some standup said recently that the reason Americans watch the Olympics is because the two things we hate most are foreigners and gym.

I’m still trying to unpack that, like if that’s the case, how come we watch? I’m not getting anywhere with my exegesis, only that I don’t especially care for watching the Olympics and have not even a lot of interest in who wins. Except how come the Chinese can spend all that money on all that razzmatazz and still let all those thousands of earthquake victims continue to suffer?

Pondering, though, I’ve a sneaking notion that our more or less chronic illiteracy and lack of curiosity as a people may have something to do with it. Xenophobia, of course, is what hatred and fear of foreigners is about. Illiteracy strings out a lot of people, places, and things about which we know nothing, which are, it be said, foreign to us, or “dead to us,” as Stephen Colbert might say.

Illiteracy and fear (and don’t forget violence) are bedfellows in general, and when the fear is incarnate in someone who’s more or less like us but at the same time isn’t, then that’s just more than we can handle. It’s too confusing. And confuse me not with my xenophobia for I am already content to let it be and occasionally stir my adrenaline.

But there’s yet gym. Gym and compulsory chapel were the two things most of my fellow laggards and I dodged in school. When sometimes I wonder why, the only reason that occurs to me is that maybe they were both too organized and demanded of me more than I was ever willing to give. But what has that got to do with my watching the Olympics?

Actually, I don’t know. Organization, I suppose. But what the comic said yet continues to intrigue me. Maybe it’ll come to me one of these days.

On the other hand, this seems as good of a place as any to report to you that one of our town’s council members has finally got enough signatures to put on the ballot the question of making English our official language. My Brit friend asked which English. I told him I didn’t know. I didn’t tell him I was surprised that considering the results of our usual elections, I didn’t know that that many people could sign their own name.